This quotation comes from a review of Jeremy Paxman's recent series, Empire. My wife and I caught the first few episodes before we left for India before Easter. It may not have been a perfect show, and Michael White's review reminds me that it may have had more problems that I remember either of us noticing at the time, but one real positive about it was that they didn't edit the opinions of Indian woman whose family came to Britain after they were expelled from East Africa in the early 70:. "We were better off when the British were in charge." Now she might be wrong about that, and I certainly don't think I agree with her, but that isn't really the point. The point is simply that this is a real opinion held by at least some former colonial subjects, and that I don't think we should avoid that or dismiss it as 'false consciousness'. I'm sure there must have been some British who missed the Romans when they left all those centuries ago. This is not, I hasten to add, to argue in favour of empire, or to think, like some Edwardian Fabians did, that an empire which is good for all, subject peoples as well as rulers, is an actual possibility. It is simply to argue for the complexity of real, lived experience, which so easily gets overlooked in our rush to pass judgement.
But now that the British empire is safely in its grave – for almost 50 years now — it's time we got a better grip on it, instead of being torn between Telegraph-esque sentimentality, snarling leftie loathing and the faint embarrassment (can that really have been Grandpa patrolling the Suez canal?) that is probably the response of most people. Fact is that, as usual, there was good and bad, heroism and sacrifice, greed and brutality – much as there would have been if no British soldier's boot had touched the local soil.There would also have been fewer canals or railways – just as colonial Britain ("Britain was Rome's Afghanistan," says naughty Cambridge professor Mary Beard) plunged into post-imperial disorder after the legions went home but lived off its Roman roads for 1,400 years. The graffiti Paxo reported from British mandate (1919-48) Palestine says it all. "Tommy, go home" underneath which a British soldier – a Tommy in the jargon of the time — had scrawled: "I wish we fucking could."
Well, they did go home and in a hurry, leaving the British with a lingering taste for what Tony Blair called "liberal intervention" and others call sucking up to the Americans. Paxo played with the theme, let's hope he explores it further in future episodes – and tries to explain how uncertainty about British identity – specifically English identity – are a legacy of empire.
But it's wrong to suggest, as Paxman did, that the British stumbled on empire via the treaty of Paris in 1763, not least because it had been amassing outposts for 150 years by then and was – thanks to the treaty of Paris — about to lose its first (American) empire. If Paxo mentioned the extraordinary East India Company which ran India before 1857 I must have missed it.He didn't mention inter-racial marriage – William Dalrymple's White Mughals is very good on this – before High Victorian morality put a stop to it or why the British army fetched up in Cairo in 1882 (it was to protect the Suez canal which the French built and the British bought), let alone exactly WHY Egyptians still come to Britain expressly – so he said – to spit on the grave of the late Evelyn Baring ("Over Baring" to his critics) who ran British Egypt from 1883 to 1907. Baring wasn't the only one with a low opinion of foreigners.Michael White, from The Guardian
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