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The British Colonies and the Creation of the Urban World
by Tristram Hunt
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As Great Britain's formal empire finally receded into the distance, the public debate about the legacies and meaning of that colonial past has grown only more agonized.8 Famously, in his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the historian Niall Ferguson made a stirring and influential case for the British Empire as the handmaiden of globalization and force for progress. 'No organization has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world,' he wrote. Since globalization and the modern world were, for Ferguson, a 'good thing', this also meant the British Empire–for all its messy crimes and misdemeanours–was equally praiseworthy. 'Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies.' Much of the chaos of the twentieth century was, he suggested, a product of the decline oftransnational empires. And he went on to urge the White House of President George W. Bush to take up what Kipling called 'the white man's burden' and show some imperial leadership. For Ferguson, the British Empire offered the most salient guide for Washington's diplomats and generals as they sought to craft their own Pax Americana across the Middle East.9
As critics pointed out, there were numerous problems with Ferguson's version of empire: its Whiggish focus on the heroic age of Victorian achievement to the exclusion of the more amoral adventurism of the eighteenth century or bloody counter-insurgencies of the twentieth century; its unwillingness to chart the broader impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples; its concentration on the free-trade period of British imperialism as the Empire's defining ethos; and its dichotomous, good versus bad balance-sheet approach to the past.
Yet just as unhelpful a side-effect of Ferguson's case was that it provoked an equal and opposite reaction from scholars and commentators who sought, by way of contrast, to cast British imperialism as a very bad thing. In the context of political opposition to perceived American imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century, discussion about the British Empire (particularly on the political left) was reduced to slavery, starvation and extermination; loot, land and labour. In the words of the left-wing author Richard Gott, 'the rulers of the British empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the twentieth century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale'.10
Much of Gott's case has received official endorsement in recent years with a series of public acknowledgements by European governments of colonial crimes. In 2004 Germany apologized for the massacre of 65,000 Herero people in what is now Namibia; in 2008 Italy announced that it was to pay reparations to Libya for injustices committed during its thirty-year rule of the north African state (judged by Time magazine to be 'an unprecedented act of contrition by a former European colonial power'); in 2011 the Dutch government apologized for the killing of civilians in the 1947 Rawagede massacre in Indonesia; and in 2012 the President of France, François Hollande, officially acknowledged the role of the Parisian police in massacring some 200 Algerians during a 1961 rally.11 Then, in 2013, the United Kingdom government (having apologized for the Great Famine of 1845–52 and expressed official regret over Britain's role in the Atlantic slave trade) was forced by a High Court judgement to announce a £20 million compensation package for 5,228 Kenyan victims of British abuse during the 1950s Kenya Emergency or Mau Mau Rebellion. 'The British government recognizes that Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration,' Foreign Secretary William Hague told the House of Commons. 'The British Government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya's progress towards independence.'12
Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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