Sir, – William Reville is certainly right that “Western civilisation is not the root of all evil” (Science, July 20th), but he falls easily into the trap of trying to balance the evils of the British Empire by considering “how it was leavened by good behaviour”. This tends to be an exercise dictated more by British public patriotism than the concerns of serious historians, who mostly don’t take an account-book approach to empire – for good reason.
First, the supposed good behaviour never balances the accounts. If the suppression of slavery, for example, was in itself something positive, it in no way mitigates the appalling suffering imposed on millions of African peoples by the slave trade, which Britain led and profited from for so long. No subsequent action can justify or atone for that. Britain’s supposed championing of the rule of law fails to recognise how the empire’s administrators made laws to suit their own interests, and when these didn’t work, particularly at times when native populations sought to repossess their own lands, simply ignored the rules or made new ones allowing them to unleash even higher levels of violence on their subjects. In her book Legacy of Violence (2022), the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins calls this “legalised lawlessness”, and it has very little to do with the rule of law. No rule of law prevailed when the British massacred, without judicial process, tens of thousands of Indians after the rebellion of 1857, in what was simply a bloodbath of revenge; nor a century later, in my own lifetime, when thousands of Kenyans were tortured and murdered during the Mau-Mau rebellion.
Second, as Priya Satia emphasizes (Time’s Monster, 2020) the whole balancing exercise “rests on the fallacy of counterfactual history”: the assumption that, for example, without the imposition of British imperial rule India would not have been able to develop a rule of law (in spite of an advanced legal system in Mughal India), or railways or any other technological advances introduced by the British (for their own profit). India had managed perfectly well before the British arrived; and Japan and Germany developed techologically and economically without the blessings of British rule.
The British Empire was not a legitimate form of government. Prof Reville’s claim that it was shot through with good principles is highly dubious. It was and remained throughout its history “an autocratic, racist, violent and extractive form of rule” (Satia). There are many fascinating lines of research being pursued by historians into its story. Balancing the bad and the supposed good is not one of them. – Yours, etc,
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BRIAN McGING,
Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus,
Department of Classics
Trinity College Dublin,
Dublin 2.