The gammoning of British history
If anybody had ever wondered where the Brexiteers would turn their ire, now that Brexit is ‘done’, or if anybody had wondered about the identity of their new enemies in the conservative culture war, the answer now is clear: historians, and especially historians who dare to question Britain’s apparently messianic role in shaping the modern world for the better. After all, we cannot just hate Jean-Claude Juncker for ever.
Boris Johnson has warned us not to edit or censor the past, or ‘to lie’ about British history, which is really something. Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary, has instructed our heritage institutions not to give undue prominence to the less salubrious aspects of Britain’s imperial past. A former judge, writing in the Spectator has decided that everything in the Empire was fine and dandy.
On a personal level, The Critic tore strips off me for concluding that British involvement in colonial slavery was not sweetness and light at every turn. At the same time, it managed to regurgitate many of the pro-slavery tropes which animated the West Indian defence of colonial enslavement.
Yet when the intellectual content of the ‘war on woke’ is analysed, and when we attempt to formulate responses to the cookie-cutter arguments that conservative commentators advance, what do we find?
The common objection to current historical practice is that we are ‘rewriting’ history. Well, yes, we are — but that is exactly the point of historical research. We spend years and decades in archives, combing through primary sources and long-lost documents, piecing together who did what, when, how, and why. If we find evidence that could change our understanding of the past, and of the prevailing historical narrative, we seek to extend this new knowledge to our colleagues — and, if we are lucky enough to find something truly interesting, to the public at large.
In my case, I went through the papers of West Indian slaveholders and merchants, government ministers, and abolitionist campaigners, the journals and newspapers of the 1820s and ’30s, and records of parliamentary debates. What did I find? That the banner of ‘Britain abolished slavery’ is pathetically crude and that our celebratory regard for emancipation fails entirely to account for the powerful forces at the heart of the British Establishment which had defended slavery so vigorously. That is why I published articles on the economics, theology, and political strength of British slaveholders in historical journals; that is why I wrote my book.
And what, then, of ‘deleting’ history or trying to cancel historical figures? Much of this rhetoric stems from the controversy over statues, which was catalysed into a national debate when BLM protestors dumped Edward Colston into Bristol harbour. What is lost here is that statues are not the sole and complete representation of historical figures, and that removing a statue does not ‘cancel’ a person or remove him — almost always him — from the historical record. Have the citizens of Baghdad, for example, forgotten about Saddam Hussein? If the statue of Cecil Rhodes is removed from Oriel College in Oxford, shall Rhodes cease being a central figure in the history of British imperialism in southern Africa? Of course not.
Rather, statues represent the values and mores that contemporary societies — that is, the people who put up the statues — chose to celebrate. It should therefore come as no surprise that most of the statues commemorating Confederate generals were erected either during the Jim Crow era following the collapse of Reconstruction, or in the 1960s when southern segregationists were resisting the extension of civil and voting rights to African Americans. It follows that, if we should wish to remove the statue of a slave trader or exploitative imperialist, it means only that we no longer wish to celebrate historical figures whose values now clash irreconcilably with our own.
At this point, whataboutery intrudes: ‘Yes, there was slavery in the British Empire, but why aren’t you attacking the Ottomans, or the Vikings, or the ancient Greeks, who also had slavery?’ There are two plain answers to any such question.
First, we — that is, my colleagues and I — are historians of Britain and the British Empire; that is our field, and that is our choice. Should we lambast neurologists for not specialising in cardiology? Moreover, if we were to write urgently and fervently on the iniquities of the Sublime Porte or Spartan servitude, we would be well outside the field of our expertise — although not quite as far as, say, a ‘former judge’.
Second, it is self-evident that few of the other former slaveholding empires are as keen to parade their historical virtues in a foam-flecked frenzy of flag-waving. It is primarily Britain — well, certain voluble parts of Britain — which is hellbent on representing British history as an unstinting procession of improvements. It is a long-standing criticism of academics that they focus on niche and unimportant subjects which are undeserving of funding, let alone wider attention. But now, if we address ourselves to issues of national mythology, self-perception, and public discourse in the attempt to correct mistaken assumptions, we are told to stop. So just what should we do?
The next weapon deployed against us in this culture war is ‘balance’: ‘Well, slavery might have been bad’, they concede, ‘but what about all of the good things that Britain did?’ The most immediate answer must be that, by exposing the atrocities committed in the name of empire, we are in fact providing balance not only to the nauseating national habit of imperialist self-congratulation, but also to the Whiggish historiographical tradition of focusing upon abolition and not upon slavery itself. As for other examples? Railways are great, but their construction followed obvious routes of economic exploitation and extraction. Education? Yes, Chinese civilisation really struggled without us, didn’t it? The rule of law and British values? I’m so glad that more than 40 of the 70 countries where being gay remains illegal are former British colonies.
The last and ultimate charge levelled against historians of empire is that they ‘hate Britain’ and want to run it down. For a start, it is difficult to know what expression of nationalistic devotion would persuade our critics to the contrary: perhaps wearing a Union Jack suit while simultaneously singing ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ and donating to Boris Johnson’s redecoration GoFundMe?
In any event, it makes no logical or historical sense to accuse of self-hatred those writers who would illuminate the failings of government or public discourse. Historically, ‘patriotism’ was an oppositional philosophy. First articulated by the Country Whigs and Bolingbroke’s Tory opponents of Robert Walpole in the mid-eighteenth century, and then arguably perfected by the American Revolutionaries, patriotism was a means of exposing the hypocrisies and corruption of government.
So, does my hatred of unthinking jingoism and British hypocrisy over historical slavery mean that I hate Britain? Does it mean that I hate the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the films of David Lean, parliamentary democracy, and cricket? No, it does not: it means that I hate unthinking jingoism and British hypocrisy over historical slavery. We should be able to tell the difference.
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Dr Michael Taylor is the author of The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (The Bodley Head, 2020).
