This work explores the lives of people of sub-Saharan Africa and their descendants, how they were shaped by empire, and how they in turn influenced the empire in everything from material goods to cultural style. The black experience varied greatly across space and over time. Accordingly, thirteen substantive essays and a scene-setting introduction range from West Africa in the sixteenth century, through the history of the slave trade and slavery down to the 1830s, to nineteenth- and twentieth-century participation of blacks in the empire as workers, soldiers, members of colonial elites, intellectuals, athletes, and musicians. No people were more uprooted and dislocated; or traveled more within the empire; or created more of a trans-imperial culture. In the crucible of the British empire, blacks invented cultural mixes that were precursors to our modern selves - hybrid, fluid, ambiguous, and constantly in motion.

Professor Wm Roger Louis, Editor-in-Chief, is Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at University of Texas, Austin.

• 1: Sean Hawkins and Philip D. Morgan: Blacks and the British Empire: An Introduction


• 2: David Northrup: West Africans and the Atlantic 1500-1800


• 3: David Richardson: Through a Looking Glass: Olaudah Equiano and African Experiences in the British Slave Trade


• 4: Philip D. Morgan: The Black Experience in the British Empire 1680-1810


• 5: Christopher L. Brown: From Slaves to Subjects: Envisioning an Empire without Slavery 1772-1834


• 6: Gad Heuman: From Slavery to Freedom: Blacks in the Nineteenth Century British West Indies


• 7: T. C. McCaskie: Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century


• 8: Vivian Bickford-Smith: The Betrayal of Creole Elites 1880-1920


• 9: Diana Jeater: The British Empire and African Women in the Twentieth Century


• 10: Timothy H. Parsons: African Participation in the British Empire


• 11: Frederick Cooper: African Workers and Imperial Designs


• 12: Howard Johnson: The Black Experience in the British Caribbean in the Twentieth Century


• 13: Winston James: The Black Experience in Twentieth Century Britain


• 14: Kwame Anthony Appiah: Language, Race, and the Legacies of the British Empire


• Index