2 Moreover, given the Tories’ past and present record of attacking the field of black British history, we should not fall for liberal illusions that hope for inevitable slow improvement and progress in this area.
This partially explains the shockingly low level of interest that young people of African and Caribbean heritage have in studying history at university-only agriculture and veterinary science are less popular. Yet, as Adi notes in his short introduction to this volume, “Unfortunately, the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain, which stretches back over two millennia, is still a hidden one.” Indeed, it remains “barely a feature of the National Curriculum in Britain’s schools”. Rather, they are central to making sense of modern, multicultural Britain. These developments underline that the black experience of the British Empire and the long history of black presence in British society are not peripheral matters. The popularity of David Olusoga’s excellent television series and book Black and British (2016) and the housing of the Black Cultural Archives in a new purpose-built centre in Brixton since 2014 also show how a once-marginalised field has begun to win a place in the mainstream. Edited by Hakim Adi, a pioneering scholar in this field, the book serves as a marker of the progress that has been made to date. 1 Just one sign of this is a series of regular conferences over the past seven years that has asked “What’s Happening in Black British History?” Another is that various history departments are now finally beginning to recruit lecturers in “black British history”.īlack British History: New Perspectives is a collection that emerged out of a conference organised in 2017. Likewise, the more recent wave of global protests inspired by Black Lives Matter-and student campaigns such as #whyismycurriculumwhite, Rhodes Must Fall and “decolonising the curriculum”-have led to both “black studies” and “black British history” finally winning a degree of academic legitimacy in British universities. The emergence of “black studies” within the American academy in the 1970s was one of the products of the Black Power movement of the late 1960s. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, Peter Fryer (Pluto, 2018 ), £16.99 A review of Black British History: New Perspectives, Hakim Adi (ed) (Zed, 2020), £18.99īlack People in the British Empire, Peter Fryer (Pluto, 2021 ), £14.99
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