David Olusoga

An author visit in conversation with Dr Cathy Bergin, Dr Anita Rupprect, Dr Vedrana Velickovic

David Olusoga's book is a vital re-examination of a shared history, published to accompany the landmark BBC2 series, coming in Autumn/Winter 2016.

“This book is an experiment. It is an attempt to see what new stories and approaches emerge if black British history is envisaged as a global history and – perhaps more controversially – as a history of more than just the black experience itself."

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David Olusoga 

In Black and British, award-winning historian and broadcaster offers readers a rich and revealing exploration of the extraordinarily long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa. Drawing on new genetic and genealogical research, original records, expert testimony and contemporary interviews, Black and British reaches back to the Afro-Romans who arrived in the British Isles in the third century AD. 

It reveals how Black British history is as global as the empire. It explores how much of the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery. It shows that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of the First World War. Black British history can be read in stately homes, street names, statues and memorials across Britain and is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. It is the story of those periods in our past when the rights, status and humanity of black people were among the big issues of the day, issues that helped shape the whole country and the empire. Unflinching, confronting taboos and revealing hitherto unknown scandals, Olusoga describes how black and white Britons have been intimately entwined for centuries. 

Tickets £8.00, or £4 with student id

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