Tibet was never a particularly peaceable place. Its empire, at its summit in the 8th century, extended to northern India, western China and central Asia. The Arabs, making inroads into the neighborhood, were awestruck. And China, in the words of an inscription memorializing Tibet’s conquest of the Tang Chinese capital of Chang’an in 763, “shivered with fear” at their mention. But, peaking early, Tibet decayed over subsequent centuries into a reclusive hagiarchy. In 1950, when Mao’s Red Army marched in, Tibet possessed neither the vocabulary to parley with the communists, nor the capacity to resist them.

Tenzin Gyatso, identified in 1937 as the reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, was hastily confirmed as Tibet’s supreme ruler at the age of 15. His court, spurned by the outside world, watched helplessly as Mao’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet unfolded in earnest. Monasteries were razed, monks executed, thousands of peaceful protesters massacred — with many more detained, starved, tortured, and carted away to communes to toil in conditions so brutal that some resorted to cannibalism. In 1959, the Dalai Lama, facing imminent capture, escaped to India with his entourage.

Since then, he has devoted himself to the preservation of Tibetan culture and the emancipation of Tibet from Chinese shackles through exclusively nonviolent means. Last week, in the lead-up to his 90th birthday yesterday, His Holiness resolved the critical question of his succession by stating explicitly that the next Dalai Lama will be identified by a trust founded by him. Exactly three decades ago, Beijing disappeared the Panchen Lama — second only to the Dalai Lama in the Tibetan pantheon — and replaced him with their puppet. China, officially atheist, is determined to appoint its own Dalai Lama once Tenzin Gyatso finally dies. By proclaiming his will to “reincarnate” in a body born in the “free world”, the Dalai Lama has given his institution a shot at survival. Yet as he enters his 90s, it is no insult to ask what his celebrity has done to secure the Tibetan people and their mutilated homeland.

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Tibet today has the distinction of being the world’s largest colony. In official Chinese documents, it is classified as “Water Tower Number One”— a source of prized minerals and hydropower. Since annexing Tibet, Beijing has relentlessly disfigured it. It has mined and carted away its mineral wealth, dammed and diverted waters from its bountiful rivers, herded innumerable Tibetans into communes, stamped out the expression of Tibetan identity, and annihilated whole ways of life.

An exhaustive report published some years ago by Human Rights Watch documented how Beijing has corralled millions of Tibetans into rows of identical-looking apartment blocks called “New Socialist Villages”. A more recent study, by the Tibet Action Institute, details the coercion of children as young as four into boarding schools to be intensively Sinicised. When they come home, they lack the language to communicate with their Tibetan-speaking parents. To Tibetans, this is only the newest phase in a long campaign to purge their identity. The sinisterness of Beijing’s conduct is exceeded only by the crassness of its propaganda. A captive Tibet is proclaimed as being free, the suppression of its language is justified as a necessary condition of its integration, and the destruction of its culture is trumpeted as evidence of its progress.

Hundreds of Tibetans — monks and lay people alike — have sought to draw attention to the plight of their land by immolating their own bodies. Consider Tsulrim Gyatso, a highly respected scholar at the Amchok monastery in Gansu, driven to despair by all he saw around him. “Tears drop from my eyes when I dwell on this state of sufferings,” he wrote in the winter of 2013. Later the same day, Gyatso walked to a busy intersection, doused himself with petrol, and lit his body on fire. As the flames consumed his flesh, Gyatso folded his palms in a gesture of respect: the tender final act of a Tibetan Buddhist who believed, like so many before and after him, that his calvary would stir the world beyond into some form of action. I have often wondered how the world may have reacted to Gyatso and his brethren had they chosen to blow themselves up among crowds of civilians in Shanghai. Might they have incited debates on the “root causes” of Tibetan “militancy”, and ignited protests in solidarity with their cause?

Despite preventing his people from adopting violent methods of resistance, the Dalai Lama has been branded a “terrorist” by China. A message from him in 2008, when an uprising against Chinese rule erupted in Tibet, would have paralysed Chinese administration in the region. His choice, instead, to calm the protesters, by invoking Buddhist precepts of nonviolence, resulted in no gratitude or offer of negotiation from his people’s tormentors. As he writes in his most recent book, Voice for the Voiceless, “Chinese Communist leaders have only a mouth to speak but no ear to listen”.

Beijing’s refusal to deal with him has eroded some of his authority within the Tibetan community in exile. Certainly, the Dalai Lama continues to be revered as a spiritual leader by almost all Tibetans, and their veneration only intensifies as age reveals his mortality. But many also see in China’s unyielding push to eradicate their identity a confirmation of the futility of nonviolence — a central pillar of the Dalai Lama’s teachings. As far back as 1988, he downgraded his demand for full independence from China to limited autonomy within its boundaries. Nearly four decades on, his homeland of six million people remains, alongside Xinjiang, the most intensely policed territory under Chinese rule. A young, restless generation of Tibetans is turning inwards, casting doubt on the movement that has so far failed to deliver anything for them.

And it is difficult to fault them. Over the decades, the Dalai Lama has travelled from capital to capital, picking up major accolades — including the Nobel Peace Prize — and interacting with well-meaning film stars, activists, and politicians. But what does he have to show for it? He admires Lincoln, but Lincoln was consequential only because his words, as Julia Ward Howe put it, were “writ in burnished rows of steel”. He admires Mahatma Gandhi — but Gandhi, as even Tibet’s most famous dissident writer Shokdun concedes, fought a system that had “some degree of moral conscience”. The CCP is not the British Raj. To say that His Holiness has kept his homeland’s cause alive while not being able to halt the slow erasure of Tibet itself is not to impugn him: it is to recognise that our world, which kowtows to votaries of violence while treating pacifists as comical curios, is what it is.

Even at the height of his fame in America, the Dalai Lama was seldom regarded as anything more than an exotic spectacle, the Oriental Pope expected to dispense morsels of easily digestible Eastern spirituality. He became anything “we would like him to be”, the late British-Indian historian Patrick French once observed. Barring notable exceptions, his supposed champions barely knew him. Larry King once introduced him to his audiences as a Muslim. Sharon Stone opened another event by calling him “Mr Please, Please, Please let me back into China”. Western Publishers minted fortunes selling books with his name on the cover, then sent 1% of the profits to his office.

For its part, the West, rapidly secularising and becoming more and more dependent on China, has grown less and less enamoured of him. The earliest omen of this denouement was Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Desperate to gratify his hosts, the US president abruptly terminated the CIA’s covert assistance to Tibetan resistance. This did not in itself make a great difference: the purpose of the programme, which cost Washington about $2 million, had always been to use Tibetans to gather intelligence on China, not to help them regain their homeland. What did make a ruinous difference to Tibet, however, was the international acceptability Nixon’s summit conferred on Mao.

The Mao who received Nixon, and whom Nixon exalted in self-clowning tones as a visionary statesman, was by then responsible for more bloodshed than any other leader of the 20th century. After all the death and devastation he had supervised in Tibet, Xinjiang, and China proper, Mao entertained himself by being vulgar, vile, and vicious even to the people who served him. When told by his physician that the procession of young women brought to his bed were being hospitalized with infections because of his appalling hygiene — Mao refused to rinse his body or brush his teeth — the Great Helmsman replied: “I wash my prick in their cunts.” The powers that fraternized with Mao were sooner or later going to teach themselves to overlook the victims of the regime he erected. The Financial Times garlanded Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, as its “Person of the Year” two years after he presided over the massacre of 10,000 pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.

By then, a self-serving consensus for closer relations with China had crystallized in the West, which, it was claimed, was more likely to influence China by partnering with it — by creating a prominent position for it inside global institutions. Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, the US locked itself into a self-destructive trade relationship with the People’s Republic. Advanced economies, underwriting Beijing’s rise by incinerating the jobs that supported their own working classes, scattered the seeds of explosive discontent at home to export material prosperity to a regime that converted it into hard power: to wield against its own benefactors.

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This rationale has come back to haunt the West. Far from molding the Chinese state’s behavior, it is the West that has incrementally relinquished its own professed values to propitiate Beijing. It is Western authors who self-censor for the tawdry privilege of being published in China. It is Hollywood that modifies its films to placate the Chinese censors. International agencies that performatively hector others lose their voice when dealing with Beijing. And governments that never tire of puffing their chests at the Middle East’s tinpot tyrannies in the name of human rights flee from the Dalai Lama for fear of offending China.

Even India, home to the largest community of exiled Tibetans, is terrified of crossing China by appearing too supportive of their spiritual leader. Narendra Modi’s government, for all its bellicose nationalism, has not endorsed the Dalai Lama’s right to decide his succession. Even before Modi appeared on the scene, it was a tradition in New Delhi to invoke penal codes dating back to the British Raj to lock up anyone of Tibetan appearance during a senior Chinese dignitary’s visit to India. Still, the profoundly worshipful attitude of Indians to the Dalai Lama — the global face of a faith that originated in India — has deterred successive governments from stamping on his acolytes. It is chilling to contemplate their fate when the Dalai Lama is gone.

This is one reason why the Dalai Lama spent the past two decades modernizing the Tibetan resistance movement and equipping the exiled community with the means to continue without him. He has weakened his own office, fostered political institutions distinct from the spiritual branch he oversees, and subordinated himself and devolved his powers to them. Tibet now has a government-in-exile that is democratically elected by a highly organized diaspora. Now, by pronouncing emphatically on his succession, His Holiness has ring-fenced an institution that has sustained Tibetan identity for centuries. Is this sufficient to guarantee its survival, and will the United States and India forever refuse to endorse a successor handpicked by Beijing? Their past behavior does not encourage optimism.

This is a truly grim moment for Tibetans. The figure who has held their nation together is fading away, while the tenets upon which his struggle was premised have so far produced no results. His long-suffering people are now torn between the precepts of their faith and a longing for home, which, 75 years after its seizure by China, looks more unrecognizable, and out of reach, than ever.

And if what Frantz Fanon called the “red-hot cannonballs and bloody knives” of decolonization are as vicious as ever in politics and the banlieue, France’s bookshelves aren’t being spared either. One of the most vivid examples of recent times is A Counter-History of French Colonization, a fusillade in paperback. Written by Driss Ghali, a novelist and essayist, and published in English late last year, it promises to provide “an antidote to the poison distilled in bad faith” by “apostles” of postcolonial thought, those who’ve distilled the complexities of French colonialism into a game of heroes and villains.

In a vivid riposte to these activists, Ghali says he can offer a fresh and “dispassionate” view of this still-urgent moment of history, arguing that it’s time to move on from 19 March and everything it stands for. It’s a position increasingly echoed across France and Algeria, a shift with potentially revolutionary consequences for the politics of both countries. All the same, we shouldn’t necessarily expect Paris and Algiers to bury the hatchet just yet, especially given the incentives Arab elites have to perpetuate hate — and the underlying tensions that endure right across France itself.

Before you even get to Ghali’s argument, A Counter-History first deploys identity. A Moroccan and a Muslim, the author is a product of French colonial history, one whose personal story can be traced to both flanks of the Mediterranean. His great-grandfather fought against the French in the Twenties, while his grandfather fought for them during the Second World War. As such, Ghali is able to report directly from the front lines of the conflicts that currently plague France, to say nothing of its erstwhile colonial holdings in North Africa.

Ghali’s claims are as striking as his background. The French Republic, he says, has been slowly fractured, corroded in gradients by social change which threatens its very existence. The most significant of these changes has been the growth of its banlieues into something like mini-cities, with their own codes, cultures and languages. They are usually at odds with mainstream France and the Republic, which in the form of the police is seen as an intrusive, oppressive presence (sometimes the word “colonialist” is used in provocation).

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For all the loose language bandied about in the past few years, there is as yet no civil war in France, though Ghali does not rule it out. But there is, he says, a permanent stand-off between those who believe in France as an ideal of civilization, and those who have no interest in such abstractions, and even violently oppose them. This, Ghali argues, is probably the greatest division in contemporary French life.

He’s far from alone. The spectre of civil war may feel hyperbolic to Anglophone readers, but in recent years it has been a staple of French cultural discourse, appearing as the major theme in the novels of bestselling authors like Michel Houellebecq and Laurent Obertone. Another good example is Athena, a popular Netflix drama that depicts a battle between the French police and the eponymous fictional banlieue. Throughout the film, the French media persistently report on what’s happening as “civil war”.

The theme of civil war is a notion that’s also been picked up by politicians, notably Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, with similar language increasingly common across the Right. In April 2021, for instance, Valeurs Actuelles published an open letter from military officers, addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron. In the so-called lettre des généraux, 20 retired generals, together with 1,000 French soldiers, condemned what they saw as an attack on French values, emanating from Islamism and “the hordes from the banlieues” — who for their part were dismissed as gangsters, drug dealers or terrorists.

At the heart of these tensions is France’s unsolved colonial legacy, especially in North Africa. Beyond Napoleon’s abortive adventure in Egypt, things really started in 1830, when King Charles X invaded Algeria. That was followed by the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco.

Yet beyond the arrival of Europeans on the Mediterranean’s southern shores, it’s really their departure that continues to haunt France every 19 March. As the Algerian fight for freedom grew hot, from 1954, France deployed torture and mass killings as weapons of war, and to protect the million or so whites who’d made the country home. But the violence wasn’t all one way. On the Arab side, insurgency, terrorism and assassination were legitimized as tools against the European oppressor. One obvious case study here is Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic 1966 film The Battle of Algiers, which presents an unvarnished account of Algerian nationalist attacks on innocent civilians during the war of independence.

Notwithstanding the cliches of French historians, then, Ghali suggests that France wasn’t the only agent of history during its messy escape from empire. More than that, he argues that the Maghreb’s failures since decolonization are largely its own fault. The end of empire offered an opportunity for these newly independent states to create their own futures on the model of what Ghali calls “the civilized world” — but which have instead wallowed in corruption, religious fanaticism, inequality and tribalism. These problems have been particularly acute in Algeria, where the stale and intransigent government helped spark civil war in the Nineties. Fought against Islamist extremists, about 200,000 people died. Tunisia and Morocco, the other French possessions in North Africa, were spared such horrors, but they too have chafed under cruel and authoritarian rulers.

Not, of course, that France is blameless here. Quite aside from the brutality of colonial rule — and though Algerian independence was formally conceded decades ago — neo-colonial exploitation persisted right across the region. Consider the clientelism of the sort seen in Morocco, or else the kind of financial, military and political influence found under the umbrella of “Françafrique” and which has ravaged countries from Senegal to Mali. As Ghali notes, that’s before you factor in the Hexagon’s enduring cultural influence, whether in television or fashion, or getting a job at a French firm.

Yet whatever Africa’s own discontents, Ghali sees the worst consequences of France’s colonial legacy in the way North Africans now make up the bulk of the immigrant population of France. Roughly 30% of the country’s immigrants hail from North Africa, while the country has over five million Muslims overall, the largest such community in Europe.

In one of his most controversial claims, Ghali is critical of what he calls reverse colonialism — which has seen millions leave the former French colonies for metropolitan France. This, he says, is a betrayal of their home nations, though he does concede that fleeing poverty and war are greater motivations than idealistic nation-building. Most importantly, this process has created an imbalance between France and its former territories, one still being played out at home and abroad. Bleakly, Ghali describes a situation where millions of euros return to the former colonies from immigrant economic activity in France, who in return offer criminality and Islamist terrorism.

Is this fair? Certainly, it ignores much of the cultural richness which has emerged from the postcolonial relations between France and the Maghreb. Yet it’s a perception that’s not only grown popular on the far-Right of French politics, but has also increasingly entered the mainstream, especially given the ever-present terrorist threat. In 2023, after all, even President Macron himself said that France had “an immigration problem” while also pushing through a law distinguishing more sharply between French citizens and migrants.

None of this is inevitable: Ghali himself is testament to the ways Arabs can straddle both shores of colonial divide. But for that to happen, both sides need honesty, and to finally face up to their shared history, not least by owning up to historical atrocities. It’s a process that Macron has sought to start, publicly acknowledging French errors and crimes. Among other things, that’s involved acknowledging responsibility for the “disappearance” of the pro-Algerian activist Maurice Audin in 1957.

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So far, though, any “reconciliation” has been strikingly one-sided, even if Ghali isn’t totally alone in pushing for change in the literary space. In the pages of Marianne, for instance, the historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, a heavyweight voice on the center-Right, declared that Ghali’s book was a must-read for Macron and any other European politician serious about understanding the twin processes of decolonization and mass immigration. For Gauchet, Ghali is not only courageous, but also accurate in his assessment of the French imperial experience — as a tragedy which has brought misery both to the colonizers and the colonized.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Arab intellectuals have had less time for such ideas, even accusing Ghali of echoing the far-Right rhetoric of Éric Zemmour. Yet here, too, change is coming. Progressive journals like Tel Quel in Morocco have, for instance, started testing long-standing taboos around the French colonial experience, questioning the collusion of powerful elites who have a vested interest in sustaining anti-French feeling to maintain their own positions. After many years of working in universities across the Maghreb, I was recently heartened at an academic conference in Morocco to hear similarly dissident views, especially surprising coming from the postcolonial academic establishment.

Just as significant, there has been a generational shift here too. A younger generation of North Africans no longer accept everything their elders tell them about the imperial past. A true postcolonial culture, they instead argue, must be forward looking: working out new geopolitical strategies for North Africa, beyond the old tensions brought up every 19 March. This thinking has even gained some momentum in semi-official circles, with Moroccan media quick to condemn Algeria’s latest arguments with France as outdated and pointless. Yet with the banlieues as unhappy as ever — Paris alone saw around 100 gangland clashes in its suburbs last year — we shouldn’t imagine that these decade-long struggles can be solved by writers alone.

Nationalists, for whom history is no more than an accoutrement of righteous vindication, have annexed their arguments. So it is that a fairly recondite debate turning on economies of old has acquired new geopolitical significance. Accordingly, a crude heuristic now has it that Frankopan is on Team China, and Dalrymple on Team India.

But they are, truth be told, on the same team. The presiding impulse of their respective books, The Silk Roads and The Golden Road — both on global trade — is to vanquish that old foe, seriously hobbled but not quite dead: Eurocentrism. Hence the emphasis on cultural diffusion, seen in the popular imagination as a set of Western bequests to a benighted East. Here, by contrast, the aim is to show that traffic was in great measure, though by no means entirely, in the reverse direction.

There is, of course, a difference in emphasis in their accounts — Frankopan being a Byzantinist, and Dalrymple an Indianist. Yet the world-historical objective is the same — guided, one surmises, by their similar intellectual formation. Born to a Dalmatian father and Swedish mother, Frankopan was fired by the lectures of Jonathan Shepard, a historian of the Byzantine world at Cambridge. His debut was an account of The First Crusade that swapped Latin for Greek sources, reversing the conventional gaze. Dalrymple, a Highland aristocrat, also passed through Cambridge before cutting his teeth as a travel writer, traversing the same subcontinental lands as some of his forebears. For both, then, there were strong biographical imperatives that militated against insularity. With such backgrounds, it is hardly surprising that they didn’t turn out to be little Englanders.

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This habit of mind was aligned to a historical sensibility. Born in 1965 and 1971, respectively, Dalrymple and Frankopan belong to the same cohort, coming of age as writers at a time when the British reading public was happily devouring 1,000-page tomes on, say, the French and Russian Revolutions. It was an age when doorstopper histories sold like air-fryer cookbooks, which is to say an age that lent itself easily to public-facing history. Happily, it was also an age relatively innocent of precarious contracts and pretentious postmodernism; pecuniary considerations and the stylistic dictates of the academy would prevent many from scaling the heights of public intellectualdom in a later age. Dalrymple took up the cudgels for popular history with a quartet on the Raj — a darker riff on Jan Morris’s trilogy — before moving backwards to Indian antiquity. Frankopan, by contrast, moved in both directions, encompassing the longue durée in histories of the Silk Road and climate change.

Billed as a “new history of the world”, no less, The Silk Roads offered a highly idiosyncratic take on global history, giving us the view from the Stans, as it were. Halford Mackinder called the region the world’s “heartland”, control over which is the sine qua non of global hegemony — a provocative argument when it was made in 1904, though these days seen as common wisdom in think-tank circles. Frankopan’s sweep — taking in the Achaemenids and Abbasids, commending the Persians and Mongols, depicted here not as barbaric cretins but as begetters of a sophisticated civilisation — no doubt had a touch of Whiggishness to it, confirming Herbert Butterfield’s wry observation that historical compression often tends towards upbeatness. One can see why Beijing’s mandarins fell head over heels with it. Trade gets top billing in these pages. War and prejudice — between Arab and Jew, Christian and Muslim — often recede from view. This was the kind of feel-good story the architects of a new Silk Road could get behind.

All the same, Frankopan was at pains to argue that the term itself was, in fact, of recent vintage. He didn’t go as far as Khodadad Rezakhani in dubbing it the “road that never was”, though he did maintain that the East-West carrying trade — ferrying money and maladies, goods and gods — coursed in the main through Indian ports. Overland routes from China were a minority taste. The fact is that no “Silk Road” ever existed in antiquity or mediaeval times. The Romans and Chinese were hardly aware of one another’s existence. On the other hand, Rome and India did a roaring trade in diamonds and drugs, amethysts and eunuchs, hair and diaphanous fabrics. Fast-forward a millennium to the 9th century, and it is still Gujarati entrepôts, topped up with the likes of Basra or Siraf in the Persian Gulf, doing the heavy-lifting.

Historically, the camel and caravan were no match for the ship. Across Central Asia, disconnection — not connection — was the norm. Then as now, sea transport was exponentially cheaper than land transport. Thanks to the revolution that is containerisation, these days it costs next to nothing to have your Shein jeans conveyed halfway across the world; the real expense, and environmental harm, lies in last-mile delivery. As it was, the “Silk Road” only became a proper thing in 1877. That is when the Prussian geographer Baron von Richthofen, enlisted to supply a fanciful genealogy for a railway linking Berlin and Beijing, coined the word. It was still later, in 1938, that the Silk Road made its Anglophone debut.

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These subtleties were lost in the reception of The Silk Roads. Coming at a time of the Middle Kingdom’s return to the world stage under state-capitalist aegis, the hype around it neatly dovetailed with the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s latest effort to win friends and buy influence. It followed that Beijing was unencumbered by real history, preferring a nostalgic version of it. As Don DeLillo’s quip has it: “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” Very simply, the ancient Silk Road was good PR, another win for China’s “heritage diplomacy”.

It is only fitting, then, that the British Museum has cleared some precious Bloomsbury real estate to commemorate its (chimerical) existence in its blockbuster show. Not in any sense a work of Chinese propaganda, of course, the Silk Roads exhibition is nevertheless of a piece with the deceptive Silk Road Revival. Its message of global connection inevitably, if inadvertently, plays up its popular image as a Belt and Road Initiative avant la lettre. Rather much is made of silk, a commodity that scarcely featured in international trade. Historically speaking, an emphasis on more important items — cotton, pepper, ivory, sandalwood — would have placed India to the fore. Indeed, as Dalrymple has argued, the elision of India in the show was striking, even as a great many of the exhibits screamed the Subcontinent. One suspects that the omission owed to curatorial parochialism, not a willingness to regurgitate Beijing’s talking points, but it was revealing all the same.

On this score, Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, published this year, is a salutary corrective to the Scylla of Sinocentrism. Yet in its upbeat Indocentric pushback, it makes itself vulnerable to the Charybdis of Hindu nationalist appropriation. Time was when India was number one, Dalrymple argues, exporting mathematics and medicine, music and mythology, religion and architecture across what he calls the “Indosphere” — “the Sanskrit ecumene” to pointy-heads in the know – spanning Kandahar and Singapore from c. 250 BC to AD 1200.

It’s a story that is bound to give Hindu nationalists hard-ons, not least because the Indosphere bears a passing resemblance to an akhand bharat — a Greater India fencing in much of Southeast Asia under direct rule from Delhi. This, apparently, was the way things were in Asia’s deep past. The more hare-brained of the Hindu nationalists, the historian Sara Perlangeli has shown, continue to harbour fantasies of an “offshore Hindu nation” protected by Delhi. Dalrymple’s own retort, prefigured in The Golden Road — that a great deal of ancient “Indian” soft power was of Buddhist, definitely not Hindu, stamp — one suspects falls on deaf ears in this puerile milieu.

Historians have no control over how their books are received — more’s the pity. Frankopan is under no illusions. “I know my place as a commentator and it’s not to shape answers for politicians… I’m a mere historian sitting in Oxford,” he has said with resigned candour. Dalrymple’s version could run: “…sitting in a farmhouse in Mehrauli.”

The Golden and Silk Roads have acquired lives of their own, as signs of forgotten, precolonial national greatness. Conceived at the outset as correctives to Eurocentric history, they will be read in an altogether different light in certain quarters. For the votaries of China’s “wolf warrior diplomacy” — Global Times editor Hu Xijin (who once likened Britain to a “bitch asking for a beating”), for instance, or China Daily EU bureau chief Chen Weihua (who once called an American senator a “lifetime bitch”) — accounts of the Silk Road no doubt serve as comforting reminders of a seemingly endless golden age before the country’s “century of national humiliation”. In India, too, histories of precolonial gloire will go down swimmingly in milieux brimming with postcolonial resentment. One imagines India’s foreign minister S. Jaishankar might cull a titbit or two from The Golden Road for inclusion in a future speech rehashing his obligatory swipes at “the West” and its “old habit” of imperialism.

