Snapshots of Empire

The problem with making the history of the British empire a weapon in a divisive culture war is the omission of empathy that such an act entails.

Conservatives feel that radical activists are determined to see Empire as an evil project, regardless of the sensitivities of Britons brought up to believe in their ancestors’  good intentions. Tearing down statues, reinterpreting National Trust properties, browbeating museum visitors with new and critical content, and lecturing White Britons on their inherited racism are all seen as acts which lack any sympathy or understanding for the majority of Britons. Conservatives are especially triggered when their national heroes like Winston Churchill are challenged as racists, and when their iconography of an innocent and quintessentially English countryside, graced by stately mansions and their landscaped gardens, is interpreted as the product of slave ownership and racial exploitation (even though they may acknowledge with a shrug of the shoulders that the exploitation of British workers is engrained in it). 

White friends of mine have argued that, if only the assaults on their long held beliefs and identities were not so vehement, if only those drawing attention to the violent realities of Empire were more reasonable in attempting to persuade them – if only they showed more empathy – then they would be more inclined to listen.

The fact that much of the government’s discussion of racial disparities is conditioned by the defence that there’s no structural racism to see here, helps to persuade many of my White friends that they are being unfairly maligned for the supposed sins of their generally well-intentioned ancestors.

Those reacting against a supposed ‘woke’ assault on history are enraged that empathy seems to be directed solely towards Empire’s victims, with no appreciation of the good intentions of British colonisers. One of Nigel Biggar’s constant refrains, demonstrated in his critique of Dan Hicks’ Brutish Museum is that Hicks shows no empathy for the British who invaded Benin, burned its capital and stole its treasures. Hicks seems to empathise only with the expedition’s victims, and neither with the British invaders themselves nor the enslaved victims of Benin’s own rulers. Biggar accuses Hicks of “an ethical schizophrenia—on the one hand morally neutral and indulgent toward non-Western, African culture, on the other hand morally absolutist and unforgiving toward Western, British culture”. Biggar goes on to detail the accusations made by expedition members that there was widespread and revolting evidence of the kingdom’s practice of human sacrifice in Benin.

A project that I am involved with providing a new interpretation board for the statue of the Victorian army general Redvers Buller in Exeter tries to pay attention to this conservative feeling of a lack of empathy among Empire’s new critics – a feeling that has been mobilised so effectively by the government’s culture warriors. We are trying to proceed through dialogue and engagement with all sides in what has become a highly charged debate over the fate of the statue. 

However, what has become clear in the course of this and other projects of late is that it is also incumbent on all Britons today to empathise with those now seeking to challenge our dominant understanding of the national past and especially of the Empire’s role in it. 

There were many people of colour around the world who, once rendered British subjects by conquest, adapted and even prospered from alliances and negotiations with their new rulers. Indian merchant families especially collaborated with East India Company and other investors and sought to share in the education offered by the British even as they were denied a share in central governance. As one would expect during any radical reconfiguration of power relations, certain groups enhanced their power over traditional rivals by allying with British rulers and accepting what limited degrees of autonomy they could negotiate with them in return. During the Scramble for Africa especially, some African and Pacific leaders saw British rule as the lesser of two evils when confronted with a sudden French, Belgian or German determination to catch up and match Britain’s exploitation of colonies. For Hendrick Witbooi of the Nama, for instance, a British protectorate would have been a far better fate than German colonisation. 

But we delude ourselves quite spectacularly if we think that a fond appreciation of British colonisation was the norm among subjugated peoples. Millions of people of colour were killed trying to resist the British takeover of their lands. In Ruling the World we examined three years of the nineteenth century closely and estimated that in the wars of conquest fought in and around those years alone (including two Opium Wars in China, two invasions of Afghanistan, the Indian Uprising, and a series of wars to confederate southern Africa) over a million died, although it is difficult to be precise because the deaths of people of colour were not recorded in the same way that White people’s deaths were. Millions more died in famines that the British colonial governments could and likely would have done far more to prevent had the victims been White rather than Black and Indian British subjects (although their semi-racialised brand of Whiteness did not protect Catholic Irish subjects from mass starvation during the Great Famine). Sixty five so-called “small wars” were fought by late Victorian armies either to annex new territory or to punish African, Asian and Indigenous societies which resisted British demands. This is not to mention the disastrous long term effects of British attempts to govern Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan and other zones in Britain’s rather than local peoples’ interests, nor the attempts to cling to influence after World War II in Egypt, Aden, Malaya and Kenya.

Well after the abolition of slavery, colonial laws ensured that people of colour’s labour was supplied to White employers freely, or as cheaply as possible, and colonial laws discriminated between coloniser and colonised whatever the British government itself claimed of their non-racialism. With formal empire on the wane, many more British subjects of colour migrated, invited, to Britain to become citizens, and found themselves rejected as equals. The ideologies of racial difference that had sustained colonial rule out there in the empire for so long were now applied more systematically against people of colour in Britain as Enoch Powell and others feared national disintegration from their presence and ever more racially restrictive immigration laws were passed.

Is it too much to expect the majority of White Britons to empathise with Black Britons over these aspects of our national story? To the defence that things have changed, that there is a progressive move away from overt racism, and that Britain is less racist than other European countries despite its legacy of empire, I would urge the ‘anti-woke’ to examine two things.

First, how such progress has come about. From their victimisation in the 1919 race riots through the Bristol bus boycotts, the New Cross fire, the Stephen Lawrence campaign and other instances, it has been the mobilisation primarily of Black Britons against racism which has spurred official enquiry and legal reform.  This progress too is a result of the empire. Britain’s vibrant communities of Black activists, themselves a product of late- and post-imperial migration, and their white allies have been responsible for what progress there has been. It is the European countries that are overwhelmingly White which still tend to espouse the racial ideas that were disseminated within and beyond the British Empire most vigorously. Secondly, there is still a long way to go to address the structural inequalities that racial discrimination over centuries, and across the world, has seeded in the UK itself. One need only look at the Office for National Statistics figures on ethnic and racial disparity or the painful and ongoing Windrush scandal to understand this.

Culture warrior scholars like Nigel Biggar could certainly do with showing a little more empathy. He may criticise Hicks for having little sympathy for Victorian Englishmen, but his own account of the Benin Expedition derives solely from the racist pretexts that these men provided for their assault. He makes no attempt to engage with historians who have examined the expedition from the perspective of its African victims. At the very least, some more engagement with historians might have allowed him to contextualise the horrors that the British expedition members reported. This does not entail excusing the evidence of human sacrifice (explained by experts on the region as the ritual punishment of criminals and those accused of witchcraft rather than arbitrary and mass killing), but it might entail an appreciation that perhaps the sacking and looting of a city and the killing of those who resisted might be seen as a fairly extreme response to what was essentially a trade dispute. 

Biggar’s other claim to justification for the expedition was the “massacre” of a “a diplomatic mission, whose nine White members, led by Acting Consul James Phillips, had been deliberately unarmed, “apart from revolvers”. In fact Phillips had written to the Foreign Office before his departure for Benin that he intended “to depose and remove the King of Benin and to establish a native council in his place”. It was not just nine “unarmed” (if we can describe revolvers as not arms) white men on the mission. Phillips reported that he had “a sufficient armed Force, consisting of 250 troops, two seven pounder guns, 1 Maxim, and 1 rocket apparatus of the N.C.PE, and a detachment of Lagos Hausas 150 strong.” The postscript was appended: “I would add that I have reason to hope that sufficient ivory may be found in the King’s house to pay the expenses in removing the king from his stool” (Evo Ekpo, The Dialects of Definitions: “Massacre” and “sack” in the history of the Punitive Expedition, African Arts, 30, 3, Summer 1997, 34-5; James D. Graham, The Slave Trade, Depopulation and Human Sacrifice in Benin History: The general approach, Cahiers d’Études Africaines , 5, 18, 1965, 317-334).

If it is incumbent on activists to attend to the sensitivities of those who cherish imperial era statues and legitimations, then perhaps it is even more incumbent on those of us brought up to cherish these things to listen to, and empathise with, those whose heritage includes mass killing, dispossession, oppression, and exploitation by White Britons engaged in imperial projects. Can we not empathise enough with Black Britons today to see how commemorating men who enslaved, killed, conquered and exploited their ancestors might not be conducive to a “shared national story”, as History Reclaimed puts it?

