Slavery
The National Trust’s shameful manifesto
The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic…
Should Kamala Harris pay reparations?
What do Stokely Carmichael, Harry Belafonte, Colin Powell, Sidney Poitier and Busta Rhymes have in common? And how are Beyoncé,…
Italy owes Wales reparations for the wrongs of the Roman Empire
There’s talk of reparations in the air. Lobbyists from around the world are demanding sin-payments from former colonial powers. Let…
Europe's eye-popping first glimpse of the Americas
The earliest depictions of the Americas were eye-popping, and shaped European art, says Laura Gascoigne
Fear and loathing in Jamaica: Caribbean slaves turn the whip on their masters
In the shadows of the British Enlightenment lurked the Caribbean sugar plantations. Masters routinely raped their slaves, punished minor wrongdoings…
Anglo-Saxons deserve reparations for the Norman Conquest
Restorative justice for the victims of colonialism is an idea whose time has come. A few years ago, the Indian…
Nyong’o is spellbinding but the plot is ultimately baffling: Us reviewed
Us is a second feature from Jordan Peele after his marvellous debut Get Out, which was more brilliantly satirical than…
Whatever America is searching for, Trump isn’t providing it
Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has…
The burden of freedom: Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan, reviewed
It’s 1830, and among the sugar cane of Faith Plantation in Barbados, suicide seems like the only way out. Decapitations…
Brazil: a country fizzing with excitement
As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be…
A Shout in the Ruins, by Kevin Powers, reviewed
We’re in Virginia, in the 1850s. A girl called Emily is tormenting her dog, Champion, and her father’s teenage slave,…
Brotherly love
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Must Colston fall?
Edward Colston, mega-rich philanthropist around the year 1700, is the nearest thing Bristol has to a patron saint. The largest…
Stitches in time
When Martha Ann Ricks was 76 she travelled from her home in Liberia to London to meet Queen Victoria. The…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
You can’t see the wood for the trees in Annie Proulx’s epic novel of logging and deforestation in North America, says Philip Hensher
The 1850s: a dizzying decade of boom and bust
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
The sophisticates are wrong about Cleveland, Ohio
To Cleveland, Ohio, where middle America’s middle class begins its great Midwest sprawl. I’ve always wanted to visit Cleveland because…
Escape Antigua’s tourists (but be ready to confront some grim secrets)
‘Tourism, tourism and tourism,’ said my Antiguan cab driver, when I asked what the country’s main industries were. Still, it’s…
The strange history of Willoughbyland, modern-day Suriname
John Gimlette on the strange and superbly told story of Willoughbyland, England’s ‘lost’ colony
From ambrosia to zabaglione — now with added slavery
This Oxford Companion ranges from the sweet to the decidedly salty, while being the most politically correct reference book you will ever consult, says Paul Levy
The turbulent reign of King Cotton: the dark history of one of the world’s most important commodities
If not for cotton, we would still be wearing wool. To equal current cotton production, we would need seven billion…
Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a…
The forgotten liberator
Slavery was ended in England not through blood and glory, but by the common law
How Plato and Aristotle would have tackled unemployment
Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems…
