‘Moor’ and ‘blackamoor’ are two English terms that were highly influenced by Iberian and Italian designations of Northern African peoples. Mouro (Portuguese) and moro (Castilian, Italian) derived from the Latin Maurus, an inhabitant of Mauretania, the Roman designation for the region of Maghreb. The lengthy duration of the Iberian Reconquista, the reconquest of Muslim territories by local Christian kingdoms, and the increasing commercial exchanges between Christian Iberia and Northern Europe contributed to the dissemination of the term in the Middle Ages, where 'Moor' remained a popular descriptor for the medieval Berber and Arab Muslim conquerors of the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. The accounts of the late medieval Portuguese travellers, explorers, and merchants often used ‘Moor’ for Muslim, although distinctions remained: despite such terms as ‘Arabian Moors’ or ‘Turkish Moors’, both were usually described as mouros brancos (white moors), while Berber and sub-Saharan Muslims were frequently distinguished between mouros da terra (Portuguese for ‘moors from the land’) or mouros negros (‘black moors’).[1] Mouro and moro also became terms associated with specific physical features, as the Portuguese and Spanish term moreno (literally ‘brunette’ or ‘swarthy’) suggests. Morisco/Mourisco, the Iberian category used to identify Christian converts from Islam, was another derivative from Moro/Mouro which sought to stigmatize and racialize the Arab and Berber descendants from the Muslim communities of Al-Andalus.[2] This complex relation between ethnicity, geography and religion informed the evolution of ‘blackamoor’, often used alongside region-inflected words like ‘Niger’ or ‘Ethiop’.[3] English grammars and dictionaries of the time made similar associations: ‘a black More, or a man of Ethiope’; ‘The Negro’s [sic], which we call the Black-mores’.[4]
The label ‘blackamoor’ in England put colour at the heart of identity. In his 1600 translation of the North African humanist scholar Leo Africanus’ Description of Africa, John Pory described the ‘principall nations’ of Africa as including ‘the Africans or Moores, properly so called; which last are of two kinds, namely white or tawnie Moores, and Negros or black Moores’.[5] ‘Tawnie Moores’ were North African Muslims, such as the Moroccan ambassador Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, who visited the Elizabethan court in 1600, and whom Pory mentioned in his dedicatory preface of Description of Africa. Pory defined ‘[B]lack Moores’ as the large numbers of individuals who ‘are thought to be descended from Cham the cursed son of Noah; except some Arabians of the lineage of Sem, which afterward passed into Africa’.[6]
While full-fledged articulations of race did not exist until the institutionalization of slavery in the late seventeenth century, there were taxonomies in place from classical antiquity that qualified the nature of individuals based on physical characteristics.[7] People are ‘naturally subordinate’ to qualities of their ‘country of birth’, wrote the Greek astrologer and mathematician Ptolemy. One should not call, say, ‘the Ethiopian white or straight-haired, and the German or Gaul black-skinned and woolly-haired...[or] the Greeks savage of soul and untutored of mind’.[8] While these classifications acknowledged the humanity of Africans, the growth of institutional slavery in the mid- to late seventeenth century drastically changed these perceptions of human difference. Walter Ralegh’s assertion in The historie of the worlde (1614) is remarkable, given the shift in perception that followed as Britain became a dominant player in the slave trade: ‘if colour...made a different Species, then were the Negro’s [sic] which wee call the black-mores, non animalia rationalia, not men, but some kinde of strange beastes' .[9]
Africa, Africans, and popular ideas of blackness played an important role in constructions of difference in moral literature. The colour black often represented malignity, death, or wickedness. Witches and dark-skinned figures were associated with the devil, and in a didactic world of contraries and comparisons, blackness stood in opposition to the purity of whiteness.[10] ‘Every vertue is commended by his contrarie’, George Whetstone wrote, ‘...[b]lack best setteth foorth White’.[11] To ‘wash the Ethiop white’ or ‘wash a blackamoor white’ was a popular maxim expressing futility, adapted from Jeremiah 13:23 (KJV): ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skinne? or the leopard his spots?’.[12] Such thinking became a way not only to cast ‘aspersions of darker-skinned peoples’, but a means ‘of emphasising the whiteness, beauty, and virtue of Europeans in general and the English nation in particular’.[13] Of all European languages, it was English that used the same word – ‘fair’ – to denote beauty and light skin.[14] This relationship between skin colour and moral traits recurred often, not only to condemn blackness but to denounce the sins of English men and women. In 1653, the puritan Thomas Hall quipped that vain women who primped their hair or wore makeup should be scorched under the sun until they had the ‘hue of the Black-moores’ to better reflect their inner degeneration.[15] The colour of ivory itself was not incidental: ‘the whiteness...thought to represent the natural fairnesse of mans skinne’.[16] Ivory demonstrated the beauty of whiteness, in this case explicitly related to its value as a commodity gained through exploration.