Yet it can scarcely be denied that both India and China have long since ceased to be colonised nations. If anything, they are now both colonial powers in their own right. No longer the “sick man of Asia”, China today is the world’s largest debt collector. Exporting its surplus capital and flexing its military muscle, its ruling class has come to treat a large chunk of Southeast Asia — everything west of its so-called “9-dash line” — as its own private garden. Power projection on the high seas has gone hand in hand with economic exploitation further afield, with Chinese tycoons snapping up everything from Zambian copper to Liberian redwood.

India’s ruling class, likewise, has come to assume that it is the sole keyholder to the Indian Ocean, propping up favourable regimes from Mauritius to the Maldives. Again, the Indian national oil company’s stab at controlling Sudanese oil and the Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s monopolisation of Ghana’s 5G network are hardly lessons in Third World solidarity.

Small wonder forgotten histories of Asian greatness are in such demand. As Benedetto Croce put it, “all history is contemporary history”.

In the wake of a cross-sectarian protest movement, and deep-seated popular anger against the corrupt and intransigent Lebanese state, many Lebanese saw their former colonial master as the answer to all their prayers. The President was especially well-received in Gemmayzeh, a Christian bastion, and one of the neighbourhoods most affected by the port explosion. Macron, for his part, played his part well, echoing the grievances of a people beset by a crumbling economy and shameless elite corruption. “I’m not here to help them,” Macron proclaimed. “I’m here to help you.”

So popular was Macron’s visit, in fact, that 50,000 Lebanese even signed a petition urging France to recolonise their homeland. The President never addressed the petition, but beyond helping raise €250 million for the benighted country, he also established an ambitious roadmap to transform Lebanon, claiming he’d received assurances from Lebanese leaders that they’d soon form a new cabinet. The humanitarian duly arrived — but the reforms never materialised. It took another year before Lebanon’s bickering politicians finally formed a new government, and by all appearances it’s just as feckless as any other.

Now, four years later, Macron is trying to save Lebanon once more — this time motivated as much by domestic political concerns as by France’s influence in the Middle East. Today in Paris, he’s hosting an international conference to garner “support” for Lebanon’s people and sovereignty, after already endorsing a ceasefire proposal to end Israel’s war in the country. Facing challengers from both the Left and the Right at home, Macron has become all but powerless domestically, and sees high-profile crises in places like Ukraine, Africa, and especially Lebanon as opportunities to boost his credentials as a bold international player. But his chances of success this time around are little better than they were four years ago. For while France has grand pretensions in Lebanon, drawing on centuries of tangled cultural and political engagement, the truth is that the Middle East has moved on.

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By Tom McTague

Relations between France and Lebanon stretch back almost 1,000 years. During the First Crusade, Count Raymond of Toulouse “discovered” the Maronites, the largest of Lebanon’s Christian sects, living in the mountains of the Levant, thereby reconnecting them to the rest of Western Christendom. Centuries later in 1649, as the area today known as Lebanon gained a degree of autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty, France opened its first consulate in Beirut and officially took the Maronites under its protection at the behest of the community’s patriarch. In the 19th century, meanwhile, as the protector of Lebanon’s Christian population, France armed the Maronites against their local rivals and even sent troops on their behalf. All the while, France spread the glories of its culture across the Mediterranean, opening universities and lycées. Even today, names like Beirut’s Saint Joseph University evoke the best schooling Lebanon can offer.

These varied efforts would be crystalised in 1923, when France established colonial mandates in Lebanon and Syria. Unlike in Damascus, where foreign rule was fiercely resisted, many in Beirut saw the French as cousins — perhaps unsurprising for a Christian-majority country where French education had long been prized. Soon enough, meanwhile, these varied influences would reshape Lebanese identity. Greetings like ça va and bonjour became common refrains in Beirut cafés, even as many Christians named their children Georges or Pierre. Michel Aoun, a commander during the Civil War and later the country’s president, is just one of many political luminaries to have a French name too.

Though French was most eagerly embraced by the Maronites, it was equally used right across society. At the institutional level, French has long appeared on Lebanon’s currency, its central bank is officially known as The Banque du Liban, and French transliterations of Arabic place names continue to appear on signs across the country to this day. Even now, around 40% of Lebanese can speak at least some French.

All the same, French in Lebanon would fade. Perhaps the main obvious factor is demography. Though the Maronite elite envisaged the modern Lebanese state as a Christian island in a Muslim sea, the country today is a multicultural nation of Sunni and Shi’a, Christian and Druze. Maronites, for their part, along with other Christian sects, have fallen sharply as a share of the country’s total population. As Lebanon’s population has grown and many Christians emigrated in search of greener pastures, the percentage of Maronites and other Christian groups in the country dropped from around 50% in 1932 to around 32% today. And while French retains some prestige among the country’s elite, the idea that Lebanon is some hardy Christian outpost is unsurprisingly alien to the Shi’as of south Beirut, southern Lebanon, and the Beqaa Valley.

Little wonder, then, that English has supplanted French as the most popular foreign language among young Lebanese. White-collar professionals have moved the same way, with English business jargon and phrases like “sorry” or “bye” (often in combination with the Arabic expression yalla) now as ubiquitous in the local Arabic dialect as French once was. Renowned newspapers that once published exclusively in French like L’Orient-Le Jour have launched English-language versions in the past few years, and recent Lebanese films like The Insult have opted to use English, rather than French, titles. While I was in Beirut several years ago, a friend comically recounted how a Lebanese university student at a poetry reading said they had written their poem in Arabic because, they claimed absurdly, it was “a dying language” in Lebanon — and was giving way not to French, but rather to English.

Nor is this merely a story of linguistic change. For as French’s star has fallen, so too has that of the Republic itself. Though Paris deployed troops to Lebanon during the Civil War — and helped secure the release of then-Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Saudi custody as recently as 2017 — it’s generally been supplanted by the US. After all, it’s now Washington not Paris that funds the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the Pentagon pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Lebanon since the Nineties. The US too has emerged as the primary Western backer of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslim political elite alongside its ally Saudi Arabia, and there is hardly a better symbol of its growing might in the country than its gargantuan, fortress-like embassy looking down on Beirut from the surrounding hills. It hardly helps that France’s own foreign policy, typified by the independent spirit of people like Jacques Chirac, has long since been subsumed by American interests.

Taken together, then, the pleas of Lebanese Francophiles back in 2020 were little more than the dying breaths of a lost age. As the President’s appearance in 2020 so vividly proved, the “Paris of the Middle East” vanished long ago. And performative proposals aside, today’s conference won’t achieve much either. Tellingly, neither Israel nor Iran are attending Macron’s shindig, making any progress towards a ceasefire a non-starter, and although the US is sending a few diplomats, Secretary of State Antony Blinken will not be present. It’s clear then that the most critical players involved in the conflict see it as a sideshow, and Macron’s ability to act decisively in the region has long disappeared, if it ever existed at all. Where Lebanon now goes, in short, is out of France’s hands.

It is not entirely for want of international pressure. In the spring of 2019, for instance, a new design for a 10,000-yen note featuring a portrait of Japan’s pioneering industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi was announced, provoking a harsh reaction from South Korea — where Shibusawa’s portrait had been briefly used on the currency imposed by Japanese colonial rulers. The nation’s objections were duly reported in Japan, yet little public debate followed. The banknote will be released, as originally planned, in 2024.

This response echoes the better-known controversy over “comfort women”,  a euphemism for the hundreds of thousands of predominantly Chinese and Korean women forced to become sex slaves to Japan’s imperial army during the Second World War. Japan’s apparent resistance to engaging fully and sincerely with these historic crimes  has inspired much international criticism, including demonstrations outside Japanese embassies in Seoul and Manila.

To understand why Japan is so guarded about its empire, it is necessary to understand how exactly that empire came about. After all, the nation had only narrowly escaped being colonised itself in the mid-19th century, when the industrialised Western powers set their sights on Asian territories. In the 20th, as the first and only non-Western country playing the game of great power politics, Japan tried to adopt the role of the anti-colonial colonialist, predestined to liberate other Asians from Western imperialism and to lead them on the road to progress. Japan’s stated aim was to create “an Asia for Asians”, a slogan it used to justify its own aggressive invasions. China had to be freed from the Western-backed regime of Chiang Kai-shek; Malaya and Burma from the British; the East Indies from the Dutch; Indochina from the French; the Philippines from the Americans. According to this view, Japan’s imperialism was not self-interested — and acted in opposition to Western colonialism.

Race was at the heart of Japan’s Pan-Asianism. Writing in late 1918, Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who would later become prime minister, urged Japan to “reject the Anglo-American Peace” to be proposed at Versailles. Shortly after attending the conference, he wrote: “That the white people — and the Anglo-Saxon race in particular — generally abhor coloured people is an apparent fact, so blatantly observable in the US treatment of its black people.” And his suspicions were arguably vindicated when Japanese delegates tried to have a clause in favour of racial equality included in the League’s charter — and failed.

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After the worldwide depression, as the Great Powers became inward-looking — putting up protectionist trade barriers and, in some cases, introducing laws against Asian immigration — Japan’s rhetoric became focused on economic security. The nation insisted that each of its expansionist steps was part of a grand project — to build a “New East Asia Order” or the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. The official goal of Japan’s war with the West was declared, in late 1941, to be the establishment of Asian “stability”. Just as the Japanese were taught to believe in their emperor’s divinity, they were also taught that their nation had a sacred mission in Asia — especially in colonial South-East Asia, where the dissatisfaction in European colonies justified Japan’s involvement, for some. For others, it had the opposite effect: in 1962, Lee Kuan Yew, who was then Singapore’s Prime Minister, identified Japan’s military occupation from early 1942 as a wake-up call. Japanese occupation made his generation of young people “determined that no one — neither the Japanese nor the British — had the right to push and kick us around”.

To this day, the belief that ousting the predatory West from Japan’s backyard was morally legitimate persists. In the Nineties, one best-selling manga by the cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi, claiming to be a “philosophical comic book”, painted Japanese imperialism in a shamelessly self-glorifying light. The Japanese army, it argued, “bravely fought the white imperialists, who arrogantly regarded coloured peoples as lowly primates”. More recently, the hawkish former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s success was partly down to his effective deployment of neo-nationalist rhetoric, which has remained present since his death.

But whatever the present-day Japanese would like to believe, in practice Japanese occupiers used anti-colonial rhetoric while behaving very much like colonial masters themselves. This led the historian Grant Goodman to observe in 1991 that Japan “out-colonialed” Westerners in terms of brutality and exploitation. In reality, it would be misguided to dismiss Japan’s “Asia for Asians” claim as purely disingenuous, a post facto excuse for its aggressive expansionism. The philosophical underpinnings for it preceded Japan’s empire.

In the late-19th century, Asian intellectuals — often writing in English — sought to reject the colonial view of Asia as an entity that was racially inferior. The Japanese art historian Tenshin Okakura, an associate of the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, emerged as one of the most influential Pan-Asianist voices. Despite its comparative material and military weakness, Okakura asserted, Asia was a civilisation par excellence. In the preamble of The Ideals of the East, he wrote:

“Asia is one. The Himalayas divide, only to accentuate, two mighty civilisations, the Chinese with its communism of Confucius, and the Indian with its individualism of the Vedas. But not even the snowy barriers can interrupt for one moment that broad expanse of love for the Ultimate and Universal.”

And yet, Japan’s quest to reach the status of the white nations that ruled the world was conducted not in spiritual terms but old-fashioned military ones. With Japan’s victory in the war against Tsarist Russia in 1905, it became the first non-white power to defeat a white one in a modern war. Unsurprisingly, this stoked anti-colonial sentiments beyond the Japanese archipelago. Jawaharlal Nehru, writing in 1939, recalled the excitement he felt as a boy: “Japanese victories stirred up my enthusiasm … Nationalistic ideas filled my mind. I mused of Indian freedom and Asiatic freedom from the thraldom of Europe.”

A string of anti-colonialists started to seek refuge in Japan — including Indo-Chinese nationalists Phan Boi Chau and Prince Cuong De, Indian independence fighter Rash Behari Bose, and, most famously, Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern Chinese nationalism. Many of them were morally and financially supported by Japan’s Pan-Asianists. The movie studio tycoon Umeya Shokichi, for example, drew on his fortune to help finance Sun’s nationalist movement, as did Torazo Miyazaki, a philosopher who actively collaborated with the Chinese nationalists by volunteering to be their publicist and supplier of arms, and even a combatant.

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Meanwhile, one of the most important figures of 20th-century Japanese literature, the novelist Masuji Ibuse, worked in Malaya and Singapore, writing editorials for the local newspaper. He emphasised the importance of propagating the Japanese language. In February 1942, he wrote, ironically in English:

“The substitution of Nipponese (Japanese) for English as the lingua franca in Malaya is but the natural recognition of a nation which has stood up for things Asia [sic] and which is now in the process of saving Asians from continuing to be the victims of the British strategy to squeeze the wealth and culture of Asians.”

Ibuse was convinced that learning Japanese would elevate other Asians. To him, and many others, Asia was not only one, as Okakura had proclaimed; rather, “Asia was Japan”.

Despite Japan’s utter defeat in the Second World War, this narcissistic self-image persisted. That the emperor was never held responsible for Japan’s imperialism did much to hinder the development of an honest debate: his throne was spared by General Douglas MacArthur out of fear of Japanese rebellion, which would have stifled efforts to rebuild post-war Japan as a fortress against communism. A lingering reverence for the imperial institution has also made Japanese colonialism something of a sensitive — if not a taboo — subject in post-war Japan. The emperor, moreover, has become a symbol of peace in a nation that now hasn’t seen war for a lifetime.

All this partly explains why the West’s post-colonial reckoning has so far elicited no discernible reaction in Japan. There is always a slight time lag before Japan absorbs any social and intellectual movements coming from the outside world. Advocacy for LGBTQ rights, for instance, took some years for college students to embrace. Yet there is a bigger reason why Japan has not reckoned with its colonial past. Whereas in Britain the ideologies used to justify colonialism, including Social Darwinism, have been thoroughly debunked, the imperial Japanese claim that Asia had to be liberated from the West is, in theory, morally unobjectionable. None of this excuses the atrocities committed by Japan in practice. And while most Japanese today are indifferent to the topic of the empire, it’s still a subject that gets conservatives riled up. They stick to the classic narrative of Asian solidarity, in which Japan stood up to the imperial bullies, instead of emulating them.

It is a story that stars Radhaninod Pal, an Indian judge beloved by the Japanese Right. Sitting on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946, otherwise known as the Tokyo Trial, he became famous for arguing that all the Japanese defendants, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, should be acquitted. He insisted that Japan’s crimes were hardly unprecedented, that one only had to look at Western imperialism to find equal brutality. He also pointed to America’s nuclear bombings as war crimes, and accused the victorious powers of moral relativism and racial prejudice. Because of such statements, Pal is to this day memorialised in Japan as a brave nationalist who sided with an Asian ally in the face of Western arrogance.

Japan’s pose as the anti-colonial colonialist will persist so long as it continues to think of itself as having fought a selfless, civilisational war for the good of Asia. All the while, an uncomfortable truth will remain ignored: that, in its execution of the Pan-Asianist dream, Japan fell far too short of delivering its grand promises.

In response, around 600 people, almost all Armenians, gathered outside Downing Street to call for support for Armenia. Their faltering effort stood in sharp contrast to the pro-Palestine protests that erupted over the weekend. Across the UK, tens of thousands marched. In London alone, their presence prompted the deployment of more than 1,000 police officers to keep the peace. As dusk fell, a large crowd milled about outside the Israeli embassy, brandishing Palestinian flags and chanting “We are all Palestinian”.

Who are these people? It seems unlikely that they’re all literally Palestinian, when the total estimated Palestinian-origin population of the UK is around 3,000. Rather they seem to come from four broad groups: genuine Palestinians, those who support Palestine through ethnic affinity, those who support Palestine through religious affinity, and those on the Left who support Palestine for ideological reasons.

All of these groups wave away the core reason given by Jewish people for desiring a safe homeland: their historic persecution, up to the Nazi project of industrialised murder that cost the lives of six million Jewish men, women and children. I don’t blame the survivors for wanting somewhere safe to live. But the crowd on London’s streets disagreed. Forget some putative “two-state solution”. They chanted: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A glance at a map should make the implication clear: the elimination of Israel.

It’s easy to understand why Palestinians competing with Israelis for the same homeland might desire this. It’s also relatively easy to see why Islamists and other Arab demographics might align with their cause. The head-scratcher here isn’t the age-old tribalism of race or religion, however incomprehensible these may be to liberals. It’s the monolithic affiliation of European Leftists with Palestine — including, as ever, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

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In some cases, the result is a coalition of pantomime-horse absurdity. The most comical instance of this phenomenon is surely “Queers for Palestine”, a movement which has been likened to “Chickens for KFC”. But there are a great many more. For the sake of brevity, let’s call this far-Left caucus “Greater Corbynism”: a kaleidoscope of fringe groups comprising everything from the placard-waving SWP, through assorted subtypes of Communist pamphleteer, to the balaclava-clad antifa. Even representatives of other seemingly unrelated Leftist causes, such as environmental “direct action” and animal liberation, regularly nail their red, green and white colours to the mast.

And elsewhere, among the far larger population of Brits who lean Left, but without sliding into the abyss of Greater Corbynism, many more are content to think harder and more empathically about the suffering of Palestinians than of Jews. This asymmetry is omnipresent: for example, on the Sunday after the Hamas attacks, the well-meaning but conventionally woke vicar at my local Anglican church managed a nod to Israel, amid a list of other international conflicts, during prayers of intercession. The following week, with Israel poised for a counterstrike, we got a mournful sermon about how terrible both sides are, and every one of the prayers for intercession was for Gazan civilians. So, too, with the BBC: an organisation that has studiously refused to employ the adjective “terrorist” in connection with Hamas, despite it being internationally designated as such.

If this was impelled by a general commitment to protecting those at risk of ethnic cleansing, these groups would have also been protesting the mass displacement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. But they weren’t. Is the simple and depressing explanation for this just that a lot of people really hate Jews? In some cases, perhaps. But my vicar, for one, is not an antisemite. Something else appears to be going on.

It is more, perhaps, that like many other well-meaning leftists, he has a blind spot. And the size and ubiquity of this blind spot on the Left is best explained not by hatred of Jews (or not only by such hatred), but by the outsized symbolic role Israel plays as a proxy for American geopolitical hegemony. For this association has some basis in fact, in the sense that Israel really is a creation of American imperial power.

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By Kat Rosenfield

Following the First World War, the surviving European empires divided the Middle East in a thicket of great-power bargaining, in the course of which the British secured a mandate to rule Palestine. This mandate both obliged Britain to balance the needs of Jews and Arabs, and also — under the Balfour Declaration that helped them to secure it — to create a Jewish national home.

As historian James Barr notes, Britain’s motive for issuing the Balfour Declaration was more strategic than compassionate. The hope was, as Barr puts it, to create “what it called ‘a buffer Jewish state’ to guard the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal and keep the French at bay”. But this strategic aim, and Britain’s obligations under the mandate, were already in tension before the Second World War broke out.

First, the Balfour Declaration prompted a swift rise in Jewish immigration to Palestine, which triggered an Arab uprising in 1936. Fearing all-out Arab revolt, the British responded by imposing a strict cap on Jewish immigration in 1939. But as stories of Nazi atrocities began to percolate from German-occupied Europe, this cap swiftly came to seem intolerably cold-hearted. Among those moved to understandable outrage were members of America’s growing, prosperous and increasingly influential Jewish population, many of whom were already engaged in campaigning for an independent Jewish homeland. These activists decried British immigration policy in Palestine, not without reason, as “cruel and indefensible” in the context of the Holocaust.

Their campaigning drew the attention of politicians. The statesman and presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, steeped in America’s national story of self-determination in the Declaration of Independence, was both moved by Jewish suffering and perhaps, as Barr suggests, also mindful of the presence of large Jewish voting minorities in key swing states required for his planned 1944 presidential campaign. He became a key figure in pursuing an end to the immigration cap, and, as time went on, in shaping American perceptions that British control of Palestine was less a buffer between hostile ethnic groups than the main obstacle to these groups’ reconciliation.

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Albert Einstein was one of many who encouraged this view. According to one American diplomat, in 1946 the theoretical physicist assured a joint British-American committee exploring Jewish refugee resettlement that all Palestine needed was “really honest government for the people there which would get the Arabs and Jews together”. Two years later, with Britain exhausted and dependent on American funds and goodwill, the US set out to make such a government a reality. The rest, as they say, is history.

None of this is to impute some special status or cunning to a “Zionist lobby”, as conspiracy-mongers are wont to do. Modern America is a nation of immigrants, and it’s common for expats to retain an interest in the old country. In 1918, for example, with the Habsburg Empire on the brink of disintegration, a delegation of Central European diplomats met in Pittsburgh seeking international recognition for a proposed Czechoslovakian breakaway state. A.J.P. Taylor also describes how emigrants were instrumental in securing American recognition for this new nation — even before the monarchy that nominally still governed those territories was formally dissolved. Similarly, the painful history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles includes a distinctive and sometimes controversial American contribution, impelled by that country’s Irish-heritage diaspora.

And if an expat-inflected international politics is characteristically American, so too is the governing theme of many of its overseas interventions: a sometimes painfully idealistic effort to reconfigure foreign cultures and political landscapes in line with the American melting-pot ideal. Indeed, if your everyday reference-point is the relative cultural “blank canvas” of modern America, and you’ve decided not to think about the Native Americans, perhaps this looks as possible as it sounded from the lips of Albert Einstein.

Amid Europe’s centuries (or the Holy Land’s millennia) of history and grievance, such a policy seems optimistic to say the least. Accordingly, many such efforts to foster America’s “self-determination” have had, at best, mixed results. Among the failures, perhaps the least disastrous was Czechoslovakia: it didn’t succeed as a post-Habsburg state, but at least managed to divide peacefully in the 1992 “Velvet Divorce”. There have been many others since — some impelled by expat activism within America; others, as for example the “nation-building” catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, seemingly by sheer conviction.

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And when the attempt to remake the world in America’s image tilts the international landscape towards American interests, so much the better for America. When Britain’s strategic Middle East foothold, the Palestine mandate, was replaced in 1948, for example, the loss signalled the beginning of the end for British control of oil in the region — and the beginning of its relative domination by America.

This double game enrages many. Charitably, we might read at least some of the resulting hatred of the American hegemon as a kind of furious disappointment at how often the high words about freedom and democracy operate in practice as delivery mechanisms for the far grubbier pursuit of power and money. Regardless, the states created in the process stand for America’s strange cocktail of high idealism, reach and ruthlessness — and its ability to reshape the world in its own image and ignore the casualties. Of these, none is a more potent symbol of than Israel: the state that offered sanctuary to Europe’s brutalised Jews, scuppered a key geopolitical rival, and has endured ever since despite near-total encirclement by hostile powers largely thanks to American support.

When the crowd bellows “From the river to the sea”, then, relatively few are saying this because they have a material interest in obliterating the real Israel. I dare say many more have no particular animus toward Jewish people. They just don’t care about them. Rather, most are moved by a desire to weaken what Israel symbolises: Pax Americana. Whenever the denizens of greater Corbynism denounce “settler colonialism”, “capitalism”, “white supremacy”, or some other formulation meaning “the reigning order, which I don’t like”, this is what they’re referring to. A defeat for Israel is a defeat for America; and implicitly, a great many Jews may be sacrificed in pursuit of that noble goal. By contrast, there’s no obvious way to turn the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict into a bloody nose for the American empire. So no one gives a stuff.

But only a fool would take these bleak realities as licence to equivocate about the conflict now unfolding. “Both-sides-ing” is itself a peacetime luxury, made possible by Pax Americana. The American empire may be amoral, extractive, asymmetrical and at times infuriatingly hypocritical. But every empire, throughout recorded history, has had feet of clay as well as high ideals. And with all its faults, America remains the principal guarantor of relative peace and order across a colossal sphere of influence that spans half the planet and includes my own nation.

Just today, Biden will step up to that project again with a visit to Tel Aviv. Do we want him to succeed or not? Those who dream of America’s downfall, literally or by symbolic proxy, offer no better alternative, and a great many worse ones. In reality, there are no blank-slate beginnings, and no happy endings either. We can only ever pick a place, and take a stand. I stand with peace and order, however flawed. I stand with Israel.

In the US, a small group of African American thinkers is pushing back against progressive orthodoxy on the race issue. Glenn Loury — a Professor of Economics at Brown University — has long argued that while historical discrimination against African Americans is undeniable, it is not the sole explanation for racial disparities in income or education. And Thomas Sowell, the conservative African American Stanford University economist, has taken on what he sees as progressives’ faulty answers in a new book, Social Justice Fallacies.

“At the heart of the social justice vision”, Sowell writes, “is the assumption that, because economic and other disparities among human beings greatly exceed any differences in their innate capacities”, they must be the result of “such human vices as exploitation and discrimination”. In his 2019 book, How to be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi stated this case plainly: “Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.” Here in Britain, leading progressive think-tanks such as the Runnymede Trust also often link racial disparities — in spheres such as health, housing, education and employment — to “systemic racism”.

Debates over the causes of group disparities are fierce precisely because they shape the answers to the practical questions of what is to be done and who is responsible for doing it. If racial disparities are caused by racism, the responsibility for redressing them lies with those perpetuating it, hence today’s progressive focus on the ideology of white supremacy.