Alan Lester

Background: On 9th January 2022, Robert Tombs, Emeritus Professor of French History at the University of Cambridge and myself debated the legacies of the British empire, all too briefly, on the GB TV News Channel’s The Debate programme. I followed up by contacting Prof Tombs, asking if he would like to engage in further debate. He invited me to submit an essay, to which he would respond, on his History Reclaimed website. I agreed and suggested that the exchange be about the relationship between the British Empire and Race, to which he assented. Below is that exchange with my initial essay, Prof Tombs’ response and my final rejoinder, which Prof Tombs kindly agreed to have as the ‘last word’ since he had had that privilege in the TV debate. At present I am awaiting publication of that rejoinder, only just sent to Prof Tombs, on the History Reclaimed website, but here is the exchange in full in the meantime:

The British Empire and Race

By Alan Lester

Historians’ approach to the past is inevitably inflected by the politics of our own time. However, the ‘culture’ war has been marked by purely politically motivated commentary on the British Empire. The Empire cannot be reduced to racism but nor should the extent of its racism be denied as part of a backlash against Black Lives Matter. The following broad conclusions are based on extensive archival research and consensus among specialists.[1]

Racial Violence
Empires have been the norm in history. Britain’s was possible only with indigenous collaboration. Resistance to it was fractured by ‘tribal’, religious, and other distinctions. Its violence was not directed only against people of colour.

Yet the British Empire’s maintenance of White people’s rule over people of colour on six continents was unique. Only the other modern European and American empires came close in scale and racial differentiation. Antecedent empires were generally founded on contiguous land annexation and with shallower gradations of phenotypical difference.

White colonists’ building of Caribbean and American plantation colonies with enslaved African people’s labour from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, was a key foundation of the Empire’s enduring association between ‘race’ and status. By 1807 Britons had transported 3 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. Within the next half century, they and their descendants had decimated Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians; subjected the Xhosa to eight wars of colonial expansion; exploited the Mughal collapse to conquer much of India; and fought three wars against Māori.[2]

When Germany and Belgium developed empires in the Scramble for Africa later in the 19th century, some indigenous leaders appealed for British ‘Protection’ to retain self-determination.[3] Elsewhere Britons continued to extend their interests aggressively. Just three years, 1838, 1857 and 1879, saw the first and second invasions of Afghanistan, the first and second Opium Wars, the suppression of the Indian Uprising and wars of conquest against Xhosa, Griqua, Pedi and Zulu.[4] In 1896, Colonel Callwell wrote a guide for British soldiers engaged in the empire’s ‘small wars’, against ‘savages … provided with poor weapons.’ There were over sixty such wars during the second half of the nineteenth century.[5]

It is impossible to calculate how many people of colour were killed in Britain’s imperial conquests since they were never systematically counted, but from the estimates we have of recorded conflicts, it is safe to say they number in the millions.

Discriminatory Rule and Consent
Despite a tradition of anti-colonial thought in Britain, people of colour were generally subordinated in status to White colonists. In most colonies even the poorest White women had access to Black people’s domestic labour, and corporal punishment of servants was common.[6] Across the Empire, racial discrimination, often finely graded according to ethnicity or skin shade, conditioned everyday life, including access to jobs, the law, health care, education, democracy, and the railways.[7]

British rule in India was distinct, with Indian elites acting as subordinate partners. The East India Company controlled the nobility and brought security to merchants. After the 1857 Uprising, a British-educated Indian middle class grew to administer the civil service. These groups prospered amidst increasing inequality.[8]

There is insufficient data to track the well-being of the mass of the Indian population under British rule, but the government spent little on agriculture, healthcare, or education while some Indian taxation revenue was transferred to Britain as East India Company shareholder dividends, railway investor subsidies, and ‘home charges’.[9] A conservative estimate is that 20 million Indians died in the major famines under British rule. Aside from the devastating Bengal Famine in 1943, major famines became rarer and government responses better in the 20th century, with none after independence.[10]

Across the Empire, rebellions were a regular occurrence.[11] In 1860 the Colonial Office advised on the distribution of imperial military resources. Perceiving the main threat at this time not so much from external powers as from subjects ruled without their consent, they used a formula based on each colony’s ratio of White colonists to ‘natives’.[12]

Abolishing Slavery and Expanding the Empire
Britain’s role in anti-slavery is erroneously conflated with anti-racism. When Britain followed Denmark in abolishing its slave trade in 1807 it also sent patrols to seize other nations’ slave ships: the result both of antislavery campaigners’ commitment and of an attempt to deny rival nations the benefits of the trade. The Royal Navy rescued 60,000 African captives, most of whom were either pressed into the British military or assigned to colonists as unpaid ‘apprentices’ for 10-20 years.[13]

Upon the British abolition of slavery in 1834, fifty years after northern US states had outlawed it and forty years after Saint-Domingue rebels had overthrown it, British slave owners were compensated for the loss of their ‘property’. Many reinvested in settler colonies, and in British infrastructure and institutions.[14] Labour shortages on plantations were met through the indenture and transport of 1.5 million British Indian subjects.[15]

Most African colonies were conquered after slavery was abolished, some with the justification of supressing indigenous slavery. Despite continuing British action against slavery around the world, the wars of confederation in southern Africa from 1878 to 1902 were influenced by Charles Dilke’s popular vision of a Greater Britain reflecting ‘the grandeur of our race.’[16] Dilke saw the ‘defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples’ as essential for the spread of civilization and applauded the fact that ‘the Anglo-Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth’.[17]

Scientific racism developed after abolition and Britain led the way in eugenics even if it did not apply these principles as extensively as in the USA and Germany.[18] The most popular notion in Britain was that that Black people lagged as children do to adults. Colonialism would eventually render them responsible enough for a share in their own governance. Missionaries and antislavery campaigners supported the Empire on these grounds.[19] However, the records of British colonists themselves are characterised by an everyday, condescending sense of racial superiority.[20]

When indigenous subjects assimilated to British culture and claimed the civilisational rights promised they were still treated as inferior. Lord Salisbury, Secretary of State for India, admitted that ‘If England was to remain supreme … she must tolerate the political role of Indian princes and of participation by Indians in the administration’, but that ‘if the number of well-educated Indians … should increase, the government would face the … necessity of closing that avenue to them’.[21] British-educated Indians and their counterparts in Africa turned to anticolonial nationalism to demand equality and policies of colonial development came too late to appease them.[22] Meanwhile, Canadian and Australian colonial governments removed indigenous and so-called ‘half-caste’ children from their families and placed them in White-run institutions, often characterised by abuse, to prevent future generations of distinct indigenous people.[23]

Transitioning from Empire
After WWII the British Empire was in retreat, but its geography has left an indelible imprint. Generations of Britons have been conditioned to think of Britain as a White country even if most of its subjects were people of colour located overseas. The fact that Britain was an empire rather than an island nation was widely disavowed until the empire ‘came home’.

From 1948, many more Black and Asian citizens exercising their right to live in the UK were met with verbal and physical abuse and discrimination, which confined them to poorer housing, schooling, and occupation.[24] Most Britons agreed with Enoch Powell that inter-communal conflict would result from further immigration.[25] Labour and Conservative governments have responded with increasingly restrictive and racially discriminatory immigration legislation, enabling the Windrush scandal.[26]

Antiracist campaigning has rendered it illegal to racially abuse and discriminate and a larger proportion of the White population now oppose racism. In the absence of any decisive rupture or reckoning with nostalgic views of Empire, however, many still hold the view that ‘those natives were never meant to come here and live next door’.[27] Official figures reveal disparities in income, criminal justice, housing, and employment that cannot be explained in the absence of institutional racism, and similar numbers of people believe racism exists in the country today (84%) as believe it existed 30 years ago (86%).[28] The British Empire secured prosperity for many people, but we should acknowledge that its legacy of racism is not a fiction of the Black Lives Matter movement.

[1] Thanks to Saul Dubow, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History, University of Cambridge, Catherine Hall, Professor Emerita of Modern British History at University College London, and Michael Taylor, historian and author, for very helpful comments on a first draft of this essay. Any lapses are my own.

[2] See for example, Trevor Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020;  Kate Fullagar, Michael A. McDonnell and Daniel K. Richter (eds), Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018; Lester, Imperial Networks; Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Simon and Schuster, 2017; Ann Curthoys and Jessie Mitchell, Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia, 1830-1890, Cambridge University Press, 2018; James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, Penguin, 2007.

[3] Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa, Abacus, 1992; Jane Samson, Imperial Benevolence: Making British Authority in the Pacific Islands, University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

[4] Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

[5] Stephen M. Miller (ed) Queen Victoria’s Wars: British Military Campaigns, 1857-1902, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

[6] Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627-1865, Manchester University Press, 2007; Fae Dussart, In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony, Bloomsbury, 2022.

