‘Imperial nostalgia has become so extreme’: Sathnam

Historians are terrorised for doing their work while the rightwing narrative has gained traction with those in power. The Empireland author explores the dangers of denial

In 2021, Oliver Dowden, the then culture secretary, appeared at the History Matters conference organised by the rightwing Policy Exchange thinktank. He had recently urged museum curators not to “denigrate” British history, as if history were a fixed, fragile thing, akin to a faltering tower of Jenga, and not something complex, changing and robust, with fresh discoveries and new arguments forever changing our sense of it.

According to a report in the Times, he proceeded to talk about the risk of curators “being pushed around by unrepresentative campaign groups … to remove our history, to remove statues and so on”, thus equating history with statues when statues are not history: they just offer one view of a historical figure at one particular point in history – and propounding the peculiar idea that history is erased with their removal (our knowledge of Lenin and Hitler continues to grow without their statues).