Su Lin Lewis: Read all about it (but not for long)

The British Newspaper Library in Colindale receives 30,000 visitors every year. Many are rediscovering their family trees; others are researching everything from the 18th-century origins of the suffragettes to the public reception of Never Mind the Bollocks in 1977. The library is one of the largest repositories of newspapers in the world, making it, like the British Library, a genuine protector of not only British, but also world, history.

Within its catacombs lie stacks of long-forgotten newspapers from such places as Penang. For two centuries, this tropical port-city in colonial Malaya was one of the most cosmopolitan places in the British Empire. Even after being eclipsed economically by its sister city, Singapore, the lush island was still a favoured destination for immigrants , political exiles, religious reformers and European travellers. Throughout the colonial era, Pengang's polyglot migrant world included Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Jews and Armenians.

Amid the colonial injustices of the colour bar, a prominent Chinese family started The Straits Echo to give voice to the English-educated, multi-ethnic inhabitants of Penang. Sifting randomly through yellow broadsheets from the turn of the century to the Second World War, one is confronted with the minutiae of everyday events: shipping timetables, news of foreign wars and political editorials. Familiar clues indicate a society caught up in a shrinking world: advertisements for Kloster beer, Cadbury's, Charlie Chaplin movies, Chinese and Tamil talkies and radio shows from Paris, Rome, and Tokyo.

In its letters pages, readers of many backgrounds wrestled with becoming "modern" and retaining a sense of cultural tradition. They drew on contemporary ideals of internationalism and tolerance even amid the shadowy stirrings of Hitler's Germany and Hirohito's Japan. They considered themselves citizens of the Empire, but also recognized the rich culture and entangled roots of their histories, valuing what each community could bring to a shared set of values.

Sources such as these faded old newspapers, memoirs, maps and images, challenge dominant, nationalistic readings of history, allowing us to learn from the past to cope better with the challenges of multiculturalism, globalisation and defining Britishness. They allow scholars and readers to forge historical connections between Britain and the wider world.

But The Straits Echo is in danger of being locked away, along with thousands of other newspapers at the British Newspaper Library. Although a plan to digitalise much of the newspaper collection exists, the Treasury has recently asked the British Library to propose budget cuts of up to 7 per cent. This would mean an end to public exhibitions and school programmes, as well as a 15 per cent reduction of its permanent collection. Admission fees would need to be charged for the first time and opening hours reduced. A document detailing the British Library's response to the Treasury's Comprehensive Spending Review explicitly warns that should the proposed cuts occur, this would entail "the closure of the Newspaper Reading Rooms at Colindale" and a "focus purely on collection and storage, abandoning the library's strategy to open up access".

Such an outcome would be inexcusable. Gordon Brown has long advocated the study of British history in fostering a sense of national identity. The extraordinary value of the British Library and its newspaper archive is that they give us a daily glimpse of the public consciousness of an age, reminding us of forgotten ways of seeing the world that we would do well to remember today.

They remind us that Britishness is not a static, unchanging ideal, which can be revived by memorising school history textbooks. Rather, Britishness is a historically contingent set of values, which has inspired millions and fuelled creative visions for the future. Throughout the centuries, the idea of Britain as a beacon of free speech, basic liberties and social justice was meaningful to many. In the days of the British Empire, these values held resonance for black and Asian activists, politicians and writers who strove for change and argued for liberation on their basis. Caribbean abolitionists pointed to the horror of "slavery under the British flag", Indian politicians used the language of representative government to argue for independence, and activists in South Africa appealed to social justice to put an end to apartheid. These were values over which wars were fought, not only by white Anglo-Saxons but Indian Muslims, Black Canadians and Chinese-Malayans, among many others.

British history must be seen to occur within a local context of multiculturalism and immigration, as well as a world history attuned to the struggles and ideals that dovetail with British values to make them both universal and inclusive. We must be kept aware of the tensions between the particular and the universal that form the basis of a cosmopolitan public sphere. Multiculturalism has earned a bad name because it boxes communities into separate categories. Only by increasing our knowledge about our own entangled histories can we graduate to a more dynamic cosmopolitanism. We can do this by protecting cosmopolitan public spaces such as libraries, in which history and culture continue to be revived.

The writer is researching a PhD in History at Cambridge