Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $9.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism
The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism
The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism
Ebook481 pages6 hours

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook


The Truth About Empire
 comes from expert historians who believe that the truth, as far as we can ascertain it, matters; that our decades of painstaking research make us worth listening to; and that our authority as leading professionals should count for something in today’s polarised debates over Britain’s imperial past.

Colonial history is now a battlefield in the culture war. The public’s understanding of past events is continually distorted by wilful caricatures. Communities that long struggled to get their voices heard have, in their fight to highlight the hidden horrors of colonialism, alienated many who prefer a celebratory national history. The backlash, orchestrated by elements of the media, has generated a new, concerted denial of imperial racism and violence in Britain’s past—a disinformation campaign sharing both tactics and motivations with those around Covid, Brexit and climate change.

From Australia and China to South Africa and Egypt, this essay collection is an accessible guide to the British Empire, and a weapon of defence against the assault on historical truth. The disturbing stories told in these pages, of Empire’s culture, politics and economics, show why professional research matters, when deciding what can and cannot be known about Britain’s colonial history.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 27, 2024
ISBN9781805261438
The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism

Related to The Truth About Empire

Related ebooks

History For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for The Truth About Empire

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    The Truth About Empire - Alan Lester

    THE TRUTH ABOUT EMPIRE

    ALAN LESTER

    (Editor)

    The Truth About Empire

    Real Histories of British Colonialism

    With a Foreword by

    SATHNAM SANGHERA

    HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

    First published in the United Kingdom in 2024 by

    C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,

    New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA

    © Alan Lester and the Contributors, 2024

    Foreword © Sathnam Sanghera, 2024

    All rights reserved.

    Distributed in the United States, Canada and Latin America by Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

    The right of Alan Lester and the Contributors to be identified as the authors of this publication is asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

    A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library.

    ISBN: 9781911723097

    www.hurstpublishers.com

    This book is dedicated to our friend and colleague Lyndall Ryan, whose chapter is published posthumously after she passed away in late April 2024. We hope that it is a fitting tribute to a woman whose career was spent doggedly pursuing the truth about Australia’s history.

    CONTENTS

    List of Contributors

    PART ONE

    SETTING THE SCENE

    Foreword

    Sathnam Sanghera

    Introduction: The Truth About Colonial History

    Alan Lester

    PART TWO

    THE REALITIES OF COLONIALISM

    AROUND THE WORLD

    1. What About Slavery?

    Bronwen Everill

    2. Tasmania and the Question of Genocide in the Black War, the History Wars and the Culture War

    Lyndall Ryan

    3. The Misuse of Indigenous and Canadian History in Colonialism

    Adele Perry, Sean Carleton, and Omeasoo Wahpasiw

    4. ‘When Men Burn Women Alive, We Hang Them’: Sati and ‘Civilising Mission’ in Colonial India

    Andrea Major

    5. ‘Unencumbered by the Scruples of Justice and Good Faith’: The Colonial Achievements of Raffles in Southeast Asia

    Gareth Knapman

    6. My Empire, Right or Wrong: Rhodes, Milner and the South African War

    Saul Dubow

    7. Written on the City: Imperial Britain and China

    Robert Bickers

    PART THREE

    HISTORIOGRAPHY AND RACE

    8. Morality and the History of Abolition and Empire

    Richard Huzzey

    9. A Short History of a Controversial Comparison: Empire and Fascism in Black Political Thought During the 1930s

    Liam Liburd

    10. Escape from Empire: Decolonisation as Disentanglement, Erasure, and Evasion

    Erik Linstrum

    11. No End of a Reckoning

    Stuart Ward

    12. Colonialism : A Methodological Reckoning

    Margot Finn

    Notes

    Index

    LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

    Robert Bickers is a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. The author of six books, which have ranged widely in subject across the history of modern China and British relations with China since the 1790s, he is currently preparing a new history of Hong Kong. He co-directs the University’s Hong Kong History Centre and leads the Historical Photographs of China project.

