Alan Lester

Balance

Fortunately educators are now increasingly sceptical about the idea of teaching the British Empire as a matter of balance between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Certain objections to this practice are already well-established:

1. The incommensurability of the ‘good’ (wealth for example) and the ‘bad’ (people being massacred for example)
2. The gross oversimplification of lives affected in various and often contradictory ways, even in the course of a single day, by colonial relations.
3. The frequent resort to balancing short term harms (particular atrocities) against long term “benefits” (infrastructures and laws) rather than long term harms (a global South-North wealth drain) and short term “benefits” (profits on trade).
4. The key question of who exactly experiences the “good” and who suffers the “bad” in any given place at any given time.

To these I would add two more fundamental points:

1. Moral evaluation rests upon an entirely different epistemology from historical enquiry. History is an ongoing pursuit of new evidence, knowledge and understanding of the past; it is a continual, unfinished journey and should be taught as such. Drawing up a moral balance sheet presumes the destination is reached. The enquiry has been completed and the evidence accumulated can now be weighed in the balance. These exercises rely on entirely different logics and historical philosophies.
2. The moral assessment of colonialism as a matter of balance is an intrinsically pro-colonial judgement. The imperial balance sheet has always been deployed not as analysis, but as a justification for colonialism. Calling for a balanced outcome in assessment (rather than a balanced approach to historical evidence and perspective) is pleading for the legitimation of an inherently dispossessive process. As Stuart Ward shows in The Truth About Empire, the concept of “balance” has its own history, and it is one of imperial legitimation.

My suggestion would be not to teach empire as a matter of balance but rather to encourage critical thinking on the notion of balance. Why is it so appealing and to whom? What violence does it do to a more nuanced awareness of the past? An interrogation of “balance” seems to me a much better use of class time than its uncritical invocation.

Legacies

So its a good thing that educators are throwing out the balance sheet and opting for critical analysis of colonialism’s uneven effects through time and across space . But I think we should also question a second taken-for-granted mode of the teaching of Empire. This is the idea of identifying the Empire’s “legacies”.

“Legacy” requires as much critical reflection as “balance”. Too often we seem to imagine the Empire’s legacies as a discrete package bequeathed by the Britons who ran it. Rather than a bequest though, there are continuities and discontinuities from the various moments at which empire ended in different parts of the world.

The governments succeeding British rule decided to pick up some aspects of colonial rule and repurpose them, allowed some practices to persist in new guise, and ceased others. It is their agency and that of all the people who have lived since the empire ended that has shaped the world as we know it now, not some heirloom handed down by British colonists. To talk of the legacies of Empire is to erase the agency of these postcolonial actors and, once again to recentre the Britons who dominated the empire.

Let me give five quick examples of frequently invoked “legacies” , drawn from either side of the conventional “balance sheet” approach that might help ground my point: democracy, railways and public health on the “positive” side, racism on the “negative”, and post-war mass Black and Asian migration to Britain, which would probably be placed on different sides by ethno-nationalists and progressives. Like the notion of balance, each is worthy of interrogation in the classroom.

Democracy was an idea disseminated by Britons through empire and claimed by emigrant Britons as their birthright in the settler colonies, but denied in practice to Black and brown people. At the end of empire not one single colony other than the settler dominions was a democracy, though India came closest (as a result of nationalist pressure) with provincial self-governance granted just over a decade before the end of a near two hundred year period of hegemony. The Empire did not bequeath democracy then; rather it helped to disseminate an idea that was implemented by various postcolonial governments.

The railways: certain sections of track, stations and the bureaucracy that made trains move were left behind by an empire that used them primarily to extract resources and move troops and labour; but the democratisation of railways for ‘ordinary’ Indians’ and Africans’ use was more a postcolonial innovation than a “legacy” of the empire.

Public health programmes such as India’s against smallpox and malaria started under British rule but drew on trans-national scientific advances and only began to impact on the country on any scale when the postcolonial government drew on Soviet and other non-British precedents. There was no public health programme to speak of inherited from the Empire itself.

The same problem applies to phenomena that are often seen as negative “legacies” of empire. It is true that the British Empire instituted racial stratification in every colony and was underpinned by ideas of the racial inferiority of Black people, formulated in the first instance to legitimate Black-only Atlantic slavery. But it does students a disservice to engender the belief that once fixed, these racist ideas were simply inherited. Racism has been continually reformulated and reinscribed as a highly malleable discourse of difference and power. The intensity with which racism informs public discourse is historically contingent.

Rather than telling students that the European empires left a legacy of racism, perhaps they should learn about the post-emancipation reformulation of racism as a substitute for legalised status distinctions from the 1840s; the de-legitimation of racist thinking after WWII and the Holocaust and, most importantly for the here and now, the ways in which racism can be reconstructed and re-entrenched as the post-WWII consenus fragments.

Finally, the post-war immigration of Black and Asian people from different components of the Empire to the UK is often seen as one of its major ‘legacies’. However, I think it is best seen as a radical discontinuity from the mass emigration of over 20 million white British colonists and the mass movements of enslaved and indentured workers from colony to colony, managed by corporate and governmental entities, that were critical to Empire.

If History’s role is in part to help us understand how we got to where we are now, I suggest the idea of legacies is unhelpful. That of reinscription, continuity and discontinuity is far more helpful. Like “balance” perhaps “legacy” is best interrogated in the classroom rather than simply deployed. For more on legacies and their complications see here.