today on the big questions should we be proud of the british empire
good morning i'm nikki campbell welcome to the big questions today we are at the oasis academy media city uk in salford to debate one very big question should we be proud of the british empire welcome everybody to the big questions
well the british empire once covered 13 million square miles and held sway over 458 million people it was the largest empire in history the extent of its territories across all the continents colored the maps pink and created an empire on which the sun truly never set but across the 20th century its power waned most of its nearest neighbor alan fought and won the right to self-rule in 1922. the imperial jewel in the crown india and pakistan gained independence in 1947 britain's new impotence was evident over sewers in 1956 and then country after country in africa the caribbean and the far east went their own way all that's left is the british commonwealth plus a few wind swept outposts and tax havens looking back now was the british empire something to swell our chests with pride or something to be deeply ashamed of well we've gathered together entrepreneurs historians faith leaders commentators and activists from across the commonwealth to debate that question and you can join in too on twitter or online by logging on to bbc.com at uk the bigquestions big questions and following the link to the online discussion plus there'll be lots of encouragement and contributions from our very lively and intelligent salford audience should we be proud of the british empire good morning everybody charles allen historian and writer the viceroy of india for it was he uh said the empire was a supreme force for good in the world yes he says it was the greatest institution in the world has ever seen he said you know to me the message is hewn and rock it's a hewn and stone you know our work is righteous and it shall endure uh and of course it didn't endure and really the question is was it righteous was it righteous and i think we we have to say this is like the cure it's egg it's good in parts but i also think we need to clarify there are two definite models here and you know going back to the greeks and the romans now the greeks their concept of of imperialism was the colony your little island is not big enough to find somewhere else else to live so you move and you settle and you become independent the other model of course this is the one that really i suspect is what upsets us is the other model like rome where you become uh extremely predatory you attack the sabines and you take their women you attack the etruscans and you gradually expand and eventually you end up exploiting a weaker nation and then you which model were we and we are a mix of both precisely we've got places like canada and australia and indeed america i suppose you could say where in a sense the the the local population was not big enough to resist but look you mentioned this trailer look at the the genocide of the tasmanian people what we did the aboriginals and maoris and look at the look at the atrocities do they not outweigh any good that may have come from i mean look i mean you know the it's a hall of shame charles the the bengal famine 1769-73 under the aegis of the east india company that 10 million people died because of uh willful incompetence massacres that amritsar and and i mean atrocities in kenya relatively recently how can we be in any way proud i think by today's standards we cannot today's stance but nevertheless what we have to do when we actually look at it particularly as a historian we have to set in some kind of context yeah and if we talk about british india we have to say what was that before the british came what was in other parts of the world when the british were there and what legacy did they leave and really it's there that we can pick out what to me are straws because my family they deeply involved in british india um you know my father was one of the last of the of the civil service to to to uh to rule over india i actually i'm a child of the empire i saw it in action and i saw in a sense the best to it because here i saw one man my memories of him are very strong sitting on the veranda as it were dispensing justice paternalistic uh you called might call it dictatorial impartial justice on a model that seemed to work very well but he but as i said that is the good aspect but of course there are other aspects too there are and we shall explore at both sides of the imperial coin as we proceed dr anita gosh it's interesting and what charles says there is interesting it's all about the context and perhaps we are rather value-led when we look at the past and value-led history is bad history there were atrocities there were appalling things what were the good things well the good things um were also there and like charles i agree it is it's it's hard to do draw any line there we are we are we are organized in the form of a debate today so we are encouraged to take sides no i don't listen listen you can agree with each other that's fine we're looking for a genuine enlightenment but uh in in terms of the good things uh uh i think um the the infrastructure that was left behind by the british in india which were built for reasons of exploitation for reasons of extraction of resources no altruism no altruism there whatsoever one of the byproducts i think is the infrastructure that was left behind of the empire which you could say gave india an added benefit in 1947 which propelled us into into the modern age but i see that as a byproduct of empire it isn't as if it was put in place there for the good of the people i mean the railways for instance which are very often cited as you know one of the best things that the british left behind you know they were there for the extraction of resources if you look at the way the railways were planned in the 19th century they were directly connecting the ports to the hinterlands that was the sole purpose they were not connecting cities they were not connecting towns they were not connecting people to pilgrimage centers where people would have loved to go to but they were built in a strategic way functioning as uh arteries of extraction when you look back as brilliant exploitation when you look back as a british indian are you um angry yes i am what are you most angry about um the way empire functioned the way it was set up it was a hugely unequal power structure a sovereign state went in to invade another sovereign state by virtue of its military might by virtue of its economic power and that fundamentally was unfair and everything else that emerges out of that is a direct a result of that process so at the at the moment the moment at which you know historians have uh as i'm sure some of our my colleagues would know historians have called