An exchange between Phillip Blond and Aditya Chakrabortty... look at what happened at Amritsar in 1919 if you want to understand Woolwich in 2013.

Yesterday, for obvious reasons, Twitter seemed to experience a rapid, uncoordinated and jerking St Vitus Dance of expressions in which a compulsive need to say something was combined with a dysarthric inability to say anything sensible.

However, amongst all the dross were a few interesting threads.

In particular I was intrigued by an exchange between Phillip Blond (head of the thinktank ResPublica and with 12,179 Twitter followers) and Aditya Chakrabortty (Guardian journalist with 13,721 Twitter followers).

I have laid out the conversation below (Twitter is bitty, so apologies if I have missed out any comments).  Phillip Blond came across (to me) as an unworldly academic musing aloud in a virtual Senior Common Room.  Aditya Chakrabortty was more jittery, as if bursting to say something yet not quite trusting himself to say what was most appropriate (perhaps on that evening he most wanted to be inappropriate?).

Phillip Blond

Britain became the most important modern nation because we never believed in race as the principal of political identification

Aditya Chakrabortty

Philip, this is utter balls. Read your imperial history.

Phillip Blond

one might argue the take over of the British East India Company by the British state was an act of imperial care

Aditya Chakrabortty

The murderous suppression of the Mau Mau: Churchill's class instinct twitching again.

Phillip Blond

not everything evil is racism and nor does racism cover every evil

Aditya Chakrabortty

I've never accused the Wests of being racist. But try dealing with the points raised. Start with a few highlights. Amritsar.

Phillip Blond

Amristar was an insane officer ordering a mass shooting he was probably racist as well but that does not mean a state policy

Phillip Blond ‏

imperialism can also secure rights and operate against racism - Empire is a paradoxical inheritance

“Renatus84” (a random American butting in - there were several of these interlopers, none of them adding anything helpful - note the over-familiar way in which he addresses Phillip Blond by his first name)

You know why loads of foreigners have a love-hate relationship with Britain, Phillip? Shit like this.

Phillip Blond

being abusive will not convince I am saying the idea that Britain's imperial legacy is simply racist is infantile

Aditya Chakrabortty

let me end here: Ashis Nandy's great Intimate Enemy talks of how the british empire, and its view of inferior races left the british with a sense of racism that they are still struggling with (and perhaps still applying to Britons). Night.

The above is a very truncated version of what was being said.  There were many points and sub-points that I have not included.  I have provided Twitter addresses at the end of this post in case you want to do any further reading.

So in synopsis:  in reaction to the events of yesterday Phillip Blond began making comments about the inclusivity of British society and arguing (perhaps unwisely on that evening and in that forum) that the British historical record largely supported his view.  Aditya Chakrabortty challenged him on this thesis, telling him to "read your imperial history".  The Amritsar episode of 1919 is referred to, and the behaviour of General Dyer is discussed.

So let us do what Aditya Chakrabortty advises and deal with the points raised.  Specifically the Amritsar episode of 1919.  How does that relate to what happened in Woolwich yesterday?

One interpretation is that General Dyer was a bloodthirsty British imperialist and murderer, a white Christian who killed brown Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus to secure the on-going British hegemony over India.

But Reginald Dyer was also a third generation Indian (born in India, to Indian-born parents) who lived his life in a cultural bubble, made no attempt to integrate with the mainstream community around him, and in a moment of crisis turned his weapons on his fellow Indians.

And although General Dyer was undoubtedly "British" so were the people he killed - indeed a quarter of the world's population in 1919 were subjects of the British Crown.  Geographically General Dyer's family came from southern Ireland.  If reparations are to be paid for the behaviour of General Dyer presumably the application should be sent to the successor government in Dublin since they would have assumed responsibility for the behaviour of the Irish quota of imperialists.

Aditya Chakrabortty, in his final contribution of the evening, said (quoting an author he admires):  "the british empire, and its view of inferior races left the british with a sense of racism that they are still struggling with (and perhaps still applying to Britons)".

The implication of this line is inescapable in the context of yesterday's events in Woolwich.  The killing of a British person in Woolwich yesterday was payback for British imperialism.  Look at what happened at Amritsar in 1919 if you want to understand Woolwich in 2013.

But I think we should say to Aditya Chakrabortty "read your imperial history" - the Woolwich killer resembles General Dyer far more closely than you are admitting. 

https://twitter.com/Phillip_Blond
https://twitter.com/chakrabortty
https://twitter.com/Renatus84

Ancestral guilt

Fascinating item on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4) this morning about the ending of slavery in the 1830s (British territories - slavery ended much later elsewhere in the world and still exists today in some places).

University College London has compiled a database of slave owners at the time of abolition http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ .

I was surprised (very surprised) that this amounts to only 3,000 individuals.

The number is surprising because a myth has grown up, promulgated by commentators such as Gary Younge, that British national wealth was founded on the slave trade and that the national economy today is largely buoyant (in so far as it can be said to be buoyant) because of the legacy of the slave trade.

To hear these people talk you would think every family in the country were slave owners in the 18th and early 19th century.

