David Olusoga is a historian and broadcaster specialising in Black British History.
In this episode, he talks with Nikki Gamble about writing the empire back into history, escaping from biographical approaches, and planning to produce material to support educators.
About Black and British An Illustrated History
This beautiful hardback gift book is a stunning visual journey through Black British history for younger readers by award-winning historian and broadcaster David Olusoga and illustrated by Jake Alexander and Melleny Taylor. The essential starting place for anyone who wants to learn about Black British History. David Olusoga’s thought-provoking text charts the forgotten histories of Black people in Britain from Roman times to the present day.
From Roman Africans guarding Hadrian’s Wall to an African trumpeter in the court of Henry the Eighth, Black Georgians fighting for the abolition of slavery, Black soldiers fighting for Britain in the First World War, Windrush, and right up to today, these are the stories that brought us all together in this country.
- When did Africans first come to Britain?
- Who are the well-dressed black children in Georgian paintings?
- Why did the American Civil War disrupt the Industrial Revolution?
These and many other questions are answered in this essential introduction to 1800 years of Black British history.
This children’s edition of the bestseller Black and British: A Forgotten History is beautifully illustrated in full colour with maps, portrait galleries, timelines, photos and portraits.
Interview Transcript
Nikki Gamble:
In The Reading Corner, I’m delighted to welcome David Olusoga. We are going to celebrate the publication of the illustrated version of Black British History, illustrated by Jake Alexander and Melanie Taylor. A great big welcome, David. Thank you for joining me.
Black and British was originally an adult book published in 2017, and then a short essential history was published last year. As you point out in your adult book, this is not the first book about Black British history. We recently had, for example, Professor Hakim Adi on this podcast. In your book, you also mention the epiphany and formative experience of reading Peter Fryer. What did you want to contribute to this growing research and writing?
David Olusoga:
It seems to me that everything that I do as a television presenter, producer, and writer is fundamentally about writing the empire back into British history. That is the essence of what Black and British is. It’s to try to reframe Black British history as an imperial history. I think what happened in Britain was that we took an American template of African American history and applied it to Britain. And I think it is possible for the most part, though not entirely, to tell the history of the African American experience with the story of events and histories of people and phenomena that took place within the continental United States. I don’t think that’s possible when dealing with Black British people because Britain’s history for 500 years is fundamentally imperial and global.
So, it has to be told in Africa, the New World, North America, and the Caribbean. The book aims to reframe Black British history about what happens in the parts of the world in which Britain and British power clash and collide with the experiences and lives of people of African heritage.
But the book had one other big aim: to try to escape the prison of biography. That is not to say that biographies are unwelcome or that there aren’t biographies in the book. There are long passages that centre around individuals. But very often, Black British history is only biographical. What it misses are phenomena, economics, and forces that are not experienced through the lives of individuals.
Nikki Gamble:
As you’ve said, one of the central themes of your writing is that we see British history in the context of global history. The more you read and learn about the past, the more impossible it is to disentangle one nation’s stories from another, which can feel overwhelming. So, from a school teacher’s perspective, what are the best starting points?
David Olusoga:
I talk to young people in many schools about empire, not just the British Empire but imperialism as a force that created the world we live in today.
I tend to talk about their daily lives and the things they encounter, the language they use, the food they eat, the words and phrases and the names of buildings and streets, and to try to reference their experiences within the wider array of empire. Because all of us, every day of our lives, are engaged in phenomena that result from the age of empire. For example, most of us will use a word that comes from the new language of the Aztec people. So when we say tomato, tobacco, or chocolate, we are using Nahuatl words because all of those did not exist outside of the Americas before the end of the 15th century. All our lives are saturated in products, cultures, cuisines, languages, and words from the age of empire. Once you start pointing this out, the imperial story will be easier to relate to.
Nikki Gamble:
In the preface to your adult book you talk about the lost history because black experience wasn’t recorded. You have obviously done a very good job of uncovering some of those lost stories, but as you’ve already said in this podcast, by their very nature, some of those stories are about uncommon experiences. When we think about Sarah Forbes Benetta, William Tull or Mary Seacole they all did extraordinary things.
I’m just interested in how you go about recovering the lost stories. Will we ever know the stories of ordinary black people living in Britain in the past?
David Olusoga:
There are discoveries all the time. There are historians like Caroline Bressey who do remarkable archival work, scouring documents, newspapers, and other sources to try to find fragments of the lives of lost people of colour in Britain’s story. But I think part of the job is to accept the difficult fact that some things are unknowable.
For people who study black British history, the most profound frustration is what we don’t know. For instance, when researching the Black Georgian population, we don’t know their numbers, whether they formed discreet communities, where they lived, or where they congregated in London. We are just teasing fragments of their lives and their social lives through the diaries and newspaper reports of others.
I’m afraid it is an unpleasant fact that some things are historically unknowable. We may never get a better grasp, but, you know, there are so many vistas in history that we thought were closed and the horizon had been viewed that we would never go further. And then discoveries or interpretations emerge, and we suddenly know a lot more. You have to be both hopeful and realistic about the fact that some things are unknowable.
