Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony, and contemporary interviews, this history reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, and Shakespeare's Othello. It reveals that behind the South Sea Bubble was Britain's global slave-trading empire and that much of the great industrial boom of the 19th century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the WWI trenches. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues, and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, this book describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries.