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The Modern Myth of the British Empire with Dr. Kim A Wagner - Modern Myth - Episode 20
1.3k Plays3 years ago
This episode dives into the world of the British Empire - as it is viewed in Britain and the lingering narratives that surround it.
Today's guest is Kim A Wagner, Professor of Global and Imperial History, who discusses the reality of the British Empire and challanges the "balance sheet" view of history which sees historical events as simply "good" or "bad".
We also get on to the topic of the culture war that seems to be happening in the UK when it comes its own colonial legacy and in particular adherence to the reminders of that past in the forms of statues and names of buildings and colleges.
You can follow Kim on Twitter https://twitter.com/KimAtiWagner
William Dalrymple - The Anarchy - http://www.williamdalrymple.uk.com/books/the-anarchy
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host's Opening Remarks
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:24
Speaker
Hello and welcome to an episode of Modern Myth with me, Tristan, also known as the Anarchiologist. Now today's episode we're talking about one of my favourite subjects, which is the destruction of the British Empire.
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm just kidding. Please stay around to hear more about actually a good, well thought out discussion about what the current state of empire is as a historical place in Britain today, as well as the kind of things that people discuss with regards to the culture war.
Guest Introduction: Kim A. Wagner
00:00:58
Speaker
And to discuss with me today, none other than Kim A. Wagner, who is a professor of global and imperial history. And yeah, thank you very much for coming join us today. Thank you for having me.
00:01:15
Speaker
So I want to start off with a kind of a little bit of, I mean, you're quite, you're quite well. You know quite a lot about the British Empire. It's a lot of the things that you study and that you talk about.
Why is the British Empire Still Significant?
00:01:30
Speaker
how like if somebody wasn't really like I think most people understand the British Empire overall but what was special about the British Empire that meant that it's such a it's it still seems to be very much in people's minds nowadays? That's a very good and very broad question.
00:01:51
Speaker
The British themselves were saved because it was so bloody brilliant and the British were so good at it and that's why it's rightfully remembered today. But of course if we take sort of a macro perspective, the British Empire is only one amongst many.
00:02:10
Speaker
But it's arguably the one that's had the biggest impact in shaping the modern world and so the global landscape as we see it today. So, I mean, anywhere you turn.
00:02:27
Speaker
in the world today, the kind of borders that people today take for granted, nationalities, lots of root causes of conflicts can be traced back more or less directly to the British Empire. Just to take one example.
Understanding the British Empire's Administration
00:02:46
Speaker
All African Americans in the US today are descendants of slaves, and the British Empire was based for several hundred years on slave trade. So that's just one. It may not seem like an obvious link, but the British Empire is pretty much everywhere you look.
00:03:06
Speaker
Of course, and it's spread throughout the world. That's why we have things like, you know, the Commonwealth, which includes places all around the globe. And I'm quite interested, however, is that like, you know, the British Empire isn't just like, obviously, there's the the conquest and the war that goes on in terms of like,
00:03:30
Speaker
going to places and almost taking them over. But obviously, there's another part of empire with regards to what happened after that control was seized or that conquest was made, that the British Empire seemed to be, it seemed to kind of develop its own kind of administration and stuff like that. How do you feel? Like, what can you tell us a bit more about, like, how the British Empire operated?
Myths and Realities of British Imperial Bureaucracy
00:03:58
Speaker
I think first of all we have to recognize the fact that the British Empire is shorthand for something that is historically quite unwieldy. There's obviously a big difference between a handful of English settlers making a new life for themselves in North America at some point in the 17th century.
00:04:26
Speaker
to the East India Company taking over the South Asian subcontinent a century later and then someone like Cecil Rhodes trying to build a railway from Cairo to Cape Town and dreaming about Anglo-Saxon world domination. So I think what you're talking about in terms of
00:04:47
Speaker
The British Empire, well, its operation, what we're really talking about is the 19th century and into the 20th century as well, which is this quite elaborate bureaucracy. But also, I mean, it's one of the things, if you're proud of the empire or if you happen to
00:05:13
Speaker
watch the PragerU video about the British Empire, which is always good for a few laughs. I mean, one of the things is, of course, that, you know, a handful of white men, because it's always men, were able to dominate tens of thousands of people and rule over
00:05:33
Speaker
your millions of square miles of territory. And it is this belief that the British, they had an innate capacity for ruling and for ruling well. And that's part of a myth that's deeply entrenched in the sort of popular imagination in Britain today, but also beyond the British Isles themselves.
