White and black relations in Europe in the past have developed in a multiplicity of contexts: the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the development of plantation economies and systems of indentured labour, colonialism and imperialism, neo-colonialism and development, and the incorporation of migrant labour in metropolitan economies. Each of these historically specific encounters between ‘white’ and ‘black’ groups has seen the construction and reproduction of subordinate ‘race’ identities.

This paper will use a case study approach to explore how 'blackness' has been presented to children over the last two hundred years. It will document the images that have circulated in private and public spaces in the UK. It will present a world which adults shaped for children through the visual, a world for children which reflected the logic of the adult world. It will then consider how these representations of blackness shaped children’s attitudes over time and suggest that they continue to have consequences for ‘race relations’ in the globalised world of the 21^st century.

Jan Pieterse, White on Black. Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Culture (Yale 1992) www.connectinghistories.org.uk