But Sowell has other ideas about why some groups are doing much better. While he acknowledges that exploitation and discrimination do “prevent different groups of people — whether classes, races or nations — from having equal, or even comparable, outcomes in economic terms”, he maintains that this is only part of the story. Some groups, he suggests, may be better off because they have, over a period of time, collectively mastered endeavours that have turned out to be profitable, teachable to younger generations and conducive to group progress. He cites people of German ancestry having created leading beer brands in countries as varied as the US, Argentina, Brazil, Australia and China — not by coincidence, but because the ancestors of today’s Germans were producing beer as far back as the days of the Roman Empire. “When a particular people have been doing a particular thing for more than a thousand years,” he writes, “is it surprising if they tend to be more successful in that particular endeavour than others who have had no such history?”

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All groups excel at something. Those statistically worse off educationally, for whatever reason, may be underrepresented in jobs where a degree is essential but over-perform in endeavours where personal talent determines success. Sowell cites sports and entertainment as spheres in which “American groups rising out of poverty” have excelled. But most people would find it odd if someone argued that the fact that 72% of NBA players are black implies that other groups are being discriminated against in US basketball. Likewise, the fact that the median per capita income of Americans of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is higher than that of white Americans is not interpreted as a sign that the US system is designed to advantage those minorities.

To “honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism”, Sowell insists. It is an assertion that will likely make more than a few people uneasy, depending on the groups being compared (although I would argue that we should always be wary of making generalisations about groups). Because China is now one of the world’s two economic superpowers, few object to comments about how the Chinese may do such-and-such better than the Americans, but the Americans are better at such-and-such than the Chinese. But most of us feel uncomfortable if similar comparisons are made between, say, Africans and Europeans. Disparities between these two groups are so wide that there exist strong fears that drawing parallels could be interpreted as arguing that the richer group is simply superior to the poorer. Which was, of course, the explicit justification for enslaving and colonising Africans — something people haven’t forgotten.

Partly because of this, if certain behavioural patterns among some groups of African ancestry — here in the West or in Africa — are pointed to as detrimental to wider black progress, Western progressives will often describe this as ‘victim-blaming’. If an African country is corruptly and ineffectively governed, the argument goes, it is because its leaders inherited exploitative colonial structures. The question of why such structures have not been dismantled or at least significantly reformed in the decades since independence will usually be answered with reference to structural constraints, imposed by the West. Africa’s ruling elites are ultimately victims — in the Western progressive worldview, anyway. No African progressive living in Africa thinks this way.

The phrase ‘victim-blaming’ was coined by psychologist William Ryan in his 1971 book, Blaming the Victim — which was a response to discussions about the role of African American family structures, which were described as perpetuating black poverty in the infamous Moynihan Report of 1965. But I believe the concept of ‘victim-blaming’ gained the power it wields today mostly thanks to feminist activists, who used it to describe how female rape victims may be questioned about what clothes they were wearing when attacked or how late they had been out. Their rhetoric was then adopted by anti-colonialists. Explaining his reasons for rejecting an MBE in 2019, British spoken word artist, George the Poet, who is of Ugandan descent, said: “Your forefathers grabbed my motherland, pinned her down and took turns. They did that every day for a couple hundred years and then left her to treat her own burns.” In many a Western progressive mind, the West violates other nations via neoliberal economic exploitation, then has the gall to tell those it has exploited that their poverty is their fault — because they didn’t work hard enough, were not well-organised enough, or allowed corruption to flourish. All in order to convince the world that the system they have built is a just one, when it obviously isn’t.

But dismissing, as ‘victim-blaming’, any arguments citing a weaker group’s actions as obstacles to that group’s progress is not helpful to anyone, least of all the weaker groups themselves. It is especially unfortunate when people do this not because they genuinely believe the argument is baseless, but because they want to signal empathy by demonstrating that they always side with the underdog — which is the sine qua non to being accepted by the progressive elite. This self-serving approach is deeply hypocritical, given that progressivism’s stated aim is to uplift groups in a weaker position, and to do that we need to have frank conversations about what may be going wrong within a group. Scholars such as Sowell and Loury, for instance, argue that the questions raised in the Moynihan Report remain valid points of discussion.

In my recent book, It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s about Wealth, I argue that the future status of blackness depends not on what happens in Britain and America — where just 3% of the world’s black population live — but on what happens in Africa, where 90% of black people live. If we are ever to speak of any kind of meaningful global racial equality, Africa must succeed. If it is to succeed, we must talk about its failures.

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Does anyone genuinely believe that the mind-boggling corruption of Africa’s ruling elites is not a major factor contributing to the continent being the poorest and least economically developed? To there being close to 500 million Africans — more than the EU’s population — living on less than $2 a day? To there being 600 million people lacking access to electricity in the year 2023? Can anyone maintain that all this poverty can be blamed on legacies of colonialism and slavery?

Even if we can blame all Africa’s problems on the past, shouldn’t the focus be on what can be done to change things today? Merely identifying the root cause of a problem does not give you a solution to the problem. That is another task entirely. Without radically improving the way most African countries are run, prosperity will continue to elude the continent. Africa has been dealt a terrible hand by history, but none of us can change the past. All we can do is play the cards we have today as best we can, so that our hand may be stronger in the future.

Of course, today’s Western progressives often appear to believe that only Westerners have the power to change anything fundamental about society, including in countries thousands of kilometres away. It is the modern-day manifestation of Eurocentrism: the idea that the world revolves around what white Westerners think and do. Development outcomes elsewhere are thus always traceable to some Western action, past or present.

In his book, Sowell emphasises that the onus of changing the fortunes of worse-off groups rests primarily on them. But the debate over the factors driving group disparities — between those who emphasise individual agency and those who emphasise external factors — does not have to be a zero-sum game in which one side must ultimately triumph. Both can play their part in taking practical steps to improve things for the worse-off in this world — which would involve looking at big-picture structural changes as well as honest analysis of potentially damaging group dynamics. Ideologies like products are subject to the laws of demand and supply, and there is clearly a strong demand for the social justice vision today — signalling a genuine mass craving for a fairer world in which there is less poverty, inequality and needless human suffering. We’d surely rather this craving existed than not. The key is to apply it usefully: to always be open to evidence about what is working and what isn’t, about who needs to do what, when and how.

Don’t be fooled. Despite its small size and seeming typicality, Gabon is different. Because this African country, with barely 2.3 million people, has played a massively outsized role in post-colonial Africa. For over 50 years, it has been both the exemplar case and chief facilitator of a dirty capitalism and corrupt neo-imperialism that has marred the continent.

To put it simply, Gabon’s leading Bongo dynasty is responsible for facilitating no-good transactions and all means of illicit activity — and the story of post-imperial French success cannot be told without it.

It all starts, as it so often does when it comes to France, with Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle was desperate to keep sub-Saharan Africa in French orbit — and so set about with a plan. To maintain dominance, France would do a few things. Most obviously, France would keep close institutional, personal and political links with its former colonies, embedding itself into new states. But De Gaulle also tried something else: France would use whatever means possible to ensure the right politicians got into the right places. De Gaulle had a type in mind: those pliant to French interests, but who would also be sensible and intelligent enough to maintain power, and so ensure continuing dominance.

And so it was, like most of former French sub-Saharan states, with Gabon, who had as its first President Leon M’ba, a man so pro-French, that initially he rejected independence, instead attempting to make the country part of metropolitan France. Yet, from very early on, De Gaulle and the advisors around him carved out a special role for this tiny country. Small, but nevertheless oil and mineral rich, Gabon was unassuming, easy to control, and awash with liquid cash. These characteristics and its cringingly loyal, ruthless and highly strategic second President, Omar Bongo, made Gabon the central puzzle piece in a system of continued French political control — where France could offshore its geostrategic dirty work.

So, France started using the small country as a base, a place where the messy business of getting what it wants could be done, but not traced back to it. At the centre of it all was a series of multinational companies, who exercised massive amounts of power, and acted at the behest of the French state. The largest, and by far most significant of which, was an oil company named Elf Aquitaine. The company, using Gabon as its base, facilitated all sorts of contracts, bribes and bungs that furthered its and the French governmental interests — tellingly, France chose its CEO.

Elf Gabon, a subsidiary of Elf Aquitaine, made a standard annual payment of £15 million to leaders of African states, mainly of ex-colonies. The payment, essentially from France itself, would not have been acceptable if it was transparently from the ex-colonial master. So France used Gabon to make its dirty tricks possible.

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As time went by, the size of the system exploded. By the Nineties, Elf was dealing with illicit financial flows exceeding $130 million a year. Money for contracts in places as far as Venezuela, Russia and Central Asia went in and out of the company, allowing French companies intimate to the French state strategic control of resources far outside of just its African ex-colonies.

In 1991, £250 million in euphemistically named “commissions” went through Elf for a deal involving six naval frigates being sold to Taiwan for a figure close to £1.6 billion. This was, in effect, a huge military contract for French companies, facilitated by a dodgy company based in Gabon. The country, in all senses but name, continued to act as a strange half-colony.

At other points, Gabon was used for more explicit and brazen political benefits. Funds were transferred to armed militias and rebel troops from it, using the Elf system. It also acted as one of the bases for Jacques Foccart’s Service d’Action Civique (SAC) — a French organisation that promoted its interests in a fashion not dissimilar to Russia’s Wagner Group.

In exchange for being the lynchpin of French neo-colonialism Omar Bongo, the kleptocrat President, would receive an unprecedented level of support from France. For one, Bongo became essential for French political life. And he was, as a result, kept safe by a crack-squad of French troops, connected by tunnels to the Presidential Palace from a local French military base. If protests, riots or a coup threatened Bongo, the French could always step in. The knowledge of this arrangement was all that was needed to keep him in power — for 42 years Bongo was President. Only his death parted him from the job.

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Bongo became a strange figure in French politics. His role in greasing no-good arrangements made the country not just a place for dodgy deals with other countries, but also between French politicians. It was not unheard of for French politicians to head to Gabon and return with a suitcase of cash. Jacques Chirac’s campaign for president, it is reported, gained huge quantities of campaign funding from Gabon’s oil riches. It is partly because of these intimate connections that when Nicholas Sarkozy first took office, the first man he called was not Bush or Blair or Merkel, but Omar Bongo.

That this system collapsed is the story of the recent coup. The demise of the hold of the French state over Gabon — and the collapse of its tightly controlled system of neo-colonialism — is what allowed this coup to take place: the special relationship between Gabon and France no longer exists.

There is no one reason that the French and Gabonese have given up on the tight relationship. Some might point to the Elf affair, when Eva Joly, a Norwegian-French judge revealed the sickening extent of the corruption, resulting in the French government distancing itself from the company. Though French corruption within the country continued, the extent of the revelations meant France spread its bets throughout the continent — as it could no longer afford to be so brazen in its search for an edge within its ex-colonies.

Others might point to the death of Omar Bongo, the shrewd, power-hungry kleptocrat, whose charismatic authority, political nous and diplomatic skill made challenging the Bongo regime near impossible. His son, Ali Bongo, though just as kleptocratic and brutal as his father, was far less strategically decisive when it came to geopolitical direction in global affairs. Instead of cutting fine to the French wind, Bongo junior diversified his portfolio. Out went French total control, in came the free market, Chinese investment and the Anglo-American multinationals. In 2019, Gabon even joined the Commonwealth — the surest sign yet that it was trying to move away from the French.

The result: a dramatic decline in patronage from the former colonial overlord, even if the institutional links remained strong. Gabon became unexceptional once again — no longer the hidden secret to French colonial control, it became just another African state.

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In a way, a farewell to the Bongos is a much-needed tonic for little Gabon. Most ordinary Gabonese never saw the results of so-called independence. Though Gabon gained a large middle class and a bechamel-thin class of super-rich elites, the majority of its population remained astonishingly poor. France continued to exploit the country as if it were a colony, in ways more pernicious and systematic than when it exercised real control. The loss of the dynasty that enabled huge funds to leak out of the oil-rich state and into a huge French slush fund seems like it only to be a good thing.

But it’s far from clear it is. What this latest coup means is highly ambiguous. Yes, it’s a clean break from a French-controlled dynast — but Bongo junior was already trying to move away from France anyway. And even that fact is highly contestable: the new leader of the military government of Gabon is none other than a cousin of Ali Bongo himself.

Perhaps this is typical. Gabon is a country whose recent history has been defined by secrecy —whose unassuming typicality gives it licence to hide the rhythms and patterns that govern its extraordinarily interesting and colourful political life. If there’s any conclusion we can draw from the recent coup, it is that that’s unlikely to change.

In each of these coups, the military officers involved cited the same reasons for seizing power: mounting concerns about a surge in terrorism and chronic social and economic underdevelopment. Despite being one of the world’s richest regions in terms of natural resources, including oil, gold and uranium, the Sahel is also one of the poorest financially. Niger is a striking example: it is one of the world’s leading exporters of uranium, yet consistently ranks towards the bottom of the Human Development Index.

In the eyes of these countries’ new leaders and their supporters, much of the responsibility for this lies with one villain in particular: France. They are, after all, all former French colonies, part of what used to be known as Françafrique. And more than any other imperial power, France has continued to exercise a huge influence over its former outposts, replacing outright colonial rule with more subtle forms of neocolonial control — first and foremost with currency.

Before Africa’s decolonisation in the Fifties and Sixties, it was common among Western powers to impose forms of monetary subservience on their respective colonies. The latter were generally forced to use currencies issued and controlled by the imperial centres, to ensure the European countries’ economic control and financial benefit. France was no exception; rather, what set France apart from other imperial powers was the fact that its monetary empire survived decolonisation. While most African colonies, upon becoming independent, adopted national currencies, France managed to cajole most of its former outposts in Central and Western Africa into maintaining the colonial currency: the CFA franc.

In the decades that followed, various countries tried to abandon the CFA system, but very few succeeded. As the Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla and the French journalist Fanny Pigeaud write in their book Africa’s Last Colonial Currency (which I translated), France did everything it could to discourage countries from leaving the CFA: “Intimidations, destabilisation campaigns and even assassinations and coups d’état marked this period, testifying to the permanent and unequal power relations on which the relationship between France and its ‘partners’ in Africa was based — and is still based today.”

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The CFA franc, as a result, continues to be used by 14 countries, mostly former French colonies, throughout Central and Western Africa — including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Together, they form the so-called “franc zone”, with France still playing a central role. Despite the formal “Africanisation” of this group, which involved transferring the headquarters of the CFA franc’s two central banks to the African continent, France continues to enjoy far-reaching control over the system — and the countries that employ it.

“More than simply a currency,” Sylla and Pigeaud write, “the CFA franc allows France to manage its economic, monetary, financial and political relations with some of its former colonies according to a logic functional to its interests.” They contend that the CFA franc represents a form of “monetary imperialism”, which hinders the development of African economies and keeps them subservient to France.

Consider Niger: the country is France’s biggest source of uranium (providing around 20% of its supply), which is needed to fuel the nuclear plants which provide roughly 70% of the country’s electricity. Yet, only one in seven Nigeriens (and just 4% of rural residents) have access to modern electricity services, while more than 40% of the population live in extreme poverty. Just as strikingly, 85% of the company that operates Niger’s uranium industry is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies; only 15% is owned by Niger’s government.

The CFA system, and the lack of monetary and economic sovereignty it entails, is central to this systematic plundering of resources — in Niger and elsewhere in the Sahel. Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest Human Development Index, five are part of the franc zone, including the three that have experienced recent coups.

Nor is France’s control over the franc zone limited to economic tools. Niger is also France’s main Sahelian military base, hosting around 1,500 French soldiers. To further complicate matters, the country is also home to around 1,000 US soldiers, one of the largest contingents of American troops on the African continent, operating under the umbrella of the United States Africa Command (Africom). Since 2013, the US has also been carrying out drone missions from several bases in Niger — including a recently constructed $110-million installation. For both France and the US, the purported objective is to fight Islamic terrorism; the reality, however, is that despite this massive foreign military presence, security in Niger and other countries has deteriorated over the years — as have their economic prospects.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Africa’s newest military juntas have singled out France as the main target of their ire. In Mali, the current military leader Assimi Goïta expelled the French army, cut diplomatic ties and even banned French as an official language. In Burkina Faso, the young revolutionary leader Ibrahim Traoré also expelled French troops and banned several exports.

For Sylla, this amounts to nothing less than “a second national liberation movement, which aims to bring to completion the decolonisation process which began in the Fifties and Sixties in Francophone Africa”. While the first stage of this process was about obtaining political independence from the West, this latest stage is about obtaining economic sovereignty and independence. This is why, as a recent United Nations report noted, popular support for these new military governments can be understood as being “symptomatic of a new wave of democratic aspiration that is expanding across the continent”. As Sylla told me: “In many of these countries, the militaries are seen as leaders upholding their nations’ sovereignty and independence, as opposed to elected governments, which tend to be puppets of the West and have done nothing to challenge the neocolonial order throughout the years.”

But what does this mean for Niger? For now, the country appears to be moving in the same direction as Mali and Burkina Faso. While the new government has stopped short (for now) of telling foreign troops to leave the country, it has revoked a raft of military cooperation agreements with France, closed the country’s airspace — effectively bringing to a halt US drone operations — and announced it is suspending the export of uranium to France. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets to show their support, burning French flags and even attacking the French embassy. “Since childhood, I’ve been opposed to France,” a local businessman told the BBC. “They’ve exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France.”

As if to prove his point, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) — a political and economic union of 15 countries located in West Africa which has the support of the West — immediately placed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial and financial transactions between Niger and Ecowas countries and, even more ominously, freezing Niger’s assets deposited in the central and commercial banks of Ecowas. The reason they can do this is precisely because Ecowas contains the West African Economic and Monetary Union, which issues the currency used by Niger, and is largely under France’s control. This allows France to weaponise the CFA franc against any government that poses a problem for it within the franc zone. The EU has also reacted punitively, suspending aid and cooperation with Niger despite it being one of the poorest countries in the world.

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More worryingly, the West African bloc said it would “take all measures necessary”, including the use of force, if the elected government was not reinstated within a week. That deadline expired on Sunday and no action was taken, but the threat has not been retracted. They are due to meet on Thursday to decide what happens next. Meanwhile, France, the EU and the US have all offered “unflagging” support to the ousted leader, and have backed Ecowas’s stance. This follows a decade of France using military force to defend its interests in Francophone Africa, intervening in the Ivory Coast, Mali and Chad.

But this is more than just a story about France’s waning hegemony and US military presence in the region. The Nigerien coup also threatens a $13-billion dollar project to build a gas pipeline connecting gas fields in Nigeria to Europe, which would pass straight through Niger. Following the EU’s decision to wean itself off Russian gas last year, this venture is arguably more urgent than ever.

The Nigerien military regime, for its part, has warned that any foreign military intervention in the country would result in a “massacre”, while Mali and Burkina Faso have both come out in support of the new government. Any military intervention, they warned in a joint statement, “would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali”, and “could destabilise the entire region”. Moreover, given Russia’s strong ties with the putschist governments, a Western-backed attack on Niger could easily mutate into what Colin P. Clarke has described as “a regional proxy war”, with Russia and the Wagner Group supporting Niger (and Burkina Faso and Mali), and Western countries supporting Ecowas.

All of which feeds into fears that we are on the verge of a new scramble for Africa, with Russia, China and the West vying for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. If this logic prevails, however, it will be a disaster for Africa. For as hard as it may be to fathom, Western countries — and France in particular — should accept that this anti-Western trend has much less to do with recent foreign influence than with historical grievances against long-running neocolonial practices. Any attempt to counter it with the same old recipe — financial blackmail and military force — will only strengthen the rebels’ resolve.

The European Union plays a particular role in this dominant narrative. The bloc is usually seen as one of the good guys: it stands up for democracy and liberalism, two values which are threatened by Russia, a country on the side of authoritarianism and illiberalism. The EU is also viewed as the embodiment of cosmopolitanism, the opposite of the nationalism of Russia and its Eurosceptic “populist” supporters.

In reality, however, the EU occupies a much more complex space within the binaries that dominate our political thinking. As an examination of its history shows, it stands for liberalism rather than democracy, while replicating some of the features of nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Crucially, rather than limiting these tendencies, the war in Ukraine may actually be strengthening them.

The history of the European project is more problematic than the idea of it as a symbol of democracy suggests. Few “pro-Europeans” know that it began as a colonial project — what might be called its original sin. As Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson have shown, the first phase of European integration in the Fifties was partly intended to consolidate Belgian and French colonies in central and west Africa, which needed an injection of West German capital. Many in West Germany, on other hand, saw it as a chance to get back into the colonial game from which they had been excluded since the end of the First World War.

From the Sixties, however, when Belgium and France lost their remaining colonies in Africa, the six countries that had created the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community turned inwards and forgot its colonial origins. Thus the narrative that emerged around what became the EU centred on the internal lessons of European history (that is, the centuries of conflict between European countries, culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust), rather than the external lessons of European history (in particular European colonialism). Europe was increasingly imagined as a “closed system”.

The EU, as it became with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, increasingly saw itself as a vehicle through which authoritarian states could make democratic transitions. It was seen as crucial to the democratic transitions of Italy and West Germany in the early phase of European integration, and then again with Greece, Spain and Portugal, which joined in the Eighties. In reality, what the EU actually did was to constrain popular sovereignty in its member states.

Yet in the post-Cold War period, the founding story of an EU that stood for democracy continued to strengthen as the bloc enlarged to include central and eastern European countries. The post-1989 revolutions in the countries of the Warsaw Pact were seen, above all, as democratic revolutions. But as Branko Milanović has recently reminded us, they were also nationalist revolutions that aimed to create ethnically homogenous nation states. Joining the EU meant that the national and popular sovereignty of these countries was immediately constrained. In the medium term, this produced a backlash against the EU, the effects of which we now see in Hungary and Poland.

Moreover, the inclusion of central and eastern European countries strengthened the identity of the EU as a white bloc. New members viewed the accession process as a “return to Europe”. But if the “Europe” they were joining was simply the post-war integration project, it was not a “return”, because they had never been part of it before. The “Europe” they thought they were “returning” to was a much older idea of Europe — a civilisational one. The EU, for its part, saw it as completely natural that central and eastern European countries should join it — once, that is, they had carried out reforms. Morocco, on the other hand, applied to join the European Community, as it then was, in 1987, but was told it could not do so, regardless of what reforms it carried out, because it was not a European country.

During the 2010s, as the EU faced a series of cascading crises, it came to feel much more threatened and, as a result, became more defensive, which led to a revival of the concept of a “geopolitical” Europe that first emerged in the Twenties. That idea was a response to a sense of European decline after the First World War — namely, a fear that Europe was losing power relative to the Soviet Union and United States. The pan-European movement — the inspiration for the post-war “European project” — urged Europeans to unite to become a “third force” in international politics and maintain their position of power in the world. Central to this thinking was the idea of Africa as Europe’s “plantation”.

The context in the 2010s was obviously quite different. But after the euro crisis and the cascade of other crises that followed, the EU increasingly saw itself as being surrounded by threats — an “arc of instability” stretching from the east to the south of Europe. Against this background, “pro-Europeans” such as French President Emmanuel Macron imagined, in a remarkably similar way as in the Twenties, that Europeans could unite to become a third “pole” in international politics, albeit with China having replaced the Soviet Union as the second pole. This was the background for the frenetic discussion among foreign policy think tanks about concepts such as “European sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy”.

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“Pro-Europeans” had traditionally rejected the concept of sovereignty, which they saw as outdated. In fact, especially in the optimistic two decades since the end of the Cold War, many imagined that European integration would overcome not just national sovereignty but sovereignty in general as the EU became a kind of blueprint for global governance. But as they became more defensive, “pro-Europeans” now embraced the idea of sovereignty — at least at the European level. For instance, whereas previously they imagined that the removal of borders within the EU was the first step towards a borderless world, they now came to see that it actually necessitated a hard external border.

Moreover, following the refugee crisis in 2015, the threats to Europe were increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. The far-Right was rising and the centre-right began to converge with it, especially on questions of identity, immigration and Islam. The policy area where this convergence between the centre-right and the far-Right played out most clearly, and with the most horrific consequences, is immigration. Since 2014, 27,000 people have died in the Mediterranean as they desperately tried to get to Europe in boats. As Human Rights Watch put it recently, the EU’s policy can be summed up in three words: “let them die.”

Meanwhile, the “geopolitical” threats to Europe were also increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. Thus while the far-Right focused on the threat to European civilisation from immigrants, especially Muslim ones, centrist politicians such as Macron spoke more in terms of the threat to European civilisation from other powers — notably China, Russia and even the United States (hence the need for “strategic autonomy”, which implies independence from the United States in security terms). Thus when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was inevitably seen as a civilisational Other against which Europe must defend itself.

The EU’s response to the war in Ukraine was quite different from its response to other conflicts in its “neighbourhood”. Even as it continued to brutally push back migrants in the Mediterranean, it opened its borders to those fleeing from Ukraine and provided them with extraordinary support. The EU saw Ukraine as defending “European values” — which, to listen to European leaders, now apparently included territorial integrity and state sovereignty. Poland, led by a “populist” government and Ukraine’s leading supporter in the EU, was now suddenly seen as standing for the same values — including democracy — that it had previously been seen as rejecting.

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Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the European response, though, is the way that “pro-Europeans” have suddenly embraced a nationalist movement — as the ubiquitousness of Ukrainian flags illustrates. Traditionally, “pro-Europeans” did not distinguish between ethnic-cultural and civic versions of nationalism, but saw all nationalism as a dangerous force. “Nationalism is war,” as President Francois Mitterrand said in his last speech to the European Parliament. This undifferentiated rejection informed the response of “pro-Europeans” to Brexit: they saw the United Kingdom as hopelessly out of touch with the real world.

