Michael: Most people think Black British history began in 1948 with a ship called the Empire Windrush. That's not just wrong, it's off by about 1,800 years. Kevin: Whoa, 1,800 years? That's a pretty significant rounding error. What are you talking about? Michael: I'm talking about the real story. It starts with Roman soldiers on Hadrian's Wall, Tudor court musicians, and Georgian-era socialites who have been systematically, and sometimes deliberately, erased from Britain's national memory. Kevin: Okay, my mind is already a little blown. This feels like finding out a whole wing of your house existed that you never knew about. Michael: That's the perfect analogy. And this is the central mission of the book we're diving into today: Black and British: A Forgotten History by David Olusoga. Kevin: Olusoga is a fascinating figure himself, isn't he? A British-Nigerian historian who has talked about facing racism growing up, which you can feel gives this book a real personal urgency. It’s not just an academic exercise for him. Michael: Exactly. And that personal drive is backed by incredible scholarship. This isn't just a passion project; it's a critically acclaimed, award-winning work that won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and fundamentally challenges Britain's story about itself. Olusoga's point is that Black history isn't an appendix to British history. It is British history. Kevin: I love that. It’s not a separate story, it’s a central thread that’s been cut out of the tapestry. So where do we even begin to re-weave it? Michael: We start where Olusoga does. Not in the 20th century, but in a Roman cemetery in York, nearly two millennia ago.

Kevin: Roman York? I’m picturing legionaries and stone walls. I’m definitely not picturing a diverse, multi-ethnic city. Michael: And that's the myth the book shatters from page one. In 1901, archaeologists in York discovered a stone sarcophagus. Inside were the remains of a young woman, buried with extremely expensive luxury goods: jet bracelets, glass beads, an elephant ivory bangle, and a mirror. For a century, she was just a wealthy Roman skeleton. Kevin: Just another artifact in a museum drawer, I'm guessing. Michael: Precisely. But in 2009, scientists used modern forensic techniques—radioisotope analysis on her teeth and bones—to figure out where she grew up. The chemical signatures revealed she was from a warmer, coastal climate. The shape of her skull pointed to North African ancestry. They named her the "Ivory Bangle Lady." Kevin: Wow. So a high-status woman of African descent was living and dying in northern England in the 3rd or 4th century AD. That single story just completely reframes the picture of Roman Britain. Michael: It does. And she wasn't alone. Olusoga details the "Aurelian Moors," a whole unit of North African soldiers stationed at Hadrian's Wall. These weren't slaves; they were imperial citizens, part of the vast, multi-ethnic Roman machine. This history has always been there, just waiting to be uncovered. Kevin: That’s incredible. But was this just a Roman-era phenomenon? What happened after the Romans left? Did that presence just disappear for a thousand years? Michael: Not at all. It just pops up in other unexpected places. Jump forward to the Tudor court, the time of Henry VIII. We all have this image of Holbein portraits—very pale, very English. But Olusoga introduces us to a man named John Blanke. Kevin: John Blanke. Okay, who was he? Michael: He was a Black trumpeter in the royal courts of both Henry VII and Henry VIII. And we know he was there because he’s actually depicted in the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll, a huge, sixty-foot-long manuscript celebrating the birth of a prince. He’s right there, on horseback, playing his trumpet. Kevin: Hold on, a Black musician in the Tudor court? How do we know he wasn't just a servant or a slave? Michael: Because we have the records of his life. And this is the most amazing part. John Blanke felt he was underpaid. So he wrote a petition directly to King Henry VIII, asking for a pay rise to match the wages of his white counterparts. Kevin: You’re kidding me. He petitioned the king? That takes some serious guts. What happened? Michael: The king granted it! He doubled his wages. And it gets better. The next year, Blanke got married, and as a wedding present, Henry VIII gave him a gown of violet cloth, a bonnet, and a hat. This wasn't a slave or a marginal figure. This was a valued member of the royal household, a man with agency, a salary, and a life. Kevin: That is absolutely astonishing. It feels like a story from an alternate history novel, but it's real. Were these just isolated cases, though? A few remarkable individuals who managed to make their way? Or was there something more? Michael: Olusoga argues they were part of a small but integrated presence. They weren't always wealthy or connected like John Blanke. Parish records from the time show Black people being baptized, getting married to white English people, and being buried in local churchyards. They were weavers, servants, sailors, and divers. Jacques Francis, a Black salvage diver, was the lead expert hired to recover cannons from the wreck of the Mary Rose. Kevin: The Mary Rose! That’s one of the most famous shipwrecks in English history. Michael: And a Black man was the lead diver on the project. When his employer was taken to court, Francis testified as a key witness. The opposing lawyer tried to have his testimony thrown out, arguing he was a "slave" and a "non-Christian." But the English court accepted his testimony. He was seen as a credible witness. Kevin: So these individual stories are the proof. They’re the threads Olusoga uses to re-weave that tapestry. It’s not just about statistics or abstract trends; it's about real people living real lives. Michael: Exactly. It makes the history undeniable. But as you said, there's a darker, much larger story running in parallel. A story that would eventually try to erase the memory of men like John Blanke and the Ivory Bangle Lady entirely.