That big reframing issue is part of my thinking. We need to escape, as I said, from biography. We also need to do something that I think is often missed out of Black British history because events like Black History Month(which I support and champion) necessarily skew things towards somewhat celebratory histories. Very often, black history circulates around a keyword, and that word is contribution. And that’s important. It’s entirely legitimate, vital, and particularly important for young people.
However, the story of Britain’s relationship with people of African heritage is also the story of race and racism and the ideas that were gathered and patched together to form the racial thinking that’s still alive and well, sadly, in the world that we live today. I think it also needs to be the history of the authors and architects of racial thinking. And in that way, my book is a homage to the book you mentioned earlier, Peter Fryer Staying Power. As well as recovering lost lives and lost biographies, he also spent a great deal of that book talking about these ideas of race, inferiority, superiority, how they were created, how they were propagandised, how they were propagated throughout our society, across the empire and that’s, that form of black history is a lot less pleasant than encountering people like Equiano and Mary Prince and Mary Seacole. But I think it’s really vital,
Nikki Gamble:
You’ve just said that you see ideas propagated in the past having a residual effect on views today. So racism masquerading as science leads to some of the most unpleasant chants that we’ve heard at football matches. You see that in the story Charles Wooton, the sailor who was killed in the riots in Liverpool. So this, to me, seems much more important than just the vignettes of their lives.
David Olusoga
That’s entirely what I believe. We need to confront that much less pleasant task of examining the impact of racial thinking upon lives and communities and upon the thinking of White British people. Here’s the irony: people like me find ourselves arguing that Britain as a nation needs to be more honest about its history and confront the aspects of British history that are not celebratory, the inglorious chapters, the figures from the past who are not heroic or, for that matter, the non-heroic chapters of the lives of people who are regarded as heroes. I don’t think we can make that appeal for a more holistic, more challenging approach to history while not having that same forensic approach to Black British History. It can’t be a form only of reassurance or about contributions of things that make us feel good. That is important, that is vital, that is legitimate. But I think Black History also needs to confront very difficult histories.
Nikki Gamble:
Can I get to the thorny issue of what we do about the remnants of this less than glorious past, the statues, the building names, the companies whose wealth was built on the slave trade? As a historian, what do you think are the best things we can do about that?
David Olusoga:
Well, the first challenge we face is seeing through the false flag arguments propagating and spreading to our deaf society now. One of the most obvious of those is that statues are history or are somehow an honest representation of history.
Not only are statues, for the most part, not an honest representation of history, but they are incapable of performing that function; the idea that statues represent history or that they represent the views of people at the time when those statues were erected is demonstrably untrue. It’s also often untrue that the statues are historically proximate to the events they pertain to, record, or celebrate.
I’m talking to you today from Bristol, where I live. Edward Colston’s story is a classic example. Colston died in 1721, 300 years ago. His statue was erected in 1895 and toppled in 2020. That statue says very little about the life of Edward Colston. It was erected because the merchant elite of Bristol were losing their position in the city, which was becoming an industrial centre rather than a trading centre. They took this one figure from their past, this philanthropist who’d also been an extraordinarily significant slave trader, and they tried to make him a civic saint.
Now, that statue said nothing about late Victorian Bristol, the merchant elite that erected it, and their motivations for doing so. It also told untruths. The statue claimed on its pedestal that it was erected on public subscription. That’s not true. The public subscription failed because working-class people in Bristol in the 1890s had better things to spend their money on than venerating a slave trader. The statue was paid for by a wealthy man called John Aerosmith, a member of the merchant elite.
But most of all, that statue does not tell history because it is silent about the victims. All the statue talks about is his philanthropy. It doesn’t talk about where the source of the money came from. And in his case, much of that money came from the slave trade. He was deputy governor of the Royal Africa Company, and in his time involved in that company as deputy governor as a shareholder, approximately 84,000 people were enslaved. And 19,000 people died. They died in the bellies of British slave ships. The statue says nothing about this.
Another example is the statue of Clive of India outside the foreign office. That statue was erected in 1907. Robert Clive committed suicide in 1774. Robert Clive was one of the most controversial and hated men of his time. The statue says nothing about the attitudes of 1770s Britain towards Robert Clive and says a lot about the ambitions of early 20th-century imperialists to create a new fake history of company rule in India for their political purposes. All of that is invisible in that statute because statues were never intended to tell history. So, recognising the falsehoods of these culture war arguments is the first step in thinking about the legacy of these objects. We need to recognise that statues are not relics of history, for the most part, of what they pertain to or claim to represent.
Nikki Gamble:
And what about, say, companies hundreds of years later are still operating and yet their wealth was built on slavery, like sugar companies, for instance?
David Olusoga:
The question about companies is really interesting because, for the most part, politicians aren’t involved, and this debate has not been conscripted into a culture war of division and dissimulation. I think there’s amazing progress. What is happening across Britain, America, and increasingly other countries is that companies are looking into their history and facing facts buried for decades, sometimes centuries.
