"Bread and arsenic: citizenship from the bottom up in Georgian London"

Journal of Social History, Fall, 2005

Isaac Land, "Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London"

This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Linda Colley's thesis about the formation of British identity, using the public response to black war veterans as a case study. Colley's contention that behavior, not birthplace or bloodline, was enough to qualify a person as "British" is in keeping with recent scholarly interpretations of Enlightenment theories of human difference, which were xenophobic or ethnocentric, but not racist in the modern sense. Responses to the significantly named "Black Poor" of the late 1780s, however, demonstrate that color-coded thinking could play an important role in shaping philanthropic and government responses to poverty in London. Jonas Hanway, who was best known as an advocate of charities to foster Britain's "nursery of seamen," led an effort to name, register, and remove the "Black Poor"--despite the fact that about half of these individuals had sea experience. In response, black sailors such as Joseph Johnson sought to articulate a different definition of Britishness, exploiting the ambiguity of the term. Johnson's successful career as a street entertainer who sang patriotic war songs with a model ship bound to his head illustrates the possibilities of a social history of citizenship "from the bottom up."