Britain: Imperial Nostalgia
By Seumas Milne* Le Monde diplomatique
May 2005
Barely a generation after the ignominious end of the
British empire, there is now a quiet but concerted
drive to rehabilitate it, by influential newspapers,
conservative academics, and at the highest level of
government. Just how successful this campaign has
already been was demonstrated in January when Gordon
Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Tony Blair’s
heir apparent, declared in east Africa that “the days
of Britain having to apologise for its colonial
history are over” (1). His remark, pointedly made to
the Daily Mail - which is leading the rehabilitation
chorus - in the run-up to May’s general election, was
clearly no heat-induced gaffe.
Speaking four months earlier at the British Museum, an
Aladdin’s cave of looted treasures from Britain’s
former colonies, Brown insisted: “We should be proud .
. . of the empire” (2). Even Blair, who was prevailed
upon to cut a similar line from a speech during his
first successful election campaign in 1997, has never
gone quite this far (3).
Brown’s extraordinary remarks passed with little
comment in the rest of the British media. But the
significance of a Labour chancellor’s support for what
would until recently have been regarded as fringe
rightwing revisionism was doubtless not lost on his
target audience. This is a man who, despite his
neoliberal enthusiasms and tense alliance with Blair,
has always liked to project a more egalitarian, social
democratic image than his New Labour rival. His
imperial turn will have given an unwelcome jolt to
anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back
from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of
intervention that have punctuated Blair’s eight-year
premiership. By the same token, his determination (in
advance of his own expected leadership bid) to wrap
himself in the Union Jack - dubbed “the butcher’s
apron” by the Irish socialist James Connolly - will
have impressed sections of the establishment whose
embrace he is seeking.
Brown’s demand for an end to colonial apologies was
part of an attempt to define a modern sense of British
identity based around values of fair play, freedom and
tolerance. What modernity and such values have to do
with the reality of empire might not be immediately
obvious. But even more bizarre is the implication that
Britain is forever apologising for its empire or the
crimes committed under it. As with other European
former colonial powers, nothing could be further from
the truth. There have been no apologies. Official
Britain put decolonisation behind it, in a state of
blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to come
to terms with what took place. In the years following
the British army’s bloody withdrawal from Aden in
1967, there was little public debate about how Britain
had maintained its grip on a quarter of the world’s
population until the middle of the 20th century.
That began to change in the aftermath of the collapse
of the Soviet Union. Rehabilitation of empire was
initially raised in the early 1990s at the time of the
ill-fated United States intervention in Somalia, used
by maverick voices in both the US and Britain to float
the “idealistic” notion of new colonies or United
Nations trusteeships in Africa. The Wall Street
Journal even illustrated an editorial on the subject
with a picture of the British colonialist Lord
Kitchener, who slaughtered the Mahdi’s followers in
Sudan a century before (4).
Under the impact of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s,
the cause of “humanitarian intervention” was
increasingly taken up by more liberal voices across
the western world. While the liberal imperialism of
the late 19th century had been justified by the need
to spread Christian civilisation and trade, now it was
to be human rights, markets and good governance. At
the height of the Kosovo war, Blair issued what
amounted to a call for a new wave of worldwide
intervention based on a “subtle blend” of
self-interest and moral purpose. Within a year, he put
this “doctrine of international community” into
practice in the former colony of Sierra Leone, where
British troops were sent back after a 39-year absence
to intervene in a protracted, bloody civil war.
But it was the September 2001 attacks on New York and
Washington and the subsequent US-led takeover of the
former British imperial zone of Afghanistan that
finally outed into the political mainstream the policy
that had until then dared not speak its name. By
spring 2002 Blair’s foreign policy adviser and Afghan
envoy, Robert Cooper (now working for Javier Solana at
the European Union council of ministers), published a
pamphlet making the case for “a new kind of
imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights
and cosmopolitan views” (5), while the prime minister
privately argued in favour of military intervention in
the former British colonies of Zimbabwe and Burma.
Such political adventurism has had to be at least
temporarily reined as a result of the political and
human disaster of the Iraq war and occupation. But the
more favourable climate for this retro reactionary
chic created by western military interventions has
been seized by Britain’s conservative commentators and
historians, such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts,
both to champion the cause of the new imperialism and
rewrite the history of the colonial past. Ferguson is
an open advocate of a formal US-run global empire and
his defence of British colonialism, notably in his
book Empire (6), as the forerunner of 21st-century
free-market globalisation, was clearly echoed by
Brown’s praise of the “traders, adventurers and
missionaries” who built the empire. Roberts is an open
advocate of the recolonisation of Africa and insists
that “Africa has never known better times than during
British rule”. When the South African president
recently denounced Churchill and the British empire
for its “terrible legacy” in Khartoum, Roberts
blithely told the BBC that the empire had brought
“freedom and justice” to a benighted world (7).
