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Blood and plunder: the looted African gold – and the fight to get it back
It’s a tale of slavery, racism and naked imperial power. Barnaby Phillips traces the fate of the exquisite golden treasures looted by British forces from the kingdom of Asante 150 years ago
In a poorly lit cabinet in the Oriental Armoury of London’s Wallace Collection, there is a near-life size gold cast head, weighing nearly 1.5kg. It is perhaps the largest gold object to have come from Africa outside of ancient Egypt. When this head arrived in England in 1874, part of the haul of treasure brought back by Sir Garnet Wolseley’s army from the kingdom of Asante in west Africa, it attracted widespread comment, not all favourable. The Times said: it “seems to represent the head of a victim gagged for sacrifice”, and pronounced it “ghastly”. The Illustrated London News said it was “hideous and horrible”. But Richard Wallace, the wealthy aristocrat whose collection was later bequeathed to the nation, may have disagreed, because he paid £500 for it (about £62,000 today). In 1974, William Fagg, a curator at the British Museum, said the ‘Wallace Head’ was “a masterpiece… a technically excellent piece of lost-wax craftsmanship” that impacted like “a bomb” on the complacent artistic sensibilities of Victorian London. What was the African civilisation that had produced this golden head? And how did it, and other Asante pieces, end up in British museums and private collections? The Asante kingdom traces its origins to the late 17th century, when smaller kingdoms inland in the Gold Coast (modern-day Ghana) amalgamated under the control of a ruler based in the emerging city of Kumasi. Europeans were familiar with the Gold Coast, having traded there for gold, as the name suggests, but also enslaved people, ever since the 15th century. In the 18th century, Asante profited handsomely through both these trades, typically selling gold and human captives through Fante middlemen to the British, Portuguese, Dutch and other Europeans in their castles on the coast. But it wasn’t until 1817 that a British delegation travelled some 125 miles inland to Kumasi, and paid its respects to the Asante king, known as the Asantehene. One of the envoys, a young man from Bristol called Thomas Bowdich, wrote that Kumasi was a wealthy city with elegant architecture and sophisticated public hygiene. The Asantehene and his courtiers, he wrote, wore “massy gold ornaments, which glistened in every direction”. Bowdich’s descriptions caused incredulity and excitement in Britain. But his delegation failed to build a lasting friendship with Asante. By the early 19th century, Britain, hitherto an enthusiastic slave trading nation, had embraced abolitionism. The Asantehene, Osei Bonsu, worried about this threat to his wealth, and asked Bowdich whether the British king could “renew the slave trade, which will be good for me”. Over the following 50 years, as Britain tightened its control of the Gold Coast at the expense of European rivals, and as Asante maintained supremacy of the interior, there were sporadic tensions – notably in 1824 when a British invasion of Asante ended in defeat and the death and decapitation of the commanding officer, Sir Charles MacCarthy – but also decades of uneasy Anglo-Asante coexistence. This all changed in 1871, when Britain purchased Elmina, the largest trading castle on the coast, from the Dutch, despite Asante insistence it belonged to them. In January 1873, an Asante army swept south and invaded the British coastal protectorate, to the surprise of William Gladstone’s government in London. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/2XKCKN2webready-5e7ae12-e1776944134163.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A historical battle illustration showing red‑coated soldiers with muskets and bayonets clashing with fighters armed with spears and varied weapons. Smoke fills the background." title="A lithograph shows British troops clashing with Asante fighters during the first Anglo-Asante War (1823–31). As Britain expanded its presence in the Gold Coast, tensions between the two powers escalated (Image by Alamy)" /> In May 1873, Earl Kimberley, the colonial secretary, said that any attempt to conquer Asante would be “mad”. But the ambitious officer appointed to lead the British response, Sir Garnet Wolseley, had other ideas. Wolseley, just 40 but already a veteran of wars in Burma, Crimea, India, China and Canada, was determined the British would march to Kumasi. If the Asantehene, Kofi Karikari, would not make peace, he would “destroy his palaces, burn his capital, and lay waste his country as well as I could”. While politicians prevaricated, Wolseley shaped events on the ground. By January 1874, he was leading three battalions of British soldiers, plus many African allies and carriers, into the Asante forest. Read more | Politics and the Bayeux Tapestry: the inside story of the blockbuster loan to the British Museum The Asante army – armed with muskets – fought bravely, but was outgunned by the British, equipped with new Snider rifles. At the battle of Amoafo, many hundreds or even thousands of Asante soldiers, but only four British, were killed. One British sailor wrote that it was “murder, not a fair fight”. On 4 February, the British entered Kumasi, only to find that Karikari had fled. Wolseley, concerned about disease and encroaching rains, decided not to linger. Instead, he would leave the Asante with “a wholesome fear of the British power”. He ordered his soldiers to take treasure from the unguarded palace, and then blow it up, and to set fire to Kumasi to ensure “its total destruction”. Then he abandoned the burning city. Wolseley wrote that Karikari was “a brutal and deceitful monarch”. The British sense of racial superiority – Wolseley wrote that black people were suited only for slavery – had been reinforced by the apparent discovery in Kumasi of evidence of mass human sacrifice by the Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1501979475webready-c12bcea-e1776944602447.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A central figure dressed in richly patterned regalia sits surrounded by attendants in traditional clothing. Large decorative umbrellas shade the group, with crowds and palm trees visible in the background." title="On the centenary of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s expedition, the then Asantehene, Opoku Ware II (seen here in 1977), requested the return of the Asante regalia, but it would take 50 more years for just 32 objects to come back to Ghana (Image by Getty Images)" /> Gold is always pretty On 13 February, the Asantehene’s envoys caught up with Wolseley on his march back to the coast, and agreed to a humiliating surrender. They handed over 1,000 ounces of gold objects, a tiny fraction of the 50,000-ounce “indemnity” demanded by Wolseley, but which included a significant part of the Asantehene’s regalia, essential to his political and spiritual authority. A history of Asante, written by one of Karikari’s successors, laments that the British were so impatient “that it was not even possible to call any of the provincial chiefs into Kumasi to contribute what they could. So King Kofi Karikari was obliged to bear the brunt of this payment alone.” Wolseley, who had already witnessed notorious plunders by British soldiers of palaces in India and China, drew a distinction between disorganised looting, which undermined military discipline and was therefore undesirable, and the acceptable collection of ‘prize’, to be auctioned off with the income shared among the troops. In accordance with this philosophy, when the British reached their headquarters at Cape Coast they held an auction of treasure from the Asantehene’s palace. The Daily Telegraph wrote: “The long centre table was covered as thickly as it could bear with jewellery and gold. The prize agent… had shown considerable taste in the arrangements of their stores… and gold is always pretty.” The auction was enthusiastically attended by many of the Cape Coast elite, delighted by the defeat of the feared Asante. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/531631001webready-71902b9-e1776944785361.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A gold sheath decorated with embossed concentric circles, leaf‑like motifs, and dotted borders" title="The British Museum houses some 550 Asante objects taken during the Anglo-Asante Wars, including the golden knife-sheath above (Image by The British Museum)" /> Many of the most valuable items, however, were sold in London in the spring of 1874 at Garrard, the crown jewellers in the West End, which had paid £11,000 (about £1.4m today) for the collection. Wolseley returned to Britain a hero – cheered by crowds, feted by Queen Victoria and the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, parodied on stage as ‘The Very Model of a Modern Major General’ – and so the sale of “the golden spoil from Ashantee” attracted considerable excitement. Queen Victoria took some pieces of treasure – presented to her by the soldiers – and this added to its prestige. For most of the aristocrats and others who crowded Garrard’s rooms, Asante objects were exotic souvenirs of a British victory, “treasured… as memorials of the recent struggle”, as The Times put it. William Cecil, the Marquess of Exeter, for example, bought two gold badges and mounted them on gilt-silver trays with his family crest and an inscription. In this way, what had been sacred objects in Asante – the badges, known as akrafokonmu, were worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul – became trophies. (One of Cecil’s mounted badges was bought by the British Museum in the 1970s, after passing through various wealthy owners). <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/1010657001webready-ce6a8d3-e1776943998684.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A round gold ornament featuring a central raised dome, concentric beaded circles, and four smaller domes set within decorative motifs." title="This 19th-century gold akrafokonmu is now in the British Museum. In Asante, such items were sacred objects worn by officials responsible for the purification of the Asantehene’s soul (Image by The British Museum)" /> Hints of humility Amid the general triumphalism, there were some doubts. The Welsh nonconformist MP Henry Richard observed that “scarcely any Englishman could look back with pride” on what happened in Asante and other recent campaigns in Asia and Africa. “Those were not triumphs of Christian civilisation but of barbarism and brute force.” Newspaper reviews of the Garrard sale also contain hints of humility. Asante, and Africa more generally, was perceived in Britain as a place without culture. And yet, The Times wrote, the gold badges were “wonderful… it would be difficult for any skilled goldsmith in western Europe not so much to surpass, but even to equal them”. Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation Inevitably, Britain’s museums took an interest. It was the South Kensington Museum (today the V&A) that reacted first. The keeper of its Art Library, Robert Soden Smith, recognised Asante goldwork as “the most striking illustration… of the art of an ancient race hitherto imperfectly known to us”, and bought an elegant gold pipe, several badges and pieces of decorated sheet gold. The British Museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks, bought 10 objects initially, but grumbled that “some of the more dramatic specimens have been secured by private individuals”. He was probably thinking of Richard Wallace, who bought not only the gold head but also 15 other Asante objects, including swords and a pair of cast eagles, for a total of £1,256 (about £155,000 today), making him the largest purchaser. His biographer Suzanne Higgott says that Wallace craved recognition, and the Asante objects, “exceptional, high status and intriguingly ‘Oriental’”, therefore had obvious appeal. All of Wallace’s Asante purchases are still in the Wallace Collection today. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/BMImages01077757001SuperReswebready-408fd12-e1776944349408.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A curved sword with a dark blade featuring triangular and circular cutouts. The gold‑coloured handle is engraved and covered with two rounded pieces of spotted animal fur." title="This Asante ceremonial sword was one of 32 pieces returned to Ghana – on a long-term loan – in 2024 (Image by The British Museum)" /> The British Museum was able to enlarge its collection of Asante gold regalia over subsequent decades. This was in part because the British government gradually released more pieces which had been taken by Wolseley’s soldiers, but also because in 1896 another British army ransacked the rebuilt palace in Kumasi, and again carried off as much treasure as it could find. Today the British Museum has about 550 objects taken in the Anglo-Asante wars, of which some 220 are made of gold. Some of the most important pieces of Asante loot, however, remain in private hands or are otherwise hidden from public view. The Royal Artillery officer’s mess, in Larkhill near Salisbury, has an exquisite golden ram’s-head mask – 19cm in width and weighing 1.2kg – which William Fagg described as “a marvel of ethereal eggshell thin-lightness…among the most striking examples of west African metallurgy”. It was taken from the Asantehene’s palace by officers who were close to Sir Garnet Wolseley. Rather than being auctioned off, he allowed them to buy it directly for £135 (about £17,000 today). When the officers returned to England, newspapers reported they had “the best trophy… very valuable”. In 1875, the Royal Artillery sealed the ram’s head in a glass dome and mounted it on a stand which is carried on the backs of three bowed African figures, dressed in loincloths. Once again, Asante regalia was transformed into a British military souvenir. Today the ram’s head is only accessible to officers and their invited guests. The Royal Artillery declined my requests to see it. