Figure 1. The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro, bronze figurine, c. 2500 BCE. Indus Valley Civilisation. Excavated at Mohenjo-Daro, Sindh (present-day Pakistan), currently in the Delhi National Museum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Introduction

What happens when an archaeological object survives for 4,500 years, only to become more contested in the modern world than it ever was in antiquity? The story of the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro is not simply the story of a bronze figurine. It is the story of how objects acquire new meanings as they move through time, political systems, museums, and national borders, since her discovery in 1926 by British archaeologist Ernest Mackay. The small bronze figure has been transformed from an archaeological find into a colonial exhibition piece, a Partition dispute, a symbol of national identity, a subject of restitution claims, and, most recently, the centre of debates over representation and ownership. Each stage in her journey reveals less about the ancient Indus Valley and more about the nations that have claimed, interpreted, and contested her.

The latest controversy in 2026 involved India's National Council of Educational Research and Training temporarily altering the image of the Dancing Girl in a school textbook by covering her torso. Critics argued that the modification distorted archaeological evidence, while supporters viewed it as an adaptation to contemporary educational sensitivities. Only months earlier, a professor from a private university in Haryana was arrested after allegedly stealing a replica of the figure from the National Museum in New Delhi. At first glance, these incidents appear unrelated. One concerns censorship. The other concerns theft. Yet both reveal the extraordinary symbolic power the object continues to hold. More than four millennia after her creation, the Dancing Girl remains capable of provoking controversy, fascination, and public debate. Yet these contemporary disputes represent only the latest chapters in a much longer story.

From Mohenjo-daro to Museum Object

The Dancing Girl was excavated in 1926 at Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, present-day Pakistan, during archaeological investigations of the Indus Valley Civilisation. Standing just 10.8 centimetres tall, the bronze figure depicts a young woman wearing numerous bangles and a necklace. Her distinctive pose has inspired generations of interpretations. Scholars have described her as confident, elegant, rebellious, and expressive. Yet none of these readings can be verified. Even the title "Dancing Girl" reveals a modern interpretation rather than archaeological certainty.

This distinction is important because the object's modern history has largely been defined by interpretation. Like many archaeological discoveries made under British rule, the figurine quickly entered colonial methods of classification, preservation, and display. Removed from the archaeological landscape that produced her, she became part of a museum world in which meaning was increasingly constructed by state institutions. The object that had once existed within the urban environment of the Indus Valley gradually became a museum artefact whose significance depended on modern narratives about civilisation, heritage, and identity.

Empire, Exhibition, and the Partition of the Past

In 1947, the Royal Academy in London organised the Exhibition of Indian Art, chiefly from the Dominions of India and Pakistan. Hundreds of objects from museums and archaeological sites across the subcontinent were sent to Britain. Among them were artefacts from Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, and Taxila. These objects travelled as temporary loans and were expected to return to their respective institutions after the exhibition concluded.

Partition changed Everything

As India and Pakistan emerged as independent states, the question of ownership became entangled with the division of governmental property and museum collections. Objects that had originally been excavated in territories that now formed Pakistan became subject to administrative negotiations occurring hundreds of miles away in Britain.

Rather than returning artefacts to their places of origin, officials increasingly treated museum collections as divisible assets of the former British Empire. Provenance became secondary to bureaucratic allocation. The issue was no longer where an object had been found but how it would be distributed between two successor nations. In this process, the Dancing Girl ceased to be simply an artefact from Mohenjo-daro. She became a political object.

The Dancing Girl and the Creation of a Disputed Heritage

The final settlement awarded the Dancing Girl to India. Although often presented as a balanced exchange, the arrangement generated immediate controversy. For Pakistani officials and archaeologists, the decision represented a separation of the object from its historical context. An artefact excavated in Sindh (Pakistan) had become detached from the archaeological landscape and historical context that had produced it. The dispute, therefore, concerned more than museum ownership. It raised broader questions about whether archaeological heritage should remain connected to its place of origin.

Soon after Partition, Pakistan sought the return of displaced archaeological material. Discussions involving Sir Mortimer Wheeler and officials from both countries failed to produce an agreement. India defended its position through legal and administrative arguments based on the circumstances of Partition. Pakistan emphasised geographical provenance and archaeological context. These competing positions established a debate that continues to shape discussions surrounding the Dancing Girl today.

Restitution and Pakistan's International Campaign

The international restitution agenda took formal shape through a series of United Nations and UNESCO initiatives. During this period, restitution was increasingly framed as a mechanism for addressing historical injustices and repairing the cultural losses produced by colonialism. These efforts eventually led to the establishment of UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee for Promoting the Return of Cultural Property to Its Countries of Origin or Its Restitution in Case of Illicit Appropriation.

Pakistan actively engaged with these developments. Government agencies compiled reports on cultural property and sought to situate Pakistani claims within the broader global movement for restitution. The Dancing Girl became part of a wider conversation concerning cultural justice, provenance, and the rights of source nations.

Unlike many famous restitution disputes involving European museums, however, the Dancing Girl occupied a more complex position. Her displacement was linked not only to colonial collecting practices but also to the political consequences of decolonisation itself. The object became caught between two postcolonial states, each advancing different interpretations of historical ownership. This complexity ensured that the question remained unresolved.

An Unfinished Claim

In 2016, a petition submitted to the Lahore High Court called for the return of the Dancing Girl to Pakistan. Officials in Sindh and representatives of the Pakistan National Council of the Arts similarly argued that the artefact should be repatriated because it originated from Mohenjo-daro. Such demands reflected more than legal claims. They expressed a broader belief that archaeological objects maintain meaningful relationships with the landscapes from which they emerge.

For many in Pakistan, particularly in Sindh, the Dancing Girl symbolises a fragment of cultural heritage that became separated from its place of origin during the upheavals of Partition. The object, therefore, occupies an unusual position. It is physically located in India but remains deeply connected to historical and emotional geographies in Pakistan. The persistence of these claims demonstrates that time alone does not resolve disputes over cultural heritage.

Different Controversies, Long-standing Questions

Debates surrounding the altered textbook image focused on questions of modesty, representation, and historical authenticity. The attempted theft of a museum replica revealed the figure's continuing symbolic value. Neither controversy directly concerned restitution, yet both reflected the object's extraordinary visibility within public culture. This is precisely what makes the Dancing Girl such a powerful case study. Few archaeological objects have accumulated so many layers of meaning. She has been interpreted as an artistic masterpiece, a symbol of ancient civilisation, a national treasure, a disputed artefact, a feminist icon, and a source of political controversy. Each generation reinvents her according to its own concerns.

Conclusion: The Afterlife of an Ancient Object

From her excavation at Mohenjo-daro to her display in New Delhi, from Partition negotiations to UNESCO-era restitution debates, her history reveals how archaeological objects can become entangled in the political and cultural struggles of the modern world. The controversies of 2025 and 2026 are therefore not isolated events. They are the latest manifestations of a much longer process that began with colonial collecting practices and intensified through Partition.

The central question is not whether the Dancing Girl should appear clothed in a textbook or displayed in a particular museum. The more significant question concerns how an artefact excavated from Mohenjo-daro became transformed into a contested symbol of heritage, identity, and ownership across South Asia. Her biography remains unfinished. As long as debates over provenance, restitution, and cultural belonging continue, the Dancing Girl will remain more than an archaeological object. She will remain a witness to the unresolved legacies of the former British Empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947.

Muhammad Nishat Hussain holds an M.Phil. in Art History from Government College, University of Lahore, Pakistan. His thesis, entitled “Politics of Displaced Artifacts: British Empire, India, and Pakistan (1849–1994)” investigates the trajectories of looted cultural heritage and the postcolonial politics of restitution. 

 References (selected)

Singh, Kavita. Remembering and Forgetting in the National Museums of South Asia. In Museums, Transculturality, and the Nation State. Edited by Susanne Leeb and Nina Samuel. Bielefeld. Transcript Verlag, 2022.

Lahiri, Nayanjot. Partitioning the Past. India’s Archaeological Heritage after Independence. In Appropriating the Past. Edited by Geoffrey Scarre and Robin Coningham. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Venkateswaran, Mrinalini. Compelled to Collect. Museums and the Race for India’s National Past Permanent Black, 2025), ISBN 9788178246956, Hedgehog and Fox Series.

Many of the legal and historical arguments surrounding the Marbles seem to me to be basically academic. The Director of the British Museum is forbidden by Act of Parliament to divest the institution of items in its collection, but presumably Parliament could order or sanction a particular restitution without necessarily miring itself or the Museum in legal precedent. The extent of the permission granted to Elgin by the occupying powers in Greece has been debated by some, but the Turks were indeed the ‘internationally recognised authority’ in the region and took no steps to prevent or circumscribe his activities. Whether Elgin’s motives were ‘selfless and noble’ is also debatable. The justification he offered on his return was the aim of fostering and encouraging the arts in the United Kingdom—but perhaps you would say that if you were trying to sell your acquisitions to the British Museum. No doubt by his actions he did protect the Marbles from further intermittent and piecemeal depredation, and possibly from damage they might have suffered in the Greek War of Independence. But it is also true that the Marbles were damaged by well-intentioned acts of ‘restoration’ in the Victorian era.

The case for retention has also rested on other principles. First, that such treasures are more easily visited and seen by the public in cities such as London, Paris, and New York that are hubs for international travel. Second, that in such metropolitan collections the works of art of different cultures and eras can be more readily compared with each other: Greek antiquities with Roman, Egyptian, Persian, or Byzantine ones, and so forth. I shall return to the Louvre in a moment, but the leftist Romantic intellectual, William Hazlitt, in his Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, made similar points about that museum: that it had ‘shortened the road to Italy’ and that the stolen items there had found ‘their adopted country’. ‘These works,’ he argued, ‘instead of being taken from their respective countries, were given to the world’. ‘School called unto school; one great name answered to another, swelling the chorus of universal praise.’

Tourist numbers are hard to estimate, but Athens welcomes around seven million visitors per year, compared to London’s twenty million or so. The Greek capital is clearly not an inaccessible backwater, nor does the road to it need shortening in our day and age. School does indeed ‘call unto school’ in institutions like the Louvre, the Metropolitan, and the British Museum, and that is a significant reason for their eminence and importance, but the British Museum holds something like 100,000 items of Greek antiquity, only a tiny proportion of which can be displayed at any given time. Would the ability of the everyday visitor to compare Greek art with other traditions be radically retarded if the Marbles were not there? The Duveen Gallery is a somewhat gloomy and subaqueous environment; it is not impossible to imagine a renovated and re-lit space that could be devoted to the Classical Greek inheritance in more of its diversity. It is also easy to imagine that, were the Marbles to be returned to Greece, a truly collegiate relationship would be established not only with the Archaeological Museum in Athens but also with collections such as those in Thessaloniki and Iraklion, allowing visitors to Great Russell Street to see many new things in light shed on them by the collection as a whole.

The relevant questions, I think, are ethical rather than historical or legalistic. That ethical questions are involved with such collections is made clear by the retention and/or return of anthropological samples held in the West from the Age of Discovery. These items are rarely of any aesthetic value and—in so far as the discipline of physical anthropology still concerns itself with ancient topics such as craniometry—their significance can surely be established via measurement, photographic record, and DNA recovery before being returned to the peoples from whom they were taken and who still regard them with spiritual reverence.

The ethical issue as regards the Marbles is not as clear-cut, but it is not invisible; modern Greeks may not worship Zeus, but their relation to the Parthenon as a symbolic entity is profound. Analogies are always imperfect—as Dr Trabucco della Torretta’s one between the Director of the British Museum and Pope Pius VII demonstrates, since the pontiff was under ‘immediate existential threat’ from an occupying foreign power, which is certainly not the case as regards Nicholas Cullinan. But imagine if Rembrandt’s Night Watch had, during the eighteenth century, been cut into four pieces and sold by its legal owner, with one section remaining in the Rijksmuseum and others ultimately and legally acquired by (say) the Met, the Louvre, and Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. If a famous Turner moves from an English country house to the Getty it retains its artistic integrity nonetheless; but the urge to return the orphaned parts of the Rembrandt to the city which it celebrates, and thus restore the painting as what it was intended to be, would surely be hard to resist. That seems to me to be the key ethical question here. Long ago Ruskin exploded the delusory distinction between a building’s ‘structure’ and its ‘decoration’: the Parthenon was designed for the Marbles quite as much as the Marbles were designed for the Parthenon, and to return them would enable the reintegration of a single work of art.

Of course, that work of art could not be completely reintegrated. No one would propose that the Marbles be returned to the Parthenon as such and exposed to Athenian air pollution. But the Acropolis Museum is a perfectly safe, purpose-built and handsome institution at the foot of the Acropolis, maintained by a (nowadays) stable and safe Western democracy, which could house the Marbles as close to their old home as possible. The administrators of the British Museum are not the sole possessors of ‘a legacy they are there to steward and transmit not just intact but even…augmented’ as Trabucco della Torretta argues. The Athenians have a legacy, too, despite not being inhabitants of Trabucco della Torretta’s ‘sceptred islands’. The Museum’s claim to stewardship goes back 200 years; the Athenian one goes back 2,500 years, interrupted for 400 of them, it is true, by a colonial occupier acting without regard for the local population and its inheritance. The contrast with the Benin Bronzes is sharp. In the first place, we have reason to be anxious about their safety in conflict-ridden Nigeria, which (as its citizens rightly complain) also suffers a pronounced degree of political corruption—and is a long way off the international tourist itinerary, too. In the second, those statues do not form a composite as the Marbles and the Parthenon together do, the restoration of which is an aesthetic duty.

Lastly: this ethical issue is not unique to the British Museum. Galleries and museums across the English Channel have a similar load to bear but are subject to far less scrutiny. During the French-Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that Pius VII witnessed European nations were routinely stripped of their cultural treasures by their invaders. ‘French art plunder was stunning’, Wayne Sandholtz concludes in Prohibiting Plunder: How Norms Change (Oxford University Press, 2007), ‘not just for the vast quantity of masterpieces it netted, but also for the systematic and informed nature of its execution.’ In Trophy of Conquest: The Musée Napoléon and the Creation of the Louvre (Faber and Faber, 1965) Cecil Gould estimated that of the 500 paintings stolen from Italy, for example, half have never been returned and remain in the Louvre and numerous provincial galleries to this day. (Hazlitt had his thoughts about this, too: ‘Instead of robbery and sacrilege,’ he wrote, such plunder ‘was the crowning and consecration of art….’ After all, ‘what is subject to barter and sale in time of peace, may be reckoned among the spoils of war.’ And so on, and so forth.)

At the second Treaty of Paris after Waterloo the French argued with brazen hypocrisy that ‘public establishments and monuments, museums and libraries and all institutions of the kind be respected’, when they had paid no respect to such institutions whatever—and I am glad to record that Wellington treated such claims with the scepticism they deserved. The Louvre records that Tintoretto’s modello for the Paradise—to take one example from dozens—was taken from Verona in 1797 by ‘conquête militaire’. It now hangs in the gallery named after Napoleon’s plunderer-in-chief, Dominique Vivant Denon. Other such items, most famously the Veronese Marriage at Cana from San Giorgio Maggiore, were covered by the legal fig leaf of treaties such as Campoformio—a fig leaf that ethically speaking can and should be removed, as a work of art should never be reconfigured as either a casus belli or a ‘reparation’, not least because the Venetian Republic put up almost no resistance to Napoleon in the first place. Such works are safe and sound in French museums, no doubt, though the Marriage at Cana was cut in half and stitched back together before being hung in the Louvre, and Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece of the Madonna enthroned was lopped top and bottom before it was repatriated. But the fact remains that France is in possession of hundreds of works, from Italy, the Lowlands, Germany, and Austria that it has not even the tiniest legal right to retain. Nicholas Cullinan is not the only museum director who should be under the spotlight: what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Richard Lansdown is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Tasmania

Mountbatten flanked by Nehru (left) and Jinnah (right) negotiating partition in 1947

Lady Pamela Hicks (9 April 1929 -5 June 2026), the younger daughter of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his wife Edwina Ashley, who died recently, was probably the last living person to witness directly the events leading to Indian independence and to meet the individuals who negotiated with her father, the last Viceroy of India. Her passing is an appropriate moment to reassess Lord Mountbatten’s actions during this controversial period of history.

Many commentators in Britain today blame Britain, and Mountbatten in particular, for the partition of India and the ensuing bloodshed. A common feature of these critical assessments is to cite modern academics, who are frequently deeply antagonistic towards Mountbatten, rather than consider the views of the leading Indian and Pakistani politicians and officials of the period who were far more knowledgeable about what actually took place. This paper redresses the balance by quoting senior Indians and Pakistanis who had direct knowledge of the events in 1947/8.

The critics seldom mention V P Menon, who, as Mountbatten’s Constitutional Adviser, was present at most of the important meetings and was the Indian best placed to judge Mountbatten’s actions. He later wrote three of the most authoritative books on Indian independence: The Integration of Indian States (1956), The Transfer of Power in India (1957) and An Outline of the Constitutional History of India (1965). In the third book he gives his considered judgment on Mountbatten:

It is hardly necessary to emphasise what we owe to him for steering us through the maze of conflicting interests and policies and personalities in Delhi in 1947. In fact, I think it is no exaggeration to say that without him the transfer of power would not have taken place. I must also pay tribute to his help and guidance in dealing with the communal situation after partition, and the mass migration between India and Pakistan. He organised the government’s forces to deal with it and the situation was brought under control in three or four months’ time. No praise would be too high for these contributions.

V.P Menon (left) and Mountbatten at a party in 1948

Regarding Mountbatten’s role in integrating the Indian States, in his book on the subject Menon wrote:

Another factor that went a long way in winning over the rulers was, of course, the infectious charm and inborn tact of Lord Mountbatten. It was because of his abundant love for India, and not merely because he was obliged to do so, that he had taken upon himself the task of negotiating with the rulers on the question of accession. And once he undertook any task, he invariably put the whole weight of his personality into what he was doing and spared himself no effort. Half-hearted methods and half-hearted measures are alien to him. India can never forget the magnificent service he rendered at a critical juncture in her history.

Menon’s views on whether power was transferred too soon and whether an exchange of population was possible are given in the following paper: (http://www.forgotten-raj.org/doc/menon.htm).

The Mountbattens and Gandhi

The ‘June 3rd Plan’ of 1947, also known as the Mountbatten Plan, set out the processes by which India and Pakistan would achieve separate statehood from the Raj. Mahatma Gandhi expressed his views on Mountbatten’s role in facilitating independence and also partition at a prayer meeting a few days after it was published:

The British government is not responsible for partition. The Viceroy has no hand in it. In fact he is as opposed to division as Congress itself but if both of us – Hindus and Moslems – cannot agree on anything else, then the Viceroy is left with no choice. The Viceroy has worked very hard and tried his utmost to bring about a compromise. This Plan was the only basis on which agreement could be reached. The Viceroy did not want to leave the country in chaos; hence all his efforts.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the All-India Muslim League, referred to Mountbatten in his radio broadcast on June 3rd:

I must say that I feel that the Viceroy has battled against various forces very bravely – and the impression that he has left on my mind is that he was actuated by the highest sense of fairness and impartiality. And that it is up to us to make his task less difficult, and help him, as far as lies in our power, in order that he may fulfil his mission of the transfer of power to the peoples of India in a peaceful and orderly manner.

Jinnah also paid the following fulsome tribute to Mountbatten at the state banquet to celebrate Pakistan’s independence on the 13th August 1947:

Here I would like to say, Your Excellency, Lord Mountbatten, how much we appreciate your having carried out wholeheartedly the policy and the principle that was laid down by the plan of the 3rd June and the Indian Independence Act which was passed by the British Parliament and received the assent of His Majesty the King on 10th July with grace, dignity and great ability. You are the last Viceroy of India, but Pakistan and Hindustan will always remember you, and your name will remain cherished not only in the history of these two Dominions but will find a place In the history of the world, as one who performed his task and duties magnificently.

The Mountbattens and Jinnah

At a function shortly before Mountbatten’s departure from India in June 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru, subsequently India’s first prime minister, paid the following tribute to Mountbatten: ‘His period of office has been memorable in the history of India and he will be remembered by the people of India with affection as one who cooperated in the great task of building a free India and who applied his great abilities and energy to this end’.

Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, the Congress politician who took over as Governor-General following Mountbatten’s departure, said in his first address in Durbar Hall:

The work of my predecessor during his memorable term of office was a marvellous instance of detachment, devotion and energy on the part of one who, though not belonging to India, worked as one belonging to her, and did his work in the spirit that is laid down in our scriptures with regard to the task that falls on anyone.

Sardar Patel, Home Minister and Deputy Prime Minister after independence, wrote to Mountbatten on the eve of his departure:

Your sympathetic imagination and realistic approach to India’s problems enabled you to win popular support for one of the boldest plans that were ever conceived in history. All of us can, I think, have the satisfaction that on the whole that plan has justified itself and has settled one of the most difficult and taxing problems which has ever faced statesmen in any country.

Hirubhai M. Patel, a senior Indian civil servant, later the Indian Finance Minister, who negotiated the division of assets between the two countries with Chaudri Muhammad Ali, the senior Muslim civil servant who later became Pakistan’s fourth prime minister, wrote of this period in the book Rites of Passage. A Civil Servant Remembers (2005):

All these various steps, measures and arrangements and many more had to be accomplished within a matter of seventy-odd days. It would have been impossible to achieve all this, but one has to accept it because all this was, in fact, accomplished. For this, credit must go to only one fact, the fixing of 15 August as the date for the transfer of power. Mountbatten was clearly moved by one consideration, and that was that the transfer must take place as early as possible, if trouble was to be averted. He received maximum possible cooperation because everyone was, for one reason or another, anxious to see the end of uncertainly and violence... Mountbatten therefore, managed to ensure that practically everything necessary to be done to facilitate the transfer of power by the British was completed on time.

Chaudri Muhammad Ali was generally critical of Mountbatten for, in his view, always favouring the Indians, but even he valued the June 3rd plan, as he stated in his book,Emergence of Pakistan (1967):

The immediate effect of the announcement of the plan and its acceptance by the main political parties was to still the controversy and bring about a semblance of calm. At last the great issues that had dominated the Indian political scene for decades and had aroused such strong passions were settled. Among Muslims there was a sense of fulfilment at having achieved Pakistan.

Maulana Azad, former president of Congress and a Moslem who decided to remain in India where he was Minister of Education between 1947 and 1958, criticised Mountbatten for partitioning the country. But in his book India Wins Freedom (1958) he nevertheless praised Mountbatten’s role in ending the violence:

I have blamed Mountbatten for the way in which he helped to bring about partition. I must now pay him a tribute for the manner in which he handled the crisis which faced us. I have already referred to the energy and vigour with which he carried out the intricate and difficult task of partitioning India. He now acted with even greater energy and vigour to restore law and order in the country. His military training now stood us in very good stead. Without his leadership and experience of military tactics, it is doubtful if we could have got over the difficulties with such expedition and efficiency.

The most heartfelt tribute, however, was paid by the 200,000 ordinary Indians who at Mountbatten’s departure from India in June 1948 came out to cheer him. Nehru referred to the vast crowds that had attended the Mountbattens’ last appearances and wondered 'how it was that an Englishman and Englishwoman could become so popular in India during this brief period' (Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten.The Official Biography (1985), 478-9.)

It is evident that most senior Indian politicians and officials at the time of independence had nothing but praise for Mountbatten and admired him greatly. Pakistani politicians and officials criticised some of his decisions but praised others. More weight should be placed on the views of these individuals who had direct knowledge of events and of Mountbatten’s actions, than those recent commentators who demonstrate a lack of awareness of the realities in India in 1947.

Following his violent death on 27 August 1979 at the hands of the Provisional IRA, India observed a week of national mourning.

We start with two important essays we’ve published by emeritus professor Kevin Fernlund, lately of the University of Missouri, on two controversial aspects of pre-Columbian American history. The first, entitled ‘Land Acknowledgment Fails to Acknowledge the Facts’ concerns the common practice in many institutions in the Anglosphere of recognising indigenous peoples as the first and true custodians of the land. But much of the land in the Americas, especially in what is now North America, was very thinly populated and very largely unsettled before contact with European settlers. Claims that it belonged to the indigenous and was stolen by Europeans need much more careful treatment.

Professor Fernlund’s second essay on ‘The Myth of Millions. Rethinking Hispaniola Before Columbus’ considers new evidence, drawn from genetic data and genomics, which has led to significant downward revisions of the size of the population in the pre-Columbian Americas, and a better understanding of the drastic impact of disease on the native population. Rather than a ‘hemispheric holocaust’ of large, thriving populations caused by contact with rapacious Europeans, the emerging pattern is of smaller and more localised populations suffering inadvertently from diseases to which they had no resistance.

Issues of slavery, reparations and restitution in West Africa continue to incite controversy. Alistair Parker has contributed an essay on the long history of slave-trading and slavery within the borders of what is now Ghana, the state that has taken the lead at the United Nations this year in the organised movement calling for reparations for Atlantic slavery: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-gravest-crime-ghana-and-slavery/ Ghanaian tribal warfare and profit-seeking led to the sale of black African slaves into two distinct slave systems, that of the Atlantic world and that of the Arab world, with the famous slave market at Salaga in northern Ghana selling to both. Yet for some unaccountable reason the government of Ghana seems to have overlooked its own slave cultures and the role of its people in capturing and selling slaves, and seems to have forgotten entirely the Arab trade in which some of those who became Ghanaians engaged. Nor does it recall the role of the British throughout the 19th century in protecting smaller and weaker tribes whose members would otherwise have been captured and sold as slaves, and in trying to stamp out the slave trade in both directions, west and east. It would seem that ‘recollections may vary’, as our late Queen put it, especially at the UN.

Mike Wells contributes another most helpful article on the Benin Bronzes, those remarkable and valuable artefacts distributed by the British to western museums and collections after the capital of the slave-holding, slave-trading, and human-sacrificing West African kingdom of Benin was sacked in 1897.

Mike’s essay, written to answer the questions of three German students, is an update on the current situation following the transfer of its collection of 116 bronzes by the University of Cambridge to…and that’s the point: where they’ve gone in Nigeria/Benin is unknown and apparently not of interest to Cambridge. We will try to follow this issue, and the Bronzes themselves. Whether they will appear in an accessible museum or public collection is anyone’s guess.

Another of our articles on restitution concerns the fabulous Koh-i-Noor diamond that adorns the Elizabeth The Queen Mother’s Crown in the royal collection held in the Tower of London:

Mayor Mamdani, newly installed in that office in New York, apparently intended to tell King Charles on his recent visit to the Big Apple that he should return the fabled jewel to India, a country with which the Mayor has many connections. But why India? As we explain in our essay, the diamond is claimed by five different nations. We also ask what great treasure the Mayor might like to return from the fabled collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum? ‘Colonial Loot’, if that it is, is widely spread, or perhaps he hasn’t noticed?

We recommend two recently-published books. The first, by one of our Australian founders and contributors, Bella d’Abrera, entitled Mindless. How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation is centrally concerned with the distorting education that western societies now provide, filling children with guilt about the past and depriving them of contact with the history of their own nations.

The second book, Not Your Victim. How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us reviewed by Mark Stocker, is a memoir and critique by another of our HR authors, Marie Kawthar Daouda. Partly autobiographical, tracing her journey to Oxford from Morocco via Paris, along the way Marie dismantles identity politics, race fixation, and progressive culture generally, focusing on their internal contradictions. See Marie’s discussion of art in the French Revolution here:

The absence of a sense of nationhood among many of Britain’s current crop of leaders and public appointees is evident in the recent decision by the Bank of England to replace great figures from British history – Churchill, Jane Austen, J. M. W. Turner and Alan Turing – from the next generation of our banknotes.

They are to be replaced by drawings of British mammals, birds, reptiles and insects. Here at History Reclaimed we have nothing against small creatures but we can see no reason to remove history from our currency. Indeed, we’d like to see more and different historical Britons not only on our money but in public prominence in general. This latest decision may be compared with that taken by the Speaker of the House of Commons to remove portraits of dozens of famous Britons from the walls of the Palace of Westminster:

We also draw your attention to some items of news. After publication of our criticisms of the University of Sydney’s Library for redacting harmless images of early Australian exploration, we were delighted to be invited onto Sky News Australia where Lawrence Goldman was interviewed ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ by news anchor Adam Boulton. See

In Rochester, Kent, the Guildhall Museum has seen fit to criticise Charles Dickens’s ‘prejudice’ and his apparently offensive, imperialistic views. “Dickens, though in many ways a fair-minded man, took advantage of certain situations to promote a vociferous intolerance which he expressed in grossly offensive terms.” The great opponent of the heartless New Poor Law, the Debtors’ Prison, the Circumlocution Office, and Mrs Jellyby’s ‘telescopic philanthropy’, is cut down to size. Talk about trashing your own brand. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/23/charles-dickens-hometown-museum-condemns-his-prejudice/?recomm_id=9c220869-0c4b-4c63-8ef6-0409fe328ee7  The Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, Holborn, in a house where Dickens lived at the end of the 1830s, is much better – at least it was on the last occasion we visited – and to be recommended.

Robert Tombs saw this notice in a recent visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and remarked on the euphemism for invasion in the phrase ‘following settlement there in AD 642 of people of Islamic culture’. Imagine if the Fitzwilliam had been discussing western ‘settlement’?

Of course, the Islamic conquest of Egypt (639–642 AD), led by the Arab commander ‘Amr ibn al-'As under the Rashidun Caliphate, permanently ended nearly seven centuries of Byzantine-Roman rule there. Meanwhile ‘Kemet’ meaning ‘black land’, refers not to Egyptian kinship with Africa but to the colour of the rich alluvial silt deposited by the annual flooding of the Nile.

We send our sympathies (perhaps our congratulations) to another of our authors, Dr Mario Trabucco della Torretta, whose view that the Elgin Marbles should remain in the British Museum led to his being barred from speaking at a conference at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, built in the hope that one day the Marbles will be returned there. The museum’s board members, who vetoed his attendance, have truly lost theirs – marbles, that is. You can read Mario in History Reclaimed here:

Finally, if anyone happens to be at the ARC Conference at London’s Olympia between June 23rd-25th, look for History Reclaimed’s stand in the exhibition area and come and say hello.

Do keep reading. Please recommend History Reclaimed to your friends. Do send us articles you’ve written, or information you think important and that we’ll find helpful – and do make a donation if you can. We are embarked on a major project on the British School History Curriculum and your financial help with that would be most helpful.

Lawrence Goldman Robert Tombs Zewditu Gebreyohanes Alex Gray

Banks always tell us that we can trust them. Most of us would automatically trust the Bank of England. But what if the Governor of the Bank of England, Sir Andrew Bailey, went around being ‘economical with the truth’? Would we trust him then?

This question arises because, in his justification last week for removing depictions of famous Britons from our banknotes, Sir Andrew said we, the public, had voted for this. Some 44,000 people had taken part in a poll on the Bank of England’s website, and the majority had opted for images of British wildlife over historical figures – so Winston Churchill is out and bees and basking sharks are in.

However, he failed to mention the focus groups, involving 119 people, that were also consulted by the Bank. It was revealed yesterday (June 5th 2026)  that one participant in these secret groups described Alan Turing, who features on our £50 note, as ‘imperialistic’; yet anyone who knows about the mathematician’s experience of prejudice will also know that nothing could be further from the truth.

Others apparently objected to people associated with Britain’s victory in the Second World War. Even images of great buildings were controversial ‘due to potential links to colonialism/slavery’. As such, marketing consultancy Savanta advised the Bank that putting historical figures on its notes was ‘potentially divisive, elitist’.

So, Sir Andrew, is your decision to banish titans of British history from our currency really a reflection of public will? Or was it because the dead hand of focus group research dovetailed with a belief, shared by much of the ruling class, that the nation’s past is ‘problematic’? For why else would you be pushing ahead with this scheme when leaders of three major political parties – Kemi Badenoch, Nigel Farage and Sir Ed Davey, representing a large majority of voters today – are all opposed?

That Jane Austen, one of our most celebrated writers, or Britain’s greatest painter JMW Turner could be replaced by puffins or hedgehogs tells us a lot about the state of the nation.

In 2000, we were asked to decide ‘Who was the greatest Briton?’ by the former, trustworthy BBC, and after watching excellent programmes, the nation chose Churchill over the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The latter was depicted by Kenneth Branagh 12 years later at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics. We thrilled there at the evocation of British history, choreographed by Danny Boyle, including scenes of the Industrial Revolution through which Britain changed the world, and dancing nurses from the National Health Service. Yet now we seem to have lost the will and confidence to put our history, and those who made it, on our money. National pride and patriotism are embarrassments in Britain today.

We all love our countryside and its animals and birds, but they hardly define us as a nation. They give no clue to British life and identity, nor of our contributions to freedom, science and the arts. Banknotes with a fresh group of famous Britons on them – how about Queen Elizabeth I, the novelist George Eliot, the physicist Stephen Hawking, and Capability Brown, the landscape gardener? – could launch ten thousand history lessons across British schools and another series from the BBC teaching us about the heritage we share.

Some chance! We are told instead by educationists and commentators in our universities, the media and the BBC, that our history has been immoral and that its great figures, including monarchs, are unworthy. Is it any surprise that the majority of people who replied to the Bank of England’s survey – the one we know about, not the one hidden from us - chose illustrations from nature for banknotes? Even so, more than a third still opted to continue with great Britons.

Think about today’s Euro notes. There’s nothing to think about, is there? Adorned with generic images of vague architectural features, in their blandness and conformity, they are eminently forgettable. They were evidently designed by a committee given a brief to be boring. But can you remember what they replaced? Richly coloured French banknotes before the franc was abolished celebrated the composer Debussy, the painter Cezanne, the engineer Gustave Eiffel, and the great scientific partnership of Pierre and Marie Curie. In Italy you would have seen images the painter Caravaggio, the sculptor Bernini, and the radio pioneer (whom we British could also claim) Marconi. For nations wise enough to illustrate their history on their banknotes, everyday commercial exchanges affirm membership of the national community and pride in its achievements, and teach tourists about the countries they visit.

For decades, American dollar bills have featured, in order from $1 to $100, great founders of the republic and presidents: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant and Franklin. Living in a nation of immigrants, Americans have always understood – at least until recently - the need for national symbols and a shared culture to bind a diverse nation together. American children begin each school day reciting the Pledge of Allegiance; the Stars and Stripes flies over every civic building; their banknotes tell the national story.

The mistake made by the British elite, which this decision about our money demonstrates yet again, is to have tried to build a multicultural society without a common identity. Rather than hiding that identity behind small mammals and reptiles, we should be reinforcing it. Instead, recent issues of our 50 pence coins have depicted Winnie the Pooh, Denis the Menace and Star Wars. The Bank of England has encouraged the trivialisation and Disneyfication of our culture and it now proposes to do further damage.

While British people from all backgrounds remain loyal and proud, their political and cultural leaders (despite occasional empty words to the contrary) retreat in horror from displays of national pride. The French call it ‘trahison des clercs’, the treason of the intellectuals.

Step forward the man making this decision, Sir Andrew Bailey. Before he became a banker he studied History at the University of Cambridge and even wrote a doctorate there on the Lancashire cotton industry during the Napoleonic Wars. Having studied this, he of all people will be aware of the significance of national symbols in bringing us together, especially in times of national danger and stress. Images of ‘Farmer George’ (George III), John Bull and Britannia (who used to be on the back of our 50 pence coin but has been steadily removed over time) saw us through the wars against the French.

Despite Sir Andrew’s educational advantages and distinctions, he demonstrates the cultural cowardice of so many people in positions of influence in Britain. If even Sir Ed Davey can complain at the thought of Winston Churchill ‘being replaced by a badger’, it’s clear something is wrong. Sir Andrew should be true to his training as a historian, and ‘speak for England’. What’s the point of a central banker who can’t be trusted, or of a historian in public life who diminishes history?

The debate has always involved more than numbers. Embedded within it are three separate claims: the size of the population, the causes of its collapse, and the moral meaning of that collapse. For generations these have been treated as a single question: How many Indigenous people lived on Hispaniola in 1492, and what does their subsequent disappearance say about Spanish rule? The genomic evidence now forces us to disentangle them. Genetics can tell us who was related; genomics can tell us how many people there were.

Nowhere has this debate been more consequential than in the Caribbean, the first point of sustained contact between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Hispaniola—today divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic—was the cradle of Spain’s American empire, the site of the earliest encomiendas, and the stage on which the first catastrophic population collapse unfolded. For generations, historians have repeated population estimates for Hispaniola ranging from 250,000 to 1 million inhabitants in 1492. These numbers, though lower than the extravagant claims of the sixteenth century, still assume a large, densely settled island society.

Map of Hispaniola from Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigationi et Viaggi (1556)

But a new line of evidence has entered the debate—one that neither Mooney nor Dobyns could have imagined. On December 23, 2020, the journal Nature published a landmark study by Daniel M. Fernandes and an international team of researchers titled “A Genetic History of the Pre‑contact Caribbean.” Drawing on ancient DNA from 174 individuals across the region, the authors reconstructed the population history of the Caribbean with unprecedented precision. Their conclusion was startling: the pre‑contact population of Hispaniola was not in the hundreds of thousands, let alone the millions, but in the low tens of thousands—of the order of thirty thousand people in 1492.

