Acknowledgements
Thank you to my wonderful dad and brother for the love and support thats kept me going since the loss of my mum in 2019 and my diagnosis with Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis the following year.
I would not have got to this point without the PSC specialists and Gastro team at St Thomas Hospital and the hard-working staff of the Alan Apley ward. My sincerest gratitude for the work you do, your patience as I bombard you with questions, and your kindness. Thanks especially to Dr Sreelakshmi Kotha and Dr Phillip Berry. My deepest gratitude also to the Liver specialists at Kings College Hospital who have taken care of my surgical needs, and especially to Ms Cortes.
I am grateful to Gurdeep Mattu of SunRise Publishing for the initial approach to write this book. Its taken me in a new direction at just the right time. The untiring anti-racist activist Jacqui Stanford and Adam Smethurst also pushed me in that direction. Thank you.
I am very grateful to the mums and dads club of Uckfield for friendship and support, and for helping me think how best to put things. Not all of them agree with me, but life would be boring if they did. In alphabetical order of mum first, so as not to indicate preference that might come back to bite me: Debbie and Nige, Jen and Ian, Jo and Nick, Jessica and Alex, the late and much missed Karen, and David, Kim and Mog, Mel and Darren, Net and Pat, Verity and Rich, and Zoe and Lee.
Ian McGukin has been a great cycling friend, encouraging me to keep riding as and when I can and lending me some beautiful coffee table books about bikes when I havent been up to reading much else.
Ian and Chloe, Matt and Fee and Ewan and Sarah have been there to support me morally and practically and Ill always be grateful.
At work, I am forever in debt to Dave Ockwell and Buzz Harrison, Fae Dussart and Simon Rycroft, for covering for me when I couldnt teach, utterly selflessly. Thanks to Fae also for reading a draft and helping me to put some things right.
It has been a real pleasure, as well as a marvellous learning opportunity, to work with Nicola Thomas and the Exeter team on the reinterpretation of the Sir Redvers Buller statue.
Over the years Catherine Hall has exemplified for me what it is to be a scholar of empire and Britain. It helps to have a role model like her.
Above all, thank you for putting up with me Jo, Daisy, Evan, Alfred (and Nellie, who has kept me exercising when I needed to). Youre what makes everything worthwhile.
Preface
Over the last year or two we have seen people in Boris Johnsons government energise an unprecedented and disturbing culture war. Culture war is a phenomenon first defined by James Davison Hunter in the USA, in which Politics becomes a proxy for cultural positions that simply wont brook any kind of dissent or argument. It began in the 1960s, with conservative institutions resisting the advances in civil rights for women and African Americans. There, it has culminated with Donald Trumps populist backlash after Barack Obamas Presidency. Here in the UK, a buoyant, post-Brexit, populist wing of the Conservative Party, with relentlessly vociferous supporters in the press and a handful of supporters in academia, are waging their own rhetorical war on those who propose antiracist, environmental and gender related reforms, using the word woke as a sneering, catch-all descriptor for such people. Young people who are sensitive to these issues are dismissed as snowflakes and accused of adopting a cancel culture by daring to speak out. A key part of these populist culture warriors activities has been an attack on those who would undermine a long-cherished view of the British Empire. This book, based on thirty years of collaborative research, writing, and scholarship on that Empire, is written in response.
For decades, even centuries, British apologists for the Empire have claimed it was an engine of globalisation, free trade, the beneficial spread of the English language, economically vital infrastructures and new ideas of governance. These ideas have been articulated since the middle of the nineteenth century, when the British Empire emerged from a period of transition after the Napoleonic War, grew and consolidated, and when the technological changes of steam and telegraph, pioneered in Europe and the USA, were harnessed worldwide. Britons have been assured ever since, in popular books, the press and on TV, that their empire was good not just for them and their numerous collaborators, but generally, for the people they colonised and their descendants. This is the powerful national myth that I believed growing up, and that todays culture warriors want to cling to. Like all such national mythologies, it has germs of truth, but it is rooted in the propaganda of the imperial period itself.
Both historians enquiries into how the British Empire actually operated and Black Lives Matter activists focus on its enduring racial inequalities, render this myth no longer tenable in contemporary Britain. It is a story that not only tells nothing like the whole truth of the Empire, but which serves actively to divide White from Black Britons. It stands in the way of a better Britain.
An enormous documentary record, spread across The National Archives, the British Library, national and local state libraries across the entire former Empire and beyond, and hundreds of private collections in the UK, and the overwhelming majority of historical experts on colonialism, now testify that: British colonisation involved great violence against people of colour around the world; that colonised people of colour were subordinated to White colonists (for example they had to show deference to White colonists who always enjoyed the highest status and were protected by colonial governments from slipping into the ranks of the impoverished, they incurred more severe judicial penalties, and they suffered, universally, from restricted voting rights; that most White Britons considered it common sense that they were superior to people of colour (not necessarily biologically but culturally) an attitude that we call racism today; that as Empire retreated and Britons of colour came to the UK in greater numbers, they met a widespread view that Black citizens did not belong here and faced racism; and that certain British politicians have amplified and stoked this view of racially exclusive belonging beyond the end of Empire.
There is, then, a far more obvious characteristic of the British Empire than its selective spreading of economic and political opportunity among White Britons and the minority of people of colour, including Indian elites, who accepted the role of subordinate partners in their rule. It is striking to anyone who has done any serious research on it. The British Empire was a vehicle for establishing, maintaining and justifying White supremacy on a global scale, and for persuading generations of Britons that ours is a White island that keeps colonised subjects of colour in their place overseas. It was not the only such vehicle, since the other European empires of the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries had similar effects, but Britains was the largest, the longest lasting, the most influential across multiple continents, and has left the most powerful legacies. The British Empires global presence is the main reason why todays Britain is so multi-cultural and we need to take the divergent experiences of Empire associated with our diverse communities into account in our national history.
As I will show in this book, the benefits that apologists for this Empire point to free trade, linguistic convergence, railways, schools and participatory governance operated overwhelmingly on behalf of White Britons for most of the empires existence, even if they also benefited some among subordinate elites. The British beneficiaries of Empire included many of those who stayed at home as well as their kin who emigrated to become colonists and settlers with Black servants, free or cheap land and exalted social status. The costs of colonialism were racked up largely, although never exclusively, against British subjects of colour who were consistently denied the rights of White Britons.
