Tag: Decolonisation
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Japan’s Empire and the Crushed Hopes of the “Colored Races” of the World
Figure 1: 1938 pamphlet issued by the Negro Commission of the National Committee of the Communist Party, USA By Dr Sherzod Muminov For a few early decades of the twentieth century, Japan came to be seen as a champion of the colonized peoples around the world. Behind this image stood Japan’s meteoric rise as the…
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Black History is not just for Black History Month!
Fig. 1 Black History Month display at UEA Library How libraries – and librarians – are grappling with decolonisation and why this matters By Jenny Whitaker and Grant Young This is probably self-evident – especially to historians – but libraries are not neutral entities. They are highly constructed. They have legacies and biases and have…
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Surprising lessons from the 1980s: inspiration from anti-deportation campaign activism
Figure 1: Poster of the Campaign Against Racist Laws By Amy Grant Beginning my research into anti-deportation campaigns in Britain during the long 1980s was a depressing experience. I became enveloped by account after account of families and individuals being torn apart by ever-tightening and often arbitrarily administered immigration laws.[1] It became clear that the…
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Reflections on Black History in Black History Month
Figure 1: Sketch of the life of Frederick Douglass in Special Memorial Murder (1895) By Becky Taylor Black History Month is often a time when I reflect not only on how Black British histories inform my own research on histories of marginalised and racialised groups – Gypsies and Travellers, refugees, the vilified poor and migrant…
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Will Africa be included in a global history of Covid-19?
ANNA ADIMA Over a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, one would be hard-pressed to deny that future history books will record this as a global milestone in the 21st century. Every individual around the world has in some way been affected by the virus; however, mainstream – Western – media remains guilty of underreporting the pandemic…
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Collecting Contexts – Why Do We Collect?
WILL BURGESS During the summer of 2019, I volunteered at the V&A’s Lansbury Micro Museum in Poplar, East London, to help run an exhibition called For the Love of Things. The exhibition put the personal collections of the museum’s visitors on display, its shelves changing throughout the summer as people contributed different groups of objects: antique…
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Everyday Decolonisation: the local museum in 2020
PIPPA LE GRAND A few Monday mornings ago, I stood outside Weston Park Museum, Sheffield, enjoying my job and welcoming visitors. There were few enough around that I was able to gaze at the frieze over the door and even discuss it at length with a colleague. The frieze, according to Sheffield Hallam’s Public Art Research…
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James Forbes’ Mango and the Art of British Indian Empire
Apurba Chatterjee In 1765, James Forbes, a mere Scottish lad of less than sixteen years of age, set sail to India following his appointment as a Writer for the English East India Company (EIC) in Bombay. Forbes was to stay in India for eighteen years, and he gradually rose to prominence as the Collector of…
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Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test
21 July 2020 Historians Call for a Review of Home Office Citizenship and Settlement Test We are historians of Britain and the British Empire and writing in protest at the on-going misrepresentation of slavery and Empire in the “Life in the UK Test”, which is a requirement for applicants for citizenship or settlement (“indefinite leave…
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Edgerton & Empire: Nationalism, Imperialism and Decolonisation
Liam Liburd One of the indirect and unintended side-effects of the tragic murder of George Floyd by an officer of the Minneapolis Police Department in late May has been a renewed effort to confront Britain’s own history of racism, especially that in the form of colonialism. Activists have taken aim at the symbols of this…
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