If the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge need some comfort reading after their awkward Caribbean tour, they could do worse than turn to Tony Blair’s autobiography. In 1997, Britain’s new prime minister travelled to Hong Kong to oversee its handover to China. Years later, Blair described how he had struggled through a conversation with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, on a subject of UK-China history, because, in his own words, Blair had “only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what that past was”. The history being discussed was the opium wars, the very reason why Hong Kong had become British in the first place. Yet here was a boarding school and Oxbridge-educated prime minister who had next to no knowledge of the history that produced the very event he had travelled to oversee.
The impression many ministers give today is that students in British classrooms are being bludgeoned with never-ending tales of Britain’s imperial crimes. This is why the government is now looking to rebalance the scales with a new curriculum that highlights the “benefits” of the British empire, as well as its negatives. Building on last year’s controversial Sewell report, the plans promoted by the equalities minister Kemi Badenoch are part of a wider campaign to move the teaching of empire away from what the government fears is a culture of victimisation and identity politics in schools, instead framing the legacy of empire as a debate of pros and cons. Was the empire wrong? Was it right? Which bits of the empire were naughty or nice?
But far from being inescapable, it is more common to find a well-policed omertà over the topic of empire within our curriculum. This amnesia about Britain’s imperial past produces a widespread ignorance about what is going on in the world, something that William and Kate recently discovered. Since the protests that greeted the couple during their trip to the Caribbean, Britain’s media has been confused about why Jamaica and other Commonwealth countries are looking to dispense with the Queen as their head of state.
Badenoch’s statement on the teaching of empire in schools was a response to the growing calls from students for greater engagement with Britain’s imperial legacy. But her approach only reinforces the culture war that she claims to be trying to overcome. Learning about empire, according to her plan, becomes a game of discussing positives and negatives that are given equal weight. This interminable back-and-forth argument over the morality of a centuries-long process will circulate endlessly, ultimately making the topic feel like a pointless dispute over a long-distant past. Yet empire is anything but ancient history. The British empire only came to an end during the 1950s and 1960s. Prior to this, empire shaped the life of this island for some 400 years. England’s establishment of the Virginia slave colonies or its colonial rule over Barbados stretches back to before the Act of Union, the Glorious Revolution and even the English civil war.
It would be very strange if this entire period in history had left no lasting impact on today’s political, cultural, economic or legal systems. Yet for many people, it is still not unusual to complete school, college and even university in the UK without hearing the empire referred to even once. Recently, issues such as the royal tour of the Caribbean, the Windrush scandal or the Russian oligarchs profiting from the secrecy protections of British overseas territories have pushed Britain’s imperial legacy on to the front pages. Such events remind us that empire isn’t a question of moral judgment about a bygone era. Empire is still shaping our world.
How can we reflect this reality in the curriculum? One answer would be moving the teaching of empire beyond the history class and into other subjects across the humanities and social sciences. Currently, students can study for their GCSE in citizenship without learning that all the people of the British empire, from Lagos to London, had the same citizenship status of “British subject” until 1948. On an A-level law course, students can be introduced to the British constitutional system with no mention that the Queen is still the head of state in places such as Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda, or that her privy council serves as the highest court in these countries. English literature students can read canonical books such as Jane Eyre or Mansfield Park without considering the colonial settings that provide the background to these stories. Economics students read entire textbooks about development without discussing how this topic emerged from the decolonisation of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. Such imperial amnesia renders pertinent questions in a number of disciplines off limits.
There is no reason why the Windrush scandal shouldn’t be a topic of study across the citizenship curriculum, or why offshore Britain and global tax avoidance shouldn’t be discussed in economics classes. Expanding the pathways through which students engage with the legacy of empire would do far more to move the topic away from divisive identity politics than Badenoch’s plan of renewing the argument about who are the “goodies” or “baddies” of history. In fact, her commitment to highlighting the “benefits of empire” is paradigmatic identity politics. It is designed to turn empire into a totem that people feel proud about, rather than as a lens to think critically about the world.
We should expect nothing less from a politician who last year told her colleagues she doesn’t “care about colonialism”. Previously, Badenoch has described the growing calls for decolonisation of curriculums in schools, colleges and universities as a “recent fad” that is “not just misguided but actively opposed to the fundamental purpose of education”. She has even threatened that those teaching race and empire in schools without “offering a balanced treatment of opposing views” are at risk of “breaking the law”.
In a climate where legal threats from the government are supported by newspaper attacks on “woke schools” accused of teaching “critical race theory”, it would be understandable if teachers choose to avoid the subject of empire altogether. The government’s recent guidance on political impartiality in teaching specifically highlighted “topics relating to empire” when reminding teachers that they “can also be subject to a prohibition order if their actions or behaviours undermine fundamental British values”. Such a charged atmosphere doesn’t exactly encourage fearless and creative teaching of a complicated but important issue.
This recent campaign seems primarily intended to renew silence on empire in British schools. If it succeeds, students will be receiving an education that trains them to be ignorant of major issues that inform the world they will inhabit. And like Tony Blair or William and Kate, they will have to navigate global society with “only a dim and sketchy understanding” of Britain’s role in the making of it.
Dr Kojo Koram is a lecturer at the School of Law at Birkbeck, University of London, and the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire
