Britain and the Caribbean: from slavery to Black Lives Matter

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Histories of British involvement in the Caribbean tend to focus mainly on the period of plantation slavery. But in her new book Empire without end. Imabong Umaren argues that we need to take a broader view.

She suggests that it's only by taking the story right back to the 16th century and right forward until the present that we can fully understand the intertwining themes of colonialism and racism in the region, and how they connect to events in Britain too. In this episode, Immerbong explores these ideas in conversation with Rob Atar. So could we begin with the genesis of this book? What made you decide to embark on this history? Yeah, that's a very good question.

So I think it was a kind of combination of two main things. Firstly, this is the field topic that kind of falls under my broad research interests and it's based on some of the teaching that I've done throughout my career, but it was also kind of based around the events of 2020. And in particular, the kind of rise of the kind of Black Lives Matter movement, which had been going for many, many years, but obviously kind of reached sort of national global attention in the summer of 2020. And in particular, I was sort of interested in the conversations that were being had at the time about anti-racism. And one of the things that I was, as a historian, kind of wanting the kind of larger media and public audience to know more about was the longer histories of

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