John Murray Black England A Forgotten Georgian History.

by Gretchen Gerzina

1

Genres: Nonfiction, History

304 pages, Paperback

Published September 14, 2023

Reviews

[Sara Raftery · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of great material, but very frustrating, particularly when read in dialogue with Black Tudors which is deeply grounded in the historical record. Gerzina isn't an historian, and it shows. She has a tendency to make somewhat sweeping claims on thin evidence ("why did they do this? presumably because...") and her analysis is, generally, less grounded in the evidence than it could be. Most problematically, she rarely takes the time to pin down whether someone she's discussing is a servant or a slave, and she tends to use "slaves" interchangeably with "black people" even while repeatedly making the point that there have been free Black people in Britain since the 16th century at least. Particularly given the unsettled legalities around slavery in Georgian England, it's entirely possible that Gerzina is unclear because the historical record is unclear and people's statuses shifted, but if that's the case she needs to say it. I was repeatedly frustrated by her lack of precision in describing people's status.

All that said, there's tons of great information in here. Gerzina is sharing an incredibly important aspect of history that is little known and should be much more widely known. I enjoyed learning about the legal battles around slavery and abolition, and I appreciated Gerzina's efforts to place the white people involved in these fights within their own context rather than applying modern value systems to them. She's clear on what we would consider their good and problematic qualities, and she helps us to understand how those would have been perceived at the time. I'm glad I read the book.

[Sarah]

Abandoned on page 70 of 281. Should have been an interesting subject but I couldn’t get on with the author’s style.