It would be interesting to hear how Roberts - or Brown
- balances such grotesque claims with the latest
research on the huge scale of atrocities committed by
British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in
colonial Kenya in the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held
in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the
terrorisation of villages, electric shocks, beatings
and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkins’s book
Britain’s Gulag (8) - and well over 100,000 deaths.
This was a time when British soldiers were paid five
shillings (equal to $9 in today’s money) for each
Kikuyu male they killed, when they nailed the limbs of
African guerrillas to crossroads posts. And when they
were photographed holding severed heads of Malayan
communist “terrorists” in another war that cost over
10,000 lives.
Even in the late 1960s, as veterans described in a
recent television documentary (9), British soldiers
thrashed, tortured and murdered their way through
Aden’s Crater City; one former squaddie explained that
he couldn’t go into details because of the risk of war
crimes prosecutions. All in the name of civilisation.
The sense of continuity with today’s Iraq could not be
clearer.
Such evidence is a timely corrective to the
comfortable British mythology that, in contrast to
France and other European colonial powers, Britain
decolonised in a peaceful and humane manner. It’s not
as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated
blemishes on a glorious record of freedom and good
governance, as Ferguson and other contemporary
imperial torchbearers would have us believe. Britain’s
empire was in reality built on genocide, vast ethnic
cleansing, slavery, rigorously enforced racial
hierarchy and merciless exploitation. As the Cambridge
historian Richard Drayton puts it: “We hear a lot
about the rule of law, incorruptible government and
economic progress - the reality was tyranny,
oppression, poverty and the unnecessary deaths of
countless millions of human beings” (10).
Some empire apologists claim that, however brutal the
first phase might have been, the 19th- and
20th-century story was one of liberty and economic
progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th-century
and early 20th-century India up to 30 million died in
famines, as British administrators insisted on the
export of grain (as they had done during the Irish
famine of the 1840s) and courts ordered 80,000
floggings a year. Four million died in the avoidable
Bengal famine of 1943 - there have been no such
famines since independence.
What is now Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of
the world before the British arrived and deliberately
destroyed its cotton industry. When India’s Andaman
islands were devastated by December’s tsunami, who
recalled that 80,000 political prisoners had been held
in camps there in the early 20th-century, routinely
experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it’s
not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast,
describing the British empire as an “inestimable
factor of value”, even if it had been acquired with
“force and often brutality” (11).
There has been no serious attempt in Britain to face
up to this record or the long-term impact of
colonialism on the societies it ruled, let alone
trials of elderly colonial administrators now in
Surrey retirement homes. The British national school
curriculum has more or less struck the empire and its
crimes out of history. The standard modern world
history textbook for 16-year-olds has chapter after
chapter on the world wars, the cold war, British and
US life, Stalin’s terror and the monstrosities of
Nazism - but scarcely a word on the British and other
European empires which carved up most of the world, or
the horrors they perpetrated.
What are needed are not apologies or expressions of
guilt so much as education, acknowledgment, some
measure of reparation and an understanding that
barbarity is the inevitable consequence of attempts to
impose foreign rule on subject peoples. Like most
historical controversies, the argument about empire is
as much about the future as the past. Those who write
colonial cruelty out of 20th-century history want to
legitimise the new imperialism, now bogged down in
another colonial war in Iraq - just as those who
demonise past attempts to build an alternative to
capitalist society are determined to prove that there
is none. If Brown really wants to champion British
fair play, and create a new relationship with Africa,
he would do better to celebrate those who campaigned
for colonial freedom rather than the racist despotism
they fought against.
About the Author: Seumas Milne is comment editor and a
columnist on the Guardian, London, and author of ‘The
Enemy Within - the Secret War Against the Miners’
(Verso, London, 2004).
(1) Daily Mail, London, 15 January 2005.
(2) Daily Mail, 14 September 2004.
(3) John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, Free Press, London,
2003.
(4) Wall Street Journal, 8 and 21 January 1993.
(5) Robert Cooper, Reordering the World, Foreign
Policy Centre, 2002.
(6) Niall Ferguson, Empire - How Britain Made the
Modern World, Allen Lane, London, 2003.
(7) Daily Mail, 8 January 2005
(8) Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag, Jonathan Cape,
2005.
(9) Empire Warriors, BBC 2, 19 November 2004.
(10) Speech to the Royal Geographical Society, 1 June
2004.
(11) Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, Verso, 2001.