Educating Empire

The "Christian underdog" myth persists in the face of complex truth

There’s an elephant in the room. It’s large; has tusks. It’s painted liberally in pink. It’s the British Empire and according to the curriculum, it barely exists.

This isn’t an essay about Empire as such: its merits, demerits and effect on the world. Our concerns are both narrower and broader: how it’s (not) taught and the wider implication for history education.

I’ve been involved in the profession for years. Perhaps too long. At primary level through to 18 and onwards to adulthood. I’ve taught all ages, many nationalities and in a variety of settings. I’ve brought language to Harlow and privilege in partnership with Eton. Spain, the UK and Europe beyond have heard my lessons. So I know the curriculum well –and the British curriculum in particular. After years of experience, I can talk with authority: they never mention the E word.

There at primary, our concerns are broad: the Ancient Greeks, the Aztec Empire, Henry’s six wives. Judea gets mentioned through religion, the Plantagenets through Shakespeare. Having skimmed through empires ancient and medieval, European and far-flung, we turn our gaze to the world wars. The horror of the trenches. The Dunkirk spirit. But the Empire is ignored: totally, utterly.

It is an extraordinary thing, so obvious, yet so unnoticed. There we were, for one brief blink of an eye, the most powerful nation on Earth. Our legacy, disputed and complex, hangs over the world in every breath we take, every vote we cast, every immigrant we “welcome” and every word we write. This essay is written in English. Yet whilst the Maya get their moment in the Sun and the Greeks share their philosophy; whilst a Roman-era Jew impacts every ethical decision and the Nazis are despised with much-deserved venom; the most important Empire of them all is forgotten. A domestic-bred Empire that folded in living memory and that impacts everything. Yet it is spoken only in whisper. Cancelled.

Even modern history is conveniently rewritten. The First World War is remembered simply and uniquely as a humanitarian tragedy. Men gassed in Verdun and mowed down at the Somme; powerless pawns made victim in an act of callous stupidity. But that picture is false.

We speak of the poorly-led British: heroes led by donkeys; soldiers of the Crown against the mighty Hun. But that too is false.

The Great War was “Great” because of who was fighting it. Not the British, French and Russians against the Germans, supported unably by The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Rather the British Empire, the French Empire and the Russian Empire against the German Empire, supported unably by two fellow imperial systems. The clash wasn’t between boys of European non-powers, but a clash of imperiums, where three - the Austrian, Russian and Turkish - utterly collapsed in the defeat, the German was hobbled in financial consequence and two - the British and French - were bankrupted to the point of future unsustainability.

It was the British Empire that fought in those trenches, in the Middle East, down the Dardanelles and as part of genuine world conflict. There in the mud-lined pits of France, the white-skinned Devon-bred fought alongside Atlantic-traversing Canadians, Muslim Indians, and black Jamaicans. Sikhs fought manly on the fields of Flanders and liberated Haifa from the Ottomans. The “British” wore turbans, sported afro hair and spoke with an Australian slur. It was a world effort. It was the British Empire, not the Blighty indigenous, fighting heroically as a team.

Yes the First World War was slaughter on an industrial scale whose consequences we analyse to this day, but the “Kent lads suffering from disease in a pointless war” narrative is a dishonest construction. It’s designed to cut out the Empire, which whether bad, good or indifferent brought great diversity to the “British” lines.

I don’t blame those that lived at the time, but rather (Christianity-inspired) modern education. When Churchill orated about fighting on the beaches, he did so knowing Britain’s imperial reach. Invasion would have destroyed our island and condemned its Jews to the flame –yet it wouldn’t have ended Britain as such. In Churchill’s memorable prose, the Empire across the sea, guarded by the British fleet, would have carried on the fight! – until in good time the British-origin New World would have come to the liberation of the Old. It wasn’t the bulldog but his descendants who changed the script, embarrassed by the Churchillian embrace of “global Britain”.

The British underdog narrative has two purposes, the first and most educational naive of which is to cut out the Empire. When “Britain” fought in Singapore and Burma, it wasn’t the plucky “white army” of a powerless, unimportant, second order State. It was the “brown” Indian, British-commanded divisions of a navy nation without a major standing army. At the war’s commencement, even Belgium outnumbered us in troops! So when we speak of the British in World War II, what we really mean is the “world army”. From the four corners of the globe they came, and “we” stood as one against the German-Japanese terror. Any attempt to ignore the Empire rewrites history in white-centered, frankly racist fashion.

So why do we ignore this arguably positive story about diversity amidst the arguably negative story about imperial exploitation? What does that tell us about British education? What does that tell us about the British national story?

