The challenge of writing histories of the British empire

Readers can hear from experts who have worked for many years to develop their expertise of these areas. And Sathnam Sanghera, who has been able to engage the public on these issues more successfully than many academics, kindly agreed to write a foreword.

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Were you conscious of the controversy when you were writing and editing the book, and is it a factor you have to bear in mind on a personal level more generally?

Sathnam Sanghera: I’ve found myself in the middle of the culture war on empire, and the consequences can be quite dark. [Historian and broadcaster] David Olusoga has to employ a bodyguard at some events, while Corinne Fowler – who wrote the National Trust report on colonialism – was so concerned for her safety that she had to call the police and became scared to leave the house. I stopped doing events for a while because of the abuse I was facing. And all because of what we’ve written about history! So my involvement in this project is definitely inspired by personal experience.

Bronwen Everill: I think that we’re at an interesting moment for this topic. Despite the fact that experts have been working on it for decades, much of that work hasn’t made its way into the wider public consciousness. Historians have moved the discussion on empire in all sorts of interesting new directions over many years, but even though the topic is currently having a cultural moment, people aren’t necessarily aware that all of that has been going on behind the scenes. So I think it’s important to show that this isn’t anything new or mysterious, but instead part of a wider, long-term conversation.

Alan, you highlighted the range of experts involved in the book. Were you also able to get a range of viewpoints on empire? Some readers may look at the book’s title – The Truth About Empire – and think: is there a single truth?

Alan Lester: This is a subject I agonised over in the book’s introduction: what do we mean by ‘truth’? How close can we get to it? Historians disagree about those issues. But it comes down to the questions we ask, the sources we use to answer them, and how we interpret those answers – whether we come to them with open minds and an agenda driven by curiosity, or whether we’re cherry picking bits of history to make a political case.

Contributors to the book have different politics and philosophical perspectives on the past. But whether we’re conservative or more radical in our approach to history, we share an open-minded curiosity about the past and a good-faith engagement with the sources.

Some groups – History Reclaimed, for instance – regard academia and the media as being dominated by leftwing viewpoints. Did you bear that in mind when you were working on the book?

Alan Lester: It’s important to understand that history as a discipline and public awareness of history have changed. For a long time, history – and particularly imperial history – has been dominated by justifications for empire, and by white male British perspectives on how it was run and how beneficial it was for its subjects. One change is that more women scholars have entered the field, particularly historians interested in aspects of gender that never got a look-in before.

There are also more scholars of colour – though still nowhere near enough – and more appreciation of what empire meant for those on its receiving end: for black and brown subjects of empire, rather than the white administrators. So the discipline has become more open and more inclusive, and started asking a wider range of questions of the past that have yielded more accurate, verifiable answers.

David Olusoga has to employ a bodyguard at some events, while Corinne Fowler – who wrote the National Trust report on colonialism – was so concerned for her safety that she had to call the police and became scared to leave the house

Bronwen Everill: I appreciate what Alan’s saying in terms of women and people of colour expanding academic horizons – but as a woman, I don’t have to write women’s history. Equally, if you are a person of colour writing about the history of empire, you don’t have to necessarily write about the subjects of empire – you could write about its administrators.

I think part of the problem with the framing that some groups want to impose is that they seem to be saying that, as more diverse groups of people become involved in its study, it will erode the ability of other groups to participate in the conversation. But that’s a mistaken idea of what historians do: if you are interested in history, you can study any aspect of history. You don’t have to study only people who look like you, or only people with your politics.

Is there a difference between public and academic perceptions of the topics you cover in this book?

Bronwen Everill: I think there’s now more widespread public acceptance of the idea that some aspects of the British empire were bad, particularly economic exploitation. Yet people sometimes look back on the trade in enslaved people and say, ‘okay, the British empire had slave trading, but it also worked to end the slave trade after 1808 – so isn’t that the good side of empire?’.

The belief that it was the first nation to do so is used to argue the case that Britain was a world leader in using its empire for good, and that it forced everybody else to get rid of the slave trade too. In fact, other places banned the slave trade first.

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Sathnam Sanghera: There are two profound problems with the way in which the public understand history. One is that a lot of people leave school thinking that history is a fixed succession of facts. And the other is that so many people view British history through feeling, either pride or shame, when I don’t think it should be seen through feeling at all, but approached as an intellectual exercise.

Bronwen, your chapter looks at slavery. Are there public misconceptions you’d like to see changed, or old views of slavery that still manifest today?

Bronwen Everill: Some of those balance-sheet arguments I outlined above – which you find even in academia – have led to the idea that Britain rescued Africans from themselves. The idea is that the nation exerted its moral duty in the 19th century to teach Africans not to participate in the slave trade. But, actually, there’s plenty of evidence of anti-slave-trade movements in Africa long before the British abolition movement.

