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 Cheddaman?

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 Kuzworthworth 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 recognize that but when 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 like 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'm 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 L. Shoga, people probably familiar with the historian David L. Shoga, 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.

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