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/7770417-2webready-ea8e369-e1776944451359.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people dressed in brightly patterned kente cloth stand outdoors, some holding ornate staffs and one playing a drum. Large colourful umbrellas shade several members of the group." title="People celebrate the Gold Coast becoming the independent nation of Ghana, Accra, 6 March 1957. Nearly seven decades after the formation of this new nation, says Barnaby Phillips,“the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions” (Image by Topfoto)" /> Decades of campaigning The Asante people still refer to the 1874 war as ‘the Sagrenti War’, from the local pronunciation of ‘Sir Garnet’. It was a seminal moment in their kingdom’s decline. By the 1880s, according to their own histories, “Kumasi was losing its power and… falling into a ruinous state”. In 1901 the British formally annexed Asante territory. They sent the then Asantehene, Agyeman Prempeh, into exile on the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, where he spent more than two decades. Read more | Who should decide the stories museums tell? In 1957 the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana, but the Asante people still revere their king and retain a strong attachment to their traditions. They have campaigned for decades for the return of the regalia. In 1974 the Asantehene, Opoku Ware II, wrote that the centenary of Wolseley’s expedition marked an “auspicious occasion on which to press for the return of objects of the deepest significance” to the Asante. This set off a flurry of diplomacy. Some British diplomats argued in favour of returning regalia, and the British Museum’s director, John Pope-Hennessey, told his trustees “there is widely conceded to be some moral weight behind the Asantehene’s request”. But the negotiations floundered, in part because even British officials who favoured flexibility could see no way round the 1963 British Museum Act, which makes it almost impossible for that institution to permanently return, or ‘deaccession’, items in its collection. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1252637177webready-448d938-e1776943890314.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people pose in an ornate room with gold columns and decorative furnishings. The person in the centre wears a blue suit, while the two on either side wear brightly coloured kente cloth garments." title="In 2023, the Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, and his wife Julia met with King Charles III as they continued to press for the return of the Asante regalia (Image by Getty Images)" /> In 2023 the current Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, raised the matter again, when he visited London to attend the coronation of his friend, Charles III. This time, his appeal fell on fertile ground. Museums in the west were under pressure to address the legacies of the colonial period and, in particular, to return objects taken by force. In 2024 the British Museum and the V&A (also constrained by national legislation from making permanent returns) announced they would return on long-term loan (for probably six or nine years) 32 pieces of Asante regalia. The Fowler Museum in Los Angeles announced that it was permanently returning seven objects looted by Wolseley’s army. In response to these developments, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, the director of the Asantehene’s museum in Kumasi, said: “We want to get back as many objects as is humanly possible… We just want people to see what our civilisation was, and how it can inspire the present.” How many treasures the Asante people do get back – and for how long they get to keep them – is bound to remain the subject of intense debate for years. “What we have here embodies the soul of Asante” The return of 32 pieces of gold regalia in 2024 sparked joy – and anger – among the Asante people, writes Barnaby Phillips On 1 May 2024, I waited in the sweltering heat outside the Manhyia Palace Museum, in Kumasi, Ghana, alongside local chiefs, foreign diplomats and museum officials. The banners on the museum’s walls proclaimed: “Homecoming; Adversity and Commemoration”. This was the ceremony to mark the return of 32 pieces of Asante gold regalia – among them, sacred badges, a helmet, a ceremonial sword and bracelets – that had been looted by British soldiers in 1874 and 1896. The Asantehene, Osei Tutu II, dressed in green robes and a golden headdress, arrived to the shouts of praise singers and the beating of drums, protected from the sun by a huge tasselled umbrella carried by his entourage. The director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, bowed low before the Asantehene and addressed the crowd: “We acknowledge the very painful history surrounding the acquisition of these objects, a history tainted by the scars of imperial conquest and colonialism.” It would have been difficult to imagine the director of a major British museum using these words anywhere, let alone in this context, just a few years ago. The Asantehene, for his part, said the British had returned a small part of what they had taken. “But what we have here embodies the soul of Asante. Today is a happy day for Asante, for the black African continent.” People cheered and filed excitedly into the museum, where they admired the glittering gold treasure, beautifully displayed on green cloth in glass display cases. Not everybody in Ghana felt so positive. Many were upset that the British were only returning objects on loan. Nii Kwate Owoo, a Ghanaian filmmaker who attended the ‘Homecoming’ ceremony, told me: “It turns my stomach, to be quite frank. An armed robber comes into your house, mows down your family and grabs your valuables, and comes back later and says: ‘Okay, you’re making noises, I’ll give this back as a loan!’” Inside the museum, I encountered more nuanced reactions. A museum guide, Sammy Amoah, said the return of the regalia was “important because it confirms history. That what we’ve been taught in books about our own past is true.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1988198434webready-1a0a230-e1776945236127.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A group of people stand closely together as a person in a leopard‑print headdress and ceremonial staff receives a white box from someone leaning forward. Others in traditional attire look on." title="Osei Tutu II receives artefacts returned by the Fowler Museum in February 2024. Three months later, the British Museum and the V&A returned 32 objects, on loan (Image by Getty Images)" /> Barnaby Phillips is a historian and conservationist. His new book, The African Kingdom of Gold: Britain and the Asante Treasure, was published by Oneworld in March This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Long to reign over us: how did Queen Elizabeth II survive seven decades of dizzying change?
When Elizabeth II ascended the throne in 1952, she could barely have conceived the currents – imperial retreat, multiculturalism, de-industrialiation – that would transform the nation during her reign. On the centenary of the Queen’s birth, David Cannadine explores how she navigated seven decades of dizzying change
When I was born in September 1950, King George VI had just over a year to live. I have no memory of him or his reign, and my first royal recollection was of the coronation of the second Queen Elizabeth – or, more precisely, of images of her state coach and horses, which I cut out of a souvenir magazine. My parents did not own a television set, and did not know anyone who did, so it was only in 2012, the year of Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee, that I watched the remastered version of the original coronation broadcast from Westminster Abbey. Richard Dimbleby’s reverential commentary, suffused with ardour and optimism, did indeed belong to that earlier time. When the Queen celebrated her platinum jubilee in 2022, few people in the United Kingdom or the Commonwealth could remember when she had not been on the throne. Like Queen Victoria, Elizabeth II had become part of what Victoria’s biographer Lytton Strachey called the “indissoluble” scheme of things, which made it impossible for many people to imagine the world without her. Apart from just over a year at the beginning, and (thus far) four years at the end, my own life has coincided exactly with the 70 years of her reign. I was no part of her life, and never met her, but she was certainly a part of mine, as she was of millions of people in the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and far beyond. Joining Shakespeare I never imagined it would one day fall to me to tell Queen Elizabeth’s life story, but in 2014 I was appointed editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it seemed likely that the Queen would die on my watch. The convention established for the ODNB’s predecessor, the original Dictionary of National Biography, was that when the monarch died, the editor would contribute the entry on him or her, and it duly fell to me to write the life of Elizabeth II. I did so in two forms: as a short book of 50,000 words, published late in 2025 by Oxford University Press; and as her entry in the ODNB, available online from April this year, which was cut to 35,000 words, putting the late Queen in the company of her namesake Queen Elizabeth I, along with Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher. The ODNB entry is a tightly written biography, while the longer book historicises the Queen by setting her more fully in the context of her times. Read more | Buckingham Palace was the height of royal power – so why did Queen Victoria and Albert hate it? Producing these two different versions reminded me how biographers and historians take different approaches when writing individual lives. Some of the most outstanding recent biographies have been by historians – among them Ian Kershaw on Hitler, Jonathan Steinberg on Bismarck and Diarmaid MacCulloch on Thomas Cromwell – but it is a genre about which many scholars remain sceptical. The political and constitutional historian Geoffrey Elton spent his life determined not to produce a biography of Thomas Cromwell, even though he greatly admired him; and in writing his life of Hitler, Ian Kershaw noted that biography ran the risk of “over-emphasising the role of the individual in shaping and determining events”, and “ignoring or playing down the social and political context in which those actions took place”. These risks most certainly apply to biographies of monarchs, though they are less acute when dealing with kings and queens who proactively make history. But sovereigns who reign reactively, rather than rule proactively, create serious expositional challenges, anticipated by Karl Marx, when he observed that “men [and women] make their own histories, but they do not do so under circumstances of their own choosing”. Elizabeth II was just such a circumscribed monarch, living out her life against trends and trajectories in many ways far from friendly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-120520595webready-f7c08c2-e1776683608167.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a person seated at a table with a BBC microphone in front of them, wearing a light blouse and a pearl necklace while holding a sheet of paper." title="In a speech broadcast to mark her 21st birthday – while she was touring South Africa – Princess Elizabeth pledged herself to a life of duty (Image by Getty Images)" /> Decline and fall One indication of this hostile 20th-century environment is that many monarchies were history’s victims rather than its victors. By the end of the First World War, the great-power thrones of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany had disappeared. The Second World War led to a further royal conflagration, as the Yugoslavian, Italian, Bulgarian and Romanian crowns were subsequently abolished, while the survival of the Japanese emperor was the exception that proved the rule. Thereafter the king of Egypt was driven out, the king of Iraq was murdered; Libya, Afghanistan, Greece, Abyssinia and Iran dispensed with their sovereigns, and only the return of a Spanish monarch in 1975 bucked that trend. This widespread royal retreat was accompanied by imperial dissolution, as the maritime empires of Portugal, Belgium the Netherlands and France disappeared during the second half of the 20th century. And so did the British empire, which had been the biggest of them all. Kipling had anticipated this retreat at Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, when his poem Recessional stressed the ephemerality of empire and the transience of global dominion. Between the partition of India and the return of Hong Kong to China 50 years later, the British empire went into full recessional mode. Elizabeth’s father, George VI, was the last British monarch to be Emperor of India, and she ‘gave away’ even more territory than George III. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613457692webready-3319b3d-e1776682784658.