British African-Caribbean people

British African-Caribbean people or British Afro-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens or residents of recent Caribbean heritage who further trace much of their ancestry to West and Central Africa. This includes multi-racial Afro-Caribbean people.

The earliest generations of Afro-Caribbean people to migrate to Britain trace their ancestry to a wide range of Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups, who themselves descend from the disparate African ethnic groups transported to the colonial Caribbean as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. British African Caribbeans may also have ancestry from European and Asian settlers, as well as from various Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The population includes those with origins in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Cayman Islands, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Belize, and elsewhere.

Arriving in port cities in small numbers across England and Wales since the mid-18th century, the most significant wave of migration came after World War II, coinciding with the decolonisation era and the dissolution of the British Empire. The governments of the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands promoted immigration to address domestic labor shortages. Known as the Windrush generation, they had arrived as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies (CUKCs) in the 1950s and 1960s, owing to birth in the former British colonies of the Caribbean. Those who settled in the UK prior to 1973 were granted either right of abode or indefinite leave to remain by the Immigration Act 1971, although a series of governmental policies in the 2000s and 2010s erroneously treated some as unlawfully residing in the UK. This subsequently became known as the Windrush scandal.

In the 21st century, Afro-Caribbean communities are present throughout the United Kingdom's major cities. As there is no specific UK census category which comprehensively covers the community, population numbers remain somewhat ambiguous. According to the 2011 United Kingdom census, 594,825 Britons identified as "Black Caribbean" and 426,715 identified as "Mixed: White and Black Caribbean". Categories for other Caribbean heritages also exist. Due to the complexities within African Caribbean peoplehood, some of those with a parent or grandparent of African-Caribbean ancestry may identify with, or be perceived as, white people in the United Kingdom.