The Truth About Empire. Real Histories of British Colonialism (Hurst, 2024), edited by Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography in the University of Sussex, is a book deliberately compiled to play a role in the ongoing culture wars that threaten to obscure imperial history. This role is, in its publisher’s words, to be a “weapon of defence” that even a layperson might wield. This is quite an ambitious description for what is essentially a collection of essays that serve as a pretty droll long-form rebuttal of various points made in Nigel Biggar’s book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023) with each essay picking apart some aspect of his argument while occasionally paying lip-service to broader cultural debates on empire.
The foreword is by Sathnam Sanghera who, incidentally, has already published a children’s book that has “The Truth about the British Empire” in the title.[1] Sanghera is a journalist, which makes for a deliciously sharp contrast with the rest of the authors, who often use their credentials as historians as a discursive crutch.
The book takes the reader across the British Empire. The usual points on slavery, residential schools and Cecil Rhodes are drilled in and we get some pontification by Andrea Major on the fact that, in relation to the abolition of suttee (sati), not every British person believed in interventionist government in India. This is true. Shock Horror.
There are some interesting pieces. We get a revisionist chapter on Raffles by Gareth Knapman, for example. But there are also some ridiculous inclusions, including one comparing the British Empire to Nazi Germany by Liam Limburd. This is apparently acceptable because a handful of black communists (mostly George Padmore) did so throughout the 1930s.
On the face of it, none of this sounds awful (except the chapter on Nazi Germany) but closer examination dispels that illusion. Sathnam’s foreword is probably the worst part of the book, and his lack of historical training shows up in its almost parody-levels of one-sidedness. ‘Historians’, he informs us, should not ‘be terrorised’. You don’t say? With cogency only found in a high school debating club, he reveals to us his next profound commandment: ‘Arguments’, he writes, the pause for effect palpable, ‘have to be based on facts’. I don’t know about you, but for me that’s £20 well-spent. The whole chapter reads like satire. Sathnam tells us to trust the experts on the Tasmanian genocide, then cites the art critic Robert Hughes. He informs us about the views of Niall Ferguson and Jan Morris on the topic but skips over the views of Nicholas Clements[2], Richard Broome[3] and Henry Reynolds[4]. He mocks Jacob Rees-Mogg for claiming that the death rate in the Boer camps was the same as that in Glasgow at that time, smugly explaining that he ‘can’t recall [the claim] being made by any historian in years of reading on the subject’. If he had somehow managed to come across the obscure historical writer Thomas Pakenham (Cheltenham Prize for Literature, W.H. Smith Award, Alan Paton Award, Bodley Medal…) and opened his book on the Boer War he would have realised Rees-Mogg was referencing the Fawcett Commission calculation of the death rate, after the implementation of their recommendations, which was‘less than the average in Glasgow’.[5]
Consensus is only commandeered when convenient. ‘The work of experts counts’, we’re told by Sathnam, in response to Kemi Badenoch’s proposition of an endogenous theory of British industrialisation. However, such theories are the economic consensus (see North[6], Allen[7], Howes[8], Mokyr[9], Burnard[10] and McCloskey[11]).
The book is full of bold claims that crumble under scrutiny, largely by ignoring key parts of the literature. Take Gareth Knapman’s chapter on Stamford Raffles, often hailed as the founder of Singapore. His attempt at a more critical take falls flat. For instance, he blames Raffles for the Palembang massacre, where Dutch soldiers and their families were slaughtered at the Dutch fort. Yet, as historian John Bastin points out—though Knapman cites him without engaging—Raffles’s only misstep was making rash promises of independence to the Sultan of Palembang, not orchestrating the massacre (Bastin, 1954 (II), p. 66). Knapman also accuses Raffles of flip-flopping between free trade and mercantilism with the Sultan, despite Raffles never promising free trade and explicitly instructing his agents in his draft treaties to ensure that the tin and pepper trade were conveyed in British ships (Bastin, 1954 (I), p. 311). He further suggests Raffles targeted the Sultan’s treasure, ignoring the fact that the Sultan had voluntarily handed it to the British Resident in a bid to regain his throne—half of which was returned to his successor when the ploy failed (Bastin, 1954 (II), pp. 73-79).
Another claim of Knapman is that the British violated a treaty with the Sultan of Mataram following his massacre of Javanese elites. This completely misses the context. After the treaty of friendship was signed between the British and the Sultan of Mataram in December 1811, the old sultan almost immediately began plotting against the British. The former Oxford historian Peter Carey (2007, pp. 312-329) provides a detailed description of the various steps taken by the sultan, including secret treaties, in order to oust the British militarily. In that sense, it almost seems ridiculous to accuse Raffles of having cooked up false excuses and pretences in order to take a more military solution. Similarly, the critique of Raffles’s time in Singapore falls short. Blame for the initial disorder is placed on Raffles, rather than the clear lack of military and police resources. Ironically, one of the cited letters—from Colonel Nahujis—actually commends the English for transforming Singapore from a desolate outpost into a bustling port city. He commends Raffles throughout his letters, in fact. (Miller, 1941, pp. 173-4, 180, 192, 198).
Every chapter has knee-slappers like this, but the rest are significantly less interesting. Liam Liburd’s essay on the history of comparisons between the British Empire and Nazi Germany results in a painful essay on black political thought. The essay is prompted by the backlash to a remark made during the famous ‘Racial Consequences of Mr Churchill’ event in Churchill College, Cambridge, where Professor Kehinde Andrews claimed that the British Empire was ‘worse than the Nazis’. He cleverly avoids quoting such an obviously inane statement, choosing instead to frame the backlash as opposition to the ‘suggestion that Churchill’s views […] be considered within the context of […] Nazism’. This is understandable, as to actually quote Andrews would have been instantly self-defeating for Liburd. He instead opts to consider Andrews’ argument as ‘rooted in a long tradition of anti-colonial critique’ calling for readers to avoid engaging in ‘the crude ethics of comparative calculation’. A good rebuttal to Andrews then, who said the Empire was worse because ‘it killed far many more people’!
The last chapter, by Margot Finn, is a quantitative attack on Biggar’s bibliography which is, we are informed, composed of 72% secondary sources, and 87% sources penned by men. That’s a real clincher if ever one existed, and I appreciate her efforts to quantify such sacrilege. But I decided to stick it a little more to Biggar by looking at the citation lists in The Truth About Empire. Chapter 4, ‘Sati and the “Civilising Mission”’, seems to have also burnt its female authors, being 79% male and 71% secondary sources. Chapter 1, ‘What About Slavery?’, seems to be equally enslaved to androcentric citation practices with its authorship being 68% male. That’s awkward. Among these criticisms, we are also informed by Margot Finn that Biggar not only reads sources in the only language he speaks, but also gets book recommendations from his friends. Will the nightmares never cease?
The chapter on Canada is equally misleading, although it covers significantly more well-trodden ground. Residential schools for indigenous children, we are told, were in fact a form of genocide. The Walpole Island First Nation missed the memo on this development with more ex-students regarding their experience as positive than as negative.[12] Physical reality also missed the bus with anthropomorphic data suggesting that residential schooling for these children improved their heights, the likelihood of a healthy body weight, and likelihood of employment.[13] The sixty students from the two Ontarian residential schools interviewed in Elizabeth Graham’s The Mush Hole[14] are similarly ignorant, with almost half describing generally positive experiences.
The charge of genocide simply does not stand up to scrutiny. The abuse of vulnerable children is a horrific feature of institutions where adults have inordinate power over minors, but not genocide. Dying of disease may be tragic but it also isn’t genocide. The chapter feels very much like wasted energy: a genuinely interesting opportunity to explain the tragically high disease mortality rates, which can be traced back to infections, especially tuberculosis, in indigenous communities, and the attempts made by both colonial and indigenous leaders to educate these children, is wasted in favour of repeatedly charging the schools with genocide.
Bronwen Everill’s chapter on slavery is equally tiring. She waxes lyrical on how Abd al-Qadir Kane (the Almamy of the Futa Toro in Senegal) ‘abolished’ slavery, but this overlooks that non-Muslims could still be enslaved (Robinson, 1975, p. 201; Barry, 1972, p. 216), and that Abd al-Qadir himself practised sexual slavery. Women captured during his wars with the Waalo were married off into sexual servitude to him and his followers (Robinson, 1975, p. 204). European travellers were also painfully unaware of his budding abolitionist tendencies when they visited his kingdom and noted the number of slaves in towns under his control (Saugnier and Brisson, 1792, p. 346). There are also other miscellaneous pieces of evidence showing that the slave trade continued under him (Curtin, Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 1975, pp. 292-293). Another misleading example involves the Tenme people, whom she portrays as abolitionists. In reality, they rebelled at the end of the 19th century, citing the abolition of slavery as one of their grievances (Report… on the Subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate, p. 527).
The Truth About Empire promises to be a salvo against the recent rise of ‘pro-empire’ history. In doing so, it often falls prey to the same ailments it accuses its opponents of suffering from: cherry picking, logical fallacies, hypocrisy and bad history.
Notes:
1 Sanghera, S. (2023), Stolen history: The truth about the British Empire and how it shaped us. Puffin Books
2 Clements, N. (2014). The Black War: Fear, sex and resistance in Tasmania. University of Queensland Press.
3 Broome, R. (2019). Aboriginal Australians: A history since 1788 (5th ed.). Allen & Unwin. p. 44
4 Reynolds, H. (2001). An indelible stain? The question of genocide in Australia’s history. Sydney, Australia: Penguin. p. 59
5 Pakenham, T. (2015). The Boer War. Little, Brown Book Group. p. 51
6 North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. Cambridge University Press.
7 Allen, R. C. (2011). ‘Why the industrial revolution was British: Commerce, induced invention, and the scientific revolution’. The Economic History Review, 64(2), 357–384. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00532.x
8 Howes, A. (2016). The improving mentality: Innovation during the British industrial revolution, 1651–1851 (Unpublished PhD thesis). King’s College London.
9 Mokyr, J. (2009). The enlightened economy: An economic history of Britain, 1700-1850. Yale University Press.
10 Burnard, T. (2022) ‘Slavery and empire’ in D. S. Doddington & E. Dal Lago (eds.), Writing the history of slavery (pp. 59-80). Bloomsbury Academic.
11 McCloskey, D. N. (2017), Bourgeois equality: How ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world. University of Chicago Press.
12 Miller, J., & Danziger, E. Jr. (2000). “In the care of strangers”: Walpole Island First Nation’s experiences with residential schools after the First World War. Ontario History, 92 (1), 71–88.
13 Feir, D. L. (2016). The long-term effects of forcible assimilation policy: The case of Indian boarding schools. The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d’Économique, 49 (2), 433–480. https://doi.org/10.1111/caje.12198
14 Graham, E. (1997). The Mush Hole: Life at Two Indian Residential Schools. Heffle Publishing
References
Barry, B. (1972). Le royaume du Waalo: le Sénégal avant la conquête.
Bastin, John, (1953). ‘Palembang in 1811 and 1812’ (Part I). Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, vol. 109, 4, pp. 300-20.
Bastin, J. (1954). ‘Palembang in 1811 and 1812’ (Part II). Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde, Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, vol. 110, 1, pp. 64-88.
Carey, P. B. R. (2007). The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785-1855. Brill.
Curtin, P. D. (1975). Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade. University of Wisconsin Press.
Miller, H. E. (1941). Extracts from the Letters of Col. Nahujis. Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 19.
Report by Her Majesty’s Commissioner and Correspondence on the Subject of the Insurrection in the Sierra Leone Protectorate. (1898). Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
Robinson, D. (1975). The Islamic Revolution of Futa Toro. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 8.
Saugnier, & Brisson. (1792). Voyages to the Coast of Africa, Pierre-Raymond de Brisson and M. Saugnier, (London, 1792)
Hira Jungkow is a British-Indian LSE graduate, whose parents fled Uganda during the reign of Idi Amin. He speaks Hindi and Bengali, and his interest in Empire is born of his familial connections.
