Lecture Given for Chichester Diocese’s Black History Month Closing Service, Sunday 25th October 2026, St Mary’s Church, Slindon[1] Alan Lester Today we are convening in two places redolent of the Anglican Church’s conflicted relationship with slavery. Over there is a memorial to Edward Long, a man who did his utmost to justify the dehumanisation of generations of enslaved African men, women and children. In St Mary Magdalene Church Madehurst, to which we are heading this afternoon, is another memorial to Roque Ferdinand, one of the individuals caught up in the web of atrocities that Anglicans like Long sought to perpetuate. […]
Background In 2019 the booklet Brighton & Hove Black History was updated by Brighton & Hove Black History community group. The group was co-founded created in 2002 by Bert Williams MBE and Sarah Lee, via a grant from the Scarman Trust. After a career in the RAF Bert spent much of his retirement researching the hidden stories of Black people’s presence in the city and presenting that work to every audience he could access. However Bert faced racism and prejudice when trying to present that work and was excluded from heritage and archive spaces which did not take him or […]
Alan Lester The Spectator’s owner Paul Marshall and its editor Michael Gove are afraid of William Dalrymple. His sequence of books on colonial India that have sold millions, his Empire podcast with Anita Anand that attracts a million downloads every month, and his outspoken opposition to the Israeli state’s genocidal actions have given him the clout to threaten their project to delimit and control the public’s understanding of British history and identity. In their efforts to discredit him and circumscribe what British schoolkids should learn, they have misled their readership about the teaching of the British Empire in schools, but […]
As community tensions amount with attacks on Jews and Muslims, can you imagine what a marvellous, ameliorative effect the headline “Poll Shows that More British Muslims View Jews Favourably than Unfavourably” might have? Newspapers carry a considerable responsibility when they select poll data to interpret. However, right wing lobbying groups are increasingly commissioning polls with leading questions, knowing that the media’s selective reporting of their data bolsters their narratives and helps them achieve their political objectives. This one was commissioned by Policy Exchange: The headline data extracted from it relentlessly pitched Muslim respondents against other Britons: 1. “The war in […]
What Happens When You Restructure a Superpower Power Around a Narcissist Who Doesn’t Understand Global Power Relationships? The Strait of Hormuz by MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA GSFC – This image or video was catalogued by Goddard Space Flight Center of the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) under Photo ID: 2018-12-10., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145434088 Alan Lester When he reacted to Trump’s threat to annihilate Iran’s ‘cvilisation’ Pope Leo XIV put his finger on Trump’s greatest weakness on foreign policy. With his narcissistic ‘delusion of omnipotence’, he simply doesn’t understand how Great Powers maintain hegemony. The USA’s greatest problem […]
Alan Lester It would be a feather in the cap for hard right-wing activists if they were able to block the Church of England’s Project Spire – a reparative justice scheme in recognition of the Church’s investments in slave ownership and slave trading. Fearful of the Church establishing a reparative precedent for other institutions, a group of right wing MPs led by Katie Lam, the right wing think tank Policy Exchange, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Critic, The Daily Mail and GB News are all trying their very best to undermine it. The lead campaigner and the right wing press’ […]
The University of Sussex, Feb 2026, taken by the author. Alan Lester The Spectator has published an article by Nigel Biggar smearing the University of Sussex as repressing students who ‘don’t dare voice’ their ‘reasonable dissent’ and attacking me personally. The salvo coincides with the High Court considering the university’s request for judicial review of the Office for Students’ decision against the University. I was not the only Sussex academic named in Biggar’s hit piece, but this response is mine alone. It focuses on what he said about me and unnamed colleagues in the Anthropology Department. The ‘hook’ for Biggar’s […]
Alan Lester Key points: 1. Trans-Atlantic slavery was unlike other forms of slavery. People were commodified and racialised as ‘objects’ for capital accumulation. 2. The Church of England invested in this system through ownership of a Barbados estate with high death rates and purchase of captives for it; donations from slave-traders; clergy who owned captives and investment in the slave-trading South Sea Company. 3. Right wing activists are campaigning against the Church’s reparative Project Spire in parliament and the right wing press. 4. They are claiming that the Church got its history wrong because it profited from South Sea annuities […]
Lecture Given to the Association of Commonwealth Journalists, 24 Nov 2025 Alan Lester Professor of Historical Geography University of Sussex Introduction[1] Reparations are ‘a commitment to acknowledge and apologize for the harm done in the past; to provide material redress for that harm; and to making the structural changes necessary to prevent that harm from reoccurring’.[2] Activists and writers from the Black diaspora have made the case for reparations ever since trans-Atlantic slavery created that diaspora. The rationale and demand for reparations has been expressed in more orchestrated fashion since the late 1960s. Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued it in a […]
Keynote Lecture for 140 Years Beyond the Berlin Conference, Africa Centre and SOAS Friday 12 December and Saturday 13 December 2025 Alan Lester Most British imperial historians have tended to follow Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, agreeing that the immediate events of the late 1870s and early 1880s precipitated the Berlin Conference of 1884-5. Primary among these events were the nationalist reaction to European control of Egypt, which called forth British occupation, expeditions to retrieve General Gordon from Sudan, and the attempts to bring southern Africa’s Boer Republics into a British imperial confederation.[1] However, news of Gordon’s death in […]
