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The Oxford Companion to Black British History; edited by David Dabydeen, John Gilmore and Cecily Jones. Oxford: OUP, 2007. xxiv, 562 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-280439-6. £30.00. Online (subscription required) at www.oxfordreference.com.
Aimed at academics, researchers, and students from ?-level onwards, the Oxford Companion to Black British History claims to answer the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's call in December 2005 for greater recognition of the black presence in British history. This is a formidable claim, and one that is only partially achieved by the text.
The OCBBH aims to address the invisibility from which many black Britons have suffered by providing comprehensive biographical and personal details for as many prominent individuals as possible. In some cases, as the editors frankly admit, lack of documentation has impeded them. Church records of the 17th and 18th centuries provide brief references to several hundred black people in Britain, but in most cases only their Christian names are given and no further details have yet been discovered.
Such anonymity indicates an ambiguous cultural presence, simultaneously within society but outside (written) history....