Education should not blind students to British colonial history, yet it largely does.
In 1948, almost a fifth of Britons couldn’t name a part of the British empire. Fifty years later, a British prime minister admitted he only had a rough idea of Britain’s imperial role in China.
Today the situation is no better, yet has grown ever more contentious in recent years, as stories of the British empire are clouded in the smoke of our culture wars. Some people attempt a “pros and cons/moral balance sheet” argument as supposed evidence for an inherently benevolent empire – with just a few relatively minor lapses. Others toil to shine a light on its role in driving the social and economic injustices of our time, searching for ways to repair historical wrongs.
But where to begin? The creation of the East India Company in 1600, the first joint-stock company for investors to profit from forcing high taxes on Indian people for the privilege of being colonised in the name of the British crown? Should it be the abolition of the slavery in 1833, after which the British government paid ￡20 million (worth over ￡2 billion today) as compensation to slave owners for the loss of ownership over 800,000 enslaved people, a sum only paid off in 2015? What about the 1947 partition of the British Raj into India and Pakistan, now two nuclear-armed foes nearing open conflict? Perhaps the 1997 return of Hong Kong to China under Tony Blair’s “tug of nostalgia for the old British empire” despite a self-admitted “fairly dim and sketchy understanding” of its history? The latest appointment of the British governor of the Cayman Islands in 2023?
In this case, I would prefer turning the clock back to 1948, to a page of the Kemsley Newspapers’ December edition. Although now defunct, a particular column remains relevant today. A national survey of 2,078 people on behalf of the then-Colonial Office begged the question of the British public’s awareness regarding the British empire. Despite the article stating the empire’s three million square mile breadth and population of 62 million at the time, 17% couldn’t name a single part of the empire while 56% couldn’t name an event that had recently taken place there. Astonishingly, one respondent named Lincolnshire, East Midlands, as a colony.
The reason I believe this survey remains poignant is because of how little basic and higher education improved Britons’ awareness of the British empire.
The ignorance of those who lived in the imperial core only two decades after its territorial peak is still with us. Even now, our primary and secondary-level curriculums fail to teach colonial history and its lasting legacies adequately, as shown by a recent report from the University of Oxford and UCL; ‘Portrait EMB Project’. I distinctly remember beginning one of my first modules in International Development, “Colonialism and its Afterlives”, worried about already falling behind due to my almost total lack of knowledge on the subject. I had come from the Belgian education system and had not learned much about the British empire. As I explained this to friends and fellow students, I was met with an all too familiar response: “neither did we”.
Only after this module did I come across a quote by renowned sociologist Peter Berger that summed up the module pretty well: it’s “not the excitement of coming upon the totally unfamiliar, but rather the excitement of finding the familiar becoming transformed in its meaning”. So many of the UK’s social and economic issues are rooted in British colonial history, as are global ones.
It seems clear that meaningfully improving peoples’ lives by solving these systemic problems cannot be done without a proper grasp of their imperial past.
In that case, putting a rising ￡27,000 barrier (or ￡81,000 for international students) in front of this information, which is only available after selecting a particular humanities’ degree, seems ill-advised. As our government continues to ignore calls for curriculum reform, I strongly believe “Colonialism and its Afterlives” should be made available to all students at the University of Sussex regardless of their discipline, particularly amidst the university’s pledge to racial equality and anti-racism. How else will we address the societal inequalities created by the British empire or credibly build students’ understanding of the world we live in? And of course, how else will people look beyond Lincolnshire?
As a wise man said to me, the more you look, the more you see.
Another article you may enjoy – University of Brighton Becomes First Institution to Sign New Anti-racist Charter