[7] See for example Curthoys and Mitchell, Taking Liberty; Elizabeth Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India: White Violence and the Rule of Law, Cambridge University Press, 2011; Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36, Oxford University Press, 1989; Thomas Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; Jon Wilson, India Conquered.

[8] Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857-2010, 4^th Edition, Oxford University Press, 2020, and An Economic History of India 1707-1857, 2^nd Edition, Routledge, 2022.

[9] Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857-2010, 67, 94, 335.

[10] Tirthankar Roy, Were Indian Famines ‘Natural’ Or ‘Manmade’? LSE Economic History Working Papers No: 243/2016

[11][11] Richard Brown, Resistance and Rebellion in the British Empire 1600-1980, Clio Publishing, 2013

[12] Lester et al, Ruling the World.

[13] Richard Anderson and Henry B. Lovejoy, Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807-1896, Rochester University Press, 2020.

[14] Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Nicholas Draper, Katie Donington, and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, Cambridge University Press, 2014; Alan Lester and Nikita Vanderbyl, Feature: Legacies Of Slave

Ownership: ‘The Restructuring of the British Empire and the Colonization of Australia, 1832–8’, History Workshop Journal, Volume 90, Autumn 2020, 165–252.

[15] David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922, Cambridge University Press, 1995; Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor in the British Caribbean, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; Adam McKeown, ‘Global Migration 1846-1940’, Journal of World History, 19,2, 2004, 158.

[16] C. W. Dilke, Greater Britain A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7, J. B. Lippincott and Macmillan, 1869, preface.

[17] R. Jenkins, Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy, Bloomsbury, 1996, 28; Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, Princeton University Press, 2020.

[18] Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A Very Short introduction, 2^nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 2017.

[19] Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867, Verso, 2002.

[20] For one example among hundreds of studies, see Brett Shadle, The Souls of White Folk: White Settlers in Kenya, 1900s-1920s, Manchester University Press, 2015.

[21] P. Smith, ‘Cecil, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-, third marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903), prime minister, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2011, retrieved 28 Oct. 2019, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-32339

[22] Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, 2nd Edition, Oxford University Press, 1991; Saul Dubow, The African National Congress, Sutton, 2000; Roy, The Economic History of India, 213; Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl and Maryina Kopf, Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-Century Colonialism, Manchester University Press, 2014.

[23] Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, David Philips, and Shurlee Swain, Equal subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous People in British settler colonies, 1830s–1910, Manchester University Press, 2018.

[24] Eleanor Passmore and Andrew Thompson, ‘Multiculturalism, Decolonisation and Immigration

Policy in Britain and France after the Second World War’, in Andrew Thompson and Kent Fedorowich (eds), Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World, Manchester University Press, 2015, 247-64.

[25] The figures in opinion polls ranged from 67 to 82 per cent. Bill Schwarz, The White Man’s World: Memories of Empire vol. 1, Oxford University Press, 2011, 48.

[26] Ian Sanjkay Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire, Verso 2021.

[27] Quote from Patel, We’re Here, vii. Observation from personal experience of conversations among White people.

[28] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/; Jonathan Portes, ‘Race Report: Sewell Commission Couldn’t Find Something It Wasn’t Looking For’, 9 April 2021: https://bylinetimes.com/2021/04/09/race-report-sewell-commission-couldnt-find-something-it-wasnt-looking-for/; https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/26/nine-ten-bame-britons-think-racism-exists-same-lev

Reply:  The British Empire in Context By Robert Tombs

I never expected that I would find myself writing in defence of the British Empire, which is not a scholarly interest of mine, and I do not pretend to any expertise.  I will not try to contest Professor Lester in detail, however occasionally tempting.  For example, the ‘decimation’ of aboriginal peoples in Australia was probably due to smallpox carried by South Asian fishermen[1]; Britain was never an empire, nor was there free movement within the empire; it is misleading to suggest that slavery was abolished in the northern USA before it was abolished throughout the British empire; although slave owners received compensation, it was not paid by the slaves – unlike the unfortunate Russian serfs a generation later; it is tendentious to imply that famines in India were caused by imperial government, when that government’s Famine Codes pioneered modern responses to famine[2]; and so on.

I am more interested in the overall approach taken by many academics and commentators today, of whom Professor Lester is a notable example.  I agree with his balanced comment that “the ‘culture’ war has been marked by purely politically motivated commentary on the British Empire … Empires have been the norm in history. Britain’s was possible only with indigenous collaboration.”  Most of his own article, in contrast, is written as an indictment, avowedly politically informed.  Are sustained negativity and rigorous selectivity convincing?  Is this the only credible interpretation?

The Empire conferred certain benefits, including protection from foreign attack, access to international trade, modern administration, technology, capital investment and order.  It did so fairly cheaply: taxation was lower than in independent states.  There were gainers and losers, and whether its subject people regarded it positively or negatively depends on who, when and where.  The voices of freed slaves, women spared forced marriages, or people saved from ritual sacrifice are mainly lost, unlike those of the celebrated anti-colonial elite.  Independence gave huge advantages to the latter, who took power in former colonies, but this was not a liberation for all their peoples, many of whom were worse governed after independence.  The end of the empire over the 1940s, 50s and 60s was in many ways a liberation for Britain, whose economy, finances and security had been skewed by possession of an empire.  I don’t think any of this is contentious.  Why then should there now have appeared, at least in some quarters, an obsessive interest in the Empire?

I think Alan Lester’s piece helps us to understand.  He is a serious scholar.  Nevertheless, his focus – to the exclusion of almost everything else – is on race and violence.  What was unique about the British Empire, he suggests, was the extent of “White people’s rule over people of colour”, whereas most other empires had “shallower gradations of phenotypical difference.” The unusual phraseology is a significant clue.  He is approaching the history of the empire through the eyes of the 21^st century, or more precisely, through certain 21^st-century eyes – seemingly those of post-colonial nationalism and Critical Race Theory, whose political record and theoretical assertions are highly questionable.

In part this revives a very old historical debate.  Is our aim to understand the past as ‘a foreign country’ (an insight that ‘humanity gradually learned’), or to summarily annex it to our own times and subordinate it to our own beliefs?[3]  There is no easy answer.  It would be repugnant to attempt to judge Nazism or Communism by their own standards.  But it would be ludicrous to criticize the Ottoman Empire for, let us say, not being a democracy.

Can the British Empire be assessed dispassionately, in the way we might assess the Ottoman or Mughal empires?  I remember being struck by one very distinguished global historian referring to massive violence by the Mughals as ‘extreme solutions’ to achieve ‘internal pacification’.[4]  We would not use those terms of the British in Amritsar in 1919.

This is not simply a chronological question, by which one might say that dispassionate analysis is possible after a certain lapse of time.  It is also dependent on whether there are people alive who claim some stake: people who are, or who consider themselves to be, in some way victims of empire, or indeed its beneficiaries.  There is also ideology.  Many people judge ‘colonialism’ more evil than the alternatives, and this inevitably colours their work.  Even defensive wars are considered wars of aggression if they take place within an empire.

The recent desire among some academics – often very publicly manifested — to pass moral judgment on the British Empire is unusual.  Historians of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, or the Mughal Empire rarely if ever pronounce moral verdicts or support campaigns to pull down statues of Mehmed II or Aurangzeb, or place apologetic notices on the Coliseum.  That is not what modern historiography is about.  Historians normally seek to analyse how things worked, and how people thought.  Yet numerous academics tried to stop Professor Nigel Biggar’s research project on ‘Ideas of Empire’, and several other historians of empire are cancelled and even threatened if they undertake such analysis.

Professor Lester seems to condemn the British Empire and other European empires firstly because pale-skinned people ruled darker-skinned people – that gradation of phenotypes.  He gives a list of violent episodes and inequalities because they seem to back up his overall standpoint.  Do they?

Imagine trying to assess the British Empire — ‘a global mosaic of almost ungraspable complexity and staggering contrasts’[5] — in the way that other historical empires – ‘the norm in history’ in Lester’s words –are assessed.  What would one need to do?  To look at its economic policies and their outcomes; at its effectiveness in keeping the peace and in fostering health and education, its costs in terms of taxation or other forms of economic extraction, its cultural achievements, and the degree of support given by its peoples.  And one would need some standard of comparison: with contemporary empires, such as the French, Russian or Dutch; with settler states such as the USA or Brazil; with states that were not colonized (for example China, Thailand, or Ethiopia); with non-state societies (such as New Guinea[6]); with previous rulers; and with successor governments in former colonies.

But comparison seems lacking.  Indeed, some comparisons seem to be taboo, and those who make them risk being vilified and silenced.  Many academics appear to espouse the nationalist myths of postcolonial states, which in some notable cases are their own countries.  These myths highlight oppression and resistance, and privilege the voices of opponents of empire.  These were often the nationalist elites of those societies, whose rule, when it came, was sometimes more oppressive, more corrupt, and indeed more violent and racist, than that of the former colonial authorities.

