Simon Akam: Why Don’t the British Teach Their Students About Imperial History?
Simon Akam is Reuters’ correspondent in Sierra Leone. You can find him at www.simonakam.com
When I was an undergraduate at Oxford University my tutor—a deeply eccentric but profoundly decent man who claimed to both “loathe this century” and be surprised by the fact that he had lived to see it—had a map on his wall. The map showed the world. The continents were outlined in black on a white field. Shaded red were all of Britain’s former overseas possessions, from India to swathes of Africa to North America. Above the image was a line of large text that read, “How on earth did we get away with it?”
That map at Oxford—which must now have gone, as its owner is retired—was more or less the limit of my exposure to my country’s imperial past during my formal education. I was reminded of this as Queen Elizabeth traveled to Ireland this week. She’s 85 now, yet this is the first time in her long reign that she has crossed the narrow seas to visit our neighbor to the west. The reason for her extended absence is the fractious relationship Britain had with Ireland for much of the twentieth century, and for hundreds of prior years, too. Until Irish independence in 1922, the country was a British colony. The north is still ruled from London, and, for 40 years, Irish Republicans tried to change that situation by force.
Seeing the fanfare attached to the royal trip—and listening here at my current base in Africa to the careful explanations to the wider world on the BBC World Service of just what it meant—I was struck by what a poor job we as a nation do when it comes to teaching our own history of empire. There is no British Imperial History 101, so to speak. As it is, instruction of British history is wont to concentrate on “Hitler and the Henrys”—World War II and the colorful Tudor monarchs of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Henry VIII and his six wives first among them.
My own school experience in Cambridge in southeast England was typical. As a small child at a state-funded primary school, I studied the Aztecs and the Egyptians. At eleven, I moved to a fee-paying school. (The private education sector is powerful in England, and theoretically lies beyond government control. However, its pupils sit for the same exams, so they do not stray far in their studies.) In history, the industrial revolution came up, and, at 14 or 15, World War I appeared, a conflict that has enormous cultural weight in Britain, an equivalent in national significance to the Civil and Vietnam wars for the United States. Later, when I chose history as one of my four “A-levels” in the last years of high school, there were two syllabuses on offer, Early Modern and Modern. I took Early Modern That meant sixteenth-century England. The Henrys. I believe that Modern, true to form, focused on Hitler. Early Modern was fascinating, and I had an excellent teacher. But it did not explain Britain’s place in the world.