For readers of Empireland and Black and British: discover the history you're not taught in school. Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can't help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight. Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects, Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba unpick the threads of the history that we never learned in school, revealing the truth of how Britain's present is bound to a darker past. Taking us from art galleries to football stands, banks to hospitals, from grand country houses to the backs of our kitchen cupboards, Human Resources is an eye-opening inquiry that gives a voice to the enslaved people who built modern Britain.
The journey to the book:
Arisa's PhD research is on the British Empire. Educating the public on more expansive narratives of Britain’s past has always been extremely important to Arisa and is something that they have been passionate about since they were at school and felt there were huge gaps in the History curriculum. And so writing ‘Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain – in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things’ was an honour and privilege. The book came out of a history podcast of the same name and same topic made by Broccoli Productions, that Arisa worked on as a historical researcher prior to starting their PhD. They worked on three seasons of the podcast alongside their co-researcher Dr Alison Bennett. Both the book and the podcast are bitesize snapshots of ways that we can still see the legacies of slavery and empire in modern Britain, told through the lens of objects, places, people etc. The stories are interwoven with interviews with historians and academics, with the aim of simplifying academic research into something hopefully digestible for anyone to read.
The book is out now and can be found in most bookstores and online.
