In Our Time - The British Empire's Legacy

Episode Date: December 31, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Britain's colonial legacy. The 18th, 19th and early part of the 20th centuries were times of colonial conquest for this country but the abiding image of empire (true or not) is stuck squarely in the 1850’s when Victoria was on the throne and the world map was liberally sprinkled with red. So what does that mean for us as we go into the next millennium - Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social History at University College London, asks us to 're-remember' our colonial past, and suggests that only by acknowledging the guilt it has saddled us with and its legacy of a truly multi-cultural Britain can we face our new life in Europe.Are there different ways of remembering that past, and what effect do these different approaches have on our present? Are we still too close to our imperial past to view it objectively, or is the reverse true - that we are too deeply rooted in our present to learn the lessons of that past? With Catherine Hall, Professor Modern British Social and Cultural History, University College, London; Professor Linda Colley, currently holder of the Leverhulme Research Professorship at the London School of Economics and former Professor of History, Yale University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, today I'm joined by two historians to discuss Britain's colonial legacy. As we approach the end of the century,

how much do you identify ourselves by reference to our colonial past? Are there different ways of remembering that past and what effect do these different approaches have on us today? I was still too close to our imperial past to view it objectively. Catherine Hall is Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London, and she's just given a lecture on Empire and Us, drawing on her extensive work on nation and empire.

She was previously a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and her books include White, Male and Middle Class, explorations in feminism and history, and for the last few years her work has concentrated on rethinking the relation between Britain and Empire in the mid-19th century. century. Linda Colley is currently the holder of the Leaverhume Research Professorship at the London School of Economics. Previously, after teaching at Cambridge, she moved to Yale University as Professor of History. Her books include, in defiance of oligarchy, the Tory Party from 1714 to 1760, and Britons,

forging the nation, 1707 to 1837, for which she won the Wolfson Prize. She is currently working on her book about captives and renegades or what she calls the other side of empire. Catherine Hall, I'm quoting from your lecture, you say, as an historian in 1998, I want to suggest that unless the legacy of the British Empire is re-remembered, it will continue to disrupt and unsettle our present in ways that obstruct the development of a new kind of nation. Let's look at that. How do you think it is disrupting and unsettling our present?

Well, I think the legacy is everywhere, and the question is the ways in which we think about it. I mean, just to reflect for a minute on its presence, it has obviously shaped our contemporary population, the Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain, the South Asian presence in Britain, the Irish presence in Britain, and so on and so forth. Our population has been constituted through that colonial legacy. It's present in the buildings that surround us, in the street names, in the statues that we see, in our national literature, and so on. So it's there and how do we think about it? Well, I want to argue that in the moment

after decolonisation, there's a kind of guilt and embarrassment about the colonial and imperial past, which impedes thinking about it now and that if we are to reconstruct a multi-ethnic, multiracial Britain for the 21st century, we have to re-remend, we have to re-remend, remember and rethink that legacy of empire. I'd like to come to Guild in a few moments, but you say it will continue to disrupt and unsettle our present. I'd like to know in which particulars now the legacy of empire is disrupting and unsettling our present today.

Well, I think in terms of contemporary questions around race, it quite visibly disrupts and upsets all the time. Race is mainly talked about in Britain today, as if the black presence in Britain dates from post-1945, as if the arrival of the windrush, was the moment when the connections were first made, for example, between Britain and the West Indies. Whereas, of course, those connections were made in the mid-17th century.

There are long connections over centuries and over generations, which I think have been terribly important, and have shaped the ways in which, for example, in the contemporary moment, young Afro-Caribbean men are represented in this society. So that would be a point of disruption. A word you use a lot is re-remembering. Why do you use that and why is it so important to you? Well, that's the word that Tony Morrison uses

and that I think is very evocative of the work which needs to be done in relation to empire. I'm not suggesting that we don't all know about empire in some way. I'm suggesting that we need to rethink it. and Morrison argues particularly... And the writer of that great novelist, yeah. And the novel, the writer of that great novel, Beloved. And particularly in Beloved, she suggests that it's extremely important in the United States in the contemporary moment

to re-remember slavery. And that slavery is such a horrific and shameful past that African-Americans have wanted to forget it, never mind white Americans. And therefore, what her novel tries to do in part, is to rework those memories. And it's that notion of re-remembering that I'm drawing upon. What's your view on this re-remembering, Linda Colley?

