An accurate and shared understanding of an institution’s history is not an academic self-indulgence or a symptom of political correctness. It is critical to understanding how they work in the here and now and their future obligations.
As the historian David Olusoga has powerfully argued, institutions all too often mask the reality of their chequered pasts in order to accentuate the heroic. In doing so, they obscure important insights about how power operates within them and what they owe the world that exists outside their doors.