this the absent-minded empire it was not an absent-minded empire people went in knowing what they wanted it was it was very well structured very well organized otherwise how could a handful of people from millions of miles away construct such an effective system uh which was the british empire in india david vance what are you proud of well i am proud of the british empire and i think just if you look at it in in the general context of in 1897 i think the year of queen victoria's silver jubilee britain controlled about 25 of the world what a remarkable achievement for these little islands and the fact is that were this an audience of italians celebrating the roman empire or an audience of spanish celebra they would be proud of their empire but we're not supposed to be i think is there anything you're ashamed of from a night from a 2016 perspective lots but as you you just said nikki that you know if you're going to have revisionist history that's very bad history at the time in the moment the british empire uh achieved lots of good and it leaves legacies which bring lots of good and that needs to be said loud and clear and we should you know the the revisionist argument trying to apply our standards in 2016 to things that happened hundreds of years ago in my mind is folly oh enjoy no people horrified at the time about many of these crimes and you know to give an example ireland that half its population either died or fled because of the potato famine in the 19th century uh whether it be there's a brilliant book by a guy called mike davis called late victorian holocaust and it it looks at how when tens of millions of indians were starving to death in the middle of the 19th century the british were exporting grain and leaving them to starve these are crimes of historical proportions and what i'm frustrated about this debate is we talk about the you know we have so much actually to be proud of in our history that we don't talk about like the people who fought for our rights and freedoms the people who fought for the right to vote for the welfare state against racism against homophobia uh for trade union rights workers rights that's a history we should be proud of not a history of subjugating the world and invading it
don't going into other people's countries taking their resources subjugating them very often dehumanizing them and very often killing them yeah yes empires rise and empires fall no empire to the best of my knowledge has been ever perfect none of them has provided utopia there's plenty like the soviet empire for example that have provided nothing but the the the genocide of millions of people i think as empires go the british empire was generally speaking reasonably benign and i think to characterize it in the way that you say oh and for example ignoring the fact that were it not for the the royal navy with the slave trade have ended well it's funny you should say that because of truth charles allen actually i'll tell you what i'll save you charles allen because anandita i saw you a couple of times wanted to come back in you were talking about value system and i think that's absolutely essential in our sitting in judgment of our empire today and like you said you know what was going on then in in in in in the late 19th century in in africa you know with the mama massacres and everything these these are contemporary concerns of those times where this is where we need to make a distinction between the roman empire and the british empire post enlightenment you know given this is the post-humanist period you know we're talking of an age of liberalism we're talking from an age of humanism how could empire be justified even by those contemporary standards so this is not a 21st century inflection of our values onto the empire in those days but by contemporary standards this is post-humanism can i talk about it charles you can and there's a lady right behind you are you are you deferring yes of course i am i'll be with you right up good morning well the values and truth remains truth whether it's in 18th century or 21st century one human should not exploit another human full stop so whether it happened in 18th century 19th century or today so i would say that's an absolute truth it is an absolute truth yeah but charles charles you know um isn't empire the default position of history we are all we are all uh you know the legacy of some empire everyone on the planet is we have the roman empire venetian empire the the the arab empire the slave trade and the islamic empire i mean on it goes should we be beating ourselves up about this obviously if you look at history it is essentially the exploitation of man by man yeah the party humans are strong so really you have a question of what you know what imperatives now if i can if i can just look at the 18th century which is when the british come onto the map in india now we have two three empires essentially we have our angseb the last of the mughal emperors now he tries to rule india with one standard law which actually happens to be sharia he brings in a whole series of rules which essentially uh discriminate against the hindus now the other model we have are the sikhs now the sikhs under ranjit singh are trying again they're essentially nevertheless a predatory empire they're expanding and they again have another model which essentially draws on an even earlier system which is the caste system the cast system now i seeks would disagree with me i suspect when i do this
we have the hindu model the hindu model is deeply racist did we exploit the caste system or did we try what i'm saying is that when the brits come in the british do try and have the idea that the law applies to all equally okay so this is a new model in the indian context and that there are advantages in that which is today to this day the indian penal code is developed by macaulay in the 1830s and it just still functions today all right guys you're coming here andre i'll be right with you i mentioned the car system there and you sort of were agreeing with the as i posited uh the the fact that it was exploited by the british uh ruling elite jagras first of all what's your when you look back at the british empire what what do you think what are your feelings well i grew up in india till i was about 11. and i can tell you that just coming back to the point there the fact is that uh now a lot of the voices that were unheard are coming out into the form so when we look back now it's from from a balanced more balanced viewpoint we can look back and hear the voice of those that were actually exploited and we can realize actually you know it wasn't so good and here what we're seeing now is that the propaganda of the british government is now you know the power back then was so powerful when they were when they were before every movie they'd