One could list episodes of pre-colonial and post-colonial violence as Professor Lester lists cases of colonial violence.  I am not clear whether he and those who adopt similar positions think that violence committed by Zulus, Asante, Marathas, Arab slave traders and so on is morally neutral.  If so, is this not adopting the position he ascribes to the colonialists – that indigenous peoples are like children?  And are today’s oppressors not being let off the hook?

Comparison may be difficult, requiring a wide range of knowledge.  Yet without at least a broad comparative perspective, judgments are arbitrary, even meaningless.  Professor Lester characterizes the British Empire as violent.  Was it more violent than other empires, European and non-European?  More violent than the rulers it replaced, or than those who succeeded it?  What exactly is being claimed?

What is really going on in postcolonial studies?  Here again, Professor Lester indicates the crux of the matter.  Studying the empire is important because “its legacy of racism”, he asserts, makes us institutionally racist today.  This, surely, is what this is really about, and it is reflected in monographs rolling off University presses as well as in fashionable best-sellers and school textbooks.  It does not pretend to be dispassionate scholarship.  Is it any more than sophisticated propaganda?

For many commentators, “empire” has become not a historical phenomenon to be understood: an improvised and imperfect attempt to manage an unstable 19^th century world and control the collision of societies at different stages of development.  Rather, it is an abstract symbol: of ‘oppression’, of ‘whiteness’, of ‘institutional racism’.  No other perspective is to be entertained.  Hence Lester’s reductionist portrayal of the Empire as a single minded process of aggressive racial conquest.  We see a parallel attempt to make slavery central to empire: both by downplaying the significance of abolition, and by attempting to discredit it as merely an excuse for imperial expansion (ironically, the very argument used by 19^th century slave traders).  From this follows the widespread campaign to ‘decolonize’ almost everything.

But is it true that Britain today is institutionally racist as a consequence of empire?  Alan Lester cites as evidence hostile journalistic reactions to the Sewell Report.  But there is a large recent (2018) study, and a comparative one, which provides a meaningful assessment.[7]  It was carried out by the European Union covering all member states including Britain, and it is based on the experiences of members of ethnic minorities.  Perceptions of being racially harassed are lowest in Britain and Malta.  Violence between people of different ethnic groups is lowest in Britain and Portugal.  Friction with the police is among the lowest in the UK, and awareness of anti-discrimination laws is highest.  Discrimination in employment is lowest in the UK, and the percentage not in work, education or training is also lowest. Pay for men is highest, and for women second highest. The experience of being discriminated against by landlords is lowest, and ownership of accommodation highest.  Among the most racist countries, in contrast, are Ireland and Finland, where the experience of racial violence is roughly four times higher than in Britain.  Where does this leave Alan Lester’s grand narrative?  “The British Empire secured prosperity for many people, but we should acknowledge that its legacy of racism is not a fiction of the Black Lives Matter movement.”  The evidence suggests that only the first part of this statement is true.

[1]           Judy Campbell, Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia, 1780-1880 (Melbourne University Press, 2002)

[2]           Helen Toye and John O’Neill, eds, A World Without Famine? New Approaches to Aid and Development (London: Macmillan, 1998)

[3]           David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country: Revisited  (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

[4]           Sir Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) pp 91-2

[5]           Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918-1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2006) p 3

[6]           See C. R. Hallpike, ‘In defence of colonialism: the case of Papua New Guinea’ https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/in-defence-of-colonialism-the-case-of-papua-new-guinea/

[7]           Being Black in the EU/Second European Union Minorities and Discrimination Survey (2018) https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2018-being-black-in-the-eu_en.pdf

Rejoinder by Alan Lester

I want to begin by thanking Professor Tombs for providing this opportunity to respond to his comments. In return I have promised to be very brief. I will not, therefore, further substantiate the five relatively minor contextual points with which Professor Tombs takes issue, especially after his admirable admission of a lack of expertise. Rather, I will follow his lead and discuss the broad contours of our respective approaches, using a metaphorical shotgun rather than a rapier.

Most of Professor Tombs’ objections can be addressed quite simply. We agreed that my preliminary essay was to be on the relationship between the British Empire and race. Hence its title, hence my focus, ‘to the exclusion of almost everything else … on race and violence’, and hence my lack of attention to Russian serfs, Mughal ‘pacification’ or the record of any other empire. Perhaps naively, I had assumed that Professor Tombs would stick to the same topic. However, his response calls for a moral comparison of the British and other empires. Had I been offered such a topic I would have declined. Neither of us has the expertise to comment on other empires meaningfully; the data with which to compare subjects’ experiences of different empires is inconsistent, inaccessible to us and inadequate; there is no objective basis on which to compare imperial moralities, and there is no space to do so without absurd reductionism. To evaluate the British Empire against others is thus a political rather than an historical approach. It is rich that Professor Tombs characterises my research of the last thirty years as being politically driven. Over the last decade Professor Tombs’ historical reflections have included Briefings for Britain – an historical toolkit for pro-Brexit politicians – and articles in the mainstream press about how our memorial heritage should be preserved in the wake of Black Lives Matter. I leave it for the reader to judge which of us is ‘approaching the history of the empire through the eyes of the 21st century, or more precisely, through certain 21st-century eyes’.

I will conclude by returning to what can be said about the British Empire and race. Professor Tombs chooses not to contest my main points: that the British Empire was founded in violence against people of colour; that its colonies were governed through racial stratification so that gains and losses were apportioned primarily (although not exclusively) according to race; that British antislavery was not antiracism and did not preclude further violent conquest, and that Black citizens of empire faced racial discrimination when they settled in Britain. Rather, he concludes by mentioning a 2018 survey showing that other European countries were more racist. This finding does not surprise me. The White supremacist ideas that the British Empire did so much to contribute to the world were of course shared by other Europeans. Their legacy is everywhere. We must acknowledge that significant progress has been made in contesting and rejecting these ideas, especially in Britain, since it became a more diverse society. We should also recognise those primarily responsible for that progress: the relatively large community of Black Britons descended from colonised people and their White allies, who have campaigned against racism for the last seventy years or so. Finally, we should ask ourselves whether we want that progress to continue to outstrip the progress of other countries. I suggest that if we do, dismissing antiracist campaigners as ‘woke’ and denying that there is still significant racism to deal with is not the way to go.

Alan Lester

On 7th June it will be one year since Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters dumped the slave trader Edward Colston’s statue into Bristol Harbour. Around 50 Brexiteering Tory MPs styling themselves the Common Sense Group has published Common Sense: Conservative Thinking for a Post-Liberal Age, outlining their response.

Upon first reading it I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh at its monstrous hypocrisy or cry at the very scary prospect of its “post-liberal” agenda being realised. I do know what I feel, however, about this group of hyper-nationalists’ attacks on history and BLM.

These MPs are trying to persuade a notoriously impressionable Prime Minister that Conservatives must engage in an all-out culture war. They claim that this war was started under Tony Blair’s premiership, when leftists encroached on conservative cultural assumptions. There is plenty of evidence here, though, that it is actually they who are the aggressors.

“The Battle for Britain has begun”, writes the group’s chair, Sir John Hayes, and “it must be won by those who, inspired by the people’s will, stand for the common good in the national interest.” Winning this war is the Common Sense group’s immediate objective, but there is a longer term aim behind it. This is where foreboding displaces ridicule.

These MPs want to discard Britain’s uncodified liberal constitution. “Leaving the EU”, Hayes warns, “is just the end of the beginning, not the beginning of the end of this process. What is required is nothing less than a complete reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual, society, the economy and the state.” Winning the culture war “is vital to such a national rebirth” (a phrase often used by twentieth century Fascists).

All the traditional concerns of Conservatives are here – immigration, family integrity, the Royal Family, crime and policing – but more sinister stuff is threaded throughout. Alexander Stafford insists that their agenda “will require both Government action and courage”, most immediately: to undermine the 2010 Equality Act, repeal hate speech laws, and break up the BBC. They want to “end the need for impartiality” in news reporting. We’ll then have the enticing prospect of exclusively right wing news channels like GB News, playing the role of Trump’s favourite Fox News, here in the UK.

The Red Wall
The MPs behind this book are riding high on the divisions that brought them to power in the post-Brexit election. Ten of them were elected for the first time in 2019 and three won traditionally non-Conservative seats. The Express, one of whose writers contributes, says “The book aims at providing a blueprint to help keep the former red wall seats”.

