All teachers ascribe a special importance to their subject. However, I genuinely believe that history’s importance as socially, morally and culturally formative is unparalleled. In this piece, I explore the significance of decolonial history to Britain’s future as a multicultural nation.Politics is the art of storytelling. Properly understood, an ideology is a story: it seeks to organise the world, give our daily experiences meaning, and in doing so, impart ethical imperatives. For instance, Catholic Social Teaching (as it was first articulated by Pope Leo XIII in 1891) derives its justifications for social and economic rights from the genesis account of human creation that describe people as created in the ‘image and likeness of god’. Writing in the same century, Karl Marx described history to be a series of stages, in each of which there are new classes and hierarchies, and now forms of oppression. In the capitalist age, he argued, the oppression suffered by the proletariat gives them a right to revolution.

While nations are often considered as ‘imagined communities’ - large groups of people who may never meet, but imagine a shared past, present and future - they bear certain similarities to ideologies. Above all, they are reliant on storytelling . Americans tell the story of a people who endeavoured to create a new world that affirmed the natural truth of man’s equality through liberty. A nation that freed itself from colonial control, and spread its radical ideas across a continent. This story (regardless of its relationship to reality) has created a powerful sense of fraternity, even as America is now wrought by division, inequality, and injustice. Beyond unity, it also creates moral meaning: the story of America’s founding has been used to bolster all kinds of ideas; speaking in 1968, Martin Luther King declared that…

“If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions… But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”

From American history - with particular reference to the constitution - King affirmed that certain actions (the injunctions) were not only illegal, but wrong because they were anti-American. From a national story, he drew moral meaning. Britain’s understanding of its past is in flux. In the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, schools have redesigned schemes of work to develop ‘diversified’ and ‘decolonised’ curriculums. For example, the school at which I teach has recently introduced a new curriculum to include a broader national and global story including new units on African Kingdoms, Islamic Caliphates and the Russian Revolution. The terms ‘diverse’ and ‘decolonial’ are deeply contested. For the sake of simplicity, I will define them as meaning two things: firstly, they imply creating a curriculum with a greater range of characters, voices and perspectives, that once put together broadens pupils' understanding of history. Above all, they seek to teach history as integrated. Diversified history should be an integral part of the dominant narrative taught in our classrooms, not relegated to one off lessons. Secondly, and more ambitiously, they seek to expose how colonialism has shaped our understanding of history and our view of the world.

These changes have proved controversial. In 2016, the former director of the V&A Roy Strong wrote that “the past is the past. You cannot rewrite history.” Others, such as the former universities minister and current member of the cabinet, Michelle Donelan, have voiced similar concerns. Beyond simply mischaracterising ‘decolonial’ history, these critiques misunderstand the nature of history itself: history is a thing of the present - our own projection upon the past, based on what evidence we have available. In this sense, it is always rewritten and reconstructed. A more serious critique is made by the historian Robert Tombs. In a piece for reclaiming history, Tombs alleges that decolonial history is anti-British. If Britain is to face up to the dangers of the modern world “as a national community still based on solidarity and democracy” he argues, “we must resist the undermining of our culture and history by people who seem to hate them, or are at best ‘useful idiots’ serving anti-liberal forces”. In other words, Tombs says: ‘don’t deconstruct a largely positive narrative of British history because if you do, it will undermine our national solidarity’.

Tombs is wrong. Britain is already a diverse country: 37% of pupils in British schools are from minority ethnic backgrounds. I teach in a school where that figure is greater than 95%. If Britain is to tell a compelling national story for the 21st century, it must be a story that recognises and celebrates the diversity of Britain’s present through the diversity of our history. It must be a story that reminds us of the western world's debt to and links with the Islamic ‘golden age’, West Africa, Meso-America and so on. It must recognise the full and long story of Black and Brown people in Britain. It must remember the people of all colours and religions who fought and died for Britain in the First World War, Second World War, and dozens of other conflicts. And it must be open about the historical processes that led to and perpetuated colonialist attitudes.

In other words, British history should represent all British people. In 2007, the educator and Associate Professor of history Kay Traille published her research on the impact of history teaching on pupils of African-Caribbean descent in Britain. She found that lessons that taught white-only history or only tokenistically cited minority figures led pupils to feel disconnected with the subject as a whole and stereotyped by teachers and fellow pupils. History teaching has improved in Britain since then, but it still has much further to go. If Britain is to flourish as a national community based on solidarity and democracy, as Robert Tombs wishes, it must go further and faster in embracing decolonial history.

Article by James Lopez