Empire & Me
During the last week, I watched all three episodes of the BBC/Open University documentary Empire , presented by my favourite historian, David Olusoga (pictured above, with me at Bradford Literature Festival). Those of you who have read some of my earlier blogs will know that I've been grappling with issues of Empire for some time. But watching this series, I feel I have finally made my peace with the history of Empire and my family's part in it - the good, the bad and the ugly. Empire affects us all, even those ancestors who never left the shores of Britian. So many movements of people around the globe, so many interrelationships. So much impact on societies, language, folklore, music, agriculture, industry, the environment... And it's complex. You can't just split it into "good" and "bad". We find different "sides" of it within our own family history. With that in mind, I'd like to walk you through some of my family's history wit...