I have a mixed response. I think it's certainly important that we in Britain at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st, are sensitive to the ways that empire in the past impacted negatively on certain peoples. And I think that that is happening if you go to the New Maritime Museum. in Liverpool and see its treatment of slavery, for example. It's a much more sensitive treatment of slavery than you got in that city back in the 1960s when I lived near it. On the other hand, the whole concept of re-remembering is, I think, fraught with danger, because what part of the empire are we going to re-remember? The empire is Pandora's Box. It's of a complex,

long, messy episode and it endangers a lot of interest groups. For example, think of the British record in 19th century India. Now, you can't understand British power in 19th century India without accepting that there was a great deal of collaboration with the British on the part of the Indian population. Now, when I speak to Indian friends now, that's not something about the empire they want to remember. They want very much to forget it. So the empire is an explosive issue and I think we have to accept that. I also think there's a built-in contradiction between moving towards a more pluralist multicultural society which we all want to do and saying in a somewhat totalitarian way, we must remember the empire in a certain way. I think we've got to accept that empire was so contentious

that different groups in this society are always going to have different takes on it. And that may be unfortunate, but that's how it's going to be. Can I add to that and come back to you, Catherine Hall, because I think the comparison of Tony Morrison's slavery is only good up to a point. One has to say that not only from a white point of view or a British point of view, there were good things about empire. There were riches on both sides, coming both sides. There were collaborations such as Linda's mentioned.

The subtext of what you're saying is that there's this terrible thing that we have to face up to. And it seems to me that to call it all a terrible thing is only to get half the point. Well, I'm not calling it all a terrible thing. I mean, you're both interpreting me as calling it all a terrible thing, but I'm not saying that. I'm arguing for a re-remembering of the complexity of empire,

which is extraordinarily rich and diverse. I completely agree with that. And slavery is one side of that re-remembering, but of course it's one episode, albeit an exceedingly important episode, and a very long episode, in a very long history. I'm as much for re-remembering

the ways in which collaboration was constructed between, for example, sections of the Indian bourgeoisie and ruling class in the 19th century and the British, as re-remembering everything else. I'm not asking for a politically correct version of history which only looks at the ways

in which white people did bad things to black people. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the criss-crossing, the hybridity, the multiplicity, the multiplicity of empire, which I think informs our contemporary society in all kinds of different ways. And I'm just as interested in Canada and Australia

as I am in the West Indies or India. I mean, we are talking about a rich and complex history that you cannot put into a few convenient sentences. This is something very, very diverse. But what is the nucleus that has to be re-remembered which we can carry through to the next century and will make us a new kind of nation. There's got to be a nucleus, isn't there?

Partly what I'm thinking about is the ways in which the assumptions of British power in the empire have been a very important part of our historic national identity. And I think unpicking that and understanding the ways in which the so-called peripheries, the colonies, have informed what is Englishness itself, what is Britishness, is also terrible. important and I don't think that's just a negative thing about guilt. I think there's also

something very positive about that, about understanding the ways in which white English identities depended on colonised others. Linda Colley. I think there's been a very important shift in the past 10 years as to how the history of empire has been written and this is entirely welcome. The history of the empire grew up initially as an adjunct to the empire itself. And historians used to be mainly interested in charting the development of the official mind of empire, how Britain ruled the world. And I think what we've seen in the past 10, 15 years,

very much at the hands of the literary scholars, really more than historians, is an emphasis on how empire impacted, not just on the colonies, but on Britain itself. And I absolutely agree with Catherine that that's very important. It's important as a way of getting a more diverse view of our past. And I'm all for greater understanding of those connections as I'm in favour of greater understanding of any kind of historical past. What I think I would say, and here perhaps I differ slightly from Catherine,

is that if we want to appreciate the impact of empire on Britain, fine. But don't let's exaggerate it. I think too much has been made of the degree, for example, to which Britishness was shaped in reaction to the racial other. I think if you look at the writings in the past, there is, for example, a lot more writing which distinguishes Britain vis-a-vis the French Catholic or vis-a-vis the German fellow Protestant.

