{"id":478,"date":"2021-09-15T18:46:47","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T18:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/snapshotsofempire\/?p=478"},"modified":"2024-07-18T08:54:32","modified_gmt":"2024-07-18T08:54:32","slug":"history-reclaimed-but-from-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/snapshotsofempire\/2021\/09\/15\/history-reclaimed-but-from-what\/","title":{"rendered":"History Reclaimed – But From What?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A group of scholars including Andrew Roberts, Robert Tombs, Zareer Masani and the ubiquitous Nigel Biggar<\/a>, has banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project<\/a>. It consists at present of a website and social media presence that aims to rescue neutral, disinterested, evidence-based historical enquiry from a supposed \u2018woke\u2019 assault. In particular the group believes this assault is directed at our understanding of Britain\u2019s imperial past. Most of the short articles and book reviews on the site, including Gilley\u2019s now notorious \u201cThe Case for Colonialsm\u201c, have been published elsewhere. They are collated under the project\u2019s auspices to create economies of scale for a group of scholars who believe themselves to be marginalised and gagged (despite Biggar\u2019s CBE). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The group introduces its project as defending a \u201cshared history\u201d and speaks of society needing \u201ca sense of common purpose and self-worth\u201d. It claims that these attributes are being undermined by historians and activists who draw attention to the racialised violence of the British Empire. A \u201cshared history\u201d, it says, \u201cis a necessary foundation for a successful democracy\u201d. The language betrays the most problematic element of the way that some conservatives more broadly have responded to the challenge of Black Lives Matter. For the history that this group defends is far from \u201cshared\u2019\u201d. It is the history created by White Britons over many decades to justify their denial of sovereignty to others. The millions of people of colour around the world who were made British subjects whether they liked it or not, tended to endure a very different historical experience from these White Britons – as subjects rather than citizens, as enslaved, indentured or otherwise coerced labourers rather than employers, as servants rather than masters and mistresses, and as dispossessed rather than landed. Continuing to write their experiences out of \u201cour\u201d supposedly \u201cshared\u201d history means denying that Black Britons\u2019 heritage belongs to \u201cour\u201d national story. History Reclaimed refuses to recognise this continuing exclusion of Black Britons from a dominant vein of historical interpretation. Accordingly it misplaces the blame for the division and dissent that it detects in Britain and its former settler colonies. This group blames the \u201cwoke\u201d, when it is the continuing resistance that Black Britons and Indigenous peoples face as they seek to make their voices heard that is the root cause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Activists motivated by the need to address racism and denial do sometimes get historical detail and individual attribution wrong, but what they get right, and what History Reclaimed gets so wrong, is the bigger picture: the British Empire was, above all else, a vehicle of white supremacy. Whatever its liberal adherents at home in Britain desired and said, it rested upon people of colour being violently subjugated, their land taken and their being put to work for White Britons. History Reclaimed exists not so as to rescue History from inaccuracy or bias (both of which characteristics are abundantly in evidence in its own pages), but in order to perpetuate ignorance of this central characteristic of Empire. This otherwise quite disparate group of contributors is intent on continuing a pattern of denial and disavowal which dates from the days of empire itself. What they want to reclaim history from is the truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scholarship and Propaganda<\/strong>
There are some things on the History Reclaimed site which seem perfectly reasonable. Saul David offers a decent pr\u00e9cis of the complex array of actors involved in the South African War and points to its legacies for a racially segregationist form of governance. I wouldn\u2019t disagree with the framing of its introduction – that \u2018Boer War\u2019 memorial interpretations should take this complexity into account. What seems to drive this group\u2019s broader approach, however, is a Manichean view of history: a belief that the primary purpose and effect of history writing is either to condemn or to redeem White Britons. Where they see scholars of empire piling on condemnation, their belief is that they are needed to restore redemptive balance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given the general lack of engagement with the recent academic historiography, the group\u2019s claim to protect nuanced, complex and holistic historical research seems disingenuous. Nigel Biggar\u2019s review of Dan Hick\u2019s Brutish Museums <\/em><\/a>and Robert Tombs\u2019 criticism of the V&A for returning some looted Asante treasures both take imperial propaganda of the late nineteenth century, which justified the assaults on Benin and Asante respectively, as a truth overlooked by their targets. Biggar emphasises the brutality of the Benin kingdom and Tombs points out that the Asante kingdom was founded in part on slave trading. They miss the broader point completely, that such justification served to legitimate British wars of aggression and occupation which contributed to tens of thousands of deaths, the Scramble for Africa, the denial of sovereignty to African people and their treatment as second class subjects governed directly or indirectly by White people in their own territories. Rather than rigorous historical enquiry, it is the propaganda for aggressive wars, racial supremacy and overseas occupation that they seek to \u201creclaim\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n


