Periodically, those of us who study the British Empire run across an attempt, either by a colleague in the historical field, or popular writers, to resuscitate the British Empire as one of history’s “Good Things.” One of the latest comes from Richard Tombs, a British historian of France who took umbrage at, among other things, the British Labour Party’s promise in a recent election manifesto to “audit” the British Empire to better understand the relationship between colonial rule and the unstable politics of some of those parts of the world formerly ruled by Britain.
Tombs, who on the basis of his essay hasn’t read much scholarship generated in the past half century on the British Empire, decided that what was needed was an essay titled “In defence of the British Empire,” published in the Spectator.
Tombs gets quite a few facts wrong--more on this below--and uses some curious lines of logic to mount his defence of Britain’s multi-century experiment in governing vast swathes of the world without the consent of the governed.
One claim is that in Britain’s Empire, there were winners and losers. That is, some of the people over whom Britain governed benefited from the upending of older social and political relations, and the redirection of economic networks. This is true of most historical phenomena. And historians spend quite a bit of time examining the diverse experiences of colonialism, or the factors that motivated some people to cooperate with colonial rule. There is a whole swathe of scholarship--of which Tombs seems blissfully or perhaps willfully unaware--on “intermediaries.” But that hardly necessitates writing a “defence” of the British Empire. There were winners and losers in Nazi Germany, but you won’t find many people writing a “defence of fascism” for that reason. There were certainly people who benefited from the Atlantic Slave Trade, but you won’t find people who consider themselves to be serious historians writing a “defence of the Middle Passage.” Scholars study the complexities of these phenomena, but recognizing that they were complex doesn’t mean that we can’t also condemn them for the horrific violence at the heart of their project, or compel us to pen emotionally overwrought “defences” of them based more on a squealing dissatisfaction with the myth of “political correctness” than on actual knowledge of the phenomena in question.
Tomb’s other point is that, in the long run, Britain may not have benefited from having an empire. The British, he argues, may have spent more on maintaining their empire than they gained from it. This fits into a wider strand of apologist historical writing that argues that the British were bumbling, amateur colonizers; that empire was a project by do-gooders who were too piecemeal and hodgepodge in their efforts to have exploited anyone even if they wanted to.
It must firstly be said that if the British Empire was unprofitable, it was not for a want of trying. Britain fought wars to access mineral deposits or to support profitable drug-running operations. The British government provided compensation--painstakingly documented by historians--to former slave owners to ensure that introducing a modicum of justice (slavery generally gave way to other forms of unfreedom in the empire) didn’t affect the bottom line too badly. Colonial administrators expended huge effort seeking to map out the best ways to make colonies profitable. Colonial development, which Tombs pitches as a sign of British benevolence, had its origins in seeking to make the empire pay for its own exploitation.
Secondly, the “the Empire wasn’t very good at exploiting people” is not much of a defence. The fact that a burglar was only mediocre at his work, or that a murderer was inefficient in his mayhem, is highly unlikely to make the victims of said exploiters sympathetic. Tomb’s argument is akin to saying “the South may not have benefited in the long run from initiating secession and civil war in defence of slavery, so we must pen a defence of the Confederacy” or “Germans may not have benefited in the long run from embarking on the experiment in fascism with Hitler, so therefore we can’t condemn Nazism.”
Tombs then has the temerity to suggest that because some societies “asked” to join the British Empire, it can’t have been such a bad thing. I’m not quite sure what he’s referring to there, but it might be the protectorates, a particular category of colony in the Empire. To hear Tombs describe it, this world sounds like one of white fences, verdant lawns, and tea parties, where some people peered over their fence and saw how wonderful things were in neighboring British territory, and how fabulous life could be there, and so asked to pop on over to join the tea party, or to take down the fence so their grass could become as green. In reality, no instance I can think of where some territory’s leadership exercised agency in joining the Empire consisted of a free choice. The situation was generally more analogous to having your house broken into simultaneously by two burglars, the larger and better armed of whom says that if you ask the other one to clear out and accept his presence there, he won’t blow your brains out. Coercion was always essential to colonial conquest.
