Richard Maguire's recent empirical endeavor centers upon working class aspects of African life in East Anglia from 1467 to 1833. Most previous works including histories of African populations in East Anglia have focused on connections to London and the Atlantic world. Applying a metaphor of tiles in a floor, this work counters that emphasis to provide a wide array of primary source evidence in local spaces, especially focusing on parish records. Africans in East Anglia, due to these sources and rigorous methods, centers on individual lives as telling examples to uncover possibly broader trends for Africans in other local English settings during the early modern era.

The thesis proposes that Africans in East Anglia during the early modern era had more locally formed identities than identities connected to the Atlantic world. In most cases, these local settings were less racialized and focused more on laboring as part of a broader proletariat. Especially in the sixteenth century, and for much of the seventeenth, East Anglia was a region that had a relatively pre-racial worldview. In this space, class was more important than race for the making and unmaking of identities that generally involved unsettled African laborers.

Chapter 1 focuses on empirical evidence of migration. Early evidence of Africans in East Anglia comes from parish records and seems to point in the direction of a North Sea trade that connected to broader Mediterranean networks. This introductory evidence allows the author to use this first chapter to introduce two important appendixes that end the book: the first, which offers confident evidence of Africans in East Anglia, and the second, which make less secure but still probable claims of ancestry. Combined, the lists include 315 Africans in East Anglia from 1467 to 1833. The author supposes a greater population but focuses the rest of the work on what aspects of these specifically uncovered lives can be gleaned from the sources.

The second chapter looks at the few cases of early migration to the region that survive in the archival record, including evidence concerning what may be the first African in the region, a man named Eylys in 1467. The third chapter looks at the space of East Anglia and how local conditions effected the few cases of Africans discovered in the archives, within this pre-racial era when alien and foreigner were more common terms for outsiders that often became fellow members of the commons. The fourth chapter marks the seventeenth century as part of the start of a broader shift to the Atlantic world and East Anglian connections to Barbados. The racialization that came with such connections is analyzed through terms attributed to individuals and how those terms, like mulatto, came from colonial spaces through absentee planters and individual workers in the slave trade.

The second half of the book focuses on a shift to slavery, and then abolitionism, in East Anglia, as the dominant identities concerning race and class arrived from the periphery to Norfolk and Suffolk. Still, this transfer is portrayed as minor, as class remains Maguire's dominant structure for understanding African labor and identities in East Anglia for the entirety of 1467 to 1833. Chapter 5 exposes the Atlantic connections, analyzes baptismal customs, and looks at six slaving voyages involving the region and connecting to the slave port of Liverpool. Chapters 7 and 8 look at a deeply contested historiography by asserting slavery came before racialization and that Africans were more a part of the working poor in the region than majority enslaved.

Africans in East Anglia is highly empirical reading that looks at individuals whose lives “contained the opportunity, even for the ones who had been previously enslaved . . . to be remembered as part of the region's working population” (199). It is a dry work in that respect, but not to a fault, as this project of reclamation needs a tone of rigor due to the importance of the recovery. As such, this work will become a standard reading for anyone researching slavery, labor, and African populations in East Anglia, as well as providing methods for understanding a more local background of African populations in Britain during the early modern era.