For much of the 20th century, the answer was: a glimpse of humanity’s political future. Long before the body’s creation, H. G. Wells imagined the eventual emergence of a world state, arguing that technological interdependence and the destructiveness of modern war would ultimately make the old system of competing sovereign states untenable. 

The advent of nuclear weapons made such predictions appear urgent. Albert Einstein became one of the most prominent postwar advocates of world government, warning that “there is no [other] possibility of control of the atomic bomb.” In his 1961 Inaugural Address, delivered a decade and a half after the United Nations was established, JFK described it as “our last best hope.” New Yorkers of a certain vintage will remember the UN flag flying next to Old Glory at their public schools.

The expectations made their way into midcentury popular culture: a powerful United Nations, with its own army, oversees interplanetary colonization in many of sci-fi master Philip K. Dick’s novels of the 1960s and ’70s; Star Trek likewise took it for granted that future politics would belong to a planetary federation.   

Whether utopia or nightmare, world government seemed inevitable, and the United Nations looked like its beginning. How things change. Today, the United Nations looks very different from the 20th century’s imagined world state. The annual General Assembly still draws world leaders, but midcentury-style “world government” seems like a distant dream.

But that’s not such a bad thing. When the United Nations tries to reach deep inside how individual sovereign states are governed — what’s implied by true “world government,” as imagined by barmy midcentury visionaries — resistance to its authority waxes, and the real-world outcomes are often disastrous. The better path is for the United Nations to embrace its current, more limited role as a symbolic forum for sovereign states.

The theater, in short, is precisely the point. While many once saw within the UN Charter an opportunity to transcend the nation-state, the body produces its best results when affirming the sovereignty of its member states, not superseding them.

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For years, the United Nations has been the subject of critiques from both ends of the political spectrum. On the Left, the core critique is that the organization is nothing more than a veil for American imperialism. As Noam Chomsky says, “the UN is considered favorably to the extent that it follows US orders.” From the Right, the United Nations is disparaged for being either all-powerful or politically impotent. After serving as Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, Jeane Kirkpatrick, writing for the Heritage Foundation, claimed that the UN was “too bureaucratic, too remote, and too difficult to hold accountable, too involved in issues unrelated to our interests.”  

More recently, a February 2025 executive order from President Trump claimed that UN agencies have been “infiltrated by members of groups long designated … as foreign terrorist organizations,” and that UN employees “were involved in the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel,” building upon a 2024 Israeli accusation (for which scant evidence has been provided).

So does the organization have a purpose in the year 2026, or should it be sent to join its short-lived predecessor, the League of Nations, in the graveyard of failed international projects?

Like the league, founded in the wake of the Great War, the United Nations was born from the devastation of a world war. The original wartime conception of the United Nations enshrined the four great Allied powers of World War II — Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China — as permanent members of what would become the UN Security Council, with France added postwar. With these five states holding veto power over the council’s resolutions, the United Nations was constrained by the rivalry of the Cold War.

As historian Mark Mazower notes, the United Nations did not emerge “like Aphrodite … from the Second World War, pure and uncontaminated by any significant association with that prewar failure, the League of Nations.” Those responsible for creating the body were not only heavily influenced by the league’s structure and mission, but also carried forward many of its institutional practices. The league’s mandates system, for example, provided an important precedent for the UN trusteeship system, which assumed responsibility for territories transferred from the defeated German and Ottoman empires. Indeed, many of the institutional arrangements through which the league had sought to manage and legitimize empire survived into the United Nations.

These imperial links create an interesting duality around these institutions. The United Nations was initially designed in ways that accommodated, and often protected, the interests of the existing colonial powers. Over the following decades, however, the same institutional machinery became an important vehicle through which anticolonial states challenged imperial rule and advanced the principle of national self-determination. The history of the UN trusteeship system thus illustrates a broader paradox: an organization built in significant part upon the institutional inheritance of empire became, over time, an important instrument in dismantling it.

Particularly striking is that the United Nations’ first armed peacekeeping force was created in an effort to uphold national sovereignty, not undermine it. After Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company in 1956, Israel invaded Egypt, and Britain and France quickly followed the Jewish state. The British government was the Canal Company’s largest single shareholder, while French investors held most of the remaining shares. Both governments regarded Nasser’s nationalization as a direct challenge to their economic and strategic position in the region. Their objectives went considerably beyond restoring access to the canal: British and French leaders hoped that military intervention would also bring about Nasser’s downfall.

Soviet supreme leader Nikolai Bulganin quickly threatened to join the fray on the side of Egypt, warning that the Soviets were “full of determination to crush the aggressor and re-establish peace in the East by using force,” while also making a pointed comment about Britain’s inability to defend itself from “modern weapons.” The Americans also objected to the invasion. Then-Vice President Richard Nixon later summarized the contradiction facing Washington: “We couldn’t, on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.”

London and Paris both vetoed a Security Council resolution demanding that Israel withdraw its military on Oct. 30, then joined the invasion the following day. An emergency session of the General Assembly quickly convened and established the UN Emergency Force, composed of soldiers from countries outside the permanent members of the Security Council, which deployed to the Sinai with Egypt’s consent. 

Britain and France agreed to withdraw within weeks, while Israel took longer. The danger that Soviet intervention might transform the crisis into a much wider war was averted, and Egypt’s sovereignty over its territory was restored. When Nasser demanded the departure of UN forces in 1967, they left — as the consent-based character of the mission required. The episode was ultimately consistent with the principle articulated in Article 2 of the UN Charter: that the organization rested upon the “sovereign equality” of its members and that it wasn’t authorized to intervene in matters “essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.”

In the following decades, however, something shifted. Rather than treating state sovereignty simply as a foundational principle of international order to be defended, the United Nations increasingly developed institutions and practices that allowed international authority to reach inside states. Sovereignty became conditional: only states who met the standards of “good government,” as enumerated by the United Nations, could expect territorial exclusivity. 

Governments that failed to meet emerging international standards of governance, human rights, or civilian protection could find their domestic authority challenged by international intervention. UN personnel were no longer just establishing ceasefires between states, but also administered elections, supervised police, rewrote institutions, governed territory, and used military force within states’ sovereign bounds. Steadily, the United Nations began to assume those functions that earlier advocates of supranational government had imagined would eventually migrate upward from states to international institutions.

Such interventions have led to a wide range of adverse outcomes, the costs of which have largely been borne by local populations rather than by the United Nations itself. The 1992-1993 UN Transitional Administration in Cambodia, which endowed its high commissioner with the extreme status of “final arbiter of Cambodian law,” has been linked to the spread of HIV in the wartorn country through peacekeepers’ exploitation of Cambodian women and the enormous expansion of the local sex industry that accompanied their arrival. Similarly, the United Nations has admitted its role in the 2010 outbreak of cholera in Haiti, introduced by peacekeepers and ultimately responsible for the deaths of thousands of Haitians and the infection of hundreds of thousands more. 

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When critics, Left and Right, assail the United Nations, it’s these “global-governance” failures — and many others of the kind — that they have in mind. There is another side of the United Nations, however, that is easy to dismiss because it can look unserious: its role as a stage. This seemingly superficial side is precisely where the institution shines.

Some of the most famous moments in the organization’s history are acts of political theater. Khrushchev banging the desk at the General Assembly and, according to the famous account, brandishing his shoe; Adlai Stevenson confronting Soviet Ambassador Valerian Zorin during the Cuban Missile Crisis; and the like. While such episodes may provoke a chuckle, the spectacle is itself part of diplomacy. The General Assembly and Security Council give states a forum in which to make claims, present evidence, denounce adversaries, rally coalitions, and communicate before a global audience. 

Stevenson’s confrontation with Zorin didn’t resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it did give Washington a venue in which to publicly establish its case against the Kremlin, while the actual resolution of the crisis remained a matter of negotiation between sovereign governments. What looks like the United Nations’ weakness — its dependence on argument, rather than enforcement — is also one of the things it was built to provide.

The United Nations is at its best when acting as a forum for states, rather than as a higher authority over them. Some of its most consequential achievements have come not from governing states, but from helping them negotiate rules governing their relations with one another. Nuclear nonproliferation provides an especially important example. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty created an international framework in which nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states accepted reciprocal obligations concerning proliferation, peaceful nuclear technology, and disarmament. The International Atomic Energy Agency, meanwhile, provided a mechanism through which states could submit to inspections and demonstrate compliance with safeguards. These arrangements didn’t eliminate sovereignty or place nuclear policy under a world government. They instead allowed sovereign states to make bargains that would have been considerably harder to sustain without common rules, monitoring, and institutions.

This more modest role is less dramatic than the world government imagined by Wells or Einstein. However, an institution needn’t govern the world to serve a purpose within it. The United Nations provides states with a place to negotiate, to establish common rules, to monitor agreements, to publicize violations, and to take appeals to the world public. Suez demonstrated what the organization could accomplish when international action reinforced, rather than supplanted, sovereign authority. Arms-control and nonproliferation agreements demonstrate the value of institutions that help states make and monitor bargains without pretending to replace them.

The United Nations may not be the beginning of the world state that Wells and Einstein and Dick imagined. Its more durable achievement may be precisely the opposite: making a world of sovereign states somewhat more capable of living with itself.

A work of great subtlety, Imagined Communities was fated to be skim-read by two generations of students, in the process coarsening its careful analysis of the spread of nationalist sentiment in New World creole societies into something far more destabilizing to Old World nations. The “imagined” was taken to mean “imaginary”, and thus “fake”. The laborious deconstruction of their own national identities by Twitter bores — the lower-middlebrow purveyors of “St George was a Turkish migrant” and “fish and chips were invented by Jewish refugees” discourse — are all, in their own strange and sub-literate ways, downstream of this undergraduate misreading. Indeed, in his autobiography Anderson himself takes pains to stress that his researches on New World nationalisms were completely inapplicable to the Old World, a warning that has passed by most of those who invoke him. Yet this misreading is so widespread, and so destructive, that it is worth looking at Anderson again, beyond his most famous and misrepresented book, to determine what his analysis of nationalism as a category in general can offer, in a country undergoing its own new and particular nationalist ferment.

Like his brother Perry (whose real name, Benedict gleefully reveals in his autobiography, is the firmly Gaelic “Rory”), Benedict O’Gorman Anderson was a product of De Valera’s Ireland. Raised in Waterford, for which city his great-grandfather Major Purcell O’Gorman had been the Irish nationalist MP, Anderson would later recall a small-town world of huddling in the cinema, “along with shawlies, shamefaced young priests, mothers and snivelling children seeking some warmth in winter”. He also remembers fighting local Catholic boys, “who took us to be snobby, half-English and Protestant” on his way to and from his Quaker prep school. His Catholic ancestors, he was proud to relate, “had a long history of political activism against English imperialism and colonialism in Ireland”, being centrally involved in the failed 1798 Rising, and the later and more successful campaign for Catholic emancipation.

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His Anglo-Irish Protestant side, on the other hand, maintained the long record of British imperial service customary of their tribe. “Had my father not been Irish,” Anderson reflects, “I might have been raised in England and fought overseas for the Empire.” Instead, reaching adulthood, and having been mocked at Eton for his “Irishisms”, Anderson chose an Irish national identity, unlike his brother Perry/Rory, who remains, in practical terms at least, a loyal subject of what he would later call “Ukania”. “I felt that I owed it to my father, who on my birth gave me the ‘tribal’ O’Gorman name, to apply for Eire citizenship,” Benedict later mused, a choice made for Leftist and anti-imperialist “political as well as personal reasons”. Anderson’s later intellectual work on the conflicted loyalties of colonial elites, and the politicized choice between national identities made by creole aristocrats, more or less openly derives from this ambivalent Irish family milieu.

Is it lazy biographical shorthand to derive a writer’s thinking from their ethnocultural hinterland? If it is, it is a sin Anderson himself happily engaged in. He observes that the great British theories of nationalism with which Imagined Communities was written to engage all derive, in differing ways, from the ethnic backgrounds of their proponents: “Almost all were written by Jews, though of widely different political outlooks.” For the Iraqi Jewish Elie Kedourie, writing from the political Right, as well as the Austrian Jewish Eric Hobsbawm and Czech Jewish Ernest Gellner, writing on different wings of the Left, nationalism was an irrational and disruptive force, breaking apart the tolerant cosmopolitanism of the great multinational empires. Such a viewpoint was natural from their situations: all were refugees from nationalisms of one form or another. Indeed, as Anderson remarks, all became “attached to the UK, partly because it was largely uncontaminated by fascism and violent anti-Semitism, and partly because the state, including England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, was felt to be more like supranational (if now defunct) Austro-Hungary than standard European nation-states such as France, Italy and Sweden”.

Yet unlike these wistfully cosmopolitan deconstructors of nationalist passions, Anderson himself was more enthused by the Scottish nationalism of Tom Nairn, which saw the Habsburg parallels for the British state not as a strength but as proof of the United Kingdom’s frailty. Coining the term Ukania for the United Kingdom, directly inspired by the Austrian writer Robert Musil’s Kakania for the polyglot and dysfunctional Habsburg state, Nairn saw the United Kingdom, just like its Austro-Hungarian analog, as destined to be broken up by the nationalist sentiment of its homeland peoples. Nairn’s The Break-Up of Britain, Anderson observes, “was strongly attacked, especially by Hobsbawm, who declared that no true Marxist could be a nationalist”. Anderson himself disagreed: “I liked the book very much, for its own sake, but also as an Irishman (Southern Ireland, after centuries of English colonial rule, had only won its independence, by armed struggle, in 1922).”

Indeed, writing in the Field Day Journal, the influential Derry-based Irish nationalist intellectual review, Anderson would observe, with some satisfaction, that “the UK, one of the victors of World War I, lost one quarter of its ‘home’ territory, what came to be Éire, within five years of the war’s end”. The Western victor of the Great War had experienced a territorial dismemberment, in the face of nationalist revolt, otherwise only experienced by the war’s losers to the East, and for Anderson this outcome was both natural and just. Rather than a cosmopolitan deconstructor of nationalism, as his lazy adherents today assume, Anderson was, in his urbane and Marxist way, an Irish nationalist, who saw in nationalism great liberatory potential from the sprawling dysfunction of the great multinational empires. Happy to derive the anti-nationalist positions of his intellectual peers from their ethnic self-interest, Anderson’s own nationalism, he was pleased to report, was entirely rational and enlightened. A cynic may demur, just as a cynic would say that Nairn’s own quixotic support for Ulster’s Loyalists, which he struggled to bend into a Marxist shape, was more convincingly derived from instinctive tribal loyalty to his Scottish kin across the water than it was from any of the socialist principles he dubiously assembled.

Where does this leave us today? Unlike Hobsbawm, who famously claimed, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, that the age of nationalism was drawing to a close, Anderson correctly perceived its resurgence in a new era of internet communication and mass migration. Rather than ushering in its demise, the new world of globalization was set to turbocharge nationalism. As he observed in his essay “Long-Distance Nationalism”, mass migration from the Third World into the West was bound to create an ‘“ethnicization” process, one sure “to draw a sharp line between the political nation and a putative original ethnos. Even if a black in the United Kingdom was born there, went to schools and university there, pays taxes there, votes there, and will be buried there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English.” The interminable debates now happening online, on the Englishness of otherwise of Frank Bruno, Rishi Sunak, and David Lammy, were prefigured by Anderson’s appreciation that nationalism is not eroded, but instead created, by the mingling of peoples. For just as capitalism, in its sponsoring of transnational migration, creates the colonial settler, so does it create the native as a category, whose nativeness is directly constructed through comparison with the incomer: “Nationalism’s purities (and thus also cleansings) are set to emerge from exactly this hybridity.”

This process, for Anderson, is not merely a malady of the displaced native. Technological advance, particularly the ease of long-distance communications, meant that incoming peoples could no longer be assimilated, as in the case of the 19th-century New World: the American “melting pot” was a one-time only process, already in reversal even in the United States itself. The Greek migrant in Frankfurt, or Sri Lankan migrant in London, is now unable to set aside his homeland as his 19th-century predecessor could, instead living, beyond its borders, in an idealized, and politically radicalized homeland of his imagination. In this “long-distance nationalism”, Anderson divines “a probably menacing portent for the future”: one which has now become our present. “One emblem of the American variant is perhaps the espionage trial of Jonathan Pollard a few years back,” Anderson notes, referring to the US intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. “In the age of classical nationalism, the very idea that there could be something praiseworthy in an American citizen’s spying on America for another country would have seemed grotesque. But to the substantial number of Jewish-Americans who felt sympathetic to Pollard, the resentful spy was understood as representing a transnational ethnicity.”

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For the newly unassimilable migrant, this engagement with the politics of the ancestral homeland is the means through which “an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized nation state that he remains determined to inhabit. That same metropole that marginalizes and stigmatizes him simultaneously enables him to play, in a flash, on the other side of the planet, national hero.” One thinks here of the Middle Eastern or South Asian migrant in the West, demanding, with no apparent trace of self-awareness, that Israelis “return” to Poland: the blood-and-soil certainties of “home” rest on unstable ground. The result of all this, for Anderson, was the growing power of ethnic identities over assimilatory national ones, from which dynamic, he observes, “has emerged the ideological program of multiculturalism, which implies that a simple nineteenth-century version of Americanism is no longer adequate or acceptable”. Multiculturalism, Anderson correctly perceives, is simply the proliferation of more meaningful ethnic identities, weakening the assimilatory power of the host nation. And so, rather than dissolving age-old ethnic bonds, as nationalists assume, instead “capitalism, in its eternal restlessness [is] producing new forms of nationalism.”

Yet, turning his anti-imperialist sentiment to the great hegemon of the time, Anderson welcomes this outcome, if in a qualified way. Rather than heralding a new age of multicultural fluidity, he suggests that globalization is just a new, sprawling, polyglot imperial order to be challenged. “What is really unprecedented,” he writes, “is primarily the current hegemony of the United States… ‘globalization’ is simply an academic-bureaucratic euphemism for that hegemony.” Briskly dismissing the humanitarian justifications given for empire by its post-national cheerleaders, Anderson observes that “Hegemonic powers tend to posit ‘human rights’ as a universal, abstract and global value to be invoked at their liking”. Ultimately, in resisting “the barrenness of neoliberalism and hypocritical ‘human rights’ interventionism”, then whether one wishes it or not, “one of the most powerful weapons in the struggle is nationalism.” Indeed, “for all its weaknesses, the nation-state remains an indispensable institution through which those who so wish can work to restrain today’s ‘evil empire’.”

Wrongly deployed as intellectual ballast for post-national, globalized, multicultural projects by those who have misunderstood him, Anderson instead stands firmly against all these things: globalization and human rights discourse are simply fig-leaves for an imperial order that will, as all its predecessors have done, crumble in the face of a nationalist wave it has itself created. Indeed, he observes, the intellectual animus against nationalism is directly attributable to imperial requirements. “Like all empires, the American empire needs enemies. ‘Dangerous nationalism’ (which of course did not include American nationalism) emerged to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of ‘the communist threat’.” Instead, it is the nation-state, for Anderson as for his Marxist Brexiteer brother Perry, that enables human flourishing, even if the excesses of nationalism must be restrained. As Anderson puts it: “This is why what is increasingly needed is a sophisticated and serious blending of the emancipatory possibilities of both nationalism and internationalism.” Rather than its dismissive obituarist, anyway, it is time to reclaim Benedict Anderson as nationalism’s humane advocate — and its prophet.

For all its purely domestic malignities, British politics is, like that of the European Union, merely a provincial outpost of those of America’s imperial center. A large part of Europe’s current woes is attributable to our leaders reshaping our societies according to the model both inspired and imposed by American hegemony in the Nineties, before being left in the lurch as our masters change course. Believing that, under the Pax Americana, globalization would dominate the future, our leaders entirely reshaped our economies and societies for the world they saw coming into view. Industry was allowed to wither in the certainty that cheap Chinese goods would sustain our lifestyles; international human rights law, in reality a fig leaf for American military intervention against geopolitical rivals, was elevated above national interests in a way the hegemon never once countenanced for itself; destructive energy policies were written into law in the illusory belief of a shared global mission to ameliorate climate change. Through a misreading of America’s early 20th century experience, mass immigration was actively encouraged, in the genuine belief, still intoned as a mantra by Labour at its conference, that ethnic and cultural diversity, contrary to historical precedent, would soon become an inherent strength.

But now the hegemon has radically changed course, leaving its regional middle managers in Britain and Europe stranded in their Nineties fantasy world, and the political parties which adopted this worldview facing collapse. Globalization was always just a superficial Americanization, from which America itself has now withdrawn. Trump’s UN speech, in which he declared that the “entire globalist concept of asking successful, industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and immediately” is a direct attack on the worldview of our leaders. So too his criticism of “uncontrolled mass migration” — which, he says, is an “assault on Western countries”.

It is difficult to think of an arc of client states surviving for long in direct ideological opposition to their imperial patron: rightly, Reform’s new signing Danny Kruger has characterized the insurgent party’s domestic foe as simply “late-stage liberalism”. In Britain, at least, the result is likely to be the diminution of Labour and the Conservatives to minor regional parties centered on London, the last ideological stronghold of the old regime. A year ago Keir Starmer delivered the Conservative Party a historic defeat; today he is the most detested prime minister in modern British history. There is no prospect of Starmer winning the next election, and little prospect of him leading the Labour Party into it.

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Yet Starmer, devoid of an individual personality, ought not take any of this personally: he is simply a stand-in for the collapsing Nineties System, of which he is the robotic final avatar. Everything that Starmer represents, even if presented in human form, would be just as roundly detested. Blair himself has transitioned from the fantasy vision he imposed on British politics to the technocratic, enlightened despotism of his proposed Gaza Mandate, in which a combination of economic growth and digital surveillance will contain the volatile nationalism of the Palestinian people: in his plans for digital ID, it is not hard to see Starmer following suit, albeit without the growth.