Similarly, Tombs cites the fact that colonial subjects fought for Britain in world wars as a sign that the empire was a grand experiment of harmonious anti-authoritarianism. This rose-tinted assessment ignores the massive and violent labour conscription during these wars, the deployment of colonial soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bargain that many colonial subjects believed themselves to be participating in when they signed up to fight for the empire. Many of them hoped that fighting for Britain would finally give them the equal status within the empire, so frequently promised in rhetoric, and so seldom delivered in reality. It also ignores the fact that many people resisted--peacefully or violently--having their co-subjects and populations being conscripted to fight for wars that had nothing to do with their own wellbeing. That Britain so resolutely refused to let the sacrifice of colonial soldiers during the wars transfer into the wellbeing that participation secured for soldiers from Britain itself was responsible for a new and more aggressive stage of anti-colonialism.
Tombs argues that because British taxpayers contributed to the upkeep of the Empire, it can’t have been too bad a thing, and claims that because Britain spent money on the “defence” of the empire, it wasn’t motivated by self-interest. The fact that imperial defence was so costly to Britain suggests that not all of the people living in its Empire were thrilled by the prospect, and that a good many of them spent a good deal of their time resisting forced incorporation into that Empire. There were moments during the Second World War when Churchill was more focused on keeping British soldiers in India to suppress anti-colonial resistance than on sending them anywhere to fight Nazis. You would hardly need to expend so much treasure and develop so many inventive forms of violence and coercion to police an empire of the willing.
Tombs’ narrative needs additional correcting. It is important to recall the sheer violence of the colonial conquest, which was actually genocidal in many places, the stout efforts of Liberal Party partisans in Australia’s History Wars notwithstanding. Tombs glosses over the example of the British theft of the Benin bronzes (he deplores the idea that they might be returned to Nigeria, from where they were plundered), suggesting it was a part of Britain’s campaign against the slave trade. But British accounts of the sack of Benin are blood-curdling in their detail of the violence and chaos the campaign embodied. Political leaders far from even remote association with the Atlantic Slave Trade--in southern and eastern Africa--and who had the temerity to resist British armed conquest were subjected to horrific violence, designed by its very brutality to shock opposition out of the system of its objects. And when it suited them, the British cooperated with agents of the slave trades they were ostensibly (by the late-19th century) committed to wiping out.
Among the destructive forces of colonialism were incidences of famine. Most famines in human history are man-made in one of two senses. Either in that people--inadvertently or otherwise--created the conditions for the absence of food. Or that the absence of food reached famine proportions because of deliberate political decisions made. The British Empire was culpable in this latter regard in famines in Ireland and India in at least three ways: in dismantling institutions for famine relief that existed in pre-colonial states; in prioritizing the supply of food to one part of its territories or the world over that part facing shortages; and in embracing during the nineteenth century a liberal political economy in which government foreswore the use of its redistributive capacities, and assumed that shortage would be rectified, if indeed it was in need of being rectified, by the all-knowing invisible hand of the market. The poor, in this formulation, were often regarded as deservingly so, by virtue of supposed social defects.
Tombs sings the praises of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, as part of a larger social democratic project, and claims that the history of these projects has been erased. This is simply untrue. The real issue may be that the histories of colonial development don’t fit well with the successes and generosity that Tombs assumes should populate them. Colonial development enterprises stemmed from several impetuses: to make the colonies more effectively pay for themselves; to make the colonies bolster a damaged British economy after two world wars; to create a space for social and scientific experimentation; and to pay some lip service to the rhetoric of trusteeship in a world where Britain’s Empire was subjected to greater international scrutiny.