Kevin: Right. It's one thing to talk about individuals finding a place in British society. It's another thing entirely to confront the system that Britain built, which was designed to do the exact opposite—to turn human beings into commodities on an industrial scale. Michael: And that's the turn the book takes. Olusoga transports us from the royal courts of London to a tiny, sweltering island off the coast of Sierra Leone called Bunce Island. He calls it the "'Pompeii’ of the Atlantic slave trade" because its ruins are so well-preserved. Kevin: What was Bunce Island? Michael: It was a British "slave factory." A fortress, a prison, and a proto-industrial production line for human beings. This wasn't a chaotic, haphazard operation. It was a meticulously organized business. Captives were brought in, sorted by age and gender, inspected like livestock, branded with hot irons to mark them as property of the Royal African Company, and then warehoused in dungeons called "barracoons" to await the ships. Kevin: The language itself is chilling. "Factory," "warehoused," "commodities." It’s the vocabulary of manufacturing, not humanity. Michael: That’s the core of Olusoga’s point. This was the cold, calculated engine of empire. And the most haunting part of the Bunce Island story is the lifestyle of the British agents who ran it. Archaeologists have uncovered the foundations of their living quarters. They had fine dining rooms, libraries, and even a two-hole golf course. Kevin: Wait, stop. A golf course? On a slave fortress? Michael: A golf course. An account from a visitor in the 1770s describes playing a round of golf with African caddies, then retiring for a lavish dinner of antelope, wild boar, and fine Madeira wine, all while hundreds of people were chained in the dungeons just a few yards away, suffering from what the traders called "the lethargy"—what we would now recognize as profound PTSD. Kevin: That is... monstrous. It's the banality of it that's so disturbing. The sheer ability to compartmentalize that level of suffering. How could they live with themselves? Michael: Dehumanization was the key. The system couldn't function without it. Olusoga unearths the most horrific detail: within the women's holding yard, there was a small, separate building. Historians and archaeologists have concluded it was a "rape house," where enslaved women were systematically sexually assaulted by the agents. It was located right next to an orchard where the men would relax and drink. Kevin: That’s just pure evil. And it was all for profit. Michael: Immense profit. This system didn't just enrich a few rogue traders. It fueled Britain's industrial revolution. The wealth generated from sugar, tobacco, and cotton—all produced by enslaved labor—financed banks, built cities, and funded the lifestyles of the British elite. Olusoga quotes an advertisement from the era for "silver padlocks for Blacks or Dogs." That one phrase tells you everything you need to know about the mindset. Kevin: "For Blacks or Dogs." It equates people with property, with animals. And once that idea takes root, it justifies everything that follows. Michael: It has to. Because Britain was also building a national identity around the idea of "freedom." The air of England was supposedly "too pure for a slave to breathe." This created a massive moral and legal contradiction. How can you be the land of the free while being the world's leading trafficker of enslaved people? Kevin: That’s a contradiction that can’t hold. Something has to give. Michael: And it did. But the legacy of that dehumanization, the idea that Black people were somehow "other," didn't just disappear when the slave trade was abolished. It mutated. It found new justifications. And as Olusoga shows, it echoed right into the 20th century, in the very heart of the empire.

