The Black History Museum

Empire was often not awful: a very personal view by RDN

Only a few of the images in The Black History Museum are directly imperial. But many of them are in some sense imperial. This is because the Empire brought British people face to face with the fact of Africa and the West Indies and their black inhabitants (“natives” was the word cheerfully used for most of history). Indeed, Empire gave British people what might be called an intimate and personal sense of faraway peoples they might otherwise have regarded as wholly foreign.

This is part of the reason why the mainstream British view of “the Black” was quite often quite friendly. It was at other times other things, but it was often quite friendly. That familiarity and friendliness (and yes, it was often patronising) lies behind the success of the gollywog in the famous Robertson jam advertisements.

Empire was a serious business
The British Empire had evolved out of commercial priorities, but it is very important (at least in the minds of Empire’s few enthusiastic modern supporters) to note that the British took their Imperial responsibilities quite seriously. They also became very interested in their worldwide fellow-subjects. I say “fellow-subjects”. It is possible that one of the merits of Empire in the mind of the average white Briton was that it allowed them to suppose that though they were down-trodden at home, they were in some sense masters of all the bits of the world coloured pink (as the Empire was in most atlases).
The British Empire produced the unintended effect that the 60 million of so people in Britain today have a shared history with billions of people around the world.

But it goes even deeper. The British have always thought of themselves as being the progenitors and inheritors of liberty. They have until recently been proud of the way they are governed. It was easy for the British to think that they could provide the world with good government. Other European countries might have empires, but theirs wouldn’t be as well and as kindly managed as ours. (The British were less wrong about that than might be supposed.)

This sense of involvement in part accounts for the way “Empire” was succeeded by “Commonwealth”. The British motives for wanting a post-imperial Commonwealth were not mostly commercial: they were to do with a sense of what was proper and even familial.

So why hate the Empire?
The British Empire divides people. Most young people thing that it was a dreadful thing. It must have been, right?

Well, it didn’t seem so to most people before the Second World War, though the left was deeply suspicious of it and campaigned against it.  The majority view of most Britons up until the 1940s was that their Empire was magnificent (that much isn’t very controversial) and noble (that is).
This changed quite quickly as it became the intellectual and popular mainstream view that no man has much superiority over another. It become obvious during the early twentieth century that “one person, one vote” had to be extended to every person, even if female or black. It followed that it was impossible to deny that democracy should be accorded to countries in the British Empire.

Democracy mostly didn’t last
It happened that the British accorded democracy to their African countries, and the leaders of those countries quite soon cancelled it. Many of those African leaders had learned a socialist rhetoric at British universities, and used to it win power in their countries. But many of them developed what came to be called a “patrimonial socialism” in which they centralised all the functions of the state and then hijacked the benefits for their own families and tribes.

There is a lively argument as to whether this process was itself the product of Empire – and not least the product of the artificial national boundaries Empire produced. Besides, it has been argued, population growth took off just as African leaders took over, and the most benign governments (even an Imperial one) would have struggled.

Anyway, Africa’s problems increased mightily and continue today. One could make a good “what if” case that for many parts of Africa, continued British rule might have been “A Good Thing”. That is especially the case if (hypothetically) the Africans concerned had voted for British rule, a thing few would have done at the time.

The Empire’s diaspora
Instead, you might say, many Africans have voted with their feet. They emigrated to Britain. One way of looking at this is to say that white Britain found a new way of exploiting black people: as cheap labour. Another way to look at it is to say that the immigrants have found a way of getting value out of the white world, and they are welcome to, granted how long the white world sought to get value out of them.

Perhaps the best way to look at immigration from anywhere at all, but perhaps especially from the erstwhile Empire, is to say that it continues the evolution of a globalised world.

Empire is normal
The truth is that until very recently, empire was the historical norm. Any country or state that could, was inclined to extend its maw. The Romans did it spectacularly, but the habit (and it was a practice more than an idea or an ideal) was centuries old when they took over chunks of Britain. The Norsemen did it (as frenchified Normans) when they took over chunks of Britain. The French revolutionaries did it under Napoleon when they aimed to take over chunks of Britain. The Europeans took over the Americas and swathes of Asia and Africa.

Only slowly over these centuries did the idea evolve that this might be a fundamentally wrong thing to do. And only very recently has the idea evolved that imperialism was the second worst thing to do (after genocide). 

Empire as racism
This modern habit of thought lives right next door to the idea that racism is the cause of most evil in the world (even worse than, though similar to, sexism and elitism). The right wing in vain lobs in the idea that totalitarianism is probably at least as bad an idea. They are politely attended-to, and then everyone gets back to hating Hitler more that Stalin or Mao.

However, one can worry about racism, and even hate it wholesale, without necessarily hating empire. It is one thing to see a people (a nation, or tribe, whatever) as weak or even primitive. It is quite another to assume that such people have no value. You may say that it amounts to the same thing, and that taking over someone’s territory, sometimes by force, is to hold them in very low regard. Actually, the fact is that many imperialists admired or liked the people they ruled. There was plenty of bad colonialist behaviour and there were plenty of attitudes it is now easy to condemn. There were attitudes most people knew were wrong, even back then.

The British Empire was often racist if you mean that it believed in the superiority of the white races (of the British race, anyway), and was convinced of its own right to rule. But it was very seldom racist if you mean that it thought its black citizens and subjects were not fully human and deserving of “decent” (if not exactly equal) treatment. There was lots of double-thinking and denial and some nastiness. But The Empire was very far from all bad, and it was nowhere near Hitlerian.