I’ve been fascinated by British colonial history for decades. Learning little about it as a child, I was shocked to learn, as a university student, how little I’d been taught about the British Empire at school. So, I set out to study it. Inevitably, this academic interest later combined with my fondness for country walking. I once trekked 1000 miles from the tip of Scotland–John O’Groats–to the southernmost part of England, called Land’s End. This took me 2 months. I’ve since explored the UK countryside’s colonial past in a humane history book called The Countryside, recounting my rambles through these lovely landscapes with ten walking companions.
I wrote
The Countryside: Ten Rural Walks Through Britain and Its Hidden History of Empire
David Olusoga is a leading British historian. Though he modestly says all he’s done is to examine “domestic” British—its established but insular island story—through the lens of empire, the result has been revelatory for the British. He’s more responsible than anyone else for resourcing an informed public conversation about empire, particularly Britain’s centuries-long involvement in transatlantic slavery.
This was the first book I read that really looked at British history from the outside, from places like Bunce island on the African West Coast, from which the British transported enslaved Africans, and the broad and unfamiliar range of colonial activities that this book accessibly captures, telling accurate, evidence-based stories with respect and compassion.
'[A] comprehensive and important history of black Britain . . . Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.' - Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times
In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean.
This edition, fully revised and updated, features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put black British history at the centre of urgent national debate. Black…
This was a pioneering book, gathering essays about British country houses and their connections to transatlantic slavery. The introduction–explaining the book’s concept and evidence base—neatly epitomizes what country houses symbolize in people’s imaginations and focuses on why and in what ways these places are connected to the empire.
The essays that follow are accessible but really detailed, and the essay collection really ends up defining the historical field.
There are few things more emblematic of England's heritage than the great country houses which grace our landscape. But such properties are not to be viewed simply as objects of architectural and curatorial or artistic interest. They are also expressions of wealth, power and privilege and, as new questions are being asked of England's historic role in the Atlantic world, and in particular about slavery, new connections are being unearthed between the nation's great houses and its colonial past.
In 2007 English Heritage commissioned initial research into links with transatlantic slavery or its abolition amongst families who owned properties now…
This is a well-written book with a strong sense of history’s human stories. It is painstakingly researched—but beautifully narrated—and based on archival evidence to explore the lives of Africans in Britain during the Tudor period.
It tells so many diverse stories about Black divers, servants, circumnavigators, and so much more. Teachers have since used this book to update their school lessons about the Tudor period.
A Book of the Year for the Evening Standard and the Observer
A black porter publicly whips a white Englishman in the hall of a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. Henry VIII dispatches a Mauritanian diver to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England...
They were present at some of the defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any…
I love this book because it describes Sanghera’s personal journey into the history of the British empire, something he barely learned about in his school lessons in the UK.
The book is great because it doesn’t assume prior knowledge about the topic, so it goes over some basics that are easy to miss. In places, it’s funny; in places, it's sad, but the best thing about Empire is its feel for narrating a good story and being transparent about some of the personal feelings that this history brought up for the author
WINNER OF THE 2022 BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR NARRATIVE NONFICTION
***THE BOOK THAT INSPIRED THE CHANNEL 4 DOCUMENTARY 'EMPIRE STATE OF MIND'*** THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
'The real remedy is education of the kind that Sanghera has embraced - accepting, not ignoring, the past' Gerard deGroot, The Times _____________________________________________________
EMPIRE explains why there are millions of Britons living worldwide. EMPIRE explains Brexit and the feeling that we are exceptional. EMPIRE explains our distrust of cleverness. EMPIRE explains Britain's particular brand of racism.
Strangely hidden from view, the British Empire remains a subject of both shame and glorification. In his bestselling…
This book is a great guide to life in hard times. What struck me about it is that there is all sorts of wisdom in here that is less familiar to us than the most famous of Dr. King’s speeches. Here, you can see the old seeds of modern-day culture wars and some excellent and brave recommendations on how to deal with them.
The book could have been written yesterday, always a great test of enduring insight.
The classic collection of sixteen sermons preached and compiled by Dr. King
As Dr. King prepared for the Birmingham campaign in early 1963, he drafted the final sermons for Strength to Love, a volume of his best-known homilies. King had begun working on the sermons during a fortnight in jail in July 1962. Having been arrested for holding a prayer vigil outside Albany City Hall, King and Ralph Abernathy shared a jail cell for fifteen days that was, according to King, ‘‘dirty, filthy, and ill-equipped’’ and “the worse I have ever seen.” While behind bars, he spent uninterrupted time preparing…
Britain’s iconic countryside evokes the rugged moorlands of novels like Wuthering Heights, the lakeside village of William Wordsworth, and grand stately homes described by Jane Austen. Yet, this countryside is rarely seen as having anything to do with colonialism. In my book, I bring rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. I connect local landscapes to India, Virginia, and the West Indies through ten country walks and roaming the island with varied companions.
Whether in Welsh sheep farms or Cornish copper mines, the empire offered both opportunity and exploitation. I show how the booming profits of overseas colonial activities led to enclosure, land clearances, and dispossession. These histories, usually considered apart, continue to link the lives of their descendants now.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
