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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
Sathnam Sanghera on the legacy of empire
Sathnam Sanghera's bestselling 2021 book Empireland found the author in the eye of a media storm. As its follow-up, Empireworld, is released, he talks to Matt Elton about how it felt to make headlines – and how we can have a constructive national conversation about Britain’s imperial past
Your new book explores the impact of the British empire around the world, which is obviously a weighty, complex topic. But I wanted to begin in the place it starts: on holiday. Can you tell us about how your trip inspired the project? I went to Barbados on one of those first trips we all did as the Covid-19 pandemic began to subside. The idea was partly to escape the stress of talking about the British empire, because I’d had such an intense response to my last book. But my girlfriend had booked the trip and chosen to go to Barbados, which is obviously not an escape from the British empire. I managed to relax for a few days, but then one afternoon found myself visiting the sites of former plantations – and was shocked to discover the tours barely mentioned slavery and its legacies. It made me realise I had to continue my journey into the empire’s history. As you say, your previous book Empireland – which focused on how imperial history has shaped Britain – received an intense reaction. How did it feel being in that spotlight, and did it shape this book? It felt weird, but varied day to day. Sometimes I’d receive abuse but find it funny; on other occasions, it really got to me. I’d be doing a public event and people would start yelling at me, for instance. Read more | The British empire in 1923: the story of the imperial project's territorial height But the positives have been incredible. I’ve met young people who are studying history because of Empireland, which is really inspiring. But it can also be overwhelming, and it did create pressure when I was writing this sequel. In fact, I’ve felt pressure on multiple fronts. You might have noticed that the book’s footnotes are quite extensive – probably more than you’d get in your average history title. That’s because I’m paranoid: I know there are people out there who want to undermine and ridicule me, so I wanted to make sure I showed up with the receipts. Do you think there’s a danger of accuracy being lost, on all sides of this debate? Absolutely. Defending empire is not a new thing: it’s as old as empire itself. But I think that it has gone further than ever in recent years, with nostalgic books about the British empire being published that ignore facts, use selective quotes, or ignore the consensus that has been built up by historians of the empire. I feel that’s taken this nostalgia into a dark place – into what is essentially fake history. And that scares me. Is the conversation we have about empire in Britain different from those that are going on elsewhere in the world? The legacies of empire are much more tangible outside Britain than in it. People live with them on a daily basis. For instance, I think the issue of reparations is often viewed in Britain as an academic, absurd argument, whereas in the Caribbean it’s a very real political conversation. British people don’t often know about the royal family’s involvement in slavery, either: the fact that the Royal African Company sent more enslaved people across the Atlantic than any other institution in the history of the transatlantic slave trade, for instance. Yet it’s quite well understood in the Caribbean, which led – for example – to the awkwardness surrounding the 2022 visit by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. The fact that they stood touching black children through a wire fence, for instance, was instantly seen as wrong by many people in the Caribbean, but I think it took a while for the penny to drop in Britain. Debates about empire in Britain also tend to be about the idea of a balance sheet: the extent to which it was ‘good’ or ‘bad’. That’s just not the way it’s being talked about elsewhere in the world, and it’s an absurd way of looking at history. It’s like studying the climate over the past 350 years by only looking at the sunshine or only studying the rain. It’d be better if you studied both, and all the stuff in between. But we don’t do that in Britain: we look at the empire in a black-and-white way that just re-enacts imperial tensions between colonisers and the colonised. I think we need to break free of that really babyish way of looking at history. The extent of the royal family’s links to empire is an example of how its legacy can provoke strong feelings and debate. Is it right to say a key argument of your book is that a story can have two sides? My overall argument is that opposite things can be true at the same time. Whatever you think about the British empire’s legacies, I think the opposite is also true to a certain degree. Yes, we were heavily involved in slavery, but that also led to the antislavery movement. British presence in its former imperial territories sometimes resulted in democracy, but also to a huge amount of geopolitical chaos. We spread the free press, but also censorship. These kind of contradictions are everywhere. I realised that the legacies of empire are almost entirely contradictory, and we don’t need to balance them against each other – we can talk about both at the same time. You write that you had doubts about the legitimacy of some of the commonly identified legacies of slavery and empire. What were those doubts? The legacies cited by the Caricom countries [a political and economic union of 15 nations in the Americas and Atlantic Ocean] in their demands for reparations – including, for instance, the high rates of diabetes – are all things that I agree with. Britain transformed that part of the world, turned it into a hub of industrial sugar production, and took loads of enslaved people there. Of course poor health in the region is a legacy of that slavery. Read more | Slavery's painful legacy: the British empire's role in the trade of enslaved people But you sometimes hear people saying their workaholism is due to the fact that they are a descendant of an enslaved person, or that PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] is handed down