Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe

20

Dorothy is a good example of the fact that in imperial times humanitarianism and philanthropy were often a family affair. Her husband was Charles Buxton, head of the Anti-Slavery Society, and her father-in-law Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was a founder of the Aborigines’ Protection Society and successor to Wilberforce as leader of the Parliamentary anti-slavery lobby. Edward North Buxton, cited earlier as one of the founders of Britain’s Fauna & Flora International (FFI), was Thomas Fowell Buxton’s father.

21

See Elizabeth Prevost, ‘Assessing Women, Gender, and Empire in Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missionary Movement’, History Compass 2009 7:3, pp. 765–99, https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00593.x.

22

‘Save the Children has become a global organization, comprising 29 national member organisations that work in 120 countries. Save the Children’s UK branch has an annual income of over £300 million. It now employs over a thousand staff, its base a corporate office space in the City of London. Over its first century, Save the Children has moved from being a fringe protest movement to one of the world’s largest and most influential humanitarian organisations.’ Emily Baughan, ‘Humanitarianism and History: A Century of Save the Children’, in Juliano Fiori, Fernando Espada, Andrea Rigon, Bertrand Taithe and Rafia Zakaria (eds.), Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order, Routledge, 2021, pp. 21–5.

23

Emily Baughan, Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire, University of California Press, 2021, p. 15.

24

Ibid., pp. 92–3.

25

Ibid., pp. 80, 87–8.

26

Ibid., p. 89.

27

Ibid., p. 93.

28

Ibid., p. 94.

29

Ibid., pp. 142–3.

30

Ibid., pp. 31, 68–9, 112, 159; Baughan, ‘Humanitarianism and History’, p. 28.

31

Baughan, Saving the Children, pp. 150–52.

32

Ibid., pp. 157–9.

33

‘The British government recognises that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,’ said Foreign Secretary William Hague at the time. ‘The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence.’ See ‘Mau Mau torture victims to receive compensation – Hague’, BBC News, 06/06/2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22790037.

34

Baughan, Saving the Children, pp. 160, 163–5.

35

See Emily Baughan, ‘Rehabilitating an empire: Humanitarian collusion with the colonial state during the Kenyan emergency, ca.1954–1960’, Journal of British Studies 2020, 59:1, pp. 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2019.243.

36

Baughan, Saving the Children, pp. 169–71.

37

Toyin O. Falola et al., ‘Nigerian Civil War’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nigerian-civil-war; Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 313–18; Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, ‘Remembering Nigeria’s Biafra war that many prefer to forget’, BBC News, 15/01/2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-51094093.

38

Baughan, Saving the Children, pp. 173, 192–4, 194–5, 196.

39

The roots of contemporary ‘crises’ in early years care and maternity services in historical perspective: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/history/people/academic/emily-baughan.

40

Baughan, ‘Humanitarianism and History’, p. 27.

41

Eva-Maria Muschik, ‘The Art of Chameleon Politics: From Colonial Servant to International Development Expert’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 2018, 9:2, pp. 219–44; Olav Stokke, The UN and Development: From Aid to Cooperation, Indiana University Press, 2009, p. 74.

42

Riley, Imperial Island, pp. 127–9.

43

‘As with the racist ideologies of the past, the discourse of development continued to define non-Western people in terms of their perceived divergence from the cultural standards of the West, and it reproduced the social hierarchies that had prevailed between both groups under colonialism. On this basis, the so-called “developing world” and its inhabitants were (and still are) described only in terms of what they are not. They are chaotic not ordered, traditional not modern, corrupt not honest, underdeveloped not developed, irrational not rational, lacking in all of those things the West presumes itself to be. White Westerners were still represented as the bearers of “civilization” and were to act as the exclusive agents of development, while black, post-colonial “others” were still seen as uncivilized and unenlightened, destined to be development’s exclusive objects.’ See Firoze Manji and Carl O’Coill, ‘The Missionary Position: NGOs and Development in Africa’, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 2002, 78:3, p. 574.

44

Ibid., pp. 567–83.

45

Gregory Mann, From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: The Road to Nongovernmentality, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 2–3.

46

Gregory Mann, in ibid., pp. 213–14, states that ‘1960 is generally taken to be a signal year for African independence, witnessing national sovereignty for the Sahelian states and many others, the collapse of the Congo, and the ever-bloodier repression of the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, as marked by the shooting at Sharpeville. Amnesty International was founded in London the very next year. One of its first investigative missions was to Ghana, a pioneer in self-government, in the wake of Kwame Nkrumah’s fall from power. In short, the period when Amnesty acquired “a virtual monopoly as a non-governmental authority speaking the language of universal Human Rights” coincided precisely with the years of African independence. The often tense relationship between human rights and African sovereignty is neither causal nor merely rhetorical. In the post-independence history of political discourse on the continent they are long-time companions, albeit with their backs often turned to each other.’

47

Lankelly Chase, the seventy-ninth biggest charitable foundation in 2021, declared it was going to abolish itself in 2023, after deciding it was not right to invest in international capital markets rooted in colonial and racial exploitation, and concluding that traditional philanthropy was a ‘function of colonial capitalism’. Advocating for the cause in Canada, Roberta Jamieson has argued that ‘despite some good intentions, history shows that the efforts of the philanthropic sector have often not been philanthropic – they have often advanced colonial enterprise at the expense of Indigenous peoples. There was, for example, the Residential School System, the appropriation of cultural artifacts for museums, and the “Sixties Scoop” that saw thousands of Indigenous children torn from their families and communities for adoption elsewhere.’ She asks for philanthropic organizations to acknowledge that ‘simply having money does not mean they know best what is needed for Indigenous communities’. Meanwhile, the author and activist Edgar Villanueva, who is from an indigenous American background and heads the Decolonizing Wealth Project in the US, has written in Decolonizing Wealth that ‘the philanthropic industry has evolved to mirror colonial structures and reproduces hierarchy, ultimately doing more harm than good’. In a recent article, he described philanthropy as ‘a sleepwalking sector, white zombies spewing the money of dead white people in the name of charity and benevolence’, ‘colonialism in the empire’s newest clothes’ and ‘racism in institutional form’. He added: ‘We need to put ALL our money where our values are.’ Patrick Butler, ‘UK charity foundation to abolish itself and give away £130m’, 11/07/2023, Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/11/uk-charity-foundation-to-abolish-itself-and-give-away-130m?CMP=share_btn_tw; Edgar Villanueva, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, Berrett-Koehler, 2018; Peter R. Elson, Sylvain A. Lefèvre and Jean-Marc Fontan (eds.), Philanthropic Foundations in Canada: Landscapes, Indigenous Perspectives and Pathways to Change, PhiLab, 2020; Edgar Villanueva, ‘Money as Medicine: Leveraging Philanthropy to Decolonize Wealth’, Non-Profit Quarterly, 29/01/2019, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/money-as-medicine-leveraging-philanthropy-to-decolonize-wealth/; Roberta Jamieson, ‘Decolonizing Philanthropy: Building New Relations’, in Elson et al. (eds.), Philanthropic Foundations in Canada, pp. 157–72 at p. 159; https://decolonizingwealth.com/about/.

48

Frederick Cooper points out that Fort Hare University in the Transkei, for instance, ‘developed out of [British] mission schools, and through its doors around the 1940s passed future leaders of the struggle against apartheid, notably Nelson Mandela (who was expelled) and Oliver Tambo, as well as people who served the apartheid regime’s system of homeland administration, such as Kaiser Matanzima (first President of the Transkei)’. Cooper, Africa since 1940, p. 75.

49

Anna Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of the Empire: Decolonisation, Globalisation and International Responsibility, Manchester University Press, 2018, pp. 155–6, 158.

50

‘How did CAFOD begin: your questions answered’, CAFOD, 25/07/2018, https://cafod.org.uk/About-us/Our-history-Q-A.

51

Manji and O’Coill, ‘The Missionary Position’, p. 572.

52

‘Fast Forward’.

53

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of the Empire, pp. 154–81.

54

Ibid., pp. 158–60.

55

Ibid., p. 177.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid., p. 72.

58

Ibid., p. 10.

59

Ibid., p. 146.

60

Anna Bocking-Welch, ‘The British Public in a Shrinking World: Civic Engagement with the Declining Empire, 1960-1970’, PhD thesis, University of York, 2012, p. 185.

61

Matthew Hilton, ‘Charity and the End of Empire: British Non-governmental Organizations, Africa, and International Development in the 1960s’, American Historical Review 2018, 123:2, pp. 493–517 at p. 508.

62

Edkins, Whose Hunger?, p. 122.

63

Baughan, Saving the Children, p. 92.

64

Riley, Imperial Island, p. 129.

65

Barney Davis, ‘Comic Relief to stop sending celebrities to Africa following “white saviour” criticism’, Evening Standard, 28/10/2020, https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/comic-relief-drops-white-savior-trips-africa-stacey-dooley-lenny-henry-a4573203.html; ‘Comic Relief to stop sending celebrities to Africa after “white saviour” criticism’, Sky News, 28/10/2020, https://news.sky.com/story/comic-relief-to-stop-sending-celebrities-to-africa-after-white-saviour-criticism-12116723.

66

Bill Morton, ‘An Overview of International NGOs in Development Cooperation’, Working with Civil Society in Foreign Aid: Possibilities for South–South Cooperation?, Case Study 7, UNDP China, 2013, pp. 325–52 at p. 336, https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/migration/cn/UNDP-CH11-An-Overview-of-International-NGOs-in-Development-Cooperation.pdf.

67

Among other things, Oxfam’s guidance quite sensibly advised against using the phrases ‘developed country, developing country, underdeveloped countries, third world’ because ‘talking about high/middle/low-income countries recognises that the economic status of a country is situational rather than definitive. Third vs first world implies that wealthier countries are better than poorer ones and erases the colonial history that led to the economic inequality of today.’ See ‘Inclusive Language Guide’, Oxfam, 13/03/2023, https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/inclusive-language-guide-621487/; Nell Sears and Ryan Hooper, ‘Beyond parody! Oxfam’s new 92-page inclusivity guide calls English “the language of a colonising nation” and tells staff to avoid the words “mother”, “headquarters” – and even “youth”, in move slammed by critics’, Daily Mail, 16/03/2023, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11869961/Oxfams-new-92-page-inclusivity-guide-calls-English-language-colonising-nation.html.

68

Baughan, Saving the Children, pp. 185–6, 212.

69

Matthew Hilton, ‘Ken Loach and the Save the Children Film: Humanitarianism, Imperialism, and the Changing Role of Charity in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Modern History 2015, 87:2, pp. 357–94 at pp. 357–63, 389–94.

70

James Vernon, Hunger: A Modern History, Harvard University Press, 2007, pp. 104–17, 277.

71

Ibid., pp. 106–8.

72

Ibid., p. 3.

73

Ibid., p. 17.

74

Michael Taylor, ‘Never forget that the British political and media elite endorsed slavery’, Guardian, 30/01/2023.

75

Fintan O’Toole, Hungry Eyes, prod. Mary Price, BBC Radio 4, 01/11/1995, cited in Edkins, Whose Hunger?, p. 3.

76

When Emily Hobhouse alerted the British public to the dreadful conditions inside British concentration camps in South Africa, built to imprison Boer and African civilians during the South African War, the suffering of ‘native’ African women and children was not highlighted, even though they ‘suffered from poorer rations, worse conditions, and greater numbers of deaths’. Vernon, Hunger, pp. 31–2.

77

Baughan, Saving the Children, p. 214.

78

Eleanor Davey, ‘The conscience of the island? The NGO moment in Australian offshore detention’, in Fiori et al. (eds.), Amidst the Debris, pp. 83–106.

79

https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-australia-policy

.

80

The 1717 Transportation Act sent criminals and vagrants to penal colonies in what is now Australia. Australia then developed its own practice of ‘far offshore processing’ – using islands to warehouse indigenous people who got in the way of colonial expansion, including the forced removal of indigenous people from Tasmania to Flinders Island from 1829. Michael Collyer and Uttara Shahani see other precedents for this movement of people in the Atlantic slave trade, Indian Removal in the United States, the settlement of Scottish and English planters in Ulster plantations in the early 1600s, penal transportation and the relocation of ‘criminal’ and itinerant groups in British India. See Elise Klein and China Mills, ‘Islands of deterrence: Britain’s long history of banishing “undesirables”’, Open Democracy, 01/04/2021, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/islands-of-deterrence-britains-long-history-of-banishing-undesirables/; Xain Storey, ‘Ghosts of History: The Tasmanian Aborigines’, Ceasefire, 03/09/2014, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/part-i-tasmanian-aborigines/; Michael Collyer and Uttara Shahani, ‘Offshoring Refugees: Colonial Echoes of the UK–Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership’, Social Sciences 2023, 12:8, p. 451.

81

‘Offshore processing’, Refugee Council of Australia, https://www.refugeecouncil.org.au/offshore-processing/; Nicole Johnston, ‘Offshore processing of asylum seekers: Is the UK copying Australia’s hardline policy?’, Sky News, 14/04/2022, https://news.sky.com/story/offshore-processing-of-asylum-seekers-is-the-uk-copying-australias-hardline-policy-12589728; Klein and Mills, ‘Islands of deterrence’; David Barrett, ‘Channel migrants should be deported to processing centres on South Atlantic islands if an agreement with France fails, report suggests’, Daily Mail, 16/02/2022, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10517365/Channel-migrants-deported-processing-centres-South-Atlantic-islands.html; Agency, ‘Archaeologists find graves containing bodies of 5,000 slaves on remote island’, Guardian, 08/03/2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/08/slave-mass-graves-st-helena-island; David Bolt, Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration, ‘An inspection of the Home Office’s approach to illegal working’, August–December 2018, https://shorturl.at/jCJM6; Ben Doherty, ‘“Stop the Boats”: Sunak’s anti-asylum slogan echoes Australia’s harsh policy’, Guardian, 08/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/mar/08/stop-the-boats-sunaks-anti-asylum-slogan-echoes-australia-harsh-policy; Diane Taylor, ‘Housing asylum seekers on barge may only save £10 a person daily, report says’, Guardian, 11/07/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jul/11/housing-asylum-seekers-on-barge-may-only-save-10-a-person-daily-report-says?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.

82

Paul Farrell, Nick Evershed and Helen Davidson, ‘The Nauru files: cache of 2,000 leaked reports reveal scale of abuse of children in Australian offshore detention’, Guardian, 10/08/2016, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention.

83

On its website, Save the Children Australia talks about how ‘from the furthest corners of Australia, to South-East and South Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific, Save the Children’s programs always put children first … Where children are being exploited, neglected or abused, we protect them from harm.’ https://www.savethechildren.org.au/our-work/our-programs.

84

‘Fast Forward’, p. 343.

85

‘Uganda was once one of Africa’s biggest producers of cotton, but is now drowning in tonnes of the cast-offs including designer fakes, fur, skiwear and bawdy hen-night T-shirts – some still marked with lipstick and sweat … more than eight out of ten garments bought in Uganda come from charity shops or donation bins in Britain and elsewhere.’ See Jane Flanagan, ‘Return to Sender: designer upcycles British hand-me-downs to reboot Ugandan textile industry’, The Times, 29/04/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/return-to-sender-designer-upcycles-british-hand-me-downs-to-reboot-ugandan-textile-industry-b8sdfkkzx.

86

Manji and O’Coill, ‘The Missionary Position’, p. 580.

87

Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office and the Rt Hon. Dominic Raab MP, ‘UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) allocations 2021 to 2022: written ministerial statement’, GOV.UK, 21/04/2021, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/uk-official-development-assistance-oda-allocations-2021-to-2022-written-ministerial-statement.

88

Lizzy Davies, ‘UK accused of abandoning world’s poor as aid turned into “colonial” investment’, Guardian, 21/12/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/dec/21/uk-accused-of-abandoning-worlds-poor-as-aid-turned-into-colonial-investment.

89

In the years since the invasion of Iraq, the world’s humanitarian sector has grown by four times in size to turn into a US$29 billion a year ‘industry’. Some 50 per cent of this money is given by mainly Western nations, directly and indirectly, to ‘non-governmental’ aid agencies. Baughan notes that during this period humanitarian organizations also became ‘service providers in “failed” states in the global South. What the world is left with, then, is aid organisations acting as intermediaries for Western states financing the functions of Southern, often postcolonial, states, almost half a century after the era of decolonisation.’ Writing in the same essay collection, Gareth Owen tells us that at the turn of the century Save the Children US (SCUS) ‘was coming under state pressure from the US government which saw NGOs as “natural partners” in the management of the aftermath of war’. He quotes Secretary of State Colin Powell addressing NGOs in 2001, not long after the invasion of Afghanistan, with the words: ‘Just as surely as our diplomats and military, American NGOs are out there serving and sacrificing on the front lines of freedom … I am serious about making sure we have the best relationship with NGOs who are such a force multiplier for us, such an important part of our combat team.’ Baughan, ‘Humanitarianism and History’, pp. 26–7; Gareth Owen, ‘The Rise of the Humanitarian Corporation: Save the Children and the Ordering of Emergency Response’, in Fiori et al. (eds.), Amidst the Debris, p. 42.

90

Melanie May, ‘Animal welfare is UK’s favourite cause’, UK Fundraising, 10/08/2022, https://shorturl.at/qJM58.

91

John M. MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 202, 271.

92

Ibid., pp. 38, 168.

93

Ibid., pp. 115, 116, 182–3, 207.

94

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, pp. 378, 467–8; Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, pp. 31–2.

95

FFI is open about this strange history, acknowledging on its website that ‘paradoxically, FFI owes its existence to an assorted collection of big game hunters who realised that they were running out of things to shoot. Other founder members who shared Buxton’s concern that hunting of African game had reached unsustainable levels included Colonel J. H. Patterson, whose lion-killing heroics inspired a bestselling book – The Man-Eaters of Tsavo – and a trio of Hollywood films; Frederick Selous, the archetypal great white hunter, inspiration for the fictional Allan Quatermain and First World War hero-in-waiting; and the brewing magnate, Samuel Whitbread, who was anxious to avert an African version of the free-for-all that had led to the near-total wipeout of the American bison. In its original guise, FFI operated first and foremost as a pressure group that drew on its collective aristocratic muscle in order to lean on the colonial authorities. With this in mind, Buxton and his co-founders wasted no time in recruiting heavyweight friends as honorary members. Among them was President Theodore Roosevelt, an ardent conservationist whose love of nature did not preclude him from mounting an African hunting expedition during which over 11,000 animals were trapped or killed in the name of science.’ https://www.fauna-flora.org/news/raiders-lost-archive-episode-one/.

