Why the British Empire really was GREAT

For those of us who were brought up on inspiring Ladybird books about the great lives of Queen Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh and Admiral Nelson, and who despair at the way today’s children are being taught to despise their own history, this punchy story of Britain by Conservative peer and former Oxford professor Nigel Biggar and Cambridge professor Robert Tombs feels timely.

Enough of the self-flagellation! That’s their overriding message. We need to remember the good and great things Britain did, not just the bad.

No country is perfect, and Britain did some appalling things, such as playing a major part in the Atlantic slave trade. But in countless ways – not least in campaigning to abolish the slave trade – Britain led the way, and was often a beacon of intellectual liberty and enlightenment.

Slaves receiving the news of their emancipation 1833

‘Historians,’ write the authors in their powerful preface, ‘should allow themselves to be impressed by the otherness of the past, its different – often vastly different – conditions and assumptions. They should avoid smothering it with their own subjectivity, either forcing it to mirror their own present or damning it for failing to. The past should be allowed to speak truths that today’s historians and their readers might not expect, or even want, to hear.’

Slavery, Biggar and Tombs remind us, ‘had been practised on every continent by people of every skin colour since the dawn of history’. British numbers should be put into perspective. The Portuguese Empire is thought to have shipped just under a half the total of African slaves exported by the Europeans, which was 12.5 million.

The British came second: they exported 3.26 million slaves between 1660 and 1807. But the number of Africans enslaved and traded by Europeans and Arabs to the Far East topped 40 million.

And it was Britain that put a stop to it – and who policed the ocean to enforce its demise.

In 1850, the Royal Navy stationed over 13 per cent of its total manpower off the coast of West Africa to disrupt the export of slaves. Britain used its diplomatic clout, the authors write, to try to secure support for a general abolition treaty between all the major European powers.

That’s the tenor of this book: to take every ‘fact’ pedalled by today’s breed of ashamed, Britain-loathing historians and have a deeper look at it.

One such ‘fact’ is that profits from the slave trade helped finance the Industrial Revolution. One or two brave academics are now daring to disagree. The economist Joel Mokyr recently wrote that without West Indian slavery, ‘Britain would still have had an Industrial Revolution, if perhaps marginally at a slower pace’.

With the British Empire, too, the authors set out to re-examine the ‘facts’.

R egarding British India, they quote one Indian historian who said, ‘Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives, and helped the East India Company to form a state.’

The Empire ‘emerged from lands ceded to the company by Indian friends, rather than lands it “conquered” ’.

The authors take us on a whistle-stop tour of British colonies, finding good in each one.

In Australia, the imperial policy of ‘adaptive assimilation’ enabled the native children to learn English, literature and agriculture.

In Sudan, one native who served in the Sudan Civil Service said of his 1950s colleagues, ‘The British had a tremendous sense of mission . . .they lived amongst a people who respected them.’

I kept thinking of people who should be made to read this book. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, who’s ploughing on with the programme of paying £100million in slavery reparations rather than using the money to protect and preserve our struggling parishes and churches.

And the label-writers of art exhibitions, who try to brainwash us into viewing works by 18th-century painters such as Hogarth through their own woke lens.

‘We are not encouraging an arrogant and self-satisfied national vanity,’ the authors insist. ‘We prefer feelings of gratitude and humility, an awareness of the value of what we have inherited, and sensitivity to what we need to protect.’