New Book
Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as “Africans” and those called “Europeans.” She gives equal attention to the most prominent figures—like Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence thought to have been born to a free African woman in a Roman village—and the untold stories—like the lives of dual-heritage families in Europe’s coastal trading towns. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.
About the Author:
Olivette Otele is professor of the history of slavery at the University of Bristol and vice president of the Royal Historical Society. She is the first Black woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in history in the UK, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, BBC Extra, and Times Higher Education. She lives in the UK.
African Europeans: An Untold Story | History Hit LIVE on Timeline
African Europeans by Olivette Otele Reviews:
“Ms. Otele, a black scholar at Britain’s University of Bristol, takes a broad view of her subject. Sometimes, the African Europeans of the title are, as one might expect, people living in Europe, but on many other occasions, they are blacks or people of mixed-race who have lived elsewhere, in other far-flung quarters of the Atlantic world. Her book is equally sprawling in terms of time, moving back and forth across the centuries, from antiquity to the present… Some of Ms. Otele’s most interesting material is future-looking, asking questions about the ambivalence experienced by blacks in contemporary Europe.”—Wall Street Journal
“Olivette Otele’s African Europeans: An Untold History is superb. Enlightening and erudite, it deploys awesome range, narrative panache and deep scholarship to overthrow conventional wisdom and show the neglected role of Africans in European history from ancient times.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore
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