The reporters who heard David Cameron tell Pakistani students this week that Britain was responsible for "many of the world's problems ... in the first place" seemed to think he was joking. But it's a measure of how far Britain is from facing up to its own imperial legacy that his remarks were greeted with bewildered outrage among his supporters at home.
The prime minister should not "run down his own country", declared the Daily Telegraph, the authentic voice of Tory England, warmly endorsing instead the insistence of his Labour predecessor, Gordon Brown, that "the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over". In reality, no such apology has ever been made.
Cameron was responding to a question about the Kashmir conflict – a product of Britain's partition of India in 1947 – and was clearly anxious to avoid antagonising either Indian opinion or his Pakistani hosts. "I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role", the prime minister explained, with a modesty that eluded him in the buildup to Nato's intervention in Libya.
But his critics were having none of it. Cameron was being naive; he was playing to the gallery, they said; there was nothing to be guilty about – and, anyway, imperial history was all very complicated. So the exposure of a 50-year British government cover-up of official documents detailing the systematic brutalisation, starvation, torture and castration of thousands of guerrilla suspects during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya in the 1950s couldn't be more timely.
This was a counter-insurgency war in which hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu were interned in concentration camps and tens of thousands killed. Half a century later Cameron's government is resolutely refusing to compensate survivors on the outrageous grounds that responsibility for any crimes by the colonial authorities passed to the new Kenyan government after independence.
But of course Kenya is only one of multiple grim British imperial legacies, a string of which are at the heart of the most inflammatory confrontations of the modern world. It's not just Kashmir and the Pakistan-Indian standoff. The Israel-Palestine conflict is the direct result of British colonial policy, as is the infamous Durand line that divides Pashtuns between Afghanistan and Pakistan and fuels the "Af-Pak" war. Then there's the toxic colonial carve-up of the Arab world and Africa along arbitrary state boundaries, and the colonial divide-and-rule of ethnic or religious groups that continues to haunt the post-colonial world.
So it's scarcely a coincidence that many of the world's most intractable conflicts are in former British colonies or protectorates: from the West Bank and Gaza, Iraq, Kurdistan, Yemen and Somalia to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Cyprus and Sudan – with the reflex imperial resort to partition a recurrent theme. What Cameron said in Islamabad can't seriously be disputed.
Of course, the colonial legacy is only one part of the story, and Britain's is only one of the colonial empires whose baleful inheritance can be felt across the world. But the failure in modern Britain to recognise the empire for what it was – an avowedly racist despotism, built on ethnic cleansing and ruthless exploitation, which undeveloped vast areas and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions – is a dangerous encouragement to ignore its lessons and repeat its crimes in a modern form.
What's needed are not so much apologies, still less declarations of guilt, but some measure of acknowledgement, reparation and understanding that invasions, occupations and external diktats imposed by force are a recipe not for international justice but continued conflict and violence, including against those who stand behind them.
Because the argument about empire isn't so much about the past, but about the renewed drive to western intervention in the present. And facing up to the colonial record isn't unpatriotic, as Cameron's critics insist, or "anti-western", but a necessity if the danger posed by the imperial revival is to be avoided.
The United States has of course long preferred an informal empire of indirect control, punctuated by military intervention and temporary occupations. And the former European colonial powers, notably Britain and France, now follow a similar approach.
So it is that the British military has found itself back in its old colonial haunts, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Palestine, and now over Libya, which Britain occupied in the 40s and 50s, maintaining its military presence until Colonel Gaddafi came to power in 1969. They've been joined by Italy, which carried out its own genocidal campaign of repression when it ruled the country before the second world war.
As the Obama administration appears to have opted for an "intervention-lite" strategy in the wake of the Iraq and Afghanistan disasters, Africa's one-time European colonists are taking the lead. And for all the insistence on the humanitarian nature of their mission, more civilians are now being killed, including by Nato; the Libyan rebels have lost control of their future; and the threat of de facto partition, that traditional imperial bequest, is growing.
Meanwhile France is now involved in three shooting wars simultaneously for the first time in more than half a century: in Afghanistan, Libya and Ivory Coast. On the face of it, the west African state would seem a stronger candidate for humanitarian action than Libya, given the scale of the refugee crisis and killing that have followed last autumn's presidential election.
But France, the former colonial power that has staged multiple military interventions in Africa since decolonisation and long backed one side in the ethnically and religiously divided Ivory Coast, is the last state to be carrying out such a mission. It can only increase the likelihood of renewed civil war.
