Article
All Conditions of Life and Labour: The Presence of Black People in Essex Before1950, by David Killingray.
Slavery, Captivity and Stapleford Tawney
From the 17th to the early 19th centuries, blackness was invariably regarded as a badge of servility and inferiority. This does not mean that in these years Britons thought that only black people could be slaves.
Whites were also enslaved in the states in North Africa. It was common for many parishes, for example in Stapleford Tawney in 1669 and again in 1680, for a collection to be made ‘for the Ransom of Captives in Algiers and Sally’ and ‘for ye Brief for the Redemption of Slaves out of Turkey’.127
White men and women were also shipped off to the American colonies to penal or indentured labour in the plantations, as was the lot of some of the soldiers who surrendered after the fall of Colchester in 1648.
Nevertheless, by the early 18th century Britons regarded white enslavement not only as aberrant but contrary to the rules of Britain: ‘Britons never, never shall be slaves’, ran the refrain of James Thomson’s ‘Rule Britannia’.128
Extract from ‘Essex Archaeology and History’. Third Series, Volume 35 (2004) p.115. The full article runs from p.114-122.
- Essex Review. Vol. 26 (1917), p.202. See further Linda Colley, Captains, Empire and the world 1600-1850 (London, 2002). ↩
- For other references to slavery and the slave trade see, in Journal No. 98 The Register of British Slave-Traders – High Country History Group; Journal No. 91 Local Links with the Slave Trade – High Country History Group; and, Journal No. 73 Silas Todd (1711-1779) in Stapleford Tawney – High Country History Group. ↩
