We tend to think of history as a straightforward record of what happened, but historian and bestselling author William Dalrymple says that’s wishful thinking.

“You do get some malevolent attempts to rewrite history,” says Dalrymple, the acclaimed author of 10 books and co-host of the Empire podcast.

“[US President Donald] Trump is a particularly good example of someone who has manipulated the historical record in order, bizarrely, to try and see slavery in a more positive light, which seems to me what you really cannot see in a positive light, whatever angle you’re coming from,” he says.

Speaking ahead of his Australian tour this week, Dalrymple says this political manipulation – Trump has called out “unpatriotic historians teaching people to be ashamed of their history” – is the greatest current danger to scholarship.

“Politicians of the right at the moment are complaining about a liberal conspiracy to ‘do down’ the glories of empire. Often that comes with a great deal of political baggage,” he says.

“What they’re actually saying is ‘we don’t want to give land back’, or ‘we don’t want to restore objects which were looted’, or ‘we want to keep all the stuff we got when we massacred everybody and took over their lands’.”

Dalrymple’s latest book, The Golden Road, tells of India’s contribution to the world, a chapter of history untold in part because of colonisation.

“Those sorts of attitudes, that everything that’s important comes from the West, and that there’s exotica out there from the east, but nothing of any real substance. That attitude, bizarrely, despite everything, despite 70 years of decolonisation ... still lingers in our education systems.”

History is like having a road map, Dalrymple says, and audiences are keen to learn. His podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, recently featured an 11-part series on Gaza, which he says generated about 100,000 downloads a day. The idea was to do a deep dive on the subject, to provide the context that “you do not get taught at school, something which is off the grid of the normal curriculum”.

“Obviously [Gaza] has been the headlines in our newspapers for every single day for the last two years and has been rumbling around newsrooms for 70 years,” he says. “And yet, we are taught nothing of its ... deep and rich and very long and complex [history].

“We decided to go in as neutrally as we could, talking to people neither from the Israeli side nor the Palestinian side, but to professors of history at Oxford and Cambridge, people we knew and could trust ... that are not firmly attached to either of the two sides, and to try and give 12 hours of reliable, factual, neutral history.”

While it’s difficult to remain entirely neutral, Dalrymple says there are steps you can take: fact-checking and using primary sources are critical.

Dalrymple plans to do a podcast on Australia before long. “The history of Australia, like the history of the Palestinians, is something we need to understand, if we’re to understand what’s going on today,” he says.

Hear William Dalrymple in conversation on the Good Weekend Talks podcast.

William Dalrymple is in Sydney on November 3; Perth on November 7; Newcastle on November 9; Melbourne on November 10; Brisbane on November 12; and Adelaide on November 13.

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