Nearly fifty years after the Portuguese Colonial War, Africans who were conscripted by the Portuguese and disabled in battle still struggle to claim veterans’ benefits. History researcher Carlos Martins has interviewed former soldiers to understand this painful legacy.

Catalonia’s merchants and towns profited hugely from the transatlantic slave trade after it was banned in the nineteenth century, as history researcher Adrià Enríquez Àlvaro documents. The good news is the recent movements to critique and reverse official amnesia, regarding public history and monuments.

For history researcher Friedrich Ammermann, a brief glimpse of colonial journalistic condescension opens broader questions about the control and ‘translation’ of information between the colonisers and the colonised – some of which might be recoverable in the archives.

In this editorial and introduction to the 2022 Black History Month blog series, history researcher Daphné Budasz explains why it is important to make Black lives and scholarship more visible at the EUI.

In the momentum of the Black Lives Matter protests, cities around the world have been challenged to remove commemorative statues recalling their colonial or slaveholding pasts. EUI history researcher Daphné Budasz examines these controversies through a reflection on commemoration, national identity and the social role of history.