Robert Tombs Robert Tombs

In defence of the British Empire

(Photo: iStock)

Is it my imagination, or are the whitened bones of the British Empire being yet again dug up and trampled underfoot? The latest Labour party manifesto promised ‘an audit of the impact of Britain’s colonial legacy to understand our contribution to the dynamics of violence and insecurity across regions previously under British colonial rule’. The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is redesigning its British galleries to link every statue and teapot to the Empire ‘with all of its systems of exploitation’. Jesus College Cambridge intends to return a bronze cockerel seized from Benin in a punitive expedition in 1897. Some Cambridge students and academics are pressing to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum, not only in English Literature and History, but in science too, in ‘an acknowledgement,’ says the student newspaper Varsity, ‘of the deep colonial roots of what we now call “science”.’

Recently (just before lockdown) I was invited to take part in a discussion in London on ‘Rethinking the British Empire and its Legacy Today’. The audience was large and interested. I was intending to speak on how present-day political culture is influenced by certain beliefs about Empire. The other panellists, I should explain, were a Guardian contributor, a young academic researcher, an older academic who had campaigned for Labour’s manifesto commitment, and a celebrated conservative writer who proved to be almost equally scathing about the Empire from a Gladstonian perspective. So extreme did I find their remarks that I attempted a brief off-the-cuff correction. What follows is a more elaborate version of those comments.

The view they put forward has become over the last generation an orthodoxy: that the British Empire was a system of racism, slavery and exploitation; that it impoverished its colonies to such an extent that many have never recovered; that Britain’s wealth was founded (some say entirely founded) on these ill-gotten gains.

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Written by
Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs is an emeritus professor in history at the University of Cambridge and the author of This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (Allen Lane, 2021). He also edits the History Reclaimed website

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