Charlotte Lydia Riley: “We need to get rid of the idea that Britain was humanitarian in its imperialism. That needs to go”

Charlotte Lydia Riley talks to Ellie Cawthorne about her book Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain exploring the complex, and often troubled, relationship between the British empire and the ‘mother country’

Published: October 8, 2024 at 3:23 PM

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Ellie Cawthorne: You write in the introduction to your book – Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain – that you want it “to set out why people in Britain today should care about their nation’s imperial past”. Why do you think that this is so important?

Charlotte Lydia Riley: Beyond the fact that I’m a historian, and I think that trying to know more about history is always worthwhile, I believe there are many reasons why we should care about our imperial past, specifically in Britain.

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There’s been a peak and a trough in knowledge about empire. For a long time, it was a very obvious and explicit part of our popular culture. Schoolchildren would study under a map on the wall that had the imperial territories marked out in pink, and people were often very celebratory about Britain’s imperial conquests. Then, after decolonisation, a silence gradually fell over the empire, and discussions of how it had shaped British society, culture and politics ebbed.

The reason I think that British people need to think more closely and carefully about the nation’s imperial past is because both empire and decolonisation have shaped so much in Britain today. A lot of the ways we still organise British society are rooted in imperialism, and many of our organisations – universities, schools and museums – have imperial roots.

The story of migration to Britain is also rooted in empire: there are people living here now whose families have connections to the colonies in all sorts of ways. It’s very difficult to look backwards at empire and say that it’s over and done with – you can see it all around you today. That’s why I think we need to have a knowledge of empire that’s clear-eyed, rather than being coloured by either celebration or silencing.

Your book focuses on the decades following the Second World War – an era in which empire was disintegrating. How did it continue to shape Britain when it was already beginning to disappear?

We think about empire being a 19th-century phenomenon, but the territorial high point of the British empire was actually in the 1920s – only around 100 years ago. And decolonisation was a slow, drawn-out process that influenced Britain throughout the 20th century. India gained independence in 1947, and the 1960s saw a wave of decolonisation in Africa and the Caribbean, but Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) didn’t become fully independent until 1980, and the fingerprint of imperialism could be detected in South Africa’s apartheid system, which didn’t come to an end until the 1990s.

You begin the book by looking at the role of the Second World War in Britain’s imperial story. Did the conflict create a sense of connection and shared experience between Britain and its colonies, or did it reinforce divisions?

I think both things were happening at the time. On one hand, there was a real sense of the Second World War as a moment when the empire was pulling together. People acknowledged the incredible contribution made by the colonies and ex-colonies in terms of resources, manpower and support, and Churchill spoke about the empire as being crucial in resisting Nazism and Fascism. The Second World War was the first direct point of contact with empire for many people in Britain, either through people from the colonies appearing here, or because Britons went to fight in places such as north Africa.

On the other hand, Britain was also crafting a narrative of ‘standing alone’ against the Nazis. There’s a famous David Low cartoon that shows a lone British soldier on the White Cliffs of Dover, shaking his fist at the sky. About a month later, though, another cartoonist, Fougasse, published a sketch in Punch depicting two soldiers lounging on the cliffs. One says: “So our poor old Empire is alone in the world.” The other responds: “Aye, we are – the whole five hundred million of us.” Even at the time, people were pointing out that Britain was not really a tiny island nation but an empire that covered a quarter of the globe. I think there’s often a sense of Britain being this kind of plucky little fighter in the Second World War, which underplays Britain’s geopolitical strength at that point and has shaped the way people thought about empire afterwards.

How aware was the ordinary Briton of the empire in the mid-20th century? Did it affect their everyday lives or was it seen as something distant and irrelevant?

The fabric of British society was interwoven with imperialism during the Second World War and the years that followed. It definitely impacted British people’s day-to-day lives, but I don’t think that necessarily means they were consciously thinking about it. For example, though the general public were aware of the discussions around Indian independence, they didn’t necessarily understand the economic history of that relationship, the experiences of the Indian population, or what that population was like. If you look at children’s Ladybird books from the time, depictions of India are all about tigers and jungles – it’s shown as a mystical place full of mystical people. So there’s a paradox: people lived in a culture suffused with imperialism, but in many ways that made it harder for them to look at it closely or interrogate it, because empire was just part and parcel of what it meant to be British at that point.

