‘As historians based at LARCA (UMR 8225, Université de Paris – CNRS), we stand with our colleagues in the UK who are calling on the UK Home Office to urgently review its current ‘Life in the UK Test’ and the attendant official handbook. As explored in this essay by Frank Trentmann, requiring would-be citizens of the UK to learn such a distorted and offensive version of the British past is unacceptable. We share his suspicions about the motivation, for example, to misconstrue key events in British history relating to the Second World War and British imperial and decolonial violence. Given the richness of historical research done, and being done, on these topics to reveal their complexity (not just for academics but for a wider public audience), it’s wholly unacceptable that the UK government has endorsed such a simplistic and dangerously misleading historical narrative in an official document.’

Members of the history research group, LARCA (UMR 8225, Université de Paris – CNRS)