This is the remarkable story of the man who gave his name to a famous bridge in Bristol. Born in the West Indies and owned by the Bristol merchant John Pinney, Pero worked on a sugar plantation on Nevis before being brought to Bristol to live and work as a personal servant to Pinney in Great George Street (the house is now the Georgian House Museum).
Pero is a symbol of the millions of men, women and children taken from their homes in Africa to the Americas as the central commodity in the infamous transatlantic slave trade. Their toil in the plantations made people like Pinney rich and Bristol a wealthy city.

The authors have pieced together the story of Pero's life as a servant in Nevis and Bristol, and at a time when the black population in England totalled perhaps 15,000, their research throws light on how the eighteenth-century master and servant relationships worked in practice.