Trapped between loyalty to a collapsing imperial ideology, and the upsurge in nationalist sentiment its implementation produced, the Labour front bench, disconsolately waving the various flags of the United Kingdom for the cameras, finds itself forced to spout incoherent slogans. The country is not broken, and to claim that it is is dangerous rhetoric: but the country also requires total renewal, indeed reforging into a “New Britain”. Reform stokes division, and yet the country is also at a “fork in the road”, from which Labour will conjure up unity from diversity. The Boriswave was a terrible mistake, but to undo it would be fascism; nativist sentiment is the preserve of a tiny internet minority, but also of the country’s most popular party; Reform is racist but its voters are not. The Home Secretary declares that “ethnonationalism” is a societal evil to be defeated, while Starmer endorses its basic principle in asserting that Israel and Palestine require two separate nation states to prevent their two peoples from slaughtering each other. If only they could have bonded over slicing half-time Jaffa oranges together, perhaps things would have been different.

The party’s messaging, as it enters full election mode just one year into its term, is entirely incoherent because it must triangulate between the roundly despised, and entirely illusory worldview of its leadership on the one hand, and the newly aggrieved mood of the country on the other. The central axis of British politics is now the basic, essential stuff of national identity, which is not a battleground favorable to Labour. Indeed, there is something late-stage Soviet in Wes Streeting vowing to defeat the combined forces of English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism through a “return to the spirit of 1945”, even as he waits to lose his seat to a “Gaza independent”. But then all British politics in 2025 has become the fantasy pronouncements of those waiting to lose their seats, in what is now merely a series of rearguard delaying actions before a Reform government.

Through having implemented its worldview, and forcing the nation to live with the results, the Labour Party is doomed. But for the Conservative Party, the immediate outlook is just as grim. Having rid his party of conservatives, that self-described “Heir to Blair”, David Cameron, condemned the Tories to share Labour’s fate: the collapse of the two parties, viewed in narrow partisan terms by the Westminster lobby, is more accurately the collapse of the shared ideology they undertook, between them, to impose on Britain.

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Starmer’s assertion that the Conservatives are the less threatening rival is based on the perception that they are, if not technically the same party as Labour, the product of a shared worldview. There is no threat, for Blairism’s last disciple, of them rolling back New Labour’s constitutional and demographic vandalism. Indeed, considering the party’s governing record in deepening and accelerating New Labour’s cultural revolution, Starmer’s backhand compliment to the Tories could just as easily be a withering broadside by Farage. Such is the shifting popular mood, Labour now even feels free to attack the party’s governing record of excessive liberalism. In disparagingly deploying the online-Right term “Boriswave” to critique Tory governance, no doubt to the despair of his remaining supporters on Bluesky, Starmer has at least put paid to any lingering ideas of a Johnson comeback.

Like a nation, a party can survive many setbacks: but enough of them together and the result is fatal. While Kemi Badenoch was evidently the wrong choice for leader — as I warned at the time of her election — it is far from clear that a belated Jenrick coronation can now do much for the party’s near-term fortunes. A counterintuitive case, though not a strong one, could perhaps be made that Badenoch’s laissez-faire attitude to management has at least allowed the Jenrick wing to experiment with forging a harder-edged, more Right-wing faction within the party. The modernizing, developmentalist, even self-proclaimed Anglofuturist faction around him, now calling themselves the “New Centre Right”, present a compelling vision for 2020s Conservativism. Their greatest appeal is that they can present the same offer of radical reform as Reform itself, but with more competent implementation: but it is a difficult task to campaign on renouncing your own party’s record, and in any case Reform can now convincingly argue that a vote for the Conservatives will be a vote for continued Labour rule. Besides, whatever its strengths, on current polling trends many of the New Centre Right’s brightest stars cannot expect to keep their seats.

The options available to the party last year are no longer on the menu, and those that remain are unappetizing. A gamble could be made that Reform will rest British politics onto a plane more amenable to future Right-wing governance, and that the losses of the next election may in time be recouped by the rump party that survives. One plausible future, at least for Jenrick’s wing, by far the most energetic and convincing Conservative faction, is playing a similar role in relation to Farage to the one Farage himself once performed against the Tories: as a purist pressure group, punishing any deviation from Rightist principles from the luxury of the sidelines. Another is as a more successful SDP, a predominantly internet-based party, with more support from commentators than voters, producing high-quality policy documents to be plagiarized by their electorally successful rivals. Yet if it wishes to remain in Parliament, the New Centre Right faction also presents, for Reform, the only attractive set of potential Tory defectors, in a path already smoothed by their erstwhile ally Danny Kruger. Extinction or co-option? Neither prospect is attractive, yet both now seem more probable than renewal. Outpaced by history, the politics of the ancien régime has another four years to further discredit itself, with every grim daily headline passing verdict on its failure. Gathering in a city that, this week, bloodily displays the UK’s very worst dysfunctions, the Conservative Party’s only chance is that our current path of extreme political volatility may still, against all the odds, extract the party from the grave it so eagerly dug itself. The old UK regime is dead in office: the time is running out to shape the Britain that will replace it, in anything other than Farage’s image.

Those days are long gone. Since her triumph in 2022, and as some of us foresaw, Meloni has eased herself into the Euro-Atlantic consensus. Adopting a conciliatory attitude towards the EU, she’s also ensured Italy’s full compliance with the bloc’s austerity-driven economic framework. Meanwhile, the Italian premier also became a vocal supporter of Nato hawkishness in Ukraine, building strong ties with Joe Biden.

Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

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Meloni, for her part, hasn’t done much to dampen the rumours of a reactionary revival. She’s admittedly been careful not to endorse either candidate in the US election, stressing she’ll work with whoever wins. But it’s also clear that she’s well-positioned to become one of Trump’s key European partners should he reclaim the White House in November. In part, that’s thanks to her long-standing ties to the broader MAGA movement. In 2018, to give one example, Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon was a keynote speaker at a political festival organised by her Brothers of Italy party. 

That’s reflected by more recent moves too. In a clear nod to national conservatives in Washington, Meloni told her audience at the Atlantic Council that “we should not be ashamed to use and defend words and concepts like nation and patriotism”. At the same time, Brothers of Italy’s recent decision to vote against a European Parliament resolution allowing Ukraine to use Western weapons on Russian soil should also be seen as a nod to MAGA’s scepticism of Western support for Ukraine — and an indication of Meloni’s willingness to shift Italy’s foreign policy if Trump wins in November.

Taken together, and especially given the looming American elections, Meloni’s decision to receive her prize from Musk could therefore be part of a wider strategy. Aimed at rekindling ties with American conservatives, that surely makes sense, especially when Musk’s influence is expected to be significantly boosted by the tycoon’s re-election. As Francesco Giubilei, a Meloni acolyte, lately told Le Monde, the Prime Minister must be both “a force for struggle” and a force for government. “She’s very cautious, waiting to see who will win the election and maintaining her ties with Trump’s world to benefit should he win.” 

So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

More to the point, the organisation’s corporate partners and funders include many of the US’s largest firms, operating across finance, defence, energy and tech. A range of Nato governments also supports the Atlantic Council, as indeed does the alliance itself. No wonder it’s gained a reputation for aggressively lobbying for American financial and corporate interests worldwide. In 2014, for instance, FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council to build support for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a proposed trade agreement between the EU and US aimed at shielding transnational corporations from public oversight, and which was ultimately abandoned in the face of public opposition. 

More recently, WikiLeaks’s US diplomatic cables leak revealed that the Atlantic Council worked closely with Chevron and ExxonMobil to undermine a Brazilian legislative proposal to grant Petrobras, a local state-owned corporation, chief control of the oil fields off the country’s coast. Since the outbreak of war in Ukraine, meanwhile, the organisation has distinguished itself for its very hawkish approach to the conflict, perhaps unsurprising given the number of defence companies among its backers. 

Given all this, one might reasonably speculate that the Atlantic Council’s grooming of Meloni has little to do with US partisan politics — the organisation is, in fact, quite distant from Trumpism — and more about expanding the influence of US capital in the Bel Paese. Even Musk’s cosy relationship with the Prime Minister seems to be about more than just “shared values” and soft feelings. In June, the Italian government approved a new regulatory framework that grants foreign space companies permission to operate in the country. It’s no secret that, in this context, Musk aims to make Starlink the country’s main “white area” internet provider, in other words for places not covered by wired or mobile alternatives. That, in turn, has the potential to displace domestic rivals like Open Fiber and Tim, which Musk accuses of obstructing the rollout of his high-speed internet.

Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors. 

Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development.

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In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics. 

If the test of “nuance” is being criticised from all sides, then Sanghera’s books pass with flying colours. Critics on the Right panned his 2021 book Empireland for invoking “the Britain-loathing New York Times” and “that prodigious bore Fintan O’Toole”. On the Left, in a somewhat warmer review, Stanford’s Prof. Priya Satia admonished Sanghera for drawing upon works which have apparently been “debunked”, such as Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy (1973-8). Only on the shelves of Waterstones Dad are his books safe — but that remains a considerable and influential constituency, one that uses the genre of popular history to form its political worldview. So if that’s who’s reading him, what will they take away from these books? What does the Sanghera project amount to?

The breadth of his reading is part of the sell. A whopping 39% of Empireworld is notes and bibliography. And Sanghera is at pains to convince his readers that he is an honest broker, presenting himself as a blank slate, an autodidact, who having read as much as possible with an open mind has arrived at his own conclusions. He wrote Empireland not principally to edify his readers, but to “plug large gaps” in his own knowledge. Unlike the “culture warriors”, he comes with no axes to grind; he poses as a latter-day Leopold von Ranke, bravely telling the hard truths about British history “as it actually was”.

This rhetorical strategy has its advantages, but can make his books read like pell-mell compilations of quotations from various authors. Sometimes in Empireworld this works to launder ideas that strain credulity, such as the British Empire being responsible for last year’s floods in Pakistan, or the trauma of slavery in the Americas “epigenetically” disposing its modern-day descendants to workaholism and “the downplaying of achievements in public”. Other times, he ends up endorsing ideas which I doubt he sincerely holds. Notoriously, in Empireland he called for Britons to accept that “ultimately, multiculturalism is, in the words of the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, just ‘colonizin’… in reverse’”. Aside from sounding awfully like a shot fired in the “culture wars”, I suspect that this would do more harm than good for race relations in Britain; and given that Sanghera does not approve of “colonizin’” but does approve of “multiculturalism”, he most likely shares this view.

But the main shortcoming of Sanghera’s books is that they tell us much more about their author’s own psychology, itself a product of an epistemic ferment of which the “culture wars” are part, than “how imperialism has shaped modern Britain” or “how British imperialism has shaped the globe”. The world around him is a Rorschach test, and he only ever sees one thing. These books have a picaresque flavour: we follow our maverick hero on his adventures as he entertains us with his party-trick, his unrivalled mastery at the game of “spot the colonial inheritance”.

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At the beginning of Empireworld, we join him on his journey from New Delhi back to London, “noting down every imperial legacy we happen across”. The sniffer dogs at the airport remind him that the “international trade in cocaine was influenced, indirectly, by British imperial politics”. Encountering some other passengers drinking at the airport bar, he thinks about how “British imperialists spread drunkenness across the planet”. No respite is to be found on his 10-hour flight. That the actors on the TV screen are skinny is a legacy of “imperial attitudes”. And watching Ralph Fiennes “do a half-decent job of making Lord Voldemort appear forbidding” makes him think about the Hollywood trope of the “British baddie” (it’s odd to make this point about a franchise where all the characters are British), a trope which — “let’s face it” — is also down to empire.

All this retreads ground already covered in Empireland, which opens with a suggestion for how empire education could be integrated into P.E. lessons: “Playing football? The perfect opportunity to tell students that ‘kop’, the colloquial name for rising single-tier terraces at football grounds, originally comes from Spion Kop” (a battle in the Second Boer War). It can feel a bit like reading the diary of an undercover Martian, whose only knowledge about our world comes from Zulu, a Kipling anthology, and the British Empire’s Wikipedia page. There is of course nothing wrong with having historical obsessions and lively imaginations. “Have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, had their hobby-horses?”, as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy once asked. But, as Shandy continues, a hobby-horse is to be indulged in only “so long as a man rides [it] peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him”.

Sanghera wants us all to get atop his horse. When he plays his game of “spot the colonial inheritance”, he treats it as a terrible failing when others do not participate. Thus the “legacy of empire” must be taught more at school and university — at the expense of John Milton or the Ten Commandments if necessary. In the second chapter of Empireworld, we pace around Kew Gardens, our narrator lost in thought about the relationship between empire and botany. He is jolted by the “painfully polite”, “twee” atmosphere in the Kew Gardens café: how are we to tally this, he asks, “with the racism of influential botanists”? It is unclear what exactly Sanghera wants: perhaps every family enjoying a day out at Kew should be made to reflect on the supposedly bloody history of their surroundings. In fact he comes close to supporting such a regime elsewhere in the book. One of his interlocutors recommends that “every European tourist to Jamaica be lectured on the history before being allowed to collect their bags”, and Sanghera’s only reservation (I suppose a valid one) is that this would “fuel the culture war over colonialism in the West”. Again, Sanghera is placed at a remove from that culture war, though I doubt this idea would please Jamaica’s tourism industry, either.

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Why must we play this game with him? Sanghera offers a different answer in Empireworld to the one given in Empireland. Empireland was essentially making a moral argument: we should think and talk and teach more about the empire because it’s the right thing to do. In Empireworld, however, morality takes a back seat. We now find ourselves in the hard-edged world of geopolitics and multipolarity and soft power.

Some portents of this did surface towards the end of Empireland. Among the unsettling instances of “imperialism” that Sanghera finds in Boris Johnson’s rhetorical repertoire are references to London being “the greatest city on earth”, Britain having the “best universities”, and Britain being “the leading military player in western Europe”. A less imperially afflicted mind would recognise these for the banal platitudes they are. Even Borat boasts that Kazakhstan is the “number one exporter of potassium”. But what Sanghera dislikes about this “world-beating” bluster is that, by being so apparently tactless about the imperial past, it somehow diminishes Britain’s standing on the world stage. This argument, which becomes the central thesis of Empireworld, is never properly explained.

Britain, on Sanghera’s account, is now too puny a nation to get away with not constantly drawing out the imperial connotations of everything it says and does. We have no choice but to play the game of “spot the colonial inheritance”. India, after all, is a “burgeoning superpower that will shape our future in all sorts of ways”, and apparently would like for us to play along. To make matters worse, the “conversation” about reparations is swiftly “leaving us behind”: “we will look increasingly irrelevant and ignorant if we continue not to engage”. Presumably an “engagement” consisting of a sharp and simple “no” is not quite what Sanghera is after. One has to wonder how many pounds we shall have to cough up if we wish to maintain our “relevance” in the world.

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This emphasis on how Britain “looks” animates every page of Empireworld. It mars, for example, an otherwise intriguing discussion of the imperial roots of Britain’s third sector, and the British enthusiasm for animal charities in particular. The first wildlife conservation charities were set up, perversely, by big game hunters; British imperialists were “pioneers in extinction”. This, Sanghera says, is an “important thing to acknowledge within our national obsession for animal conservation and protection” — for “if we forget it, we risk looking cynical and hypocritical as we go about lecturing the planet”. When the King and the Prince of Wales bleat on about saving the rhinos, they are “seemingly oblivious to the fact that their ancestors were at the forefront of destroying some of these species in the first place”. Perhaps, however, they are not “oblivious” to this fact at all, and simply do not think it relevant that (to use one of Sanghera’s examples) Edward VIII once shot a tiger.

For all these flaws, there is a worthwhile book buried deep in Empireworld, one which could have “provided nuance” to a heated and often ugly debate. Every now and then, Sanghera says the sort of thing that ought to feature more prominently in discussions of imperial history: that empire was “unplanned” and “nebulous”; that it had “areas of grey, where seemingly opposite things could be true at once”; that it was “messy” and “full of contradictions”; that it “instilled chaos and spread democracy”. Near the end of the book we get some much-needed self-reflection: for all his inveighing against the hoary old balance-sheet question of whether the empire was “good or bad”, he confesses that he had himself “participated in a micro form of balance-sheet thinking myself”. No prizes for guessing which side he tended to come down on.

Alas, this tease of the sort of book that Empireworld might have been is forever snatched away from us in the conclusion. On the final page, returning to his fixation on “optics”, Sanghera recites a litany of all the things Britain “cannot” do until it somehow faces up to its imperial past. “We cannot lecture nations about homophobia without accepting that we determinedly enforced homophobia upon large parts of the world.” “We cannot negotiate climate change treaties without acknowledging that we were pioneers in inflicting man-made climate change upon the planet.” One might quite reasonably say in response that yes, we can, and yes, we should. In any case, this screed on the sins of empire rather gives the game away. For no “nuance” is here to be found: only a rousing battle-cry in the “culture war”.

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.

As teams do whatever it takes to win, swearing by the rather un-cricket mantra of by hook or by crook, is it any surprise that esprit de corps has wound up a collateral casualty? This is more significant than it appears at first blush. Historically, especially in the early decades of the previous century, the sentimentalisation of sportsmanship enabled cricket to declaim a unifying myth that was for the better part true. The “spirit of the game”, trite as this might sound, was the glue holding together the riff-raff and the ruling class, black and white — or so the Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James argued in Beyond a Boundary, indisputably the best book on cricket, published 60 years ago. On the field, he argued, all social divisions were transcended, even if only fleetingly. For players were bound together by the “code” of cricket.

What the game looks like in default of such a code is plain to see. Around the same time Bairstow was having his battles with the bails, there detonated the bombshell ICEC report, “Holding Up a Mirror to Cricket”. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Over three in four black and brown respondents spoke of having faced racial discrimination, substantiating the Yorkshire player Azeem Rafiq’s charge made before a parliamentary inquiry last year. Since then, heads have rolled — though not those of his harassers. Rafiq has left Britain on account of the abuse following his testimony. Incredibly, the man tasked with reforming Yorkshire’s club, Kamlesh Patel, has been hounded out his position as well. As in Yorkshire, so in Essex, where the black cricketer Maurice Chambers was repeatedly called a monkey and taunted with a banana. C.L.R. James, one suspects, must be rolling in his Trinidadian grave. For the game he describes in Beyond a Boundary is many worlds apart from the game it has become. Time was the “spirit of game” was more than a cynical expedient to clobber opponents. As James has it, it is something of a higher, even egalitarian calling.

James was drawn to cricket at an early age. It was, he describes, one half of a double inheritance. There was, on both sides of the family, the Puritan bequest, which translated into a generosity of spirit embodied by his aunt Judith: “whenever I went to see her, [she] fed me with that sumptuousness which the Trinidad Negroes have inherited from the old extravagant plantation owners”. The spirit of cricket was only an extension of this habit of mind. And it was a stroke of luck that his home gave on to a cricket pitch, his “window exactly behind the wicket”. Tunapuna, his hometown of 3,000 a stone’s throw from Port of Spain, was a cricket-crazy place. All in all, “a good case could be made for predestination”, he slyly writes.

But the sport was also an engine for rising above hoi-polloi. It’s no secret, of course, that cricket has always been a game of certain pretensions. We immediately understand, for instance, the significance of Paul Pennyfeather’s social handicaps in Decline and Fall when he declaims, “I don’t know a word of German, I’ve had no experience, I’ve got no testimonials, and I can’t play cricket.” For James, the game furnished a certain respectability — and “respectability was not an ideal; it was an armour”. The older Jameses craved it just as the young C.L.R. did. His father saw to it that the young C.L.R. acquired the cultural capital needed to secure a spot at Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad’s Eton. There, he studied Latin and Greek under Oxbridge types, who, more importantly, “taught a code, the English public-school code”. If all of this sounds Bridesheady, it’s because it is. He took a de haut en bas view of his fellow natives, whom he disdained because they were less au fait with Burke than he was. “Intellectually I lived abroad, chiefly in England.” Vanity Fair came as a revelation: “George Osborne was the hero.” One can see the appeal of snobbery. Later in life, he would credit “Thackeray, not Marx”, for his turn to the Left.

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A career path had been cut out for him: Oxford (read: prestige), lawyering (read: prosperity), political office (read: power). But the rebel had other plans. The lure of cricket wasn’t feasibly resisted. Though he would later be embarrassed by his choice, he plumped to play for Maple, the club for light-skinned West Indians. Shamrock and Queen’s Park Oval were “almost exclusively white… I would have been more easily elected to the MCC than to either.” Stingo was “plebeians: the butcher, the tailor, the candlestick maker, the casual labourer, with a sprinkling of unemployed. Totally black and no social status whatsoever.” Shannon belonged to the “black lower-middle class: the teacher, the law clerk, the worker in the printing office”. Maple, by contrast, was distinctly “brown-skinned and middle class”.

As he later explained, though not entirely in an attempt at self-exculpation, “the Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people and about 15 or 20 per cent who are a varying combination of white and black. From the days of slavery, they have always claimed superiority to the ordinary black… It is not too much to say that in a West Indian colony, the surest sign of a man having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself.” All of which is to say cricket in James’ time was no post-racial, anti-elitist Eden. Yet it was the “spirit of the game” that prevented the uglier instincts of a hidebound society from raising their head: “The foregoing makes it easy to misunderstand the atmosphere in which we played. We never quarrelled. When we played, Shannon, Maple, and Stingo members mixed easily on the same side.” Social tensions were sublimated into a sporting register, the cricketing drama of strokes and catches. “The sportsmanship was clean… Racialism did very little harm… If I had the power, I wouldn’t alter one selection.”

