To Empire and Beyond: A Critique
Shashi Tharoor has made a welcome intervention in the national discourse about the British Empire. Now, we must dispel the historical amnesia.
James Whittaker and Shameera Lin
It all started with an incisive speech made by former UN diplomat and famed Indian politician Shashi Tharoor at the Oxford Union. Currently viewed over 4.2 million times, it has become a must-watch for those wishing to understand the true face of British imperialism. Over the past few months, in particular, Tharoor has been stirring the pot of controversy — launching a public crusade against apologists of the British Empire. Despite invoking the ire of Churchill admirers and unabashed patriots alike, Tharoor is absolutely right: it is time to have an open and honest discussion regarding the ills of the Empire. The Brits got way too big for their boots, but no Empire is too big for the boot.
In an interview viewed over 9 million times on Facebook, Tharoor criticises the ‘historical amnesia’ the British Empire had engendered, adding, ‘You don’t really teach colonial history’. There is an undeniable fixation on the Tudors and Nazi Germany in the national syllabus. Discussion of the Empire, on the other hand, is conspicuously absent. And despite lacking a proper education about the history of Empire, polling suggests that British people are overwhelmingly “proud” of it — a sizeable minority even wishing that Britain had maintained its imperial status. David Cameron is among those openly proud of British imperialism, refusing to apologise for the crimes and plunder of the Empire. Likewise, Gordon Brown unashamedly announced: ‘the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over’. In the academic world, Niall Ferguson is the most renowned embodiment of smug imperial pride. His histories draw on counterfactuals to deflect criticism from the reality of British imperialism: ‘What if there was another global empire worse than Britain’s?’. Such speculative whataboutery is in large part dismissed by serious historians as a reductive attempt to rewrite history from the perspective of the powerful and the victorious. In Empire, Ferguson used the oldest trick in the colonialists’ book: frame your empire as more liberal and progressive than any in history. Despite all this, Ferguson was tasked with rewriting the history syllabus through his Eurocentric rose-tinted glasses by Michael Gove, Education Secretary in the coalition government. Even British film and TV — most notably period dramas — remain overwhelming uncritical and unapologetic of the Empire. Recent release Victoria and Abdul, for example, ludicrously presents Queen Victoria as a sassy, anti-racist ‘woke monarch’. Rather than a direct result of imperial policy, the ‘famine in India’ and ‘trouble in Ireland’ are presented as if they were regrettable, natural disasters too ‘depressing’ to discuss at the dinner table.The British public conversation about the Empire therefore only serves to bolster Tharoor’s point: historical amnesia exists where there should be clarity and critique.
An apropos example of this historical amnesia is the obscene cult of Churchill, which recently cumulated in his dour picture being emblazoned across the new five-pound note. In The Churchill Factor, Boris Johnson sought to appropriate the cult of Churchill in aid of his own leadership ambitions and claim the mantle of proud British intransigence in the face of adversity. Yet what defines Churchill most of all is his commitment to British imperialism.
Even in the 1930s, Churchill’s Conservative contemporaries, like Stanley Baldwin, were slightly alarmed by his hardcore and racist colonialism. The public veneration of Churchill also obfuscates his role in the 1943 Bengal famine, which killed 4.3 million Indians and led Tharoor to compare him to the twentieth century’s bloodiest tyrants. Not an inaccurate claim, when one considers his dismissal of Indians as ‘a beastly people with a beastly religion’. Churchill went on to blame the famine on Indians for ‘breeding like rabbits’, callously disregarding the blatant plundering of Indian resources by the Empire at the time. There is the matter of his refusal to export food to India — all while Australian wheat sailed past Indian cities to form stockpiles, to ease post-war strain on Britain. Moreover, Churchill made a deliberate decision to stop ships docking in Calcutta from disembarking their cargo. As Amartya Sen succinctly writes, the Bengal famine ‘was not the reflection of a remarkable over-all shortage of foodgrains in Bengal’. Looking past Churchill’s implicit involvement in such a dark period in history would be counterproductive to the notion of honest discourse about the Empire.
Beyond the Churchillian wartime era, Britain subtly continued its colonial meddling in the postwar period. British colonial rule only served to deepen racial tensions, irrespective of location. Race relations in modern Peninsular Malaysia, for instance, have been effectively tarnished by the insidious strain of British Malayan rule. As Charles Hirschman astutely notes, direct colonial rule ‘constructed a social and economic order structured by race’.
The ‘divide et impera’ strategy employed by the British in Malaya contained an undeniable racial element: the Chinese were largely confined to the mines and side streets, Indians belonged in estates and Malays were stuck in villages. And through the creation of the Federated Malay States to ensure centralisation, the Empire further propagated its rapacious hold on the tin and rubber industries whilst exacerbating racial stratification. This carried forward to the Malayan Emergency which was conceived by British capitalism in order to prevent decolonisation and allow mining of natural resources, particularly rubber, to continue undisturbed. In modern-day Malaysia, the spectre of imposed British social order continues to haunt Malaysians in spite of rapid development in recent years — the consequences are irrevocable, and there is a disheartening lack of accountability from the British side.
Critiquing the Empire is also particularly germane in the context of Brexit, a symptom of the post-imperial malaise that remains integral to the British psyche. In lieu of European integration, Liam Fox unveiled plans for ‘Empire 2.0’ which was predicated on the post-imperial notion that Britain could once again turn to its commonwealth. Moving beyond, in Tom Whyman’s words, ‘an understanding of imperial history derived largely from images on vintage biscuit tins’, has never been of greater importance. As the former head of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, points out: ‘Britain forgets its past.’ More needs to be done to encourage a cogent understanding of the Empire. After dispelling the hazy, romanticised amnesia that surrounds the British Empire, it becomes increasingly apparent that Tharoor’s intervention is more than welcome. In fact, it is a necessity.