The New York Times immediately grasped the significance of the finding, reporting that ancient DNA was “changing how we think about the Caribbean.” That is an understatement. The genomic evidence does not merely revise earlier estimates—it overturns them. It forces a fundamental rethinking of the demographic, social, and moral history of the first century of European colonization.

To appreciate the scale of this revision, it is necessary to revisit the high‑counter tradition. Borah and Cook, working in mid‑twentieth‑century Berkeley, argued that Mexico’s pre‑Hispanic population was no less than 25 million and that it did not recover until 1947—a demographic recovery time of more than four centuries, twice as long as Europe’s recovery from the Black Death. Dobyns went further still, proposing that the Indigenous population of the Americas had been almost unimaginably large before 1492.

These estimates were not merely academic. They reshaped the moral narrative of the Conquest. If tens of millions died, then the Spanish—and by extension, Europeans—were responsible for one of the greatest demographic catastrophes in human history. The high‑counter numbers fed directly into the modern revival of the Black Legend, the sixteenth‑century Protestant polemic that portrayed Spain as uniquely cruel, greedy, and genocidal.

Yet even before the genomic revolution, doubts had begun to accumulate. Archaeology, ethnohistory, and ecological studies increasingly suggested that the high‑counter figures were inflated. Angus Maddison, the pioneering macroeconomic historian, offered far more conservative estimates: 7.5 million for pre‑Hispanic Mexico, 2 million for what became the United States, and 250,000 for Canada—a total of roughly 9.75 million for all of North America.[i] These numbers aligned more closely with the early low counters than with the postwar high‑counter orthodoxy.

Still, the Caribbean remained a stubborn outlier. Hispaniola’s early collapse was so rapid and so complete that scholars struggled to reconstruct its pre‑contact population. The written sources were contradictory, the archaeological record fragmentary, and the political uses of the numbers—by Spaniards, Protestants, nationalists, and modern activists—made sober analysis difficult.

ii. Columbus, Las Casas, and the Rhetoric of Numbers

The earliest population estimates for Hispaniola came from Christopher Columbus and his brother Bartholomew, who placed the island’s population at 1.1 million. This figure was not the product of a census; it was a sales pitch. Columbus needed to impress investors and patrons in Europe, and a populous island implied wealth, tribute, and opportunity. The number was fiction, but it was useful fiction.

 Columbus's letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, 1493. Columbus’s report of a populous, wealthy island was crafted to impress patrons and investors, not to record demographic reality.

Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar who became the most famous defender of Indigenous rights, offered even larger numbers. Las Casas claimed that Hispaniola had held three to four million inhabitants before the arrival of the Spaniards. By the time he arrived on the island, he insisted, only a few tens of thousands remained. His Very Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies (1542) was an indictment of Spanish cruelty, and his population figures were part of his moral arsenal. To condemn the Spaniards, he needed the scale of the catastrophe to be immense.

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566) 16th‑century portrait.

Las Casas lived on Hispaniola, but his population figures were no more empirical than his estimates for regions he never visited. He arrived after the initial demographic collapse had already begun, never saw the pre‑contact population, and relied on secondhand claims about what the island “must have” held. His arithmetic belonged to the genre of moral indictment, not demographic measurement. Even his contemporaries doubted his numbers. A census taken in 1540 counted only 250 surviving Indigenous people on Hispaniola. If the island had once held millions, the death rate would have been unprecedented in human history. If it had held tens of thousands, the catastrophe was still immense—but it was not the apocalypse Las Casas described.

The persistence of the high estimates is itself a historical phenomenon. They were sustained by the polemical power of the Black Legend, by Protestant and later nationalist uses of Las Casas, by the moral appeal of large numbers, and by the difficulty of reconstructing Caribbean demography from fragmentary evidence. The high‑counter paradigm endured not because the evidence supported it, but because its moral narrative was compelling. Scholars also tended to extrapolate from Mesoamerica, where populations truly were large. The result was a historiographical inertia that survived long after doubts had accumulated.

Willem Blaeu’s 1639 map of Hispaniola. A richly detailed Dutch engraving that captures the island’s geography long after the demographic collapse, offering a visual counterpoint to inflated early population claims.

iii. The Genomic Revolution

This is where the Fernandes study enters the story. Ancient DNA allows researchers to reconstruct population history directly from biological inheritance rather than from rhetorical or politically motivated sources. The genetic patterns on Hispaniola show a population that was small, tightly knit, and marked by unusually close relatedness across individuals separated by centuries—a hallmark of limited population size.

The genomic findings also align with the archaeological record. Settlement patterns on Hispaniola reveal small, dispersed villages rather than dense urban centers, and the island’s conuco horticulture—small, intensively managed garden plots—could not have supported populations in the hundreds of thousands. Ecological studies of the island’s interior point to similar constraints. The genomic evidence does not stand alone; it corroborates what archaeology and ecology have long suggested.

Using the study’s effective population size estimates, even the combined population of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico could not have exceeded roughly 80,000—and was likely far lower. The Caribbean, the study concluded, was populated by small, mobile, interconnected communities with low genetic diversity and high levels of kinship across islands. This is not the demographic profile of a densely settled region with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants. It is the profile of a small, fragile population.

The implications are profound. The genomic evidence shows that the pre‑contact population of Hispaniola was not 1 million. It was not 500,000. It was not even 250,000. It was in the low tens of thousands. This does not diminish the tragedy of what followed. A population of 30,000 reduced to 250 in less than fifty years is a catastrophe of staggering proportions. But it is a catastrophe of a different kind than the one imagined by Las Casas and repeated by generations of historians.

iv: Disease, Not Genocide

The genomic evidence also helps clarify the causes of the collapse. Borah’s most important insight was that disease, not Spanish sadism, was the primary killer. Smallpox, measles, influenza, and the hemorrhagic fevers known as cocolitzli or matlazáhuatl swept through populations with no prior exposure. The shock of conquest—war, famine, forced labor, and social disruption—made Indigenous communities even more vulnerable.

This pattern was not unique to the Caribbean. In central Mexico, the population may have fallen from 7.5 million in 1518 to 1 million in 1603. Elsewhere in North America, the decline was slower but still devastating. As Alfred W. Crosby observed, the diseases “did not rain down uniformly and all at once,” but their cumulative effect was comparable to the Black Death in fourteenth‑century Europe. The difference is that Europe recovered. Many Indigenous societies did not.

An illustration in the Florentine Codex, compiled between 1540 and 1585 by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún depicting the Nahua peoples suffering from smallpox during the conquest-era in central Mexico

v: A New Understanding of the Caribbean Catastrophe

What the genomic evidence forces us to recognize is that Hispaniola’s tragedy was not the destruction of a populous, flourishing civilization of millions. It was the near extinction of a small, tightly knit, vulnerable population whose social fabric was torn apart by disease, exploitation, and the shock of colonization.

Recognizing that Hispaniola held tens of thousands rather than millions does not diminish the tragedy. It reframes it. The Spaniards did not exterminate a populous civilization in the modern genocidal sense, but they presided over—and contributed to—a demographic collapse of extraordinary severity. The moral weight of the event lies not in inflated numbers but in the near extinction of a vulnerable world.

This reframing has several consequences. It undermines the numerical foundation of the Black Legend. Las Casas’s millions were rhetorical inventions, not demographic realities. It vindicates the early low counters and the empirical approach of Angus Maddison. Maddison’s estimates, long dismissed as conservative, now appear remarkably close to the genomic evidence. It clarifies the moral history of the Conquest. The Spaniards were not the industrial‑scale mass murderers of Las Casas’s imagination. But they presided over—and contributed to—a demographic collapse of extraordinary severity. And it restores agency to Indigenous peoples. Small populations are not insignificant populations. They are simply more vulnerable to shocks.

vi: The Myth of Millions

The myth of millions has shaped our understanding of the Caribbean for five centuries. It has distorted the moral narrative of the Conquest, inflated the scale of the catastrophe, and obscured the lived reality of the Indigenous peoples of Hispaniola. The genomic revolution allows us to see the past more clearly—not to exonerate the Spaniards, but to understand the tragedy in its true dimensions. The destruction of Hispaniola was not the annihilation of millions. It was the shattering of a small world. And that, in its own way, is no less devastating.

As genomic data accumulates across the Americas, longstanding demographic assumptions will require re‑evaluation. The “hemispheric holocaust” narrative will give way to a more precise, regionally differentiated understanding of Indigenous population history. In this sense, the genomic revolution does not minimize the scale of Indigenous suffering; it grounds it in evidence rather than rhetoric.

Kevin Jon Fernlund is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, a Fulbright Scholar, and a former Director of the Western History Association. He is also the author of A Big History of North America, from Montezuma to Monroe (University of Missouri Press, 2022).

Thank you for reading my articles about the Benin bronzes, and for your interesting questions. Before answering those, may I make some points?

Research:

There is no better guide to the controversial bronzes, and background to the restitution debate, than Barnaby Phillips’s book “Loot”. He’s an honest reporter, formerly the BBC’s West Africa correspondent, and his book is the result of  prodigious original research and interviews.

One of the questions Phillips settles is that in 1897 when the British expedition took brass, wooden and ivory items from Benin - today lumped together as the “Benin bronzes” - these were legally spoils of war, and not illegal loot. It was the Oba’s troops who attacked first, massacring an unarmed British expedition in January 1897, to which Britain responded with a naval expedition the following month.

The Kings of Benin:

The hereditary Obas (kings) of Benin ran a violent regime, propped up by a small group of hereditary Chiefs (in some senses the Oba was their puppet, a situation that continues today, though not mentioned. His Chiefs, not the Oba, ordered the massacre of the January 1897 expedition, which is why the defeated chiefs were executed and the Oba was not). Successive Obas controlled all trade, including the sale of human beings, mainly captured from neighbouring tribes. Their reign of terror was underpinned by regular massed human sacrifices. They kept their Edo people illiterate and were selling slaves before the first Europeans arrived, and continued doing so for many decades after Britain enforced its ban on the trade.

Arrival of the British:

For evidence of how much the Edo preferred British colonial administration to the deposed Oba’s regime, consider what happened: nothing. There were no mass revolts, and Edo people could trade, they received healthcare and education, the rule of law and human rights. Far from leading any revolt, the Oba’s warlord Ojo Ibadan, who had led the attack on the January expedition, went on to serve with distinction in the British colonial forces. The British colonial system wasn’t perfect, but for the vast majority of the Edo it was an improvement on the previous regime.

Vanishing bronzes:

Benin artefacts recently restituted to Nigeria have been vanishing. Not only has there been no stock-check of the world-class Benin collections bequeathed to Nigeria at independence in 1960 - and many pieces appear to have been stolen - but Nigerians have little interest in visiting their museums, which is why they are so dilapidated, with such poor security. German TV crews, interviewing people in the street in Benin, found them far more interested in scratching a living in a deeply corrupt country, and in what a Benin bronze might be worth in cash, than in going to look at one in a museum.

Do artworks have a right to be seen?:

My own view is that when unique works of art and craft have survived for many generations, and are judged to be worth displaying in museums and galleries, it is arrogant of today’s generation to think it has all the answers: what these pieces mean, who should be allowed to see them, whether future generations might come to other views. In short, I believe that over time artworks acquire something like a soul of their own, their own right to exist and to be seen. Certainly not to be made to vanish, as the Nazis did to art, books and Jews.

Celebrating Murder. The Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt in Hamburg (known as MARKK) censored this lid of a carved wooden box from Benin. Only a rubbing from a 1919 book is available. Second left, an executioner brandishes the head of a human sacrifice: each side of him are swords of the type described below. The following photo of one end of the box shows the female victim's bound and headless body.

Preserving evidence:

The Benin bronzes are physical embodiments of the trade in human beings, many of them having been cast from the brass ingots with which slaves were purchased from Benin. So it is our duty today to preserve and display this physical evidence of a vile trade - for which Benin’s rulers have never apologised - for present and future generations to learn from.

So arrogant are some museum managers that the director of MARKK Museum in Hamburg - the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt, founded in 1879, and one of the largest museums of ethnology in Europe - tried to suppress an image from Benin, carved into a wooden box, showing a ceremonial human sacrifice. Is this physical evidence of a murderous regime, now that it’s been handed over to Nigeria, likely ever to be seen in public again?

————

Now to your questions:

a) "Nigeria has failed to look after the Benin Bronzes it has and shouldn't be given any more, says top Swiss enthnologist”. Why did you choose to write this article, [or rather] this translation of an interview, about Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin? 

(That headline was the editor’s, not mine, incidentally). The late Professor Hauser-Schäublin was one of the few, and most influential, European protesters against German politicians’ rush to purge their country’s museums of their Benin collections.

Personally Hauser-Schäublin was no right-winger; on the contrary, she appeared sceptical of capitalism. But she was an original, thorough and truthful researcher. It was she who pointed out that Germany’s initial handover of Benin bronzes coincided with the first large shipment of Nigerian Liquefied Natural Gas to a nation suddenly deprived of Russian gas; it was she who reported the MARKK director’s censorship (see above), it was Hauser-Schäublin who realised Swiss museum managements had been conspiring for years to purge their museums of Benin artworks. Her death in 2025 was a great loss to the academic community.

Another of Prof. Hauser-Schaüblin’s discoveries was the extraordinary account by the Oba’s warlord Ojo Obadan of his massacre of the January 1897 expedition, widely published in 1899 and then, it seems, completely forgotten. It’s a rare narrative because his account of hand-to-hand combat with Captain Boisragon, one of the two British survivors, exactly matches the account of that fight which Boisragon gave in his own book. (My father’s cousin was a Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot who survived being shot down by the Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland - who also survived WW2, after which the two of them became great friends!)

b) "The Scandal of the Benin Bronzes"

How would you explain the rush of restitution when the history of the Benin Bronzes is so controversial?

Politically-motivated museum managements imagine that by “decolonising” their collections they can rearrange history, while, happily for their careers. also demonstrating their personal virtue. They try to impose today’s assumptions and values on events and people of the past which they don’t understand, and without considering that future generations may have other ideas.

Prof Hauser-Schaüblin deplored the simplistic “perpetrator/victim narrative” of many of today’s museum professionals: there’s a perceptive article about her approach to her discipline, Ethnology, and her attitude to restituting the Benin bronzes, here:

https://backend.uni-heidelberg.de/en/documents/bblhauser-schaublin/download

c) How can it be that so many people, museums and politicians want to restitute the Bronzes while the descendants of the slaves, that were sold by the Oba, try to stop it? Isn't that a contradiction? 

Indeed it is a contradiction, and an embarrassing one for the restitution lobby in the west. However. while descendants of enslaved people want to preserve and display this physical evidence of the trade in human beings, their campaign has been somewhat derailed by cash reparations offered by, for example, the Church of England - best not to rock the boat, and go after the money. The American word for this is grifting, we don’t really have a word in English.

d) You also mentioned in your article that you were on a photographic assignment in Nigeria: what kind of impression did you get on the whole Benin Bronzes topic? Did it change your opinion in any way? And do you think the Bronzes are safe in Nigerian museums?

In 1978 I was commissioned, as an independent press photographer but sponsored by the Nigerian government, to shoot a wide-ranging coverage of the country - showing how its cascade of new oil wealth was being put to use. Having seen the British Museum’s collection of Benin bronzes, I was keen to see the national museum’s collection in Benin.

There was some difficulty about this, and when I did get into the “closed” museum I understood why. As a curator explained, the collection was being steadily looted by the government, which collected a bronze whenever it needed a gift for some dignitary. At the time I merely tucked away the knowledge - worse things were happening under Nigeria’s military dictatorship - but decades later I was amazed by Nigeria’s demands for restitution from foreign collections, on the grounds that this was Nigeria’s “heritage”. Why not start by tracking down the pieces Nigerians had recently stolen from themselves?

As to whether Benin pieces are safe in Nigeria’s museums, see the multiple examples of theft in “Loot”. Items returned today may be briefly displayed to the press before vanishing into locked store rooms, or they’re quietly presented to the current Oba. They’re not available to ordinary Nigerians, nor to the rest of the world, and certainly not to the slaves’ descendants abroad who consider them to be “blood metal”.

Also, there are Muslim fundamentalist insurgents in the north of Nigeria, to whom any human or animal representation is haram. They would melt down any Benin bronzes they could lay their hands on - see the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan, Palmyra in Syria, Mosul and Nimrud in Iraq. No, there’s no guarantee Benin bronzes are safe in Nigeria.

e) On the Benin Bronzes restitution debate, you've written multiple articles critical of the Benin Bronzes restitution campaign. What first drew you to this topic, and what do you think the mainstream media gets most wrong about it?

I realised that I had, from personal experience, a point of view that was not being published: so I started to research and write. As to mainstream media, publishing the full history and not just a partial account would be a good start. Slavery still exists, sometimes in other guises, and we should learn from the past.

f) On [the Cambridge museum’s] provenance evidence: you argue the provenance documentation for many of the 116 items is too weak to justify a handover. What standard of evidence do you think should be required before artefacts are returned?

 “Evidence” compiled by the Cambridge museum would never have survived being tested in a court of law: too much guesswork. This was a charade, to justify an already-decided policy.

As “Loot” makes clear, many Benin items found their way abroad both before and particularly after the February 1897 Expedition: at market in the west, there was prestige, a sort of premium, around “1897” items. Coral regalia which the Oba would annually “purify” by washing it in the blood of slaves sacrificed for the purpose, is routinely described as “looted in 1897”. But I’ve seen no evidence in any of the contemporary accounts that the British either found any coral, or realised what it signified, or removed it.

On the contrary, from his internal exile in Calabar, the deposed Oba later complained to the British that “my boys” were stealing his coral regalia. Perhaps they were delighted he had been deposed and they could make some quick money by telling foreigners why the coral was important, and sell it to them? It was looted, I agree, but by Nigerians.

(g) On the historical context of the Benin Kingdom: you note that the current Oba has never apologised for his ancestors' actions. Do you think such an acknowledgement would change the terms of the debate for you?

Of course. Well into the middle of the 19th Century, sailors of the Royal Navy’s Preventative Squadron were still dying as they patrolled the coast, intercepting slave ships - by then trading mainly with Brazil - and freeing their captives. Who do people imagine had been enslaving and selling these Africans to the traders?

(h) How do you respond to the accusation that focusing on Benin's historical practices is a form of "whataboutism" that avoids reckoning with British colonial violence? 

The records are there for those who want to study them: the Benin regime’s historical practices were abominable. “British colonial violence” is a loaded phrase which should be either justified or dropped.

Some colonisers were violent, specially so in King Leopold’s private African colony, the Belgian Congo; or the Germans in what is now Namibia, the Romans in what is now Germany, and so on throughout history. A good test of how violently a colony is or was run is to check how many armed troops were needed to keep the population under control: see Japan in China, China in Tibet, Russia in eastern Ukraine today, and so on.

Britain’s colonies often needed remarkably few troops and administrators: famously so in the case of India, after maharajahs, nizams and nawabs, outraged at the loss of their wealth and privileges, had been subdued. The same in west Africa. My conclusion is that populations often preferred the new order - bringing with it medicine, literacy, education, law and right to life - to the old order. They did not favour a return to arbitrary rule by despots.

Benin’s Obas literally had the power of life and death over all their subjects, not just those they’d enslaved (though they knew better than to mess with the Chiefs). This was the meaning of the oversized executioners’ swords which were brandished beside an enthroned Oba, and still are to this day - they meant “Remember, I can make a human sacrifice of you any time I want to”. And the square brass bells which are displayed in so many museums’ Benin collections? These were used to announce the human sacrifices, though you won’t usually read that in the museum captions beside them.

You can call all this “whataboutisim” if you like, I prefer to call it facing facts.

Image of an executioner's sword  previously held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, and now sent to Benin. Digital Benin described it as an  "Iron sword of peculiar shape with cast bronze hilt showing skeumorphic [sic 'skeuomorphic'] wire binding. A label which has since come off said it was an executioner's sword." As item 48 on the handover list, it was less candidly described as merely "ceremonial".

(i) You mention Professor Brigitta Hauser-Schaublin's work approvingly. Are there other academics or commentators you think are doing important work, that isn't getting enough attention, on this issue?

The problem for academics is that it’s usually career suicide to speak out against the “perpetrator/victim” narrative (see above) surrounding the Benin bronzes, or to examine too closely the behaviour of West African despots who enslaved their fellow Africans and sold them.

This is why the louder voices in UK are usually retired and emeritus professors: Robert Tombs, Lord (Nigel) Biggar, Lawrence Goldman and others - they’re collecting their pensions and can’t be muzzled. Another such retired professor was the late Brigitta Hauser-Schaüblin.

(j) You refer to a "post-colonial guilt industry", that's a loaded phrase. Who specifically do you think is driving it, and what do you think their motivations are?

You call that a loaded phrase: I consider your catch-all “British colonial violence” a loaded phrase. With exceptions such as the notorious Amritsar Massacre, British colonial rule brought a number of benefits to the majority of those colonised, not the least being literacy.

Portuguese traders, the first outsiders to buy Benin’s slaves, taught the then Oba’s family to read and write, but even up to 1897 this was never a benefit Benin’s Obas wanted for their people. As George Orwell described in “1984”, if you control the narrative and can rearrange history however you wish, you control the people. Unfortunately for despots, literacy brings independent thought

And yes, it is an industry. Thousands of academics, administrators, teachers and campaigners live on salaries funded by taxpayers or by billionaire-funded charitable trusts, promoting post-colonial guilt. We would all be happier if we studied and learned from the past, and used it to build a better future. The past was another country, where they did things differently, and we can’t change that.

(k) Where do you draw the line between legitimate acknowledgement of colonial wrongs and what you see as counterproductive guilt? Is there a middle ground?

The middle ground is telling the truth. A good example is South Africa’s Truth & Reconciliation Commission, after the fall of the apartheid regime. The country is by no means perfect, but there could have been terrible bloodshed without the Commission. Granted immunity from prosecution, people simply told the truth about what they did in the apartheid years, and for most people the truth is a better healer of old wounds than revenge is. Most people want to look forward and make a better world for their children.

(l) If the restitution campaign is, as you suggest, largely self-inflicted in its setbacks, what do you think a more credible and honest campaign for cultural restitution would look like?

The setbacks the Nigerian restitution lobby has brought on itself have been laughable. Nor do I understand what western fanatics think is achieved by restitution, other than making themselves look virtuous. Most Nigerians don’t want museums, they want their family to be able to eat and be educated - and ideally, to emigrate, see below.

The Benin bronzes were never the “cultural property” of the Edo people. They belonged to the Obas in person, emblems of their brutal regime and their power of life and death; rarely if ever seen by their people. Most of the British Museum’s remarkable Benin relief panels, for example, were discovered in 1897 burnt, broken and buried under the floor of a storehouse - no-one has ever explained why. Is it not better for future generations, and is it not a better tribute to their long-ago creators, that these remarkable works should continue to be displayed in London - and not reunited with similar pieces which today are hidden in store rooms in Lagos and Benin, and seen by nobody?

Which cultural practices would we, today, wish to see continued? From his house arrest in Calabar, the Oba who’d been deposed in 1897 asked his British captors to arrange for the crucifixion of some female slaves. His people back in Benin were complaining of a drought, and this traditional custom would be sure to bring rain, he said. The crucifixions didn’t happen: the British had freed his slaves, and volunteers were hard to find.

As to the fashion for “cultural restitution”: the Ford Foundation dropped a particular question from the national surveys of Nigerian attitudes which it sponsors, after the proportion who said they would emigrate at once if they possibly could climbed above 70%. Future Nigerians might be more likely to see Benin’s artefacts in New York and London - though not, sadly, in Cambridge. There’s an interesting irony in western fanatics seeking to restitute bronzes to Nigerians who largely want out of their corrupt and dysfunctional country.

———

Thank you Sophia, Emily and Sarah, for reading my articles and for your perceptive and interesting questions. I’ve enjoyed the challenge of answering them. It’s good for someone of my age to be asked to justify their opinions now and again. We’re separated by two generations, in different countries, and my attitudes won’t be yours of course - but perhaps these remarks may be helpful.

I hope you enjoy the rest of your education - keep asking questions, take nothing for granted, read and research! - and please give my thanks to your remarkable Mr Roth for passing you on to me. I’m sure he’s a teacher who you will remember long after you’ve settled into your own careers. (Readers can find Roth’s History Reclaimed article here:https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/benin-coral-regalia-restitution/ )

With all best wishes,

Mike Wells

King Charles III reigns at the constitutional centre of a nation of 70 million people and leads a Commonwealth of hundreds of millions. For more than 50 years he has met all of the most important statesmen and women in the world. It is well known that he is a person of strong and deep convictions on environmental and architectural issues. Which is why it was strange to read that the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, reportedly told journalists that, given the chance, he hoped to discuss the 'return of the Koh-i-Noor diamond' with the King when they met earlier this month in New York.

Mamdani was elected by mouthing platitudes about socialism. But this kind of request was triviality of the worst type: of all the great questions Mamdani might have raised with someone of such deep wisdom and experience, he wanted to focus on something as irrelevant as a diamond, set in the beautiful Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s Crown, which is a component of the Crown Jewels that reside in the Tower of London’s Treasury.

When you have the honour of meeting King Charles, why talk about something so trivial? Credit: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon/Pool

Is this why he was elected? Is this the full extent of the mayor’s political imagination? Does his electorate, as opposed to people from similar backgrounds to Mamdani that he might wish to impress, even care?

There is the striking ignorance of the request: where, exactly, does the mayor think the Koh-i-Noor diamond should be “returned”? It is claimed by India, to which Mr Mamdani has familial ties. However, the diamond is also claimed by Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran.

Meaning “Mountain of Light”, the great jewel was unearthed using slave labour from the diamond mines of the Deccan Plateau, now part of modern India, in the late Middle Ages.

It initially went to a local Hindu dynasty, then to Muslim sultans. It was first mentioned in 1526, when it was the possession of the founder of the Mughal Empire in India, Babur, who had himself been born in what is now Uzbekistan. Two centuries later the Iranian warrior Nadir Shah occupied Delhi and took the Koh-i-Noor. After his assassination the diamond was possessed by one of his generals who founded a new dynasty in Afghanistan. A century after that, it was given to the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, for his role in helping an Afghan king regain his throne.

By 1849 it passed to the East India Company under the Treaty of Lahore at the end of the First Anglo-Sikh War. Maharaja Duleep Singh, who later lived in exile in Scotland and became a close friend to Queen Victoria, was compelled to surrender control of the Punjab and the jewel itself under the terms of the Treaty.

The Koh-i-Noor diamond is claimed by claimed by India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan

Credit: Tim Graham

These details tells a familiar and important story: that great artefacts and works of art have complex histories that defy easy historical or geographical categorisation. A gem owned by so many people across such an expanse of territory could go anywhere. Where does Mr Mamdani suggest? If his answer is Delhi, he would only create further international tension between nations frequently at odds with each other.

He should also be aware of the bad precedent set by the Indian government after it acquired the fabulous jewels once owned by the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1995. These reside in vaults of the Reserve Bank of India in New Delhi, where they cannot be seen.

Surely the test to be applied in all these cases of disputed possession is whether or not the object or treasure is accessible to the public? The Koh-i-Noor diamond meets that test as part of the Crown Jewels display, visited by thousands from all over the world each week.

The blindness and hypocrisy of Mr Mamdani’s stance should also be noted. For a mayor of New York, of all places, to be keen on the “restitution” of great artefacts seems a dangerous folly in a city stuffed full of art derived from the other continents of the world.

The director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, one of the world’s greatest, might have something to say if Mamdani suggested returning the Sphinx of Hatshepsut to Egypt, or the 17th-century Crown of the Andes to Colombia, both of which adorn the Met’s collection.

Crown of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, known as the Crown of the Andes (Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Tellingly, Mr Mamdani wears his “restitution” heart on his sleeve only when meeting a King of England, not when addressing the citizens of New York who cherish their museums.

Dr Marie Daouda, a lecturer in French at Oriel College, Oxford, is probably well-known to many History Reclaimed readers. Ethnically and intellectually, she exudes hybridity, being Moroccan born, French educated, and professionally and emotionally British – of a decidedly Oxonian caste. Courageously and intelligently, she refuses to toe the political line expected of a person of café au lait colour, and her new, short, readable and very necessary book says as much in its title: Not Your Victim: How Our Obsession with Race Entraps and Divides Us.

In explaining why she believes this is so, she tells us of her Moroccan origins, mischievously noting that her distant ancestors might well have owned white slaves. Rather more important is her fierce commitment to education and still more to intellectual challenge: bravely, aged seventeen, she took off to a Parisian lycée, patronised the dying breed of once ubiquitous second-hand bookshops and bookstalls, was a fan of The Cure and donned lace and long skirts, and read Balzac and Baudelaire.

After the Sorbonne, she taught at a Catholic school and would surely have made it as an academic had she championed post-colonialism. She did not. Britain, minus the complications of a colonial relationship with Morocco and still blessed with vestiges of its noble liberal tradition, ultimately proved more hospitable. Daouda writes movingly at the end of the book about Elizabeth Anscombe ‘teaching philosophy, smoking cigars, and opposing the nuclear attacks on Japan with a handful of babies around her’; Saint John Henry Newman, also of Oriel; and Oscar Wilde (actually far more privileged than ‘the Irish boy’ that she calls him, with Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford behind him).

Then there are ‘the green hills beyond the ghost gates of Oxford, and… the hills’ deep soil full of stories, and… the blue sky behind the hazy clouds, full of the dreams that rise with the chiming bells…’.  She links these with her ‘desire for what is beautiful and true, against… the raging yells of the crowds’. Teaching Mallarmé, Zola and perhaps Gissing to clever young students, her own life is devoted to just this.

But Daouda is far more important than some gushing, latter-day Betjemanite girl. She is passionate and she is angry: this century, she believes, education has been transmogrified and trivialised with the decolonisation of the curriculum; the jettisoning of the canon (for example, Chaucer cancelled from the University of Leicester English Literature syllabus; one wonders how their enrolments are faring); and likewise the loss of any sense of historical perspective and possibility (‘everywhere became the here and now’).

This was aggravated by the fact that ‘we were the first settlers of the digital village – the first to have moved out of reality’. Thanks to the later, lethal cocktail of the Covid lockdown and George Floyd’s killing, identity politics, which she had fondly hoped was but a passing mad fad, has become far more deeply entrenched, while gender, sexual and still more virulently racial ‘victimhood means power’.

Daouda laments that ‘the young people I see around me have no trust in the future. Victimhood is reassuring, as it gives a sense of community, a sense of purpose, and even a narrative to interpret the big mess that life can be’. It does this ‘through fostering divisive anxiety through blame and through guilt. There is a dreadful complementarity between those who deal with anxiety by blaming all the problems of the modern world on an egregious image of the colonial white man, and those who deal with anxiety by showcasing their guilt through farcical self-flagellation’.

Trigger warnings and easily taking offence have replaced the more robust environment that Daouda was (just) old enough to experience: ‘No one needed to show DNA credentials to be allowed to enjoy or to criticise European, Asian or African art’. Now, she claims, ‘The very idea of appreciating Europe, its art, and its history is suspicious. Anything western is deemed bad’.

Daouda believes this cultural shift ultimately brings no joy to its recipients, whatever their ethnicity or gender. She does not quite say so, but the whole curriculum is now founded on joyless condemnation, negativity and guilt. What a tragic replacement this is of the television series and publication that probably did more than anything else to shape this reviewer, Kenneth Clark’s celebratoryCivilisation: A Personal View (1969). Much of her book is devoted to an exposé of the historical simplifications and falsifications that are the foundation of the decolonised curriculum. The latter celebrates the supposedly idyllic condition of pre-colonial cultures and condemns the unmitigated evils of colonialism, with its attendant capitalistic greed, racism and slavery (in which the Anglo world was, of course, the chief offender).

Daouda traces the origins of the pre-colonial Eden to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the cult of the noble savage, which is plausible. But rather less forgivable is the short shrift that she gives to the Enlightenment in general. This is ironical given that the educational ideals that she most values have their intellectual origins in that complicated movement. Daouda could do worse than consult a counterpart to Clark, Peter Gay’s Age of Enlightenment (1966) from the Time-Life ‘Great Ages of Man’ [sic] series.

Rather more convincingly, she derides the phony floating signifier of the ‘Global South’, ‘simultaneously below the Western norm by… standardized indicators of development and above it according to the Western fantasies of a pure, untainted humanity in tune with itself and with nature’. On the question of slavery reparations, Daouda asserts: ‘European self-flagellation about imperialism, colonialism and slavery has devastating consequences in Africa. It tells Africans they have no agency, and that since everything is irremediably ruined by white people, they should whine until they get money’.

Daouda devotes two admirable chapters to the statue wars, the first addressing ‘Iconoclasm, old and new’, where she examines the distinctions between iconoclasm and vandalism. There was surely a mindless coalescence of the two in the toppling of the Edward Colston statue, which was a tragic sequel to George Floyd’s death (See in History Reclaimedhttps://historyreclaimed.co.uk/considerations-on-the-colston-statue/ )

Daouda astutely observes: ‘We could not accept… that Floyd may have been a criminal and also the victim of police violence, or that Colston may have been a benefactor and also a slave trader, and that none of these facts erases the existence of the other’. This reviewer has remarkably similar thoughts: a litmus test for wokery is whether someone describes Colston as a ‘slave trader’ tout court.

The Rhodes statue is on Daouda’s doorstep at Oriel, and is a gift for her eloquence. My sympathies are again close to hers, not least when she diagnoses the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ standpoint as ‘iconoclasm’ which is ‘nothing but the inverted image of a latent idolatry, projecting issues onto objects without any care for factual accuracy, or the architectural meaning of what is targeted’. Indeed, Basil Champneys’ Rhodes Building (1911) facing onto the Oxford High Street was expressly designed to accommodate Rhodes’ and other statues in the heyday of the New Sculpture movement. There are a couple of infelicities, nevertheless, in Daouda’s account. The contentious statue is not, as she claims, four feet tall but life-sized. Moreover, her suggestion that ‘Rhodes did not ask for any plaque or statue’ is somewhat naïve, as the only living people granted that privilege are monarchs.

In a later chapter, Daouda writes eloquently of the ‘tyranny of low expectations’, where cultural levels in education have been ‘lowered in the name of inclusion’. She bemoans ‘the current generation of educators’ who believe ‘that everything they get from their own senses should be doubted, but that other people’s subjectivity is absolutely sacred. This untenable position is at the core of modern education, where… knowledge [has] been replaced by emotions’. This reviewer would add that you can have the privilege of being emotional when you have learnt something, and normally not till then. For any half-decent art historian, Ernst Gombrich’s dictum should always hold good: ‘You see what you know’.

‘Where do we go from here?’ we may well ask, in a world that is worryingly ethno-nationalist, surely a backlash against the cultural excesses that Daouda dissects. Touchingly, she feels there is hope yet in the Britain she obviously loves. She regards it as ‘a diverse and inclusive country… remarkably good at giving people a chance to excel’, where the British have ‘fought narrow-mindedness by excellence’. She can wave no magic wand; in a recent interview, Daouda confessed that privately she prays for a more loving and accepting world, and also hopes for a revival of pub conversations, with face-to-face encounters, as opposed to being glued to tribalized social media. I’ll drink to that!

***

Mark Stocker is the former Curator, Historical International Art, at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington. He has taught at the universities of Canterbury and Otago. His publications include numerous contributions to the Burlington Magazine and When Britain Went Decimal: The Coinage of 1971 (2021).

However, given the size of the precontact population of the area that became the United States, one may well question the extent of indigenous stewardship or the actual size of the footprint of the Native American economy. The British economist Angus Maddison estimated the size of precontact America at 2 million souls—and precontact Canada at 250,000 (see Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, 2003).  Native Americans worked sophisticated hunting, gathering, and fishing economies that, in terms of productivity, equaled, or perhaps even surpassed, those found anywhere else in the world.

Farming in pre-contact North America, on the other hand, differed profoundly from farming in Africa and Eurasia. The labour involved in agriculture in the New World rested entirely on human muscle and sweat because there was an absence there of large draft animals, e.g., horses, oxen, water buffalo, donkeys, and camels.  The llama, the only meat and pack animal in the Americas apart from dogs, was confined exclusively to the high lands of South America.

In short, the New World’s agricultural revolution was only half a revolution in comparison with the transformation that had occurred in the Old World, where the domestication of plants and animals, including chickens, goats, and sheep, produced a powerful double helix of human culture. And of crucial importance was the “secondary products revolution” that followed the domestication of animals, allowing for the exploitation of renewables such as milk, eggs, wool, and manure.

This difference helps explain why European explorers encountered dense populations in the Middle East, India, and China, but not in North America (or Australia), at least above the Rio Grande. In contrast to Upper North America, Maddison estimated Mexico’s pre-contact population at 7.5 million.  Moreover, the size of all of Upper North America’s post-Columbian (1492) native populations, already relatively small and thinly dispersed across the continent, would be tragically reduced by the introduction of terrible new diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, to which neither conquerors nor conquered had immunity, and the subsequent stress caused by dislocation and the forced imposition of assimilationist policies.

