Britain and Its Neighbours: Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Dirk H. Steinforth and Charles C. Rozier, eds. Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. xx + 240 pp. $160.

Abstract

remains Maguire’s dominant structure for understanding African labor and identities in East Anglia for the entirety of 1467 to 1833. Chapter 5 exposes the Atlantic connections, analyzes baptismal customs, and looks at six slaving voyages involving the region and connecting to the slave port of Liverpool. Chapters 7 and 8 look at a deeply contested historiography by asserting slavery came before racialization and that Africans were more a part of the working poor in the region than majority enslaved. Africans in East Anglia is highly empirical reading that looks at individuals whose lives “contained the opportunity, even for the ones who had been previously enslaved . . . to be remembered as part of the region’s working population” (199). It is a dry work in that respect, but not to a fault, as this project of reclamation needs a tone of rigor due to the importance of the recovery. As such, this work will become a standard reading for anyone researching slavery, labor, and African populations in East Anglia, as well as providing methods for understanding a more local background of African populations in Britain during the early modern era.