96

Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, p. 468.

97

MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, pp. 39, 94–5.

98

Ibid., p. 201.

99

Of imperial big-game shooting, MacKenzie notes that ‘no other sport went through such a rapid transition from an acceptable and central aspect of imperialism into an activity regarded as dubious, with the capacity to damage environments and seriously reduce the numbers of increasingly rare animals’. The speed was such that some imperialists changed their view within their lifetime, Baden-Powell among them. ‘Formerly fierce in his extolling of pig sticking and shooting during his career, even incorporating the use of guns into the early editions of his Scouting for Boys, [he] changed his mind in the 1920s. It may be that for some like him, the experience of the carnage of the First World War made the substitution of camera for gun an attractive proposition.’ See MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, pp. 107–8.

100

One exception was H. A. Bryden, who became active in the preservationist lobby in Britain. ‘In 1894 Bryden repeated his warnings with greater force in an article in the Fortnightly Review. He was quite clear about where the responsibility for destruction lay. It was with Europeans and the introduction of breech-loading firearms.’ MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature, pp. 113–15.

101

Regional museums are beginning to look into how they built collections of hunting trophies and taxidermied animals. See recent Guardian article on exhibition at Scarborough Art Gallery: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jan/11/scarborough—museum-legacy-colonial-past-scarborough-art-gallery. And the research taking place at the Powell-Cotton Museum on hunting trophies and dioramas: https://pcmresearch.org/research/; https://powell-cottonmuseum.org/projects/colonial-critters/.

102

Corinne Fowler was the first writer I came across who pointed out that imperialists hunted exotic animals to the point of extinction. ‘Tiger-hunting – always popular with Indian rulers – escalated under the British Raj and there is a direct link between colonialism and the decimation of tiger populations. By the 1930s, the Van Ingen taxidermy firm were processing 400 big cat skins a year. Elephant populations also diminished as European markets increasingly opened up for ivory products at the height of empire.’ Fowler, Green Unpleasant Land, pp. 31–2.

103

The interior decor schemes of British stately homes like Blair Castle and Tatton Park have borne witness to the imperial hunting craze, with the heads and horns of exotic animals being placed alongside the more traditional sight of locally sourced stag heads. See Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, pp. 29–31.

104

Valentine Low, ‘William’s poaching warning in first major speech as Prince of Wales’, The Times, 04/10/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/8910b764-43cc-11ed-8885-043c27446b97?shareToken=dd9a203997a3f7e2899efe057696a7fa.

105

https://www.royal.uk/conservation.

106

Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, pp. 115, 193, 309–10.

107

https://www.heirsofslavery.org/

.

108

Press Association, ‘Prince William “calls for Buckingham Palace ivory to be destroyed”’, Guardian, 17/02/2014, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/17/prince-william-buckingham-palace-ivory-destroyed.

Chapter 5: A Rational and Intelligible System of Law

1

Michael Safi, ‘Campaigners celebrate as India decriminalises homosexuality’, Guardian, 06/09/2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/06/indian-supreme-court-decriminalises-homosexuality; Amy Kazmin, ‘India gay sex court ruling sets stage for cultural battle’, Financial Times, 12/09/2018, https://www.ft.com/content/8a8cbd02-b5c5-11e8-b3ef-799c8613f4a1.

2

Kyle Knight, ‘India’s Transgender Rights Law Isn’t Worth Celebrating’, Human Rights Watch, 05/12/2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/05/indias-transgender-rights-law-isnt-worth-celebrating.

3

https://www.nazindia.org/

.

4

The suicide of Arvey Malhotra, a sixteen-year-old pupil at the elite Delhi Public School in Greater Faridabad, made headlines across India in 2022. The Class 10 student jumped from the building where he lived with his mother, Aarti Malhotra, a teacher at the same school (who was away when it happened). The contents of the suicide note were widely published in Indian newspapers and he was clear about who was to blame: the school, which didn’t challenge the relentless harassment and abuse he faced for being gay. Mrs Malhotra was fired as a teacher following her child’s death. See Maitree Baral, ‘“The school has killed me”: Arvey Malhotra’s mother recalls his suicide note and elaborates on the bullying that led to her son’s death; awaits justice even after 4 months’, Times of India, 07/07/2022, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/parenting/moments/the-school-has-killed-me-arvey-malhotras-mother-recalls-his-suicide-note-and-elaborates-on-the-bullying-that-led-to-her-sons-death-awaits-justice-even-after-4-months/articleshow/92721354.cms.

5

‘The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is the highest court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries, as well as the United Kingdom’s overseas territories, crown dependencies, and military sovereign base areas. It also hears very occasional appeals from a number of ancient and ecclesiastical courts. These include the Church Commissioners, the Arches Court of Canterbury, the Chancery Court of York, prize courts and the Court of Admiralty of the Cinque Ports.’ https://www.jcpc.uk/about/role-of-the-jcpc.html.

6

‘Law, Colonial Systems of, British Empire’, Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/law-colonial-systems-british-empire.

7

Ferguson, Empire, pp. 64–5; ‘Terra nullius’, Australian Museum, 09/09/2021, https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/unsettled/recognising-invasions/terra-nullius/https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/mabo-decision.

8

These include British Overseas Territories like Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands, Crown dependencies like the Channel Islands, and also, controversially, ten independent Commonwealth states, mostly in the Caribbean. Leslie Thomas QC, a prominent lawyer in London, recently suggested that British judges should cease sitting as the top court for Commonwealth countries, describing the Privy Council as one of the ‘last vestiges of colonialism’. See Jonathan Ames and Catherine Baksi, ‘Lawyer condemns British court as colonialist relic’, The Times, 09/06/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/802fbe26-e74a-11ec-aa87-2eea7c6e5b01?shareToken=b7e9eb6df701848be465236d027a1dbb.

9

Amrit Dhillon, ‘Indian minister calls for abolition of 1,500 laws dating back to Raj’, Guardian, 25/10/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/25/indian-minister-calls-for-abolition-of-1500-laws-dating-back-to-raj.

10

Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality: Queens, Crime and Empire, Routledge, 2019, pp. 3–4, 11–13.

11

Ibid., pp. 10–13, 24, 34.

12

Ibid., pp. 2, 62; https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-63970659; Feliz Solomon, ‘Compromise Lies behind Singapore’s New Approach to LGBT Rights’, Wall Street Journal, 02/09/2022, https://www.wsj.com/articles/compromise-lies-behind-singapores-new-approach-to-lgbt-rights-11662110698.

13

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, p. 41.

14

Ibid., p. 4.

15

Douglas E. Sanders cited by Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, p. 4; Douglas E. Sanders, ‘377 and the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia’, Asian Journal of Comparative Law 2009, 4, p. 1.

16

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, p. 59.

17

Chidera Ihejirika, ‘Fuck your gender norms: how Western colonisation brought unwanted binaries to Igbo culture’, gal-dem, 19/02/2020, https://gal-dem.com/colonialism-nigeria-gender-norms-lgbtq-igbo/.

18

William Spurlin, Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 33–55.

19

Marc Epprecht, ‘“Unnatural Vice” in South Africa: The 1907 Commission of Enquiry’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 2001, 34:1, pp. 121–40.

20

Nilanjana Bhowmick, ‘India’s Opposition BJP Calls Homosexuality Unnatural’, 16/12/2013, https://world.time.com/2013/12/16/indias-opposition-bjp-calls-homosexuality-unnatural/.

21

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, p. 105.

22

Scott Long, ‘Before the law: Criminalizing sexual conduct in colonial and post-colonial southern African societies’, More Than a Name: State-Sponsored Homophobia and its Consequences in Southern Africa, Human Rights Watch, 2003, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/safrica/safriglhrc0303-07.htm.

23

Jessica Hinchy, Governing Gender and Sexuality in Colonial India: The Hijra, c.1850–1900, Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 1.

24

The Act included section 61 on sodomy and bestiality: ‘Whosoever shall be convicted of the abominable Crime of Buggery, committed either with Mankind or with any Animal, shall be liable, at the Discretion of the Court, to be kept in Penal Servitude for Life or for any Term not less than Ten Years.’

25

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, p. 31.

26

Ibid., pp. 10–11, 31.

27

Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality, Taylor & Francis, 2002, p. 276; Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Manchester University Press, 1990.

28

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, pp. 6, 10–11, 41.

29

Tom Daley: Illegal to Be Me

, BBC, 15/08/2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001b0yv; Andrei Tapalaga, ‘Buck Breaking: The Worst Form of Punishment against Enslaved Men’, History of Yesterday, 23/01/2023, https://historyofyesterday.com/buck-breaking-the-use-of-sexual-violence-against-enslaved-men-as-punishment-for-wrongdoing-897647489732; https://medium.com/black-history-month-365/buck-breaking-the-rape-and-beating-of-black-enslaved-men-to-make-them-compliant-75107aeaf2d6.

30

Thomas A. Foster, Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men, University of Georgia Press, 2019, p. 101.

31

John Saillant, ‘The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic’, in Thomas A. Foster (ed.), Long before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, New York University Press, 2007, p. 310.

32

Foster, Rethinking Rufus, p. 86.

33

William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Random House, 1968, pp. 226–40.

34

Foster, Rethinking Rufus, p. 86.

35

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, p. 14.

36

Ibid., pp. 31–43; ‘What caused Bligh’s crew to lead a mutiny on his ship, the Bounty, in 1789?’, Royal Museums Greenwich, https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/william-bligh; ‘Rum Rebellion’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Rum-Rebellion.

37

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, p. 28; Nathan Dorn, ‘New Acquisition: The Trial of Governor Picton – A Case of Torture in Trinidad’, Library of Congress blog, 10/03/2021, https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2021/03/new-acquisition-the-trial-of-governor-picton-a-case-of-torture-in-trinidad/; ‘Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton (1758–1815)’, Amgueddfa Cymru, https://museum.wales/collections/online/object/4adfdd41-6370-36bf-a907-c74f5ad7d4a5/Lieutenant-General-Sir-Thomas-Picton-1758-1815/.

38

‘Edward Huggins Sr.’, Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146635234; Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, pp. 43–5; Josephine Humphreys, ‘History and Mystery on Nevis’, New York Times, 12/11/1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/12/t-magazine/history-and-mystery-on-nevis.html; https://rb.gy/xad6h.

39

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, pp. 48–9; ‘Arthur Hodge’, Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/2146650163; ‘Arthur William Hodge’, National Portrait Gallery, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw14993/Arthur-William-Hodge?LinkID=mp14472&role=sit&rNo=0; Lauren Benton, ‘This Melancholy Labyrinth: The Trial of Arthur Hodge and the Boundaries of Imperial Law’, Alabama Law Review 2012, 64:1, pp. 91–122.

40

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, p. 14.

41

Ibid., pp. 191–2.

42

Zoë Laidlaw, Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870, Cambridge University Press, 2021, is very good on this theme. On the topic of colonized people themselves appealing to the Crown, there is Maria Nugent’s insightful essay, ‘The politics of memory and the memory of politics: Australian Aboriginal interpretations of Queen Victoria, 1881–2011’, in Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent (eds.), Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 100–122.

43

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, pp. 91, 102; Lee C. Godden and Niranjan Casinader, ‘The Kandyan Convention 1815: Consolidating the British Empire in Colonial Ceylon’, Comparative Legal History 2013, 1:2, pp. 179–210.

44

https://committees.parliament.uk/inquiries/

.

45

‘Less money equals better care: Inquiries springing up: But where are the shears?’, Public magazine, 02/11/2006.

46

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, p. 60.

47

Ibid., p. 57.

48

Ibid., p. 58.

49

In a recent article historians Jon Wilson and Andrew Dilley talk up the essential incoherence of the British empire. ‘British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent,’ they maintain. ‘Idioms of sovereignty varied; there was no single British way of claiming territory. The “British empire” was a jumble of different lands and societies, all ruled through different forms of government with differing claims to political power, ultimately unified by their common existence under the sovereignty of the Crown, as the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica recognised. Claims to sovereignty were articulated through an extraordinary range of idioms and practices, from violent conquest through treaties and concessions to the right of settler communities to govern themselves. The plurality of imperial sovereignty meant “the empire” could never be a single power or space. It was not even a single “project”. Incoherence was the essence of empire. Plural sovereignty is not just a helpful perspective for understanding empire. It was what Britain’s empire actually was.’ Jon Wilson and Andrew Dilley, ‘The Incoherence of Empire. Or, the Pitfalls of Ignoring Sovereignty in the History of the British Empire’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 2023, pp. 1–27, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0080440123000063.

50

Benton and Ford, Rage for Order, pp. 195, 197, 180.

51

Ferguson, Empire, p. xxii.

52

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 5–6.

53

Richard Lloyd Parry and Raphael Blet, ‘Colonial nostalgia rules in Hong Kong as young refuse to accept China’s authority’, The Times, 14/06/2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/colonial-nostalgia-rules-as-young-refuse-to-accept-beijing-rule-gswccq0vf.

54

Winston Churchill, The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan, Dover Publications, 2007; Ferguson, Empire, p. xxvii.

55

MacKenzie continues: ‘If any building should have been emblematic of the British empire, it should have been law courts. A central aspect of the ideology of empire was its alleged basis in law and its dissemination of distinctively English legal practices to the rest of the world: English because the common law, rooted in the Middle Ages, was so different from the Roman Dutch law of parts of continental practice, as well as of Scotland (the British encountered Roman Dutch law in Ceylon and in South Africa and often turned to Scots to operate what they had inherited).’ See MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings, pp. 90 and 101.

56

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 230.

57

Many Western legal conventions arguably existed in various forms in pre-colonial India, which was governed by a mixture of regional laws, Hindu and Muslim personal law and Islamic criminal law before the British turned up. The Mughals had sharia law, which stood apart (formally, at least, as was the case with the British) from the executive. The Hindu concept of ‘dharma’ could be seen as a version of the rule of law (‘Law is the king of kings, far more rigid and powerful than they; there is nothing higher than law; by its prowess as by that of highest monarch, the weak shall prevail over the strong’: The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad). Meanwhile, Nandini Chatterjee reports that the Mughals ruled over largely non-Muslim multilingual populations, and that the sources of Mughal legal traditions were multilayered: ‘I propose that “law in Mughal India” consisted of rules derived from a number of sources – royal and sub-royal orders, administrative conventions and rules, Islamic jurisprudence and local custom – “Islam” providing a general sense of order, together with royal grace.’ See Aakash Singh Rathore and Garima Goswamy, Rethinking Indian Jurisprudence: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law, Routledge, 2018, p. 74; Nandini Chatterjee, Negotiating Mughal Law: A Family of Landlords across Three Indian Empires, Cambridge University Press, 2020; Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, pp. 11–12; Nandini Chatterjee, ‘Reflections on Religious Difference and Permissive Inclusion in Mughal Law’, Journal of Law and Religion 2014, 29:3, pp. 396–415.

58

Keally McBride, ‘Mr. Mothercountry: The Rule of Law as Practice’, Law, Culture and the Humanities 2017, 13:3, pp. 320–34, and McBride, Mr. Mothercountry.

59

McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, pp. 43, 48.

60

Ibid., pp. 50–51, 327.

61

Ibid., p. 321.

62

D. M. Young, The Colonial Office in the Early Nineteenth Century, Longman, Green, 1961, p. 12; McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, p. 47.

63

McBride, ‘Mr. Mothercountry’, pp. 321, 327.

64

McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, p. 157.

65

Ibid.

66

Severin Carrell, Rob Evans, David Pegg and Mario Savarese, ‘Revealed: Queen’s sweeping immunity from more than 160 laws’, Guardian, 14/07/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jul/14/queen-immunity-british-laws-private-property.

67

McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, pp. 63, 5, 11, 30.

68

‘British law and order existed mainly to maintain White dominance in the colonies where British colonists dwelt,’ writes Alan Lester. ‘When the Colonial Office or India Office (after 1858) in London prescribed that colonial law be non-racial, that intent was generally undermined by local colonial interests.’ See Alan Lester, ‘What are the British Empire’s “Legacies”?’, University of Sussex: Snapshots of Empire, 10/10/2022, https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/snapshotsofempire/2022/10/10/what-are-the-british-empires-legacies/.

69

David Anderson and David Killingray, Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830–1940, Manchester University Press, 1991, p. 7.

70

Ibid., passim; Georgina Sinclair, ‘The “Irish” policeman and the Empire: influencing the policing of the British Empire–Commonwealth’, Irish Historical Studies 2008, 36:142, pp. 173–87; M. Silvestri, ‘“Paddy Does Not Mind Who the Enemy Is”: The Royal Irish Constabulary and Colonial Policing’, in T. McMahon, M. de Nie and P. Townend (eds.), Ireland in an Imperial World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017; Richard Hill, ‘Policing Ireland, Policing Colonies: The Royal Irish Constabulary “Model”’, in Angela McCarthy (ed.), Ireland in the World: Comparative, Transnational and Personal Perspectives, Routledge, 2015, pp. 61–80.

71

Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, p. 7.

72

Jon Wilson, India Conquered: Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Simon & Schuster, 2016, pp. 209–11.

73

‘Thomas Babington Macaulay’, New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay.

74

T. B. Macaulay, Speech delivered in the House of Commons, 10/07/1833, The Miscellaneous Speeches and Writings of Lord Macaulay, Longmans, Green, 1889, p. 570.

75

Wilson, India Conquered, pp. 213, 214.

76

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 70.

