David Olusoga’s work begins with a challenge to the way history is framed. Black British history, he argues through his books and broadcasts, is not a specialist supplement to the national story. It belongs within that story: alongside the histories of empire, slavery, warfare, migration and everyday life. As a historian, writer and broadcaster, he has carried that argument from archival research to a wide television and reading public.
From Lagos to Gateshead
Olusoga was born in Lagos in January 1970, the second child of a Nigerian father and a British mother. He moved to Britain with his mother when he was five and grew up in Gateshead, in north-east England. He has described a childhood in which his family encountered sustained racist intimidation. By the time he was 14, the National Front had attacked their home more than once, and the family needed police protection. They eventually had to leave because of the racism.
These experiences are part of his biography, not a complete explanation of his work. His historical arguments rest on evidence and research, rather than personal experience alone. But the contrast between the Britain he encountered and the narrowness of familiar national narratives gives context to his attention to belonging, race and the histories that public memory leaves out.
At the University of Liverpool, he studied history with a focus on slavery, graduating with a BA in 1994. He then took a postgraduate course in broadcast journalism at Leeds Trinity University. That combination of historical study and media training became central to his career: he could investigate the record and also consider how to make its findings clear to viewers.
Learning how television tells history
Olusoga’s early television work was behind the camera. He began as a researcher on the 1999 BBC series Western Front, presented by Richard Holmes, and went on to produce history programmes. His credits included Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich, The Lost Pictures of Eugene Smith and Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner? This production experience preceded his emergence as a presenter and gave him a working knowledge of how archival material is selected, interpreted and made legible on screen.
He began presenting documentaries in 2014 with The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire. The series examined Indian, African and Asian troops who fought in the First World War. Its subject changes the scale of a familiar British account: the war was fought by an empire, and the history of those who served cannot be separated from that imperial setting. Olusoga subsequently presented other documentaries and appeared on The One Show.
In 2015 it was announced that he would co-present Civilisations, alongside historians Mary Beard and Simon Schama. The series, a successor to Kenneth Clark’s 1969 television programme, offered another setting in which to explore how the histories of societies are told. Olusoga’s wider body of work has moved between military history, empire, slavery and the histories of Black people in Britain, without treating any of those subjects as detached from the others.
Slavery, records and public attention
Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners brought the links between slavery and British life into prime public view. The television project drew on research associated with University College London’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership project and examined records of compensation paid to slave-owners after abolition. Its subject was not simply slavery overseas, but the people and interests in Britain connected to its ownership and profits.
The programme received the Royal Historical Society’s Public History Prize for Broadcasting in 2015 and the Specialist Factual BAFTA at the 2016 television awards. Those honours recognised both historical work and its communication to a broad audience. The project illustrates an important feature of Olusoga’s practice: archival records can make large, distant systems concrete by showing how they connect to named people and institutions.
His presenting career also included Fighting for King and Empire: Britain’s Caribbean Heroes and, in 2019, The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files. In 2021, he presented Our NHS: A Hidden History; in 2023, Union with David Olusoga. Across these subjects, the work asks viewers to look again at stories that can appear settled, and to consider whose experiences have been left outside the frame.
A House Through Time, which began in 2018, offers a different route into the past. Rather than starting with a national event, it traces people connected to a particular house over time. The address provides a way to follow changes in family life and society through individual lives. It makes social history tangible: a building becomes a record of those who inhabited it, and of the wider conditions that shaped their lives. The series was still among Olusoga’s television work in 2026.
Black and British: a wider national history
Olusoga’s best-known book and television project, Black and British: A Forgotten History, sets out the central claim of his public work: that the history of Black people in Britain is part of British history, not a recent or marginal addition to it. The book, published in 2016, ranges across the long history of African-descended people in Britain. Its account reaches back to Roman Britain and covers slavery, abolition, warfare, seafaring, citizenship and migration.
The project is substantial in scope, but its importance also lies in the question it asks of the usual national narrative. If Black people have been present in these islands across centuries, then their experiences cannot be confined to a separate commemorative category. They affect how Britain’s past is understood as a whole. The book’s recognition included the Longman–History Today Trustees Award and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, both in 2017.
Olusoga’s other books extend that work across subjects and formats. The World’s War accompanied his exploration of the conflict and its imperial participants. With Casper Erichsen, he co-authored The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, published in 2011. He also contributed to the Oxford Companion to Black British History and wrote for publications including The Guardian, The Observer, the New Statesman and BBC History.
In 2024, he co-created Black History for Every Day of the Year with his siblings Yinka and Kemi Olusoga. Its 366 entries associate people, events, places and themes with each day of the year. The format invites readers to encounter Black history throughout the calendar rather than restricting it to a single month. It is an accessible structure for a larger historical proposition: these histories are part of ordinary national attention.
Recognition and public history
In 2019, the University of Manchester appointed Olusoga Professor of Public History. The title gives institutional form to work he had already been doing across broadcasting and publishing: bringing historical research to audiences beyond the university. He delivered his inaugural professorial lecture that year on identity, Britishness and the Windrush. In 2021, the British Academy awarded him its President’s Medal for services to the humanities and social sciences.
Olusoga was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to history and community integration. He has also received honorary degrees from the universities of Liverpool, Leeds and Leicester, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019. These distinctions sit alongside prizes for particular books and programmes; together, they mark recognition across historical scholarship, public communication and writing.
His work has continued into new formats. In 2025 he began co-presenting the history podcast Journey Through Time with historian Sarah Churchwell. That year he was also appointed an ambassador for the National Trust, and appeared in the first series of The Celebrity Traitors. The range of settings is striking, but his enduring public contribution is not simply visibility. It is the repeated act of making history’s evidence available to audiences who might not encounter it in an academic book or archive.
Why David Olusoga deserves a place in British Legacy
David Olusoga deserves a place in British Legacy because he has helped make the country’s history more complete and more usable. Black and British places the long presence of Black people in Britain within the national account, while The World’s War brings Indian, African and Asian servicemen into a history often told from a narrower perspective. Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners turns records of compensation into evidence of the connections between slavery and British people and institutions. These are not disconnected subjects: together, they help explain how empire, race and wealth have shaped the country.
His achievement also lies in how he carries that evidence to the public. As a researcher, producer, presenter and author, he has worked across television, books and public history, retaining the detail of historical enquiry while making it approachable. A House Through Time shows how broad changes can be traced through an ordinary address; the 2024 daily anthology makes Black history a continuing part of the year’s reading. His professorship and the British Academy’s medal recognise the value of taking scholarship beyond specialist audiences. For British Legacy, Olusoga’s importance is specific: he has helped more people see that Britain’s past is richer, and its present more intelligible, when Black British history is treated as part of the story rather than an appendix to it.
Sources
Adapted in part from David Olusoga by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
