The threat is actually coming from the opposite direction – by ignoring history we are unable to understand the shape of our nations. I’m thinking specifically of three recent works of popular history about colonialism and slavery; Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project for the New York Times, for which she won a Pulitzer last year (the podcast is incredible); Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland; and Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy, which details his own family’s slave ownership in late 18th-century Tobago. Each work is hauntingly original, and the perspectives different, but certain themes emerge. The first, forensically analysed by Hannah-Jones in the American context, is how slavery and exploitation as systems get into the fabric of all that is woven afterwards, whether that’s modern-day healthcare or the economics of agriculture. “We’re here because you were there”, Sanghera writes, quoting the academic Ambalavaner Sivanandan, collapsing the walls between the past and the present.