77

James Fitzjames Stephen, the son of the James Stephen we came across earlier, served in India as law member of the Governor General’s Council from 1869 to 1872, and was one of the architects of the code. He famously proclaimed: ‘If it be asked how the system works in practice, I can only say that it enables a handful of unsympathetic foreigners … to rule justly and firmly about 200,000,000 persons of many races … The Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the institutions which they regulate, are somewhat grim presents for one people to make to another, and are little calculated to excite affection; but they are eminently well-calculated to protect peaceable men and to beat down wrongdoers, to extort respect, and to enforce obedience … If, however, the authority of the Government is once materially relaxed, if the essential character of the enterprise is misunderstood and the delusion that it can be carried out by assemblies representing the opinions of the natives is admitted, nothing but anarchy and ruin can be the result.’ See https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/snapshotsofempire/2022/10/10/what-are-the-british-empires-legacies/.

78

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 78.

79

Ibid., pp. 97–103; Ferguson, Empire, pp. 199–205; ‘Ilbert Bill’, Britannica, 18/01/2023, https://www.britannica.com/event/Ilbert-Bill.

80

Arthur Herman, Gandhi and Churchill: The Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged our Age, Random House, 2010, p. 34.

81

Ferguson, Empire, pp. 202–5.

82

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 11, 210.

83

Ibid., pp. 190–91.

84

Ibid., p. 191.

85

Her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, remarked on her daughter’s despair: ‘Iris told us that the most difficult thing was to read one case after another of the atrocities … She read hundreds of such cases. She felt numb after a while. She told me she sometimes had to get up and away from the documents to take a deep breath. She felt suffocated and in pain.’ See Robins, ‘Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?’

86

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 199–201.

87

Ibid., pp. 194, 203–4.

88

Ibid., p. 204.

89

Fae Dussart, ‘“Strictly Legal Means”: Assault, Abuse and the Limits of Acceptable Behaviour in the Servant–Employer Relationship in Metropole and Colony 1850–1890’, in Claire Lowrie and Victoria K. Haskins (eds.), Colonization and Domestic Service: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Taylor & Francis, 2014, p. 167; Christopher J. Fettweis, The Pursuit of Dominance: 2000 Years of Superpower Grand Strategy, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 173–207; Fae Dussart, In the Service of Empire: Domestic Service and Mastery in Metropole and Colony, Bloomsbury, 2022.

90

Nick Mansfield, Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth-Century British Military, Oxford University Press, 2019, p. 179.

91

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 78, 108, 110.

92

Ibid., pp. 107, 4, 203, 18, 187.

93

Ibid., pp. 186, 194–5.

94

Rana P. Behal, ‘Coolie Drivers or Benevolent Paternalists? British Tea Planters in Assam and the Indenture Labour System’, Modern Asian Studies 2010, 44:1, pp. 29–51.

95

Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, pp. 195–6, 9–10, 195, 187.

96

Taylor C. Sherman, State Violence and Punishment in India, Routledge, 2010, pp. 174–5. Around 2016, the Indian court system had a backlog of over 30 million cases, and roughly 70 per cent of inmates in the nation’s jails had never been put on trial for a crime. Meanwhile, Ashoka Mody, Visiting Professor of International Economic Policy at Princeton University, recently observed that ‘the police kill suspects so often that Indians do not bother to spell out “killed in an encounter”; alleged criminals are simply “encountered”. Indian elites, anxious to protect their gated lives, celebrate police officers described as “encounter specialists”.’ McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, pp. 33, 123; Ashoka Mody, ‘India’s Law-of-the-Jungle Raj’, Project Syndicate, 12/05/2023, https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/atiq-ahmed-murder-reveals-india-lawlessness-state-violence-by-ashoka-mody-2023-05.

97

Elkins, Legacy of Violence, p. 582.

98

David M. Anderson and David Killingray, Policing and Decolonisation: Politics, Nationalism, and the Police, 1917–65, Manchester University Press, 1992, p. 58.

99

McBride, Mr. Mothercountry, pp. 134–5.

100

As Alan Lester puts it: ‘Since the demise of colonial regimes, of course law and order has often worked partially … in favour of other minorities defined ethnically, regionally, by kinship or clientelism. In these instances, conservatives use phrases such as corruption that they tend not to apply to equivalent British colonial practices that favoured White people.’ See Lester, ‘What are the British Empire’s “Legacies”?’

101

Han and O’Mahoney, British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality, pp. 59–61.

102

Safi, ‘Campaigners celebrate as India decriminalises homosexuality’.

103

See Penelope MacRae, ‘No justice, says India gang-rape victim after killers get early release’, The Times, 18/08/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/2045eb84-1efe-11ed-b7c3-8b288ab55a56?shareToken=40090cafd02b3b9872b41b53dca84e2f.

Chapter 6: The Colour Line

1

Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber.

2

Ibid., p. 192.

3

Elliot Rudwick, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois’, Britannica, 25/01/2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-E-B-Du-Bois.

4

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 247; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography, Holt, 2009, pp. 279–80, 335.

5

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 1–4; Duncan Bell, Dreamworlds of Race: Empire and the Utopian Destiny of Anglo-America, Princeton University Press, 2020, pp. 380–85; J. R. Hooker, ‘The Pan-African Conference 1900’, Transition 1974, 46, pp. 20–24.

6

Coleridge-Taylor organized the musical entertainment for the Conference, composing the music for five songs.

7

‘To the nations of the world, ca. 1900’, Copy of address signed by Du Bois, Alexander Walters, Henry B. Brown and H. Sylvester Williams, https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b004-i321.

8

W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, The Atlantic, August 1897, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/strivings-of-the-negro-people/305446/

9

Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, pp. 380–81.

10

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 1–2, 247; Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, pp. 32, 381; W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of White Folk’, Library of America, pp. 923–4.

11

Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 192–3.

12

Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, pp. 381–2, and https://twitter.com/DrKevinGray/status/1579391884577103872?lang=en.

13

Alan Lester explains how the narrative that abolition had failed took root. ‘Antislavery proponents … had promised their fellow Britons that, in line with the new principles of political economy, freed black men and women would work harder on the West Indian plantations than they had as enslaved labourers, that they would practise a sober and diligent Christianity, and that they would receive gratefully the blessing of instruction in the art of civilised, British, conduct in church, in the home and in the workplace. When, in the early 1840s, most former slaves in Jamaica, Britain’s main focal point for the discursive contest over slavery, chose to leave the plantations on which they had been held captive, to work for themselves and their reconstituted families rather than for their former owners, and to define their own syncretic take on Christianity rather than reproduce the dour forms of worship that their missionaries taught, plantations were left short of labour, sugar production plummeted and the Jamaican economy collapsed. By 1857, The Times was proclaiming the failure of the emancipation experiment: “it destroyed an immense property, ruined thousands of good families, degraded the Negroes still lower than they were, and, after all, increased the mass of Slavery in less scrupulous hands”.’ Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial Inclusions and Exclusions’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World, Routledge, 2012, p. 383.

14

‘In every single colony, White colonists had rights that were denied to colonised people of colour,’ writes Alan Lester. ‘Even in India where the accommodations and alliances between elite Indians and British rulers were perhaps most evident, Indians were allowed to participate in governance only in an advisory role, only very late in the era of colonial governance, and only in response to nationalist agitation. Judicial systems systematically punished people of colour and White colonists differentially for the same crimes in every colony throughout the colonial period. On a quotidian level, people of colour were generally expected to show deference to White colonists no matter what their respective class status. Only Black people were enslaved within the British empire, and they were “owned” overwhelmingly by White people, with a relatively few free people of colour also slave-owners. White colonists generally had Black servants, never the other way around. White colonists could use violence against colonised people of colour relatively freely, with punishment quite exceptional. Never the other way around. The everyday discourse of colonial governance was predicated on racial distinctions, as you will appreciate if you work in any colonial archive.’ https://twitter.com/aljhlester/status/1671099643726295043?t=0JnfyuVUntNb7_Eh-hgODw&s=03.

15

Titles including Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line; Bell, Dreamworlds of Race; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Harvard University Press, 1995.

16

https://twitter.com/aljhlester/status/1647856752254132225

.

17

The full quotation from Beckles is worth reading: ‘First, they globalized the trade so that, by the eighteenth century, they were the largest shippers; second, they produced the most abundant body of writing that established, within the intellectual and social consciousness of the world, the racist philosophy that African people were not entitled to the freedom they cherished. During the seventeenth century, the English generally believed that black Africans were an inferior people. This view was expressed in the laws and customs used to govern them as enslaved persons. It was also stimulated by writing about the slave trade. Together these texts constituted a source of cultural authority used to justify slavery and the slave trade as entrepreneurial activity. The English justification of slave trading was a large-scale literary and intellectual project. The notion that Africans were non-human, or subhuman at best, and that their right to humanity could be denied and ignored was an intellectual construct that required considerable literary focus and sustained articulation. A mountain of published materials was produced supporting this justification of slavery. As a body of writing, it represents the moral descent of the British mind into the darkest pit of racial hatred. Seeking to deny the human status of Africans also required the theological support of the church. The English public would support the crime only if it was presented to them as “right” and in the national interest.’ Beckles, Britain’s Black Debt, p. 39.

18

Surodya Prakasika quoted by Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 16.

19

Hall quoted by ibid.

20

Ibid., p. 18.

21

Michael Makovsky, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, Yale University Press, 2007, pp. 156–7.

22

‘While I should have no scruple whatever in entrusting to natives properly trained the care of the lighthouses at Colombo, Galle, and Trincomalie,’ the Governor of Ceylon declared in 1879, ‘I think that the entrusting to natives the care of such important and at the same time such isolated lighthouses as the Great and Little Basses, requires grave consideration. I find upon inquiry in India and Singapore that in the Madras Presidency natives (Asiatics) have not been placed in sole or partial charge of any lighthouses. And the lighthouses throughout the Straits have a European or Eurasian in charge. In Hong Kong a Light … is said to be in charge of Chinese only, under frequent supervision. But Chinese are so far superior to the bulk of other Orientals in steadiness and intelligence that the successful employment of Chinese in any pursuit is by no means a guarantee that the employment of other Orientals in the same pursuit would be equally successful.’ Lester, Boehme and Mitchell, Ruling the World, p. 10.

23

The South African comedian Noah became the focus of intense criticism, involving public figures and government ministers, when he dared to observe the simple fact that Rishi Sunak’s appointment as Prime Minister had provoked racism among some Brits. See Oliver Slow, ‘Trevor Noah: I never said entire UK racist, says comic after Rishi Sunak row’, BBC News, 29/10/2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-63437351.

24

Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 328.

25

Sean Elias, ‘Colour Line’, The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism, Wiley Blackwell, 2015, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/315772103_Colour_Line/link/6079cf6a907dcf667ba44372/download.

26

Arnold, cited by Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging, Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 8.

27

Cited by Nancy Stepan in The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960, Macmillan, 1982, p. xvii.

28

Even though they spent their careers in Jamaica criticizing the cruel treatment of slaves, British missionaries did not consider them equals: they saw themselves as the teachers of these ‘children’ within the ‘universal family of man’. The missionaries’ concern for the underprivileged was often combined with the conviction that white people were their only hope. See Kolsky, Colonial Justice in British India, p. 15.

29

I’m thinking of biographer James Boswell, who was notably kind and generous towards Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson’s black servant, even as he expressed enthusiastic support for West Indian planters.

30

Gorman, Imperial Citizenship, pp. 51–2.

31

‘The Waco Horror’, Brown University Library, July 1916, https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1292363091648500.pdf.

32

‘A young black laborer on a farm outside Atlanta, Hose got into a dispute with his employer and killed him in self-defense,’ explains a blog on the website of the Library of America. ‘During the ensuing ten-day manhunt, the rival Atlanta newspapers excited their readers by competing on lurid details. As days went by, rape, infanticide, and other “unnatural acts” were added to descriptions of the crime. When Hose was finally apprehended, the surrounding hysteria led to excursion trains being arranged to transport hundreds of Georgians from Atlanta to the site of his execution. On Sunday, 23 April 1899, the day after his capture, Hose was brought before an estimated crowd of 2,000 in the town square of Newman, Georgia. There he was stripped; his ears, fingers, and genitals cut off; his face skinned, and his body burned on a pyre. Souvenir hunters fought over his organs and bones. For W. E. B. Du Bois the lynching was an awakening. Having arrived at Atlanta University two years before, the pleasantries of his studies were shattered.’ See ‘How Sam Hose’s lynching became an awakening for W. E. B. Du Bois’, The official blog of The Library of America, 18/03/2011, http://blog.loa.org/2011/03/how-sam-hose-lynching-became-awakening.html. Also: Edwin T. Arnold, ‘Across the Road from the Barbecue House’, Mississippi Quarterly 2008, 61:1/2, Special Issue on Lynching and American Culture, pp. 267–92.

33

‘Immigration policy during this period was discriminatory and heavily Eurocentric,’ writes Salih Omar Eissa. ‘Even when the McCarran–Walter Act of 1952 eliminated all racially specific language from the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), national quotas remained and migration from the African continent was set at the lowest quota of 1,400 annually.’ This changed with the 1965 Hart–Cellar Immigration Act: ‘Voluntary immigration of peoples of African descent did not begin in earnest until passage of the Hart–Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, which revolutionized the criteria for immigration to the United States. The Act called for the admission of immigrants based on their skills, profession, or relationship to families in the United States.’ Salih Omar Eissa, ‘Diversity and Transformation: African Americans and African Immigration to the United States’, Immigration Policy Center, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/sites/default/files/research/Diversity [URL inactive] and Transformation March 2005.pdf.

34

Noa Yachot, ‘“We want our land back”: for descendants of the Elaine massacre, history is far from settled’, Guardian, 18/06/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/18/elaine-massacre-red-summer-descendants-history.

35

For a discussion of the reliability of the quotation see Mark E. Benbow, ‘Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and “Like Writing History with Lightning”’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2010, 9:4, pp. 509–33.

36

Gary Younge, ‘Lest We Remember: How Britain Buried its History of Slavery’, Guardian, 29/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/29/lest-we-remember-how-britain-buried-its-history-of-slavery; Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, Verso Books, 2020, p. 55; Riley, Imperial Island, pp. 44–5.

37

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, ‘USA vs England: The 200-Year Rivalry’, The Rest Is History podcast, episode 263, 25/11/ 2022, ten minutes in, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1fmP92v1fZeUWdXVFZTDFB?si=e21eed1527e54a6b. ‘The greatest shortcoming of much of the historical work being done in the United States is not its lack of the methodological or theoretical rigor that is found in the “hard” social sciences – history has its own quite defensible methods and theoretical assumptions – but rather its parochial vision,’ writes George M. Fredrickson. ‘Historians of the United States in particular characteristically know little in depth about the history of other societies, unless, like Early Modern England, they can be directly linked to the American experience.’ See George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study, Oxford University Press, 1981, p. xiv.

38

For more, see Zoë Laidlaw and Alan Lester (eds.), Indigenous Communities and Settler Colonialism: Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939, Oxford University Press, 2011; Fredrickson, White Supremacy, p. 45.

39

Ibid., p. 241.

40

Ibid.

41

Ibid., pp. xviii–xix.

42

The intellectual age of supposed reason that dominated the West between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries developed differently on the east side of America and, for example, in Scotland. Also, it had varying degrees of influence on how countries developed. But the international book trade allowed for the worldwide reach of Enlightenment thinkers, and what the major personalities had to say about race shows that white supremacy developed at roughly the same time, and in roughly the same way, on both sides of the Atlantic. David Hume, the revered Scottish thinker of the Enlightenment, said in 1753, ‘I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to whites,’ while the German philosopher Immanuel Kant included in his Lectures on Physical Geography (published in 1802) his opinion that ‘the yellow [Asian] Indians do have a meagre talent’ but that ‘Negroes are far below them and at the lowest point are a part of the American peoples.’ In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke maintained that ‘Negroes’ were the result of African women mating with apes, and as a consequence should be viewed as subhuman. And then there was the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, who noted in 1785 that ‘the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind’. Despite this, Jefferson was still able to have several children with Sally Hemings, a black slave he had been abusing sexually since she was fourteen. ‘When European thinkers set the standard for what they considered a modern human, many built it around their own experiences and what they happened to value at that time,’ writes Angela Saini. ‘While a few Enlightenment thinkers did resist the idea of a racial hierarchy, many … saw no contradiction between the values of liberty and fraternity and their belief that non-whites were innately inferior to whites.’ Angela Saini, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Fourth Estate, 2019, pp. 23–5; Kehinde Andrews, The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World, Allen Lane, 2021, pp. 2, 8, 17; https://blackcentraleurope.com/sources/1750-1850/kant-on-the-different-human-races-1777/; Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, ‘The Enlightenment’, The Rest is History podcast, episode 86, 16/08/2021, 7 mins, 10 seconds, https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Lu92A3BRBL3uYQ15wwmSS?si=OSGGDLDITA2OnPzMCUl5Cg&dl_branch=1.

43

‘Cotton Capital: How slavery changed the Guardian, Britain and the world’, Guardian [no date], https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cotton-capital.

44

Andrews, The New Age of Empire, p. 104.

45

Ibid.

46

Younge, ‘Lest We Remember’.

47

David Olusoga, ‘Slavery and the Guardian: The Ties That Bind Us’, Guardian, 28/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/28/slavery-and-the-guardian-the-ties-that-bind-us.

48

Ibid.

49

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 109.

50

Andrews, The New Age of Empire, p. xiv.

51

Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, p. 30; the theme is expanded upon at p. 373.

52

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 131.

53

The official justification for intervention was on behalf of the ‘uitlanders’ – white immigrants, mainly of British origin, living on the goldfields controlled by the Afrikaner Transvaal government, who were denied the same voting rights as Afrikaner citizens. The British wanted to gain control of gold and diamond mines and there was little attention paid to the rights of Indians or Africans in the Transvaal. However, the British did promise that the ‘non-racial’ constitution of the Cape and Natal (both of which excluded the vast majority of Africans from the vote in practice) would be extended to the Afrikaner republics after their defeat. This persuaded many Africans and Indians (like Gandhi) to side with the British in the war. That promise was betrayed at the Treaty of Vereeniging which finally brought the war to an end. The British thus abandoned their new Black subjects to explicitly racial exclusion from the franchise in the two former republics because the guerrilla war being fought by the Boers was proving enormously costly in British lives and in damage to Britain’s reputation. The use of scorched-earth tactics and concentration camps against white colonists was causing considerable opposition at home and in Europe (of course these tactics were far less controversial when used against Black people resisting colonization; Black concentration camps resulted in at least 14,000 deaths). So the British compromised, forsaking promises of non-racialism in order to secure peace and achieve the objective of unifying the region under British rule.

