What Schools Skip

Ask a graduate of a British secondary school what they learned about the British Empire. Most will tell you about the abolition of the slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and a vague sense that India was, on the whole, grateful for the railways. Ask the same question of a Belgian, a French, a Spanish, an American or a Dutch graduate, and the answers will differ in the particulars but not in the shape: the empire was big, it was complicated, mistakes were made, but the underlying enterprise was civilizing, and besides, that was long ago.

This is not an accident. It is the result of a century of careful curriculum design by ministries of education that have, again and again, concluded that the full history would damage national self-esteem. The damage to the descendants of the colonized is, evidently, considered less urgent.

The Techniques of Forgetting

The whitewashing of imperial history is not done by lying — at least, not usually. It is done by a more sophisticated set of techniques:

1. 01

   Passive voice

   'Mistakes were made.' 'Lives were lost.' 'Cultures were disrupted.' Nobody specific ever does anything specific to anyone specific.

2. 02

   The bad apple

   Atrocities are attributed to rogue individuals — Leopold, a particular general, an over-zealous district commissioner — rather than to the systems that produced and rewarded them.

3. 03

   The civilizing balance sheet

   'Yes, but also railways / English / Christianity / the rule of law.' As if a railway built with forced labor to extract resources is a gift to the people it bypassed.

4. 04

   The contextual shrug

   'You can't judge the past by today's standards.' This is selectively applied. We have no trouble judging Nazi Germany by today's standards. We have a great deal of trouble judging the British Raj.

5. 05

   The chronological cliff

   History 'ends' in 1945, or 1960, or whenever the empire formally folded. The continuing financial, political and cultural consequences are filed under 'current affairs' and never connected to the chapter on empire.

6. 06

   The hero substitution

   Wilberforce gets a chapter. The enslaved who liberated themselves in Haiti do not. Lincoln gets a chapter. Nat Turner does not. The colonial subject is allowed into the story only as a grateful recipient of white emancipation.