Ideological notions of blackness and whiteness, dark and light, should not distract from the actual African presence in England. It is likely that the metaphorical attributes of blackness were increasingly popular precisely because the English began to encounter African peoples more frequently. Imtiaz Habib found records of 448 individuals in the Tudor and Stuart era who were potentially African, stressing that this is likely not a complete number.[17] Parish records, and the increasing administrative oversight of the Tudor Crown, make it possible to trace the births, deaths, and baptisms of dozens of ‘blackamoors’, particularly in London parishes. One ‘Christian Ethiopia[n]’ was baptised in London in 1602, and ‘Richard a Blakmore’ in 1609. Burials included ‘Peter a blackmore ... from Mrs Locksmiths’ in 1616, and ‘Barbaree, servant to Mr Smith’ in 1623.[18] A Guinean diver testified in an admiralty court case of 1548, though Italian merchant witnesses complained that his testimony was unlawful because he was a ‘slave’. [19] Africans in England held a range of occupational roles, often as skilled labourers. Henry VIII had a black trumpeter in his retinue, while other Africans served as royal pages, laundresses, maids, or goldsmiths.[20] Africans in the household of Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, including the ‘esclava’ Catalina of Motril, may have been some of the first to arrive in England, and Africans lived and worked in the households of Spanish and Portuguese merchants and traders living in London throughout this period. [21]
Merchants and explorers were largely responsible for the increased number of Africans appearing in England in the Elizabethan period, where the desire for commodities led to increased exploration in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Africans arrived mostly ‘as a result of England’s expeditionary forays into Africa and the Western Atlantic in search of new commodities and markets,’ where pirates, privateers, and merchants – often with royal backing – recognised that trafficking people could be profitable and enhance one’s status.[22] There were African servants in the house of Lady Ralegh, wife of Sir Walter, in the 1580s, some of them likely having served under Ralegh as crew members on his Atlantic voyages.[23] Between 1531 and 1567, the English conducted 16 trips to the West African coast, or stopped in Africa on their way to America.[24] Amid the search for ivory and gold, human trafficking emerges in small, often offhand references: ‘the English in anno 1554 tooke away 5 Negroes’.[25] A ‘fellowe came aboord our shippe without feare, and...demaunded, why we had not brought againe their men, which the last yeere we took away...we made him answere, that they were in England well used, and were there kept till they could speake the language, and then they should be brought againe to be a helpe to Englishmen in this Countrey’.[26]
In 1596, Elizabeth I’s privy council authorised the merchant Caspar Van Senden from Lubeck to transport ‘blackamoors’ from the realm, proclaiming that ‘there are of late divers blackamoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to [sic] manie’.[27] Five years later, Van Senden complained again to Elizabeth that ‘great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors...are crept into this realm’ and were ‘infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel’.[28] Though these complaints made their way to the queen and council, there is no evidence to suggest that Africans were actually deported from England at the time. Van Senden complained to Robert Cecil that merchants and members of the elite refused to part with the Africans in their households. Emily Bartels has suggested that Elizabeth’s proclamations had more to do with anxieties over foreigners arriving in London as a result of privateering and war with Spain than with any prejudice based explicitly on skin colour, where ‘blackamoors’ became bargaining tools in larger issues of trade and commerce.[29]
