“The ten most terrifying words in the Indian language are: ‘I’m from the
British Empire and I’m here to help.’”

I think he meant “large corporations”.

And I was just about to mention Leo Congo Rex m’self. One of most squalid and nasty episodes in modern history. But to be fair, you couldn’t really call it colonialism – Leo personally owned the plantation and ran it along antebellum lines but without that Southern TLC.

Anyway, tacking back to topic, the best thing you can say about the British Empire is that any other geopolitical player around would then have fucked it up even worse. Counterfactuals are usually pointless, occassionally instructive and always fun. So imagine the subcontinent held uneasily by the Romanov Bear or the Hohnenzollern Eagle during the age of Imperial expansion. I reckon that’d screw India up even worse than the Moghuls or the Brits ever did.

And it’s almost a cliche even in supposedly liberal American newspaters like the NYT to claim that conditions in postcolonial societies are much worse than they were under colonialism. In some cases that’s probably true—I suspect, for instance, that Idi Amin was not an improvement over British rule in Uganda. But the claim is made so often I think people forget or never learn about the atrocities committed by the British and others during their reign. (There are a couple of recent books out about the British atrocities in Kenya during the 50’s, something I’d never heard of before.) So you often see Hitler, Stalin, and Mao listed as the great mass murderers of the 20th century, with Leopold II conspicuous by his absence. You see, only the totalitarian ideologies of communism and fascism ever lead to millions of deaths. Colonialism was only about profit, and gee, no one ever kills people just for money.

Actually, from what I’ve read, Stalin was extremely upset. Just like the Bushies today he was planning to rule the world and meager post-WWII expansion was a huge disappointment. He hardly ever was seen smiling again, his heart was broken. Roosevelt and Churchill were smiling. Especially Roosevelt – he was getting ready to meet his maker.

People are always squabbling over what gets taught in school history, and particularly GCSE and A Level history.

For instance, I did GCSE British social history (1699-1948 or something similar, mostly about the industrial revolution as I recall), other people do an odd hybrid paper about the Tudors + the Second World War. These objections seem to be perennial, everyone wants their favourite bit of history studied, on the right it is the exploits and achievements of the Empire, the Kings and Queens, dates etc., on the left it is the problems of slavery, Ireland, colonialism, the lives of women and ordinary people, sources, world history etc.

“The Curriculum Online website is funded by the Department for Education and Skills and recommends teaching resources for all subjects taught at schools. But only one source in the module “world study after 1900” for 11- to 14-year-olds is suggested for the study of the partition of Ireland. This compares to 26 for Adolf Hitler and 17 for the Western Front. Similarly in the “Britain 1750-1900” module, 16 sources are suggested for the extension of the franchise in Britain, with only one for the Opium War against China.”

“Mr Lang believes there is no deliberate bias against teaching the ugly past of the British Empire. Unlike many other European countries, the Government does not have control over the content of school lessons.”

I admit my details about the state and evolution of history schoolteaching in the UK is effectively non-existent and based around what I saw on the BBC. The most relevant thing I could find on Google was this recent article:

http://education.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=632239&host=16&dir=365

and this one from The Age (Australia), about a museum:

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/22/1056220466935.html

My gut feel is that what young teachers think is largely irrelevant to what ends up in the curriculum. Certainly here in India, textbooks seem to change in parallel with parties coming and going out of political power. Just as an example, all imperial references to the events of 1857 call it the Sepoy Mutiny, but in our textbooks it’s referred to as the first Freedom Revolt. The truth is somewhere in between, but each side has its own axe to grind (I went to school while the Congress was in power in the 80s).

Few people in the US —and certainly not the wingnuts who purport to opine with any “knowledge” about the “virtues” of British colonialism—are aware that Muslim rulers governed most of the subcontinent encompassed by colonial India as the Mogul Empire for most of the period between the 12th and 18th centuries, that there were (in the context of the times) reasonably amiable relations between Hindus and Muslims under most Mogul rulers, that a few (such as Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal) even sought to develop a fusion between the two religions, and that Mogul leaders who resisted British domination—such as Tipu Sultan in Mysore—are seen as heroes today in many overwhelmingly Hindu parts of India.

The British were nothing if not shrewd manipulators, and knew that they could never unify their empire, much less hold it, if the regions of India united against them. That’s why they heightened divisions of religion, region, and even caste, to ensure that Indians would have more to fight about amongst themselves than against their British exploiters. They succeeded so well that ironically, even today English is the lingua franca among the roughly 20 major languages in India, and the Civil Service they built to rule above the squabbling nawabs at least gives India a greater potential for governance than most other developing nations, though it remains rife with the self-serving corruption it was designed to respond to under the British.

British rule in India was certainly less bad and much more mixed in its legacy than, say, the fairly genocidal rule of the Dutch in Indonesia or (via the Boers) South Africa, or the virtual slavery, destruction of education, and substance addiction of the French in Indochina or (to a lesser extent) the British and (somewhat) the US in parts of China.

But it was still, beyond dispute, the source of divisions that led ineluctably to the partition of India.

Really? I’m surprised, because these right-wing historians are always bemoaning how negative teaching of the British Empire is in schools.

It certainly must be a recent thing, when I went through school in the 80s and early 90s, although we did study the British Empire, we also did stuff about the marginalisation of women in history, the Irish potato famine, slavery and colonialism, British social history (including things like the Corn Laws, Diggers, poor laws, the welfare state). I never came across the idea that colonialism was a good thing in any way, maybe the pendulum has swung back, but I’d be surprised, the era most of the younger teachers were taught in didn’t exactly embrace that idea.

Mind you, what with some of the British planning to round up Gypsies and stick them in camps, it’s almost as if every really bad idea for the last two hundred years is being given a thin coat of paint and trotted out as the solution to all ills.

The same BBC World ran a few programs recently about how this whitewashing is going on in British schools, which concentrate on the positive aspects of colonial history while leaving out the bits where they happened to kill millions of people and destroy entire communities and industries. I guess it was only a matter of time before the kids who went through that education system grew up and started spouting this nonsense as truth. As a result, today most people seem to have heard about the Black hole of Calcutta, but draw a blank on Jallianwalla Bagh.

I know this is a bit tangential to the powerline post, but for folks like me sitting in India with parents and grandparents who have seen the Raj first hand, it’s far too surreal and laughable to even begin to address directly.