By the time of the California Gold Rush in 1848-9, which opened the American West to white settlement, the Native population had plummeted to 228,000—a horrifying, slow-motion decline of 88.6 percent over three and a half centuries. This meant that the U.S. Native population in 1850 was roughly only 0.9 percent of the entire U.S. population of 23,580,000 at the time.

Given this extreme demographic asymmetry, which grew worse over time, it is perhaps not surprising that European America regarded the New World as terra nullius, that is, land which belonged to no one, or at least was land not effectively utilized, a concept expounded upon in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690). In 1893, the University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner repackaged the idea in his famous ‘Frontier Thesis’, arguing that the westward expansion of the United States into empty wilderness shaped American democracy, individualism, and character. The American wilderness, of course, was not empty—but nor was it full.

The myth of free land pulled the rug over a messier reality and has been rightly debunked by modern scholarship.  Unfortunately, the myth of free land has been replaced by a new, countervailing myth—the myth of maximum occupation. This latter myth airily holds that every acre of land once belonged to the continent’s original inhabitants. Since there are 1.9 billion acres in the lower 48 or contiguous American states alone, this would mean, if we use Maddison’s pre-contact figures, a ratio of one person for every 950 acres—a massive area, the equivalent of no less than 720 American football fields!

And yet this absurdity has become central to the counter “settler-colonial” narrative—the myth of stolen land, the evil twin of the myth of maximum occupation.  The contention that every acre of North America was stolen—that America is ill-gotten and Canada, too, for that matter—ignores demography, social development, a long history of diplomacy, purchase, and war, to say nothing of the good work of the Indian Claims Commission, established by the U.S. Congress

in 1946 to address treaty violations and other past wrongs. It nevertheless continues, obstinately, to find its way into classrooms as well as popular culture—as evidenced by Billie Eilish’s “stolen land” speech at this year’s Grammys and the growing calls for accountability.  History, however, should be based on data, not dogma; math, not myth.

Kevin Jon Fernlund is a Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri – St. Louis, a Fulbright Scholar, and a former Director of the Western History Association. He is also the author of A Big History of North America, from Montezuma to Monroe (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2022).

The UN resolution was opposed by three countries and 52 abstained; generally, on the grounds it would create an undesirable hierarchy of historical atrocities and, as Ambassador Dan Negrea, the US representative to the UN Economic and Social Council, noted, her country ‘does not recognise a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time they occurred’.

Others were quick to point out that the resolution was focused on the shameful trans-Atlantic trade and European slave traders without acknowledging the equally abhorrent African slave trades within Equatorial Africa, the Trans-Saharan caravan slave trade to the Maghreb, the East African trade from Swahili city-states via the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and the west of India, or the Nile Valley trade from Sudan to Egypt. It also did not take account of modern chattel slavery in states like Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Libya, and Sudan.

Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, Sudan (Woodcut, Wellcome collection, V0041263)

Without detailed written records, estimates for the quantum of the other African slave trades vary considerably. Overall, historians estimate that, between the years 650 and 1900, some 11 to 18 million peoples were enslaved and taken from Africa across the Red Sea, Indian Ocean, and Sahara Desert[1] – ‘… ancient and persistent and between them over very many centuries they perhaps delivered as many Africans into foreign servitude as did the massive Atlantic trade during its much shorter existence’.[2]

The massive number of enslaved Africans forced into ships for the trans-Atlantic voyages did not freely walk down to the coast. Excepting some early slavery raids, largely by the Portuguese, they were generally captured and enslaved by Africans and then forcibly taken to the coast to be sold. One estimate is that nearly 10%, or 1.209 million of the trans-Atlantic slaves, were taken from the Gold Coast or present-day Ghana (https://www.slavevoyages.org/). Others suggest that more than half a million people from Northern Ghana were sold into slavery in the period 1732 to 1897 while thousands of others were killed in the slave raids[3], with the bulk of slaves sold on the Gold Coast coming from the Salaga slave market[4] located in northern Ghana, 600 km from the Cape Coast Castle. In considering historical wrongs, it would also be right to examine this part of the trade.

Site of the former Salaga Slave Market, northern Ghana

President John Dramani Mahama is a distinguished member of his local society. He was born in Bole, a northern town in what is now the Savannah Region but was once the western capital of a divisional chieftainship of the Gonja kingdom. His father, the first MP for the West Gonja, is said to have held (was ‘enskinned’) the Zenpe chieftainship (Zenpewura, ‘skin’ or stool of Bole), and his grandfather, the Gbenfu chieftainship. Mahama is therefore, according to Alhaji Abass Dangba, the leader of the Kuntunure Clan of Damango[5], Royal of Bole, and can ascend to the paramount chieftainship of Bole where succession is rotated among four groups. The Bole chieftainship is one of seven providing, again by rotation, the ultimate ceremonial Gonja chieftain (Yagbongwura or King).[6] Being Royal of Bole (Ngbanya), the President is considered to be a descendent of Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa (King of Gonja 1675-97).

The current King and Overlord of the Gonja Kingdom, Yagbonwura Bii-Kunuto Jewu Soale I

The Gonja kingdom is said to have been established by Mandingo Muslim cavalry, invading from Mali in the 17th century, as part of the interminable tribal warfare from the 11th to 18th centuries in the northern part of Ghana where ‘domestic slavery was an immemorial institution’[7] with constant warfare being the engine of enslavement. Domestic, or indigenous, slavery provided labour for agriculture, bureaucracy, mining, trade and industry as well as for household services, distinguishing those from slaves exported beyond West Africa.

Map of the Gonja Kingdom

Sumaila Ndewura Jakpa established by conquest in the late 17th century a loosely knit federation of states that extended over areas of the northern part of present-day Ghana and parts of Togo and Benin. Pre-colonial Gonja society was heavily stratified, relying on a slave class for labour, with an economy largely dependent on kola nuts, gold and slave trading.

‘When the external slave trade was introduced in Ghana from the 17th Century onwards, domestic slavery and trade were well established institutions. The external trade did not decrease or destroy the domestic trade; the two systems existed side by side sustaining each other’.[8]

The early 17th century slave trading included the Portuguese buying slaves from other parts of West Africa, particularly from Benin, and then selling them in Ghana for gold, a practice also followed by the Dutch and the Danes.[9] In the northern region there were four main slave markets: Salaga, Yendi, Bole and Wa, with Salaga being the most famous and most important market in Ghana for both the trans-Atlantic and trans-Sahara trades.[10] According to the German researcher Heinrich Klose in 1899, in Salaga ‘in former times, it was estimated by older travellers, there was a turnover of 15,000 slaves annually’.[11]

The Asante empire emerged in 1696 with King (Asantehene) Osei Tutu taking the crown in his capital Kumasi. After the Asante invasion and conquest of Gonja in 1732 and Dagomba in 1744, those states were required to pay annual tribute to their overlords which they did by raiding lesser clans like the Kasena, Sisala, Kusasi, Builsa and Frafra to make the tribute of some 1000 - 1500 slaves per division or chieftainship per year.[12] The slaves were moved along four main slaving routes from the northern territories to Kumasi. These included the route from Wa and Bole to the Asante capital and then to the coast.

The Asante hegemony was disrupted by the British, firstly with the 1806 Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Act outlawing slave trading with foreigners, which ended near two-thirds of the West African export trade, and secondly, in armed conflicts. These conflicts included three wars over the period 1806-14 until an 1821 treaty; then four wars over the years 1823-96, after which Asante became a British Protectorate in 1897. There followed a rebellion in 1900.

From 1631, the English, along with other European nations, had established coastal trading posts or forts along a thin 300-mile coastal strip which initially stretched between the Volta and Pra rivers on land rented from local chiefs. After the establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672, these were also used as slaving hubs. By 1700, England had 13 forts of various sizes largely located near the Cape Coast Castle,[13] which, after 1752, was run by the African Company of Merchants. It was their President between the years 1830-47, Capt. George Maclean, who secured the 1821 treaty with the Asante.

Whilst Maclean was highly valued in the Gold Coast, the British Government came under pressure from abolitionists who considered he was not doing enough to end slavery after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.[14] Consequently, in 1843 the Government took back control of the colony whose sovereignty only extended to the forts’ walls and no further, as was still the case in 1874.[15] Colonial ‘Ghana’ did not come into being until 1902.[16]

The 1874 Treaty of Fommanah (Fomena), ending the Third Anglo-Asante War[17], required the Asante to end slave tributes and human sacrifices and accept free trade. The unforeseen consequences from the collapse of the Asante regime[18] were secession attempts by members of the Asante federation, independence declarations from conquered states like Gonja, Asante moves to regain territory, and the emergence of new warlords in the north taken to slave raiding. All this led to constant and endemic warfare and further enslavement. This period witnessed a tremendous surge in the ‘domestic’ use of slave labour[19] as the economy transitioned from exporting slaves to exporting other commodities.[20]

The British, long inclined to indirect rule and a colonial policy of reconciliation, had relied on chieftainships where they existed, and they strengthened them in areas where they were non-existent or weakened by civil wars or slave raiding. This was formalised in the 1883 Native Jurisdiction Ordinance. Whilst in 1866 the Secretary of State for the Colonies had reminded the Governor at Lagos that slavery was not permitted within the colony and that neighbouring chiefs should be warned that any slaves entering the territory would be freed,[21] the colonial government pragmatically sought to balance the ‘native custom’ of ‘domestic slavery’ against the abolitionists’ pressure.

The end of the Third Anglo-Ashanti War in 1874 led to a great British public debate on slavery in the Gold Coast with the Under-Secretary of State noting in Parliament:

 ‘… unhappily, domestic slavery was an institution on the Gold Coast…  If we were to insist on the total and immediate abolition of slavery on the Gold Coast, the Government must ask … for something like a million either to compensate the owners of the slaves or to maintain troops for carrying on another war. Therefore, the Government proposed to seek the gradual…abolition of domestic slavery’.[22]

Governor Strachan’s careful announcement later that year that protection would be available to any slave in the Colony who fled or complained but that ‘slaves will be entirely free to stay or leave their masters’ was seen by some in the press as sensible in the circumstances.[23]

Ongoing concern was stoked by British Commissioner Reginald Firminger, resident in Salaga in 1887-89, who critically reported that ‘From the evidence given by the King and Chiefs which I verified by numerous independent inquiries, it appears that about 20,000 slaves are disposed of in one way or another annually’.[24] The pressure to suppress slavery continued and, having been long reluctant to extend control with greater expense and no material gain,[25] the British began to expand control outside the Colony to the Asante and the Northern Territories, partly to suppress slave raiding, partly to secure free trade to improve the Colony’s viability, and partly to keep out the French and Germans.

The Governor sent the civil servant George Ferguson to secure friendship treaties in the Northern Territories in the period 1890-95 with various rulers including the chiefs of Bole, Daboya, Yendi, Bimbilla, Wa and Gambaga[26] but ‘he took it upon himself to persuade local communities in the Northern Territories that treaties of friendship with the British offered protection against slave-raiding, and that they should not engage in the slave trade themselves.’[27] By 1902, the Governor reported that ‘In the Northern Territories … slave raiding has been completely stamped out, but slave dealing is prevalent’[28] and the practice did not die out until after the 1928 Abolition of Slavery ordinance.

The endemic conflict between tribes, or ‘ethnic majority groups’, over territory and chieftains, continued in the post-colonial history of the Gonja people, the smallest of the majority ethnic groups. They endured numerous conflicts, colloquially referred to as the Bull Cow War (1940), Pito Bar War (1981), Nawuri-Gonja War (1991-92), Guinea Fowl War (1994-95) and Nanumba Dagomba Gonja v Konkombo War (1995-97).[29]

This long and violent history of indigenous slavery is not unknown in West Africa. In 1994 the then-Ghanian President, Jerry John Rawlings, apologised for Africa’s role in slavery[30] noting

‘I am not enthusiastic about (financial) reparations. Those taken during the transatlantic slave trade must decide. If they return, we should offer them land and dual citizenship as restorative and social justice’.[31]

In 2009, the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria demanded that traditional Nigerian rulers apologize for their ancestors' roles in the trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan slave trades. They argued that African chiefs collaborated with European and Arab traders by raiding communities and selling people: thus Africans must accept responsibility rather than only blaming Europeans.[32] In response to President Mahama’s role in leading the recent UN resolution, the Ghana Minority Leader, Alexander Afenyo-Markin, remarked;

‘When a vessel docks at Cape Coast and you travel to Bono, Ashanti or Assin areas to capture your strongest among your own people, then after a century, demand compensation – who compensates whom? We maltreated our own and invited the white man to do the same. The story must be told in proper context’.[33]

In Ghana, early post-independence historians tended to characterise West African slavery as near-benevolent in contrast to the harsh Americas’ experience. They also overlooked enslavement through warfare and raiding. They focused on the struggle for freedom rather than the opposition to abolition. They pointed to the trans-Atlantic trade rather than the trans-Saharan or Indian Ocean trades. Obviously the ‘militarisation of the West-African peoples expanded the slave trade, as the demand for European firearms incentivized the capture of slaves, while the weapons made enslaving easier’,[34] and European slave demand created profitable opportunities for those who could control the supply.

After 1806 British imperialism largely aimed at abolishing the African slave trade, securing free trade, and forestalling the Germans and French in Africa in general. It now stands condemned by a Ghanaian leadership whose own ancestors fought against the prevention of slavery. President Mahama blames the colonialists and refuses to join the British and other Europeans in the league of infamy he has constructed. The truth is clear, however: Mahama’s royal ancestors were slaveholders and slave traders long before, and also long after, Europeans came to the coasts to collect and transport slaves.

Yet for readers of History Reclaimed, the most striking, and most alarming is the transformation of history itself in schools. It will come as no surprise that the subject has been repurposed in recent years under the banner of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘social justice’. History is no longer taught as an attempt to understand the past on its own terms, but as a vehicle for present-day moral instruction, which results not in a broadening of perspective, but a narrowing of it.

Across the Anglosphere, a common pattern is emerging across our nations. History has been whacked over the head with the decolonisation stick and dragged into the world of presentism, identity politics, Critical Race Theory, post-colonialism, social justice, diversity, and equity and inclusion. This is the history that children are now being taught.

When it comes to the British Empire and its legacy, one would be hard-pressed to find classroom materials which dare to even suggest that despite its many flaws, perhaps colonialism was not all bad. As Nigel Biggar has argued forcefully in Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, the empire was a morally mixed phenomenon, responsible for both exploitation and emancipation.

The teaching of the slave trade is a case in point. Among progressive educators, there is a marked reluctance to acknowledge that it was the British Empire and its much maligned ‘white saviours’ like William Wilberforce, that ultimately abolished this appalling practice. This is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the free classroom resource produced by Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum which leaves children with the distinct impression that Britain not only invented slavery, but that its eventual abolition came not from moral conviction or political courage, but from national shame.

We also find that since the death of George Floyd and rise of Black Lives Matter, schools have been falling over themselves to ‘diversify’ and ‘decolonise’ their history curricula. By 2021, 83 per cent had already ‘diversified’ their Key Stage 3 history programs, typically by adding Black and Asian British history, migration, women’s history, and LGBTQ+ themes. The top three motivations cited by teachers were: (1) a sense of social justice; (2) better representation in history; and (3) a direct response to the death of George Floyd.

At present, the loudest and most persistent voices calling for a de-Europeanised curriculum are leading us into the realms of fantasy and nonsense. We are witnessing in schools wholesale rewriting of the past in which white children are being denied the truth of their own story, while also being denied a unique cultural or ancestral claim to Britain. They are recast as simply another migrant group among many.

This message is now being introduced at the earliest stages of education. In Brilliant Black British History, a book by Nigerian-born author Atinuke, that has won many awards including Children's Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2024, primary school children are told: ‘The first migrants to Britain had black skin. Yes, that’s right! – the very first Britons were Black!’ The book goes on to assert that: ‘Britain was a Black country for more than 7,000 years before the white people came – and during that time the most famous British monument was built: Stonehenge. Britain has been a mostly white country for a lot less time than it was a Black country – only about 4,000 years.’ And the final blow for any white child reading: ‘Every single British person comes from a migrant.’

Ultimately, the message being conveyed to white children is that they don’t belong. But the message to black children is that they don’t belong either. Both messages are false, and both are cruel. From Anglo-Saxon settlements to the Windrush generation, everything is filtered through the question: ‘Who gets to belong?’ The answer, it seems, is nobody. Is anyone really benefitting from their British history lessons? Not as they currently stand.

Nor is this problem confined to Britain. In Australia, no one is benefitting from Australian history lessons either. The country’s deeply progressive education establishment long ago abandoned the idea that history should illuminate young minds. Among academics, bureaucrats, and policymakers, there is now near-unanimous agreement: the story of modern Australia, though relatively short, is primarily a story of violence and genocide. They present the nation’s past not as a complex history, but as a crime scene, and in this version, there’s no mystery about the culprits. They lay the blame for the problems plaguing remote Aboriginal communities fairly and squarely on the arrival of the British in 1788.

A key feature of an Australian child’s education is that he or she must apologise for the sin of colonisation; this is called ‘reconciliation’, and it starts in kindergarten. On government orders, teachers are expected to recruit their young charges into a battalion of nappy-wearing ‘active citizens’ embarking on what is promised to be a lifelong ‘journey of reconciliation’. They are instructed to decolonise early childhood education by ‘reconsidering education spaces, acknowledging colonisation and its continued impacts, while seeking to disrupt and reconceptualise colonial understandings.’ This is extraordinary language to use in a kindergarten setting, but it reflects a teacher training system in Australia which is steeped in social justice ideology and the full apparatus of postmodern theory.

In primary and secondary schools, guilt runs through the National Curriculum like cracks in a facade, as Australian history is recast as a single, unbroken narrative of ‘frontier warfare, massacres, removal from land, and relocation to protectorates, reserves and missions.’ It is unrelenting and consistently negative. Everything is taught except the concept of nation-building.

The question at this juncture is a simple but profound one: what does the decolonisation narrative do to young minds? Increasingly, Western children are taught to see being British, American, or Australian as something shameful rather than complex, heroic, or worthy of admiration. They are being led to believe that their countries are morally compromised, and this in turn breeds anger and resentment. Polling data suggests that nearly half of Generation Z in Britain now regard their country as racist and backward, while surveys in multiple Western nations reveal a declining willingness among young people to defend their country in times of crisis. The implications are profound, not just for the individual and for society.

The curriculum that was once about understanding the past has become about dismantling it, and those who have absorbed the decolonisation story are taking their new understanding and moral code to the streets. Filled with righteous indignation, they believe that tossing a statue of a Bristol merchant, Edward Colston, who died 300 years ago, into a river will put an end to ‘systemic racism’, or that it is perfectly reasonable to saw through the ankles of a bronze likeness of Captain Cook as punishment for being a ‘racist coloniser.’

None of this is happening by accident. Among the architects of this ideological shift are activist historians, post-colonial theorists, and critical race educators whose goal is, and always has been, to sever loyalty to country. This is because they are postmodernists who believe that national myths are lies, that patriotism is a mask for oppression, and that emotional attachment to country reinforces injustice.

Children are to be denied the possibility of patriotism, as they are taught to view positive narratives not as a shared civic inheritance, but as tools of exclusion and control. Belonging to a nation gives people a framework of identity: a common history, culture, and set of values that root them in time and place. When these things are strong, they provide anchors in a fast-changing and uncertain world. Strip them away, and children are left unmoored, adrift in ideology, and vulnerable to whatever replaces it.

Robert Tombs points to the irony that the University of Cambridge, not now notable for its support for the British monarchy, is nevertheless content to send its collection of 116 Benin Bronzes into the safekeeping of the ruler of Benin, its Oba – and this despite the protests of organisations formed by descendants of slaves, living in the United States, who are deeply opposed to the return of these artefacts to the royal house that enslaved and traded their ancestors.

But this ‘restitution’ is as nothing to the trillions of dollars now demanded by the African Union and Caribbean nations who together piloted a motion through the General Assembly of the United Nations last month, March 2026, calling on the UN’s judicial arm, the International Court of Justice, to open a case for reparations from those nations in western Europe historically associated with the Atlantic slave trade. We examine the mendacious and specious aspects of this ‘lawfare’ and its highly partial interpretations of history, and draw attention to the degradation of international law that will follow from this sort of malpractice.

Meanwhile, the concept of reparations is spreading geographically and coming much closer to the present day, and it is usually Britain in the dock. In a deeply researched essay on the  so-called Al-Bassa Massacre of 1938 in mandate Palestine, then under British trusteeship, Alistair Parker reminds us that a claim for reparations for British control of that territory between 1918 and 1948 is now alive and kicking: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/al-bassa-massacre-1938/  As Alistair shows, however, the history is complex and does not support the claims made. What happened at Al-Bassa is being used to justify reparations, but the events there are unclear and the deaths were probably not the responsibility of British forces.

The problems of Palestine remind us of all the costs of empire. It has become an apparently accepted public fact that Britain profited hugely from its empire. All sorts of wild claims have been made about the profits of empire underpinning the Industrial Revolution, and the living standards of the British going up in step with imperial exploitation. Yet as historians have known for some decades, and as our article argues, the empire was more likely a ‘millstone round our necks’ in Disraeli’s phrase from 1852:https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/did-the-empire-pay/ The costs of imperial defence and of the garrisoning and governing of imperial possessions probably balanced the profits accrued to the nation in general. The Victorians could see this and therefore favoured building ‘an empire of free trade’ rather than an empire of annexation – a trading bloc where goods could be exchanged freely, to Britain’s advantage, rather than a formal political union.

Defending the empire and projecting British power depended on the Royal Navy, of course. The ecent revelations that this once great force is in a parlous state with most of its few vessels unfit for service (even if the British government wanted to assist the United States in the Middle East, which it doesn’t) has prompted Robert Tombs to remind us of our debts to ‘the senior service’ in home waters, defending Britain from European enemies, and overseas in the defence of the empire and the projection of British power. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/royal-navy-decline/  As Robert argues, this is not just a failure of policy and of finance but of our historical awareness. The British have forgotten what they owe to a large, efficient and well-led navy, and how important such a service still is today. It’s a lesson hard-learned at present, in particular, and our naval weakness is evidence of our national decline.

Many contemporary historians, with axes to grind, do not forget, however. Or perhaps more accurately, they use the past as a weapon in the present. One of these is surely Brooke Newman in her new book The Crown’s Silence. The Hidden History of Slavery and the British Monarchy reviewed here by Alistair Parker: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/british-monarchy-slavery-book-review/  A book combining slavery and royalty cannot fail, even if much of this story is already known. Fifteen reigns, and a sometimes circuitous succession, separate Charles III from his namesake Charles II who established the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves, in 1660 on the Restoration. At that distance, it isn’t clear why or how the contemporary monarchy can be held responsible for the sins of earlier kings and queens, just as we might object to wider claims that the British today are somehow responsible for practices – the slave trade and imperial slavery itself - that ended two hundred years ago. Judge for yourself. As Alistair concludes:

‘The Crown and its governments sometimes profited from these activities, but in the British case they more often did not, operating within a system that, as Adam Smith famously concluded, “derives nothing but loss from the dominion”. Whether there was any overall economic gain remains highly contested, and there must also be limits to how far present circumstances can realistically be attributed to decisions taken generations or centuries earlier.’

Professor Richard Dale, author of the standard work on the history of the South Sea Company and its infamous financial crash in 1720, known as the South Sea Bubble, has contributed an enlightening and helpful essay on the historical case against ‘Project Spire’, the plan set out by the Church of England to pay £100 million in reparations for its role in slavery and the slave trade, and to assist in raising a further £900 million for black causes as well. We have covered this extensively in History Reclaimed, notably in a long critique of the historical case made in support of Project Spire which we published last summer:

Richard helpfully brings together all the historical evidence in one very clear and concise essay, showing that the Church’s extensive investments in South Sea Annuities had nothing to do with slavery, and that its very small investment in South Sea Securities – shares in the trading company which was at that time involved in the slave trade – occurred during the 1720s in a period of financial turmoil and had been liquidated by the end of that decade.

We draw to your attention the problem of the censorship of historical sources, in this case by the Library of the University of Sydney, which, having digitised material on the history of the early exploration of Australia, has now ‘redacted’ much of it.

Our essay explains why it has done this, and also shows how difficult it may become, under ‘protocols’ such as those put out by the library, to investigate anything related to native/indigenous/Aboriginal history. Our concern is that this kind of attitude will spread and influence the way other libraries, especially in western universities, treat legitimate research.

Finally, some good news. Last year Alistair Parker published on our website another of his closely researched essays, this time on the early life of Elihu Yale, whose benefaction to a college in New Haven, Connecticut, ensured the perpetuation of his name in Yale University. Alastair took issue with the presentation of the East India Company at the end of the seventeenth century when Yale was an employee in what became Madras in a new book Yale and Slavery, by the historian David Blight: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/the-shame-of-yale-university/ Professor Blight presents an unnecessarily critical (and anachronistic) account of the East India Company, which at that stage in the 1690s, was a small trading venture struggling for its survival. We sent the essay to the author and to the President of Yale but received no reply.

We’re delighted to note, however, that the Center for British Art at Yale University is currently running an exhibition on Painters, Ports, and Profits. Artists and the East India Company 1750-1850. https://britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions-programs/painters-ports-and-profits-artists-and-east-india-company-1750-1850. It emphasises the personal and stylistic interplay between Indian, Chinese and British artists in the service of the Company. It also refrains from judging the past and strives to attain the right balance. As the exhibition’s curators, Laurel Peterson and Holly Shaffer, write, ‘There is a deep and sometimes discomforting tension between the ventures of a powerful global corporation and the works of great beauty created by artists who worked under its auspices. This exhibition shows that we keep company with both legacies’. Exactly.

We thank our subscribers for their continuing interest and support. If you come across an issue or problem in the presentation of British and western history, or visit a local museum or gallery which has distorted the past, please contact us and please consider writing an essay for publication.

History Reclaimed depends upon its readers and friends who receive this newsletter. There are more than 163,000 of you as at the last count in November 2025. Please consider a donation to help us keep going. Our purpose is to draw attention to the distortion of history, usually for ulterior ideological ends. Help us to continue doing that.

The Editors Lawrence Goldman Robert Tombs Zewditu Gebreyohanes Alex Gray

Old South Sea House, Threadneedle Street, London. (The building was burnt down in a fire in 1826)

It is over three years since the Church Commissioners published their controversial report on the Church’s links to the slave trade.  Since then critics have challenged the Commissioners’ historical research while both the Church Commissioners and their historical advisers have published their separate responses to such criticism.  However, in the light of recent academic research it is now clear beyond doubt that the Commissioners’ historical analysis is deeply flawed and their conclusions mistaken.  The Commissioners therefore have a moral responsibility to withdraw their report and correct the record before a false historical narrative, to which they have lent their full authority, becomes further embedded in Google, AI and in schools and colleges throughout the world.

In February 2021 the accountants, Grant Thornton, were instructed by the Church Commissioners to review the ledgers of Queen Anne’s Bounty to “determine the extent to which the origins of the Endowment Fund may have been derived from the profits of the slave trade.”

Grant Thornton’s verdict was devastating: “We found that Queen Anne’s Bounty had purchased investments in an entity called the South Sea Company which is known to have transported 34,000 enslaved persons across the Atlantic.  The South Sea Company ceased trading in enslaved people in 1739 at which point the Bounty had invested £443 million (in today’s terms).”

These findings were incorporated into the Church Commissioners’ report on the Church’s links to slavery, publicised in the press and cited as the basis for Project Spire, a proposed £100 million impact investment fund, that was announced in January 2023.

The central argument of the Church Commissioners and their historical advisers is that Queen Anne’s Bounty profited hugely from their slavery-linked investments, derived principally from interest on its holdings of South Sea Annuities.  Church leaders were understandably shocked by the Commissioners’ report.  The then Archbishop of Canterbury publicly apologised for the fact that the Church had profited from slavery, and the Bishop of Manchester, who was also deputy chair of the Commissioners, wrote an open letter to Save the Parish in support of Project Spire.  He said:

“Having come to the full understanding of the extent of the involvement of Queen Anne’s Bounty in investing in the slave trade through research and forensic analysis…….. we cannot hold on to money gained so wrongly, any more than a burglar can hang on to profits from their activity.”

Here, then, is the historical narrative propagated by Church leaders and invoked as justification for Project Spire.  However, this narrative is demonstrably false.  The Church Commissioners’ historical advisers have misled the Commissioners, the Commissioners have misled Church leaders and Church leaders have misled the public at large.  Because there is incontrovertible evidence that Queen Anne’s Bounty’s investments earned not one penny from the slave trade.

The Commissioners’ Report makes three related mistakes that distort its historical account.  First, although the Report refers to the South Sea Company stock splits in 1723 and 1733 that separated the Company’s trading operations from the newly created South Sea Annuities, it fails to examine the legislative framework governing the latter.  In 1723 Parliament established a new annuity company, the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities which, according to the statute’s preamble, legally insulated investors from “future frauds, abuses, errors and mismanagement” of the South Sea Company.  The Annuity certificates stated that the contracting party and issuer was the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities and not the South Sea Company.  The Annuitants were entitled to receive their pro-rata share of interest from the government at a specified rate in perpetuity and were ring-fenced from the risky and generally loss-making operations of the South Sea trading Company.  The Company’s capital was split again in 1733 when, according to its chief clerk, Adam Anderson, “the proprietors of the trading stock becoming uneasy on account of their late losses by the Asiento and Greenland [whaling] trades” petitioned Parliament to divide the Company’s capital 25/75 in favour of South Sea Annuities.  Thereafter there was a nominal distinction between Old and New South Sea Annuities.

The failure of the Commissioners to address the legal basis of the South Sea Annuities contributed to a second serious error.  The authors mistakenly categorise South Sea Annuities as investments in the South Sea Company and the interest thereon as earnings related to the slave trade.  This, despite the fact that the Annuities, as the report acknowledges, were invested exclusively in government debt and therefore equivalent to government bonds.  Furthermore, Francois Velde, an authority on 18th century English finance, states in a recent paper that after the stock split of 1723 the Annuities represented the only form of liquid government debt available and that “if the Bounty wished to invest in government funds, there was no choice.”  It is preposterous that the Bounty managers should be castigated for investing in slavery related assets when they were opting for a low risk investment strategy that explicitly avoided exposure to the South Sea Company’s trading activities.  Even more extravagant is the Report’s assertion that “anyone [including Annuitants] investing in the Company before 1740 was consciously investing in [slavery] voyages.”  Of course, the precise opposite was the case:  Annuitants could be sure that they were not investing in such voyages.

This consideration leads to the third major error – which is also the most outlandish.  Although the South Sea Annuities were government bonds in all but name the Commissioners’ advisers claim to have found a direct linkage between these assets and the South Sea Company.  Their wording is significant:  Grant Thornton’s website refers to its research into “Annuities issued by the South Sea Company” and the Report itself refers variously to the South Sea Annuities as “South Sea Company investments”, “investments in the South Sea Company”, “South Sea Company securities” and, in the glossary, as “Annuities in the South Sea Company”.  Here, the Commissioners’ advisers have confused two different companies, each with the words “South Sea” in their name: the South Sea Company and the separately incorporated annuity company, the Joint Stock of South Sea Annuities.  Furthermore throughout the Report the authors incorrectly refer to South Sea Annuities as South Sea Company Annuities, a descriptor unknown in contemporary records, whether this be the ledgers of the Bank of England, the Bounty’s ledgers, Chancery proceedings or the Annuity certificates themselves.  Once more, the report is guilty of an elementary gaffe by conflating two legally separate entities.

The South Sea Bubble by Edward Matthew Ward (1847) (Tate Britain)

From the above it is clear that South Sea Annuities had no connection whatsoever with the South Sea Company’s trading activities.  As the parliamentarian and banker, John Brocklehurst, explained to the House of Commons in 1834, “the South Sea Annuities had nothing to do with the South Sea Company beyond receiving at their hands the dividends as they became due from the government.”  The annuities were payable at an office called South Sea House in much the same way that other publicly held government debt was payable at the Bank of England.

The Bounty did, for a time, have a much more limited investment in South Sea Company stock.  This was acquired in April 1720 when the South Sea Bubble was beginning to inflate, England was at war with Spain, and, with its trade suspended, the South Sea Company had become “of necessity a naked finance corporation”.  Quantitatively, this one- off investment in stock was a small fraction of the Bounty’s Annuity investments.  In the period 1708-1793 dividends from the South Sea Company represented a mere 0.1% of the Bounty’s total income against nearly 30% for Annuities, First Fruits and Tenths accounting for most of the balance.  Nevertheless, though limited in both amount and duration - the stock was largely disposed of in 1728 - the investment became a direct exposure to the slave trade when this was resumed in 1722 - 28.

However, the dividends the Bounty received from its holding of stock were not derived from profits from the slave trade because the trade was loss-making.  A committee, appointed by the South Sea Company’s shareholders to examine the Company’s accounts, shows that in the period 1720 to 1732 (which covers the time when the Bounty held stock) the loss on the trade account was over £385,000.  The books of the Company have not survived but on the basis of these summary accounts Velde finds that the Company was forced to issue bonds to cover its losses and then, when in 1732 the bond debt had reached £2 million, to slash its dividend to a level below the interest it received from the government.  Stung by its losses the South Sea Company declined in 1748 to take up Spain’s offer to renew the Asiento Contract on unchanged terms.

Velde also shows that when the Bounty invested in South Sea Company shares in 1720 it did so by exchanging its  existing  holdings of government debt, (eg. lottery loans) for stock.  This was done on terms that proved to be highly unfavourable, prompting the Bounty’s Treasurer to set out the losses the fund had incurred through this transaction.  According to Velde “[the Bounty’s] involvement in the South Sea Company was financially costly and within a few years it disposed of its equity and bond interests in the company.”

In summary, the Bounty’s investments, whether in stock or annuities, earned no money from the slave trade.  Additionally, the Commissioners’ advisers dropped a clanger when they assumed that it was the South Sea Company that issued South Sea Annuities.  In fact the Company was neither issuer, vendor, counterparty or guarantor of the Annuities which were issued by a legally separate company with its own investor base and investment objectives.  The whole point of the stock splits of 1723 and 1733 was to create a new class of asset that had nothing whatsoever to do with the South Sea Company’s commercial activities.  In propagating a false historical narrative around the Bounty’s alleged earnings from and links to the South Sea Company and the slave trade, the Church Commissioners’ and their historical advisers have deluded themselves and misled everyone else.

South Sea Annuities share certificate, issued 13 November 1784 (British Museum)

It was not long before criticism of the Commissioners’ historical research appeared in print and on line.  Criticism was also raised privately in April 2024  with the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in the hope of finding a diplomatic route out of a situation that could be damaging to the Church.  However, after some preliminary exchanges the Archbishop decided to delegate the matter to Gareth Mostyn, Chief Executive of the Church Commissioners, who refused to engage with his critics.  In June 2024 Mr Mostyn published a Comment piece in the Church Times in which he reiterated that the Bounty “invested significant sums in, and derived a material amount of its income from, the South Sea Company” (in fact dividends from the Company represented 0.1% of the Bounty’s total income in the 1700s.)  He also stated that the degree of profitability was no longer the issue, a departure from the Commissioners’ original remit to Grant Thornton, and that what mattered was unspecified “historical connections”, “financial involvements”, and “tangible links” to enslavement.

But not everyone was singing from same hymn sheet.  On April 14th 2025, the Archbishop of York gave a keynote address to a UN sponsored forum on historical injustices in which he focussed on the Commissioners’ research into the Church’s links to slavery: “how we invested in the South Sea Company and the very significant amounts of money we made from this.”  Here again there was an assertion that the Church had made large profits from the slave trade.

The Commissioners’ historical advisers, Professor Richard Drayton and Dr Helen Paul, released their own defence of the Commissioners’ research in June 2025.  However, once again there were serious errors, some of which are identified below:

• D and P renewed the claim that the South Sea Company was a counterparty to and issuer of South Sea Annuities.  Apparently, the South Sea Company “could issue a financial instrument or contract called an annuity to investors.  The investors would be entitled to an annual payment (ie. an annuity payment) from the South Sea Company”.  This rash assertion is contradicted by the wording of the Annuity certificates (no mention of the South Sea Company) and the stated objective of the 1723 and the 1733 stock splits which was to relieve Annuitants of any risk exposure (including counterparty risk) to the South Sea Company.  The D and P assertion does not qualify as evidence based research, the authors having failed to identify a single Annuity certificate on which the South Sea Company is named as counterparty.

• D and P proclaim “the myth of the unprofitability of the Asiento”.  Their assertion that the South Sea Company made profits from this gruesome slaving contract relies on an (outlier) article by Price and Whatley who base their findings on the capital asset pricing model.  The econometric formula makes heroic assumptions about investors (all are  rational, have the same access to information, have the same expectations of future returns on all assets, can borrow without limit at the riskless rate of interest etc, etc) which limit the technique’s relevance even to today’s markets, let alone the unregulated mayhem of Exchange Alley in the early 1700s.  In any event there is no need to rely on controversial mathematical formulae when there exists a contemporary shareholders’ report on the South Sea Company’s accounts published in 1733. As already stated this shows large losses on the Company’s trade account.  Price and Whatley do not cite, mention or reference this crucial document or indeed other primary sources such as Adam Anderson’s classic contemporary account.  Evidence based research surely requires that the best evidence be used, a principle which D and P have failed to follow.

