SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOLFSON HISTORY PRIZE A major new history of Britain that transforms our
understanding of this country's past'I've waited so long so read a comprehensively researched
book about Black history on this island. This is it: a journey of discovery and a truly
exciting and important work' Zainab Abbas Despite the best efforts of researchers and
campaigners there remains today a steadfast tendency to reduce the history of African and
Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival
of a single ship the Empire Windrush and continues mostly apart from a distinct British
history overlapping only on occasion amid grotesque injustice or pioneering protest.Yet as
acclaimed historian Hakim Adi demonstrates from the very beginning from the moment humans
first stood on this rainy isle there have been African and Caribbean men and women set at
Britain's heart. Libyan legionaries patrolled Hadrian's Wall while Rome's first 'African
Emperor' died in York. In Elizabethan England 'Black Tudors' served in the land's most eminent
households while intrepid African explorers helped Sir Francis Drake to circumnavigate the
globe. And as Britain became a major colonial and commercial power it was African and
Caribbean people who led the radical struggle for freedom - a struggle which raged throughout
the twentieth century and continues today in Black Lives Matter campaigns.Charting a course
through British history with an unobscured view of the actions of African and Caribbean people
Adi reveals how much our greatest collective achievements - universal suffrage our victory
over fascism the forging of the NHS - owe to these men and women and how in understanding
our history in these terms we are more able to fully understand our present moment.
