David Edgerton: Britain's persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history
To make empire the dominant story in
British history is to misunderstand the nature of Britain, its elite and its
exploitative power, and its persistent racism. The racism of Oswald Mosley and
Enoch Powell, for all its roots in the past, was a self-consciously
post-imperial nationalist one..
The question of empire
has become central to discussions of Britain’s national past. Some see residual
imperialism as the prime element in a deficient, delusional, racist culture.
Others think emphasising the dark underside of empire is an attempt to erase
British history. The problem is that although long historical tradition
sanctions criticism of imperialism, national history has proved far more
resistant.
Talk of empire is now
omnipresent, but it was previously written
out of history. In the 1940s the unashamed imperialist Winston Churchill
didn’t offer an imperial history of the second world war, or even a national
one, but an Anglo-American, cold-war version of events in his six-volume work,
The Second World War. Subsequently, what’s striking about postwar historiography
is the lack of imperialist histories and the absence of condemnation for
nationalist and anti-imperial forces. At most there were sotto voce
claims that the British empire should have done a deal with Adolf Hitler in
1940 to keep itself alive.
More importantly,
national histories ignored empire altogether. The reason is easy to
find: after the war, a new nation arose that wanted to tell a national, not
imperial, history of itself. This story was about the
dawn of the welfare state, the Labour party and the National Health Service.
This country’s ancestry lay in the industrial 19th century, but it only became
a true nation in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/24/britain-persistent-racism-imperial-history
