Sadiah Qureshi

On 22 October,​ Olivette Otele – a scholar of British and French colonialism who teaches at Bath Spa University – became the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in history at a UK university, and only the second black academic (the first was Hakim Adi, who teaches the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester). With her promotion,...

In​ the early 1990s, the historian Gretchen Gerzina went to a London bookshop looking for a copy of Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). When she asked the shop assistant for help she was told ‘Madam, there were no black people in England before 1945.’ In fact, as David Olusoga’s remarkable book shows, people racialised as black...