Kevin: So the economic engine of slavery is dismantled, but the ideology behind it lives on. How did that play out after abolition? Michael: Olusoga fast-forwards to World War I, which is a perfect case study. When the war broke out in 1914, there was a huge wave of patriotic enthusiasm across the West Indies. Thousands of men volunteered to fight for the "mother country." They saw themselves as loyal British subjects, ready to do their duty. Kevin: They were answering the call. They believed they were part of the empire and wanted to defend it. Michael: Absolutely. But the British War Office had a very different view. There was a deep-seated fear of arming Black men and having them fight, and potentially kill, white Europeans. The idea was that it would shatter the myth of white racial prestige and superiority that the entire colonial system was built on. Kevin: So it was a threat to the racial hierarchy. Military necessity came second to maintaining the illusion of white dominance. Michael: Exactly. After immense pressure, including from King George V, they finally agreed to form the British West Indies Regiment, the BWIR. But it came with conditions. The men of the BWIR were largely denied combat roles. Instead, they were used as labor battalions, digging trenches, loading ammunition, often under heavy fire and in horrific conditions. They were paid less, housed in segregated quarters, and subjected to constant racism from white soldiers. Kevin: It’s a classic bait-and-switch. "Come fight for the empire, but don't think for a second that makes you equal." Michael: The ultimate betrayal came at the end of the war. In July 1919, London held a massive Victory Parade to celebrate the end of the conflict. Troops from Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand marched proudly through the city. The British West Indies Regiment was explicitly excluded. Kevin: You cannot be serious. They were deliberately left out of the celebration they fought and died for? Michael: They were deemed "unsuitable" to march alongside white troops. One furious Black veteran wrote that the message from the empire was, "Get back to your kennel you damned dog of a nigger!" It was a stunning, public act of erasure. Kevin: And this is the "forgetting" Olusoga talks about, right? This isn't just a passive lapse of memory. This is an active, deliberate decision to write people out of the national story of triumph they helped create. Michael: It's the very definition of it. And it had immediate, violent consequences. That same summer of 1919, race riots erupted in port cities across Britain—Liverpool, Cardiff, London. White soldiers, demobilized and facing unemployment, turned on Black communities, blaming them for taking jobs and houses. A Black sailor named Charles Wootton was chased by a mob in Liverpool and lynched, drowned in a dock while a crowd of thousands watched. Kevin: This is in Britain, not the American South. That’s a part of history I was never taught. Michael: Because it was forgotten. Or more accurately, buried. This history directly contradicts the comforting narrative of Britain as a tolerant, welcoming nation. Olusoga draws a straight line from this erasure to the rhetoric of someone like Enoch Powell decades later. Powell's infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech was built on the fiction that Britain had always been a homogenous, white nation, and that the arrival of Black and Asian immigrants was an unprecedented invasion. Kevin: But as Olusoga proves, that was a complete fantasy. It required ignoring centuries of history. It required forgetting the Ivory Bangle Lady, John Blanke, and the thousands of Black soldiers who served the empire. Michael: It required a national amnesia. And Olusoga’s book is the cure. It’s an act of remembering.

Kevin: So when you put it all together, it’s this incredible, heartbreaking arc. You start with the reality of a long, deep history of Black presence in Britain. Then you have this brutal, industrial-scale system of slavery that required their total dehumanization. And finally, you have this period of national amnesia, a deliberate forgetting, that tried to erase both the presence and the crime. Michael: That's the perfect summary. Olusoga's central argument is that you simply cannot understand modern Britain—its culture, its wealth, its politics, its ongoing struggles with race—without seeing all three of those threads woven together. They are inseparable. The book is so powerful because it doesn't just present facts; it restores a narrative. Kevin: It really makes you question what "British history" even means. The book isn't just adding Black people back into the old story; it's forcing a complete rewrite of the story itself. It shows that the history of Britain is also a history of Africa and the Caribbean, and vice versa. They're not separate worlds. Michael: They never were. And that's the deep insight here. This isn't just Black history. This is everyone's history. Forgetting it doesn't just harm Black Britons; it impoverishes the nation's understanding of itself. It creates a fragile, false identity that can be easily threatened by the truth. Kevin: It leaves you with a really powerful question. What parts of our own national, or even our own family histories, have we conveniently "forgotten" because the truth is uncomfortable? Michael: That's a question we could all probably spend some time with. The book is a challenge to do just that—to confront the whole story, the good and the bad, and to build a more honest future from it. Kevin: It’s a profound and necessary work. It feels less like a history book and more like a restoration project for a nation's memory. Michael: Well said. It’s a book that demands to be read and remembered. We’d love to hear your reflections on this. What parts of this history surprised you the most? Find us on our socials and join the conversation. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.