Racism and elitism very simply were, as the common phrase goes, “not cricket”. More than a game, it seems, cricket for James was a temperament: “as soon as we stepped on to the cricket field, we were a motley crew: the children of some white officials and white business men, middle-class blacks and mulattos, Chinese boys, Indian boys, poor black boys… We learned to play [as a] team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip.” It is no accident that such a worldview — ironically of patrician derivation — primed James for a life on the Left. A political awakening of sorts swiftly followed. The snobbishness retreated. His sympathies for the lower orders became more pronounced in industrial Lancashire, where he arrived in 1932 to help the cricketing giant Learie Constantine write his autobiography. Not long after, he became a cricket columnist for the Manchester Guardian, as it then was, on the strength of that connection. For five years, he shuttled between his Hampstead home and Lord’s, while also working on his pioneering survey of the Haitian Revolution. Black Jacobins appeared in 1938, the year he left for the New World.

There he stayed for 15 years, not seeing a single cricket match for all of that time. Instead, he immersed himself in the Pythonesque quarrels of the American Left, one micro-party accusing the other of selling out. The most formative episode of his American stay, though, was a basketball scandal in the early Fifties. What transpired was far from revelatory: in time-honoured fashion, college players fixed matches in cahoots with bookies. Yet, such an innocent James was, it came as a revelation to him. How could these young men betray their teams? His American friends understandably rolled their eyes. But the middle-aged James just couldn’t get over it. Rather touchingly in Beyond a Boundary, he records his “instinctive repulsion” on learning of “these crimes”.

America proved too much. James, unsurprisingly, came hurtling back home to reacquaint himself with that treasured breed of his, the cricketing “genus Britannicus”. In later years, he did his bit to make the gentleman’s game a fairer one. In his brief spell back home in Trinidad as the editor of The Nation in 1958, for instance, he combined political activism and cricket to bring an end to the age white Test captaincy in West Indies. By all accounts, it was an unpleasant campaign — most definitely “not cricket”. The previous captain, Gerry Alexander, whom James insinuated was a racist for sending back the intemperate Roy Gilchrist from the team’s India tour, possibly had his reasons. Gilchrist had bowled one too many beamers and — apparently — even pulled a knife on Alexander. Still, installing the black Frank Worrell was an important milestone. Less rational was James’ uncritical adoration of the mediocre batsmen Wilton St Hill. With a batting average of 27.15, he was, rather perversely, likened to Bradman (the Don’s average: 95.14). It would have been a baffling encomium but for James’ appropriation of the comedian Jimmy Durante’s signature phrase: “that’s my boy”. As James put it with candour, “Wilton St Hill was our boy.”

“Our boys”, as it were, are in short supply these days. Most Brits no longer relate to the players on the field. In our time, the talent pathway runs through public schools. A curious inversion has transpired: in society at large, and indeed football among other ball games, meritocracy has become a watchword and racism has declined; in cricket, however, the opposite has been true. The day the ICEC report hit the front pages, a visual corroboration materialised in the England XI selected for the second Ashes Test. It was Lord’s in the year 2023, but it could have been the House of Lords circa 1923. All 11 players were white; nine were privately educated.

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Of all the Test batsmen who have debuted for England since 2011, some 95% have been white, and 77% from private schools (a mere 7% in the country have attended these). This when one in five cricketers at the academy level are South Asian. Likewise, between 1995 and 2020, the number of black professional cricketers has fallen by 75%. Adil Rashid, from a Bradford two-up two-down, these days it is the exception that proves the rule. What we have witnessed, in nuce, is nothing less than the strange death of progressive cricket. What on earth has happened? For one thing, cricket has ceased to belong to our zeitgeist. Football has stolen a march on it, not least because run-of-the-mill cricket kits can set you back north of £500. At the turn of the millennium, moreover, penurious schools across England set about selling their playing fields. Furthermore, Test cricket has moved behind a televisual paywall since 2005.

It is worth remembering that a hundred years ago, it was cricket, and not football, that was the national game, binding the classes together. Emblematic was the popular Gentlemen vs Players fixture that ran from 1806 to 1963, paid working-class professionals in the employ of county clubs playing against unpaid amateurs of aristocratic and bourgeois stock. The two classes also played shoulder to shoulder in the same teams, though in a singularly and preeningly English way. The lower and higher orders took the field through separate gates at Lord’s, the latter having their initials precede their surnames on scorecards (and vice versa for the former). Freud would have described this as the narcissism of small differences. More substantively, though, cricket was a game for all. Received wisdom had it that when England needed a fast bowler, “all it had to do was whistle down a Nottinghamshire coal mine”. Just as D.H. Lawrence was saved from a career at the colliery by his facility with words, his near-neighbour Harold Larwood was whisked away from the pits thanks to his way with the ball. From Fred Trueman to Freddie Flintoff, it’s been a subaltern’s game. As late as the mid-Nineties, four in five Test cricketers were state school kids.

Now is a good time to remember this history. Clearly, we’re in the midst of a cricketing renaissance. “Bazball”, the new style of cricket — bolder, riskier, faster — inaugurated by the captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum, has given the game a new tenor. Victories in white-ball cricket, too, have been infectious. Some of the stardust has rubbed off on the unabridged game. The opening fixture of the Ashes brought in a staggering 2.1 million viewers, Sky Sports reported, the highest ever for a Test match. Even the stumping affair showed a renewed interest in the game, the British and Australian prime ministers crossing bats over the matter. Australia will retain the Ashes, but there is now a momentum to English cricket. There’s no telling how the next Ashes will pan out. But first, England will need to cleanse the Augean stables and rediscover the Jamesian spirit of the game.

Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire.

Analysis of Britain’s lost Greek empire opens up new and productive pathways for interpreting the imperial past, keenly studied by a young generation of Greek historians even as it is ignored in the former colonial metropole. As the historian Evangelos Zarokostas observes, the half-century Ionian interlude took place at a formative time, “a period of transition between the collapse of old structures and the establishment of new ones”, in which “British officials were ambivalent about the place of the protectorate in the empire from its very beginning.” From the very start, Britain ruled the islands as a crown colony, but under the legal fiction they were an independent state under British protection. This ambiguous settlement would prove fatal to British rule, but it also provided a template for later British governance in Cyprus, Egypt, Mandate Palestine and Iraq. The islands were a laboratory for later imperial adventures, and would soon prove just as onerous a burden. In this sense, the bloody and still-unresolved conflicts of today’s Middle East were born on the verdant islands of the Ionian. Similarly, the failed Ionian experiment, abandoned just as Britain began to acquire hegemonic status, was to be Whitehall’s first experience of decolonisation — a first draft, in colourful mid-Victorian style, of Britain’s 20th-century decline. 

In 1815, when Britain won the Ionian Islands from a vanquished Napoleon, the world looked very different. The island chain off Greece’s western coast commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, and seemed to offer mastery of the Mediterranean. In the 20 years preceding the raising of the Union flag over Corfu’s medieval fortress, the islands had rudely entered modernity after 400 years as a sleepy colony of Venice, passing from French to Russian hands and back to France again in a wearying succession of sieges and conquests. Desperately poor, they presented London with a complex society to govern: centuries of Venetian rule had left a Greek-speaking peasantry living in feudal squalor, lorded over by an absentee class of Italian-speaking nobles. In the regional capital, Corfu Town, all classes spoke Italian of one form or another, including the many Jews, confined to their ghetto by the vigorous antisemitism of their neighbours. As European Christians for the most part, the islanders were an anomaly in Britain’s expanding empire. How, then, were they to be governed? 

The Treaty of Paris which granted them to Britain asserted that Whitehall’s rule was merely a benevolent guardianship of the first independent Greek state since the Middle Ages. The reality was rather different: fresh from negotiating Haiti’s handover to its new black rulers, the Ionian Islands’ first British Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, or “King Tom”, ruled with a rod of iron. A Scottish nobleman, described by his new Ionian charges as “dirty” and “frequently drunk”, Maitland began his decade as “conquistador” by erecting imposing monuments to himself, and ensured that, whatever the constitution said, absolute power rested with his own person. Feared by the locals as a volatile and abusive autocrat, whose secret police penetrated every level of Ionian society, Maitland’s absolute rule established the basis for later British governance. An enlightened despot, and a devotee of Adam Smith’s latest, fashionable theories, Maitland encouraged trade and imposed a sense of British order to Corfu’s teeming, overcrowded streets. Finding the locals disinclined to work, Maitland imported Maltese labourers to build his imposing regency palace of St Michael and St George, in the process reviving Corfu’s dwindling Catholic community. Correctly assessing the local nobility as easily swayed by glittering baubles, Maitland invented a chivalric order to dazzle them, still awarded today, in the absence of Greeks to bribe, to British diplomats — by themselves.

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For a while, in the early decades of the 19th century, British rule was accepted by Corfiot society, if not by the more rebellious inhabitants of the southward islands. As Aggelis notes, there were even “popular demands from many Ionians to be ‘modernised’ by the British”. So, with all the lost confidence of Victorian Britain, Corfu was duly gifted the Foucauldian novelties of a Panopticon prison in Benthamite style, and a high-walled lunatic asylum, still occupied today. New Macadamed roads, also still in use, linked the villages to the capital, and a sturdy aqueduct brought water to its population. The expansion of new law courts, coupled with stiff sentences for carrying knives — at the time the British arrived, the Ionians had the second-highest murder rate in Europe — transformed a previously violent society into the most pacific, if now litigious, in the region. Handsome villas, their sober Regency neoclassicism softened by pastel-coloured limewash, sprung up around the town and its prosperous new suburb of Garitsa to house the garrison’s officers and their wives in British comfort. They are still lived in today by Corfu’s upper-middle class professionals — indeed, Prince Philip was born in one, Mon Repos. Banks and stock exchanges, hotels and sewers, street lamps and bandstands transformed the medieval walled city into a Balkan simulacrum of Cheltenham.

The eccentric Lord Guilford — whose erratically-spelled name is still commemorated by Corfu’s central square — founded modern Greece’s first university on the island, after being dissuaded from situating it on a goat-haunted mountain peak on Ithaca. A network of “Lancastrian schools” provided public education, including the first ever schooling for girls; British sentries guarded the ghetto during Holy Week, ending the local custom of stoning Jews who dared venture outside. And amid all this reforming zeal, garrison life drifted along with a sleepy, romantic charm, where red-coated officers and their crinolined companions hunted scented paper in lieu of foxes, and enjoyed champagne and oyster picnics on the island’s beauty spots, surrounded by peasants toiling in the olive groves. For Mrs Gaskell, imagining the life of an officer’s wife, enjoying “music and dancing” in her “house with its trellised balcony,” the daily round was one long summer holiday. For the ordinary squaddies, happily acquiring “local connections with women” and “local habits” and serving in the only British posting where wine was the ration drink, the only hazards were drunkenly falling from the ramparts or being snatched by sharks while swimming. A soldier’s life here was distinctly less onerous than in the Empire’s more spartan outposts. 

But the holiday atmosphere would not last long. The outbreak of the Greek Revolution aroused nationalist passions which would ultimately make British rule untenable. The exiled Corfiot nobleman Ioannis Kapodistrias, Russia’s foreign minister and a fervent opponent of British rule, complaining that the islanders were treated “like indians”, became the new Greece’s first head of state, complaining that the islanders were treated “like Indians”, until he was assassinated by his volatile mainland charges. When a Turkish ship carrying Muslim refugees landed on Zakynthos, the passengers were murdered by the islanders, causing Maitland to impose martial law and disarm the Ionian population. Agrarian rebellions would rumble on in the southern islands, with British officials occasionally murdered, and reprisals exacted. The Ionians were the only British territory where the revolutionary fervour of 1848 was successful: the liberal Tory Lord High Commissioner Lord Seaton, fresh from his experience governing Upper Canada, widened democratic participation and permitted a free press, recasting the Ionians as a white dominion fit for Canadian-style responsible self-government. Indeed, under Seaton the Ionian islanders were granted greater democratic rights than the people of Britain itself. When, the following year, British troops put down a peasant uprising in Kefalonia, burning villages and hanging rebels to the applause of the local nobles, his reactionary successor Sir Henry Ward blamed Seaton’s naive idealism for the disturbances, proroguing the Ionian parliament and exiling journalists in an abrupt return to authoritarian rule.

This constant oscillation between Liberal and reactionary Tory proconsuls introduced tensions into Ionian governance that would soon make British rule untenable. The expansion of education, of the legal system and of employment in the British administration created a new Ionian bourgeoisie who rejected the pro-British sympathies of the islands’ aristocracy in favour of radical nationalism: a pattern that would be repeated in more exotic colonies. In stirring Italian prose (though the British had reintroduced Greek as the language of law and government for the first time since the 13th century, Italian remained the language of choice for the educated classes) nationalist radicals with names such as Dandolo, Padova and Lombardo demanded union with the Greek fatherland. Enraged by Ward’s repression of the Kefalonian rebellion, the moderate reformists, who had previously sought closer integration within the empire on more favourable terms of trade and access to imperial sinecures, ceded power to the radicals.

When the Crimean War broke out, and the islands became the supply base for Britain’s defence of the hated Ottoman Empire against the islanders’ Orthodox co-religionists, even the formerly-pliable clergy began to publicly pray for the Tsar’s health and success, while islanders celebrated Russian victories over their colonial overlords. The end was looming. Local government was deadlocked as the radicals frustrated British rule, but the heightened repression angered liberal sentiment in London. In the dying decade of British rule, as at the beginning, Whitehall’s sole concern with the islands became keeping them out of Russian hands. Nervously, London discussed gifting the islands to Austria, though feared the international response. A proposal was made by Ward’s successor, Sir John Young, a former MP for Cavan who consistently likened the increasingly unruly Ionians to the now equally troublesome Irish, proposed to annex Corfu while ceding the more volatile islands to Greece.

In a justificatory British correspondence, the placid Corfiots were now characterised as “half-Venetian and half-Albanian” and thus barely Greek at all. As Paschalidi notes, Young insisted that “Corfu was perfect for ‘British capital and enterprise’ and “would be ‘completely Anglicised’ in a few years.” Yet the initially convenient legal fiction of the Protectorate prevented Britain from either fully annexing Corfu or handing the problem to a friendly power. The publishing of Young’s stolen correspondence just as Gladstone arrived in Corfu to find some workable solution forced London to reassure wary European powers it had no intention of creating a Balkan Gibraltar. At a loss for how to rid itself of its now unwanted Greek dependency, the British government began to search for a way out. That way out was to be King Charles’ great-grandfather, Prince William of Denmark.

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In 1862, Greek revolutionaries overthrew their unpopular Bavarian king Otto, and the country voted for a successor. When the votes were tallied, the winner, with more than 95% of votes cast (still the greatest democratic mandate in Greek history) was Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son. Both Alfred and Victoria immediately declined the offer — the throne of an impoverished Balkan country in the throes of revolution was hardly a prize — but the Greeks refused to listen: Alfred-mania had entirely swept the country. The Greeks believed that choosing Alfred would guarantee British protection for their weak and unstable new state, with the still-unliberated Ottoman possessions of northern Greece thrown into the bargain. Struggling to convince them that the Alfred option was impossible, British officials feared the disappointed Greeks would choose a Russian king in a fit of pique, swinging the country into the orbit of London’s greatest rival. After much haggling, British officials settled on a safely pliable king for Greece, Prince William of Denmark — King Charles’ great-grandfather. But to seal the deal, London needed a handsome gift to woo the Greeks: and what better option than Corfu and the Ionians, no longer strategically valuable and now impossible to govern?

And so, on June 2, 1864, the last British troops marched out of Corfu’s Old Fortress and the Union flag was lowered for the last time. The final Lord High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks, gave a tearful speech in Italian while island notables gathered round him, “embracing him and conferring upon him not infrequently those salutations which Englishmen generally reserve for the other sex”. The frosty atmosphere of Britain’s last decade of rule had evaporated with their looming departure, as soldiers marched along streets “strewn with flowers”, “fêted in the taverns with free beer”. Now it was over, Corfiots had already begun to feel a certain nostalgia for their brief episode of Britishness. “Sono bono genti [they are good people],” a British correspondent quoted an old man waving his straw hat at the departing ships, wiping tears from his eyes: “’Adesso siamo liberi!’ [Now we are free!], said a young man, as he lit a cigarette by way of inaugurating the new order of things.” The young man was not quite correct: in relinquishing Corfu, Britain won a far greater prize, a quasi-colonial dominance over Greece itself, which would remain an effective British protectorate until London was supplanted by Washington following World War Two. For this exact reason, once Britain finally agreed to cede the Ionians, Ionian radicals who had long demanded union futilely began to campaign against it, as the historian Eleni Calligas shows: after experiencing “the corruption, intrigue, and clientelism permeating Greek politics” they soon retired from public life altogether, entirely disillusioned.

British rule in the Ionians is often seen, in Britain, as a curious backwater in the long imperial record, but the romantic but ultimately failed Ionian experiment set the scene for later imperial trends. Oscillating between Liberal and Tory proconsuls, tensions in British internal politics introduced a wild incoherence to Ionian governance: Tory repression inflamed local passions; Liberal idealism created a native nationalist bourgeoisie who would make the islands ungovernable. But young British administrators who cut their teeth in the failed Ionian project would later move on to the equally ambiguous annexation of Egypt, which established a precedent for British mandate Iraq: British governance in the Ionian would shape later failures in the Middle East. Similarly oscillating between liberal idealism — tempered by the nationalist enthusiasms of a bourgeoisie British rule had created — and harsh oppression, Britain repeated the same cycle in the Middle East as it did in the Ionian, ending in bloodier and less romantic failure. In the end, British patronage of independent Greece ended as that of its rule in the Middle East did, a rule supplanted by America, now being supplanted in turn..

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Cycling through an incoherent policy mix of authoritarian repression and liberal idealism, benevolent modernisation and indirect rule through feudal elites, British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation, even as Britain stood on the brink of world hegemony. But far from the black-and-white moral certainties of today’s demagogic historiography, the Ionian islanders themselves always felt ambivalent about their status as semi-Britons, as often pleading for greater incorporation into the imperial fold and the right to send an MP to the Commons as demanding independence. 

London, too, always felt more ambivalence than cupidity for its Greek possessions, searching for the least painful way to relinquish them and finally doing so according to the unsentimental demands of realpolitik. Far from the Ionians’ union with Greece being the inevitable result of nationalist fervour, London chose the moment of decolonisation, just one of many potential outcomes, and did so with relief. “I wish them joy of the association,” Storks wrote bitterly, “Ionia will be the Ireland of Greece.” When the British left, they were mourned only by Corfu’s nobility, its Jews (whose “situation would be very pitiable, if the English did not take them under their protection”), and its women, who, Storks observed, were “universally opposed to the cessation of British protection”. But in the end, aside from the residual Anglophilia of Corfiot elites, the only living result of this brief and romantic Anglo-Hellenic synthesis is our own philhellene King, and a lingering Corfiot taste for cricket and ginger beer, the last ghostly echoes of Britain’s lost Greek empire.

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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British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

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.

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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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.

A New Zealander, previously secure in his oceanic British identity, Pocock worked through the implications of the moment in his 1973 lecture, “British History: a Plea for a New Subject”, composed, he would later note, immediately “after the great divorce which occurred when you told us that you were now Europeans, which we, as New Zealanders, were not”. It was a conceptual reordering which meant “you cared as little for our past as for our future”.

Yet, Pocock observed, the implications for Britain were just as great as for the home archipelago’s imperial cast-offs. For after all: “if it has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the Commonwealth…it is not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate themselves, in their turn.”

Without a grand overseas project with which to occupy itself, the centre itself, focused on Westminster, may not hold. Future historians may find themselves writing of “a ‘Unionist’ or even a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the 13th, the 17th or the 19th centuries and a date in the 20th or the 21st.”

What evidence for this prediction can we find, a half-century later, in the collapsing British state of 2023? It is self-evident that the act of leaving the EU was an act of self-definition, a great inward turn to force the questions of what Britain is and what it should be back to the heart of national politics. Support for Brexit was closely aligned in the minds of its voters with a return to an economy of domestic industrial production, and to a drastic reduction in the historically unprecedented levels of inward migration to which the British political class had committed itself.

Yet the Brexit we got was another Brexit entirely: a vision of Britain as a global trading power entirely unmoored from the realities of its position, a product of the fact that our politicians, for all that effective governance of the UK remains beyond them, find our islands too small a stage for their talents. Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are each in their own ways exemplars of how the ideology of global Britain has made the British governing class incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago, prisoners of a delusion that Britain must always strive to be world-beating, even as it struggles to maintain parity with its closest neighbours.

For the Welsh political philosopher and former Labour MP David Marquand, writing in 1995 in a collection of essays engaging with Pocock’s grand conceptual reordering of our island story, such global pretensions were baked into Britishness from the start. As he observed, “for most of its history, the identity embodied by the British state was quintessentially global, oceanic, imperial and, by virtue of this, non- or at least extra-European”. The new British state’s justification was the consolidation of the various kingdoms of these islands in a grand imperial project, with the result being a vision of the British state and people which Marquand termed “whig imperialist”. And at its heart, he said, “lay the twin themes of globalism and constitutionalism. The British state was, by definition, a global state; and the British people, by definition, was a global people.”

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As Marquand observed, “the Whig imperialist vision of the British state helped to shape the mentality of the entire political class, left as well as right”. Whig imperialist Britain was Britain. “The British state was the child as well as the parent of empire. Its iconography, its operational codes, the instinctive reflexes of its rulers and managers were stamped through and through with the presuppositions of empire.” Even as the empire fell away, its ghosts still haunt Westminster, in inverted form, as a needy internationalism and an aesthetic distaste for the homely and familiar. Unlike our European neighbours, whose revolutions and wars of national independence helped clarify a secure sense of nationhood, Britain’s relentless focus on the periphery left a hollow void at the centre, at least for its rulers. As Marquand, now a convert to Welsh nationalism, observes, “shorn of empire, ‘Britain’ had no meaning”.

