Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

How far back does the story of black people in Britain stretch?

Who was cheddar man?

And what evidence do we have of black people in the medieval and

Tudor eras? Since October is Black History Month here in the UK, we thought we'd share this

everything you wanted to know episode with historian Hannah Cusworth, all about Black British

History. Recorded in 2022, Hannah answers your top questions on the subject

in conversation with Charlotte Hodgman. Just to start off with, perhaps we could just outline,

we're going to be talking about Black British history today. What do we mean by that in this kind of

context? Yeah, it's an important question to start with because it's a really, really, really broad topic, or at least my understanding of it is it's maybe sort of two, maybe even more thousand years worth of history and covers obviously Britain, but if we're thinking about sort of what we mean by black, and that is a term that has changed over time,

and I think it's important to recognise that. But when I'm talking about Black British history

and about the kind of word black, I'm thinking about people who are from Africa and also what

we call the African diaspora. And so what we mean by that is people who kind of have their

family heritage back in Africa. So I consider myself as being a member of the African Diaspora,

my family on my dad's side from Antigua, which is an island in the Caribbean. And originally,

I kind of always assumed that they were from somewhere in West Africa. But so you have people from

the African diaspora in Europe, in the Americas, the Caribbean, and of course all over the world. So it's

those people who have that heritage in Africa and then their history in Britain. But also in

David O'Shoge, people probably familiar with the historian David O'Shawga, has been, I think,

really influential in thinking about black British history is also what happened in those areas of the

world that Britain was sort of involved with because of its empire. So we're also talking about

some kind of, I feel like Caribbean history, when we're thinking about the islands that Britain

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