My younger niece described learning about three waves of ‘invaders’ at primary school – the Romans, the Vikings and the Normans; then a leap ahead to the Fire of London and Samuel Pepys (‘bit boring’) and also the Victorians (restricted to life in Britain, nothing about overseas territories). At secondary school she didn’t do GCSE history but between eleven and fourteen the modules she remembered studying were: JFK, Jack the Ripper, Charles I, and Cromwell and the slave trade. My ears pricked up at this last topic, so I asked her more about it. She thought they’d spent about ‘two to three weeks’ doing this subject, ‘Everyone in the class was shocked … I remember we learned that our economy had been based on slavery at that time. I’d heard about it before but I never understood the scale before that.’ However, when I asked about wider studies of Britain and Empire, she explained they hadn’t studied anything about colonisation, nothing about Britain in India, Africa, America, Australia or China. She agreed completely with Grass’s comment, saying, ‘We never learnt about the way Britain used to own a third of the world.’ And, having friends in Germany, she also said she felt this lack of knowledge was ‘quite disgusting, when you think about what young Germans learn about their history, the Holocaust and so on, they take it really seriously in Germany – unlike us’.
My elder niece, who at the time of writing is about to study history at university, said that she remembered doing the Anglo-Saxons at primary school (‘that was really fun’), also the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Tudors, the Victorians (‘we did a Victorian school day’) – but ‘nothing on foreign policy or empire’. In the last year at primary school ‘we did both world wars, and we went on a residential trip to a place in Norfolk, near Cromer. We were “evacuees” and were given ration books, it was really interesting.’ At secondary school they studied King John and the feudal system, the Battle of Hastings, and then the Suffragettes. ‘In Year 8 or 9 we did slavery and the British Empire – but we didn’t spend a huge amount of time on it … maybe a couple of lessons. I can’t really remember anything about it, except being made aware that we weren’t the good guys.’ For GCSE they had done four units – Medicine (mid-1800s to the Second World War), the Civil Rights Movement, the Roaring Twenties, and Hitler’s Rise to Power (up to 1939). She’d also completed an EPQ (Extended Project Qualification) on ‘Morality in the Twentieth Century’ – ‘I looked at the Holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’ She too agreed with Grass’s analysis, repeating that British colonisation and empire hadn’t formed a critical part of her history syllabus from GCSE through to A levels – ‘We were never formally examined on slavery or any aspect of the British Empire.’
These limitations on history teaching about Britain’s colonial past are certainly not just confined to my relatives’ recent experience. The author Moni Mohsin wrote this about her children’s education in London:
For all the range and candour of their education, they haven’t once encountered Britain’s colonial past in school. My daughter is now in her second year of A levels. She has studied history from the age of nine, but the closest she has come to any mention of empire was in her GCSE syllabus that included the run-up to the Second World War. While studying the Treaty of Versailles, she learned that some countries had colonies at the time, and, as part of Germany’s punishment, it was stripped of its colonial possessions. Period.fn3
In the same article she quotes Dr Mukulika Banerjee, associate professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, on British students who
arrive at university completely ignorant about the empire, that vital part of their history. When we talk of Syria today, they have no knowledge of Britain’s role in the Middle East in the last century … Similarly they have no clue about the history of … immigration. They don’t understand why people of other ethnicities came to Britain in the first place. They haven’t learned any of it at school. So … at university, when my students discover the extent of their ignorance, they are furious.
What happens if a country is continually told that it has nothing to apologise for, no need to learn from its past mistakes? In this way, an entire nation, like a sickly child, can become permanently disabled, stuck in an illusory safety zone composed of past myths about its glory days, infantilised by a selective view of its own history, which may be comforting but also means it will be unable to develop into a questioning adult. Think about our own country and the narratives we have all grown up with. More and more these days I hear a persistent voice in my head that questions whether the ongoing British obsession with the Second World War, and its ‘finest hour’, isn’t in fact a subconscious process of denial – a deflection away from the reality of history, which we cannot bear to face. The truth which, as Sebald says, ‘lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered’.
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But, to return to Günter Grass’s implicit challenge, how should we begin trying to teach our children about the crimes and genocides committed in the name of the British Empire? Where would you start? There is an immediate challenge here – whereas the particular savagery of Nazism occured within a twelve-year span (or perhaps two generations, going back to its causation), the violence unleashed by the British Empire took place over almost 500 years – more than twenty generations. The contrast with Germany could not be greater. And this is not only a matter of the time frame. The Holocaust took place in a recognisably modern world – we can see television images of Hitler and Himmler chatting, of the senior perpetrators on trial at Nuremberg, we even have images and photographs of the extermination camps. For the vast majority of Britain’s reign of terror around the world we have only documents from other centuries. This creates an immediate challenge for even the most inspirational teacher – how to make such distant history come alive? How to make a document listing the names and ages of slaves on a British sugar plantation as vivid as interviews with Holocaust survivors? To put it crudely – how to bridge the ‘empathy gap’ which inevitably exists when we cannot really see or hear people from the past?
Maybe we can only start from what we know. We know that in 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted the first charter to the East India Company, the first truly transnational corporation in the world. We know that this organisation, in partnership with the British state, ended up ruling India. We also know that its policies were responsible for exacerbating the Bengal famine in 1770 in which millions of Indians starved to death. The company had taken over all taxation rights in Bengal (today covering West Bengal, Bangladesh, parts of Assam, Odisha, Bihar and Jharkhand) after the British victories at Plassey and Buxar in 1757 and 1764 respectively. Land taxes were immediately raised, from 10 per cent to 50 per cent, giving huge profits to East India Company shareholders and the British state – rising from 15 million rupees in 1765 to 30 million rupees in 1777. The company also forced many farmers to move from food production to growing opium poppies (for the export market, particularly to China). The dual impact of these two developments, combined with a severe drought in 1769, caused the devastating famine of 1770, resulting in an estimated 10 million deaths.