have like you know these cheering natives thanking the british empire and it was all designed to make people here feel good that actually this was a force for good and that that that viewpoint has endured even though it wasn't real even though the people didn't want to be exploited and many many indians fight fought against the british to get them out of india but that viewpoint was kept quiet and the point that was sold to the british public here was that this is an empire that is actually designed to as a force for good and what i find worst about this is that that viewpoint now looking back 100 years later and you're hearing about all the exploitation all the murders and we can still sit there thinking oh no there must be something good about it i think it's kind of this is fake it doesn't come it's not real in reality the people never wanted to be exploited many many great nations were destroyed it's not mitigatedly negative there are no there's not a case of because you hear this a lot of mixed feelings love hate you know there may be something good about um getting shot in the back but you know and you might say well some good came up now we can struggle we can look around for a few straws here and there and say well you know we had a benign rule or you know that we made some railways but in reality it was a very exploitative system dr lavani cartalavan you wouldn't come back it was during the british rule when all the cars cultures and the races really just worked together for the first time in five thousand years it goes back the the heart system because of the president the first time in the british rule they worked together in the army all the untouchables and then everybody worked and ran for the first time so was the railways railways again hundreds of thousands both most boston telegraph hundreds of thousands work together there's no problem it was actually the first time in the also because they were india was a conglomerate of many kingdoms and that's the british worked out together and then time took time to collect put them out together and conquered other things so a sense of nationhood almost was in india was actually it was british you created india there was no india before out of conglomerate of many kingdoms they brought midway india and that was a good thing yes can i ask you as well do you do you think can i ask you doctor do you think and you do hear this sometimes and it's a it's a contentious thing but you read it and you hear it when people say ultimately uh in terms of social progress uh the british empire in india was a civilizing mission do you believe that it certainly was it was most certainly most likely destroyed i'll let you come back in a second i'll let you come back in a second just explain what you mean look here certainly he should know better than anybody else he's sick you know but i don't know what he what he's saying but let me tell you it was first time first time the the burning of uh the sati with the waiters with husbands by right and they were thousand years there were many things not one but one thing ever bothered to do anything about it everybody stopped it but stopped it and not only just british but the british company stopped it company took a great risk by indulging into social uh matters you know but the kings did not bother before and this is the point that that in black void is actually wrong it's a more you have to have a more nuanced view david we did let me just sorry i'll i'll get jagras to come back in because is extremely exercised lawrence in a second david i will let you come back my goodness everyone wants to speak to me
too yeah there's a lot of social reforms you know including the the infantry side if if the girl is born the british stopped in fantasy i stopped it it was banned you know so a lot of things and that the most of all people should appreciate more should be mr thing you know are these inconvenient truths these uh these civilizing influences and examples of social progress i think what we're seeing here is somebody a mindset which is basically the colonial mindset where when people who have been programmed to believe that people are coming here to exploit you for your own good and they don't they look past the exploitation and they think oh well they gave us a few things let me just go back to all those two points that i raised about sati and about female infanticide well firstly the guru's banned that so what we're seeing is that the the empire that the british that there's the sikhs built the law for every sikh and i'll take issue with that for days for a sick it was totally against the law something made by the gurus in the 17th century to ever have sati or to have ever have in female infanticide um and issues like this make me think that actually we had a very high culture um and then we were told oh your culture was actually terrible in fact it was amazing the sikh empire never had any capital punishment so we had an empire that was so talented and yet nobody
no he was he was the king of the sikh empire but he was not seen as an exemplary sick he was punished by the sikh authorities themselves he was pulled to be whipped by the sikh empire in amritsar just kind of got you clarified and andrea i've got you you know i'm coming i'm coming but just clarify what you're saying but i'm just saying if you go to lahore there you will see the imprints of all the wives of ranjit singh who when he died when he died had to be cremated on his funeral power now that does not actually they chose to be just to make that point i've tried the history they chose to be chosen but listen we're not here saying that we're not judging you you're defending seekerism as being anticipated so sikhi ism versus registering are two very different things
we're into a very very rich seam with this debate i feel laurence reese um well first of all you launched james i do make a party first of all we seem to be examining the tree rather than having a look at the forest we've got odd incidents of the injustice here a hospital opened here so on i think take us into the context to come yeah the whole empire i take to be the forest and i think we put it in context during the 18th and 19th century there are two several revolutions in europe an intellectual a scientific and an industrial and they give europe what i might call western europe certainly a preponderance of power at the same time there is in europe an enlightened movement to say we should share these things with other people and if you like when the first banal example perhaps but the first cinema opens in india in 1896 this is a very simple example of the sharing of knowledge now that is quite important it's quite essential the fact that there were a lot of cads and scoundrels and rascals running this empire is certain we will all agree on