This week, the Foreign Office released thousands of lost – or hidden – colonial-era documents, but it is unknown how many more, which recorded atrocities at the end of the British empire, were destroyed. Tory MP Kwasi Kwarteng and writer Richard Gott meet to discuss this latest chapter in Britain's imperial history. Emine Saner listens in.
Kwasi Kwarteng: It's shocking that these documents were destroyed. I'm surprised there wasn't a 50- or 100-year ban on seeing these – to sanction the destruction of documents is terrible.
Richard Gott: It makes one feel that the Foreign Office is not really fit for purpose. Not only did it destroy them, but also lost them. Last year, it had an internal inquiry into what went wrong and the report was public, but redacted.
KK: I can't condone it, but to give some context this happened in the 1960s, at the height of the cold war when governments did that sort of thing.
RG: Everybody in parliament knew what was going on – they knew about torture, castration, these dreadful things happening. It wasn't just radicals such as Barbara Castle and Fenner Brockway – the Labour party was far more radical then than it is today on colonial issues, and actually the Conservative government as well, because eventually it was Iain Macleod [Secretary of State for the Colonies under Macmillan] who was responsible for decolonising the empire.
KK: I think [the decision to destroy documents] is a revealing episode in decolonisation, which is one of the themes I'm interested in – the chaos, lack of organisation, arbitrariness of many of the decisions leading to, in some cases, human rights abuses. This shows the desperation of the unwinding of empire.
RG: You feel everything was accelerating and people were beginning to wonder what on Earth they were doing. After 1945 the imperial idea was disappearing down the plughole, but nobody expected it to happen as quickly as it did.
KK: The collapse of the empire is something that needs to be looked at again because it was dramatic. In my research, looking at India, I remembered someone saying it took the British 300 years to establish rule in India, but it only took 70 days for them to leave.
Emine Saner: Do you get the sense there is a strong revisionist movement?
RG: There was a brief moment with the publication of the book [Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World] by Niall Ferguson, where he tried to portray the empire in a better light, but I think that's disappeared, curiously enough.
KK: That was published around the time of the second Gulf war and he was a cheerleader for US neocons. Like all good history, it was really about the present. That was the high-water mark of the neocon idea – that we could export democracy, free trade – and that's what the British empire was about, that was Niall's argument. You and I have different political outlooks, but we both reject that naive neocon view of the empire. You stress the violence; I stress the incompetence and the consequences.
RG: He wrote his book before two important books appeared about Kenya and the Mau Mau [by David Anderson and Caroline Elkins] that were fundamental in revealing the extent to which the end of empire ended in war crimes. Kenya saw 10 years of violence – the British hanged 1,000 people. They now think 100,000, even 300,000 people, died during the Mau Mau campaign.
KK: My problem with Niall's book was that it was deterministic; that the empire was a necessary precursor to modern American hegemony. But to many now, the British empire is as antique as the Roman, even though its consequences are still being felt. We need to understand the empire on its own terms.
RG: It's still with us. Whenever I open the newspaper, anywhere you look, whether it's Burma, Afghanistan or Sierra Leone, the British were there.
KK: The title of my book is Ghosts of Empire and it's alive in that sense, you can see the eerie echoes.
RG: I'd go further – I think people like Tony Blair tried to revive the empire.
KK: I'm not sure I'd go that far. The only empire that is relevant is the American empire, and you could argue that Blair was trying to ally Britain to that, but there's no sense in which he was acting unilaterally in the way a British imperial thinker such as Disraeli or even Churchill would try to act. Empire is a mixed legacy. There were terrible things, but I don't think it was an appalling catalogue of complete woe. Some good things came of it – a sense of the rule of law, some penetration of parliamentary democracy, the English language, [which has] facilitated a more globalised world. But it didn't set out to do those things.
RG: I have a much darker picture of the empire. A huge amount of extermination went on, seizure of land – it's a very bleak picture.
KK: That's fuelled, if I may say, by your ideology – you're one of the few self-avowed Marxists left in public life. That class struggle and violence and power …
RG: Well, it was there.
KK: I'm not saying it wasn't, but I think to describe it all in those terms is too one-sided. The one element that your analysis misses is the extent to which native rulers co-operated. If it had just been pure force, the thing wouldn't have lasted as long as it did.
RG: Then we're back to class. The British cleverly allied themselves with power.
ES: Where do you stand on reparations?
KK: I think it's all nonsense. It's something that happened so long ago, where would you draw the line? I think it's a mad route to go down.
RG: I'm not in favour of reparations either, but politicians, when they visit old parts of the empire, ought to display a degree of humility about the past, which they rarely do.
ES: How should empire be taught?
KK: I would not take the view that it should be entirely negative. We must never think that these countries were utopias before the British came.
RG: I'm not sure Michael Gove wants much nuance [shortly after the election in 2010, Gove asked Ferguson to help rewrite the history curriculum].
KK: What Gove wants is a sense of narrative understanding of what happened.
RG: Empire and Britain should be taught together – the history of both are intertwined. We should emphasise the downside as well as the upside – if you can find any upsides.
KK: The only way to understand how Britain has evolved in the last 30 years as a multiracial society is to understand empire. So it's even more important now, to understand Britain as it is today.
Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury) by Kwasi Kwarteng and Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (Verso) by Richard Gott are both available for £20 at guardianbookshop.co.uk