At the same time, ‘blackamoors’ were not free from exploitation or manipulation. While some Englishmen did express sympathy towards Africans or Native Americans, it was often ‘the supposed cruelty of the Spaniards, not the injustice of slavery’ that explained why the English often denounced Atlantic slavery.[30] The English Jesuit Thomas Gage, who lived in Central America in the late 1620s and 1630s, noted that sugar plantations in Mexico were maintained by hundreds of ‘blackamoor slaves’.[31] Although these were owned largely by the Spanish, English merchants and traders to the Americas and Caribbean expressed few qualms in participating in the trafficking of human beings, a practice initiated by Elizabethan privateers like John Hawkins and Francis Drake. While Pory praised Leo Africanus’s wit and learning in his Description of Africa, he was not translating a history of Africa to engender awareness of another continent in its own right. Pory’s patron was Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Warwick sought to use Bermuda as a privateering base for attacking Spanish ships, and had knowingly purchased Angolan slaves from the Spanish to help with tobacco cultivation in the English colony by the mid-1610s.[32] The English were complicit in keeping the status of ‘blackamoors’ as undefined as possible.
As Jennifer L. Morgan demonstrates in her study of Maria, a ‘proper Negro wench’ captured by Drake and left pregnant on a remote Indonesian island, African men and women who encountered the English through such voyaging were subject to those assumptions and ideologies ‘operating in Elizabeth’s London’.[33] The contexts in which individual Africans arrived in England is important for determining how the person may have been treated, and in what capacity. Since Africans were often purchased from the Spanish, who did use enslaved peoples for plantation labour, some scholars subscribe to the idea that all Africans in early modern England were enslaved.[34] However, until the codification of colonial slavery in English plantations in the 1660s, which also saw the creation of the Royal African Company in England, the status of Africans in the eyes of the English remained deeply ambiguous and depended heavily on individual experience, whether as a married man or woman in a rural parish, an interpreter employed in merchant transactions, or an attendant at court.
As letters from the privy council indicated in the late sixteenth century, concerns over African migrants were tied to fears of taking jobs from English men and women, suggesting that English and African labourers worked similar jobs, and were paid for doing them. This should not, however, imply a pervasive equality. On a household or parish level, this may have sometimes been the case, and English trade negotiations with high-status African princes or ambassadors were conducted using the language of amity and friendship.[35] Nonetheless, to the Crown and the elite, the Africans who arrived in England seem to have been regarded largely as curiosities. They were finely dressed and placed in portraits and still life paintings to enhance the status of white sitters, rather than depicted in their own right.[36] The presence of black figures, often children, appear in the portraits of Peregrine Bertie, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby (date unknown, c. late sixteenth century); Anne of Denmark (1617); Charles I and Henrietta Maria (c. 1630-2); and Prince Rupert, Count Palatine (c. 1630s), among numerous others. In the portrait of Charles II’s mistress Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (1682), the African girl gestures to the Duchess with a swathe of luxury goods that seem present only to reinforce the wealth and prestige of the sitter.[37] The disassociation between salon and slave port in elite art was deliberate, but also artificial; by the later seventeenth century, the political economy of slavery is what allowed courtiers continued access to exclusive goods and commodities that fed their expressions of civil refinement.[38]
Though scholars have increasingly sought to uncover the range of experiences that black Tudors and Stuarts might have undergone, the daily experiences of ‘blackamoors’ in England can be difficult to reconstruct. Often, they appear nameless in the historical record, given only the label ‘blackamoor’ or ‘negro’. Parish records indicate that most Africans living in England had been baptized and practised Christianity, meaning the names that do appear for them are usually their baptized name: Peter or Mary, for example, or ‘Phyllis...[daughter of] a Moroccan basket and a shovel maker’ who ‘was desyrus to becom a Christian’.[39] In the mid- to late seventeenth century, poets envisaged Anglo-African sexual encounters, as in Henry Rainolds’s ‘A Black-moor Maid Wooing a Fair Boy’. ‘Stay lovely Boy, why fly’st thou mee...I’m black ’tis true: why so is Night, / And Love doth in dark Shades delight’.[40] The poem played on light and shadow, and on night as an equalizer in the act of love, blurring distinctions between white and black bodies.
