The British Empire and its Contested Pasts (review)

Empires, like nations, have their usable and unusable pasts. As Ernest Renan reminded us, not just memory but “forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation” (“What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration edited by Homi K. Bhaba [Routledge, 1990], 11). Empires are not nations, but they too have shameful or inglorious episodes that they wish to ignore or suppress. If the French nation has to forget—and remind itself constantly to forget—the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572, the British Empire equally has to bury the memory of such things as what Caroline Elkins calls “Britain’s gulag” in Kenya (Imperial Reckoning [Henry Holt, 2005]).

It is a pity that, despite its title, no one in this volume, not even the editors, chooses to reflect on the general theme of empires and their contested pasts. After strongly declaring that “empires are contested entities” and claiming that “the sheer scale and extraordinary diversity of the British empire perhaps provides the richest seam for the investigation and interrogation of contested imperial pasts,” the editors quickly move on to a celebration of the current abundance and vitality of the historiography of the British Empire (1). That is undeniable, and worthy of investigation. But it is a different thing from considering the uses of the past by apologists for and detractors of the British Empire and historians trying to write its histories from their different perspectives. If the contributors were given guidance along these lines at the conference at which the essays were first presented, they seem blithely to have ignored them.

There are two main exceptions to this. One is Milla Schofield’s chapter “Enoch Powell against Empire,” which uses the Kenyan Asian crisis of the late 1960s as a case for the study of Enoch Powell’s views. Powell is indeed a fascinating subject for the theme of “contested pasts.” A passionate imperialist in the 1940s, with a special fondness for India and a determination to keep it within the benevolent fold of the British Empire, he became, in the 1950s and 1960s as the Empire melted away, an equally passionate Little Englander, convinced that the Empire had been a terrible mistake which had deflected England (Britain for him was always England) from its true destiny as a nation. The imperialist became a nationalist. This meant a complete reversal of historical vision. A past defined by a growing sense of imperial greatness and the imperial mission was now replaced by one that wished to write the Empire out of Britain’s history entirely. By 1965 Powell was arguing for a new history written around the nation: “I am not quite saying that the new history will be ‘Britain without Empire’, but it will be very nearly ‘Britain with the imperial episode in parenthesis’” (qtd. in Blyth and Jeffery 160). It was necessary, he said, to ignore post-1880 historiography, written at the height of the Empire, and go back to earlier histories that traced the evolution of the English nation. It was consistent with this exclusionary view of the nation that Powell could argue that Britain had no real responsibilities toward the Kenyan Asians, despite the undoubted fact that they were British citizens with British passports. It is indeed interesting that, in the post-imperial era, both the Left and the Right turned against empire: the Left because they were ashamed of it, the Right because a multinational empire did not square with their newly-constructed model of a homogeneous and virtually timeless English (or British) nation.

Schofield’s excellent chapter shows what can be done with the theme of contested pasts. Powell might have been extreme in his call for a conscious and comprehensive rewriting of the past, but the case is instructive in indicating how to view milder varieties. Michael Silvestri shows this in his chapter on...