Growing Up British and Rethinking the Empire
Growing up, I knew two things about the British Empire:
1. It was founded during the reign of Elizabeth I.
2. At its height, it encompassed a third of the world’s land, inspiring the phrase ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’.
Alongside these two key facts, came other hints and scraps of knowledge: we set up the first American towns, we found Australia and New Zealand and made them liveable, it was the British and her vast Empire that crushed the evil Nazi and Imperialist Japanese regime during WW2. And when the colonies wanted independence, we graciously let them go without a fight.
AN EDUCATION OF IMBALANCE
Looking back, I can see how flawed my childhood ideas of our history were, with ‘our’ representing the idea that everybody in Britain (although usually white and Christian of some denomination) shares the greatness of this country’s history. But even this idea of a shared national history has since been proved untrue; the idea of shared responsibility for our history only seems to extend to British achievements, and not its failures or barbarism.
We celebrate the fact that the Australian flag still holds the Union Jack, but not the decimation of the aboriginal peoples; we celebrate the fact that our navy stopped the importing of enslaved people’s from Africa to the Americas in the 1800s but not the fact that it was our ancestors who financed the plantations in which these slaves died working on in the first place; we celebrate the great stretches of railways across the Indian subcontinent, a feat of British engineering- but we do not acknowledge the fact that three million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 under the watch of the British regime, under the watch of the late, great Winston Churchill.
At school, the roles of empires are at the forefront of the curriculum, the horrors and destruction they entail especially. However, the empires which are taught about do not include our own; the Third Reich, the Imperial Japanese, the Soviet Union. We learn about the Nazi concentration camps used to murder six million Jews, the Soviet gulags made to silence political dissenters, the Japanese railways of death across Burma and Thailand- but not the murder of seven year old Lizzie van Zyl and 26,000 other Boer women and children in British camps during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902).
Nor did we learn of what we did to our closest neighbour, Ireland. In my hometown of Birmingham, every year on 21 November, there is a citywide commemoration of the twenty-one people killed during the IRA pub bombings of 1974; regional news shows documentaries on the bombings, gives updates on the victim’s family’s court hearings and the history surrounding the bombings. We learn that it was an unjust terrorist attack, devoid of humanity and unprovoked- and while that is somewhat the case, as is any attack on civilians- they were not unprovoked.
There is little mention of the attacks in both the ROI and NI that were committed by British and Unionist forces before and during the Troubles. I was never taught about the 1649 Sack of Wexford, in which 2,000 Irish people were killed including over 300 civilians who drowned whilst trying to cross the River Slaney, nor the Great Potato Famine which led to the Irish population decreasing by 20–25% due to starvation and emigration and how the British government’s laissez-faire economic policies only exacerbated the disaster.
FORWARD PROGRESSION
The way in which our youth should be educated about the British Empire has become especially polarised in the wake of movements such as #RhodesMustFall, #BlackLivesMatter and Decolonise the Curriculum, but in my opinion, I think the best way to achieve such a feat would be to focus on balancing the story, rather the complete overhaul of all that is taught. For every positive of Imperial rule written on the whiteboard and copied onto lined paper, another facet should follow. For every tale of heroism by white British soldiers during the world wars, the lives of Nora Inayat-Khan and Ganju Lama should be recounted. For every mention of Queen Victoria as the ‘Empress of India’, there should be a lesson on the atrocities at Amritsar. And for every screening of films such as ‘Zulu’ (1964), there should be a lesson on generations of Apartheid that followed. (Side note: my original intention was to compare ‘Zulu’ to an anti-colonial film that represented the negative side of the British in Southern Africa, however the fact that I was unable to find any Western films that would complete my comparison is more evidence to the greatly imbalanced view of the empire in society and media as a whole).
CONCLUSION
Nothing in life is black or white, especially regarding history. And it only makes sense for our national education system to represent that fact. The British Empire was something that categorically changed the world, and it something we need to face. In order to progress and make sure the attitudes which fuelled the flames of imperialism never happen again, we must take responsibility.
Regarding the German attitudes towards Nazi Germany, the West German president Richard von Weizsäcker said in a speech in 1985, “…today’s population were either children then or had not been born. They cannot profess a guilt of their own for crimes that they did not commit… But their forefathers have left them a grave legacy. All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and liable for it…” And it is my opinion that we too must consider Weizsäcker’s words, for they apply to us as much as they apply to any previously imperial nation.
