Then sociologist Orlando Patterson describes slavery as "social death". It means being ripped from your family, your friends, your community, and taken to a place where your sole function is to serve someone else. It means ceasing to be a person at all: a kind of living death. This is the fate that British, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Dutch merchants inflicted on millions of Africans.

The Black Lives Matter movement has forced many Western countries to reassess their history. For example, yesterday the National Trust released a report identifying 93 historic buildings in Britain that were funded with wealth taken from its colonies.

The report has sparked a debate over whether we can still appreciate historic monuments built on human suffering.

Some, like journalist Alessio Colonnelli, argue that we should "contextualise" these buildings - provide information about their human cost - because it is necessary to teach people about their colonial past.

They argue that people living in European countries that once ruled over large empires are too positive about their own history. According to polls, one-third of Britons think that former colonies are better off thanks to the empire.

Others, however, insist that we cannot dwell too much on the origins of buildings because many of the world's greatest monuments were built through human misery. The most popular tourist attraction in Europe, the Palace of Versailles, was constructed at huge expense by a king whose people were starving. And hundreds of thousands of forced labourers are thought to have died during the construction of the Great Wall of ChinaActually a number of different walls built over several millennia by different Chinese dynasties. Most of the current wall was built by the Ming dynasty between 1373 and 1644. Contrary to popular belief, the Wall cannot be seen from space..

Supporters of contextualisation counter that the Great Wall is a different case because ancient Chinese slavery does not affect people's lives today. But descendants of European slaves still suffer from the legacy of slavery - in the form of racism. African American activist Randall Robinson has led calls in the US for reparations to be paid to the descendants of slaves.

Their opponents assert that the same logic can be applied to the ColosseumA vast stadium built by the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus. It could seat between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators. It was used to hold gladiatorial contests and even mock sea battles., which was built using wealth that the Romans stole from the Second TempleThe second of two temples built by the Jews in ancient times on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The first was destroyed by Babylonian invaders in 586 BC. The Second Temple, was constructed on the same site in 538BC, and demolished by the Romans in 70 AD., a Jewish holy site. Although Jews today still suffer racist discrimination, no calls have been made to contextualise this building.

But, it is argued, ancient Rome no longer exists to compensate them, whereas European countries still holding colonial wealth have a duty to acknowledge its origins.

Some propose that acknowledging the colonial atrocities in our past allows us to make amends for them. Indian politician and writer Shashi Tharoor has called on Britain to make a public apology for the 1919n Amritsar MassacreIn 1919, British soldiers under General R. H. Dyer fired into a crowd of Indian civilians in the northern Indian city of Amritsar. The massacre fuelled the Indian independence movement, and less than three decades later, India became an independent state., in which British soldiers killed 600 Indian civilians.

Others suggest that we should focus more on modern slavery. Many people will watch the 2022 World Cup unaware that thousands of Indians and Nepalis, working in slave-like conditions, have died constructing the Khalifa Stadium in Qatar, where it will be held.

Yes, of course, say some. They argue that recognising the colonial links in our past does not mean disavowing it: no-one is proposing to tear these buildings down. The aim is rather to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of their creation, putting them in their full context. Historian Corinne Fowler suggests that by contextualising the origins of great historical monuments, we are in fact adding to their history.

Not at all, say others. They insist that colonialism is in the past, and that it would be more helpful, as modern citizens of former imperial countries, to examine the progress we have made in our own societies. Some are concerned that we are focusing too much on the negative aspects of our own history at the expense of the positive contributions that European former colonial powers have made.