People are perhaps hard-wired to love story, so putting people at the absolute centre of a narrative is a very powerful way to write. In all Adam’s books he places character and biography at the very heart of his stories and this is another example of him doing that brilliantly. This book came out at the moment when many of us in Britain were busy marking the bicentenary of the end of the slave trade in 2007.

Your first choice is Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery by Adam Hochschild. Let’s look at some of the books that have inspired you in your journey to find out more about race. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery.

Shortlisted for the inaugural Jhalak Prize. Winner of the Longman History Today Trustees’ Award. Winner of the 2017 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Unflinching, confronting taboos, and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how the lives of black and white Britons have been entwined for centuries. It is not a singular history, but one that belongs to us all. Black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation.

It shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. It is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation and it belongs to us all.ĭrawing on new genealogical research, original records, and expert testimony, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire. Black and British is vivid confirmation that black history can no longer be kept separate and marginalised. 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. 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. Written with a wonderful clarity of style and with great force and passion.’ – Kwasi Kwarteng, Sunday Times ‘ comprehensive and important history of black Britain.

David olusoga books