that there are also men of virtue and integrity and honesty of course and i think we should look in that general position of the empire is transforming the world and quite an amazing transformation ultimately a force for good i think a force for good but there were some villains hanging around yes there are in all human institutions yeah indeed so an engine an engine have changed there is a phrase that the the sun never set on the british empire because the almighty couldn't trust what the british would get up to in the dark there was it was certainly a playground for many uh femi andrew one second but family's trying to come in here you you've been responsible for the campaign to get rid of the cecil rhodes statue do you beg your pardon andrew but i i will be with you what would you say so we had to join us we had a bit of talk about the instrumental instrumentalization of the um caster system in india in the british colonial rule the british raj was actually a model for the use of the house of fulanis in northern nigeria an indirect rule there the british right was the was the model for a lot of what happened later in the process of colonization you mentioned that there are legacies of empire i would say the darfur conflict and the recent civil war in sudan is a legacy of the fact that you split the arab north and the black african south into two segments and developed the north whilst leaving the south and the british are entirely responsible for that i'd say that the british are largely responsible before there was there was conflict in sudan before the british came there was not racial conflict there was conflict but it was not as heavily along racial lines now there are i thought the northern parts of the sudan were preying on the south in the sudanese slave trade which general gordon helped destroy relied on the north the islamic north taking people from the tribal region to the south and selling them into egypt there are three segments you have animist and christian black africans in the south you have in the middle muslim black africans and you have the north arab muslims and it was a muslim animist conflict mainly before the imposition of christianity in the south and the kind of but people make their own decisions to to rape and to pillage and exploit whether that's the british they don't make their own people people people make that like this is the same argument of the fact that there's so much crime in um black america is due to the fact that there are primordial tensions for these it's not it's socioeconomic and structural inequality and in the same way so the gendered militia which i'm saying it's not our fault well no if you if you look at um most um conflict in in africa at the moment and you look at most um ethnic conflict a lot of it is due to um poverty a lot of it is due to people
a lot of poke haram comes from our majority schools which are impoverished schools in northern nigeria where hundreds of kids have to go out and beg i mean i've been to kaduna and seeing them myself so the rape of resources and resources drawing on those straight lines on the map hey david vance do you want to come back in here for a bit about that andrea well i mean just to revert back to what we have been talking about a couple of minutes ago it did take the british empire to stop the burning of widows in india and whilst we talk about so many other things that was a clear dramatic demonstrable advance of civilization in that part of the world and had it not been for britain it wouldn't have happened andrea yeah i'm i saw it so long before coming thank you yeah going back to this whole thing around civilizing mission um i think what we have to understand is that even in the 19th century the british felt they had to justify what they were doing because it was known to be inherently wrong so the emphasis on things like the abolition of sati and i'm not going to defend burning widows for a second and i'm not sorry that they abolished it and i have problems with the idea of voluntary sati so i'm not i'm not defending
then that there were there were good people there there were noble-minded people there because humans are you know we're complex creatures who saw this and thought this is wrong and who in very very good faith sought to and succeeded in abolishing it do you give those people i absolutely would give those people credit of course in any place in any time there are good people and bad people and there are people who are working from good intentions what they believe to be good intentions at the time and also those who are willing to sort of undertake nefarious acts to personally profit or profit the nation of course there's good and bad rose in just one second to talk about the spread of religion i don't i don't think that we can take a few examples of civilizing mission i mean sati affected maybe 500 widows a year there are thousands of pages thousands of pages of parliamentary papers on them none at all on hundreds of thousands of people who died of famine professional civilization yes yeah yeah i i think it is it is far far more to be appreciated that the authority who stopped it was a company and company was solely responsible to directors
to do what the kings could not dare to do in india before and they did it to courage to do it this is it's a very great very great achievement it's really much it's not just normally stopped you know an early manifestation they were advancing globalization yeah they were strongly advised advice what you're seeing here is the best of best of british values and we can't say that britain has no good values army yeah i spent four years i believed in british values yeah i do think that the current britain we're living in now does have at the best very good enlightened values that is not to say that we look back in india and and and find a few little good things that we did and then say well the whole thing must have been good the reality is they did the good things they did i don't know where to start from you know there's so many one after other railway was i have a 20 chapter book of doing good there is only one the rest is it comes about 20 one after other now you see judiciary what what judiciary was before and the judiciary civic society judiciary system the universe university in india was built by british empress of india queen victoria yeah she never went there did she
okay listen everyone listen everyone um femi mentioned the religious there in in sudan animism and islam and christianity let's talk i'm sorry
