They're not all that different

Tweet

 

During the last week, who said “I actually think overall the British Empire did much more good for the world than it did bad”, and who thinks that “the British Empire was a force for good in the world”? For those who might not have kept up, the answer, of course, is those two famous peas-in-a-pod, namely Fromage and Sir Starmer. The point that they are both trying to make is that ‘we’ should be proud of ‘our’ history rather than ashamed of it, an aspiration which completely fails to understand the nuance between being proud of one’s country on the one hand and supporting everything it has ever done on the other.

They’re not alone, of course; there are plenty of other politicians, Labour and Tory alike, whose views on the issue are little different from those of Reform Ltd, but there are at least some of us who might be more likely to take pride in a country which recognised its chequered past, was able to admit and face up to the fact that its history hasn’t always been covered in glory, and that much of its wealth is based on theft and expropriation. It’s easy enough to identify the bad things that were done in the Empire like the occasional massacre, and the exploitation of people and territories to seize the wealth for the colonialists. Finding things that are unequivocally 'good' is a lot harder. Claiming that one of the good things was the abolition of slavery rather overlooks the fact that much of the wealth extracted from the empire was extracted on the back of slavery: reversing a policy and compensating the slave owners (but not the slaves) after more than two centuries of benefiting from slavery is rather hard to present as being a ‘net good thing’ for anyone taking an objective view.

The other ‘benefits’ usually claimed by empire apologists are the building of railways (all the better to extract goods and resources), the introduction of English law, Christianity, and the spread of the English language. Implicit in the claim that they are all ‘good’ things is the inherently racist belief that all of those things are better than anything that the mere natives had developed, or might have gone on to develop, for themselves. Whilst there is a clear advantage to being able to speak what has become the world’s lingua franca, claiming that as a benefit of imperial rule ignores the fact that English only achieved that status because it was imposed on so many conquered peoples by the imperial rulers or (in the case of the other great driver of English linguistic dominance) by white settlers driving native Americans from their lands. Presenting that as an unarguable net benefit is problematic, to say the least.

What the convergence of views between Sir Starmer and Fromage (to say nothing of all the others in between) does tell us is that English nationalism is based on a highly ethnocentric view of the world, a view based on an innate sense of superiority and exceptionalism. It’s a world view in which lesser peoples (and that includes the Welsh, Scots and Irish) should know their place and be grateful for that which was forced on them by military conquest. It’s a world view from which they are unable to escape, and in which it is incomprehensible to them why anyone might see things differently. It shouldn’t go unquestioned.