The British Empire is now the subject on which the sun never sets

Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes a meta-approach to this. Its author Priya Satia has read widely, and has written essentially a cultural history of the Empire from the early modern period to today, of the way Britain’s colonial expansion has been interwoven with the culture. Many of the connections she draws are intriguing and her narrative is nuanced enough to be sympathetic to both pro- and anti-imperial arguments past and present.

But overlaying this is a discussion of how historians themselves have shaped the perception of the Empire, acting as boosters, or at least as apologists (such as John Robert Seeley, with his claim that it developed in a ‘fit of absence of mind’). Of course, academics were often beneficiaries of empire themselves in various ways — universities received bequests from those whose wealth came on the back of slavery and exploitation (an issue some institutions in the UK and the US are having to address today), while British professors gladly took posts in the universities that sprung up across the dominions throughout the 19th century.

In Padraic X. Scanlan we have a writer explicitly claiming to reassess the history of the British Empire — specifically the role of slavery within it. He is an economic historian, so is alive to the ways in which slavery was integral to Britain and its empire becoming an economic powerhouse, much of it driven by the labour of unfree bodies. But he appears to think this is little known or addressed. I don’t know in which circles he moves, but it’s not a revelation to most people that Britain profited from the slave trade, despite Scanlan’s suggestion that such claims are met with a ‘chorus of rebuttals and denial’.