uh it brings us actually on nicely to talking about religion and uh the missing missionary position if you like uh spreading i wish i hadn't said that spread spreading spreading the word spreading the the the good word of the of the lord that wasn't a good thing though was it you were you were destroying people's cultures i'm not saying you were rose but people's cultures were destroyed absolutely i would agree with that entirely and as a christian i want to say yes to christianity but at the same time recognizing that along with christianity people brought their own culture with them and of course you know people had their own religions where they were and the the audacity of the british empire to think that we know what is right and you know yours is no longer important or valuable
but you know there was health and education some of the the longest serving establishments in terms of education and health were brought through the christian medium there so it is not so much another cure its egg whatever you may call it but the reality is we cannot just say i personally with my hand and my heart cannot say that i am proud of the british empire because it and i'm not just looking at it through rose tinted lens as it were as it were i i really do believe that some awful things were done and you mentioned about um the the british demolishing slavery they they didn't it was the people who were being enslaved who were making slavery unworkable
i'm afraid what that does is that that simply uh contradicts the the fact that the british navy was the instrument to ensure that the slave trade was eventually it's a matter of historical fact how can you deny history let's
the navy actually took africans and indentured them on the caribbean to work just like slate but that's a bad thing they also took many back to africa again to endure poverty and trouble so in fact it wasn't a good thing that the navy did not at all don't believe that brother so had it so you would you think that had the royal navy not sought to stop the slave trade it would have magically no they didn't no no no no no they actually encouraged it in the sense of using those same africans to do what the planters wanted well hence the point hence of course the the the jamaican rebellion which was some years after because of the disappointment that emancipation had not made a difference to their lives and that was very brutally put down when was it it was the 1865 65
uh promote this image of uh some utopian british empire and then talking about a soviet dystopia the uh caribbean was a dystopia for the caribbean people the africans who were transported as german said and you're trying to present this position about the navy cancelling slavery say who stopped slavery it was the africans who for hundreds of years in the caribbean rebelled violently against their own gods at the same time granted there were a lot of people in the uk who fought for abolition as well but don't visit this position because from the early from the late 1500s until 1833 there was that forced migration of 20 million people plus all of their descendants forced dehumanization rape and movement of culture and eradication of culture for you to then try and say oh the navy stopped it it's frankly historically disingenuous well i can die from that yeah about the navy point the french was of the early 19th century when we were fighting the french it was partly just just an excuse to attack french ships okay we've abolished slavery the people have abolished slavery how can we attack the french i know the french who yes granted it was your other europeans who were transporting slaves across and who canceled their own slave trades after and excuse them to attack friendships because when we're at peace with the french we can't just attack them but since we don't like slavery anymore we can attack any ship flying french colours you read the historical parliamentary papers the excuse essentially let's attack the french because they're we're in a time of peace but they're carrying the flag so don't try and posit the navy as this great humanization force when it was that same navy who enforced that policy of forced migration of people for 350 years prior but i'm not suggesting excuse me do you want to come sit in the front row
i think we need to put this in context we have to also understand that while all this debate about abolishing was going on 40 of the contemporary state state budget was given to former slave owners as as as compensation 40 of the contemporary state budget that much amount of money was at stake here that was given over to the slave owners why did they need to be pacified why did they need to be paid compensation for exploiting people's lives well of course it wasn't impossible i mean i mean somewhere at the end of the the slave trade is it's like going on a killing spree and then saying i don't like killing anymore you won't pat him on the back foot would you but the one i just wanted to bring that point about cinemas which i thought was quite a curious point because it is possible to have cultural exchange and to share culture and ideas without conquering much of the world and inflicting famines which
is this argument that somehow that again which is we're applying 21st century standards to the past in the 1950s there was the marijuana uprising in kenya against british rule and the british empire responded brutally killed thousands of people here wasn't it ah that there were people i'm just making this point people spoke up against it do you know who one of them was that well-known lefty enoch powell who condemned the british brutality in kenya the point i'm making is this there were people there were people who stood up against this brutality and it is a disservice and a smear on those people at the time who fought for the freedom of people to say that they did not do so and we're just applying this the broader point here the broader point here which some don't seem to seem to have rather overlooked this no one's arguing that the british empire was a model a utopian model of empire there never has been a utopian model of empire let me finish my point there's never been a utopian model of empire the very fact that the british empire did contribute towards the in the in the mid 18th century towards the stopping of the slave trade shows that it was a more enlightened empire than many other ones that existed but you're not here to whinge about that you agree with that i think i think the arab empire was far more brutal yeah i want to make just one point though the thing with the arab empire because the sikh suffered from both the british empire and the arab empire yeah the thing with the arab empire that sikhs knew was is that these are enemies we're going to fight them with the british empire it was it was a bit more nuanced how they tried to do was it they tried to change the sikh religion so the arabs never really tried to change the secret religion and try to twist it to suit them it was just straight out it was clear enemies with the british it was very much a case of take a religion which was very independent very free very freedom loving and try and convert that into something which you can use for your own benefit convince these people to join the british army convince them that it's for their own good and then use them to then subjugate other indians