I don't actually think that people in the past were as invariably interested in race as some scholars in the late 20th century would contend. Well, I do profoundly disagree. I think that ideas about English ethnicity and what it meant to be English in the 19th century, and that is my period, so that's what I'll talk about, were shaped by notions of a racial other. Though I don't think they were only shaped by notions of a racial lover, I think the figure of the French Catholic, the figure of the German and so on were also significant.

But I think a rereading of the newspapers, the fiction, the everyday materials which pass through people's homes in the 19th century. Can you give us some specific examples as you're going through here? Of course. I mean to choose one that's terribly, terribly well known, Jane Eyre. I think the figure of Bertha, the Creole woman in Jane Eyre, is quite central to the structure of the novel. And Jane's freedom, the white English woman's freedom,

depends on the position of that other woman. So that would be one example. I mean, it would be boring, but I could repeat to you, example after example after example, of ways in which these racial others figure in the English imagination in different ways in the 19th century. I think it's very easy to play the game of canonical text to say we will focus on certain works of literature in the 18th, 19th, early 20th century.

And I'm not denying that these references are there, but if you think of the sheer mass of English literature in the 18th and the 19th century, I do think you have to say, well, how important are these references? within this enormous mass. I mean, you know, I don't actually believe Pachez Said that anti-slavery is a main theme in Mansfield Park. It's there, but it's a tiny part of a large novel. I think also we've got to ask a deeper, older question. I'm not saying that the British in the 19th century, before, after, were not racist, many of them were.

But many of these attitudes actually evolved, long before the British had an empire. For example, if one wants to look at attitudes towards Islam, hostile representations of the Muslim, you can see those developing in classical Greece and in the Latin Empire. You can see it being developed in the 11th, 12th, 13th century. And to see some of these prejudices, prejudices against the Muslim,

prejudice against the black, primarily as a byproduct of empire is, I think, in some cases, a historic. I'm sure empire, in many cases, deepens racism and gives rise to new forms of it. But I don't think we can attribute all the signs of prejudice, all the signs of English complacency that we're there in the 19th century to the imperial experiment as such. Can I just come back to this notion of gold to Catherine, Because it seems to me that that has been something

which has clouded at the very least, post-imperial studies since the middle of this century. There has a sort of expected guilt. How does this figure in your re-remembering? Well, I think guilt is a profoundly unhelpful and blocking emotion. And I think guilt is a way of avoiding facing things. Part of what I mean by the disruption in the present is that guilt intervenes

and as if breastbeating does any good in dealing with the historic past. It doesn't. What you need to do is be able to come to terms with, understand, and move on from. So I'm not asking for everybody to be guilty, far from it. I'm asking for people to think about what the guilt is about and in what senses there are historic responsibilities and legacies out of those historic responsibilities because we're thinking about the present as well as thinking about the past.

and how things can be done differently, how Britain can be thought of, not as a white nation, which it certainly was thought of as until very recently, and how it can be imagined differently. Did people go around thinking we're a white nation, Linda Colley? I don't think it was talked about as much before 1800 as it was after, partly because people took it for granted, and therefore, you know, talking about shades of whiteness

was not part of the discourse so much. With regard to the issue of guilt, I think I agree with Catherine that beyond a point it's not very helpful, though I think it's important for all societies to realize that we all have a capacity for genocide. There is a genocidal element in British history,

there is in American history, there is in Chinese history and so forth. Again, I think a better knowledge of history would actually put some of this guilt in perspective. At the end of the 20th century empire is a dirty word, so much so that many states in the world today, which are in fact empires, now call themselves something different. I mean, the People's Republic of China has, in fact, inherited much of the dimensions of the Chinese empire and many of the qualities of Chinese Empire, but it calls itself a People's Republic.