54

‘Apartheid’ is an Afrikaans word (literally ‘apartness’) specifically associated with the Afrikaner nationalist government elected from 1948. Essentially what it did was reinforce the British policies that maintained white supremacy and added positive discrimination for Afrikaners relative to English-speaking whites. At the time more than 80 per cent of the land was owned by the white minority, and only 13 per cent of land had been designated Bantu Homelands for the black African majority. Apartheid extended segregationist racist policies into more personal domains – marriage, ‘intimacy’ and so on – and made them easier to enforce with mandatory racial classification; it also created a vast sector of state employment for Afrikaners and promoted the Afrikaans language so that Afrikaners ceased to be the ‘poor whites’ and, by the 1980s, were as privileged as English-speakers. For an overview see Alan Lester, Etienne Nel and Tony Binns, South Africa Past, Present and Future: Gold at the End of the Rainbow?, Routledge, 2000.

55

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 230; House of Commons Debates 1909, vol. IX, col. 998.

56

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 121.

57

Ibid., p. 124.

58

Ibid., pp. 210–13; Saul Dubow, Racial Segregation and the Origins of Apartheid in South Africa, 1919–36, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989.

59

Viceroy of India 1894–9; Colonial Secretary 1905–8. Grandson of the man famously associated with the Marbles from the Parthenon.

60

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 232.

61

Ibid., p. 9. I looked up the source material at the National Archives, which directed me to surreal correspondence between imperial civil servants on the topic, one Morgan Evans in the Attorney General’s Office in Cape Town informing colleagues in 1903 that in the case of South Africa ‘Japanese subjects are in exactly the same plight as other Asiatics. They being, however, more Anglicized than many other Asiatics, they, and the better class Indians, are much more likely to come in than, e.g., Chinese.’ The request was made by M. Cambon to Lansdowne on 24/09/1902. See Foreign Office to Colonial Office, Enclosure, CO 885/8/1.

62

Nigel Biggar, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, William Collins, 2023. For a forensic review of the book by a historian who has studied the British empire for decades, see Alan Lester, ‘The British Empire Rehabilitated?’, Bella Caledonia, 07/03/2023, https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2023/03/07/the-british-empire-rehabilitated/.

63

Alan Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship: Colonial Inclusions and Exclusions’, in Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World, p. 383.

64

The legislative assembly of British Columbia passed an act designed to limit Asian immigration, but it was blocked by Earl Minto who, as the Governor General of Canada (based in Ottawa), had the power to overrule the provincial assembly.

65

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 165.

66

Ibid., p. 61.

67

James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Auckland University Press, 1986, p. 328; Alan Lester, ‘British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire’, History Workshop Journal 2002, 54:1, pp. 24–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/54.1.24.

68

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 50–51, 56–7.

69

Ibid., pp. 49–50, 58–9.

70

Ibid., pp. 49–50, 59.

71

Ibid., p. 64.

72

Ibid., p. 61.

73

Ibid., pp. 61, 69.

74

Ibid., p. 64.

75

Ibid., pp. 3, 75–6.

76

Ibid., p. 92.

77

Duncan Bell, ‘The Anglosphere: new enthusiasm for an old dream’, Prospect Magazine, 19/01/2017, https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/anglosphere-old-dream-brexit-role-in-the-world.

78

Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, p. 294.

79

Ibid., p. 203.

80

Ibid., p. 287.

81

Ibid., pp. 212, 213.

82

Ibid., p. 159.

83

Ibid., pp. 177–80, 184.

84

Ibid., pp. 185–6.

85

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 5, 62–7, 128–9. For a good article on the topic see Jeremy Martens, ‘A transnational history of immigration restriction: Natal and New South Wales, 1896–97’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2006, 34:3, pp. 323–44.

86

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 5, 63, 147, 300–301.

87

Ibid., p. 18.

88

Ibid., pp. 125–6.

89

Ibid., pp. 293–7, 316–17.

90

Josh Axelrod, ‘A Century Later: The Treaty of Versailles and its Rejection of Racial Equality’, NPR, 11/08/2019, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/11/742293305/a-century-later-the-treaty-of-versailles-and-its-rejection-of-racial-equality?t=1654014119173; Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 293.

91

In 1919 Balfour stated that ‘he believed it was true in a certain sense that all men of a particular nation were created equal, but not that a man in Central Africa was created equal to a European’. See Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 11.

92

Ibid., p. 308.

93

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/13/us/politics/biden-howard-commencement-black-voters.html

.

94

See ‘Post Office admits “abhorrent” racist slur was used to describe suspects in Horizon scandal’, Sky News, 27/05/2023, https://news.sky.com/story/post-office-admits-abhorrent-racist-slur-was-used-to-describe-suspects-in-horizon-scandal-12890411.

95

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 1–3.

96

See ibid., p. 185.

97

Ibid., p. 203.

98

The historian Heather Streets has written about how the British decided after the Mutiny of 1857 that the Sikhs, Highlanders and Gurkhas were inherently ‘martial’ people. Other ‘racial’ groups to be fetishized by British imperialists included the Zulus and Hausas of Africa. Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857–1914, Manchester University Press, 2004.

99

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 312–15.

100

Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, p. xix.

101

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, pp. 159–62.

102

Ibid., p. 68.

103

https://www.lib.washington.edu/specialcollections/collections/exhibits/southasianstudents/das

.

104

Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, p. 187.

105

Ibid., p. 280.

106

Ibid., p. 325.

107

Lester, ‘Race and Citizenship’, p. 381.

108

Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines, British Parliamentary Papers (1837), vol. 7, p. 5.

109

Bell, Dreamworlds of Race, p. 8.

110

Ibid., p. 374.

111

Manan Desai, ‘What B. R. Ambedkar Wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois’, SAADA, 22/04/2014, https://www.saada.org/tides/article/ambedkar-du-bois.

112

There is a long tradition in Britain of attempting to teach imperial history through the stories of individuals. In 1927, the HMSO Handbook for Teachers advised that teachers could bring the history alive through human examples. ‘[Pupils] will learn naturally in how many different ways the patriot has helped his country, and by what sort of actions nations and individuals have earned the gratitude of posterity. Without any laboured exhortations they will feel the splendour of heroism, the worth of unselfishness and loyalty, and the meanness of cruelty and cowardice.’ Numerous texts and teachers’ manuals commended ‘books of heroes’ as teaching aids in the early to mid-twentieth century. More recently, when he was Secretary of State for Education in 2013, Michael Gove announced plans, subsequently withdrawn, to enforce a curriculum for English schools based on a chronological timeline of British national heroes’ achievements. See MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, pp. 178, 180–81; Matthew Watson, ‘Michael Gove’s war on professional historical expertise: conservative curriculum reform, extreme whig history and the place of imperial heroes in modern multicultural Britain’, British Politics 2020, 15, pp. 271–90, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41293-019-00118-3.

Chapter 7: Reaping the Chaos

1

T. G. O. Gbadamosi, Olugbolahan Abisogun Alo and Wale Osisanya-Olumuyiwa (eds.), Floreat Collegium: 100 Years of King’s College, Lagos, Third Millennium Publishing, 2014, p. 57.

2

Ibid., p. 45.

3

King’s College was opened nearly seventy years after missionaries opened Nigeria’s first primary school and five decades after they opened Nigeria’s first secondary school. Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 265–80.

4

The administrator George Goldie was responsible ‘more than anyone else’, according to Kwasi Kwarteng, for the ‘aggressive imperialism’ that Nigeria witnessed. His involvement began in 1879 with the takeover of a modest trading company that operated in the region around the River Niger, which he refashioned first as the United Africa Trading Company and then as the National African Company, before obtaining a Royal Charter in 1886 and creating the Royal Niger Company. In a series of treaties that, it appears, the chiefs themselves did not always fully understand, he persuaded indigenous leaders to sign away much of their powers over their nations in order to further his objectives. The company was essentially ‘doing the job of the British government at a much less burdensome cost to the British taxpayer’. Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 276–82.

5

King’s College is probably not Nigeria’s most exclusive school – that accolade goes to Katsina College (later Barewa College), which was founded in 1921 to educate the sons of emirs in the tradition of similar institutions in British India and has produced more political leaders than any other school in Nigeria. Approximately 42 per cent of the nation’s heads of government during the post-independence era received their education there. See Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 265–80.

6

Gbadamosi, Abisogun Alo and Osisanya-Olumuyiwa, Floreat Collegium, pp. 14–15.

7

Ibid., p. 101.

8

Lugard was the second most important Briton in the history of Nigeria and also made a key contribution to the intellectual development of British empire in his espousal of ‘indirect rule’. As an unofficial policy in Nigeria this had originated with George Goldie who, back in the 1880s, was happy to let local chiefs remain in charge of their areas on the condition they let him trade as he wished, though the princely states in India were the earliest model of indirect governance. Driven by the recognition that the British could not afford to govern Nigeria entirely themselves, Lugard turned this practice of indirect rule into an official policy, meaning that ‘fifty or a hundred different Native administrations’ in Nigeria were free to develop in their own way, ‘subject only to a general scheme of policy’. Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 290.

9

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 272.

10

Ibid., p. 2.

11

‘I think my upbringing and schooling in another country has really influenced the way that I look at these things,’ Kemi Badenoch told Times Radio. ‘There wasn’t any sort of attempt to describe the British empire as this awful, terrible thing that oppressed and victimised us.’ See Zaina Alibhai, ‘Equalities minister Kemi Badenoch says British empire achieved “good things” throughout rule’, Independent, 21/03/2022, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/kemi-badenoch-british-empire-colonialism-b2040002.html.

12

Philip Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth, Hurst, 2021, pp. 56–60; Penelope MacRae, ‘Narendra Modi vows to make India a developed nation’, The Times, 15/08/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a975ef56-1c7b-11ed-add4-d333562d46fb?shareToken=933058c5b78c4c10b4dcb10be35fd079.

13

A 2017 ‘soft power index’ found that fifty-eight of the world’s leaders at the time had been educated in the UK, a tally not rivalled by any other country. In 2023, the US was found to have provided tertiary education for one or more leaders in fifty-four countries, compared to Britain’s tally of fifty-three. Meanwhile, a recent investigation by The Times found that Russian oligarchs convicted of embezzling hundreds of millions of pounds were sending their children to Britain’s private schools. Transparency International, an anti-corruption organization, said schools were not just providing education but ‘conveying legitimacy’. There are, however, signs that the prestige of British education, established during the British empire, might finally be fading. The USA took the top position in the ‘soft power index’ produced in 2018 – with fifty-eight world leaders compared with the UK’s fifty-seven – and widened its lead in 2022, having educated sixty-seven world presidents and prime ministers compared with fifty-five who studied at British institutions. The Times reported mournfully that several UK-educated leaders had lost office in the past year, including Costa Rica’s Carlos Quesada (alumnus of the University of Sussex), Armenia’s Armen Sarkissan (University of Cambridge) and Pakistan’s Imran Khan (University of Oxford). See Shayma Bakht and Anna Dowell, ‘Britain vies with America to educate the world’s leaders’, The Times, 22/08/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0527fd6e-4069-11ee-8b31-3c9c533abb75?shareToken=28cf9540f551a71741dac13146d854a5; Nicola Woolcock, ‘British influence on wane as leaders are educated elsewhere’, 24/08/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/british-influence-wanes-as-world-leaders-are-educated-elsewhere-3hhwd538z.

14

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 267–78.

15

In defence of the aforementioned imperially nostalgic book produced by King’s College for its centenary, it does take time to recall that the proposed syllabus at King’s was initially rejected by the school’s board in London because it was not vocational enough. Rather than languages and classics, the board said the school should concentrate on technical, practical subjects, presumably in order to produce the railway engineers and so forth that the country needed. ‘The board also recommended agricultural and industrial training for the project and objected to the use of the words “college” and “professor”.’ Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 272–3; Gbadamosi, Abisogun Alo and Osisanya-Olumuyiwa, Floreat Collegium, p. 39.

16

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 268.

17

At least, north vs south was how many British imperialists saw the country. Following their initial takeover of Lagos, the British pushed to annex much of Yorubaland: these lands were consolidated first as the Niger Coast Protectorate, then as the Southern Nigerian Protectorate. The British takeover of the north occurred in 1900, resulting in the Northern Nigerian Protectorate. The whole country was then under Britain’s control. But many scholars stress that the ethnic demography of Nigeria is much more complex than this basic division between north and south suggests – the south, for instance, is also home to other long-established groups, such as the Ijaw and the Tiv. Kwarteng, for his part, describes the country as being split in three. ‘In simple terms the British understood, there was a northern region, which was predominantly Muslim, a western region, which was dominated by the Yoruba tribe, and an eastern region, where the Igbo were the predominant ethnic group … For the British, the division of Nigeria into three parts was a crucially important fact in its short history. The north was dominated by feudal, Islamic lords known as emirs. In the west, the Yorubas had a society in which chiefs were powerful. In the east, the Igbos were widely known to be less feudal.’ Kwarteng adds that even ‘this was an oversimplified view’. Ajay Verghese, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, Stanford University Press, 2016, pp. 195–6; Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 284.

18

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 278–9.

19

In 1912, the French-born British journalist E. D. Morel maintained that the ‘Southern Nigerian system is turning out every year hundreds of Europeanized Africans’, but the ‘Northern Nigerian system aims at the establishment of an educational system based upon a totally different ideal’. Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 305; Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 323–4.

20

‘Nigeria’, The World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/nigeria/#people-and-society; Verghese, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, pp. 195–9; John Burger, ‘Backgrounder: Why is there so much Christian persecution in Nigeria?’, Aleteia, 24/01/2023, https://aleteia.org/2023/01/24/backgrounder-why-is-there-so-much-christian-persecution-in-nigeria/; Justine John Dyikuk, ‘“Scores of Christians killed, others displaced” – Nigerian think tank builds “atrocities database”’, The Pillar, 14/02/2023, https://www.pillarcatholic.com/scores-of-christians-killed-others-displaced-nigerian-think-tank-builds-atrocities-database/; Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 321; Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 256–7; Shobana Shankar, ‘Precolonial Christianity and Missionary Legacies’, in Carl Levan and Patrick Ukata (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics, Oxford University Press, 2018, pp. 47–59.

21

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 324.

22

Jack Straw said: ‘I’m not a liberal imperialist. There’s a lot wrong with liberalism, with a capital L, although I am a liberal with a small L. And there’s a lot wrong with imperialism. A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now are a consequence of our colonial past. India, Pakistan – we made some quite serious mistakes. We were complacent about what happened in Kashmir, the boundaries weren’t published until two days after independence. Bad story for us, the consequences are still there. Afghanistan – where we played a less than glorious role over a century and a half … The odd lines for Iraq’s borders were drawn by Brits. The Balfour declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to Israelis – again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one.’ Sunder Katwala, ‘Is the British empire to blame?’, Guardian, 17/11/2002, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/nov/17/foreignpolicy.comment.

23

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 3.

24

Richard Assheton, ‘Peter Obi, the 61-year-old “youngster” who wants to clean up Nigeria’, Sunday Times, 07/01/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/538d8d6e-8e00-11ed-a303-61858d68dcd6?shareToken=d9715f67849647111dc08285cf02161c.

25

David Pilling, ‘How Nigeria’s state lost the trust of its citizens’, Financial Times, 19/09/2022, https://www.ft.com/content/bc086fd8-12c5-4a15-afc2-734be4443aac.

26

Lolade Olu-Ojegbeje, ‘Bolt Driver Connives with Abuja Police to “Kidnap”, Rob Passenger of N1m’, Foundation of Investigative Journalism, 31/03/2022, https://fij.ng/article/bolt-driver-connives-with-abuja-police-to-kidnap-rob-passenger-of-n1m/; ‘Twitter User Accuses Uber Driver of Trying to Kidnap Her’, Bella Naija, 11/01/2017, https://www.bellanaija.com/2017/01/twitter-user-accuses-uber-driver-of-trying-to-kidnap-her/.

27

‘Nigeria: Gunmen abduct more than 30 in train station attack’, DW, 01/08/2023, https://www.dw.com/en/nigeria-gunmen-abduct-more-than-30-in-train-station-attack/a-64321012.

28

Uduegbunam Chukwujama, ‘Violent Attacks: Nigeria’s 10 Most Dangerous Highways This Season’, Prime Business Africa, https://www.primebusiness.africa/violent-attacks-nigerias-10-most-dangerous-highways-this-season/.

29

‘The reconfiguring of buildings was a key aspect of imperialism,’ observes John M. MacKenzie. ‘In the British imperial period in India, Mughal buildings were adapted as residences for the British (as in the case of the tomb at Lahore). Indigenous forts were taken over as redoubts and barracks for the British military. It is not surprising then that postcolonial nationalists have similarly taken over buildings and developed them. Some buildings have been demolished, certainly, and many statues have been destroyed or removed, but much else has been retained and provided with new meanings … The church in Fort William, Calcutta is now a library. Decline of Christian observance has led to the reuse of churches elsewhere too. In Quebec City, the former Anglican St Matthew’s Church is also now a library. Elsewhere, churches have been taken over by indigenous worshippers and often converted to new forms of communal and demonstrative worship.’ MacKenzie, The British Empire through Buildings, pp. 269–70.

30

As the Brookings Institution puts it, Nigeria is ‘not yet a failed state’ despite many predictions, because of Nigerians’ incredible ‘self-organizing impulse’. ‘Despite the chaos and disorder in the nation’s public sector, the volatile nature of the economy, and societal stressors of various dimensions, Nigerians find impetus to organize life by themselves and for themselves.’ See Andrew S. Nevin, Uma Kymal, Peter Nigel Cameron and Rufai Oseni, ‘Self-organizing Nigeria: The antifragile state’, 2/03/2023, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/africa-in-focus/2023/03/02/self-organizing-nigeria-the-antifragile-state/.

