SOURCE: “The Black Presence,” in Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing, Associated University Presses, 1988, pp. 17-42.

In the following excerpt, Sandiford examines the social and cultural situation of blacks in England before 1800 and discusses the lives and works of prominent black writers and intellectuals—including Ignatio Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and Job Ben Solomon—whose works would spur literary reactions and philosophical debates about blacks and the institution of slavery.

Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano were undoubtedly the three best-known Africans in eighteenth-century England. But it is important to establish at the outset that they were also members of a considerable Black community that grew up in England as a direct consequence of that country's participation in the slave trade. The fact that several thousand Africans made their home in England during this period is not yet as fully...