Moreover, the colonial development of the interwar and postwar years is associated with what scholars call the ‘second colonial occupation.’ The changes in colonial governance and the developmentalism associated with them in the interwar years marked the deepest intrusion of colonial rule into the daily lives of colonized peoples. Colonial experts came into the bedroom, the hospital, the agricultural field, the family unit, the school, using coercive, illegitimate power to alter people’s lives without their consent. Often these interventions were based on totalizing claims about culture, landscapes, and society, utterly ignoring colonial subjects who farmed or fished or lived in the way they did based on an actual understanding of their social and ecological environments, and therefore failed spectacularly.
Predictably, Tombs cites the wonders of colonial infrastructure, but as actual scholarship on this infrastructure points out, it was built to service exploitative, extractive colonial economies. After decolonization, new nations had to expend enormous effort and seek new allies (to escape entanglements with intransigent British interests) for development in order to construct new infrastructure that allowed those nations to escape the logics of colonial infrastructure and build transportation networks--for goods and people--that reflected the actual economic needs of nations and the people inhabiting them. In cases where new governments proved slow to decolonize useless public transit infrastructure, local entrepreneurship, tolerated by national governments where it had been suppressed by colonial authorities, stepped into the breach.
There has long been a strand of pseudo-scholarship arguing that among Britain’s greatest gifts to its colonised people were the rule of law and forms of parliamentary governance. Such a claim rests on a dismal failure to understand what colonial governance actually looked like. Colonial rule in most parts of the British Empire was deeply authoritarian, divided by the mid-twentieth between a near dictatorial “Administration,” comprised of paternalistic generalists who ruled geographic fiefdoms backed by police and military might, and technical departments, which embodied aspirations of development, but were deeply intrusive, unaccountable to colonial subjects, and often saw Africa as a laboratory for cultural, social, agricultural, economic, and other forms of experimentation.
Democracy was slower to come to Britain itself than is often recognised, but Britons enjoyed far more democratic institutions than did people in their colonies, and Britons would not have been able to find the democratic features of their society in the authoritarian apparatus they bequeathed to colonies as they turned into nations. Emergency laws, state infrastructure primed to deploy violence, a mighty and penetrative executive, censorship apparatuses, winner-take-all ethnically-oriented politics, wide latitude for extralegal violence by the powerful, and contempt for the governed: these were the practises of statecraft and habits of official mind “gifted” by Britain to its colonies.
These were accompanied by the forms of violence pioneered in British and other colonial contexts. The systematic and deliberate use of torture, internment and concentration camps, the psychological violence of “rehabilitation”, forced villagization, aerial bombardment, and the logic of forced removals, and the segregation underpinning white supremacy, were all forms of coercion honed in colonial contexts. They were then transplanted between colonies, or even exported globally.
Indeed, it could be argued that from the late-nineteenth century onward, the British Empire helped to facilitate the emergence of an authoritarian international. Both within its empire and in its collaboration with other empires, Britain facilitated the globalization of authoritarian security services, intent on suppressing pro-democracy activists on multiple continents, and to disrupt the links that those activists increasingly sought to construct between the struggles of colonized and oppressed people in different parts of the world.
Tombs says that it’s “ideological” to say that the British Empire was exploitative. I’d say it’s accurate. It doesn’t require belief in a conspiracy of leftist elites intent on distorting real British history into ideological propaganda to prove as much. It simply requires reading the records that officials, settlers, and other agents of empire left behind. Historians can then--and they have, in contrast to Tombs’ rather pitiful characterization of scholarship--spill a great deal of ink exploring the reasons for that exploitative character, the wide cast of characters who benefited from the exploitation of others, the belief systems that underpinned it, the limitations to its exploitative character, or the ways in which the colonized as well as dissenters in British society resisted exploitation. The scholarship on the British Empire is vast and complex. [Tombs is an historian at a prestigious institution with one of the world’s best libraries at his fingertips, so I am not going to provide for him a bibliography, but if anyone reading this would like recommendations of scholarship dealing with any of these themes, I’d be happy to provide it.]