00:06:02
Speaker
completely completely and actually just as an aside I really really despise Perugia on a lot of levels but particularly because they tried to say that you know the British brought civilization to Ireland which I take particularly bad on several levels and I feel like there's just this lack of actual knowledge on the ground and I think this is reflected actually in a lot of people's ideas about empire that
The East India Company and British Imperialism
00:06:29
Speaker
there is a superficial level of knowledge, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of in-depth knowledge. So if we were to talk a bit just like as an example, the East India Trading Company
00:06:44
Speaker
I mean, you look at that and you kind of see that that's something to me, that's that's like a company. That's not necessarily, you know, the British crown and the British as a government going in, it seems it sounds more like a company going in and taking things over. How how does that actually match up with what happened? Well, I mean, William Dalrymple has recently written an excellent book called The Anarchy in which he compares
00:07:14
Speaker
the East India Company to Amazon of today. And so yes, it is a private trading company, but they have the blessings of the British crown. The Union Jack is in one corner of the East India Company flak. So wherever the East India Company goes, so does the British Empire. So it's never this completely independent sort of
00:07:42
Speaker
romantic notion of free trade. It is deeply entangled with British imperial ambitions. And if we think about really the establishment of these new companies, gaining a foothold in India in the 18th century,
00:08:04
Speaker
At that time, the British are competing with French trading companies, Dutch, even Danish, settlements along the coastlines of South Asian subcontinent. And at that point, the Mughal Empire is quickly weakening. And so these European trading companies forge local alliances and in many ways, exploit the sort of power vacuum that is emerging
00:08:34
Speaker
But the British are just one amongst many competing powers. And since I've mentioned the other European trading companies, and the fact that the British are never just a trading company, but that they also represent British interests, the wars that we see that really shape global politics, from a Western perspective at least, in the 18th century,
00:09:03
Speaker
It's, of course, a conflict between the British and the French. What's in America known as the French and Indian wars in Europe is called the Seven Years' War, but that is literally fought all over the world. It's fought in North America, of course. It's fought in India. It's fought in the Caribbean, and everywhere where
00:09:25
Speaker
these European powers that they're sort of expansionist policies that they clash and they rub up against each other. So it's not even just about the East India Company trading in India and getting a foothold. It's also about what is essentially European politics.
00:09:46
Speaker
But as we now know, the French are finally defeated in 1815 and are pretty much out of the picture in India.
00:09:59
Speaker
And the British, by 1818, so not long after, the British are the dominant power in India.
Economic Motives Behind British Imperialism
00:10:09
Speaker
And the Mughal Empire has been reduced to sort of a puppet emperor sitting in Delhi. But even then, it takes decades before British India, as we know it, is established. So one of the things that
00:10:27
Speaker
you often hear, the British say, are quiet, they're in a fit of absent mindedness. It's a bit too blessed, but there's also something to it in the sense that it was never a master plan that was followed. And actually every time the local
00:10:44
Speaker
governors in India. They engage in another military, costly military campaign and acquire another part of India. The board of directors back home, they write them back and say, please stop that. It's costing us too much. But the distance means that it can take months and even years before this kind of communication goes back and forth. It's still at a time when
00:11:13
Speaker
the world might be globally connected, but it's not quickly or efficiently connected. And so it's a piecemeal expansion of British conquest, which doesn't always align with what might be in the best interest of the stakeholders back in London. But of course, the situation looks very different if you're sitting in Madras or Bombay, thousands of miles away.
00:11:43
Speaker
It's interesting how, without, like you said, this broad, specific plan, that these things kind of occurred and happened. And I think one of the most interesting insights that I gained was when I talked to Dr. Priyam Vadagopal about her book,
00:12:02
Speaker
insurgent empire and talking about resistance in these territory in like in parts of the British Empire. And I think it kind of speaks to this idea that, you know, these places didn't just kind of like, magically, you know, get, you know, just suddenly were in British or French or, you know, Belgian or Danish hands, they were there was resistance at times, and there were there were complex things going on. But
00:12:31
Speaker
in spite of not having a well thought out, precise plan with pure intent, it seems to have worked out very well for Britain in terms of the amount of things that it got out of these places. So I mean, could I could see somebody saying, well, they didn't have a plan, it wasn't intentional, you know, just happened that way.
