William Hogarth, like many of his contemporaries, was critical of those who derived their wealth from transatlantic trade, and also of the fashion for transatlantic commodities. He used his skills as an artist and printmaker to satirise the moral weakness which he saw in those who consumed these ‘foreign’ goods and to expose the levels of exploitation at work in London, then trading capital of the world. Often he used black figures in his images as rhetorical devices to underline the lack of ‘civilisation’ amongst those apparently responsible for spreading it throughout the colonised world.

In this image, plate two from a series of six prints depicting A Harlot’s Progress, the figure of the young black page highlights the moral decline of ‘Hackabout Moll’, the simple country girl drawn into prostitution following her arrival in the city. Here, she is surprised with her lover by her wealthy Jewish master and attempts to cause a distraction by knocking over a table of tea things. The presence of the monkey, the tea things, the mahogany table and the turbaned black page all point to the colonial source of the merchant’s wealth and to the overriding theme of exploitation. The upright pose of the page and his widened eyes invite us to consider this scene of immorality from his perspective.