Tombs concludes by citing the following experience: "I remember after speaking at a school being approached by a sixth former of East-African Asian descent who told me she did not feel that her family fitted into British history. But, as I said to her, they are part of that history: she and her family saga embody one of its great themes." In that regard, at least, he is right--although not in the way that he thinks. The first South Asians living in East Africa during the colonial era were brought there to labour on the construction of a railway that was bulldozing its way through African societies alongside the violent conquest of their territory by British armed force. In many British colonies in Africa, South Asians were subjected to fierce discrimination, to the point that the activism that brought down the British Empire in India had its origins in anti-racist organizing in South Africa. But in the calculated manner of much of colonial rule, Asians in Africa were given an elevated status relative to Africans themselves, and sometimes used as a useful category of intermediaries.
After independence, to varying degrees in East Africa, Asians found themselves subjected to new forms of discrimination that grew from resentment of their favored if still-subordinate status under British rule. In some cases their decisions to depart East Africa were the result of vicious and violent persecution. In other cases they bridled at being asked to live equally with African neighbours. But when they arrived in Britain, they suffered persecution and discrimination anew, this time from the most pro-Empire elements in British society, now furious at being asked to "walk the walk", and angry that there was actually some danger of some element of their storybook Empire--based on equal, multi-ethnic societies--becoming real.
Above all, what Tombs’ schoolboy version of history does is to mask the reality that the British Empire was at every stage of its development based on a notion of hierarchy among peoples; a hierarchy which allowed some people to rule over others and to do things to them, their societies, their economies, their cultures, and their ecologies, without their consent, in ways that they couldn’t have done in most instances to people in metropolitan Britain. Sometimes the British Empire was about unclothed and unalloyed exploitation, without any attempt to mask this reality. Sometimes it was based on the ideas that Britain and British people were more developed (sometimes based on scientific racism, sometimes on social Darwinism) than other peoples, and thereby had rights and obligations to rule those people and decide their destinies. But in each of these cases it was based on the premise that might made right, and that some people should have--by social convention or by nature itself--power over others. That hardly seems like a project worth defending, although it is certainly worth one studying.
Tombs, who on the basis of his essay hasn’t read much scholarship generated in the past half century on the British Empire, decided that what was needed was an essay titled “In defence of the British Empire,” published in the Spectator.
Tombs gets quite a few facts wrong--more on this below--and uses some curious lines of logic to mount his defence of Britain’s multi-century experiment in governing vast swathes of the world without the consent of the governed.
One claim is that in Britain’s Empire, there were winners and losers. That is, some of the people over whom Britain governed benefited from the upending of older social and political relations, and the redirection of economic networks. This is true of most historical phenomena. And historians spend quite a bit of time examining the diverse experiences of colonialism, or the factors that motivated some people to cooperate with colonial rule. There is a whole swathe of scholarship--of which Tombs seems blissfully or perhaps willfully unaware--on “intermediaries.” But that hardly necessitates writing a “defence” of the British Empire. There were winners and losers in Nazi Germany, but you won’t find many people writing a “defence of fascism” for that reason. There were certainly people who benefited from the Atlantic Slave Trade, but you won’t find people who consider themselves to be serious historians writing a “defence of the Middle Passage.” Scholars study the complexities of these phenomena, but recognizing that they were complex doesn’t mean that we can’t also condemn them for the horrific violence at the heart of their project, or compel us to pen emotionally overwrought “defences” of them based more on a squealing dissatisfaction with the myth of “political correctness” than on actual knowledge of the phenomena in question.
Tomb’s other point is that, in the long run, Britain may not have benefited from having an empire. The British, he argues, may have spent more on maintaining their empire than they gained from it. This fits into a wider strand of apologist historical writing that argues that the British were bumbling, amateur colonizers; that empire was a project by do-gooders who were too piecemeal and hodgepodge in their efforts to have exploited anyone even if they wanted to.