multiple generations, which quickly leads to arguments about whether trauma can be inherited. There, I think, the links are much less clear. In your chapter on the role of the British empire in spreading racism around the world, you pre-empt the objections some readers might have to it. Was that one of the topics you were most apprehensive about tackling? I think you are always going to be influenced by your personal experience. I occasionally get accused of being biased, but every historian is biased. Politics is just the way you see the world, and it affects my viewpoint just as it does anyone’s. I would say, though, that my politics are actually quite centrist. I’m a classic Centrist Dad: I’ve voted for all three of Britain’s major political parties. For some people, on the left and on the right, that might make me extreme. But I’d argue my views are mainstream, and what I write about race in the book pretty much reflects the view of most imperial historians. One of the key points is that we forget that, when ‘race science’ emerged in the 19th century, it had a distinctly British flavour. It became something different and dark in Germany, and something else again in the United States, but our empire was often the testbed for all of those weird theories. I’m Sikh, and my community was subject to the idea that it was in some way a ‘martial race’. That’s obviously absurd – as you can see, there’s nothing martial about me – but you can see the idea of characterising races elsewhere, too. Some Brits decided that black people would only work if compelled, or that it didn’t matter if Tasmanian people were wiped out because they were regarded as the lowest of the low. But at the same time this racism was going on – most clearly manifested, I think, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden – the British empire officially regarded itself as non-racist. This is another way in which opposites are true: sometimes when colonists and settlers behaved in a particularly racist way, people in London became concerned and tried to intervene. So you had racism and anti-racism playing out at the same time. The empire was different things at different times and in different parts of the world. That’s how deeply complex a subject it is. Why do you think we struggle to have a conversation about empire in Britain? It’s partly because empire happened abroad. We’ve never had a dark night of the soul, or even a light night of the soul, in which we have had to think about its legacies, because it all happened elsewhere. Read more | The Victorians and the British Empire: a brief guide and timeline I also think it’s because a lot of people in Britain have direct family links to empire, whether to the colonisers or the colonised. So a conversation about the empire can start to feel deeply personal very quickly. People sometimes think you’re accusing them or their ancestors personally of being racist and horrible. That’s not what’s being said, but it’s often the way it’s taken. Do you think there are things we can do to change the political conversation? I think we can end the ‘culture war’ that’s been going on. This absurd idea that you need to be proud of British history to be proud of being British has become quite popular among rightwing pressure groups and some sections of the political classes. To draw pride from your history is not the same thing as understanding it, so we need to uncouple pride from our history – and shame, too, because there are lots of people who say we should be ashamed of British history because of what we did. I don’t think our feelings of pride or shame have anything to do with it. We need to get rid of our feelings and reach a deeper understanding of what happened. What would you say to people who don’t see this as a culture war, but instead that negative changes are being made to the way that Britain sees itself? I would encourage them to look at the example of Ireland. Ireland was an imperial territory and the Good Friday Agreement was an exercise in postcolonial reconciliation, which involved the issuing of apologies and even reparations of a sort. I’d say Ireland is now a much healthier nation because of that process, and I think that the same could happen to our relationships with other countries around the world if we underwent a similar process with them, too. There are practical things that we can do to understand the world better, and to have better relations with the rest of the planet. Have you encountered instances in which you’ve been able to persuade people to change their mind? How possible is it to change people’s views on this subject? I work on The Times, which is a centre-right newspaper, and people often ask me: ‘Why don’t you just go and work at The Guardian?’ But I like working on The Times partly because I can feel the resistance to what I’m saying. Sometimes that resistance results in racial abuse and horrible letters, and sometimes I feel scared for my safety, but at the same time, I can definitely feel people’s minds changing. I get letters from people in their 70s and 80s who say I’ve helped them understand that something they were taught in school wasn’t true, or that the reality was much more complex. I really value that, even if it sometimes comes at a personal cost. How would you like people to think and feel about the history of the British empire as a result of reading your book? I hope people realise that the legacies of empire are profoundly contradictory – but also that this isn’t a history that divides us, but one that ultimately unites us. So many people in Britain today have deep links to this history, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It explains our multiculturalism – and our racism, too. It explains our daily habits, whether it’s drinking tea (which I’m drinking now) or rum (which, to be clear, I’m not). It’s a history that unites us, explains us and that, actually, can liberate us. You can listen to Sathnam Sanghera speak to Matt Elton in this HistoryExtra podcast episode. This article was first published in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
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. Sathnam Sanghera is the author of Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe: Signed Edition (Penguin, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones