Inglorious Empire?

A couple of years ago I did a session at the Bradford Literature Festival with Professor Paul Rogers and Shashi Tharoor. I had never heard of Shashi Tharoor. It turned out he had been a deputy to Kofi Annan at the United Nations, but had now returned to India and was involved in domestic politics. The session we did was on where the world was heading … and no one mentioned a pandemic.

The day before the event I was sent Tharoor’s new book, but didn’t have time to read it until afterwards. Inglorious Empire opened my eyes to the reality of the British Empire. The question was: why did it take a book like this to inform me?

I grew up in Liverpool where we were taught something vague about the slave trade and the transatlantic routes that brought such wealth to my home city and England. I loved the buildings in the city center without ever asking where the money came from to build them. I used to get my hair cut at the barber shop at Penny Lane, but never wondered who the street was apparently named after. It was after I had left at 18 that I found out that James Penny was a slave trader.

Reading Tharoor’s book I found myself cutting through some of the complacent mythology about the British Empire to some actual facts. We often hear reference to Britain as “the greatest trading nation” – without any reference to those who paid the price. The blood of slaves and the exploitation of people didn’t get a mention – as if the noble Brits went around the globe doing their best for people at no expense, civilising them and giving them railways. For example, I didn’t know that prior to the British taking over India had twenty three per cent of global trade; when the British left it had only three per cent. Look around our great cities to see where the money went.

So, this is what I am thinking while the Black Lives Matter protests go on. The USA has its own history of exploitation, segregation and racism; the UK has its own unique history. But, they are inextricably connected in the common experience of the slave trade itself.

Ignorance is no excuse. Yet, silence does not necessarily signify acquiescence; it can also be a response to facing the truth and having no excuse for not having enquired or understood in the first place. I am uneasy about making gestures that cost nothing – which is why I have not rushed to action or reaction, but need to think and consider and plan what might make an actual difference. (I know many people have ‘taken the knee’ as a mark of solidarity with black people; I have to be honest and say that I feel uneasy about appropriating someone else’s experience in this way, but recognize that I might be wrong and misreading the iconic power of it.) But, I find Reni Eddo-Lodge’s words powerful: “Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” (From Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.)

History is complex and can be appropriated for ideological ends by anyone. But, however some times and periods are open to debate and interpretation, there are some facts that cannot be ignored. Behind the numbers are people. And many of their successors still pay the price today of other people’s privilege gained yesterday.

This might be a pivotal moment in our history – on both sides of the Atlantic. Justice cannot be reduced to gestures. Our teaching of history clearly needs some serious attention – and that would only be a start, but not a conclusion. As James Baldwin said in As Much Truth as One can Bear (quoted by Susan Neiman in Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil): “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”