It must firstly be said that if the British Empire was unprofitable, it was not for a want of trying. Britain fought wars to access mineral deposits or to support profitable drug-running operations. The British government provided compensation--painstakingly documented by historians--to former slave owners to ensure that introducing a modicum of justice (slavery generally gave way to other forms of unfreedom in the empire) didn’t affect the bottom line too badly. Colonial administrators expended huge effort seeking to map out the best ways to make colonies profitable. Colonial development, which Tombs pitches as a sign of British benevolence, had its origins in seeking to make the empire pay for its own exploitation.
Secondly, the “the Empire wasn’t very good at exploiting people” is not much of a defence. The fact that a burglar was only mediocre at his work, or that a murderer was inefficient in his mayhem, is highly unlikely to make the victims of said exploiters sympathetic. Tomb’s argument is akin to saying “the South may not have benefited in the long run from initiating secession and civil war in defence of slavery, so we must pen a defence of the Confederacy” or “Germans may not have benefited in the long run from embarking on the experiment in fascism with Hitler, so therefore we can’t condemn Nazism.”
Tombs then has the temerity to suggest that because some societies “asked” to join the British Empire, it can’t have been such a bad thing. I’m not quite sure what he’s referring to there, but it might be the protectorates, a particular category of colony in the Empire. To hear Tombs describe it, this world sounds like one of white fences, verdant lawns, and tea parties, where some people peered over their fence and saw how wonderful things were in neighboring British territory, and how fabulous life could be there, and so asked to pop on over to join the tea party, or to take down the fence so their grass could become as green. In reality, no instance I can think of where some territory’s leadership exercised agency in joining the Empire consisted of a free choice. The situation was generally more analogous to having your house broken into simultaneously by two burglars, the larger and better armed of whom says that if you ask the other one to clear out and accept his presence there, he won’t blow your brains out. Coercion was always essential to colonial conquest.
Similarly, Tombs cites the fact that colonial subjects fought for Britain in world wars as a sign that the empire was a grand experiment of harmonious anti-authoritarianism. This rose-tinted assessment ignores the massive and violent labour conscription during these wars, the deployment of colonial soldiers as cannon fodder, and the bargain that many colonial subjects believed themselves to be participating in when they signed up to fight for the empire. Many of them hoped that fighting for Britain would finally give them the equal status within the empire, so frequently promised in rhetoric, and so seldom delivered in reality. It also ignores the fact that many people resisted--peacefully or violently--having their co-subjects and populations being conscripted to fight for wars that had nothing to do with their own wellbeing. That Britain so resolutely refused to let the sacrifice of colonial soldiers during the wars transfer into the wellbeing that participation secured for soldiers from Britain itself was responsible for a new and more aggressive stage of anti-colonialism.
Tombs argues that because British taxpayers contributed to the upkeep of the Empire, it can’t have been too bad a thing, and claims that because Britain spent money on the “defence” of the empire, it wasn’t motivated by self-interest. The fact that imperial defence was so costly to Britain suggests that not all of the people living in its Empire were thrilled by the prospect, and that a good many of them spent a good deal of their time resisting forced incorporation into that Empire. There were moments during the Second World War when Churchill was more focused on keeping British soldiers in India to suppress anti-colonial resistance than on sending them anywhere to fight Nazis. You would hardly need to expend so much treasure and develop so many inventive forms of violence and coercion to police an empire of the willing.
Tombs’ narrative needs additional correcting. It is important to recall the sheer violence of the colonial conquest, which was actually genocidal in many places, the stout efforts of Liberal Party partisans in Australia’s History Wars notwithstanding. Tombs glosses over the example of the British theft of the Benin bronzes (he deplores the idea that they might be returned to Nigeria, from where they were plundered), suggesting it was a part of Britain’s campaign against the slave trade. But British accounts of the sack of Benin are blood-curdling in their detail of the violence and chaos the campaign embodied. Political leaders far from even remote association with the Atlantic Slave Trade--in southern and eastern Africa--and who had the temerity to resist British armed conquest were subjected to horrific violence, designed by its very brutality to shock opposition out of the system of its objects. And when it suited them, the British cooperated with agents of the slave trades they were ostensibly (by the late-19th century) committed to wiping out.
