By Alan Lester The Red River Expedition with Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s boat featured flying the ensign at Kakabeka Falls, Frances Anne Hopkins, 1877: https://picturingtheamericas.org/painting/the-red-river-expedition-at-kakabeka-falls/ We understand the British Empire’s military campaigns mainly via the accounts of the officers who led them. These records render the acquisition of territory, the crushing of dissent and the seizing of plunder into honourable enterprises but, when published, they were also about self-promotion. A heroic narrative, leavened with the correct dose of self-deprecation, could launch the career of an ambitious officer with literary flair. The best-known example is probably Winston Churchill, whose talent for burnishing […]
In April 2024, the Conservative MP Kemi Badenoch gave a speech in which she sought to deny the extent to which Britain’s economic trajectory was reliant on colonialism. When criticised by William Dalrymple, Toby Young, responded with this tweet, linking to an article in support of Badenoch by Nigel Biggar. This is my quickfire response to Badenoch’s and Biggar’s case: Biggar makes three historical arguments, each of which is tendentious and based on the construction of straw men: He starts with the economic foundations of the South African War, arguing that the antisemitic Hobson’s thesis that Cecil Rhodes and other […]
Alan Lester In the early stages of World War I, the Raj came to the south coast of England in the form of over 4,000 wounded Indian soldiers. They convalesced in a number of specially constructed hospitals, including in the Brighton Pavilion. Between 1914 and 1916 the former Prince Regent’s Oriental-style palace became charged with the hubris and anxiety of the largest and most diverse Empire the world had ever seen. [1] A Palace Becomes a Hospital In August 1914, the Indian Army was roughly the same size as the regular British Army (around 240,000 men), but their deployment against the […]
Alan Lester University of Sussex and La Trobe University Winston Churchill is an iconic figure. For many, he stands for the idealised qualities of the British nation: a bulldog spirit leavened with a sense of fair play and deep attachment to freedom. His character, contribution to historical events and legacy have been contested to greater or lesser extents ever since he became a public figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, but after Black Lives Matter protestors named him a racist by graffitiing his stocky, brooding statue in Westminster in June 2020, he also become more central to the […]
Talk delivered to ALES virtual event: Communications of Archives as Public History 18 March 2024 The sociologist James Davison Hunter first used the term ‘culture war’ in a book on American religious authority and politics since the 1960s, first published in 1991. He identified a worrying tendency: a ‘political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding’.[1] Hunter believed this new form of divisiveness was emerging over issues such as reproductive rights, child-care, affirmative action, gay rights and multiculturalism. These issues all rest upon moral authority – ‘the basis by which people determine whether something is good or […]
Alan Lester University of Sussex and La Trobe University Winston Churchill is an iconic figure. For many, he stands for the idealised qualities of the British nation: a bulldog spirit leavened with a sense of fair play and deep attachment…
In the early stages of World War I, the Raj came to the south coast of England in the form of over 4,000 wounded Indian soldiers. They convalesced in a number of specially constructed hospitals, including in the Brighton Pavilion.…
Alan Lester Colonial Realities Colonialism is, by its very nature, incompatible with many of the ideals of justice that we hold dear today. The very definition of the word, according to the Oxford Online Dictionary, is “the policy or practice…
With statues at the heart of the culture war over empire and with retain & explain as government policy, it’s important to explain them fully and sensitively. This has been tried in the case of the Redvers Buller statue in Exeter. A blog here on his career and its interpretation. Philip Halling / Statue of General Sir Redvers Buller / CC BY-SA 2.0
