Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

Empire might have made us permanently internationally minded, but it may have also made us insular and closed-minded once we get abroad.

British missionaries once headed out in droves to spread Christianity across the empire, but nowadays the average unbelieving Briton is more likely to be on the receiving end of such zeal, The Times reporting in March 2016 that ‘Christians from converted countries are now engaging in “reverse mission” to reintroduce God to an increasingly secular Britain.

In the 1970s we had the dilemma of what to do about 60,000 Ugandan Asians and 23,000 Kenyan Asians, in the 1980s we had ‘race riots’ which were more often than not inspired by white aggression directed at ethnic communities, while, more recently, we have had the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Windrush scandal. Ian Sanjay Patel has observed that ‘perceived crises related to immigration and perceived crises related to the end of empire’ have been ‘highly correlated (although not tied by direct causation)’.

In The Colonial Present, the geographer Derek Gregory sees the influence of empire in Western escapades in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, arguing that the war on terror is a ‘violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of “us” and “them,” “civilization” and “barbarism,” “Good” and “Evil”’, reminding us that Britain embarked on numerous Afghan wars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to keep Tsarist Russia from its doorstep in India, and highlighting the remarks of journalists who have expressed distinctly imperial sentiments about contemporary wars.

Others, such as Jeremy Paxman, have observed more generally that Britain’s prime ministers cannot resist adopting an imperial tone of voice nor can they ‘resist the temptation to lecture other governments’.

‘British politicians often felt moral pressure to intervene where states were failing or non-existent, most extensively in India and Africa.’

In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.’

This defence is one you could swallow, I suppose, if you had only a superficial understanding of imperial history.

It would be a happy day, he stated in 1856, ‘when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia’.

Lizzie Collingham estimates that as many as 16 million Indians died in famines between 1875 and 1914. ‘The colonial government did very little to alleviate the misery, insisting that this was nature’s way of keeping a check on the burgeoning Indian population,’ she writes.

In summary, even if you give Brexiteers the benefit of the doubt, concede that their historical wistfulness is more about nostalgia for nineteenth-century free-trading prowess rather than nostalgia about empire per se, you ignore the fact that free trade at that time was actually imperial. You also ignore that some of the deadliest calamities in Britain’s history of empire, some leaving millions dead, happened in the name of free trade.

is reflected in the global vision of our increasingly stretched armed forces, with Britain spending about the same proportion of national wealth on its military now as it did in the nineteenth century (2 to 3 per cent, according to Robert Tombs),15 the Royal Navy website citing ‘deploying globally’ as one of it missions – ‘Our versatility gives us the freedom to deploy anywhere in the world’ – and the army asserting, despite its modest size, that ‘we are persistently engaged around the world to help shape the environment and prevent conflict in the future.’

After the Prince Regent visited in 1807, Sezincote is said to have inspired the design of the Brighton Pavilion, which, in turn, has significance for British–Indian relations as being the place where, between 1914 and 1916, some 2,300 Indian soldiers who had been wounded on the battlefields of the Western Front were treated.

‘The wealth of the West was built on Africa’s exploitation’ and arguing that ‘without Africa and its Caribbean plantation extensions, the modern world as we know it would not exist.’

And here, in 1937, we have George Orwell writing in The Road to Wigan Pier that ‘the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa.

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.’

Imperial figures also observed this as a fact of empire, with General Charles Napier, who became Commander in Chief in India, declaring in 1844 that ‘our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money – lucre: a thousand millions sterling are said to have been squeezed out of India in the last sixty years. Every shilling of this has...

Stephanie Barczewski has shown in her fascinating study Country Houses and the British Empire, 1700–1930 how the global history of empire is woven into the history of our most famous houses, with around 1,100 individual landed estates in Britain being purchased by men who ‘made their money in the empire between 1700 and 1930’, accounting, depending on whose numbers you choose and how you define imperial wealth, for between 6 and 16 per cent of all the country houses in Britain.

Williams also presented what has since been termed the ‘decline theory of abolition’: the idea that Britain gave up on slavery, not for moral reasons, but because the profits of the slave-based economy had entered into an irreversible decline.

with Disraeli remarking in a famous speech made in Crystal Palace in 1872 that, far from being an asset to Britain, ‘it has been shown with precise, with mathematical demonstration, that there never was a jewel in the crown of England that was so costly as the possession of India’.

But why, despite the fact Britain mines very little gold itself, is London at the centre of the international bullion trade?

The screenwriters for the hit show Succession had their fictional media mogul Logan Roy put it crudely in series one when he surveyed a stately home and remarked: ‘I mean, look at this fucking place … Slaves. Cotton. Sugar. This country’s nothing but an off-shore laundry for turning evil into hard currency.’

In the end, the Brits settled on, among other things, blowing Indians from guns – the rebel bound to the mouth of the cannon before it was fired – which had the additional result, through the scattering of body parts, of violating various religious and caste sensibilities and denying the families a proper funeral. A relative of the Nawab of Farrukhabad was arrested, tortured, choked with pork and hanged.

Reading accounts of what happened I find myself not only feeling sick at the inhumanity of the acts, but also queasy at the way some British historians still write about the events.

Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery’),

Yes, the colonized also committed acts of vicious racial violence, but they were, more often than not, responses to dehumanizing colonization, and the facts got routinely exaggerated by the British.

Kipling in 1899 popularized the idea, through a poem, of ‘the White Man’s Burden’ – presenting the notion that whites had a moral duty to rule over non-whites and encourage their cultural, social and economic development.

As colonization expanded, so did the European fascination with the ‘other’, people considered ludicrous characters of colour.

