Culture wars about the British Empire may seem ridiculous - but they matter
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On 27 January 2018, a group of fourteen SOAS (School of African and Oriental Studies) students, stormed the Blighty UK Café in Finsbury Park chanting “we have nothing to lose but our chains”. They demanded that Chris Evans, the owner, “apologise to the local community” for commemorating Winston Churchill, instead of presenting him as a racist who perpetuated the injustices of the empire.
The café in question offers a breakfast entitled the Winston and décor featuring model Spitfires and a mock-up of an air-raid shelter. A change of décor and menu was demanded. The SOAS Students’ Union, in a statement, declared that the café “exercises a concerted historical amnesia of British colonialism, which is offensive to those who continue to experience institutional racism.” Subsequently, in March 2018, some of those involved took part in a violent blockade of the main building of SOAS, their statement protesting at “the white-supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalist order” of university life.
The phlegmatic Evans remarked, “if you cannot celebrate Britain and great Britons, you are just erasing history and if you cannot celebrate Churchill, you cannot celebrate anyone.” This resonated, given that in 2002 Churchill was voted the ‘Greatest Briton’ in a large-scale BBC poll.
In February 2018 another controversy erupted when ‘The Past is Now’ exhibition opened at Birmingham Museum Art Gallery. In this case, the information boards claimed that “the relationship between European colonialism, industrial production and capitalism is unique in its brutality.” The key Birmingham politician of the Victorian period, Joseph Chamberlain, an exponent of a stronger British empire who became Secretary of State for the Colonies (1895-1903), was described as “still revered despite his aggressive and racist imperial policy.”
One board attacked Britain’s ‘hasty’ departure from India in 1947 for “trauma and misogyny”, and a second board offered partisan context: “capitalism is a system that prioritises the interests of the individuals and their companies at the expense of the majority.” Janine Eason, the Director of Engagement, said that it was “not possible” for a museum to present a ‘neutral voice, particularly for something as multifaceted as stories relating to the British Empire,’ and, instead, that the exhibition was both a way to serve the multicultural population of Birmingham and was intended ‘to provoke.’ Of course, real provocation would have been to offer a different account, one that was more grounded in historical awareness, or, even more, two or more accounts.
A new month, a new controversy. In July 2018, the portrait of Edward Colston, an eighteenth-century slave trader and philanthropist, which has long hung in the office of the Lord Mayor of Bristol, was removed on the instructions of Cleo Lake, the current Mayor, a Green councillor and member of the group ‘Countering Colston’, who stated that she “simply couldn’t stand” being in the same room. Lake added: “Many of the issues today such as Afriphobia, racism and inequality stem from this episode of history where people of African descent were dehumanised to justify enslaving them.” This is a somewhat problematic view, which does not really address the more widespread prevalence of coerced labour, including slavery, not least within Africa. In a remark with which Americans well-up on ‘statue wars’ will be familiar, she remarked: “Having it on the parlour wall, in my view, sent mixed messages about the city council’s values today.”
The same month, Satyapal Singh, the Indian Minister for Higher Education, denounced evolution as wrong, and a legacy of British colonial rule in the shape of an education system reinforcing an imperialist mentality. Instead, he announced that he would offer a new Hindu theory on the origin of species.
It is difficult to see imperial amnesia in the contention of recent years over the history of the British empire. Indeed, empire is a big aspect of the culture wars, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes bitter, sometimes both, in Britain and elsewhere, of recent years. It is also an aspect of the problematic nature to many commentators, across the world, of national history and national identity.
This is not some obscure issue, but one that is crucial to the nature of public history and, as such, indicative of a highly significant attitude of these sometimes ridiculous culture wars. The issue is relevant in Britain, its former empire, and elsewhere. As both a former colony and the successor to this position, the United States is a major part of the equation, not least because the United States is frequently decried by critics for allegedly taking part in what are termed imperialist wars.
As the British empire was the largest in the world and is still not lost in the mists of time, its reputation is most contentious. Indeed, both empire and reputation play a key role in the foundation account of many states, and in the subsequent history of a large number. That is why the culture wars in Britain are so significant for the rest of the world.
This piece draws on Jeremy Black, Imperial Legacies (Encounter Books, forthcoming).