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows six people in formal ceremonial dress. At the centre stand a man in a decorated military uniform and a woman in a gown with a long train and veil. Two seated figures and two standing figures wear military uniforms with medals or elegant gowns and jewellery. Draped curtains and a carpeted floor form the backdrop." title="A family portrait from the wedding day of Elizabeth II’s parents, 26 April 1923. (From l to r): the Earl and Countess of Strathmore, the Duchess and Duke of York (the future Queen Mother and George VI) and Queen Mary and George V (Image by Getty Images)" /> A royal rebranding Such was the broader, confining global context against which Princess Elizabeth, born in 1926 as the eldest child of the Duke and Duchess of York, lived out her life. One further indication of these changing and challenging times was that only one of her parents was royal. Before the First World War, Europe’s ruling houses constituted an international, inter-connected elite, as exemplified by Queen Victoria’s children, most of whom wed their continental (especially German) relatives. But the First World War, which ranged the British and German royal dynasties against each other, put an end to that, and in 1917 George V rebranded the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as the House of Windsor, and decreed that his descendants might select marriage partners from among British families, by which he meant members of the aristocracy. Read more | The young Elizabeth II: life before she was Queen The Duke of York duly wed Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, daughter of the Scottish grandee the Earl of Strathmore, which meant Princess Elizabeth was only ‘semi-royal’, whereas both the parents of Prince Philip of Denmark and Greece, whom she would later marry, were royalty. Philip may have belonged to the rootless and impoverished interwar diaspora of minor princelings, but his lineage was grander than Princess Elizabeth’s. At the time of her birth, there was no realistic likelihood Elizabeth would become the queen regnant of the United Kingdom. Like all Europe’s remaining royal houses, the British monarchy was patriarchal and patrilineal, which meant that if the Duke and Duchess of York produced a son, he would immediately leapfrog his elder sister and become first in the line of succession. And Princess Elizabeth’s uncle, the Prince of Wales, who would accede to the throne on the death of his father, George V, might yet marry and father a boy who would eventually follow him as king. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514080420webready-b1c182a-e1776682680633.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows two people standing together: one wearing a light dress with a brooch and a fur‑trimmed hat, the other in a dark suit with a patterned tie, light vest, and a flower pinned to the lapel. A stone wall with a metal window grille is behind them." title="The former Edward VIII marries Wallis Simpson in June 1937 after abdicating the throne. In doing so, says David Cannadine, he put “self and love before service and duty” (Image by Getty Images)" /> This meant there was every initial expectation that Princess Elizabeth would live out her life as a minor member of the royal family, marrying a British aristocratic landowner, doing good works in the local community, and enjoying the company of her horses and dogs. But she would not be the first member of the British royal family in modern times to inherit the throne unexpectedly. The same had been true of Victoria, of George V, and of her father, George VI. All three, like Elizabeth, were unanticipated monarchs who became successful sovereigns – as she would do to an even greater extent. This unexpected turn in Elizabeth’s life took place in 1936, when she was 10 years old. Her uncle, who had succeeded George V as Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson, putting self and love before service and duty. But this obliged Elizabeth’s father to put service and duty before self and love, by becoming the sovereign, as George VI, he had never wanted to be. Having sired no son, this meant his elder daughter became heiress presumptive, and she fully assimilated her parents’ ethos of duty and service. In 1947, on her 21st birthday, when she was accompanying her parents on a tour of South Africa, Princess Elizabeth delivered a broadcast, pledging her life, “whether it be long or short”, to the service of the empire and Commonwealth, and it was a pledge she honoured and kept all her life. But that was not the only reason why 1947 was so important a year. India became independent, and was partitioned, portending the end of the British empire and its evolution into the voluntary community of association known as the Commonwealth. That same year, Elizabeth wed Prince Philip, beginning a more than 70-year union that would be perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-613465636webready-d118ece-e1776682342956.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a bride in a lace wedding gown, tiara, and pearl jewellery holding a bouquet, smiling at a man in a formal military uniform with medals. Dark curtains form the background." title="Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten on their wedding day, 20 November 1947. Their 73-year union was, writes David Cannadine, “perhaps the greatest royal marriage in history” (Image by Getty Images)" /> British revolution Thereafter there were many milestones in Elizabeth’s long life and reign, extending across an astonishing 70 years. Here are just a few of them. 1952: the death of her father, her accession as the second Queen Elizabeth, and the widespread belief that a ‘new Elizabethan age’ had dawned. (Due to Britain’s diminishing status in the world, that belief would prove to be mistaken.) 1960: Harold Macmillan’s ‘wind of change speech’ delivered in South Africa, portending the end of what remained of the British empire. 1964: the advent of the Queen’s first Labour government, led by Harold Wilson. 1965: Winston Churchill’s state funeral, both the last rites of the great man and a requiem for Britain as a great power. 1979: Margaret Thatcher took office, as the Queen’s first female prime minister. 1997: the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, delivered a jolt to the monarchy and the nation. 1999: the Queen opened devolved legislatures in Wales and Scotland. 2011: she visited Ireland and expressed sympathy for “those who have suffered as a consequence of our troubled past”. 2016: 43 years after Britain joined the EEC, an EU Referendum ended in Brexit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1450414706webready-b13781c-e1776682235671.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a group of formally dressed people standing on steps outside a building. Some wear military uniforms, others fur coats or ceremonial robes. One naval officer salutes while others hold programs." title="The State Funeral of Sir Winston Churchill" /> Significantly, none of these events were initiated by Elizabeth II, but she had to adapt to all of them. That is what monarchs who reign but not rule must do. At the same time, there were many milestones in her own life, as she celebrated a unique grand slam of four jubilees. 1977: her silver jubilee (25 years) – not yet even halfway through the Queen’s long reign, taking place during James Callaghan’s premiership, nearing the end of a difficult decade. 2002: her golden jubilee (50 years) – initially anxious, following the dismal 1990s and the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, but turning out to be an unexpectedly successful amalgam of royal tradition and Blairite ‘cool Britannia’. 2012: her diamond jubilee (60 years) – perhaps the happiest of them all, following the marriage of William and Kate Middleton, preceding the successful opening of the London Olympics, and instantiating the Queen’s own hard-won apotheosis. 2022: her platinum jubilee (70 years) – inescapably elegiac, as the Queen was largely absent from the celebrations, and her last years had been hard, with Covid, the death of Prince Philip and the departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to the US. But she made a final appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, where she had first been glimpsed as a baby in her mother’s arms 95 years before. The Queen’s long reign meant her closest relatives were obliged to adapt in unprecedented ways. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother became a dowager queen for half a century. Prince Philip gave up a promising naval career and subordinated his life to supporting hers. Prince Charles had to wait until his early 70s before he became king. Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, found neither personal happiness nor a fulfilling public role. In different ways, this must have been difficult for all four of them. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3335882webready-e52ecc4-e1776682455805.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a woman in a light outfit, hat, gloves, and pearls holding a bouquet as she interacts with a crowd of adults and children waving flags." title="The Queen meets children during her silver jubilee celebrations, 1977. Despite the smiles, Britain was suffering a crisis of confidence at this point in her reign (Image by Getty Images)" /> Unlike their parents, but like their Aunt Margaret, three of the Queen’s children – the Prince of Wales, Princess Anne and Prince Andrew – divorced, which meant the (dysfunctional) royal family increasingly became a scandal-ridden soap opera. Prince Andrew’s excessive sense of entitlement, and his close friendship with the convicted American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, were deplorable displays of bad behaviour and demonstrated still more deplorable and damaging lapses of judgment. The Duke of Sussex denounced his father in public for being cold and aloof, while his wife branded members of the royal family as uncaring, unsympathetic and racist. “Recollections may vary,” was the Queen’s response. As someone who belonged to the generation that had gone through the Second World War, she was ill at ease with the emotional incontinence that had become widespread during the closing decades of her reign. Total transformation During her 70 years on the throne, Britain changed significantly. In the early 1950s, the traditional aristocracy still counted in the corridors of power, the middle classes were closely linked to the empire, the military and the civil service, and working-class men were overwhelmingly employed in such heavy industries as coal mining, steel making and ship building. Except for the Queen, women knew their (subordinate) place, social mobility was limited, higher education was restricted to a minority, Britain was, to a large extent, ethnically homogeneous, the Church of England was a significant force, and the Victorian moral code still prevailed. Read more | The royal family and their right to privacy: who should have access to the records? But by the end of the Queen’s reign, the aristocracy was no longer the power elite, the middle class sought alternative employment, and the de-industrialisation of Britain meant most men no longer undertook hard manual labour. Rising standards of living and the expansion of universities made the country a more mobile and less deferential society, women occupied prominent positions in public and professional life, the influence of the Church of England had declined, the Victorian moral code had been dismantled, and the influx of immigrants from the dissolving empire meant Britain became an increasingly multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multicultural society. To all this the Queen adapted, slowly and not always enthusiastically, but overall, wisely and well. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-530137388webready-eab239c-e1776682946240.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Three people at a formal event: one in a sequined gown with a tiara and jewellery, one in a patterned dress with gloves and pearls, and one in a light traditional outfit. They appear to be conversing in an ornate indoor setting." title="With Margaret Thatcher at a Commonwealth meeting in Zambia, 1979. The Queen placed great store on Britain’s membership of this association of more than 2.7 billion people (Image by Getty Images)" /> As the United Kingdom diversified, the British empire diminished, until by the end of her reign it had almost completely disappeared. However much she cared about it, and however hard she worked at it, being Head of the Commonwealth was scarcely the same as being Empress of India. In 1952 Britain was still – just – a great global power; 70 years later, it was a middle-sized nation that had sought to compensate for the loss of empire by joining the European Economic Community, a venture that was abandoned following the referendum of 2016. It thus fell to Elizabeth to preside, not only over domestic devolution, diversification and de-industrialisation, but also over imperial retreat and international withdrawal. This meant that although in later life she became, like Victoria before her, a justly venerated matriarch, the uplifting, expansive narrative widely proclaimed in 1887 and 1897 found no echoes in 2002, 2012 and 2022. Queen Elizabeth II’s greatest achievement was, perhaps, to make recessional majestic. These were not circumstances of her own choosing, but she made history, all the same. Sir David Cannadine is the editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. His latest book is Queen Elizabeth II: A Concise Biography of an Exceptional Sovereign (OUP, 2025) This article was first published in the May 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
War Plan Red: The secret US plan for war with Britain via Canada
