I had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Miranda Kaufmann, the author of the well- known book Black Tudors, who shares my enthusiasm for history. I learned a lot from talking to her and I have developed a better understanding of Black Tudors. Here is how the interview went.
Kaivalya: What inspired you to write about Black Tudors?
It was the subject of my PhD research. I was interested in history from an early age. But when I learned about the Tudors at school and at university, there was no mention of anyone that wasn't white in the story. I came across this fact, by accident when a lecturer mentioned that the Tudors started trading to Africa in the middle of the 16th century. I'd never heard anything about that before, I had only known about trade to Africa in the context of trafficking enslaved Africans in the 18th century. So I went to go and find out more and quite quickly found references to Africans actually living in Tudor England. I set about trying to find out more. From the beginning of that research, I always really wanted to bring it to a wider audience, because I do not see the point of doing research which only five other academics, ever read. Black Tudors was specifically written in an engaging way to bring this information to the widest possible audience.
Kaivalya: What made you fascinated by history? What made you go to that lecture?
Well, by that point, I was in the third year of my history degree but you can trace my obsession with history to my childhood. Reading historical novels, watching historical dramas on TV with my Dad who also loves history, and visiting historic sites with my family … I just loved it - I lapped it all up.
I had some really great teachers at primary school too. I remember this one teacher sitting at her desk and telling us about history like it was some, big exciting, adventure story, which it is really. I just think it's eternally fascinating to see how human beings behave and what they do and why. I have always loved travel as well and I think studying history means you can also be a time traveller. We can’t understand the world that we're living in without studying history.
Kaivalya: How did you begin your research?
I went to the library. There were quite a lot of books published on the black presence in Britain. in the 1970s from people like James Walvin or Edward Scobie but they tended to focus on the 18th century, with only passing references to the Tudors. There's a book by Peter Fryer that was really seismic. It's called “Staying Power” and it traces the history of Black people in Britain from Roman times to what was his present day in the 1980s.
He had about 10 pages in the period up to the 18th century and there were quite a few leads in his footnotes. Then I dived into the archives. I went to the National Archives at Kew and asked questions and put terms into the search engine. Other scholars were doing this at the same time but I did not realise this until a bit further along my journey.
Kaivalya: How long did it take to write the book? And did you ever want to give up because it took so long?
The book was based on my PhD research, so it took me six years to write in total – four years on the PhD, then another two to write a readable book! I actually did take a couple of breaks. Writing up the PhD was really tough – I suspended my studies for a year. And I had got married and had a baby before I finished writing the book! I got there in the end. I do think PhDs should come with a mental health warning because research can be quite lonely and few people want to talk to you about it!
Kaivalya: Before Black Tudors came out, were there many other books on the same topic?
I started my PhD research in 2004. In 2008, Imtiaz Habib published a book called Black Lives in the English Archives where he looked at quite a lot of the same archives I had, but it was a much more academic book than Black Tudors turned out to be. I was still writing up my PhD at that point, so I was able to read his work and respond to it in my analysis.
There's another scholar called Onyeka Nubia who's now published two books about Africans and Tudor England. The first one, Blackamoores came out in 2013. And in 2019, two years after Black Tudors came out, he published England’s Other Countrymen: Black Tudor Society. It is great to be part of a growing scholarship on the subject.
Kaivalya: Which story of a Black Tudor was it most interesting to find about and which one was there the least amount of information on?
One Black Tudor that I discovered was Edward Swarthye, who was an African man who was a porter in Elizabethan Gloucestershire, who is the subject of Chapter Four. He turns up in the National Archives in a court case and it is just pure fluke that I was able to find him because of his testimony in this court case had been filed separately – normally court cases were filed under the names of the main figures in the case.
But somehow this piece of paper had been separated from the rest of the papers and so it was filed as ‘testimony of Edward Swarthye alias Negro’. It was because he was called ‘alias Negro’, that when I searched for the word ‘negro’ in the in the National Archives search engine, this thing came up, it was one of only two results I got for that word.
What's really remarkable is that in this court case, we learn that Edward Swarthye is actually whipping a white man in the household in 1596, which was quite surprising . From there I was able to trace how he came to England from the Caribbean. There are many hundreds of individuals for whom we just have a name and the date of their burial or baptism without any further biographical information at all.
Kaivalya: How do you come up with different ideas for your books?
The idea for my next book, Heiresses, came from some research I got commissioned to do some research for English Heritage back in 2006 while I was still doing my PhD. Because 2007 was the Bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade, they were looking into their houses’ connections with slavery and abolition. And, so while I was doing that survey, I came across a couple of really interesting stories about heiresses, who had brought the profits of enslavement into the family through marriage. So these things can sometimes have long gestation periods!
Kaivalya: How would you explain your new book to someone who does not know anything about the topic?
It is about women who inherited enslaved people and plantations in the Caribbean and then married into British society with that money. I look at what happened to them in their lives and also what happened to the people they enslaved. Which all shows us about connections between Britain now and then to the Caribbean.
Kaivalya: Are you still researching Black Tudors now, after finishing writing your first book?
No, I am not doing any new research, although sometimes people send me things that they've found. But I am doing other things based on the book. One of the important things I have done is to create a free online course with FutureLearn, When you're writing a book, you have to have a narrative voice and say, this is how it was. But with the course, it was much more open-ended questions, which was interesting. I keep telling the story in different ways, I've been asked to give lectures on it all over the place, from Westminster Abbey to Jamestown, Virginia, and I have been working with teachers, creating teaching resources as part of my Teaching Black Tudors project.
Once again, I thank Miranda Kaufmann for allowing me to talk to her and recommend to anyone who is interested that they visit her website to find out more. (http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/ ) And if you haven’t already, read her book, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (Oneworld, 2017), which can be found in a library or in all good bookshops.
* Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is the author of the Wolfson History Prize and Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize shortlisted book Black Tudors: The Untold Story (2017). She read History at Christ Church, Oxford and is now an Honorary Fellow of the University of Liverpool, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, where she co-convenes the 'What's Happening in Black British History?' workshop series. She is currently working on her second book, Heiresses: Slavery & The Caribbean Marriage Trade; as Lead Historian for the Colonial Countryside project; and taking her work into schools with her Teaching Black Tudors project and to the world with her new Black Tudors: The Untold Story course with FutureLearn. www.mirandakaufmann.com