Just as the European powers built their empires in the name of Christian civilisation, modern liberal imperialism flies the banner of human rights. Nicolas Sarkozy has hailed the new drive for western intervention triggered by the Libyan uprising as offering a new model of "world governance" based on the "responsibility to protect". So long as it remains a pretext for the same powers that have dominated and divided the world selectively to enforce their will, it will deliver neither protection nor rights – but only reinforce the imperial legacy.
• This article was amended on 7 April 2011. The original headline read: Ignoring its imperial history licences the west to repeat it. This has been corrected.
From Gulf Stream Blues
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Comments in chronological order (Total 367 comments)
6 April 2011 10:10PM
@Seamus,
Nice one, I'm glad someone (other than the Times) noticed.
Peter Oborne was especially good yesterday, just as the details of the Mau Mau cover-up emerged. He chose to describe the coverup in these terms:
As culpable understatement goes, this is one for the ages.
6 April 2011 10:10PM
A much better Telegraph article on this is here:
Pakistan's problem is that we did not make it British enough/
6 April 2011 10:14PM
another part of the story is that whenever we left them country's we left them democracy's.,,, it's not Britain fault they didn't want to be democratic when they became independent .
6 April 2011 10:14PM
What would you do? Leave them to it?
6 April 2011 10:15PM
And who is going to protect us from our "protectors"?
6 April 2011 10:16PM
Doubtless Britain has some less than glorious elements to it's history (which country doesn't?), not to condone it, but it was far from the worst. It's also easy and convenient to continue to blame others instead of finding solutions.
The multinational corporations are the empire builders of today and they have the politicians and the political agenda in their pockets, they don't apologise for it either.
6 April 2011 10:16PM
There are two main problems with 'reparations' for the past:
1. how far do you go back?
2. why should people who weren't alive or to blame, pay compensation to people who weren't harmed by them.
The answers seem to be:
1. you decide which era suits your political ideology.
2. can only be answered if you believe that old 'the sins of the father' nonsense.
6 April 2011 10:16PM
@liberalintheoldsense,
I'd have thought a romantic in the old sense a better description. Because, at bottom, that's what imperialists are --- romantics about violence. Just imagine, the imperilaist will think, what might have been, had we killed or tortured only a few more; just imagine how wonderful the world would be. Meantime, the bodies pile up.
6 April 2011 10:17PM
The main problem with this analysis is that it presumes the alternative to British rule would have been better.
I don't fly a flag for the empire, but recognise it did good as well as bad.
Banning slavery (and enforcing the ban with gunboats) is a good thing.
The British Empire also died a very good death, bankrupted by the fight against Nazism, and then in most cases peacefully granting colonies independence.
6 April 2011 10:18PM
No ... just I don't see the world in black and white as you do.
6 April 2011 10:18PM
The Mau Mau are a byword for cruelty against non compliant africans. Or is their behaviour to be excused?
6 April 2011 10:20PM
If British imperialism is held responisbile for many of the worlds problems why can it not be credited with the worlds succeses? Would there be democracies of any kind in any of these countries today if not for us? Doubtful at best. Do we get the credit for indian economic success? Having given India its rail network, modern universities, a civil service and a parliment one can't help but wonder if its current postion might not have a smidgeon to do with it. We get routinely blamed for slavery, but somehow not credited for ending it, not only our own trade, not only european slavers, but the entire east african slave trade ended by British imperialism. Either third world countries are being hyprocritical and whiny by blaming their colonial legacy for their problems, or Britian really did shape the modern world massively, for good and bad. It can't just be one.
6 April 2011 10:20PM
"The former colonial powers who now fly the flag of protection and rights as they go to war will not deliver either." You've said it all here Seumas; the rest is superfluous: albeit interesting.
6 April 2011 10:21PM
@liberalintheoldsense,
Ohh, yes please. The main alternative to Hitler in large parts of East and central Europe was Stalin. I'm guessing it follows that Stalin was one of the good guys.
There's nothing so bad that it can't be made good by looking at alternatives, is there?
6 April 2011 10:22PM
@liberalintheoldsense,
I, er, thought that was one of the requirements of empire.
6 April 2011 10:25PM
I suspect the reason most people fail to recognise the vision of the British Imperialism as laid out by Seamus Milne is because it's basically a misrepresentation of reality.
