Facing the truth about our empire

When it comes to attitudes to the British Raj, there’s no neutral ground, says William Dalrymple. Harsher critics deem it a crime on the scale of slavery and fascism; defenders insist it exported capitalism and democracy to Asia. One thing, however, all agree on: the empire “was the most important thing Britain ever did”. So how come it barely features on school curriculums? Children study the Tudors and Nazis, but seldom get “a whiff of Indian history”. As a result, we remain remarkably ignorant of our empire’s darker side: we think of the Raj “as all parasols and Simla tea parties”, not as an institution that perpetrated war crimes and reduced India from economic giant to third-world nation. British politicians and diplomats routinely fail to appreciate how, across much of the globe, it is this slant on the British Empire that holds sway. Hence the less than rapturous welcome Theresa May was given when she visited Delhi with a business delegation. If we are to prosper in a post-brexit world, we need to acknowledge the true history of our empire: “the bad as well as the good”.