Namibia: Genocide And The Second Reich "The ghosts of the Namibian genocide have been reawakened. They return to haunt liberal post-war Germany, and in doing so they force Germany to wake-up to a very uncomfortable fact that the dark racial theories that helped inspire the Nazis run much deeper into German and European history than most people want to acknowledge." The powerful documentary by David Olusoga (BBC) is the story of Germany's forgotten genocide. It takes a sensitive and […]
Rasicm: A History: Part 1 The first part of Racism: A History was screened in March this year on BBC4. Partly filmed at Bristol Radical History week last year, the first of this excellent three part documentary deals with the rise of transatlantic slavery. Bristol Radical History Group think this is one of the best documentary series we have ever seen on the BBC. What did other viewers think on the BBC website? Here is a selection: "This should be shown in every secondary school in the country. […]
Richard Hart: Key figure in the politics of the Caribbean of the 20th century. Trade Union and political activist in Jamaica, Guyana and Attorney General of Grenada; a post he held until the American invasion in 1983. As an academic, Richard Hart taught at Northwestern University, USA, and has also been a visiting lecturer at a number of Canadian and American universities, the University of Guyana, University of Havana, University of the West Indies in Jamaica and Trinidad and the University of […]
Adam Hochschild: A multi-award winning author, his first book Half the Way Home: a Memoir of Father and Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror at Midnight: a South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves. His widely read books have won numerous […]
Jim McNeill, local historian, storyteller and member of Living Easton will lead us on a walk that explores the history of Bristol Blue glass and reveals its links to slave money. From Ye Shakespeare Public House, (Victoria St) to The Ostrich Public House. A walk along the River Avon, through the districts of Redcliffe and Temple, Bristol, to explore the sites of the city's glasshouses and how they were sustained by colonial expansion and Bristol's involvement in the slave trade. Read an […]
Pontecorvo's memorable sequel to Battle of Algiers sees Brando in finely ambiguous form as the drunken, cynical Sir William Walker, a British agent sent to the Caribbean island of Queimada in the mid-1800s to stir up a native rebellion against the Portuguese sugar monopoly; ten years later, he is forced to return there to destroy the leader he himself created, in order to open up trade with Britain. Falling between epic adventure and political allegory, the film is occasionally clumsily […]
Sugar and Tobacco: Drugs of Capitalism - Dave Cullum This lecture studies the impact of Bristol's international trade on the developing industrial economy of England in the 18th and 19th centuries, with a focus on diet, nutrition and addiction amongst the new urban proletariat…. Listen to this talk: Download this lecture The Anti-slavery Movements in Bristol - Madge Dresser There were three anti-slavery campaigns in Bristol between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries: the […]
West Country Slavery (700-1150) - Chris Brian Slavery in England is little known about, neither is the fact that in medieval times the West Country had a very high proportion of it's population enslaved. The talk highlights West Country slavery, including the early establishment of Bristol as a slave trading post. It also explores who was likely to become a slave in medieval England, and asks what were the conditions like for these slaves, compared to other slave cultures. Slave Revolts - Edson […]
First known as 'Luther Blisset', Bologna's fiction-writing collective return with a stylish atmospheric and provocotive saga set in British America in the years prior to the white settler uprising of 1776. There's the rub: turning received ideas on their head, as ever, Wu Ming evoke the coming rebellion through the eyes of the Mohawk nation loyal to George III, the 'Great English Father'. At the core of this sweeping, narrative, bursting with colour and character, stands the real-life war chief, […]
This book is an interesting and necessary cross discipline (historical, economic and meteorological) explanation of the horrific famines in China, India and Brazil at the end of the 19th century. Starting from the premise that revisionist and even Marxist historians (Hobsbawm gives them one line in his famous trilogy) have ignored these massive events or failed to link them across these disciplines, he goes on to explain how the dogmatic free market approach of the British ruling class married […]
