Faces of Perfect Ebony by Catherine Molineux - 9780674050082

Harvard University Press

Faces of Perfect EbonyEncountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain\nAuthor(s): Catherine Molineux\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Harvard University Press, United States\nImprint: Harvard University Press\nISBN-13: 9780674050082, 978-0674050082\nSynopsis\nThough blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. For two hundred years, as Britain shipped over three million Africans to the New World, popular images of blacks as slaves and servants proliferated in London art, both highbrow and low. Catherine Molineux assembles a surprising array of sources in her exploration of this emerging black presence, from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, playing cards, and song ballads to more familiar objects such as William Hogarths graphic satires. By idealizing black servitude and obscuring the brutalities of slavery, these images of black people became symbols of empire to a general populace that .