• D and P suggest that “at the level of the firm” there was “reciprocity” between the South Sea Stock and the South Sea Annuities, the one (stock) risky and the other (annuities) secure, as if we were dealing with a single corporate entity diversifying its income stream.  In reality, as anyone who has read the relevant legislation should know, there were two companies with separate balance sheets, legally separated assets and liabilities, separate revenue streams and separate proprietors.  There was no “reciprocity”.

• D and P claimed that money is “fungible” and that the sums to be paid out to annuity holders “was not neatly separated from other moneys held by the Company.” The South Sea Company was therefore free to divert such funds to its own use and then use profits from the slave trade [!] to pay the Annuitants.  The authors have evidently not understood the relevant legislation which makes clear that interest received from the government by the South Sea Company on behalf of Annuitants was to be held separately “in trust and for the benefit of the annuitants” before passing to the Annuitant beneficiaries.

• The government paid an annual fee of £14,500 to the South Sea Company for acting as registrar and paying agent for government debt.  This sum, equivalent to less than 0.1% of assets administered, was intended to cover the enormous costs of maintaining an army of clerks:  we do not know how many but no doubt considerably more than the Bank of England which, in 1720, with a much smaller balance sheet than the South Sea Company, employed around 100 clerks on a minimum salary of £50 per annum.  Allowing for the higher salaries of senior clerks and supervisors, the administration fee does not appear exorbitant.  However, D and P state that the annual fee provided “a steady income stream” for the South Sea Company which could be used for any purpose they chose, as if it were a net profit rather than payment for (costly) book-keeping services.

• There are several lapses of scholarship in the D ánd P response, notably a reference to the historian Victoria Sorsby.  She is cited as authority for D and P’s insistence that a payment of £100,000 to the South Sea Company in 1750 was not made as compensation for the Company’s losses on the slave trade.  However, the abstract of Sorsby’s excellent thesis states unequivocally that “in 1750 the Asiento Contract was terminated and the South Sea Company paid £100,000 to cover their losses on the trade.”  It is quite a feat to seek to rebut ones critics by citing a source that proves their point.

• D and P cast around for any conceivable connections between the Annuities and the South Sea Company’s slave trade.  Such speculation includes hypothetical cross-subsidisation involving the South Sea Company’s administration fee and the suggestion that some clerks at South Sea House may have been tasked with book-keeping for the Company’s trading activities as well as the legally separate Annuity function.  However, no evidence is offered and all is surmise.  Perhaps there was even occasional sharing of quill pens?

The responses of the Commissioners and their historical advisers to criticisms of their research simply serve to raise fresh questions about their version of history.  Nevertheless, though the Commissioners have grossly exaggerated its connection with the slave trade the 18th century Church, in common with so many others, looked on passively while this abominable traffic in humans was in full swing.  Furthermore, the Bounty managers did make one foray into the stock market during the South Sea Bubble, which, for a limited time, exposed them directly to the slave trade.  Finally, the Bounty received significant tainted funds from benefactions as the Commissioners have demonstrated – though at 4-5% of the Bounty’s total income such slavery related donations were surely no greater than the tainted funds received by other charitable institutions in the 18th century.  In short, the Church, with all its faults, was a reflection of society at the time rather than a malign actor profiteering from the slave trade.

The question that arises is why the Commissioners have shown such willingness, even eagerness, to accept an ill-founded version of history so damaging to their predecessors.  Certainly church leaders may feel that by denigrating their 18th century forebears, they are placing themselves and the modern church on a higher moral plain than would otherwise be the case.  Such virtue signalling has an ancient history as evidenced by the biblical warning from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Beware of practising your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for you have no reward from your father in heaven.” (Matthew 6: 1)

When the Commissioners were confronted with compelling evidence of major flaws in their research different forces came into play.  No doubt convinced that they were pursuing a righteous cause, their behaviour exhibited all the signs of “cognitive dissonance”.  This may arise when discomfort is triggered by beliefs clashing with new information.  In the words of Leon Festinger, the eminent American social psychologist who originated the theory: “Tell them you disagree and they turn away.  Show them facts or figures and they question your sources.  Appeal to logic and they fail to see your point.” Another tell-tale manifestation of this condition is “Belief Disconfirmation” where those affected double-down on a belief when confronted with evidence that it is wrong.

The Dividend Hall, South Sea House, 1810

What should happen now? Some may take the view that although the Commissioners’ research is flawed and misleading too much reputational damage would be incurred by a formal admission of error on their part.  Therefore it might be better to let things stand.  This however would be a grave mistake.

In the first place the Church Commissioners are appointed to uphold their publicly declared principles which include a commitment to transparency, accountability and evidence-based research.  Failure to demonstrate this commitment would be a betrayal of their office.

Second, the Commissioners’ allegation that the Bounty was deeply complicit in the slave trade provided their justification for launching Project Spire.  It would surely be morally wrong if not illegal, to seek charitable status for such a project on the basis of a false historical prospectus.

Finally, and most importantly, the widely publicised historical misrepresentations to which the Commissioners have lent their full authority are now embedded in Google and AI and no doubt relied upon by schools and colleges worldwide.  For instance, Google/AI put the Church’s earnings from the slave trade at between £400 million and £1.4 billion, the higher figure equating with the Bounty’s total revenue from South Sea Annuities.

The consequences of the Commissioners’ false historical narrative have therefore gone well beyond the remit of Church leaders and must be viewed as nothing less than a national scandal.  If the Commissioners will not appoint a truly independent legal panel to look into this matter it would surely be appropriate for Parliament to intervene and conduct an investigation into how the Commissioners came to rely on deeply flawed research to damage the global reputation of our established Church and distort our national history.

Professor Richard Dale is the author of The First Crash. Lessons From the South Sea Bubble (2004)

Edward John Eyre (1815-1901) photographed in 1867

by Julia Margaret Cameron

I’ve always been interested in Edward John Eyre, the acting governor of Jamaica at the time of the Morant Bay Rebellion – also known as the Governor Eyre Rebellion – in 1865. Over the years I’ve collected material on him and on the intense divisions that his actions caused among Britain’s intellectual and cultural elite. In 2022 I suggested the idea of a programme on the Eyre Rebellion to the ‘In Our Time’ team at BBC Radio 4 and subsequently participated in the discussion which you can listen to here:https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001dnlr

My recent efforts to collect information about Eyre’s early exploits in Australia, however, have come up against the librarians of the University of Sydney who seem intent on preventing free academic inquiry. The story is worth relating.

Eyre is one the most infamous figures in the history of the British empire because of his overreaction when confronted by a local rebellion of exploited, free black labourers tending sugar cane at Morant Bay in southeastern Jamaica. Their rebellion led to the deaths of 17 whites. Eyre then declared martial law and the summary execution of hundreds of protestors followed, in addition to the hundreds killed by British troops putting down the spreading unrest. Hundreds of houses were also burnt down or demolished.

There was political and public uproar in Britain. Inquiries were held; committees to prosecute and defend Eyre were established; court proceedings were initiated in which Eyre was ultimately acquitted. Anyone who thinks that the empire had no conscience and was inured to acts of violence should study this affair. John Stuart Mill, Thomas Henry Huxley and Henry Fawcett called Eyre a murderer and demanded that he face charges; Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and yes, Charles Dickens, defended him as a man who did his duty. After five years of this, during which Eyre was the most talked-about and cursed figure in the British empire, he sloped off into obscurity, dying many years later in Devon in 1901.

Eyre was born in England but only became a colonial official in later life. Before that he had a spell as a farmer and an explorer in South Australia. His first expedition dates from 1839; his second, in the following year, took him from Adelaide to Albany, Western Australia, across land never before traversed by a European. He was celebrated for his feats of endurance, and also – and this is most relevant to this story – for the ‘humanity and tact’ he showed in his relations with indigenous people, Aborigines. Indeed, he was made resident magistrate and protector of the Aborigines on the Murray River in South Australia where he preached the virtues of co-existence to white settlers. In 1845 he published in London a pioneering work, Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of Australia, including in it the journals from his expeditions. Eyre was hardly alone in the 1840s in finding Aboriginal culture inferior to European, but he was respectful and deeply interested in the lives of the indigenous and his book is an important source on early white-indigenous encounters (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ‘Eyre, Edward John (1815-1901)’)

Anyone interested in Eyre and trying to understand why he behaved as he did in 1865 on the other side of the world in Jamaica must take his early experiences with native people in the Australian bush and desert into account. At the very least, his interest in, and sympathy for Aborigines calls into question his subsequent dismissal as a ‘racist’.

It was in this spirit that I went to the Sydney University Library website to explore what it held on Eyre. But I immediately encountered screens that told me that his publications had been ‘redacted’. At some point before 2010 they had been digitised by the Library, but now they are inaccessible to readers.

https://digital.library.sydney.edu.au/nodes/search?keywords=Edward+Eyre&submitidx=Search+%EF%80%82

It took some time searching the website to understand why this is the case. Eyre’s memoirs described Aboriginal life and ritual, and whether they did so favourably or otherwise, the indigenous people living today in the areas he traversed and wrote about apparently have a veto over accessing them. Whether they have actually been consulted on this matter, and on accessing other texts, is not altogether clear. But the pages that the Library once digitised for researchers to see and use have now been ‘redacted’.

Readers of History Reclaimed are probably aware that over the past generation western museums have returned physical Aboriginal remains to indigenous groups in Australia. About this there can be no quarrel. Respect for the dead and for the customs and beliefs associated with death in Aboriginal society require the return of such material, especially when it is held in museum vaults and plays no role in explaining Aboriginal history or ethnography.

Readers may also be aware – I was not – that it is distressing to some of Australia’s indigenous to see images of the dead and of their ancestors. In which case, warnings might be given in catalogues and listings, though it should be obvious that an ‘account of the manners and customs of the Aborigines and the state of their relations with Europeans’, the subtitle of Eyre’s book, might contain such images.

But why has a university library decided to refuse access to a foundational text, written by a white settler who lived with, and studied Aborigines? Of course we would write it differently today. But that is why Eyre’s text is important: it shows us how whites  - a sympathetic white in this case – thought about the indigenous in the early stages of Australian settlement.

If the answer to my question is that a text from the 1840s might cause offence, then the same arguments used to combat restrictions of free speech apply in this case to the restrictions of free inquiry: ‘offence’ is never sufficient grounds for silencing free expression or academic research. Those likely to be offended need not listen or look.

The University of Sydney Library website is full of clues to the outlook of its librarians.  A banner running across the webpages reads: ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’.

The website tells us that books and other material written by ‘non-Indigenous people…may not have had the input of First Nations peoples themselves’, as if that should be a condition that all academic work must obey.

The Library has published its own ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Protocols, which are intended as a set of principles and guidelines to enhance and embed culturally competent practice within an Australian academic library context’, whatever that means.

https://www.library.sydney.edu.au/about/first-nations-hub#acknowledgement-of-country

The Protocols tell us that indigenous peoples have ‘the right…to determine use and access provisions for materials which reflect their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, and traditional cultural expressions’. We are being told that sets of people – librarians and Aborigines – have the right to control what readers and researchers may consult.

Read further and it appears that there is an equivalent of the infamous papal ‘Index of Forbidden Books’ which for centuries listed and banned heretical works considered dangerous by the Catholic Church. The University of Sydney Library excludes access ‘to any published monograph that has been restricted on the AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) catalogue’. I assume that Edward Eyre’s 1845 account of his explorations is one such banned book.

The Protocols go on to explain that when someone wants to see some of this ‘restricted material’ a consultation will follow ‘with the relevant First Nations community to negotiate appropriate conditions of access’. To the best of my knowledge, no such consultation occurred in regard to my request.

But that’s not the end of it. ‘Non-indigenous clients’ (I think that refers to me) may gain access to restricted material ‘if they provide written permission from an organisation or member of the First Nations community from which the cultural information originates’. Those of us living in Suffolk may find this a tad difficult to arrange.

There is more – much more – of these Kafkaesque directives and conditions over the 35 pages of the Protocols.

Image from the frontispiece of Eyre's Journals

Over a period of two months I wrote to two different librarians to try to find out what the redacted images depicted and to gain access to them. I was asked what I intended to do with the material should I be allowed to see it and replied that I could not say for certain. Perhaps it will be a book about Eyre and the whole controversy, or perhaps a learned article about his comparative racial attitudes to the Australian indigenous and Jamaican blacks. It rather depends on how much new material I find.

At no time in these exchanges did I get the sense that the Sydney University librarians knew who Eyre was, or were aware of his significance in British and imperial history. To them he was a white man who wrote about indigenous people and illustrated their lives - and for that reason was being ‘redacted’. That Eyre was one of the most controversial figures in the history of the Victorian empire was not recognised and of no consequence, and certainly wasn’t enough to get me access to whatever it is they’ve redacted.

It’s quite likely that the redacted images on the website contain nothing beyond the images published in Eyre’s 1845 memoir, but at no point did the librarians confirm this. After my last message went unanswered I gave up and I’ve written this article in protest at the University of Sydney’s barriers to legitimate academic research.

This censorship is performative rather than genuine. If the Sydney University Library was sincere it would simply take down the offending material and no reader would be any the wiser as to its digital holdings. Instead, the website contains darkened images with the word ‘redacted’ across them in a species of virtue-signalling. The library’s saying, in effect, ‘Look what we’ve done to prove our commitment to the rights of the indigenous: blanked out material from a key text about aboriginal history. How clever and good we are!’

In one perspective this is all painfully silly, unworthy behaviour from a major university. But it is also a serious infraction of free inquiry which should be contested lest more minorities and communities are encouraged to control what can and can’t be read by readers and researchers. I have no quarrel at all with indigenous people in Australia and doubt very much if they have a quarrel with me. Why should they object to an Englishman reading a book by another Englishman about the early history of Australia? More to the point, why should they be allowed to object to such a thing? Why should anyone have the right to control another’s reading and legitimate inquiry? But the problem here is with the librarians, and I most strongly object when they – or anyone else – dictate what can and can’t be seen. That’s censorship.

A final thought. Last year Australians voted in a constitutional referendum and decided to reject proposals that would have entrenched legal and political privileges for Aborigines, preferring to retain civil equality across their institutions. Like so many western universities, the University of Sydney seems to be living in a world of its own, out of step with the outlook of the majority of citizens.

(This article was first published in the Daily Telegraph. We are grateful for permission to republish it here)

Many people think Britain has never been invaded since 1066. They recall Shakespeare’s lines about the sea being like “a moat defensive to a house / Against the envy of less happier lands.” The daily arrival of immigrants in small boats shatters that illusion. The sea is not a moat but a highway. Since the Norman Conquest, these islands have in fact been invaded innumerable times.

The most important – and on that occasion benign – instance was the Dutch invasion by William of Orange in 1688. There have been many near misses too. In 1745, the French were poised to land in Kent to support Bonnie Prince Charlie. In 1779 a big French and Spanish invasion fleet came in sight of Cornwall. In the 1790s, there were hostile landings in Wales and Ireland. In 1804 Napoleon had an invasion fleet and army ready and waiting to march on London: “If we control the crossing for twelve hours, England is dead.” We faced a similar prospect in 1940.

Building a navy to make invasion impossible was, in the words of our leading naval historian Nicholas Rodger, “the most complex and expensive project ever undertaken by the British state and society.” It was only completed, after more than a century of effort, in Nelson’s day, and it lasted over a century and a half. It required money and resources. The Royal Navy  became the world’s biggest and most modern organisation. It obtained tar and hemp from the Baltic, copper from Wales, cannon from Scotland, masts from Canada, and oak from Croatia (though to boost local supply chains, one admiral carried a pocketful of acorns to plant in suitable locations). It pioneered production lines and steam-driven machinery.

As Napoleon realised too late, Britain had made itself invulnerable. It was France that was doomed to defeat, its foreign commerce ruined, its navy destroyed, its territory open to invasion by armies armed and paid by a Britain whose economy relied on control of the oceans.

Though the navy was run down after Waterloo (by which time, uniquely in history, it possessed half the world’s total of warships), the priority of maintaining a presence round the globe, and absolutely controlling European waters, was recognised by every government. They stayed in the forefront of technological change – steam, screw propellers, iron hulls, rifled guns, steel armour, submarines, aircraft.

When the French launched the ironclad Gloire in 1860, a junior Admiralty minister sneaked on board and made some measurements with his umbrella, and Britain built the more powerful HMS Warrior. When Russia, Germany, Japan and America began building ocean-going fleets, Britain responded with HMS Dreadnought, built very fast in 1906. It made earlier warships obsolete and disrupted every other country’s naval plans.

British warship HMS Dreadnought in 1909

Credit: Topical Press Agency

The Royal Navy pioneered aircraft carriers during the First World War. During the 1930s, when rearmament began in the face of the Nazi threat, Britain out-built every other country, and had the most technically sophisticated weapons systems. In the 1982 Falklands War, Britain launched a naval operation that only the Americans could have equalled.

HMS Warrior, the 19th century ironclad warship, is preserved today in Portsmouth

Credit: Ben Mitchell/PA

The priority was homeland defence. Only three times in its history has the Royal Navy’s main fleet left home waters: in 1782, in 1945, and in 1982. Making yourself invulnerable is itself a huge deterrent. But the navy was also a devastating offensive weapon. Blockading Napoleonic France altered the whole French economy, and it took generations for western ports to recover. Sea power gave global reach. In 1850, the Royal Navy unilaterally (and illegally, according to international law) ended the Brazilian slave trade. In 1878, it protected Turkey from Russian aggression – and, topically, acquired Cyprus as a forward base.

During the First World War it strangled Germany’s huge overseas trade. Its increasingly tight blockade helped tip Germany into economic collapse, revolution and defeat: its economy shrank by 30 per cent and – let’s be blunt – thousands starved.

A certain Corporal Hitler decided that in his future war of revenge, British blockade would be beaten by seizing lebensraum in Eastern Europe, deliberately starving millions of Slavs in the process. But when war came, British control of the seas again made Germany’s defeat inevitable. Take oil: Germany could never get more than 8 million tons a year for the whole of occupied Europe, but Britain, controlling the Atlantic, imported 20 million tons in 1944 alone. The Royal Navy also supplied Russia, controlled the Mediterranean, and protected the D-Day landings.

I mention this history not to indulge nostalgia, but to underline a point: for an exposed and strategically important island state, controlling the surrounding seas is existential, and it demands unceasing and expensive effort. Governments and people used to understand this, even those that preferred spending money on welfare. The public demanded battleship building to counter the German navy in the 1900s – “We want eight and we won’t wait!” In the late 1930s, the Conservative government doubled defence spending in a year. They knew they had to. So did the public.

And today? Have we forgotten we live on an over-crowded island? Already in the 1840s, one hostile European politician gloated that one day Britain would be starved. Today we depend even more on sea communications. We rely on the ships that carry our food, fuel and goods. The pipelines. The offshore wind turbines. Perhaps most vulnerable of all, the net of flimsy cables that carry the digital information on which our economy and our everyday life depend.

And we struggle to send a single warship to defend our base on Cyprus, the most important intelligence hub we possess.

I had the privilege of spending a day on HMS Duncan, the Type 45 destroyer that was first mentioned for the Cyprus deployment. I was hugely impressed by the ship and its young crew, women and men in their twenties and thirties, calm, competent, utterly reassuring. Nelson would have approved.

But there are so few ships. Their crews are overstretched, undervalued and under-rewarded. Weakness invites aggression, and we have never been so vulnerable since the Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway and captured the Royal Navy’s flagship in 1667. If we don’t wake up to this ourselves, I fear we shall have a rude awakening at the hands of our enemies.

1. ‘Britain Owes Palestine’: Reparations for the British Mandate for Palestine, 1920-1948

The BBC News recently reported that, in 1938, ‘the people of al-Bassa got their lesson in imperial brutality when the British soldiers came after dawn … Villagers were rounded up while troops later herded men onto a bus and forced them to drive over a landmine which blew up, killing everyone on board’[[1]].

This event is a key part of the ‘Britain Owes Palestine’[[2]] campaign, launched in a renewal of the efforts by Munib al-Masri, the Palestinian industrialist, to secure acknowledgement, satisfaction and reparation for ‘British war crimes’ in Palestine committed over the period of the Palestine Mandate. Reportedly, the envisaged reparations might amount to some £2 trillion [[3]]. Al-Masri started a UK Parliamentary Petition in 2017 for the British Government (HMG) ‘to openly apologise to the Palestinian people for issuing the Balfour Declaration’. HMG then responded:

The Balfour Declaration is an historic statement for which HMG does not intend to apologise. We are proud of our role in creating the State of Israel. The task now is to encourage moves towards peace. The Declaration was written in a world of competing imperial powers, in the midst of the First World War and in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. In that context, establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in the land to which they had such strong historical and religious ties was the right and moral thing to do, particularly against the background of centuries of persecution [[4]].

Ben Emmerson KC, former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, said that the legal team had unearthed ‘shocking crimes committed by certain elements of the British Mandatory forces’. The latest lengthy legal petition refers to the northern village of al-Bassa and notes that ‘the killing of approximately 50 people was part of a reprisal for the death of four soldiers of the Royal Ulster Regiment (‘RUR’) from the detonation of a roadside bomb on the evening of 6 September 1938’. It goes on to say that this was ‘the most egregious event that has been uncovered from the period’.

Rather than describing this episode as ‘unearthed’ or ‘uncovered’, it would be more accurate to acknowledge that it was documented by Matthew Hughes in his 2009 articles [[5]] and, in greater depth, in his meticulously researched book published in 2019 [[6]]. Hughes, more than anyone, has investigated the violence of the British Army during Britain’s Mandate for Palestine (1920-48). He identified the al-Bassa event as the ‘worst single atrocity that this author can uncover’, suggesting that twenty - rather than fifty - Arabs were killed, after being forced onto a bus that was deliberately driven over a buried road mine. He provides four British sources.

2. What happened at Al-Bassa?

Late on the night of the 6 September 1938, a patrol of ‘B’ Company, 2nd Battalion RUR (2/RUR) left Iqrit travelling west to al-Bassa, near the northern Lebanon frontier road. Approximately three miles west of al-Bassa, close to al-Bassa Police Post No. 2, the second vehicle in the column - an armoured truck - detonated a land mine. Two soldiers were killed instantly, a third died on the following day, and the 22-year-old officer, 2nd Lieut. John Anthony Law MC, died on 9 September [[7]]. The press reported that ‘punitive measures are being taken against the villages of Bassa and Zib near the scene of the landmine explosion last night that caused the death of three soldiers’[[8]]. The following day it was reported that ‘Troops later blew up several houses in the villages of Bassa and Zib as a punitive measure’[[9]]. The RUR regimental journal similarly recorded that ‘At dawn of the 7th September certain punitive measures were taken against villages known to have had knowledge of the outrage’.

Hughes’s first source is the 1998 memoir [[10]] of Harry Arrigonie (1908-1990), a Palestine Police Sergeant, that covers the incident which occurred a week before his arrival in al-Bassa. Arrigonie suggests that ‘Three days later an army reprisal force of about 20 soldiers were sent into Bassa village and collected 50 men, herding 20 of them onto a bus. Villagers who panicked and tried to escape were shot (killing several). The driver of the bus was forced to drive along the road and over a land mine buried by the soldiers’.

Raymond Cafferata MC PM (1897-1966), a senior Palestine police officer, is better known as the Hero of Hebron when, in August 1929, Arab mobs savagely attacked the Jewish Quarter, killing 65 Jewish men, women and children. Cafferata, the only British police officer in the town, held off eighty Arabs with just a revolver, having shot one Arab policeman cutting off a child’s head with a sword and another stabbing a woman [[11]]. Seven weeks after the al-Bassa events, Cafferata wrote to his wife: ‘You remember reading of an Arab bus blown up on the frontier road just after Paddy was killed. Well, the Ulsters did it - a 42-seater full of Arabs and an RE Sgt blew the mine. Since that day not a single mine has been laid on that road’ [[12]].

An Arabic account of the event was posted in 2004 by Eid Haddad, a Christian Arab, who recalls what his father told him of the 1938 event that he witnessed as a 15 year-old boy [[13]]. This account tells of a military jeep being blown up by a mine; another road mine discovered by the British ready to explode; and British troops killing six villagers, destroying lots of private properties, and taking Bassawis men away and torturing them. The British then forced 30 men from the neighbouring Al-Zeeb village onto the bus and made them drive over the road mine, which then exploded.

These are hearsay accounts, in contrast to that of Lance Corporal Charles Tinson of Squadron A, 11th Hussars, who largely worked on convoy protection in a troop of three 1908-14 Rolls-Royce armoured cars. In an interview fifty-seven years later he recollected being present at al-Bassa when his troop ‘flattened’ the village. He made no reference to a bus but did refer to the use of known insurgents riding in leading vehicles to discourage indiscriminate minelaying.

And I don’t know if I should tell you this, but there’s a place called Bassa and, uh, the company or the CEO of the Black Watch come from there and they give all that village – ‘cos the terrorists were coming from Syria through this village -  and they give them 48 hours to get out of them houses …. And they blew the lot. They got the people out and they just flattened it. Twice they done that. And we found out … that the terrorists are in there, they are using them’ [[14]].

Also present at the time was Lt.-Col. Desmond Woods MC (1917-2002), then a freshly commissioned 20 year-old subaltern in ‘C’ company of the 2/RUR, who recalled in an interview some fifty years later, without any reference to a bus, that his company was ordered to al-Bassa to take punitive measures:

I will never forget arriving at al-Bassa and seeing the Rolls Royce armoured cars of the 11th Hussars peppering Bassa with machine gun fire and this went on for about 20 minutes and then we went in and I remembered we had lighted braziers and we set the houses on fire and we burnt the village to the ground’ [[15]].

He mentioned that Major-Gen. Gerald Whitfield MC (1896-1975), then the Major in command of the 2/RUR,

realised the Arab gangs when they started to operate would warn the villagers about what they were going to do in laying ambushes…[and] had informed the mukhtars of all the villages in the frontier that if any of our men were blown up by mines he would take punitive measures against the nearest village to the scene of the mine because we knew that the Arab gang that lay the mine would always inform the villagers nearest to it so they wouldn’t be blown up by those mines.

He also recalled how;

this mining continued and we decided the best thing we could do would be to put some taxis … in front of our patrol, fill them with Arabs, the naughty boys we had in cages in these camps … hoping the gangs would realise that there are Arabs in front of our patrol and they would think twice about laying a mine but unfortunately the gauge of those taxis was not the same as our 300 cwt trucks and it wasn’t very effective, so after that we got hold of buses and we used to fill them with Arabs and send them down the road in front of our patrols and that did the trick and there were many fewer mines after that’.

The Arab rebels made land mines from old Turkish artillery shells filled with scrap iron and gelignite that were indiscriminately fired by a nail activated by a pressure ‘mouse trap’. Between March and December 1938, the press reported 55 deaths from 20 land mines including 21 Jews, 16 Arabs and 17 soldiers. One land mine accidentally exploded in the courtyard of a Jaffa house in October, killing six Arabs and wounding three. [[16]].

On the 14 September, days after the al-Bassa events, the press reported that ‘Ten Arabs were killed and ten injured when a land mine blew up a bus on the Northern Frontier road today’ [[17]]. The RUR regimental journal for November 1938, usually written by those on the ground, may well provide the most accurate and credible account of what transpired at al-Bassa. It noted that

A system of mine sweepers has been started. This consists of having an Arab car in front of our patrols, and was a very wise move (from our point of view), as an Arab bus, carrying twenty Arabs, was blown up on the same spot that ‘B’ Company had lost their truck. Ten Arabs were killed and ten wounded as a result [[18]].

There appear to be two reasonable explanations of these events, therefore. Either 2/RUR troops returned, unusually [[19]], for a second time on the 8 or 9 September and forced 20, 30 or 42 villagers, from either al-Bassa or al-Zib, into a bus which was then driven over a mine they had laid (or knew was there) near al-Bassa, and all the villagers died. Or, alternatively and perhaps more plausibly, a bus with 20 Arabs accidentally drove over a mine laid by rebels on the 14 September in the same place and ten died. The simple coherence of the latter explanation can be contrasted to the confusion over dates, villagers and the number of dead in the former account.

Roll-Royce Armoured Cars used in Palestine under the Mandate

3. The Context of the events at al-Bassa: The Palestine Mandate

There is no lack of British source material for the Palestine Mandate over the years 1922-1948, with annual reports to the League of Nations, Blue Book annual returns (1927-1938), Statistical Abstracts (1936-1945), three Government White Papers, seven Commissions, four Inquiries, and so on. Hence we know that the stone-built village of al-Bassa had, in 1931, a population of 1,948 made up of Arabs, Christians and Jews in 479 houses. In 1945 it had a population of 3,100 in 700 houses, and thus it is difficult to accept that it had been wholly destroyed, flattened or burnt to the ground in 1938. It was, however, entirely razed by the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in May 1948.

Al-Masri’s ‘Britain Owes Palestine’ petition maintains that Britain reneged on the Husayn-McMahon agreement with the Sharif of Hijaz (Hedjaz) that Palestine was to be included in the British promise to support Arab independence; that Britain had no right to issue the Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine; that the British unlawfully governed Turkish sovereign territory and unlawfully held a ‘self-granted’ Mandate from the League of Nations which had unlawfully issued it, breaching the 1899/1907 Hague Convention regulations. It is claimed that Britain also committed war crimes. Moreover, in withdrawing from Palestine in 1948, it is contended that Britain unlawfully terminated its unlawful Mandate and unlawfully breached obligations ‘codified’, over 50 years later, in the 2001 ILC draft articles [[20]]. Britain, it is maintained, failed ‘to protect the Palestinian Arab people from foreseeable harm, including atrocities and mass expulsions from their national homeland’ in the 1948 ‘nakba’ (meaning ‘catastrophe’).

The 423-page Peel (Royal) Commission report in 1937 examined in detail the legal arguments raised by Arab bodies (Ch. 2) and the 1915 Husayn-McMahon agreement [[21]] with Sir Henry McMahon denying ‘definitely and emphatically’ that Palestine was included in the promises to the Arabs. That remained the British government line [[22]] though the point remains disputed today. However, the Mandate could reasonably be said to be ‘self-granted’ as Lord Balfour, the first President of the League of Nations Council, explained to its 18th session in May 1922, in that ‘the League of Nations is not the author of the policy, but its instrument’. Or, as the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs noted in 1920, ‘the gift of the Mandate … rests with the Powers who have conquered the territories’.[[23]]

The interim Palestine civilian administration, set up in 1920 with 39% Arabic- speaking British civil servants [[24]], faced a number of problems from the outset: the ‘quasi-feudal’[[25]] Arab society, the Ottoman’s weak economic legacy, the ‘absorbative capacity’ for immigrants, the archaic land tenure system, and Jewish land purchases. [[26]] The British administration viewed the sparsely populated region as ‘a semi-derelict, over-burdened, ex-Ottoman vilayet’ characterised by ‘a conglomeration of archaic land tenures, prohibitive taxation of the medieval Moslem type’ and disorganised, illiterate, indebted ‘starving peasants who lacked the initiative to improve the land and held fatalist ideas about their position on it’[[27]]. In 1924, 78% of the population were Muslims.

Political consciousness was associated with a small urban effendi elite, shaped by Ottoman bureaucratic culture and regarded by British officials as venal, corrupt and factional. This elite was seen as divided between the rival Husayni (Husseini) and Nashashibi families, whose competing claims were believed to inhibit a coherent Arab political programme and to complicate British efforts at governance [[28]].

By contrast, the rapidly growing Jewish population was regarded by the British administration as organised, motivated, literate, politically coherent, semi-industrial, and furnished with comparatively cheap capital - though it was often judged to be ideologically ‘infected’ with socialist or communist tendencies [[29]].

The British believed that under the Mandate the welfare and prosperity of both populations had substantially improved thanks to the extension of education, health provision and public order. Consequently, the ‘1919-1938 population doubled when it had been static for two centuries under the Turks’… ‘Broadly speaking, the Arabs have shared to a considerable degree in the material benefits which Jewish immigration has brought to Palestine’[[30]]. During the period 1920-1948, Palestine’s per capita income growth was among the highest in the world [[31]]. However, by 1938, as the Woodhead Report noted, Jewish taxpayers were, in effect, subsidising the Arab population at an approximate annual cost of £1.25 million.

The Arab Revolt commenced with attacks on Jewish settlements, public infrastructure, the Palestine Police, and the British military. In 1936, the population of some 1.36 million were restrained by only 3,486 military men, commanded by the RAF, and regulated by 3,216 policemen, of whom 59% were Arab [[32]]. Initially the Mandate Government was committed to a policy of reconciliation instead of repression, a stance which was, both at the time [[33]] and subsequently, criticised [[34]]. The revolt waxed and waned around various events but after the Arab assassination of District Commissioner Andrews in September 1937, the British gloves came off with the grant of emergency powers, the arrest/exile of leading Arab nationalists, and a military surge of reinforcements [[35]]. By 1938, the police force had grown to 5,400 and the military, now led by the Army, to some 20,000 men, who switched from garrison defence to offensive operations.

Fresh promises made to the Arab population in the 1939 White Paper and increasing assistance for the British from disenchanted villagers, combined with the heavy military presence, helped bring the Arab Revolt to a sputtering end. The imposition of village searches, curfews, travel restrictions, collective fines, long prison sentences and various economic constraints contributed also. Some 3,000-5,000 Arabs, 415-547 Jews, and 294 British soldiers and policemen had been killed, but ‘almost as many Arabs were killed by Arabs … as the total number of Jews killed during the Revolt’[[36]]. This reflected the slide into anarchy with the struggle for dominance between the leading political families, inter-village blood feuding, intimidation and banditry. Arab rebel operations were funded by robberies, extortion, and drug running across the borders. There were also contributions from Italian and German sources [[37]].

The Jews, who had largely constrained their forces, began a more aggressive approach after the third White Paper in May 1939 [[38]] which rejected partition, capped Jewish immigration, and promised independence within 10 years. 27,000 Jews (5.7% of their population) joined the British military, in contrast to the 12,400 Arabs (1.1%) who also joined [[39]]. Many leaders of the Arab rebellion adopted a pro-Axis position, notably Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who fled to Berlin and, when the war ended, was indicted for war crimes by Yugoslavia for helping to raise Bosnian SS battalions. He was listed as a Nazi war criminal in July 1945. It was his young cousin, Yasser Arafat, who later succeeded him as leader of the Palestinian cause.

The 1939 White Paper was seen to revise Mandate policy in favour of the Arabs. The lesson learnt by the Jews from the Arab Revolt was that violence paid, and the ‘immediate result of the success of Arab terrorism was the beginning of Jewish terrorism’[[40]]. The subsequent ‘Jewish Insurgency’ was met, when the 3rd Infantry Division arrived in Palestine in 1947, by about 100,000 British troops, five times the amount used to control the Arab Revolt. The population had by then risen to 1.8 million, and the cost of the operation was ‘£30 million to £40 million a year from our diminishing resources’, spent ‘upon this vast apparatus of protraction and delay’[[41]]. A further 754 British service personnel and policemen died trying to maintain law and order in the 1945-48 period [[42]].

4. Policing Palestine: The Context of the al-Bassa events

In testimony to the 1946 Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, Jamal Effendi Husseini, leader of the Palestine Arab Party, said ‘that it was the wish of the Arabs of Palestine that British forces and police should be withdrawn forthwith’. Auni Bey Abdul Hadi (Awni Abd al-Hadi)[[43]], President of the Independence Party of Palestine and its representative on the Arab Higher Committee, ‘expressed his agreement’ (Ch.8, s.8) [[44]]. Having given formal notice in February 1947, the British finally withdrew in May 1948 and abandoned the Mandate to the care of the United Nations. Civil war intensified and, after Israel declared its independence, the uncoordinated and inexperienced Arab armies from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, joined by contingents from Yemen, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Sudan, invaded the former Palestinian Mandate in November. The experienced Arab Legion of Trans-Jordan, largely British officered and British led [[45]], intervened in the conflict to successfully seize the West Bank but, by the armistices in early 1949, the Israeli army had secured most of Palestine, leaving Egypt and Jordan in control over the Gaza Strip and the West Bank respectively.

All of this occurred in an era when the maintenance of law and order was widely regarded as the primary duty of government. As armed rebellions grew, so did government responses. Overwhelmed civilian police were replaced, or supported the army, whose force, or violent brutality, corresponded to the scale of the perceived problem. Sir Charles Tegart, a leading colonial security adviser to the Palestine administration, contended that ‘gangs of banditry armed with rifles cannot be dealt with by policeman with notebooks’[[46]].