    Sean Carleton is a settler historian and Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia (UBC Press, 2022).

    Saul Dubow has worked at the Universities of Sussex and London and is now Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at Cambridge. He is the author of several books and numerous articles about segregation and apartheid in South Africa and has developed interests in the history of race, science, empire and commonwealth. He is currently working on a book about South Africa as a problem for the world.

    Bronwen Everill (FRHistS) is the Director of the Centre of African Studies at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. She is the author of Not Made by Slaves: Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (Harvard University Press, 2020) and Abolition and Empire in Sierra Leone and Liberia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

    Margot Finn is Astor Professor of British History at University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy. The author of two monographs with Cambridge University Press, she has co-edited four volumes of essays on British and British imperial culture, including two works on the East India Company. She has published widely on the cultural, social, legal and political aspects of Britain’s empire in India and its contemporary legacies, including histories of material culture, gender and loot. A former editor of the Journal of British Studies, she is a founding-co-editor (with Deborah Cohen and Peter Mandler) of the book series Cambridge Modern British Histories.

    Richard Huzzey is Professor of Modern British History at Durham University. His first book was Freedom Burning: Antislavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Cornell University Press, 2012), and he has published a variety of articles and chapters on abolitionism in the period since the later eighteenth century. He co-edited, with Robert Burroughs, a volume on The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (Manchester University Press, 2015).

    Gareth Knapman is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Dr Knapman works across colonial Southeast Asian history and colonial Australian history. His principal work is Race and British Colonialism in Southeast Asia, 1770–1870: John Crawfurd and the Politics of Equality (Routledge, 2016). Much of Knapman’s research activity is applied research supporting the provenancing for the repatriation of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ ancestral remains. Dr Knapman’s ORCID profile with a complete list of publications can be found at https://orcid.org/0000–0003–4431–6659

    Alan Lester (FRHistS) is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and Adjunct Professor of History at La Trobe University. He has written widely on British colonial history. Previous books include Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2021) (with Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell); Humanitarianism, Empire and Transnationalism in the Anglophone World, 1760–1995 (Manchester University Press, 2023) (edited with Joy Damousi and Trevor Burnard); Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) (edited with Zoë Laidlaw); Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014) (with Fae Dussart); The East India Company and the Natural World 1600–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) (edited with Vinita Damodaran and Anna Winterbottom); Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006) (edited with David Lambert); and Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth Century South Africa and Britain (Routledge, 2001). He is co-editor of the long-established Manchester University Press Studies in Imperialism research monograph series.

    Liam J. Liburd is Assistant Professor of Black British History at Durham University. His research focuses broadly on the ongoing impact of the legacies of empire and decolonisation in modern Britain. His current research focuses on Black radical analyses of fascism and on the question of how historians might use these to transform our understanding of the relationship between British fascism and the British Empire, as well as, more broadly, of the politics of race in modern Britain. He is in the process of trying to turn his thesis into his first book, under the working title: Thinking Imperially: The British White Supremacist Movement and the Politics of Race in Modern Britain.

    Erik Linstrum is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Harvard University Press, 2016), which won the George Louis Beer Prize awarded by the American Historical Association. He has held fellowships from the American Academy in Berlin, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, among others.

    Andrea Major is Professor of Colonial History at the University of Leeds. She specialises in British Colonial and South Asian History; the East India Company; sati (suttee); slavery, indenture and abolitionism; social and gender issues; and colonial philanthropy. Her books include Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843, Liverpool Studies in International Slavery (Liverpool University Press, 2012) and Sovereignty and Social Reform in India: British Colonialism and the Campaign against Sati, 1830–1860, Edinburgh South Asian Studies Series (Routledge, 2010).

    Adele Perry is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, where she is also director of the Centre for Human Rights Research. She is committed to creating and disseminating critical histories of empire in the lands where she was raised and lives as a settler.