00:12:55
Speaker
that's not really what's going on here. Instead, it's things that are happening. And at the same time, there's things are being wealth is being extracted from these places. I mean, I've heard of like, people trying to calculate how much wealth was taken from India, for example. And do you think that like, those calculations are
00:13:20
Speaker
beneficial to helping people understand the way the relations of empire? Or do you think they kind of make it harder to kind of get away from, well, this is good about empire and this is bad about empire? Like, how do you what do you feel about like the calculation of stolen wealth, for example? I'm not an economic historian. And I find I find the attempt at
00:13:50
Speaker
measuring factually the exact amounts quite tedious in some ways.
00:13:59
Speaker
But at the same time, I think it's really important that we do acknowledge and absolutely recognize the fact that Western imperialism is an extractive and capitalist project and that is the basic course of it. And the various governors and officials working in the East India Company, they amassed massive private fortunes and were deeply corrupt.
00:14:26
Speaker
to the point that we have this famous trial of Warren Hastings in the 1880s and 90s, where people back home, it becomes too obvious that this is a greedy and corrupt system.
00:14:47
Speaker
But by 1818, early 19th century, these senior companies no longer getting the major part of its profit from trade, but from revenue. So we can already see there is a complete shift in terms of the interest. And that stems directly, of course, from taking over land.
00:15:09
Speaker
And then later when we get into the 19th century, it's about creating markets for British produce, which then links British possessions in India to the Industrial Revolution. But just to go back to your question, we don't...
00:15:27
Speaker
We don't actually know. People talk about the GDP during the Mughal era was such and such. And that's a completely ridiculous attempt. You simply cannot know these kind of numbers.
00:15:46
Speaker
and also they're meaningless because GDP is an average. As we know today, wealth can be held in the hands of very few people. It doesn't actually say anything about the relative prosperity or well-being of societies in that sense. But even if we don't necessarily take these numbers, these kind of historical statistics, when we go back
00:16:14
Speaker
I mean, to this period, we simply do not have the data to make the specific argument in terms of numbers. But there is no question about the fact that India was an incredibly wealthy and vibrant
00:16:32
Speaker
subcontinent really but the Mughal Empire was a vibrant and very rich both culturally and economically when the British arrived and by the time they left in 1947 it looked very different.
00:16:50
Speaker
And so there's no, the British came there for profit, but then things then changed, and then there's also such a thing as political prestige and political
Teaching and Perception of the British Empire
00:17:02
Speaker
profit. So the sort of, the sort of the greedy essence of the imperialist project,
00:17:11
Speaker
kind of shifts a bit. And when we start talking about British prestige, imperial pride and sort of political capital, which obviously operates in slightly different ways. Of course, that's a good time for us to take a break. And we'll be back right after these messages.
00:17:32
Speaker
And we're back. You're listening to Modern Myth and I'm here with Kim Wagner talking about Empire. Now, obviously, I think in Britain, the way empires talked about it and taught, I think is
00:17:47
Speaker
They leave a lot kind of off the table. What do you think, from your interactions with other people, how do you feel like Britain talks about its own empire in both education and just in the general population? Do you think it's kind of like, is it a reality or is it a bit of an Instagram filter, so to speak?
00:18:16
Speaker
So I think there is actually a slightly unhelpful narrative about how poorly the Empire is taught in schools in Britain today. There's no question if we go back a decade or two, it was taught poorly, if at all.
00:18:35
Speaker
But the students that I see now teaching at university, but also the teachers that I talk to and engage with, are working extremely hard to update the curriculum and to actually provide a really comprehensive, critical, nuanced
00:18:59
Speaker
education that very much includes the empire. So I think what the kind of, you know, we will be talking about the culture wars. I think some of the debates we're seeing in the UK today are also about a generational shift. And so there were people who went through the basic education and grew up at a time when the British Empire was basically something you were proud of. And there was a very
00:19:28
Speaker
sort of, you know, it's not exactly a Snapchat filter, but the empire was never just about ruling the world and sort of, you know, Rupert Tanya and all that sort of jingles nationalism. It was also about establishing and in many ways dictating what that narrative was. Priya Satche's book, Times Monster, does a brilliant job of actually showing that this rose tinted
00:19:58
Speaker
history of the British Empire was part of this sort of imperial propaganda project.
