Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical

The experience of marginality has always been a key concern for historians of the revolutionary black Atlantic. Biographical and micro-historical approaches in particular have an awkward tendency of presenting us with square pegs where we only have round holes: stubbornly inconsistent individuals who frustrate our nice, neat models. In this meticulously researched new biography, Amanda Goodrich brings one such seemingly contradictory actor from the supporting cast of the historiography of British popular politics firmly into the transnational limelight, raising new and important questions about the unstable relationship between ethnicity, nationhood and political identity. Born on the small West Indian island of Barbuda in 1772, Henry Redhead Yorke was steeped in the experience of contradiction and marginality from the beginning. His mother, Sally Bullock, was a light-skinned dual heritage woman, enslaved under the Codrington family until the year before his birth. His father, a white slave-owner and an agent for the Codringtons (a man who, by all accounts, embodied the dissipated, violent ‘Creole planter’ stereotype) ‘had been left to run Barbuda as a sort of lawless fiefdom’ (p. 39). Yorke spent his first years surrounded by the violence of racialised plantation slavery, but he himself was free, reasonably well-off, and acknowledged by his father. When the family came to Britain in 1778, he found that he was light-skinned enough to ‘pass’ as white—but only sometimes. Throughout his life, enemies and friends alike felt the need to fix his origins in racial terms: ‘He was, if not a mulatto, a quadroon’ (p. 117), ‘a West Indian with some negro blood’ (p. 82), and in a vicious satire by William Cobbett, ‘a descendant on the female side ... from the Prince Lee Boo of one of the most ancient and venerable of the sable sovereigns in Africa’ (p. 254). Clearly, in some ways Yorke’s apparently ambiguous ethnic status did little to undo the privilege afforded by his father’s slavery-derived wealth: he read law at Cambridge, travelled extensively throughout Europe, published multiple works and edited several periodicals, and later in life practised as a barrister. Yet, as Goodrich skilfully draws out throughout this biography, in a career defined by controversy, the question of his ethnic ‘otherness’ was never far from the surface

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