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1756
Mounting black response to slavery through covert
means, resistance and flight. Notable Black activists are: Oluadah
Equiano; Ignatius Sancho; and Ottobah Cugoano. Movements
among Britons to demand black freedom from slavery.
Supporters include workers and urban poor who themselves suffered
under the ruling classes of the day.
Mid-18th century
London Blacks vociferously contested slavery and
the slave sales widespread in Britain. The legal status of
these practices were never clearly defined. Slavery of whites was
forbidden. Free blacks could not be enslaved. But blacks who were
brought as slaves to Britain were considered bound to their
owners.
1772
Lord Mansfield court ruling that a slave who has deserted
his master could not be taken by force to be sold abroad.
Verdict triggers black flight from their owners, the decline of slavery
in England, and calls by Equiano and others for the abolition of the slave
trade. Clandestine Black quarters develop.
1775-83
In the wake of the American revolution hundreds
of "Black loyalists" , the African-American slave-soldiers who fought
on the side of the British, arrived in London. Deprived of pensions many
of them became indigent and begged in the streets
of London.
1786
London's Blacks and Asians (Lascars) lived among whites
in such areas as Mile End, Stepney, Paddington, and
the St. Giles areas. The majority were living, not as slaves and Servants
in wealthy homes, but as free men, householders or
tenants. Many became the Black Poor: ex-low-wage soldiers, seafarers, and
plantation workers, but with few desirable skills
in an evolving urban capitalist economy.
1789
Blacks and south-east Asian Lascars did not fit
easily into the Poor Law welfare strategies of the period. A
special Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor laid plans for the Settlement
of Blacks in Sierra Leone, West Africa.
Publication of the memoirs of Equiano, the chief Black spokesman
of Britain's Black community, "The
Interesting Narratives of the Life of Olaudah Equiano".
1792-1815
Further groups of black soldiers and seamen settle
in London after services in the Napoleonic wars.
Late 18th century
The slave trade declines greatly in economic importance
to Britain with the evolution of industrial capitalism. Resurgence
of intolerance buttressed by "scientific racism". This effectively ends
the first period of large-scale black immigration to London and Britain.
Decline in immigration and gradual absorption of blacks and their
descendants into the white population occurs.