00:20:05
Speaker
One of the things, probably the most obvious cases of slavery, which I joke, that's the one thing all students know about. They know little about the sort of preceding centuries of actual slavery. But that was even at the time, in the 19th century, we have these redemptive
00:20:28
Speaker
narratives coming in. And so there's always yes, you know, the Eastern Company, the people were a bit greedy, a bit corrupt, they didn't really take the civilizing mission seriously, if at all. But thank God, you know, now we have these, you know, Christian missionaries and benign governors, and we are now sort of spreading civilization. And I think, I think really sort of
00:20:53
Speaker
the history of slavery is one that very much fits into that mold. Has very, very little to do with any kind of attempt to understand what actually happened. And everything to do with a particular exception with narrative, according to which, you know,
00:21:14
Speaker
Imperialism is not a nice thing, but the British were pretty good at it, especially if you compare us to, I'm using an inclusive us here since I'm Danish, but especially if you compare us to, you know, Belgian Congo or the Germans in Southwest Africa. So that is very much the kind of established narrative, which is pretty much has become a cornerstone of the culture war that's currently being fought out.
00:21:40
Speaker
I must say it's very, very reassuring that the younger generations are having a better kind of idea of empire taught to them. And it does very much feel as if there are, there's a certain demographic that seems very invested in this narrative empire that you're talking about that, oh, it might have had some bad things, but especially like I feel
00:22:08
Speaker
I feel like I didn't really understand the really bad things or the things that people talk about with regards to empire that could stand out as pivotal moments.
The Amritsar Massacre and Indian Nationalism
00:22:21
Speaker
I mean, the Amritsar Massacre is one of the things that I feel has come to the surface more recently. I don't know. Could you describe for us what happened with the Amritsar Massacre?
00:22:38
Speaker
Yes, so this is the bone that you throw liberals when you have to admit that the British Empire...
00:22:47
Speaker
You know, it wasn't all rosy. And there were these bad moments. I think the Daily Mail actually has one article where they talk about the occasional massacre, which is like when somebody, they sort of, they spill ketchup and it's like, oops, it's like, we accidentally massacred some people, but it's definitely not part of the plan. The Emirates massacre takes place in 1919 during this sort of,
00:23:14
Speaker
economic political dislocation that follows in the wake of the First World War, when returning Indian soldiers and moderate Indian politicians, including Gandhi, have been openly supportive of the British war effort for the preceding four years.
00:23:33
Speaker
with the expectations that they would be rewarded for their loyalty and their quite substantial contributions to the war effort. I think something like 1.3 million Indians are actually either fighting or in other ways engaged during the First World War. And the British are not actually minded to sort of follow up on the reforms that have been promised.
00:23:59
Speaker
And instead, they kind of panic and begin to see this beginning Indian nationalist mobilization as a second mutiny, you know, thinking back to one of the sort of nightmare scenarios of the 19th century.
00:24:17
Speaker
And so the British think that they can calibrate the carrot and the stick very carefully and offer reforms to moderate loyal Indians and then use the really quite draconian
00:24:35
Speaker
legal measures, I mean, the kind of laws that are being put in place in 1919 are very similar to the sort of anti-terrorism legislation that we see today after 9-11. And so, you know, on the one hand, the British are saying, yes, you know, Indians can. If you're willing to work with us, then we will allow you to have a seat at the government at some level, right? But at the same time, any kind of political agitation will be clamped down on very hard.
00:25:03
Speaker
And that kind of just spirals out of control. So you have unprecedented mass mobilization across India. And the British, they basically input in Punjab, which is in the northwestern corner.
00:25:22
Speaker
of India butting up against Afghanistan and the Northwest frontier, they basically pull the emergency brake and freak out. And so we have these sort of clashes where on the one hand local Indian nationalist leaders and the local population believe that they're engaged in a
00:25:45
Speaker
some kind of parliamentary negotiation with the British authorities and that they are actually in a position to bargain and the British they think they're about to be overrun by thousands of bloodthirsty rebels and that sort of
00:26:04
Speaker
deeply tragic, uh, misreading on both parts, uh, leads, um, well, leads to the Emirates Damascus, which takes place on the ninth, uh, on the 13th of April, 1919, when, uh, the British general Dyer, he orders, um, his troops to open fire on, on a, on a gathering, which is in a, in a sort of a park, which is surrounded by walls and houses. So people can't escape. And there's something like 15, 20,000,
00:26:31
Speaker
People gathered, a lot of families, some women, lots of children playing. There is a political meeting. And the way I sort of explain it is that the Indians who were gathered there were either there just because it was a park and it was also a religious festival, or to hear some political speeches which they didn't really know much about.
