High on the walls of the lobby in the Royal Lake Club, Kuala Lumpur, hang several boards listing the names of all the club’s past presidents, including my Malaysian father-in-law. I stood in front of them with my two young sons a few years ago.
“Can you spot Grandpa’s name?” I asked them. Then, “Is there anything else you notice?” It’s not hard. From 1890 until 1965, all the names are European, only then changing to recognisably Malay, Chinese and Indian. “Under the British, Grandpa wouldn’t even have been allowed to be a member of the club,” I told my boys. They looked astonished. “But that’s racist,” said one, with a child’s lack of inhibition about stating the obvious.
Three of their grandparents come from what were once British colonies. My sons live in Malaysia and hear about Singapore, which they’ve visited. In time they’ll learn more about Ireland, the land of their other grandfather.
A few facts: by the early 18th century, Irish Catholics made up 90 per cent of the population but had been robbed of all but 10 per cent of the land. So catastrophic was the Great Famine, which started in 1845 and is widely blamed on the failure of the British authorities to act, that the country’s population is still lower today than it was then. And the occupiers’ attempted suppression of the Irish language has been described as an act of “cultural genocide”.
I wonder if the British Conservative leadership contender Robert Jenrick had any of those countries in mind when he wrote an article on Monday that has caused some controversy. Its headline? “Many of Britain’s former colonies owe us a debt of gratitude for the inheritance we left them.”
They’re bold words, no doubt intended to appeal to Tory party members irritated by all the self-flagellating liberals who are never happier than when they’re apologising for something they didn’t personally do. But Mr Jenrick could be leader of the Conservative party by Saturday, and therefore just conceivably UK prime minister one day. He, at least, believes he should be taken seriously.
Would he be bold enough to repeat that statement to Shashi Tharoor, the Indian diplomat and politician whose book Inglorious Empire details how the subcontinent’s share of global gross domestic product shrank from 23 per cent to a mere three per cent under British rule? “The reason was simple,” wrote Mr Tharoor. “India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredation in India.”
Mr Jenrick would like to be prime minister. Would he have dared make his claim at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, at which the leaders’ communique noted “calls for discussions on reparatory justice” on the transatlantic slave trade? Last year, a UN judge said that the UK owed at least $24 trillion for its historical involvement in slavery in 14 countries.
What would be his reply to Bell Ribeiro-Addy, the British Labour MP and chairwoman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan Reparations, who has said: “Enslavement and colonialism were not ‘gifts’ but imposed systems that brutally exploited people, extracted wealth, and dismantled societies, all for the benefit of Britain. To suggest that former colonies should be ‘grateful’ for such unimaginable harm disregards the legacy of these injustices and the long-term impact they still have on many nations today.”
Mr Jenrick has half a point. He was correct when he wrote that academic critics “don’t judge our record against other empires of the day. They assume that modern western values were somehow universal 400 years ago”. For most of history, to win an empire was glorious. That’s why we still call Alexander of Macedon “the great”.
But it wasn’t 400, but 83 years ago, when in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the British authorities decided to evacuate only the European population of Penang, leaving the locals to their fate, and leading one historian to conclude that “the moral collapse of British rule in South-East Asia came not in Singapore, but in Penang”.
It was later than that, in the 1950s, that British torture of Kenyans held in detention was so egregious that in 2013 the then UK government agreed to pay a multimillion-pound settlement to some of the victims.
Mr Jenrick believes that former colonies should be grateful since the British Empire “came to introduce … Christian values”. I’m not sure how that fits with going to war with China in the 19th century to demand that it open its markets to the dangerous and addictive trade in opium, and the subsequent establishment in China of enclaves where no Chinese (and no dogs) were permitted.
He also thinks he has made his case by writing “long after independence, the institutions we built in these countries endure … Even amid their resentment towards us, former colonies recognised that the British system of governance was the best in the world for promoting peace and prosperity”. I disagree. James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania, has argued that in formerly colonised countries, “more often than not, local elites simply imported and modified the political systems of their European overlords”.
This leads to problems of perception today. As I put it in an essay for the Erasmus Forum: “Outsiders see the facade of liberal democracy in South and South-East Asia. They do not realise that inside many of the furnishings – including overriding attachments to liberal values and individual rights – are missing.”
Other value systems, many ancient, run deep, and thrive in and animate former colonies; but people like Mr Jenrick won’t see or understand them if they only concentrate on a Westminster-style political set-up and courts modelled on the Old Bailey.
Above all, though, the point that Mr Jenrick so spectacularly misses is simple. At its core, the British Empire could only be justified by one assumption: that the white Briton was superior to all other races. This was not an empire in which conquered peoples could rise to the top: the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was African, and many Ottoman Grand Viziers were Albanian.
So if Mr Jenrick really thinks that any former colony “owes a debt of gratitude” for having been forcefully integrated into an association run on that basis, he is either a dangerous extremist, or dangerously misguided. For his sake, and for Britain’s sake, I hope it’s the latter.