they were far more insidious insidious yeah exactly lawrence um let's talk about decolonization there's things i want to return to as well you know the christianization as well because that's left it's when we come on to talk about legacies that's left some people argue some very negative legacies and it's tearing apart the anglican communion at the moment with very conservative christianity homophobia rife in the west indies and in africa jamaica but lawrence let's talk about decolonization and generally those you know sitting down in those straight lines drawn on the map in africa and no understanding of tribal or ethnic complexities in that continent i mean i suppose you know empires have been historically rather short on foresight but we made some terrible mistakes there didn't we um well i'm not sure african states no let's think of it if there were how many african states are fighting boundary wars at the moment quite a few actually you have a lot of interest well then they will fight them but let's forget about the boundaries i think that that's slightly irrelevant what is relevant is that in the british empire between 1939-1945 the british government asked for the assistance of the subjects of empire to fight the second world war and this generated a powerful sense of reciprocity uh a large number well i think indians and africans knew what hitler and mussolini had in store for them it was very nasty so they fought and at the end of the war in 1945 a lot thousands upon tens of thousands of them in the french as well as the british empire came home and asked the question we have risked our lives in a fight which we have been told and rightly so i believe was a morally good cause what do we have in return we have been fighting a war for freedom uh the three for the freedoms of president franklin roosevelt's uh the atlantic charter what share are we going to get of the spoils of this war and i think that's the first thing in the background to decolonization thousands and thousands of africans with an educated elite and ex-soldiers were asking the question um this freedom we fought for for five years when is it coming to us and the british government turned round and said well i think we've got to consider decolonization uh in 45 labour government comes to power promising in india no money so we liked them yes they won it and it was a manifesto the labor said we will give independence to india salon and burma and this was in the labor manifesto and of course it came about in 1947. they go further into saying this will be extended to africa no one could work out quite what the timetable will be the 1990s was given until 1950 and then something else happens in 1945 and i'll cut off here we have the beginning of a cold war yes in which newly independent countries are going to find that the soviet union and the united states are competing for them they are coming along and saying join us vote for us in the united nations we will help you and to finish 1954 an african ruler of an independent country uh
wants weapons and he asks khrushchev for weapons khrushchev says i will give you mig fighters i will give you tanks i will make egypt strong to fight in this case uh israel but also to resist any encroachments by britain and then you have africa decolonizing at the same time as the soviet union and the united states are looking for world power and confronting each other and so we're rather uh irrelevant uh well britain does become irrelevant yeah but and interestingly of course nasser there are there are arguments uh well-sourced arguments that that secular regime of nasa the reaction to it has led to many of the seeds of islamism and the problems we have there one thing leads to another basically can i ask you because you've been trying to come back in anandita um if you were if we talk about 4647 the uh uh india's uh freedom if you were to have to drawn uh to draw a mat to draw a line on the map and to have done it better what would you have done
that's what we're looking for well i certainly would have taken more than two weeks to draw that body
uh i i i i think you know this question isn't it it is it is um so if if i can slightly uh evade that question and come come to another there's so many things just been bandied about in this debate that i want to get back to one is uh you know the idea that britain gave india independence in 1947 is a myth i think i think we need to get over that so so uh you know this also all the civilizing that we had been doing for all this period you know we did all this great great good to the people and this was the time when we felt that india was right to be uh handed over its its freedom and and we left it didn't work like that britain was in a terrible mess in the post-war situation um and it might have been in the labor manifesto for obvious reasons but it was also a question of this was becoming a very expensive colony to maintain it just could not have happened the congress showed itself as downright you know non-cooperative during the second world war and this was the last straw this was the time when they were absolutely sure that no more kind of cooperative talks could go on between themselves and and britain so from from the point of view of the indian freedom struggle it had reached its its its head as well so you know this had to be solved so it was internal pressure as well so it wasn't just the war and all the aspirations for liberation that had been you know kind of suddenly uh sparked alive in people that this led to you know this is a this is a freedom struggle that goes back to 1885 it isn't suddenly the second world war which is creating all these aspirations