I challenge anyone to read about how gangs of Teddy Boys ‘cruised the streets’ in the 1950s with iron bars, table legs and knives, looking for West Indians, Africans or Asians to assault, or Paki-bashing skinhead gangs who murdered taxi drivers, students and restaurant workers in the 1970s and 1980s, and not be taken back to the atmosphere of the 1857 Uprising or the Morant Bay Rebellion.

Throughout empire, the British found ways not only to distinguish themselves from brown people, but to distinguish types of brown people from one another.

Needless to say, there was no consistency in this absurd generalizing. As Tayyab Mahmud explains, when 1.5 million Indians went overseas as indentured labour between 1834 and 1920, filling the gaps created by the abolition of slavery in the European colonies in the early nineteenth century, they endured being stereotyped in often entirely contradictory ways.

The reason we are institutionally racist as a nation is that our society grew out of the racist institution of British empire. It doesn’t explain all our racial injustices, but you can hear the echoes of imperialism in the almost daily headlines highlighting racial injustice and inequality

Of course we like to remember the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of the Nazis, and sometimes even the success of multiculturalism and our history of anti-racism and the social justice campaigns it inspired, but we also dominated the slave trade for a significant period, ran one of the biggest white supremacist enterprises in the history of humanity and dabbled in genocide, and the stain of it has seeped into many aspects of our contemporary culture, from the jobs market to the sinister re-emergence of violent white supremacy.

@cholenacree who tweeted: ‘Do I believe everything happens for a reason? Yes. And the reason is colonialism.’

After Empire, Paul Gilroy reflects upon the harrowing effect that colonial violence may have had on the colonized, pointing out that while ‘the practice of blasting prisoners to death by tying their bodies over the mouths of cannon’ was meant to terrorize and subjugate Indians, it also had a dehumanizing effect on the British: ‘The vastly more interesting issue of what this grisly spectacle might have meant and done to its British organizers, spectators, and enthusiasts gets smuggled out of sight,’ as does the experience of ‘onlookers who were covered by blood and fragments of flesh … to say nothing of the plight of an unfortunate bystander who was hit by one of the vanished prisoners’ flying heads that, singed but intact, fell back to earth from a height of several hundred feet.’

jingoism

short, there is a popular view that if you don’t celebrate the empire you’re ‘anti-British’. And along with the demand that I be more ‘grateful’ for what Britain has given me (which I get whenever I comment critically on any aspect of British life), the suggestion that I am insulting Britain has been a common reaction to any comments I have made in public about the dark chapters of British empire, a reflex which is in itself, as we established a few chapters ago, a symptom of imperialism.

As Robert Saunders has put it: ‘It is probably only possible to be nostalgic for empire if you forget most of its history.’ We have already touched upon some illustrations of such amnesia: as a nation we routinely forget the imperial precedents for modern wars; as a society, we forget not only that black and Asian people were invited to work here, but that many came as citizens; we forget more generally that Britain was built on immigration, Robert Winder observing that ‘Britain has an amnesiac streak … when it comes to acknowledging the immigrant blood in her veins’; the imperial nature of the wealth that built and sustained many stately homes was deliberately concealed by owners and has been wilfully forgotten since.

Indeed, the most serious and painful omission of my education was that during the years of being taught about world wars and sitting through endless remembrance services, no one cared to tell us, a racially diverse student body, that our people were there too.

The Guardian gathered GCSE exam data in 2020 and found that only up to 11 per cent of GCSE students are studying modules that refer to black people’s contribution to Britain and less than one in ten are studying a module which concentrates on empire.

Meanwhile, a campaign group pushing for the mandatory teaching of empire in schools called The Impact of Omission has been conducting an ongoing online survey and as of autumn 2020 has found that while 86 per cent of people were taught about the Tudors at school, and 72 per cent were taught about the Battle of Hastings and 73 per cent learned about the Great Fire of London, just 37 per cent were taught about transatlantic slavery, just 10 per cent were taught about the role of slavery in the British Industrial Revolution and just 8 per cent learned about the British colonization of Africa.

As the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel put it in a tweet: ‘If British people understood colonial history half as well as they understand the details of Henry VIII’s wives, Britain would be a different country.’

There is perhaps an even starker illustration of imperial amnesia, and how it mingles with nostalgia to produce dysfunctional attitudes to empire, in Britain’s obsession with India’s railways. It feels impossible in the third decade of the third millennium to turn on the TV on any evening and not happen across a show like Indian Hill Railways, Great Indian Railway Journeys, India’s Frontier Railways or Extreme Railway Journeys in which an invariably white presenter travels on trains in India and informs us how they were a gift British empire bestowed upon India.

the former British Museum Director Neil MacGregor once put it: ‘What is very remarkable about German history as a whole is that the Germans use their history to think about the future, where the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves.’

As the character Whisky Sisodia remarks in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, ‘The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means.’

The British profited from slavery for many decades, brutalized and exploited millions, paid compensation of £20 million to former slave owners while offering the slaves nothing – but the moment Britain abolished it, abolition became the main narrative.11 As Eric Williams famously put it in 1964: ‘The British historians wrote almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing

A fifth reason we struggle, as a country, to accept what happened with British empire is that the public have arguably never been particularly aware of empire in Britain.

In 1860 John Bright observed that ‘the English people … are very slow and very careless about everything that does not immediately affect them.

In the UK, there are many more monuments to notable men and women who owned slaves, and to William Wilberforce, the white man most strongly associated with abolition, than to the actual victims and survivors of enslavement. The human victims of this crime against humanity have been forgotten.

We are not alone in this refusal to face up to difficult facts. The aforementioned 2020 YouGov survey of international attitudes to colonialism found that the Dutch are actually even more proud of their former empire than us, with half of Dutch people saying their old empire – which counted South Africa and Indonesia among its territories – is something to be proud of rather than ashamed of.