    Lyndall Ryan AM FAHA is Professor Emerita in Australian Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The author of three books on the history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, she has also published widely on the history of convict women in colonial Australia and settler violence and genocide of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the British Empire. She is also the lead investigator of the digital map of colonial frontier massacres in Australia 1788–1930; https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres

    Sathnam Sanghera was born to Punjabi parents in the West Midlands in 1976. He entered the education system unable to speak English but, after attending Wolverhampton Grammar School, graduated from Christ’s College, Cambridge, with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards twice, for his memoir The Boy with the Topknot and his novel Marriage Material, the former being adapted by BBC Drama in 2017 and named Mind Book of the Year in 2009. His third book, Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Viking, 2021) became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on release in 2021, was named a Book of the Year at the 2022 British Books Awards, and resulted in Empire State of Mind, the acclaimed two-part documentary for Channel 4 for which he earned a Best Presenter shortlisting at the 2022 Grierson Awards. The book also inspired a sequel, Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe (Penguin, 2024), which became an instant Sunday Times bestseller on release in 2024. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2016 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in recognition of his contribution to historical scholarship in 2023.

    Omeasoo Wahpasiw is a néhiyaw iskwew living in Anishinaabe territory. She co-wrote the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Women’s Commission submission to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People and is cross-appointed with Carleton University School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies and the Department of History.

    Stuart Ward is Professor of History at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, working on the political, social and economic dimensions of global decolonisation in the twentieth century and the historical legacies of British imperialism worldwide. He recently published Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

    PART ONE

    SETTING THE SCENE

    FOREWORD

    Sathnam Sanghera

    In 2021, Oliver Dowden, the then culture secretary, appeared at the History Matters conference organised by the right-wing Policy Exchange thinktank having recently urged museum curators not to ‘denigrate’ British history, as if history were a fixed, fragile thing, akin to a faltering tower of Jenga, and not something complex, changing, and robust, with fresh discoveries and new arguments forever changing our sense of it.

    According to a report in The Times, Dowden proceeded to talk about the risk of curators ‘being pushed around by unrepresentative campaign groups … to remove our history, to remove statues and so on’,¹ thus equating history with statues when statues are not history: they just offer one view of a historical figure at one particular point in history—and propounding the peculiar idea that history is erased with their removal (our knowledge of Lenin and Hitler continues to grow without their statues).

    Incredibly, the inanity had still not peaked. That moment came when Dowden, according to the same report, was asked what he would do if the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which was set up, among other things, to put up a new memorial for the victims of the transatlantic slave trade,² sought to remove statues of national heroes Winston Churchill and Lord Nelson. The then culture secretary answered: ‘I would happily chain myself to Nelson to stop him being removed.’³

    Now, I’ve checked, and while some activists seem to have complained out loud that Nelson, who resisted the abolition of slavery, should not be glorified, I cannot find a single suggestion from anyone with power that Nelson’s column should be pulled down. Moreover, in the three years since Dowden’s strange offer to chain himself to Nelson, the Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which stated very clearly on being founded that it was not established to remove statues or monuments,⁴ has taken down precisely … zero monuments.

    Nevertheless, we still had a minister of state suggesting he would climb 160 feet above Trafalgar Square to chain himself to a statue that was not under threat. In his defence, he was not the only person who succumbed to hysterical hyperbole during the statuecide which erupted around the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and which, in Britain, saw the likeness of slave trader Edward Colston being dragged by protestors into Bristol’s harbour.

    In the midst of a worldwide health crisis, Prime Minister Boris Johnson managed to carve out time to pen a column and issue a string of tweets in which he vowed to defy any attempt to move the statue of his political hero Churchill from Parliament Square (it had been graffitied but faced no real threat).⁵ Later, following a demonstration, the statue was observed being guarded by a sizable contingent of Metropolitan Police officers, even though the protest was over and it was still under no threat of toppling.⁶

    Then there were the activists who turned up to guard a statue of the nineteenth-century novelist George Eliot. ‘I’m purely here to protect our history’, one military veteran told CoventryLive, apparently unaware that Eliot was a supporter of the anti-slavery movement and that her statue was under no threat whatsoever, unless the country’s army of Jane Austen fans had suddenly become dangerously radicalised in an entirely unexpected way.