This interpretation does much to explain the strange pathologies of the 21^st-century Westminster class, and elucidates the strange mystery of why Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, possesses a markedly anti-national commenting class (intelligentsia is not quite the right word), whose European pretensions, like the continental affectations of a Hyacinth Bucket, are simply those of the provincial petit bourgeois, repelled by the drab simplicities of home. It explains why Britain, for a European country, is uniquely at risk of self-dissolution by global economic forces, and why its governing class’s sense of national identity, as far as can be judged from its citizenship tests, is such thin gruel, entirely indistinguishable from vague internationalist norms of liberal tolerance. It explains the compulsion towards mass immigration, entirely inconsistent with the demands of British voters: for as the empire folded in on itself, sucking the empire’s global children in along with it like a collapsing star, it became easier to remake Britain in the image of the world than to shape the world in a way congenial to British desires.

Such an interpretation also explains the extraordinary ease with which Britain’s governing class has reduced the country to a powerless factotum of America’s global empire, and the degree to which such total self-abnegation of sovereignty is presented and experienced, not as a humiliation fetish but as the natural order of things, and the bedrock of Britain’s security. To maintain its global pretensions, the Westminster class has been forced into a posture of what Perry Anderson termed “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power”. It explains why our Right-wing populists are enamoured of globalised free markets even as they rail against “globalism”, why our state broadcaster functions as a vector of America’s new ideological fixations, and why our royals as well as our politicians look longingly at the better opportunities to be found in California. It explains, too, why our sole national institution, the NHS, sucks both staff and patients from around the world, finding its merely national mission too paltry for its dignity, and the humanitarian obligations of the British taxpayer too bountiful to be shared only among the British people.

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For the British governing class, and its taste-making hangers on, Britain as a small European country is simply too small a stage to bother with. Yet instead of addressing these tensions, surely the underlying cause of the failures of British governance which drove Brexit in the first place, the result of Brexit has only been to heighten them: more immigration, the Indo-Pacific tilt, the endless attempt to summon a Global Britain into being in a post-imperial world. The contradictions between Britain’s world-leading pretensions and shabby material realities are now becoming too sharp for the state to effectively manage. If Brexit has foregrounded one essential fact of British politics it is that the problems facing the country are rooted in its governing class: a class which swooped together with organic solidarity after Brexit to prevent any democratic attempt to redirect its course, and frittered away the country’s economic sovereignty on dreams of global relevance.

As Pocock observed, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which accelerated the consolidation of the British state in Westminster were the result of England’s governing class attempting to resolve their own political divisions through the incorporation of their neighbours in a greater, shared project. For “the English did not want such a war, but found that they had to fight it with each other; and they hated it so much that they imposed it on Scotland and Ireland in the attempt to resolve it. The imperial sovereignty they imposed on other nations was an effect of the imperial sovereignty they had imposed on themselves.”

Britain’s entry into the EC was itself, likewise, a failed attempt to recapture a greater stage on which Britain could play a global role, and foundered on the same tensions, the inward-looking domesticity of the British electorate rebelling against the outward-facing cosmopolitanism of its governing caste. Always the foil of other nations’ acts of self-definition — a process now continuing, with Scotland, even in the home islands — Britain never saw the need or found the occasion to do so for itself. In the collapse of Britain’s empire, then, the only anti-imperial project that failed was that of liberating Britain from its own rulers.

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But is it possible to liberate Britain from Westminster while maintaining the Union? The Union’s collapse would surely only leave us stuck with the same governing elite on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale, just as the cosmopolitan pretensions of the various Celtic nationalisms are, if anything, even more hysterical and absurd than those of the Union as a whole. Yet any attempt at a British Meiji restoration similarly falters on the unavoidable fact that the British governing class has very little interest in the governance of Britain itself — instead it recoils from it, as a distraction from the glittering possibilities of the wider world.

Such an elite makes a shaky foundation for a project of national renewal, yet without a total overhaul of Britain’s governing class, the remaining time in which to advance such a project is rapidly slipping away, before the nation dissolves itself with an affected smirk of enlightened tolerance. The revolt against Brussels then, was always just the opening salvo, on a continental front, of a far more difficult campaign: to become a prosperous European country, Britain must still liberate itself from the self-defeating foibles and global aspirations of the Westminster class.

While most of us have spent the week praising the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II, she has been denounced by those who claim to speak on behalf of truth and justice. She wasn’t a benign monarch, these people say. She sponsored a system of racist division, and any black or brown person who mourns her death is a stooge of Empire and white supremacy. A House Negro. Self-hating. A coon.

It is indisputable that the British Empire committed many atrocities, and many of its advocates were motivated by racism. But the idea that Queen Elizabeth II’s international legacy can be reduced to colonial oppression and violence is a perverse distortion of history. When many West Indians moved to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, their claim to a British identity and equal status with native white Britons was on the basis of being subjects of the Crown. Should they have rejected this? Is any black or brown person who accepts a knighthood a traitor to his race? Are all those nations where they are now flying flags at half-mast — from India to Nigeria to Jamaica to Ghana to Trinidad and many, many more — governed by self-hating coons? Every single one of them? Were all the postcolonial leaders who either decided to stay in the Commonwealth or join it motivated by profound self-loathing? This is not just an offensive argument: it’s patently absurd.

Rather than being a symbol of white supremacy, Queen Elizabeth II devoted much of her reign to fostering amicable relations with those countries which used to be a part of the British Empire. In April 1947, Princess Elizabeth spent the afternoon of her 21st birthday recording a filmed message to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”. Elizabeth calmly outlined her dedication to the colonies and countries that linked through Britain like a daisy-chain across the world: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise she would keep.

By the time of her coronation, in June 1953, the Commonwealth, which had emerged after decolonisation, only had eight countries. They wanted to rule themselves, but they didn’t want to completely sever their relationship with Britain. It would be tempting to describe the Commonwealth as Anglophone, a continuation of the countries Britain conquered and subjugated, and imposed their language and customs upon: the pink splash across old maps of the world. But this is a simplistic way of looking at this mosaic of nations.

The picture is a complex one. Canada is a majority English-speaking and minority French-speaking country; Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country and minority English-speaking country, colonised by the Germans before it was handed over to France. Both Canada and Cameroon are part of the Commonwealth. The official language of Mozambique is Portuguese — and when it joined the Commonwealth, in 1995, it became the first country to do so that was never a part of the British Empire. Togo and Gabon, two former French colonies, have joined the Commonwealth this year. They are the 55th and 56th members. It is a club that people want to join, not a union imposed by force.

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If it’s not language, then what unites these nations? To a great extent, it was that quietly-spoken young woman, who, five years after giving that speech on her 21st birthday, became the Queen of Britain, and assumed the ceremonial position of managing the loss of an Empire. She didn’t bestride these newly independent countries like an aggrieved dictator. Nor was she a passive caretaker. She listened, and learned, and exercised her inquisitive mind. She was devoted to internationalism, and many nations warmed to those qualities. Elizabeth was the greatest diplomat of the 20th century.

Her diplomatic qualities were crucial in 1961. By that time, the Commonwealth had grown from eight to 12 members. That year, she would have to visit one small but profoundly consequential country in west Africa, and make sure it didn’t leave the club.

Ghana was the first black African country to gain independence, and it soon became the first African country to join the Commonwealth. The president was a charismatic firebrand called Kwame Nkrumah. He spent the Thirties studying sociology and economics in Pennsylvania, and selling fish on the streets of New York. After he moved to England, in 1945, he was often in Camden cafés chatting amiably with communists and anti-imperialists. When Nkrumah moved back to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and threatened the status quo by launching a mass strike, the governor-general Sir Charles Arden-Clarke described him as a “thoroughgoing communist”.

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1961 was the white heat of the Cold War: five years after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the year the Berlin Wall went up. Africa was decolonising, and many of these new nations were being courted by the Soviet Union. The Queen was scheduled to arrive in Ghana on 9 November 1961. The month before, Nkrumah had visited Moscow. Closer to Ghana, five days before her visit, a bomb exploded in the capital city of Accra which damaged a statue of Nkrumah.

The Queen was undaunted, telling Prime Minister Harold MacMillan: “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth — and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children”.

The trip was a peach. She landed first in Accra and met several government ministers and dignitaries. These diplomatic endeavours were followed up by meetings with the chiefs and kings of Ghana. According to Nkrumah’s personal photographer, the Queen was genuinely interested in the people she met, asking incisive questions, for instance, about the cultural significance of native dress.

She was introduced to High Life music — a fusion of the native Akan musical rhythms and Jazz — and danced with Nkrumah. The revolutionary pan-Africanist leader, the chum of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, danced happily with the Queen of Britain; the Commonwealth was a model of tolerance. (This, at a time when any black man who stared at a white woman for too long could be lynched in the United States.)

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Ghana never left the Commonwealth. And by the Seventies, with revolutionary fervour ramping up across the developing world, the club had more than doubled its membership to nearly 30 nations.

If the legend of Elizabeth as the silent, passive doll Queen were true, the Commonwealth never would have worked. Her public inscrutability belied a deeply engaged person. Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, and the so-called Iron Lady of the Caribbean in the Eighties, said of the Queen that, “it’s obvious that she’s not just talking pieties. She’s interested, definitely interested, in what is happening in each of those countries”.

The Queen of the Commonwealth was not the mute Queen of postage stamps. She was articulate, she argued, she cajoled. The former Prime Minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara, put it like this: “If you don’t know what you’re talking about she’ll soon let you know that you’re not quite fully versed in what you’re talking about because she’s so knowledgeable.”

Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, knew this Queen, a version largely hidden from the rest of us: “Every prime minister, every president, and I’ve been up against some pretty radical ones, militant ones, ones that you might think probably don’t care too much for this all monarchical thing.” Even they, according to Ramphal, placed maximum importance “on those 15-20 minutes when they can sit down with the Queen and talk about their countries, their problems, because she knows them very well”.

Her ability to approach internecine conflict with wisdom and knowledge was never on greater display than in her attitude to the nation where she was staying on her 21st birthday: South Africa. A year after that speech, South Africa started introducing a series of laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; forced people of certain races to live in certain areas; and reinforced and expanded all pre-existing discriminatory practices in the country. These laws institutionalised the inferior status of black people. The word Apartheid entered the lexicon.

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In 1961, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth. The Afrikaner government saw the Queen as a symbol of British imperialism, and they wanted to be free to pursue their racist policies without hindrance. In 1986, Commonwealth leaders all decided, with the consent of the Queen, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Queen later developed a strong relationship with Nelson Mandela. He called her Elizabeth, and she called him Nelson. He was the only non-royal to call her by her first name. In 1994, four years after Mandela was released from prison, and in the year of its first ever democratic and multiracial election, South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth.

The Queen’s decades of service within the Commonwealth display a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the British empire and the postcolonial world. This is a story that is about more than conflict. To have the Commonwealth — that legacy of the Empire — embraced by leaders who also embraced Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx illustrates the complexities of the post-colonial relationship to Britain. These leaders detested white supremacy and brutal economic exploitation. But they also loved the Queen. Through the dignity of her character, she transcended hateful divisions.

Many of these post-colonial leaders, like Nkrumah, later degenerated into corrupt and authoritarian despots. Others, like Mandela, are universally acclaimed. But for most of them the Queen was a genuinely popular figure. A source of unity rather than oppression. An embodiment of the greatest virtues in a divided world: curiosity, compassion, grace and knowledge.

King Charles may not possess exactly the same qualities as his mother, but he is the custodian of a magnificent legacy. Despite the fact Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state last year, it is still a part of the Commonwealth. And I predict many more countries will want to join. And despite the bitterness of parochial diaspora activists, we have this to console ourselves with: our head of state, for 70 years, was a unifying figurehead across the world.

But the so-called “Holy Mowers” who maintain this beautiful spot are in something of a quandary about the very purpose of their existence: mowing. After all, this is “No Mow May” — a movement that began in 2019 in Britain and has taken off not just in this country but also in the US. It calls on mowers to give it a rest during the late spring as a way of allowing wildlife to be, well, a little more wild. Plants need pollinators and pollinators needs plants, so let the weeds return. Alas, its detractors think this creates an unholy mess, giving the dreaded green alkanet a free pass during this crucial growing month.

How we came to fall in love with the closely cut grass lawn is a long and fascinating story. Two years after my new church was opened in 1714, the landscape gardener Capability Brown was born. Known as England’s greatest gardener, Brown’s landscapes created the now familiar aesthetic of the English country house — Blenheim, Chatsworth, Burleigh — surrounded by clumps of trees, lakes, and vast swathes of cut lawn as far as they eye could see. Gone were the straight avenues of trees and geometric fountains; the new look was an imagined reconstruction of nature as God intended. Brown was not just copying nature; he was, some said, improving on it.

Styled as unaffected, the Brown look reflected the view that the English had of themselves: free and unmannered. In truth, it was just as mannered and even more expensive to produce than the more obviously artful and rectangular gardens that it replaced. And Marxists were right to point out that all the means of production, the way wealth was generated, was deliberately out of view. It was as though the aristocratic lifestyle could be built upon a few effortlessly grazing sheep. Later gardeners came to regard the Brown revolution as something of a cliché and a bit of a con.

But nonetheless, the idea that a little slice of paradise and individual freedom could be found in cut grass took hold in the most remarkable way. With the invention of the cylinder mower in the 1830s, the cut grass paradise was democratised. Even those moving from the country to the town could have a little patch of their very own Eden. Sport, too — golf, cricket, football — all required a mown surface. And as the British Empire spread its influence around the world, the lawn became a symbol of domestic success and tranquility.

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In the US especially, the lawn represented the bourgeoise American Dream, the promise of domestic happiness available to all. It mattered not that the climate was unconducive. Millions of gallons of water were redirected to keeping this promise alive. Fertilisers were invented to keep the weeds down. Hours and hours of maintenance were required. As Yuval Noah Harari said of wheat: it’s not that we domesticated grass, but that grass domesticated us. But No Mow May is something of a fightback. The lawn is being cancelled — not green enough and too imperialistic.

And what all gardeners know, of course, is that the weeds will inherit the earth. This is especially true in Kew churchyard. Among all the fading gravestones, our constant mowing is only a temporary and ultimately futile act of resistance. It’s what we think we ought to be doing as responsible stewards of the natural world. As if the natural world relied upon us for its preservation.

Though perhaps it does. On the other side of the cricket pitch from the church is the Kew Gardens’ Herbarium, containing over seven million dried plants. Kew Gardens also houses the largest collection of living seed and plant diversity on earth: 2.4 billion seeds are carefully stored, frozen or dried — a priceless insurance policy for a future time of ecological crisis. I could not be more aware that it is now science, not religion, that is building Noah’s Ark.

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At best, religions are a supporting act, taking our lead from others. The vision of some uniform, Capability Brown-inspired paradise has not helped us. We need different visions of how the natural world and the human aspiration for beauty and order might work together. And I suspect this will mean less carefully managed spaces and more appreciation of the serendipity of the wildflower meadow, with its bees and bugs and butterflies.

After all, a weed is simply a plant growing where it is not wanted. This has a parallel in Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as matter out of place. Mud tramped in from the garden becomes dirt in the kitchen. For Douglas, this idea of everything having a rightful place implies the existence of a kind of social order that is premised upon a map of the world in which everything exists in relation to that map. Religion has generally been very influential in drawing these maps, as Douglas brilliantly explained.

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Some maps are more helpful than others, though. The Capability Brown map of the world was profoundly unhelpful and, unfortunately, deeply influential. It set up an impossible view of the natural world and invited us all to participate in its aesthetic and social pretence. It was always a kind of aristocratic deceit. And as a consequence we came to view the real natural world — green alkanet and all — as some sort of uninvited intrusion. Unnatural even. That’s the irony.

No Mow May freaks some people out. Their garden doesn’t look like it should. The dreaded weeds are re-appearing. But what is wrong here is not the weeds, but the way we have come to think about our gardens and our natural spaces. What we need is not fewer weeds but a new map of the natural world and our place within it. We can redesignate them as plants. Learn to make your peace with them. Because when you are six feet under, they will still be growing there above you.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

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And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

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And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

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Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

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Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.

When to this rhetoric are added fanciful claims about the EU’s unique vaccine success (based on its “unique solidarity” — patently lacking) and its efforts to advance “the sovereignty of peoples” (which it is busily undermining), one is tempted to conclude that everyone knows this is just flim-flam to gratify its audience of Euro MPs. A dash of cynicism rarely goes amiss, and the simplest explanation is that Macron is facing an election in April, and wants to buttress his image as the philosopher-king of both Europe and France.

Macron is now the only tirelessly enthusiastic Europhile among France’s leading politicians. When he was elected in 2017, he was the only candidate standing on a “European” platform. That will be true again this year. It may seem a risky strategy, as the French electorate is no more Europhile than the British was. But the French, whatever their misgivings about the EU, are more resigned to it. Marine Le Pen crashed in the last presidential campaign when she could not explain how to get out of the eurozone, which is the crucial issue.

Besides, what most people in France feel about the EU does not much matter. In reaction to the parliamentary systems of the Third and Fourth Republics, the presidential system of the Fifth, designed for Charles de Gaulle, provides France with a “republican monarch” to provide national leadership, especially in foreign policy. This means doing what the elite thinks is in the national interest. De Gaulle put it memorably: how can you govern a nation with 246 sorts of cheese? The answer is by not being guided by the cheese-makers.

France, even more than most democracies, has government by an elite, practically a caste. I once asked a rising young French diplomat how it was that they all seemed to agree. He unhesitatingly said it was learnt at “Sciences Po”. The distinguished Institut des Sciences Politiques was deliberately set up in the 1870s, after a disastrous cycle of revolutions and defeats, to “create a brain for the people”. Sciences Po graduates, and those from other elite training schools, most famously the École Polytechnique and the École Nationale d’Administration (which Macron attended, after graduating from Sciences Po), still shape the brain that runs France. Unlike elite educational establishments in Britain or the United States — Oxbridge or the Ivy League, for example — these are smaller, more exclusive, and above all dedicated primarily to State service. Like a civilian Sandhurst or West Point.

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So while electoral tactics come and go, Macron is really the spokesman for a much older and deeper consensus. His Europeanism is more eloquent, but his views are little different from those of his predecessors. Part of this is a simple conviction that France is unique, and the legitimate cultural and political leader of Europe. De Gaulle famously wrote that he had always believed France dedicated “to an eminent and exceptional destiny”. As Harold Macmillan realised, when de Gaulle, “says ‘Europe’, he means ‘France’.” Macron’s Strasbourg speech, in similarly European language, reflects France’s historic fears and ambitions: plus ça change.

These fears have their roots in the catastrophe of 1870, when Prussia invaded, bombarded Paris, destroyed French primacy in Europe, and emerged as the new German Empire. Since then, relations with Germany have dominated French foreign policy, traumatically confirmed by two world wars. “France has a German policy, she has no other,” wrote a leading French commentator soon after the end of the Second World War. Her European policy is her German policy.

After 1870, it took 50 years for France’s strategy for recovery to be worked out. At first, there were bitter partisan divisions — bitter enough to get a leading politician shot leaving parliament — about whether true patriotism meant responding to defeat by turning away from Europe to gain colonies or concentrating forces on “the blue line of the Vosges”, the mountains that ran along the new border with Germany.

In the end, the French decided to do both, creating a global empire to buttress its power in Europe. In the Twenties, realising that Germany’s defeat in the First World War had not destroyed its power, and that France could not rely on British or American support, Paris proposed European integration.

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This was to be the means of both reconciling and controlling Germany. After a promising start, it failed during the Thirties. But the idea never went away, and the second defeat of Germany, in 1945, produced the same logic, especially when again Britain and America seemed, in French eyes, to be unreliable allies. European integration, culminating in the creation of the euro, was to be the principal means of taming German power — sweetened by fulsome expressions of friendship.

Macron’s speech shows that France’s grand strategy — the strategy of its governing caste — has been based on the same logic for nearly a century. Partnership with Germany within a European framework is the bedrock. And if Germany is unresponsive, the language becomes more enticing and the pressure more sustained. This time, Macron has told the European parliament that France and Germany have agreed to give it more power — the right to initiate legislation, hitherto the monopoly of the Commission. Not much doubt who is steering the ship.

And what of other allies? Russia — whether ruled by the tsars, the Communists or today’s plutocracy — has been a difficult but always tempting geopolitical partner: France’s principal ally from 1890 to 1917, and an ally again in 1935. And now? Macron says Russia must be negotiated with over Ukraine, to find a political compromise. Even more strikingly, he announces a “dialogue” with the Russians over the “collective security” of a new “European order”, a “security order”. This may permit the Western Balkans to join the EU, but that, he says, will require EU governance to become more centralised.

He sees the “vocation of our Europe” — of France, in other words — to be a “true balancing power”, which seems to mean more distanced from the Atlantic alliance. Part of this vision is of a new “alliance” between the EU and Africa, emphasising the connections between the two coasts of the Mediterranean, the core of the old French empire.

This is Gaullism, pure and simple. Pulling away from the “Anglo-Saxons”, emphasising the special relationship with Germany, flirting with Russia, influencing Africa. Unlike Britain, France has unashamedly clung to its imperial and post-imperial role, maintaining a military, political and financial presence in its former African colonies, legally converting far-flung island possessions into parts of France (and hence parts of the EU), and promoting la Francophonie, its Commonwealth equivalent. As noted earlier, since the 1880s it has seen its global role as complementary to its European status. European integration continues this strategy: to the outside world, France presents itself as the leader of Europe, and to Europe it presents itself as the Continent’s only global power, with nuclear weapons, overseas territories, and a UN Security Council seat. Such high-flown ambition might eventually prove illusory. But one has to admire the determination. There is no alternative plan: the die has long been cast.

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Where does Britain stand in the French vision? Macron referred to “ties of friendship” with “the British people” — but pointedly not with their government. To follow “a common path” after Brexit requires Whitehall to apply “in good faith” agreements on Northern Ireland and fisheries — the “condition for staying friends”. Any Brexiteer will reply that it is France that has lacked good faith over the Northern Ireland Protocol and fishing. No matter: Macron thinks he wields the EU as a big stick, and perhaps he does.