Lloyd’s of London is currently conducting archival research to examine the documents and objects held in its collection that show its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. Lloyd’s, as an insurance broker, was heavily involved in the insurance of slave ships. The brewer Green King is engaged in similar research. Recently, the Rowntree Foundation and the four charities under that umbrella published research into their backgrounds.
A few weeks ago, historians contacted me asking me to sit on a board for another company with an extremely dark history that’s beginning to embark upon the same work. This is also true for universities like Glasgow.
When that research shows connections to slavery, empire, extractive capitalism, and empire’s violence, it engages in forms of restorative justice. So, I think what you’re seeing is the misrepresentation of empire and slavery through the memorial landscape. Politicians are distorting one, and the other has taken place within the commercial private world, which is far more productive, honest, and, I think, progressive.
Nikki Gamble:
You write about Britain now being a place of mixed heritage. We live in a time when families include people of different ethnic backgrounds. We must think very carefully about how we present history to our children. We need thoughtful and authoritative guidance on teaching Black History positively.
David Olusoga:
I think there’s an actual demand, and we’re seeing progress on this for both the publishing industry and the educational textbook industry; I’m involved in producing some lesson plans with my older sister, a doctor of education at the University of Sheffield. We must remember that teachers, like everybody else, have been brought up in a country that’s not engaged with these histories. None of this history was taught in my school. If I had not become a historian and had not gone looking for these histories, I would know nothing about them.
We’re starting from a pretty low base, where the background level of knowledge is so low that we’re trying to start from the ground up, and it’s extremely difficult. Even when the willingness is there, the knowledge often isn’t.
Nikki Gamble:
I would like to turn my attention very briefly, if I can, to publishing itself. I know that you’ve been involved in the Black Writers Guild. Part of the way in which we learn about history is through reading, but we have to be sure that the publishing industry is doing the job well. Can you tell us a little bit about that work?
David Olusoga:
I’m just a member. The people leading the Black Writers Guild are doing a fantastic job. It’s effectively a union of black writers. The leadership are holding the publishing industry to account, demanding that the industry look at itself and its failings, both in terms of what books get published, which writers have their careers supported and which do not, and also in representation within the publishing industry itself.
I think the publishing industry, more than ever since I’ve been involved in it, is aware of and acknowledges its historic failings. One of the things people in publishing, television, museums, and galleries find difficult to come to terms with is the fact that I think the liberal arts are doing particularly badly regarding diversity.
And people are often very shocked when I say this, but I’m, I’m, let me give the reasons for it. I’m in a very privileged position. I get to talk to many companies every year. I advise companies on their diversity and inclusion strategies. I work with employee research groups to facilitate discussions about these issues. And I work across a vast range of sectors. It is very difficult not to come away from that without realising that sectors in more commercial and financially driven parts of the economy are doing far better than the liberal arts. And I think what happened is that sub-sectors like television and publishing are full of very nice middle-class liberal people who are opposed to ideas of racism and discrimination. There was a cultural presumption within those industries that there would be nice outcomes, but that didn’t happen. So, in some ways, the liberal parts of the economy gave themselves a free pass.
Changes don’t come about without proactivity. And when you spend time around publishing, in museums, on television, or, for that matter, in universities, you don’t see the dynamism of change that you see in, for example, the city of London. We need to recognise that not only do we have a great job to do in those liberal sectors, but we’ve also failed and that the initiatives of the past 10, 20, and 30 years have achieved almost nothing. We’ve normalised the idea that minority communities are only marginally involved in working within and being represented by those industries.
Nikki Gamble:
I have just one final question for you: guilt. Do feelings of guilt about the past and looking inward stop us from moving forward?
David Olusoga:
Well, I don’t think guilt or, for that matter, pride are appropriate emotions with which to engage with the past. But I think if you invest in the idea that you should feel proud in actions that took place before your birth in which you had no part, then I think you lay yourself open to the charge that you should also have to face the shame of inglorious chapters of the past that similarly took place before you were birth by people from your country.
I don’t think either of those emotions are sensible, rational, appropriate emotions to go into the past. I don’t feel pride as somebody who’s British when I think of, for example, the successes of the British Army on the Western Front, and I don’t feel pride as a Nigerian when I look at the Benin Bronzes.
I feel astonishment and fascination with both things. And I think both phenomena need to be better understood, and I feel huge investment in them.
I think this idea that people are being made to feel ashamed – a phrase I hear all the time – is a bizarre way of engaging with history. History is not there to allow us to revel in certain emotions. And if you look at history as a thing, the place you go to, to feel pride or other positive emotions, then I think you’ve crossed this emotional Rubicon.
I feel enormous emotionality concerning the past. I wouldn’t be able to be a historian if it were not, but I tend to feel empathy. I tend to feel emotions of shock, revulsion, or wonder, but not pride and shame. So I think we are all, we are always going to have problems being honest about our past if we delve into it expecting to feel pride and being upset when we feel shame. I think both emotions are best left at the door before entering the library of history.
Nikki Gamble:
What a great place to end. David, it’s been illuminating to talk to you
David Olusoga:
Thank you very much. Lovely to talk to you