Radical History Then and Now

In July 2016 the Radical Histories/Histories of Radicalism conference was held in London, commemorating twenty years since the death of Raphael Samuel and forty years since the founding of History Workshop Journal. In the opening plenary session I was one of the speakers asked to reflect upon the theme ‘Radical history then and now’. The conference came soon after the UK referendum on EU membership, preceded during the campaign by the use and misuse of immigrant histories, stories of belonging and not-belonging and charged debates about what it is to be British, and what Britain should be in the future. It was with these debates and conversations in mind that I reflected upon my past twenty years or so researching Black British Histories, particularly the lives of Black Victorian women in London. I had begun to do so because so little work was being undertaken when I began historical research as an undergraduate student, and in July 2016 it felt that despite positive, albeit limited, changes under New Labour governments were being successfully undermined by a resurgent political right. The piece below is a version of the thoughts I presented at the conference