Once upon a time we controlled a vast empire, but we do no longer, Yet in our imaginations we are still empire builders, just ones who are down on our luck. This leaves our countries collective ego permanently bruised. The more we remain in this realm of loss, grieving, we stay stuck within a resentful state of denial and anger over it. The more we behave like petulant infants, the more foolish we look in the eyes of everyone else, except to ourselves. Our constant bragging and talking up our status as 'world beaters' appears as the ridiculous charade it is. We don’t drive the world's economy anymore. Paradoxically our present standing and influence in the world, though greatly diminished, remains utterly indebted to that past and the stains of an empire.
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| Full extent of the British Empire |
History, truthfully told, informs us that how we behaved in order to create and maintain that empire, power and influence, came at a huge human cost. There is then a debt of guilt that we constantly try to squirm out of paying off, one we defer, deny or void transacting. Our conscience as a country will never be clear until we do. We continue to avert our gaze. When will we stop our sulking and cease the constant straining to reheat the stone cold cadaver of empire? Whilst all the while newer economic forces are kicking us further into the long grass like a useless rusty old can. The world long ago lost patience with waiting for this imperious attitude to change.
Even my humble lifestyle, many centuries later, is built on the ground that British slave traders and entrepreneurial marauders first made. The British Empire, like all empires, did not come about reasonably or peacefully, it pillaged and ravaged like any other, We raped other countries of their people, resources, culture, independence and dignity. We used lies, subterfuge, dissimulation, coercion and repressive power to get our way. We placed iron necklaces around people’s necks, we commodified and displaced them. We committed gross atrocities, created the world's first concentration camps, were the great despoilers of cultures and empires far older than our own. All of which we’ve retrospectively applied a sepia tinted veneer to, and a quintessentially English mood of refined respectability and aloof beneficence.
Though we undoubtedly all have had our own struggles, our own indignities, our own sense of wrongs being done to us via common prejudices about status, class or gender. We can always fall back upon national pride in the empire to buttress our self-esteem if we wish to. This presents us with an authenticated certificate of a god given mission. We feel somehow divinely blessed, and no matter how poor we are we can always grasp onto that particular lifebelt. Inhale its salty revivifying perfume, whenever reality knocks us down to size and puts us in our true place in the world.
I have a responsibility as an Englishman, to own my ingrained racism, to accept that it's ingrained nature will make it hard to see clearly. It resides in an unspoken sense of economic entitlement, a national and cultural superiority that arises in part from the propaganda of empire the effects of which still insidiously roll on and on. But this means our present identity as a country is fatally flawed and gives itself an entirely unearned gratuity. Resorting to playing the sentimental rhapsody of empire whenever things get a little challenging to our national self-esteem.
Yet the Empire petered out during the first half of the 20th Century, and ceased effectively to exist before I was born. It nevertheless has left a stain upon our psyche that seeps out in how we talk, think and see ourselves and others. It’s a poisonous legacy, tangible through the all pervading fatalism, our arche cynicism, our ridicule of positive developments, our persistent amnesia over our role in the slave trade, our denial of responsibility or guilt for the dark side of the empire, the defensive defiant nature of our anger, our negative views of the state of our country, all fundamental to the desire for Brexit and the need to be great again. It’s like a psychological plea for help hidden away in the lining of some very plush but closed curtains.
At the moment we hear stronger echoes of our level of indebtedness and responsibility through the #blacklivesmatter protests. This is holding up a mirror to us, yet again. Our refusal as a country to look for too long into that mirror, to fully face the wrongs committed against our fellow humankind in the days of Empire and even through to today, leaves us all abandoned in an alienated state of mind. Always wanting to be left alone as an island, able to physically and psychologically cut ourselves off from Europe, even though we share a history of being fallen empires with most of them. Many have allowed themselves to grow beyond the stains of their empires. Yet here we are still viewing the rest of the world as if it still owes us allegiance, that the Empire can be re-kindled from the embers of what is essentially a mythology founded on lies and half-truths.
There is a pressing need for the history books on the British Empire, to be publicly re-examined, re-thought and re-written. Our history, like some of our statues, does present and uphold unexamined many immoral things. Toppling those statues or burning those books, without self-reflection and self-examination, would do us no good whatsoever, that would let us off far too lightly. Until we embark on some essential re-examination of our past, we petrify the vision, creativity and imagination of our future, we leave the door closed to a more optimistic forward looking identity as a country.
Britain is a mongrel nation, that prefers to think of itself as thoroughbred. We have been for millenia an island that benefited greatly from successive waves of immigrants, this is what has created who we are. It is then quite ironic that we have this strong tendency toward being small minded, insular and xenophobic. We do not fully understand how we came to be as we are, because our view of our past is deluded and holds us back. There is no longer any room for special pleading, but we try nonetheless - the British Empire was not all bad - look how much we helped them - we gave them democracy and well run institutions - we gave them our god and our reason. All delivered in a patronising form of kindness, as though you’re sending a bolshy child to bed without supper until they show some respect and are grateful.
We were never anyone’s betters. We were just the more powerful adversary, economically, militarily so we could usually get whatever we wanted. What has been portrayed in the Boys Own Annuals as pioneering and heroic, was in actuality a colonial opportunistic grab of power and land, often for purely personal aggrandisement and gain. Such was the life of Clive of India, for instance, but he was far from alone in this sort of activity. This behaviour was often state endorsed, officially approved annexation and appropriation.
I maintain some pride in my country, but the way it continues to behave makes that hard to hold without shame and embarrassment. Our patriotism is of the shallow sort, the one that waves a cheap plastic union jack on a stick, one that is founded on a rotten set of self-beliefs. If it reeks of hypocrisy, racism and corruption this originates in our state institutions, our establishment and its moneyed elites, but it spreads out to infect our wider culture, economy and society. Everyone recognises the smell, the stench of it, it is like a broken drain that no one wants to dig up and mend.
The stains of empire bind us to a view of the past that is actually unworthy of us. We should expect more from ourselves than this tattered old map of Britannia ruling the waves. If we could liberate ourselves from this, we might see ourselves as capable of so much more. If we could genuinely re-envision our past, we would be free to re-vision our future and take it forward in any way we wished.
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