In the interwar years, the United States prepared for all kinds of future conflicts, including against its allies. Jonny Wilkes explores the Americans’ secret plan to defeat the British empire, via Canada
In 1930, the United States war department approved a secret plan that mapped out a course of action for a hypothetical war with Britain. Its codename: War Plan Red. Yes, the two nations were allies, having fought on the same side in the First World War, and the likelihood of this plan ever being needed was extremely low – but not impossible. Tensions had been creeping up over the last decade, and Britain and the US had a history of bitter military conflict. Why did the US have a plan for war with Britain? It was, and still is, normal practice for militaries to prepare for all manner of scenarios, even against allies. War Plan Red was just one of many contingencies drawn up by the US, all of which were designated a different colour. Green covered the eventualities of a war with Mexico; Brown for an uprising in the US-controlled Philippines; Yellow for China; and Orange for Japan. White, meanwhile, focused on a domestic situation within the US. War Plan Red (a reference to the British redcoats of the American War of Independence) was further subdivided, depending on where in the world a potential war might break out. Ruby referred to India, Scarlet was Australia, and Garnet was New Zealand. The chief anticipated theatre for any conflict between the US and the British empire, however, was Crimson: Canada. What reason would the US have to go to war with Britain? In the First World War, the British, Americans and Canadians had been allies, but in the years after the armistice tensions began to rise. The British Deputy Chief of Naval Staff, Vice-Admiral Sir Osmond Brock described the possibility of war as “very improbable” without going so far as declaring it “impossible”. Since Germany had been knocked out as a naval power, Britain and the US stood alone as the global superpowers of the seas, which raised the risk of a situation somewhere in the Atlantic that could all-too easily escalate. The most likely scenario that might lead to a naval clash was if Britain went to war with another country while the US continued to trade with it. The British would try and stop any ships believed to be heading to its enemy, but if they were American ships, possibly with an armed convoy, this risked provocation and an outbreak of hostilities. What’s more, the colossal war debt that Britain owed the US had fuelled increasing frustrations on both sides. How was War Plan Red going to work? Approved in 1930, War Plan Red did not propose a direct attack on Britain, especially not its superior navy, but an invasion of Canada. The US (always designated as ‘Blue’) would shore up North America as a defensive fortress and so prevent Britain from gaining a foothold for their own invasion south of the border. Crucial to the success of War Plan Red would be capturing the port of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, as this provided a strategically vital base for British ships. So important was this target that the plan even proposed the use of poison gas to secure it. The hydroelectric plants at Niagara Falls had to be seized too so that the Canadian power grid could be disabled. Simultaneous assaults on the cities of Montreal, Quebec City, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver would ensure the US had control of Canada’s industrial centres and railroads. From this position of strength, the Americans hoped to force the British into a quick peace deal. What happened to War Plan Red? During the 1930s, War Plan Red was updated a number of times. The manoeuvres were laid out in such detail that specific roads were suggested for particular American forces. The US also carried out a huge set of war games involving 36,000 troops. But, of course, nothing came of it: the US, Britain and Canada remained allies and would once again fight on the same side with the outbreak of the Second World War. Canada's plan for war against the US While Britain did not have an official strategy for war against the US (or at least, one we know about), the Canadians commissioned their own secret plan 10 years before War Plan Red for an invasion of the US. Defence Scheme No. 1, as it was called, had been headed by the Canadian director of military operations and intelligence, the war hero James ‘Buster’ Brown. It involved ‘flying columns’ of Canadian troops invading across the entire stretch of the border, occupying cities like Seattle, Spokane and Portland in the west; Great Falls, Fargo and Minneapolis in the centre; and Detroit, Niagara and Albany to the east. The purpose of the invasion would be to throw the Americans off guard and take control of some of the infrastructure in the northern US, before waiting for British reinforcements. This utterly relied on Britain coming to Canada’s aid, something of which there was no guarantee. If anything, it appears Britain would have let Canada fall, focusing its efforts elsewhere. Canada, as a colony of the British empire, and the US were foes in the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The rest of the 19th century had seen a number of petty border disputes, which had threatened to spill over into all-out conflict. Read more | The capture of the Chesapeake: how the British Royal Navy rescued its reputation in the War of 1812 The Pork and Beans War of 1838-39, began when lumberjacks from New Brunswick to the north and Maine to the south argued over which trees they could cut down. Taking its name from the lumberjacks’ meal of choice, the situation escalated until militias from both sides had mobilised on the border and US Congress authorised a force of 50,000 troops to settle the matter. Then there was the Pig War of 1859, which saw thousands of troops and several warships mustered after a Canadian pig was shot after getting into an American garden in the San Juan Islands of the western coast. Thankfully British rear admiral Robert L Baynes did not take action, declaring he would not start a conflict “over a squabble about a pig”. It ended bloodlessly, except for the pig.
Imperial spectacle: inside Britain's 1924 'Empire Exhibition'
Matthew Parker takes listeners inside the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley Park in London
A century ago, in 1924, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley opened its doors, receiving as many as 27 million visits over two years. It was a grand declaration of an empire at its territorial height. But behind the spectacle was a superpower grappling with its position on the world stage, seeking to recalibrate its own sense of influence and importance. Speaking to Elinor Evans, Matthew Parker takes listeners inside the exhibition, which featured huge sporting events and battle reenactments, glamorous pavilions showcasing new technology and science – and even a replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb. To listen to Matthew Parker discussing events that occurred across the British empire on one specific day in 1923, click here
Charlotte Lydia Riley: “We need to get rid of the idea that Britain was humanitarian in its imperialism. That needs to go”
Charlotte Lydia Riley talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her book Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain exploring the complex, and often troubled, relationship between the British empire and the ‘mother country’
Ellie Cawthorne: You write in the introduction to your book – Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain – that you want it “to set out why people in Britain today should care about their nation’s imperial past”. Why do you think that this is so important? Charlotte Lydia Riley: Beyond the fact that I’m a historian, and I think that trying to know more about history is always worthwhile, I believe there are many reasons why we should care about our imperial past, specifically in Britain. There’s been a peak and a trough in knowledge about empire. For a long time, it was a very obvious and explicit part of our popular culture. Schoolchildren would study under a map on the wall that had the imperial territories marked out in pink, and people were often very celebratory about Britain’s imperial conquests. Then, after decolonisation, a silence gradually fell over the empire, and discussions of how it had shaped British society, culture and politics ebbed. The reason I think that British people need to think more closely and carefully about the nation’s imperial past is because both empire and decolonisation have shaped so much in Britain today. A lot of the ways we still organise British society are rooted in imperialism, and many of our organisations – universities, schools and museums – have imperial roots. Read more | How has migration changed the world? The story of migration to Britain is also rooted in empire: there are people living here now whose families have connections to the colonies in all sorts of ways. It’s very difficult to look backwards at empire and say that it’s over and done with – you can see it all around you today. That’s why I think we need to have a knowledge of empire that’s clear-eyed, rather than being coloured by either celebration or silencing. Your book focuses on the decades following the Second World War – an era in which empire was disintegrating. How did it continue to shape Britain when it was already beginning to disappear? We think about empire being a 19th-century phenomenon, but the territorial high point of the British empire was actually in the 1920s – only around 100 years ago. And decolonisation was a slow, drawn-out process that influenced Britain throughout the 20th century. India gained independence in 1947, and the 1960s saw a wave of decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean, but Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) didn’t become fully independent until 1980, and the fingerprint of imperialism could be detected in South Africa’s apartheid system, which didn’t come to an end until the 1990s. You begin the book by looking at the role of the Second World War in Britain’s imperial story. Did the conflict create a sense of connection and shared experience between Britain and its colonies, or did it reinforce divisions? I think both things were happening at the time. On one hand, there was a real sense of the Second World War as a moment when the empire was pulling together. People acknowledged the incredible contribution made by the colonies and ex-colonies in terms of resources, manpower and support, and Churchill spoke about the empire as being crucial in resisting Nazism and Fascism. The Second World War was the first direct point of contact with empire for many people in Britain, either through people from the colonies appearing here, or because Britons went to fight in places such as north Africa. On the other hand, Britain was also crafting a narrative of ‘standing alone’ against the Nazis. There’s a famous David Low cartoon that shows a lone British soldier on the White Cliffs of Dover, shaking his fist at the sky. About a month later, though, another cartoonist, Fougasse, published a sketch in Punch depicting two soldiers lounging on the cliffs. One says: “So our poor old Empire is alone in the world.” The other responds: “Aye, we are – the whole five hundred million of us.” Even at the time, people were pointing out that Britain was not really a tiny island nation but an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. I think there’s often a sense of Britain being this kind of plucky little fighter in the Second World War, which underplays Britain’s geopolitical strength at that point and has shaped the way people thought about empire afterwards. How aware was the ordinary Briton of the empire in the mid-20th century? Did it affect their everyday lives or was it seen as something distant and irrelevant? The fabric of British society was interwoven with imperialism during the Second World War and the years that followed. It definitely impacted British people’s day-to-day lives, but I don’t think that necessarily means they were consciously thinking about it. For example, though the general public were aware of the discussions around Indian independence, they didn’t necessarily understand the economic history of that relationship, the experiences of the Indian population, or what that population was like. If you look at children’s Ladybird books from the time, depictions of India are all about tigers and jungles – it’s shown as a mystical place full of mystical people. So there’s a paradox: people lived in a culture suffused with imperialism, but in many ways that made it harder for them to look at it closely or interrogate it, because empire was just part and parcel of what it meant to be British at that point. In the 1950s and 60s, people migrated from across the empire and commonwealth to Britain in greater numbers than ever before. Can you tell us about some of the new communities that were established in British cities? The British Nationality Act of 1948 created a new category of citizenship, reaffirming the right of people from across the empire to live in the metropole. And from 1948 until 1962, there was no limit on migration from the empire to Britain. If you were an imperial subject, you were entitled to live and work in Britain. From the end of the Second World War until the late 1950s, migration was very heavily weighted towards the West Indian community. In 1955, for example, around 40,000 people came to Britain from the Commonwealth and about half of those came from the West Indies. Meanwhile, people from India and Pakistan were coming to Britain after partition in 1947, and migrants also came in smaller numbers from other former colonies in Africa, Cyprus, Hong Kong and elsewhere. In terms of the dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there was more of an outward flow from Britain. Interestingly, the fact that Britain was itself a nation of migrants never really came up in debates around immigration. When people talked about imperial immigration, they were talking about migration to Britain, not from it, and they were talking about people of colour. So alongside British cities that had long hosted diverse communities – Cardiff, London, Glasgow – new migration hotspots emerged: Bradford and Leicester, for example, which became centres for Asian migrants. And in some places you would see a layering effect, where a new migrant community established itself and then moved on, to be replaced by another migrant community. A good example of this is Brick Lane in east London. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was home to French Protestant immigrants, before becoming a hub for Jewish, then Asian and, more recently, Somali migration. In the 1940s and 1950s, dock cities were particularly prominent sites of immigration, but also of racial violence – for example, the 1948 Liverpool riots. The book also examines several incidents of racial violence. Can you elaborate on the connections you draw between empire and the strained race relations of 20th-century Britain? That’s an interesting question – and I found myself asking exactly the same thing while sitting in the archives writing this book. Sometimes the link between empire and race relations in Britain is really explicit in the sources, with people saying things like: “I want these people to go back to the colonies.” In the 1960s, the Monday Club [a rightwing political pressure group] started to speak about what it called “voluntary repatriation” to the colonies for people of colour. So there was definitely a sense of racism being framed around the idea that people had come from the empire, so why couldn’t they just be put back there? Why did they have to be let into the metropole? Racism in Britain was often built on very imperial attitudes. Empire is justified by white supremacy – it makes sense only if you think that white people are more civilised, more educated and more skilled than people of colour. That idea shaped the development of racial hierarchies in Britain in the 19th century, which continued into the 20th century after decolonisation. Read more | The challenge of writing histories of the British empire Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, attitudes to migrants from the Commonwealth were reflective of imperial attitudes from earlier periods. Take education, for example: in the 1970s, activists highlighted the fact that children from communities of colour were facing racism in the classroom, and were being discriminated against by the school system. In his 1971 book How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System, Grenadian author and political activist Bernard Coard argued that the British education system was framed by the work of colonial administrators in the 19th and 20th centuries. He stated that it saw children from the Caribbean as less academically able than white children, which completely shaped their experience of school. How did this imperial mindset colour the attitudes of people who migrated to Britain across the 20th century? Did they generally view themselves as imperial subjects or British citizens? Reading the accounts of people who came to Britain from across the empire, you often see a huge moment of disillusionment when they actually arrived. They had been taught that Britain was their mother country – that they were part of a great imperial community. Education systems in colonised countries emphasised learning about Britain. I’ve read accounts of children in village schools in Kenya being able to name all of the rivers in England, or all of the lakes in the Lake District. Yet when these imperial migrants landed in Britain, they found themselves unwelcome, and targets of explicit racism. After the Second World War, there was bomb damage, rationing and horrible winters. Britain was poor, it was grey – nothing like the glorious mother country they had been told about. So for a lot of people it was a real moment of psychological crisis. You also look at the 1980s, an era that isn’t usually closely associated with empire. How do you think imperialism influenced British culture in that decade? One of the things I looked at was Britain’s complicated relationship with apartheid-era South Africa. The very existence of apartheid was rooted in British imperialism. Often, lip service was paid to opposing it – as in Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech in 1960 – and there was a lot of anti-apartheid activism. Many of those activists were cognisant of the fact that Britain should be trying to do something about apartheid, expressly because of the historical connection. But from the 1940s right up until the 1980s, there were also British people who were supportive of apartheid. Some British firms continued to trade in South Africa, the UK sold South Africa arms, while English cricketers tried to circumvent boycotts with the rebel tours. Then you have the 1982 Falklands War, which was in many ways an anachronism. It feels like a throwback to 19th-century naval imperial wars – a conflict over a distant isle, where even the Queen’s son goes to fight. But it was easier to support than previous imperial wars. It didn’t involve an indigenous population, and it was a war in which Britain could be seen as the good guy – which was, I think, a relief to some after decades of decolonisation. Another aspect of the 1980s that’s been interesting to re-examine is the humanitarian relief efforts of Band Aid and Live Aid. On one hand, it was a moment of real generosity on the part of the British people. But depictions of starving children were used to justify British involvement in Ethiopia in a way that echoed previous imperial narratives and campaigns. And there was very little reflection at the time about why Africa (a continent often treated as one homogeneous place) was so poor, whereas British people had spare money to donate. That never really got interrogated, which I think is quite profoundly imperial. How does Britain’s experience compare with other former imperial nations? Like Britain, a lot of European nations are now struggling with questions of how to remember empire. Belgium has recently reconfigured its national imperial museum, and France is having debates about figures in the Algerian War that mirror those around statues of slave traders here in Britain. A lot of European people are proving quite resistant to thinking about empire as a bad thing, or as something that had victims and shouldn’t be a moment of national celebration. So it’s a debate playing out across Europe – but I do think that there are some things that are very distinctly British about our narrative. There is a trope within Britain that we had the most humanitarian and ‘civilised’ empire and the cleanest decolonisation process. But you can’t forget that Britain’s was the largest of the European empires, and in fact had a very violent decolonisation process. Look at the violence that unfolded in Malaya and Kenya, and during the partition of India, for example. Discussions about empire feel very heated at the moment. Do you think it’s possible today to have a constructive conversation about our imperial past, or is the debate too polarised? We have to be able to talk about our national past without descending into arguments and threats, which doesn’t always seem to be possible at the moment. Because history is massively shaped by interpretation, I think there’s sometimes a tendency to see it purely as a subjective art, and treat empire as simply a subject for debate between two sides. That might mean that you could have two accounts that are wildly different – one that celebrates imperialism and one that’s critical of it – and the impetus is to find some middle ground. But I’m not really interested in finding that middle ground. I don’t want to move my argument towards the idea that empire was a good thing. When I finished my PhD in 2013, plenty of historians had already been re-examining imperial history, and I had no concern that the work I was doing would get picked up by newspapers or become a topic of contention, national debate or government intervention. So it’s really striking to me how much that has shifted over the past decade. Empire has become a topic in the culture wars – a shorthand for all sorts of frustrations, and a lightning rod for all kinds of identity questions. So what’s your take on how Britain grapples with its imperial past today? Something that isn’t helpful is that the voices on one side of this debate get very caught up with how ‘guilty’ people should feel. You don’t need to feel personally guilty for something that happened generations before. Equally, though, if your great-grandfather stole something and you still had it, you should probably give it back. Individual people don’t need to feel bad but, institutionally, we do need to think critically, and perhaps reparatively, about how Britain has benefited from imperialism, and what we can do with that now. Read more | “It was painful to realise how my education had colonised me”: Sathnam Sanghera on the legacy of imperialism in Britain We also need to get rid of the idea that Britain was humanitarian in its imperialism. That needs to go. We need to think about empire as a dark moment in Britain’s history, and use it as a lens through which we can better understand stuff happening in Britain today – migration or museums – because it’s a really important explanatory tool. This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
The British empire’s last hurrah? Why an epic celebration of imperialism in 1924 failed to mask a superpower in decline
It featured exotic pavilions, sporting spectacles and even a replica of Tutankhamun’s tomb. But, as Matthew Parker explains, when the British Empire Exhibition opened its doors in Wembley a century ago, it also spoke of a superpower in decline
In the summer of 1924, Scientific American’s ‘Special Correspondent in Great Britain’ warned his readers that, “the size and scope of the British Empire Exhibition, like the British empire itself, is almost too big to be grasped”. Within a vast area of 216 acres – 10 times the size of the famous Great Exhibition of 1851 – the “industries, manner of life and art of the 460 million people of the British empire [were] represented”. The reporter was not only awestruck by the organisers’ ambitions of attracting 46 million visitors during its initial six-month run, but the sheer scale of the exhibits themselves. Constructed in Wembley Park, north-west of London, the sprawling site included “by far the largest sports arena in the world”, “two palaces of industry and engineering”, as well as the latest “developments in telegraphy, telephony and wireless communication”. But that wasn’t all: there were working models of timber mills, oil wells and mines of all descriptions, as well as sheep stations, ostrich farms, rice paddies and cotton fields. In the exhibition’s Canadian Pavilion, visitors could view a mocked-up Niagara Falls and a life-sized refrigerated butter statue of the Prince of Wales, while the Indian Pavilion boasted snake charmers, acrobats, jugglers and veiled dancers. To the south of the site, in the Empire Stadium, visitors could watch military tattoos, historical pageants and Wild West rodeos, before enjoying the delights of the exhibition’s 47-acre fairground. In another corner, there was even a replica of Tutankhamun’s recently opened tomb. Read more | Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun: was the tomb really cursed? Other commentators feared that visitors might experience sensory overload once they had paid their one shilling and sixpence entrance fee and clicked through the turnstiles. Indeed, Eric Pasold – a recent immigrant from central Europe – remembered being “overwhelmed” as he made his way around the exhibition and jostled with “Nigerians in their colourful robes, cowboys from Calgary, dusky east African beauties, Indians, Malays, Chinamen, Australians, New Zealanders and Fiji islanders”. And yet, he was also left feeling inspired. “All were members of one great empire, united under one king and flag, linked by the English language, financed by sterling, ruled by British justice and protected by the Royal Navy. How proud they must all feel, I thought, and how I envied them.” Imperial glamour Pasold’s words would have no doubt delighted the exhibition’s government-appointed organising committee. The extravaganza, opened by King George V on 23 April 1924, sought to celebrate the British empire and its constituent parts. More than 50 of the empire’s territories were represented with displays or specially constructed pavilions, with other exhibits supplied courtesy of the event’s commercial partners. Pears’ Soap, for instance, had a kiosk featuring actresses dressed as Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and other “beautiful women from history”. Beneath the frivolity, though, the exhibition’s rhetoric suggested that nothing had been changed by the Great War, and that the certainties of the Victorian and Edwardian ages – the power and unity of the empire, the loyalty of its subjects, its old hierarchies, and even the glamour of imperialism itself – were alive and well. The Times newspaper was convinced: how could visitors fail to “feel pride [in] the unity and the power of the British nations?” But