What makes the sudden “pro-European” identification with Ukrainian nationalism even stranger, however, is that it is not just any nationalism. Rather, it has a long history of anti-Semitism which extends from its 16th-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky to Stepan Bandera during the Second World War — both of whom are still venerated in Ukraine. Moreover, after 2014, much of the fighting in the Donbas was done by the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia that was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. Supporters of Ukraine claim that these neo-Nazi elements were later removed. But at least two of the five Azov commanders who Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky recently brought back to Ukraine as heroes are neo-Nazis who go back to the founding of Azov.

Just as it was seen as natural that central and eastern European countries should join the EU after the end of the Cold War, it is now seen as natural that Ukraine should also join. In fact, the question of Ukrainian accession is now the biggest preoccupation for “pro-Europeans”. In a typically technocratic way, they are focused on how to manage the process. But there are much bigger questions, such as whether, once in the EU, Ukraine would become a larger version of Hungary and Poland.

Meanwhile, the danger is that the war, and Ukrainian accession, will increase the EU’s tendency to see itself as the embodiment of a threatened European civilisation — and further strengthen its identity as white bloc.

Now, TV foodie Gregg Wallace is not someone I had ever thought of as being in the same category as Lecter. Nor indeed, as some kind of public intellectual cum satirist, reflecting on the great social issues of the day. Yet his recent Channel 4 mockumentary on eating human flesh was clearly a satirical social commentary on the cost-of-living crisis. In it, people are forced to sell slices of their bodies; “with money from her donation, Gillian will be able to pay for two weeks of energy bills”. At one point, Wallace and Michel Roux consider whether the lifestyle of their dinner might affect the flavour: Alison, a former NHS nurse tasted a bit stressed, but children were the most succulent. “Our babies taste best with gravy,” explained the fictional start-up company, Good Harvest.

The show didn’t put me off my dinner, as it did many predictably outraged viewers. It was clearly a reference to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which he proposed that poor Irish children be sold to the rich for food: “A young healthy child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled.” People were outraged then, too.

Cannibalism has a long, politically charged history. In the early modern era of colonialism, the figure of the cannibal became the representative Other to Western civilisation. Soon after Columbus discovered the New World, the cannibal became a sensationalist spur to much European moralising about what counted as right behaviour. In this era, considerable legal attention was given to shipwrecked colonisers forced to eat their dead colleagues. As the Romanian philosopher Catalin Avramescu argues in his history of cannibalism, these extreme situations represented a crisis of Western civilisation, a descent into the kind of savagery only seen, or perhaps just imagined, in the distant societies that sailors encountered.

Cannibalism thus represented the boundary, and thus, to some extent, the defining feature of European moral consciousness. Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest — whose name, some argue, derived from an anagram of the Spanish for cannibal — is a very obvious counterpoint to the “civilised” colonialist, Prospero. Half man, half monster, Caliban is “not honour’d with a human shape”, and so is enslaved by Prospero. Cannibalism became a key link in the moral justification of slavery.

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I find cannibalism fascinating. Partly, I suppose, because as a high-church Christian, and one for whom the Eucharist is at the centre of his spiritual life, the invitation to consume the body and blood of Christ is a daily source of nourishment, albeit spiritual — that caveat a source of endless medieval dispute. Early critics of Christianity made much of the cannibalistic vibe of passages like this from John’s Gospel: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” I have often wondered why we who believe in transubstantiation do not experience at least a bat squeak of disgust when receiving the bread and wine.

Philosophically, though, cannibalism presents fewer issues than we might imagine. After all, if a body can be left to medical science, for the betterment of society, why can it not be left to feed the hungry? Where is the violation of the harm principle? The same may be true of something like incest. People say it is wrong because it may have negative genetic consequences, but those people don’t argue that incest with birth control is fine.

No, cannibalism is more a theological problem than a philosophical one because we treat human bodies — even after death — as in some way sacred. Those who blithely insist that after death anyone can do what they want with their bodies — throw them on the rubbish tip — are very much in the minority, and I often wonder how sincere they are. Even dead bodies are reckoned to bear some sort of imprint of the life that the body lived. That is why, in what remains at root a broadly Christian culture, bodies are treated with respect, not used as fresh meat for the butcher.

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But in strictly ethical terms, the disgust with which we react to cannibalism is now reckoned to be a poor guide to moral assessment. That some may react to the thought of gay sex in the same way, for instance, is now widely understood to be, more or less, as morally insignificant as my child’s grimacing at eating something a little bit different. Disgust may originate in some evolutionary need to protect against infection, but outstays its welcome when translated into various forms of social othering.

Indeed, disgust seems highly illogical. You may kiss your partner on the head, nuzzling her hair, but then retch when you clean the same hair from the shower plug. Your mouth is constantly full of saliva, but we generally don’t like the idea of spitting into a glass and then drinking it. Intellectually, it’s hard to know the difference; viscerally, it matters.

Here we might recall Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as “matter out of place”: what is called soil in the garden is called dirt on the kitchen floor. That is, our interpretation of things is rooted in a certain map of the world in which things have their place. Hair on the head, in its place: fine to kiss. Hair in the plug, out of place: disgusting. This is why conservatives, who tend to have a stronger sense of there being “a place for everything and everything in its place”, reference disgust more readily than liberals. And nowhere is this truer than the politics of the human body — transgender issues, for example. The breast-feeding man violates the conservative’s map of things.

Liberals argue that the “irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight”. But the limits of this viewpoint can be seen when it collides with cannibalism. Strict liberals may — philosophically at least — find no fault with the man who served tacos to his friends made with meat from his own amputated leg. My body, my choice and all that. But I doubt they would be first in the queue for that buffet.

What the response to Wallace’s documentary made clear is that strict rationality is not — and perhaps never will be — the fundamental basis of our morality. As conservative bioethicist Leon Kass put it, “repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate”. Yes, the liberal warning against disgust being weaponised against minorities is well made. But when used in the defence of human dignity, disgust can be a powerful moral ally. What begins as a biological reaction to a threat to our bodies can be a sign of a spiritual reaction to a threat to our souls.

In the process, Prigozhin has become the state-sanctioned tip of Russia’s foreign policy spear — a position that is unlikely to change anytime soon, despite recent reports suggesting that there is a growing rift between him and Vladimir Putin. The footprint of the Wagner Group has become indispensable, both for Russia’s war aims in Ukraine and for its longer-term stability. And Prigozhin is something of an enigma: he both represents the will and the policies of the Kremlin, while also being one of the few — and certainly the most prominent — voices inside Russia that can effectively challenge Putin’s state. While Kremlinology is a difficult art, it appears very possible that Prigozhin serves as controlled opposition for Putin: a hawk who can appeal both to domestic ultra-nationalists upset with the course of the war in Ukraine and to security-obsessed regimes abroad. In that sense, we should see Prigozhin more as a shadow defence minister than an entirely independent actor.

When asked about growing calls from within the House of Commons to declare his force a terrorist organisation — which the British government now plans to do within weeks — Prigozhin wrote on his Telegram channel: “The Wagner PMC has been fighting ISIL, Al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, and other terrorist organisations everywhere, and very successfully.” If Wagner is a terror group, Prigozhin sarcastically wrote in Russian, then perhaps al-Qaeda and the Islamic State should become humanitarian charities, they could even hold meetings inside Westminster. “I’m all for such an arrangement,” he wrote.

It’s remarkable smugness from the head of a fighting force responsible not just for brutal torture, executions, even possible war crimes — but for filming and broadcasting the atrocities to serve as propaganda. He presides over a group, staffed with special forces veterans and conscripted prisoners, that has helped Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad regain his grip on power in Syria and delivered some of Russia’s only recent territorial gains in Ukraine. And now, thanks to him, Russia is being venerated as an anti-colonialist, anti-terrorist power by governments and citizens in Burkina Faso, Mali, the Central African Republic, and further afield. As Jonathan Batenguene, a Cameroonian political analyst, explained to me, there is a rising perception in Africa that Russia is a “reliable partner in the struggle against terrorism”.

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Prigozhin’s play in the Sahel should be a wakeup call to the United States and France in particular. Their decades of counter-terrorism operations in the region have not brought security: self-interested efforts have, in some cases, only fomented more militancy and violence.

If the West hopes to both stabilise central Africa and deny Russia new trading partners, it will need to get serious about solving the region’s substantial security challenges — and acknowledge its own role in creating them. One problem has been that the West has spent far too much time pursuing its own counter-terrorism objectives — that is, denying groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaeda a base from which to launch attacks on Europe and North America — and far too little considering how best to foster long-term stability. Even when state-building has been part of a counter-terrorist strategy, it has often not gone to plan: the United States’ long-running investment in Iraq or France’s long-suffering relationship with the Malian government are prime examples.

But those investments have grown deeply unpopular. Resolve to provide security to nations in the Global South has fallen, particularly as the threat of terrorism in the West has declined significantly. In some cases, the consequences of these open-ended interventions, which inevitably lead to civilian casualties, have worsened the situation in a fundamental way.

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The ousting of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, for example, unravelled Tripoli’s security state and unleashed a flood of weapons and fighters into the region. That domino toppled a series of others, and understanding how that Western action led to calamity in Mali and Burkina Faso can help explain why these countries have welcomed Wagner with open arms.

In Northern Mali, Gaddafi’s fall prompted Tuareg militias, which once counted Gaddafi as a benefactor, to push for long-sought independence; they even briefly declared the creation of the Azawad republic in 2012. During the period of instability, Islamist groups rushed in and seized territory. Some have organised under the Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin umbrella group, affiliated with al-Qaeda; while others have joined The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. Mali has been locked in a brutal war ever since.

Militancy was on the march, but Western appetite for another Libya-style intervention was low, so the West, America in particular, wildly expanded its drone programme instead. France’s approach has been more hands on, but not by much. Operation Serval was launched in 2013 to eliminate the threat posed by these trans-national jihadist groups. The multi-national coalition was designed to help Mali’s government in Bamako regain control of the region, but as the European Council on Foreign Relations says it “dislodged the jihadist groups from Mali’s cities, but did not eliminate them”. After the operation ended in 2014, “they slipped away and reorganised”.

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The fighting soon spilled over into Burkina Faso. Following two military coups in 2022, France launched a second mission, Operation Barkhane. But it proved even less successful than Operation Serval. In a taxonomical look at how the effort floundered, analyst Nathaniel Powell writes that “broadly speaking, the answer boils down to a combination of unalterable structural features of France’s intervention, a misunderstanding of local conflict dynamics, serious political mistakes, and operational errors”. The situation worsened so severely that even Canada abandoned the parallel United Nations peacekeeping mission, to cheers from Islamist factions.

It is in this context that the Wagner Group arrived in the region. One of its first orders of business when it landed in Mali in 2021 was to go after France as a neo-colonial power which had no concern for civilian lives. According to Paris, the Russian mercenaries went so far as to stage bodies near a Malian military base in order to accuse France of a massacre. (The murders were, in fact, likely conducted by Wagner themselves.)

The citizens and decision-makers in West and Central Africa don’t need to be helped to the conclusion that Western aid and intervention has utterly failed to address the mounting security concerns in the region. But Russia is still keen to make the point.

Wagner’s propaganda campaign in Africa is a serious and well-financed affair, as revealed in those leaked American intelligence memos. “The campaign’s primary objective was to promote Russian foreign policy in a manner that would shape public opinion towards African nations pulling back from Western pressure and realigning with Russia in mutually beneficial cooperation,” the leaked intelligence reads. That includes propaganda which “highlight US and French interference in African internal affairs and conducting activities to shape a negative attitude toward the armed forces of Western countries against a backdrop of crimes committed by their military members, particularly in Burkina Faso and Mali”.

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As a result, Wagner’s footprint in the region has grown quickly. It is believed that Prigozhin’s forces are now present, at least to some degree, in the Central African Republic, Libya, Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Madagascar, Botswana, Comoros, Rwanda, and Lesotho. That presence ranges from fairly minimal, as in their single office in Lesotho, to quite substantial — US Signals Intelligence reports that 1,645 Wagner fighters were present in Mali earlier this year.

There is little doubt about Wagner’s impure intentions: there is ample evidence that Prigozhin hopes to pilfer diamonds and other natural resources while using these countries to launder weapons and goods for Russians. Yet the perception is that France and the United States are equally greedy and self-interested, if not more so — and there are certainly data points to back up that belief.

“One of the reasons that these guys are popular is because they actually die,” says John Lechner, a freelance journalist who spends considerable time in the Central African Republic. That is: Wagner fighters are on the ground, battling militants. They appear to be risking their own lives to bring security to these states. One official from an unnamed Sahel country, speaking to the US Institute of Peace, remarked: “When your house is burning you don’t judge the quality of the water you spray to stop the flames.”

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Wagner’s support also means weapons. Whereas the West has been apprehensive about selling weapons to some of these regimes, Russia has had no such qualms. Look no further than Sudan, where evidence has emerged of Wagner arming the rebellious Rapid Support Forces with missiles as they fight a deadly conflict against the ruling military regime.

Russian-backed weapons deals serve as a quid pro quo — a way for African countries to source military hardware without jumping through America’s and Europe’s hoops, while also helping Russia to prosecute its war in Ukraine. The leaked US intelligence documents state that: “According to Prigozhin affiliates, Malian Transition President Assimi Goita was involved in efforts to acquire weapons from Turkey for Vagner’s interests.”

The question of how to frustrate Russia’s Scramble for Africa is painfully simple. The West needs to work with the United Nations, African Union, and local governments to become a reliable partner in the region, not just to strike militant groups, but to bring about long-term stability and security. It also needs to look back on its past decade of involvement in the region and ask why it has failed. But a strategy that targets Wagner first and foremost is not strategy at all. Forcing the Wagner Group out of the Central African Republic in short order, Lechner argued, “could be very negative from a civilian protection standpoint”. “You better be coming with something better to replace it.”

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If the West is to supplant Russia in Africa, it must prioritise ending the human suffering caused by these interlocking crises. But it must also put a stop to Russia’s attempt to forge an international illiberal alliance. Like a new Warsaw Pact, Moscow hopes it can — using Prigozhin as its conduit — win over long-term partners to trade with and launder resources through. This will be Putin’s only hope at remaining in power as sanctions continue. Even if Prigozhin loses his favour with Moscow or, even more unlikely, if he winds up outmanoeuvring Putin and replacing the strongman as leader, these tactics are likely to continue, or even intensify.

Russia has no shortage of possible partners, especially in countries where the state has proved itself incapable of maintaining order, and where the international community has talked a good game but not delivered: Haiti is a prime example. The leaked US intelligence reports that Prigozhin has plans to approach the Haitian government with an offer to help their fight against gangs that have taken over swathes of the country. This comes as traditional Haitian partners — France, the United States, Canada — have proved unable to help Port-au-Prince restore order.

Continued violence in Yemen, Sudan, and Libya presents another opportunity for Russia to pick winners and install client states. And there are signs that Wagner is planning to foment unrest elsewhere, like Côte D’Ivoire, so it can swoop in and offer security solutions. This is just colonialism, cloaked in bilateral aid. China has perfected this strategy with its Belt-and-Road Initiative. Whereas Beijing is keen to hook developing countries up to debt bondage, Russia wants to help them outsource their domestic security to a paramilitary force with no concern for human rights.

While the fighting in Sudan is, on the face of it, little more than a power struggle between the two rival factions that control the country, there is also an important international and geopolitical dimension to the conflict. At its heart is the great powers’ competition for influence over the continent — what has been called the “new scramble for Africa”.

Given its vast natural resources, including gold, its agricultural wealth and its geopolitically strategic location, Sudan has long attracted regional and international power plays. In recent years, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel have all been cultivating economic and political ties with the country’s leadership — and its two warlords in particular.

One country, however, stands out for its “special relationship” with Sudan: Russia. Putin made sure to cultivate an alliance with the country’s former leader, Omar al-Bashir, deploying the infamous Wagner Group in 2017 to provide him with political and military support. More importantly, that same year, al-Bashir signed a military cooperation agreement with Russia which included allowing the Russians to establish a military base along the Red Sea, ensuring a permanent presence for the Russian Navy in a crucial region and easy access to the Indian Ocean.

Al-Bashir was overthrown in 2019, before the agreement came into play, but Russia maintained good relations with the new administration’s military leaders, especially Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, whose Rapid Support Forces control the country’s gold mines. The transitional military-civilian government confirmed the decision to allow Russia to establish a base in 2020, but backtracked the following year under pressure from the US. However, once the civilian members of government were purged in yet another coup, in 2021, the agreement was revived.

Today, there is no indication that the issue of the naval base played a role in the recent outbreak of fighting, nor are any of the major foreign players openly backing either of the two warring factions. But if one side should explicitly align itself with, say, Russia, the conflict could easily turn into another front of the proxy war between the West and Russia, alongside Ukraine, with potentially disastrous consequences for the entire continent.

For Africa is already the stage of the New Great Game of the 21st century — the struggle between Western countries, China and Russia for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. In this game, Russia is particularly well-positioned. More so than the West, it enjoys strong historical and ideological ties with many African nations. The Soviet Union was the primary ally of several nations on the continent during the Cold War, and supported various anti-colonial and post-colonial movements; many countries are still ruled by parties that were supported by Moscow during their struggles for liberation from colonial or white supremacist rule, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC).

The West’s appeals for democracy and national independence, on the other hand, are perceived as hypocritical, given its history on the continent. Hence Russia’s argument that the war in Ukraine is actually part of a broader struggle against Western imperialism resonates in Africa, which harbours strong grievances against the West over its colonial and neocolonial practices. Indeed, a recent study carried out by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy shows Russia remains popular across much of Africa today.

This has meant that not a single African nation has joined Western sanctions against Russia, choosing to either remain neutral — for example by abstaining in UN resolutions condemning Russia — or more or less explicitly siding with Russia, as in the case of South Africa, which in February even participated in a joint military exercise with Russia and China. It is also why Russia has actually strengthened its military, security and economies ties in the region since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. Just last month, delegations from 40 African countries and 14 leaders assembled in Moscow for the international parliamentary conference “Russia-Africa in a Multipolar World”.

On that occasion, Putin gave a keynote speech in which he stressed that Russia “has always and will always consider cooperation with African states a priority”. He recalled the large Russian investment projects being implemented in Africa, emphasising the importance of electricity production on the continent. Russia also has a military presence in several African countries, either in an official guise or via the Wagner Group, including in Libya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Angola, Madagascar, Mozambique and Mali. It is also the region’s largest arms exporter (close to 50%).

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Meanwhile, Sino-African relations are also deepening, with China now the continent’s largest trading partner and main source of project finance in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative. This has included massive infrastructural projects, including the Addis Ababa-Djibouti and Mombasa-Nairobi railways and the planned Angola-Tanzania railway, which will be the first railway section connecting the Atlantic coastline to the Indian Ocean, on top of roads, dams, ports and airports. China is also the largest political and economic supporter of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), which has 43 parties and another 11 signatories, making it the largest free-trade area in population and geographic size, spanning 1.3 billion people.

Even though there is no evidence that China is engaged in so-called debt trap diplomacy, as claimed by Western representatives, Chinese activities in Africa have been associated with poor labour conditions and unsustainable environmental practices. Yet it’s a fact that “African officials overwhelmingly view China’s role in Africa positively”, as the Rand Corporation noted in 2014, as do the majority of African citizens. This is not only because they see China’s tangible contribution to their nations’ infrastructure and overall economic activity, but also because China’s approach to global affairs and development — ostensibly based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and on prioritising societal stability and economic development over political reforms — offers an alternative to the mainstream Western model for development, largely considered to have failed.

Indeed, it is telling that China has achieved all this without resorting to explicit military force: at present, China operates a single military base on the African continent, in the small East African country of Djibouti, which it inaugurated in 2017. The contrast with America’s approach to the continent couldn’t be starker. As part of its post-9/11 “War on Terror”, the US massively expanded its military presence in Africa, placing troops in at least 15 countries. In 2008, in order to coordinate its growing presence in Africa, the US placed responsibility for the continent under a single United States Africa Command, or Africom. This led to a considerable spike in the number of US troops, bases and drone strikes across the continent, most with counter-terrorism as the stated mission, as well as in coups (attempted and in some cases succeeded) carried out by US-trained troops.

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The best-known example of Africom’s impact is the US-led bombing campaign against Libya in 2011, which plunged the country into anarchy and violence. But several other African countries have been the target of US bombs in recent years. Just last year, the US bombed Somalia and Niger. Meanwhile, as Politico recently reported, American special operations teams are playing a direct role in military actions in at least eight African countries, including Somalia, Kenya, Tunisia and Niger, under a set of classified “surrogate programmes”. Officially, the US only has one permanent base in Africa — Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. But formerly classified documents obtained by The Intercept show that the US military footprint in Africa is much larger, encompassing 29 bases located in 15 different countries or territories. According to CBS News, “the US does have some military presence in virtually every African nation, even if it’s small”.

It seems to finally be dawning on US policymakers that this military-centric approach — which has sparked resistance in many African states — might not be the best way to counter Chinese influence on the continent. In recent months, several high-profile US representatives, including Kamala Harris, Anthony Blinken and Jill Biden, have travelled to Africa on what has been described as a “charm offensive”, while President Biden has promised to visit this year. “The United States is all in on Africa and all in with Africa,” he said last December at the second-ever US-Africa leaders’ summit in Washington.

It signalled that America seems to be catching on to the fact that African nations no longer want to be bossed around, they want to courted. They know that today they don’t have to choose sides, as they did during the Cold War, but they can do business with anyone and everyone at the same time. And this gives them power — more power than they’ve ever had. As a result, the real winner in the new scramble for Africa is likely to be Africa itself.

Some would say he had it coming. The doyen of India’s nationalist historians, R.C. Majumdar, has said that Mill “suffered from a strong dose of racial prejudice and ignorance about ancient Hindu culture”. Likewise, for the Stanford historian Priya Satia, Mill was little more than a propagandist for empire, an apologist for “Britain’s civilising mission”. To be sure, there is plenty in Mill’s triple-decker History of British India to support this view. “The Hindu,” Mill writes, “like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.” In the Muslim, he discerned “the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy”. India was a “rude” and “backward” society.

But to carp about a clutch of infelicitous phrases is to miss the wood for the trees. The charge of racist imperialism, of course, isn’t easily resisted in our time. Understanding the thought-world of the 19th century, however, requires more than a mindless aggregation of poorly-aged gaffes. Reflexive cries of “Orientalism” will not do. The truth is that Mill was a radical egalitarian ahead of his time.

If the History took the form of a scathing sermon, it was only because its author was a sour man. His impatience with Indian tradition must be taken as a proxy for his frustration with British tradition. Railing against the caste system was a way of railing against the class system. Born in Angus in 1773 to a shoemaker and smallholder, Mill had a keen awareness of status. His mother had married down. Mill’s benefactress, who put him through Edinburgh University, that centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, reminded him of his station when he fell in love with her daughter, whom he was tutoring. Wilhelmina Stuart was hurriedly married off to the seventh baronet of Pitsligo, very much against her will. In her dying breath, apparently, she would call out Mill’s name, and he would name his daughter Wilhelmina.

Mill carried his hatred for the aristocracy into maturity. It didn’t help that, studying for the Kirk, he had to moonlight — like the character in Parasite — by teaching the privileged sons and daughters of the titled nobility. Disillusioned with the ministry, he reinvented himself as a freelance writer in London, married, and sired nine children.

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Mill had never been to India. It was poverty and precarity that prompted him to write his History, a job application masquerading as a 2,000-page love letter to Progress, in 1818. In it, Mill made a virtue of his shortcomings, spinning his lack of first-hand experience, not to mention his monolingualism, into a commitment to objectivity. But no matter. Ruth Benedict wrote The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, arguably the greatest work of 20th-century anthropology, without ever setting foot in Japan, and the East India Company’s head-hunters duly recognised Mill’s equally impressive achievement. On the strength of it, Mill was placed in charge of examining the Company’s prodigious correspondence, a position he held until his death — as a very rich man — in 1836.

Proclaiming the creed of Utilitarianism, the History seemed to come out of nowhere. At the time, the Company men who ran the subcontinent were traditionalists to a man — committed, in the first viceroy Warren Hastings’s phrase, to “reconciling the people of England to the nature of Hindustan”. Indians, by their account, were incorrigible. It was the Company’s job to interpret their way of life. Mill disagreed: the point was to change it.

It may appear that in tut-tutting at the nabobs who went native, Mill shared the reforming ambition of the radical Clapham Sect, which believed in putting the heathens to rights with the aid of its militant brand of Christianity. Yet Utilitarianism was an altogether different proposition. For one thing, it belonged to the Enlightenment tradition. Indeed, Mill and his mate Jeremy Bentham thought in universalist terms, where once even Voltaire held that different rules applied in the “oriental despotisms” of the East.

So it was that where, like obliging Erasmus students on cultural exchange, the likes of Hastings and his successor Charles Cornwallis coolly accepted — appreciated even — the inequities of the caste system as a fact of life, Mill vehemently denounced the “detestable views of the Brahmins” in rather colourful terms. Caste was “a degrading and pernicious system of subordination”, and the Hindu “system of priestcraft” was “built upon the most enormous and tormenting superstition that ever harassed and degraded any portion of mankind”. It was for this reason Mill described Hindus as “the most enslaved portion of the human race”. The enormities of untouchability, in particular, made a deep impression on him: “Those wretched outcastes had no resource for subsistence excepting either the bounty of the established classes, to whom they were objects of execration and abhorrence, or the plunder of those same classes, a course to which they would betake themselves with all the ingenuity of necessitous, and all the atrocity of much injured, men.”

