Extremist Imperial Nostalgia And Colonial History

In 2021, Oliver Dowden, the then culture secretary, appeared at the History Matters conference organised by the rightwing Policy Exchange thinktank. He had recently urged museum curators not to “denigrate” British history, as if history were a fixed, fragile thing, akin to a faltering tower of Jenga, and not something complex, changing and robust, with fresh discoveries and new arguments forever changing our sense of it.