Centring Blackness: A Focus on Gender and Critical Approaches Through Black Women's Lives

I relish the different approaches used by scholars to centre blackness in the historical conversation, none more so than those demonstrated by the esteemed contributors of this reflection. The diversity of these approaches testifies to the growing significance of centring blackness in early-modern Black Atlantic and European history. Yet I believe the key to centring ideas of blackness in the early-modern period lies in examining lived experiences, with an emphasis upon black agency, reassessing the limitations of black historical materials and examining the intersection of race, gender, and class, following in the footsteps of Walter Johnson, Saidya Hartman, Gretchen Grezina and more. ¹ These three focuses will help scholars create the ‘new maps that fully engage with the differentiated understandings of class, of labour, of gender and of race …’. ²

It is established that the idea of blackness, as a derivative of the ideas of race, is a ‘product of the mind’ not nature, and it manifests through individuals, relationships, and interactions, some of which are captured in primary material. ³ These manifestations of blackness speak to the various constructions of identity often rooted in racial ideas; identities which range from the personal to the collective, communal, social, and national and are constructed within both writers of historical materials and the Black subjects who were written about. Understanding blackness in early-modern societies comes from a more personal, intimate, and social place than contemporary theories or representations of blackness can describe. I believe that to comprehend and centralize blackness, we must understand individual Black people's histories of lived experience and, beyond that, the various processes of identification that informed them. In this reflection, I will be comprehending the aspiration and necessity to centre blackness into the European historical conversation, by considering the role that history plays in creating identities. I will relate this reflection to my research journey examining Black women in eighteenth-century London. ⁴

My research journey began with a question I, as a London-born Black woman historian, ask myself daily: What was it like to be a Black woman walking London's streets in the eighteenth century? Initially, I struggled to comprehend Black women's lives in the eighteenth century as they did not possess the same historiographical focus as their slightly more studied descendants. Firstly, the study of Black people in early-modern Britain has hinged on histories of slavery and perspectives on the Atlantic world. Black American histories far outweigh the quantity of historiography that focuses on Britain, despite the unique racial and socio-political atmosphere of Britain in the early-modern period and beyond. Moreover, early-modern historians agree that Black women are seriously underrepresented, with historiographical priority given to quantitative research into presence or biographical research into men like Olaudah Equiano. ⁵ The research is further limited by the lack of primary materials on Black women. Contemporary references to Black women were often brief, infrequent, sporadic, and written by third-person historical commentators. Because of these factors, Black women, as Hartman argues, become dispossessed, left to the ‘power and authority of the archives and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose perspective matters and who is endowed with the gravity and authority of historical actor’. ⁶ In historical materials, Black women are presented more as observed objects than as historical agents.

From limited sources come limited histories on Black women. Histories based on lacking primary material cannot go as far as seeking to comprehend experience or identity. Instead, Black women's lives are categorized based upon the popular narratives or known roles in British society. For example, in eighteenth-century Britain, Black women were frequently known to be servants (or enslaved), migrants, or sex workers (of sorts). These roles frame early modern Black women's historical narratives in Britain. Where the details of a Black woman's life were unspecified, her life is assumed to fit into one of these roles. These limited sources, categorizations, and absence of focus confine the investigation into early-modern Black women, hampering our perceptions of them as historical agents. Her contributions to the construction of Black identity and experiences of blackness are overlooked, abstracted, and minimized, in favour of exceptional Black men and masculine narratives, with little consideration for the impact of gender and class in race conversations.

The details in the brief and referential recorded instances that frame Black women's lives, may be easy to categorize, but this does not characterize their experiences. As Bressey states, ‘not all Black women followed the same path, nor would they have visualised the city in the same way’. ⁷ At a basic level, Black women's lives were defined by the world around them and by the circumstances and contexts of their lives. Considering these two factors alone, indicates the distinctive and complex lives of Black women and the identities they constructed. As an initial framework for my research, I centralize each Black woman's life as a point of focus, under the proviso that her history is one of many Black women's histories subsumed within contemporary London. This initial framework breaks down into four core ideals. Firstly, Black women in this period, though conditioned by their circumstances, were, to varying degrees, historical agents. Secondly, as historical agents, the recorded instances in historical sources symbolize Black women's interactions with the local community and vice versa. Thirdly, behind each recorded instance of Black women, in brief, racialized third-person sources, Black women's actions and contexts are present and act as the source's inspiration. Finally, evidence of actions indicates that Black women possessed knowledge or consciousness of the world around them, further implying an awareness of their social position, their racial and gendered identity, how society would engage with them through interactions and, consequently, how to navigate their identities in the local space.

These core ideals begin a process of contextualization to assemble a composite image of the ordinary, named but unknown, woman. We recover knowledge of her action by contextualizing its presence in the recorded instance. Further fragments of her life and history are drawn by considering ‘the variety of ways humans process information’; a consideration of the social, cultural, and political circumstances surrounding and motivating her actions. ⁸ Finally, I root these findings in a contextual understanding of the geographic space, so in this case London, and the local environment's relativity to the woman's life. We affirm that the named but unknown woman possessed a consciousness of the city around her.

