Why read Faces of Perfect Ebony?

Book cover of Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain

Book description

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low.…

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European history

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Why read it?

1 author picked Faces of Perfect Ebony as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Brooke Newman

Author

A fascinating exploration of how British imperial ambitions influenced popular representations of Black slavery and white mastery during the peak years of Britain’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade (c. 1680s to 1807). Using a wide variety of sources—including shop signs, tea trays, product advertisements, portraiture, graphic satires, plays, and more—Molineux argues that British artists, writers, and shop keepers obscured the horrific realities of Atlantic slavery in favor of idealized power relations that supported Britain’s imperial fantasies and developing racial ideologies.

This book helps to answer the question: what role did Africans and people of African descent play in the…

From Brooke's list on Britain and Atlantic slavery.