Here are 100 books that Britain's Black Past fans have personally recommended if you like
Britain's Black Past.
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I am drawn to stories that grip, teach, and hold power to account. Some of my favorite writers have the ability to do all of it in one goāLawrence Wright, David Grann, Dan Fagin, etc. I just try to write stories I want to read. So, when I started looking into a pharmacist who made drugs in a dirty lab outside Boston and who shipped his fungus-plagued vials throughout the U.S., I saw an opportunity. As an investigative journalist, I seek stories that shine light on dark corners of government and industry, as well as those that have the chance to better things while entertaining and educating the reader.
The grime and stench of crowded, electric 1850s London permeates the pages of this book. I loved the immersion mixed with a history of urbanism and the problems unique to places where people live crammed together, sharing resources and, unfortunately, diseases.
Iād read about the cholera outbreak in London before, which occurred at a time before doctors understood germ theory. Johnsonās account gripped me as we follow early epidemiologist John Snow through his revolutionary investigation into the cause of the outbreak. This book tought me key medical and science history that I needed to understand as I embarked on my own book about a deadly, mysterious disease outbreak.
A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure-garbage removal, clean water, sewers-necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to runā¦
This book is my favorite historian, Rohan McWilliam, writing about his favorite thing, Londonās West End.
Itās about actors and singers and dancers and the audiences that flocked to their performances. Itās about the West End being a place of extremes, where cutting-edge āhigh cultureā lived next to accessible popular culture and sex work. McWilliamās notion of the West End as the first āpleasure districtā was the first time I understood how opera houses and theaters and department stores and nightclubs and restaurants and street performers somehow all go together and add up to more than the sum of the parts.
Itās a scholarly achievement and an entertaining read.Ā
How did the West End of London become the world's leading pleasure district? What is the source of its magnetic appeal? How did the centre of London become Theatreland? London's West End, 1800-1914 is the first ever history of the area which has enthralled millions. The reader will discover the growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry. The area from the Strand to Oxford Street came to stand for sensation and vulgarity but also the promotion of high culture. The West End produced shows and fashions whoseā¦
I thought I had read enough about Queen Victoria to last a lifetime, but I was wrong! This amazing book offers a new perspective on Queen Victoria as āan Indian Maharaniā as well asĀ āBritish monarch,āĀ and explores not just what India meant to the queen, but what the queen meant to Indians.
An entirely original account of Victoria's relationship with the Raj, which shows how India was central to the Victorian monarchy from as early as 1837
"A widely and deeply researched, elegantly written, and vital portrayal of [Queen Victoria's] place in colonial Indian affairs."-Journal of Modern History
In this engaging and controversial book, Miles Taylor shows how both Victoria and Albert were spellbound by India, and argues that the Queen was humanely, intelligently, and passionately involved with the country throughout her reign and not just in the last decades. Taylor also reveals the way in which Victoria's influence as empress contributedā¦
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother hadā¦
I was looking for books on the history of emotions and this is one of the best!
Dixon demonstrates that the infamous British āstiff upper lipā is a lot more recent and a lot less timeless than most people think. I learned that until the late 1800s men could cryāin public no lessāwithout anyone thinking less of them! Food for thought.
There is a persistent myth about the British: that we are a nation of stoics, with stiff upper lips, repressed emotions, and inactive lachrymal glands. Weeping Britannia - the first history of crying in Britain - comprehensively debunks this myth.
Far from being a persistent element in the 'national character', the notion of the British stiff upper lip was in fact the product of a relatively brief and militaristic period of our past, from about 1870 to 1945. In earlier times we were a nation of proficient, sometimes virtuosic moral weepers. To illustrate this perhaps surprising fact, Thomas Dixon chartsā¦
As a child, I was an avid reader. However, I noticed none of the characters I read about looked like me. As a Black girl growing up in London, I yearned for stories that reflected my experiences. Thankfully, by the time I was a teenager, I was able to immerse myself in books written by some amazing African American authors. There was still something missing on my reading list, though. The stories of Black people who lived where I did, especially those from the past. Fast forward to now, and as an author of historical fiction, my passion is telling, writing, and highlighting āforgottenā stories.
This book covers the comprehensive history of the Black presence in Britain. It had everything I needed and more when researching my own historical fiction novels. Growing up in the UK, the only part pertaining to Black history was a brief mention of the transatlantic slave trade and nothing that pointed to the Black presence in the UK.
I found this book very well-researched by the author and was fascinated by the wealth of information, some of which I did not know. It also reminded me of why I love writing historical fiction!Ā
'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' - Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times
In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean.
This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. Blackā¦
Kundnani writes about racial capitalism and Islamophobia, surveillance and political violence, and Black radical movements. He is the author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror and The End of Tolerance: racism in 21st century Britain, which was selected as a New Statesman book of the year. He has written for the Nation, the Guardian, the Washington Post, Vice, and The Intercept. Born in London, he moved to New York in 2010. A former editor of the journal Race & Class, he was miseducated at Cambridge University, and holds a PhD from London Metropolitan University. He has been an Open Society fellow and a scholar-in-residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
A. Sivanandan was a key intellectual of the Asian and African-Caribbean working-class movements in Britain during their insurgent heyday from the late 1960s to the late 1980s. The essays collected in this volume, written between 1982 and 1990, are about how those movements were disaggregated and undermined ā laying the ground for todayās racist Britain. The son of a rural postal clerk from the hinterland of a minor colonial territory, Sivanandan fled Sri Lanka after the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958 and arrived in London as a refugee. The socialism the book advocates is poetic, loving, joyful, and centered upon the experiences of Third World peoples. Not a single sentence of Communities of Resistance is clunky or lacking in feeling.
Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain's most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Communities of Resistance collects together some of his most famous essays, including his excoriating polemic on Thatcherism and the left "The Hokum of New Times".
This updated edition contains a new preface by Gary Younge and an introduction by Arun Kundnani.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man sheā¦
I am a historian and historic buildings consultant with a longstanding interest in 15th and 16th century England. In addition to my own work on memorials, funerals, and the Howard family, I have worked as a researcher and consultant for television and books, including being a production researcher for the BBC adaptation of Wolf Hall.
In this thought-provoking book, Onyeka Nubia encourages us to re-examine Tudor concepts of race and ethnicity in Tudor (and Stuart) England without assumptions based on post-colonial narratives. What emerges is a nuanced picture of complex interactions, attitudes, and prejudices. As well as studying the writings of Tudor scholars, theologians, and authors, Nubia looks at the lives of individual Africans in England, showing that they werenāt āstrangersā but lived as part of English communities - whether in cosmopolitan London parishes such as St Botolph without Aldgate, or in rural villages.
The Tudor period remains a source of timeless fascination, with endless novels, TV programmes and films depicting the period in myriad ways. And yet our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. This ground-breaking and provocative new book seeks to redress the balance: revealing not only how black presence in Tudor England was far greater than has previously been recognised, but that Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe.
Onyeka Nubia's original research shows that Tudors from many walks of life regularly interacted with people of African descent, both at homeā¦
Iāve been fascinated by British colonial history for decades. Learning little about it as a child, I was shocked to learn, as a university student, how little Iād been taught about the British Empire at school. So, I set out to study it. Inevitably, this academic interest later combined with my fondness for country walking. I once trekked 1000 miles from the tip of ScotlandāJohn OāGroatsāto the southernmost part of England, called Landās End. This took me 2 months. Iāve since explored the UK countrysideās colonial past in a humane history book called The Countryside, recounting my rambles through these lovely landscapes with ten walking companions.
This is a well-written book with a strong sense of historyās human stories. It is painstakingly researchedābut beautifully narratedāand based on archival evidence to explore the lives of Africans in Britain during the Tudor period.
It tells so many diverse stories about Black divers, servants, circumnavigators, and so much more. Teachers have since used this book to update their school lessons about the Tudor period.
A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer
A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England...
They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like anyā¦
Ghanaian-born, I came to Britain aged twelve with my family and was always a lover of stories.Ā Now a PhD-educated mum of three, it niggled that there werenāt many novels with a Black child as the protagonist, especially a Black British one.Ā As a creative whoād acted and performed poetry in the past, I set out to write a story about a Black child in Britain overcoming challenges.Ā Inspired by anecdotes of children remaining with relatives in their home country as their parents moved to Britain to make a life before sending for them, I was interested in writing a story about such a child after they arrived in Britain.
This novel is the story of Leonard.Ā The book starts with a focus on Jamaica but most of the story is about life after Leonard arrives in the UK with his mother to join his estranged father, who left Jamaica when Leonard was a baby.Ā I found this to be a thought-provoking but easy-to-read historical novel about leaving the home you knowĀ where you feel loved and starting again somewhere that doesnāt feel so warm and welcoming. The story is about family, the Windrush generation and the history of Jamaica and Great Britain.Ā An interesting read drizzled with Benjamin Zephaniahās poetry.
In this heart-stopping adventure, Benjamin Zephaniah shows us what it was like to be a child of the Windrush generation.
Leonard is shocked when he arrives with his mother in the port of Southampton. His father is a stranger to him, it's cold and even the Jamaican food doesn't taste the same as it did back home in Maroon Town. But his parents have brought him here to try to make a better life, so Leonard does his best not to complain, to make new friends, to do well at school - even when people hurt him with their wordsā¦
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the worldās most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the bookā¦
As a child, I was an avid reader. However, I noticed none of the characters I read about looked like me. As a Black girl growing up in London, I yearned for stories that reflected my experiences. Thankfully, by the time I was a teenager, I was able to immerse myself in books written by some amazing African American authors. There was still something missing on my reading list, though. The stories of Black people who lived where I did, especially those from the past. Fast forward to now, and as an author of historical fiction, my passion is telling, writing, and highlighting āforgottenā stories.
I like how this book is both personal and factual in assessing Britainās imperial past. Iāve always loved this authorās work, and she said some lovely things about my novel The Attic Child.
Her writing really makes you think about the subject matter and want to find out more...
From Afua Hirsch - co-presenter of Samuel L. Jackson's major BBC TV series Enslaved - the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.
You're British.
Your parents are British.
Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.
So why do people keep asking where you're from?
We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch's personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be - and an urgent call for change.
