Black men and women from across the Americas were a common feature of the British Christian scene in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They came as missionaries en route to Africa, as ...fugitives from British or United States slavery and as suppliants for financial aid for black-led churches. Much transatlantic shipping, dominated by British vessels, came to British ports which served as transit points for further travel. Black travellers to Britain had indeterminate times of stay when often they were aided by white British patrons who provided opportunities for preaching, for further study, to acquire new skills, gain financial support, and in some cases to marry. And for black missionaries proceeding to Africa, Britain’s pivotal location remained as a place for rest and recuperation, for the education of children, for medical care, deputation work, and for retirement. These processes and opportunities are analysed in this paper.
This essay examines the ideas, motivations and activities of a handful of black Baptists who played a role in the pan-African movement which straddled the late nineteenth- and early ...twentieth-centuries, notably Thomas L. Johnson, Theophilus Scholes, Emmanuel Mulgrave, and William Forde. Several revisionist views are suggested. First, that although black professionals initiated and directed pan-African activities, they relied heavily on the moral, practical and financial help provided by white men and women. Second, that this inter-racial endeavour relied on Christian networks of Quakers and other dissenters, including various strands of the Brotherhood Movement in Britain, to oppose lynching in the United States, and in demanding a recognition of black civil rights at home and in the colonies. And third, that black Christians played a significant role in the formation of the African Association in 1897, its child the Pan-African Conference held in London in June 1900, the subsequent short-lived Pan-African Association from 1900-1902, and the few weak attempts to revive and foster pan-African cooperation in Britain until 1913.
Proto-Pentecostalist ideas in Britain owe a debt to the activities of the Gold Coast businessman Thomas Brem Wilson (1865-1929), who settled in London in 1901. His recently discovered diaries and ...personal papers detail his commercial interests and activities in West Africa and his relationships with a number of fellow Africans living in London. The diaries also record Brem Wilson's transatlantic involvement with J. A. Dowie's faith healing Catholic Apostolic Church in London and Zion City, Illinois, which he visited in 1904; evangelistic work among his African friends in London and in the Gold Coast; and his personal and financial relations with Alexander Boddy. In 1908 Brem Wilson helped found the first black-led Pentecostal church in Britain, where he was a pastor for the rest of his life.
This essay is an attempt to consider the British Empire in the last years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century from an alternative point of view. Most authors view ...the empire from a 'North-South' perspective: London's impact on the world; the world's reaction to London. The emphasis here is rather on the links that developed at Britain's expense - between the white ruled Dominions and between the African and Asian people over whom they ruled. This is undertaken in the context of Britain's increasing awareness of its weakness and vulnerability, despite the empire appearing to be at its zenith. The aim of this essay is to outline official attempts in London at systematising imperial rule in the early twentieth century and then to sketch the reactions across the empire.
From the late eighteenth century onwards the majority of the inhabitants of the expanding British overseas empire were increasingly non-Europeans. Racial and ethnic discrimination was at the heart of ...British imperial governance, in the black Atlantic world shaped by a long history of slave-holding and then the growth of pseudo-scientific racial ideas in the nineteenth century. Whites rarely perceived the black and brown subjects they ruled as being British, although legally all, irrespective of race or ethnicity, were subjects of the Crown. The institutions of empire helped to foster among many black people in the Atlantic world the use of the English language and a strong sense that they too were British. An identity of 'Britishness' was encouraged by service in the naval and military forces of the Crown, by slave emancipation and by Christian missions, especially through education. Imperial ideologies focused on the monarch helped nurture imperial loyalties. In African colonies where local laws and white attitudes enforced racially discriminatory practise, black elites appealed to the law to demand recognition of their entitlement to 'English liberties' and for full British civil rights. Such appeals were invariably rebuffed. In the United Kingdom, where official and private racial discrimination was overt and covert but rarely endorsed by law, black Britons also failed to secure legislation to protect their civil rights. (Author abstract)
Before 1912 a small number of black South Africans lived and studied in Britain. This experience of a 'modern' European industrial society, so different from the racially constructed states and ...colonies south of the Limpopo, exposed them to new ideas, freedoms and opportunities, including contacts with white sympathisers and patrons and with black people from the African diaspora. For some these were formative years which helped shape their political awareness and self-confidence as they engaged with different expressions of Christian brotherhood, pan-Africanism, and the English legal system. The major focus here is on a handful of individuals: Alice Kinloch, Francis J. Peregrino, Henry Gabashane, and the first black South African lawyers Isaac Pixley Seme and Alfred Mangena.
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