31

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 300–301.

32

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 301–3.

33

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 40–41.

34

Ibid., p. 40.

35

Elliott Green, ‘On the Size and Shape of African States’, International Studies Quarterly 2012, 56:2, p. 2; Ieuan Griffiths, ‘The Scramble for Africa: Inherited Political Boundaries’, Geographical Journal 1986, 152:2, pp. 204–16; Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, The Size of Nations, The MIT Press, 2005; Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, ‘Conflict, Defense Spending, and the Number of Nations’, European Economic Review 2006, 50:1, pp. 91–120.

36

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 294.

37

Siollun adds that ‘the introduction of Christian missionaries in the south had caused a revolutionary change to the region’s religious life and created a Western-educated cadre that was anxious for independence, while the north had little interest in rushing into a union with a southern region that was so radically different in religious and social ethos. British rule had also changed the north by introducing a Christian convert population into the region on the outskirts of the Muslim emirates.’ Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 323–4.

38

Ibid., p. 151.

39

Ibid., p. 326.

40

Ibid., pp. 11–12; Michael Taylor, ‘Powers of Darkness’, London Review of Books, 21 October 2021, 43:20, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/michael-taylor/powers-of-darkness.

41

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty, Profile Books, 2012, pp. 252–5. Peter Frankopan argues that this enslavement explains a lot of instability across West Africa today. ‘Supplying captives to traders on the coast demanded constant raiding to secure near endless numbers of captives – which created a vicious and circular world of enslaving or being enslaved. That in itself had other consequences, not least demand for weapons and above all guns – areas in which Europeans had an advantage by the time of enhanced contact with Africa, an advantage maintained and furthered thanks in part to the sheer number of conflicts in Europe and between Europeans that incentivised the development of improvements in reliability of firearms. The demand for guns, itself in part a function of the need both to defend against raiding and to use in raids, became a motor of intensification of the slave trade in its own right, as well as propelling the emergence of highly centralised states dominated by military elites such as Oyo, Dahomey and Asante, each of whose fortunes were closely connected to the European expansion … In this age of mounting violence and insecurity, it was perhaps not surprising that ties between villages weakened, communities became introverted and levels of trust plummeted dramatically … Research has suggested that these breakdowns developed into long-term issues which are still prevalent today in many parts of West Africa, and explain low levels of co-operation, low levels of trust and poor economic performance. Regions that provided large numbers of captives to be shipped across the Atlantic are worse off now thanks to the historical effects of slavery. In other words, it is not just that peoples and places in Africa paid a heavy price centuries ago; they continue to do so to this day.’ See Frankopan, The Earth Transformed, pp. 384–5.

42

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 48.

43

Ibid., p. 92.

44

Ibid.

45

Ibid., p. 82.

46

Ibid., pp. 83–4.

47

Ibid., p. 83.

48

Ibid., p. 188.

49

Ibid., pp. 191–2.

50

Falola continues: ‘The linkage between parties and violence began early. The post-1940 political parties were formed in an atmosphere of distrust and ethnic competition. Each major political party represented a region: the Nigerian People’s Congress in the North, the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in the East, and the Action Group in the West. Each successfully kept control of its region and all struggled bitterly to control the center. The task of national integration was complicated.’ Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 172, 173, 181.

51

Pilling, ‘How Nigeria’s state lost the trust of its citizens’.

52

Adam Forrest, ‘End SARS protests: UK government admits it did train and supply equipment to Nigeria’s “brutal” police unit’, Independent, 30/10/20, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/sars-nigeria-police-protests-uk-government-training-equipment-b1424447.html.

53

Neil Munshi, ‘Gun for hire: Nigeria security fears spark boom in private protection’, Financial Times, 26/10/2021, https://www.ft.com/content/a12bb6b1-798d-4863-8b49-104a56ccc716.

54

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 106–8; Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, pp. 178–9.

55

Micah Damilola John, ‘Public Perception of Police Activities in Okada, Edo State Nigeria’, Covenant Journal of Business & Social Sciences 2017, 8:1, p. 31.

56

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 116–17. He continues: ‘The ethnic composition of the army remains a controversial and difficult problem with which Nigeria still grapples in the 21st century. Its effect on national stability is so serious that to make military recruitment more balanced, Nigeria still applies an ethnic quota to military recruitment and promotions.’

57

It’s a problem that afflicts other armies and police forces in other parts of the former empire. ‘Decolonisation marked an uneasy political transition for the colonial police,’ write David Anderson and David Killingray. ‘Officers and constables who one month carried out the surveillance of nationalist leaders and anti-colonial protesters, in the next month found these same “suspects” transformed into their paymasters and political overlords. It is therefore not difficult to appreciate why the history of policing in the transfer of powers remains a matter of some political sensitivity and one upon which documentary sources are still commonly withheld from public scrutiny.’ See Anderson and Killingray, Policing and Decolonisation, p. 10; Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 116–17.

58

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 320; ‘Nigeria: Steel factory will open after 40 years | Al Jazeera English’, YouTube, 16/06/2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqVyWiYdKQA; Ifeanyi Onuba, ‘How Buhari’s Govt Failed to Revive Ajaokuta Steel Company Despite N31bn Allocation’, The Whistler, 18/05/2022, https://thewhistler.ng/how-buharis-govt-failed-to-revive-ajaokuta-steel-company-despite-n31bn-allocation/.

59

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 49.

60

Ibid., pp. 316–17.

61

Megan Leonhardt, ‘“Nigerian prince” email scams still rake in over $700,000 a year – here’s how to protect yourself, CNBC Make It, 18/04/2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/nigerian-prince-scams-still-rake-in-over-700000-dollars-a-year.html.

62

Femi Aribisala, ‘Bigmanism in Nigeria’, Vanguard, 01/10/2013, https://www.vanguardngr.com/2013/10/bigmanism-nigeria/; Farah Bakaari, Vincent Benlloch and Barry Driscoll, ‘Political scientists talk about African “Big Men” inconsistently’, London School of Economics, 22/03/2021, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/africaatlse/2021/03/22/political-science-talk-about-african-big-men-governance-patronage-inconsistently/.

63

Ihejirika, ‘Fuck your gender norms’.

64

Under the colonial administration, the red cap was a symbol of authority, used as a means of social control. ‘The practice of giving caps was started at Ikot Ekpene by the district commissioner, Mr Reginald Hargrove,’ reports Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo. ‘He gave fez caps bearing metal engravings of the crown to all Warrant Chiefs and satisfactory headmen, and special staffs with decorated heads to chiefs who were considered more influential than others. This created a new hierarchy of status in society. An ambitious and successful young man could become a “capped” headman, then a Warrant Chief and perhaps earn a staff. The “cap and staff” system proved very popular and spread from Ikot Ekpene to other divisions. It gave political officers a firmer control over the headmen and the chiefs. To be deprived of one’s cap or staff was an obvious disgrace, a proof that the victim had been found wanting in certain respects.’ The red cap continues to be used (and abused) as an emblem of authority in contemporary Nigeria. See Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929, Longman, 1972, p. 105.

65

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 287–8, 290.

66

Femi Adegbulu, ‘From Warrant Chiefs to Ezeship: A Distortion of Traditional Institutions in Igboland?’, Afro Asian Journal of Social Sciences Quarter II 2011, 2:2.2, pp. 1–25.

67

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 294–5.

68

Victor C. Uchendu has described traditional local Igbo political village culture as ‘an exercise in direct democracy’, but Femi Adegbulu points out that ‘their history was more complex and changing than is often assumed’ and that ‘there were exceptions to this general picture: some Igbo communities, especially trading cities along the Niger, like Onitsha, Oguta, Arochukwu, Ossomari and the “holy city” of Nri had elaborated chieftaincy institutions in pre-colonial times’. Also, ‘However “democratic”, some believe that inner structures of pre-colonial Igbo communities were anything but egalitarian. Igbo society, they argue, had its “slaves” (ohu) and “cult slaves” (osu) on the one hand, and it had leaders on the other. Depending on what sub-cultural area of Igboland we are discussing, there were lineage headships, influential age groups, and powerful titled and secret societies. There were also individuals carrying the title eze or obi, indicating a special degree of influence and power, though not independent of the person and, especially, the wealth it could mobilise.’ See Victor C. Uchendu, The Igbo of Southeastern Nigeria, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965. Cited by Adegbulu, ‘From Warrant Chiefs to Ezeship’, p. 3.

69

Cecilia Macaulay, ‘Nigerian schools: Flogged for speaking my mother tongue’, BBC News, 07/01/2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-63971991.amp.

70

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 280.

71

Ibid., pp. 259–60.

72

Siollun notes that King Eyo Honesty of Creek Town issued an edict to forbid twin infanticide when Slessor was still a child. Ibid., pp. 262–3.

73

Ibid.

74

British empire is commemorated in a huge number of place and street names in Nigeria. Port Harcourt, the fifth most heavily populated city in Nigeria, is named in honour of Lord Harcourt, an infamous paedophile who committed suicide when his sexual assault of a young boy was reported to the boy’s mother. In the town of Owerri we find Douglas Road, commemorating another notorious colonial officer, Harold Morday Douglas, labelled by one historian as ‘the worst D.O. [District Officer] to ever serve in the region’. See ibid., pp. 322–3, 307.

75

After all, the threat of kidnapping is a massive problem in modern Nigeria, just as kidnapping has, historically, been an enormous problem for this part of Africa. I’m not just thinking of those people who were kidnapped for the transatlantic slave trade, or of Britain’s tradition of kidnapping local rulers to replace them with more compliant ones (e.g. Jaja of Opobo), but of the slavery that persisted, despite what Britain tells itself, long after abolition. As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson explain, ‘legitimate commerce’ in produce such as palm oil still used the enslaved. ‘What were all these slaves to do now that they could not be sold to Europeans? The answer was simple: they could be profitably put to work, under coercion, in Africa, producing the new items of legitimate commerce … slavery, rather than contracting, appears to have expanded in Africa throughout the nineteenth century.’ Also, Africans continued being essentially enslaved by Britons in Nigeria even as the empire claimed to be wiping out slavery elsewhere, through the forced labour that was widespread in the early colonial era. Forced labour was used by the British government for everything from building roads to carrying the luggage (the latter was not necessarily the cushier option: carriers were known to drop dead from thirst, hunger and strain). Conscripts would often have to leave their families and communities to work far away, and sometimes made to act against their own interests, such as razing their own agricultural land in order to make way for a colonial infrastructure project. All this without any form of wage or compensation. The colonialists did not seem to be aware of their hypocrisy. ‘To the natives, it appeared as if Britain had abolished indigenous slavery so it could replace it with its own system of slave labour,’ writes Siollun. ‘Yet Britain defended forced labour as an unavoidable instrument of colonial rule. In 1906 Winston Churchill defended the practice in Parliament by stating: “In West African Colonies and Protectorates in which there is legal power to demand labour on roads and waterways, the Governor or High Commissioner alone can make an order that such work shall be done.”’ See Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, pp. 312–16; Tife Owolabi, ‘Gunmen kidnap 32 people from southern Nigeria train station’, Reuters, 09/01/2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/gunmen-kidnap-32-people-southern-nigeria-train-station-2023-01-08/; ‘Twitter User Accuses Uber Driver of Trying to Kidnap Her’; Abdulqudus Ogundapo, ‘Kidnappers abduct farmers, demand N10m ransom in Osun’, Premium Times, 13/01/2023, https://www.premiumtimesng.com/regional/ssouth-west/575412-kidnappers-abduct-farmers-demand-n10m-ransom-in-osun.html; Oludamola Adebowale, ‘Jaja of Opobo: The Slave Boy Who Became King’, Guardian: Life, 25/08/2019, https://guardian.ng/life/jaja-of-opobo-the-slave-boy-who-became-king/; Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail, pp. 256–7.

76

Simon Waters, ‘Cameron’s F-word outburst at reporters over British empire “gaffe”’, Daily Mail, 10/04/2011, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375341/David-Camerons-F-word-outburst-reporters-British-Empire-gaffe.html; Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 89–141; Kyle J. Gardner, The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India–China Border, 1846–1962, Cambridge University Press, 2021.

77

‘Maharajah Gulab Singh acknowledges the supremacy of the British Government and will in token of such supremacy present annually to the British Government one horse, twelve shawl goats of approved breed (six male and six female) and three pairs of Cashmere shawls.’ The clause acknowledged the British interest in the luxury pashm ‘shawl wool’ trade used to produce the famed pashmina or Cashmere shawls. The actual tribute shawls were presented to the British monarch. See Gardner, The Frontier Complex, p. 166.

78

‘Conference of San Remo’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Conference-of-San-Remo; Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 89–141; Matthieu Rey, ‘The British, the Hashemites and monarchies in the Middle East’, in R. Aldrich and C. McCreery (eds.), Crowns and Colonies: European Monarchies and Overseas Empires, Manchester University Press, 2016, pp. 227–44; Martin Walker, ‘The Making of Modern Iraq’, Wilson Quarterly 2003, 27:2, pp. 29–40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40261182; ‘Kashmir’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Kashmir-region-Indian-subcontinent; Christopher Clary, The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia, Oxford University Press, 2022, pp. 43ff.; ‘Kashmir: Why India and Pakistan fight over it’, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10537286; Hyacinth Mascarenhas, ‘How the British screwed up the Middle East, in 10 classic cartoons’, MIC, 13/06/2023, https://www.mic.com/articles/91071/how-the-british-screwed-up-the-middle-east-in-10-classic-cartoons. ‘The British, under the strains of war, recession, and dependence on oil, were never quite able to surrender their remaining control over Iraq’s independence until they were forced to do so,’ writes Martin Walker. ‘And by maintaining that control, the British precluded the development of a political system that might have produced a non-authoritarian regime capable of governing the unstable, improbable country they had created.’ See Walker, ‘The Making of Modern Iraq’, p. 40.

79

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 145–208; ‘Myanmar: The initial impact of colonialism’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Myanmar/The-initial-impact-of-colonialism; ‘A Short History of Burma’, New Internationalist, 18/04/2008, https://newint.org/features/2008/04/18/history; Anthony Webster, ‘Business and Empire: A Reassessment of the British Conquest of Burma in 1885’, Historical Journal 2000, 43:4, pp. 1003–25; Lindsay Maizland, ‘Myanmar’s Troubled History: Coups, Military Rule, and Ethnic Conflict’, Council on Foreign Relations, 31/01/2022, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/myanmar-history-coup-military-rule-ethnic-conflict-rohingya.

80

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1886/feb/22/resolution

, cited by Kwarteng in Ghosts of Empire, p. 170.

81

Constance Kampfner, ‘British Museum’s Myanmar exhibition explores how colonial rule “set stage for genocide”’, The Times, 01/07/2023, https://shorturl.at/zFMZ2.

82

Heikkilä-Horn continues, explaining that this simplifying has proved particularly problematic for the ‘Rohingyas’: ‘There is a heated discussion going on among academics and activists concerning who the Rohingyas are, whether they are Burmese or Bengali/Chittagonians with deep roots in Burma, or possibly more recent Bengali/Chittagonian immigrants escaping the economic and political instability of East Pakistan/Bangladesh as the military government claims … The [imperial] statistics gave an impression of accuracy, yet many of the categories were artificial and simplistic … The group known as “Rohingyas” is still fighting to be regarded as citizens of Burma.’ Jane M. Ferguson echoes the assessment, observing that ‘British colonial censuses introduced in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries effectively re-arranged local difference into figures that were legible to the colonial empire, providing an “essential abstraction from social reality”, and later serving to frame ethnic problems and issues … When they carried out the census, the British-trained enumerators required that respondents give single, discrete, unqualified answers for their race, and these would be fit into a prescribed categorical scheme. The Burmese term for race/ethnicity used in the census is luumyo, literally, “type of person”. Amyo, type, or sort, in reference to people is often translated as “race”, though the understanding of it being biologically immutable (ascribed), or socially constructed (achieved), is ambiguous, and thus situational.’ Marja-Leena Heikkilä-Horn, ‘Imagining “Burma”: a historical overview’, Asian Ethnicity 2009, 10:2, pp. 145–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/14631360902906839; Jane M. Ferguson, ‘Who’s Counting? Ethnicity, Belonging, and the National Census in Burma/Myanmar’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 2015, 171:1, pp. 1–28, https://www.jstor.org/stable/43819166.

83

Jeffrey Mankoff, Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security, Yale University Press, 2022.

84

The British-Sudanese journalist Nesrine Malik stresses that Sudan’s most recent conflict, which has seen fighting between rival military factions turn Khartoum and other urban areas into battlefields, has little to do with colonial history. ‘Colonialism in Sudan had one big legacy, civil war between the South and North, which should have been two different countries,’ she tells me. ‘But they have separated. And what is happening now is a much more localised conflict between the centre and the periphery, which falls along the lines of ethnicity and class.’

85

‘Why is Sudan so unstable?’ Economist, 04/01/2022, https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2022/01/04/why-is-sudan-so-unstable; Kim Searcy, ‘Sudan in Crisis’, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective June 2019, https://origins.osu.edu/article/sudan-darfur-al-bashir-colonial-protest?language_content_entity=en; Marina Ottaway and Mai El-Sadany, ‘Sudan: From Conflict to Conflict’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 16/05/2012, https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/05/16/sudan-from-conflict-to-conflict-pub-48140; Oystein H. Rolandsen and M. W. Daly, A History of South Sudan, Cambridge University Press, 2016.

86

Searcy, ‘Sudan in Crisis’.

87

Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You, p. 144; Richard Pankhurst, ‘Post-World War II Ethiopia: British Military Policy and Action for the Dismantling and Acquisition of Italian Factories and Other Assets, 1941–2’, Journal of Ethiopian Studies 1996, 29:1, pp. 35–77; Gufu Oba, Nomads in the Shadows of Empires: Contests, Conflicts and Legacies on the Southern Ethiopian–Northern Kenyan Frontier, Brill, 2013.

