{"id":290692,"date":"2025-06-13T07:32:06","date_gmt":"2025-06-13T07:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/entertainment\/books\/a-new-history-of-britain-and-the-caribbean-interview-with-imaobong-umoren\/"},"modified":"2025-06-13T07:32:06","modified_gmt":"2025-06-13T07:32:06","slug":"a-new-history-of-britain-and-the-caribbean-interview-with-imaobong-umoren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=290692","title":{"rendered":"A new history of Britain and the Caribbean \u2013 Interview with Imaobong Umoren"},"content":{"rendered":"


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In this interview with LSE Review of Books Managing Editor Anna D\u2019Alton<\/strong>,<\/em> Imaobong Umoren<\/strong> discusses her new book<\/em>, Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean<\/strong>. From the first arrival of Europeans in the archipelago in the 15th century through to the Windrush scandal in the 21st century, the book traces these intertwined histories and the legacies of exploitation, slavery and empire that persist today. Umoren writes against selective, sanitised narratives of the British Empire, arguing that we must reckon with the violence and complexity of this history if we are to understand its impacts today and move beyond them.<\/em><\/p>\n

Empire Without End: A New History of Britain and the Caribbean.<\/em> Imaobong Umoren. Fern Press. 2025.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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What motivated you to write a new history of Britain\u2019s colonial relationship to the Caribbean?<\/h2>\n

The main reason was my desire to intervene in ongoing public debates about British Imperialism and its legacies. I, like many people, get frustrated with the simplistic, selective understandings of empire, often rooted in the Victorian era, that celebrate it as an empire of trade or of spreading British values across the globe.<\/p>\n

\"Empire<\/a>In the work that I do as a historian on the Caribbean, the legacies of British colonialism look very different, especially when you stretch back to the 1400s and the initial contact between Europeans and indigenous people. When we take this longer historical trajectory, we can see how empire operated differently in different times and places, and we can see much more clearly the devastating legacies of empire today.<\/p>\n

I also wanted to write a reparatory history<\/a>. I hope that it helps to contribute to a real groundswell of energy, hope and optimism, that the legacies of the British Empire in the Caribbean, which are rooted in the construction of race and in the spread of structural racism, aren\u2019t features that are going to be around forever. Through the history of repair that I\u2019m writing, that lots of people are involved in, we can challenge those racial and class hierarchies that stem from colonialism, and even consider a future where they no longer exist.<\/p>\n

You argue that \u201cthe roots of contemporary racial and linked class divisions in Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean today lie in the racial-caste hierarchy created in the early days of the Caribbean.\u201d What was the racial-caste hierarchy and how did it operate?<\/h2>\n

It\u2019s a term that lots of historians and scholars \u00a0(like Gordon K Lewis<\/a> and Charles W. Mills<\/a>) use to describe a society that emerged during the period of slavery in the Caribbean. The racial-caste hierarchy was a loosely triangular structure with white elites at the top, mixed-race people in the middle who had a variety of different roles within the larger plantation structure of slavery during that period, and enslaved Africans, the biggest group who were labouring on sugar or coffee plantations across the Caribbean, at the bottom.<\/p>\n

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The story of abolition is often told from a British perspective as a celebratory history. The role of white abolitionists was important, but there were many different people who helped to end slavery.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The hierarchy was based on the construction of race which emerged because of the development of slavery. But it was not static: it shifted over time and place, and it looked different in different places in the Caribbean. There was some movement within it, in particular within the middle and the top section. It was inflected by class status, legal status, gender. The hierarchy shifted over time and place, but its power and longevity lay in its being founded on violence. It also shaped the discourses of racism in Britain.<\/p>\n

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