00:26:56
Speaker
But General Dyer, he's got two armored cars and he's got British troops stationed all around the city gates. And he literally thinks he's entering a war zone and that he'll be ambushed and has to fight his way out. So he sees this as a
00:27:12
Speaker
Yeah, he carries this out as a military operation, and they kill something like five, 600 people, maybe three times as many are wounded, and the violence sort of escalates. The following day, there is bombing of villages elsewhere and sort of widespread. Just, you know, the British, they really overreact. And that's the moment when
00:27:38
Speaker
Gandhi and a lot of other prominent Indian nationalists, they realized that actually the future of British rule in India is not possible and that independence for the first time becomes a reality. And so that has become
00:27:55
Speaker
It wasn't even at the time because it caused an outcry internationally. Churchill famously denounced General Dyer in the House of Commons, which is something you often hear being brought up. Crucially, what Churchill said was that this is not what the British Empire is like. This was one rogue officer.
00:28:15
Speaker
who led the site down and acted in a very un-British way. And notably, Dyer, he was forced to resign on half pension. But that was the full extent of his punishment. And the House of Lords supported General Dyer. And as we also know, there was a widespread support for him with a collection of something like 26,000 pounds, which was quite a huge amount at the time.
00:28:45
Speaker
But even then, in 1919, 1920, there was this narrative that, you know,
00:28:52
Speaker
This was not the way the British Empire was run. And then General Dyer was, I don't think it's unfair to say he was thrown under the bus. And we also know from Churchill's own historical record that he was not actually opposed to using violence in the Empire. It's just that what happened, Adam Ritza, made it impossible to defend the Empire.
00:29:17
Speaker
There are moments like the Emirates massacre, the suppression of Mauma in Kenya in the 1950s, or we could go back to the 1857 uprising. There are these moments that
00:29:28
Speaker
are simply indefensible. These are the bad moments, but they are also the exception. They are the exception that proves the reality of a benign British Empire.
00:29:48
Speaker
contradictory for me to say that you can't put too much emphasis on these moments since I've written about them extensively myself. But I think it's important, really important to realize that these were not isolated moments, but that they were the part of a very obvious pattern because the British Empire was predicated on the use of extreme force.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's interesting that you can kind of see the damage control and the PR happening earlier on in the British Empire in terms of trying to say, talking about things like bringing civilization to
Defending the British Empire: Is It Justifiable?
00:30:38
Speaker
these areas. And I'm sure that some people didn't really believe it.
00:30:42
Speaker
I feel like the modern kind of view, there are people who are particularly happy to wrap it on about the benefits of Empire and how, you know, yeah, well, you know, we did the best in all this. But the problem is that
00:31:04
Speaker
there are these kind of culture wars that are generated about, you know, are you pro-empire or anti-empire? And I think that's a problem in itself, because it's being dragged into this, you know, very dichotic kind of view of history in the past. What do you think is, what are some of the main arguments nowadays that you come across,
00:31:31
Speaker
that are kind of like about defending the British Empire. What are the kind of examples that you would normally come across when people speak to you?
00:31:43
Speaker
I think it's almost a knee-jerk reaction or way of engaging with the past, which is a balance sheet approach. And people will say, oh, yeah, sure, there were some bad things, but why don't you ever talk about the good things? And for me, it's a deeply bizarre notion that you can reduce the past to this kind of
00:32:08
Speaker
really banal notion of good and bad and where you have the massacres and famines on the bad side but then you have railways and rule of law and all the other things that didn't actually exist in the empire on the plus side and you can
00:32:24
Speaker
It leads to a deeply disturbing moral calculation, according to which 1,000 miles of railway equals X number of dead natives in inverted commas. And it's, of course, a deeply ahistorical way of looking at the past. I mean, there's no historians, no matter the topic, who actually look at the past in order to pass out good and bad things. I don't think Richard Evans, he studied
00:32:53
Speaker
the Nazis for his entire life in order to determine what was good and what was bad. We don't use the same approach either. I'm sometimes criticized for talking about the Nazis too easily, but if somebody was to say,
00:33:09
Speaker
his you know the Holocaust and his Auschwitz and he said yeah but what about the good things it's just very obvious that that that is a an attempt at somehow if not justify then at least relativizing atrocities and these kind of things and that's why we shouldn't use that approach to the British Empire but it was never a way of
00:33:36
Speaker
It was never a way of understanding the past, and it was always a part of imperial propaganda that was used in the 19th century itself. The abolition of slavery is one clear example of that. Yes, we did.
00:33:56
Speaker
We did engage in slavery for several hundred years, but then we abolished it and then we spent all of the 19th century fighting slavery. So in the final equation, we can be proud of the British Empire. And that's just pure propaganda. It's got nothing to do with historical facts. It's got nothing to do with any attempt at understanding what happened. Just to take the example of
00:34:20
Speaker
You know, Britain's effort to stop slavery and slave trade. I mean, people think that the British, they freed slaves and sent them home with, you know, I don't know, a meal, a ticket or whatever. But that's not actually what happened. The people who were freed, they often became indentured laborers and the British efforts to stop
00:34:49
Speaker
slavery was used as an excuse to expand the sphere of British colonial control in various parts of Africa. Which is not to say that it was bad, but it's just blatantly obvious that you can't simply describe pretty much any
00:35:07
Speaker
thing in a historical context as either good or bad. And that's one of the things that really frustrates me because people simply cannot get away from this idea that you have to
00:35:25
Speaker
You have to either if you don't say that the British Empire was good, it must be because you hate yourself or you hate the British Empire. And so there's a very sort of strange conflation between historical analysis and then personal
00:35:41
Speaker
well, I guess, identity or self understanding, which is, of course, one of Yeah, totally. It's the whole. Yeah, it's the whole pride thing, isn't it? Like, you have to be proud of who you are in the country you come from. And that is, I think is actually, it took me a long time to realize this. But that is actually key to understanding the kind of
00:36:03
Speaker
I mean, he even talks about statues and stuff like that. I mean, who on earth cares about these old statues? But it's quite clear that, and I don't think the people who are actually insisting that we should keep up every single statue against the horrible woke crowd or mob from, I mean, they're not actually interested in the history of these individuals. They're not interested even in the statues themselves.
00:36:31
Speaker
But these statues are perceived as part of a narrative about British exceptionalism that, at a personal level, people are deeply invested in. So if you have to take down a statue, it means that maybe the stories you've been telling yourself or that you were told about how proud you should feel have to be questioned. And people don't like to question their own
00:36:57
Speaker
believes. For activists to demand that a statue should be taken down is by many of a conservative leaning perceived as a personal attack because it attacks a kind of a symbolism, this whole repertoire of symbolism that they're deeply invested in.
00:38:00
Speaker
And that is where you bang your head against the wall, because you keep seeing and even sort of critical work, critical historical research, such as the kind I do. But I mean, we've had quite a few sort of
00:38:21
Speaker
publications recently that made a bit of a splash. And I think that's fantastic.
Rewriting Historical Narratives: Necessary or Not?
00:38:25
Speaker
You mentioned Priekopal's book, but we've had Ben Hicks, the Brudish Museum, and Satnam St. Geras, Empire Land, more recently. And people, you know, we had the secretary, the cultural secretary, not too long ago talking about, and warning people against trying to rewrite history.
00:38:46
Speaker
And it doesn't make sense to me, because rewriting history is literally what historians do. Otherwise, there would just be one narrative, and we could just add to it as the years pass. But rewriting history is what historians do. So what are these people actually talking about? And after reading, actually, Priya Sacha's book, I came to realize that what they are saying is we are rewriting, not history, but the historical narrative that they are proud
00:39:15
Speaker
of that allows you to be proud of the empire and that's what they're objecting to. And the same thing with statues, same thing with returning loot in museums. I mean, people don't actually, they're not actually invested in these things for their own sake, but
00:39:35
Speaker
The idea that the British Museum should return something suggests that maybe the idea of the greatness of Britain, and the British Museum is one of the British institutions, needs to be rethought. Or maybe you need to think a bit more carefully about the narrative you tell yourself. And people are really reacting very strongly to that. And of course, we're saying people, which is, again, a shorthand for
00:40:04
Speaker
a wide range of different voices. So we're just going to take a break there and when we come back we'll talk tactics, I think.
00:40:17
Speaker
So you're listening to Modern Myth. We're talking about Empar and the Apologia within. And I think you're absolutely right in highlighting some of the really good work that has come out recently. I actually have the British museums on it.
00:40:34
Speaker
desk pile on a pile on my desk here. And I'm kind of starting my way through that. And I think it's nice to know that there is actually work that's being, you know, recognized and talked about. But I, I know that people I know we just came out the other segment saying that people, you know, the people that are against this form are coming from all different backgrounds.
