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.

7. 07

   Map amnesia

   The maps in school atlases zoom in on the metropole and shade the colonies in a single pastel block. Borders were 'established' and 'agreed', never drawn with a ruler through a village by a man who had never been there. Where the empire is shown, it is shown as territory acquired, never as land taken from someone.

8. 08

   The euphemism vault

   'Pacification', 'punitive expedition', 'settlement', 'plantation', 'protectorate', 'reservation', 'transportation', 'indentureship', 'mandate', 'discovery'. Each word is doing the work of three darker words it has been hired to replace. Vocabulary, here, is policy.

9. 09

   The exam-board firewall

   Even when teachers want to teach more, exam boards reward the safe answer. A British GCSE student who writes a strongly anti-imperial answer on Empire is, in practice, marked harder than one who hedges. Pedagogy bends, slowly, around assessment.

10. 10

    The white saviour as the lesson

    Where colonial violence is taught, the framing is often the European who opposed it: Wilberforce, Casement, the missionary, the journalist. The agency of the colonised is reduced to suffering. The story of how they freed themselves — Haiti, Vietnam, Algeria, India, Ghana, Mozambique, Zimbabwe — barely registers.

11. 11

    The 'we' problem

    British textbooks say 'we' when describing British actions in 1815 and 'they' when describing British actions in 1919 once those actions have become inconvenient. The first-person plural is rationed by national pride.

12. 12

    The university-press paywall

    Most of the best historical work on colonialism (Patnaik on India, Elkins on Kenya, Hochschild on the Congo, Davis on famines) costs £25–£80 a copy or sits behind academic journal subscriptions. The honest history exists; the public access to it has been priced for the comfortable.