Among the destructive forces of colonialism were incidences of famine. Most famines in human history are man-made in one of two senses. Either in that people--inadvertently or otherwise--created the conditions for the absence of food. Or that the absence of food reached famine proportions because of deliberate political decisions made. The British Empire was culpable in this latter regard in famines in Ireland and India in at least three ways: in dismantling institutions for famine relief that existed in pre-colonial states; in prioritizing the supply of food to one part of its territories or the world over that part facing shortages; and in embracing during the nineteenth century a liberal political economy in which government foreswore the use of its redistributive capacities, and assumed that shortage would be rectified, if indeed it was in need of being rectified, by the all-knowing invisible hand of the market. The poor, in this formulation, were often regarded as deservingly so, by virtue of supposed social defects.
Tombs sings the praises of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, as part of a larger social democratic project, and claims that the history of these projects has been erased. This is simply untrue. The real issue may be that the histories of colonial development don’t fit well with the successes and generosity that Tombs assumes should populate them. Colonial development enterprises stemmed from several impetuses: to make the colonies more effectively pay for themselves; to make the colonies bolster a damaged British economy after two world wars; to create a space for social and scientific experimentation; and to pay some lip service to the rhetoric of trusteeship in a world where Britain’s Empire was subjected to greater international scrutiny.
Moreover, the colonial development of the interwar and postwar years is associated with what scholars call the ‘second colonial occupation.’ The changes in colonial governance and the developmentalism associated with them in the interwar years marked the deepest intrusion of colonial rule into the daily lives of colonized peoples. Colonial experts came into the bedroom, the hospital, the agricultural field, the family unit, the school, using coercive, illegitimate power to alter people’s lives without their consent. Often these interventions were based on totalizing claims about culture, landscapes, and society, utterly ignoring colonial subjects who farmed or fished or lived in the way they did based on an actual understanding of their social and ecological environments, and therefore failed spectacularly.
Predictably, Tombs cites the wonders of colonial infrastructure, but as actual scholarship on this infrastructure points out, it was built to service exploitative, extractive colonial economies. After decolonization, new nations had to expend enormous effort and seek new allies (to escape entanglements with intransigent British interests) for development in order to construct new infrastructure that allowed those nations to escape the logics of colonial infrastructure and build transportation networks--for goods and people--that reflected the actual economic needs of nations and the people inhabiting them. In cases where new governments proved slow to decolonize useless public transit infrastructure, local entrepreneurship, tolerated by national governments where it had been suppressed by colonial authorities, stepped into the breach.
There has long been a strand of pseudo-scholarship arguing that among Britain’s greatest gifts to its colonised people were the rule of law and forms of parliamentary governance. Such a claim rests on a dismal failure to understand what colonial governance actually looked like. Colonial rule in most parts of the British Empire was deeply authoritarian, divided by the mid-twentieth between a near dictatorial “Administration,” comprised of paternalistic generalists who ruled geographic fiefdoms backed by police and military might, and technical departments, which embodied aspirations of development, but were deeply intrusive, unaccountable to colonial subjects, and often saw Africa as a laboratory for cultural, social, agricultural, economic, and other forms of experimentation.
Democracy was slower to come to Britain itself than is often recognised, but Britons enjoyed far more democratic institutions than did people in their colonies, and Britons would not have been able to find the democratic features of their society in the authoritarian apparatus they bequeathed to colonies as they turned into nations. Emergency laws, state infrastructure primed to deploy violence, a mighty and penetrative executive, censorship apparatuses, winner-take-all ethnically-oriented politics, wide latitude for extralegal violence by the powerful, and contempt for the governed: these were the practises of statecraft and habits of official mind “gifted” by Britain to its colonies.
