Non Fiction
Issue #1
Don't Mention The Empire
2006 began with two highly-publicised, vastly differing accounts of what it means to be British. The first was ‘The Future of Britishness’, Gordon Brown’s speech to the Fabian society on 14 January. The second was Sam West’s production of Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain, which has not seen a full-scale revival in Britain since its premiere in October 1980. Brown’s version of British history is benign: ‘there is,’ he says,
a golden thread which runs through British history [...] of the individual standing firm against tyranny and then – an even more generous, expansive view of liberty – the idea of government accountable to the people, evolving into the exciting idea of empowering citizens to control their own lives.
Brenton’s version of British history, on the other hand, is a litany of horrors which puts British people in the unfamiliar role of the colonised, while the language of the colonisers is recognisably ‘British’. The play begins in the midst of Julius Caesar’s second raid on Britain in 54 BC. Caesar remarks dryly that ‘The politics of the Roman dinner table are with us, even on the filthy marshes of the edge of the world,’ and the soldiers call the British Celts ‘wogs’.
While Brown’s British history is a smooth narrative that reveals ‘the shared values that bind us together,’ Brenton’s play presents a fragmented tableau about the different perspectives of conqueror and conquered. In the first act, a British village is massacred. For the conquering Romans, the day is a minor strategic disaster (the villagers were allied to their allies). For the British villagers, it is the end of everything.
An understanding of empire is a prerequisite for an understanding of what it is to be British. According to Sam West, The Romans In Britain is about ‘how we convinced ourselves that the Roman invasion was a good thing and even acquired a talent for it ourselves.’ Gordon Brown mentions the British Empire three times in his speech, all within the first three paragraphs, and all in reference to either the ‘end of empire’ or the ‘post-imperial world’. After that, he only alludes to imperialism with coy remarks like his description of Britain’s ‘uniquely rich, open and outward looking culture.’ This is an audacious euphemism: describing imperial Britain as ‘outward looking’ is like saying that Bonnie and Clyde took a keen interest in the banking profession.
That may seem glib, but the rapaciousness of the British Empire was formidable. During a drought in 1876, the Indian viceroy, Lord Lytton, forced farmers to export their already depleted crops to Britain. The resulting famine killed between 12 and 29 million people. In spite of this, parliament passed the bluntly titled ‘Anti-Charitable Contributions Act’ in 1877, banning ‘at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.’ As Seumas Milne points out in the Guardian, there have been no comparable famines in India since independence. Atrocities like this one, or the quashing of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s (during which British soldiers were given five shillings for every African they killed) are not aberrations – they are part of the imperial framework. George Orwell understood this, and explained the inevitable avarice of empire in The Road to Wigan Pier:
Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.
In a 1936 review of a book that described the torture of a villager in a Dutch colony, Orwell foreshadowed the brutal suppression of Mau Mau:
The dreadful thing about the kind of brutalities here described, is that they are quite unavoidable. When a subject population rises in revolt you have got to suppress it, and you can only do so by methods which make nonsense of any claim for the superiority of western civilisation.’
Orwell recognised that it was unproductive to simply condemn the British Empire: generally speaking it was less despotic than the Spanish, French, or Belgian versions – though the negative achievement of being ‘not as bad as Belgium in the Congo’ does not seem like something to be extravagantly proud of. But this kind of comparison assumes that the idea of an empire is basically acceptable, and as Sam West says, it may not be. The British Empire’s detractors and apologists could continue indefinitely to select congenial examples and present them as definitive evidence of its basic munificence or malignance, but we need to address a broader and simpler question of when, if ever, it is morally acceptable to invade, and – either through coercion or direct rule – control another country. Contrary to the claims of all empires, it does not require a more ‘advanced’ civilisation to conquer somebody. Groups conquer other groups because they are better armed and their troops are better organised. On the other hand, when a country has been colonised its residents are bound to develop more slowly than their conquerors, so the proof of being an ‘advanced civilisation’ can be established after the fact. This is not peculiar to the British Empire – it is the phenomenon on which the distinction between the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world is based. George Monbiot argues this point in The Age of Consent:
The countries which as a result of various historical accidents were among the first to establish the international networks on which the current trading system was built, fashioned them to ensure that wealth flowed from their weaker trading partners into their own economies [...] this pattern has persisted, surviving both the transition from informal coercion to formal colonialism, and from colonialism back to informal coercion (a state of affairs generally described as independence).