    There’s a risk, I realise, in focusing on these incidents, of implying that it’s only those on the right who are inclined to excess when it comes to imperial history. This is not true. ‘Topple the Racists’, an online crowdsourced map of problematic statues and monuments, targets, among many others, commemorations to former prime minister William Gladstone, which feels decidedly unnuanced, given that he opposed the slave trade, as well as defended it at times, while also benefitting from family wealth generated from it.⁸ Some of the estimates made for reparations are such colossal numbers that they stop being useful: it feels unrealistic to begin a conversation on the topic with the claim that Britain ‘drained’ a total of nearly $45 trillion (in today’s money) from India during the period 1765 to 1938, or the 1999 claim from the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission that $777 trillion would be suitable compensation for the enslavement and theft endured by Africa during colonisation.⁹

    But the crucial difference is that, in Britain, the left has not been in power for more than a decade. In contrast, the right have in recent years had their arguments adopted by government and amplified by interlinked, opaquely funded thinktanks keen on culture wars, and the consequences have been serious.¹⁰ At least, it felt serious when, in June 2020, Gavin Williamson, the then education secretary, rejected proposals to add more about Britain’s involvement in slavery and colonial past to the history curriculum with the words ‘we should be incredibly proud of our history’.¹¹ Studying history should never be about instilling pride or shame; it should be about encouraging understanding. We don’t need to look far in the world, only to Ukraine, for an extreme illustration of what can happen when imperial history and patriotism blur.

    It also felt serious when, in February 2019, Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg referred to one of the darkest episodes in imperial history, the death of around 50,000 South Africans,¹² mostly children, in British-run concentration camps during the South African War and claimed that ‘these people were interned for their safety’. He added that ‘[t]he death rate was exactly the same as Glasgow’,¹³ claims I cannot recall being made by any historian in years of reading on the subject. Indeed, the consensus among imperial historians who have been studying the subject for their professional lives has long been that General Kitchener authorised the construction of ‘concentration camps’ in South Africa with the intention of dividing the families of Boer commandos and severing their access to supplies, comfort, and food.

    These incidents demonstrate how imperial history is no longer confined to libraries, classrooms, and tutorials. It plays out in frontline politics and on the front pages of newspapers, with imperial historians regularly being vilified, and their work being wilfully misunderstood, in public. What has been driving the government’s involvement in this culture war? The Economist has suggested it does it simply because it comes easily—‘As the pandemic recedes, the government will have to make choices about the future role of the state and how to steady the nation’s finances, which cannot please both camps. How much easier, then, to put off such thorny decisions and play a little more Elgar.’¹⁴ Tim Shipman of The Sunday Times has argued that some Conservatives see it as a way of appealing to voters who are left wing on spending and public services but ‘culturally conservative’.¹⁵ Meanwhile, historian Michael Taylor has proposed that historians are handy hate figures now there’s not much to be gained from attacking the European Union: ‘After all, we cannot just hate Jean-Claude Juncker for ever.’¹⁶

    I suspect that Conservative politicians have been motivated by a combination of all these factors, and behind it all lies a misunderstanding of what history is, and what historians do. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak revealed as much when he was challenged in the Commons by the Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy on the issue of reparations for slavery and replied that ‘trying to unpick our history is … not something that we will focus our energies on’, seemingly not comprehending, or deciding not to comprehend, that ‘unpicking’ history is exactly what all historians do.¹⁷

    The impact of this culture war on individual historians has sometimes been devastating. It’s a matter of record and a cause of national shame that one of Britain’s most respected historians, David Olusoga, has to employ a bodyguard at some speaking events.¹⁸ I largely stopped doing events for adults for a period because the abuse had become routine.¹⁹ And then there is Professor Corinne Fowler, who co-authored a report for the National Trust in 2019 on its estates’ ties to the East India Company and transatlantic slavery and was subjected to a barrage of hate.²⁰

