Decidedly Different: The Seventeenth Century and Africa

By the eighteenth century, Englishmen and Americans had developed the set of prejudices that led to the racial attitudes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historians seem to agree that these attitudes were influenced by the profitability of slavery and the slave-trade, though there is disagreement about the importance of slavery in their formulation.

Some historians argue that racial prejudices existed long before the eighteenth century and that slavery was more the result than the cause of racial prejudice. Yet there is much evidence that in the seventeenth century, English attitudes were ambivalent and hardly fully formed.

Before the first English voyages to West Africa in the late sixteenth century, little was known about black Africans and most of it was based on translations and popularizations of Greek and Roman writers such as Herodotus and Pliny. Occasionally, Africans had been depicted in literature. One of the early references was in Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, which mentions St Jerome’s long sojourn in the African desert, an experience that supposedly left him blackened.