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In this feature, New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton offers a personal account of how his academic research in various archives has become inadvertently and yet inextricably implicated in the current ‘culture wars’ being fought over how best to tell Britain’s history.

Joining Tom, textual scholar Dr Alison Searle explains how archives can contain brutal and shocking stories – revealing the competing impulses between commercial, financial and charitable impulses in Britain’s complex history of colonisation – and considers the responsibilities of researchers handling such material. The Bahamian Anglican priest and Caribbean theologian, Revd Dr Carlton Turner, reflects on the potential ramifications today of a growing awareness that some of Britain’s Christian missionaries were funded on the back of slave labour.

Archives are a key part of how our history is constructed; Tom Charlton argues here that an attentiveness not only to the tales they contain, but also to the stories of the archives themselves – who compiled them up, and how – is an equally vital part of how we should approach history. Such a process is no denigration of Britain’s past, but rather a rewarding scrutiny of who gets to tell what stories, and how.

The Reader is Stephane Cornicard

Producer: Mohini Patel