Yet the British empire used this moral rationale for continued intervention across the 19th century, even in the division of the continent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The idea that African people couldn’t be responsible for governing themselves was very pervasive.

Were there subjects that you specifically wanted to cover because you thought people didn’t know enough about them?

Alan Lester: There are whole areas that aren’t really covered by popular media representations of empire. One example is the chapter on China by Robert Bickers. Because China was never formally colonised by Britain, it disappears off our mental map of the empire. Yet, via the Opium Wars and other military interventions that go under the radar, China was subject to informal British control for a long time.

Sathnam Sanghera: There’s also a chapter on the Tasmanian genocide that highlights the way in which historical arguments from people on the right of the political spectrum are growing more extreme. The [19th-century] Tasmanian genocide appears in every survey of British empire I’ve ever read – in books by Niall Ferguson, Jan Morris and Jeremy Paxman.

Ferguson, for instance, describes how “the Aborigines in Van Diemen’s Land were hunted down, confined, and ultimately exterminated”. He calls it one of the most shocking of all the chapters in the history of the British empire. Similarly, Morris cites the episode as the cruellest illustration of the fact that the empire was about race. But some defenders of empire are now essentially denying it happened, which is a position far beyond what defenders of empire were saying even 20 years ago.

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Alan, you argue in the book that, though we can trace the roots of this politicisation back to the 1960s, it has really picked up since the 2008 financial crisis – and that we can link similar upticks to other moments of particular anxiety.

Alan Lester: What got me thinking about this was the hysteria sparked after the toppling of [slave trader and philanthropist] Edward Colston in a BLM protest in Bristol in 2020. Once you start to look into the statues across our urban landscape, particularly around Westminster, you realise that many of them were not put up soon after the death of their subjects but during moments of imperial anxiety.

Many are late Victorian or early Edwardian, and that was a period in which the British empire was being challenged by new empires such as Germany’s, the rise of American economic power, the South African War [with the Boers between 1899 and 1902], and the feeling that the British population was relatively weak and not in a condition to fight that war properly. These anxieties fuelled a renewed determination to celebrate and cling on to what Britain had.

We are losing the ability to be nuanced, and to understand that opposite things can be true at the same time... History has no space in that, because history is packed with complications and nuance

We saw the same thing again when the empire was coming to an end in the 1950s and 60s, when British governments were sending national servicemen to fight in former colonies in Kenya, in Aden, in Malaya. That was another period in which we see a sudden intellectual resurgence of justifications for empire, when neoliberals came together to justify the British and other European empires. In part it was an attempt to retain the loyalty of former colonies during the emergence of the Cold War, to combat fears of newly independent governments moving off into the Soviet or Chinese spheres and not staying in the western (now US-dominated) sphere.

The balance-sheet approach returned: yes, we were racist, and yes, we did delay independence too long – but we brought you railways, education, civilisation, effective governance, the civil service. And in many ways that’s what we’re seeing again now.

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What would you say to people who don’t feel there’s anything wrong with their view of empire – that rather than being a result of anxiety, it’s a source of pride?

Alan Lester: I know Sathnam raised issues with the idea of pride and shame earlier, but I’m not necessarily against people feeling pride in their national past. But we do need a more inclusive story, because sometimes that pride translates into pride in a white British national past, when we need to understand the past in all of its complexity.

Britons were always a complicated lot: they were just as argumentative and divisive in the past. When there were slave traders, there were also people arguing against slavery. When settler colonialism was going on, missionaries and humanitarians and others in those colonies were arguing that it was immoral – but there weren’t too many saying that we should just allow indigenous peoples to live their own way. Even the most progressive arguments tended to promote colonisation as benefiting those being colonised, bringing them civilisation.

Bronwen Everill: Again, history is not one story – it’s a sort of negotiation, a debate. What historians do is look at the past from lots of different angles, because there isn’t just one narrative.

Sathnam Sanghera: We are losing the ability to be nuanced, and to understand that opposite things can be true at the same time. I feel like that’s the way that politics is headed: it’s all about simplistic messages. Social media is polarising us. We’re ending up in echo chambers because of algorithms and so on. History has no space in that, because history is packed with complications and nuance.

Alan Lester is professor of historical geography at the University of Sussex, and editor of The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (Hurst, 2024)

Sathnam Sanghera wrote the foreword to The Truth About Empire and his latest book is Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe (Viking, 2024)

Bronwen Everill is director of the Centre of African Studies and lecturer in history at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge

This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine