When did ethnic africans and asians first appear in the U.K?

Question

I recently saw a film set in medieval times that had coloured actors portraying some of the parts.This promted me to wonder if coloured people were in fact in this country at that time and when in fact the first of them did arrive on these shores.I'm guessing the romans may have brought some over as slave labour.

Answer 1

The day the white man in the UK decide that he could not do his own work and needed slaves.

Answer 2

You people are morons. Why do people assume that africans with the romans were slaves. Until the transatlantic slave trade started after columbus slavery was not color based. In fact the word slave comes from slav. Africans fought for rome just like people from all roman territories did.

Africans in numbers of any consequence began coming to the UK after WWI and then in large numbers after WWII as Britain was forced to give up it's colonies.

Answer 3

Queen Charlotte Sophia

Consort of George III and Queen Victoria's grandmother


Queen Charlotte, wife of the English King George III (1738-1820), was directly descended from Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. The riddle of Queen Charlotte's African ancestry was solved as a result of an earlier investigation into the black magi featured in 15th century Flemish paintings. Two art historians had suggested that the black magiC must have been portraits of actual contemporary people (since the artist, without seeing them, would not have been aware of the subtleties in colouring and facial bone structure of quadroons or octoroons which these figures invariably represented) Enough evidence was accumulated to propose that the models for the black magi were, in all probability, members of the Portuguese de Sousa family.

Six different lines can be traced from English Queen Charlotte back to Margarita de Castro y Sousa, in a gene pool which because of royal inbreeding was already minuscule, thus explaining the Queen's unmistakable African appearance.

The Negroid characteristics of the Queen's portraits certainly had political significance since artists of that period were expected to play down, soften or even obliterate "undesirable" features in a subject's face. Sir Allan Ramsay was the artist responsible for the majority of the paintings of the Queen and his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits. Ramsey was an anti-slavery intellectual of his day. He also married the niece of Lord Mansfield, the English judge whose 1772 decision was the first in a series of rulings that finally ended slavery in the British Empire. It should be noted too that by the time Sir Ramsay was commissioned to do his first portrait of the Queen, he was already, by marriage, uncle to Dido Elizabeth Lindsay.

Thus, from just a cursory look at the social awareness and political activism at that level of English society, it would be surprising if the Queen's Negroid physiognomy was of no significance to the Abolitionist movement.

Perhaps the most literary of these allusions to her African appearance, however, can be found in the poem penned to her on the occasion of her wedding to George III and the Coronation celebration that immediately followed.

Descended from the warlike Vandal race, she still preserves that title in her face. Tho' shone their triumphs o'er Numidia's plain, And Alusian fields their name retain; they but subdued the southern world with arms, She conquers still with her triumphant charms, O! born for rule, - to whose victorious brow The greatest monarch of the north must bow! ..there has been 2 black queens of Englang.there's a painting of Henry V111 being trumpeted and i think 2 of them are black .when the moors invaded and got as far as Cornwell and other parts of the south west .i'm sure some stayed.Black people have been here a long long time .even if some people don't want to believe it..if you are genuine and want to know more email me and i'll be glad to tell you .good question

Answer 4

No doubt the Romans had black slaves and maybe some came over here but African people have been in this country for several hundred years. Not sure about Asiatic people

Answer 5

The question does not have a precise answer, since we are all basically Africans who evolved there then spread to the rest of the world.

Answer 6

When the Labour Government first came to power and they are still letting them in.

Answer 7

Don't think they had to go as far as Africa for slaves then. I think Britain had it's own peasants. May be wrong.

Answer 8

you call these people "coloureds"? white people are born pink, are blue and purple when they're cold, and grey when dead, and you call these people "coloured"...

Answer 9

cheap labour, mostly still are