Undoubtedly the British army’s approach in crushing the Arab Revolt over six months was brutal, often inhumane, and was occasionally judged illegal in courts by the laws of the time. The army’s actions in Palestine was commonly described as ‘very severe’ or, by Italian or German newspaper propaganda, as atrocities. Under this propaganda pressure, the War Office issued a long statement in 1939 describing the main rebel leaders and their activities. It explained that troops would cordon a village for searches, that all were warned not to break out, and that some ‘cordon breakers’ were shot running away, but ‘not in cold blood’[[47]]. Houses demonstrably used by rebels were demolished. It further contended;

 … the principle of collective responsibility for a crime committed within a district is fully recognised and understood by the Palestinian Arab. Collective punishment is the only method of impressing upon the peaceful but terrorised majority that failure to assist law and order may in the long run be more unpleasant than submitting to intimidation[[48]].

At the time, British government had no illusions about the effect of ‘strong measures’ in dealing with the Arabs. As William Ormsby-Gore explained to the Permanent Mandates’ Commission, ‘the more ruthless the treatment by the British military and police of disturbances arising from a political cause, the wider becomes the gulf, not merely between the Arabs and the mandatory Power, but between the Arabs and the Jews’[[49]]. Similarly, the Peel Commission concluded ‘that peace, order and good government can only be maintained in Palestine for any length of time by a rigorous system of repression…The moral objections to maintaining a repression are self-evident’.

Matthew Hughes acknowledges that ‘other imperial powers responded much more harshly than the British’; that ‘the British were often brutal but they rarely committed atrocities’; and that they were ‘relatively speaking, humane and restrained’[[50]]. The British, he suggests, ‘directed the bulk of their violence at property not people’ and ‘this achieved the desired political effect with relatively low casualty rates on both sides and without the use of systematic unsightly deadly force’[[51]]. Elsewhere, however, he has suggested that ‘the British employed considerable excessive violence and atrocities, brutality, torture, shootings, assassinations, during the repression of the Arab Revolt’[[52]] and he commends Caroline Elkins’s work [[53]]. She has argued that ‘racial capitalism can explain everything’ and that it’s ‘brown and black labor that is being exploited for the benefit of white capitalists and people in power’ leading to her conclusion that ‘All empires are violent, period’[[54]]. Needless to say, her work and its conclusions have been criticised. [[55]]

If we return to the case being made by the ‘Britain Owes Palestine’ campaign, the conduct of Arab gangs in assassinating rivals, killing women and children, and bombing civilians was hardly behaviour consistent with the Hague Conventions. There are also significant legal obstacles to the allegation that the British committed ‘war crimes’. First, the 1899/1907 Hague Conventions regulated the conduct of contracting parties, and although the Ottoman Empire acceded to the Conventions in 1907, it was not the sovereign authority during the Mandate period. Palestine itself was not a ‘High Contracting Party’ until 2014. Secondly, war crimes were originally limited to ‘international armed conflicts’ and it was not until the 1994 ICTR (International Criminal Statute for Rwanda) and the 1998 Rome Statutes that they could be applied to ‘non-international armed conflict’. Finally, the Geneva Conventions establish individual criminal responsibility for grave infractions: neither states nor organisations are themselves criminally liable for war crimes.

Given that any individuals alleged to have committed such offences while serving in British forces more than three-quarters of a century ago must now be deceased or close to it, it is evident that the purpose of such accusations today cannot be prosecution. They are driven, instead, by a legal obsession with century-old grievances that are being used to construct a case for national legitimacy based on a claim of historical victimisation. The events at al-Bassa in September 1938 have become part of that claim.

Were the residents of al-Bassa or al-Zib victims of British brutality, and were the victims in the bus killed deliberately by the British? There are several different interpretations of what occurred and it may never be possible to establish the truth at this distance from the events. But the most straightforward and likely of the explanations is that the bus accidentally went over a mine laid – like many other mines before it – by Arab rebels.

The 208th birthday of Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, on 11 January 2023, also marked the inception of the Canadian Institute for Historical Education (“CIHE”): https://cihe.ca/ This was not a coincidence. Over the past decade, Sir John’s reputation and legacy have been trashed. The attack has built on grievances made public with the release of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015. In this, and in subsequent discussions, Macdonald was accused of being a major proponent and instigator of the “cultural genocide” of Canada’s indigenous peoples. As a result, information on Macdonald was excised from Government of Canada websites, and statues were removed, toppled, or “boxed” in Kingston (Macdonald’s adopted hometown), Montreal, Charlottetown, Hamilton, Picton, Victoria and Toronto. Many streets, schools and buildings were renamed. In short, Macdonald became a pariah to many Canadians.

Sir John A. Macdonald (1815-1891)

Yet many of the statements made about Macdonald were incorrect, and his life and work were removed from their appropriate contexts. Most of the contested events and practices in the Indian Residential Schools’ system occurred well after his death in 1891, in fact. But Macdonald is the “founder” of Canada, and because Canada was now being designated by many as a ‘genocide state’, Macdonald was labelled a ‘genocidaire’.

Other historical figures such as Egerton Ryerson, Matthew Begbie, Henry Dundas, Hector-Louis Langevin, and Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin were also attacked for their involvement with the Residential Schools or slavery. Canadians were being told by many, including the then prime minister, Justin Trudeau, that they should be ashamed of their history.

Thus in 2023, the CIHE began its activities to reclaim the legacies of the accused, and to provide a more balanced interpretation of Canadian history. Our mission is to promote historical literacy through research, education, and engagement in the public square.

The initial activities of the CIHE were, therefore, reactive. We countered disinformation with facts. Over the past three years, colloquia have been held on Macdonald, Dundas and Ryerson. We have hosted speaker events including David Frum (“Settlers & Colonists”), Margaret MacMillan and Nigel Biggar (“Colonialism”), and Stephen Bown (“Manifest Destiny”). These talks, and other resources, are available on our website here: www.cihe.ca.

We realized that however successful these events, their overall impact on Canadian society was minimal. We were especially concerned that general knowledge, understanding and interest in our history is dismally poor. The CIHE had to design a programme to engage Canadians with their history, and a social media strategy was developed using Twitter/X, Threads, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram.

The results have been gratifying. Over the past year, our content has attracted over 2.2 million views. Relative to industry benchmarks, our X community is “hyper” engaged with our content; Instagram and Facebook engagement exceeds norms; but we are lagging on TikTok. Over 2,100 new followers were added in November 2025 alone. We also initiated our ‘History Matters’ podcast in 2025 with thirteen episodes to date.  

Egerton Ryerson (1803-1882), Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada 1844-76

Our historical battles over the past two years have been successful. The proposed renaming of Dundas Street by Toronto City Council was defeated. However, Yonge Dundas Square was renamed Sankofa Square. Sankofa is a Twi word from the Akan tribe meaning “go back and get it”. The Akans, it turned out, were active middlemen in the African slave trade. The CIHE, along with the ‘Save Our History’ group, was successful in opposing efforts to remove the names of Henry Dundas, Egerton Ryerson and John A. Macdonald from Toronto schools.

The CIHE’s efforts to have statues resurrected were also rewarded in 2025. The Council of Wilmot Township voted to reinstall all the statues in their ‘Prime Ministers’ Path’ that were removed in 2021: https://www.wilmot.ca/news/posts/wilmot-council-concludes-prime-ministers-path-deliberations-with-renewed-inclusive-direction/  The Institute’s J. D. M. Stewart was recruited as a member of an independent committee to oversee the project and also develop educational content. Perhaps the most gratifying action over the past year was the unboxing of Macdonald’s prominent statue at Queen’s Park in Toronto, an event that signalled a renewed commitment to understanding our history rather than erasing it. The momentum for the reinstallation of Macdonald’s statues in cities across Canada has swung in our favour. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/sir-john-a-macdonald-statue-uncovered-queens-park-1.7559190

We want to ensure that the renaming of places reflects a fair and balanced treatment of our past and that relevant facts and context inform these decisions. We work with historians to provide legislators and municipal officials with relevant historical evidence and analysis; commission new research where it seems necessary; and act as a catalyst for a more informed understanding amongst all Canadians. Our document, “Principles: Naming and Renaming”, is available on our website: https://cihe.ca/about-us/#principals  

Henry Dundas, First Viscount Melville (1742-1811), British Home Secretary and Secretary for War. Counsel for Joseph Knight in the famous Scottish antislavery 'Knights Case'  (Knight versus Wedderburn) in 1778. Proposer of 'the gradual abolition' of the slave trade in the British parliament in 1792

These accomplishments form the foundation for a new era for the CIHE, one where we shift from being seen primarily as a reactive voice to becoming a proactive national leader in historical education.

Our Resolutions for 2026 focus on the following:

1. Become a truly national organisation.

Our activities to date have been focused mainly on Ontario. We will expand our reach across provinces and territories, bringing together historians, educators, policy makers, and citizens who believe in the value of historical literacy. This reach has been achieved through a “Friends” model. Many of the initiatives require a local presence, especially as many Canadians resent being told what to do by those from Toronto (I am originally from Hamilton, Ontario, and have a large “chip on the shoulder” as a result). The local presence allows the CIHE to be aware of, and to address, issues that may need a rapid response in order to prevent knee-jerk reactions by activists and politicians. To support this network, the CIHE has assembled a Rapid Response Committee from academia to quickly counter erroneous claims made about historical figures and events.

Our template for expansion has been established with The Kingston Friends of the CIHE, and we are underway in establishing our Friends network in Halifax, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. Our goal is to grow CIHE into a representative, coast-to-coast body that Canadians can rely on for credible, balanced leadership on historical issues.

2. Commission research on the state of historical education.

Data, rather than anecdotes, is needed to understand what students know, what they’re missing, and how we can help. In 2026, CIHE will undertake the first phase of a national research initiative to assess the level of historical knowledge across the country. In Canada, secondary school curricula are the responsibility of provincial governments. As a result, the CIHE will review and influence the teaching of history across the various jurisdictions.

3.  Strengthen partnerships with academic institutions.

We will work closely with universities, colleges, and scholars to commission research on Canadian historical figures and events, explore curriculum improvements, deepen historical awareness, and support educators who are shaping the next generation of Canadians. This will include the establishment of scholarships supporting Canadian history students, and funding towards specific projects.

4. Increase public engagement around Canadian history.

From expanding our social media presence, to growing History Matters, to hosting more regional events, the CIHE will continue to create opportunities for Canadians to learn, question, and participate in the stories that define us. Mr. Trump’s 51st State threat may be a blessing in disguise. The sabre-rattling has many Canadians asking how and why we differ from our southern neighbours. Macdonald’s National Policy of the 1880s, by which Canadian industry was protected from US competition to ensure its survival, is suddenly in vogue.  2026 also marks the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, which created two countries, not just one. We believe that commemorations of the Revolution in the United States and Canada will generate further interest in our history.

5. Advocate not only for the preservation of history—but for its understanding.

We will continue to defend our shared heritage when necessary. But our primary mission going forward is to promote a richer, more nuanced understanding of Canadian history through research, education, and responsible public engagement. We believe that a strong understanding and interest in our history will rebuild pride in our nation, which has been fractured by regionalism over the past decade. Our aim is to ensure that Canadians can access, appreciate, and learn from their history—accurately, confidently, and together.

The CIHE looks to collaborate with other organizations within and outside of Canada to assist in research and advocacy. We especially look forward to working alongside History Reclaimed.

Best regards,

Donald F. Cranston

Chairman

The Canadian Institute for Historical Education

The Old Republican Palace in Khartoum has been destroyed in Sudan's civil wars

Reports from Sudan that the authorities in Khartoum are seeking British financial help to rebuild a palace on the Nile shattered by the civil wars there (Daily Telegraph, 16 February) raise again the controversial issue of the costs and benefits of the British empire.

Today’s activist historians would have us believe that Britain extracted vast amounts from her empire, money that should now be repaid to Britain’s former colonies. Yet the rotting Old Republican Palace, first erected in the 1830s and then rebuilt by the British in 1899 after the Battle of Omdurman (in which Churchill took part) reminds us only of the costs of empire.

In 1885, the rebellion of the Mahdi in Sudan cost the infamous General Gordon his life, cut down on the terrace of the Palace. That cost the prime minister, William Gladstone, his popularity for supposedly failing to support Gordon. Known before as the GOM (‘Grand Old Man’) he became instead the MOG (‘Murderer of Gordon’). It also cost his Liberal government its coherence and direction, blown off-course by this and other colonial conflicts.

General Gordon's Last Stand (George William Joy, 1893. Leeds Art Gallery)

It was Disraeli who in 1852, long before these events, described our colonies as ‘millstones round our necks’. Most Victorian statesmen agreed with him. Far from the pantomime image of glorious, reckless Victorian expansion into all the corners of the globe, from the 1820s it was standard British policy to avoid, if at all possible, planting the flag and annexing territory. We sought a ‘free trade empire’, based on commerce rather than conquest, that encouraged improvement and progress in the territories with which we traded, including an end to the slave trade and slavery across Africa and Asia.

The storied ‘age of imperialism’ at the end of the nineteenth century when annexation was more common was a reaction to the growing competition of other would-be European empires, threatening our strategic position and dominance in overseas markets. We needed control of Egypt, Sudan and other parts of East Africa to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India.

All this had a price. Though colonial defence was often based on native troops and local taxes, it was also a drain on the Treasury in London. From Adam Smith, writing at the end of the eighteenth century onwards, economists and historians have long argued that to have built strong trading relationships around the globe would have been more lucrative (and less politically onerous) than planting the flag and assuming responsibility for millions of colonised people. In any case, throughout the three centuries of the British empire, our trade and loans to Europe, the American colonies, and then the United States, were much more significant than strictly imperial commerce.

Some Britons made fabulous imperial fortunes, of course, among them East India Company merchants, plantation owners in the Caribbean, and City bankers. The figure of the Nabob home from India, living in great style and able to build an eastern palace in the English countryside, as at Sezincote in Gloucestershire, was a late eighteenth-century stereotype. But much of this wealth was consumed where it was made, in the colonies themselves, and the cost of imperial defence was a constant burden.

Sezincote House, Gloucestershire

Recent analysis suggests that British taxes could have been cut by almost a quarter without an empire to administer and defend. It’s estimated that the cost of imperial defence by the 1920s, at over a third of tax receipts, far outweighed the economic returns of empire, and diverted resources better spent on home defence and alleviating the inter-war economic slump.

Britain’s economic decline in the twentieth century was largely the result of fighting two world wars in defence of democracy. Those conflicts also entailed the extra cost of defending the empire from invasion and occupation, stretching Britain’s resources and finances to the limit. Without the empire, Britain might well be stronger economically today, though it can also be argued that without Canadian pilots, Indian soldiers, and Australian sailors those allied victories would have been less likely.

Activists claim that the great profits of slavery in the British empire provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution: thus Britain’s economic dominance was built on the backs of slaves. But historians and economists, among them the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joel Mokyr, have long shown this to be a myth. The West Indian slave economy counted for only about 2.5% of GDP overall until slavery’s abolition in the 1830s. Its key product, sugar, made a smaller contribution to the British economy than domestic raw materials like wool, or wood, or leather – or even beer. The fact that Britain had the most productive agriculture in Europe, generating wealth for landholders and also ensuring that we could feed a growing urban population, was of far greater importance than sugar and rum to British industrialisation.

If the government decides to pay towards rebuilding the Palace in Khartoum for a second time, let it do so in recognition of the many beneficial legacies of the British empire: the buildings erected, the bridges built, the waterways and railways constructed, and the social progress imparted through schools, hospitals, and civic order. We should not give funds because it’s said that we made great profits from empire – because we didn’t.

It was inevitable that the British monarchy would come under the critical gaze of cultural revisionists searching for evidence of exploitation. Brooke Newman’s new book [[1]] does not disappoint. Sweeping through centuries of history, Newman sketches out how the British monarchy sanctioned, invested in, and profited from transatlantic slavery – from Queen Elizabeth I through to Queen Victoria. These 13 monarchs, she contends, supported enslavers, built a slave empire and embedded slavery at the core of their imperial system, but, at the end, kept a deliberate silence on its iniquities whilst reshaping the nation’s collective memory after abolition. It is unclear why the author did not start with the Anglo-Saxon monarchs, who reportedly were responsible for up to 30% of the English population being kept as slaves in 1068. Perhaps the slavery of our own people was not the point Ms Newman wanted to make?

While carefully researched, written in a popular style, and often very engaging, the work nevertheless feels ‘a day late and a dollar short’ in its pursuit of the now-receding ‘critical race’ tide, particularly in its tendency toward over-simplification and insufficient contextualisation. Much of the author’s charge sheet depends on a conflation of the monarch as a guilty actor with the government as a malevolent organisation. That approach may be arguable in the pre-1688, pre-Glorious Revolution period, but it becomes increasingly difficult to sustain thereafter - quite apart from questions of how much effective control either the monarch or the government realistically exercised in the early modern ‘small-state’ world, or how much the monarch would even have known about slavery.

Indeed, one headline charge is that ‘the Crown bought 13,400 enslaved men to serve in the West India Regiment … making the king the single largest purchaser of enslaved people in the British Empire’. This might surprise readers, as it also surprised the abolitionist, William Wilberforce, who, in 1804, wrote to his friend, the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger, having just learnt about something that had been running for a near decade. Wilberforce asked

‘that their situation as soldiers would be beyond comparison preferable to that of plantation slaves cannot be doubted; but how can we justify buying slaves for that desirable and even humane purpose [?]’[[2]].

He was referring to the 1-12th West Indian Regiments (WIR), which were established, with pragmatism overcoming principle, in 1795 during the desperate Napoleonic Wars and seven years after the Pitt had noted in the House of Commons that ‘It had been pretty generally thought that the African slave-trade ought to be abolished’[[3]]. Their story is instructive and provides the sort of context that is too often missing in Brooke Newman’s account.

A Private of the 5th West India Regiment, 1812, in Charles Hamilton Smith, Costumes of the Army of the British Empire (1813)

As a solution to the high island death rates for British soldiers, the WIR initially sought freemen, but ended up purchasing slaves for five year periods with freedom granted at the end of service. The regiments purchased 13,400 slaves over the period 1795-1808 for £925,000 from the ultra-secret, and still extant, Army Extraordinaires fund [[4]]. The black soldiers, largely ‘new negroes’ rather than West Indian blacks, had equal pay, allowances, medical care and pensions, although their ambiguous legal status was threatened by hostile colonial legislatures until the imperial government formally emancipated all slaves in uniform in 1807, thirty one years before the rest of the island slaves were freed. The WIR, a formal part of the British Army, went on to win battle honours in Guadeloupe, the Anglo-Ashanti Wars, Sierra Leone, East Africa and Palestine before being disbanded in 1921.

As this example demonstrates, the history of slavery is often more complex and certainly more nuanced than Brooke Newman’s account suggests.

By way of general context, and on the subject of the league of infamy, the distinguished slavery historian, David Eltis, notes ‘that in 1804 there were 45 million slaves labouring across the globe’, that 3 millions of these were of African descent and living in the Americas (6.6%), and of these, about 750,000 were slaves on British islands (1.7%). 10.7 million slaves survived Atlantic transportation and British dominance of the trade was restricted to 1730-1800, during which period British traders carried 1.73 million slaves. The focus of the business was the South Atlantic rather than the Caribbean, in fact, peaking in 1829, two decades after the British abolished their slave trade. The majority of slave voyages began in the Americas rather than Europe, and almost two thirds of all Africans ending up in Iberian America [[5]].

The role of the English—and, after 1707, British—monarchy in the slave trade varied considerably over the centuries. Elizabeth I, the ruler of what was then a second-rank power and a monarch burdened by substantial inherited debts, readily granted charters, marques, and licences to merchants, and regulated trading companies and privateers, while simultaneously enforcing the fiscal and regulatory apparatus of customs duties and, later, the Navigation Acts. As Newman notes, Elizabeth did sanction the three slave-raiding voyage syndicates led by John Hawkins in the 1560s, conducted in small galleons and carrying perhaps 1,200 enslaved Africans in total. She held a profit share in two of these expeditions and received charter rent for one vessel—the Jesus of Lübeck—which she lent to the enterprise. The Queen profited from the second voyage and suffered losses on the third. It is also worth noting, however, that during the same period she likely lost more than 1,200 English subjects to enslavement by Barbary pirates.

The Crown’s Silence then turns to the 1618 Guinea joint-stock company licensed by James I to secure gold on the West African coast. Despite the King lending three ships and promising to subscribe capital, the venture proved a financial disaster. Control of the company passed to Sir Nicholas Crispe, who secured a new charter in 1631 authorising trade in gold, redwood, and sugar.

Newman notes that the Company factor, when asked if he would like to buy slaves responded ‘We were a people, who did not deale in any such commodities, neither did wee buy or sell one another, or any that had our owne shapes’ and, when told other white men bought slaves, he replied ‘They were another kinde of people different from us’ [[6]]. Newman strikingly suggests - with little evidence - that this answer was ‘far from the truth’. The company’s principal objective then was gold ‘and at that moment human beings were not on the list’, she writes, but would be later.

By 1640, when the company lost its monopoly charter, Newman observes that the company had acquired land in Barbados and were owed debts there, ‘presumably for the purchase of enslaved Africans’, a presumption she treats as sufficient confirmation that the company had engaged in the transatlantic slave trade. However, other historians have argued that it was Crispe’s three partners who, competing against the company, were undertaking slave trading contrary to the charter. It is also suggested that this was a conflict between the Royalist anti-slaver Crispe, and the Puritan slave-trading Parliamentarians [[7]].

The next chartered enterprise was the Royal Adventurers into Africa, established in 1660. Like its predecessors, it set out primarily in search of African gold and was led by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, alongside a board of inept and inexperienced aristocratic directors and shareholders. The company quickly became insolvent as ‘the whole venture was more reminiscent of an aristocratic treasure-hunt than of an organised business’[[8]].

Newman suggests the directors reconstituted the company and secured a new charter from King Charles II chiefly for slave trading, supported by gold and sugar. In reality, the Royal Adventurers lost 90% of their capital and the remaining assets were bought by the newly formed 1672 Royal African Company (RAC) which was led by more experienced merchants and funded by a much wider base, though one that did include the King, the Prince of Wales, Prince Rupert, and most of the chief ministers.

Initially, the RAC performed well, largely on the back of gold and goods’ trading, until around 1692. Thereafter, however, the company drifted into insolvency, propping up dividend payments through increasingly dubious, Ponzi-like borrowing on credit, and it finally collapsed in 1708. Newman notes that James II, a company Governor and the largest shareholder at 2.7%, made a profit on his shares of ‘at least £6,281’. Yet the company’s foremost historian, Kenneth Davies [8], suggests that James II’s £3,000 of stock received dividends of £3,480 and was sold after he fled for France in 1689 for £5,730, realising an annual return of 12%. However, Davies goes on to point out that those, unlike James II or Prince Rupert, who failed to get out before 1691 lost £350 per £100 capital of stock.

Another early seller was the notorious Bristol merchant Edward Colston, who disposed of part of his RAC stock in 1689. Contrary to Newman’s claim that Colston gave his shares away, he in fact sold them to William III at £191 per share, having originally paid approximately £150 [[9]].

Leaving aside its disastrous financial performance, the RAC did get the Asiento slaving sub-contract and, according to the Slave Voyages database, was responsible for transporting 99,177 slaves across the Atlantic. Newman correctly notes that the RAC transported more slaves ‘than any other institution during the period’ 1672-1688, but this on its own is misleading as to the scale and responsibility for this horrific trade.

This was 37.3% of the total of slaves transported in this period. The Nieuw West Indische Compagnie (Dutch West India Co.) had a 21.7% share, followed by others like the Swedish Africa Company, the Danish Africa Company and the Brandenburg Africa Company (Prussia). Monarchs, or the ruling institutions, across European maritime nations then engaged directly or tangentially with slavery and licensed or promoted slaving companies. The responsibilities and numbers are still being researched.

Scott Stawski argues, for example, that Denmark was integral to transporting ‘more than 600,000 African slaves to the Americas from 1671 until 1825, making Denmark, not the 7th but the 5th largest slave-trading nation, only surpassed by Portugal, Great Britain, and France’[[10]].

In a wider perspective, Eltis concludes that ‘Overall, a total of at least 40,000 transatlantic slave voyages occurred over the 350-year-long transatlantic slave trade era. State sponsored company ventures could have accounted for only 5 per cent of these’. On this view, the trade was overwhelmingly one of private enterprise rather than one driven primarily by avaricious monarchs.

Newman is keen to portray the monarchs after James II as active governors of chartered companies, personally directing their affairs for private profit. Yet there appears to be no evidence that any of them ever presided over a Court of Directors or a General Court of Proprietors [[11]]. Their role is more accurately described as one of patronage, “largely honorary or nominal”, as John Brocklehurst explained to the House of Commons in 1834 [[12]]. She also argues that Queen Anne appointed her husband, Prince George of Denmark, as Lord High Admiral and that, in this capacity, he was particularly helpful to the RAC by instructing Royal Navy vessels to protect its trade. This claim is difficult to take seriously. Effective power within the Navy at the time rested with George Churchill, while Prince George’s role was widely regarded as ceremonial—he perhaps was, after all, ‘the very stupid and insignificant husband of Queen Anne’, as Queen Victoria later described him.

The RAC’s Asiento sub-contract was granted by the South Sea Company (SSC). The SSC itself had obtained the Asiento—previously held successively by the French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Genoese—under the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, agreed during Queen Anne’s reign. Newman gives the impression that Queen Anne personally negotiated the treaty, rather than it being the product of policy and diplomacy led by her chief minister, the ‘blue-water’ Tory Robert Harley, in opposition to the Whigs’ continental strategy. Newman recognises that the SSC, established two years before the treaty,  was ‘created to address Britain’s national debt’ and the prospect of the future Asiento ‘bolstered the perceived value of the stock’, which was underwritten at 6% by the Treasury. The scheme was a response to Queen Anne’s appeal to Parliament in 1710 that ‘the Navy, and other offices, are burdened with heavy debt which so far affect the public service that I must earnestly desire you to find some way to answer these demands’[[13]].  What Newman does not address, however—having detailed the scale of royal and governmental involvement in the venture—is the longstanding debate over whether, in financial terms, the South Sea Company’s involvement in the slave trade amounted to very much at all.

The Queen's Speech, 1710

This issue has recently been examined in detail in relation to the Church Commissioners and their Queen Anne’s Bounty fund. In short, the evidence strongly suggests that the 1712 ‘investment’ in the SSC was in fact a forced conversion of holders of public debt into SSC shareholders. This is borne out by the 1723 division of the company’s shares, prompted by debt subscribers’ demands to separate the risky trading ventures of the ‘money subscriber’ from the secure government annuities. The monarch’s and the government’s holdings remained in the form of fixed SSC annuities, ultimately paid by the Exchequer, while the tradable SSC stock—representing only around 10 per cent of the company’s capital—generated what was described as ‘a paltry return’ from goods trading rather than from slave trading [[14]]. Nevertheless, the SSC was responsible for transporting an estimated 34,000 slaves to Spanish South America, representing 1.64% of slaves delivered to Spanish South America, or 0.32% of the total transatlantic slave trade over the period 1525-1867 [[15]].

Newman also points out that the public revenue, and hence the monarch’s Civil List, was partly funded by ‘custom taxes on slave-produced sugar’ and that the royal family liked eating sugar: in the case of George II, apparently 110 lbs of sugar in November 1758 alone. She notes that ‘sugar had emerged as the most valuable British import, funnelling more tax revenue into the Exchequer annually than any other commodity’ without drawing out the distinction that sugar was not subject to excise tax as opposed to spirits, wine and tobacco which were taxed under both customs and excise to a higher yield. Moreover, her analysis does not recognise that the economic gain was far exceeded by the cost of defending the colonial sugar plantations and that the customs revenue went on military costs rather than enriching the monarchy, as per the Sugar Act 1764. Indeed, one suggestion in this contested history is that sugar, at its peak, contributed no more than 2.5% to the British economy [[16]].

Newman’s later chapter turns to abolition, but the account is ultimately unsatisfactory, placing disproportionate emphasis on figures who were not central to bringing abolition about. Sir William Dolben’s 1788 Slave Trade Act, for example, is presented as having been prompted by Olaudah Equiano, a West African former slave, rather than as a measure shepherded by William Wilberforce, driven through the Commons by William Pitt’s political threats, and skilfully forced through the Lords by Charles Stanhope. Regulation was seen at the time as an interim step towards full abolition, but progress was thwarted by fears provoked by the French Revolution of 1789 and the slave revolts in St. Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. The remarkable oratory of Wilberforce, Pitt and Fox failed to convince the sullen majority in the Commons until Pitt led the momentous debate of 1792 asking ‘how is the enormous evil ever to be eradicated’[?] [[17]]. This secured the first Commons majority in favour of abolition - albeit ‘gradual’ - an event Newman reduces to the observation that the motion ‘passed the Commons but was subsequently defeated in the House of Lords’.

Newman notes, correctly, that George III’s public position on abolition was neutral, but she nevertheless suggests that the royal family as a whole was strongly opposed to freedom, citing in particular the active defence of slavery by his son, Prince William, Duke of Clarence, later William IV. Far less attention is given to contrary evidence: the possible abolitionist sympathies of Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (the 6th son and 9th child of George III), and the clear abolitionist positions of George III’s nephew and son-in-law, William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and of Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales and the estranged wife of George IV.

Others have concluded that the ‘king’s concern for order and stability, and his desire to protect the strength of the British Empire against a backdrop of revolutionary changes in Europe and America, disposed him towards maintaining the status quo in regard to slavery’ although he exhibited clear contradictions that were also ‘inherent in the views and behaviour of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the issue of slavery’[[18]].

The tortuous and difficult political route from the Regulated Slave Trade Act 1788 and the 1792 resolution through to the Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Act 1806, the Slave Trade Act 1807, and finally to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 is not really covered by Newman either. The final ‘buying off’ of the opposition by the £20 million compensation, then about 40% of annual public spending, is dismissed by her as failing to compensate slaves when abolitionists of the time thought it a huge price worth paying to end ‘that atrocious traffic in human beings … the desolation of Africa and the blackest stain upon civilized Europe’, as Albert, Prince Consort described it [[19]]. That compensation, in conjunction with the Royal Navy’s costs in enforcement from 1815, has been described as ‘the most costly international moral action … in modern history’[[20]] at nearly 2% of GDP for sixty years, or about £3.47 trillion of today’s economy. It would appear that Newman is inviting Britain to repeat the gesture.

View of English Harbour, Antigua. Thomas Major 1756.

George III Collection. Royal Archives.

A historian looking over the ‘documentary record that stretches across four centuries’ should bear in mind, for example, that the last woman legally burnt alive in Britain as a witch was executed in 1727 and the practice abolished in 1735, and the last man inhumanely ‘hung, drawn and quartered’ died in 1782 and the practice was abolished as late as 1870. The immorality of slavery, and indeed the modern concept of human or natural rights, were themselves relatively recent entrants into the political lexicon, emerging with real force only in the late eighteenth century. The more interesting historical question is therefore why such ideas arose so abruptly in British political consciousness in the 1770s and 1780s - a question that does not fall within Newman’s analytical framework, given her determination to assemble evidence in support of a pre-established case.

This results in an inevitably inconsistent and contradictory narrative. On the one hand, the monarchs are portrayed as leading government and personally enriching themselves from slave trading. Oon the other hand, the monarchs are said to have failed to deploy royal prerogative against ‘parliament’s avowed dominance’, while simultaneously being reduced to a ‘symbolic linchpin of the eighteenth-century British Empire’, obliged to remain ‘above the political fray, as [their] constitutional position required’.

Newman’s partisan account is reminiscent of only having a hammer and seeing problems as nails. Contested events are often presented as settled facts, novel interpretations are treated as established narrative, and the focus remains narrowly fixed on the British transatlantic trade, largely detached from its broader Atlantic and global context. While the UK edition would also have benefited from more careful proofreading—not least the inclusion of footnote numbers in the text—the book’s trajectory is clear from the outset, culminating in the claim that after abolition ‘generations … would pass as free people of African ancestry waited for the British sovereign to acknowledge and atone …’. Newman has long argued that ‘it’s time for the British royal family to make amends for centuries of profiting from slavery’ [[21]]. Whether one accepts that conclusion depends less on the evidentiary record than on the prior assumptions brought to it - assumptions that this book does little to interrogate.

The Crown and its governments, over the period 1561-1838, did licence and occasionally invest in slave trading, did tax commodities produced by slave labour, and did look to seize territory characterised by plantation slavery. The Royal Navy undoubtedly used slave labour for building and running its two main dockyards in Antigua and Jamaica, impressed both freemen and former slaves into service, and protected commercial shipping in the Caribbean - alongside the Navy’s later role in slave trade suppression. None of this is hidden, nor was it exceptional among European maritime crowns or governments in the periods concerned.  The Crown and its governments sometimes profited from these activities, but in the British case they more often did not, operating within a system that, as Adam Smith famously concluded, “derives nothing but loss from the dominion” [[22]]. Whether there was any overall economic gain remains highly contested, and there must also be limits to how far present circumstances can realistically be attributed to decisions taken generations or centuries earlier.

Professor Newman of Virginia University, a historian of Atlantic slavery, may care to reflect on the fact, as Eltis points out, that most slaves were born into servitude and, in the US case,

‘fewer than half a million captive Africans arrived via the maritime slave trade over 250 years. But by 1865 at least 10 million people had experienced slavery on the North American mainland. More than 90% of them were born into bondage, rather than captured, and then sold’ [5].

None of this excuses the actions or moral failings of the British Crown and its governments when judged by modern standards. It does, however, raise a legitimate question as to why culpability for the atrocities of the Atlantic - and indeed Indian Ocean - slave systems is not more evenly or comparatively examined across the full range of state powers involved.

Article:

The saga of the Benin bronzes has taken a new turn. Readers may recall that these beautiful and sinister brass objects were seized by British forces in 1897, and subsequently ended up in museums across Europe. One is the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, which decided to return 116 bronzes to Nigeria. No valuation was done – it was “too difficult”, said the relevant university official.

The process was held up when it became unclear where in Nigeria the bronzes would go, whether they would be safe, and even who would own them. The lucky owner, it later emerged, would be the Oba of Benin in person, the successor of the slave-trading monarch from whom the blood-stained objects were confiscated.

The University of Cambridge has nevertheless just announced that it “has transferred legal ownership … under a management agreement with the Benin Royal Palace." The University website carries a bland and sanctimonious video by the Museum’s director, Professor Nicholas Thomas, skating over the circumstances of 1897 and the tyranny of the then Oba.

The Observer quotes him as saying that “We take no view of where [the bronzes] go” – an irresponsible attitude for a museum curator. He claims in his video that “Everyone I’ve spoken to across Cambridge” agrees.

But he has not spoken to descendants of slaves sold by the Oba’s ancestors for the metal to make the bronzes. They object strongly to gifting them to the present Oba. A university committee decided that their wishes were irrelevant and did not even bother to inform them. They’re not in Cambridge, of course, so they don’t count.

By the mid-19th century India was becoming industrialised, particularly in the production of textiles (cotton and jute), coal mining and engineering. The emergence of large factories in Bombay, Ahmedabad and Calcutta created new forms of labour. However, in these earliest factories large numbers of women and children worked long hours in unsafe environments for low wages.

In 1874, the attention of the Secretary of State for India, then Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (later Conservative prime minister 1886-92 and 1895-1902) was directed by a question in the House of Commons to the dangers faced by children in the expanding Indian cotton industry. Salisbury pointed out to the Government of Bombay the need for an inquiry and possible legislation. A Commission was duly appointed in March 1875. In India, social reformers, such as Sorabejee Shapurjee Bengallee, the prominent 19th-century Parsi philanthropist and journalist, who was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council, having observed working-class movements in Britain, had begun campaigning for better working conditions in factories, and reforms in India to mirror those in Britain. While the Commission was sitting, in 1875 the famous Christian evangelical social reformer Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the 7th earl of Shaftesbury, pressed the case in the House of Lords for legislation in India.

Another group who were very keen to improve factory conditions in India – but for different reasons - were textile mill owners in Lancashire and organisations like the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. They favoured the reform of Indian factory conditions that would likely increase costs of production and make Indian cotton textiles less competitive with their own products. The Commission’s report addressed issues such as safety of machinery, age of child workers, their hours of work and holidays, sanitation, ventilation and the need for legislation. Most of their recommendations were accepted and a factories bill was introduced in the Council of the Governor-General of India in 1879 and passed in 1881.

This 1881 Factory Act covered textile factories employing more than 100 workers. It prohibited the employment of children below the age of 7, whilst those between 7 and 12 years of age were prohibited from working for more than 9 hours a day. It also specified a weekly holiday. Though the Act focused on the employment of children, it indirectly influenced the working conditions of adults. It addressed safe working practices to prevent accidents and hazardous machinery had to be fenced off. It appointed Inspectors of factories to ensure compliance with the Act.

There were obvious limitations to the legislation. As it applied only to factories employing more than 100 workers, it left out smaller establishments. It did not formally regulate the working hours of adults. There were very few factory inspectors. They only had limited powers: hence there was inadequate enforcement of its provisions. The penalties were also weak. Nevertheless, the 1881 Act established the principle that the Indian state had a duty to protect workers, especially children. It served as the foundation of future factory laws that progressively improved conditions. It created an institutional framework to monitor and enforce those laws, and also raised public and political awareness about the plight of industrial workers. It linked the conditions of industrial workers in Britain and India.

The inadequacies of this Act were soon apparent and the Bombay Government established a Commission in 1884, including Bengallee, to make further recommendations. Among the submissions made to the Commission was a letter from the Chairman of the Millhands’ Association containing signatures of 5,500 Indian mill operatives. Its proposals in the following year included improving sanitary provisions, raising the minimum age for the employment of children to 9 and restricting the hours of female labour. It led to the appointment of a national Commission in 1890, including several Indian members, whose recommendations resulted in the 1891 Factory Act. This extended the operation of the legislation to factories employing more than 20 workers; increased the minimum age of employment for children from 7 to 9; restricted the employment of women to 11 hours per day; and ensured proper ventilation in factories.

There were no further legislative changes in India until 1911. In the twenty years after 1891 the number of factories in India increased from 656 (1892) to 2403 in 1911. Indian factory conditions were inquired into by the Freer-Smith Committee, appointed by the British government in 1906, and the Factory Labour Committee formed in 1907. Following their recommendations, the Factory Act 1911 was passed. This limited the working day for men to twelve hours. The number of hours worked by women was unchanged, but they were prescribed a rest break of 90 minutes. All workers were given a half-hour break. Children’s hours were reduced to 6 per day. There were several provisions regarding health and safety which was to be more effectively inspected.

India was one of the founder members of the League of Nations in 1919 and joined the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in the same year. Two of the Conventions promoted by the ILO relating to hours of work and night work for young persons were adopted. In the case of hours of work, though the ILO recommended an 8-hour day and a 48-hour working week, it was accepted that India would retain a 60-hour week. Similarly, though the ILO restricted the employment of all young people under 18 for night work, it was accepted that in India girls would be barred, but boys could work at night.

After the Great War inflation rose rapidly and serious strikes took place including in the cotton mills at Bombay, Ahmedabad and Cawnpore. The workers demanded higher wages and lower hours of work and the mill owners eventually conceded. Prior to 1920 there was little co-ordination between the central and provincial governments on matters concerned with labour, and official efforts at mediation in trade disputes were virtually unknown. Indian participation in the ILO and the increasing interest shown by the Indian public in issues connected with labour persuaded the Government of India in 1920 to establish a Labour Bureau. Meanwhile, the Governments of Bombay and Madras appointed Commissioners of Labour. Their success was limited, but in 1922 a new Factory Act was passed. The provisions of this Act included the prohibition of child labour below the age of 12, and restrictions on the hours of work of all adults to eleven per day and sixty per week. Women were prohibited from working at night. There were to be compulsory rest breaks, weekly holidays, and improved factory conditions.

The Workmen’s Compensation Act 1923, and the Trade Unions Act 1926, followed. The former directed employers to keep factories safe to work in, and provided compensation to workers who were injured at work. The latter, despite the opposition of employers, legalised trade unions and transformed the relationship between workers and their employers. The formation of trade unions, such as the Girni Kamgar Union, Mill Mazdoor Sangh, gave new strength to an emergent Indian urban working class. There had been organisations representing workers in the 19th century, but most of the major unions such as the Bengal Trades Union Federation and the All-India Railwaymen’s Federation, formed in 1920. The same year saw the formation of the All-India Trades’ Union Congress, modelled on the British TUC. The number of trade unions increased from 104 in 1929 to 865 in 1945.

The  economic depression that began in 1922 and that lasted for several years led Indian mill owners to reduce wages, leading to strikes. Indeed, a general strike, which lasted two months, took place in 1925, a year before the British General Strike. It ended when the Viceroy abolished an excise duty which was levied on cotton manufacturers. The years 1926 and 1927 were relatively calm but industrial disputes increased after 1928, firstly because employers introduced new working practices which meant workers had to mind more machines, and secondly because more members of the militant Workers’ and Peasants’ Party became trade union officials.

By 1929 it was apparent that the Labour Laws enacted in 1922-3 had several defects and the Government of India announced the appointment of a Royal Commission, chaired by J H Whitley, the former Speaker of the House of Commons. In 1917, in the midst of war, Whitley had chaired an inquiry in Britain that led to the establishment in many industries of joint committees, so-called Whitley Councils, of employers and workers to discuss pay and conditions. The Royal Commission contained prominent British and Indian members, and was empowered to inquire and report on conditions of labour in industrial undertakings and plantations in British India; on health, efficiency and standards of living of workers; and on the relations between employers and employees. The Report of the Whitley Commission, published in June 1931, made hundreds of recommendations relating to factories, mines, railways, dockyards and agriculture. This resulted in several important pieces of legislation including the Factories Act 1934, Payment of Wages Act 1936, Unregulated Factories Act 1937, and the Trades Disputes Act 1938 which together ensured improvements in conditions and hours of work, workmen’s compensation, payment of wages, and the handling of trade disputes.

In neighbouring Ceylon, employment legislation was introduced much later than in India as Ceylon has a largely agricultural rather than an industrial economy. The Contracts for Hire and Service Ordinance, passed in 1865, specified that a verbal contract should be regarded as a contract for hire and service for a month, and could be terminated by either party with one month’s notice. An 1889 ordinance then defined the terms ‘checkroll’, ‘employer’, ‘estate’, ‘labour’ and ‘wages’ and specified that a labourer whose name was entered on the checkroll would be regarded as being on a monthly contract.

Major legislative enactments took place only after the passing of the Indian Immigrant Labour Ordinance No.1 in 1923 which resulted in the founding of a Department of Indian Immigrant Labour. A Controller was appointed to supervise the welfare and feeding arrangements of Indian labourers during their journeys from India to estates in Ceylon. Following the introduction of the Donoughmore Constitution in 1931, when Ceylon effectively became self-governing, the Department was renamed the Labour Department and assumed additional responsibilities for industrial welfare, industrial associations and disputes, conditions, safety, wages and hours of work, inspection of factories and poor relief.

The first piece of legislation under the new constitution was the Industrial Disputes Ordinance in 1931 followed by the Workmen’s Compensation Ordinance in 1935. When unemployment rose in the 1930s an employment exchange to assist workers looking for jobs was established in Colombo followed by exchanges in outstations. A Shops Ordinance came into effect in 1939. The Wages Board Ordinance and the Maternity Benefits Ordinance were introduced in 1941. A Factories Ordinance, passed in 1942, was suspended while maximum wartime production was required. In 1944 a number of Wages Boards were set up. A separate Department of Social Services was created in 1948 to administer Poor Relief, Workmen’s Compensation, Relief of Distress and Social Insurance.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary in 1948 of the founding of original Department for Indian Immigrant Labour, shortly after independence, the Department published 25 Years of Labour Progress in Ceylon and the minister, Mr T B Jayah, declared: ‘The worker in Ceylon, in most trades, now enjoys protection in respect of minimum wages, hours of work, weekly and annual holidays; in respect of health and safety at workplaces and compensation in the event of disease, accident or death caused at work. There are protective restrictions regarding the employment of women and children; facilities are available for the adjustment of differences between managements and staff, and the Employment Exchange Service is growing from strength to strength’

It is readily apparent that prior to Indian and Ceylonese independence in 1947-8 there was already a considerable body of labour legislation, largely modelled on British statutes and practice, which had transformed the working lives of tens of millions of workers in the sub-continent and laid the foundations for further progress after independence. This aspect of the history of the empire has received scant attention and deserves much greater coverage. The fact that so many of the major labour reforms that protected workers in industrial Britain were transferred to, and implemented in industrialising India and then Cdeylon, is yet another reason to reject claims that the history of empire is a history of exploitation.

References

Blunt Sir Edward (1939) Social Service in India

Das Gupta T (1958) Nalanda Year Book

Department of Labour Ceylon (1948) 25 Years of Labour Progress in Ceylon

Dhanavel B and Praveenkumar B (2024) ‘Labour Legislation under the Colonial Period and its Post-Colonial Transitional Developments’,Journal of Law and Legal Research Department, 1(3)

Jadhav A (2019),  ‘The Role of British Legislation and the Working Class Movement in India’, International Social Sciences Review, 1(1),

Kydd J C (1920) A History of Factory Legislation in India.

Rees Sir Stanley (1945-6) The Indian Year Book

The wording on the plaque (see above) led the church to place a sign (see below) beside it and also make some unsubstantiated claims on the church website that cousin James was an “imperialist” and “involved in the scandal of the slave trade” amongst other presumed crimes. I carried out a lot of research, including in Brighton where Sayer family papers are held, and sent my detailed findings to the vicar and his Parochial Church Council (PCC).

Wimbledon Museum

Featured Image Credit: David Rose

In September 2025 the annual RAF history conference convened at the RAF Museum in Hendon, north London. At the end of one talk, when the role of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of wartime Bomber Command, was discussed, several academics in the audience stood up and began hurling insults. It showed, once again, the depth of feeling against Harris, who is held responsible for thousands of unnecessary civilian casualties.

Britain, perhaps uniquely, has an unpleasant track record of abandoning its war heroes as soon as victory is declared. Seaman coming ashore after the defeat of the Spanish Armada were left to starve. Crimean war veterans were left with pitiful pensions. Since World War II the tradition has been maintained whenever the reputation of RAF Bomber Command is raised. If one part of Britain’s role in WWII remains ‘controversial’ it is that of the RAF’s five-year-long bombing campaign.

Analysts and historians have criticised the bombing of Germany, claiming the attacks failed to reduce its war industries but instead killed so many innocent civilians. In 1963, that most controversial of historians, the late David Irving, published The Destruction of Dresden which became an international bestseller when it grossly exaggerated the number of civilian casualties and laid the blame firmly on the RAF. As a result, Dresden became the ‘Guernica’ of WWII, the city hit by German bombers during the Spanish Civil War eight years earlier. In retrospect, it is clear that Irving’s book was the first stage in his historical assault on the Allies, designed to denigrate Britain and raise sympathy for Germany.

Dozens of critics have subsequently condemned Harris for unleashing a ‘brutal and immoral’ campaign. Since 1945 approximately 430 books have been published on Bomber Command, including excellent studies of individual operations, squadrons, and outstanding air crew, but no in-depth study had examined the full effects on Germany - until now.

Fourteen years ago I attended the unveiling of the new Bomber Command memorial at Green Park in London, and spoke to many of the surviving air crew. They asked: “How could it be possible for Germany to be bombed to ruin by 1945 and yet for so many writers to claim Bomber Command had not been successful?”

In 2025 after two years of research I completed a new book ‘The Greatest Force’ which criticises previous histories and dismisses claims that the campaign was ‘ineffective, costly and even a war crime’. The evidence shows it was stunningly successful. As a research journalist and not a professional historian I thought the task would be difficult – but in truth the evidence was not difficult to find.

=

Work in German archives showed that the RAF wreaked much greater initial damage than previously assumed. I found a hefty batch of individual raid reports from as early as 1940. Even though the RAF dropped only 14,000 tons of bombs that year, the Germans were already aghast at the damage caused. These raids, said to be ‘puny’ by British aviation historians, halted 5% of German oil supplies, and devastated rail marshalling yards and canals. At that stage the RAF could muster only a few hundred twin-engine bombers. In 1944 the RAF would drop that tonnage in just three days.

What no one seems to have understood until now is the relationship of early RAF bombing to one of the worst decisions of the war. It so infuriated Hitler that it provoked him into the launch of the V-weapons programme in December 1942. Militarily worthless, the programme consumed the same resources Germany could have used to build some 40,000 new Luftwaffe aircraft. Analysis of British, American and German documents confirms that Bomber Command was the undoubted game-changer in ensuring the ultimate defeat of the Nazi regime.

First and foremost, in the teeth of all criticism, Harris was indeed correct in attacking city centres – because these were the location of the thousands of vital small workshops and factories making spare parts and components for aircraft, tanks and U-boats. Highlighted in 2015 by the Professor Phillips Payson O’Brien, the destruction of Germany’s inner-city weapons’ factories led directly to its parts and components crisis, orZulieferungskriese, which paralysed weapons production.

In the 1990s as a reporter for The European newspaper I visited many key German factories in Dortmund, Augsburg, Hamburg and Berlin, and met the last of the workers and managers who had experienced the hailstorm of Allied bombs. There can be no doubt about the devastating impact of bombing. In each raid approximately 200 factories, large and small, were destroyed. Each Luftwaffe aircraft required 4,000-5,000 parts and a loss in the supply of a handful could hold up production for days and weeks.

Secondly, if Harris had attacked only big assembly plants in precision raids - as his critics believe he should - the Germans would have needed only small numbers of anti-aircraft guns and fighter aircraft to defend them. But by attacking cities and other targets across the whole of Germany Harris compelled the Nazis to build a gigantic and fully nationwide defence infrastructure. That system soon extended far beyond German borders into Norway, the Netherlands, Italy and France.

In March 1943, in the First Battle of the Ruhr, Harris mounted 16 heavy raids against the largest industrial cities. He destroyed in one three-month period no less than 43% of the region’s metal-working industries – an extraordinary outcome. Proper scheduling across Germany soon ceased to exist.

Equally unrecognised or quantified, the raids triggered a unique, additional stream of indirect effects which soon undermined Germany’s capacity to fight. By 1944 two million men and women were diverted from frontline duties or productive work in factories to man the thousands of anti-aircraft batteries and to clear the rubble across the Reich – the manpower equivalent of dozens of army divisions. During air raids on German cities entire ammunition trains exploded, devastating a sizeable area. The metal and aluminium used in manufacturing anti-aircraft ammunition alone could have created 30,000 fighter aircraft.

Thirdly, in a desperate bid to save their cities, 80% of the Wehrmacht’s deadly, rapid-firing 88mm anti-tank guns, and up to 85% of Luftwaffe fighters, were hurriedly withdrawn from the Eastern front.

Without this crucial anti-tank capability, the task of the Red Army and Allied armoured forces became a great deal easier. Such diversions made D-Day possible. There were only around 120 ‘88s’ present in Normandy in 1944. On Omaha Beach on D-Day, where the Americans suffered their heaviest casualties and came close to withdrawal, there were only two 88mm guns. What if there had been 20?

Fourthly, vast volumes of heavy ammunition that could have blunted Soviet offensives in the East were instead wastefully expended at Allied aircraft. It took on average between 5 and 20 rounds to knock out one T-34 tank on the Eastern front, but merely to damage an Allied bomber required 1,500-2,000 shells, and sometimes many more.

Fifthly, the removal of most twin-engine aircraft from battle fronts eliminated the Luftwaffe’s aerial reconnaissance capability, with astonishing results. All Allied landings from North Africa to Sicily, Salerno, Anzio, the south of France and D-Day, and the two great Soviet ground offensives of Bagration and Oder-Neisse - came as a total surprise to the Germans. Under the clear blue skies of the Mediterranean highly vulnerable convoys of up to 600 ships moved for days on end towards occupied coastlines undetected.

One fact critics of Harris have long overlooked is that only 52% of Bomber Command sorties were directed at urban areas. Much of the remainder were devoted to aiding Allied navies and armies. The Royal Navy was particularly well served by Bomber Command during the war – even though many of its officers thought its operations were ineffective against the Kriegsmarine.

Throughout the war Harris was the outspoken supporter of sea mining from the air – a role the RAF largely took over from the Royal Navy. At night and at low level near to enemy coasts, bombers dropped thousands of sea mines at great risk to crews. These not only crippled U-boat training operations; they may have sunk the 80 German submarines whose fate is unknown.

Research in 2018 by Jon Loftus at Queen Mary, University of London, reveals that Bomber Command did indeed have a crucial role in throttling the flow of U-boats from Germany into the Atlantic. A Royal Navy report admitted: ‘Only 5 U-Boats entered the Atlantic in May 1943, the reduced numbers assessed to be a result of Bomber Command attacks on German industry and mine-laying in the Baltic’ [my italics]. Mr Loftus concludes: ‘The decisive factor that led to Allied victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, and indeed the war, was manufacturing capability’.

Owing to bombing, the Germans decided in late 1943 to construct their advanced Type-21 U-boats in eight prefabricated sections at inland factories. These would then be floated down waterways and assembled quickly at shipyards such as Kiel and Hamburg. But, in practice, none of the sections fitted properly and by the end of the war only one Type-21 had entered service.

The RAF also sank or disabled all but one of the Kriegsmarine’s larger warships. Along with Coastal Command, RAF and USAAF aircraft were able to help bottle up the 300,000 Wehrmacht marooned in Norway and prevent their movement back to Germany. The heavy toll taken on Germany’s coastal fleet from mines also prevented any evacuation of the 200,000 troops stuck in the Courland Peninsula in western Latvia.

The British Army also benefitted from Bomber Command. It was air operations that first prevented a total rout in North Africa against Rommel. In the Mediterranean, Italy and Normandy, Bomber Command wrecked many frontline units of the Wehrmacht. Starting in the Western Desert in 1942 Air Marshal Tedder saturated narrow corridors of heavily defended German lines with bombs and tens of thousands of anti-personnel mines, to the huge relief of advancing Allied troops.

There is little doubt that the RAF raids on cities in northern Italy in mid-1943 forced Italy out of the war, thus compelling the Germans to station 23 full divisions in the peninsula.

In addition to the purely military impact, the mere threat of British bombing prompted one of the largest construction programmes in history: a vast series of underground factories, bunkers, flak towers and U-boat pens was built.

To make the Atlantic Wall bomb-proof around 1.2m tons of steel were used in its construction – equal to the metal required to make 20,000 Tiger tanks or 1,200 U-boats. The island of Guernsey was fortified with more than 300 gun emplacements, which absorbed 13% of the resources allocated to the Atlantic Wall.

Much of the scorn directed at Bomber Command stems from the conclusions of the post-war US Strategic Bombing Survey which concluded that the campaign had been a failure. Those claims were based most of all on information supplied by Albert Speer, Germany’s armaments minister, an untrustworthy source who was trying to defend his own reputation. On close examination, the survey was deeply flawed. As Noble Frankland, co-author of the official history of the strategic bombing campaign (The Strategic Air Offensive Against Nazi Germany 1939-45, 4 vols.) pointed out, the results relied on thousands of questionnaires being sent to factories, many of them locations which had long been destroyed. Its inspectors were also forbidden to enter the one third of Germany now run by the Soviets.

Speer claimed to have created a manufacturing ‘miracle’ during the height of the bombing. Long believed uncritically by many historians, this is an absurdity. The thousands of aircraft he told Hitler had been built never appeared at Luftwaffe airfields. The few that did were often barely flyable.

As the Canadian historian David L. Bashow summed it up: “By 1945, Allied bombing had destroyed virtually all of Germany’s coke, ferroalloy and synthetic rubber industries, 95 per cent of its fuel, hard coal and rubber capacity, 90 per cent of its steel capacity, 75 per cent of its truck producing capacity, and 70 per cent of its tyre production.”

Although the USAAF’s attacks on oil installations in late 1944 have long been hailed as the foremost of crippling blows, strong evidence suggests that it was the RAF’s so-called Second Battle of the Ruhr, a largely anti-transport blitz against canals and railways which finally strangled coal supplies and brought Germany to a halt in a matter of weeks.

It did not matter what Germany could or could not manufacture - if they could not move it to frontlines the materiel was irrelevant. The same point was made by Norman Stone to account for the Russian defeat on the Eastern front in the First World War: there had been a Russian failure of distribution rather than of production in 1916-17.

In any case, by mid-1944 Germany’s need for oil had diminished rapidly as it moved from offensive operations to one of dogged defence using weapons such as panzerfausts, land mines and mortar shells that required little in the way of gasoline.

If the general history of Bomber Command requires total revision so too does the conventional interpretation of the infamous raid on Dresden in February 1945. Dresden’s Zeiss Ikon factories were the last to be manufacturing vital gunsights and rangefinders for tanks and artillery. Far from being a ‘war crime’, the raid was justified on these grounds alone.

In Sir Antony Beevor’s book ‘Berlin: The Downfall 1945’, published in 2007, he writes that ‘Dresden’s population was swollen by up to 300,000 refugees from the east’. But there were very few refugees in the city: the Russians were only 60 miles away and, as a result, no one disembarked from the few trains passing through, en route to the south of Germany.

Consequently, the death toll was around 10,500, far fewer than the 65,000 killed in Hamburg or the 250,000 in Warsaw, and far fewer than almost all current estimates of casualties in Dresden. Interestingly, it is probable that the raid saved more lives than it took. Why? Because some 12,000 slave workers fled the city after the raids and, in the chaos, survived the war.

Dresden in 1945

Tragically, RAF Bomber Command air crew losses throughout the war were grievous: 44 per cent of the 125,000 did not survive. So great were the fatalities in the early years that one airman, Tom Jefferson DSO AFC of 18 Sqn. went from Sergeant to Squadron Leader in only 10 weeks.

There should be little doubt that the bombing campaigns by the RAF over five long years - and the USAAF for the last 15 months of the war - were, for all their setbacks, the principal reason for Germany’s military defeat. No Allied military commander, including those from the Red Army, inflicted more direct damage on Germany than did Air Chief Marshal Harris. I forecast that a future generation in Britain will come to realise the significance of this tragic but necessary campaign. I also hope that when Harris’s reputation is discussed again at an RAF history conference it will be with a greater appreciation of his achievements and of the scale of the problems he faced.

Marcus Gibson is a former news reporter and columnist with The Financial Times. Earlier, he worked at The European newspaper and on BBC Radio News in London. He is the author of The Greatest Force. How RAF Bomber Command Became the No. 1 Factor in Defeating Nazi Germany (2025) www.rafbook.co.uk

In 1989, Edward Said pointed out that the wealth, the comfort, and the complacent English worldview of the Bertram family in Mansfield Park rests upon their ownership of a sugar plantation. He charged that this fact goes unacknowledged in Austen’s “uninflected, unreflective citations of Antigua” (93).

This moral shortcoming was not evident, or at least not worth mentioning, for earlier critics. From the time of its publication in 1814 until modern times, no one raised the issue of slavery in Mansfield Park, as we know by examining Brian Southam’s 1968 compilation of Austen reviews and commentary. There are only two references to Sir Thomas Bertram’s trip to the West Indies, and then it is only mentioned as a plot point. A 1927 review made the typically unfavourable comparison of the sparkling Mary Crawford with the priggish heroine Fanny Price but called Sir Thomas Bertram nothing worse than a “worthy old bore”: https://www.lonamanning.ca/blog/cmp232-a-100-year-old-review-of-mansfield-park . Said is credited with bringing the issue of slavery to the forefront, although Avrom Fleischman (1967, 15-8) and others had discussed the novel in the context of the slave trade before him.

Some major scholars such as Harold Bloom (2009, 65) pushed back against the notion that Mansfield Park could only be understood by coming to grips with its colonial backdrop. His rear-guard action has been overtaken by those who believe, in contradiction to Said, that the novel “contains a caustic assault on the moral basis of British colonial slavery” (Wood, 298). If so, Austen devoted far more energy to assailing absentee clergymen, private theatricals, and mercenary marriage, than she did to slavery. Her critiques of slavery, according to Wood, are “nuanced and ironic.”

As it happens, there were numerous novels of the era (to say nothing of essays and poetry) which were anti-slavery and not at all nuanced. Some novelists dropped scathing editorials in their books, as in The Microcosm (1801). The virtuous characters inveighed against it, as in What Has Been (1801), or opposing sides debated the issue, as in Edward (1798) or The Bristol Heiress (1809). Even the children’s book, The Barbadoes Girl (1816), features a frank discussion between parents and their children about the financial and social consequences of emancipation and the guilt of the planter class. The last three titles would be far more illuminating for a university course than Mansfield Park—that is, if the educational aim is to explore the guilty inheritance of slavery and empire.

On the other hand, if a teacher were so heterodox today as to teach Mansfield Park merely as a great novel, then it would be useful for the students to understand that the West Indies were invaluable as a plot device for writers of the era. It was exceedingly common for characters to exit stage left to the West Indies or stage right to the East Indies when the plot called for it, as in Miriam (1808) and A Winter in London (1806). Austen had to remove Sir Thomas so that Henry Crawford could work his seductive wiles on Maria and Julia. Ireland is not distant enough, while the Napoleonic Wars sealed off Europe. That leaves the East or West Indies as a plausible destination.

It might also surprise students to learn that West Indian plantations were sometimes presented as a fact of life. A hero saves the father of the girl he loves from a slave uprising in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801), and no-one pops up to say that the planter had it coming. Some planters wanted to ameliorate the conditions of their workers, as in Mary Brunton’s Discipline (1814).

As for Austen’s supposed nuance, it would take a great deal of nuance to counterbalance what Austen actually says. When we examine every passageabout Antigua, we find only narrative solicitude for Sir Thomas; reminders of the hardships and risks he must undergo, including the dangers of the West Indian climate, the possibility of shipwreck, or the risk of capture by the French. The “good” characters (his son Edmund and his niece Fanny Price) worry about his welfare, while his absence is welcomed by his daughters.

Austen doesn’t tell us exactly why Sir Thomas had to go to Antigua or what he did there. Fleishman suggests that a reader of Austen’s time would have surmised that Sir Thomas was “seeing to it that his slaves did not die so readily of malnutrition, overwork, and brutality” to compensate for the end of the slave trade and its cargoes of new workers (17). But we don’t know.

Modern critics, undaunted by the absence of an explicit anti-slavery message, have mined the book for symbolism. To take one example, the self-important Mrs. Norris identifies an apricot tree as a “Moor Park” when defending the quality of its fruit in a squabble with Dr. Grant. The Moor Park was a popular variety of apricot (Hatch, 120). Kelly believes that Austen’s readers would see “Moor,” then think “Othello,” then think “black man,” then think “chattel slavery,” and thus be reminded that slavery is a moral abomination (179). But if Kelly is correct, surely the most remarkable thing about Mansfield Park is not the anti-slavery message, readily and more explicitly available elsewhere, but that Austen was employing unheard-of subtlety and a type of indirect allusion which no other novelist begins to approach for decades (if ever?)

Some critics have argued that it is the absence of any mention of slavery which makes the anti-slavery message all the more powerful. In that respect,many critics will tell you that Sir Thomas met a question about the slave trade with a “dead silence,” but this is a misreading of the text. It’s true that Austen does not tell us what Fanny Price asked or Sir Thomas answered, but this is not, as we have seen, because the topic was too sensitive. He did respond to her question and would have been “pleased to have been enquired of further,” but Fanny was reluctant to continue because of the “dead silence” of the other family members. The “dead silence” is more likely intended to illustrate the unfilial behaviour of the Bertram girls, who are not interested in listening to their father hold forth about anything. Heroine Fanny, on the other hand, takes “pleasure” in the “information” Sir Thomas gives her and says: “I love to hear my uncle talk of the West Indies. I could listen to him for an hour together. It entertains me more than many other things have done.” Which is a very nuanced way indeed of saying, “I am utterly horrified by what I hear about our complicity in slavery.”

Well then, if slavery is not the theme of Mansfield Park, what is? I suggest that Austen’s theme is education. Mansfield Park belongs to a sub-genre of the sentimental novel concerned with the consequences of faulty education. Other examples include Twin Sisters, or the Effects of Education (1788), The Advantages of Education (1793), Elinor, or the Errors of Education (1796), and The Corinna of England (1809), a book which also features a prim hero and heroine who disapprove of private theatricals.

Female education is a theme that recurs throughout Mansfield Park. At the conclusion, the narrator dwells at some length on the regret and remorse Sir Thomas feels—not about owning human beings—but over the mismanagement of his daughters’ education and its scandalous outcome. In contrast, in the conclusion of Persuasion (1817) the narrator praises the hero for helping the widowed Mrs. Smith regain her West Indian income. Captain Wentworth helped “by writing for her, acting for her, and seeing her through all the petty difficulties of the case with the activity and exertion of a fearless man and a determined friend.” There is nary a hint that the money is blood-soaked. Jane Austen is known for her wry humour and ironic style, but who could seriously entertain the proposition that Austen really meant to fault Wentworth for his actions? And again, colonial fortunes provided a deus ex machina windfall in many other novels, such as in Seraphina (1809), Modern Times (1814), and even Jane Eyre (1847).

Jane Austen had no commercial or artistic incentive to write a story filled with ironic subversion from beginning to end, to present us with a family who live off the avails of slavery but suffer no consequences as a result. Where is the satisfaction in being assured that a slave-owner finds peace of mind when his son marries Fanny in the end? For me, the logical conclusion is that Austen did not intend this kind of message or this kind of novel. For others, the novel must be re-interpreted as a sustained experiment in irony, or failing that, be rejected as unworthy of inclusion in the canon.

My interpretation will be unpopular with modern admirers who embrace a conception of Austen as a woman at odds with her time. I, for one, have no difficulty in stipulating that she opposed slavery in real life, just as her brothers did. But unlike some of her contemporaries, she did not choose to make it a central feature of her novels.

Bibliography

• Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. Ed. John Wiltshire. Cambridge: CUP 2005.
• Boulukos, George E. “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 39:3, 2006, pp. 361–83.
• Fleishman, Avrom. “Mansfield Park in Its Time.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 22:1, 1967, pp. 1–18.
• Hatch, Peter J. The Fruits and Fruit Trees of Monticello. UP Virginia, 1998.
• Kelly, Helena. Jane Austen, the Secret Radical. Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.
• Kiek, Miranda. “Celebrity--thou art translated! Corinne in England” in Celebrity Across the Channel, 1750–1850. Eds Anais Pedron and Claire Siviter. U of Delaware Press, 2021.
• Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel,1800-1900. Verso, 1998.
• S.A.G. “Mansfield Park—Jane Austen’s Worst Novel,” Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Jan. 20, 1927, p. 2.
• Said, Edward W. “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Culture and Imperialism. Knopf Doubleday, 2012.
• Southam, Brian (ed). Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage. Routledge & K. Paul: Barnes & Noble, 1987.
• Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. OUP Oxford, 2002.

Lona Manning (MA Res U of York) is an independent researcher and writer. She lives in Canada. Her research for this article was first published on her blog, “Clutching My Pearls.” She studies the forgotten sentimental novels of the long eighteenth century, which are a rich trove of information about the social attitudes of the time. www.lonamanning.ca

Ogot’s intellectual hospitality was rooted in his trust in the disciplinary power of historical method. This, in his view, required of all serious historians, no matter what their origin, the same rational distrust of all evidence. Neither the nationality nor the gender of the historian mattered. It was enough that she or he stuck to the discipline, tempered by the sympathy of which, again, all people are capable. None of us, he believed, could claim any superior understanding of a particular people or situation in the past; all pasts are strange to all who come after. None could re-enter even their ancestors’ world; the context would be foreign however familiar it seemed.

Time changes all contexts; no context is ever repeated. Nor are there timeless characteristics. Indeed, the most alien pasts may be those that are supposedly our own; they have more expectations of familiarity to betray. All in all, therefore, anybody, so Ogot assured us, may study any past. Africans can as well study European history as Europeans study African history, gays may study straights, straights gays; women may characterise kings, men understand queens. Rigorous historical method, the constant awareness that one may have failed to grasp inner meanings, together with human sympathy, should get the better of ignorance, preconception, and prejudice. Nobody, finally, can claim to own any part of the past, let alone fence out competitors.¹

As a member of an imperial nation (and, in the late 1950s, a former practising imperialist when serving as a conscript junior officer in the King’s African Rifles) I warm to Ogot’s awareness of imperialism’s inescapable contradictions. There was always an inherent racism that, for instance, deliberately tried to humiliate the research student Ogot and his new wife Grace when they were looking for a flat in London.² On the other hand, Ogot repeatedly records the unselfish, tutorial rather than paternalist, devotion with which individual Britons tried to open up future opportunities for their African students.

He first became aware of this responsible aspect of the imperial relationship as a boy, when seeing the work of Olive Owen among Luo women. She is still remembered as mikayi, the wife of Archdeacon Owen who was himself nicknamed the ‘Archdemon of Kavirondo’ by white settlers angered by his championship of African interests (My Footprints in the Sands of Time, 18). Ogot was most conspicuously grateful to Carey Francis, legendary headmaster of the Alliance High School in the 1940s and ‘50s. Francis was both big and humble enough to admit in front of the school that his own, now outdated, mathematical method was inferior to the newer method taught by his junior, the recently recruited African maths master (Footprints, 60-65, 70-73, 93, 86). In his autobiography Ogot is similarly appreciative of others who were driven by their proper concern for the uncertain future awaiting an African student or junior colleague. He remembers, in particular, Professors Roland Oliver at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and Kenneth Ingham at Makerere (Footprints, 49, 86-7, 95-6, 99-106, 131).

Ogot’s ability to appreciate the liberal humanity of individual Britons, despite his often insulting encounters with other Europeans more anxious to assert their insecure sense of racial superiority, stemmed from his own humane intelligence. He had a wonderful capacity to appreciate the equal value of both the local and the global, both inherited and acquired knowledges and culture, both oral and literate wisdoms. He saw the need to steer between the twin arrogances of Eurocentrism and Négritude (Footprints, 538-9). He constantly strove to create a teaching curriculum that imparted respect for both African and global history. Neither, he felt, could be fully understood without the other.

My reading of his autobiography, My Footprints in the Sands of Time, leads me to believe that Ogot’s concern for a creative balance between ancestral wisdoms and those of strangers followed from his youthful enthusiasm for English literature and European history more generally, and his reciprocal determination to see that, while they enlightened him, they would never dominate his thoughts. In 1946 he entered Maseno School at the impressionable age of 17. It was there that he ‘discovered the beauty and wealth of English literature.’ He ‘voraciously read’ nineteenth-century novelists and poets; Shakespeare ‘really captured [his] soul’ and entered his ‘everyday vocabulary’. Still more importantly, Ogot the teenage scholar was not only bewitched by the literature but remained critically alert enough to realise that his beloved poets and novelists, not least Dickens, portrayed an England that was nothing like as idyllic as the England taught by his history teachers. Ogot already had the historian’s ability to discern underlying, perhaps darker, truths beneath the often-glittering surface of publicly available evidence. The schoolboy questioned the self-interest of his sources long before receiving any professional training in the historical method on which he since placed such importance.

The evidence to which the young man applied his critical mind at Maseno was imperially British. When going on to Makerere and St. Andrews University in Scotland, Ogot continued to cherish ‘a rich and varied Western intellectual menu, especially the philosophical and historical debates. I soaked myself in Western philosophy from Socratic dialogues to Logical Positivism.’ (Footprints, 539) Upon receiving a Litt.D., honoris causa, from Kenyatta University in 1995, he called for the University to be full of the ‘intellectual ferment’ that in the Poland of the sixteenth century had inspired Nicolaus Copernicus to insist on a heliocentric universe. Ogot continued in this globally ecumenical vein to exhort Kenya’s scholars to share the spirit of adventure shown by the seventeenth-century English scientist Isaac Newton, who had imagined himself as a boy playing with pebbles on the seashore ‘while the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.’

That is the point. Only a broad perspective could make it thinkable for African history to be world history and world history African. Ogot was entirely consistent. When in 1957, at the age of 28, he received a colonial government bursary for the fourth year at St Andrews that enabled him to take a BA Honours degree, he was ‘determined, in the words of the University motto, “Ever to be the best”, and not to put to shame the lineage of which I came’ (Footprints, 85). The two ambitions, widely global and intimately local, reinforced each other; they did not clash. After years spent poring over printed texts in university libraries Ogot went on to justify the use of oral tradition in his SOAS doctoral research into the precolonial history of the Kenya Luo. Like virtually all other Kenyans, they had spent centuries living nowhere near Kenya. He asked why anyone should think oral history strange or second-rate: after all, the historians of early medieval England also had to rely on the oral traditions set down in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.³

The methods of African history were not suspiciously untried but reassuringly proven by age—if, again, African history was also world history. In Ogot’s view the world was full of equivalents, some clearly significant, some not so obviously so. The Anglo-Saxons were almost certainly of less importance to early medieval Europe than the Luo peoples were to the changing history of precolonial East Africa. But this did not diminish the Saxons’ significance for African historical method.

Ogot was similarly insistent that only widespread, all-inclusive history was good enough for teaching the history of their migrant nation to Kenya’s young. It had to be a history that not only did the obvious in stressing African as much as European achievement, precolonial as much as the colonial past, but also, less obviously but every bit as importantly, had to be about every Kenyan, not just the most powerful or articulate (Footprints 145-159).

To conclude, this insistence was most provocative of constructive debate when, at Atieno  Odhiambo’s and my invitation, Bethwell contributed his thoughts on what constituted Kenya’s nationalism and nationhood to our collection in 2003 on Mau Mau and Nationhood.⁴  Ogot was clear that those who took to the forests of Nyandarua and Mount Kenya were never the only heroes of freedom; nor was their memory alone sufficient to build what would always be a multicultural nation of immigrants. The ‘national project’ had to be capacious, with plenty of respectful room for all of Kenya’s many culturally creative nationalisms, all of them seeking some mastery of global, no less than colonial, modernity. Among these political groups were South Asian Kenyan trade unionists, journalists and lawyers, products of global history, just as most of Kenya’s migrants had colonised their trails across wide swathes of African history, both eastwards around the continent’s equatorial forests and southwards up the River Nile.

To insist on the teaching of African and world history in the school and university curriculum, as well as Kenya’s many-stranded national story, marks Ogot as not so much a nationalist - his natural inclination - but as a citizen, a more demanding consciousness. As an enquiring man of the world, his familiarity with its many histories of struggles for freedom made him more than a nationalist—a convinced, sternly critical, patriot, demanding that Kenya prove itself worthy of its international sovereignty.