okay can i can i just quickly finish so you know that that is one myth we we should we should get over and and i i if i can return to what dr lalvani was saying earlier on the idea again that the nation itself was a gift of britain to india does not absolutely hold true at all it wasn't western education it wasn't railways it wasn't the civilizing mission that did all of this but it was the presence of the british in india it was the anti-colonial nature of the struggle that brought india together so the british contributed to the indian nation but by just being there and being what they were which was an oppressive colonial regime but yeah let's let's talk about legacy as well not just decolonization but legacy of for example in africa we paved the way to apartheid didn't we david vance many of the femi touched on this many of the problems in africa today are down to uh how we behaved what we did should we hide our our um heads in shame because no i i don't think that the problems today right now today in africa our attitudes to race can be can be laid at the heart at the door of an empire long since gone nikki i mean it's time we people have to accept responsibility for themselves in their own independence people today are still suffering because of the traits of the slave trade aren't they which which of course is being carried out by by other uh rising empires such as for example some of the uh in terms of the islamic empires that we see cropping up no we cannot be carrying the consistent guilt over everything that isn't perfect in every part of the world you know we weren't a perfect empire i've not said that we were did we make mistakes yes we did but we've done good and as well regards africa i would simply raise this one final point when uh for example zambia zambia uh whenever it was part of the british empire uh and we ruled and governed in it the average zambian uh had an income of about one-seventh of what we had here all these years later what do they have 1 27th of the income we have that whose fault is that we've gone who's responsible
i don't think you can separate as being the fifth richest country in the world from our colonial past
secondly there's a few points i want to make first one is on owen and what he said about the mao mao insurrection we should keep talking about this civilizing mission um how is bringing civilization to a culture systematic internment camps of 1.5 million people rape anal rape of men with snakes and scorpions and knives you have you have you have women and pregnant women shot you have you have kids um when the british went to um australia are there atrocities in all that other atrocities in all empires there are trustees in the french empire there are trustees in the building but they were not attracted because human beings these people were not writing about liberalism at the time and freedom there are atrocities in all empires but yes that there are um but not that not all empires call themselves civilizing missions um well moving but yeah everyone else is
you mentioned um how many wars are there in africa at the moment in a kind of flippant way the british media does nothing to cover the congo civil war the biggest war since world war ii it doesn't look at it the british media did not look at the angolan war which went on even though it was not a british x colony no but it went on for 40 odd years which is two-thirds of the extent to which some of the last colonies were and then you're they're saying it's not that long ago this is 60 years is in is not a um it's not a very long time long term the great span of history in the greatest benefits we haven't heard from you for a while in a second we're going to talk about legacy charles i think there's an awful tendency to simplify the fact is that we do not study this period uh and indeed in many countries which are newly liberated or been liberated from 1947 onwards and i use that word liberty it is a liberation um they do not study anything rather than the freedom movement india is a classic example if you ask people about what happened uh in the 19th century people will not know because this freedom movement has now become we need national myths we need founding myths and i can understand why every country whether it's kenya or if it needs to portray the freedom struggle in the most positive terms but it's it's all ambivalent there are there are nuances here which are being missed in the question of mauma for instance how many other tribes beyond the kikuyu got involved how much of that was actually about land grabbing by the kikuyu how much of that who were the victims other africans who were the main victims very few europeans actually got killed by the malmo so it's not simple black and white this is history my worry is that now we're getting a black and white history but there are so many nuances involved in this yeah and the great delight do you want nuances are the great delights of history aren't they let's talk about legacy you can come in without me even asking you a question i would like it's not necessarily to go away feeling guilty about the atrocities of the british empire what i want us to do however is to acknowledge that there were these major major issues that that is still that is still impacting on us today so for example by virtue for example of paying the slave owners and and giving nothing to those who are the victims of it have left people still in that victim mode by virtue of um taking away a people's culture um killing who they are still exists today and that is why the racism that exists in in our in our present time exists because we still think we are white we are great black you are not good enough but it's not this is gross can i just say something yes this is this is right it's the legacy we see this happening all over the world from upsets of one set of human beings towards another set of humans we see that we see the chinese empire the rape of resources in africa from the chinese empire at the moment there are still the american empire the chinese empire there will always be empires there will always be things yeah we are discussing the present which do you think it has a uniquely uh pernicious legacy because of the slave trade because of the racial aspect it it is there we cannot deny it is still it is still there why is it that our children today do not learn about um cultural things of their particular groups why is it only what is eurocentric or can we take upon ourselves a type of collective guilt people watching the you know today can should we feel guilty guilt is useless guilt is useful are we are we responsible in the way we speak christianity for homophobia i was listening to a documentary the other day about homophobia in jamaica and they were saying look you gave us the bible you gave us the truth and we believed it and all of a sudden you're telling us not to believe it well i i would agree that that is wrong i would never condone that but the point that i have are we responsible for it spreading those attitudes back in the 80s i think we did we did spread those and and we are reaping the legacy of it today so do you think the spreading of christianity was wrong therefore it's not so much about the spreading of christianity it's what we packaged it in but i just want to explain something simply those okay those there's very strong arguments that we are responsible for the spread of homophobia in spreading those attitudes but there have been generation after generation to change the penal codes and they haven't changed the penal codes so can we still put the blame on our door
