Introduction

This chapter introduces the main themes of this political, cultural, and intellectual biography of Henry Redhead Yorke, an illegitimate creole of African/British descent. It provides a brief summary of Yorke’s peripatetic life in the Georgian period, from his birth in 1772 on the island of Barbuda to his death in London in 1813 as a gentleman. It considers how biographies may be written from sparse personal evidence. Black biographies provide a new perspective on understanding such transatlantic individuals, and their contribution to contemporary politics. This book incorporates fiction and myth to develop a contemporary sense of Yorke. It aims to restore Yorke into the panoply of colonial America figures.

The major themes include radicalisation, radicalism, loyalism, and political recanting, in the shadow of the French Revolution. The question is raised: how did a transatlantic ‘outsider’ challenge conventional ‘English’ politics, and vice versa? Another important theme, identity, considers how identities may be constructed in the face of complex attitudes to mixed race, illegitimacy, and class in Britain. The over-arching theme here questions the relationship between politicisation and identity. Additional themes include political and social exclusion, social mobility and assimilation, and Enlightenment and Romantic influences on politics.