Seumas Milne: This Attempt to Rehabilitate the British Empire is a Recipe for Conflict
[Seumas Milne is a Guardian columnist and associate editor.]
David Cameron's coalition government likes to present itself as consensual, even touchy feely. However threatening its policies, the message is "we're all in this together". But if the latest plans of his close ally Michael Gove were to come to fruition, prepare for an outbreak of culture wars under the new regime: conflicts that would be fought out in classrooms across the country.
Last week the new education secretary publicly appealed to pro-empire TV historian Niall Ferguson to help rewrite the history curriculum for English schools. Considering this is a man who has unashamedly championed British colonialism and declared that "empire is more necessary in the 21st century than ever before", letting him loose on some of the most sensitive parts of the school syllabus in multicultural Britain might have been expected to provoke uproar.
Instead it passed almost without comment. The same was true when the neoconservative Gove suggested in March that Ferguson should join the even more extreme Andrew Roberts to bring school history teaching into line with Tory thinking. The passivity won't last. Given the education secretary himself believes history lessons should "celebrate" empire, Roberts is clearly the right man for Gove. The British empire was an "exemplary force for good", Roberts has claimed, and imperialism "an idea whose time has come again"....
The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people....
And far from decolonising peacefully, as empire apologists like to claim, Britain left its colonial possessions in a trail of blood, from Kenya to Malaya, India to Palestine, Aden to Iraq. To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead....
...What is needed are not expressions of guilt or apologies so much as genuine exposure to the historical record, to serve as an inoculation against falling into the imperial trap of the future. Not only will any attempt at an "even-handed" rehabilitation of empire be rejected by historians, teachers, students – and perhaps even Liberal Democrat ministers. But, in contrast to the colonial period, there are now millions living in Britain whose families had direct experience of colonial tyranny – as well as powerful successor states who will object vociferously to any imperial whitewash in British schools. If people like Ferguson and Roberts are allowed to get their hands on school history, it will be contested every step of the way.
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
David Cameron's coalition government likes to present itself as consensual, even touchy feely. However threatening its policies, the message is "we're all in this together". But if the latest plans of his close ally Michael Gove were to come to fruition, prepare for an outbreak of culture wars under the new regime: conflicts that would be fought out in classrooms across the country.
Last week the new education secretary publicly appealed to pro-empire TV historian Niall Ferguson to help rewrite the history curriculum for English schools. Considering this is a man who has unashamedly championed British colonialism and declared that "empire is more necessary in the 21st century than ever before", letting him loose on some of the most sensitive parts of the school syllabus in multicultural Britain might have been expected to provoke uproar.
Instead it passed almost without comment. The same was true when the neoconservative Gove suggested in March that Ferguson should join the even more extreme Andrew Roberts to bring school history teaching into line with Tory thinking. The passivity won't last. Given the education secretary himself believes history lessons should "celebrate" empire, Roberts is clearly the right man for Gove. The British empire was an "exemplary force for good", Roberts has claimed, and imperialism "an idea whose time has come again"....
The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people....
And far from decolonising peacefully, as empire apologists like to claim, Britain left its colonial possessions in a trail of blood, from Kenya to Malaya, India to Palestine, Aden to Iraq. To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead....
...What is needed are not expressions of guilt or apologies so much as genuine exposure to the historical record, to serve as an inoculation against falling into the imperial trap of the future. Not only will any attempt at an "even-handed" rehabilitation of empire be rejected by historians, teachers, students – and perhaps even Liberal Democrat ministers. But, in contrast to the colonial period, there are now millions living in Britain whose families had direct experience of colonial tyranny – as well as powerful successor states who will object vociferously to any imperial whitewash in British schools. If people like Ferguson and Roberts are allowed to get their hands on school history, it will be contested every step of the way.