The only history worth learning is the factual kind

The story of our Empire amounts to more than a simple narrative about ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’

When I was seven, my form teacher decided to teach my class about the Victorians. I still have the exercise book. On one of the early pages, I had been tasked with colouring in red the parts of the map that made up the British Empire. On another page, I had made a poster to convene a public meeting of abolitionists, illustrated by my drawing of a cruel slave driver with a whip. After these highlights, nearly the entire project was devoted to quite another subject: dresses.

This, then, was the sum total of my education on Britain’s imperial era until I reached university. I can’t help but feel rather cheated. There I was, with a brain ready to learn, wasting my time on the vocabulary of crinolines, bustles and corsets instead of learning about the scramble for Africa or the Indian Mutiny. So when I read Jeremy Corbyn’s comments this week that we ought to teach more colonial history to our children, I actually agreed with him. Our national memory has some pretty serious holes in it.

The general problem with this discussion is that as soon as it is raised, we get instantly bogged down in a debate about values and morality. This is in part because the strongest advocates of the argument on the Left often equate “learning about history” with “teaching Britain about its unrelenting history of oppression”. The Right responds by accusing these dangerous subversives of “hating Britain” and the debate progresses no further.

When I say we need to learn more colonial history, however, I mean neither of these things. I mean simply that schoolchildren (and adults) ought to become acquainted with more of the facts and events of colonisation. It is a rather poor show that most children go through school knowing as little of the Bengal famines or David Livingstone as they know of Mars. If they retain any history in their heads, it consists mainly of those familiar chestnuts, the Tudors and the Nazis.

Despite Mr Corbyn’s correct assertion that we need more of our imperial past in the classroom, however, he is the last person I would trust to deliver on such a pledge. That is because, for him and his fellow travellers, history is never just history. It is a continuous manifestation of the dialectic between oppressed and oppressor, or whatever reductive theory he currently favours.

For example, the press release accompanying Mr Corbyn’s comments states the following: “Labour’s Emancipation Educational Trust will tell the story of how slavery interrupted a rich African and black history.” The word “interrupted”, presumably intended to convey the unwelcome arrival of the transatlantic slave trade, is revealing. It is the kind of word one would use about human interference in a perfectly enclosed biosphere and therefore connotes, rather weirdly, that African history was in some kind of natural state to which slavery was an ahistorical and artificial interruption.

In fact, as we know, slavery was endemic throughout most of human history, including in Africa. So it would be more accurate to say that you want to teach children about how the unprecedented scale of the European transatlantic slave trade disrupted existing African societies.

Perhaps you think this is a quibble. It isn’t. Colonial history is complicated. The transatlantic slave trade immiserated millions of Africans and enriched many Europeans. It also enriched many Africans, who were enslavers and sellers of rival tribesmen to the European sea traders. Similarly, the societies “interrupted” by colonisation were diverse and complex. In Buganda, the British “interrupted” the rule of an absolute monarch who liked burning Christians and raping page boys. The British Empire in India “interrupted” the Mughal Empire, originally established by a dynasty from the Asian Steppe. Cecil Rhodes’ arrival in Zimbabwe “interrupted” the expansion of the Matabele tribe, which had seized land from the Shona.

None of this “justifies” anything that went before or after it. Nothing can justify machine gunning warriors armed with spears or presiding over successive, devastating famines. But this is the point. History isn’t there to justify itself. The past is a wreckage of deeds, migrations, empires, rebellions, ruins and graveyards. It should be learned as such, subject neither to the glorifying narrative of imperialist, racial superiority nor to the fetishist, nativist dialectic in which everyone is either “oppressed” or “oppressor”.

Purists will object that no study of history can be truly neutral. Of course that is true. There’s selection bias, there’s the way we present facts and the way we relate to them. Victorian corsets, I was taught, were horrid because women couldn’t breathe in them. On the other hand, the dresses’ frills were so pretty to colour in. Nothing is ever purely a fact.

There is a difference, though, between arguing that our curriculum has some gaping holes in it and suggesting that it is a tool of white supremacy. When students at Oxford suggest their reading lists should include more non-white authors whose work has been unfairly neglected, that seems entirely reasonable to me. But when they suggest that we need to “decolonise the syllabus” as a late-stage act of resistance to the imperialist machine, I see merely a vanguard of ideologues trying to impose their ideas on everyone else.

Unfortunately, Western teachers and academics are not well-placed to navigate this difficult territory. They are, if anything, moving further away from facts and towards theories. As an undergraduate in the US, I scoured my university’s 3,000 course offerings for a broad course on European colonial history. I found one, entitled “Violence in the British Empire”, that sounded general enough to be a good introduction. On the first day, I turned up to hear the professor, a rising star in her department, explain that the course would focus on “theories on the intimacy of violence in the British Empire”. In other words, we wouldn’t be learning about events. We would be learning about her pet theories on intimacy and power. I quickly decided the class wasn’t for me.

We are tying ourselves in knots over something that shouldn’t really be so complicated. Do we want our children, black, white and every other colour, to know the basics of British history? If so, let’s not start by talking about injustice or arguing over whether the empire was “good” or “bad”. Let’s start with some facts. It shouldn’t be a controversial idea.

There is a difference between arguing that our curriculum has gaping holes in it, and saying it is a tool of white supremacy