The contributors understand their success in these constituencies as being the result of two promises. The first was “levelling up”, flowing from a tsunami of government investment in the neglected infrastructure and industries of northern England. The second was to align with constituents against perceived threats from “metropolitan elites”, including the immigration they allowed from the EU.

In the light of the post-Covid deficit, levelling up now seems much less likely. Now that Brexit is “done” it too looks increasingly unlikely to deliver promised material rewards. Without being able to deliver economically, a culture war becomes not merely a defence of values that these MPs cherish; it is also all that’s left of a strategy to retain these seats.

All the contributors to Common Sense are intent on perpetuating the divisions that saw them into power. Continued momentum depends upon the creation of a new enemy – a spectre as contemptible as that of the EU conjured up before the 2016 EU referendum. “Once the Brexit transition period is over”, writes Stafford, the Conservative Party will be at a crossroads. We must double down on the social conservatism that voters in our constituencies expect of us. We must avoid losing our way”.

The new spectre is the “woke”. Tory hyper-nationalists made a start in sketching it out in the immediate aftermath of the BLM protests last summer, opening two main fronts: against the practice and teaching of history and BLM.

The Attack on History
Common Sense assaults history in all its guises: academic research on the past, heritage preservation and interpretation, and teaching in schools and universities. All publicly funded practitioners, its authors believe, “should be required to promote British values, traditions and history”. But only of a certain kind. No free speech here.

“Britain is under attack”, writes Gareth Bacon. “Not in a physical sense, but in a philosophical, ideological and historical sense. Our heritage is under a direct assault – the very sense of what it is to be British has been called into question, institutions have been undermined, the reputation of key figures in our country’s history have been traduced”. Bacon’s visceral sense of endangerment reminds us that this culture war is not solely about appealing to the perceived socially conservative views of red wall voters.

The Common Sense group’s engagement with history reveals deep emotion and genuine perplexity. Like the statues I wrote about in my last blog, these are petrified white men. The story of Britishness that defined their sense of national belonging is the same as that which shaped me growing up in the 1970s and 80s. I understand it. It is one of exploration, discovery, conquest, colonisation and rule over people of colour. It is also one of civilising, Christianising and freeing those less privileged than “us”.

The founders of the modern nation who did all these things were white, and Britain’s heritage is that of a white nation only recently inundated with people of colour. It is a version of history that denies Black people’s belonging, either in Britain itself, or in “our” national story.

Those people of colour, both threatening and pitiable, who were made British subjects by Empire whether they liked it or not, were acted upon by Britons. They were not proper Britons themselves. Their ancestral story of being colonised, enslaved and exploited was certainly not part of the story of Britain and Britishness. The hyper-nationalists’ favourite anthem, Rule Britannia, though, is premised on a lie: “Britons never … shall be slaves”. The act of enslaving African people and putting them to work on British colonial plantations rendered them British subjects. So Britons were slaves. The fact that most of us today still see the white enslavers as British and the Black enslaved as something other means that the descendants of the enslaved are still written out of “our national story”.

For these culture warriors resisting any revision of this story, Britishness is still whiteness. We need, however, to start seeing slavery as something that Britons did to other Britons if we are to move towards racial reconciliation in this country.

Gareth Bacon most sincerely wants to believe that the British Empire was “a modernising, civilising force that spread trade, wealth and the rule of law around the globe”. He is no doubt genuinely disoriented to be told that yes, it spread trade – but only that which was favourable to Britons. Free trade in British manufacturers’ and merchants’ interests was often enforced at the point of a gun. At the very same time that Manchester saw a monster anti-Corn Law demonstration to open up trade on behalf of the British poor, British steamships and marines were forcing China to accept an illegal trade in opium, grown for Britons by their Indian subjects.

And yes, the Empire spread wealth – mainly to white Britons who either stayed at home, perhaps as absentee slave owners, or East India Company shareholders, or emigrated to become settlers. Their wealth came from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the violent destruction of their societies in North America, Southern Africa and Australasia.

And yes, the Empire spread the rule of law – applied almost universally so as to maintain white supremacy, within legislative systems from which people of colour were generally excluded. The rule of law was not universal until colonised people kicked the British out of former colonies.

The Common Sense group and their allies may choose to look the other way, but as we show in Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Britain’s Empire rested by the mid-nineteenth century on three main pillars: a tropical plantation system beginning with enslaved African labour in the Caribbean and spreading to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, with the use of indentured Indian workers thereafter; the extraction of rent for Company shareholders from Indians, and their coerced production of opium to smuggle into China; and a British diaspora of some twenty million over the course of the century, to create the settler colonies, later dominions.

Gareth Bacon MP fears a woke-revised, “slanted and de-contextualised” history. Omitting the most blatantly obvious characteristic of British imperial rule – its ability to put people of colour around the world to work on behalf of white Britons – is the real slanting and decontextualizing. Historians wearing nationalistic blinkers have been getting away with it for far too long.

The fact that both historians and activists have brought a sense of self and nation premised on white superiority into question, is deeply unsettling for those who have invested their identities in it. Even though they clearly do not consider themselves racist, the recovery of colonised Black British subjects’ experiences of the past is causing genuine bafflement among the Common Sense group. They obviously feel that their virtue and their value is at stake. However, they cannot bring themselves to welcome a revision of Britain’s national story so as to include Black subjects. Instead, railing against the “diminution of our country’s stature and history,” they are seeking to preserve a fundamentally racist idea of what their country is and what it should be.

What they need to appreciate is that historians like myself who work on the Empire do not “despise[e] the history and culture of the United Kingdom”. I love being British and I am not ashamed to be white British either. What I despise is a whitewashing of our history that exacerbates racial divisions and makes the United Kingdom a less pleasant place to live in.

So what, exactly, has been undermining the Common Sense group’s cherished version of national history, causing them to be so upset? Two things, I think, are primarily responsible.

The first is history itself: the process of seeking better to understand the past. Projects like the Legacies of British Slave Ownership database at UCL are the result of painstaking historical research over decades, inquiring into aspects of Britain’s past that have been obscured or buried by previous generations of historians. This particular project has brought slavery home, revealing how ordinary Britons who had never seen an enslaved person in their lives nevertheless owned and profited from these people of colour at a distance. Each of us can find out who owned enslaved people in our home towns. They include, for instance, the vicar of my local church in Uckfield, East Sussex, and the man upon whose former estate my housing estate was built.

The East India Company at Home project has shown how Britons were rapacious in the eastern half of their empire too, with Company shareholders “earning” dividends by charging Indians rent for the privilege of living on their own land and profiting from opium trading, and then using the proceeds to build country estates. Much of this new historical work, revising what we thought we knew of our imperial past, is now being popularised due to the work of British TV’s first major Black historian, David Olusoga

It tends to be more recent research of two women in particular that especially incenses the Common Sense group and their supporters. The Daily Mail was obliged to pay £25,000 to the author of Insurgent Empire, Priyamvada Gopal, after falsely accusing her of inciting a race war in in article based on tweets mocked up by right wing trolls. Corinne Fowler’s work with the National Trust is referred to in the manifesto as the epitome of hated historical revisionism. Professor Fowler, who has also been subject to Daily Mail rants, worked with the National Trust and primary school children on a project revealing how many of our stately homes were built upon the proceeds of slavery, opium -trading and other forms of colonial exploitation. As the blurb on the back of her book, Green Unpleasant Land notes, “The heatedness of the recent media response … shows just what is at stake: a selective vision of nation that underplays the impact of four colonial centuries, or a version that embraces, as Paul Gilroy expresses it, a post-imperial ‘convivial culture’”.

These academics have been exposed to precisely what Bacon alleges the “woke” are doing: “an explicit campaign of aggressive bullying, intimidation and censorship.”

Fowler’s work with the National Trust has been criticised by a group of members aligned with the Common Sense group, with The Telegraph insinuating (falsely according to the National Trust itself) that its chairman had been obliged to resign because of its “woke” agenda. The Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has insisted on the replacement of a trustee of the National Maritime Museum because he is too “woke” for the government’s liking. When Fowler responded to a question about how she felt about the attacks on her, one of the authors, Lord Peter Lilley declared “If she cannot take criticism she should not be in the university, let alone lecturing the nation. Arguably, it is she who has insulted her country by her book whose very title — Green Unpleasant Land — tells us what she thinks of her fellow citizens.” And yet, in just one example of their monstrous hypocrisy, the Common Sense group complain that they are being deprived of “the right and the ability to challenge those on the left”; that “any attempt to do so is viciously put down – disagreement is not now tolerated and any perceived deviation from the narrow ‘true path’ is ruthlessly crushed” through “’noplatforming’ and the rise of the ‘cancel culture’”.

