These records include "royal and aristocratic households accounts, government proclamations and legal records, parish entries, medical notations, and personal accounts" (65). Habib begins in 1500, when political and economic ties connected England and Scotland to the slave-holding kingdoms of Portugal and Spain, before relations with Catholic Spain deteriorated in the 1540s and led eventually to war; he continues in the period of conflict, reconnaissance and plunder that brought English privateers and pirates like Hawkins and Drake into contact with commercial systems that were inhabited by people of color, including the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Throughout the book, he maintains that these records are the visible traces of a much larger Black presence that has been lost or intentionally hidden, in part because "the English trafficking in Africans between 1550 and 1650 was an activity in denial of itself as it were, and not only the subject of clear or deliberate recordation but also of documentary suppression" (69). By the last quarter of the seventeenth century, Habib claims, Black subjects become visible: he writes, "That eventual visibility is paradoxically the completion of the historical denuding of the early modern English black subject, who then appears fully processed as the legally mandated bare object of English colonial enslavement" (121).
bare wench the final chapter Full
Habib's search for "imprints of the invisible" is not limited to London records. He also shows that there was a significant Black presence outside London, primarily but not exclusively in the coastal counties, and he provides a final chapter that traces the signs of other people of color (primarily East Indian and American) in early modern England. Along the way, Habib points to some fascinating and moving cases--the black maidservants who accompanied the entourage of Katherine of Aragon when she arrived in England in 1501; the African mercenary Peter (Mogo) Negro, who fought with the English against the Scots and was knighted on the field of battle in 1547; Jacques Francis, a Black diver from Guinea was hired (also in 1547) to salvage tin and lead from a Venetian wreck off the English coast at Southampton; the 1586 baptism of "Elizabeth, a negro child, born white, the mother a negro" in the church of St....
15Maho was general dictator of hell, and yet for good manner's sake he was contented of his good nature to make show that himself was under the check of Modu, the grand devil in Master Maynie. These were all in poor Sara at a chop; with these the poor soul travailed up and down full two years together, so as during those two years it had been all one to say, "One is gone to hell," or "He is gone to Sara Williams"; for she, poor wench, had all hell in her belly. And had had it still to this day for any thing we know if it had not pleased Father Weston and his twelve holy disciples to have delivered her of that devil-child. 2ff7e9595c
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