Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain

by Catherine Molineux

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low. Catherine Molineux assembles a surprising array of sources in her exploration of this emerging black presence, from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, playing cards, and song ballads to more familiar objects such as William Hogarth’s graphic satires. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring the brutalities of slavery, these images of black people became symbols of empire to a general populace that had little contact with the realities of slave life in the distant Americas and Caribbean.

The earliest images advertised the opulence of the British Empire by depicting black slaves and servants as minor, exotic characters who gazed adoringly at their masters. Later images showed Britons and Africans in friendly gatherings, smoking tobacco together, for example. By 1807, when Britain abolished the slave trade and thousands of people of African descent were living in London as free men and women, depictions of black laborers in local coffee houses, taverns, or kitchens took center stage.

Molineux’s well-crafted account provides rich evidence for the role that human traffic played in the popular consciousness and culture of Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and deepens our understanding of how Britons imagined their burgeoning empire.

Genres: History

374 pages, Hardcover

First published January 2, 2012

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an academic book, but much more lively than some due to all the art and print that’s in it. It’s interdisciplinary, a historian analyzing art and literature to look at how white British people in the long 18th century saw themselves in relationship to black bodies. I learned so much about Hogarth and his politics and the vision he had of how London worked and the way he integrated black Londoners. One of my take aways was that white British people back home tried to disassociate themselves from some of the culpability of slavery by acting as if it was all news to them, but looking at the way the arts and even commerce acknowledged the Atlantic economy and the black bodies that were in it, gives the lie to that innocence. And Molineux demonstrates the various ways black bodies were used—positively and negatively in the arts to say something about British people and their feelings about the empire. She also shows black British citizens were aware of this and tried to use it in some ways.

[Mele Halatokoua · Rating 5 out of 5]

A much needed addition to the understanding of racial dynamics in the eighteenth century. Brings to light many aspects of black bodies and their objectification in art history. Fantastically written.

[Jackie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though many historians have suggested that Britons only really became aware of the horrors of slavery in the late 1770s, thousands of images of Black people appeared in British portraits, advertisements, signs, prints, and literature from the Restoration through the 18th century. "Why did metropolitan Britons, who could have left their reliance on African slavery in their imperial pursuits 'out of sight, out of mind,' instead produce and consume a wide array of representations of blacks?" Molineux asks (2). Her answer: "Rather than hiding the violent margins through straightforward projections of ignorance, Britons actively imagined their relationship to Africans, entailing metropolitan society and culture in the contact zones of Atlantic slavery" (12). "Britons at home were not unfamiliar or unaware of African slavery, but they looked at the practice of bondage through their own desires": the desire to view themselves as benevolent imperialists (59).

This desire first manifested in idealized images of submissive and grateful Black servitude, which became a "not uncommon feature" in portraits of elite white Britains by the end of the 17th century (Chapter 1). Through such images, white mastery of African bodies was transformed into iconographic patronage: "An idealized, hierarchical relationship became vernacular, inoculating the general public from the responsibilities of slave ownership as artists turned mastery into an iconographic formula. The fashion of black servitude in Britain emerged through not only the acquisition of Africans themselves, but also growing familiarization with an idealistic vision of imperial mastery" (21).

This narrative of white mastery was complicated, though, by the wealth of imagery used in tobacconist ads and wrapping papers throughout the period (Chapter 5), as well as in Hogarth's mid-18th century depictions of black people in his paintings and prints (Chapter 6).

Molineux also examines depictions of Blacks in British writing. Chapter 2 focuses on slave rebellions as depicted in two texts: Aphra Behn's 1688 Oronooko and “A Lamentable Ballad of the Tragical end of a Gallant Lord and Virtuous Lady, with the Untimely end of their Two Children, wickedly performed by a heathenism blackamoor their servant,: the like never heard of” (reprinted multiple times during the 17th and 18th centuries). She argues that such rebellions allowed white Britons "less invested in maintenance of master/slave hierarchies" to laugh at "collective and individual acts of slave rebellion," but also as to use such narratives to "talk about authority, both at home and abroad" (67). These print & song invocations of African revolt suggest that "Britons did not entirely believe their own myths of imperial benevolence and that deep resistance to racial integration undermined them.... Perhaps the most important function of these stories was to model responses to resistance that preserved the witnessing role of the audience, absolved of culpability in the violent ends of empire" (86).

Chapter 3 analyzes debates in the late 17th c periodical Athenian Mercury about the origins of blackness and the implications of human diversity. The periodical imagined blackness as an “accidental monstrosity” that could be corrected through British Christian salvation.

Chapter 4 analyzes how the colonial planation became a site of debate about British (and Protestant, as opposed to Catholic, and Spanish) virtue, linking the retention of a balance of power in Europe to the luster of black skin (112).

Chapter 7 traces the figure of "Mungo," a comical black servant who first appeared in Isaac Bickerstaff opera 1768 The Padlock (which in turn was based on a Cervantes story), in text and image. Molineux maps how his depiction shifted over the course of the late 18th century, from a figure used to satirized George III and his ministers by the opposition, to "Mungo Macaroni" (evoking the real-life Black British macaroni Julius Soubise), to a stock sentimental character in literature advocating for the closure of the slave trade. "As a character who oscillated between the comic and the tragic, Mungo embodied two major developments in imagined relationships between white Britons and black slaves: the sentimental image of the poor African that curried support for abolition, and the comic image of the black Londoner that expressed, for satirists such as Dent, political and social corruption in Britain" (221).

"In metropolitan visual and print media, blacks were always pointing out something about Britons," Molineux writes in the conclusion to this fascinating study. But by the end of the 18th century, "blacks became central subjects of images and central to the desire to maintain imperial identities threatened by the American and Haitian Revolutions. This movement from the peripheries to the center mapped a critical integration of Britain into the Atlantic world. The inversion of the imperial gaze did not disentangle blacks from how Britons understood themselves (though it had that potential), but it did begin to undermine the viability of the black body as a site of encounter with the external world and to intensify domestic critiques of the domestic market for black labor." (261)

[Karen]

* Understanding Oppression: African American Rights (Then and Now)

Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain | Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. In her exploration of this emerging black presence, Molineux assembles evidence ranging from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, and playing cards to song ballads and William Hogarths graphic satires. #slavery