The Attack on Black Lives Matter
Since 7th June last year, diligent historical enquiry has been joined by something that the Common Sense group find even more unsettling: the assertiveness of Black Britons and the support that they have received from white allies. This really put the frighteners on hyper-nationalists who invest their identities in a white Britain.

When protestors ditched Colston’s statue in the harbour, they made it clear that they would not rest until white Britons addressed the racism and violence of Empire and its legacies. Britain must revise its national story to include Black people.

To the horror of the Common Sense bunch, before we know it, we might even have a National Curriculum recognising that a four hundred year-long project pursuing a white supremacist Empire and ending only in my parents’ lifetime has shaped modern Britain more than, say, a single century of Tudor rule over four hundred years ago. In a Radio 4 Moral Maze debate (although “debate” would suggest a more even sided encounter) that I took part in last summer, a panel almost exclusively comprised of imperial apologists (with the exception of the brilliant Nesrine Malik) concluded meekly that yes, we should all learn more about the Empire. But I do not think they realised how uncomfortable this “learning” will be.

The problem for those who prefer comforting narratives is that all the positive things one could say about the British Empire have already been cherry picked for public consumption over the last hundred years. All that’s left to teach is the buried and disavowed parts – the racism and the violence. We’ll have to teach it nonetheless, though, if we’re to include Black Britons’ heritage in our national history.

Another big problem for the Common Sense culture warriors is that, despite all the ground work laid by attacks on historians and heritage bodies, they still have more work to do if voters are going to blame the “woke” for their ills. A poll shows that most people in the UK still do not know what “woke” means, and “a majority have hardly heard of ‘cancel culture’ or ‘identity politics’. In fact there is “limited awareness of the culture war debate generally”. This is where BLM comes into play.

Given that the authors admit that “there is no official ‘woke’ political party and the left-wing parties espousing elements of the ‘woke’” are diverse, their invention needs a focal point. Climate change activists, also targeted here as “woke”, don’t quite fit the bill, perhaps because even the “extremists” of Extinction Rebellion tend to be too white and their cause now too mainstream. BLM is a much better material out of which to sculpt “the woke”.

The language surrounding the protests of last year is revealing. Tensions around race were not the result of pre-existing racism, according to Common Sense. No, they “came to fore during the summer of 2020, particularly after the death of George Floyd … who died following his arrest.” I think we all know now how he died, but according to this group of MPs, racial grievances are a matter of history, not of today.

They admit that “claims of perceived injustice stem, somewhere down the line, from real injustice. Slavery was, and is, inhumane, as were the Jim Crow laws and segregation”. However, “the ensuing Civil Rights movement was a tremendous achievement in righting those wrongs … once those very real laws were abolished, there was left a vacuum which needed to be filled with more things to fix. As a result, although racism certainly does still exist, the real racism expanded to encompass perceived racism too”.

This, of course, is exactly the narrative supplied for the government by the Commissioners on Race and Ethnic Disparities in the Sewell Report. Widely discredited, including by those it cites, this report has not gone away. Quietly, the government is continuing to make policy based on its denial of enduring structural racism.

This despite the following facts, taken from the ONS website: Black households are the most likely out of all ethnic groups to have a weekly income of less than £400; people in White British households are consistently the least likely to live in low income households; across the NHS workforce in 2018, Black men were paid 84p for every £1 received by White men, and Black women 93p; when comparing staff in similar roles, White staff had higher average pay than those in all other ethnic groups; among juveniles sentenced in 2017, the Black ethnic group had the highest percentage of offenders sent to a young offenders institution. In every year during the same period, White offenders were given the shortest custodial sentences on average, and Asian or Black offenders were given the longest; in every socio-economic group and age group, White British households were more likely to own their own homes than all ethnic minority households combined.

Despite supposed red wall grievances, in every region in England and in Scotland, unemployment rates are lower for White people than for all other ethnic groups combined, with the biggest differences in West Midlands, the North East and Yorkshire and the Humber. And provisional analysis for the period 2 March to 15 May 2020 shows that the mortality rate for deaths involving COVID-19 was highest among males of Black ethnic background at 255.7 deaths per 100,000 population and lowest among males of White ethnic background at 87.0 deaths per 100,000. For females, the pattern was similar with the highest rates among those of Black ethnic background (119.8) and lowest among those of White ethnic background (52.0).

Despite these quite legitimate grievances, the Common Sense group decries “the intolerant woke dogma of Black Lives Matter”, labeling it an “extreme cultural and political group … fuelled by ignorance and an arrogant determination to erase the past and dictate the future”. Rather than seeking to address injustice it is “motivated by darker emotions: hatred, jealously, malice, insecurity”. Behind the “universally accepted idea that racism is wrong”, BLM activists apparently “hide other more controversial ideas such the desirability of the destruction of the conventional family unit, smashing capitalism, defunding the police and an unpleasant strain of anti-Semitism.”

These MPs seem to have a particular fondness for images of cities ablaze. James Sunderland and David Maddox say that “we only have to look at the corporate sponsors of Black Lives Matter who poured in millions of US dollars even as America’s cities burned”, while the BBC apparently “describe[d] the BLM riots as ‘mostly peaceful’ and ignore[d] cities and businesses being torched”. But the thing is, they were largely peaceful. I don’t remember the skies above Britain glowing red as BLM protestors filled the streets of many of our towns and cities last year.

The reality of what BLM is, how it came about and what it seeks to achieve does not matter though. What matters is that white voters can be persuaded that “the ‘woke’ warriors of BLM, advocates of ‘decolonisation’ and ‘white privilege” are “destroying the fabric of British society”. The hypocrisy is stunning. The same contributor goes on to note that “A country divided into rigid identity groups which refuse to accept the validity of differing points of view would soon become ungovernable”.

Alan Lester

I’ve been spending more time than I’d like in St Thomas’ Hospital lately. St Thomas’ is at the centre of Britain’s memorial landscape, just across Westminster Bridge from the Houses of Parliament. Thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve become more aware of London’s imperial statuary on my walks to escape the ward.[1] The Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust has recently removed the statue of Sir Robert Clayton, President and renovator of St Thomas’, and a major shareholder in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company.[2] However, I’ve encountered many other men on pedestals who made their reputations, careers and fortunes exploiting people of colour in the British Empire.

The first thing that struck me as an historian of the British Empire was the dates of these statues’ erection. Victorian Britons professed an aversion to the “tawdry glitter” of other European empires. In the 1870s Disraeli acceded only reluctantly to Queen Victoria’s request for the title “Empress”, fearing accusations of being un-British. Statues tend not to have been erected during the period when Britons were most complacent about their global power. Most of the ones in Westminster date from the end of the Victorian and the Edwardian periods, when the Empire was facing new challenges from American and European rivals and anticolonial resistance. Britons sculpted their imperial figures not in triumphal self-congratulation, but in a desperate gesture of reclamation. Now that I’ve opened my eyes to them, I can’t stop seeing petrified imperial men around Westminster. 

Challenge and Amelioration

When protestors finally pulled down the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol last June, they drew attention to the distancing and disavowal of violence against people of colour that is generally inscribed in this late imperial British memorial-scape. Colston, like many other slave traders and absentee slave owners, was cast in bronze because he was a generous philanthropist within his community. In 1895, when his statue was erected, the source of his largesse – the savage exploitation of enslaved Africans – was overlooked. Colston and others ‘traded’ people marked by a difference of phenotype as if they were commodities. As apologists like to point out, Africans too were extensively involved in the capture and trading of other Africans, but they tend not to stand on pedestals in British towns and cities.[4]

The slave-owning system that Colston and other Britons scaled up during the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries relied upon markers of physical difference – on Blackness as a proxy for inferiority. But it wasn’t just the trans-Atlantic trade in people that was facilitated by this difference.

Once relocated on colonial plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean, colonial authorities could police the mobility and behaviour of the unfree so much more efficiently if they were generally distinguished in appearance from the free. This was why slavery was such a powerful contribution to a systemic imperial racism that long outlived emancipation, and which spread far beyond the Caribbean during the 19^th century. The markers of difference between free and unfree became those between planter and labourer, master and servant, citizen and subject, colonist and colonised around the British Empire as it expanded and reoriented to the east and south, conquering, subduing and colonizing people of colour in the aftermath of abolition.[5]

Fig. 1 Mary Seacole

Upon leaving St Thomas’ main entrance, the first statue I encounter bucks the trend. In 2016, the memorial of Mary Seacole was erected in a small garden in the hospital grounds.[6] Despite the addition of the woman voted Greatest Black Briton to the National Curriculum, most Britons’ schooling has left them in profound ignorance of the realities of Britain’s imperial rule and its implications for Black subjects.

