Black Tudors: The Untold Story

Miranda Kaufmann

Nov 2017 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Corrie James

About this audiobook

A black porter publicly whips a white English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is despatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose . . . Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England. From long-forgotten records, remarkable characters emerge. They were baptised, married, and buried by the Church of England. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. Their stories, brought viscerally to life by Kaufmann, provide unprecedented insights into how Africans came to be in Tudor England, what they did there and how they were treated. A ground-breaking, seminal work, Black Tudors challenges the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and forces us to re-examine the seventeenth century to determine what caused perceptions to change so radically.

About the author

Miranda Kaufmann is a senior research fellow at the University of London's Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She has appeared on Sky News, the BBC and Al Jazeera, and she's written for the Times, Guardian and BBC History Magazine. She lives in London.

Corrie James has worked on both sides of the Atlantic in theater, radio, and audiobooks. She credits growing up listening to the BBC for her love of the spoken word.