Recent popular western histories deprive British imperialism of its roseate hue
The museums and monuments of Istanbul and London, former centres of two of the world's most powerful empires, offer an interesting contrast in their approaches to their pasts. They reflect, in a sense, the differing popular views of imperialism.
For the Turks, the Topkapi Palace, magnificent residence to the Ottoman Sultans for almost four centuries, and the Dolmabahce, the kitschy, European-style palace that became the dynasty's last home, are little more than curios. Symbols of an ignominious past less than a century old, those structures and the many markers of the Ottoman Empire, once Europe's largest land empire and Caliphate of Islam, are viewed as little more than useful sources of tourist dollars in the truncated geography of modern Turkey.
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The capital city has shifted east to Ankara, and the great gate of the Sublime Porte is now an obscure entrance to a police barracks in the Topkapi complex.
London retains a palpable nostalgia for its imperial past on which the sun set more recently and only a shade less humiliatingly. The Queen lives in Buckingham Palace facing an unprepossessing statute of an Empress, her great-great-grandmother, Victoria. In the city's galleries and museums the Empire is commemorated in myriad ways. The Kohinoor and Cullinan diamonds proudly on display in imperial crowns in the Tower of London are part of it, as are the collections of textiles, paintings, statuary and artefacts from Britannia's former globe-girdling properties in the galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.
It's all understated, of course. But for an Indian who was taught from Class V onwards about the inherently exploitative nature of colonial rule - that India was a source of raw material for British industry and a market for her finished goods - these well maintained reminders of Britain's imperial past provoke a mild and irrational feeling of irritation.
It reflects the fact that the average Briton retains a roseate view of the imperial past, reinforced by school history syllabi that apply an anodyne gloss to the deeply destructive nature of imperial rule. For the Raj, Britain's largest colony, this perception deepens, no little thanks to Rudyard Kipling, the paintings of Thomas and William Daniell and such nostalgic indulgences as Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown, which became a hit TV series.
This was the kind of outlook that could prompt an academic like Niall Fergusson to pen Empire, in 2011, setting out all the so-called gifts the British brought to the people they subjugated, a skilfully written if poorly argued defence of the indefensible.
The book was a best-seller but provoked a collective cringe in British academe. In those more thoughtful groves, there is a general sense of embarrassment rather than pride in Britain's colonial past, as Julia Lovell pointed out. Lovell, a teacher of Chinese history at Birkbeck College, is author of Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (2011), an excellent account of how opium wars shaped modern Chinese nationalism.
So much so, the late Oxford historian Christopher Bayly told me, there was some relief now that Fergusson had crossed the pond to professorship in Harvard. Bayly co-authored with Tim Harper Forgotten Armies: Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, 1941-1945 (2005) and Forgotten Wars: Freedom and Revolution in Southeast Asia (2007), the first serious exploration of post-imperial Asia.
Still, the embarrassment of western scholars did not produce the kind of accessible popular history to counter Empire and its like. Lovell and Bayly-Harper's books focused on specific aspects of imperial practice. Sven Beckert's outstanding 2014 book Empire of Cotton, lays out in detail the destruction of Asia's textile industry by the British. Otherwise, there is John Keay's 1993 history The Honourable Company.
Luckily there's an end to this drought. First came Tears of the Rajas, by journalist Ferdinand Mount, a history of the more egregious periods of the Raj narrated through the lives of his Scottish ancestors who served there in many capacities. It set out in stark terms the inherently destructive nature of British imperialism and made me freshly indignant of the iniquities of British rule.
This month, Jon Wilson, professor of history at King's College, London, has come out with India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos Empire. The book examines how British rule in India really worked, revealing a violent and chaotic reality that contradicts the calm orderly perception of the Raj. Unlike the Mughals, says Wilson, the British remained perennial outsiders to Indian social and political structures which they systematically destroyed.
Mount and Wilson's books go some distance in deglamourising the Raj. In India, they're preaching to the converted. In London in 2002, several old India hands attending the book launch of William Dalrymple's White Mughals contested his portrait of an affair between an East India Company resident and a Hyderabadi Begum. Such intimate mingling of the races was unthinkable, in their view. In 2015, Mount said, his book was extremely well-received in Britain. At the very least, that's an encouraging start.