And so we must come to the pink elephant’s brain; how Britain sees itself as a country. It can be summarised in three words: the Underdog narrative. And it can be rebuffed with equal linguistic ease.

This is how we tell history. We were small and irrelevant when faced with the mighty Roamn Empire. We were dwarfed by France and brave Henry V gallantly defied the odds. We were dwarfed by France and foolish Henry VIII arrogantly fought the mighty. We were overwhelmed by Catholic Europe so we left the club with chutzpah. We were overwhelmed by Catholic Spain, but we held out, Armada crushed. The Dutch were craftier than us. The Germans were mightier than us. The Americans were BIG; far too big. And Napoleon? His terror nearly starved us, but Nelson stood strong.

And so it continued (skipping rapidly over the Empire-divorced Industrial Revolution; just where did we get that cotton from?). We held out alone against the Nazi terror, struggling to survive against a continent-spanning war machine and we were flailing in plucky stasis until the Americans came to save the day. After the war, we were a medium, powerless nobody trying to find our place. Would the Europeans accept us? Would the Commonwealth love us? Would the Americans be our special friend?

Even in sport, we would pay the card of the downtrodden. Liverpool, legendary European Champions as they were, were plucky underdogs against those Goliath-like Italians. Australians, the Spanish, the Trinidadians (!), each in their sporting field were the mighty coming to crush us. But would we hold out? Would The Ashes be reclaimed?

In all this pathetic story of victimhood, we conveniently forgot the truth; that we have been an extremely influential country, once the most powerful on Earth, now a hugely significant soft-power hub. From the Elizabethan era onwards we have sailed like a colossus upon the waves, colonising America, imposing trade on China, exporting an ideology of free trade and democracy. In World War 1 we fought in globe-spanning, racial diversity. In the Second War, our Empire stood united; Jews, Indians and Asians (forgetting their differences and) fighting fascism as one; and combined we had a demographic strength far surpassing that of the Soviets or America. Our army was tiny —but our army has always been tiny. We are a maritime nation.

Today, our power has waned from 19th Century heights, but far it exceeds our influence in the centuries prior. Roman England was a backwater, Tudor England a powerless joke. Today we are the second biggest cultural power and our fingerprints can be seen everywhere from global governmental systems to Commonwealth civil society to international sport to the international financial system. The underdog sob story is pure saccharine smaltz.

Even where we dare to reference the Empire, it is never about our power, but their need. How missionaries spread the gospel to the “unenlightened underdog”, how humanitarian liberals helped others with hands open wide. East Indian corporate greed is whitewashed. Christian benevolence to the needy is put centre stage. Either we are the underdogs or we are helping the underdogs. Power for evil, for good or for complexity is just too unChristian for our simplistic narrative analysis.

And indeed, it is in narrative as concept that we understand our reluctance to educate for Empire. It is less the simplistic Corbyn line that our “crimes” must be forgiven or the flag-waving Fergusonian riposte; for all the intelligent understand the moral balance sheet: it is muddy. It is complex. It defies simple analysis. The imperial motives were mixed from rapacious greed to curious exploration to benevolent charity to Christian salvation to pure accident. It was planned and haphazard. It was desired and rejected. It was a boon and a burden. It was liberty and control. It was intermarriage and racial separation. It was always about the bloody French! And lest we forget: East India was a Company; they were as British as Amazon is American. Half the time, the Crown arrived as a belated 19th Century afterthought.

The problem isn’t crime v rule of law or loot v railways. It is complexity. Yet we have a human desire for moral judgment. Right or wrong, good or evil. And the Empire just doesn’t fit the mold.

So this is the Christian-British framing: no acknowledgement of power, just eternal underdog status. This childish analysis spills into modern, geopolitical affairs. For the dimwitted, Israel-Palestine is perfect: ideally suited to underdog v the mighty fairy tail. Some say little Israel is the Arab-surrounded victim. Others that Palestinians are suffering; alone against the mighty Jews. In either case, there is a simple story to tell. But Empire? It’s too complicated and too morally unclear. It’s global-spanning and fact-overflowing. The more you know, the less you can judge, and so it is forgotten in the school curriculum; a sop to narrative simplicity.

In conclusion, let’s admit it:. History education isn’t about facts or “one f&%cking thing after another”. It’s about morality, simplicity and judgement. All issues and eras, however near in time, however domestic in ubication, are ignored in the face of the childlike impulse: a Christian-spirited, do-gooding, underdog-ing balance sheet of right and wrong. Until we finally enter the world of complexity, truth will be lost and our judgment along with it.

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