Brexit poses both a danger and an opportunity, as has been clear since 2016. Britain cannot be allowed to leave the EU successfully, or France’s European project is threatened. But if Britain came to accept some sort of subordinate status, conforming with the EU’s (and hence France’s) political and economic “common path”, France’s position would be strengthened. The resignation of Lord Frost, who had explicitly rejected this, caused rejoicing at the Elysée, where Liz Truss seems to be seen as a lightweight.

A former European Commissioner with a keen eye for history recently told me that he thought Britain and France had been engaged, since the beginning of European integration in the Fifties, in their third Hundred Years’ War. The first, ending in 1453, was won by the French. The second, ending in 1815, by the British. In the third, we still have another three decades to go.

Does Britain deserve obloquy for profiting so hugely from the Transatlantic slave trade, or credit for having abolished it? Statues of imperialists and slavers have been toppled and daubed and tossed into rivers. The Right, more rampant and paranoid than at any time since the war, denounces the ‘woke’ movement as a new and noxious threat to Western civilisation. Yet as far back as 1938, the great Lead Belly was already warning travellers to Alabama, “I advise everybody. Be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” But Belly’s warning was a long time ago.

Why has it all come alive again, and with such unappeased ferocity on both sides? The book that caught the zeitgeist in the midriff this year was Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland. It is never simplistic, always thoughtful, wry, and rueful as well as angry.

Sanghera comes from a family of Punjabi Sikhs and was brought up in Wolverhampton. He describes that upbringing in in his touching memoir The Boy with the Topknot. When he first went to school, he was unable to speak English, but he finished up at the great Wolverhampton Grammar School and then got a first in English at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He thus has the most intense imperial legacy, from Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech all the way back to the massacre of hundreds of Sikhs at Amritsar by the psychopathic temporary Brigadier Dyer.

In Empireland, he patiently explores that legacy: the loot in British museums (‘Loot’ is the Hindi word for the spoils of war, jocularly adopted by the British — a Pekingese dog found during the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking was christened Looty and sent home as a gift to Queen Victoria); the millions of post-war immigrants from the Commonwealth who have transformed England’s inner cities; above all, the abiding sense of the superiority and exceptionalism of the British race; and always in the background, the dark shadow of slavery, as abiding an embarrassment as it was profitable, best not spoken of in company — witness the silence of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park when their estates in Antigua come up in conversation.

Personally, Sanghera is grateful for everything that Britain has given him, and he acknowledges the formidable achievements of the British in India, up to and including the famous railways, one of the only vestiges of empire that ever make it on to TV, usually omitting the reality that the prime purpose in building them was to ferry troops quicker to suppress native disturbances and to carry British goods to the furthest corners of India at the cruel expense of native producers.

Sanghera refuses to tolerate the vainglorious, barely qualified praise of Empire from Right-wing historians and politicians, or their deliberate bleaching of our Island Story. Take David Starkey’s assertion, made in 2011, that “Britain is a white monoculture and schools should focus on our own history”. Sanghera’s deep-lying target is what he calls “imperial amnesia”, the pretence that the experience of the greatest empire ever known left no serious mark on the British psyche; a fifth of the world painted Peppa Pig pink, the English language the globe’s lingua franca — all this was a passing episode in our long history, which we shrugged off with a gracious smile.

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By Aris Roussinos

Outside the specialist literature, in the public sphere the whole experience has been muffled in a tactful silence as profound as the silence of the Bertrams. Now the argument has resurfaced with a vengeance — all the more toxic and unsettling for having been so long suppressed. At the many previous hauling downs of the Union Jack, would any royal personage have spoken as bluntly about the horrors of slavery as Prince Charles has just done on declaring Barbados a republic?

Nowhere can the extraordinary fluctuations in the British view of Empire be traced more vividly than in the rhetoric of Enoch Powell, Sanghera’s fellow-Wulfrunian whose shadow loomed so grimly over his childhood. Powell was devastated by the loss of India, but nevertheless wrote in his 1951 election address to the voters of Wolverhampton: “I BELIEVE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body.” But by the mid-1960s, he was claiming that the British Empire had been “a myth”, “a deception” and “an invention, all along”. That people had ever believed in it was “one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in political history”. He insisted that “England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire”.

His response to Dean Acheson’s wounding taunt that “Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role” was to sign up wholeheartedly to Macmillan’s application to join the EEC: “It is as a European power… that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect… This is Britain’s world-wide role, no less than that of France or Germany.”

Powell’s recoil from this new enthusiasm was even more violent. By the time of the first referendum in 1975, he had become apocalyptic about the dangers of staying in the EU: “Belonging to the Common Market… spells living death, the abandonment of all prospect of national rebirth.”

You might think that such an erratic record would disqualify Powell from being taken seriously as a sage. Far from it. It is because he publicly charted his zigzags with such melodramatic passion that he attracted and still retains such undiminished veneration; witness the volume published in 2012 to celebrate what would have been his hundredth birthday with contributions from Roger Scruton, Simon Heffer, Andrew Roberts, Iain Duncan Smith et al. For his wanderings were their wanderings too, his disillusion their disillusion. He taught them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

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In defence of defending empire

By Robert Toombs

For Brexiteers, the suppression of imperial memory becomes almost as important for the future of the nation as the promotion of the project was in its heyday. Imperialist hankerings have to be explicitly denied. In This Sovereign Isle, one of the few attempts by a serious historian to justify Brexit, Robert Tombs, who in 1975 voted to stay in, argues that the Empire never did us much good: “Having an Empire had not been the source of Britain’s power and wealth… Empire had been in many ways a political, strategic and economic liability.” He insists that Brexit is in no sense a furtive effort to recreate it.

On the contrary, it is in fact a crucial trope in the Brexiteers argument that it was the European Union that was underpinned by “imperial nostalgia”. For historians like Toombs, and his fellow Cambridge historian Richard Tuck, the EU is indistinguishable — or very soon will be — from the great empires of the past. The idea of voluntarily sharing a range of powers with other nations is unimaginable to them. The simplest shared code of practice is seen as a vile infringement of sovereignty.

For Brexit Minister, David Frost, who is fast becoming the last hero of the cause, divergence is king. If as Lord Frost and Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, have both admitted, the results so far seem less than satisfactory, that is because Brexit has not been properly tried, an argument familiar from old Communists disillusioned with an earlier god that failed.

This view of the nation sees Britain’s borders as an impermeable, indispensable protection of our national integrity. Up until the Fifties, Powell believed that “we must reduce or remove the barriers to free movement within the Empire of goods, of money, and above all, of human beings”. Now of course the free movement of human beings must be resisted without remorse: send them back, dump them on hulks in the Thames Estuary, send them to Albania, let them drown. Anything rather accept any obligation of humanity, let alone of empire.

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Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

This was not how the dream of disentanglement was presented. Once ‘out of Europe’, we would be free, nimble, our bounds would be boundless. What was not said, perhaps not even thought, was that the Brexit dream brought with it harsher implications, of wilful exclusion of others, of hostile vigilance.

Only Nigel Farage and the ultras were prepared to deploy that harsher language, which was why they had to be kept out of sight not to frighten decent folk. With all their faults, the old empires — the Roman, the Ottoman, the British — had a certain openness, a sloppiness about ground rules. Which is partly why half the ministers in the present government are the descendants of recent immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution as well as poverty. Palmerston defended to the hilt the somewhat sleazy character of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, who happened to be a British citizen by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. These days Pacifico would be lucky to get past immigration control.

It is because Brexiteer rhetoric depends on peddling a sanitised version of the national past that we must redouble our efforts to recover every scrap of that past — the years of Empire, yes, but the years in the EEC/EU too — and not brush over any of the peculiar institutions that have adorned or polluted those pasts, including the most peculiar institution of all, the mass transportation and enslavement of millions of our fellow human beings. With all its attendant sillinesses and petty intolerance, this is a struggle that needs to be played out to the end, until we understand better exactly where we have come from and who we are. Better woke than dead to the world.

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.

When Parliament then refused to pass the deal the following spring, Lord Ricketts, a former national security adviser and ambassador to Paris, claimed that May’s last-ditch appeal to Brussels for more time was “perhaps the greatest humiliation for a British prime minister since the Suez crisis… When can a British Prime Minister have cut such a lamentable figure at an international meeting?” Good question.

While a few Brexiteers have also made the link (Boris Johnson once said that if May’s deal went through, it would be “the greatest national humiliation since Suez”), the parallel has mainly attracted Remainers. It’s not hard to see why. While some are old enough for it to have been the defining moment of their youth, for others, it is simply a sophisticated way to state their prejudice that Leavers ignorantly voted for some sort of splendid imperial isolation — a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the historian Robert Saunders.

That has not stopped the FT journalist Philip Stephens from arguing (in his recent book, Britain Alone) that “Brexit, like Suez, was an attempt to chart the future by reaching back into the halcyon days of history,” the triumph of “an appeal to nostalgia over reason”. And David Lammy, who has accused “hard Brexiteers” of:

“still mourning Suez, Britain’s last fling of the colonial dice. Back then, Anthony Eden failed to recognise that Britain was no longer capable of launching a solo imperial adventure. Let us not fall for the same hubris today.”

But contrary to this stereotype, the Suez Crisis was not a lonely, self-inflicted error brought on by nostalgia. The reality is more complex and far more interesting.

The Suez crisis began, perhaps, at the UN’s General Assembly of 1955, when the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, extolled “the immense benefit the British Empire had been and was” in a conversation at the UN with the British foreign secretary, Harold Macmillan. The two men were bemoaning the recent decision by Egypt’s Prime Minister, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to buy weapons off Russia, after balking at the conditions the United States would attach to such a sale. The Americans had supported Nasser’s coup, but as their client turned against them, Dulles asked Macmillan “if we had enough troops to reoccupy Egypt”. Macmillan thought Britain had.

Once, it would have seemed impertinent to ask such a question. But Britain had emerged from the war deeply in debt; since the sterling crisis six years earlier, the nation had been in dire financial straits, because of an unsustainable balance of payments. After the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Macmillan had privately compared the cabinet to the “directors of a rapidly deteriorating concern. They dare not tell the shareholders the facts”.

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How Britain created the Middle East crisis

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A few months before Dulles and Macmillan spoke, Churchill — winged by a stroke in 1953 — had finally shuffled off into retirement. He was succeeded by his impatient understudy, Anthony Eden, who was also in no great shape: due to a bodged gastric operation, he was plagued by chronic pain. Macmillan’s report of Dulles’s sly enquiry as to whether Britain might intervene triggered a splenetic prime ministerial rant. “The big interest in the Middle East is ours, not America’s,” he said, annoyed by what he saw as the consequences of a cack-handed American intervention. “We are dependent on Middle East oil.”

The dependence was not just economic but financial: Eden was referring to the fact that the oil produced by Iraq and Kuwait was priced in sterling — a legacy of the fact that both countries, though never British colonies, had formed part of Britain’s informal empire. The Bank of England could always print currency to afford it, while sales to other countries provided a welcome boost to Britain’s holdings of foreign currency. The comparison of Suez and Brexit breaks down because in 1956 nostalgia played no part in British calculations. They were guided by fear of losing an ongoing advantage.

That fear had an important consequence. Based on another claim of Eden’s, that the “US has almost always been wrong about the Middle East”, the minutes of the meeting record an important decision: “We should not, therefore, allow ourselves to be restricted overmuch by reluctance to act without full American concurrence and support.” In mid-October, the British government made a crucial move. Without warning the Americans, it authorised military action to remove a Saudi force from a remote oasis, where it was preventing British oil exploration in Oman. The US had significant financial and strategic interests in Saudi Arabia, but the British found Dulles’s reaction, when he was belatedly told about the fait accompli, encouraging. He “did not like the news”, recalled one diplomat, “but he was not unpleasant about it.”

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The “Buraimi incident,” as this altercation was known, seemed so obscure as to be laughable at the time (it was the subject of a Goon Show sketch), but it set a precedent. Buoyed up by the ease with which they had routed the Saudis, the British now sought to press home their advantage by encouraging Saudi’s northern neighbour, Jordan, to join a regional military alliance with Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact. The heavy-handed British approach backfired and, barraged by incessant Egyptian radio propaganda, in March 1956 the king of Jordan sacked the British head of his armed forces, John Glubb, following rioting. Eden believed Nasser had engineered this coup. If Suez is a formative influence on today’s Remainers, then Eden had been scarred by Munich. Fearing the consequences of failure to deal with the Egyptian leader before he became too powerful, he told a close adviser: “It is him or us, don’t forget that”.

It was not just the British attitude to Nasser that was hardening: so was the United States’. In the spring of 1956, Dulles began talking of “ditching” Nasser; like FDR before him, and Donald Trump more recently, President Eisenhower was keen to swing his country’s support behind the Saudis, who had started to see the Egyptian’s republican ideas as a threat. The previous year the United States had promised to lend Nasser millions of dollars to enable him to build a new dam at Aswan. On 21 July, Dulles announced that the United States was pulling the loan. Nasser responded days later by announcing that he was nationalising the Suez Canal.

Eden felt his convictions about Nasser had been vindicated. The idea that he was alone in this — that Britain was isolated in its approach — is groundless. When news of Nasser’s move reached London, Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Said, happened to be in Downing Street at a dinner and worried that Nasser would only be emboldened by the takeover. “Hit him,” he advised Eden. “Hit him hard and hit him now. … If he is left alone, he will finish all of us.” So worried was Nuri by the news of the canal’s takeover that he even suggested encouraging the Israelis to invade Egypt.

Since being forced out of Palestine by a Jewish insurgency eight years earlier, however, the British had only the most perfunctory relationship with Israel. It took an old rival, and old ally, of Britain to bring the crisis to a head. Not that anyone, in drawing parallels with Brexit, would admit that France had anything to do with Suez.

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Unlike the British, the French had a strong relationship with Israel, and a direct imperial interest, since Nasser was supporting the insurgency in French Algeria. They opened secret talks with the Israelis that autumn. In mid-October, French representatives presented their idea to Eden: Israel would invade Egypt, giving Britain and France grounds to go in and order both sides to retreat from the canal. Precisely because he was unwilling to go it alone, Eden leapt at the French proposal. To allay old Israeli suspicions of Britain, the secret protocol summarising the arrangement was signed by representatives of the three conspiring powers. Madcap plot it may have been, but Suez was never a solo British plan.

The Israelis invaded Sinai on 29 October. The following day Britain and France, as they had secretly agreed, issued ultimatums to both Israel and Egypt and landed troops in Port Said on 5 November. The collusion was not hard to see, and under immense international and — more importantly — financial market pressure, which threatened to drain Britain’s remaining reserves, the two European powers were soon forced to abandon their military operation. The truth is that Britain lacked the confidence in 1956 to act alone. But had she done so, she might well have got away with the deception: it was high-altitude photos of French jets on Israeli runways that alerted Washington to exactly what was going on.

A sense of vulnerability led Britain and France to lash out. Britain, which owed millions to Washington, looked towards its creditor. France, on the other hand, turned to Europe as a way to preserve her empire from American predation. These complexities — in particular the role of money — are lost in the comparison of Suez and Brexit. But then its chief purpose has not been honest, but to denigrate the intelligence of Leavers.

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.

Writing in 1852, Dickens was satirising the dramatic failure of the 1841 Niger Expedition, the brainchild of the Quaker abolitionist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. Like other liberal abolitionists of the era, Buxton believed that the only way to stamp out the slave trade in West Africa was to penetrate the continent’s unexplored interior to establish model villages and trading settlements, where, under the influence of free trade and Protestant Christianity, African kingdoms whose economies had depended on slavery for centuries would be civilised into liberal modernity.

Yet like the fictional Borrioboola-Gha scheme, “which turned out a failure in consequence of the King of Borrioboola wanting to sell everybody — who survived the climate — for Rum”, the expedition, which departed with high hopes, popular acclaim and the fundraising efforts of British dignitaries from Prince Albert to Lord Palmerston, was an abject failure, with the “staggering cost of £79,143… borne by taxpayers”, the historian Richard Huzzey notes, “largely because the Whig prime minister, Viscount Melbourne, wanted to associate his faltering ministry with a popular anti-slavery project”. A quarter of the participants died of fever shortly after setting out, yet, “commissioned in the final gasp of public anxiety over slave-holding in Britain’s own West Indian colonies and as a desperate attempt to revive the current ministers’ anti-slavery credentials,” the precedent it set established the pattern for Britain’s later conquest of most of the African continent, an irony of history that does not seem to have entered the public consciousness today.

There is a timely lesson for us about mission creep and the unintended consequences of moral crusades in distant lands that the Victorian campaign against slavery highlights. For all that the topics of slavery, colonialism and imperialism have been discussed endlessly in the culture wars of the past few years — usually by conflating the three very different processes — the archetypal British colonialist in the crucial mid-19^th century period was not the sneering pith-helmeted figure of legend, but rather idealistic liberal and evangelical abolitionists, often Quakers, middle-class liberal women and free trade advocates, who genuinely saw British imperial might as a means to right the moral wrongs of distant societies of which they knew little.

As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys, endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.

The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the African continent took place in three very different stages. In the first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers, paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.

It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19^th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.

By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where  abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.”

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As with the humanitarian interventions of our own era, ideals of free trade, globalised capitalism, military intervention and the conversion of downtrodden natives to liberal Western ways were intertwined from the start. For Sierra Leone’s governor, Charles MacCarthy, the division of the colony’s unexplored forests into parishes run by the Church Missionary Society was the beginning of a process that would make “Sierra Leone the base from whence future exertions may be extended, step by step to the very interior of Africa”. As Everill notes, “colonisation was a developing anti-slavery ideology,” which “disrupted local economies, power structures, ideologies, and religions in much the same way that settlers in Australia or North America overcame the aboriginal peoples.”

Yet the failure of the Niger expedition radically altered the process by which the British conquest of West Africa took place. Instead of leading through example, the British Foreign Office and Admiralty found themselves drawn into an ever-widening series of military interventions to eradicate slavery at its source, which would lead inexorably, though unintentionally, to direct colonial rule. Firstly, the anti-slavery campaign of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron turned out to be almost wholly ineffective: the trade in enslaved Africans boomed over the course of its deployment as American and Spanish merchantmen, backed by their governments, refused the Royal Navy’s authority to board their slaving vessels.

Instead, the Royal Navy settled on a policy of eradicating the slave trade on the ground, sailing into coastal towns and villages to pressure their kings and chieftains to sign agreements banning the sale of slaves, and bombarding them and replacing their rulers when they did not. Bit by bit, driven by the unintentional logic of humanitarian intervention, Britain found itself the master of much of the West African coastline.

Similarly, in the forested interior, Sierra Leone’s “Afro-Victorian” middle-class descended from freed American slaves pushed the boundaries of their settlement into unexplored regions, dragging London’s writ behind them. As historians such as Philip D. Morgan have noted, the freed African-Americans who became Sierra Leone’s elite had acquired a frontier mentality of rugged individualism and capitalist enterprise from their American sojourn, and applied the same logic to Africa’s interior. For all the misgivings of politicians and civil servants in London, the boundaries of the Sierra Leone colony expanded as its black elites — who had, in Morgan’s phrasing, “rediscovered in Africa their true American selves” — pursued their manifest destiny into the forests, bringing them into conflict with as yet-unconquered peoples, and dragging the British state into military intervention on their behalf.

Over the course of the 19th century, the modest humanitarian goals of the Sierra Leone colony for freed slaves had evolved into the conquest of much of Nigeria, from the naval bombardment of Lagos in 1851, followed by its annexation in 1861, to the conquest of the mighty slaving kingdom of Benin in 1891 (whose spectacular looted bronze sculptures, the fruit of the Atlantic slave trade, remain in contested British custody today), and then the defeat of the country’s Muslim, slave-trading north towards the end of the century. Driving these conquests was the desire not just to bring Christianity but also the creed of anti-slavery.

Many Africans were bewildered by the shift in British policy, and the destruction of their traditional ways of life. As late as 1897, the Nigerian historian Philip A. Igbafe observed, the deposed Oba or ruler of the Benin kingdom pleaded from his jail cell for permission “to catch some Urhobo slaves for sacrifice as the rains were falling too incessantly for the good of the people and their crops,” a request the new British rulers denied. In what is today Ghana, the Asante king or Asentehene asked of the British “‘But if they think it is bad now, why did they think it was good before?’” and continued the trade in humans that had for so many centuries underpinned the kingdom’s existence, little thinking that it would lead to its downfall.

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Yet the unwillingness of African rulers to go along with the newfound abolitionist crusade of the British middle classes had set the stage for a reinterpretation of Britain’s mission from one of education and negotiation to one of military conquest and direct enforcement of liberal mores. As Huzzey notes, “blunt bigotry and frustration at African slave-dealing led the Spectator, in 1853, to moan that ‘British lives are lavished on the African coasts to negotiate and treat with the Black babies who can’t keep from selling each other and cheating us.’ The paper concluded that it was impossible to educate West Africans as ‘moral observers of the Anti-Slavery faith.’” Instead, the perceived intransigence of African rulers “moved Britain to kindle freedom with force”, setting the stage for the expansionist, racialised imperialism of the later 19^thcentury.

After a series of bloody Anglo-Ashanti wars, the historian Marika Sherwood notes, “The Asantehene was forced to sign a treaty, giving up any claims to the coastal forts and territories, and to his vassal states. The British thought this would be the end of Asante empire-building, but on his accession King Prempeh I slowly began to resuscitate his country and mobilise his troops. The British asked him to accept ‘Protectorate’ status. The King refused. The British invaded the kingdom, burnt down the capital city of Kumasi and looted it of all its treasures.” From Ghana to Nigeria, from its modest utopian Quaker roots in Sierra Leone, the logic of humanitarian intervention had led, step by unintended step, to the destruction and looting of native kingdoms and their replacement by direct British rule.

