While looking for a history of Black people in Britain, the author was told by a saleswoman in a bookshop: ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945’ — and so, the need for a book such as this.
William Hogarth self-portrait, detail. Gretchen Gerzina shows that Blacks were hardly invisible in early England, turning up in the work of Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds. National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons
