India, April 18 -- 1Why do you think conversations about colonial history feel especially urgent right now? In many ways, I think of the past as a setting, as a prologue. The past sets the stage for the beginning of our story. But it doesn't necessarily set the stage for the end of it. And so when we think about the urgency of the colonial experience in present-day circumstances, we need to focus on the ideas and practices as well as the legal systems that were bequeathed to formerly colonised populations. Even though it's been 50, in some cases over 75 years, many of those practices and legal systems remain in place. Much of my work looks at states of exception and emergency regulations, and the ways in which authoritarianism is really part of the colonial legacy. We see it play out over and over. We certainly see it here in India. We're seeing it right now in Palestine. And we can see it even in the United States today. 2Do you feel historians today are being asked to do something different than in earlier decades? Perhaps to intervene more directly in public discourse? That's a terrific question. The short answer is yes. Historians by nature are not what I like to call presentists. They'll tell you long, wonderful, important stories about the past, but they hesitate to speak about the present. If historians don't step up, people who frankly have no knowledge of history are going to do that. They'll talk about it in the media, on television, social media. So, I feel it's incumbent upon historians to help explain, in simple terms and understandable language, the ways the past does and does not influence how we think about the present. Honestly, I sometimes wonder why historians who know so much don't want to dip their toes into present-day issues. I have a different approach to that - not necessarily better or worse - but it comes from a sense of responsibility to help smart people in the public today understand how we got to where we are. 3When your books contributed to legal accountability and reparations, did it change how you thought about the power of historical writing? It didn't so much change my thinking as affirm why historians must be extraordinarily careful. I made significant claims in [Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya] against powerful institutions, and there were strong efforts to discredit my work; to say it was fabricated, unreliable even. Eventually, the work went under legal scrutiny, where evidence must stand objectively. It's like my revisionist history was put on trial. The only thing I was sure of was that my research was careful. I had spent 10 years on it. That experience reaffirmed the importance of rigorous research. It's an extremely time-consuming process, but that is our craft as historians....