If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely?
The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of British history, how it is generally taught and understood. Like all the best illusions it draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the illusionist does not want you to see. It is carefully designed to frame and delineate our understanding of the past by focusing our attention away from certain linkages and connections.
The illusion in question works like this: it marginalises the histories of slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth, between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a
— source theguardian.com | David Olusoga | 12 Apr 2023