Opinion Removing blinkers

A few mainstream British politicians have demanded the inclusion of colonial history in the school curriculum.

Since 2005, all immigrants who want to become British citizens have to pass a 45-minute test that includes questions on the customs, laws and history of their adopted land. A key part of the country’s immigration procedure, the “Life in the UK” test, often attracts criticism for focusing on unnecessary — at times, factually incorrect — trivia. This year, nearly 200 historians have called out the test for being “fundamentally misleading” on issues relating to slavery and the British Empire. The target of their criticism is the handbook given to the applicants, which has sentences like, “by the second part of the 20th century, there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from the Empire to Commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence”. In a similar vein, the abolition of slavery is seen solely as an act of enlightened policy. The historians have asked the British Home Office to review the handbook. Perhaps their criticism could also renew debate on how the UK has engaged with its colonial legacy, especially the erasures and silences of its official history.

The British Empire shaped large parts of the modern world. It powered the Industrial Revolution, built social and economic hierarchies and created new borders. Colonial administrators cannot be absolved of culpability in modern-day conflicts and problems — between India and Pakistan, Palestine and Israel, some of the environmental concerns today. There is also a wealth of scholarship on how the empire, its people and their ways of living impacted English culture. Yet, people in the colonies are never actors in school textbooks in the UK. The abolition of slavery is discussed but there is silence on the processes of enslavement. Britain seems to be quite happy to talk about its colonial past, as long as it’s framed in nostalgia for the empire. The Jallianwala Bagh killings, the Bengal famine, the brutality of the Boer wars, the massacres in Kenya in the 1950s, have been airbrushed from the official narratives of the past.

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A few mainstream British politicians have demanded the inclusion of colonial history in the school curriculum. Last year, the then Labour Party chief, Jeremy Corbyn, talked about the need to address the legacy of slavery. The criticism of the historians should be seen as a part of this discourse. Without such an acknowledgement of colonialism, any engagement with racism or multi-culturalism would be incomplete.