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: To these I would add two more fundamental points: 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 […]
Alan Lester The Dividend Hall of South Sea House, 1810 Robert Tombs has a new essay in the TLS disparaging the historians who helped the Church of England uncover its historical complicity in slave trading. They “did not appear to understand what they were reading”, apparently. He blames their historical illiteracy for “probably the most expensive historical error in modern British history” and charges them with inflicting “severe reputational damage” on the Church. Tombs wants us to believe that the Church Commissioners were persuaded to establish a £100 million reparations scheme because of their failure to grasp the difference between […]
Donald Trump has imperialist intentions, but no idea of what it took for Empires like Britain’s to sustain their hegemony. He is trying to recreate the kind of trade dominance that the British Empire established in the nineteenth century, whilst at the same time withdrawing the USA from overseas ‘forever wars’, and finding that these are incompatible objectives. When Trump held up his bookies board announcing arbitrary tariffs on every country in the world and some places that weren’t even countries, economists saw a contradiction between his idea of tariffs as short-term leverage forcing trading partners to lower protections against […]
Alan Lester The Critic Magazine has printed a story about me called A Lester Man. Presumably a wordplay on A Lesser Man, the title sets its tone. The author, Herbert Anderson, has trawled through my social media posts attributing beliefs and motivations to me with which he disagrees. The hit piece is intended to be a warning: ‘We ignore Lester and his kind at our peril’. Occasionally he gets my beliefs and motivations right. We clearly have contrasting political viewpoints and he’s entitled to object to mine. More often though, the claims he makes about me are false. They reflect […]
Remarks on the Preconditions Alan Lester These notes were the basis of a ten minute talk delivered at the Africa Centre, London as part of a panel in commemoration of the 140th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Conference of 1885.[i] I will aim to complement Dele’s [the previous speaker’s] focus on the discussion and outcomes of the conference itself by discussing its pre-history: the events and ideas that allowed European leaders to conceive it as both possible and legitimate to decide among themselves the fate of another continent while its inhabitants looked on from the sidelines. Such events […]
Alan Lester The right wing think tank Policy Exchange has published a report attacking the Church of England Commissioners for planning to engage in reparative measures with an investment endowment fund of £100 million over the next nine years. The plan was devised after historians and accountants found indisputable evidence of the Church’s complicity in slave trading. But instead of simply stating why it is opposed to the plan, Policy Exchange has tried, and failed, to undermine the historical research behind it. The Conservative Peer, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead CBE initiates the report’s chastisement of the Church Commissioners with a […]
Alan Lester On 7th June 2025, it will be the 5th anniversary of Black Lives Matter demonstrators toppling Edward Colston’s statue into the harbour whence his slave ships had sailed. Immediately following the protests of 2020, I and other historians objected to right-wing journalists and politicians describing the event as an attempt to ‘erase’ or ‘cancel’ the past. Until we have a time travel machine, it will, very obviously, be impossible to change what has already happened. But it was also said that this act of ‘statuecide‘ was an attempt to to ‘rewrite history’. Upon reflection this is true, albeit […]
Alan Lester Conservative leadership contenders often say outrageous things as they vie for the support of the ‘Tory “selectorate’. Kemi Badenoch appreciated quickly that adopting an outraged blocking stance on a conversation about looming Commonwealth reparations claims was attractive to the party faithful. She got off the starting blocks in May, promoting the absurd notion that Britain had never profited from slavery. Compensating for a later start, Robert Jenrick has pushed the historical revisionism further, using the Daily Mail’s platform to suggest that those on the receiving end of slavery and colonial exploitation should thank Britain for it. He seems […]
https://theworld.org/segments/2024/10/24/former-uk-colonies-push-for-reparatory-justice-at-commonwealth-of-nations-summit-in-samoa
https://www.thetimes.com/radio/show/20241024-26839/2024-10-24
