THE TIES THAT BIND US

There is an illusion at the centre of British history that conceals the role of slavery in building the nation. Here's how I fell for it

- David Olusoga

If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely? The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood.

The illusion in question works like this: it marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people, and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country.

It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them.

The trick was constructed over centuries by politicians, lobbyists, and journalists who sought to create a highly romanticised version of our national story. They were assisted by generations of historians who were equally determined to construct British history around the biographies of "great men" whose achievements, they believed, proved the nation's supposed exceptionalism. The illusion has long shaped the history delivered to us at school and, as we are not taught of the existence of the redacted and missing chapters, we have no reason to go in search of them. This approach to the past is so powerful that it is capable - as I recently discovered - of triggering a form of cognitive dissonance.