In the 1950s and 60s, people migrated from across the empire and commonwealth to Britain in greater numbers than ever before. Can you tell us about some of the new communities that were established in British cities?

The British Nationality Act of 1948 created a new category of citizenship, reaffirming the right of people from across the empire to live in the metropole. And from 1948 until 1962, there was no limit on migration from the empire to Britain. If you were an imperial subject, you were entitled to live and work in Britain.

From the end of the Second World War until the late 1950s, migration was very heavily weighted towards the West Indian community. In 1955, for example, around 40,000 people came to Britain from the Commonwealth and about half of those came from the West Indies. Meanwhile, people from India and Pakistan were coming to Britain after partition in 1947, and migrants also came in smaller numbers from other former colonies in Africa, Cyprus, Hong Kong and elsewhere.

In terms of the dominions of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, there was more of an outward flow from Britain. Interestingly, the fact that Britain was itself a nation of migrants never really came up in debates around immigration. When people talked about imperial immigration, they were talking about migration to Britain, not from it, and they were talking about people of colour.

When people talked about imperial immigration, they were talking about migration to Britain, not from it, and they were talking about people of colour

So alongside British cities that had long hosted diverse communities – Cardiff, London, Glasgow – new migration hotspots emerged: Bradford and Leicester, for example, which became centres for Asian migrants. And in some places you would see a layering effect, where a new migrant community established itself and then moved on, to be replaced by another migrant community. A good example of this is Brick Lane in east London. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was home to French Protestant immigrants, before becoming a hub for Jewish, then Asian and, more recently, Somali migration. In the 1940s and 1950s, dock cities were particularly prominent sites of immigration, but also of racial violence – for example, the 1948 Liverpool riots.

The book also examines several incidents of racial violence. Can you elaborate on the connections you draw between empire and the strained race relations of 20th-century Britain?

That’s an interesting question – and I found myself asking exactly the same thing while sitting in the archives writing this book. Sometimes the link between empire and race relations in Britain is really explicit in the sources, with people saying things like: “I want these people to go back to the colonies.” In the 1960s, the Monday Club [a rightwing political pressure group] started to speak about what it called “voluntary repatriation” to the colonies for people of colour. So there was definitely a sense of racism being framed around the idea that people had come from the empire, so why couldn’t they just be put back there? Why did they have to be let into the metropole?

Racism in Britain was often built on very imperial attitudes. Empire is justified by white supremacy – it makes sense only if you think that white people are more civilised, more educated and more skilled than people of colour. That idea shaped the development of racial hierarchies in Britain in the 19th century, which continued into the 20th century after decolonisation.

Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, attitudes to migrants from the Commonwealth were reflective of imperial attitudes from earlier periods. Take education, for example: in the 1970s, activists highlighted the fact that children from communities of colour were facing racism in the classroom, and were being discriminated against by the school system. In his 1971 book How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System, Grenadian author and political activist Bernard Coard argued that the British education system was framed by the work of colonial administrators in the 19th and 20th centuries. He stated that it saw children from the Caribbean as less academically able than white children, which completely shaped their experience of school.

How did this imperial mindset colour the attitudes of people who migrated to Britain across the 20th century? Did they generally view themselves as imperial subjects or British citizens?

Reading the accounts of people who came to Britain from across the empire, you often see a huge moment of disillusionment when they actually arrived. They had been taught that Britain was their mother country – that they were part of a great imperial community. Education systems in colonised countries emphasised learning about Britain. I’ve read accounts of children in village schools in Kenya being able to name all of the rivers in England, or all of the lakes in the Lake District.

Yet when these imperial migrants landed in Britain, they found themselves unwelcome, and targets of explicit racism. After the Second World War, there was bomb damage, rationing and horrible winters. Britain was poor, it was grey – nothing like the glorious mother country they had been told about. So for a lot of people it was a real moment of psychological crisis.

