First, Othello isn’t actually Shakespeare’s caricature to all that great an extent. The character is very much lifted from another source, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (you can find a translation here: http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/shakespeare-survey/cinthio.pdf). It’s actually important to note that Othello is, like Cinthio’s Captain, a Moor, which also means he’s likely from somewhere like Egypt (North-ish Africa, rather than West Africa, where a lot of slaves were picked from).
Shakespeare also relies on a number of historical texts to develop Othello’s character as well. The faults he demonstrates towards the end of the play, including his jealous and volatile temper, were traits ascribed to Moors by, among others, a text called A Geographical Historie of Africa, by Leo Africanus, translated by John Pory circa 1600.

Finally, there are very few records or references to black people in England. I’m not saying that the English weren’t involved in the slave trade (they were) but the market for buying and selling slaves was, for the most part, not in England, and there was no market for selling slaves in England in Shakespeare’s day…that came later, after his death (he’s dead by 1616, only a few years after the first English colony in America is established, i.e. Jamestown established in 1607/charter was granted in 1606).

Here’s one source that gives you an idea of how England initially participated in the slave trade (note, they don’t sell the slaves in England):

“English intervention in Spanish traffic began with the three voyages of John Hawkins, who transported people as slaves from the coast of Africa for sale in the West Indies, ‘being amongst other particulars assured’, as Hakluyt brutally put it, ‘that Negroes were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of Negroes might easily be had upon the coast of Guinea’. 7 Only the Portuguese were licensed to conduct the horrific trade of capturing and reselling Africans as slaves to the plantations in the West Indies and Brazil, where the original population had all but died out from European ill-treatment and disease. The Queen wavered, forbidding Hawkins to break Spanish laws and denouncing his trade as ‘detestable’, while at the same time lending him ships, investing in his ventures, and granting him a coat of arms, bearing as its crest ‘a demi-Moor [i.e. African], bound and captive’. ”

Source: This Stage-Play World: Texts and Contexts, 1580-1625 by Julia Briggs; Oxford University Press, 1997.

Here’s another that actually gives a better impression of the time frame:

“When in 1620 the English trader Richard Jobson went up the Gambia River in West Africa, a native merchant named Buckor Sano offered to sell him slaves. Jobson indignantly replied, he later wrote, that “[w]e were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did we buy or sell one another, or any that had our own shapes.” 1.

Only three decades later the English were briskly buying and selling Africans, supplying labor to their newly founded American empire. By the eighteenth century the English had come to dominate the transatlantic slave trade, and not until 1807, after a bitter twentyyear struggle, did the members of the English Parliament abolish the nefarious traffic in their own shapes. By that time the Western world had dramatically changed, with many millions of Africans toiling in servitude in the Americas, in a plantation regime made by white masters. Africa was undergoing changes that are still not fully understood by historians; Europe was consuming sugar, tobacco, and other commodities; and white men in Europe and America were accumulating wealth as a result of a new economic system.”

Source: London, Metropolis of the Slave Trade by James A. Rawley; University of Missouri Press, 2003.

One more quite interesting section from Rawley’s book:

“At the turn of the century, when the Henrietta Marie was plying the slave trade, London was the center of British slaving. The capital of the nation, boasting a population of about 674,000, it was the country’s largest port, its financial center, the hub of its international commerce. The Bank of England was organized in 1695, with insurers and shipping interests, both shipbuilding and owning, concentrated here. The bulk of the country’s imports and exports flowed through the port of London. Not to be overlooked was the presence of substantial manufacturing and processing industries. Though sugar was grown in distant islands, from the late sixteenth century London was the refining center not only for Great Britain but also for Europe. The political, economic, as well as cultural capital, London was the great metropolis, dominating the English slave trade. It was about this time that an agreement was made in London to furnish the Spanish West Indies with slaves from Jamaica. London had the further advantages of enjoying a monopoly of the East India Trade with its textiles prized by Africans, large warehousing facilities, and a national policy that sometimes prevented use of the outports for both imports and exports. 19.

The economic thought of the time has been named the theory of mercantilism. Its doctrines looked to national self-sufficiency in a competitive, warring world. This goal was to be attained by restricting manufacturing to the mother country, acquiring colonies that supplied commodities not produced at home, maintaining a fleet useful in both peace and war, and having an excess of exports…over imports. A favorable balance of trade would result in the flow of bullion into the mother country. A strong company endowed with special powers and privileges seemed the best solution for promoting foreign trade. All slaving nations employed the privileged company as the means of conducting the slave trade. Portugal as early as 1481, the Netherlands in 1621, and France in 1633 made the trade a privileged one. 20.

England followed suit; after failed attempts at chartered companies earlier in the century, the Crown—not the Parliament—in 1672 gave the Royal African Company the monopoly of the African trade. Charles II, recognizing that the trade was “of great advantage to our subjects of this Kingdom, ” conferred sole rights upon the company for one thousand years, requiring delivery of two elephants to him and his heirs whenever the company set foot in the territories mentioned in the charter. ”

Hope this helps.

Celebritylife.org tracking back – Casualty Petition…