Yet by this point, whatever appeal direct humanitarian intervention on the African continent had held for Britain’s governing classes had long since evaporated. As the Colonial Secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, observed in 1861, “the ‘suppression of the Slave Trade’ is leading us into serious Territorial complications, on the whole W. Coast of Africa.” Prefiguring anti-interventionist voices today, the Times in 1863 demanded with exasperation,

“Who ever heard of a war in Gambia? What do we know of the King of Bedaboo, and why should we rejoice at having taught him a “severe lesson!” What harm has he done us and why should we be anxious to pay an additional income tax for the pleasure of killing . . . his sable subjects? As it stands it looks as much like a piratical inroad as any exploit we ever read about. . . . who ordered it? And who will pay for it? . . . Can it be possible after all the lessons we have received of the inflammatory character of little wars we can find ourselves in the thick of a ‘war upon Gambia’ without notice, and so far as we know, without reason?”

By 1865, the parliamentary select committee chaired by Charles Adderley was strongly advising against any further extension of direct control and urged British withdrawal from Africa, though only once the slave trade had been finally extinguished, an exit strategy whose conclusion seemed to stretch further and further out of reach. The financial benefits accruing to Britain were, contrary to modern perceptions, negligible: throughout the early and mid-19^th century, trade with the entire African continent made up less than 2.6% of Britain’s trade balance.

As even James Stephen, described by the historian Seymour Drescher as “the Colonial office’s most influential abolitionist undersecretary” warned, “[If] we could acquire the dominion of the whole of that continent, it would be but a worthless possession.” As the Times complained in 1873, “why do we retain or even extend what we call a Protectorate over this pestiferous coast?” And yet, as Huzzey notes, “Anti-slavery policies locked an unwilling state into obligations toward African colonies.” And then as now, it was the moral crusading of journalists that drove Britain into its next wave of imperial expansion.

The British military conquest of West Africa had led to the extinction of the international trade in enslaved Africans — British governors, wary of enraging local populations, still turned a blind eye to the institution of domestic slavery — yet the pacification of the coast pushed the focus of the slave trade deeper into the interior. “Arab” slave traders from the Sultanate of Zanzibar — often in fact Islamised Swahili-speakers — penetrated deeper and deeper into the unexplored regions of Central Africa in pursuit of forced labour for the clove plantations of Zanzibar and the date groves of Basra and Arabia, focussing the attention of British liberal abolitionists on the continent’s east. Into this situation strode the crusading figure of David Livingstone, whose mission into the continent’s unexplored interior, and lurid and harrowing depictions of Arab slave raids, awoke a new wave of popular abolitionist fervour.

Just as the British government was losing its taste for humanitarian intervention in Africa, letters from the long-lost Livingstone republished by his “discoverer”, the Welsh journalist Henry Morton Stanley, demanded to a captivated audience that the successes of the West African campaigns be reproduced “on the opposite side of the continent”, so that “no reasonable expense, that preserves us from contamination, should be esteemed a sacrifice” in extirpating “the open sore in the world”.

Driven by popular pressure that something should be done, “the Liberal government under Gladstone — a longstanding skeptic of anti-slavery violence — reluctantly sanctioned a mission to Zanzibar”, Huzzey observes. “In August, his ministry declared war on the East African slave trade in Queen Victoria’s speech opening a new session of Parliament. The cabinet approved negotiations for concessions that would allow the Royal Navy to suppress the slave trade effectually,” setting the scene for the conquest of East and Central Africa by first Britain and then the other European powers.

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The modern fixation on Rhodes’s more nakedly imperialist power grabs conceals the awkward truth that from Livingstone to Baker, Gordon to Lugard, Britain’s exploration and conquest of Africa took place under the banner of humanitarian intervention against slavery. From Zanzibar into Uganda, the Sudan and the depths of Central Africa, British abolitionist activism and rhetoric dragged British generals and administrators into wars against local rulers more or less against the government’s express orders, driven by popular fervour and the moralising exertions of what the British assistant secretary at Zanzibar termed “the period of cheap journalism”, wherein, as Huzzey notes, “complex political and economic struggles with African leaders could be easily reduced in reports home to stories of British officers fighting villains addicted to slave trading”; meanwhile the cruelties of the “Arab invasion,” and the conquest of nations could be chivalrically framed by its practitioners as “those of a gentleman defending a woman or child from an abusive ‘ruffian.’”

By the time of the 1884-85 Berlin Conference, called by Bismarck, and now seen as the beginning of the Scramble for Africa and the highpoint of European imperialism in the continent, the popular clamour by liberal and evangelical activists for anti-slavery conquests had established the principle that military intervention against African states and their replacement with European governance was not just legally permissible, but an overriding moral duty.

Where before anti-slavery activism had driven colonial expansion, now the veneer of anti-slavery action was cynically applied to win popular support for nakedly imperialist power grabs. When even as sinister an actor as King Leopold of Belgium framed his conquest of the Congo as a mission to extirpate slavery from the Dark Continent’s darkest reaches, he was lauded as a hero by the liberal press and abolitionist activists in Britain. As late as the early 20^th century, British anti-slavery activists were applauding the Italian conquest of Libya and Ethiopia, both ostensibly carried out to rid the countries of the stain of slavery. As Drescher notes, “antislavery became a major rationalisation for the legitimising and creation of European spheres of dominion” in Africa, whose effects have defined the continent’s subsequent history. As one anti-imperialist MP, Sir Wilfred Lawson, observed in opposing Lugard’s conquest of Uganda, “formerly we stole Africans from Africa, and now we stole Africa from Africans.”

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It is noteworthy that the recent historiographical reassessment of British and European colonial expansion in Africa in this crucial, mid-19^th century period is a direct product of historians observing the exact same processes at work during the past 30 years of American military hegemony and humanitarian intervention. As Hegel famously declared, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and perhaps it is only now that this strange period is itself passing into history that we can reassess the humanitarian impulses of our forebears, who were driven by similar noble aims into ever-widening and counterproductive moral crusades. As historians have noted, liberal women activists like the fictional Mrs Jellyby were central figures in establishing the current of moral indignation at home that pressured the British government into reluctant colonial expansion, in India as well as Africa, a parallel that can be clearly seen today in the reshaping of America’s Afghan war as a feminist cause.

It is worth remembering then, when we are lectured via Instagram stories or the lobbying of activist groups about the evils of slavery, colonialism and imperialism for which we must all now make penance, that much of the interplay of these three quite separate historical processes was carried out at the moralising behest of their direct forebears.

Unlike the moral clarity of propaganda, history is a series of ironies and ambiguities; in this case, the irony that, entirely contrary to the dominant popular narrative, the fervent moral certainties of today’s activists reflect precisely the same dynamics which led the British state, initially reluctantly, into the conquest of much of Africa for what seemed noble, humanitarian ends.

Like the poor, the Mrs Jellybys will always be with us: perhaps, now the second historical wave of humanitarian crusading is drawing to a close, we can limit the future unintended consequences of their activism, for our sakes as well as those of the unwitting objects of our imperial mercy.

As Biden observed, entirely correctly, “there’s nothing China or Russia would rather have, would want more in this competition than the United States to be bogged down another decade in Afghanistan”. Instead, he asserted, “this decision about Afghanistan is not just about Afghanistan. It’s about ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries.” Whatever the howls of outrage from America’s prestige opinion pages, the age of liberal imperialism is over: the time of nakedly realist great power competition has begun.

Yet Biden’s worldview, so outrageous for an American commentariat as recklessly jingoistic as John Bull magazine in its Edwardian prime, is supported by analysis from an unexpected quarter: that of the architect himself of both America’s War on Terror, and of the great slaughter in New York that precipitated it, Osama bin Laden.

Piecing together the themes of bin Laden’s various statements to the outside world in the years immediately before and after 9/11, a specific, concrete plan emerges, by which the “slave of God” — as the billionaire son of a Yemen-born construction magnate styled himself — would accelerate the collapse of the American empire through embroiling it in long, unwinnable and expensive ground wars in the Islamic world. This plan, bin Laden claimed, had formulated itself through his experience of the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, whose ignominious withdrawal from the country had shortly preceded their imperial collapse, events in which he himself had played a relatively undistinguished part.

In an interview conducted a month and a half after 9/11, bin Laden observed that:

“the Soviet Empire has become — with God’s grace — a figment of the imagination. Today, there is no more Soviet Empire; it split into smaller states and only Russia is left… So we believe that the defeat of America is something achievable — with the permission of God — and it is easier for us — with the permission of God — than the defeat of the Soviet Empire previously.”

Why would it be easier, asked the journalist, al Jazeera’s then-star reporter Taysir Alluni incredulously? Because, bin Laden replied, “we have already fought them — like our brothers who have engaged in battle with the Americans, as in Somalia. We have not yet found a significant force of note. There is a great aura about America, which it uses to scare people before it engages in battle.”

But, he claimed, the brief and inglorious American episode in Somalia showed that American power could not stretch to imposing order on insurgent forces far from home: “America left, dragging behind it tails of humiliation, defeat, and loss, without looking back; it retreated unexpectedly, and it forgot all that great media enthusiasm about the New World Order, and how it was the master of that order, and could do whatever it pleased.”

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This was not the first time bin Laden had used the example of Somalia to persuade sceptics of the logic underlying his plan. In his first interview with al-Jazeera three years earlier, after al-Qaeda’s twin bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which had killed more than 200 people, bin Laden noted that:

“We believe that America is much weaker than Russia, and we have learned from our brothers who fought in the jihad in Somalia of the incredible weakness and cowardice of the American soldier. Not even eighty of them had been killed and they fled in total darkness in the middle of the night, unable to see a thing.”

Even before then, in a 1997 interview with CNN journalist Peter Arnett, bin Laden noted that in Somalia, “after a little resistance, the American troops left after achieving nothing. They left after claiming that they were the largest power on earth. They left after some resistance from powerless, poor, unarmed people whose only weapon is the belief in God Almighty, and who do not fear the fabricated American media lies.”

Indeed, he added, claiming dubiously that veterans of the Afghan jihad had fought against the Americans in Somalia, “We learned from those who fought there, that they were surprised to see the low spiritual morale of the American fighters in comparison with the experience they had with the Russian fighters. The Americans ran away from those fighters who fought and killed them, while the latter stayed.”

In choosing Afghanistan as the location for the war with the United States which would, he believed, bring about its decline, bin Laden embroiled the Afghan people in a conflict not of their choosing, doubling the length of their civil war by another twenty years and inflating its butchers’ bill by 46,000 civilian deaths alone. And yet, with the easy confidence of a billionaire, he told Afghans in a video message that their sacrifice was worth it — and that “whoever doubts this should learn from the Russians how the blessed jihad destroyed their myth.” Because, bin Laden claimed, “the struggle is both financial and physical” so that even as the Taliban reeled under American bombing, “it is possible to strike the economic base that is the foundation of the military base, so when their economy is depleted they will be too busy with each other to be able to enslave poor peoples.”

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This emphasis on the War on Terror as a giant, entrapping money pit for the American empire runs throughout bin Laden’s messages. In his 2002 Letter to the American People, bin Laden taunted the inhabitants of “the worst civilisation witnessed by the history of mankind” that “it was easy for us to provoke this administration and lure it into perdition. All we had to do was send two mujahidin to the Far East to raise up a rag on which “al-Qaeda” was written, and the generals came running. This inflicted human, financial, and political losses on America without them even achieving anything worth mentioning, apart from providing business for their private corporations.”

Indeed, in his critique of America’s conversion of the War on Terror into a vast and lucrative wealth-creation scheme for the military-industrial complex, bin Laden either echoes or prefigures the identical critiques of American anti-interventionists of both Left and Right, from Bernie Sanders to Trump’s previous, anti-interventionist incarnation.

As bin Laden boasted, the massive borrowing needed to finance the wars “truly shows that al-Qaeda has made gains, but on the other hand it also shows that the Bush administration has likewise profited. Anyone seeing the enormity of the contracts won by dubious large corporations, like Halliburton and others connected to Bush and his administration, can be certain of that. But the reality is that it is you, the American people and your economy, who are losing.” For “we are continuing to make America bleed to the point of bankruptcy, by God’s will,” he asserted.

Yet it was only the presence of America’s then-Republican government, surely a gift from God, which enabled this situation: “the White House leadership, which is so keen to open up war fronts for its various corporations, whether in the field of arms, oil, or construction, has also contributed to these remarkable results for al-Qaeda.” Indeed, he mocked, “to some analysts and diplomats, it seems as if we and the White House are on the same team shooting at the United States’s own goal, despite our different intentions.”

No wonder, then, that Biden has similarly invoked the vast cost of the wars — two trillion dollars in his estimate — in bringing about their end. But even this colossal sum may be an understatement. As Fortune noted recently, this figure does not include the interest payments on the loans taken out to prosecute the war, nor the benefits paid to the survivors of the more than 7,000 American dead. Nor does it include perhaps the greatest single expense: the medical bills for the war’s more than 50,000 wounded veterans, which may alone total $2.3 trillion by 2050.

All told, claims Fortune, citing Brown University’s Costs of War project, the real bill of the War on Terror, including the lesser engagements in Yemen and Syria, may end up closer to eight trillion dollars, the effect of which American taxpayers have not yet faced, as “almost the entire cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars has come from borrowed money, much of which has yet to be repaid”.

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Among America’s creditors is, of course, China, which made use of the West’s overriding distraction with winning over mountain village chieftains in the wilds of Afghanistan, with trying and failing to install a functioning liberal democracy in Iraq and then with destroying the Islamic State caliphate the invasion spawned to accelerate its rise to global industrial dominance. It is surely no accident that only now that the War on Terror is winding down, competition with China has finally intruded into the American foreign policy consciousness, despite being mocked as eccentric or even racist when expressed by then-presidential candidate Trump as the empire’s overriding challenge.

Even in the new Cold War over infrastructure and state capacity, perhaps the battleground on which wavering nations will be competed for, the money wasted on the failed wars in Asia could, as the Institute of Policy Studies thinktank observes, “have solved multiple problems in the U.S., like erasing all student debt for $1.7 trillion [or] decarbonizing the entire electricity grid for $4.5 trillion.”

But we are where we are. The twenty failed years of war, debt and distraction may not yet have led to America’s collapse in the manner bin Laden eagerly anticipated, but it certainly set the then-sole superpower at a disadvantage in preparing for the coming competition over its right to global hegemony. As Biden noted in his speech announcing the withdrawal, abandoning the Afghan adventure was necessary because “we need to focus on shoring up America’s core strengths to meet the strategic competition with China and other nations that is really going to determine our future.” Returning to this theme in his speech justifying the chaotic scenes in Kabul, he reiterated that “the world is changing. We’re engaged in a serious competition with China… We have to shore up America’s competitiveness to meet these new challenges in the competition for the 21st century,” and “as we turn the page on the foreign policy that has guided our nation the last two decades, we’ve got to learn from our mistakes.”

But can America do so? Their foreign policy establishment certainly seems averse to learning any lessons from two decades of failure, even if ordinary voters overwhelmingly support Biden’s diminution of America’s historical mission. It is not obvious that a GOP establishment responsible for the manifold strategic disasters of the twenty-year war can legitimately criticise Biden’s decision to end it, especially not when its last president rode to power partly on the same platform.

Yet even bin Laden’s purported killer, a SEAL operative-turned conservative talkshow celebrity and anti-masking activist, maintains his brand by asserting that “It baffles me right now that we’re even considering negotiating with the Taliban … Why don’t we just go kill them?” — to the applause of American conservatives who applauded Trump’s anti-interventionism just as passionately when the random spinning wheel of America’s culture war was calibrated to reward different incentives.

For al-Qaeda itself, America’s endless internal political conflict, its deepest malaise, is nothing but a cause for crowing celebration. In a recent propaganda video, America Burns, an adaptation of a previous magazine article, al-Qaeda surveyed the American political scene, crowing at the internal divisions of a “decaying polity” on the “verge of collapse”. In al-Qaeda’s framing, America is teetering on the edge of civil war. Its vast security apparatus has increasingly been directed onto American voters themselves as the combination of crude populism and the reactive collusion between the security state and “the liberal press that controls the American media industry” raised the country’s tensions to boiling point. As a consequence, America’s “usury-based economy” is merely “an inflated balloon ready to implode”, serving only “the corporate robber barons” and “Communist China.” Indeed, they boast, “It was Allah’s wisdom that the fourth plane whose downing was ordered by Dick Cheney on the 11th of September did not reach its target, and Americans were left to destroy the edifice of their democracy with their own hands.”

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So what can be said of America’s standing twenty years after 9/11? Strategically, the hegemon appears a strange oxymoron, a global military empire which cannot win wars. It can kill hundreds of thousands of people and cause untold destruction — generally with the very best and noblest of intentions — but is seemingly unable to deploy the overwhelming military force on which its global position depends in a way that advances its interests. Given its military caste was unable even to manage a bloodless withdrawal from an airfield it controlled under a timetable it itself set, who can bet confidently that they would emerge the victor from a struggle against a competent and prepared near-peer adversary like China?

Only a reckless gambler, or the British government, would be happy with such a high-stakes throw of the dice. Politically, America’s divisions are a cautionary tale rather than an example to the world it still claims to lead; if the US still retains its status as the global standard-bearer for liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is not as enticing a prospect as it once appeared.

Yet America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, like the withdrawal from Iraq — which, after a decent interval to avoid the appearance of being pushed out by the Iranian-backed militias the war empowered, seems certain to follow — does not herald the end of American power. It was the wars themselves that were the trap, as bin Laden made clear time and time again, and their ending is a necessary moment of rebalancing to focus on the far greater challenge ahead. In this, we can say Biden was the president the American empire needed, even if his supporters didn’t realise that was what they were getting: a cautious realist brought to power by a liberal-imperialist establishment, and a broadly competent manager of retrenchment, and objective decline.

It is therefore wrong to claim — as Tom Tugendhat and others have — that the withdrawal from Afghanistan is America’s Suez moment, not least because Suez was a military victory for Britain. It would be more apt to view it as America’s Singapore, a failure of planning and overconfidence which heralded the collapse of imperial power in vast swathes of Asia, yet a moral and psychological defeat more than a terminal strategic one. The Suez moment, if it comes, still lies over the horizon.

The lustre of the American empire has been tarnished, but the core underlying structure may hold good for decades yet; if America has lost its claims to global leadership, it has also lost its desire to press them. In abandoning America’s failing wars to focus on its decaying infrastructure and the great power competition that will now define its future, Biden has, perhaps, twenty years after the carnage of 9/11, finally exorcised bin Laden’s ghost.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

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The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

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Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

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In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.

That was some time ago. More recently, the last time the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, in 1996, they found a previous president, Mohammed Najibullah, at the UN compound in Kabul. He, too, had been a puppet leader, supported by the Soviets. The Taliban seized him and tortured him and his brother to death, castrating him at some point. Their naked bodies were dragged through the street and hanged outside the presidential palace, as a warning to the populace. As a considered insult, funeral prayers for Najibullah were forbidden in Kabul.

On August 16^th this year, the American president Joe Biden gave a televised speech justifying his decision to withdraw his troops. Much of it was devoted to complaining about the conduct of the Afghans — the ones who had been left high and dry. “Afghanistan’s leaders gave up and fled the country,” he claimed. It would have been true with the addition of the word “some” — Hamid Karzai, for instance, stayed where he was, in Kabul. And if the president, Ashraf Ghani, took the opportunity to seek safety in the UAE, it may have been the memory of Najibullah’s grisly fate that encouraged him to flee. Or the fate of Shah Shujah. Biden, on the other hand, appeared entirely ignorant of how things go and have gone in Afghanistan. Ignorance is the general condition of many anti-imperialists in the West, and Afghanistan has paid heavily for it.

I am a novelist by profession. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself inexplicably possessed by a subject. I couldn’t understand it. I had very little interest in historical novels. I had never been to Afghanistan. But there was no alternative: I felt under a compulsion to write a novel about the First Afghan War.

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The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, replacing the Emir, Dost Mohammed (who fled) with Shah Shujah. Two years later, forces loyal to Dost Mohammed routed the British, killing almost all of them on their retreat. Dost Mohammed regained his throne and kept it.

Nobody, in the late 1990s, could understand why I was writing this. I could only shrug. I could see that something important was happening in Afghanistan while I was writing, but I submitted to the compulsion rather than investigate parallels. Very strangely indeed, at one point I had the unarguable conviction that my hero, in 1839, should look up into the sky and see jet planes flying westward. It made no sense, and it had to be done.

The novel was finished, and the bound proof was delivered. It was September 10^th, 2001. The next day I switched the television on, and understood what The Mulberry Empire had wanted to say.

At this time, I’d also been writing a weekly column for the Independent, and though I seemed like an unserious person to the editors, they occasionally let me write something about Afghanistan if there was nothing else going on. These are curious to read now.

I wrote that, when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in March 2001, it was a harbinger of much worse acts of destruction. After the war started, mindful of Dost Mohammed’s tactics in the 1830s, it was absolutely clear to me that the Taliban had usefully melted into the mountains to regroup patiently. In an interview in March 2002, I complained with comic exaggeration that rather than an imperialist project, the West in Afghanistan was “going there for three months, sending sandwiches and then leaving again, which is a recipe for disaster”. Quite soon after, I wrote that in the end of our Afghan adventure, “when it comes to the point, we can evacuate in shame and dishonour”. And so it has proved.

All this was perfectly obvious to a fairly lazy novelist sitting in South London. Why the sequence of events has proved so astonishing to every Western commentator and politician is an interesting question, and unlike many things said to be an interesting question, this one has a fairly easy answer. They don’t know anything.

This is not much of an exaggeration, as Biden’s amazement at Ghani running for safety instantly shows. What has primarily driven all political decisions in the absence of understanding is something universally agreed upon. Imperialism was a very bad thing. No-one must ever be able to describe us, now, as imperialists. We must “start a conversation about Empire” — since this demand came fifty years after Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica was a bestseller, this did not quite mean what it seemed to.