Contrast this with the head-in-the-sand observation of Mill’s nemesis, the Bombay governor Mountstuart Elphinstone: the condition of the lower castes “was much better than that of the villains of the Middle Ages or any other servile class with which we are acquainted”. What’s more, while Mill was drawing attention to the plight of India’s underclass, Elphinstone insisted that such a “servile class” had ceased to exist in the early 19th century.

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Our latter-day Elphinstones, of course, still like to bang on about cultural relativism, defending primordial hierarchy as “alternative modernity”, primitive savagery as “alternative justice”, shamanic quackery as “alternative medicine”. These are fanciful sleights of hand. It’s an uncomfortable thought, but too much sympathy for an alien society can easily shade into a naive exculpation, if not outright endorsement, of its most hidebound traditions.

Some of Mill’s contemporary critics, such as Lord Bhikhu Parekh, complain that the Utilitarians tipped the balance too far in the opposite direction. For nearly 40 years, to 1855, the History was the established textbook at Haileybury College, the Company school in Hertfordshire. It was insinuated by early Indian nationalists, including Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and R.G. Bhandarkar, that Mill had spawned a whole generation of Indian Civil Service apparatchiks inimical to Indians, a foreign ruling caste as removed from hoi polloi as the native Brahmin elite. Not so. To the traditionalist credo of “live and let live”, the Utilitarians had one of their own: “Human nature is the same in Cawnpore as in Cheapside.” Ideology trumped culture. Far from being a homogeneous mass of traditionalists, Indians, too, had their diminutive reforming currents. The heirs of the Scottish Enlightenment found allies in the freethinkers of the Bengal Renaissance.

Mill’s greatest contribution, however, was his stab at bettering the lot of the Indian peasantry. This is a side of him generally ignored by decolonial historians, for it sits uncomfortably with their Manichean worldview. In Mill’s time, two systems of land tenure prevailed: Cornwallis’ zamindari system, predicated on middlemen who served as tax-farmers and prevalent in Bengal, and Thomas Munro’s ryotwari system, widespread in the South and North-Western Provinces, wherein the state took a share of the produce directly from peasants. Both were perversions of pure capitalism. Mill’s solution was to bring all land under public ownership. He was inspired by David Ricardo, who had held that “the interest of the landlord is always opposed to every other class in the community”. It followed for the Utilitarian Mill that the “greatest happiness of the greater number” could only be secured if the parasitic rentier interest was eliminated.

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It should be stressed that, despite being a radical egalitarian, Mill was no Marxist avant la lettre. His vision turned on free trade and individual enterprise, both shackled in equal measure by government and go-betweens. Here, then, was a rather quaint, Right-wing case for nationalisation. A big state was dead weight, he argued. As universal landlord, government could extract the tiniest rent to conduct its business and educate the masses, and so eliminate taxation altogether. As he put it in his History, “light taxes and good laws; nothing more is wanting for national and individual prosperity all over the globe”.

What of good laws? Here, too, the cocksure know-it-all that that he was, Mill had a ready answer: abolish juries and judicial procedures, investing competent judges with autocratic powers. Mill and his mentor Bentham had no time for the Whig fetishisation of checks and balances. The separation of powers was pooh-poohed in Utilitarian circles. Betraying a vestigial Protestantism — he had in fact developed his own eccentric faith — Mill hoped that mass education and simpler legislation would render the legal profession redundant and every man his own lawyer. More importantly, where Company traditionalists supported having separate legal codes for Hindus and Muslims, and preferential treatment for Brits, Mill believed there ought to be only one law for everyone.

These were big, bold reforms. Needless to say, Mill’s startlingly original assault on privilege did not go down well with the men on the spot, many of them of aristocratic and gentry stock. Land reform along the lines proposed by Mill was briefly piloted in the Bombay Deccan, but then abandoned as impracticable. Spurred by developments at home — the Great Reform and Slavery Abolition Acts — a soupçon of social reform ensued in British India from the 1830s on, admittedly more of Whiggish than Utilitarian stamp, outlawing suttee and enabling widow remarriage. But then, in 1857, the deus ex machina of the Great Rebellion detonated. For a brief moment, it appeared that Britain’s empire in India was teetering on the edge of collapse. Lessons were learned, and the blame laid squarely on reformist zeal.

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In the autopsy of the revolt that followed, the view from London was that traditionalism was a better doctrine to rule India than Utilitarianism. One could either keep the moral high ground or keep an ear to the ground — but not both. So it was that the traditionalist consensus that ran from Clive of India in the mid-18th century to Elphinstone in the mid-19th, fleetingly interrupted by the Utilitarian moment, resumed for another 100 years until independence in the mid-20th. Ultimately in the grand scheme of empire, Utilitarianism was little more than a blip, a pointillist dot shrouded by the thick brush strokes of traditionalism. But of its existence, and brief influence, there can be little doubt.

Mill himself, it needs stressing, was no saint. Like Whitman, he contained multitudes — embarrassing contradictions even. Iconoclastic in some ways, he was utterly conventional in others. For one thing, his impeccably liberal premises led him to conclusions that were incontrovertibly authoritarian. Utilitarianism, after all, preached the doctrine of happiness, not liberty — of good government, not self-government. Mill himself ruled out democracy for Indians. Likewise, to the dismay of his contemporaries — his son John Stuart Mill especially — he argued against extending the franchise to women, who, like children, had no interests independent of the family patriarch.

In philosophical mode, he struck a rather different note. Each individual, he wrote in his Essay on Government, was the best judge of his own interests. Suffragists a century on, then, were staying true to Mill’s principles rather than his prejudices, as indeed were Indian nationalists after independence, when they abolished zamindari and outlawed untouchability. It’s an irony of history that it was the Indians, not the British, who put into practice the theories James Mill advanced in his History of British India.

Over the last few years, the people of Britain are increasingly falling on the side of Lord Byron — who, in 1812, mourned the Parthenon’s sorry post-Elgin look: “Dull is the eye that will not weep to see. Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed.” According to successive YouGov polls, a clear majority of Britons want to see the Parthenon artefacts displayed in the magnificent New Acropolis Museum, in a special hall overlooking the defaced Parthenon.

Alas, the British government and Elgin’s surviving supporters are resisting tooth and nail, insisting that the Parthenon artefacts in the British Museum are its property and must remain so eternally. Their claim to legal property rights is both tendentious and detrimental to the British sense of justice. They point out that Elgin had a permit from the Ottoman occupying forces in Athens to take what he liked from the Acropolis — which, they insist, gave him the right to own and to sell on whatever he removed. Even if we set aside the fact that said Ottoman permit never granted Elgin permission to hack the statues and friezes from the monument with the use of saws, the claim is absurd and, indeed, quite dangerous.

Imagine if the Nazi occupying forces in Paris had granted some gentleman a permit to remove statues from the Louvre. Or if Putin’s men in Mariupol were, today, to grant a visiting antiquities dealer a permit to remove priceless artefacts from a local museum. The very notion that these permits bestow secure property rights over the removed artefacts is an affront to every decent person worldwide. As for the British establishment’s usual rejoinder — that the Ottoman occupation of Greece was centuries long, or that Greece had not been a modern nation-state before the Ottomans invaded it — it is terribly disrespectful to scores of Britons who, like Lord Byron, travelled to Greece shortly after Elgin had vandalised the Acropolis to fight alongside the Greeks reclaiming their liberty and founding the modern Greek state.

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A Greek Watergate threatens the West

By Yanis Varoufakis

This unending saga is back in the news. For the last six months or so, George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer who currently serves as Chair of the British Museum, has been negotiating a deal with the Greek government. It will see a portion of the Parthenon sculptures sent to Athens, on loan, to be displayed at the British Museum in exchange for other antiquities. The real reason Osborne has entered into such negotiations is self-serving: he needs to raise £1 billion to refurbish the British Museum, but fears that, in view of British public opinion, unless he washes away the stench of Elgin’s larceny from the halls and corridors of the British Museum, sponsors will not be forthcoming.

Unfortunately, constrained by the British establishment’s determination to insist on maintaining full property rights over the artefacts Elgin brought to England, the deal Osborne is offering the Greek side is shameful. Indeed, it could not be otherwise, as long as the UK government and the British Museum insist that they own the artefacts outright.

Think about it: members of the British establishment, who consider the artefacts to be British, and know that the Greek side does not recognise their property rights, oppose even lending them to the New Acropolis Museum, fearing that a Greek court, if not the Greek government, might decree that they not be returned to Britain. The only way they would consider lending them is on the basis of the deal that Mr Osborne is now putting to the Greek government: a deal stipulating that, for the privilege of being lent half the removed Parthenon artefacts, Greek museums must send over other priceless artefacts to be kept in the British Museum as “collateral” — essentially as hostages that will force the Greeks to return the loaned Parthenon marbles.

No Greek government can ever agree to such a sordid deal. And no decent Briton should look at it with anything other than deserved scorn.

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Speaking personally, I think it is absurd, after 200 years, to be having the same discussion. It is upsetting for us Greeks and it is dispiriting for the Brits. I am no cultural nationalist, in that I do not want to see every fragment, every statue, every frieze or vase produced in Classical Greece returned to us. The Parthenon friezes, metopes and pediments are a very, very special case. They were created as integral parts of the Parthenon and were hacked down by Elgin with a permit from our enslavers. They belong neither to the Greeks nor to the Britons. They belong to the Parthenon, with which they can be best re-united if they are displayed in the perfectly-designed room on top of the New Acropolis Museum. It is visually connected with the temple in a manner that would bring tears to any visitor’s eyes.

And what about the British Museum? Does it end up with an empty room where the Parthenon relics are now? Absolutely not. As an internationalist, and an Anglophile, I would loathe that. But imagine the following. Let the Parthenon Marbles be re-united with the Parthenon permanently. And let the Greek government commit to keeping the relevant room in the British Museum stocked with a permanent, rotating exhibition of priceless stand-alone classical era treasures. It would allow the people of Britain and international visitors a reason to visit the British Museum again and again and again.

In this manner, the Parthenon will become whole again. And the British Museum will be enriched by a never-ending parade of splendid Greek antiquities that function as joyous ambassadors of Classical Greece in central London, not as Mr Osborne’s sad hostages.

His reputation, too, is in tatters. Last year, the National Theatre staged a play about his assassination. But The Father and the Assassin centred not on Gandhi but Godse, the man who killed him 75 years ago this week. Here is a tender portrait of a tortured soul, a blushing boy raised as a girl to propitiate the gods who had taken away his three brothers, who becomes radicalised and blames Gandhi for betraying Hindus and mollycoddling Muslims, so causing Partition. It is no accident that Godse was a card-carrying Hindu supremacist, a member of the parent organisation of the BJP, to which India’s new ruler Narendra Modi belongs. Today, statues of Godse are going up across the country just as statues of Gandhi are being pulled down across the world.

Needless to say, this is a most disturbing development. Yet the reaction of liberals, Indian as well as Western, has been no less troubling. An unthinking anti-imperialism of old has joined up with an unthinking anti-Hindu supremacism of new to beget a bastardised Gandhi. What we have is not a creature of flesh and blood, possibly a great if also flawed man, but rather a deified hero. This is the Gandhi with a saintly halo around him who greets you from Indian billboards, grins at you from rupee notes, stares down at you from his plinth on Westminster’s Parliament Square, and, in Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of him, slathered in a thick impasto of fake tan, moves you to a standing ovation.

This is the easily comestible fortune-cookie Gandhi you encounter in airport bestsellers such as Ramachandra Guha’s double-decker hagiography, and also the sartorial icon whose wire-rim glasses were emulated by Steve Jobs. There is the Gandhi of the gags, most famous for a retort he probably never made: asked what he thought of Western civilisation, the Mahatma is reported to have replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” Ba-dum ching! Then there’s the Christological Gandhi, a modern messiah turning the other cheek: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” There’s also Gandhi the self-help guru: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” One could go on.

Here’s where the historian in me says, would that it were so simple. Gandhi was no liberal. And if those who sing his praises today knew a little more about Gandhi the man, rather than Gandhi the saint, their adulation would very quickly dry up. The fact is that the Mahatma hasn’t aged well. He detested democracy, defended the caste system, and had a deeply disturbing relationship with sex.

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None of this should surprise us. Unlike some of the more cerebral thinkers of his cohort, figures such as Ambedkar and Periyar, Gandhi possessed a shallow mind. The product of a rather parochial education, admittedly the best that could be bought in turn-of-the-century western India, he struggled to juggle academic and conjugal demands. His precocious marriage to Kasturbai at 13 was a mésalliance, perennially troubled by his suspicions of her infidelity. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he dropped out of Samaldas College. It was only in London, where he went to read law, that his horizons widened.

Then again, not for the better. For Gandhi’s London was the batty milieu of late-Victorian cranks, all self-abnegation and séances, familiar to us from George Bernard Shaw’s satirical sketches of his contemporaries. We also get a glimpse of it in Kathryn Tidrick’s remarkable intellectual biography of Gandhi, by far the best. His friends were frankly a bizarre bunch: theosophists and esotericists, magnates and men of leisure, ever experimenting with unconventional lifestyles and food fads. An early influence was the president of the London Vegetarian Society, A.F. Hills. A battleship manufacturer, Hills was of the opinion that celibacy and a suitably rarefied diet mostly consisting of uncooked food could lead to self-divinisation, thus rendering all manner of conflict redundant. Political parties and trade unions would wither away. Strikes and lockouts would become distant history. Politics as we know it would cease to exist. That would be the day when smug, enlightened chaste vegetarians such as himself would lord it over society.

This was the worldview Gandhi carried into his career. Mass democracy was unwholesome, he felt — even imperialism infinitely preferable to the tyranny of the majority. The correct way of organising society was to have enlightened men representing different faiths come together and hammer out a moral compact, rather than battle it out on the hustings.

Accordingly, throughout the Twenties and early Thirties, he held the Congress Party in a vice-like grip. Proceeding at glacial pace, decolonisation was a slow, largely elite affair, dominated by parleys with Brits in exotic locales, never forgoing the niceties of wit and repartee. Every now and then, about once a decade, the rabble were summoned in a show of strength. But beyond that, the people were surplus to requirements. Gandhi always called off mass movements when it appeared that the truculent masses were getting ahead of themselves.

Gandhi, then, could be quite the uppity aristocrat. Preaching the gospel of disengaged action, he exhorted people to mindlessly spin cloth, take up fasting, and embrace celibacy. So carried away was he by his renunciatory rhetoric that he concocted a defence of slavery. Sure, slavery was bad for the master, who was reduced to a state of dependency, he argued, but it was, counterintuitively, good for the slave, who ennobled himself through his great act of self-sacrifice.

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The valorisation of self-sacrifice also led Gandhi to offer the following advice to Jews in the Holocaust: “the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.” Brits were told much the same thing: “let them [the Nazis] take possession of your beautiful island. Allow yourself to be slaughtered, but refuse to owe allegiance to them.” Women were offered similar counsel: do not resist rape; appeal instead to the assailant’s sense of virtue through passivity. As the historian Faisal Devji has it in The Impossible Indian, Gandhi could tolerate any number of deaths to secure his moral objectives. This was the crux of his non-violence: killing was evil, but dying was heroic. The death cult, however, was reserved for lesser mortals. For himself, Gandhi fancied a long life, hoping to live to be 125.

Predictably, many subalterns did not take kindly to being used as cannon fodder to defend a higher cause. They found his defence of the caste system — “we have to earn our bread by following [our] ancestral calling” — particularly grating: it was all very well to decry social mobility when one sat close to the top of the caste pyramid, as Gandhi did. The Mahatma’s rejoinder, that those born low were simply paying for sins from a previous life, they found understandably unconvincing. They also took umbrage at his disapproval of intermarriage and interdining between lower and higher castes, between Hindus and Muslims.

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India is being erased from history

By Robert Lyman

The strong opinions Gandhi developed on the subject of race in South Africa, where he spent two decades to 1915, were an early harbinger of his unforgivingly hierarchical mind. Brown Asians were “infinitely superior” to black Africans. The plague outbreak in Durban would persist, he argued in 1905, so long as both communities were “herded together indiscriminately” in hospitals. Segregation was needed. It is on account of such views that students and staff at the University of Ghana had Gandhi’s statue on their campus removed.

Gandhi Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall, then, point to a common theme. History has no heroes, and nor should we look for them. Just like his arch-imperialist contemporary, the nationalist icon is “problematic” — to use a word beloved of a certain generation.

Counterpointing the reverential tones of Richard Attenborough’s biopic, we have another portrayal of the Mahatma, perhaps all too brief, in Weird Al Yankovic’s UHF, also made in the Eighties. This is not the historical Gandhi, of course, but “Gandhi II”: “No more Mr Passive Resistance, he’s out to kick some butt”, an American baritone television announcer intones, as we get footage of the Mahatma thrashing baddies, ordering a steak (“medium rare”), and seducing women.

It’s cheerful nonsense, of course, but it hits closer to home than intended. No, Gandhi did not mow down villains, but he did enjoy outré sexual antics — most perversely, perhaps, sleeping naked with his 16-year-old grandniece, also naked. “Experiments”, he called them. Tests of his celibate resolve. Given contemporary sensibilities, we might beg to differ. One man’s “experiment” is another man’s grooming. Now, UHF didn’t set out to plumb the darker depths of human nature, but it is, at least, a worthy antidote to apotheosis.

This was an age far more gung-ho than our own about taking artefacts, creatures and even living human beings from their contexts, and putting them on display for the entertainment and edification of the masses. Prince Albert’s 1851 Great Exhibition had displayed technological innovations alongside consumer goods and looted colonial treasures, setting off a trend for World Fairs that served both in person and via print media as a kind of populist catalogue of all there is to know about the world. Museums of all kinds flourished over the same era as standard-bearers for culture across Europe and the New World.

But is it intrinsically wrong to display things — or people — in this way? Even in 1906, caging a living human in a monkey enclosure prompted outrage. Since then, though, our discomfort with the objectification this implies has grown much more intense. “What’s the point of museums?” asked the Wellcome Collection recently on Twitter. This was a preamble to announcing the closure of the Wellcome Trust’s Medicine Man exhibition, a large collection of medical artefacts from around the world that had been amassed by the American pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The announcement prompted a furious response, denouncing the move as “infantile and anti-intellectual” and modern museums as “vandalising themselves”. And it’s true that the economic and political power that allowed museum collections to be amassed has come under revisionist scrutiny more recently — as has the worldview that gave rise to museums as a cultural form. The turning-point was the First World War, the conflagration that destroyed high imperial Europe, and set in motion the disintegration of its empires in favour of the Pax Americana we’ve all inhabited since.

More than a century after that hinge moment, today the worldview and geopolitical order that amassed most of our museum collections are denounced as “problematic” — and increasingly subject to “dismantling”. But rather than merely complain, yet again, about “woke” culture war being waged in museums, we should see that the assault this implies on an entire worldview — Enlightenment objectivity — is not without justification. Nor is the “dismantling” of this worldview something that can be halted. But the ongoing assault on what’s left of our 19th-century cultural heritage is less a reflection of moral progress in any absolute sense, than of shifts in the underlying power relations that gave rise to museums in the first place.

In their classical 19th-century form, museums and exhibitions are the quintessential “pop” expression of the Enlightenment worldview. To present something as an exhibit in a museum makes a statement about that thing, and what we can know about it.

It says: I, the curator, am in command of what’s knowable about this thing, which you observe from a distance while absorbing facts about it. A museum’s traditional spatial arrangements underline the core empiricist relation between observer and observed. You aren’t free to touch or use or otherwise form a tactile relationship with the artefacts on display. Instead, visitors are invited to observe exhibits from a distance, while absorbing curated facts about them. By extension, the museum implies, this is how civilised people relate to the world in general.

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Who would want fake Elgin Marbles?

By Francesca Peacock

And to make sense in this context, the exhibit must be removed from the network of social relationships that produced it, and rendered as a thing: a discrete object. So what, you might say. What’s wrong with looking at things, in order to learn about the world? But the revulsion occasioned by Ota Benga’s appearance in the Bronx Zoo in 1906 suggests that it isn’t just “woke” modern-day curators who sense that something violent, or violating, happens when an “exhibit” is removed from its social context and placed on display: a literal objectification, made only starker when it happens to a living person.

This perspective argues further that it’s not just the act of turning artefacts into exhibits that both enacts, and conceals, violence. And this core of the woke critique of this social form is the same as its critique of rationalism more generally: that it obscures its own power relations.

For even when they’re presented as high-minded repositories of knowledge, under the bonnet museums hold the residue of much else besides. Museums encode a hierarchical power relation between observer and exhibit, and another secondly between curator and visitor.  In their 19th-century form, museums also collated the edited highlights of the entire civilisational order of high colonial Europe, while downplaying the real-world power, money and sometimes bloody violence that went into creating that order. In his 2020 polemic The Brutish Museums, Pitt-Rivers curator Dan Hicks argues that far from being a benign side-effect of imperialism, museums are in fact inextricable from that violence — and that for as long as museums exist, they’re still perpetuating it.

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Hicks cites as a central example the Benin bronzes, which were looted from a destroyed city in what is now Nigeria, following the Punitive Expedition in 1897, during which Benin was destroyed and its inhabitants massacred. Though today negotiations are ongoing about returning them to Nigeria, some 900 of the bronzes remain in the British Museum, where they were displayed for many years with little commentary on their provenance.

The British Museum is also under ongoing pressure to return the Greek sculptures taken from the Parthenon between 1801 and 1812 by Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin. Their removal was controversial even at the time, and Elgin eventually backed out of the controversy by selling the sculptures to the British government. Like the Benin bronzes, they now reside in the British Museum, where they have become a bone of diplomatic contention between Britain and Greece.

So museums serve as powerful sociocultural force-fields. They collate objects taken sometimes forcibly, while entrenching some ideas as “facts” and normalising the invisibility of other, equally salient ideas, along lines that align with the dominant political order. But the woke critique tends to stop here, rather than noticing that this cuts both ways. Wherever we find museums — or their exhibits — obviously under attack in the modern world, this tends to correspond to wider shifts in power relations; for example modern Greece has been complaining about removal of the Elgin Marbles since the state was founded in the 19th century. But Greek diplomats didn’t start seriously campaigning for their return until some time after the collapse of Britain as a global geopolitical hegemon.

Meanwhile, Dan Hicks has provided a furious text to accompany the Wellcome Collection’s exhibit of Jeremy Bentham’s skin, in which Hicks denounces the way museums “recentred the white cis-male body” and demands that curators “Dismantle Wellcome’s enduring colonialism, its white infrastructure”. But what this perhaps ignores is that we could dispose of Wellcome’s entire collection of artefacts, and doing so wouldn’t make the smallest dent in the Wellcome Trust’s contribution to the objectifying worldview at the heart of woke critiques of museums as such.

Henry Wellcome made his money in pharmaceutical innovation, a success founded in the scientific paradigm: a worldview even more quintessentially objectifying and rationalist than the architecture of a traditional museum. Museums extend this worldview beyond the sciences, implying that this is what “learning” is: a detached, observing consciousness standing at a little distance from an object whose meaning is contained on a little sign. And if you were taking serious aim at the “violence” encoded in that rationalism, you would have to be willing to sacrifice all of the natural sciences too.

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But the Wellcome Trust isn’t doing that. The rationalism encoded in scientific research is still generously funded by Wellcome Trust grants, even as the same worldview is loudly “contextualised” in the same foundation’s museum exhibits. So regardless of how loudly the surface colouring is denounced by Dan Hicks, the institution’s plumbing and associated worldview have been left more or less intact, with little more than a change of surface colouring.

Objectors might point out that the war on science is indeed happening in some contexts, for example where Scientific American and Nature publish pieces arguing that “sex is a spectrum” (it really isn’t a spectrum). But it’s also true that scientists remember there are two sexes again the moment there’s money to be made from the fertility industry.

And this, ultimately, is why woke museum revisionism excites anger: the sense that power relations are less being “dismantled” than redecorated, in the name of a new and just-as-mystified set of power relations. And we can infer from this that calling progressives “anti-culture” is to underestimate this worldview.

Some of those challenging the objectification baked into the museum format are no doubt genuine in their wish to give voice to marginalised perspectives. But no matter how you rail against the past, how many angry footnotes you add to an exhibit, or even if you abolish museums altogether, you can’t really undo historic power relations. Nor does rescuing “objectified” artefacts even necessarily reinstate them in the context from which they were taken. Ota Benga ended up being “rescued” by Black Baptists, who took him to Virginia and gave him a room and board. But he was never happy living in a house, and would often sleep in the woods. Homesick for the Congo, eventually he built a bonfire, burned the European clothes in which he’d been dressed, and shot himself.

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By the same token, while the artefacts in the Wellcome Collection aren’t sentient human beings, it’s not as though being “contextualised” afresh in light of the new morality will make any substantive difference to their previous history, or result in their restitution wherever they came from. Nor would it make any difference to the wider paradigm of scientific rationalism whose advance continues to be funded by the legacy of Henry Wellcome. All that would change would be the aesthetics that decorate that advance.