It is useful to remember this whenever people ask why so much of the world has failed to develop. Since Britain has, at various points, exerted control over so much of the world, it is also worthwhile to consider this flow of wealth and power when one is thinking about Britishness. As Orwell observed in 1939, ‘what we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa.’
It is odd to find so little about empire in Brown’s ‘Future of Britishness’ speech, which urges that ‘we should not recoil from our national history – rather we should make it more central to our education,’ but Brown has not always been so reticent. A year (almost to the day) before he delivered this address to the Fabian society, during a dawn visit to a cemetery in Tanzania the Chancellor told the Daily Mail that ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.’ This announcement must have mystified his colleagues in Westminster. Which government, they might have asked, had been ‘apologising’ for the British Empire? Blair’s government hadn’t apologised to anyone, and neither had Major’s or Thatcher’s.
Now, according to the Chancellor, if any of these people had been planning to start apologising for the British Empire, they had missed their chance – he was closing the door on Britain’s period of national contrition before it had even begun.
Perhaps this explains why he touches on empire so briefly in his ‘Future of Britishness’ speech: with ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history’ being over, he no longer has anything to say on the subject.
And yet he was making a speech about the meaning of Britishness, which is deeply bound up with empire. Historian Lawrence James clarifies this idea in his Rise and Fall of the British Empire:
The Union of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and the cohesion it imposed was vital during [the] crucial period of imperial growth. Indeed, Scotland’s entry into the Union in 1707 was in large part determined by a widespread urge to share in the overseas commercial advantages hitherto enjoyed by England alone.
Since it was the economic incentive of empire that helped to forge Britain, it seems futile to try to try to define ‘what it means to be British in the modern world’ (to use Brown’s phrase) without taking time to study the British Empire.
This brings me to the question that this essay seeks to address: ‘can history help us define British identity today, or is it part of the problem?’ My answer is yes on both counts, and I would go so far as to say that it is history itself that constitutes the problem. We live and die in a world built by our ancestors, and all historical narratives are exercises in creative omission. It is only in the debate between competing histories that the gaps are filled.
There are heartening indications that the debate over the British Empire is coming to life. On 22 February, 2005, the Evening Standard reported that the government was considering a proposal from the Commons public administration committee to replace the ‘Order of the British Empire’ with an ‘Order of British Excellence’, because, as the government acknowledged, the term ‘Empire’ ‘feels anachronistic to some people.’ After only one day’s deliberation, the government scrapped the plans. A Cabinet Office report explained that "The government does not believe that the case has been made for change to the Order of the British Empire. It is regarded with affection and respect by very many people, not only in the United Kingdom.’
However, the issue has been left open: the report adds that ‘the government is conscious that for some the title of the Order of the British Empire feels anachronistic in a different sense to other historic titles [...] [It] will consider the matter further [...]’ Even by politicians’ standards, this is soft-pedaling. What do they mean by ‘anachronistic in a different sense’? More to the point, who are they afraid of offending by going ahead and saying that many British people today experienced (or have parents who experienced) the British Empire as a foreign occupation that they were glad to be rid of? Nobody who supports the re-christening of the OBEs would mind if they stopped beating around the bush about this, and nobody who wants to hold onto this last, titular shred of the empire can deny that Britain occupied many countries against their will. And yet, by treating ‘Empire’ as a free-floating word with vaguely-implied connotations that may offend some people, the government ensures that most British people are denied a thorough understanding of their history, which (as Gordon Brown would agree) is a necessary precondition for an understanding of their identity. Not that this hazy understanding of empire is anything new. As the sociologist Harry Goulbourne writes in his study of British race relations, in imperial Britain ‘the elites had knowledge of some aspects of specific areas in the colonial world, but the British people within these islands, in rather sharp contrast to the colonised, remained comfortably ignorant.’ In 1954, John Atkins observed that:
The British ruled India and ninety-nine per cent of them were abysmally ignorant of it [...] there was really no public consciousness of India, only of the Empire, and ‘Empire’ was one of those sacred words like ‘mother’ and ‘king’ and ‘navy’. In the last resort no one wanted the Empire to disintegrate although some, particularly Left-wing intellectuals, were rather shamefaced about it.