A cynical interpretation would see Seacole as a relatively comforting Black figure for inclusion in what imperial apologists like to think of as “the national story”. She determinedly surmounted the racism of the Victorian Establishment in order to aid British troops fighting an imperial war against Russia in the Crimea. 

The addition of Secole’s statue, like those of Mandela (2007) and Gandhi (2015) in Parliament Square, is a good thing, even if it is ameliorative rather than transformative of conventional views of Empire. Better to have a Black British woman than another statue of a white man whose fame relied upon imperial conquest. However there are still many figures of the latter sort littering the streets around the hospital.

India and Lesser Known Imperial Conquests

Once across Westminster Bridge and around St James’ Park, the most imposing statue is of Robert Clive, the East India Company officer who helped British shareholders reap dividends from Indians, first through outright plunder and, in the longer term, through the extortion of rent. I could not agree more with William Dalrymple when he says “it is not just that this statue stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers”.[7]

Fig. 2 Robert Clive

Despite imperial apologists’ refrain, “what about the railways?”, which they seem to believe were gifted by Britons to Indians, the Company regime that Clive conceived and which first built those railways, gave very little thought to the welfare of its subjects. Governor General Dalhousie, who first promoted an Indian rail network in the 1840s, was quite explicit that the tracks would be for the benefit of British investors and producers, and that rapid rail movement of troops would enable the more effective conquest of India’s remaining independent states.

When, in 1833, the East India Company was finally prevented from pursuing further commerce, Parliament guaranteed its shareholders continued dividends of 10.5%. From then on, their income was drawn from the rent charged to Indians for the privilege of being governed by them. This ruthless rent extraction continued even throughout the famine of 1837-8 which killed 800,000 British Indian subjects – the same number, incidentally that were simultaneously freed from the apprenticeships succeeding slavery in the Caribbean. It went on under the guise of the Raj which succeeded the Company during the 1878-9 famine, which killed another 5 million.

Fig. 3 Garnet Wolseley

The next statue came into view as I wandered into Horse Guards Parade, and it led my thoughts from India to other parts of the Empire that have been relatively neglected in the culture wars. Field Marshal Sir Garnet Wolseley was Gilbert and Sullivan’s “very model of a modern Major-General”. Mounted in 1920, the plaque underneath his horse indicates the diverse sites of his military exploits: “Burmah 1852–3 / Crimea 1854–5 / Indian Mutiny 1857–9 / China 1860–1 / Red River 1870 / Ashanti 1873–4 / South Africa 1879 / Egypt 1882 / Soudan 1884–5.”

Wolseley’s first campaign experience was the result of provocation by Dalhousie’s expansionist Company government and resulted in the annexation of Lower Burma. After the Crimean campaign, Wolseley joined the army led by Sir Colin Campbell, which relieved the siege of Lucknow and brutally suppressed the Indian Uprising of 1857. Very much in accord with Charles Dickens’ call “to blot [the Indian race] out of mankind and raze it off the face of the earth,” thousands of Indian civilians were peremptorily hanged, and rebels blown to pieces by cannons in reprisal.

Three years later Wolseley was in China, helping to enforce legalisation of imported, Indian-grown, British opium. Having helped secure this lucrative imperial narcotics trade on behalf of the Treasury, he participated in the looting of Beijing’s Imperial Summer Palace. Charles Gordon, whom Wolseley would later try to save from a famously stoic death in Khartoum, complained that “These palaces were so large & we were so pressed for time that we could not plunder carefully”.

The British imperial policy which did most to shape Wolseley’s subsequent impact on the world was Confederation. It was pursued by Lord Carnarvon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, after the shock of the Indian Uprising had prompted the more integrated governance of the empire from a new building – the current Foreign Office, outside of which Clive now stands. The rationale for the policy was outlined in Charles Dilke’s popular book Greater Britain which spoke of “the grandeur of our race, already girding the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, eventually to overspread”. Dilke was quite frank that the “defeat of the cheaper by the dearer peoples” was an essential precondition for this spread of British civilization.

Carnarvon’s first step was the confederation of the separate colonies in Canada, so that they could form a better administered and more prosperous whole within this Greater Britain. In 1869, however, Métis people of mixed First Nations and French colonial descent, recognised as aboriginal to Canada, established an independent government of their own at the Red River Colony, in today’s Manitoba. They did so rather than be absorbed into the Canadian federation as Carnarvon wished. The Red River Métis declared their intention of joining the federation, but on their own terms: representation in Parliament, a bilingual legislature and chief justice, and recognition of their land claims.

Wolseley was charged with leading an expedition to put down the Red River “rebellion”. He arrived in Manitoba too late to capture any rebels, but succeeded in suppressing the most viable attempt by aboriginal people to have their interests represented in a united Canada.

Wolseley’s reputation soared in Britain. He became trouble-shooter in chief for the Empire. If independent-minded people of colour blocked British aspirations, Wolseley was the man to lead a punitive expedition against them.

His next campaign was against the Asante kingdom. In 1872, the Colonial Office was seeking to consolidate Britain’s fragmentary governmental entities on the West African coast, in accord with the larger objective of confederation in the settler colonies. This included the purchase of the Dutch Gold Coast with its port of Elmina, and its incorporation within the British Gold Coast colony. However, Elmina was also the powerful Asante kingdom’s sole remaining coastal trade outlet, and a key source of its revenue. In early 1873 Kofi Karikari, the Asante king, ordered his army to attack the British in an attempt to reclaim the port.

Wolseley’s expedition, including Black West Indian troops and Fante allies, destroyed the Asante capital Kumasi, burning down villages as it went. The expedition was justified in Britain as an attempt to end Asante practices of slavery, but used enslaved women among its 17,000 porters. The official haul of plunder from Kumasi included King Kofi’s state umbrella and a golden stool, which Wolseley gave to Queen Victoria and which are still in the royal collection.

Since the prize money from the Asante loot was considered too little to distribute among all the soldiers who participated, as Wolseley’s army field guide advocated, Disraeli’s cabinet decided to award them an extra thirty days pay in lieu. Asante gold is now in the British Museum, the Wallace Collection; the Royal Artillery mess at Woolwich; the National Army Museum and the Green Jackets Regimental Museum.[8]

Having helped bring the Asante kingdom under British “protection”, Wolseley next joined the long running campaign to bring Southern Africa’s diverse colonies, Boer republics and independent African kingdoms under confederated British rule, following the Canadian precedent. Here, his trajectory converged with that of the very next imperial man that I encountered, standing on a plinth on the Victoria Embankment, just along from the Houses of Parliament.

Antislavery and the Conquest of Africa

Sir Henry Bartle Frere had come to southern Africa as High Commissioner, also determined to effect Confederation. His reputation was that of an antislavery man of action.

After 1833 and the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in the Caribbean, the Cape and Mauritius (but not yet in India), Britons patted themselves on the back as the most benign exponents of imperial rule in history. But being antislavery did not mean that they were anticolonial or antiracist.

Fig. 4 Henry Bartle Frere

Far from discouraging further aggression against Africans, Britain’s mantle as an antislavery nation actually encouraged it. It was not just Wolseley’s assault on Kumasi that was justified as an anti-slavery intervention. As the historian Richard Huzzey explains, “Anti-slavery traditions helped to translate private interest and personal ambitions into national interest and patriotic duty ”.[9]

Bartle Frere was in the forefront of this new, moral crusade. Under Dalhousie, he had been the East India Company’s Resident in Satara, one of the first states to be annexed by the freshly aggressive Governor General. From there, Frere moved to Sind, where he installed a postal system based on Britain’s, which was subsequently adopted across India. It is often proclaimed as one of the enduring, positive, legacies of British rule. As Governor of Bombay he again sponsored modernizing, liberal projects, including the Deccan College at Pune, and a specialist college to instruct Indians in civil engineering.

Both a high churchman and a member of the Antislavery Society, Frere had long condemned what he called the “fashion of looking down on all men who differed from us in colour or in race.” He also bemoaned the British public’s general ignorance of the Arab-led East African slave trade. In March 1872, Frere invoked the original struggle of Thomas Fowell Buxton and his generation against slavery in the Caribbean, exhorting “the present supporters of the anti-slavery movement to imitate their predecessors and to be up and doing”.^[10]

Fig. 5 Buxton Antislavery Memorial

(Thomas Fowell Buxton’s son Charles had also sought to revive waning British antislavery commitment, with a monument to his father’s campaign first erected in Parliament Square in the 1850s. However, in a development that Robert Jenrick would presumably oppose, it was removed in 1949 because its gothic style did not fit with a classical re-design of the Square. In 1957, on 150th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, it was rebuilt, without its piped water and drinking cups, on Victoria Embankment, where it now sits next to Frere.)

