In general, the designation black in Europe, unlike in the United States, has been reserved for those of dark color, not the broader definition based on known black African ancestry.
Such is the dilemma we face in considering the influence of blacks in European history for a primarily American audience.Ī discussion of the influence of black Africans on Europe and on Europeans is complicated by the absence of a universal definition of black. It is likewise problematic to project onto European history social and cultural constructs that have evolved in the United States, and perhaps nowhere else, in quite the same form. There is a risk in asking 20th-century questions of earlier times because today’s terms of discourse may not find a meaningful context there. His discussion below is excerpted from a larger article written for the American Historical Society in 1999. Their numbers ranged from a few hundred scattered across Germany, Scandinavia and Russia in the period between the 16th and 18th Centuries to approximately 150,000 on the Iberian peninsula. His article reminds us that persons of African ancestry resided across Europe. In the following account, Professor Allison Blakely of Boston University describes the presence of blacks in Early Modern Europe.
0 kommentar(er)