    Her entirely measured report concluded that a third of the National Trust’s properties had links to British colonialism, and, initially, the media reporting was reasonable. But then the report was condemned by Cabinet ministers, and a gathering of MPs within the Conservative Party, who call themselves the Common Sense Group, turned the spotlight on Fowler and her colleagues. In a speech to Parliament, Rees-Mogg claimed the report denigrated Churchill by mentioning his home, Chartwell (the report recalls, factually, that Churchill was Colonial Secretary and voted against Indian Independence). Despite the National Trust Act of 1907 clearly stating that the Trust ‘may acquire property … for purposes of public recreation resort or instruction’, The Daily Telegraph claimed that the Charity Commission could look into the National Trust on the grounds that the report was outside the Trust’s charitable remit.²¹

    From this point on, the onslaught expanded to Fowler’s other research project, Colonial Countryside, a child-led history and writing project steered by historians. The book was the focus of several attacks, including inaccurate reporting (The Daily Telegraph falsely claimed that she wrote in her book that ‘gardening is racist’) and The Daily Mail claiming incorrectly that the National Trust report was ‘error strewn’. Another inaccurate report claimed she had likened Japanese treatment of POWs to British colonialism (The Daily Mail), an article that provoked an avalanche of hate mail and threats. Fowler was denied the opportunity to respond in most of these articles. Senior government ministers and members of the ‘Common Sense Group’ briefed against her, and she says the whole experience made her feel as though she was passing ‘through the valley of the shadow of death’. Her safety was compromised; she occasionally needed to call the police and was, at times, unable to walk alone.²²

    It feels absurd to have to say it, but it’s not acceptable that historians should be terrorised in this way simply for doing their work. Discussion and free speech are essential. But threats, wilful misrepresentation of people you may disagree with, and intimidation are not. Equally concerning has been the intensifying enthusiasm among the imperially nostalgic to break the basic rules of conducting history in order to make their case. There are countless illustrations in this volume of the tactics employed, from the erection of straw men to attack, highly selective quoting, cherry-picking evidence, dismissing some witnesses to events but not others, and making false accusations, to ignoring context.

    But for me the single most troubling development has been the denial of the Tasmanian genocide, as outlined by Lyndall Ryan in Chapter 3. There is no one single truth about the British Empire, and as Stuart Ward explains in Chapter 11, there is nothing new or illegitimate about British historians wishing to justify and defend imperialism. Niall Ferguson and Jan Morris are among them. But while the former describes how ‘the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land were hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated’, as ‘one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British empire’ and ‘an event which truly merits the now overused term genocide’,²³ and while Morris cites the episode as the ‘cruellest’ illustration of the fact that ‘empire was race’,²⁴ we now live in an era where bestselling authors try their best to absolve Britons of responsibility.

    It’s depressing beyond belief that imperial nostalgia has become so extreme that its advocates feel the need to deny killing that has, through the consensus of experts, long been accepted as deliberate and largely tolerated, if not condoned, by the empire’s gov-ernmental and legal structure at local level. An episode which the celebrated art critic Robert Hughes has described as ‘the only true genocide in English colonial history’,²⁵ and which was employed as a case study by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin when he shaped the concept of ‘genocide’ after the Second World War.²⁶ History is argument. But the arguments have to be based in facts. The arguments also have to acknowledge the overwhelming consensus, when it exists, among people who have studied the subject for decades. It has become highly unfashionable to say it, but the work of experts counts, and this volume demonstrates why.

    INTRODUCTION

    THE TRUTH ABOUT COLONIAL HISTORY

    Alan Lester

    The contributors to this book are all academics who specialise in histories of colonialism.¹ Lately, our field has become a battlefield in a culture war, but we have not come together to fuel the divisions. We doubt that many committed participants in the culture war will change their minds about Britain’s colonial past because of the historical evidence we supply and our interpretation of it. The culture war is about politics rather than historical understanding. For its most avid participants, interpretations of the past are simply a weapon to be wielded in a struggle between progressive and reactionary philosophies and instincts.² The pitch and intensity of that social, cultural and political struggle, first identified by political scientists in the United States of the 1960s, has intensified since the financial crisis of 2008, with the resurgence of simplistic, populist ‘solutions’ to structural inequalities. In this politically charged context, our craft—colonial history—has been woven together with gender, sexuality, abortion, religion, race, environmentalism, migration and other potentially weaponised demarcations of difference.³ For culture warriors, where one stands on Britain’s colonial history is determined by one’s political orientation, not by serious research or even interest.