Imperial apologists’ second most popular refrain (after “what about the railways”) is “what about the Arab slave trade”. It was this that Frere sought to draw to the attention of the British public in the early 1870s.

Although much of this continuing Indian Ocean slave trade was financed by British Indian subjects in Bombay, British outrage was becoming focused on Zanzibar’s sultan, Barghash bin Said. In 1872 the Foreign Office asked Frere if he would put his campaigning to practical use as the new British envoy to the sultan. Exceeding his instructions, Frere ordered the Royal Navy to seize any slave ships sailing between Zanzibar and the African coast. He then threatened Barghash with a total blockade. Against fierce local opposition, the sultan was forced to close the slave market in Zanzibar, end the import and export of enslaved people, and ban British subjects, including Indians, from owning enslaved people. Arab slave owners, however, were left in possession of their “property”.

By the late-1870s Frere had become a kind of civilian management consultant for the British Empire, just as Wolseley was its military trouble-shooter. Carnarvon now sent Frere to pursue confederation in southern Africa and the two men whose statues stand within a half mile of each other both ended up in South Africa.

By the time Wolseley arrived in 1879, the antislavery Frere had already attacked and defeated the Griqua, the Gcaleka Xhosa and the Zulu in a series of wars of aggression. Wolseley was despatched when it looked like things were going badly after the British defeat by Zulu at Isandhlwana, but he arrived too late to take command before Lord Chelmsford atoned for the defeat with a crushing victory, aided by Gatling guns, at the Battle of Ulundi. Wolseley would have to content himself with finishing another war that Frere had launched and paused before the Zulu campaign, against the Pedi.

Not only were tens of thousands of African people killed in Frere’s and Wolseley’s wars of South African confederation, but viable, independent societies were broken apart and families separated as the template for apartheid was laid. After the fragmentation of their kingdoms, Black South African men were obliged to engage in migrant labour, working at low wages for white employers in segregated towns and cities, their mobility policed by pass laws. Black women were left to scrape a subsistence for themselves and children in environmentally degraded reserves or take domestic service for whites. During the ensuing decades and especially after the South African War, this system was refined by British mining investors and governments. It was inherited and turned to specifically Afrikaner purposes in the guise of apartheid after the 1948 election of the Afrikaner-led National Party.[11]

Wolseley’s next war was waged to preserve control of the Empire’s main strategic lifeline. Egypt was nominally an Ottoman territory, but governed by a pasha who had become indebted to British and French financiers and governments. Its Suez Canal played a vital role connecting Britain with India and the colonies of the southern hemisphere, so when Orabi (sometimes spelt Urabi) Pasha, a soldier in the Pasha’s army, led a rebellion against indirect Anglo-French control in 1882, the British government intervened. One of Orabi’s demands was for an Egyptian parliament like the ones that liberal Britons demanded for themselves, but which they consistently denied colonised people of colour. His was a proto-nationalist rebellion which predated that of Nasser by some seventy years.

After British ships had shelled Alexandria, Wolseley’s troops suppressed Orabi’s revolt at the Battle of Tel el Kebir, killing some 2,000 Egyptians. In 1883, Wolseley returned to the region to put down the revolt led by the ‘Mahdi’, a religious leader of Sudanese groups resisting control by the British-backed Egyptians and objecting to the Ottomans’ lax version of Islam. General Gordon had been sent to Khartoum to oversee the withdrawal of Egyptian troops but had chosen to remain there. At the Battle of El Teb, en route to try to save him, 2,000 of the Mahdi’s followers, whom the British called “Fuzzy Wuzzies”, were killed, and 2,500 more killed thereafter at the Battle of Tamai.

What to do with all the Statues

Statues have become central to today’s culture wars not so much because Colston’s was pulled down by protestors last summer, but because the government chose to fuel a backlash against Black Lives Matter with scare stories of “woke militants” tearing down more statues and accusations that organisations like the National Trust are indoctrinating visitors with self-flagellating rants about slavery.

It should not be necessary to point out to the highly educated Prime Minister and his ministers the distinction between “the past” and “history”, but since they have so often conflated the two, with claims that the past is being “edited”, “censored” or “attacked” by protestors, and that “history” is being lied about, a basic lesson seems requisite. In raising awareness of the racialized and brutal nature of British imperial rule, historians and activists are not seeking to, and nor could anyone ever, change “the past”. “The past” is the sum total of everything that has already happened to anyone anywhere to date. It is done. It has gone and it cannot be changed. “History” is the necessarily far more selective stories about the past that we choose to tell, and the better grounded in diverse evidence that survives from the past, the better it tends to be.

In raising awareness of uncomfortable aspects of the past that have been overlooked or buried by previous generations of historians, today’s historians and community activists are doing history, adding to it, not undermining it. In seeking to decolonise our teaching we are not reducing it; we are expanding it.

For all Frere’s antislavery credentials, it is indisputable that both he and Wolseley behaved as if Black lives mattered little compared to white lives. The main purpose of the latter’s career was the subjugation of independent Black societies to serve British interests. The argument that these were men of their times rings true, even though these particular men were directly responsible for much more killing than most of their contemporaries. However, it is precisely a clear eyed awareness of what those times were and how we might wish to commemorate those who contributed most to them that is needed today.

Across Britain, and much to the chagrin of the government, communities and local authorities are engaged in a re-evaluation of our memorial landscape, but in the current government’s defence of statues there is an echo of the era of imperial decline when those statues were put up. Symbols like the Union Jack and statues of imperial men are being more aggressively valued as Britain’s real geopolitical power subsides yet further in the wake of Brexit. Comfort, and perhaps votes too, are to be found in national pride.^[12]

Defending a nostalgic, romanticised, self-congratulatory and often patently false image of the past, however, is no way to ensure the wealth and well-being of a diverse British society in the future.

Now that the government has made it all but impossible for controversial statues to be removed to museums where they can be properly contextualised, perhaps we can do the next best thing: wherever site constraints allow, use statues as focal points for educating Britons about their connections with peoples and places that are distanced and disavowed in a narrow, white-centric “national story”.

We should see, and many are now seeing, the intensification of controversy over statues as an opportunity to educate Britons more, and not less, about the diverse and complex history of the British Empire and the depth of scarring that its racist constitution has imprinted on our society.

Wolseley’s and Frere’s statues, for instance, could enable us to consider Britain’s role in the Indian Uprising and Opium Wars; the plunder of Asante treasures and the debate over repatriation from British museums; Confederation’s role in creating the geographical template for apartheid in South Africa, and the story of early Egyptian nationalist resistance.

At the same time, we could follow the advice of the imperial historian Philippa Levine. Her suggestion for resolving the dispute about Cecil Rhodes’ statue in front of Oriel College, Oxford is to “invite a black British artist, perhaps a Zimbabwean or South African, to shape a memorial to those whose sufferings made Rhodes wealthy enough to endow Oriel, or a piece that spells out a critique of the colonial mindset”.

The statues of Gandhi, Mandela and Seacole in Westminster are all well and good. We need more such memorials of Black figures. But one effect of colonialism itself has been the suppression of our knowledge and understanding of the lives of millions more British subjects of colour who cannot be represented in such an individualist form. Here, as Levine notes, we need public “art that is more innovative and passionate than the dull formalism of statuary and plaques can ever be”.[13]

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[1] https://www.toppletheracists.org/

[2] https://www.guysandstthomas.nhs.uk/news-and-events/2020-news/june/200611-joint-statement-on-statues.aspx

[3] https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/how-city-failed-remove-edward-4211771

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/08/edward-colston-statue-history-slave-trader-bristol-protest

[5] Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2021

[6] https://www.maryseacoletrust.org.uk/mary-seacole-statue/

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/11/robert-clive-statue-whitehall-british-imperial

[8] https://www.africavenir.org/nc/news-details/article/kwame-opoku-when-will-britain-return-looted-ghanaian-artefacts-a-history-of-british-looting-of-mor.html. Thanks to Mary-Ann Middlekoop for information here.

[9] Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, Cornell University Press, 2012, p. 133.

[10] The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 30 March 1872.

[11] Alan Lester, Etienne Nel and Tony Binns, South Africa Past, Present and Future, Prentice Hall, 2000.

[12] Compulsory worship of national symbols is the sure sign of a culture in decline | Politics | The Guardian

[13] https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/cecil-rhodes-oriel-should-we-stop-erecting-statues-maggie-hambling-mary-wollstonecraft