88

‘In the Ethiopian case too, victors invoked economic, political, racial and emotional arguments to rationalize the unlawful embezzlement of enemy property, both state and private. Victors also cooperated on the international stage to avoid responsibility by sponsoring self-serving clauses in the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty. What Ethiopia, Britain and Italy did with regard to the property of their defeated enemy had much in common with the long tradition of the appropriation of plunder. Hence, the war caused the unexpected downward and upward economic mobility of Italians and Ethiopians respectively, while enabling Britain and Ethiopia to finance state expenses using proceeds from enemy property.’ Haile Muluken Akalu, ‘The British and Ethiopian Disposal of Italian Property in Ethiopia, 1941–1956: A Historical Review of the Theory and Practice of the Custodianship of Enemy Property’, Canadian Social Science 2019, 15:2, pp. 22–33 at p. 32.

89

Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You, pp. 135–6.

90

Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Stanford University Press, 2019; Gardner Thompson, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel, Saqi, 2019; Segev, One Palestine, Complete; Avishai Margalit, ‘Palestine: How Bad, & Good, Was British Rule?’, New York Review, 07/02/2013, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/02/07/palestine-how-bad-and-good-was-british-rule/; Walid Ahmed Khalidi, Nabih Amin Faris, William Charles Brice, William Foxwell Albright, Arnold Hugh Martin Jones, Rashid Ismail Khalidi, Ian J. Bickerton, Peter Marshall Fraser, Kathleen Mary Kenyon, Glenn Richard Bugh, ‘Palestine: World War I and after’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Palestine/World-War-I-and-after.

91

The most important component of this double-dealing was the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement, also known as the Asia Minor Agreement, which was formed in May 1916 between Great Britain and France (with the approval of imperial Russia) for the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement resulted in the theoretical division of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and other countries held by Turkey into separate French- and British-administered regions. The borders of the mandates were not decided upon for years after the secret agreement. Nonetheless, in the words of the New Yorker, ‘the Sykes–Picot Agreement launched a nine-year process – and other deals, declarations, and treaties – that created the modern Middle East states out of the Ottoman carcass’. And the fact that the agreement established the foundation for these borders inspired intense animosity. Declarations of ‘the end of Sykes–Picot’ have frequently been pronounced in response to political unrest in the modern age, not least the 2014 advent of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). See ‘Sykes–Picot Agreement’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement; Robin Wright, ‘How the Curse of Sykes–Picot Still Haunts the Middle East’, New Yorker, 30/04/2016, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-the-curse-of-sykes-picot-still-haunts-the-middle-east.

92

Segev, One Palestine, Complete, pp. 5–6; Sharif Nashashibi, ‘Balfour: Britain’s Original Sin’, Al Jazeera, 04/11/2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/11/4/balfour-britains-original-sin. The recent controversial move by Israel’s far-right, ultra-religious government to reduce the power and influence of the nation’s Supreme Court, and to push forward extreme policies, has an imperial element. As the academic Anne Irfan has explained, the ‘rule of reasonableness’ which has been withdrawn, and which has in the past entitled the Supreme Court to overrule government decisions, was a British colonial creation. ‘The law that was struck down actually predates the state of Israel and is rooted in its antecedent: the British Mandate of Palestine (1922–48). The British army entered Palestine in late 1917 and occupied the whole country the following year … In 1922, the newly created League of Nations added a veneer of international legitimacy to the British occupation when it granted the Mandate for Palestine. The mandate system was ostensibly designed to prepare colonised territories for self-governance. In practice, it facilitated another form of colonial rule by Britain and France – by no coincidence, the same powers that dominated the League … The British system of rule in Palestine provided much of the basis for the subsequent Israeli state. This included the “test of reasonableness”, which dates back to 16th-century English public law and means that laws must be properly considered and not arbitrary. After 1948, Israeli jurists adopted and developed the principle of “reasonableness” as part of the supreme court’s system of checks and balances over the Knesset. In overturning it this week, the Knesset removed one plank of Mandate Palestine’s lasting legal infrastructure.’ Anne Irfan, ‘Israel: unpopular judicial reform involves repeal of law set up under British colonial rule in Palestine – here’s what that tells us’, 26/07/2023, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/israel-unpopular-judicial-reform-involves-repeal-of-law-set-up-under-british-colonial-rule-in-palestine-heres-what-that-tells-us-210401.

93

Julia Lovell, The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China, Picador, 2011.

94

Ibid., p. 8.

95

Ibid., p. 277.

96

Ibid., p. 12; Peter Frankopan, ‘West’s reckless lack of expertise on China will cost us dear’, The Times, 18/02/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d006ad54-af9c-11ed-bde0-64a2ad0fcf88?shareToken=bb15e644b80e5368ab5e24c708ae1a78.

97

Kim A. Wagner, ‘Savage Warfare: Violence and the Rule of Colonial Difference in Early British Counterinsurgency’, History Workshop Journal 2018, 85, pp. 217–37.

98

Ibid., p. 229; Frédéric Mégret, ‘From “savages” to “unlawful combatants”: a postcolonial look at international humanitarian law’s “other”’, in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and its Others, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 293.

99

Wrong, I Didn’t Do It for You, p. 101.

100

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 327.

101

Ferguson, Empire, pp. 357–8.

102

Ibid., p. 366.

103

As summarized in Michael Bernhard, Christopher Reenock and Timothy Nordstrom, ‘The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival’, International Studies Quarterly 2004, 48:1, pp. 229–30.

104

Nicholas Owen, ‘Democratisation and the British Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 2019, 47:5, p. 974.

105

Alexander Lee and Jack Paine, ‘British colonialism and democracy: Divergent inheritances and diminishing legacies’, Journal of Comparative Economics 2019, 47:3, pp. 487–503; Myron Weiner, ‘Empirical Democratic Theory’, in Myron Weiner and Ergun Ozbudun (eds.), Competitive Elections in Developing Countries, Duke University Press, 1987, pp. 3–34; K. A. Bollen and R. W. Jackman, ‘Economic and Noneconomic Determinants of Political Democracy in the 1960s’, Research in Political Sociology 1985, 1, pp. 27–48; S. M. Lipset, K. Seong and J. C. Torres, ‘A Comparative Analysis of the Social Requisites of Democracy’, International Social Science Journal 1993, 136, pp. 155–75; Axel Hadenius, Development and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, 2009; Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber and John D. Stevens, Capitalist Development and Democracy, University of Chicago Press, 1992; Jean Blondel, Comparing Political Systems, Praeger, 1972; S. Huntington, ‘Will More Countries Become Democratic?’, Political Science Quarterly 1984, 99, pp. 192–218; S. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, Oklahoma University Press, 1991; Larry Diamond, ‘Introduction’, in Larry Diamond, Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, vol. 2: Africa, Lynne Rienner, 1988, pp. 1–32.

106

Bernhard, Reenock and Nordstrom, ‘The Legacy of Western Overseas Colonialism on Democratic Survival’, pp. 245–6.

107

Owen, ‘Democratisation and the British Empire’, pp. 976–7.

108

Ibid.

109

Harshan Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia: Decolonisation and State-Building in the Aftermath of the British Empire, Routledge, 2016, pp. 2–3.

110

R. A. W. Rhodes, John Wanna and Patrick Weller, Comparing Westminster, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 12–16; Wilson and Dilley, ‘The Incoherence of Empire’, pp. 1–27.

111

Rhodes, Wanna and Weller, Comparing Westminster, p. 16.

112

Ibid., p. 57.

113

Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, p. 27.

114

Other essays in Kumarasingham’s collection provide accounts of how Asian countries adapted the Westminster model to suit them. For example, bills of rights, which have long been seen in Britain ‘as at best useless and at worst dangerous’ appeared in the constitutions of Burma (1947), India (1950), Pakistan (1956) and Malaya (1957). Asian former colonies also tended to be more prescriptive in their constitutions regarding the powers granted to their leaders. These so-called Eastminsters (a term coined by the editor) also contained provisions for emergency powers of the kind that Caroline Elkins has cited as a prominent imperial legacy. In contrast, the constitutions of early former colonies such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada did not explicitly address the issue of emergency powers, explains Anne Twomey. ‘Asian colonies, however, had a different background. First, the need for some kind of emergency power to deal with internal violence or insurrection has proved much greater in Asia than the older realms. Second, there is an historical basis for the use of such powers in Asia. Emergency powers were conferred upon British governors and governors-general as a means of asserting colonial power and suppressing insurrection and independence movements.’ See Charles Parkinson, ‘British constitutional thought and the emergence of bills of rights in Britain’s overseas territories in Asia at decolonisation’, in Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, p. 36; Anne Twomey, ‘Discretionary reserve powers of heads of state’, in Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, pp. 55, 70.

115

Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, pp. 6, 23.

116

Ibid., p. 7.

117

Ibid., p. ix.

118

Asanga Welikala, ‘“Specialist in omniscience”? Nationalism, constitutionalism, and Sir Ivor Jennings’ engagement with Ceylon’, in ibid., p. 112.

119

Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, p. 10.

120

Ibid., p. 13.

121

Mara Malagodi, ‘Constitution drafting as Cold War realpolitik: Sir Ivor Jennings and Nepal’s 1959 constitution’, in ibid., pp. 169–70.

122

Chandra D. Bhatta, ‘Nepal’s political and economic transition’, Observer Research Foundation, 15/06/2022, https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/nepals-political-and-economic-transition/.

123

Welikala, ‘“Specialist in omniscience”?’, p. 130.

124

Neil DeVotta, ‘Behind the crisis in Sri Lanka – how political and economic mismanagement combined to plunge nation into turmoil’, The Conversation, 18/07/2022, https://theconversation.com/behind-the-crisis-in-sri-lanka-how-political-and-economic-mismanagement-combined-to-plunge-nation-into-turmoil-187137 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11999611.

125

Tahir Kamran, ‘Pakistan’s first decade: democracy and constitution – a historical appraisal of centralisation’, in Kumarasingham (ed.), Constitution-Making in Asia, p. 96.

126

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 140.

127

‘The result was an inherent political instability. In the seven years after 1932, Iraq went through 12 different cabinets, and frustration with parliament’s weaknesses helped provoke a military coup in 1936.’ See Walker, ‘The Making of Modern Iraq’, p. 34.

128

Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.

129

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 187.

130

Under the headline ‘Colonial nostalgia rules in Hong Kong as young refuse to accept China’s authority’, The Times reported in 2019 that Union Jacks were appearing ‘on T-shirts, on tiny flag poles’ and ‘even draped over a war memorial’. See Richard Lloyd Parry and Raphael Blet, ‘Colonial nostalgia rules in Hong Kong as young refuse to accept China’s authority’, The Times, 14/06/2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/colonial-nostalgia-rules-as-young-refuse-to-accept-beijing-rule-gswccq0vf; ‘Nostalgia for the British empire is no solution to the crisis in Hong Kong’, CGTN, 26/07/2019, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2019-07-26/Nostalgia-for-British-empire-is-no-solution-for-Hong-Kong-IEfDhcX7fW/index.html.

131

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 387.

132

Ibid., p. 381.

133

Ibid., p. 368.

134

Ibid., p. 390.

135

Owen, ‘Democratisation and the British Empire’, p. 987.

136

Ibid., p. 984.

137

In 2021 he wrote that ‘the British claimed a huge set of achievements, including democracy … but often enough these were not gifts that could be exercised under the British administration during imperial days. They became realisable only when the British left – they were the fruits of learning from Britain’s own experience, which India could use freely only after the period of empire had ended. Imperial rule tends to require some degree of tyranny: asymmetrical power is not usually associated with a free press or with a vote-counting democracy, since neither of them is compatible with the need to keep colonial subjects in check.’ Meanwhile the politician and writer Shashi Tharoor argues in What the British Did to India that democratic processes of anti-colonial struggle led to the establishment of democracy in India. ‘The Indian nationalist struggle and its evolution through various stages – decorous liberals seeking legislative rights, “extremists” clamouring for swaraj, Gandhi and his followers advocating non-violent struggle, the Congress, the Muslim League and other parties contending for votes even with limited franchise: all these pre-Independence experiences served as a kind of socialization process into democracy and helped to ease the country’s transition to independence.’ Amartya Sen, ‘Illusions of empire: Amartya Sen on what British rule really did for India’, Guardian, 29/06/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/29/british-empire-india-amartya-sen; Shashi Tharoor, ‘Shashi Tharoor on why India is suited to a presidential system’, The News Minute, 07/11/2016, https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/shashi-tharoor-why-india-suited-presidential-system-52516.

138

The Economist noted ‘a serious deterioration in the quality of democracy under leader Narendra Modi, whose Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has presided over increased intolerance and sectarianism towards Muslims and other religious minorities’. ‘The world’s most, and least, democratic countries in 2022’, Economist, 01/02/2023, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/02/01/the-worlds-most-and-least-democratic-countries-in-2022?fsrc=core-app-economist.

139

Nick Westcott, ‘Oligarchs, Oil and Obi-dients: The Battle for the Soul of Nigeria’, African Arguments, 03/02/2023, https://africanarguments.org/2023/02/oligarchs-oil-and-obi-dients-the-battle-for-the-soul-of-nigeria/; ‘Nigeria–India: Learnings from two large democracies’, PWC, https://www.pwc.com/ng/en/publications/nigeria-india-learnings-from-two-democracies.html.

140

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, pp. 322–3.

141

Lenin Ndebele, ‘What Nigerians think of their democracy ahead of elections’, 04/02/2023, https://www.news24.com/news24/africa/news/what-nigerians-think-of-their-democracy-ahead-of-elections-20230204.

142

Ayisha Osori, ‘Nigeria’s elections have bigger problems than vote trading’, Al Jazeera, 17/02/2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/2/17/nigerias-elections-have-bigger-problems-than-vote-trading.

143

William Clowes and Ruth Olurounbi, ‘Bright Side of Nigeria’s Cash Shortage: Vote Buying Declines’, Yahoo Movies, https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/bright-side-nigeria-cash-shortage-131553672.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADUf1GBGkvmo3pn8SQJhoGhDfRWBziayj8NUFHvRf6hCPulCtCin5JcwLhJpgUCeev_HkuFGfqKmx9ourlfblGHBkK8WwhVFE2jbjzSecxGPGwuwVi63fJGrsEFWHRtokqbPFMzRcx2A8DfNPndJSiDm5OQCskJqmm0Cq0KiQQKh.

144

Emmanuel Akinwotu, ‘Gunmen destroy 800 ballot boxes in Nigeria, the latest in a series of attacks’, NPR, 02/02/2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/02/02/1153753025/nigeria-election-ballot-boxes-destroyed.

145

Incredibly, Nigeria imports much of its fuel: ‘One of Africa’s top oil producers, Nigeria often struggles with fuel shortages as it imports most of its petrol and diesel because its refineries are not working.’ See AFP, ‘Cash and fuel shortages crank up Nigeria election tensions’, Eyewitness News, 03/02/2023, https://ewn.co.za/2023/02/03/cash-and-fuel-shortages-cranks-up-nigeria-election-tensions.

146

Richard Assheton, ‘Nigeria election 2023: opposition demands cancellation of “sham” vote’, The Times, 27/02/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f53d0046-b5fa-11ed-a513-158bcb2665eb?shareToken=9f85359135067ab84c4a37aea6662aab.

147

Richard Assheton, ‘Nigeria presidential election: Bola Tinubu claims victory as rivals demand rerun’, The Times, 01/03/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nigeria-presidential-election-bola-tinubu-claims-victory-as-rivals-demand-rerun-n07228v57; Aanu Adeoye, ‘Bola Tinubu leads disputed Nigerian vote as opposition calls for election rerun’, Financial Times, 28/02/2023, https://www.ft.com/content/64724f5c-a6b5-45cb-8fa6-96e1531a98f8.

148

Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 7.

149

The University of Bristol: Our History and the Legacies of Slavery

, University of Bristol, 2022, pp. 15–19, https://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/university/documents/university-of-bristol-legacies-of-slavery-report.pdf.

150

Alan Lester, ‘Time to Throw Out the Balance Sheet’, University of Sussex: School of Global Studies Blog, 21/03/2016, https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/global/2016/03/21/time-to-throw-out-the-balance-sheet/; Tristan Boyle, ‘The Modern Myth of the British Empire with Kim A. Wagner – Modern Myth – Episode 20’, Archaeology Podcast Network, 05/05/2021, https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/anarchaeologist/mm20-empire.

151

Not including the subsequent generations born into slavery between 1600 and 1833.

152

‘Legacies of British Slavery’, UCL, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/made-at-ucl/stories/legacies-british-slavery.

153

Jan Morris: Writing a Life, Archive on 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0011jxq.

Conclusion: An Evolutionary Outgrowth

1

Andy Bull, ‘Can radical changes restore sagging prestige of Commonwealth Games?’, Guardian, 23/07/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2022/jul/23/can-radical-changes-restore-sagging-prestige-of-commonwealth-games.

2

https://twitter.com/joelycett/status/1552637751803236355

.

3

Agency staff, ‘“Leftie multicultural crap”: Blundering Tory MP Aidan Burley insists London 2012 opening ceremony swipe was “misunderstood”’, Mirror, 28/07/2012, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/london-2012-tory-mp-aidan-1178770.

4

Originally slated to host the 2022 Games, the South African city of Durban lost its hosting rights in 2017 as a result of financial difficulties and missed deadlines. Nine months later, Birmingham agreed to serve as host. At the time of writing, as a result of the Australian state of Victoria cancelling its plans to host due to budget overruns, the 2026 Commonwealth Games are in doubt. Before Victoria offered to host in April 2022, the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF) had difficulty finding a candidate. But Victoria’s cost projections subsequently tripled. Meanwhile, the government of Alberta has recently withdrawn its support for a bid to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games due to rising costs. Tiffanie Turnbull, ‘Commonwealth Games: 2026 event in doubt after Victoria cancels’, BBC News, 19/07/2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-66229574; Thomas Mackintosh, ‘Canadian province Alberta cancels bid for 2030 Commonwealth Games’, BBC News, 04/08/2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66402140

5

Last Week Tonight

, 20/07/2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Aj3KZa1ZCM.

