I don’t think I’ve ever read a book before that I’ve enjoyed (enough), but also repeatedly put it down, sighed, and thought to myself, “Couldn’t this have been a podcast?”
Yes, although this is a meticulously researched and thus impressive text, Black Tudors seems to operate from a bizarre and reactionary standpoint that it never steps away from even by the end of the book: that anyone, absolutely everyone, who has chosen to read a book called Black Tudors – which is a history book about the lives of Africans and people of African descent living in England during the Renaissance…
Black Tudors presumes that everyone, absolutely everyone, reading this book is someone who fundamentally disbelieves in the book’s premise.
This book writes as if anyone reading it is getting ready to accuse the author of lying: it seems to exist as if the presumed reader is not a curious, cosmopolitan person who sees it as self-evident that following centuries (millennia?) of near-globalised international trade, at least a handful of people would have moved from Africa to Northern Europe, but that the presumed reader – bearing in mind this is a reader who has chosen to read a history book called Black Tudors – is someone who doubts that such a thing would happen, and that they would need the referencing of thousands of footnotes tied to hundreds of documents to change their mind. They would need this to accept the possibility of a single Black Tudor, and need this again and again and again as the book goes on before accepting the existence of any of the others.
The book presumes that its readers will continue to be shocked, surprised, overwhelmed, that Black people could live in England… over and over again.
In the rare likliehood, then, of someone having fallen into nonsense white supremacist thought-holes, and then having picked this book up by accident, maybe the formalised written proof of the existence of one Black person in Tudor/Stewart England might have been enough to convince them of the possibility of more? But no… Miranda Kaufmann writes every chapter as if the need to be convinced is fresh, as if her presumed reader isn’t someone open-minded, imaginative and, frankly, able to extrapolate historical reality from lived present, but someone who (bizarrely) seemed to genuinely believe the UK population was 100% white (and they’d probably capitalise that) before… errr… the communist Tony Blair ordered the Windrush flotilla to England as revenge for Maggie Thatcher’s Falklands War win, or something like that…
It’s a frustrating tone that’s taken, as the narratives being told here are often deeply interesting, and incredibly detailed. Kaufmann has access to an impressive and empowering list and library of texts to show and document the lives of ordinary people, from various industries and areas of the UK, tracing back the likely routes of their immigration journey and noting the legacies they left behind.
It’s interesting stuff, absolutely, but it’s all presented as if the idea of a Black seamstress or courtier or musician or servant or skilled worker in 17th or 16th century England is one that would cause the reader to collapse, hyperventillating, to the floor of their semi-detached, mortgaged home.
And maybe, yes, maybe here in England that Daily Mail-ified right wing ideologue is the primary (the majority?) audience of non-fiction history books. But in a book that is so clearly trying to document, demonstrate and evoke a different type of history to the one this person has propagandised themselves with, it seems sad, actually, that so much space within the text is given over to patting the back and the cheek of the dissappointed white supremacist whose fantasy version of historic England has been shattered by the realities contained within this text…
Interesting, yes, but a text too in thrall to the sensibilities of people who, alas, probably won’t be reading the book…
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