The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale

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The story peddled by imperial apologists is a poisonous fairytale
Priyamvada Gopal
The Guardian
28 Jun 2006

Aresurrection is haunting the British media, the bizarre apparition of “benevolent empire”. It takes the form of documentaries and discussions steered towards the conclusion that colonialism was not such a bad thing after all and that something of a celebration is in order. Trouble is, to get there, some creative reworking of the facts is needed. After a recent brouhaha about Britain’s imperial history on Radio 4’s Start the Week — in which I took part — the presenter Andrew Marr worried that the debate had been “pretty biased” against empire: there was a lot of enthusiasm and a “warm nostalgia” for empire, he suggested in the subsequent phone-in, even in former colonies, “still something there, absolutely”.

Only the desire to recover some imaginary good from the tragedy that was empire can explain the elevation of the neoconservative ideologue Niall Ferguson to chief imperial historian on the BBC and now Channel 4. His aggressive rewriting of history, driven by the messianic fantasies of the American right, is being presented as a new revelation. In fact, Ferguson’s “history” is a fairytale for our times which puts the white man and his burden back at the centre of heroic action. Colonialism — a tale of slavery, plunder, war, corruption, landgrabbing, famines, exploitation, indentured labour, impoverishment, massacres, genocide and forced resettlement — is rewritten into a benign developmental mission marred by a few unfortunate accidents and excesses.

Soundbite culture thrives on these simplistic grand narratives. Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative. The racism institutionalised by empire also seems to be back in fashion. The book accompanying Ferguson’s current Channel 4 series on 20th-century history, The War of the World, tells us that people “seem predisposed” to “trust members of their own race”, “those who are drawn to ‘the Other’ may … be atypical in their sexual predilections” and that “when a Chinese woman marries a European man, the chances are relatively high … that only the first child they conceive will be viable.” Not far from the pseudo-scientific nonsense that once made it possible to punish interracial relationships.

Behind such talk and the embrace of the broadcasters is the insistence that we are being offered gutsy truths that the “politically correct” establishment would love to suppress. This is the neoconservative as spunky rebel against liberal tyranny. Yet Ferguson peddles nothing more than the most hackneyed, selfaggrandising myths of empire, canards once championed by old imperialists such as Macaulay and Mill and rehashed now by the Bush administration: western imperialism brings freedom, democracy and prosperity to primitive cultures. The myth decorates US and British foreign policy spin while trendier versions have also emerged in platforms such as the Euston Manifesto. By anointing Ferguson and his fellow imperial apologists such as Andrew Roberts as semi-official historians, the British media are colluding in a dangerous denial of the past and lending support to contemporary US imperial propaganda .

The evidence — researched by scholars such as Amartya Sen, Nicholas Dirks, Mike Davis and Mahmood Mamdani, Caroline Elkins and Walter Rodney — shows that European colonialism brought with it not good governance and freedom, but impoverishment, bloodshed, repression and misery. Joseph Conrad, no radical, described it as “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly”. Good governance? More famines were recorded in the first century of the British Raj than in the previous 2,000 years, including 17-20 million deaths from 1896 to 1900 alone. While a million Indians a year died from avoidable famines, taxation subsidising colonial wars, and relief often deliberately denied as surplus grain was shipped to England.

Tolerance? The British empire reinforced strict ethnic/religious identities and governed through these divisions. As with the partition of India when 10 million were displaced, arbitrarily drawn boundaries between “tribes” in Africa resulted in massive displacement and bloodshed. Freedom and fair play? In Kenya, a handful of white settlers appropriated 12,000 square miles and ... read more...