Professor John Lonsdale is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

Notes:

1. Bethwell Allan Ogot, ‘Who, if Anyone, Owns the Past? Reflections on the Meaning of “Public History”’ (Kisumu: Anyange Press, 2010), 20-21.
2. 2Bethwell A. Ogot, My Footprints in the Sands of Time (Kisumu: Anyange Press, 2003), 106. Future references to this autobiography will be in parenthesis as Footprints and page number.
3. B. A. Ogot, ‘Oral traditions and the historian’ in Merrick Posnansky (ed.), Prelude to East African History (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 140-48; idem, History of the Southern Luo, Vol I: Migration and Settlement, 1500-1900 (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1967), 17-18.
4. Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘Mau Mau & Nationhood: The untold story’, chapter 1 in Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms, authority & Narration (Oxford: Currey; Nairobi: EAEP; Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 8-36.

This year’s Reith Lecturer is the historian and activist Rutger Bregman and his title is ‘Moral Revolution’. Given the way things work in the BBC, it comes as no surprise that a Dutchman, however charismatic, has been chosen to lecture us on modern British History. There are dozens of extremely well-qualified historians in British universities who could have spoken rather more insightfully. Nor is it surprising that in his first lecture he should have declared himself to be a social democrat. The BBC simply cannot understand real diversity of the mind and they ‘turn left’ reflexively. At the moment of Bregman’s declaration, half the audience at home will have winced, and some will have switched off. They will have winced not because they are of a different party but because no one talking about history should need or want to declare their political affiliations. The facts, presented properly and fairly, speak for themselves.

Bregman deserves credit for his second lecture, at least, on the history of British anti-slavery. It is a corrective to all the many BBC programmes and broadcasts that berate Britons, then and now, for having traded or owned slaves at a time when slavery was ubiquitous across the globe. The really important historical question, as Bregman understands, is not why the British owned slaves but why they came to see that slavery was wrong.

It’s in Bregman’s third lecture that the problems with his approach and the limitations of his knowledge become clear. For Bregman tells us that his real aim is to ignite a moral revolution in the West, and he attempts to do so in this lecture by comparing the Fabian Society, the famous socialist think tank founded in 1884, with the neo-liberal movement that emerged after the Second World War to counter the growth of state socialism. Like so much BBC history, Bregman presents it simplistically as ‘goodies versus baddies’, the joyless Sidney and Beatrice Webb versus Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. But it’s Bregman’s misunderstanding of Fabianism which is most revealing and, from the mouth of a self-declared moral reformer, most concerning.

There are the expected errors, of course. The 8-hour-day, votes for women, and public education were ideas that reached the public sphere in the 1860s and 1870s, long before the Fabian Society was founded, and were certainly not ‘utterly fringe’, apparently awaiting the Fabians to implement them, as Bregman states. The Tyneside engineers had won the 8 hour day in 1871. Elementary education was compulsory after 1880. Unsuccessful amendments to the 1867 and 1884 Reform acts had tried to enfranchise women.

Worse, Bregman ignores inconvenient - because immoral - facts about the Fabians. Mentioning by name H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw he fails to tell us that these two Fabians, along with the Webbs themselves and many more in the society, were enthusiastic eugenicists. Wells and Shaw would not just have limited the family size of those they deemed degenerate: they would, out of their own mouths, have sent them to their deaths. Nor is there anything about the Fabians later on. In 1935, after a visit to Stalin’s Potemkin villages and at a time of mass starvation and the purges in Russia, Sidney and Beatrice returned from the Soviet Union and published that classic of political and moral blindness, Soviet Communism. A New Civilisation. Bregman refers to the Fabian Society as a ‘Conspiracy of Decency’. Really?

But for a self-declared moral revolutionist Bregman’s worst failing is that he doesn’t understand either the Fabians or the other traditions of British socialism, many of which were deeply critical of Fabianism as anti-democratic, top-down, socialist elitism. The Fabians believed that by taking control of the state, pulling the right levers, and constructing the correct apparatus, they could dragoon everyone into the ideal socialist society of the future. Morality and consent had nothing to do with it: the people would be reformed whether they liked it or not by policies and structures that the Webbs thought good for them, and all in the name of socialist efficiency.

Writing in his notebook in 1912, the Christian Socialist and genuine moral reformer, R. H. Tawney, probably the most widely read and admired British socialist of the 20th century, had this to say:

‘This is where I think the Fabians are inclined to go wrong. They seem to think you can trick statesmen into a good course of action, without changing their principles, and that by taking sufficient thought society can add several cubits to its stature. It can’t, as long as it lives on the same spiritual diet. No amount of cleverness will get figs off thistles. What I want to do is to get clear in my mind what those moral assumptions or principles are, and put others in their place.’

R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) in 1915

Bregman has told us in each of his lectures that he wants just such a moral transformation, and he’s used history to exemplify it, but to put it bluntly, he’s backed the wrong horse. There was indeed a strong tradition of ethical socialism in Britain, the tradition of John Ruskin, William Morris and Tawney, to which the earnest, Christian working men who really created the Labour Party looked for inspiration. But its focus was on the principles by which we should live and not on the structures of the state. As Eric Hobsbawm (who scorned and derided the Fabians) pointed out long ago, true Labour ignored the salon socialism that Bregman thinks will save us.

The real problem with all of this is the conception of history shared by Bregman and by the BBC today (though in the recent past the BBC did much better): that it is raw material for a message, a creed, a call to arms, a social-democratic crusade. The BBC will continue to present History badly and incorrectly for as long as it tries to use it to enforce an approved message. History is nobody’s fool and it certainly cannot be bent to the will of BBC executives living off the license fee as if in some Fabian paradise.

There may have been much that was ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ in many of the lessons observed by Ofsted inspectors, but in Ferguson’s view, that meant little in a context where history was not a compulsory subject beyond the age of 14 (it still isn’t); where 30% of comprehensive schools allocated less than one hour a week to History for pupils under the age of 13; and 25% of schools taught History through cross-curricular or interdisciplinary approaches rather than as a discrete subject.

When the report considered a typical scheme of work in primary history, there was concern that pupils would receive a ‘fragmented overview’ of ‘disconnected topics’. We can only wonder why the authors failed to join the dots or dig deeper.

This government’s recent Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) shows a similarly optimistic view of school History, and a similar failure to look and think more deeply. CAR celebrates the rising entries for GCSE History from 31% in 2009/10 to 42% in 2024/25, but fails to acknowledge thatapplications to study History at undergraduate level have fallen by 17% between 2014/15 - 2029/20, with postgraduate entries down by 16% over the same period. Where does the government think future historians and history teachers will come from?

Perhaps they don’t think about such things, which is a loss to us all because our public culture, as well as educational institutions, won’t thrive automatically. Certain preconditions need to be in place, one of which is a political class able to identity major problems and work out solutions based on a combination of knowledge and ethical principles. It doesn’t look like today’s educational mandarins are doing any better than their 2011 counterparts.

The authors of the CAR note the following main problems with the history curriculum:

1. An insufficient focus on methods historians use to assess information sources, or on constructing arguments at KS1-3 (ages 5 to 14). The first of these is of particular concern because it feeds into the government’s penchant for media literacy
2. Pressure for rote learning owing to the amount of content, at the expense of fulfilling the Assessment Objectives (COs)
3. Teachers misunderstanding what content is statutory and what is non-statutory
4. The semblance of an overloaded curriculum due to extensive lists of  (non-statutory) exemplary material in the KS 2 and 3 programmes of study
5. Insufficient recognition of the ‘complexities and diversities of our national histories’ and insufficient guidance to support this goal.

There is much to be said about no.5, but it suffices here to note that the report takes the Runnymede Trust as a bona fide ‘sector organisation’ in their reviews of History and English. Whatever one thinks of the politics of the Runnymede Trust, it is a charity dedicated to work on race relations. It is not known for its experience or expertise in either education or History and English specifically. So, the public could expect a government committee to treat submissions from the Runnymede Trust with some caution if the obligations to sections 406 and 407 of the Education Act, requiring objectivity in teaching political content, are to be fulfilled. Instead its opinions are uncritically accepted with no acknowledgement that any history of a nation will be complex and the outcome of diverse (domestic and international) influences. This is integral to the discipline so maybe what is needed is better educated history teachers rather than more guidance from external bodies such as the Runnymede Trust.

Points 3 and 4 unwittingly express somewhat dim views of teachers who, it is suggested, are either predisposed to miss, or to misunderstand, the words in the National Curriculum programmes of study that say, in bold type, ‘Schools are not required by law to teach the example content in [square brackets] or the content indicated as being ‘non-statutory’’.

If correct, this casts serious doubt on the criteria and standards of entry into the profession. Maybe a government review might have considered the possibility that too many are entering the teaching profession inadequately experienced or educated themselves? This might not be popular, but it may be true, and we need to bear in mind that today, qualification and education have rarely been so distanced from each other. Were this not the case, there would be little need for universities to offer foundation courses to compensate for the fact that applicants may have the qualifications but lack the requisite education.

Points 1 and 2, however, point to the elephant in the curricular room: the curriculum itself. Writing in 2012, Melissa Benn summarised the prejudices of a swathe of educational commentators in implying, in a disparaging tone, that the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove’s preference for a ‘traditionalist, linear curriculum’ amounted to ‘rigid traditionalism’ within the Department for Education.

This type of political criticism of an educational ethos has long characterised the left’s educational efforts, whereas the right’s thinking has been to outsource a moral vision of education to the chimera of an ‘educational science’. The 2010 coalition government would have done better to have spent its £125 million grant from the Education Endowment Foundation on enabling teachers to attend courses to develop their own thinking about their subject and profession. Instead, the EEF endorsed the illusion that problems caused by confused or weak founding principles can be solved by empirical research alone.https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/first-eef-grants-announced#:~:text=The%20grants%2C%20totalling%20

We might then have had today a profession of educators and commentators able, and more importantly, willing, to point out the obvious: that when it comes to the school History curriculum KS1-3 (that is, while it is compulsory), there is, in fact, rather little that is rigid, traditional or linear about it.

Let’s look at the KS 1-2 History curriculum. Discounting the non-statutory exemplars, here’s what is stipulated for teachers to teach pupils in the 6 years between the ages of 5 to 11:

Key Stage 1

• Changes within living memory. Where appropriate, these should be used to reveal aspects of  change in national life
• Events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally
• The lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements
• Significant historical events, people and places in their own locality.

Key Stage 2

•  Changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age
• The Roman Empire and its impact on Britain
• Britain’s settlements by Anglo-Saxons and Scots
• The Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor
• A local history study
• A study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066

Six years is allocated to this, in Ferguson’s words, ‘smorgasbord’ of a curriculum. In contrast, the social, cultural and political development of church, state and society from 1066-1745; industry and empire from 1745-1901; the challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world from 1901 to the present day; and a study of an aspect or theme in British history that consolidates and extends pupils’ chronological knowledge from before 1066 are expected to be taught in the 3 years of KS 3 only!

Frankly, this is a disastrous abdication of educational responsibility. A generous guess would be that this pig’s ear of a curriculum was  probably the result of trying to be all things to all vested parties (except children and parents themselves). Can the present day count as history while its taking place? There are interesting contrasting views among historians about the issues involved, but no evidence that these curriculum constructors were aware of them.

If today’s events count as school history, then where are the boundaries between history, politics, sociology and so forth? Why does pre-1066 history make a somewhat arbitrary re-entry at KS3 after having been covered for 6 years at KS 1 and 2? It is an appalling abdication of responsibility to expect teachers to make the proverbial silk purse from a sow’s ear.

Where I live in Norwich, significant local history could include anything from anti-Jewish pogroms in 1190, the early medieval English Christian mystics, the Lollards’ pit, the production of Norwich shawls, the creation of the fens in Anglia in the 17th century, or Pablo Fanque, Britain’s first black circus-owner who was born in Norwich in 1810.

These nuggets of information lack any overarching principles for selection, such as a national-narrative comprising  political, social, cultural and economic history, to be presented chronologically. Without these, the curriculum is too open to the personal predilections of schools, teachers and, increasingly, EDI ‘experts’. Without more structure, a militant atheist teacher might choose the twelfth-century pogroms as an illustration of the evils of religion; a devout Christian teacher might choose the mystics as an illustration of the virtues of Christianity; and a believer in EDI might choose Fanque to illustrate how Norwich has always been multicultural really.

Some examples provide a cautionary tale.

One recent history lesson for 10-year-olds brought to my attention was on the theme of witchcraft. The lesson was the creation of an individual teacher and was presented on a digital platform (the latest deliverer of content, usurping both textbooks and possibly worksheets). It looked like a social media feed, with images of Donald Trump with a witch’s hat on, headlines of news item on the murder of a child by parents under the spell of witchcraft, and concluded with something on how witchcraft had been a colonial export to colonies.

Such arbitrariness is evident where the lesson content is less politically contentious, too. For example, an RE lesson on the Bible required pupils to make their own ‘Bible of Fashion’.

Maybe this was only a single lesson in a scheme of work.  Even so, lessons like these are evidence of more than just ignorance on the part of the teacher. They point to a wider lack of oversight by the school, the local authority, the relevant professional bodies, and ultimately, the government. On such a scale, lack of oversight indicates a fundamental loss of meaning of education.

I am a teacher by trade, and have long been a supporter of the autonomy of teachers to create their own lessons. But teachers and schools serve the public; children and parents are not there to serve teachers’ autonomy or schools’ position in comparative league tables.  Once, I might have said that the ‘bagginess’ of the history curriculum is to allow teachers the scope to make it their own - which could work in better cultural conditions. But if the profession (and the Department for Education) no longer knows the difference between knowledge and opinion and does not know why Tik-Tok-type presentations are not suitable for school teaching, then somebody with authority has to take responsibility.

We desperately need a better curriculum; one where the underpinning moral and educational vision of a classical liberal education, its  attendant principles and substantive content, are made explicit. This would be a helpful contribution to redirecting the profession back to its core purpose, which is to educate the next generation with the best knowledge we have to date. This is best delivered by teachers with a strong commitment to truth as an aspirational standard rather than to the imperatives of either social justice or technical Assessment Objectives.

Alka Sehgal-Cuthbert is a teacher, educationist and the Director of Don’t Divide Us. https://dontdivideus.com/

We start this bulletin by drawing your attention to three articles we’ve published recently on the subject of Allied military cemeteries and the honour due to our war dead. In the BBC’s televised coverage of Remembrance Sunday last month reference was made to discriminatory treatment of imperial soldiers who died on active service. This perpetuates a story that emerged in 2019 but for which there is no evidence as Nigel Biggar demonstrated in his report on these allegations, published two years later (see https://www.nigelbiggar.co.uk/p/building-a-racist-mountain ). Robert Tombs sets out the accusations and the actuality in his article here.

Robert is echoed by Geoffrey Van Orden’s experiences of Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries around the world, which he’s visited as a high-ranking British army officer and subsequently in retirement.  We add to these essays another from the senior and influential American journalist David Shribman, who draws attention to the recent removal from the American cemetery at Margraten in the Netherlands of commemorations of black soldiers who died in the Second World War in northern Europe. It cannot be right to play politics with those who died serving their nations in war. They should be treated with all the dignity and honour they deserve and left to lie in peace.

The problems with the BBC’s versions of history are evident in three articles, two of which focus on David Olusoga’s recent series ‘Empire’. Lawrence Goldman reviews the series as a whole and criticises two aspects in particular: the focus on only the most controversial episodes in British imperial history and the failure to present the full facts in some of the case-studies chosen by Olusoga for special attention:

David Elstein examines Olusoga’s presentation of the Mau Mau Emergency in Kenya in the 1950s as set out in the final programme of the series and uncovers a host of errors and distortions, not least the failure to explain that the Emergency arose when the Kikuyu tribe descended into civil war. This was never a simple anti-colonial rebellion as presented by some historians, Olusoga included.

Quite different in subject and tone is the essay by Lona Manning explaining the errors in a recent BBC programme on the life and work of Jane Austen who has been turned into a social justice warrior of the early nineteenth century. As it’s the 250th anniversary of her birth this very week, the article is timely and may act as a necessary corrective to things said both now and earlier this year when this documentary was broadcast.

Another cinematic distortion is examined by the historian Tony Lentin in his critique of the recent Indian film on the Amritsar Massacre of 1919 and its aftermath entitled “Kesari. Chapter 2’.  The film’s focus is the libel action brought by Sir Michael O’Dwyer (1864-1940), Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab 1913-19, against an Indian author, Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, for some remarks made in Nair’s book entitled Gandhi and Anarchy, published in 1922. A court-room drama, the film has been commended for his own party-political reasons by the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But neither the account of what went on in Amritsar nor of the actual legal dispute and its resolution are rendered accurately in the film. Through its many refractions and distortions the truth recedes and is obscured.

Restitution is never far from the news: as this newsletter is going to press we read in the newspapers of the British Museum’s project to ‘decolonise’ itself by sending artefacts from its collections on loan to different parts of the world. So it is timely to read David Abulafia’s essay on the Rosetta Stone which rightly and appropriately belongs exactly where it is, and where it can be seen by anyone, in the British Museum.

We continue our coverage of restitutions to Benin but with a slightly different subject on this occasion: not Benin bronzes, the usual issue of controversy, but Benin royal coral headdresses. It has been claimed, though on very thin evidence, that in the 1930s the British returned coral regalia that had been taken from the Oba of Benin at the end of the nineteenth century. By careful work in the archives and with photographs from the period, Andreas Roth shows, however, that the real story of the coral regalia does not fit the postcolonial narrative some want to attach to these artefacts. They don’t provide a precedent for the return of Benin Bronzes.

The subject of eugenics is never very far from the news as well, and is almost always associated with right-wing political figures. That seems to have made it easier for academics to remove memorials and to rename rooms and buildings commemorating scientists and statisticians associated with eugenics. But as Jesper Rosenløv’s second of two articles on British eugenicists demonstrates, the left was as notable as the right in its enthusiasm to control fertility and remove so-called ‘degeneracy’. Rosenløv pays particular attention to George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells in his article.

We've also published two pieces on the history of anti-slavery. Robert Tombs reminds us that in the eighteenth century slavery and forced labour were ubiquitous, features of the labour systems of every continent and of most civilisations and cultures. As he explains, the important historical question is therefore why and how in Britain pre-eminently so many people from the 1780s onwards came to question the morality of slavery and to organise themselves into a movement for its abolition.

No single individual better exemplifies that change of heart than John Newton, the Liverpool slave captain of the 1750s who ceased to trade slaves, became an Anglican curate and minister, the composer of many famous hymns, and a notable protagonist of anti-slavery at the end of his life. We’re very pleased to publish Richard Longfoot’s personal memoir on his quest to uncover Newton’s relationship with Alexander Clunie, another ship’s captain, who was instrumental in Newton’s conversion from slave trader to slave emancipator. The story begins with Mr Longfoot’s purchase of a portrait. You will greatly enjoy the rest…

For devotion to duty under extreme duress we recommend Professor Nigel Biggar’s performance while being interviewed (mugged) by the broadcaster Medi Hasan on ‘Head to Head’ on Al Jazeera TV.  Zewditu Gebreyohanes has written a review of the programme which you can read here: https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/mehdi-hasan-vs-nigel-biggar-debate/.  You can also watch the debate (if that it was) on YouTube here: .

Someone has compared it to Daniel in the Lion’s Den. In that Bible story, the Lord sent an angel to shut the lions’ mouths. You may come to the conclusion that at least one side in this debate gave us rather too much mouth, and that Lord Biggar of Castle Douglas behaved impeccably in his measured and thoughtful responses.

Finally, some news from our museums. We learnt this week that the Tate Galleries – Tate Modern and Tate Britain among them – are in financial difficulty necessitating a change of leadership (The Times, 16 Dec. 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/culture/art/article/maria-balshaw-tate-director-st6hffhcs). Among the first of our national museums to advertise its ‘decolonization’, Tate Britain, home to the Tate’s collection of British Art, has tried to obscure its origins as the benefaction to the nation of Sir Henry Tate. Sir Henry’s fortune derived from sugar plantations in the West Indies, though after the abolition of slavery there. The declining number of visitors to the gallery – ‘slumping visitor numbers’ - tells a simple story: it is going broke.

Meanwhile, the Imperial War Museum is – rather late in proceedings – going woke. This year it has closed its gallery devoted to heroism in war that featured many winners of the Victoria Cross and it now invites the public to a lecture on ‘Lifting the LGBT Ban’ in the forces, in association with Queer Britain Museum, and to an exhibition on ‘The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus’ (enews@iwm.org.uk). We wish the IWM good luck with this redirection and we’ll follow footfall in the Museum with interest. Meanwhile, the wonderful exhibition on Victorian military art at the National Army Museum in Chelsea continues and we encourage all our readers to see it before it ends in November 2026. https://www.nam.ac.uk/whats-on/myth-and-reality

As always, we thank you for reading History Reclaimed and supporting us. Please consider making a donation so that, if at all possible, we can extend this website and also begin other projects to counter disinformation about British History. Expect another newsletter reviewing our work in 2025 shortly. In the meantime we wish everyone a Happy Christmas and New Year. Please keep the flow of articles and news items coming, and contact us if we can be of assistance.

Lawrence Goldman

Robert Tombs

David Abulafia

Alex Gray

Zewditu Gebreyohanes

In 1785, John Newton’s advice was sought by William Wilberforce, MP for Hull. Through his meetings with Newton, Wilberforce made the decision not to enter the ministry himself, but to remain an MP and become the voice of the abolitionist movement in parliament. Newton then wrote the pamphlet “Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade” in January 1788. The newly formed Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade paid for 3,000 more copies to be printed and sent a copy to each member of the House of Commons and the House of Lords.

But how and by whom was John Newton first converted? Who helped this slave trader to become one of the most famous abolitionists? The answer is Captain Alexander Clunie.

I have to confess at the outset that I knew nothing of the existence of Captain Clunie until I started doing some research into a painting that I recently bought, attributed to Nathaniel Dance RA, entitled ‘Portrait of Captain Alexander Clunie and Mrs Jane Clunie’. That brought me to the website of the Cowper and Newton Museum at Olney. Most of the following information I have about Captain Clunie comes from there, including quotes in John Newton’s own words.

It was August 1753 when ’The African’ (Newton’s ship) returned to Britain and only six weeks later sailed again for West Africa. The trading was poor and Newton carried only 87 slaves to St Kitts (St Christopher’s) in the West Indies, instead of the usual 220. However the increased room below decks meant an increased survival rate and the entire voyage passed off without a single death, amongst either crew or slaves.

It was while in St Kitt's that Newton met someone who had a profound effect on him. Alexander Clunie was a sea captain who was not involved in the ‘triangular trade’. They soon became friends. Clunie was a Scot and belonged to the Independent Chapel in Stepney, London. His minister there was Samuel Brewer, a friend and pupil of Dr Jennings, who had been pastor to Newton's mother, Elizabeth Newton, at the Independent Meeting House at Wapping, where John had been baptised in July 1725.  Both Brewer and Jennings had been friends with Isaac Watts (1674-1748), the famous hymn writer.

Under the influence of Clunie, Newton’s understanding of his faith became more focused.

“I was all ears and what was better, he not only informed my understanding, but his discourses inflamed my heart.” For nearly a month the two met regularly on board each other’s ship.

Although Newton had read and re-read the Bible and other religious books such as Hervey’s ‘Meditations’ and Henry Scougal’s ‘Life of God in the Soul of Man’, meeting Clunie turned an intellectual exercise into a more outward expression of his faith. With encouragement Newton began to pray aloud. Clunie also gave him addresses of others from whom to seek further instruction. Newton lost no time and began, in June 1754, a series of letters to Dr David Jennings.  He also kept in regular contact with Clunie and his letters to his friend between 1761 and 1770 (the year Clunie died) were later published as The Christian Correspondent’ in which Newton paid him this tribute: “Your conversation was much blessed to me at St Kitt’s, and the little knowledge I have of men and things took its first rise from thence.”

Newton’s voyage back to England from St Kitt’s was uneventful, apart from storms in the Western Approaches, and when ’The African’ docked in August 1754 Newton was unaware that he would never go to sea again. He had a period of illness and had to seek a job on shore.  In 1755, he took the position of Tide Surveyor at the Port of Liverpool. This coincided with the Seven Years War, which reduced maritime traffic, giving him time to meet with preachers and evangelists such as George Whitfield and John Wesley. Following Clunie’s advice, he attended the Stepney Dissenting Chapel.

The only other snippet of information that I have been able to discover about Captain Clunie is from the National Archives at Kew, which shows that he was still a captain of the 200-ton ‘St Kitt’s Merchant’ with a crew of 30 in November 1757.  However, he must have retired soon after that. He apparently had a warehouse in London where his business dealt with a wide range of imported goods.

Two years ago, in 2023, there was an exhibition at the Cowper and Newton Museum at Olney, which featured some newly discovered letters from John Newton to his 'close friend' Alexander Clunie. https://cowperandnewtonmuseum.org.uk/dear-brother/ The letters, 22 in total, were found in 2018 in the archive of a long-established London lawyer’s office where Captain Clunie had been a client. According to the exhibition, which provided an illustrated display about the two men and their wives,

Clunie is mentioned in John Newton's ‘Authentic Narrative’ as the man whom he met in St Kitts on his last voyage, and who over the course of a few weeks became his spiritual adviser. The friendship lasted. The letters were written between 1765 and 1769 and tell us something about John and Polly Newton's life at the vicarage in Olney. The accompanying display also tells us a little about Clunie, a merchant who in earlier years had explored the hinterland of North America and Canada. Clunie never engaged in the slave trade.

Newton never returned to the sea again after the year he met Clunie. He benefited from the teaching of Clunie's pastor at the Stepney Independent Meeting and other evangelicals across London. Taking a job in Liverpool, he studied for a possible career in the church and was eventually ordained to Olney in 1764. In London Clunie had various business interests and owned a warehouse. He performed frequent errands for John Newton, and it was to Clunie that the Newtons turned when they needed goods for the vicarage.

Alexander Clunie was a regular visitor to Olney. He got to know Newton's parishioners and in hard times provided money and supplies for the poor. Newton kept him informed of the topics he chose for sermons.

Newton wrote regularly to Clunie, and sometimes Polly Newton added her own postscripts. Although she was less of a fluent and elegant writer than her husband, Polly did not shy away from chastising Mr Clunie for the poor quality of tea he supplied and delays to her order for new grates!  Polly cared very much about her appearance and her clothes. In March 1767, the Newtons planned a journey to Helmsley in Yorkshire, for which Mr Clunie provided Polly with a portmanteau.

In 1770, Alexander Clunie was in poor health and passed away. After his death Clunie's son from an earlier marriage published John Newton's correspondence with his father (a total of 61 letters), though without seeking permission from Newton. The majority of the 22 letters on loan to the museum were included in this printed collection, but the editor cut out most of the domestic details and Polly's contributions.

From the costume details we think the painting we have was commissioned around the time of Clunie’s retirement from the sea.  It may even have been to celebrate his second marriage.

Their foundation seems to be an assumption that somehow today’s wealth is ultimately derived from the Industrial Revolution fuelled by the profits of slavery. So presumably every subsequent economic advance (everything from the railways to nuclear power and AI) remains literally indebted to slavery. Hence the trillions.

Leaving aside its implausible logic, basic facts make this view untenable. It has recently been estimated that Britain held only 1.7 per cent of the global enslaved population. Its trade with Africa represented only 3.6 per cent of exports in the 1780s. Many countries in which slavery was economically far more important – including Portugal, Spain, Turkey, France and the United States – did not pioneer an industrial revolution. Though some British people got rich from slavery, the overall economic effect seems to have been small. No trillions, therefore.

It is simple to explain why the British were involved in slavery: everyone was. The more difficult and important question is the opposite one. Why did the British public turn decisively against the slave trade and slavery itself? The change began in the 1770s-80s and continued throughout the 19th century and beyond – arguably up to the Modern Slavery Act (2015).

Remember that slavery was practically universal. Every continent (with Europe a partial exception) ran on slavery and always had. Apart from an occasional lonely voice, no one raised moral objections. That included slaves themselves: those who gained their freedom, or even rebelled against their own servitude, generally saw nothing wrong in enslaving others. So what changed in Britain?

The explanations are not obvious. For example, vaunted “Enlightenment values” were not clearly opposed to slavery. Several of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers ignored the issue or endorsed slavery as rational. Some even participated, at least to the extent of investing in African trade, as did Newton and Locke. Adam Smith thought slavery was inefficient, but events did not bear him out. The popular radical poet Robert Burns took a job as a slave overseer.

Political changes stemming from Enlightenment principles are not the explanation either. The French Revolution at first subsidised the trade, and there were slave ships called Liberté, Égalité and even Fraternité. In 1793 the leading English radical thinker William Godwin considered that “It is perhaps right to suffer the negroes … to continue in slavery till they can be gradually prepared for a state of liberty.”

Popular among Marxists is the argument that the British abandoned slavery because it was no longer profitable. The evidence contradicts this. The slave economy remained highly profitable in North and South America (as it does of course in parts of the world today), and there is no reason to think that it would have become obsolete, despite Adam Smith.

Slave rebellions were not enough to end the demand for slaves either. In 1791 an ultimately victorious slave revolt began in Haiti, but despite the terror it inspired, the number of enslaved Africans being transported kept rising, as did their price. So when Britain banned the trade in 1807, it was renouncing huge potential profits.

Nor does religious sentiment explain the change. Every major religion had long condoned, practised and in some cases encouraged slavery. Quakers, eventually active abolitionists, had been keen slave traders, and the first who had second thoughts were appalled by the worldly gains of the owners, not the plight of the victims.

The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, was an individual opponent of slavery, but it was not an issue the Methodists took up. Other Evangelical Christians concerned themselves with the moral condition of enslaved Africans, wanting them to be baptised and educated. Some openly took the view that to be a Christian slave was better than being a free pagan. John Newton, the author of the hymn Amazing Grace, crewed slave ships and had even himself been enslaved in Africa. It took him 30 years after his emotional religious conversion to conclude that slavery was wrong.

The explanation for why public opinion changed rapidly from the 1780s is therefore not straightforward. Enlightened ideas about freedom and human equality did become part of the mix. So did the mid-century cult of nature, “sensibility” and emotional empathy. This included intense interest in traditional cultures and idealisation of the ‘noble savage’ – shown for example in Reynold’s great portrait of Omai (c. 1776).

Joshua Reynold’s ‘Portrait of Omai’ in the National Portrait Gallery.

Newspapers and books, which in Britain had now become part of everyday life, enabled lively political discussion. For the first time in the 1780s the uncensored press widely publicised eye-witness reports of the brutal realities of slave trading, of desperate mutinies on slave ships, and of vicious exploitation in colonial plantations.

The comforting myths of contented well treated slaves evaporated. There was a public reaction, in which devout Christians gave a crucial lead, against the cruelty of slavery and against obscenely rich slave owners and their corruption of politics. The loss of the North American slave colonies weakened the pro-slavery lobby: why, asked Samuel Johnson, do the loudest yelps for liberty come from the drivers of slaves?

This unique cultural and political mix gave birth to a campaign in which ordinary women and men became actively involved through legal action, boycotts and petitions. For more than a century they supported British abolitionists, politicians, diplomats and the Royal Navy in making themselves a thorough nuisance to slave traders and owners the world over.

Slavery came to seem a contradiction of modern British values. Critics have alleged arrogance and hypocrisy, and pointed out, rightly, that action against slavery sometimes led to imperial rule. Others have stressed the idealism and pointed out the huge economic costs to Britain.

One can debate the motives. Nevertheless, without an unprecedented British change of heart, slavery would have continued indefinitely, in the open, and on a vast scale. Instead, a century-long liberation of millions of human beings began – the greatest social revolution of modern times.

Tucked into an 8-minute section of the third episode of his 3-part documentary series, “Empire”, David Olusoga’s account of the Mau Mau Emergency in colonial Kenya in the 1950s is not just deeply skewed and error-strewn, but - by the end - unintentionally hilarious. A supposed authority on the official archives, Dr Riley Linebaugh, is interviewed whilst she wears a pair of blue plastic gloves - presumably to avoid damaging the file she is handling.

It is actually a file I have consulted myself - using my bare hands! Indeed, I and hundreds of other scholars and students have handled this and thousands of similar files in the reading rooms at Kew’s National Archive, without a blue glove in sight. Dr Linebaugh was careful not to violate the document, but she and Olusoga instead violated the trust of the the audience in the BBC's presentation of British History.

The errors flow thick and fast, almost from the start. We are told that months after Princess Elizabeth visited Kenya (whilst there, her father died, and she became Queen), the Mau Mau rebellion broke out, with the aim of recovering lost Kikuyu lands, and ending colonial rule. In fact, the uprising had begun more than three years earlier, in the Kikuyu heartland of Central Province - the Kikuyu constituted 20% of Kenya’s population.

Mau Mau was a name attached to what the rebels themselves called the Land and Freedom Army (the derivation of “Mau Mau” is unknown). Olusoga tells us that it was “the killing of white settlers in Kenya which shocked the British into action”, namely, declaring a State of Emergency, calling in battalions of soldiers and bomber squadrons to help deal with the rebels.

This is all completely untrue. No settlers had been killed. Indeed, for a self-styled anti-colonial movement, Mau Mau seemed surprisingly indifferent to Kenya’s 40,000 European settlers. In the entire 7-year Emergency, just 32 lost their lives: fewer than were killed in traffic accidents.

The vast majority of Mau Mau’s victims were fellow Kikuyu: thousands of men, women and children, strangled, shot, stabbed, hanged, drowned, and beaten or chopped to death. Those targeted were the ones who refused to swear oaths of loyalty to Mau Mau and its leadership: they and their families faced threats of violence and eventually execution. The same fate awaited those who witnessed mass oathing ceremonies and informed the authorities.

The origins of the Emergency were in effect a civil war within the Kikuyu tribe, as landless young men rebelled against traditional age-based hierarchies, and against Chiefs and Headmen who were prospering under British rule. The anti-colonialist rhetoric was there, but could only be put into action once Mau Mau had gained full control of Kenya’s largest tribe: that never happened.

Olusoga correctly states that most of the fatalities in the Mau Mau rebellion were Africans: Kikuyu, to be precise. What he fails to mention was that the great majority of them were killed by Mau Mau, mostly before the actual declaration of the Emergency.

It was the increased pace of these murders - 59 in just a few months, culminating in the brazen assassination of Senior Chief Waruhiu on the outskirts of Nairobi - which triggered the Emergency, announced by the new Governor of the colony, Sir Evelyn Baring, just days after his arrival there. His predecessor, Sir Philip Mitchell, had spent years ignoring the rising tide of alarm emanating from Central Province, where barely 200 police and administrators vainly tried to control a population of 750,000. As Mitchell later admitted, his blinkered response had cost thousands of lives.

Once the Emergency was declared, the Kikuyu resisting Mau Mau (“loyalists” for want of a better term) were allocated rifles and were better able to defend themselves, forming a Home Guard. They and their families became particular Mau Mau targets, but eventually gained the upper hand. As many as 60% of the 10,000 Mau Mau fighters killed in the shooting war were accounted for by the Home Guard (Dr Linebaugh, in her published research, exaggerates the total, and goes on to say they were all “murdered”).

Olusoga then casually announces that “hundreds of thousands” were “imprisoned”. Even if we assume that “imprisoned” was a slip of the tongue for “detained”, Olusoga’s claim has no basis in reality. Detailed end of-month figures for the total of convicts and detainees, and for numbers of detainees released (the average period in detention was four months) were published throughout the Emergency.

There were never more than 20,000 in prison or 55,000 in detention. Allowing for releases and new arrivals, 78,000 detainees were reported as passing through the camps by the time they were closed. As end-of-month figures do not reflect intra-month movements, a reasonable estimate could be as many as 100,000 (though this might involve fewer than 100,000 individuals if we allow for those who were detained more than once).

As well as these inaccuracies, Olusoga offers no context. Detention - however deplorable we might find it today - was a feature of colonial judicial systems long before Mau Mau. Before the Emergency, detainee numbers might be as high as 20,000 in Kenya,and throughout the Emergency there were always more non-Mau Mau detention camps than Mau Mau ones.

For years after Mau Mau had been defeated militarily, in 1954, the unresolved issue of the camp- where conditions were often poor and treatment of detainees often brutal - was a running sore. Even so, the claims made in “Empire” are startling: indeed, not really credible. A historian interviewed at Mweru school - reportedly a re-purposed detention camp - told Olusoga that Mweru, like every camp, had had a swimming pool for those in command. We were not actually shown it, and none of the many accounts of the camp system has ever mentioned such. There was certainly no swimming pool at the key Mwea group of camps.

Moreover, we were told Meru had a gallows, where Mau Mau detainees, after conviction, were secretly hanged in the middle of the night, and their bodies buried in hidden graves.The historian David Anderson has written a 400-page book entitled “Histories of the Hanged”, in which he exhaustively analyses the full list of the 1,090 men hanged after being convicted of designated Mau Mau crimes - primarily murder. Even though capital punishment had long been a feature of the Kenyan legal system, and executions for non-Mau Mau crimes continued throughout the Emergency, that total was - as Olusoga rightly says - much higher than in any other British colony at the time. It is certainly shocking.