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There was plenty of very interesting work being done on empire, but not much of it seemed to enter into the “conversation” — neither Srinath Raghavan’s exceptional study of India’s transition from empire through the experience of World War II, nor Amartya Sen’s lucid understanding of how Empire both shaped and went on restricting India.

Instead, a soothing bromide like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland was much preferred by the lumpenintelligentsia, however ill-informed or misleading. Sanghera’s approach to his subject was summed up by his account of the “brutal truth” that the Koh-i-Noor diamond ended up in the Crown Jewels after being seized from Ranjit Singh. He fails to mention that Ranjit Singh’s family had owned it for all of 36 years, having seized it from Shah Shujah as the price of hospitality. Still, the evils of imperialism emerge consolingly from the half story Sanghera tells.

What lies behind Biden’s decision is a horror of what people might think of us. This is never going to lead to a stable position. People might think that an unstable and wicked foreign state needs to be dealt with. People might also think that putting things right by moving in and running is wicked imperialism. The end result is that the West decides to move in; after a while, they get bored and nervous of bien pensant opinion; their President declares that twenty years’ presence is a “forever war” and the only solution is to run away, and anyway, look how expensive it’s been. We tried to get them to do stuff our way for, like, forever, and my God they just wouldn’t. Their fault, obviously.

Since there is clearly no appetite for an open-ended imperial commitment, with a viceroy in the Bala Hissar, the only realistic option would have been never to have engaged in the first place.

“Hang in there, sisters,” a groovy Greek commentator advised the women of Kabul last week, and that seems to be about the limit of our interest. The old imperialists, appalling as they were to our eyes, at least took the trouble to find out about these cultures and talk to them. Sathnam Sanghera sneers at the limit of engagements of the imperialists who were to be found “dining on curry and arak, chewing betel and smoking hookahs, forsaking beef, donning dhotis and growing moustaches.”

I doubt Sanghera’s knowledge of Pushto and Dari is as confident as Alexander Burnes’s, however, or his Sanskrit up to that of William Jones. I suspect, on a lighter level, that those imperialists who dined on curry were a bit better informed than the commentator in the Washington Post who, from an impeccably bien pensant position, informed his readers this week that Indian food is “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based on one spice”.

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We are never, now, going to be able to have an honest conversation about Empire. It would now be quite impossible to say on paper, for instance, that Fiji tried to join the British Empire in 1852 and was turned down flat. Or to talk about the establishment of the medical school in Agra in the 1850s. Or to suggest, as I did, that the heroic ability to fight off imperial annexation, whether in the 1830s or the 2000s, may carry something of a cost.

The current confused state of affairs is that we are perfectly certain that wrong is being done elsewhere, and something must be done, and, also, it would be terribly wrong to do anything but run away in order to put that wrong right, or at any rate excuse ourselves from being called names.

I dare say that the Taliban are going to settle in for an extended period of rule after a certain amount of initial bloodshed, just like Dost Mohammed on his glorious return. There was always considerable tension between them — parochial, tribal, Afghanistan-focussed — and the sophisticated internationalists of al-Qaeda they found themselves hosting. They might not want to go down that path again, and the West will stick to mouthing platitudes and leaving the men, women and children of Afghanistan in the situation they find themselves in.

What’s the alternative? Learn something about the long history and culture of those men, women and children? Talk to them in their own languages? That’s never going to catch on.

Before planting a single bulb, you need time and patience to learn about the different types of terrain, shrubs and climates. Only after you have acquired that foundational knowledge can you decide what you wish to grow. But even then, it’s all too easy for the vagaries of the weather to wreak havoc on your plans, for you to lose faith and pull the plug. Yet failure isn’t guaranteed; with a bit of persistence, your original target could still be reached.

Consider the US government’s attitude towards Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty years since 9/11. It has invested so much in terms of lives, injuries, morale and money on its campaigns in the Middle East. At the same time, paradoxically, it has learned an extraordinary amount. More was achieved than met the eye. But just as green shoots were beginning to emerge, America gave up.

Joe Biden appears to be pivoting away from almost every key decision made by his predecessor, for no other reason than the fact that he was a Republican. US foreign policy, which should be a long-term strategic investment, is falling victim to the perennial inter-party struggle between the Republican and the Democratic Parties.

It was not always like this. In the late 1940s — a period now so remote that few living Americans can remember it — the US was starting to face the full extent of the Soviet threat. The new President, Harry Truman, took a far harder line towards Stalin than his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. But until the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, both Democrat and Republican administrations opposed communism.

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Yes, fellow-travellers and spies still existed. But largely there was a remarkable degree of bipartisanship, and its importance should not be overstated. Across the world, every political leader knew that the US would continue to pursue a consistent foreign policy, no matter who was in the White House. If the Soviet Union intervened anywhere, the United States would seek to thwart its efforts.

Intellectually, too, this bipartisan support for the broad contours of US foreign policy made it easier for those abroad — friend as well as foe — to predict how America would act in a given situation. This helped reduce the chance of a catastrophic miscalculation. Certainly, some presidents were “tougher” on communism than others, but a new administration did not rip up a previous administration’s policies out of spite.

So when did it all go wrong?

On the campaign trail in 2008, Barack Obama set a precedent when he declared his intention to reverse the key foreign policy decisions of the George W. Bush Administration, promising “to remove US combat troops [from Iraq] within 16 months, leaving behind a residual force with limited responsibilities”. The effects of this withdrawal are well-documented — the most serious being the rise of Isis.

Eight years later, Donald Trump responded by resolving to do all he could to “dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran” — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which was portrayed by top officials in the Obama Administration as their biggest diplomatic achievement. And four years after that, Joe Biden indicated he would reverse key foreign policy decisions of the Trump Administration, particularly with respect to Iran and Saudi-Arabia. The Biden Administration has also decided to not only pull out of Afghanistan — prioritising haste over competence — but also to resuscitate the Iranian JCPOA deal, despite unrelenting provocations by the Iranian regime.

Indeed, the end of bipartisanship was all but confirmed in May, when White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki delivered a scathing verdict on the Trump Administration’s efforts in the Middle East: “Aside from putting forward a peace proposal that was dead on arrival,” she said, “we don’t think they did anything constructive, really, to bring an end to the long-standing conflict in the Middle East.”

In reality, last August’s Abraham Peace Accords represented an extraordinary step forward for the Middle East. The UAE and Bahrain recognised Israel’s right to exist, and with it the need for Arabs and Jews to join forces against the existential threat posed by Iran.

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As for this summer’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, it should be noted that the country was far from stable when it was handed over to the Biden administration — though it was certainly not so dire as to justify a hasty withdrawal of the remaining US troops. Indeed, far more concerning for America’s security is another development over the past decade, something rarely noted in the American media: that is, the discernible leadership change that has occurred within several countries of the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf States.

For a long time, America’s relationship with Middle Eastern countries centred around the question of oil — and the vast fortunes the West hoped to extract from it. But during this period, US diplomats had to negotiate with men who, after making assurances, would then go home and do nothing. Combined with a frequently oppressive treatment of women, and widespread anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda, the Arab status quo was more threatening to American interests than supportive of them. Later, when confronted with their financing of jihadist groups, these “diplomats” would deny any involvement, no matter how strong the evidence.

Today’s leaders in the Middle East are quite different, whether in the UAE, Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. This is especially true when it comes to their key advisers, many of whom have been educated in Britain and America, and seek a future in which a more humanist, pluralistic Islam emerges to challenge the fundamentalists. Financing radical Islamist ideology abroad — to say nothing of jihad — is no longer on the agenda. Instead, the focus is on developing the framework of a modern economy.

But to do this, Middle Eastern governments are fighting a number of opposing power dynamics in their own societies, including jihadists, Wahhabis and traditional tribal interests. All of this takes time. Nevertheless, one can see that real change is happening, particularly in terms of the role of women.

All this and more is now being undone by the Biden administration — and the result will not be that Americans sleep more peacefully in our beds. Rather, if the jihadists regain control of Afghanistan, or if violence escalates in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon, neither Europe nor America will be spared the consequences. Any additional instability in the Middle East will produce an enormous refugee flow, as happened following the rise of Isis and the collapse of Libya following Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow.

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How can this be avoided? Well, America’s eventual success in the Cold War surely proves that foreign policy needs to be a long-term effort. Strategy cannot be made on the campaign trail. If US policy is reversed every four or eight years, America is bound to lose — with the Chinese Communist Party being the main beneficiary. For in mixing elements of capitalist efficiency with authoritarianism, the CCP benefits from a long-term geopolitical outlook and strategy.

Beijing is already exploiting the power vacuum in Afghanistan, while in Pakistan Chinese influence has succeeded in pressuring the prime minister to downplay the horrific mistreatment of the Uighurs. In the Middle East, too, the CCP is wooing governments with the familiar offer of investment in infrastructure with no political strings attached.

Under such circumstances, what country in the world would decide in favour of a strategic alliance with the US? If every incoming American administration gleefully shreds the foreign policy of the Administration that preceded it, why would its strategic adversaries not exploit this vacillation to their advantage?

After forty long years, the consistency of Cold War containment ultimately brought victory. The subsequent inconsistency of America’s foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is having the opposite effect. And under Biden, that shows no sign of changing.

The US has promised to remove all its forces from Afghanistan by 11 September this year, and there is something astonishing about the world’s hyperpower agreeing to a date that will become doubly resonant not of American victory but of American failure. Were America leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of spent blood but with a thriving, stable Afghan society, then it is possible that the whole exercise could still have been marked up as a success. Instead, the opposite is true.

After two decades of insurgency, open warfare and betrayal, the US and her allies are leaving an Afghanistan that could be overwhelmed by the Taliban at any moment. Only yesterday, just hours before Boris Johnson announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan, Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff, revealed that the Taliban now holds “nearly 50% of the rural districts”.

Suhail Shaheen, the Islamist group’s spokesman, this week warned that all foreign troops must obey the withdrawal deadline — a demand that the Biden administration has so far displayed every indication of following. Yet it would be wrong to think Biden is solely to blame. As wildly different administrations have come and gone in the past two decades, a vacillating commitment to the Afghan operation has remained a constant.

Perhaps it is inevitable that when a conflict goes on for so long, people, including politicians, eventually switch off. But even without that, I suspect that many would have tired of the Afghanistan war long before this grim season finale. For the truth is that if there is no point in fighting wars you’re going to lose, there is even less point in fighting wars you’re going to lose slowly.

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In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict. The US and her allies went in to ensure that Al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups would never again be able to have a country they could call home and from which they could plan attacks on the West. The allied bombing campaigns and ground operations wound up the first stages of that operation successfully and in good time.

And then, within the first year, the mission creep began. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban merged into an understandable blur in the eyes of the allies. The borders of Afghanistan and her neighbours were more porous than our generals expected, and as the conflict became entrenched within the country, it also seeped out. All the while, America and her allies failed to create anything that resembled civil society.

It was famously, if erroneously, claimed in 1883 by Sir John Seeley that Britain acquired her empire in “a fit of absence of mind”. America today has spent her time as the world’s leading superpower attempting not to be accused of the same. But while the US has often been criticised by her enemies for “empire-building”, the country’s problems on the world stage have largely been caused by her unwillingness to do any such thing.

If you are going to invade a country like Afghanistan and attempt to transform its society in the space of a few years — or in this case decades — then your military, diplomatic service and political class all must contain people who wish to engage in that activity; people who are fascinated with the local culture, are willing to learn the language and are eager to live among its people and to show leadership if needs be. To put it simply, if you are going to acquire an empire then you need empire-builders.

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For better or worse, this is not an American instinct. Its military does not want to remain in control of large countries thousands of miles away from home. Its diplomats have no special vision for how these societies might realistically look. And its political class professes its desire to get out as swiftly as possible even as they become more embroiled in conflict. Whether it is Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, all wanted to get out of the mess they had inherited. Yet all professed commitment while dreaming of abandonment. And now we see the results.

Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.

After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions  and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions. That isn’t to say that the UK would have been any better if it had attempted such missions alone. Simply that America has repeatedly demonstrated herself to be eminently capable of starting fights while being profoundly disinterested in actually winning them.

Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or “operational ease”. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started. It had the resources and the technology, certainly. But without the personnel to make a success of it, that’s meaningless. The country had fallen for the pottery barn rule of intervention (“You break it, you own it”), despite having no wish to own the countries it intervened in and forgetting that in warfare it is perfectly permissible to go in, break a lot of things and then leave.

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That is what America should have done in Afghanistan: gone in, carried out some punitive strikes, made an example of her enemies and then left. Would it have still had to return to the country from time to time? Most certainly. Would it have been able to do everything it wanted to do from 20,000 feet? Almost certainly not. But it would have beaten two decades of American soldiers having to give up their lives for stretches of road which their colleagues — and eventually their government — would shortly abandon.

So perhaps it is inevitable that the stories emerging from Afghanistan are greeted quietly. They stir quite a cocktail of feelings: inevitability, boredom, disappointment, shame.

Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India puts the kibosh on these assertions. In it, Roderick Matthews argues that there was no fixed plan, either in the inception of British India or the hasty exit; the vaunted connection between the British and Indian economies was marginal at best; and though the rise of racial supremacism was a feature of the cultural landscape of Victorian England, the colour hierarchy in India had roots prior to the 19th century, and was caught up in a roiling vortex of broader currents in the Western world.

Matthews, who has written extensively on British India, contends that while the jewel in the crown was a glittering signal to the world of British power, it did not make that power. And yet he presents little coherent explanation for these centuries when the decisions made by the British gave us the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan. Peace, Poverty and Betrayal would have us think that these were incidental, but even without a plan, the decisions made by India’s colonial overlords have shaped the lives of 25% of the world’s population.

In the realm of British-Indian historiography, the centuries between 1600 and 1947 are divided into three neat subunits. The East India Company’s (EIC) era of assimilationist age of “White Mughals”, to use William Dalrymple’s phrase, is followed by an evangelical Christian one, with the British Raj closing out a three-act tragedy. To Matthews, the overarching themes applied to justify these three eras can be forced and misleading, overly reductive. I take his point.

He kicks off the narrative conventionally enough in 1600, when the East Indian Company (EIC) was founded, and ends it in 1947, when the British Raj transferred power to the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. In Peace, Poverty and Betrayal, the EIC never transcends its 17th-century origins, when it was a tool of the British monarchy battling the Portuguese and Dutch on the high seas, skulking around the margins of the Mughal Empire to obtain minor trading concessions. Despite the later pomp and circumstance, Matthews argues persuasively that the EIC remained an institutionally weak organisation from its beginning to its very end.

The nature of the EIC for most of its history can be illustrated by the Child’s War of the 1680’s, when it first confronted the Great Mughal directly. The conflict did not go well for the EIC, and eventually a surrender was negotiated where the company’s envoys prostrated themselves before Emperor Aurangzeb and paid a substantial indemnity. It is easy to forget that for generations, British merchants and soldiers were almost beneath the notice of the rulers of India.

How, then, did the British become masters of the subcontinent by 1800? Well, Robert Clive conquered Bengal for the EIC at the Battle of Plassey in 1757. But again, this was not part of any plan. Clive looted what would today be billions of pounds, and was put on trial by Parliament for his actions. Clive’s protégé, Warren Hastings, was impeached by Parliament for extortion, embezzlement and committing judicial murder against a personal enemy. The fall of India to the EIC was a conspiracy of individual greed rather than a coordination of imperial power.

Clive and Hastings’s ignoble careers illustrate the institutional capture of the EIC, where they burdened the company with quasi-imperial responsibilities and risks, while personally hoarding the gains. No surprise that in 1772 the British taxpayers bailed out the EIC, extending a loan to stave off bankruptcy.

But British hegemony in India was born of more than the private interests of rapacious aspiring nabobs. The total chaos of the mid-18th-century Mughal collapse was such that India fell into their laps. In the war of all against all that defined India in the 18th century, Clive and Hastings were only exceptional in that they were British. By the second half of the century, India was divided between warring Mughal vassals bickering over who could manage to hold the emperor hostage.

Across the vast centre of the subcontinent, an array of warlords allied to create the Maratha Confederacy, which persisted as a power across the whole of the 18th century. Though lionised by modern Hindus for defeating Muslim invaders, at the time the Maratha playbook of raids geared toward looting and destruction left only fear and loathing in its wake. The Maratha invasion of Bengal in the 1750s resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Yet while men such as Clive and Hastings clearly operated purely on the basis of selfishness, a widely agreed fact, their leadership of the EIC arguably brought relative peace to the Indian subcontinent. Matthews notes that during the 1857 Indian Rebellion, the cities of Bengal stayed loyal to the EIC and the British, as did most of the native princes. Both factions preferred the peace of British India to the potential chaos — something akin to China under the warlords — that might have been unleashed by a rebel victory.

Nevertheless, Peace, Poverty and Betrayal chronicles the gradual disillusionment of India’s forward-looking urban elite with British rule, contrasted with the complacent satisfaction of the innumerable maharajas. By the time of the Indian Rebellion, a modernising native professional and capitalist class had emerged. When EIC governor-general William Bentinck banned sati, the ritualised burning of widows, in 1839, Indian objections were minimal. In fact, Ram Mohan Roy, a prominent Bengali cultural reformer and wealthy financier, had campaigned for banning the practice.

This cultural liberalisation within India in the 19th and 20th centuries was not just a tone-deaf top-down imposition from the Anglo-Indian elites, but a process that occurred in concert with native professionals. Much of the urban elite of India was educated in the British system, realising Thomas Babington Macaulay’s vision of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the first leaders of India and Pakistan, both trained as lawyers in London.

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The leadership of the Raj did remain the exclusive preserve of British aristocrats— though the EIC officers routinely mixed with and assimilated into the conservative Indian ruling class, while some Indian women became the ancestors of prominent British notables. Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool and Prime Minister from 1812 to 1827, likely had an Indian great-great-grandmother. In the 1820s, EIC major-general David Ochterlony took his 13 Indian wives on a promenade atop 13 elephants around the Red Fort of Delhi.

Ochterlony, however, was the last of his kind, as officials and officers started to reflect 19th-century British cultural triumphalism and a more sober Christian outlook. The sharp turn away from synthesis and assimilation was even felt in the homes of company officials; the standard curries of the early 19th century gave way to vegetarian Indian cooks attempting to master the art of the roast.

But Matthews rejects standard histories which chronicle a transition from an EIC infinitely accommodating of local custom and tradition to one dominated by evangelical zeal and utilitarian calculation. The EIC still understood that active attempts to convert Hindus and Muslims would only result in hostility from the population they ruled. The business of the East India Company was business. Excessive evangelistic enthusiasm was tamped down. In 1847, those who served in the company were forbidden to engage in missionary work in any official capacity.

The toxicity of mixing religion and rule in India was illustrated by the infamous trigger for the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Rumours swirled that the Enfield rifle cartridges distributed among the sepoys were greased with cow or pig fat. Soldiers needed to prise out the cartridges with their lips or teeth before use, a gross violation of the religious taboos of both Muslims and Hindus. Later investigations proved that the grease was indeed from pigs and cows, but the reason was self-interested cost-cutting by obtuse contractors. In other words, a rebellion was sparked by capitalist avarice, not insensitivity of zealous Christians bent on trampling the beliefs of Hindus and Muslims. The British blundered into conquest and rule, and they blundered into a rebellion. Venality was far more common than malevolence.

The subsequent betrayal of India’s political and cultural elites after 1857 was due to short-sightedness. The British crown developed a much closer relationship to the conservative Indian princes, who were very positively disposed toward undemocratic rule on the subcontinent. The EIC conquest brought peace in the early 19th century, but the transfer to the British Raj in 1858 and the crowning of Queen Victoria as the Empress of India in 1877 consolidated and ossified an imperial system which remained fixed in the past, shutting out the rising Indian middle class from political power.

In addition to its political conservatism, the British Raj did little to alleviate poverty, inspired by the same economic theories which led to the calamitous Irish potato famine. India was subject to 24 major famines between 1850 and 1899 and millions died of starvation. Nobel-Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen argues that these tragedies were caused by a lack of accountability in an undemocratic regime, rather than the vicissitudes of the monsoons.

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And so by the early 20th century, the Indian National Congress, precursor of modern India’s Congress Party, was agitating for full independence and national self-determination, while Mahatma Gandhi led campaigns of civil disobedience against the British colonial administration. The children and grandchildren of the prosperous burghers who had remained loyal in 1857 were no longer satisfied with just peace and order; they wished to govern themselves.

In the decades up to 1947, the Anglo-Indian ruling elite understood the looming future in the abstract, but refused to acknowledge the necessity of concrete steps. The tragedy of a hasty partition, and the death of millions, can be attributed to these attitudes and policies. Britain unwound its Indian responsibilities in haste, rather than in an ordered fashion. Matthews’s heterodoxy in treating the 18th and 19th centuries swerves back to expected orthodoxies in the 20th. Anyone familiar with the late stages of the British Raj will not be surprised by the depictions of the regime’s bumbling and missteps, but this unplanned improvisation was foundational to British rule in India, rather than a new development.

The reality of permanent chaos in decision-making leads us to the conclusion that the great prosecutions of British misrule in India are off-base. India as a part of the British Empire was a matter of prestige and pride for the ruling gentry, but its economic connections to the metropole have been greatly exaggerated. India’s poverty in the 20th century had more to do with the fact that its economic basis, subsistence agriculture, did not change much from the 18th century.

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In contrast, Britain was at the forefront of  industrialisation before the conquest of India. Nationalist Indian observers such as Shashi Tharoor in his polemical Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India argue for a zero-sum world of wealth redistribution, but European nations without extensive colonies also underwent rapid development in the 19th century. The EIC itself was marginally profitable, and made many of its largest windfalls in the China trade. Taxation and goods remitted to Britain were always minimal.

