The Empire Project

"This is an extraordinary panoramic tour de force . John Darwin is an Oxford historian much indebted to Robinson and Gallagher, who were the presiding deities of a certain way of doing imperial history. Darwin is very concerned to stress that the Empire was a varied, in some ways chaotic and very contingent, construction. Nothing like as permanent or as solid as all those bits of the world coloured red would lead you to suggest. It did in large part depend upon a quiescent Europe, United States and Asia and it is that, Darwin suggests, which enabled the British to acquire and engage with large parts of the world in terms of the direct exercise of power, in terms of economic interaction and in terms of migration. But Darwin points out that as soon as Europe becomes inhabited by nations which are aggressive, especially towards Britain, and as soon as America becomes a world power, and as soon as Asia becomes non-quiescent in the form of Japan and Indian Nationalism – then keeping the British show on the road gets much harder and by the 1950s and 1960s it has become impossible. One of the points that Ronald Hyam seeks to make is that it is not clear if for the majority of people in Britain the Empire mattered all that much. There is a big debate about that. He thought that while for the governing classes the Empire was important it actually didn’t impinge on the lives of many people at all. What I think is interesting is that in some ways we can make the argument that we have become more conscious about the Empire as it has unravelled than we were when it was there. Some of that is because of the substantial immigration into Britain of people formerly living in the British Empire. In a sense the Empire has come home to Britain. We are a much more multicultural nation and much of the multiculturalism is derived from Caribbean, African and South Asian immigrants to Britain at the time when the Empire was unravelling. Darwin makes a good point in his book that some people do suggest that the Empire is a story of scandal and exploitation that we should feel guilty about. Other historians of a more right-wing persuasion think the British Empire is a great story that we should be proud of. Darwin says it is not really very helpful to keep fighting about whether it was good or bad because there will never be agreement. Instead the way to move forward is to try to understand how it worked and why it fell apart. I must say I am rather sympathetic to that. One of the things that we found out in the course of our work was that there was a constant complaint from the 1900s on that the British Empire was inadequately taught in schools. In large part because very little 19th century history was taught in schools in the early part of the 20th century and later on because it was often that there was no interest in the subject. It does rather bear out the view that on the whole most people in Britain weren’t very interested in the Empire. From Lord Meath, who invented Empire Day, through to Winston Churchill in the 1940s, there were complaints that history teaching was insufficiently patriotic and insufficiently imperial. What we are doing with this is to try to understand and provide evidence about the teaching of history as a taught subject in English school classrooms from the early 20th century until the present day. The motive for that is that there has been in recent years a huge amount of discussion and disagreement in the media about whether history is badly taught in schools and I wanted to get some historical perspective on this current debate. What we did was to set up an elaborate research project where much of the work was based on official government materials about the sort of history they thought should be taught in school and on the basis of inspectors’ reports about how history has been taught in schools. We also interviewed a large number of former teachers and pupils going back to the 1920s. We reached a variety of conclusions, one of which was that as long as history is being taught some people think it is being taught well and other don’t. If you are a good teacher then you can teach your students anything and they will enjoy it and remember it. So really this current discussion is merely the latest version of something that has been going on for well over a century. There is also this issue of how history should be taught and much of that debate amongst politicians and the press is very polarised. Should it be a cheerleading narrative or should it be about skills or knowledge? Whereas the reality is that in the classroom many teachers don’t feel those polarised issues are very interesting and it is not actually the issue that preoccupies them most when they come to teach."