There has not been much sleep in the past four months, the time it took to write Black and British, in between filming the tie-in TV series. It is a 10-part remake of Kenneth Clark’s landmark documentary series on the history of western art and thought, due on our screens next autumn. Having just finished book three, he has put the next one (about the global history of slavery) on hold in order to co-present Civilisations alongside Simon Schama and Mary Beard. Meanwhile, his BBC2 series, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners, earned a Bafta this year.
His second book, The World’s War, won a Political Book award for “World War One Book of the Year” in 2015, no mean feat for a book published in the previous, centenary year (his first, The Kaiser’s Holocaust, looked at Germany’s colonial rule in Namibia). He has an easy eloquence that is made for TV, speaking in perfectly formed, modulated sentences. He arrives in the hotel lobby for this interview fresh from Delhi, on his way to Mexico, in a sharp suit and with luggage in tow. Olusoga, 46, who started out at the BBC in 1998 as a researcher on Radio 4, is surely a “celebrity historian” in the making. “Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history,” he says. It also becomes harder to ignore the legion of black Britons who have lived on the Sceptred Isle since Roman times, rarely acknowledged in mainstream textbooks, but whose presence proves that there was never a “year zero” or a lost idyll of ethnic purity to which modern day nativists can hark back. Joining up history at home and abroad makes it harder to gloss over Britain’s part in the slave trade.
Domestic history cannot be separated from the vast former empire building, he argues, which was inextricably bound to the economics of global slavery. Olusoga’s new book, Black and British: A Forgotten History, is not about slavery as such, but it is a radical reappraisal of the parameters of history, exposing lacunae in the nation’s version of its past.
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