not everyone was converted. The exhibition was lampooned by Punch magazine, and pretty much ignored by the left-leaning New Statesman. For the Daily Herald, the performance of ‘Rule Britannia’ at the exhibition’s opening ceremony, as well as the involvement of imperialist author Rudyard Kipling, who named the site’s interconnected streets, made the spectacle particularly offensive. “Opportunist politicians have made the word ‘patriotism’ stink in the nostrils of thousands of decent men and women,” the paper declared. “To this debased spirit we owe many unnecessary wars, the loss of much valuable blood.” For some, the exhibition’s military displays – which included reconstructions of famous battle scenes from British history and narratives of heroic martial adventure – sat uneasily in the shadow of the western front. Even the composer Sir Edward Elgar, who conducted performances of ‘Jerusalem’ and then his own ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the opening ceremony, described the pomp as being “irredeemably vulgar”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a strong level of distaste for the exhibition among North London intellectuals, who went as far as to form a society in opposition to the exhibition: WGTW, or ‘Won’t Go To Wembley’. Novelist Virginia Woolf did deign to visit, but concluded that it was an “outmoded piece of antiquated fiction”. In many respects, Woolf was right. The British Empire Exhibition was part of a longer tradition of public spectacles, going all the way back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 – a time now seen as the apex of Britain’s industrial and commercial supremacy. Back then, there had been very little emphasis on the colonies – the focus had instead been on international industry and technology. But in 1886, as belligerent popular patriotism coincided with a new wave of imperial expansion, South Kensington played host to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition – the first of its kind to be funded with government money, and thus made ‘official’. Here, foreign exhibitors were replaced by an emphasis on the raw materials of the colonies, and ethnographic displays of ‘native’ art, archaeology and religion. And to give the proceedings an added air of authenticity, colonial peoples were shipped in and ‘installed’ in mocked-up villages or temples. Getting the show on the road By the end of the 19th century, such exhibitions were a worldwide phenomenon, and whether they were held in Britain, France, the United States or lesser colonial powers such as the Netherlands or Belgium, they sought to demonstrate their home country’s military and technological dominance over their territories, as well as their knowledge of and care for ‘native’ cultures. In addition to these official exhibitions, private sector commercial exhibitions became almost annual events at London venues such as the Crystal Palace and Olympia, along with other, imperial exhibitions of an explicitly theatrical nature. Most of the latter were staged by the Hungarian impresario Imre Kiralfy, who had worked with the American showman PT Barnum, and was very much part of the spectacular theatre movement of the time. Kiralfy’s productions often had a strongly orientalist style, bringing the wonders of exotic faraway places to a single site, with architecture of temporary wood and plaster not unlike a Hollywood film set. Notably, in 1899, he staged the Greater Britain Exhibition at Earl’s Court, which included re-enactments of recent colonial battles and tableaux with titles such as ‘Savage South Africa’. And later, Kiralfy would be consulted by the planners of the British Empire Exhibition, which attempted to bring these ‘official’, ‘commercial’ and theatrical traditions together in one location. Getting the Wembley venture off the ground, however, would prove to be a lengthy process. The initial idea for the exhibition had first been mooted by the imperialist British Empire League in 1902, only to be killed off by the Liberal Party’s landslide election victory in 1906. The concept was then briefly revived in 1913 by uber-imperialist Lord Stathcona, before the outbreak of the First World War put an end to the plans once again. In May 1919, however, the British Empire League hosted a lunch attended by all the Dominions’ high commissioners, as well as Australian prime minister Billy Hughes. Recalling the League’s original 1902 resolution, Hughes declared that a new exhibition was “essential” to promoting unity with the empire, and reigniting the spirit that had won the war and would pave the way for the reconstruction that lay ahead. According to Hughes, there was an educational imperative, too: “The depth of ignorance of the different parts of the empire about each other [is] rather appalling.” Fraying at the edge sThus, the manifesto that emerged for the new exhibition, as outlined in the official guide, was to “foster inter-imperial trade… To make the different races of the British empire better known to each other, and to demonstrate to the people of Britain the almost illimitable possibilities of the dominions, colonies, and dependencies overseas.” Its main aims, then, were economic, and to inspire, educate and entertain. All these factors, however, would prove problematic. In sharp contrast to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the economic aims of Wembley spoke more of desperation than dominance. Burdened by war debt and unprecedented mass unemployment, Britain had also lost a considerable share of world trade to Japan and the United States. Most importantly, the European market – on which exporters relied far more than the empire – had pretty much disappeared due to political unrest and hyper-inflation. The slightly vain hope was that trade within the empire could make up the shortfall. It was a short step from this to what the exhibition seemed to promise: the empire as not just a mutually beneficial unit, but an economically exclusive one, too. This was certainly the ambition of most of the Dominion leaders. New Zealand prime minister Bill Massey reckoned that “the exhibition [would afford] striking proof of the empire’s capacity to become self-supporting”, and that the countries of the empire would “learn to buy from each other rather than from outside”. But the 1923 general election had shown that this was a non-starter: an exclusive empire of commerce meant the introduction of tariffs. Dominion leaders had called for such measures the previous autumn, and prime minister Stanley Baldwin’s small accessions to these demands had been enough for him to lose power – no one was going to vote for more expensive food. Furthermore, recent events had shown that the exhibition’s promotion of military unity was also something of a sham. During the Chanak Crisis of September 1922, the then prime minister David Lloyd George had pledged Dominion troops to join what looked like a possible war against Turkey. But of the empire’s constituent parts, only New Zealand responded favourably. South Africa didn’t even acknowledge the request, and Canada replied by stating that it was a matter for its own parliament to decide. Then, at the 1923 Imperial Conference in London, there had been no agreement on a shared foreign policy, and Canada even refused to guarantee military help if any part of the empire was threatened. All the conference had agreed on in terms of unity was shared loyalty to the monarch – a situation that The Times considered “very worrying”. Each of the Dominions, to varying degrees, were asserting their autonomous identities – something that was reflected in their contributions to the exhibition. At the nations’ requests, the historical pageants staged about Canada and South Africa were rewritten to explore the multiple historical origins of their nations, rather than just the British involvement. In their pavilions, too, the Dominions took the opportunity to display and celebrate their independent industries, wealth, landscapes and cultures. Tusks and technology In previous imperial exhibitions, the Indian pavilions had always been relied on to provide a taste of the ‘exotic’. But at Wembley, among the inevitable elephant tusks, animal heads and traditional crafts, there were railway and telecommunication displays that aimed to show India as advancing both industrially and technologically. The Government of India Act of 1919 had gone a considerable distance towards granting self-rule – at least at a provincial level – and since then, such had been the level of unrest and protest that most of the British in India believed that the game was up. But the exhibition’s official guide was having none of it. While inviting the British visitor to have pride in the way the imperial project in India had created a story of “progress” and of a victorious fight against “ignorance, famine, flood and pestilence”, it described the India Pavilion as having “the majesty of the east [and] also some of its mysticism”. The exhibits of Malaya (encompassing parts of modern-day Malaysia and Singapore), Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar) were also seen through the prism of the exotic and primitive, clearly inferior in the imperial hierarchy and frozen in time. “If you are looking for romance at Wembley, you have to travel east,” The Times reported. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, Virginia Woolf’s “outmoded” criticism rang true. Malaya, one of the empire’s richest colonies, was producing tin and rubber on an industrial scale, and the island of Singapore had one of the most important ports in the world. Meanwhile, in Burma and Ceylon, as in India, political reform had enfranchised significant parts of the populations. Even more than the ‘exotic’ east, the West Africa exhibit attracted comment by journalists who wanted to have their outmoded prejudices confirmed. No Africans were consulted about the make-up of the exhibit, even though it was paid for out of the colonies’ revenue. Inside its replica walled fort, based on Kano and Zaria in Northern Nigeria – an area of indirect rule that had nothing to do with the region’s ever-increasing political activity – were three villages representing Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast (Ghana). Inside, lived some 60 Hausa, Yoruba, Mendi, Ashanti and Fanti people who, during opening hours, demonstrated local skills in weaving, dyeing, metalwork, woodcarving and pottery. This was interpreted by The Illustrated London News as “African industries as encouraged under British rule”, which “[had] turned the native from a savage into a civilised being”. A journalist for the Evening News went even further. “Civilised government,” he wrote, had only recently ended “cannibalism, slave-trading [and] obscure black-magic rites of almost incredible barbarity.” The Evening News article prompted a complaint from Ladipo Solanke, representing the Union of Students of African Descent (USAD), a recently formed alliance of London-based West African and Afro- Caribbean student groups, who were already irked that visiting friends and relatives were finding it almost impossible to locate hotels that took ‘coloured’ people. But the complaint did nothing to stop the deluge of racist cartoons, picture captions and articles in the popular press, all of which placed Africans at the bottom of the cultural hierarchy. Alarmingly, the exhibition had also prompted a rush of racist songs. One, entitled ‘In my little Wigwam, Wembley Way’, had the lines “[T]here you will find me in a costume gay / In charge of the girls from Africa / All they wear is beads and a grin”, before referencing “dusky Eves”, “dressed in nothing but leaves”. The tipping point, however, arrived when the Sunday Express printed a piece entitled ‘When West Africa Woos’. Through an interpreter, one of the newspaper’s journalists had arranged an interview with a woman residing inside the exhibition, Akosua Baa – the daughter of the Ashanti queen mother – only to ask her a series of blunt questions about sexual practices and native marriage rituals. Complaints to the Colonial Office got nowhere, but the Gold Coast Governor intervened and had the press barred from the West Africa exhibit. Sporting spectacles Despite the press ban, the West Africa exhibit remained one of the event’s most popular attractions, in part due to its proximity to the newly constructed Empire Stadium. From the earliest planning stages of the exhibition, the idea had been to include a “great national sports ground” capable of hosting football matches, and thereby attract members of Britain’s working classes. The 125,000-capacity venue – the predecessor of the modern-day Wembley Stadium – had even been completed early enough to stage the FA Cup final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United in April 1923. Making sure that people from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds could access the exhibition was paramount. The franchise had only been extended to all men over 21 (and most women over 30) in 1918, and their support of the imperial project was crucial if the empire was to have a healthy future. “In a democratic age, everything depends on public opinion,” wrote the Independent Conservative politician Lord Robert Cecil. “This means that the public must have an opinion on international affairs, and that its opinion must be right.” Overall, the attractions needed to highlight the benefits of the empire, and make it seem exciting for a new and more cynical postwar generation, considered by some of the ruling class to be less inclined to respond to calls for patriotism – and by most to be ignorant. HG Wells, for instance, reckoned that 19 out of 20 Englishmen knew no more about the British