You also look at the 1980s, an era that isn’t usually closely associated with empire. How do you think imperialism influenced British culture in that decade?

One of the things I looked at was Britain’s complicated relationship with apartheid-era South Africa. The very existence of apartheid was rooted in British imperialism. Often, lip service was paid to opposing it – as in Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech in 1960 – and there was a lot of anti-apartheid activism. Many of those activists were cognisant of the fact that Britain should be trying to do something about apartheid, expressly because of the historical connection. But from the 1940s right up until the 1980s, there were also British people who were supportive of apartheid. Some British firms continued to trade in South Africa, the UK sold South Africa arms, while English cricketers tried to circumvent boycotts with the rebel tours.

Then you have the 1982 Falklands War, which was in many ways an anachronism. It feels like a throwback to 19th-century naval imperial wars – a conflict over a distant isle, where even the Queen’s son goes to fight. But it was easier to support than previous imperial wars. It didn’t involve an indigenous population, and it was a war in which Britain could be seen as the good guy – which was, I think, a relief to some after decades of decolonisation.

Another aspect of the 1980s that’s been interesting to re-examine is the humanitarian relief efforts of Band Aid and Live Aid. On one hand, it was a moment of real generosity on the part of the British people. But depictions of starving children were used to justify British involvement in Ethiopia in a way that echoed previous imperial narratives and campaigns. And there was very little reflection at the time about why Africa (a continent often treated as one homogeneous place) was so poor, whereas British people had spare money to donate. That never really got interrogated, which I think is quite profoundly imperial.

How does Britain’s experience compare with other former imperial nations?

Like Britain, a lot of European nations are now struggling with questions of how to remember empire. Belgium has recently
reconfigured its national imperial museum, and France is having debates about figures in the Algerian War that mirror those around statues of slave traders here in Britain.

A lot of European people are proving quite resistant to thinking about empire as a bad thing, or as something that had victims and shouldn’t be a moment of national celebration. So it’s a debate playing out across Europe – but I do think that there are some things that are very distinctly British about our narrative. There is a trope within Britain that we had the most humanitarian and ‘civilised’ empire and the cleanest decolonisation process. But you can’t forget that Britain’s was the largest of the European empires, and in fact had a very violent decolonisation process. Look at the violence that unfolded in Malaya and Kenya, and during the partition of India, for example.

Discussions about empire feel very heated at the moment. Do you think it’s possible today to have a constructive conversation about our imperial past, or is the debate too polarised?

We have to be able to talk about our national past without descending into arguments and threats, which doesn’t always seem to be possible at the moment. Because history is massively shaped by interpretation, I think there’s sometimes a tendency to see it purely as a subjective art, and treat empire as simply a subject for debate between two sides. That might mean that you could have two accounts that are wildly different – one that celebrates imperialism and one that’s critical of it – and the impetus is to find some middle ground. But I’m not really interested in finding that middle ground. I don’t want to move my argument towards the idea that empire was a good thing.

When I finished my PhD in 2013, plenty of historians had already been re-examining imperial history, and I had no concern that the work I was doing would get picked up by newspapers or become a topic of contention, national debate or government intervention.

So it’s really striking to me how much that has shifted over the past decade. Empire has become a topic in the culture wars – a shorthand for all sorts of frustrations, and a lightning rod for all kinds of
identity questions.

So what’s your take on how Britain grapples with its imperial past today?

Something that isn’t helpful is that the voices on one side of this debate get very caught up with how ‘guilty’ people should feel. You don’t need to feel personally guilty for something that happened generations before. Equally, though, if your great-grandfather stole something and you still had it, you should probably give it back. Individual people don’t need to feel bad but, institutionally, we do need to think critically, and perhaps reparatively, about how Britain has benefited from imperialism, and what we can do with that now.

We also need to get rid of the idea that Britain was humanitarian in its imperialism. That needs to go. We need to think about empire as a dark moment in Britain’s history, and use it as a lens through which we can better understand stuff happening in Britain today – migration or museums – because it’s a really important explanatory tool.

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This article was first published in the September 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

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