Those who set the limits on what can or can’t be “problematised” know this. They will merrily smash every legacy of high European imperialism, in the name of ending oppression — except where that legacy is still useful. And this is not any kind of “dismantling’”; it’s simply new owners redecorating an economic and political engine, which will go on operating largely untouched. In other words: it’s not moral progress, it’s just a change of management.

No matter how sensitively you try to approach it, colonial history is an inherently divisive issue in Britain. It cannot be otherwise in a country where the descendants of those who were colonised live alongside the descendants of those who did the colonising. One’s story of successful expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

Akala poignantly expressed this in his book, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire: “Even at five years old, we already know on some level that, in this society at least, we are indeed lesser citizens with all the baggage of racialised history following us ghost-like about our days. We are conquered people living in the conquerors’ land, and as such we are people without honour.” It is an emotion rarely voiced and so rarely captured in polls or surveys.

In my fellow African immigrant circles, when we complain about racism in the West, we often sum up the situation with something along the lines of: “Well, it’s not their fault, it’s because we’ve had to leave our countries to come and live in their country, that’s why they think they can misbehave towards us.” Our situation is psychologically easier to handle because we came here of our own accord, usually as adults, and can at least envisage somewhere else in the world we could go if things were to become unbearable here. This allows us an empowering sense of autonomy.

But Akala was speaking about those who, like him, were born here, in the land of their former conquerors, and who can’t envisage living anywhere else. Britain is all they know. Naturally their frustrations at the current status quo are often stronger. Why is it that they have to live in the land of their former conquerors? Why do their life options seem restricted in comparison with their white peers? Why is it that they live in a world where even if they feel Britain is a white supremacist hellhole, they can’t simply say: “Sod it, I’m jumping on a plane and moving to an African or Caribbean country where I won’t have to deal with white racists?”

Race is sometimes, but not always, a relevant proxy for the key dividing line in our world which is between so-far successful groups and so-far unsuccessful groups. The Japanese, South Koreans, Singaporeans, Emiratis and increasingly the Chinese are not on the same side of this divide as Kenyans, Pakistanis or Yemenis. They are, along with most white or white-majority nations, in the successful group camp.

It is no coincidence that, even though they’re not white and have been victims of racism and colonisation in the past, you won’t find too many Singaporeans or South Koreans today focusing on the ills colonialism rendered their societies. Successful nations and peoples usually find the present quite satisfying; when they discuss the past, it’s generally for the feel-good reason of reminding themselves how far they have come. It is not that a South Korean may not face racism here in Britain, but that, like Jewish people today, they always have the option of a wealthy well-developed ancestral homeland they can move to, if need really be. This knowledge creates a completely different psychological dynamic.

A lot of effort, however, is put into recalling the colonial pasts of nations not doing that well today for two major reasons. First, to convince the world that this is not the result of current misrule, but because of problems that have their “root causes” in colonialism and, possibly, slavery as well. In other words, something attributable to external forces beyond their control.

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The second aim is to bring white folk, Westerners especially, down a peg or two. This group tends to consider itself more civilisationally advanced as a result of having built several dozen successful states across the globe. No amount of political correctness can hide this. Their sense of superiority at having built “developed” societies while we are still “developing” engenders in us a strong psychological need to make the point that the only reason they are so rich, and we are not, is because they robbed us through colonisation and slavery and caused the problems our nations face today.

Olivia Rutazibwa outlines this position: “It is only through sustained colonial amnesia in knowledge production in [Western] society that the ills in the global South are systematically and almost exclusively attributed to the now and the local (over there)… this allows for the sustained… presentation of Western actors as firefighters when they are more often than not the arsonists.” What is thus needed, according to Rutazibwa, is to “first and foremost foreground the transatlantic slave trade and the colonial encounter as the sites from which any thinking about development-related issues need to be addressed”.

In other words, you simply can’t discuss any development issues of Nigeria or Pakistan today without first discussing colonialism. Indeed, there wouldn’t even be a Nigeria today, a country comprised of hundreds of ethnic groups speaking some 500 different languages, if not for British colonialism. Though colonialism is often portrayed as having divided Africans, it actually forced together thousands of formerly disparate communities, city-states, empires and autonomous groups into 54 Western-style nation states.

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Nigerians over the years have countered by arguing that this forcing together of overly (culturally) different peoples has created an “artificial” country that struggles to develop consensus on national norms and forge a sense of nationhood. The practicality of this point is valid in Nigeria’s case, but we should also be aware that this is precisely the argument some deploy against multiculturalism in Western societies. They say white Europeans shouldn’t be forced to live with so many people from different cultures with different value-systems. So this particular critique of colonialism is a slippery slope. We can’t argue “forced” multiculturalism is bad for African states but good for Western ones.

What is certainly the case, however, is that colonialism brought massive disruptions to the ways of life of millions of people in colonised territories, rubbishing their cultures, belief-systems, values and traditions — all the things Queen Elizabeth is praised for upholding here in Britain. Postcolonial Africans are yet to recover (and may well never recover) from this assault on their identities and are still trying to figure out what exactly they are or want to be. People were also killed, something that cannot be glossed over. Colonialism wrought serious damage.

But it is not to blame for everything. It is fanciful, for example, to suggest that the $600 billion stolen from the Nigerian people by Nigerian rulers since independence is down to colonialism. If that had been used to fund roads, schools, hospitals, universities and power systems, Nigeria would be in a very different place today. We would definitely not be in a situation whereby three-quarters of Nigerians aged 18-24 want to emigrate to richer pastures, including often to the land of their former conquerors, Britain.

Nonetheless when the issue of corruption among African ruling elites is discussed, the fact that these stolen funds are often deposited in Western banks is often raised along with the implication that it is the white man who is again robbing Africa of its wealth. I cannot imagine that, were it to emerge that Boris Johnson had stolen £2 billion from the UK treasury and deposited it in a bank in Dubai, there would be people more concerned with the role of the Emiratis in the whole affair than in the fact Johnson stole £2 billion from Britain.

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Yet a tranche of white Westerners lap up these anti-colonial arguments. They nod their heads, displaying an incredibly paternalistic and patronising attitude to Africans, painting them as helpless children who, even when they steal from their people, probably do it because the white man has told them to. All this only serves to downplay the role of corrupt African leaders in impoverishing their people: how thrilled these rulers must be as those useful idiots make the “corruption is all the West’s fault” argument for them.

And no, accounts of massive corruption in African states are not exaggerated stereotypes. In a 2021 survey of citizens in 34 African countries, an average of 58% said corruption was getting steadily worse. And not just among their elites; a third of respondents had been forced to bribe the police at least once in the past year. They also rated their civil servants, judges and local government councillors as very corrupt. Worse, 71% said “ordinary citizens risk retaliation or other negative consequences if they report corruption to the authorities”, proof they see it as a systemic arrangement. Is that the white man’s doing as well?

Of course there are global structural hangovers from the colonial era that impede the progress of African and other (poorer) global South countries today. Western countries have far more influence over and within major international organisations — from the UN to the IMF and World Bank. African countries have very weak positions in these institutions because they lack financial muscle, determined by their position in the world economy. Basically, the more you pay, the more you say.

The general stance of Africans who live in Africa is certainly not to blame the former colonialists for the problems of their countries today. They place the blame squarely on their ruling elites as a cursory glance of a newspaper in any African country will evidence. A majority — 59% — of Africans aged 18-24 believe that the impact their country’s former colonial powers have on their education systems is positive, while a quarter (25%) disagree. A majority — 57% — also feel trade relations with the former colonial power have a positive impact, while 27% disagree. Surprisingly for me, 47% even think the former colonial power’s impact on their country’s culture and identity is positive and 46% think their access to its natural resources has a positive effect, compared with 32% and 36% who disagree, respectively.

Six in ten, meanwhile, believe that foreign companies have been allowed to take advantage of their country’s resources without sufficiently benefitting or contributing to the local populations. These figures suggest the majority of African youths who actually live in Africa have quite different views from those in the West who are attempting to speak on their behalf — usually Guardianistas or their equivalents in the US. Kehinde Andrews’s The New Age of Empire at least makes the argument explicitly. Most others hide behind implication to generally say the same thing.

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Any white person who would suggest colonialism is not one of the “root causes” of Africa’s problems today is engaging in colonial amnesia, white denialism (both real but over-exaggerated phenomena), or is simply a racist. This tactic has the dual advantage of putting whites on the moral and psychological defensive as well as rallying Africans and other black folk to join in repelling the racist denialists. And if any black people in the West suggest colonialism does not really explain all African problems today, the tactic will be to portray them as “brainwashed” by the white man, dim-witted coconuts or mercenaries who in order to reap the rewards of pandering to white prejudices, are enabling “ahistorical” arguments that ignore the legacies of colonialism and slavery. An “ahistorical” argument is any argument that does not firmly point to the white man as the root of Africa’s problems today. White people who make the “colonialism is the root cause” argument will be praised as “thoughtful” and generally given the thumbs-up for showing how informed they are; they get it.

But who is this helping? Certainly not the 500 million Africans who currently have to survive on less than $1.90 a day or the hundreds of millions more who live on $2-$5 a day which is still serious poverty. It is not helping those living in countries with 50% or higher unemployment rates who are dying of easily curable diseases because they often lack access to basic healthcare. It is not helping the Africans who often live under governments that often think nothing of unleashing open violence on them to stay in power.

It is, at best, helping some black folk here in the West who might genuinely feel better believing white people have what they have while black people lack what they lack because of colonialism.

The root cause of Africa’s problems today is not colonialism or Queen Elizabeth — it is the way it is being ruled. And until that changes, the status quo will remain the same, no matter how many times we yell “colonialism”.

The first modern revolution was neither French nor American, but English. Long before Louis XVI went to the Guillotine, or Washington crossed the Delaware, the country which later became renowned for stiff upper lips and proper tea went to war with itself, killed its king, replaced its monarchy with a republican government and unleashed a religious revolution which sought to scorch away the old world in God’s purifying fire.

Nearly four centuries on, England and the wider West is again being turned upside down. Again, we are living in the aftermath of a system that is dying or dead: then, the last gasp of medieval monarchy; now the Anglo-American Empire — and perhaps modernity itself. Again, we are living in a period of radical technological change: then, the printing press and the end of censorship, which allowed the distribution of radical pamphlets on an unprecedented scale; now, the internet’s enabling of global dissent and chaos. Again, we are living in a period in which the cultural mores of previous centuries are being upended: then, feudal assumptions governing everything from landownership to the meaning of marriage; now, the endless ructions of a tedious and unending “culture war”.

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How the Left fell for capitalism

By Paul Kingsnorth

Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a “white supremacist”, or the more general but still-lethal “hater”. The old world is again running up like parchment in the fire, and nobody who wants to be part of the new one can be seen to defend it.

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The Anti-Christ now rules us all

By Paul Kingsnorth

The poet and storyteller Robert Bly, who died last year, had his own name for the culture we now inhabit, in the West and increasingly elsewhere too. He called it a “sibling society”. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of the post-war West and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.

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The liberal order is already dead

By Paul Kingsnorth

A kind of corrupted cultural Levelling had taken hold, and the result was our culture of inversion, in which rebellion against all and any forms was seen as the only inherent good. And in the desert created by late 20th-century American capitalism, which had decimated communities and households, stripped the meaning from the lives of young generations and replaced it with shopping, little seemed worth preserving anyway. As a result, adults had remained perpetual adolescents: uninitiated, afraid to grow up, slouching towards Bethlehem quoting Marlon Brando in a kind of eternal 1954. ‘Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?’

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

“Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism, but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors. Many siblings are convinced that they have received nothing of value from anyone. The older truth is that every man and woman is indebted to all other persons, living or dead, and is indebted as well to animals, plants and the gods.”

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Covid was liberalism's endgame

By Matthew Crawford

It is indeed, and even more so. Our cultural elite’s ongoing “deconstruction” of all we once were has deteriorated into a kind of incoherent rage, a culture of inversion on steroids, and it has now elicited its own rising counter-revolution. Nobody knows where any of this will lead, but the primary emotion it is all channelling, on Right and Left, among radical and reactionary, is rage. In our perpetual sibling society — sick with consumerism, eye-glazed with screen burn, confused, rudderless, godless — we have forgotten how to behave like adults, or what adults even look like. The result is that we squabble like children, fighting over toys in the mud.

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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Crisis is the new normal

By Aris Roussinos

Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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Why we love to hate Imagine

By Dorian Lynskey

If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Your Fitbit has stolen your soul

By JUSTIN E. H. SMITH

Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

It is 40 years now since the outbreak of the Falklands War, one of the strangest, most colourful and most popular conflicts in British military history. Today this ten-week campaign to free the South Atlantic islands from Argentine occupation seems like a moment from a vanished age. But that was how it felt at the time, too: a scene from history, a colossal costume drama, a self-conscious re-enactment of triumphs past.

On the day the Invincible sailed, Margaret Thatcher quoted Queen Victoria: “Failure? The possibilities do not exist.” In the Sun, executives put up Winston Churchill’s portrait. And as the travel writer Jonathan Raban watched the departure of the Task Force on television, he thought it was like a historical pageant, complete with “pipe bands, bunting, flags, kisses, tears, waved handkerchiefs”. He regarded the whole exercise with deep derision, until the picture blurred and he realised that, despite himself, he was crying.

For many people the Falklands War was only too real. There were serious issues and genuine lives at stake, not just for the 1,813 islanders who had woken to find military vehicles roaring down their little streets, but for the tens of thousands of Argentine conscripts and British servicemen who were soon to be plunged into the nightmare of combat. And although polls suggest that about eight out of ten Britons strongly supported it, there were always those who considered it a mistake, a tragedy, even a crime. A certain Jeremy Corbyn thought it a “Tory plot to keep their money-making friends in business”. The novelist Margaret Drabble considered it a “frenzied outburst of dying power”. A far better writer, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, famously called it “two bald men arguing over a comb”. That seems an odd analogy, though, for almost 2,000 blameless sheep farmers, who had no desire to be ruled by a junta that threw dissenters out of helicopters.

One common view of the Falklands campaign is that it was Britain’s last colonial war. But this strikes me as very unpersuasive. When we think of colonial wars, we think of wars of conquest by white men in pith helmets against brown-skinned underdogs. We think of embattled imperialists struggling to stave off a nationalist uprising, or fighting in defence of white settlers against a native majority. But the Falklands War was none of those things. There was no oppressed indigenous majority — except perhaps for the islanders themselves, some of whom had been there since the 1830s. As for the Argentines, their Spanish and Italian surnames were a dead giveaway. Indeed, few countries in the Americas had done a more thorough job of eliminating their original inhabitants.

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What of the British? For all the “Empire Strikes Back” headlines, they had actually spent the last decade trying to give the islands away. Less than 18 months before the invasion, Mrs Thatcher had sent the chain-smoking Nicholas Ridley to urge the islanders to accept a sovereignty deal with Buenos Aires. His words have a blackly ironic ring today. “Do you want the Argentinians invading you and us kicking them out in a state of perpetual war?… I mean, it’s all very well sitting here saying someone else must come and kick the Argentinians out. Of course we will, but is that good for sheep farming, for fishing, for looking for oil, for all your futures, for your children, and your grand­children and your great­-grand­children?”

On paper, much of what he said was perfectly true. Not unsurprisingly, however, it went down like a lead balloon. When Ridley flew home, the islanders saw him off with a loudspeaker playing Land of Hope and Glory, This Land Is Our Land and We Shall Not Be Moved. He didn’t come back.

Not a war of decolonisation, then. And still less a Victorian war of conquest. Yet there’s no denying that this was a war with a sense of history. On the morning the Task Force sailed, the Daily Mail interviewed a veteran of the First World War, Tommy Mallen, for whom it had been a day of catharsis. “I thought England was done for, spineless, a doormat for the world,” he said. “I’d pass the war memorials or see Nelson’s Victory and wonder what it had all been for. But I was wrong, thank God. We are still a proud country, and we’ll still protect our own.”

The fleet’s commander, Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward, said much the same. Two months later, bursting with pride after the successful landing at San Carlos, he too looked back to the age of Nelson. “What difference,” he wondered, “between Ardent, crippled and burning, still fighting and Sir Richard Grenville’s Revenge all those centuries ago? Or between this and that October day off Cape Trafalgar as Nelson and Hardy walked the quarter deck of the Victory shortly after noon?”

The references to Nelson, the most romantic of all British patriotic heroes, were no accident. From start to finish there was something oddly 18th-century about the Falklands campaign, not least the fact that so much of it involved the high seas. One of its many ironies was that until the Argentines invaded, the Thatcher government had been planning to slash the Royal Navy to the bone. But the spectacle of the Task Force ploughing through the Atlantic was perfectly calculated to stir the hearts of a seafaring people who had grown up with tales of Drake and Nelson. And from the moment the fleet left, press and public alike relished the connections with Britain’s maritime history. In that respect, the news editor of the Sun, who took to wearing a naval cap and demanded that his subordinates address him as Commander, spoke for millions.

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Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today much of the Sun’s coverage would have sensitive readers running for the hills. The “GOTCHA” headline, glorying in the sinking of the General Belgrano, was merely the most infamous example in a long series: the repeated admonitions to “STICK IT UP YOUR JUNTA”, the paper’s “Argy-­Bargie” joke column, even its operation to airlift 50 gigantic posters of Page Three girls to the RAF base at Ascension Island.

Yet none of this would have seemed shocking to newspaper readers in 18th-century London. Britain fought at least seven major campaigns against the Spanish Empire in the course of the 18th century, from the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear to the Seven Years’ War and the struggle against Napoleon, and the press coverage back then was much the same. On one side, the jolly, earthy, open-hearted Jack Tars, the defenders of individual liberty and plain-speaking Protestantism. On the other, the inheritors of Spain’s Black Legend: flamboyant, superstitious and unspeakably cruel. “A jumped-­up junta of barbarous men,” roared one Tory backbencher. “The very thought that our people, 1,800 people of British blood and bone, could be left in the hands of such criminals is enough to make any normal Englishman’s blood boil,” thundered another.

He was speaking in the spring of 1982, but he could so easily have been talking two centuries earlier. Indeed, it’s striking how often MPs reached for parallels, not just with the Second World War, but with the campaigns against the Spanish, the French and other similarly sallow and superstitious foreigners. “Let us hear no more about logistics — how difficult it is to travel long distances,” declared the Tory backbencher Edward du Cann. “I do not remember the Duke of Wellington whining about Torres Vedras. We have nothing to lose now except our honour!”

History never repeats itself, of course. But when you start noticing the Georgian resonances, it’s hard to stop. A few months after the Task Force returned in triumph, the social commentator Peter York claimed that the single most powerful “piece of everyday symbolism” in the country was the mock-Georgian front door, “strong and safe and solid… a revisionist burst of bourgeois individualism”. The members of Visage, Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, with their whitened faces, billowing pantaloons and over-elaborate eye make-up, would have made superb extras in a stage revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. So too would the greatest sporting icon of the age, whom you can easily imagine roaring out “Hearts of Oak” on the deck of the Victory.

As the cricket writer Derek Hodgson put it: “Regency England would have recognised him instantly as the man who could ride to hounds from dawn, fight 25 rounds bare-knuckle of an afternoon, dine on a mountain of boiled mutton, roast beef, plum duff and cheddar cheese, washed down by ale and claret, and top it off with a bottle of brandy: a man who proclaimed one Englishman worth 10 scurvy foreigners. For Ian Botham read John Bull.”

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How to lose a leadership election

By Dominic Sandbrook

Even Margaret Thatcher, so often seen as a Victorian Gradgrind, had her Georgian side. When she moved into 10 Downing Street, she specifically requested paintings of Nelson, Wellington and George II. At a reception in the autumn of 1982, she gave the journalist Hugo Young a tour of the new paintings, proudly pointing out George I, Sir Robert Walpole, William Pitt the Younger and “other admirals and soldiers”. And when, in her memoirs, she discusses the moment she became Prime Minister, whom does she quote? Not Churchill, but Pitt the Elder: “I know that I can save this country and that no one else can.”

Perhaps it was no wonder, then, that the Falklands War felt like an eighteenth-century throwback. In a country shorn of its imperial pretensions, struggling to find a new place in the world, it revived the image of a buccaneering, free-trading, maritime people, sometimes boorish, often vulgar, but always staunch in the defence of freedom. Here was the Britishness — or perhaps more accurately, the Englishness — of Rule Britannia, of James Wolfe at Quebec and H. Jones at Goose Green, swashbuckling martyrs in the national cause. It was cynical and sentimental, ruthless and romantic, fervently patriotic and often aggressively populist. Some people hated it. But deep down, most felt its emotional pull.

For almost two centuries it had been buried beneath a veneer of Victorianism, but it had never disappeared. “It must have always been there,” wrote the columnist George Gale on the day of victory, “for we have seen it flooding back.” Britain, agreed Margaret Thatcher, “has re-kindled that spirit which has fired her for generations past and which today has begun to burn as brightly as before.”

But it was an even more controversial politician who put it best. “A change has come about in Britain,” wrote Enoch Powell. “We are ourselves again.”

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the Falklands War in The Rest is History.

Chaos is a void because nothingness has no shape. There isn’t a triangular kind of negativity as opposed to an oval one. So-called “chaos theory” deals with systems whose behaviour is random and unpredictable, one of which is known as Vladimir Putin. One of the curious features of the Russian president’s attack on Ukraine is its recklessness. Former KGB agents may be callous or thick-headed or sadistic, but one would not expect them to be impetuous.

Still, Putin was a KGB man a long time ago, and has had plenty of time to go mad since then. Not mad in the sense of not knowing what he’s up to, but mad in the way that pop stars who are surrounded by sycophants and don’t know what a can opener is. Shakespeare’s Lear is in something like this state when the play opens, and has to be hauled through hell in order to be cured of it. (He didn’t know what a can opener was either, but that was understandable.)

Putin’s motive in flattening Ukraine is partly ethnic. He thinks that the country is ethnically speaking a fiction, a cardboard cut-out of a nation, and should be wound up as soon as possible. Ukraine is a void, a non-entity, and Russia will impose some order on this chaos by incorporating it into itself. Then the Ukrainians will cease to be unreal and become what they essentially are, namely Russians.

In this sense, the war reminds us of the dangers of ethnicity. Contrary to postmodern thinking, it isn’t always to be applauded. You don’t have to be a racist to be aware of the murderous conflicts ethnic difference has inflicted on humankind. If everyone came from Cornwall or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world would be a lot more dreary but a lot less bloodstained as well.

Behind Putin’s assault on his neighbours lies one of the worst ideas humanity has had for a long time: the Romantic-nationalist demand that there should be a precise fit between politics and ethnicity, so that an ethnic ‘people’, whatever that means, is entitled to its own sovereign state, and should extend this sovereignty to those of its own kind currently living under different regimes.

The result of this doctrine has been political havoc. The English have a right to self-determination, but not because they are English. Scottish independence is a question of democracy, not a genetic or patriotic affair. Colonised nations from India to Mozambique have thrown off their colonisers, but this is a political matter, not an ethnic one.

Colonialism is objectionable even if those who have plundered your resources are of the same ethnic origin as yourself. There are Republicans in Northern Ireland who oppose the partition of the country because they would prefer to live with their fellow Gaels over the border rather than with a bunch of benighted Ulster Scots who believe the world was created only 6,000 years ago. There are, however, better reasons for opposing partition than that. Ethnicity in the West is mostly a matter of ensuring equal rights, and is thus to be affirmed; yet ethnicity on a more general scale has piled the bodies high, and continues to do so as I write.

Too sharp a contrast between order and chaos is misleading. War creates chaos, but it is a deliberately manufactured disorder, not an arbitrary mess. You spread ruin and despair, but in as planned, well-disciplined way as possible. Besides, what you regard as chaos depends largely on your idea of order. In this sense, the two concepts are mutually parasitic.

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Anyone who has just returned to Britain from a so-called developing nation will be struck by how surreally neat and tidy everything seems, but people in poorer countries don’t consider their lives to be anarchic. Virginia Woolf saw life as fragmentary and formless, but it’s unlikely that the housemaids who scrubbed her floors felt the same.

My university tutor regarded almost everything around him as chaotic, from the gurgling of a baby to the purring of a car engine, but this was because his notion of order was pathological. He would refuse to shake hands with you in the vacation because of some medieval university statute which nobody else had ever heard of. I once asked him at the end of a tutorial whether I might consult him in his role as a university officer, whereupon he asked me to leave the room, knock on the door and wait till he invited me to come in again. People like this should be chained to the wall in padded cells, approached only by those wearing protective suits. One could only wonder what wild orgiastic urges he was repressing.

Like many deep-dyed conservatives, my tutor was a devout adherent of what one might call the floodgates argument. Allow one person to play the trombone in a tube station, and (key phrase) before you know where you are the whole of the London underground system will be packed wall-to-wall with people playing trombones and chaos will ensue. In Freudian idiom, this man had fallen morbidly in love with the law. Like the Pharisees of the New Testament, he had turned the law into a fetish in order to keep chaos at bay.

Naive libertarians react to this pathology by ditching the law altogether, but this fails to acknowledge the distinction between obeying the law because of what it commends and obeying it for its own sake. “The law is the law” is one of the most lethal tautologies in any language. On this view, you don’t do what the law demands for a reason, because that would mean that legality was dependent on rationality and was thus no longer absolute.

For Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest of modern philosophers, you should be moral because it is moral to be so. This is deeply questionable, but it contains a kernel of truth, which is that being moral doesn’t get you anywhere. It isn’t necessarily a path to a more fulfilling life. In fact, for the New Testament it is a path which leads to a squalid death at the hands of the state. The 18^th century novelist Henry Fielding writes that there is a noble doctrine to the effect that the virtuous will reap their reward in this world — a doctrine, he adds, which has only one defect, namely that it is not true.