empire than they did about the Italian Renaissance – a type of criticism that led the exhibition’s guide to claim that the visitors would learn more about the empire in a few days than several months of travel. Yet cynics pointed to the fact that the most popular attractions – the Queen’s Dolls’ House, the Wild West Rodeo, the dance pavilions and the amusement park – had little or nothing at all to do with the empire. Indeed, in his 1924 short story The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy, PG Wodehouse sends Bertie Wooster to Wembley, where he is quickly bored by “the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine-fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia”, and instead takes “a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indian section”. Similar scenes also made their way into theatre: “I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of empire,” complains the father in Nöel Coward’s This Happy Breed, “and all you want to do is go on the dodgems.” In terms of attendance, the exhibition was a disappointment, failing by some margin to meet the hopes – and budgeting – of the organisers. In 1924, there were some 18 million visitors. Facing a large deficit, it opened again the following year, attracting 9 million people before closing permanently on 31 October 1925. Unlike the hugely profitable Great Exhibition of 1851, Wembley in 1924–25 made a considerable loss. The sun never sets? Despite these setbacks, it would be wrong to conclude that this necessarily pointed to a British public weary of or antagonistic to empire and all it entailed. Twenty-seven million was still a considerable number, representing more than half the then population of Great Britain. The exhibition also garnered huge coverage in the press, far more than the other large exhibitions that followed: the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938, the Festival of Britain of 1951 and the Millennium Experience of 2000. More than 2,000 articles about the British Empire Exhibition appeared in The Times from 1923 to 1925. Furthermore, the opinions of intellectuals like Virginia Woolf were far from representative. The mass middlebrow culture of interwar Britain was largely traditional, representational and conservative, and the antithesis of modernist preoccupations. Youth literature in the adventure tradition remained replete with militarism and patriotism, while the displays and re-enactments at the exhibition drew huge crowds. The unifying principle of empire as expressed by the exhibition – the monarchy – also continued to be popular. At least 6 million people tuned in to the new BBC to hear the radio broadcast of King George V’s speech at the opening ceremony, and ordinary people still frequently hung pictures of the monarch and his wife, Queen Mary, in their houses. You could even argue that an enduring pride in the empire, a heroic view of its wars and the popularity of the monarchy survives in many quarters to this day. As for the exhibition itself, revisiting it a century later provides an intriguing snapshot of an empire torn between looking backwards or forwards – and ignorant of its looming collapse. Matthew Parker is the author of One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink (Abacus, 2023) This article was first published in the May 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
The challenge of writing histories of the British empire
In its collection of essays, The Truth About Empire makes the case for the expertise of historians in debates about Britain’s imperial past. Matt Elton spoke to three of its contributors about the gap between academic and popular views of empire
Your new book, The Truth About Empire, features essays on the legacy of the British empire from academic historians at a range of institutions. What were your aims when you started work on the project? Alan Lester: British colonial history has become a highly controversial topic. We’ve seen a backlash against Black Lives Matter (BLM) and, in some quarters, an attempt to morally defend the British empire against the critique articulated by the BLM movement. In the midst of all that, I wanted to collect the work of expert historians and present it in a way the public could engage with – and, hopefully, help them be better informed when navigating what’s become a really contested area of history. How did you choose which experts to call on to write the book’s chapters? Alan Lester: I reached out to a vast number of people, and many were willing to expose themselves to the controversy that surrounds these topics. I ended up with a fairly good coverage both thematically, on the key issues at the heart of the controversy, and geographically, across the vastness 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. Read more | “It was painful to realise how my education had colonised me”: Sathnam Sanghera on the legacy of imperialism in Britain 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. 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. Read more | Afua Hirsch on tracing the story of the transatlantic slave trade 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. Read more | Genocide: what can we learn from history? 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 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. Read more | The British empire: 10 big questions 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
Michael Wood on crafting a new national narrative
“We need a meaningful story for the new generation – our composite union,” writes historian Michael Wood
What a summer we have had in 2024, with an astonishing election result. There has been much talk of national renewal, and in due course we’ll see what that means. But it felt like a watershed. The new prime minister Keir Starmer’s dad was a toolmaker, his mum a nurse; the cabinet is majority comprehensive-educated, with more alumni of Parrs Wood High School than of Eton. Among commentators – not just on the left – there’s been a growing feeling that 14 years of Tory rule, compounded by Brexit, have undermined what the great medieval historian Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah: group feeling – the glue that makes societies work. And watching TV on election night, I found myself wondering whether, like sediment settling in a glass, the time has finally arrived for a new national narrative. Read more | Opinion: “History is currently being used for political purposes that have very little to do with the past” One hundred years ago, the British empire reached its apogee. It was a world, as depicted in popular culture, orchestrated by Elgar and redolent with the scent of saddle soap and railway smoke. As Jan Morris memorably put it in the Pax Britannica trilogy: a world of P&O liners rolling down to Rio, of “dominion over palm and pine”, of an empire on which the sun never set. It is amazing to think that our oldest fellow citizens today were alive then. What changes they have seen over the span of a single lifetime. World war, imperial decline, the election of ’45 and the birth of the welfare state. Wilson’s recovery in the Swinging Sixties, then the Thatcher era that saw Britain’s de-industrialisation. Blair’s Cool Britannia orchestrated by cocky Oasis optimism – till, fatefully, Iraq ushered us into the past quarter century to Brexit and beyond, with its starkly divided narratives of Britain. Read more | Clement Attlee: Labour's postwar leader That’s a very simplistic sketch, I know. But it seems to me that certain ideas of national identity continue to have a massive influence on us: on our vocabularies of nationhood, our understanding of the world and our place in it. It’s nearly 30 years since the British flags were lowered in Hong Kong, signalling the end of the empire. Yet the narrative still grips us. Look at the plethora of Winston Churchill films released around the time of Brexit: Darkest Hour, Churchill, Dunkirk. To be sure, these were great and often heroic events. My dad, injured on D-Day, was treated at Haslar Naval Hospital in Portsmouth; Uncle Syd was torpedoed and sunk off Tobruk; Uncle Bill saw Dunkirk, D-Day and the march to Berlin. My postwar generation grew up with all that, and also with the idea that we were good and right – that we were different. Read more | Did Churchill’s postwar speeches save the world? My parents, aunts and uncles were good folk – hard-working, deferential little people who believed in that story. But they served a vast imperial project whose lineaments and oppressions are being laid out now by a new generation of historians and writers. All empires are based on exploitation and violence: we waged war in every corner of the Earth. It is staggering to think, for example, that the enormous financial compensation for slavery fixed in 1837 was not paid off till 2015 – paid to the descendants of the owners, not those of the enslaved. Of course, there are still those willing to prop up people’s sense of themselves with a tissue of myth and racial prejudice. But the time is surely now finally up for the old narrative. We need a meaningful story for the new generation – for our composite union in which all Britons, of whatever origin, recognise themselves. Fundamental to this is the meaning of history: how it sustains and defines us, and how to build that sense in a fragmenting world for a new, inclusive vision of our history. What should sit at the heart of a new narrative? The British empire has been the greatest influence on our history over the past three centuries. It shaped us all, whether our ancestors came from Govan, St Kitts or Bangladesh, from Bodmin, Halesowen, Cardiff or Belfast, our identities remade as Britons to go out to the world. Now, for the first time, arguably, we have a government that reflects British society: 92 per cent comprehensive-educated, close to gender-equal, with a black foreign secretary and a female chancellor. It has taken 200 years since a demonstration for reform was crushed at Peterloo, almost 100 since the expansion of the franchise to include all women, and 80 since that transformative election of 1945. Not long, then. Democracy, as we are often reminded, depends on the informed consent of the governed. In that, history has a crucial role to play. And history, after all, is written by us. All of us. This column first appeared in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Eastern promises: the long and troubled history of Britain's relations with China
Lured by rich trading prospects, Britain attempted numerous times to cultivate relations with China from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Sometimes, they were successful; often, the attempts ended disastrously. Kerry Brown explores the difficult but ultimately vital links between two ambitious realms
China may feel like an exotic destination to many Britons – far distant and undeniably other, culturally and politically. Yet China’s influence permeates our daily lives. It was where we originally sourced tea, the first advert for which appeared in London as early as 1658. It was where the technology for making porcelain came from, inspiring the likes of Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode. It was where a huge number of flowers now flourishing in our gardens were first found, collected by botanists and explorers from the 18th century onwards. And it has, of course, produced so much of the technology that today fills and powers our homes. Often unappreciated and sometimes tucked out of sight, China’s contributions to British life today are nonetheless tangible – and largely positive. As these examples show, links between the two nations go back centuries. And, despite the fractious tone of the political relationship today, coloured by arguments about Hong Kong, human rights and espionage, much of that history involved people from both places discovering, appreciating and learning from each other. When did the English first make contact with China? The first English efforts to make formal contact with China came during the reign of Elizabeth I, who sent letters to the Chinese imperial court proposing trade. “We are borne and made to have need one of another, and that we are bound to aide one another,” the queen wrote in one missive. None of her letters ever arrived, but China remained on the minds of English traders and merchants. And the East India Company, established in 1599–1600, made launching trade with the far east a key priority. Read more | The voices of China: 5 perspectives on an extraordinary past One of the earliest recorded incidents between the nations relates to an argument in Bantam, west of what’s now Jakarta on the island of Java. A disgruntled trader, Edmund Scott, blamed his Chinese neighbour for a fire that blazed in his warehouse in May 1604. In a horrific description, he recounts how he took hot irons and pincers to the accused man, who nonetheless refused to confess – and was executed. “Between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to pieces before they left him,” Scott declared. Unfortunately, such violence was the norm in that early era of contact. Britain, seeking new sources of wealth in the 17th and early 18th centuries, was eager to muscle in on the eastern markets and mysterious ancient lands of the Ming and, from 1644, Qing empires. These great realms were known to be places where spices, silk and other great riches might be found. However, China was largely closed to outsiders. Who was allowed to work in China? The only Europeans permitted to work there were Jesuits, and even they were ordered to leave in the 1720s. Most who engaged with China were not scholars or statespeople but sailors, traders and adventurers