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Biography of Mary Seacole, a pioneering nineteenth-century British-Jamaican nurse.

Mary Seacole’s remarkable life began in Jamaica, where she was born a free person, the daughter of a black mother and white Scottish army officer. Ron Ramdin—who, like Seacole, was born in the Caribbean and emigrated to the United Kingdom—tells the remarkable story of this woman, celebrated today as a pioneering nurse.
 
Refused permission to serve as an army nurse, Seacole took the remarkable step of funding her own journey to the Crimean battlefront, and there, in the face of sometimes harsh opposition, she established a hotel for wounded British soldiers. Unlike Florence Nightingale—whose exploits saw her venerated as the “lady with the lamp” for generations afterward—Seacole cared for soldiers perilously close to the fighting. As Ramdin shows in this biography, Seacole’s time in Crimea, for which she is best known, was only the pinnacle of a life of adventure and travel.

A full understanding of Black and Asian history within the British context is integral to achieving a truly multicultural Britain. In this landmark book, Ron Ramdin offer the first complete history of both the Black and Asian experience in Britain

Blacks and Asians have a long history in the British Isles. Ramdin illustrates this by covering a 500-year period, from 1500 to the present day. He recounts the major historical episodes and covers all the major figures, including Ottobah Cugoano, William Cuffay, William Davidson, George Padmore, Mary Seacole, C.L.R. James, V.S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Walter Tull, Shirley Bassey, Bill Morris, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureshi and Bernie Grant.

In bringing the largely hidden histories of these immigrant communities to the fore, Ron Ramdin’s wide-ranging study challenges conventional histories of the British Isles. Reimaging Britain will lead to a reappraisal of how ‘British’ history is written in the future.