00:41:01
Speaker
who people who don't want the narrative to change of the British Empire. But it seems the loudest voices seem to come from certain demographics in terms of, I find it very, very funny that there are a number of professors and academic staff who almost feels like they make their career on talking about the balance of empire and the good things about empire.
00:41:29
Speaker
I, how do we, how do we, how do we move forward? You know, how do we actually do things differently, so that we can actually start talking about the Empire in a truthful way? Well, you know, is it like, it's obvious that not just saying, well, actually, this happened, isn't enough. And there's something else that needs to be done. What do you think about that?
00:41:57
Speaker
Well, I mean, I have to admit that quite often I'm quite sort of not exactly depressed, but disillusioned about the state of the public debate because these issues have very much been politicized.
00:42:15
Speaker
We're now living in Brexit, Britain. So I mean, we're living the realities of this. This is a particular historical moment where, you know, I never knew that the British Empire would be this big thing that's pretty much dominating, you know, the debate for quite a while now. And I'm not sure. I mean, the thing is,
00:42:44
Speaker
If you write critically about the British Empire, and I say critically as in history being a critical endeavor in which you question established narratives and you don't simplify it and reduce it to a matter of good or bad. I mean, just for the record, I have no time for people to say the British Empire was just one long massacre.
00:43:08
Speaker
I mean, something like Richard Gott's book, which I think is called Britain's Empire or something like that, came out a few years ago. I find that quite unhelpful because that's just lists, a sort of a list of massacres and sort of the litanies of the empire. It doesn't actually explain what happened or the historical processes. And then another example would be Shashi Tarrou's book.
00:43:32
Speaker
which is just crammed full of factual infidelities, but is also an oversimplified narrative. So I very much think
00:43:49
Speaker
We have to distinguish between a genuine debate about the past, which is life and blood of what historians we do. That's pretty much why I do that all the time. Even the authors whose work I like, I don't like all of it.
00:44:11
Speaker
debate each other and we disagree about historical interpretations all the time. That is how history is actually rewritten in a productive way and we absolutely have to have those conversations and debates. But that's not actually what's taking place during this sort of confected culture war because
00:44:34
Speaker
It's not about, I mean, people have a sort of nostalgic persuasion. They don't actually care about history. None of them have spent five minutes in the archives trying to actually learn about the past. Instead, they simply weaponize the past and reduce it to these sort of almost sort of bumper sticker kind of
00:45:02
Speaker
But the railways, you always hear that. Which again, there's no relation to what actually happened. The British did not conquer India in order to build railways for Indian people. They build railways for strategic reasons, so they could move troops around. And so that produce could be moved around quickly and benefit British profits. And after, obviously,
00:45:32
Speaker
Indians could also use the trains and they did, but the idea that railways is just a good thing is really in many ways bizarre to me. But we have to realize that that's why this is not a
00:45:49
Speaker
a genuine discussion and I think it's a mistake to have debate about the past with people who don't care about the past.
Engaging with History: Challenges and Strategies
00:46:03
Speaker
and you just have to realize that it doesn't matter how many facts you can muster, how much nuance or sophisticated narratives or criticism or whatever you can come up with, you're not going to change people's minds if they are deeply invested in one particular narrative.
00:46:24
Speaker
I would say take Cecil Rhodes. Cecil Rhodes was a white supremacist. He wrote throughout his life about Anglo-Indian world, Anglo-Saxon world domination. And yet we have people who insist that he was not a racist. And I mean, how are you supposed to debate that? You just can't. It's a bit, you know, somebody who's a flat earther. You can't, you know, talk to them about
00:46:54
Speaker
anything, or climate denial, it comes in the same same kind of category. And so I'm torn between, you know, you know, what's the what's the appropriate strategy in that respect. This is the problem is that you could say, you know, ignore them, don't debate them, don't give them oxygen. But that doesn't work. I mean, we've seen online that
00:47:22
Speaker
you know, the rise of the alt right, the far right online has not been stopped by people ignoring them, you know, it has actually grown in spite of what some people think, oh, just leave them alone, they'll just do their own thing. And then they've actually gone and, you know, done things that like,
00:47:44
Speaker
everybody's shocked by I think there must be something that we I think there's I think you're right to say that the the role of the historian is to interpret and analyze history. And I think the that what you see day to day with people making apologia for the empire in the very basic and superficial ways that you've talked about
00:48:10
Speaker
They're not historians. A lot of them are commentators. They're pundits. They're ex-politicians. They're newspaper columnists. But they're not historians. And I think, perhaps, by a historian engaging with them, you're right. It kind of gives them the credibility that really they shouldn't have.