Obviously it's a mistake to deny the mistakes which were made, the atrocities which it was responsible for and the people who have died because of it but equally it's a mistake not see the bigger picture and the myriad of benefits it brought not just to the UK but a huge number of other people throughout the world.
6 April 2011 10:25PM
Maybe the journalists were incredulous because they'd heard of the Mughal Empire, unlike Mr Milne.
6 April 2011 10:26PM
Wow, Milne's two minutes hate is quite special this time!
Britain liberated Libya from Fascist Italy. Britain wasn't a colonial or imperial power in Libya. The current intervention in Libya is a UN operation.
Milne might not value the UN but fortunately most of us have no truck with his extremism. Milne reveals with both his hostility to UN operations in Libya and this article that he is simply hostile to the West - in his own words pretty much, if the West is doing it, its bad, even if the West is stopping crimes against humanity by a lunatic like Gaddafi.
6 April 2011 10:26PM
@chosen
You make a good point. If we can be expected to pay reperations to countries we may or may not have harmed a century ago, then how about islamic countries recompense italy for arab piracy, spain for moorish invasion and eastern europe for ottoman agression. Its not a serious policy. Also given that it has been proven, often by anti-imperialists argueing it damaged the home country, that there was far more resources going into the empire than back to Britian, if all debts were paid one would actually end up with former colonies paying us back.
6 April 2011 10:28PM
Victoriatheoldgoth
"Maybe the journalists were incredulous because they'd heard of the Mughal Empire, unlike Mr Milne."
Sshhh! Only white people have empires! Unless the white people are from Russia in which case it isn't an empire, its a confederation of the just and any comparisons with Hitler based on death camps are a travesty...
6 April 2011 10:28PM
Well perhaps they ought to do something about the pirates in the Indian ocean
then, holding the world to ransom!!
6 April 2011 10:30PM
danielwaweru
And the reason most people today don't think killing and torturing your way to glory is a good idea is in a large part down to the British Empire and the civilising influence it exerted across the world.
If it wasn't for the British & their Empire standing up to Hitler ( and the Japanese ) then you would have had no need of an alternative to him because you'd have been dealing with the real thing.
6 April 2011 10:31PM
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6 April 2011 10:31PM
Chosen
For a moment I thought you were talking about the persecution of Jews and the Holocaust. Never mind.
6 April 2011 10:32PM
This really is an absurdly reductive argument. This article resembles a British version of Chomskyite inverted jingoism, where everything is the fault of the US and the rest of the world is patronised as entirely passive and powerless.
Of course we should constantly remember the disgraces of our past, and aim not to repeat them, but too often Milne shows a willingness to dismiss the aspects of Britishness that we should be proud of. And this kind of critique also operates from the comfort-zone of not offering an alternative plan of how exactly to respond to the complexities of north Africa and the middle-east.
6 April 2011 10:32PM
Dear Mr. Milne
Please come down here and give me an apology for the firebombing of Copenhagen in 1807. Don't forget to bring the reparations.
Thank you
Felix Krull
6 April 2011 10:32PM
OK, Seumas. Are you going to stump up? Come on, mate. A few hundred quid might clear your conscience in "acknowledgement" of the behaviour of ancestors whose names you probably don't even know.
You might in return ask these countries for "acknowledgement" of the railways, electricity, telephony - and democracy itself - which your ancestors left to them.
6 April 2011 10:32PM
danielwaweru
"Ohh, yes please. The main alternative to Hitler in large parts of East and central Europe was Stalin. I'm guessing it follows that Stalin was one of the good guys"
Well, that's Seamus Milne's logic! How come he goes easy on Stalin but not on the British Empire? Especially since the British Empire did plenty of good too - it brought modern civilisation to swathes of Africa for example.
6 April 2011 10:34PM
Yes and another part of the colonial legacy is that millions of them came to this wicked country to build a new life.,,, Seumas.
6 April 2011 10:34PM
@danielwaweru ... your point being?
6 April 2011 10:36PM
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6 April 2011 10:37PM
Our democracy and values are not worth exporting.
Good article.
6 April 2011 10:37PM
Liberalintheoldsense
It was not as noble as you'd think. Britain banned slavery, but with a wink and a nod. The bonded labourers transported from the subcontinent to the West Indies and the East Indies to work on the Empire's plantations were slaves in all but name.