Take, for example, Eleanor Elizabeth Collins, who was born in 1746/7 and who was baptised in St George, Bloomsbury parish on 19 July 1766, and recorded as ‘Eleanor Elizabeth Collins, Black Woman Aged 19’. ⁹

Eleanor's record possesses features seen in many recorded instances of Black women in parish records, specifically recording her name, her gender and a racialized term to highlight her cultural or ethnic difference. Yet contextualizing this source alludes to some contexts that expand our awareness of Eleanor's life. First, for example, Eleanor's baptism was a traditional narrative for contemporary Black women, as an act of ensuring social manumission and symmetrizing her religious and social identity to parallel others in British society. The baptism alludes to her active immersion into the St George Bloomsbury community and possibly reaping some of the parish's resources. ¹⁰ Moreover, being baptised as an adult (rather than a child) could allude to her domestic or international migration and integration into the community, or relocation between London parishes.

Eleanor was a single woman, with no listed family or master/employer, and so we can question what her roles/functions were in the area. If she was a labouring woman, she could be working or settling in the area or awaiting employment. Though her master/employer went unrecorded, she could have been a servant or casual labourer, along with many other contemporary women. Nevertheless, around the St George Bloomsbury parish, Eleanor was exposed to an area of ‘elite residence’, in proximity to homes of the gentry such as the Duke of Bedford’s Montagu House and the house of William Murray, Earl of Mansfield (Lord Chief Justice of Britain), on the north corner of Bloomsbury Square. ¹¹

She is racialized as a ‘black woman’, highlighting a complicated assessment of blackness and ethnicity. The term ‘black’ in this period was ambiguous and often referred to people of African and Asian heritage. So, interestingly, the demarcation does not allow us to understand her origins, heritage, or ethnicity but highlights the significance of being different to the white majority, which likely impacted her racial identity. Moreover, racialization was a pattern of differentiation in the records, which highlighted that Eleanor was not the only Black person in the area. Between 1755 and 1769, there were 13 recorded baptisms and burials of Black people across class lines (eight men and five women). Some were residents, some were workers in the area and some were merely recorded in the area. Many servants were recorded in St George's parish records. The absence of distinction for Eleanor could indicate that she was not a servant but lived locally or worked casually. The diverse social positions would cause how blackness was navigated in the area to vary, and likely increase the significance of Eleanor's class and position in terms of how she moved in the space.

Conditions of race likely defined Eleanor's capacity to move in the space. She could and likely did participate in local cultures, attending public houses or market spaces, utilizing her freedoms in the absence of institutional slavery, which impacted perceptions of Black people in Britain indirectly. However, the practice and possibilities of (re-)enslavement were everywhere, with enslaver families (and wealth from plantations) living locally, and the products of slavery (sugar, tobacco, coffee) flooding the consumer cultures of the city.

Following Eleanor through the archives confirms her status as a dependent woman and captures a life of financial struggle. Aged 40, Collins is noted to have had two admissions to a local workhouse, on 4 August and 11 December 1786, where she was ‘well known by order of Mr Taylor Overseer’. ¹² She was also admitted to St Thomas’ Hospital in August 1788 with a likely son Michael Collins of No.10 Carter Lane in Blackfriars before a final stint in St Martin's workhouse where she died in 1791. ¹³ Briefly, we recognize institutional inclusion and similar impermanence of position/settlement between Eleanor and labouring/dependent people. Peter Clark argues that Londoners constantly relocated between communities. ¹⁴ We see her access the available systems and organizations for the dependent poor and, distinctively, an inclusion that did not distinguish race or ethnicity, highlighting the influence of racial identity in lower class and institutional spaces. Stemming from her presence in one racialized parish record, Eleanor emerges as a recognized woman, a poor dependent woman, a single woman, with a son, with relationships, struggles, tenacity, and fragility that speaks more definitively to the navigation of blackness in eighteenth-century labouring London.

This approach continues the strides undertaken by historians and scholars examining the Caribbean and Atlantic World, such as Marisa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, and Meleisa Ono George, who outline a transferable methodology for thinking about Black women and silenced histories. This approach incorporates Black British feminist literature, from scholars like Heidi Safia Mirza, to adapt and consider black women's lives in a British context, all to place greater emphasis upon centring lived experience and agency in early-modern British and European historical conversations. But this approach has its difficulties. Like many historians of Black British history, I deviate from traditional historical practice to venture into the realms of speculation and historical imagination, grounded in evidence, which, to some, harms my research's reliability. Additionally, my research often poses more questions than answers. However, I believe that the value of the question in underrepresented histories should not be underestimated, for it testifies to a new historiographical emphasis placed upon centring the humanity of people subsumed into hidden histories and to the significance placed upon all communities rather than simply dominant ones.

Eleanor's history is one of many Black women's histories, encompassing economic, social, and personal identities that serve to complement and contextualize the Black lived experience and provide substance to Black women's historical narratives. Yet centring Black individual lives, through expansive research, presents and prioritizes the subjective experience of blackness over representations of blackness, allowing us to comprehend the various constructions of identity and the intersectional experiences of Black women, Black Britain, and the Black people of early-modern Europe collectively.