i that is a very good question i think we are very much still under the the umbrella of it as it were of that painful time in history still very close to mcgregor audience audience yes you've had your hand up for so long and i've got i've been trying there's been a lot of talked this morning and i think the saddest thing should come every week yeah the saddest thing is i think i've seen this morning is the typical british way where the two sikhs have been arguing the most i find that interesting we talked about how the british went they were non-civilized let me tell you we had you just talked about the mughal empire preceding the british empire they were more than civilized they didn't need you to come in sati is not an islamic principle but let's modernize it as a young british pakistani muslim what we're talking about now angers me the most muslims are always told you don't integrate you're not involved black people are always told you're not good enough you're not smart enough there's something about your culture your criminals you need to follow this way of life the reality is the british empire is the biggest reason that racism exists today in this country when you have people like this on the front row who will always see black brown asian people as being below them we subjugated you we owned you at one stage we you can't get above you above your level how dare you get anywhere
one of the arguments you hear is that one of the positive legacies of the british empire is our multicultural society it's not working is it because there's a multiculturalism to an extent they always want to keep you at a level they don't want to progress so let's talk about what we do what do we do next well it's interesting in your intro you talked about indian pakistan being the jewel in the crown literally the jewel in the crown you've still got the jewel in your crown we wanted micro no in the queen's
it needs to be returned back to the people you stole it from i won't recreate it from anyone
there's a lot of use going on here
charles allen the korean charles allen should go back to the tribal people in golconda okay that's they're the ones who turn it up return it it certainly shouldn't go to lahore very few because it's gone through hundreds of rulers and conquerors over the centuries the idea that these little simple tokens that's not enough yeah it's not just let me go back there to that gentleman there you've you've been yeah you you good morning to you good morning hi well quick point yeah very quickly well i i just needed a minute uh what i want to say is i've heard some of the most preposterous comments today made by many panelists which one which one most of all mainly from this side but we started as an india with the nation nationhood was given by britain thank you yes but that was and then there were infrastructure that was laid whether it was indian indian penal code indian uh post office or indian railways indian army these were all central to the development of the the empire that the infrastructure was necessary so it was for their own needs as uh one of our panelists we we had that point out earlier well we haven't got a lot of time but what i'm what i'm coming to is the also the social engineering that we talked about earlier is was not given by the british it was by all the social engineers like raja ram mohan roy uh people like gandhi ambedkar they they they are the ones who did okay
i just think that point you made about race and racism is just is critical because obviously to justify empire people who were being colonized were dehumanized they had to be seen as inferior because you wouldn't possibly allow for that sort of barrier to be conducted against people you would see as being like yourself and that legacy scars our society today but just finally i do think the worry is i have are people going to watch this and go oh you will just custody in britain it's a big british anti-british hate fest and the truth is what frightens me is in our curriculum in schools across the country what we're not seeing is the history we should be proud of that i spoke about before people of all backgrounds and faiths freedoms are you proud of churchill i'm proud of the british war effort against the nazis of the people service people who went to as they say it's like he had racially supremacist attitudes he did yeah well of course the people who run the british would you like to take his stuff churchill would you like a statue in the long run i think having a statue of someone who called um who called he said indians were ghastly people with a ghastly religion the famine was their own fault because they bred like rabbits he said he said many things churchill is is is ultimately would you like to there's a statue i'm not going to make a comment on that because i'll be dragged through the daily mail tomorrow nonetheless nonetheless just to make your point on the um on the uh you said chinese rape of african resources as if shell was not a british dutch company it was not paying the nigerian government in we are now a 1990 society china and we can build we can build on it and go forward is that for you what is the positive legacy what can people look at and remember is there anything about the empire that still binds us together right i think commonwealth for me is a good thing and i am glad that you gave us cricket in that we and i'm talking with my caribbean hats on i gave you cricket yes and look what we're doing with it look how terrific we are but but i'm also glad that right here in britain we can be a truly we're not we're not fully there yet we need to work at it we need to work at better being being a better diverse and multi-ethnic multicultural society celebration there are three three enduring legacies that that we can be proud of we've left liberal we spread liberal capitalism around the world to the annoyance of some we shared a form of government which in many ways still continues and last but by no means least 450 million people speak english with and in some regards what what what a wonderful legacy as well so there's lots to be proud of we've heard lots of grievance gravens mongeri going on wait andre you have the very last word and it's a quick one well they only need to speak english today as the global lingua franca precisely because we did colonise half
listen we did a shakespeare special a few weeks ago but let's just you know when i speak to my kids i have to constantly tell them you've got to speak to elders with a bit more respect because english does not have that verb left anymore for adults which french has and it's not a good thing you know it's an achievement but it's not a great achievement it's actually a very negative immigration they we are here because we're finished rose we're finished rose the sun will never set on the big questions thank you very much for watching see you very soon
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