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There are other ways in which order and chaos are old friends. In Freud’s view, what enforces law and order is the superego, a faculty which draws its formidable strength from the forces of the chaotic unconscious. No political order could endure if it didn’t engage us at this kind of depth. You can’t govern people off the top of their heads, not even if they are French. Any political power which can tap into the collective unconscious will prove remarkably difficult to dislodge. If it also provides its citizens with just enough satisfaction, however meagre, to keep them going, it is very likely to survive. There has to be something in it for you. If there isn’t, however, either affectively or materially, power is highly vulnerable.

Social order is shrewd enough to encourage us to disrupt it from time to time. The traditional name for this in medieval Europe was carnival. The common people tumble into the streets wearing monstrous papier-mâché phalluses and vaginas and hump merrily away in defiance of the state. A wave of travesty and inversion — nose/phallus, face/buttocks, mouth/anus, high/low — sweeps through social life. Absolutely nothing escapes this great spasm of satire. Nothing is too solemn or sacred to be blasphemed. People dress up as Cardinals and piss in the streets. All this calls the established social order into question, but it is also a way of protecting it, a collective blow-off after which the sun will rise on myriad empty wine flagons and gnawed chicken legs and the populace will return obediently to work.

You need order if you want to be free. Unless you can predict how the world is likely to behave, you can’t fulfil your powers and capabilities, which is the positive meaning of freedom. You can’t play croquet if the hoops consist of flamingos which keep wandering around, as they do in Alice in Wonderland.

All the same, social life wouldn’t work if every bit of it was bound by precise rules. You wouldn’t be able to say “Stand roughly there”, which makes perfect sense, or shake someone’s hand, since there are no rules which determine how long a handshake should last. Maybe this is why my tutor was so wary of them.

We live and work on what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the rough ground of social existence, even if there are those who try to walk on the pure ice of some flawless vision of order. But the two are not simply opposites. What we have witnessed in Ukraine is how easily such flawless visions can create the rough ground of a city brought to ruin.

De Kom is to Suriname what Mandela is to South Africa: a heroic patriot, an advocate of the oppressed, and a symbol of resistance against colonialism. His magnum opus, We Slaves of Suriname — originally written and published in 1934 — was the first history of slavery and Dutch colonialism in Suriname written by a Surinamese man. It was composed while he was exiled to the Netherlands and under surveillance for anti-colonial protests. After its publication, he and it were censored and neglected for years by the Dutch, let alone the West in general.

But then came the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and a renewed interest in examining the racial injustices of the past. There has since been a surge of interest in De Kom. Last February, the Dutch government pledged to honour him “with a generous gesture”. He became the first Surinamer to be included in the canon of Dutch history, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. And this month, the first ever English translation of We Slaves of Suriname will be published, 88 years after its completion.

The book is, in part, an ode to De Kom’s homeland: a beautiful, tropical wonderland, teeming with life. But it also tells the history of Suriname, from the beginning of European settlement — which very quickly led to the catastrophic demise of the nation’s aboriginal peoples — to when the Dutch fully colonised it in 1667, turning it into a plantation colony. From this point onwards, thousands of enslaved Africans were imported, to work producing sugar and coffee to export back to the mother country.

For De Kom, slavery was personal. He repeatedly refers to the enslaved as “our fathers and our mothers”, and deftly weaves his own autobiography into the history of Suriname. His father was born a slave, and later became a farmer. He was part of the generation of slaves emancipated into “free” citizenship under Dutch rule, yet haunted by memories still fresh in their minds, and stories passed down by their elders.

Early in the book, De Kom invites “the white reader”, who he believes will be sceptical of what he writes, to contemplate a sailing ship. For De Kom, the image is not one of freedom; it represents instead the torture of his ancestors:

“But we do wish to warn you. From your lofty seat, do not venture down the futtouck shroud … Up here you can smell the invigorating smell of tar and the salt sea wind … Down there it already reeks a mile leeward of the sweat and excrement of a thousand slaves packed into a hold.

Up here you can hear the cries of the albatross, the song of the sailors, and the crash of the wave … Down there you can hear the cries of the slaves, the wails of the women in labour, and the crack of the whip coming down on the backs of blacks.”

When the history of European colonialism is interrogated, the focus tends to be on the British and French (and, to a lesser extent, Spanish) empires. The role of the Netherlands is rarely noted, though it had one of Europe’s oldest empires, including colonies in Suriname, Java and Southern Africa. And, as Pepijn Brandon has argued, the Netherlands was also a key player in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch planters had a reputation for being especially cruel and sadistic in their treatment of slaves.

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The typical colonial narrative argues for the “civilising” influence of the imperial power. De Kom counters this with brutal expositions of what Dutch rule really meant for the Surinamese, documenting gruesome accounts of the torture frequently dished out to those seen as slacking or insubordinate. A common technique was the notorious “Spanish billy goat”, where the slave would be mercilessly flogged while his two hands were tied together, his knees pulled up through the arms with a stick inserted between them and planted onto the ground. The frequent sexual abuse of black women by their masters, long a taboo subject, is also given in-depth treatment by De Kom.

Despite all this, De Kom is uneasily ambivalent towards the end of slavery in Suriname. In 1863, 100,000 or so slaves became free citizens — in name, but not in essence. “The physical instruments of torture,” De Kom lamented, “have largely been replaced by mental torments, poverty and want.” While former slave-owners were compensated for the loss of their “property”, former slaves received no reparations. They weren’t given any land, training, education or credit — unlike European settlers, who had received all these things upon arrival, to help them make a living.

Instead, former slaves had little choice but to enter coolie contracts under “state supervision” for ten years before they could even be officially “free”. It was basically another form of slavery; in other words, the abolition of slavery was managed in the interests of plantation owners, rather than the individuals they’d exploited. It was a sham.

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Likewise, Suriname’s “autonomy” was also a sham. The nation was still seen as inseparable from the Dutch kingdom. De Kom’s raison d’etre for writing We Slaves of Suriname was to unshackle his compatriots from their “inherited sense of inferiority and to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” so that they could extricate themselves from the Dutch yoke.

Nevertheless, despite his fervent indictments of the evils of slavery and Dutch colonialism, De Kom was unlike some of his contemporaries, in that he did not subscribe to the “back to Africa” agenda. The decolonisation struggle he envisioned was not meant to be a violent one, or a regression into narrow tribalism: “What I was after was organisation, not a bloodbath.” He firmly believed that the mosaic society of Suriname — composed of blacks, Indians and Javanese — could unite in the spirit of solidarity to liberate their nation, and achieve a dignified human existence for all citizens.

On the last page of his book, De Kom dreamt of the day he would return to a free Suriname:

“Sranang my fatherland.
I hope to see you again once.
On the day when all misery shall be erased from you.”

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The lines are particularly poignant if you know that, when he wrote them, he would never see his treasured homeland again. Shortly after the German invasion of Holland in 1940, De Kom joined the Dutch resistance and wrote for the censored De Vonk, a paper affiliated with the Dutch Communist party, which mainly documented the abusive activities of fascist gangs in the streets of The Hague (in particular those against Jews). On the 7th August 1944, he was arrested by Nazi forces and sentenced to forced labour at Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis and was buried in a mass grave. Ever since, his legacy has risked fading into history.

His work is poignant, too, because Suriname has suffered since then. National independence, like the abolition of slavery, has not been a glowing success. Since 1975, when Dutch rule finally came to an end, Suriname has endured civil war, dictatorships, tribalism and corruption — similar to that which plagues a lot of post-colonial nations. The nation is still haunted by the abuses of empire.

Anton De Kom’s work doesn’t tell an uplifting story, then; but it is a common story, of how our modern world came to be. Black labour, in the form of chattel slavery, played a significant role in creating the wealth of the West. “This is the price we pay for the sugar you eat,” cries out the limbless and nameless Negro slave (owned by a cruel and unscrupulous Dutch merchant) in Voltaire’s Candide. Human beings turned into commodities: this is our history whether we are comfortable with it or not. And De Kom, despite all the efforts to silence him, will not let us forget it.

The massacre of Algerian demonstrators by police in central Paris on 17 October 1961, and its decades-long cover-up, burns all those who touch it. This October, on its 60th anniversary, President Macron’s guarded avowal that the killings represented a “crime” unleashed the wrath of Marine Le Pen and other nationalists. Since then, it is the Right-wing maverick Éric Zemmour, who comes from an Algerian Jewish family, who has set the tone for next spring’s presidential election — even if his candidacy fails, as it will.

Millions of French people, like Zemmour, descend directly or have close links to the pieds-noirs: European Algerians who resettled in France after the brutal independence war led to French withdrawal in 1962. Millions more belong to Arab and Berber families with Algerian roots. The intimacy and intensity of this almost-domestic quarrel explains much about the country’s recent politics.

In 1954, when anti-colonial revolutionaries of the FLN began hostilities, Algeria became an early example of those causes that, in the age of mass media, polarise opinion not just in their own backyard, but among rival tribes of impassioned onlookers. As French paratroopers routinely turned whips and blowtorches on suspects plucked from the Casbah of Algiers, as settler militias murdered their Muslim neighbours, and as FLN guerrillas executed “traitors” by the score and planted bombs in cafés packed with European families, the now-familiar rhetoric of “With-us-or-against-us” and “Whose side are you on?” carved its acid path through a worldwide language of partisanship and recrimination. There it remains, its corrosive power massively enhanced by social media, which has glamorised the fury of the bystander — the vicarious passion that drives so many battles for the moral-political high ground that spill over their original borders.

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For that reason, the tormented but always-lucid responses of Albert Camus to the agonies of his native land have lost none of their vigour and value. Famously, Camus chose not to choose between the commitments of his Arab and his European friends. He detested racial and social inequality, the “institutional” abuses of colonialism (his adjective), and the laws that enforced them. He demanded democracy and self-determination for all Algerians in a federation of free peoples. But he opposed formal rupture with France, and stoutly defended the rights of European Algerians to flourish in the only homeland they had ever known. For Camus, all Algeria’s peoples “must live together where history has placed them, at a crossroads of commerce and civilisations”.

When his refusal to share the “bitterness and hatred” of either settlers or revolutionaries isolated him, he fell silent on the subject closest to his heart and mind for well over two years. “I have passionately loved this country, in which I was born and from which I have taken everything I am,” he said in his final public statement in Algiers in 1956, “and among my friends who live here I have never distinguished by race”.

Camus was the impoverished Algiers-born child of a father who (in his infancy) died on the Western Front, and a deaf, illiterate mother who cleaned houses. He could never conceive of himself and his working-class peers as part of an oppressive colonial elite. He could, and from an early age did, not only recognise but fight against the racially-coded injustices of French rule. Indeed, his outspoken 1939 reports on famine and hardship in the Kabylia region for the Alger républicain newspaper got him blacklisted by the colonial authorities, and prompted his move to France.

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However, his great works of fiction in the 1940s — first L’Étranger and then La Peste — quickly attracted not just acclaim but doubtful scrutiny. Critical readers argued that they masked or dodged the realities of the Algeria he so loved: in the unspeaking anonymity of the “Arab” gratuitously killed by Meursault in L’Étranger; or in the sidestep into allegory undertaken when Camus depicts pestilence raging in Oran in La Peste. Later critics, from Conor Cruise O’Brien and Edward Said to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud — who in 2013 brilliantly rewrote L’Étranger from the perspective of the victim’s family in his novel The Meursault Investigation — have found large, non-European elements of Camus’s native land “of happiness, energy, and creativity” missing in the stories that he told about it.

In his essays, public statements and journalism, however, Camus lays bare the internal divisions that tore his pied-noir soul in two. A new Penguin Modern Classics collection of speeches and lectures, Speaking Out, collects interventions on the burning topics of his day: from post-Second World War cultural despair, to the them-and-us blind loyalties of the emergent Cold War; from the obscenity of state violence against workers’ uprisings in the Communist countries of eastern Europe, to the growing respectability — which disgusted Camus, whose mother had Spanish origins — of Franco’s still-vicious dictatorship in Spain.

It also contains his remarkable “Appeal for a Civilian Truce in Algeria”, delivered in Algiers in January 1956. When it came to the future of his birthplace, Camus did not so much sit on the fence as dance naked in no-man’s-land. Exposed to raking fire from every side, he spoke with the almost-naive courage that had carried him through the war as a Resistance activist and editor of the underground journal, Combat.

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His “Appeal for a Civilian Truce” is the classic testimony of an embattled pluralist who will resist political and ethnic tribalism to his last breath. Camus looks on aghast at the “fratricidal struggle” that has locked “the two peoples I love” — European and Arab Algerians — “in mortal combat”. For him, “The endless dispute over who committed the first wrong becomes meaningless”. He appeals beyond militants and partisans to a wider “community of hope” that embraces diversity. Camus re-states his faith “in differences, not uniformity, because differences are the roots without which the tree of liberty withers and the sap of creation and civilisation dries up.”

Camus well knew how deeply rancour and suspicion suffused both camps. He asked, for the moment, not for any cessation of hostilities; merely a promise by combatants not to target civilians with terror or reprisals, because “no cause justifies the deaths of innocent people”. As he spoke, in the hall of the Arab-owned Cercle du Progrès in Algiers, diehard settlers heckled him. Outside, a large crowd of angry demonstrators brandished placards demanding “Death to Camus”. At this stage, though, Camus still enjoyed protection from the FLN. One of their more conciliatory leaders — his old friend Ferhat Abbas — later joined him on the platform.

But the FLN did not listen; neither did the militant settlers; still less the French army. The round of atrocity and counter-atrocity — what Camus elsewhere calls “the bloody marriage of terror and repression” — rose into a spiral of ever-intensifying savagery. Even independence in 1962 failed to stem it: thousands of harkis, Algerians who had fought with the French, were slaughtered, along with their families, after the colonial administration packed its bags.

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Distraught and despairing, Camus said and wrote nothing on Algeria between early 1956 and mid-1958, when he collected his articles and speeches into a book. Behind the scenes, he interceded with French ministers to show leniency to Algerian fighters sentenced to the guillotine. By 1958, however, no one in a with-us-or-against-us climate of mutual detestation wanted to hear from the sad guy in the middle of the road. The publication flopped; and it took until 2013 for these Algerian Chronicles to appear in Arthur Goldhammer’s first-rate English translation. It remains an exemplary, even inspiring, act of conscience and of witness.

Camus’s Algerian dilemmas had nothing to do with “centrism”, with compromise or with even-handed detachment. He knew, he loved, and he suffered with, both irreconcilable sides. Riven to the core of his being by divided allegiances, Camus the Algerian appears, in hindsight, to be as much of a tragic figure as any of the existential heroes he created in works such as The Fall or The Just. Posterity, and reputation, has sometimes blunted the force of the wrenching ambivalence that he felt about his homeland and its fate. Read his own words and this conflicted integrity comes into dazzling focus.

In 1957 — as Algerian Chronicles though not Speaking Out explains – Camus ran into trouble after he had travelled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. At a press conference the next day, an FLN journalist attacked his stance. Camus responded by reaffirming his belief in “a just Algeria in which both populations must live in peace and equality”. But he also condemned “blind terrorism” in Algiers. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers,” he said. “My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother”.

Le Monde, however, reported a twisted paraphrase of what he had said: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice.” Worse, a grossly distorted version of his meaning passed into political folklore when later writers pretended Camus had stated: “Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother.” Yet the thrust of his remark was to show that indiscriminate violence against civilians never counts as “justice”. Divided souls, even one as eloquent as Camus, may struggle to get their message of balance, nuance and plurality across. Now, in another age of fervent faith and monocular vision, we need to hear it again.

But to my surprise we won, and by a considerable majority, in a packed chamber. Not due to my halting efforts, but rather to a brilliant speech by Trevor Phillips, who evidently touched both the hearts and the minds of the large and diverse audience. He was able to draw on his family’s opposition to colonial rule in British Guiana, and yet also on his father’s patriotic service in the Second World War and his own respect for many of our country’s achievements today.

Not all students fit the “woke” stereotype that I was too ready to ascribe to them, then. Many of those present, including several who spoke, were not British; the University is today a highly international institution. And yet they recognised that our nation can and should inspire pride and gratitude.

Trevor urged the audience not to emulate their Oxford predecessors and encourage the enemies of democracy and freedom by publicly rubbishing our common culture; and he politely but firmly rebuked a young woman who proclaimed from the floor that the current Tory government was little better than a populist dictatorship. Though he had never been and would never be a Tory, he said, the present government included more people from ethnic minorities in senior positions than all the governments in our history combined, and more than any government in Europe today.

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This is what our “history wars” are really about. Not analysing and understanding the past, but using historical claims to support negative assertions about the present. Despite the majority of students who voted for us that evening, I was alarmed at some of the opinions that were presented as incontrovertible fact. Two that remain in my mind are that our history had been “a long bloodbath”, and that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine if 1943.

I hope these were not History students, who should have known that the Bengal famine is a complex and contested episode, and our domestic history, compared with most countries’, has been relatively peaceful and bloodless. I hope that History students might also have recalled the conclusion of that deeply anti-colonialist former imperial policeman, George Orwell, that the British Empire had been “peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been [with] fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state”.

Where do (some) Cambridge students get the idea of our history as a “bloodbath”? Much recent popular writing on the empire — for example John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried — has emphasised its violence practically to the exclusion of all else. But for that perspective to seem plausible, it is necessary to avoid all comparisons with what existed before colonial rule, and with what, in some countries, came after it. It is necessary to draw a veil over pre-colonial societies, and imagine them uncritically either as “noble savages” living in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable Eden, or as viable modernising states. It is even more important to avert one’s gaze from post-colonial failures and tyrannies.

Instead, one has to accept the accounts of axe-grinding nationalist politicians, such as the Indian polemicist Shashi Tharoor, who in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, uses the British Raj as a scapegoat for the failings of modern Indian governments. Or one has to play up to the politics of victimhood by making slavery the hallmark of the Empire — even though the Empire was the major force that suppressed global slavery during a century and a half of effort.

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The “woke” fervour that has recently disturbed the cloistered calm of Cambridge is based on bad history, then. The kind one would expect of a doctrinaire first-year undergraduate, perhaps. And yet, as my pleasant and interesting evening at the Cambridge Union suggested, I do not believe that it comes primarily from the majority of students. Some of it may come from PhD students and academics in subjects such as “postcolonial literature”, for whom wokeness is practically a requirement of the job. But although they managed to bully one young academic out of his college fellowship after accusing his research of being “racist”, generally they are too few and intellectually too marginal to have an impact on their own.

The real problem comes from the University and College administrations. It is they who are encouraging, and even requiring, gestures towards “decolonisation” and the sort of anonymous denunciation that masquerades under the once innocent slogan of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”. It was a Pro-Vice Chancellor who pushed a now notorious anti-racist strategy that encouraged secret complaints about “microaggressions”, and which had to be withdrawn in the face of strong internal and external criticism. It is certain Colleges, notoriously Downing, that are now attempting to adopt an almost identical policy at the lower level. It was the University’s central authorities who dragged their heels over guaranteeing free speech, until forced to change direction by a vote of the academic rank-and-file in the Regent House. And it was the Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, who in 2019 set up an enquiry into the University’s links with slavery, “amid a wider reflection taking place in the United States and Britain on the links between universities and slavery”.

Herein lies a clue as to what is really going on here. The university is in competition, especially with American universities, and, pretty obviously, wokeness is part of a marketing strategy. University managers are increasingly operating like any other multinational corporation. All have to “curate” their public image, and their gestures carry no more intellectual or moral weight than those of Nike or Ben and Jerry.

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My own College, St John’s, has been spared the temptation of progressive histrionics: luckily, our connection with slavery is that the two greatest English abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, were undergraduates, as were Lord Castlereagh (who secured the first international anti-slave-trade commitment in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna) and Lord Palmerston (who in 1850 sent the proverbial gunboats to Brazil to stop the largest remaining trans-Atlantic trade). It seems that the father of an 18th-century student owned slaves, but fortunately the College got none of his money.

Not so fortunate has been Jesus College, whose contortions have epitomised the worst hypocrisies of “woke”. Their embarrassing record of lucrative sycophancy towards the Chinese regime means that discussion of human rights has been regarded as “unhelpful”, and suppressed, in case the College were “perceived as being a campaigning college for freedom for Hong Kong [or] freedom for the Uighurs”. But if they show limited concern for genocide in the 21st century, they are very sensitive indeed to an investment in the slave trade by their great benefactor Tobias Rustat in the 17th. Him they are busy cancelling, to the extent of trying to remove his memorial from the College chapel. Meanwhile, the college’s China Centre, which “aims to deepen mutual understanding between China and the West by ‘using the past to serve the present’”, blithely continues.

Jesus College has also just ostentatiously returned to Nigeria a “Benin Bronze”, seized during a British punitive expedition against the slave-owning Kingdom of Benin in 1897, following the slaughter of a diplomatic mission. Of course, the college is free to donate its property as it wishes, and it could have decided, unobtrusively, that a brass cockerel from Nigeria would be more appreciated in its ancestral homeland than merely by being placed on a dinner table in Cambridge during feasts.

But instead, the college staged a fulsome ceremony, in which the statuette was handed to a descendent of the Obas of Benin, the slavers from whom it was confiscated. The British who freed the Oba’s slaves were described by the Master as having committed “a wrong that is so egregious”. Slaving by Africans, it would seem, is not worth a mention. At Jesus College, the Master added, “we teach, we educate.” It is hardly surprising if Cambridge students thereby acquire strange notions of history.

Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, first had a taste of such treatment in 2017, when he published a now famous, or notorious, article entitled, “The Case for Colonialism”. It was peer reviewed and published by a reputable scholarly journal. But then came the storm: a collective letter signed by hundreds of colleagues denounced him; editors of the journal resigned; terrified publishers pleaded with him to withdraw the article to protect them from possible violence; and abuse and death threats came flying his way.

What was his crime? To suggest, in careful and moderate terms (judge for yourselves — the piece is available here), that European empires did some good. And that some similar arrangement, through which advanced democracies might adopt some of the duties of government in failed states, might do some good today. Of course, one could object that not all European empires were benevolent or effective. One could equally suggest that few (or no) developed countries would be willing to shoulder the burdens of quasi-colonial government today. Many, even most, people might think Gilley’s ideas one-sided or unrealistic. So what? Debate — often heated — has for centuries been the way we have advanced knowledge and reached agreed position: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

But Gilley was not being offered debate. He was being threatened and silenced, labelled a heretic. Needless to say, this has become a familiar sight in Western academic life. Fortunately, he seems to have a secure tenured position; and admirably, he seems not to be easily intimidated. His new book, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire, takes the battle to a different level. “The Case for Colonialism” was a general survey: a birds-eye view of empire. A biography, of course, is the opposite: a worms-eye view from the grassroots.

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Burns, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was a distinguished man in his field, and a witty and dedicated public servant. But he was not a maker of high policy or an intellectual of wide influence. I had never heard of him; I expect few historians have. This, of course, is part of the attraction, if you want to show what governing the British Empire meant in everyday terms — not the view from Whitehall, but from an office in Nassau, a mud hut in Benin, or ultimately Christiansborg Castle in Accra. Burns started at the bottom of the colonial administration, as a 17-year-old junior revenue officer in St Kitts, and he ended as Governor of the Gold Coast. He was a true son of empire, born in the Caribbean, one of that rather small occupational class (his father was a local official), who for a few decades managed the largest empire in history on a shoestring.

Perhaps Gilley was drawn to Burns because he was “the last man” to make a principled defence of empire, as his career drew to an end at the United Nations. “It is the fashion today to decry colonialism,” Burns wrote in his memoirs, “but it has saved millions of people from worse evils … slavery and human sacrifice, corrupt judges and tyrannical chiefs, famine and disease.” Merely to say this is to break a contemporary taboo: “on balance, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” But Gilley clearly agrees.

He goes further in this lively, accessible, often amusing and frequently exciting story: he hammers home facts that outrage the “woke” consensus on colonialism. That many of its peoples wanted to be part of the empire. That they were proud to be colonial subjects. That opposition to colonial rule was rarer than the desire for more of it. That its peoples showed loyalty, even to the point of fighting for it. That officials like Burns were popular with the people they governed.

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One small episode is intriguing in today’s context. As reforming governor of poverty-stricken British Honduras (now Belize) in the 1930s, Burns got the British Museum to return Mayan relics that had been recently discovered by a British doctor and sent to London. His plan was to set up a local museum to foster Mayan self-respect: “We see that the people have their bread but too often forget to let them have some butter with it”. The colonial government in Ceylon repatriated the royal regalia of the pre-colonial Kandy kingdom for similar reasons. But Burns never regarded the acquisition of these artefacts as theft. The Mayan ones, for instance, had been saved from oblivion.

Over the course of the period covered by Gilley’s book, and Burns’s career, the empire reached its apogee and its end. Two world wars and then the Cold War shattered its foundations. Burns became governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1941, surrounded by Vichy-controlled territory. The colonies proved, he wrote, “true loyal friends” at this time: had they wished “to push us into the sea there was little to prevent them.” Instead, they provided donations for Spitfires and volunteers for the army. Visiting Americans were astonished that Burns travelled the country without a bodyguard.

