The Battle over the British Empire

In colonial debates, why do people ignore other empires?

david horspool

It is more than 60 years since Dean Acheson, the former US Secretary of State, told an audience at West Point Military Academy that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role’.

One role that we do seem to have embraced wholeheartedly since then is discussing that empire.

Much of that discussion turns on the question of whether the British Empire was a good thing or a bad thing. In Oxford, a project was set up called Ethics and Empire which, until recently, was notable mainly for the stink its very existence caused among fellow academics.

Some 170 of them signed a letter arguing that the project ‘obscures the complexities which scholars of empire have carefully unpacked over recent decades’.

This was a fair-enough plea to move beyond moral ‘cost-benefit analysis’ when discussing the British Empire. That said, the language of a recent, critical imperial history, Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence, set out ‘monstrosities [that] inflicted untold suffering’. It is an example of a tendency not to want to cool the argumentative temperature on the other side, either.

A new book by the project leader, Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, will provide more fuel.

To add to the sense of embattlement, the book, after being commissioned by Bloomsbury and accepted, Biggar says, by his editor there as ‘a book of major importance’, was then removed from their list, and his contract cancelled. The book is being published by HarperCollins.

Historians used to shy away from moral judgements. For good reason: the past is complex, values change and, anyway, it’s not clear that moral certainty is useful for historical study. I know the

Holocaust was unmitigatedly bad, but would that certainty make me draw any more convincing conclusions about its origins, causes or course, or is it possible that concentrating on the moral dimension could lead me to overlook other crucial details?

Of course historians should have a moral compass, but concentrating too hard on it might make us miss the turns in the road.

I agree with Biggar that the British Empire needs to be put into context. So much of the debate over it takes place in a historical vacuum. Imperialism is remarkably old and remarkably widespread.

But, to read much of the discussion of the British version in newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a unique experiment in human history.

A walk through the British Museum, that great imperial treasure house, puts you right. It is a tour of empires, from the cylinder seals of the Akkadians and Assyrians, via Persian, Greek and Roman sculpture, the remains of Ashoka’s Buddhist Indian empire and the lacquer cups of the Han Chinese, to the booty of the ocean-going colonisers of the Americas and the Pacific.

Every continent inhabited by humans has witnessed or spawned empires.

For every advance these objects represent – the invention of writing, agricultural technologies, the bureaucratic state – they are testimony too to dominance, death and defeat; in other words, to winners and losers. To talk about the British Empire as if it might be an exception to these rules seems hopelessly parochial. Naturally the British did things differently from other civilisations at other times. But they did not change those fundamental truths of human interaction. And it is not clear how putting different aspects of empire in the balance – positive (cricket! railways! the rule of law!) and negative (massacres, famines, the wholesale suspension of the rule of law) – helps.

In most cases, these empires were long enough ago or far enough away to enable us to look at them without feeling the need to pass moral judgement.

What would be the point in calling Ashurbanipal, Emperor of the Assyrians, a war criminal?

To know what kind of ruler he was and what kind of empire he presided over, it is important to recall his ruthlessness and violence, which included destroying rivals’ religious sites as well as killing their leaders. But giving a moral verdict on the empire of Ashurbanipal, which perished shortly after his death in the seventh century BC, seems absurd.

Time will eventually allow the same critical distance from the British Empire. But, for the descendants of the colonised, wherever they live, it hasn’t yet passed from memory.

The journalist Sathnam Sanghera’s book Empireland was partly motivated by that sense of personal connection, but commendably also by the sense that the British have ignored their imperial history.

If we do feel the need to make moral judgements, it’s better not to do so from a position of ignorance.