6

In 1931 what emerged was the British Commonwealth of Nations. The modern Commonwealth, conceived as an organization of ‘free and equal members’, came into being in 1949 when it was renamed the Commonwealth of Nations.

7

In the Queen’s Christmas Day 1953 broadcast. See Ben Macintyre, ‘The Crown and the Commonwealth face a perilous future’, The Times, 25/03/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-crown-and-the-commonwealth-face-a-perilous-future-lx3vjlmrf.

8

Ibid.

9

PTI, ‘Queen Elizabeth calls for bold reforms in Commonwealth’, The Hindu, 28/10/2011, https://www.thehindu.com/news/international/queen-elizabeth-calls-for-bold-reforms-in-commonwealth/article2577183.ece.

10

‘Our Vision and Mission’, Royal Commonwealth Society, https://www.royalcwsociety.org/.

11

Anna Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire: Decolonisation, Globalisation, and International Responsibility, Manchester University Press, 2018, p. 30.

12

‘Commonwealth: association of sovereign states’, Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Commonwealth-association-of-states.

13

https://thecommonwealth.org/about-us

.

14

‘Up to 1949, the basic definition of the Commonwealth was of a group of countries under a common sovereign. Since then, with India allowed to remain in the organization as a republic, the monarch has had a separate, personal role as head of the Commonwealth. The organization now consists overwhelmingly of states of which she is not sovereign.’ Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. 82.

15

Ibid., p. 26.

16

‘Commonwealth: association of sovereign states’.

17

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 21–2.

18

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, p. 38.

19

The Design Museum now occupies the building once occupied by the Commonwealth Institute. Ibid. https://designmuseum.org/building.

20

Roger Boyes and Jane Flanagan, ‘How revitalised Commonwealth can be a bulwark against Beijing’, The Times, 17/06/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/533d9990-ee4f-11ec-b47a-cf598c451bbb?shareToken=0e59d173a4c585bb77fb23be06cff025.

21

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. 203.

22

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, pp. 29, 30, 24.

23

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 24–5.

24

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, p. 30.

25

Ibid., p. 37.

26

Ibid., p. 38.

27

Anna Bocking-Welch, ‘Whose Commonwealth? Negotiating Commonwealth Day in the 1950s and 1960s’, in Saul Dubow and Richard Drayton (eds.), Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, p. 297.

28

Ferguson, Empire, p. 362.

29

Macintyre, ‘The Crown and the Commonwealth face a perilous future’.

30

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. xi.

31

Ibid., p. 2.

32

Ibid., p. 16.

33

Tumaini Carayol, ‘Athletic feats at Commonwealth Games cannot distract from Britain’s colonial sins’, Guardian, 28/07/2022, https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/28/athletic-feats-at-commonwealth-games-cannot-distract-from-britains-colonial-sins.

34

Sure, Amazon and Microsoft are not what the philosopher-politician Edmund Burke called ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’ and they don’t have armies twice the size of Britain’s like the East India Company did, but the historian William Dalrymple, the author Nick Robins and others consider the EIC to be a precursor of the modern corporation. Indeed, in 2002, the chief executive of the Standard Chartered Bank declared that his aim was to ‘build on the courageous, creative and truly international legacy of the East India Company’. Meanwhile, the former executive of British Airways, Rod Eddington, saw the EIC as an example of how corporations succeed ‘by dint of hard work, shrewdness and charm’, which makes you wonder which history books he had been reading. Just as the East India Company monopolized the tea trade and Indian textile production, Nick Robins argues, its modern counterparts seek to concentrate power and influence wherever they can, whether that is in places such as commodity chains (‘generating powerful downward pressure on the prices of goods exported by developing countries’), companies managing infrastructure utilities (‘such as energy, telecoms, transport and water’), the European power sector (‘market concentration in the field of power generation has to be seen as endangering fair, competitive and sustainable energy markets’) or the global media industry. Nick Robins, The Corporation That Changed the World: How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational, 2nd edn, Pluto Press, 2012, pp. 212–13; Nick Robins, ‘The East India Company: The Future of the Past’, openDemocracy, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/east_india_company_3899jsp/.

35

It has been suggested that the trade monopolies pursued by big tech are similar to those that the East India Company pursued – though the monopolies today are not in tea and spices, but in data and the minerals needed to make electronic parts and technology. When it comes to data, tech behemoths press for the flow of unrestricted e-commerce and data across borders, to the annoyance of India, various African countries and other states which are home to mounds of unprocessed data, but lack the digital infrastructure to make use of it. See paper by Pallavi Arora and Sukanya Thapliyal, ‘Digital Colonialism and the World Trade Organization’, https://twailr.com/digital-colonialism-and-the-world-trade-organization/; Ian Jack, ‘Britain took more out of India than it put in – could China do the same to Britain?’, Guardian, 20/06/2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/20/britain-took-more-out-of-india; Michael Kwet, ‘Digital colonialism: US empire and the new imperialism in the Global South’, Race & Class 2019, 60:4, https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818823172.

36

The gold standard was a system where the standard economic unit of account was based on a fixed quantity of gold. The historian J. Taylor Vurpillat writes that ‘British pre-eminence played a crucial role in the emergence of the international gold standard in the 1870s,’ and Barry Eichengreen, author of Globalizing Capital, concurs. ‘With Britain’s industrial revolution and its emergence in the nineteenth century as the world’s leading financial and commercial power, Britain’s monetary practices became an increasingly logical and attractive alternative to silver-based money for countries seeking to trade with and borrow from the British Isles. Out of these autonomous decisions of national government an international system of fixed exchange rates was born.’ See J. Taylor Vurpillat, Empire, Industry and Globalization: Rethinking the Emergence of the Gold Standard in the 19th-Century World, John Wiley, 2014; Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, Princeton University Press, 2019, pp. 5–6.

37

Vanessa Ogle reports on how the British exported their own time standards: British Rhodesia was the first country to introduce standardized time on 1 August 1899 under British rule; in 1903, the British colonial administration adapted the time of UTC-8 as the official time for Hong Kong (UTC, Coordinated Universal Time, is a name adopted in 1972 for Greenwich Mean Time), a time zone subsequently embraced by numerous Chinese coastal cities; British North Borneo embraced UTC-8 in 1905, mainly because Hong Kong, the Philippines and Formosa had done so; South Africa’s numerous time zones were merged into one in 1902; and empire played an important role in the subcontinent’s adoption of Indian Standard Time (IST), five and a half hours ahead of UTC. According to Ogle, the name ‘Indian Standard Time’ came about to avoid drawing attention to its contentious ‘British’ origin, and arose out of initial correspondence discussing the time zones of America. Bombay resisted, as Indians ‘perceived the change in official mean times as yet another in a long series of attempts by the colonial state to meddle with local and personal affairs’. Residents of the city complained, petitioned and insisted Indian Standard Time be revoked, but by the 1930s most of the city’s institutions had complied. It still took another fifteen years, a combined period referred to in the press as the ‘44-Year-Old Battle of Clocks’, for the city’s municipal corporation to get on board. See Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870–1950, Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. 99–119.

38

As Ruth A. Morgan explains, the ‘quantitative approach to weather recording’ in the colonies, and ‘the systematic collection of meteorological statistics in colonial territories … fostered imperial understandings of climate in statistical terms’. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the East India Company built observatories in cities like Madras and Bombay, and these observatories evolved into hubs for the collection of climate data. The gathering of this meteorological data over time allowed colonial meteorologists to analyse local climatic patterns in the colonies. These interpretations were key to the development of weather forecasting, a branch of predictive science vital to empire’s maritime and agricultural endeavours. Also, the imperial gathering of meteorological data provided the statistics needed to progress the emerging field of climatology. Today, this archival data is essential for scientists in getting a sense of how the world’s climate has changed. See Ruth A. Morgan, ‘Climatology and Empire in the Nineteenth Century’, in Sam White, Christian Pfister and Franz Mauelshagen (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp. 589–603; Sherry Johnson, ‘El Niño, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1760s–70s’, William and Mary Quarterly 2005, 62:3, pp. 365–410; Sherry Johnson, Climate and Catastrophe in Cuba and the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution, University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

39

The UN evolved from the League of Nations, which was founded in 1920 after the First World War to promote world peace. Jan Smuts, the South African statesman who was a key architect of the League of Nations, made no secret of the fact that British empire had been an inspiration, saying that the international cooperation involved was already evident in ‘the British empire, which I prefer to call … the British Commonwealth of Nations’. At another time he declared that ‘the British empire is the only League of Nations that has ever existed’. The argument that the United Nations inherited such imperial attitudes is not rare. The organization was founded in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, with the stated aims of maintaining international peace and security, developing relationships between nations, promoting respect for human rights and achieving international cooperation for solving the world’s problems. However, according to the historian Craig N. Murphy, the true aims of the UN were imperial in nature: ‘When the UN Charter was negotiated, the European colonial powers wanted it to buttress and preserve empire.’ Amrita Chhachhi and Linda Herrera argue that ‘the UN presents an example of imperial sovereignty, which legitimizes a set of global hegemonic norms regarding biopolitical life, rights and codes of conduct’. Kehinde Andrews puts it more strongly: ‘Western imperialism did not end after the Second World War, it merely evolved … The UN, IMF and World Bank pose as friends to the underdeveloped world, all whilst creating a framework that continues to allow the West to leach from the Rest.’ This ‘new age of empire’, he writes, ‘maintains colonial logic but has clothed itself in the legitimacy of democracy, human rights and universal values’. See Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, Penguin Books, 2012, pp. 132–3, 128; Wallace Notestein, ‘Jan Smuts’, The Atlantic, July 1918, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1918/07/jan-smuts/645967/; United Nations Charter, United Nations, https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text; Craig N. Murphy, ‘Imperial Legacies in the UN Development Programme and the UN Development System’, in Sandra Halperin and Ronen Palan (eds.), Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 152; Amrita Chhachhi and Linda Herrera, ‘Empire, Geopolitics and Development’, Development and Change 2007, 38:6, pp. 1021–40.

40

The historian Ronen Palan observes that, as empire dissolved, fourteen small island states chose to remain as British Overseas Territories, including Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, and financial specialists soon learned that one could use these territories to avoid British tax and take advantage of a lack of regulation. The British Virgin Islands was a pioneer in making a law allowing for the existence of companies which did not need records to be kept – so-called shell companies, which are now a primary means by which people hide their wealth and avoid the payment of taxes. Meanwhile, Vanessa Ogle writes, settlers escaping ‘hostile non-white rule’ across the decolonizing empire were lured to ‘some of the newly expanding tax havens still safely within the fold of the British empire’. She continues: ‘Jersey and, to a lesser degree, Guernsey soon attracted not only the money of former imperial dwellers but also empire’s returnees themselves. For those accustomed to life in the empire, moving from one colony to another or a place like the Channel Islands was often the more natural choice than returning “home” to a Britain they had left long since or possibly never set foot in at all.’ The developing tax-haven sector in the Channel Islands purposefully started to target empire returnees at the beginning of the 1960s. Similar steps were taken by Malta. The author Oliver Bullough goes deeper in the compelling Butler to the World, where he argues that it was the end of colonialism itself that triggered another international flow of cash offshore, this time into the so-called Eurodollar market. The pivotal moment, he says, was the Suez Crisis in 1956, which is seen by many as the point when it became clear that Britain’s imperial age was at an end. Ronen Palan, ‘The Second British Empire and the Re-emergence of Global Finance’, in Halperin and Palan (eds.), Legacies of Empire, pp. 46–68; Vanessa Ogle, ‘“Funk Money”: The End of Empires, the Expansion of Tax Havens, and Decolonization as an Economic and Financial Event’, Past & Present 2020, 249:1, pp. 213–49; Oliver Bullough, Butler to the World, Profile Books, 2022.

41

Just as British politicians today worry about these vital cables being cut by Britain’s enemies (recently there were fears that a Russian ‘scientific research vessel’ might have been involved in the severing of cables linking the Shetlands to the mainland), imperial administrators fretted about their telegraph cables being cut. As Daniel R. Headrick explains, America and France had initially proposed that cables be treated as neutral in times of war, but Britain objected. A clause acknowledging the right of belligerents to cut one another’s cables was incorporated into the International Cable Agreement of 1885 at Britain’s urging. The Royal Navy had a huge advantage in this field since British companies had placed all British and the majority of non-British cables throughout the world and possessed twenty-four of the thirty cable ships in existence. Headrick, The Tentacles of Empire; Alexander Downer, ‘The threat to Britain’s undersea cables’, Spectator, 29/10/2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-threat-to-britains-undersea-cables; ‘Fibre optic cable sabotage causes global internet slowdown’, Brussels Times, 25/10/2022, https://www.brusselstimes.com/311704/fibre-optic-cable-sabotage-causes-global-internet-slowdown; ‘Shetland cut off from world after undersea cable breaks’, New York Times, 21/10/2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/world/europe/shetland-scotland-outage.html; ‘About International Telecommunication Union (ITU)’, ITU, https://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/default.aspx.

42

The term ‘lobbying’ in the context of politics may have originated in the United States in the nineteenth century, but the East India Company had been exerting ‘pressure from Leadenhall Street’, its London headquarters, from the seventeenth century. According to Arnold A. Sherman, the Company’s political clout increased as a result of riches from Asian commerce, and in the seventeenth century it loaned and gifted large amounts of money to the King. ‘These grants became a kind of business expense, needed to help the Company maintain its powers and privileges,’ writes Sherman. This ‘fiscal symbiosis’ continued with successive royals. For those without blue blood, the Company had ‘financial inducements and personal influence’ to offer. Some Members of Parliament were Company investors. A number of these MPs subsequently took up important positions in the Company. At the same time, Company officers sat as Members of Parliament. As a consequence, ‘the improvement in the Company’s fortunes and the content of England’s commercial and foreign policy came to be closely interwoven’, and by the 1770s the EIC had become a company that was too big to fail. The amount of money involved and the influence of the people involved were so great that when the EIC found itself in crisis, flailing as a result of a famine in Bengal and a financial collapse in Europe, among other crises, it was subject to an unprecedented state bail-out. Edmund Burke’s dramatic warning that ‘this cursed Company would, at last, like a viper, be the destruction of the country which fostered it at its bosom’ is one that could be applied to the banks that governments bailed out during the 2007–9 financial crisis. See Matthew Wills, ‘The East India Company Invented Corporate Lobbying’, JSTOR Daily, https://daily.jstor.org/the-east-india-company-invented-corporate-lobbying/; Arnold A. Sherman, ‘Pressure from Leadenhall: The East India Company Lobby, 1660–1678’, Business History Review 1976, 50:3, pp. 329–55, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3112999?mag=the-east-india-company-invented-corporate-lobbying#metadata_info_tab_contents.

43

Anna Greenwood prefaces the claim by pointing out that other specialities, such as epidemiology and public health, were also ‘mobilised to serve in the colonial context’. Meanwhile, it should be noted that the development of gynaecology had an imperial element, with pioneering surgery often conducted on enslaved women and, later, on impoverished immigrant women, many from Ireland. But it was only tropical medicine that was developed with ‘the explicit intent of facilitating and extending colonisation’. When the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, called for the founding of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the end of the nineteenth century, he did so out of national self-interest: the British empire needed fit and healthy men to run it. Its prominence owed quite a lot to Patrick Manson, who was a leading researcher in the field through his research on filariasis, a tropical disease caused by parasitical worms, commonly known as elephantiasis. ‘Since 1895, Manson had been delivering lectures on the topic at St George’s Hospital, London, UK, and he soon gained Chamberlain’s ear – and an appointment as the Consulting Physician to the Colonial Office – persuading him that “constructive imperialism” involved establishing a training school for doctors about to embark on careers in colonised countries … The tropical medical career did not typically recruit top-flight physicians but was attractive to middle-class, masculine, sporty types, with less cerebral propensities.’ Havelock Charles, a prominent doctor in the Indian Medical Service, put it thus: ‘The best kind of man to go to the tropics is the good ordinary type of Britisher, with a clear head “well screwed on”, an even temper, not over intellectual.’ The colonies, bursting with ‘new’ diseases, illnesses and parasites, became, as Greenwood puts it, ‘a living laboratory for research’, and the imperial scientists didn’t even have to worry about pesky issues such as participant consent. Anna Greenwood, ‘The Art of Medicine: Diagnosing the Medical History of British Imperialism’, Lancet, 03/09/2022, 400, pp. 726–7. See also Deirdre Cooper Owens, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, University of Georgia Press, 2017, p. 5.

44

As The Times explained recently, after it transpired that the wife of the then Chancellor, and eventual Prime Minister, was a ‘non-dom’, the policy was introduced in 1799 by William Pitt the Younger, with the aim of keeping ‘the new class of colonial rich, who were financing and propping up the burgeoning Empire, happy by exempting all of their foreign earnings from British tax. At a time when some of the richest and most powerful of these British colonialists had acquired much of their wealth from abroad by farming sugar cane in Jamaica or tobacco plantations in Virginia, they would otherwise have faced eye-popping tax bills in Britain on their overseas earnings.’ Of course, the non-doms of today are not citizens of British empire, but citizens of the planet. The tax break nowadays attracts the mega-rich from former Soviet republics, from Asia and from the fields of finance and entertainment, some 120,000 people according to a recent estimate. See David Byers, ‘What is non-domicile status? How it’s earned and why it cuts tax’, The Times, 08/04/2022, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/what-is-non-domicile-status-how-its-earned-and-why-it-cuts-tax-7tlx5g538; Richard Brooks, ‘A relic of empire that created a tax economy’, Financial Times, 20/02/2015, https://www.ft.com/content/6b83be28-b863-11e4-b6a5-00144feab7de; Dhana Sabanathan, ‘What exactly is a non-dom?’, FT Adviser, 25/04/2022, https://www.ftadviser.com/investments/2022/04/25/what-exactly-is-a-non-dom/; https://shorturl.at/bpyK1.