There are various ways where which you could describe the United States of America as, in fact an empire in that it was constructed in some cases by force, by grabbing land belonging to other peoples, Native Americans, Mexicans. So empire was an ubiquitous phenomenon. It wasn't just something that the Western European nations did. Empires are still around us and to that extent the phrase post-colonial I think is very deceptive. It gives people the impression that empire is something only in the past. We should realise that in the 18th, 19th century, empire was not considered disreputable.

Empire was what almost all great powers aspired to be. There were all sorts of abuses associated with that, and we were the biggest colonial power for a while in the 19th century, but we were not the only one. Can I come back to something you write about Catherine Hall? You write about tea and sugar and chocolate and tobacco and goods that came from outside this island. And you attach your significance to the way they changed us.

Could you develop that a little? Well, I'm drawing on lots of other people's work here. There's a wonderful book by the anthropologist Sidney Mintz on sugar, for example, which argues that sugar, the use of sugar really changed the ways in which people thought about themselves in the 18th century, that having access to sugar made you into a certain kind of. modern person because sugar had been a luxury and it became a facet of everyday life. So sugar became part also of being English because of course the most common use of sugar was in tea and the English cup of tea is that quintessential aspect of Englishness which we all know and I certainly

love. I think one of the reasons why I focus on these kinds of commodities of empire is to do with the ways in which they were part of everyday life. And so I'm not only to talk. talking about, you know, particular texts in the 19th century. I'm not only talking about certain paintings or pieces of writing or pieces of legislation. I'm also talking about everyday lives and the ways in which they were shaped by empire. And sugar and tea would be a very important example of that. And in the anti-slavery movement, for example, in the early 19th century, one of the things which supporters of anti-slavery did was by newly designed tea sets,

which said no slave sugar on them and they would only eat sugar made by free labour. So that's an example of everyday interaction with questions of empire that cuts across the literate public, all kinds of people had access to those kinds of arguments. What's your reaction to that, Landa Carly? I think the point about consumer goods is obviously right. I mean, it's not just that imperial products are changing diet,

as Catherine said, but of course they're changing what people wear. Silks, calicos, all sorts of garments are coming in from the empire. I think what I'm perhaps a little dubious about is, given that this stuff is so ubiquitous, how do people think about it? Indeed, do they think about it at all? I mean, think of a late 20th century analogy. Millions of Brits every day go in and have a beef burger or a hamburger, and then they go home and they see some American TV.

That doesn't necessarily make them very interested in the economy of Nebraska, nor does it enable them to point out where Iowa is on the map. In other words, you can eat American products, you can see American products without thinking very much about America. And I think that's one of the issues about the commodities of empire that are not always faced. Yes, they existed. Yes, they were very important in the economy.

But did they actually prompt people to think about the empire as merely distinct from eating it? You talk in your lecture in terms of almost a practical solution. Were we to re-remember history, then it would help us to get on with what we keep saying again and again is much more of a multiracial society. And I think a lot of people listening to this programme might feel that the integration is going on reasonably well without necessarily doing this re-remembering? Well, I don't know that it's getting on terribly well. In this last year, we've had, on the one hand, Stephen Lawrence and the case about him,

on the other, the celebration of the Empire Windrush. In a way, you could say those two moments give us access to different ways of understanding the Afro-Caribbean presence in Britain in the late 20th century. It's not something we can be entirely happy or comfortable about us yet. No, I agree with that. and nobody's saying everything in the garden's lovely for a second. But my question was, if we do the Shreremembering, how is it going to help? Let's take an example.

Let's take some of the issues that come up after the Stephen Lawrence case. One of the key issues in that case has been the way in which both members of the public and the police had very particular expectations of how young black men behave on the streets, which were catastrophically wrong on that occasion. Now that way of representing black young men has a very long history and I'm saying if we understood that history it would help us to shift those stereotypes in the present. It's about understanding.

