African Migration and Communities (c.1500–1900)

African arrivals in Tudor England

Africans were living in England well before Britain developed its large Atlantic empire. Their arrival was connected to trade, the movement of European households and warfare. These routes brought people with different backgrounds and different degrees of choice over their journeys.

Some Africans arrived with royal or merchant households from southern Europe, especially Portugal. Others travelled with English merchants returning from trade with Africa. Many probably originated in North or West Africa, the regions with the strongest contacts with Europe at the time. However, English records often used vague descriptions rather than recording a precise birthplace.

There is evidence of at least 350 Africans in England during the Tudor and early Stuart period, 1500–1640. This is a count of documented individuals across a period, not a population total for a single year. Africans lived in different parts of the country, with larger numbers in ports such as London, Southampton, Bristol and Plymouth. Ports connected overseas journeys with opportunities for employment.

Warfare, escape and the journey to England

The war between England and Spain, 1585–1604, created another route. English privateers attacked Spanish ships and ports where enslaved Africans were living. Some Africans were taken during these attacks; others escaped from Spanish enslavers and joined the English, hoping to gain freedom.

Francis Drake’s attack on Santo Domingo in 1586 provides a concrete example. African men and women fled their Spanish masters to join his expedition. Their journey was dangerous: many Africans and English people died when a storm struck the fleet at Roanoke in Virginia in June 1586. Reaching England was therefore neither a simple nor a safe process.

An unnamed African man who later appeared in Hector Nunes’ household in London probably arrived through this expedition. His route illustrates how an individual might reach England through the Caribbean rather than travelling directly from Africa.

Work, family life and freedom

Many Africans in Tudor England worked as domestic servants, but this was not their only occupation. Reasonable Blackman was an independent silkweaver in Southwark in the 1590s. His experience shows that Africans could earn a living through skilled work rather than remaining dependent on a wealthy household.

Africans received wages, could testify in court, and were baptised, married and buried in the Church of England. Some married other Africans and some married English people. Mary and Grace, African servants in Hector Nunes’ household, appear in the burial records of St Olave’s, Hart Street, London. Such records show participation in local communities as well as employment.

Legal freedom did not remove the danger of exploitation. In 1587, the Portuguese doctor Hector Nunes petitioned the Queen after paying the sailor John Lax for an African man brought from Santo Domingo. The man refused to remain and serve Nunes for life. Nunes acknowledged that ordinary English common law gave him no remedy to compel lifetime service.

The episode shows both an attempt to treat an African person as property and that person’s resistance. It supports a distinction between domestic service and slavery in Tudor England. The surviving petition does not reveal the eventual court decision, so it cannot establish the man’s later circumstances.

Colonial expansion and the Royal African Company

From the seventeenth century, England’s expanding Atlantic colonies changed the scale and circumstances of African migration. England established Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, acquired Caribbean colonies during the seventeenth century and seized Jamaica in 1655. Colonial production, including tobacco and sugar, depended increasingly on enslaved labour.

The transatlantic slave trade forcibly transported captive Africans to the Americas. It created an African diaspora in Britain’s colonies, from which some people later reached Britain. The main forced movement was therefore across the Atlantic to the colonies, not directly to Britain.

The Royal African Company, established in 1672, helped expand this trade. It was granted a monopoly: the exclusive right to conduct the English trade in enslaved Africans. Growing Caribbean sugar plantations increased demand for enslaved labour, and the company transported an average of about 5,000 enslaved people a year between 1680 and 1686. In 1698, Parliament ended its monopoly, allowing other English merchants to enter the trade and contributing to further expansion.

The company’s connection to African communities in Britain was chiefly through the colonial world it helped build. Forced transportation increased the population of African descent in the colonies, while commercial and household connections between those colonies and Britain created routes for later migration.

Hundreds of enslaved men, women and children came to Britain accompanying people who claimed to own them. Others arrived after being freed or purchasing their freedom. Some worked as domestic servants in households connected to colonial wealth. Trade and empire thus encouraged migration through both coercion and opportunities available to free people.

Some estimates suggest that around 20,000 people of African descent lived in Britain by the middle of the eighteenth century, probably more than half of them in London. This is an estimate rather than a precise census figure, but it indicates substantial growth from the small communities documented in the Tudor period.

The loss of the American colonies

The American War of Independence, 1776–1783, generated a further movement of people. After Britain lost its American colonies, several thousand formerly enslaved people who had fought alongside the British came to Britain.

Many of these Black Loyalists travelled through Nova Scotia, where the defeated British had first taken them. This migration resulted from wartime allegiance, freedom from slavery and the consequences of British defeat. Britain’s relationship with the wider world could therefore produce immigration through the loss of territory as well as its acquisition.

Continuing movement in the nineteenth century

Britain ended its own participation in the slave trade in 1807, but slavery continued in its colonies. Parliament legislated to end colonial slavery in 1833, with full emancipation following in 1838. These were different stages, not a single event.

Mary Prince’s experience shows how connections between Britain and its colonies could restrict an individual’s choices. She was brought from the Caribbean to London by John Adams Wood in 1828 and left his household after mistreatment. She wanted to return to her husband in Antigua, but returning would have exposed her to re-enslavement because Wood refused to release her as a free woman.

After emancipation, smaller-scale migration from the British Caribbean continued. Seamen and students were important groups, and not everyone settled permanently. In the late nineteenth century, students came to Britain for university education and professional training in fields such as law and medicine, opportunities unavailable at university level in the British Caribbean.

Across this period, African communities grew through several connected processes: trade, colonial slavery, individual journeys to freedom, wartime displacement and later educational and maritime links. These routes produced varied experiences, rather than one uniform story of African migration.

Tudor arrivals and experiences

• Routes: southern European households, English trade with Africa, privateering and escape from Spanish slavery.
• 1585–1604: war with Spain increased movement through captured ships and attacks on ports.
• 1586: Drake attacked Santo Domingo; Africans joined his expedition.
• Experiences: paid domestic service, skilled work, marriage, church participation and the ability to testify in court; exploitation remained possible.
• 1587: Nunes’ African servant refused lifetime service; Nunes acknowledged no ordinary common-law remedy to compel it.
• Reasonable Blackman: independent Southwark silkweaver in the 1590s.

Growth through trade and empire

• Atlantic colonial expansion and slavery created an .