White Responses

Abstract

Much of the preceding history of black society had been gleaned from what contemporaries said about it. It would in fact be perfectly possible to reconstruct a history solely from such sources. But the study of white responses to black society demands a much more varied investigation for it takes us not merely into the reactions of whites towards blacks living in Britain but also into the infinitely more complex terrain of racial attitudes themselves. At its most ambitious therefore an analysis of white responses would be, in itself, a history of black—white relations. Clearly, such a study is beyond the scope of the present book. On the other hand it would be unrealistic simply to suggest that British reactions to their black minority were shaped merely, or even largely, by personal contact, fleeting glimpses or more intimate connections forged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To view white reactions solely as a function of short-term relations between black and white would be to miss the point that by the late eighteenth century both black and white communities were the inheritors of an ancient tradition of mutual observation and commentary.