ABSTRACT
Although black people have sustained a continuous presence in Britain for at least four centuries, they remain almost invisible in historical writing. This is partly a reflection of the ephemerality of evidence, but it also serves to indicate the economic and legal position of black people during this period. Hence the history of black people in Britain tended to remain marginal to the historiographical mainstream until the 1970s when it attracted interdisciplinary scholarship and generated quite a substantial literature. The historical study of blacks in Britain remains indebted to several factors for its apparently rapid progress. Among these are to be included the prominence of the African continent in world affairs, a development which from the 1950s stimulated an expansion of research into African history, and also the flowering of Afro-American and Caribbean studies. The influence of Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1963), cannot be overestimated in redirecting historical research in general towards the path of neglected peoples; and to this should be added the role of those blacks in Britain who initiated a search for their own roots and culture.