Of course I'm making an argument that understanding more can shape new ways of thinking and that's an optimistic. You could say that's an optimistic way of thinking but I would hold to that. Is we remembering, does it always involve apologising? No, not necessarily. I don't think that guilt and apology are the only things we're talking about. They might be a part of this whole history, but as we've been emphasizing, it's a very complex and rich and diverse history.

Lindicke, do you think that people coming with their own history and holding onto their own history? I mean, we can most easily see it in religions, can't we? With the Muslims wanting to hold on to that. There's a two-way process there, wasn't there to be? I mean, we seem to be always talking about it as if, those people who've been here for rather longer, should sort of reach out, re-remember. But there's certainly two sides are done there. Yes, and I think in a sense that's where the test for liberals come. It's something that the United States is living through at the moment, that the United States had this very interesting explanatory device of a melting pot,

which said we will welcome all groups of immigrants, whether they did or not. But, of course, they must speak English, they must subscribe to certain political tenants. and if they do that, we'll give them a good life. And one of the things that the United States is having to confront now is growing number of immigrants, particularly Hispanics, who say, well, we actually don't want to speak English. That's not our way of being American.

And I think that that's perhaps where the test is going to come in this country. It's all very well being open-minded and saying, oh, well, yes, of course, some of these people get badly treated and we want to make sure that they get equally treated with the rest of the British. But what happens if they don't want to be British? What happens if they have very different cultures? And we're seeing that, obviously, particularly with some of the Muslim groups. And if we're going to have a tolerant, pluralistic British society in the 21st century,

that I'm afraid is what we're going to have to cope with, that it's not just opening up our notion of Britishness to include others. We're going to have to accept that many groups are going to have different interoperations. of what it means to be British or are going to choose not to be British at all? Yes, it is something that has to be faced up to. I think the re-remembering has to be on all sides. I'm not suggesting that it's only for one group.

But over and above that, don't have to face up the fact that people who are living here now are living here now in this quite small set of islands, unless they go forward on the basis of a commonality, then there's always going to be disruption and fissures and gilts. and I don't know whether you're re-remembering. Another way of looking at it is that it could open wounds that are best left healed over.

Well, I don't think wounds do heal over very well. I think they leave marks, which is the point that I'm making, and the marks are there across the society, across the social body, across different groups within the society in all kinds of different ways, because the inequalities are marked in all sorts of different ways. But life leads marks. I mean, growing older leaves marks,

and that's the way it is. Well, but understanding might allow us to grasp those histories, those inequalities, those differences in different ways. Are we talking about trying to reach towards a value-free view of history, Linda Colleen? If so, is this possible? A completely value-free view of history, no, it's not possible. I mean, we are not eunuchs, we should not try to be. On the other hand, I am suspicious of scholars who say, because value-free history cannot exist, let's not even try it.

That's rather like saying because none of us is perfect, we might as well all go and rush out and commit murder. I think we all realize that none of us is perfect, but we can try and avoid the grosser crimes, the grosser sins, if you like. By the same token, I think we should recognize that we go, into the past, all of us with a great deal of ideological, emotional, personal baggage. But we can recognise that up to a point and we can work against it. I don't have Catherine's utopian view of history,

and I think perhaps Catherine is more of a utopian than me. I think historians are sceptical by profession should be. We are there to puncture conceit. We are there to make things awkward. We are not there to cater to the agenda. of anybody. We shouldn't be. And particularly with a phenomenon like empire, we should show the way that it matters,

but also the way that it didn't matter. We should say that it's very complex, very sticky, very controversial. And we should always be puncturing cocoons because that's what historians do. Well, I think historians also imagine pasts, presence and futures in their writing. I completely agree with your insistence on skepticism, your insistence on proper use of evidence, careful work, being as objective as we can possibly be,

given the baggage we all carry. But I also believe that we're in the business of intervening in our own ways in the contemporary world, and we have to take responsibility for that too. Thank you both very much. Thanks, Linda Colley. And Catherine Hall, next week, I'll be joined by Jermaine Greer and Helena Kronin. We'll be discussing feminism and Darwinism in the 20th century. Thank you for listening and Happy New Year. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy

at BBC.com.com.com.com.