Yet there was a formal legal structure of court trials (however questionable in some cases) underpinning the process. A quarter of those convicted of murder were actually acquitted on appeal, or had their death sentences commuted to imprisonment. Hangings took place at either Nairobi prison or Gathigiriri detention camp, with the bodies normally buried in the grounds of Kamiti prison. There is no mention of a gallows at Mweru or any other detention camp, let alone of hangings in the middle of the night, or secret graves.

It is the story of hidden graves - a familiar Mau Mau myth - which is the biggest giveaway in this dubious tale. Despite the availabilty of modern techniques such as aerial photography, somehow the graves retain their secrets seven decades later. Channel Four recently broadcast a programme in which the son of one of the victims of the Hola massacre in 1959 claimed his father’s body, along with those of the other victims, was buried in mass grave. This was one of a series of lies he told, and which Channel Four failed to check before transmission. All the bodies were in fact returned to their families.

Actually, bodies have re-appeared. Many were exhumed towards the end of the Emergency, to check the truthfulness of admissions made by Mau Mau detainees hoping that confession would grant them a ticket home (it usually did). At one point, 450 bodies, with the ropes still around their necks, were found: Mau Mau had its own “courts”, with conviction swiftly followed by execution. This number of bodies with such a distinctive cause of death was surprising: anecdotal evidence is that most Mau Mau victims were disposed of in rivers, or ravines, or deep latrines - or were left to be consumed by wild animals.

Towards the end of the section, Olusoga references the killing of eleven detainees at Hola detention camp (not mentioning that it was beating with batons by poorly supervised African guards that caused the deaths). He then claims that this led to the rapid closure of the detention camps. He is not just wrong, but 180 degrees wrong.

By March 1959, nearly all the camps had already closed, and fewer than 2,000 detainees - deemed by the authorities the hardest of the hard core - were still in custody. It was the attempted consolidation of those remaining hundreds which was the precursor to the Hola disaster, as the administration for the first time attempted to force inmates there to work by digging irrigation ditches. (Hola was adjacent to an irrigation scheme at the Tana River).

The planned operation was deeply flawed. There were far too many detainees, many of whom had actually volunteered for the work, and were paid for it, with the result that the process was spread over far too large an area (two football pitches in length).

Unanticipated staff shortages meant that there was almost no European supervision, and the askaris - who regarded the detainees with a mixture of hatred and contempt - believed their instructions allowed them to punish any resistance with baton blows. Only when two detainees collapsed and quickly died was the entire operation halted, and the surviving detainees driven the two miles back to the camp. Subsequently, nine more men died in the camp hospital, as a result of shock caused by persistent beating.

Also shocked was the UK Parliament and government. Mau Mau by this time had faded away as an issue in Kenya, but the Hola massacre led to wholesale changes: after a swift and damning public inquest, the camp commandant and senior colonial officials were sacked or forced to retire, the Governor was replaced and a new Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, immediately embarked on the task of delivering independence to Kenya.

That process, too, is misrepresented by Olusoga. He is told by the blue-gloved Dr Linebaugh that the prospect of independence triggered mass destruction of colonial government documents, with a view to concealing what had really happened during the Mau Mau uprising.

Document culling and re-classification certainly happened. As one senior official said at the time, “no sensible person would expect the transition to independence to be unaccompanied by the destruction or removal of documents”. Inevitably, Special Branch intelligence reports, which could have re-kindled the now dormant hostilities within the Kikuyu, had to be destroyed. Less inevitably, but understandably, documents which might embarrass British or allied governments were also targeted.

Yet a surprising volume of material survived, not least because the Colonial Office was determined that a reasonably full account of Britain’s rule in Kenya should be preserved, in case a future post-independence government put forward a false version. This delicate balancing act was enlarged by a commitment from the administration to preserve as much material from the early years, as far back as 1895, thanks to lobbying from two long-serving Africa hands, Dick Cashmore and Margery Perham.

The expanded secrecy classification system was undoubtedly complex, sometimes laughably so: senior officials could not always be certain whether all the people being copied on a communication were entitled to know about all its contents. But the system had only brief transitional significance. Virtually every one of the thousands of documents held at The National Archive (TNA) is available to the public.

Indeed, far from “keeping secret the evidence of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya”, as Dr Linebaugh inexplicably asserts, we have not only Frank Corfield’s official report on the origins of Mau Mau (published in 1960 despite Macleod’s apparent attempt to suppress it) but also annual reports on the numbers of detainees and prisoners, incorporating extensive data analysis, published and sold to the public by His Majesty’s Stationery Office.

On top of this, in the archives we have vivid reports on the attempts at rehabilitation of detainees, as well as a blow by blow account of the crucial debate within the colonial administration over the legality of the use of force to induce detainees at the Mwea camps to work. We can read the bitter complaints circulated by the system’s internal critics, as well as the immediate responses and subsequent action; fascinatingly, the listing of recipients, carefully curated, tells us volumes about the politics of the civil service.

Dr Linebaugh talks at length about the “migrated archives”: the documents flown back to the UK shortly before Kenyan independence. These indeed have an odd history. To begin with, they were stored at a depository in Hayes, West London, awaiting transfer to TNA. But the officials at Kew repeatedly declined to accept them, claiming they were largely duplicates of material already in their system - a response which had some justification, not least because of the propensity of civil servants to circulate more than a dozen copies of a report around the various departments.

The junior staff at Hayes lacked the skill to catalogue everything being stored (which was not restricted to Kenya documents). Few scholars consulted this archive, and by the time the lease at Hayes had run out many decades later, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (successor to the Colonial Office), had to work out what to do.

Most of the archivist staff had retired, and - with Kew still resistant - the “migrated archives” migrated once more, to an FCO facility called Hanslope Park, there to sit undisturbed until a civil lawsuit, launched by a collection of Mau Mau seeking compensation from the British government for alleged ill-treatment in the detention camps, triggered a departmental search. Finally, an FCO official, Edward Inglett, located the thousands of files, which were belatedly made available to the litigants.

As it happens, there was nothing particularly revelatory in the documents, but their existence had been flatly and repeatedly denied, and the judge in the case made clear his displeasure at the apparent (even if entirely inadvertent) deceit. Foreign Secretary William Hague quickly offered a generous settlement and apology so as to avoid further embarrassment.

That the Hanslope Park affair has now assumed mythic status amongst Mau Mau supporters and revisionist historians flies in the face of the facts: that so much in Olusoga’s account of this period is misconceived or flatly wrong is what should really concern us.

It is not just the errors, but the omissions. Olusoga fails to tell his audience about Kenya’s first President, Jomo Kenyatta. As the most prominent Kikuyu of his generation, Kenyatta was widely assumed by the British to have a leadership role in Mau Mau (some level of involvement may well have been advisable for him, given the casualty rate amongst Mau Mau’s opponents). Kenyatta was arrested soon after the Emergency was declared, tried (on very dubious evidence), convicted of helping organise Mau Mau, and imprisoned in a remote corner of Kenya for eight years.

On release - as part of the drive towards independence - he made clear his criticisms of Mau Mau. On becoming President, he denounced them as “hooligans”, and proscribed the organisation - just as the colonial government had done, but this time the ban lasted for 40 years. But why spoil a good story by telling viewers what actually happened?

All the facts set out in this critique can be found in the afterword to my 2019 book “Mau Mau Interrogator”. Most can also be found in two recent articles in “The Critc”, re-published by History Reclaimed. The way Olusoga presents this history should give the BBC pause when considering further commissions. It might also want to reconsider its association with the Open University which ostensibly collaborated in this production.

But most dismaying of all is the airbrushing from their own history of the thousands - perhaps tens of thousands - of Mau Mau victims, other than the handful of Europeans Olusoga chooses to mention: a particularly distasteful example of what might be called neo-colonialism.

David Elstein read History at Cambridge, was producer of the 1970s television documentary series, The World at War, and had a long career in broadcasting including as chief executive of the new Channel 5, launched in 1997.  

The History Reclaimed report found that the BBC fostered ‘a negative view of British history…It is as if the BBC is choosing interviewees who are intended to give a particular slant.’ We asked for greater accuracy; that BBC programmes reflect the range of historical interpretations; that programme-makers use acknowledged experts; and that the Corporation establishes an advisory panel of qualified historians to assist its work.

It's against this background that we should review David Olusoga’s new series entitled ‘Empire’, which is, in fact, a history of the British Empire alone. Has the BBC learnt any lessons from our criticisms and those of others, viewers and historians alike?

No one watching these three programmes could be in any doubt that the ‘negative view of British History’ pervades everything. The series is not a balanced history of the empire but a collection of some of its most controversial and violent episodes. When Olusoga himself isn’t telling us what to think we switch to a panel of largely young people (whose backgrounds and qualifications for reflection are not made clear) who continue in the same largely negative vein.

There is no mention in these programmes of educational and medical advances under the empire; of the foundation of cultural and scholarly institutions; of canals, railways and other infrastructure; or of the science that empire made possible. In the 1830s John Herschel mapped the southern night skies from the Cape Colony but Olusoga would never tell you something like that.

The second programme takes viewers to Flinders Island to review the failure of a nineteenth-century resettlement programme for the indigenous, but Matthew Flinders, the first to circumnavigate and map Australia, is not mentioned. Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), one of several destinations across the empire for Britain’s transported criminals, is compared by Olusoga to Siberia in the Russian empire.

Most histories of the west European empires begin with the advances in navigation and seafaring that made oceanic expeditions possible. Olusoga’s approach is to present the British empire as an exercise in avarice only. It’s a materialist’s view of the past without reference to exploration, geography, Christianity, language, social reform, modernisation, the governance of colonies, and the benign inspiration of so many colonial servants. Nor does he pause at any stage to consider whether judging people in the past who lived under another moral code and thought differently from us today makes any kind of historical sense.

The series begins with the efforts of the Virginia Company to establish a British settlement at Jamestown from 1603 based on plantation agriculture, and ultimately, on black chattel slavery. Viewers are not told about the settlement of Massachusetts a few years later by religious radicals and political refugees who built a more egalitarian society based on small, self-sufficient farms spreading west across New England. Here, slavery was of no consequence – it was effectively abolished in Massachusetts in the 1780s – and a different kind of settler colony developed, one characterised by religious independence, self-government and individualism. One of the empire’s greatest legacies is the spread of democracy and the rule of law, but you won’t hear about that from Olusoga.

Explaining the history of North America accurately is certainly not the purpose of this series. Viewers are told that ‘the expansion of the United States involved a series of wars against the indigenous people’ – and only them. The wars the British fought against the French in the mid-eighteenth century and the Americans fought later against Spain and Mexico for control of the American interior go unremarked. Nor is the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 of vast tracts of what is now the American south-west mentioned.

The key driver of empire – strategic competition between European powers – is simply ignored in the American case and in the series as a whole. The failure to relate the British empire to other European empires removes the most important context for an understanding of British expansion.

It’s at the micro-level, however, that Olusoga’s economy with history and context is most revealing. The final programme is bookended by two vignettes that deserve scrutiny.

The first takes Olusoga to the Kainai people in Alberta, Canada, where he participates in a ritual commemorating Mike Mountain Horse. Mike fought in the First World War. According to Olusoga, he ‘found himself on the Western Front because he and his people were subjects of the British empire’ as if transferred there by magic or by conscription: quite how is not explained.

In point of fact Mike volunteered to fight, as his brother had done before him, because he supported the Allied cause. He saw action at Vimy Ridge, Cambrai and Amiens and was awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the oldest British award for military valour and the second highest award for bravery by non-commissioned soldiers, only exceeded by the Victoria Cross. (It was discontinued in 1993). At the start of the Second World War Mike actually re-enlisted for overseas duty.

Yet none of this is told to viewers. Explaining Mike’s story properly would require Olusoga to discuss an indigenous man’s loyalty to the empire and the empire’s recognition of his services to freedom.

The second story is told by Olusoga at the very end of the series and concerns one of his ancestors from Nigeria, caught up in the British-Ijebu War in 1892. Olusoga reads from a list of weapons deployed by the British in their expedition, taken from a published account of this war. However, he gives no information at all on the reasons for the conflict and the viewer is left with the impression that this was motiveless imperial carnage.

The war arose, in fact, because the Ijebu tribe, who lived fifty miles north of Lagos, blockaded trade routes into the city and extorted customs payments from traders. The British colonial authorities tried several times to persuade the Ijebu to open the blockaded routes and seemed to have succeeded in early 1892, only for the Awujale, their leader, to renege on the agreement.

When the British sent an expeditionary force of about 600, they found themselves in combat with 8000 Ijebu fighters, though these were ultimately overcome. The colonial forces burnt several Ijebu villages as they advanced to the capital, Ijebu Ode, and many non-combatants died.

Olusoga has carefully and personally chosen these episodes in imperial history but, in both cases, he has also chosen not to tell the audience the full history and allow them to decide for themselves. This, as History Reclaimed wrote in our report, is to give a ‘particular slant’ to the past. Worse, it is disrespectful to the viewer and the licence payer.

Michael Prescott and whoever it was who leaked his report did the nation a great favour in calling out BBC bias. Where history is concerned it evidently continues. Will the BBC respond to us now, please, and explain why ‘Empire’ is so resolutely negative in its depiction of British History?

Professor Lawrence Goldman is Executive Editor of History Reclaimed. He was General Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2004-14.

Marx and Engels had assumed that a socialist society would produce a new form of human existence, implying the emergence of ‘men who are able to cope with a new world’. They initially accepted Lamarck’s theory of the heritability of acquired characteristic and saw human nature as malleable. The socialist society of the future would thus be able to breed a new socialist type of human being. However, certain social groups were, so to speak, already damaged to such an extent that they were deemed unfit to contribute to the future socialist society. ‘The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way,’ Marx declared in 1853.[2] In industrial societies, this included the ‘lumpenproletariat’: drunkards, habitual criminals, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and morally degraded individuals. From the late nineteenth century, German socialists increasingly defined these groups biologically and targeted them for eugenic measures. The same occurred in Scandinavia, where thousands deemed to have undesirable traits were forcibly sterilised.[3]

Eugenic thought also gained support among British and American socialists and communists. Prominent defenders of (at times so-called ‘Bolshevik’) eugenics included H. J. Muller (1890-1967), J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), J. D. Bernal (1901–1971), Herbert Brewer (1897–1968), and Karl Pearson (1857–1936).[4] The more moderate argued that abolishing class society would clarify the importance of heredity and environment in health and abilities. Only then could socially responsible eugenics be implemented.[5]  Others were inspired by eugenic measures that were made possible in the Soviet Union after 1917.[6]

One of the earliest British socialist advocates of eugenics was Marx’s son-in-law, Edward Aveling (1849-1898). In Darwinism and Small Families(1881), Aveling declared that a large number of offspring among the lower classes would increase the number of individuals of an ‘injurious or retrograde kind’. He also concluded that ‘our deformed and diseased people do not, or ought not to marry’.[7]

A few years later the notable statistician Karl Pearson explained that creating a strong and competitive society required both socialism and eugenics. Socialist nations with strong community bonds would be superior in the struggle for life. ‘We have every need to strengthen by training the partially dormant socialistic spirit, if we as a nation are to be among the surviving fit’, he emphasised.[8] Pearson demanded absolute obedience to the state, ideally governed by a chosen elite: ‘Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post’. [9] Besides community cohesion, socialist nations had greater opportunity to organise society’s ‘mental and physical resources’. As Pearson emphasised:

‘Individual societies have the strongest interest in educating, training, and organizing the powers of all their individual members, for these are the sole conditions under which a society can survive in the battle for life. This tendency to social organization, always prominent in progressive communities, may be termed, in the best and widest sense of the word, Socialism.’

Karl Pearson

Darwinian principles and eugenics were applied to develop these resources – and socialism was a prerequisite for implementing correct eugenic policy. Equality allowed society to identify which individuals were worth investing in reproductively. Such a policy was easier under socialism. Physical selection would also be more effective, since everyone had to work for their livelihood. Only individuals with favourable traits would have equal rights, and only socialism could ensure that the most talented, regardless of social background, would reproduce and lead the state. This was necessary for the winning of future wars and the progress of civilisation.[10] Means included free sexual relations, the exemption of mothers from work, and state regulation of children’s ‘quantity and quality’.[11] Other British socialists, however, advocated even more drastic programmes.

In an appendix to the play Man and Superman (1903), G. Bernard Shaw declared: ‘The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man’.[12] Shaw was a member of the Fabian Society, where Sidney and Beatrice Webb were also strong advocates for eugenics. They supported forced sterilisation and other measures to reduce birth rates among groups deemed undesirable.[13] Sidney Webb asserted these were the only ways to ‘avoid degeneration of type – that is, race deterioration, if not race suicide’.[14]

The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) also considered various eugenic measures. He approved of forced sterilisation to ‘diminish imbecility’ and state-issued ‘medical certificates’ for parents fit to procreate.[15] H. G. Wells, the novelist and controversialist, and another Fabian socialist, went a step further. He argued that breeding programmes were not feasible owinge to uncertainty about inheritance of desirable traits. Therefore,

‘The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.’ [16]

In 1908, Wells outlined socialism’s principles:

“The fundamental idea upon which Socialism rests is the same fundamental idea as that upon which all real scientific work is carried on. It is the denial that chance impulse and individual will and happening constitute the only possible methods by which things may be done in the world,”

According to Wells, the Socialist desired

‘a complete organization for all those human affairs that are of collective importance. He says, to take instances almost haphazard, that our ways of manufacturing a great multitude of necessary things, of getting and distributing food, of conducting all sorts of business, of begetting and rearing children, of permitting diseases to engender and spread, are chaotic and undisciplined.’

The Socialist therefore ‘seeks to make a plan as one designs and lays out a garden, so that sweet and seemly things may grow, wide and beautiful vistas open, and weeds and foulness disappear’. What makes the garden’s ‘graciousness and beauty possible, is the scheme and the persistent intention, the watching and the waiting, the digging and burning, the weeder clips and the hoe.’[17]

H. G. Wells

How the removal of ‘weeds and foulness’ could take place had already been explained by Wells in 1901, when he stated that he not only supported forced sterilisation but also had the hope that in the future society, ‘the New Republic’, a higher form of ethics would develop to support the use of euthanasia:

‘These men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity – beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge – and to check the procreation of base and servile types.’

When it came to ‘a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures […] the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence. […] The men of the New Republic will not be squeamish, either, in facing or inflicting death. […] They will have an ideal that will make killing worth the while’. These men would ensure that undesirable elements were removed from society. ‘This thing, this euthanasia of the weak and sensual, is possible’, Wells declared, adding that the killings could be carried out humanely by means of ‘an opiate’.[18]

George Bernard Shaw also advocated euthanasia of undesirable individuals – habitual criminals and those he regarded as a general burden on society. In 1898, he wrote:

‘The majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive; and no serious progress will be made until we address ourselves earnestly and scientifically to the task of producing trustworthy human material for society’.[19] In a 1910 lecture, he stated:

‘We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. […] A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.’[20]

George Bernard Shaw

What did Shaw mean by ‘a lethal chamber’? At the time, the public understood perfectly well that Shaw was referring to a well-tested method of killing – not of humans, but of stray dogs. Since the late nineteenth century, these dogs had been put down in gas chambers liked this:

Shaw’s statement thus had a chillingly concrete meaning – and in a way, Shaw was among the pioneers in this area when he suggested applying the method to humans.[21]  Some of Shaw’s like-minded contemporaries, such as the socialist Eden Paul (1865–1944), later also advocated the killing of ‘anti-social types’ in ‘lethal chambers.’[22]

Shaw repeatedly considered the state’s right to kill unwanted individuals. He believed incorrigible criminals should be euthanised in a lethal chamber rather than serve long, inhumane prison sentences.[23] ‘If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way’.[24] In a 1931 filmed interview, he stated: ‘I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. You must know people who are no use and more trouble than they are worth’.

Citizens should justify their existence as beneficial to society, Shaw believed. If one couldn't do that, then one couldn't expect society's large organisations to be used to keep you alive ‘because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself’.[25] In a 1934 radio broadcast, he denied that weapons of mass destruction would lead to war; rather, they made wars less likely. Therefore, ‘If you are a humanitarian, like myself, appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly; in short, a gentlemanly gas, deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.’ And if and when we stop fighting, Shaw ‘suggested a domestic use for such gas’.[26] What domestic use Shaw had in mind, one hardly dares to think. In 1938, five years after the National Socialist takeover in Germany, Shaw remarked in a letter to Beatrice Webb: ‘I think we ought to tackle the Jewish Question by admitting the right of the State to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to’.[27]

While other supporters of eugenics later reconsidered, Shaw maintained his position even after the Second World War. Thus in 1948 he still contended that ‘the ungovernables, the ferocious, the conscienceless, the idiots, the self-centered myops and morons’, should be euthanised. [28] Despite this and many other such statements, Shaw has been strangely spared contemporary outrage and condemnation. This is puzzling when one considers that other historical figures have been shamed and dishonoured for statements far milder than those of Shaw and the other socialists highlighted here. History’s judgment – or put another way, the judgment of those who would abuse history to make their case - is truly arbitrary.

Jesper M. Rosenløv holds a doctorate from the University of Copenhagen and worked originally on Greco-Roman culture and the history of religion. In recent years he has focused on intellectual and political history, including the expansion of Islam as the background for the crusading ideology. His forthcoming book examines Marx and Engels’s antisemitism, racism, and glorification of violence – and the continuation of these darker aspects of Marxist doctrine by their ideological heirs. For his first essay for History Reclaimed, see https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/racist-socialists/

Notes:

[1] G. Wheatcroft: Churchill’s Shadow: An Astonishing Life and a Dangerous Legacy (2021) p. 129, cf. pp. 61f., 206. Wheatcroft refers to P. Addison: Churchill on the Home Front 1900-1955, London (1992) p. 125. But Addison’s assessment of Churchill’s position on eugenics (pp. 123–126) must be said to be far more balanced than Wheatcroft’s.

[2] Collected Works vol. 10, p. 117; vol. 11, p. 531

[3] Cf. J. Rosenløv: Other Sides of Marx and Engels. Antisemitism, Racism and Violence (forthcoming)

[4] Cf. G. Watson: 'Race & the Socialists', Encounter, November (1976) p. 22; D. B. Paul: ‘Eugenics and the Left’, Journal of the History of Ideas (1984) 45:4 pp. 567-575, 577.

[5] Paul, ‘Eugenics and the Left’, p. 574

[6] ibid, pp. 575-585

[7] Darwinism and Small Families, London (1881) pp. 6, 8

[8] The Grammar of Science, London (1892) p. 435

[9] 'The Moral Basis of Socialism' (1887), The Ethic of Freethought, London (1901) pp. 307f., The Function of Science in the Modern States, Cambridge (1919) 14f.

[10] Op. cit. (1892) pp. 430-437, cf. Paul pp. 573ff. and “Socialism and Natural Selection”, The Chances of Death, and Other Studies in Evolution, vol. 1, London (1897) pp. 130, 138

[11] 'Socialism and Sex'(1886), The Ethic of Freethought, London (1901) pp. 418, 421, 424, 427

[12] Man and Superman, London (1903) p. 219

[13] Cf. A. Wooldridge: Measuring the Mind, Cambridge (1994) pp. 21f., 183-185, 209-211, Paul pp. 568f.

[14] 'The Decline in Birth-Rate', Fabian Tract No. 131, London (1907) p. 19.

[15] Icarus or the Future of Science, New York (1924), pp. 48ff., and letter to Alys Pearsall Smith, October 2, 1894, Selected Letters (N. Griffin, ed.), vol. 1, p. 128.

[16] American Journal of Sociology, vol. 10, July 1904 p.11. Cf. Mankind in the Making, London (1903) pp. 37ff.

[17] New Worlds for Old, New York (1908) pp. 21, 25f.

[18] Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, New York / London [1901] (1902), pp. 321-325, 332. Cf. Paul pp. 568f.

[19] The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring, London (1898) p. 67

[20] Reported in The Daily Express, March 4, 1910 (“Amazing speech by G.B.S. Barefaced advocacy of free love. Socialist hopes”)

[21] See Shaws letter to J. S. Stuart-Glennie in January 1900, D. H. Laurence (ed.): Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters 1898-1910, London (1972) pp. 128f. Executions by gas were not used in the United States until 1924, cf. E. Black: War against the weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York (2003) pp. 247ff., S. Christianson: The Last Gasp: The Rise and Fall of the American Gas Chamber, Berkeley (2010) pp. 23-33

[22] 'Eugenics, Birth-Control, and Socialism', in: Eden & Cedar Paul (eds.): Population and Birth-Control: A Symposium, New York (1917) pp. 145f.

[23] F. O’Toole: Judging Shaw: The Radicalism of GBS, Dublin (2017) pp. 272-275.

[24] 'Imprisonment' (1922) in: Prefaces (1934) p. 298, cf. pp. 136f., 296-301, 317-320.

[25] Paramount British Pictures, 5 March 1931. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-Ljkoh_vmE  See also Shaw’s defense of executions of habitual criminals and unwanted individuals in the Soviet Union in the preface to the play On the Rocks (1933) (Too True to Be Good, Village Wooing & On the Rocks, Three Plays by Bernard Shaw, London (1934) pp. 143, 146, 156-158'[26] Published in The Listener, a magazine published by the BBC, London, February 7, 1934, L.W. Conolly: Bernard Shaw and the BBC, Toronto (2009) pp. 187-195

For nearly two years, the American Cemetery in Margraten in the Netherlands – a solemn site of more than 8,300 graves of Americans who died freeing Europe from Nazi rule -- displayed commemorative panels honoring the black military personnel who fought for freedom abroad that they were denied at home.

Until, in early March, the panels were quietly removed, almost certainly as part of the Trump administration’s effort to cleanse American history of conflict and negativism and to play down the separate contributions of minorities.

The removal sparked a reaction that is anything but quiet. The development has been front-page news in the Netherlands, lawmakers are beseeching American officials to return the panels, and relatives of those buried in the cemetery in the southern part of the Netherlands are angry and heartbroken.

The removal of the commemoration -- like an article on the baseball pioneer Jackie Robinson’s military service record that was initially removed from a Pentagon website -- is consistent with the administration’s effort to erase what it called 'illegal DEI and "diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility" (DEIA) programs.' The article about Robinson, who desegregated Major League Baseball in 1947, was restored -- exactly the treatment officials in the Netherlands are hoping to win with the Margraten panels, which speak of the black soldiers 'fighting on two fronts.'

That phrase is a direct reference to an effort, prominent in black circles yet all but unknown among whites, called the 'Double V' or 'Double Victory' campaign. It began with a 1942 letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, the leading black newspaper and one with a national audience, that spoke of the incongruity of black soldiers fighting for freedom in Europe while being denied freedom at home.

The drive to strip references to the achievements of various groups, especially minorities, is congruent with the White House offensive to remove any scent of negativism or single-interest matters in portrayals of American history. 'The exhibitions in Margraten are not intended to promote an agenda critical of America,' American Ambassador Joe Popolo, who visited the cemetery said on the X social media platform. He donated $827,900 to the Trump 2024 campaign.

But the record of black involvement in World War II, including digging graves at Margraten, and the irony of blacks’ commitment to foreign freedom while lacking it domestically, is not solely part of African American history, nor is it inherently negative. It is immutably part American history more broadly, especially since the Double V campaign is considered a precursor to the civil rights movement.

‘This was an important movement by the Pittsburgh Courier on behalf of a community experiencing segregation throughout the United States and the military,’ Rod Doss, the publisher and editor of the newspaper, said in an interview. ‘Our soldiers fought overseas for the freedom of others, but they lacked that same freedom in the United States.’

The Double V campaign came after James Thompson, a 26-year-old Courier reader from Wichita, Kansas, wrote to the newspaper posing six questions, which we might regard as black analogues to the four questions Jews ask at Passover, itself a moment of reflection about freedom:

‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending? Will America be a true and pure democracy after this war? Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?’ As Thompson continued, ‘I want to know, and I believe every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know.’

Thompson, who eventually was awarded the Soldiers Medal, the highest honour for non-combat situations, for his service in the segregated Quartermasters’ Corps in the India-Burma theatre, died 26 years ago.

It took six years after the Thompson letter, and an order from President Harry Truman, to desegregate the armed forces. It took a dozen years for the Supreme Court to issue its school desegregation decision. It took 22 years, marches and sit-ins around the South for Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act.

But the involvement of Black Americans in World War II, despite their having no answers to the six questions that Thompson posed in his letter, remains one of the most poignant parts of the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny.

‘We’re talking about 1.2 million African Americans who made a vital contribution to the liberation of Europe,’ said Sebastiaan Vonk, a historian with the Black Liberators in the Netherlands foundation.

Dutch citizens -- thankful for the Allied campaign to liberate them -- along with American relatives of those buried in the Netherlands cemetery have adopted the graves, learned the names of individual soldiers and aviators, decorated them each May, pledged to visit them several times a year, and, in some cases, have a portrait of the fallen American in their homes. Some 1,000 people are on a waiting list to become grave adopters.

The adoptions span generations and now include Dutch people who have no memories of the Nazi occupation of their country or of its liberation by a force that was principally Canadian and which Cornelius Ryan said required ‘the rawest form of courage’ and rendered the Dutch ‘hysterical with joy’. In announcing the offensive, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower said, ‘The hour of liberation the Netherlands have awaited so long is now very near.’

The Dutch today remain mindful of the sacrifice of black service members who fought for liberty for others without possessing it themselves.

‘The panels that no longer have a place in the visitors’ centre of the American Cemetery in Margraten tell the story of a struggle by black American soldiers on two fronts: against the enemy and against racism’, said Bas Albersen, spokesman for Emile Roemer, governor of the southernmost Dutch province. ‘They fought for a freedom they themselves did not have. Among other things, the panels give them recognition for the role they played in the liberation of Limburg -- recognition that, due to the deeply-rooted segregation in the American army at the time, they hardly received.’

One of the tragedies of our time is that Americans, about to celebrate 250 years of freedom, have to be told this by someone 3,750 miles from Washington.

David M. Shribman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who worked for the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe before his 17 years as Executive Editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius, a BBC documentary created in partnership with the production company 72 Films, aired in the UK in May of this year. As with Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius (2023) and Mozart: Rise of a Genius (2024), the format features commentary from “writers, actors, and experts” alongside dramatic re‑creations of the artist’s life and times in which the actors emote, but do not speak. Shakespeare walks down a mucky, ribald, dangerous street in Tudor London and looks concerned as fights break out and a man is hung from the gallows; Jane Austen walks down a mucky, ribald, dangerous street in Georgian London and looks concerned as a black man is dragged away for some unspecified reason.

These scenes set the stage for exploring the central theme, which is evidently: how did Shakespeare and Austen express their opposition to social injustice in their writing? And additionally in Austen’s case: how did Austen express her rebellion against patriarchal oppression?

Both programmes are notable for their unfounded assertions and missing context. For example, we are told that Shakespeare’s tragic play about the nobly-born teenage offspring of two wealthy feuding families is—somehow or other— “a response to the social injustice he’s seeing.” This is because “up until now, romantic plays have been comedies, but Shakespeare writes this as a tragedy.”

Are we to believe that not a single person currently employed in BBC Arts knows that Shakespeare didn’t create Romeo and Juliet by upending a romantic comedy? He sourced his plot from a 1562 poem, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Iuliet. Emphasis on “Tragicall”. Likewise, Shakespeare’s regrets about his failings as an absentee father might possibly have informed King Lear, but shouldn’t we also tell the viewers that the play is sourced from ancient fables such as in Holinshed’s Chronicles?

The Jane Austen programme is a compendium of disinformation and distortions. One presenter assures us that Austen’s teenage creation, Lady Susan Vernon, was a convention-busting anti-heroine. “Lady Susan is the hand grenade that Jane Austen is lobbing into Georgian society. Women are meant to present in a certain way, and she did away with all of that… it’s unfathomable”. Again, does nobody at BBC Arts understand how ridiculous that sounds? What is really unfathomable is that the BBC, with all the resources at its command, with their extensive archives, with the institutional power and prestige which guarantees their enquiries will be answered by any university on the planet, did not check to see if the story of a wicked aristocrat who tries to coerce her daughter into a mercenary marriage was an outlier in Georgian fiction.

The producers ignore readily available information in favour of making up their own version of Austen. Austen’s nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh recollected that his aunt “never was seen, either morning or evening, without a cap” (73). Nevertheless, the actress portraying Austen in the dramatic vignettes is never seen with a cap indoors or a bonnet out of doors. This may seem like a pedantic objection, but the BBC’s renegade bareheaded Jane is emblematic of their agenda. For the BBC, the important thing to know about Austen’s genius is not her wit and her cool irony (hardly mentioned), her revolutionary narrative techniques (briefly mentioned), but that Austen—a woman, let’s remember—sought for a way “to tackle big subjects and say something about the world without alienating readers and critics”.

Watercolour of Jane by her sister Cassandra, 1804

We’re invited to believe that the critics ignored Mansfield Park because it rebuked the institution of slavery. To prove this, they show an excerpt from the 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park, with dialogue hinting at sexual concubinage—dialogue which is not in the novel.

It’s unknown why Austen’s third novel wasn’t reviewed but it might have been for no reason at all. The comprehensive British Fiction database lists 441 titles published between 1811 and 1817, the years that Austen was active. Of those, 201 titles have contemporary reviews. But this programme is singularly devoid of basic fact-checking or consistency. We’re told that because of Mansfield Park’s failure to gain critical attention, “Jane realizes that if she wants to pose big questions, and challenge social convention, she must do it through a more engaging and entertaining heroine.” Next, we hear from an Austen scholar who quotes Austen’s famous remark that Emma Woodhouse is “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”. Further, Austen began writing Emma before Mansfield Park was published: she created Emma Woodhouse before any critic could have ignored Mansfield Park.

While the viewers are knocked over the head with the usual historical context about sexism, empire and slavery, they are given almost no literary context whatsoever. Nobody explains that many novelists criticized the institution of slavery. The Advantages of Education (1793) and Lady Maclairn (1806), for example, discuss sexual concubinage in the West Indies. Instead, the viewers of Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius are taught that Austen was “brilliantly subversive”. In Pride and Prejudice, “she's going against the hierarchical nature of society, of class, of class divide.” Never mind that Austen famously described her tale of Darcy and Elizabeth as “too light, and bright and sparkling” because it was devoid of the kind of sententious lectures featured in many novels of the time. Never mind that the standard impediment in a sentimental novel was the apparent class divide between hero and heroine.

The depiction of Austen taken from A Memoir of Jane Austen (1871) written by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh, and based on the sketch by Cassandra, her sister.

An excerpt from the 1996 movie version of Emma shows the sequence when Emma is rude to the garrulous spinster Miss Bates and is scolded by Mr. Knightley. This is described as Austen’s critique of “the disparity that is going on in the country between rich and poor.” And yet Emma, for all her faults of self-importance, is the only Austen heroine who visits a poor family, and the narrator tells us she is sensible and benevolent. Austen is rather unique in not depicting her heroines as ministering angels who bring succour to the poor; it was a trope of the time.

The assertions in Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius are not only undermined by Austen’s own novels, but they have not been put to the simplest of tests: Austen was a subversive social critic—compared to whom? As James Walton noted in The Spectator, this documentary erases all mention of other female novelists.

To take a few of many examples: Elizabeth Helme castigates the selfishness of the privileged in Albert, or the Wilds of Strathnavern (1799). Her character Mrs. St. Aubyn prefigures Scrooge: “Does not the parish provide plentifully for the poor?”

Agnes Hall, writing as Rosalia St. Clair, attacked “the absurd institutions of society, which so strongly tend to exalt the mere accidental distinction of birth, or the possession of property, over intellectual attainments or moral worth” in The Banker’s Daughters of Bristol (1824).

Novelist Ann Ryley, like Austen, detested the Prince Regent. Unlike Austen, Ryley didn't confine her thoughts to her private correspondence. A formidable dowager in Ryley’s Fanny Fitz-York (1818) repeatedly attacks the Regent and the entire British political establishment. She condemns them for “an impoverished revenue—a starving people—and the misery of thousands of individuals, who deplore the loss of husbands—fathers—brothers—and friends in this unjust, unnecessary, and destructive war.”

And yet, the female authors I’ve named are forgotten today. Could it be that Austen’s immortality derives, not from her supposed passion for social justice, but from some other attributes? Shamefully, the BBC is now utterly incapable of exploring what those attributes are.

Works Cited

Austen-Leigh, James Edward. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 1870. Wordsworth Editions, 2007.

Garside, Peter, et al. British Fiction Database 1800-1820: A Database of Circulation, Production & Reception.  http://www.british-fiction.cf.ac.uk/index.html

Walton, James, “Why is the BBC Making Stuff Up About Jane Austen?”. The Spectator, May 31, 2025.

Lona Manning (MA Res U of York) is an independent researcher and writer. She lives in Canada. She studies the forgotten sentimental novels of the long eighteenth century, which are a rich trove of information about the social attitudes of the time. www.lonamanning.ca