    The differences between the approaches we adopt as professional scholars of colonialism and the inclination of those engaged in culture war politics will never be absolute. None of us is capable of a God-like detachment from political affairs or unadulterated objectivity. But there are significant differences of degree. We became interested in the colonial past for a variety of reasons, but the main motivation we share is genuine curiosity about it. This is a different motivation from entering the fray directly to promote or defend political claims. There are significant differences among us, since academic history is still about questioning, debating, discussing and disagreement. But for us, interpretations of the past are not simply a battlefield on which one has to be aligned with one army or the other. The other main difference between us and those who comment regularly on colonial history as culture warriors is that we have spent our careers immersed in study of the subject. Collectively, the time dedicated to poring over archival documents, most of them left by British colonists and officials, and discussing one another’s interpretations of them, amounts to decades.

    The first aim of this book is to make the fruits of this historical work on aspects of British colonial history, many of them key points of contention in the culture war, more accessible.

    The second is to show how the work that we do, and that many of us have been doing for decades, is being misrepresented in the culture war. Gareth Bacon, a member of the Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs, for instance, claims that ‘traducing’ the ‘reputation of key figures in our country’s history’ calls ‘the very sense of what it is to be British … into question’. Our work, which inevitably entails examining the actions and beliefs of such figures, means for him and his colleagues that ‘Britain is under attack.’⁴ Nigel Biggar’s bestselling book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, granted welcoming publicity by The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator among other media outlets upon its publication in 2023, alleges that an unthinking ‘anti-colonialism’ is ‘fashionable’ in academia, ‘opening doors to posts, promotions and grants’. It argues that scholars like us are brain-washed by Frantz Fanon’s ‘preference for barbarous vitality and irresponsibility over civilised reason and restraint’ and even speculates that a ‘degenerate Christian sensibility’ results in ‘a perverse bid for supreme self-righteousness’, which in turn drives critiques of colonialism.⁵

    Biggar’s Colonialism is by no means the first popular defence of British colonialism’s morality. Historians and journalists set about rationalising the idea of empire in the late nineteenth century, and, as we will see, moral defences have resurfaced during times of imperial anxiety, for instance during the First World War and at the end of empire.⁶ Biggar, however, was explicit that his moral assessment arose from the contemporary culture war context. He explained that his interest in colonialism stemmed from being publicly criticised for defending the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford against the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Academic specialists in colonialism vehemently opposed a research project he set up to debate (although critics suggest to reassert) the morality of colonialism, and his publisher Bloomsbury decided not to proceed with his book, which was instead published two years later by William Collins.⁷ This all indicates an intolerant cancel culture emanating from those who insist upon British colonialism’s innate and indefensible violence and racism.⁸ It seems to justify the allegation that disinterested scholarship has been overtaken by a shared ‘anticolonial’ predisposition.

    Biggar had a precedent. An article by Canadian American Bruce Gilley calling for voluntary recolonisation, published in the journal Third World Quarterly in 2017, was withdrawn after threats were made against the journal’s editor. Gilley had presented data which appeared to show that formerly colonised countries had fared better in the long run than those which had remained independent. He blamed stalled progress on the nationalists who led many countries to independence, condemning them for turning their backs on the advantages of European colonial governance. Academics criticised Gilley’s methods, data and findings, but it was the threats from some activists that resulted in the article’s withdrawal.⁹ Those threats did the cause of academic freedom and debate tremendous harm. Refusing to engage with the lawful arguments of those with whom we disagree rarely helps to further knowledge and understanding, while of course personal threats to academics are unacceptable from any quarter.

