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The aim is obviously to create something that is going to be useful to readers, so you do need to present the entire history. And I also wanted to showcase the latest research.<\/p>\n
The key book in the recent period is Peter Fryer\u2019s Staying Power<\/em>, which was published nearly 40 years ago, and while lots of work has been done by various people since that came out, the history hasn\u2019t been presented in its entirety.<\/p>\n So I wanted to sum up that research and try and build on it, while also giving recognition to what others had done. Sometimes, people write histories and it appears almost as though they discovered everything. That\u2019s never the case.<\/p>\n Thinking about the wider history, because of the kind of society we live in, all of it is related. Technically speaking, you could say Cheddar Man \u2013 the skeleton of a man who lived in Britain about 10,000 years ago \u2013 isn\u2019t part of this history in the sense that he came neither from Africa or from the Caribbean, at least not directly.<\/p>\n But he still fits into this history, because he gives us a new way of looking at how black people are perceived, and the relationship, if you like, between Britishness and blackness.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Cheddar Man is one of the earliest Britons that we have physical evidence of. And so when he was discovered, over a century ago, it was a really important find. But the reconstructions and representations of him were always of a blond-haired, blue-eyed person. The latest DNA evidence presents a very different picture of him, however: as a dark-skinned person with blue eyes, rather interestingly.<\/p>\n Britons 10,000 years ago, and indeed Europeans 10,000 years ago, would all have looked like Cheddar Man. So that changes our perspective on what Britishness is, and what Europeanness is.<\/p>\n On the HistoryExtra<\/em> podcast |<\/strong> The story of African and Caribbean people in Britain goes back to before the Roman empire. Rhiannon Davies spoke to Professor Hakim Adi to discover how their lives and stories have shaped Britain\u2019s history<\/p>\nMore from Hakim Adi<\/h4>\n