6 April 2011 10:37PM
The British Empire may be responsible for many things but Kashmir was never part of that Empire. It was a Princely Sate and the only man who could decide its future was it's sovereign ruler Maharaji Hari Singh. He decided to join India but only after tribesmen backed by Pakistan had attacked his country (Pakistan has since annexed these areas and ethnically cleansed Hindus). So the greatest blight that effects India and Pakistan occurs in an area that was never under British rule, so how exactly is Britain to blame? Cameron is showing his ignorance in the same way that Blair did when he said the USA stood shoulder to shoulder with us in the blitz (they weren't in the war at the time). He is playing fast and loose with history just to make up for another gaffe that he made when in India that upset Pakistan. When you're in hole Dave, stop digging.
6 April 2011 10:38PM
They laughed because it was Cameron (but they took the money of course).
You obviously laugh if the messenger boy makes a joke after all who cares its just the messenger boy. I doubt the ISI etc will have changed whatever views they hold one iota. I thought he was the heir to Blair. I was wrong. He is less than that. It is a pitiful and pathetic spectacle he makes giving away our money to support minor Pentagon war aims (to a nuclear armed power)!
6 April 2011 10:38PM
You see the first problem is Seamus's starting point - that Imperialism was evil in comparison with the counter factual alternative of no imperialism. I disagree that Imperialism - although bad - was worse than no imperialism. In fact - the sad un PC truth is that the overall development of most occupied third world countries spiked during the imperialist phase only to fall back post imperialism. I would also so that - counter factually - Africa in particular - probably would be better off in terms of the life opportunities of its people - if it were still under occupation.
Now to be clear I do not support imperialism as an ideal type but I do not see it is a crime that requires compensation to be paid. Actually as someone who sees the broad sweep of history, my feeling is that imperialism will re-emerge at some stage mainly because of the spread of global insecurity due to failed states. China is pushing in that direction in my view, although the new imperialism will be structured differently using local clients.
Pakistan as a failed state with nuclear weapons may end up being the test case.
We will see.
6 April 2011 10:39PM
Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't mean it wasn't good.
6 April 2011 10:39PM
Curious use of licence.
6 April 2011 10:42PM
And while we are breaking away from the past and making apologies it may well be that modern countries are picking up where britain left off. I wouldn't apologize to despots.
6 April 2011 10:45PM
Kashmir's current problem lie in its roots a typical despotic Asian state. If it had been part of the British Empire, its people would have been at least consulted on whether they wanted to join India or Pakistan.
6 April 2011 10:46PM
Brilliant article. I only wish we had this kind of candor and analysis in the (polluted) "mainstream press" in the U.S. For this sort of understanding, you have to turn to someone like Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky. You Brits are lucky to have this level of quality available in your daily press.
6 April 2011 10:47PM
What would you have told the citizens in Benghazi, and now Misrata, Seamus?
Would love to help, but that would be inconsistent?
Sorry, but it would be repeating our colonial mistakes of the past?
Any chance of an answer on those?
I can understand if it is more urgent to churn out another 500 words of meaningless posturing.
6 April 2011 10:47PM
Y'know I have this strange feeling that the intervention in Libya is motivated more by stupidity than by imperial hubris.
I'm afraid there is no defence against stupidity.
6 April 2011 10:48PM
@danielwaweru
What do you mean by "imperialists are?" I have never met an imperialist. Indeed no-one in their right mind would want to take on a country like Pakistan today, let alone any African states.
You are the one who's living in the past. As for bodies piling up, are you saying that I or any of my friends or colleagues are responsible for that? It is a disgusting remark.
6 April 2011 10:49PM
And i wonder what country you live in ?
surely not this imperialist wicked country by any chance ?
6 April 2011 10:52PM
danielwaweru
Explain please how you get from your assertion here ...
To this point where you have now decided exactly what the other posters point of view is without any evidence from him/her that it is ...
It make things a lot easier if you acutally address what people say and not what you imagine they might possibly say if they were just a figment of your imagination.
6 April 2011 10:57PM
I can't answer for Seamus but that's pretty much what I would have said to them.
6 April 2011 10:58PM
If we're going to delve into history, why not blame the Muslim invasion of India? Muslims are always harking on about the crusades as if they only happened last week but develop a curious amnesia about their own history of aggression.
6 April 2011 10:58PM
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6 April 2011 11:00PM
danielwaweru
"The UK ran a series of concentration camps in Kenya"
No, Kenyans ran a series of concentration camps.