Moral Maze, The Morality of the British Empire

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of the British Empire 

 "‘

There are many who while acknowledging its faults and darker episodes, maintained the Empire globalized trade, brought the rule of law, education, prosperity, modernity to the furthest corners of the world. Should we be ashamed or proud of our past? Should we acknowledge and examine it is the key to the present and the future? Or is the current obsession with it stoking ideas of victimhood, identity politics, even reawakening the racism it sets out to deplore?’…

‘I think we all have a habit of using the past to justify or to criticize the present. And that's obviously what we're doing right now in our conversation about the British Empire. But the reality is that the Empire was not only morally mixed, and it was as hated as much as it was loved in its own day. But it was so darn complicated that if we tried simply to agree we would tie ourselves up in knots’...

‘You know, I keep hearing people on one side saying that British people suffer from this kind of post Imperial guilt. And then I hear people on the other side saying that we suffer from this kind of nostalgia for Empire, but actually I don’t think people, most people don't feel either because I think we can only be responsible for the things that we've done ourselves’...

‘Is there a single positive thing to be said in your view about the British Empire?’

‘The question is a very flawed question to be asking. I don't know-’

‘Whether it's whether it's flawed or not, would you mind answering it?’

‘I don't think that that that simpl-, if we look at historical fact around the Empire, then absolutely we wouldn't be talking about the Empire as though it had anything good to offer. And it's precisely that kind of mythology around the empire that we can somehow set about looking at what was good and bad. That leads to us thinking that we can actually package it as somehow having been a gift to the world, and that we can not revisit it as a question, reckon, reckon with its, with its past, right its wrongs, consider questions around reparation, and actually think about how we can make good on, on historical injustice. I think that the stakes are actually really high for accepting that Britain itself is a product of what was a violent and white supremacist system. And that was the British Empire’...

‘Would you not say that the history of civilizations has really been the history of empires, with the idea that the nation state is actually quite a recent phenomenon? And all empires exploit, oppress and kill, often with complete impunity. So what makes the British Empire much worse than other empires?’

‘Well, I'm not really interested in comparing the British Empire with other empires. I'm interested in thinking about how the British Empire and its legacies affect people's lives today. That is what I'm interested in. If we look at how Britain remains colonially configured because it's past and we see racial injustice and violence taking place every day, whether we look at the Grenfell tower fire, whether we look at the Windrush scandal, the hostile environment, the way in which black people continue to be harassed and brutalized by the police-’

‘Fine’

‘Then what we would be doing is addressing actual wrongs that took place, the way those wrongs continue to shape our present and addressing them. I'm not interested in having an abstract debate around civilisation-’

‘It isn’t an abstract debate, precisely the opposite. Because if you're looking for evidence as to what makes the British Empire and its legacy, all the things that you've outlined, you know, horrific or really bad or morally corrupt, and how do we deal with them, then we have to think about how has human civilization itself developed? And that so many countries that were, you know, former colonists of Britain today, how are they living with the legacies? Not all of them have picked up where Britain left? So it's not just a matter of what's happening in the UK. We also have to think about these countries that were once colonized. What is their moral deficit? What is their moral momentum after the British left?’

‘Well, I mean, the British didn't leave. The British were driven out, they were fought out. The British Empire was defeated. The British presence was resisted from the first moment… as for how these countries are faring today, well we know there are vast global wealth and health disparities. We have very much in place colonial structures in the forms of debt and trade arrangement’

‘One of the legacies of the, of the demise of Empire is the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth is actually a positive institution, isn't it? Because these countries have voluntarily come together with the Queen as their formal head’

‘Well, I mean, to me, what's more interesting is looking at how Britain actually treats its Commonwealth citizens or treat people who are associated with the Commonwealth. And if we look at the hostile environment, we can see the derisory way in which Britain treats the Commonwealth or treat citizens that apparently in your telling of the story are somehow celebrated or held up’

‘But I am a product, I am a product of that colonial legacy. I, my parents chose to come here, I have benefited from coming here, my children have benefited. So with all the issues in the society, as they are prevalent in most societies. Isn't the real moral task is to constantly look at the past to learn rather than constantly condemning Britain for what it once was?’

‘This is the point I think we disagree on, on the fact that this is somehow a question of the past.’…

‘So you're saying that we should be looking at historical fact, but, and nobody is denying that there were atrocities under the Empire. But I think by saying that there was nothing good about the Empire, aren't you risking a kind of absolutism? I mean, just to give you a couple of examples, during the reign of Queen Victoria, there were only 2000 members of the Indian civil service. In Uganda there were just 25 British officials. Does that not suggest I mean, that would not have been sustainable would it unless there was a considerable degree of acquiescence from the local population?’

‘Well, of course, Empire has always required some level of cooption and coptation [sp?] in order to function. But the point is, I'm interested in the Empire’s legacies today. And I don't think that it's really helpful to say, oh, well, you know, what about the railways? That kind of argument that something good might have been done? I mean, let's not pretend that those railways were built by the British, they weren't. They were built by subjugated populations, and they weren't built for them’...

‘By taking this absolutist view and saying that there is absolutely nothing good about Empire, you are parting company from the vast majority of historians. Just to give another example, Britain did spend the best part of a century systematically opposing slavery throughout the world. They dispatched the Royal Navy to prevent slave ships from crossing the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, they were vigorously opposed to the slave trade in Africa. Are these not good things? Can you not concede that these were good things?’