00:48:34
Speaker
But then, you know, it's up for then it's up for other people who are also not technically historians, you know, to fight them, I guess, it's a very difficult, it's a very difficult need, like needle to thread, because I like I find this difficult as well, because
00:48:53
Speaker
I want people to have a better idea of how to handle history in the past. I'm really interested in how do people engage with the past and what are the ways we can kind of give them the tools.
00:49:06
Speaker
to enjoy it and go through it and be invested in it. Because I think one of the biggest failures of the modern time is that, you know, history and the past seem as some sort of luxury that you kind of like, oh, I'll do this for culture, you know, and there doesn't seem to be an investment in it.
00:49:29
Speaker
You know, I think for me as somebody who's half Northern Irish, I was never really invested in Irish history until I actually went to Dublin and I visited the Kamanaham Gaul. I started reading up about Irish myths and legends. I started reading like, you know, about the actual history behind the famine.
00:49:50
Speaker
And that actually connected me more. That really gave me a better insight. And I think maybe, I don't know what you think about this, but if we can get people invested in the past and caring about it, maybe that's the way forward. I don't know what you think.
00:50:09
Speaker
Well, I think what we're seeing is that people are deeply invested in the past. The question is, how do they perceive it? And the thing is, you can't discuss history with people who don't actually care about history, but still instrumentalizes history. So I think you're absolutely right. We have to teach history. It's what I do and write about it. We have to
00:50:37
Speaker
keep doing what we've been doing all along. But the thing is, I mean, you can't control how you're read, right? And so one of the things I've found through own bitter experience is that you can write as carefully, as nuanced, as well-researched as you will, people will still misread it if they want to.
00:51:06
Speaker
And so I think there is a part of this debate which it makes no point in engaging will, but rather we need to call it out. And that's what I do on Twitter a lot. But at the same time, we then also have to keep producing interesting and critical history. And again, just for the record, this is not about everybody agreeing on one particular line. Of course, that's what
00:51:33
Speaker
uh these sort of free speech warriors and you know nostalgically inflicted people would like to insist that oh yeah we hate the british empire we say it's bad and you know we won't rest until all the statues have been destroyed and everybody tells the same same line
00:51:50
Speaker
I mean, which is actually, I mean, it's, it's, um, that's not act. I mean, I tell my students that they don't have to agree with me. Yeah. And actually I prefer if they don't because otherwise it's just, you know, it is just an echo champion. That's again, not what history is about. It's not what the past is about.
00:52:08
Speaker
And so we have to keep pushing. And I think we are, sort of the books we've been mentioning, the kind of heritage work that is taking place, but then which is also really coming under attack in quite disturbing ways by the current government as well.
00:52:32
Speaker
In some ways I'm disillusioned and in some ways I also think there's a lot of good things happening and the sort of reaction we're seeing is really a rearguard action of a lost cause and that conservatives and right-wingers and free speechers are
00:52:58
Speaker
kicking out the way they are because their time has passed.
Empire Nostalgia: A Modern Phenomenon?
00:53:05
Speaker
I'm not sure that empire nostalgia is quite...
00:53:10
Speaker
necessarily very useful as a term. And I thought of calling something like phantom pains of empire. Some people don't realize that the empire has gone and they still feel this sort of pride and personal investment in particular narratives about the empire at a time when they're completely obsolete and sort of
00:53:37
Speaker
obviously anachronistic. And so I think the government wouldn't have to attack any attempt at discussing slavery in the context of heritage institutions with such virulence unless they were actually really afraid that the narrative might be changing. So in some ways,
00:54:05
Speaker
The culture war and the debates are disheartening, but at the same time, I also think they can be interpreted as being a positive reflection of change. Excellent. Well, thank you very, very much for coming and talking to me about this. This is something that I think is really, really important. And if people want to kind of follow what you have to say on Twitter and elsewhere, where would they look online?
00:54:32
Speaker
So I think I'm K-I-M-A-T-I-W-A-T-N-E-R on Twitter and
00:54:41
Speaker
yeah yeah just on twitter no worries i'll have a link for it boop boop with my name of course well thank you again uh for coming and talking to us and i hope you've enjoyed this it was my pleasure
00:55:08
Speaker
Why can't you say that the truth was set to free? Expose this utter myth with me! A myth!
00:55:26
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.