But Burns knew that the war meant the days of British rule were numbered. He was to face growing political opposition. Bizarrely, his worst problem stemmed from a case of ritual human sacrifice. The victim had been gruesomely slaughtered to mark the accession of a new chief. Important men were involved. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested the murderers, who were sentenced to death. Burns supported severity — he regarded human sacrifice, which still lingered on, as something he had a duty to suppress. But the case became politicised, opposition led by a nationalist lawyer, Joseph Danquah, who won support in Westminster against what was presented as excessive colonial harshness. Even Churchill denounced Burns.

More broadly, nationalist opposition, though limited in its popular support, acquired backing not only in Britain, but internationally. Burns foresaw all this. Indeed, he had long understood his task as being to prepare for independence, and had tried to reduce racial inequality. He forcefully promoted “Africanization”. But he believed that premature independence would endanger “the mass of the population”, especially if the Soviet Union (or indeed the Americans) weighed in.

Gilley begins his book with a poignant story that encapsulates the tragedy that ensued after the British released the reins in 1957. Burns’s erstwhile opponent, Danquah, who had seemed destined to rule Ghana, soon ended up in prison under the new dictator Kwame Nkrumah. The darling of Western progressives, feted by John F Kennedy and decorated by the Soviet Union, Nkrumah caused the economy of Ghana, hitherto Africa’s richest country, to collapse. Shortly before Danquah died of ill treatment in 1965, he wrote to Nkrumah from prison about justice and compassion, reminding him that:

“it was our people’s love of justice that compelled them to ask the British in 1843 to come back to Ghana … Now the British people have gone away … and already some people are asking … “Is this justice?”’ 

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This, then, is potentially a very controversial book — unless Gilley’s adversaries manage to have it written off as the work of a lone extremist, published by an obscure press and hence systematically ignored. There is an interesting story behind its publication — of at least one contract rescinded by a mainstream publisher after protests by their staff.

But why has the subject of empire become so explosive that a minority voice like Gilley’s must be silenced? If his general argument about empires were obviously false, it would be easy to refute. If his scholarship on Burns were faulty, the book could be effectively criticised. The orthodox view in academe today — that the empire was essentially repressive, exploitative, racist, violent, destructive, and so on — is backed up by numbers, research funding, and patronage. Even though its scholarship and intellectual bases are sometimes embarrassingly shoddy, it is in no danger of being overthrown.

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But this is clearly not the point. Anger is aroused by Gilley’s work not because what he says is false, but because much of it is evidently true. Scholarship aside, mere common sense suggests that a system as huge as the British Empire, which the Cambridge scholar Ronald Hyam describes as “a global mosaic of almost ungraspable complexity and staggering contrasts,” must have had some good effects. Perhaps those idealistic young people who volunteered for the colonial service, like Burns, were sometimes arrogant or naïve. But they often worked hard and selflessly to keep the peace, create economic development, provide medical treatment, build infrastructure and promote education. As Gilley’s book shows, they believed they were making the world a better place.

This is what cannot be admitted. It explodes the idea of the British empire as purely violent exploitation. It exposes the fragility of nationalist myths about struggles for freedom. Above all, it undermines the view that empire created a permanent legacy of racial oppression that still weighs on us today.

For Indian nationalists, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the subcontinent was tainted by an Islam that has subsequently exported itself to Pakistan and Bangladesh. And secondly, it was part of the Raj, and thus tainted by Britain. It is politically unbecoming, then, to equate a sense of Indian-hood with what Marxist historians in the West and Hindu nationalists in India tell us was India’s slave status.

As a British historian researching India’s role in the Second World War, I’ve encountered this view repeatedly. And not just in India; to be fair, it is equally rampant in the UK, especially in parts of academia. But it is hardly logical. In fact, it is deeply unhelpful.

The problem is that the post-colonial interpretation makes slaves of Indians. It argues that they had no personal control of their destiny because their government was in the hands of others. When the British declared war, India became an unwilling participant. This argument, simply stated, is that the colonial government, together with its systems, structures, cultures and attitudes, were deeply and inherently exploitative, such that it cannot properly be argued that colonial intentions were anything other than unfair and abusive.

In this view, Indian men fought and strived against their will, even though they weren’t fully aware of it, as cultural coercion blinded them to the reality that they were fighting a British war against Britain’s enemies. The absurdity of this argument suggests, to give but one example, that the efforts of Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, to raise the pay of Indian Commissioned Officers to the levels of their British colleagues in 1943 and 1944 were for the purpose of buying their loyalty rather than of giving them equality with their peers.

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It is also seriously suggested in some quarters that the offer of money likewise persuaded millions of otherwise impoverished Indians to sign up for war work during the industrial expansion of India. According to this narrative, illiterate peasants knew no better than to take the financial bribes offered in exchange for their labour. It is argued that others were forced by convention and the belief that family and personal honour depended on a military career. Millions of men thus became mercenaries of the British, subject to intense and relentless propaganda which bound their minds and wills in an unprecedented and highly successful, coercive, manipulation.

Rather than being taken as fact, these assertions must be recognised for what they are: exaggerations and political point-scoring, with the purpose of proving that the Raj was evil and that the Indians who willingly fought against fascism and totalitarianism weren’t doing so for India, but because they were forced against their conscious will to do so.

It needn’t matter that there is no evidence that 2.5 million men joined the Indian Army between 1939-45 as the result of what one leading historian described as a “propaganda offensive” by the British government which “secured the partial allegiance or at least acquiescence of part of the population”. This argument fails to explain why the men thus recruited were prepared to die for this compulsion, and why Indian soldiers went on to win 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses awarded, for example, during the Burma Campaign.

Instead, it seems rational to conclude that most Indians who joined the armed forces did so because they had weighed up the options and assessed the nature of the sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of the government in India, regardless of its political colour. In this sense, their decision was made on the basis of a conception of India much larger than the framework of politics as it existed within Indian polity at the time. Even before 1947, the threat to their conception of what India was and could be therefore far outweighed the rights and wrongs in their minds of colonialism, if the issue or argument ever surfaced at all.

The truth is that reality trumped ideology in the face of the imminent and existential danger to the Indian state by the Japanese. Most Indians accepted that the Raj was, rightly or wrongly, or for the time being, the legally constituted Government of India. Like all governments, it had supporters and opponents. Few who opposed it on nationalistic or self-governance grounds questioned its legitimacy, as that would have invalidated their own claim to be its successor in due course. Likewise, the Indian Army was India’s army, not Britain’s.

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As Professor Roger Beaumont has observed, “it is most interesting to weigh the charges that the Raj built its army in India as an oppressive instrument against what one sees in how lovingly and energetically the Indians have retained the model”. Rather, the evidence suggests that the theory of “prosaic oppression” and its common language of “unconscious bias and systemic structures of power” is a fabricated political construct that does not relate to everyday human experience in colonial India. The facts are being squeezed to fit within a fixed and unbending theoretical, political and ideological model.

It was true that India did not have political independence, but in every other sense the freedom to make social, economic and political choices within this environment cannot be said to have been constrained by such oppression that human agency was so deviously manipulated to suit ruling British interests. Young Indian men and young Britons both joined the Indian Army for the same purpose in times of peace; for adventure, employment, the lure of military glory, the age-old attraction of the sword.

Indians were no more victims of their polity than were Britons, both of whom were, of course, victims of the fascist militarism that dragged the world into a second great slaughter of world war. The tyranny to which some refer, if it relates to anything, can only do so to the prosaic constraints of ordinary civic society — such as obeying the law, as can be seen during the Quit India protests in 1942 — rather than that of an unbending and devious oppression.

Looking back at the imperial period through the lens of victimhood is therefore deeply problematic both historically and philosophically. It ensures that we never see the 350 million Indians of the time as they saw themselves, collectively or individually: as a people with acute political agency (as evidenced by the burgeoning nationalist movement), on a journey to self-rule. Likewise, it treats every Briton in India at the time, every level of power exercised and every action undertaken in response to a decision by London or Delhi, as oppressive. It also forgets that agency in imperial power relationships is never one-sided; for instance, it ignores the importance of Indian political, social and economic agency in the Twenties and Thirties (combined with Japan’s pricking of the imperial bubble) in enabling India to achieve independence in 1947.

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Our sense today of the size of the nationalist protest against colonial rule has almost certainly exaggerated its impact on ordinary people. This is not to underestimate its ultimate importance, rather the influence it had on the behaviour of men considering joining the armed forces, and the impact it had on those who had already enlisted. History remembers the noisy minority, whose views tend to be over-represented in any analysis of the past, while generally neglecting those without a voice.

Fortunately, nationalism and respect for the Government’s legitimate role in defending India (even a colonial one) were not mutually exclusive in 1942, or the ranks of the Armed Forces might have remained empty, and India’s door opened for the Japanese to march in. Perhaps it is precisely because the ranks of the army were so large between 1942 and 1945 that so much effort is generated today in post-colonial studies in explaining away why these men joined in such numbers and with such alacrity.

India, therefore, has every right to recover the history of the pre-1947 period, for it was then that the foundations of modern India were established. The Japanese in Assam and Manipur in 1944 and in Burma in 1945 were defeated by an Army that was 87% Indian. Victory in Asia could never have taken place without Indians coming forward in large numbers, and of their own volition, to serve their country. And that is surely something in which India can take great pride.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

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The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

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Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

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Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

A longer version of this essay was originally published at The Abbey of Misrule.

In some respects, as an approach to understanding history, CRT has a certain credibility. Ibram X. Kendi’s retelling of American history in Stamped from the Beginning is lucid, well-crafted and internally consistent in its description of racism as both a motivating force and by-product of the American tale. He uses it to rationalise and support his claim that African Americans have failed to attain the fruits of American life in the same way as whites — higher education, corporate leadership, home ownership and intergenerational wealth — but suggests this is due almost entirely to racist policies embedded in American institutions and law.

It certainly does not serve any country’s history to ignore such things; they are fundamental strands of the national tapestry. But CRT and its adherents present an all too one-sided view. Its founding father, legal scholar Derrick Bell, even claimed African Americans had not made progress since Abolition, obliterating the enormous contributions — in politics, arts, culture and elsewhere — made by African Americans in the face of widespread discrimination.

CRT takes an opposite approach to many black leaders — Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois — who sought not to lower standards, but to raise them. Indeed, Black Americans made significant progress in terms of incomes and skills in the 1940s to the 1960s, before many of the most heinous forms of racism were abolished. Relying on whites to achieve an anti-racist enlightenment has never been a good strategy, in any era.

But rather than draw inspiration from this, today’s racial activists decry the habits often associated with success as reflections of “whiteness”. Some even denounce habits such as punctuality, rationality and hard work as reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Mathematics and science have also been dismissed for being reflective of “racism” and “white privilege”. Yet as African American economist Glenn Loury has observed, CRT wipes out agency by downgrading “western” concepts and “impedes the acquisition of traits that are valued in the marketplace and are essential for human development.”

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CRT also gives short shrift to many other histories. Most working-class Americans, particularly outside the American South, had little contact with black workers. Their struggles were not against African Americans but against the white factory owners who controlled capital. Working-class Americans or Brits of the last century do not fit easily into the role of oppressors, nor have they enjoyed the economic benefits CRT imputes to them by dint of racial privilege.

Also cast into what Trotsky famously called “the dustbin of history” are the family stories of most Americans, Canadians and Australians — most of whom came to supply cheap labour. Engels writes about the Irish being “demoralised by dirt and poverty”, living in the worst slums of Victorian England.[1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, translated by W.O. Henderson and W.H. Chaloner, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,1958), p.34] Whether in the United States or in Britain, Irish migrants were oppressed by their fellow whites. Although many Left-wing historians now downplay this repression, it was only in the middle of 20^th Century that being Irish Catholic disappeared as a disqualification for the highest office, through the election of John F. Kennedy.

Other newcomers, such as Italians, also faced discrimination and prejudice. But few faced more strenuous opposition than Asian immigrants, who were banned from immigrating or even owning land. During World War II, the US Government actually shipped Japanese Americans off to concentration camps, albeit not for extermination but to address the racist paranoia of their mostly white neighbours — a crime not perpetrated against white German Americans.

Today, Asian-Americans and groups like Hindus in the UK generally outperform whites in school and incomes — despite a history of discrimination against them, even after leaving harsher discrimination in East Africa. Instead of embracing this history, many advocates of CRT see this success as an affront. Although clearly “people of colour,” Asians have transcended “whiteness” by dint of hard work and educational achievement.

As a result, at Harvard, the birthplace of CRT, Asians now face official discrimination, much as Jews did in the last century. In the same vein, when violence is inflicted on Asians, advocates of CRT even suggest that it is somehow the product of white nationalism. Meanwhile, some racial theorists, like Robin DiAngelo, accuse Asians of being “white adjacent”, non-whites who succeed to copping Anglo attitudes.

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But perhaps no group has been more forgotten in the broad assault on “whiteness” than the Jews. CRT, notes David Suissa, publisher of the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, forces people of whatever background to allow themselves to be defined by their peculiar “systemic ethos”. This means that Jews are whites like any other, despite millennia of persecution in virtually every country where they have settled. Their right to a separate identity is denied; their unique history, obliterated.

However successful they may be today, it took centuries — including a 365-year exile — for Jews to become full citizens of the British Empire. In America, where their rights were guaranteed by the Constitution, they still struggled against fierce WASP opposition, seeking to block their ascent into the highest echelons of business, professions, media, culture and politics. Given their history, Jews often identified with black communities, and the oppressed in general, and were particularly early and disproportionate backers of African American equality.

It is strange, then, that while CRT advocates seek to obliterate three thousand years of unique history, much of the Jewish Establishment — including the Anti-Defamation League — has been slow to distance themselves from Black Lives Matter, even after riots led to desecrations of synagogues. They even embraced BLM allies like Al Sharpton, a Brooklyn preacher with a history of leading anti-Jewish protests.

In modern America, Jewish leaders would rather adopt the politically acceptable focus on white nationalists as their biggest threat. But that doesn’t change the fact that despite several bloody incidents perpetrated by individual white nationalists, a significant proportion of recent attacks on Jews came from African Americans, criminals, the mentally ill or by Palestinian activists. Neo-Nazis are not thick on the ground in Brooklyn or the Fairfax district of Los Angeles where recent acts of violence have occurred.

Meanwhile, CRT, as Rabbi Meir Y. Soloveichik has noted, represents an increasingly secular America: “a strange form of moral Puritanism without faith, and therefore without forgiveness.” Its functionaries on campuses and in the street often embrace their dogma like the sometimes hysterical Chinese Red Guards, who demonised their own country’s rich history to create a totally new one. Mao would certainly have understood such things as dismantling “the systems of hegemonic power” and introducing compulsory “anti-racism training” throughout education, business, and government.

The authoritarian nature of the movement is not hard to spot. Ibram X. Kendi has called for an Orwellian federal Department of Anti-racism with extra-constitutional power to abolish any law deemed insufficiently “anti-racist”, He identifies racism and capitalism as “conjoined twins”: both will have to collapse before racism can be eradicated. Of course, this is hard to reconcile with the lack of racial harmony in China and other socialist countries, much less the vast fortunes Kendi and BLM receive from the oligarchy.

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The good news is that CRT’s racialist agenda may not become a permanent fixture. The vast majority of Americans — including millennials and minorities — do not, for example, favour defunding the police. Most American voters — by wide margins — reject the notion of teaching Critical Race Theory in schools, even though the effort is adopted by the billionaire class as well as corporate HR departments, most Democratic politicians, the White House and the powerful teachers’ unions.

Equally promising is the growing alarm among liberals —including TV host Bill Maher and journalist Andrew Sullivan — whose devotion to the ideal of colour-blindness is dismissed by CRT adherents as a “fantasy”. Similarly, former Clinton advisor Bill Galston has pointed out that CRT is a “doctrine” that rejects the Enlightenment, “tacitly requires deconstructing the American order and rebuilding it on an entirely different foundation”. In other words, it is not a project likely to be enacted democratically.

Perhaps nothing more reflects the “on-the-street” reality, as opposed to Twitter, than the growing tendency towards intermarriage and interracial dating — not only in the US, but in Canada, Australia and the UK. Inter-racial dating in America is up 40% since 2003, according to the Census, while interracial marriage has soared from 3% in 1967 to roughly one in six now.

There is, of course, more work to be done. African-American incomes — as well as those of Pakistanis and West Indians in the UK — have not kept pace. And there are still racial imbalances in imprisonment, confrontations with law enforcement and worse health effects, particularly during the pandemic.

But whatever is needed to help African Americans will only gain political support if it focuses on alleviating the economic and health challenges of all races. The key to addressing our racial divides, notes Richard Parsons, former President of Citigroup, lies not with pushing racial distinctions but promoting economic growth and opportunity. There will never be “unity”, he suggests, until people “feel it in their pockets”. The goal should be to do whatever it takes to address poverty and distress, whether in the south Chicago ghetto, Appalachia or the British Midlands.

Whether they realise it or not, CRT and its backers appear to be undermining this goal. In the last decade, the percentage of Americans who consider relations between black and white communities as “poor” has almost doubled, to near 60%. Certainly, policies of “reverse discrimination” seem likely to stir resentment. People don’t like to be forced to beg forgiveness and make recompense for the sins of their fathers, especially when they have no reason to believe their fathers , most of whom immigrated well after the Civil War, have done nothing wrong. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that the anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish far-Right — including the neo-Nazi National Socialist Club, Proud Boys and Aryan Nations Arizona — has targeted anti-CRT protests as a way build support.

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Despite the persistence of these racists, there’s still a reason that non-whites continue to move to Britain and its colonial offspring. After all, these places offer important legal protections not common in the developing world. China’s autocratic Xi Jinping may offer “the Chinese dream”, but the number of immigrants from China living in the United States more than doubled between 2000 and 2018, reaching nearly 2.5 million, with many others heading to Canada and Australia. There is little such movement to China — where the foreign population is barely one in a thousand —or most other Asian countries.[2. Carlos Echeverria-Estrada and Jeanne Batalova, “Chinese Immigrants in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, January 15, 2020]

In the end, our shared historical legacy — so different than China — represents the essential basis upon which we can expand and improve our multi-national societies. It does little good to demolish the historical bonds we, as citizens, feel, even as we recognise that our greatest heroes — whether its America’s Founding Fathers, Lincoln, Churchill, Roosevelt or Martin Luther King — were in some ways flawed.

The solution to the racial crisis in the West requires not separating people by race but by finding common grounds upon which to create a successful, diverse and coherent society. Without “awareness” of our history, its differing tangents and permutations, we, as classicist Michael Grant once noted, will be “blindfolded in our efforts to grapple with our future”. Communities that don’t fit a certain label — whether they are Jewish or Asian — will continue to find their histories obscured. And more important, we will steal from ourselves and our children the common sense of past needed to forge more perfect unions.

In its officially approved history, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) defeated internal enemies, vanquished imperialist powers and brought an end to China’s “Century of Humiliation”. The stains of defeat left by a series of opium wars and unequal treaties from the 1840s onwards were washed away by the revolutionary victory of 1949. The Chinese people, in the words attributed to Mao Zedong, had “stood up” and defeated colonialism.

But there’s a problem with this heroic narrative. Had it not been for colonialism and the imperial powers, there would never have been a successful Chinese Communist Party in the first place. If the sclerotic Qing Empire had not been forced to accommodate European military powers during the nineteenth century, the ideas and networks that allowed a communist movement to exist would never have been able to come together in the twentieth.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession. The French Concession and the neighbouring “International Settlement” (originally the British and American “concessions”) had been created because of the first of the unequal treaties: the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing following the first Opium War, under which China ceded Hong Kong to the British.

The two city districts were not formally colonies, but Chinese law did not apply there. By the early twentieth century, their combination of loose regulations and global connections had turned Shanghai into an international entrepôt. In the words of historian Tony Saich: “Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

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Li Hanjun and his brother Li Shucheng had built neighbouring houses in the French concession precisely to take advantage of the opportunities provided by this imperial intrusion on China’s territory. Both were political activists and their ideas, like their homes, were constructed from a hybrid of Chinese and European styles. Preserved for its role in CCP history, 106 Rue Wantz (now 76 Xingye Road) is one of the few remaining examples of a once popular Sino-European architecture known as shikumen.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Shanghai was one of around 30 “treaty ports” around the coast of China and along the Yangzi River. All had been forced on a reluctant Qing Empire by the threat of European military force. Some were insignificant harbours while others played roles that went much wider than trade. Shanghai and Tianjin became enclaves of radicalism, centres of newspaper and book publishing that spread foreign ideas far into their hinterlands. One of the CCP’s co-founders, Chen Duxiu chose to found his magazine New Youth in Shanghai in September 1915.

These radicals were following in the footsteps of European evangelicals a couple of decades earlier. Organisations such as the Christian Literature Society had been created by Brits and Americans to spread the good news of both Jesus and Western culture throughout what they regarded as a decaying Asian empire. They founded newspapers to translate the latest ideas about science and society into Chinese. They may not have converted many Christians but they radically transformed the worldviews of a generation of reform-minded students and officials.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese. Meanwhile, John Fryer, from Hythe in Kent, was the founder and editor of a magazine, Gezhi Huibian (known in English as the Chinese Scientific Magazine). In 1892 it published what is thought to be the first article in Chinese suggesting a division of humanity into categories based upon skin colour. These proselytisers, and many like them, helped spread ideas of evolution, social progress, racism and nationalism in the final decades of the Qing state.

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Protected by international treaties that guaranteed them immunity from local laws, missionaries and other Westerners could preach across the country. “Extra-territoriality” allowed them to create local “study societies” in which new ideas could be introduced and debated under the noses of the authorities.

These groups and methods were copied by the leading reformists Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with their “Self-Strengthening Study Society”. Another historian of the early years of CCP, Hans van de Ven of the University of Cambridge, has argued that it was this “infrastructure” of intellectual networks that created the foundation for the subsequent growth of radical organisations and ultimately the Communist Party itself.

Other missionaries helped to create hybrid institutions intended to reform and modernise the Qing Empire. The Rev W.A.P. Martin, who had acted as a translator for the American delegation during the negotiations for the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin, became the founding president of Peking University in 1898. Timothy Richard was the engine behind the creation of Shanxi University in 1902.

By the 1910s, Peking University was providing both the ideas, and in many cases the employment, behind the intellectual movement that gave birth to communism. Mao Zedong was the assistant librarian there, working under Li Dazhao who became the other co-founder of the CCP. By then Chen Duxiu had become head of the Literature department. Many of the other professors were key figures in the “New Culture Movement” which called for the abandonment of traditional ideas and the adoption of Western science and democracy. It was disillusionment with Western promises that led some to join the “May Fourth Movement” protests in 1919 and then to turn to communism.

In 1918, Mao and a few other students formed the “New Citizen Study Society” based on the earlier missionary-led model. Its key beliefs were also borrowed from the missionary-inspired reformist movement. Even the name — “New Citizen” — was copied from a newspaper edited by the reformist Liang Qichao who had once worked as Timothy Richard’s assistant. The missionaries, the reformists and the revolutionaries all prioritised the transmission of Western ideas to the masses.

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Studying in Japan, too, was a critical element in the communist awakening, although don’t expect any mention of this from the current CCP leadership who prefer to portray Japan as a bogeyman rather than a source of enlightenment. In the half-century following 1853, when the US Navy had forced open Japan’s markets and society, the elite in Tokyo and other cities had whole-heartedly adopted Western ideas of modernisation, liberalism and nationalism. As a child in the 1900s, Li Hanjun had been sent to study in Japan and remained there for a decade. He wasn’t alone: Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu and thousands more like them lived and studied there. The ideas they acquired flowed back into China during and after the revolutionary events of the 1910s.

By the time Li Hanjun showed up in Shanghai, the foundations of what would become the CCP were falling into place. The catalyst that turned talk into action was the presence of two foreigners among the 15 delegates to the First Party Congress in Rue Wantz in July 1921. One was a Dutchman, Henricus (Henk) Sneevliet. The other was a Russian, Vladimir Nikolsky. Both attended as representatives of the Communist International: sent by Lenin to bring about revolution in East Asia.

This was just one more contribution to a globalised series of events and accidents that had unfolded without any central plan over the previous four decades. Chinese communism, just like Chinese nationalism, developed as a set of hybrid ideas — mixing elements of local culture with supposedly universal values derived from Western sources. Its hybridity was, and remains, its strength. Nonetheless, communism, as it developed in Shanghai and elsewhere, was just as much a colonial ideology as the liberal nationalism and the colonialism that it claimed to oppose.

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Let’s try to imagine a counterfactual. What would have been different if European states had not mastered naval gunnery? What if there hadn’t been opium wars or treaty ports, missionaries or magazines? What if Japan had remained closed?

The Qing Empire was already in crisis by 1840. Its economy was failing to provide for its people, hardship was spreading, and rebel groups were already challenging central authority.  In time, these dynamics would have probably spelled the end of the empire. The Qing Dynasty, a Manchu lineage whose homeland was north of the Great Wall, would have collapsed and their state would have fragmented.

Lacking the “glue” of Western notions of nationalism to hold the state together, the empire’s constituent parts — Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria and “China Proper” — would have split. Perhaps those areas closest to the Soviet Union would have ended up being incorporated within it (as Mongolia was in 1921). Some parts of the empire may have ended up communist but not Chinese Communist.

Without the treaty ports, the international connections, the intellectual milieu and the organisational networks that developed as a result of imperial interference, there would have been no political space in which the CCP could emerge. The imperial powers provided it all. So, when Xi Jinping and the Politburo celebrate their party’s centenary over the coming weeks, they should really raise a glass to the colonialists who got them to where they are today.