45

‘Nuclear historians have neglected the imperial dimensions of the British nuclear programme, preferring instead to focus on the more instrumental role played by the USA,’ explained the modern historian Christopher Hill to me over email. ‘Yet one only needs to glance at the basic characteristics of the British nuclear programme to see it was highly entangled in imperial politics as well. We tested in Australia with the support of the Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies; we used the Gilbert and Ellice Island Colony (Christmas and Malden Island in present-day Kiribati) to test atomic and thermonuclear weapons. We procured our uranium by colluding with the Belgians in the Congo. We later sourced supplies from Namibia, illegally occupied at the time by Apartheid South Africa … Imperial politics of knowledge were reflected not only in the choice of test sites, but also in human radiation tests on the femurs of babies from Australia and Hong Kong. The Commonwealth was used as a global source of knowledge about radiation. British mining politics were a huge factor in the expansion and re-making of empire. Uranium and thorium were a significant part of this story when it was discovered that uranium was a fissile material that could be weaponised from the late 1930s. The sites of tests were usually places that had an entire history of colonial violence. Ironically, the colonisers often used indigenous knowledge to gain mastery of these environments. Take, for example, the role of Len Beadell in the creation of British test sites in South Australia.’ Hill is lead researcher on a funded project entitled ‘The New Nuclear Imperialism: Science, Diplomacy and Power in the British Empire’. The politics of non-proliferation and nuclear deterrence have also been shaped by decolonisation, with Shampa Biswas’ book, Nuclear Desire: Power and the Postcolonial Nuclear Order, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, being illuminating on the theme.

46

In Empireland I talked about how current caste-based hierarchies in India can be traced back to the British, who oversimplified an elaborate system of religious and social identities to create new, rigid systems that still shape Indian life today. But Ajay Verghese, tracing the different patterns of violence in two different parts of modern India (the 75 per cent of Indians who were under the thumb of British colonial administrators vs the remainder of the country which was ruled by mostly autonomous local kings with the implementation of the aforementioned post-Mutiny policy), comes to a more nuanced conclusion: in contemporary India, those provinces which had been directly ruled by the British see intensified caste and tribal conflict, while religion is more likely to be cause of violence in the former princely states, where the British had less influence. Sanjoy Chakravorty, ‘Viewpoint: How the British reshaped India’s caste system’, BBC News, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48619734; Ajay Verghese, The Colonial Origins of Ethnic Violence in India, Stanford University Press, 2016, pp. 3–4.

47

I do recommend this book, however: Gurminder K. Bhambra and Julia McClure (eds.), Imperial Inequalities: The Politics of Economic Governance across European Empires, Manchester University Press, 2022.

48

Danielle Heard, ‘Comedy’, Oxford African American Studies Center, https://doi.org/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.50279; J. P. Rossing, ‘Emancipatory Racial Humor as Critical Public Pedagogy: Subverting Hegemonic Racism’, Communication, Culture & Critique 2016, 9:4, pp. 614–32, https://doi.org/10.1111/cccr.12126; Corliss Outley, Shamaya Bowen and Harrison Pinckney, ‘Laughing While Black: Resistance, Coping and the Use of Humor as a Pandemic Pastime among Blacks’, Leisure Sciences 2021, 43:1–2, pp. 305–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449; https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/ROL/TJC_Vol1.pdf.

49

Sunday Mercury

, ‘The areas of Birmingham that are no-go areas for white people’, Birmingham Mail, 03/01/2009, https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/local-news/the-area-of-birmingham-that-are-no-go-areas-for-white-237564.

50

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 12, 68–9.

51

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, p. 31.

52

The Demos report said: ‘Britain’s traditional connections with the rest of the world provide an opportunity to reinvent the role of the Commonwealth and forge new approaches to reconciliation, conflict prevention and poverty reduction. This could begin with a world tour which apologised for Imperial wrongs, combined with a new effort to make the Commonwealth effective and relevant to the new challenges of globalisation. These measures would help to transform perceptions of both the UK and its monarchy.’ See Tom Bentley and James Wilsdon, ‘The new monarchists’, in Tom Bentley and James Wilsdon (eds.), Monarchies, Demos Collection 17, 2002, p. 15, https://demos.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/files/monarchies.pdf.

53

Ferguson, Empire, pp. xii–xiii; ‘Queen “must say sorry for Empire sins”’, Evening Standard, 27/05/2002, https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/queen-must-say-sorry-for-empire-sins-6328283.html?amp.

54

Boyes and Flanagan, ‘How revitalised Commonwealth can be a bulwark against Beijing’.

55

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. 134.

56

Victoria Ward, ‘King Charles wants Britain’s role in the slave trade “better highlighted and acknowledged”’, Daily Telegraph, 09/11/2022.

57

Valentine Low, ‘Commonwealth Day service: King urges leaders to “unite for a global good”’, The Times, 13/03/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/king-charles-first-commonwealth-day-service-speech-2023-qv8cspzk6.

58

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, p. 28.

59

Murphy, The Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 7–8.

60

Ibid., pp. 129, 133.

61

Brooke Newman, ‘The Royal Family should apologise for their links to slavery before they are embarrassed into doing so’, I News, 29/07/2022, https://inews.co.uk/opinion/royal-family-apologise-links-slavery-before-embarassed-1677595.

62

James II made £6,210 from his investment, equivalent to £1 million today (according to the historian K. G. Davies) and in the sixty years the Company lasted, 38,000 of its victims died during the process of trafficking. See Michael Taylor, ‘The Manchester Guardian: The Limits of Liberalism in the Kingdom of Cotton’, Guardian, 29/03/2023, https://shorturl.at/qyEFW.

63

Wills, ‘The East India Company Invented Corporate Lobbying’; Sherman, ‘Pressure from Leadenhall’, pp. 329–55.

64

Newman, ‘The Royal Family should apologise for their links to slavery before they are embarrassed into doing so’.

65

Newman, ‘The Royal Family should apologise for their links to slavery before they are embarrassed into doing so’.

66

Ibid.

67

Upper Burma was offered as a present for Queen Victoria on New Year’s Day, 1886. Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire, p. 167, and Adam Gopnik, ‘Finest hours: The making of Winston Churchill’, New Yorker, 23/08/2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/finest-hours.

68

Gardner, The Frontier Complex, p. 166.

69

‘Since [Queen Victoria] strongly opposed home rule for Ireland and approved of the war in South Africa, she was prepared to do as much as she could to ensure the survival of the Unionist government,’ writes Phillip Buckner. ‘Royal tours were one means of showing her approval’ and she made a visit to Ireland in 1900 ‘partly to indicate her opposition to home rule and partly to show her gratitude to those of her Irish subjects who had served in the South African War’. Hilary Sapire adds that, more generally, ‘royal tours to the empire, which originated in the visit of Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred to the Cape and Natal in 1860, were the direct descendants of the great domestic progresses of Queen Elizabeth I. They had evolved to provide a means of associating successive generations of the royal family with the empire, to parade the symbols of imperial hierarchy before the subjects of empire, and allow them the chance to display their loyalty. In its modern incarnation, the royal tour drew on the vision of George V who, in 1901 [shortly before becoming Prince of Wales], had visited South Africa as part of one of the longest world-wide tours. This visit in turn paved the way for his Christmas radio broadcasts to the empire in the thirties, and Edward VIII made his name with a series of empire tours including his successful visit to South Africa in 1925.’ See Phillip Buckner, ‘The Royal Tour of 1901 and the Construction of an Imperial Identity in South Africa’, South African Historical Journal 1999, 41:1, pp. 324–48 at p. 325, https://doi.org/10.1080/02582479908671897; Hilary Sapire, ‘African Loyalism and its Discontents’, Historical Journal 2011, 54:1, pp. 215–40, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X10000634.

70

Max Siollun tells us that ‘[After Benin city had been captured, Ralph Moor] supervised the looting of the artefacts, which he ordered to be collected at one location. He selected some as gifts for Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, and for officials at the Foreign Office. Moor later recalled: “I may mention that Her Majesty the Queen was graciously pleased to accept some trophies of the operations sent through Lord Salisbury – and I believe that His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales and the First Lord of the Admiralty also accepted trophies.”’ See Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 141.

71

‘Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl, Looty’, Royal Collection Trust, https://www.rct.uk/collection/406974/looty.

72

Sapire, ‘African Loyalism and its Discontents’, p. 226.

73

David Pegg and Rob Evans, ‘Buckingham Palace banned ethnic minorities from office roles, papers reveal’, Guardian, 02/06/2021, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jun/02/buckingham-palace-banned-ethnic-minorities-from-office-roles-papers-reveal.

74

Bocking-Welch, British Civic Society at the End of Empire, p. 36.

75

Kojo Koram has proposed a British truth and reconciliation commission for colonialism, based on a Belgian model. See Kojo Koram, ‘Britain needs a truth and reconciliation commission, not another racism inquiry’, Guardian, 16/06/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/16/britain-truth-reconciliation-commission-racism-imperial.

76

David Barber Wellington, ‘The Queen says sorry to wronged Maoris’, Independent, 02/11/1995, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-queen-says-sorry-to-wronged-maoris-1536901.html.

77

Suhasini Raj, ‘The queen’s death draws a more muted response in India, the largest of Britain’s former colonies’, 09/09/2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/09/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-death-india-empire.html.

78

Empire heightened the expectations for British coronation ceremonies. ‘Ostentatious spectacles and pageantry were central to imperialism,’ explains John M. MacKenzie. ‘Since empires cannot be self-effacing, repeated processions and ritualised events were partly designed as acts of self-regard, to fortify and offer reassurance for the participants … Ceremonies also accompanied the arrival and departure of viceroys, governors general, governors and other imperial officials … The most elaborate of all ceremonial came to surround the royal visits to colonies that began in the 1860s.’ Adopting the word used for Indian rulers’ courts, and going on for up to a month, these ‘durbars’ made King Charles III’s ceremony feel low key. In 1877, there were 84,000 spectators present, and by 1911 there were 250,000. In 1911, a total of 50,000 soldiers and military personnel were reviewed, the new Emperor and Empress appeared on thrones on the roof of the Red Fort, and a crown with 6,002 jewels was made for the occasion. In 1877, some 16,000 prisoners were let out of jails in celebration. In 1903 Lord Northcote, the Governor of Bombay, reportedly had glass doors on his tent and English fireplaces inside. Numerous objectives were served by the pageantry, including the establishment of hierarchies and the promotion of the idea that the British monarchy was a legitimate institution. These coronations-on-tour were also global media events, with newspapers, newsreels, Reuters, the Press Association, all publishing excitable coverage of the durbars of 1903 and 1911. MacKenzie continues: ‘It is intriguing that in early [East India] Company days it was the Indian princely states that were more eager to impress the British with ceremonial than the other way round. Thus the princes sought to overawe them to turn aside their apparent threat to the existing order. But the British developed their own responses later in the century, seeking to make themselves appear “more Indian” by adopting what they conceived to be powerful resonances of Indian splendour.’ MacKenzie, A Cultural History of the British Empire, pp. 39–41, 51; Alan Trevithick, ‘Some Structural and Sequential Aspects of the British Imperial Assemblages at Delhi: 1877–1911’, Modern Asian Studies 1990, 24:3, pp. 561–78.

79

Furthermore, it was reported that the Koh-i-Noor diamond would, in a new exhibition of the crown jewels at the Tower of London, be referred to as a ‘symbol of conquest’, alongside an explanation of how a ten-year-old Sikh maharaja was made to give up the Koh-i-Noor after the British conquest of the Punjab. See Valentine Low, ‘Crown Jewels exhibition at Tower of London to recognise British imperialism’, The Times, 15/03/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/crown-jewels-exhibition-at-tower-of-london-to-recognise-british-imperialism-6wvhql0k8.

80

Described by one South African academic as ‘a blood diamond’ and ‘stolen’, the diamond is wrapped up in dark imperial history which saw Britain colonize South Africa. See Brahmjot Kaur, ‘Camilla swaps the Kohinoor diamond for another controversial stone on her coronation crown’, NBC News, 17/02/2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/camilla-swaps-kohinoor-diamond-another-controversial-stone-coronation-rcna71032; Dave Roos, ‘Was the Cullinan Diamond a Royal Gift or Stolen Gem?’, How Stuff Works, 06/10/2022, https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geology/cullinan-diamond.htm.

81

Valentine Low, ‘Camilla’s crown for coronation avoids Koh-i-noor headache’, The Times, 14/02/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/camillas-crown-shows-colonial-diamonds-arent-for-ever-z0vnkc3s7.

82

David Pegg and Manisha Ganguly, ‘India archive reveals extent of “colonial loot” in royal jewellery collection’, Guardian, 06/04/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/06/indian-archive-reveals-extent-of-colonial-loot-in-royal-jewellery-collection?CMP=share_btn_tw.

83

Josh Butler, ‘Commonwealth Indigenous leaders demand apology from the king for effects of colonisation’, Guardian, 04/05/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/04/commonwealth-indigenous-leaders-demand-apology-from-the-king-for-effects-of-colonisation.

84

PA Media, ‘St Kitts and Nevis PM says country is not free while King Charles is head of state’, Guardian, 08/05/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/08/saint-kitts-and-nevis-pm-says-country-is-not-free-while-king-charles-is-head-of-state.

85

Sabah Choudhry, ‘Jamaica: King’s coronation accelerates plans for Jamaican republic – with referendum “as early as 2024”’, Sky News, 04/05/2023, https://news.sky.com/story/jamaica-kings-coronation-accelerates-plans-for-jamaican-republic-with-referendum-as-early-as-2024-12872453.

86

David Conn, Aamna Mohdin and Maya Wolfe-Robinson, ‘King Charles signals first explicit support for research into monarchy’s slavery ties’, Guardian, 06/04/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/06/king-charles-signals-first-explicit-support-for-research-into-monarchys-slavery-ties.

87

Becky Grey, ‘Commonwealth Games: Birmingham puts on captivating opening ceremony’, BBC Sport, 28/07/2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/commonwealth-games/62340186; Ariana Baio, ‘Tom Daley enters Commonwealth Games surrounded by Pride Flags to make powerful statement’, indy100, 28/07/2022, https://www.indy100.com/sport/commonwealth-games-tom-daley-opening-ceremony.

88

Grey, ‘Commonwealth Games’.

89

Bull, ‘Can radical changes restore sagging prestige of Commonwealth Games?’; https://thecgf.com/news/commonwealth-sport-foundation-launches-ambition-lead-world-sport-and-social-change [URL inactive].

90

Siollun, What Britain Did to Nigeria, p. 81.

91

Reuters, ‘Dutch King apologizes for Netherlands’ historic role in slavery’, CNN World, 01/07/2023, https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/01/europe/dutch-king-apologizes-netherlands-slavery-intl/index.html.

92

Anna Holligan, ‘Netherlands slavery: Saying sorry leaves Dutch divided’, BBC News, 19/12/2022, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63993283.amp. The research showed that the royal House of Orange earned the equivalent of €1 billion in today’s money from the trade and colonial military conquest. The Princes of Orange, including William III who was also the King of England, played an important role in establishing a policy of robbery, exploitation, slavery and forced labour in Asia and the Caribbean. See Bruno Waterfield, ‘Dutch royals pocketed €1bn from conquest and slavery’, The Times, 18/06/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/44c5de96-0e14-11ee-a92d-cf7c831c99b5?shareToken=fa161a27d99697b5b6327608110fc073.

93

Tine Destrooper, ‘Belgium’s “Truth Commission” on its overseas colonial legacy: An expressivist analysis of transitional justice in consolidated democracies’, Journal of Human Rights 2023, 22:2, pp.158–73.

94

Bruno Waterfield, ‘Belgium to return looted artefacts from colonial past’, The Times, 17/03/2023, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/belgium-to-return-looted-artefacts-from-colonial-past-vjfwgvrp5.

95

Catarina Demony, ‘Portugal Should Apologise, Confront Past Role in Slavery, Says President’, Reuters, 25/04/2023, https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-04-25/portugal-should-apologise-confront-past-role-in-slavery-says-president.

96

Catarina Demony and Belén Carreño, ‘EU says slavery inflicted “untold suffering”, hints at reparations’, 18/07/2023, https://shorturl.at/dgHL7.

97

Nicole Winfield, ‘Pope Voices Willingness to Return Indigenous Artifacts’, Time.com, 30/04/2023, https://time.com/6275864/pope-indigenous-artifacts/.

98

‘African royalty touchdown in Jamaica to discuss reparations’, The Voice, 02/03/2023, https://www.voice-online.co.uk/news/world-news/2023/03/02/african-royalty-touchdown-in-jamaica-to-discuss-reparations/.

99

‘Two centuries of forgetting’, Economist, 19/08/2023.

100

Joshua Nevett, ‘UK’s £18tn slavery debt is an underestimation, UN judge says’, BBC News, 23/08/2023, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790.

101

‘Two centuries of forgetting’.

102

Harriet Sherwood, ‘C of E setting up £100m fund to “address past wrongs” of slave trade links’, Guardian, 10/01/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/10/church-of-england-100m-fund-past-wrongs-slave-trade-links.

103

Matilda Head, ‘Cambridge’s Trinity College to examine its links to slavery’, Independent, 18/03/2023, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/trinity-college-university-of-cambridge-africa-b2303546.html.

104

Jonathan Smith and Paul Lashmar, ‘William Gladstone: family of former British PM to apologise for links to slavery’, Guardian, 19/08/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/19/william-gladstone-family-of-former-british-pm-to-apologise-for-links-to-slavery.

105

Aamna Mohdin, ‘Clive Lewis calls for UK to negotiate Caribbean slavery reparations’, Guardian, 08/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/08/clive-lewis-calls-for-uk-to-negotiate-caribbean-slavery-reparations.

106

Aamna Mohdin, ‘Guardian owner apologises for founders’ links to transatlantic slavery’, Guardian, 28/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/mar/28/guardian-owner-apologises-founders-transatlantic-slavery-scott-trust.

107

Aamna Mohdin, ‘UK government and royals called on to investigate slavery links after Guardian apology’, Guardian, 29/03/2023, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/mar/29/uk-government-royals-called-on-investigate-slavery-links-after-guardian-apology.

108

Rob Harris, ‘Penny Wong tells Britain to confront its colonial past’, The Age, 01/02/2023, https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/penny-wong-tells-britain-to-confront-its-colonial-past-20230131-p5cgvw.html?ref=rss.