Miranda Kaufmann, “Black Tudors: The Untold Story” (Oneworld, 2017)

A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptized in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From the archival records emerge the remarkable stories of ten Africans who lived free in Tudor England. They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. Read all about it in Miranda Kaufmann’s revealing book Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld, 2017).

Links of interest from the interview include the John Blanke Project and the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Database.

Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Studies, University of London. She is an historical consultant and avid public speaker, working with the Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, and many other media outlets, museums, and exhibitions. Dr. Kaufmann is also the lead historian on the Colonial Countryside Project, which is working with ten National Trust properties, local primary schools, and creative writers, to explore the houses’ histories of links with Caribbean slavery and the East India Company.

Tyler Yank is a senior doctoral candidate in History at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her work explores bonded women and British Empire in the western Indian Ocean World.

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