Performing Africa and blackness in England evoked a much different world than the experience of Africans on board ships and in London households. Shakespeare’s ‘Moor’ characters – Aaron in the early Titus Andronicus, written between 1588 and 1593, and Othello in the play that bears his name, written around 1603 – represent two ends of the spectrum, in terms of their social and moral status. Beyond the sphere of the popular theatre that Shakespeare inhabited, plays and city pageants often equated the figure of the African with wealth and the allure of global expansion. ‘Africana’ can be found in Ben Jonson’s ‘The Masque of Blackness’ (1605), the masque of ‘Solomon and Sheba’ (1606), and in civic pageants like Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth (1613).[41] Court masques could be unruly affairs. The ambassador Dudley Carleton expressed little amusement when the ladies of court appeared with blackened skin in ‘The Masque of Blackness’. ‘Their black faces and hands, which were painted and bare up the elbows’, Carleton described, ‘was a very loathsome sight and I am sorry that strangers should see our court so strangely disguised’.[42] It is clear that the shame at the performance was not in the misrepresentation of other peoples, but in maintaining the reputation of the English among other European powers. The French and Spanish ambassadors, Carleton complained, were all present to view this show of incompetence. A sketch of Inigo Jones’s costume designs survive for the character of a ‘Daughter of Niger’, her skin black and wearing robes in hues of blue, yellow, and cream. The figure is a graceful sight, but this is to be expected when embodying a royal and European figure.
Into the seventeenth century, the ‘present-absentness’, to use Habib’s term, of ‘blackamoors’ in early modern England was intimately and inextricably connected to the burgeoning colonial world and English imperial aspirations.[43] ‘Here we saw a little Turke and negroe which are intended for pages to the two young ladies’, the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary in 1662[44] In 1667, Pepys noted that Mingo, Sir William Batten’s African servant, had appeared in Batten’s will. Batten requested that Mingo become lighthouse keeper, retaining the sum of 20l a year.[45] Mingo’s relatively stable position in Batten’s household, and Pepys’s frequent and not altogether negative depictions of him, were indicative of these structures of power and imperial intervention. The Virginia slave laws in 1662 and 1667 were the beginnings of stricter legislation against Africans based on the need for human labour to produce the vast quantities of tobacco and sugar that North America and Caribbean colonies supplied to Europe. Tobacco advertisements presented intermingling Africans, Native Americans, and English planters in shared moments of sociability, smoking pipes or even, at times, working alongside each other.[46] Yet these fictions of harmony and cross-racial brotherhood in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic were not indicative of the collapse of a world dependent on African labour, but a sign of its success. Africans were idealised in art or elite fashions as accoutrements to a society that did not perceive Africans as a threat to English sovereignty at home or in the Americas. As Simon Gikandi wrote of the eighteenth century, the ‘existence of slavery in absentia [in Britain] would make it difficult to conceptualise or represent slaves as a visual and palpable ingredient of British society, but...slavery was part of the political unconscious of Britishness’.[47]
Brief glimpses into interlinked African lives on a parish level or in port cities may suggest, as Habib has posited, a moment in which ‘blackness’ emerges as an ‘English social category’ or, in the words of Onyeka Nubia, as ‘a black sense of self’.[48] There is as yet little evidence of Africans self-identifying in this way; but unfortunately, there is little trace of direct African voices at all. It is in the realm of literature and fantasy that the most poignant appeals to the humanity of Africans were often imagined by white authors. The celebration of ‘black beauty’, though a transgressive poetic trope, envisaged a space where blackness was not a defect: ‘What th’world calls fair is foolish, ‘tis allow’d / That you who are so black, be justly proud’.[49] Taken in its broader context, however, these poems continued to perpetuate the ‘blackamoor’ as markedly different.