who had little time for the niceties of cultural empathy or building trust. In 1637, English captain John Weddell sailed to the south China coast, where he was met with resistance, which turned violent. Eventually, local officials ordered Weddell and his ships to leave and never return. Peter Mundy, a trader and diarist on that voyage, left accounts of people using chopsticks and drinking a strange infusion he called ‘chaa’ (tea); he also wrote that “there are more people on the water than in the land”. In 1720, Scottish surgeon and diplomat John Bell tagged along with a Russian delegation to “the celestial empire” of Qing. There he encountered a stretch of the Great Wall of China, reporting that: “Running from one high rock to another, with square towers at certain intervals, even at this distance, [it] is most magnificent.” After an audience with the Kangxi Emperor – who had been on the Chinese throne for almost six decades since 1661, when he was just six years old – Bell commented on “the good nature and affability of this ancient monarch”. How much business did the Chinese permit? In the mid-18th century, East India Company merchants were finally allowed to conduct business in China, but in only one place: the port of Canton, today’s Guangzhou, on the Pearl river delta in the far south near Hong Kong. The British were frustrated by this restriction, because the goods they felt would be most worthwhile trading in China – woollen garments – were more suitable to the distant northern regions, and not so readily saleable in the balmy south. In 1759, James Flint was sent on an illegal mission to Qing authorities in Tianjin, aiming to get restrictions lifted to allow British merchants to trade in other locations in China. He delivered a translation of his request to government offices – an act that was viewed dimly by Chinese authorities. Flint was arrested, sent back to Canton, imprisoned in Macau for three years and then ordered to leave the country, never to return. It could have been worse; the Chinese man who translated his request was executed. Clearly, dialogue in those early decades of contact and trade was not always straightforward. But the enquiring nature of some Britons drove them to seek pathways into even the most remote areas. Read more | What was traded on the Silk Road? Having heard reports of trade possibilities with Tibet, then essentially under the control of Qing China, in 1774 Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, despatched a young Scottish official, George Bogle, to investigate. Bogle’s wonderful account provides a superb example of benevolent curiosity, cultural understanding and empathy. He wondered, for example, at the system of polyandry – in which a woman may have several husbands – practised by the Tibetans: men, he commented, “club together in matrimony as merchants do in trade”. He also built a warm relationship with the Panchen Lama – the second most senior religious leader in Tibet, after the Dalai Lama – who promised to intercede for the British on an imminent visit to Beijing. The mission achieved some limited and temporary commercial gains, but it was another century and a quarter before Britain finally gained trading access to Tibet – using force, not diplomacy, during the British expedition of 1903/04. How important was tea to British and Chinese relations? By the end of the 18th century, Britain was importing vast quantities of tea from China. At first, most was sourced from secondary markets; it was heavily taxed, and smuggling was rife, so more formal connections were needed. In the 1780s, prime minister Pitt the Younger asked his chief confidant, Henry Dundas, to arrange the first-ever government-led mission to China. An initial attempt in 1788 under Charles Allan Cathcart ended prematurely when he died soon after his ship left Britain. Then, in 1792, George Macartney – formerly an ambassador to the Russian court of Catherine the Great and a colonial governor in India – was selected to lead another delegation. He set off with a fleet of ships, one of them laden with gifts to impress the Chinese. Read more | The Great Tea Race of 1866 Macartney’s mission marked one of the great moments of modern history. Described by some as a clash of civilisations, it brought the world’s fastest-industrialising and modernising country face to face with one of the oldest continuous cultures. Macartney was joined by William Alexander, an artist from Kent who produced beautiful sketches of the Chinese coast, and George Staunton, whose young son learned Chinese over the course of the mission and charmed the Qianlong Emperor with a few words in Mandarin. Botanists and scientists were also on board. Macartney’s venture failed in its main aim – opening up trade across China. But it did accrue a vast amount of knowledge about a realm the British had been trying to penetrate for almost two centuries, but about which they understood little. Macartney was just one of several men who wrote accounts about the trip. Another complained bitterly about the food, much like grumbling tourists today do worldwide. Some were amazed by Chinese architecture: the account of the overland journey back from Beijing to Canton by John Barrow, Macartney’s secretary, includes descriptions of the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing and the old bridges of Suzhou. Indeed, the antiquity of China impressed many. What attempts were made to understand the Chinese language? The language and writing, so different from European scripts, represented another source of fascination. Members of the Royal Society tasked the Macartney delegation with trying to establish whether Chinese was similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics – an idea that had first surfaced in a 1660s work claiming Noah’s Ark had landed in China after the biblical floods. British understanding of Chinese languages was improved hugely thanks to the work of the greatest sinologist Britain has ever produced. Robert Morrison was a Protestant missionary sent to China in 1807 to convert the so-called ‘heathens’ to Christianity, but he proved more successful in linguistics. He compiled the first Chinese-to-English dictionary, published from 1815, then translated the Bible into Chinese. These extraordinary achievements were, of course, possibly only in collaboration with Chinese people who helped him despite stern edicts forbidding such cooperation. Morrison’s work demonstrated the potential for a deeper kind of understanding and appreciation of China. Yet the century that followed reinforced the old adage: familiarity tended to breed contempt rather than deeper affinity. How did the British react to Chinese culture? In the second half of the 18th century, Britain had been in the thrall of all things Chinese, from wallpaper to building design; a new word, ‘chinoiserie’, was even coined to describe such fashions. That fascination was then replaced by a view of China as a backward country – buried in tradition, isolated from the wider world and unwilling to engage. This perception of a fading empire was reinforced by the writing of John Barrow, who had been attached to the first British embassy to China. He suggested sourly in his 1804 account that it was a nation “worn out with old age and disease”. Read more | When pirates ruled Asia's waves Still, Britain made efforts to grow closer to China, in 1834 sending its first formal representative, the unfortunate Lord Napier, appointed chief superintendent of trade at Canton. At the time, the relationship between China and Britain was largely dominated by traders such as Scotsmen William Jardine and James Matheson, who gleefully set out to exploit the opportunity that opened up when the East India Company’s monopoly on British-Chinese trade was ended in 1833. Napier proved unpopular with the British residents in China, who felt that he was too soft on the locals, but also the Chinese, who resolutely opposed his attempts to speak not just to the designated traders but also to officials directly. His situation was typical of those experienced by many emissaries and diplomats since then. Napier was turfed out of Canton only a few months after his arrival, and died soon afterwards. Did Britain and China go to war? It wasn’t long before Sino-British relations deteriorated into full-scale conflict. Known to the Chinese as the Opium Wars, these were in fact not primarily about the drug, though vast quantities were being imported into China from India by the British with the aim of correcting the trade imbalance created by the export of tea and other goods. The first war, fought 1839–42, was sparked by the arrival in Canton of an assertive official, Lin Zexu, sent from Beijing – to the horror of Napier’s successor, Charles Elliot. Lin’s mandate was to stop the contraband trade in opium, and he proceeded to impound goods, imprison foreign merchants associated with the trade, and generally rid the country of what was regarded as a debilitating scourge. Plenty of people in Britain were sympathetic to this Chinese response to the trade. These included William Gladstone, who made a rousing speech in the House of Commons defending the Chinese for their actions. Read more | What caused the First Opium War? Elliot himself was dismissed for what was perceived as a lack of aggression and decisiveness. His dispatches from the final weeks of his time in post often acknowledged that, in some respects at least, the Chinese may have had the right to take the actions they did. However, Britain had the will – and the means – to gain what it wanted. That, in the end, dictated everything else. This war – really a series of skirmishes that ended in total victory for Britain, thanks to the superiority of its military technology and navy – left a searing mark on the Chinese. It is remembered in China today as the start of the so-called ‘century of humiliation’. The Treaty of Nanjing that ended the war achieved the real aims of figures such as the British foreign secretary, Viscount Palmerston. Their concerns were not so much about the drug trade per se, but the general lack of access for British business in China; barriers preventing foreign officials from speaking directly to the Chinese government; and, primarily, the sense that Britain’s status as a great power was not being recognised by China. As well as addressing these issues, the treaty ceded Hong Kong to the British. Who were key figures in Sino-British relations in the 19th century? British involvement in China reached its peak in the mid-19th century, an era encapsulated in the actions of three figures. The first was maverick botanist Robert Fortune, who was involved in perhaps the most audacious act of intellectual property theft ever committed. Masquerading as a Chinese traveller, in the 1850s he stole tea plants and devised a way to grow them in British-run India – which is why so much tea drunk in Britain today originates from India. The second key character at that time was the strange mystic Charles Gordon, who had participated in the looting of the Summer Palace by British and French forces in 1860, during the Second Opium War. He turned up again in 1863 to lead a group of foreign mercenaries, nicknamed the Ever Victorious Army, during the so-called Taiping Rebellion, a civil war that had been convulsing the country for 13 years. The third of these influential British figures, Robert Hart, achieved a different kind of fame. From 1863, he ran the Imperial Maritime Customs – a unique system responsible not just for collecting import duties for the Chinese government, but also for establishing infrastructure such as lighthouses and for collecting statistics. Hart, the highest-ranking British person to serve as a Chinese official, maintained that position till 1911, by which time he was responsible for close to a third of the Qing’s revenue. Read more | Has China always been the world’s greatest superpower? Just as Britain has been influenced by these interactions, so too was China. It was introduced to key technologies, belief systems and processes of modernity, from railways to ideas around administration and finance, largely through British companies, officials or individuals. Neither country would be the kind of place it is today without these three centuries of early engagement. That needs to be more wider recognised today, particularly in a time when there are such sharp disagreements between the two over values, rights and ideas of global order. The situation changed as China became open on the world stage throughout the 20th century. The US, Japan and other powers grew more influential, and Britain’s role slowly receded. Hong Kong became the key focus, with colonial rule there maintained till 1997. Yet even today, in the 21st century, China ranks as among Britain’s largest and most important trading and economic partners. As we’ve seen, links between the two go back centuries – and their impacts on one another have been profound. Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London, and author of The Great Reversal: Britain, China and the 400-Year Contest for Power (Yale University Press, 2024) This article was first published in the September 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Sathnam Sanghera considers how we can have a constructive national conversation about Britain’s imperial past
Sathnam Sanghera’s bestselling 2021 book Empireland catapulted the author into the eye of a media storm. Following the release of its follow-up, Empireworld, he spoke to Matt Elton about how it felt to be at the centre of a heated national debate on empire – and how we can have constructive conversations about Britain’s imperial past. View Green Video on the source website