The publication of Michael Prescott’s leaked report into bias at the BBC and the subsequent threat of legal action against the Corporation from Donald Trump have focused attention primarily on the deliberate misediting of the President’s words when he addressed supporters at the Capitol in January 2021.
Rather less attention has been paid to one of Prescott’s nineteen pages on the BBC’s presentation of British history. He was commenting on a study of six BBC History broadcasts between 2020 and 2022 undertaken by History Reclaimed. These programmes and news items concerned slavery, colonialism, and famines in Ireland in the 1840s and Bengal a century later in the midst of the Second World War. Prescott described the detail we provided in our criticisms of the BBC as ‘fascinating’, and wondered why the BBC hadn’t bothered to reply to our ‘moderate’ suggestions for improvement.
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.
