ACTUALLY, THERE WERE MANY GREAT THINGS ABOUT THE EMPIRE
THE PURPOSE of history should be the quest for the truth about the past. But too often in modern Britain, it has been used as an instrument for political propaganda.
Some of the very institutions that have a duty to promote understanding of our past now indulge in vast exercises in brain-washing and self-loathing.
In this culture of manipulative distortion, ideology and modern-day political sentiment come before enlightenment, and the rich story of Britain is presented as a source of shame.
The idea that the British Empire was a cruel abomination, without redeeming features, is now a ruthlessly enforced conventional wisdom pervading schools, museums, universities and — as I have discovered as a historian focusing on the Stuart age — in government record offices.
Anyone questioning this belief is treated as a heretic who must be silenced.
I am fortunate enough to live in the London Borough of Richmond, which houses the National Archives, that wonderful treasure trove of written material covering everything from Cabinet papers to medieval manuscripts.
I first noticed the National Archives falling prey to insidious political correctness in 2009 when I visited the Keeper’s Gallery at its Richmond HQ, where a series of displays about British history had been mounted.
To my profound irritation, I found that impartiality had regularly given way to political posturing. It was as if some of the entries had been written by a group of earnest but ill-informed Left-wing activists.
Perhaps the most offensive example was the section on slavery, which, ridiculously, failed to give any mention of the great British campaigner William Wilberforce, whose heroic fight in Parliament saw the abolition of the slave trade in 1807.
JUST as misleading was an 1868 photograph on the display board of HMS Daphne sailing on the Indian Ocean, its deck full of black slaves. There was nothing, characteristically, to indicate that these unfortunate people had actually just been rescued by the Royal Navy, for the Daphne was one of the key vessels that patrolled the seas in the drive to stamp out the slave trade between East Africa and the Arabian peninsula in the late Victorian age.
This kind of deceit is not confined just to the Keeper’s Gallery. I was also disturbed to read on the National Archives website, during all the recent commemorations for the 70th anniversary of the partition of India, an official blog which gave an utterly jaundiced view of the event, heaping all the blame for the bloodshed that occurred on Britain.
But the historical reality is that the Indians, including Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, had been campaigning vociferously, sometimes violently, for the end of the British Empire.
When autonomy was finally granted in 1947 by Clement Attlee’s government, it was not a precipitate act — as this National Archives blog pretended — but the culmination of long years of negotiations.
Partition was not an act of folly by the Labour government, but the inevitable consequence of independence, accepted by all political leaders, since most Muslims did not want to live under Hindu rule.
That kind of misinterpretation is so characteristic of officialdom’s view of British history today: anything to give our country a bad name.
It is all so one-sided and depressing. Why are these display boards not used to provide a more uplifting, layered and compelling narrative of Britain’s past instead of this dreary agitprop?
What is truly worrying is that the National Archives is supposed to be a great resource for us all — think of the countless children taken there on school trips whose view of our island’s past is being warped.
There is far too little, for instance, about the real story of how our democracy was established, stretching back to the Middle Ages when the first representative parliaments were created, providing us with a system of accountable rule that was later exported around the world.
Nor is there much about the wonderful Victorian feats of engineering which transformed the 19th century. On the Empire, there could be far more about the benefits that British rule brought.
Of course there were faults, but I believe they were in so many cases more than outweighed by the benefits.
The Empire brought peace, security and stability through the rule of law to people who had lacked them; it delivered the products of science and technology to vast tracts of the world; and showed their inhabitants how they could master their environment through sanitation, agriculture and building development.
Throughout the world, the Empire brought nations medical colleges, hospitals, schools, universities, roads, railways, airfields, harbours, bridges, telegraph and phone systems and wireless transmitters.
AND it brought wealth, too — indeed, Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson contends that ‘no organisation in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
‘And no organisation has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.’
It was Lord Curzon, the grandest of Indian Viceroys, who did so much to protect and rebuild the Raj’s architectural heritage, while Lord Rosebery, the Liberal Imperialist Foreign Secretary of the early 1890s, annexed Uganda
precisely to put down the slave trade there.
Since my visit in 2009, I have been fighting a battle with the National Archives to persuade it to show greater impartiality in its displays and blogs.
It has been a struggle, with the organisation hiding behind bureaucracy to defend itself. The correct procedures have been followed, it cries, as if this were a municipal planning application rather than a presentation of British history.
I have had a few successes, like the withdrawal of its blog on Partition and a fuller explanation on the display board about HMS Daphne’s role.
But the general attitude has been one of continued negativity and obfuscation, as if the National Archives — which in any other nation would be shouting about Britain’s achievements — is ashamed of its country.
This desire to run down British history before the advent of allcaring, all-wise political correctness reminds me of a scene in George Orwell’s terrifying novel 1984, about the horrors of totalitarian rule.
At one point, the hero Winston Smith picks up a children’s history textbook and reads a passage about British life before the social revolution.
‘The rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture opposite... The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them, they could throw them into prison.’
Tragically, I fear we are beginning to slide into an Orwellian one-sided stance on history. The signs are all around us. Not just in the outrageous attacks from students and even fellow dons on Oxford’s Professor Nigel Biggar, who had the temerity to suggest that some elements of the Empire were beneficial. But also in the simplistic teaching of history in schools, with all its narrow obsessions with equality and diversity.
The same is true of the terror about giving offence in universities, which has resulted in the idiotic creation of ‘safe spaces’ — where students are ‘safe’ from criticism — and endless censorship of ‘offensive’ literature.
THE GROWING influence of politically correct dogma in our intellectual life is further reflected in the relentless attacks on the symbols of British past, like the statues of politicians and military leaders — including Nelson’s column — that student agitators want to pull down.
The truth about this politicised approach to history was exposed yesterday by a comment from Kathleen Burk, emeritus professor of history at University College, London, who said that she felt ‘sorry for the National Archives because they are trying to appeal to a wide multi-cultural population’. But it is not the job of history to provide a political comfort blanket to certain sections of society.
Besides, the very reason so many migrants want to settle here is exactly because of our rich past which, whatever today’s politically motivated vandals of British history might pretend, has helped to build one of the most successful nations and cultures that mankind has ever known.