The true impact of the British relationship with India was not economic, but cultural and social. It is an undeniable fact that the political and legal systems which constitute the machinery of the modern Indian state to this day are inherited from the British. The economic “great divergence” between the West and the rest of the world was a universal feature of the 19th and 20th centuries, not something special and peculiar to the relationship between India and Britain.

There was no need for transfer of wealth from India to Britain, because Western economies were all shifting toward higher value manufactured goods that ushered in a middle-class society well before the apex of the Raj. Nineteenth-century English historian John Robert Seeley observed that the British “seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” But despite the lack of forethought, India inherited a salubrious set of institutions and norms from the Raj in terms of maintaining and keeping a liberal democratic republic. The modern Republic of India is a testament to this fact.

This is the nearly 400-page case Marie Favereau lays out in The Horde: How the Mongols Changed the World — and it’s a convincing one. A professor of history at Paris Nanterre University, Favereau’s previous published work focused on the wide-ranging geopolitical connections the Mongols made, and subtle cultural revolution that transformed them from an alien, conquering elite to deeply-rooted imperial administrators who shaped the societies they ruled. Though Favereau occasionally fixates excessively on the internecine dramas of Genghis Khan’s family, on the whole The Horde is both brisk and dense with facts and analysis about a period and people that remain unknown to most Westerners.

The Golden Horde emerged during the Pax Mongolica, when the various divisions of the Mongol Empire — Khanates —were ruled separately by the descendants of Genghis Khan, but united by treaties based on Mongol tradition. Marco Polo traversed the length of Eurasia, from Europe to China, and back, when the Mongol Empire was at its peak in the late 13th century. But the Golden Horde was the most geographically expansive of the Khanates. It stretched from modern Bulgaria and Romania in the west, to the vast Eurasian steppe north of the Black Sea, and yet further eastward still to the western edge of Mongolia. Beyond it lay the Great Yuan, who ruled most of the landmass of China and Mongolia, while the modern Middle East and southern Central Asia were under the two smaller Khanates.

The high noon of the Golden Horde’s power came between 1250 and 1400 AD, when it had unquestioned hegemony over all of the Russian principalities, northern Central Asia, Siberia and the Caucasus (Moscow remained a nominal vassal of the Horde until 1480 AD). This was an empire at enormous scale, with a vast reach — like Augustan Rome, or Spain during el Siglo de Oro, or Victorian Britain. For centuries, the Golden Horde stood athwart the trade routes of Eurasia. It was colossal.

But before there was the Horde, there were the four sons of Genghis Khan: Jochi, Chagatai, Ogedei and Tolui. It was from Jochi that the Horde would come. The eldest, he had a checkered relationship with his father, and with good reason. His mother, Börte, had been kidnapped by an enemy of Genghis Khan eight months before his birth. Although a shadow was cast over Jochi’s paternity, Genghis claimed him anyway. (Favereau straightforwardly accepts that Jochi was likely not Genghis Khan’s biological son.) After a great conference of Mongol leaders in Central Asia was held to determine the succession, and passed over Jochi, he marched his forces west, pitching his tents on the far fringe of the Mongol Empire north of the Caspian Sea.

Jochi’s self-exile set in motion a long train of consequences, and the real narrative of The Horde begins with Jochi’s sons, Orda, Batu, and Berke. Their lives illustrate three principles that reoccur again and again in The Horde. First, there is the principle of consensus and coexistence. Batu ruled the western half of the Golden Horde, while Orda ruled the east. These were the Blue and White Hordes, due to the association of these colours with the west and the east, and for over a century they respected each other’s territory. Second, the ascension of the younger Batu over Orda as Khan reversed expectation and reflected pragmatism.

Rather than slavishly following rules and customs, the Golden Horde embraced flexibility in its culture and political organisation. Finally, after the death of Batu, the youngest brother, Berke, became the Khan. Berke was the son of a Muslim woman, and he eventually converted to Islam, anticipating the later wholesale conversion of the Horde’s Mongol elite. Berke’s religious choice was also reflected in his geopolitical decision-making: he had no compunction about aligning with fellow Muslims against other Mongols. But Berke was also a pragmatist, not a fanatic, and he valued Mongol legal precedent and accepted the importance of religious toleration within his empire. The Golden Horde eventually became Muslim, but the empire it dominated was never Islamic.

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One of the major themes of The Horde is that the wealth of the ruling class of the Golden Horde was uniquely fuelled by trade, and this drove much of its diplomacy and war-making. Unlike China, Europe or the Near East, the territories of the Horde were sparsely populated. The Khans of the Golden Horde could not tax vast numbers of peasants to sustain their wealth. Rather, their economic activity was geared toward exploiting natural resources, as with furs shipped to Europe via the Hanseatic League, and customs collected on overland trade passing between Europe and China, as well as exports of slaves south to Egypt via Constantinople.

Some actions of the Khans that seem ideological on their surface turn out to have straightforward material explanations. Berke’s conversion to Islam cemented an alliance with the Mamluk regime in Egypt against the Mongol Il-Khanate. The Golden Horde supplied the Egyptians with slave soldiers to battle their Il-Khanate cousins, resulting in the first major defeat of the Mongols, which stopped their military advance. But those slave soldiers were also a major economic commodity that powered the financial health of the Golden Horde. The conflict with the Il-Khanate was not just ideological or geopolitical, but driven by the reality that the Golden Horde’s trade routes were constantly threatened by enemies — in this case, other Khanates. Berke and the Khans who succeeded him were engaging in literal trade wars.

Similarly, the amity between the two major divisions with the Horde, the Blue and the White, was not just a matter of sentimental familial bonds between the descendents of the brothers Batu and Orda. It reflected business savvy. The Golden Horde invested heavily in a Silk Road route that began at ports on the Black Sea, like the Genoese colony of Kaffa. The route continued eastward, grazing the southern fringe of Siberia, and moving onward all the way to the rich lands of the Great Yuan (Mongol-ruled China).

Cooperation between the Blue and White Hordes was necessary, not simply preferred, for this Silk Road to function. Additionally, propagandists in the service of the Horde whispered in the ears of merchant houses in Europe that the southern route that snaked through the rugged lands of the Il-Khanate was more dangerous and expensive. The ruling class of the Golden Horde wanted the world to know they were “open for business,” and offered a favourable tax regime for merchants willing to traverse their peaceful and well-ordered territories.

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But trade-fuelled prosperity is subject to the vicissitudes of globalisation. The collapse of the Il-Khanate in the 1330s resulted in the northern route achieving even greater prominence, as the southern Silk Road fractured between numerous hostile states. This monopoly was short-lived. In 1368, the great engine of west-east trade was turned off; the Mongols were expelled from China, and the ascendent Ming Dynasty shut the door to the rest of the world. If agriculturally-based empires were vulnerable to weakening in times of famine, merchant prince fortunes soared at the pleasure and caprice of foreign potentates.

Additionally, the 14th century saw the lucrative global trade in furs across the lands of the Horde facilitate the spread of the Black Death to Europe and the Near East from the eastern steppe. As we keenly feel today, one downside of globalisation is that a much larger human population can be a potential host for a pandemic. More than 30% of Europe and the Near East died from the bubonic plague, and the impact was significant on the Horde itself, as some of its leaders succumbed to the disease. The paradoxes and discontents that emerge from globalisation are long-standing.

Favereau’s narrative makes much of the reality that the Golden Horde was religiously pluralistic, a phenomenon immediately intelligible to contemporary readers. This was a legacy of Genghis Khan himself, who exempted clerics from taxation and left all houses of worship intact. He believed that the sky god, Tengri, had given him the world. Genghis and his descendants looked favourably upon all religions as the expression of the same divine principle.  Most earlier Khans were not Muslim, but devotees of Tengri. Nevertheless, they patronised Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity to cultivate relationships with subject people, most of whom were Christian or Muslim, and encourage the migration of other Mongols, many of whom were Buddhist. However, 1313, the Khan of the Golden Horde declared Islam the religion of the Mongols in the Blue and White Hordes.

Even after the Khan of the Golden Horde demanded that Mongols in his domain convert to Islam, he continued to encourage Christians to practise their religion (in contrast, Buddhist Mongols were expelled and their temples torn down). The Golden Horde exempted Russian Orthodox Church lands from taxation and encouraged European Roman Catholics in the trading cities to build their own houses of worship. Even when the Mongol ruling class became thoroughly Islamicised, they accepted religious diversity for both principle and profit.

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Though the global commercial orientation and religious tolerance of the Mongols are nothing to sneeze at, perhaps the biggest direct impact of the Golden Horde was upon the nascent identities of their subjects. Almost as an aside, Favereau notes that the Mongols liberated Wallachia from its nomadic overlords, laying down the foundation for modern Romania in the 13th century. But this is nothing, compared to how the Golden Horde played inadvertent midwife to the rise of the modern Russian state. Traditional accounts date the origin of Russia to the Christianisation of Kievan Rus’ under Vladimir the Great at the end of the 10th century. Though 1,000 years later this culture and society may seem exotic to us, Kievan Rus’ was oriented to the west and Europe, which explains how Anne of Kiev became queen of France in 1051. The deep separation between Russian culture and that of Western Europe only emerged during the period under the Golden Horde, as the ruling elite shifted its focus from Kiev in the west to Moscow in the east.

By the time the Mongols arrived, the Rus were ruled by a patchwork of more than a dozen principalities. Their main southern trading partner, the Byzantine Empire, was in sharp decline, and the Northern Crusades by German knights were impinging upon the prosperity of the Baltic-facing trading cities. The Mongol invasion was even more traumatic. In 1246, an envoy of the Pope traveled through Kiev and observed that “it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are at the present time scarce two hundred houses.” The only major city to avoid being sacked by the Horde was Novgorod in the far north, which survived through preemptive surrender.

Modern Russia was built upon the ashes of cities the Mongols burned. The imperial Russian state of Ivan of the Terrible that rose to unprecedented power in the 16th century was not shaped by Kievan Rus. It did not face the European kingdoms to the west, but the Golden Horde to the east. Instead the rulers of Moscow were positioned between the core territories of the Rus to the west and the lands of their steppe rulers to the southeast. A perfect location to be cultural and geopolitical go-betweens.

Just as Batu had been promoted over Orda, so the Khans of the Golden Horde strategically promoted Moscow’s junior princely lineage, the Danilovich, above the others. The House of Moscow did not have the pedigree, but they got the job done, collecting revenue and suppressing revolts. In the process, Moscow accrued enormous power and influence, eventually overthrowing the “Tatar Yoke” to impose its own domination on what became imperial Russia. While 11th-century France obtained a queen from Kiev, 18th-century French asserted that if you “scratch a Russian… you find a Tartar.”

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Favereau’s contention that you cannot understand the Russian imperial order without considering the formative impact of the Golden Horde is just one aspect of her argument. A broader thesis explicit in The Horde is that the empires that arose in the last 500 years mimicked and adapted many of the features of the steppe polities they dismembered. Russian historiography speaks of the period of subordination to the Golden Horde, but the centuries of disgrace were erased only with the conquest of the lands of their erstwhile oppressors: Siberia and Central Asia.

The Russian Empire also assimilated the Horde’s ruling class. Much of the Mongol military elite became Christian and part of the Russian nobility, while Jochid princesses married into the Russian ruling houses. A tradition of autocratic rule arose that was different from the more decentralised model that had characterised Kievan Rus. Ivan the Terrible took the title Tsar only in 1547. Before that he had simply been a prince, a reflection of the Kievan legacy. His assertion that he was a Tsar reflected an imperial ambition more in keeping with the traditions of the steppe than the nation-states emerging in Western Europe.

Though there are occasions in Favereau’s narrative where fixation on the political and social intrigues of the Jochid lineage overshadow the broader lessons, The Horde is most deeply understood as a cultural and social history. Like many histories which centre the steppe, it attempts to roll back the erasure of nomadic empires from the genealogy of modern states and societies. This process is clearest in the case of Russia, but applies pervasively across Eurasian history.

Historians of the steppe observe that the kingdoms of Europe and the emirates of the Near East may have built vast stone cities which withstand the test of time, but the religious tolerance and the global mercantile orientation of the Mongols are much more in keeping with the values of modern cultures. Like the Horde, modern developed societies are not fundamentally agricultural.

Also like the Horde, modern developed societies tolerate a wide variety of religions, often with the unspoken understanding that this will be socially useful. And, like the Horde, modern nation-states tend to exhibit a centralising and expansive tendency, with an explicit hierarchy of administrators and decision-makers. The Horde argues that multicultural global empires have much more relevant lessons for modern nation-states than the agrarian societies which the Mongols ruled. Without recognising it, we all still travel on a path the Mongols carved out for us centuries ago.

Iain Macleod was the last Chancellor to die in office. He lasted 30 days, 17 of which were spent in recovery from a stomach operation. When he had his fatal heart attack, at 23:35 on July 20, 1970, it cast a dark omen over the already fragile Edward Heath government.

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Almost 10 months later, the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering Floyd, is about to start. And while nobody promised to eliminate racism in less than a year, enough has happened since Floyd’s death for us to ask ourselves an important question: how likely is it that today’s antiracist activists will succeed?

For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting that even though no racial group has a monopoly on racist views — the idea that skin colour defines the quality of a person — when “racism” is spoken of these days, what is really meant, of course, is white racism. As many have pointed out, that isn’t to say that white people cannot be the target of racism. Whitebashing is certainly a thing these days; it is generally safe, even quite trendy, to make all sorts of derogatory comments about “whiteness” under the guise of “speaking truth to power”.

But we should also acknowledge that in western societies like Britain, the type of racism with the power to limit one’s life chances is typically that practised and condoned by white folk. This is partly down to the sheer potency of numbers. I, for example, cannot realistically choose not to worry about the attitudes of Britain’s 85% white population towards people of black heritage such as myself. In contrast, a white Brit does not have to be concerned in the same way about what black folk, who constitute just 3% of Britain, think about white people.

The existence of that choice is a fundamental difference; one that justifies today’s consistent focus on white racism, however repetitive or even unfair it may seem to some white Brits. But does this emphasis make the task of abolishing racism any easier?

I am not convinced — not least because today’s activists are overly focussed on the non-material sphere of life: on words, on what can and cannot be said, and by whom.

This approach to “fixing” the race problem is underpinned by a strong belief in the almost magical power of language. It assumes that the world runs on “narratives”, and that language is the only reality. Change the story, and you change everything. All of which means that white racism can be moralised into non-existence with the correct phrasing; that if we frequently mention how exploitative slavery and colonialism were, and how much western nations like Britain profited from them, white citizens will no longer believe that their societies are any better or more advanced than others.

This preoccupation with words is partly the ideological outcome of poststructuralist thinking, with its intellectually fashionable emphasis on highlighting how certain accepted “facts” function to reinforce the dominant position of powerful actors — in this case, white westerners. This approach, by its very nature, places great importance on words and how they are used.

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But the current antiracist emphasis on language is also a consequence of the kind of people driving the race debate. Following the furious fallout from cataclysmic events such as George Floyd’s death, antiracism, long a dissident reaction to white discrimination, has now achieved mainstream prominence — and, in the process, has generated its own elite elements. These are usually well-educated middle or upper-class writers, scholars, intellectuals and artists. People whose trade, like mine, is in words and ideas. It is people from this group who the organisers of public debate — chiefly the media — usually call upon to opine on race in Britain, as I am doing at the moment.

The disproportionate influence of middle-class authors is, of course, not confined to the race debate. But that does not mean we should ignore its practical consequences. For more often than not, this intellectualist preoccupation with language is accompanied by a tendency to ignore the material priorities of those minorities at the margins of society. Decolonising the curriculum might be something I feel strongly about, considering I work in academia, but I suspect the minimum-wage level might be a more important issue for the black immigrant working the till at Sainsbury’s.

Indeed, the reality is that only 1 in 3 British workers earn their living either in managerial positions or in jobs generally classified as “professional”, namely those requiring a degree-level qualification. This generally applies to all ethnic groups, with Indians being the most likely to work in professional jobs (33%), while Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are the least likely (18%).

While there may be racial issues at play here as well, with some minorities perhaps working jobs below their qualifications, this nevertheless offers a picture of the socioeconomic structure of Britain, including minority Britain. More importantly, it shows how the more material priorities of some segments of that society are often obscured in the middle-class dominated race debate. This is not about today’s activists holding bad or even consciously selfish intentions, but about the fact that we are all prone to view the world, as well as what most needs to be changed about it, through the lens of our own everyday situation.

And this works both ways. Roughly five years ago, during a trip spent travelling around Nigeria — my country of birth — a banker friend urged me to “keep things positive” if I decided to write about the experience in “western media” when I returned to Britain. I asked why he would say that, considering Nigeria was in the middle of a huge economic crisis, with civil servants going unpaid for months and millions struggling to feed their families. My (well-paid) friend replied that this was nothing new in Nigeria, and was, in fact, better not emphasised. “You know negative western media stories on Africa only make these white folk and others look down on us,” he pointed out.

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It typified the attitude among Africa’s privileged classes towards how their continent is viewed. While the majority poor population are often keen for the international media to highlight their suffering in the desperate hope some help might be forthcoming, affluent Africans are usually more concerned with the “negative stereotypes” they believe discussing poverty in Africa perpetuates. Their priorities are driven by their socioeconomic realities; they are the ones who travel abroad and come into contact with white people in international settings, conferences and what not. They understandably want to be treated as equals in these settings, not patronised, especially as they are accustomed to being treated deferentially in their own societies as a result of their class status.

They are, therefore, irritated by unflattering news stories about poverty in Africa because they know this helps shape how they themselves will be perceived abroad — as people associated with an unsuccessful continent. In essence, they are more interested in what is said about Africa than in the material reality of Africa for the majority of its inhabitants.

In recent years, I have come to notice similar class-based preoccupations in today’s western-centric antiracism, which is often too distant from the everyday material problems of the vast majority of black and brown-skinned people in the world, including here in the rich West. It is an antiracism that seems to believe policing language and boosting the influence of black and brown-skinned people in western cultural spaces is the highway to racial equality. Language and culture certainly matter, but the truth is that they can often be a distraction in the pursuit of racial equality.

Marx, despite everything, was correct in his key observation that it is the material world which determines ideology, not the other way round. Indeed, white racism today is the primordial manifestation of a global class system; one that, thanks mostly to material factors, has the power to impact black and brown lives. While it is true that numbers alone create a huge power differential between whites and others in a country like Britain, in a global context where whites constitute less than 15% of the world’s population, the only reason white racism is feared and talked about is because of the disproportionate power wielded by white wealth. Racism, after all, can only thrive when a particular racial group possesses the capacity to dominate others. Then it simply becomes a question of whether they choose to exploit that ability or not.

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It needs hardly stating that the white capacity to dominate stems from their wealth. Despite the recent economic success of a few non-white nations, most notably Japan and China, 6 of the 10 largest economies in the world today are white-majority nations. Britain alone has a larger GDP than Africa. And when it comes to per capita wealth, crucial for deciding the negotiating power of individuals in a capitalist world, 17 of the top 20 nations are white-majority societies. Crucially, whites run much of today’s world because of this wealth, not because of their words. If the west were poor, nobody would care about white racism because it would be a toothless beast.

This white economic power is also reflected in our domestic reality: median white British household wealth stands at £314,000 compared to £66,000 for the median British-Bangladeshi family and £34,000 for the black African family. These material realities are far more important for the enabling of white racism than whether we read more or less Shakespeare in British schools. Or whether Churchill ends up pronounced a racist or not.

That is not to deny the power of words and morality. Moral arguments played a significant role in ending the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonialism by rendering both embarrassingly difficult to defend. People generally like to think themselves as good, and most find it unsettling to be accused of injustice. As it happens, British identity is very much intertwined with a self-image of fairness. This is why accusations of racial inequality usually provoke a strong reaction from mainstream (by that I mean “white”) Britain; it stems from a psychological need to protect that self-image.

This desire to not be seen as unfair has often proved an ally to those who have found themselves in a disadvantageous power relationship with Britain. Obafemi Awolowo, one of colonial Nigeria’s key pro-independence leaders, often emphasised that Nigerian independence was won “without firing a single shot” thanks to a combination of mass mobilisation and moral persuasion. His message was simple yet powerful: colonial rule does not meet the moral standards and democratic values the British professed to practise. In other words, it was a fundamentally unfair system deployed by a country that claimed to uphold fairness. With time, Britain had to acknowledge that this contradiction couldn’t be squared and the system had to go.

In a similar vein, the UK protests following George Floyd’s death, demanding an end to racial inequality, have also elicited a commitment to greater fairness from the majority population. This is not to be sneered at. But one thing history shows clearly is that while moral arguments were effective in helping end the formalised racial hierarchies we saw during slavery and colonialism, they did not, and could not, end the informal racial hierarchies stemming from economic hierarchies. These hierarchies place the wealthiest racial group — white people — at the top, the collectively poorest large racial group — black people — at the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in the middle.

Aside from the practical implications of this, the knowledge that their nations tend to be wealthier and better-developed helps foster a sense of superiority among more than a few white people, while simultaneously placing many black and brown-skinned folk at a psychological disadvantage.

Meanwhile, historical debates over how we got to where we are today might be important, but unless we actually believe they can lead to white folk one day deciding to hand over half their collective wealth — which I don’t believe will happen — then “winning” such debates won’t change much in the real world. Focusing on the non-material aspects of white racism may come more naturally to those driving the race debate; it is certainly easier than coming up with practical solutions to its long-lasting material aspects. But only the latter can truly change the everyday realities of Britain’s minorities.

This is why I think by far the most important British reaction to the protests following George Floyd’s death was the government’s establishment of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, due to release its report soon. Of course, the true measure of this initiative will be in the depths of its findings and the plausibility of its recommendations to reduce the material disparities between this country’s racial groups. But acknowledging that socioeconomic power differentials are the key to enabling white racism today is a crucial beginning to a more equal and racially harmonious Britain. The sooner we start focussing more on the material side of things, the better.