This was the view from the British Isles, the heart of empire. Those living throughout the rest of the empire had a more concrete understanding of what ‘empire’ meant. Now that so many of Britain’s far-flung ‘subjects’ are British citizens living on the island itself, this country is privileged to be able to look at the British Empire simultaneously from both sides of the fence – the same way that the audience at The Romans in Britain is able to view the Roman Empire.
Consider, for example, the poet Benjamin Zephaniah, who rejected an OBE in 2003, saying ‘I get angry when I hear that word empire - it reminds me of slavery.’
Interestingly, Gordon Brown thinks that hearing about Britain’s empire should do the opposite. In his speech to the Fabian Society, he said ‘it was in the name of liberty that in the 1800s Britain led the world in abolishing the slave trade – something we celebrate in 2007.’ 1807, the year that Brown is referring to, is a date to be proud of, but a strange date to take unqualified pride in, since you can’t abolish something unless you have been doing it up to that point. And yet, 1807 is a date cited by the empire’s stoutest defenders, such as historian Andrew Roberts, as evidence of its benevolence. Roberts echoes Brown, boasting in the Express that ‘It was the British Empire that abolished slavery in 1807.’
Well, sort of. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, but slavery in the West Indian colonies persisted into the 1830s. Also, a less flattering way of phrasing Roberts’ claim would be ‘from 1750 to 1807, Britain was the foremost slave-trading nation in the world.’ In fact, by 1792, Liverpool alone handled 42% of all the slave trading in Europe. Unlike America, whose entire history has been dogged by racial conflict, Britain succeeded in externalising its ‘race problem’. Though there were some black slaves living on the British Isles, their financial presence was much greater than their physical one. Bristol and Liverpool made fortunes on the slave trade, but most of the Africans who were kidnapped never came near it, going straight from Africa to America and the West Indies. While the British Empire reminds Benjamin Zephaniah and other West Indians of slavery, the indigenous inhabitants of the British isles are as insulated from knowledge of the slave trade as their ancestors were.
This may be about to change. Last November, Ofsted’s chief inspector of schools, David Bell, criticised school history departments for, in his words, ‘insufficiently addressing the issues of Britain's diversity, its position in the world, and how this is explained by its past, not least the legacy of empire and decolonialism.’ This single sentence offers a more cogent assessment of the contemporary meaning of Britishness than anything in Gordon Brown’s ‘Future of Britishness’ speech. Prince Charles also objects to the absence of empire from the history curriculum, as do Andrew Roberts (writing in the Express), Tristram Hunt, and Jonathan Steele (both writing in The Guardian). This must be one of the only occasions that these four have ever agreed with each other. Of course, they have rather different ideas about what a history of the British Empire would look like. According to Roberts, ‘for the vast majority of its half millennium-long history, the British Empire was an exemplary force for good.’ Steele, on the other hand, argues that while ‘tolerance of others is a value that today's Britain boasts, [...] it is not the dominant feature of recent centuries.’ These competing versions of history need to contend with each other in the open, as they certainly will do if the National curriculum puts a greater emphasis on the history of the British Empire. Right now, with Britain’s imperial history taught rarely and discussed less, any individual article on the subject acquires an unhealthy significance. Roberts presents one view in the Express, Steele presents a contradictory view in the Guardian – the number of people who have read both articles must be very small.
History is most accurate, and most exciting, when it is an open forum rather than a grand narrative. It is especially important that the discussion over Britain’s history is not merely a debate between the descendents of colonisers. Many British citizens come from former colonies, and if history can be defined, as Andrew Roberts defines it, as ‘the collective memory of a people,’ they possess a different ‘history’ from that which has been taught in British schools. When history is only told by the colonisers, atrocities soften into ‘diplomatic embarrassments’ (as they do for the Roman army in The Romans in Britain) and entire societies dissolve into caricatures.
According to Gordon Brown, Britishness is best defined by three values: ‘liberty for all, responsibility by all, and fairness to all.’ This sets a high standard for any nation, and a worthy goal to aspire to (though if you start to believe that these values are uniquely British, you have already failed to uphold them). Rather than merely extolling them, and emphasising only those bits of British history that exhibit them, we should apply these three virtues to an unflinching examination of all of Britain’s history. If this country fully acknowledges the implications of its history, that will be something to be proud of.