At its height in 1919, the British Empire stretched from East to West incorporating one quarter of the globe.

Scratch the surface of almost any institution with roots in Britain’s era of global dominance and legacies of the British empire will appear. Take the British Museum, whose founding collection was funded by profits from Jamaican plantations worked by slaves. Or the pub chain, Greene King, whose business was started with the money received from UK government as compensation for losing their 1,396 enslaved men and women in the Caribbean. (More can be read here).

Universities are no different, and played an important role, alongside other instruments of state, in the justification for and maintenance of the British empire. Race played a huge part in this, giving empires the conceptual tools they needed to justify colonising large parts of the world.

If we fast forward to the present day, the demand to decolonise our academic institutions has gained traction following the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement which originated in Cape Town, and later took hold at Oxford University. Taking statues as a starting point, these campaigns question the need to continue to glorify and celebrate people whose actions oppressed marginalised people, and uncovers the mechanisms through which imperial thinking is still upheld within our universities today through the way we are taught, what we are taught, and how the academic institution is still imbued with historical, colonial ways of being.