The queen stands in the church. She looks to her side and sees an axe glinting ominously, and the story begins by pointing to its end.

This is the opening of a new series, Anne Boleyn, which tells the life of Henry VIII's second wife. Anne, the mother of Elizabeth I, was beheaded for treason.

Discussion of the show focused on the actor playing Anne, Jodie Turner-Smith. Unlike Anne Boleyn, Turner-Smith is Black.

Some see a Black queen as a trendy anachronism, others see her casting as a sign of progress.

The way most people understand skin colour now is different from 1536.

Nobody in early 16th Century England described themselves as White.

Some scholars see the roots of the ideas in 15th-Century Spain.

A trade of enslaved Africans had started, and it is the development of the trade that brought the idea of race.

Describing differences in skin tones as "race" made it about biology. It permitted Europeans to talk about slavery as something that could be inherited.

By 1661, a code of laws justifying slavery on the basis of race was created.

In the 18th Century, Europeans developed a taxonomy of human races, with White at the top.

Is race a modern invention?

Yes. Our idea of race is not simply about different backgrounds. It is a concept of essential difference that was invented to help create the global system of trade. The invention of race shaped what historians call modernity. From the 17th Century to the present, race has been one of the world's ruling ideas.

No. Ideas of human differences are more fluid. The racial hierarchies of Europe are not different to the Medieval treatment of Jews. We cannot bracket off the influence of such ideas in order to call race modern or an invention. To point to a moment when race was "invented" is to oversimplify history.