Rob Waters. Thinking Black

Historical studies of metropolitan Britain have long excluded robust discussions of racial-political histories. Yet the field is now being awakened from slumber by new works of magnitude, as young scholars mine community-based archives as well as government-housed records, and as they speak in depth with those still living. Rob Waters’s splendid contribution to this recent literature is instantly a work of seminal importance and impact; it sets a new standard for cataloguing and referencing black British activists and organizations, and for the depiction of their written, spoken, and visual records. Those who write histories of modern British political culture risk narratives that could appear impoverished and diminished without a reckoning with this growing body of work. The etiquette that sidelines black British history far from the central political plotline or that relegates it to efforts in journalism and social media, to public history and museums, to the social science of “race relations,” and to the postcolonial histories of territories and peoples outside the Isles can no longer survive scrutiny given the new scholarly level of production about events unmistakably transpiring “at home” whose transnational links are understood.

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