These were accompanied by the forms of violence pioneered in British and other colonial contexts. The systematic and deliberate use of torture, internment and concentration camps, the psychological violence of “rehabilitation”, forced villagization, aerial bombardment, and the logic of forced removals, and the segregation underpinning white supremacy, were all forms of coercion honed in colonial contexts. They were then transplanted between colonies, or even exported globally.
Indeed, it could be argued that from the late-nineteenth century onward, the British Empire helped to facilitate the emergence of an authoritarian international. Both within its empire and in its collaboration with other empires, Britain facilitated the globalization of authoritarian security services, intent on suppressing pro-democracy activists on multiple continents, and to disrupt the links that those activists increasingly sought to construct between the struggles of colonized and oppressed people in different parts of the world.
Tombs says that it’s “ideological” to say that the British Empire was exploitative. I’d say it’s accurate. It doesn’t require belief in a conspiracy of leftist elites intent on distorting real British history into ideological propaganda to prove as much. It simply requires reading the records that officials, settlers, and other agents of empire left behind. Historians can then--and they have, in contrast to Tombs’ rather pitiful characterization of scholarship--spill a great deal of ink exploring the reasons for that exploitative character, the wide cast of characters who benefited from the exploitation of others, the belief systems that underpinned it, the limitations to its exploitative character, or the ways in which the colonized as well as dissenters in British society resisted exploitation. The scholarship on the British Empire is vast and complex. [Tombs is an historian at a prestigious institution with one of the world’s best libraries at his fingertips, so I am not going to provide for him a bibliography, but if anyone reading this would like recommendations of scholarship dealing with any of these themes, I’d be happy to provide it.]
Tombs concludes by citing the following experience: "I remember after speaking at a school being approached by a sixth former of East-African Asian descent who told me she did not feel that her family fitted into British history. But, as I said to her, they are part of that history: she and her family saga embody one of its great themes." In that regard, at least, he is right--although not in the way that he thinks. The first South Asians living in East Africa during the colonial era were brought there to labour on the construction of a railway that was bulldozing its way through African societies alongside the violent conquest of their territory by British armed force. In many British colonies in Africa, South Asians were subjected to fierce discrimination, to the point that the activism that brought down the British Empire in India had its origins in anti-racist organizing in South Africa. But in the calculated manner of much of colonial rule, Asians in Africa were given an elevated status relative to Africans themselves, and sometimes used as a useful category of intermediaries.
After independence, to varying degrees in East Africa, Asians found themselves subjected to new forms of discrimination that grew from resentment of their favored if still-subordinate status under British rule. In some cases their decisions to depart East Africa were the result of vicious and violent persecution. In other cases they bridled at being asked to live equally with African neighbours. But when they arrived in Britain, they suffered persecution and discrimination anew, this time from the most pro-Empire elements in British society, now furious at being asked to "walk the walk", and angry that there was actually some danger of some element of their storybook Empire--based on equal, multi-ethnic societies--becoming real.
Above all, what Tombs’ schoolboy version of history does is to mask the reality that the British Empire was at every stage of its development based on a notion of hierarchy among peoples; a hierarchy which allowed some people to rule over others and to do things to them, their societies, their economies, their cultures, and their ecologies, without their consent, in ways that they couldn’t have done in most instances to people in metropolitan Britain. Sometimes the British Empire was about unclothed and unalloyed exploitation, without any attempt to mask this reality. Sometimes it was based on the ideas that Britain and British people were more developed (sometimes based on scientific racism, sometimes on social Darwinism) than other peoples, and thereby had rights and obligations to rule those people and decide their destinies. But in each of these cases it was based on the premise that might made right, and that some people should have--by social convention or by nature itself--power over others. That hardly seems like a project worth defending, although it is certainly worth one studying.