‘I would be absolutely fine with you running with that argument as long as you started with the argument about how Britain not only put slavery in place in the first place, but continues to benefit from slavery and the profits of slavery today, as it did in terms of railway investments, of cotton exports from the US, if you want to start with that story, and you want to talk at length about that, and then tell me that Britain abolish slavery, I would be here to listen. And in fact, I, I had all of my schooling in this country and the story always began with Britain's abolition of slavery and never began with its participation in slavery’

‘So it sounds to me a little as though you're less interested in a discussion about slavery in the historical circumstances, and more with starting with the conclusion you want us to reach and working backwards from there.’

‘I'm starting by saying that what we should begin with is an education ensuring that we are educated and not ignorant around what the British Empire fundamentally was, which was a white supremacist structure built in order to benefit Britain and further the white British race. If you're going to tell me that we should be looking for good in a system that is built on white supremacy, I will absolutely reject that on every note’

‘But I'm not suggesting that we should go in just looking for good. What I'm saying is we should have a recognition that nothing is all good or all evil, we don't have this, a morally dualistic approach, and that we accept that history is complex, human beings are complex, and we need more nuanced discussion and not less.’

‘Of course history is complex. And if you're feeling uncomfortable with recognizing some of the bad and so you want to start with the good or you want to avoid questions of guilt, but when we're dealing with a question of injustice, that injustice needs to be righted, and then you can talk about whether you can find a modicum of good in a system of white supremacy, which continues to see racialized people brutalized on the basis of those notions of white superiority and racial inferiority, that, that the Empire built and that it instigated across most corners of the world, and even places that weren't touched by the Empire are poisoned by the legacy of racism today, including Britain as a space today.’...

‘The British Empire was many things. It was about trade. It was about a desire for a better life. It was about international rivalry. But it was also about advancing humanitarian causes. And here are two of them. First of all, not only did the British abolished slavery within the Empire, but it spent over a century, over a century, suppressing the slave trade in the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, across Africa, across India and elsewhere. And the the second large, I mean, great humanitarian endeavor was the the fight against fascism in Europe in the Second World War. Between May 1940 and June 1941, the British Empire was the only force in the field against Nazism with the sole exception of Greece’...

‘Ganesh, you are in a heritage sense, a product of the British Empire. Are you happy about that? Or do you resent it?’

‘I probably feel neither emotion. It simply is biographic fact. I do enjoy living in Britain and having citizenship and the rights that come with it and it wouldn't exist, had it not been for the Empire and post colonial migration and you know, I'm a, I'm a product of that twice over because the family's from Sri Lanka, but I was born in Nigeria. And both were former British possessions. So it's neither joy nor resentment so much as a fact’...

‘Can you understand how these immigration patterns from ex colonies do make people feel like they have been maneuvered and plucked out of their, of their home countries to live in the UK?’

‘I can understand if they do feel that. I'm not actually sure how many people do simply because the distance in time is such that it probably doesn't impinge on people's present lives. I mean, the average British person personally, I think they've spent no time at all under the British Empire, even their parents will have only known the tail end of it. And so whether you are a white British person, or a black or brown person from a former colony, does it live in your head constantly? I'm not sure it does. I don't think it is quite as present in people's minds as maybe, maybe it should be... I'm sure there are lots of people who don't feel integrated but that would be true of lots of countries that have never had an empire. Switzerland never had an empire. And it's got lots of immigrants who are not completely a part of civic or economic life. I mean, you could name any number of countries in the West that did not have colonial possessions but still struggle with that problem’...

‘Brexit... the idea that it drives a lot of modern British behavior. I never bought the idea that Imperial nostalgia drove Brexit. If anything did, I think it was nostalgia, if anything for the 1950s and domestic British society. The, the kind of stability of it, the deference of it. The idea that people were explicitly romanticizing the possession of former territories didn't ring true to me’... ‘If anything that the cities of empire you know, London, the Metropole cities in Scotland, they all voted Remain. So it's not that they wanted more Empire. They probably wanted less Empire. But in a sense do you not think that in a way, capitalism really is the new Empire? That today we don't look at colour, culture or religion if money can be made? And that really trade is our new God?’

‘Yeah. And I think it's, you know, there are worse empires to have. But I wouldn't say it is the only Empire. I mean, living in the US, you know, it's a very soft kind of Empire, but they do have a currency that penetrates most of the world. They do have, you know, military garrisons around the world. The US itself is an empire, it didn't start off with 50 states. And I think the more you look at the world, the more you discover that the Imperial principle does hold across time, and across regions, and therefore were we to discuss the British Empire more, which I think we should, it would also raise the question of, is this form of organization almost hardwired into the human experience?’...

‘Our first witness didn't seem to want to acknowledge any single positive element to the British Empire, that it was suppression and violence and exploitation and so on. No acceptance, perhaps, of somewhere like Hong Kong, where millions of people were pretty desperate to get into it’"

If you refuse to consider the pros - or the cons - of something, you're obviously a partisan hack. If you refuse to utilise the comparative approach, you're just engaging in special pleading. If you're always obsessed with history, you will never be able to see the world as it is, or move forward

Convenient to pretend that the good the British did was not by them - while bad things done by locals are just blamed on the British

Strange how we start with Britain's participation in slavery - and not how slavery has been part of the condition since time began and is still practised in the world two centuries after Britain abolished it. And of course racism is only the fault of white people since we can accept that race and racism have pre-dated European colonialism

Since grievance mongers will always see injustice, even that 'modicum of good' she concedes may have existed will never be explored

Apparently it is not people's ancestors' faults they moved to the UK