Topography of Remembrance reframes the Second World War as a truly global conflict,  one whose roots lie not in 1939, but in the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and deeper still in centuries of colonial expansion, racial hierarchy and imperial rivalry. The war commonly remembered through European stories of the Holocaust, liberation and reconstruction was a catastrophe that touched every continent and reshaped the entire world.

At the heart of the exhibition and book are ten individual narratives. A Kenyan rifleman in Burma, a Filipina guerrilla, an Indian nurse in Italy, a West African infantryman in France, an African American GI in Europe, a Jewish resistance fighter in North Africa – their stories bring the war’s global scale to life, illustrated with maps, photographs and propaganda material of the time.