Hyperbole<\/strong>
Some of History Reclaimed\u2019s featured articles, such as Andrew Roberts and Zewditu Gebreyohanes\u2019 defence of Churchill\u2019s reputation react to the supposed hyperbole of detractors, which itself is misrepresented<\/a>, but descend into their own fantasies of legal equality and an apparently universal British desire for \u201cthe best for the peoples of their Empire\u201d. Many of the articles suffer from their own forms of hyperbole. Joanna Williams\u2019 article on critical race theory starts promisingly, with a reasonable overview of its origins in the recognition of structural racism but descends into a rant about the existential threat that the scholarly field now poses to Western civilisation. The Alt Right American activist Christopher Rufo has boasted about deliberately demonising Critical Race Theory<\/a> as the root of all ‘woke’ evils and History Reclaimed follows suit. Many of the other contributions also stereotype antiracist initiatives, rather than the failure to act sufficiently against racism, as fundamentally undermining Western societies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an article primarily on the Canadian Historical Association\u2019s decision to adopt the description \u201cgenocide\u201d for the forced assimilation of First Nations people, Liam Kennedy declares that \u201cthe CHA directive is worse than any of the ideologically-loaded pronouncements that shaped the Irish Famine debates. None of the antagonists in those controversies sought to close down discussion. There was no burning of books\u201d. As far as I am aware the CHA has not called for discussion to be closed or for books to be burned. Kennedy also asks, \u201cBut do they [the CHA] want to go a stage further and endorse the genocide thesis as a test of faith or virtual entry requirement to the profession?\u201d Well, no. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I quite agree with Kennedy that \u201cHallmarks of the historian include confronting complex historical experiences with intellectual integrity and attention to context, evidence, and the values of the time. Holistic accounts are normally preferred to selective and partisan renderings of the past that can be dished up so easily in the service of contemporary political positions\u201d. Following this advice, however, surely means refusing to overlook the evidence of forced assimilation and governmental attempts to eradicate a separate Indigenous culture<\/a>? A project designed to exonerate Britons of past culpability for acts of oppression seems to me just as void of intellectual integrity as any extreme \u201cwoke\u201d statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both C. R. Hallpik and Nigel Biggar are willing to go further than Kennedy, explicitly positioning Indigenous and African groups lower than White Britons in a hierarchy of civilisation. Hallpik\u2019s article asserts that it is quite legitimate and accurate to portray Indigenous societies as primitive and less culturally evolved than Western societies. Presumably the point of its inclusion here is for us to infer that the colonisation of such societies by Britons, the usurpation of their land, the killing of those who resisted, and the enforced cultural assimilation of survivors, was justifiable on the grounds of some greater human good. Perhaps the real clue as to what drives this project as a whole is found in Biggar\u2019s comment: \u201cIt is clear that the [British colonial] officials did regard the cultures of many African peoples as \u201cprimitive\u201d. But I doubt they deserve blame for that, since \u2014 whether in terms of science, technology or medicine \u2014 African cultures were, compared to European ones, obviously underdeveloped in the 1920s\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n


Liberalism and Culture War<\/strong>
In an article reproduced from the Telegraph<\/a>,<\/a> Nigel Biggar and Doug Stokes argue that \u2018woke\u2019 criticisms of the West\u2019s history undermine the liberalism upon which Westerners rely for their security and prosperity. They fail to see that they are part of the backlash against precisely the most precious aspects of Western liberalism that have been won since 1945 \u2013 gains such as the rights of women and civil rights of Black people, that are now under assault from populists on the Right. The culture wars were started in the USA in the 1960s by conservatives resisting these most progressive elements of Western liberalism. The group is aligned with those doing their very best to undermine these gains with their complaints about the nihilism of the \u2018woke\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The academic historians whose work I have read in many years of reviewing for many publishers generally seek to characterise the British Empire as accurately and inclusively as possible, regardless of the feelings of patriotic readers. They are written in pursuit of historical veracity rather than historical validation. They eschew the idea of historical goodies and baddies. They recognise that human agency is complex; that people who consider themselves humane can participate in oppression and that White Britons were no better or worse, intrinsically, than any other people. There is a huge body of literature on the accommodations and adaptations that colonised people made to colonial regimes, as well as on their resistance. Entangled and intimate relationships between White colonisers and Indigenous people are noted and explored sensitively in this literature. Characters are humanised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These historians, however, also feel obliged to draw attention to the everyday racial assumptions that generally rendered White Britons citizens and colonised people of colour subjects of empire. They do not simply ignore systems of governance that enabled White people to be masters and Black people servants; White people to be employers and Black people labourers, White people to be land owners and Black people to be dispossessed. Of course there were individual and group exceptions to these patterns. Imperial subjects of colour could be employers, land owners and slave owners. As the recent scholarship indicates, by overthrowing regimes that exclude and suppress in other ways, imperialism presented new opportunities to some colonised people relative to others. Of course other imperial regimes in history have been brutal and discriminatory too, but constantly deflecting from debates about Britain’s empire and its repercussions for Britain, for example, with lurid tales of the Arab slave trade,<\/a> does nothing to help resolve Britain’s problems with ongoing racial disparities. Any account of empire which seeks to deny its consistent patterning of White racial privilege over colonised people of colour, or to talk about other things instead, is blinkered to say the least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHistory has become one of the major battlegrounds in the culture wars\u201d not because of colonial historians\u2019 efforts but because members of History Reclaimed along with allies in the Conservative Party and the right wing press have become determined, especially in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, to stake a defence of a racially unequal status quo on the ground of history. The group declares its aim \u201cto inform and support individuals and institutions who feel uncertain in the face of the culture wars.\u201d But defending a propagandistic view of the past <\/a>aimed at the denial of racism will not help such people. Perhaps the best critique of the History Reclaimed project comes from the rhetoric of the group itself: \u201cTendentious and even blatantly false readings of history are creating divisions, resentments, and even violence. This is damaging to democracy and to a free society.\u201d
\u2003
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A group of scholars including Andrew Roberts, Robert Tombs, Zareer Masani and the ubiquitous Nigel Biggar, has banded together to create the History Reclaimed Project. It consists at present of a website and social media presence that aims to rescue…<\/span><\/p>\n

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