Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire

"Priya Satia’s brilliant book is about how historians were actually crucial to the building and justification of empire. It’s fascinating because imperial history has become completely entrenched in the culture wars, and there’s this huge battle about telling imperial stories, and about how we should tell them, what narratives we should be allowed to tell, what should be revised and what should be rewritten. Inherent to these arguments is the idea that historians didn’t used to have political agendas, and now they do. What Satia demonstrates in her book is that historians have always been political. But the point is they used to be political in service of the establishment, and Empire. She picks out particular moments to show the development of history in the 19th century as an academic topic, and how that was framed through a Whiggish interpretation of explaining progress and how Britain had got to be top dog. There were lots of histories produced to give you lessons from past imperialism, or to demonstrate why it is that Britain’s Empire is doing so well. She describes how histories of Empire or specific histories – such as Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – were used to justify imperialism at moments of moral doubt. Her argument at the end of the book is that historians became less and less useful. There were anti-colonial thinkers – she talks about William Blake and also E.P. Thompson, who is a radical historian – whose work was used completely in service of the opposite position, to justify a push against power. So history fell out of favour of the ruling Imperial elites, because history started telling stories that didn’t really fit with their narrative. Satia tells a story about when historians themselves are really powerful. They’re partly powerful because academia was much more prestigious. It was a small group of elite white men who literally had the ear of policymakers, or people like Winston Churchill, who sees himself as a historian. Satia sets out this idea of historians as being immensely powerful in terms of how they shape national discourse and political processes. At the end of the book, she says that historians don’t have the ear of government anymore, because government doesn’t care about them. I think she’s right: today, historians, and academics in general, aren’t powerful. Historians are a much more diverse group of people, and we aren’t bending policy to our every whim. But if we do want to have influence, maybe we don’t want to have it over government anyway, maybe we should be trying to help other people. There are citizen protest movements who can really use historical tools to help them with their campaigns. Yes, absolutely. People tend to be nostalgic for a point of Empire they haven’t themselves experienced. They’re not nostalgic for decolonisation, which actually many, many people alive today lived through. I think this shows the importance of Catherine Hall’s work, because Empire really has been critical in constituting what it means to be English or British. It stands to reason that when historians say ‘we need to be a lot more critical about this history’, of course, it’s going to upset people. It shows how important Empire was in setting out these identities. Bill Schwarz’s work shows how at the end of Empire, we’re left with this very defensive form of whiteness. Part of what it’s defensive about is these historical stories; trying to control the narrative to say that we civilised the world and we were better than the other European colonial powers and so on."