Black Africans in Stuart England, 1603-1714

This PhD project will analyse the lives of Black Africans in Stuart England; a period that witnessed the emergence and growth of Britain's trans-Atlantic slave trade alongside shifting racial ideologies. The research will produce a prosopographical database of the African English and will write black individuals and communities into the economic and social history of Early Modern English society.
Digital methodologies offer the potential to create a step-change in histories of ethnicity. This PhD builds on my MA research, which transformed Dr Miranda Kaufmann's extensive archival evidence of Black Tudors into a publicly searchable, open-access database entitled BAHBO: Black Africans in Historic Britain Online. My PhD project will push historical analysis of Black Africans into the Stuart period, offering substantial and original insights into the ways in which the growth of Empire altered the place, status, and careers of Africans in England. Through its focus on Black Africans, this project will therefore illuminate broader and longstanding historiographical debates about the connections between social and economic change in seventeenth century England.