To a certain kind of imperial historian, empire is everywhere. Like latter-day John Hobsons, they believe they alone are keeping alive the anti‑imperial tradition, courageously defying the curmudgeonly nostalgics sipping gin and tonic in the home counties like nabobs of old. But Hobson wrote his famous Imperialism: A Study in 1902, when empire was approaching its zenith and few among his peers counted as anti-imperialist. The same can’t be said of his contemporary heirs.
“Britain is in denial,” Charlotte Lydia Riley tells us. “The British people as a whole tend to be resistant, when asked outright, about any reappraisal of their nation’s imperial past.” It might be more accurate to say instead that hold-outs like Robert Tombs periodically wax eloquent about the days of the Raj in the Spectator. But the odd apologist apart, polls show that most Britons are indifferent to empire these days; only a third are “proud” of it.
It’s a forgivable bias on the part of a subject specialist. Yet I wonder if, in this instance, its implications are more than ordinarily damaging. Imperial Island rests on the assumption that racism in postwar Britain is self-evidently the upshot of colonialism. And why would it not be? After all, racism was “one key aspect of the empire story”.
The causal link, though, isn’t nearly as neat as Riley suggests. Arguably, she’s got it backwards. In the Victorian era, the imperial metropole was indisputably a hierarchical society, but its fundamental distinctions weren’t racial, with class instead at its core, even as “scientific racism” gained currency at the turn of century. It was only in the mid-20th century – when the British nation emerged from the British empire – that the positions of class and race were reversed. It is no accident that we find a dozen black and brown MPs in the Commons before 1929, and tens more after 1987, but not one in the years between.
Empires necessarily set great store by what we now call multiculturalism. Nations, by contrast, don’t. So, it is unsurprising that the ugliest currents of “white Britain” came into their own in the decades after Winston Churchill presided over the liquidation of empire. Likewise, we would do well to remember that it was British nationalism, not imperialism, that ended free movement in the 1960s. Enoch Powell’s anti-immigrant rhetoric was a product of the former, not the latter. World-historically, too, it is the collapse of empires and rise of nations that breeds intolerance, doing for older multinational, multilingual and multiracial polities. Think Vienna after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
Imperial Island may disappoint as “a history of empire in modern Britain”, as the subtitle has it, but it nevertheless succeeds as a history of race relations. What we have here is a withering indictment of cruel Britannia, which it undoubtedly was for much of the postwar period – and on some measures still is, as Riley rightly points out. Comprising 50 or so vignettes from the 40s to Nigel Farage, this is a chilling history of institutional and public prejudice.
We start with the second world war, when Britain supposedly “stood alone”. In reality, it never did. London could depend on 800 million subjects contributing to the war effort. We move swiftly to the Caribbean arrivals of the Empire Windrush, docking at Tilbury with great fanfare in 1948. It is now clear what a singular moment that was: within a decade, immigrants had become the politician’s bugbear.
The influence of the hard right runs like a thread through this book. The National Front was only defeated in the 60s and 70s because of the Conservatives’ co-option of its agenda, which, in turn, prompted Labour to dial up its xenophobia. So, we find the Tories stealing a march on the far-right by curbing Commonwealth immigration in 1962. When, two years later, Labour shadow home secretary Patrick Gordon Walker lost Smethwick to the Tory Peter Griffiths – whose notorious campaign slogan put a racist slur front and centre – Harold Wilson thought it best to adopt some of the same positioning, albeit in more palatable form. As a result, free movement in the Commonwealth came to an end in 1968. By 1971, 70 Tory MPs and peers were members of the Monday Club, which opposed non-white immigration to Britain and supported apartheid.
Along the way, Riley pauses to take in the crushing of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya and the Malayan Emergency. In later chapters, she shows how imperial adventurism destroyed the reputations of two prime ministers (Anthony Eden and Tony Blair) while burnishing the image of one (Margaret Thatcher). It helped that unlike the Suez crisis and Iraq war, the Falklands war succeeded on its own terms. But it helped, too, that Thatcher had the tabloids on her side; the Sun did what it does best, combining “soft pornography and rampant jingoism” in its snaps of women wearing underwear embroidered with warship names.
More important, Riley gives injustices that ought to be better known their due: the “virginity testing” of Asian women suspected of exploiting an immigration loophole at Heathrow, for instance, or the classification of African Caribbean children as “educationally subnormal”.
But there is a habit of talking down to the reader, spelling out obvious ironies and rephrasing quotes just in case we lack the moral clarity to recognise enormities for what they are. I think we’ve come a long way from the early postwar era in which Imperial Island begins, when, apparently, most British people couldn’t name a single British colony. Among those who thought they could, the Daily Mail indignantly reported, some wrote Wales, others Scotland, still others Lincolnshire. Worse, one in 30 put down the United States.
Pratinav Anil is a lecturer in history at the University of Oxford and the author of Another India (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, £25). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Imperial Island by Charlotte Lydia Riley (Vintage Publishing, £25). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