    As Sathnam Sanghera indicates in this volume’s foreword, though, the pressure to ‘cancel’ academic research on colonialism now seems to come mainly from the populist right wing of the culture war, including Bacon’s colleagues in the Common Sense Group. Academics like Corinne Fowler, who led the National Trust report on its properties’ colonial connections, and the researchers at last uncovering evidence of institutional involvement in slavery, are targeted and their work declared ‘anti-British’.¹⁰ While The Daily Mail and The Daily Express wage a populist ‘war on woke’ with attacks on colonial scholars, The Daily Telegraph provides a platform for a clique of retired Oxbridge professors to write repeatedly about scholars of colonialism supposedly undermining history.¹¹ At the time of writing, it is the historian of technology Jenny Bulstrode who is receiving serious personal threats, as well as some more disinterested scholarly critique.¹² Much of the animosity against Bulstrode arises not from the intricacies of her well-publicised article itself (which argues that the British industrialist Henry Cort’s patented process of rendering scrap metal into valuable bar iron was stolen from enslaved African metallurgists) but from a furious response to the very idea that Black people may have played any kind of role in Britain’s Industrial Revolution and a manufactured outrage that such an analysis amounts to a criticism of all White Britons today.¹³

    Biggar and I have published our exchanges and engaged in a school debate.¹⁴ This book allows other specialist historians to engage specifically with Biggar’s popular moral defence of British colonialism and consider what has happened to their fields of research more broadly in recent culture war discourse. It gives us an opportunity to present the work of experts on some of the most controversial aspects of colonial history. We are intent on telling the truth based on the evidence we have analysed and debated over many years. We leave it to readers to judge the strength of our analysis and decide how those truths should be deployed in the dilemmas facing society today.

    Writing colonial history

    As Hilary Mantel wrote, history is

    no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.¹⁵

    But if there is no objective and comprehensive basis for history writing, what is it that distinguishes academic writing seeking impartiality from mere polemic?

    The answer lies in the guidelines academics use to assess credibility through peer review and scholarly debate. They should try to read the work of all other scholars who have written on their topic and reflect honestly upon their evidence and arguments. This means reading beyond only those scholars with whom they are disposed to agree. They should try to reflect equally upon the evidence at their disposal. For the most part, this takes the form of texts written during the period they are studying and retained in various archives and collections. Whether qualitative or quantitative, this evidence is very different from the ‘data’ that repeatable experimental observations can yield for most scientists.¹⁶

    Historians need to consider Mantel’s point that their sources of evidence are the writings of ‘fallible and biased witnesses’. Not only that, but also the point that these witnesses’ records were the ones selected by institutions and individuals for preservation. Equally valid insights from other witnesses were never written down or never preserved. Writing about most people in the past who were illiterate, and about whom we have only scraps of evidence, mainly from the perspective of their social ‘superiors’, is an especially different proposition from conducting an experiment and recording one’s observations. A loose analogy would be a chemist able to see only a tiny fraction of the periodic table, and that fraction compiled by someone with a preference for certain elements and a prejudice against others.

    This question of a far-from-neutral selectivity for document storage and preservation is especially acute in colonial contexts. A disproportionate number of the documents now available to colonial historians were generated by colonial officials, responsible for maintaining order over disenfranchised colonised people. They tended to look upon those people as potential sources of disorder. Their writings are redolent with stereotypes and infused with anxieties. While those anxieties and stereotypes are telling in themselves, historians cannot necessarily take their sources at their word.¹⁷ As Antoinette Burton puts it, ‘strategic antagonism toward sources is, or should be, the hallmark of all historians interested in a critical engagement with the past’.¹⁸

    While being healthily sceptical of the ‘evidence’ upon which they rely, competent and conscientious historians nevertheless try to develop their arguments as they engage with it through archival study and debate. They do not set out with an idea they intend to ‘prove’ and stick with it stubbornly in the face of contradictory evidence. Whether they trust a text’s version of reality or not, they should never ignore it or misrepresent what its writer was seeking to convey. They try not to cherry-pick words or sentences

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1