The UCL data tells us plainly that only 3,000 people were slave owners - a tiny proportion of the total population.

I do not need to enter my own family name in the data base - I know who my ancestors were as far back as the 1750s and they did not own slaves or any other property.  Like most people in the country I come from a long line of paupers.  Our poverty goes all the way back to the Dark Ages. 

It has long been a cliche of historians that up until the death of Queen Victoria only four hundred families in England owned all of the wealth.  Well thanks to UCL we know which of those families owned slaves.  So now the West Indian claque that goes on about "reparations" know exactly who to go after and they can stop the offensive suggestion that the rest of us owe them anything or that the post-war unrestricted West Indian immigration we have experienced is just "payback" for slavery.

Of course Diane Abbott MP is gleefully jumping on this bandwagon (but is it not the case that due to the incidence of violent rape between slave owners and slaves the majority of West Indians are descended from both sides? - if such a thing as ancestral guilt exists, presumably the current West Indians represent both the oppressors and the oppressed).

Charlie Beckett, Director of the think tank Polis and Head of Media at the London School of Economics, indicates that he might be descended from one of the 3,000 slave owners - it would be interesting to trace how many of our current "establishment" (public school educated, Oxbridge educated, and enjoying comfortable quasi-sinecure positions) are from the UCL database and whether we still have an hereditary elite firmly occupying all the positions of power in the areas of politics, media and economics.

And on the subject of the "ancestral guilt" scam, here we see Damian McBride (former adviser to Gordon Brown) trying to tell us that the Highland "clearances" were a variation of ethnic cleansing.  All over the United Kingdom the common land was enclosed and the common people (mostly subsistence farmers) given the choice of moving away or starving.  This happened in England as well as in Scotland (my mothers' ancestors were cleared off the land in Hampshire and my fathers' ancestors were cleared off the land in south Yorkshire) and the Clearance Acts were passed by Scottish MPs as well as English MPs.

The place for Richard III

Surely the place for Richard III is St George's Chapel Windsor with his brother?

Or Westminster Abbey with his wife? (he could go into the same grave).

Not sure I like this idea of human remains being set up as a tourist attraction for people in Leicester to gawp at. 

The historical narrative of a nation (and the identity of its population) must be disrupted and destabilised

Article in The Independent (website) by Owen Jones on the evils of British imperialism:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/owen-jones-william-hague-is-wrong-we-must-own-up-to-our-brutal-colonial-past-8101370.html

The article is provocative and highly tendentious, and at several points seems to equate British imperialism with Nazi Germany.

On the one hand, radical reinterpretations of history can be useful.  New evidence comes to light on a continual basis and needs to be integrated into the historical record.  Owen Jones studied History at Oxford and must be allowed an opinion on areas of valid debate.

However I do not think this article is entirely an impartial attempt to contribute towards historical research and review.

Socialists (true socialists, not social democrats) believe that bourgeois capitalist society cannot be reformed, it must be destroyed and rebuilt along socialist lines.

To achieve this the historical narrative of a nation (and the identity of its population) must be disrupted and destabilised so that the ordinary people question who they are and question whether the national myths which sustain their society are worth maintaining.

In a normally-functioning democracy such attempts to subvert the national mythus ("the inter-relationship of value structures and historical experiences of a people, usually given expression through the arts") would get nowhere.  The population would have enough collective intellectual rigour to be able to decide whether British history was no better than that of Nazi Germany.  But as the GCSE grade inflation scandal demonstrates, the way subjects are taught in schools has become corrupted, and for several decades school leavers have not had the knowledge or interpretation skills to know when they are being manipulated.

Ley lines

When you first hear the theory of ley lines it sounds crazy.  The idea that ancient sites (medieval churches, iron age tumuli, Roman dykes etc) are arranged in absolutely straight lines is incredible.  Or coincidence that could be matched by randomly lining up petrol stations or telephone boxes (except that they don't line up).

Then you look at a map and find that you can make the historic sites line up.

But nothing prepares you for actually following the route of a ley line and finding that the landscape shows you exactly where it is.

Above:  marked in the golden corn on a summer evening.

Above:  or made evident by distinctive trees planted on top of a prehistoric burial mound.

Bizarre

Bizarre statement by Labour activist and Independent columnist Owen Jones on his Twitter microblog "massacres have never been committed by self-described atheists".

Considering that Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all atheists and pursued official atheist policies (to the point of eradicating religious people in the territories they controlled) this assertion is difficult to understand.

Owen Jones studied history at Oxford - this sort of tweet does not reflect well on his alma mater (or perhaps an Oxbridge education is just a bogus affectation without the intellectual rigour of less self-publicising educational institutions).

https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/223521728758951937

UPDATE

The tweet was meant sarcastically.

Just shows you how careful you have to be.  

Ancient Worlds on BBC 2

On Wednesday I began watching Ancient Worlds on BBC 2. It is a review of regional "civilisations", focussing upon their urban achievements (literally civitates). Presented by Dr Richard Miles.

On the whole I liked it, although I think Dr Miles laid on the "globalisation" propaganda a bit too thick. Ancient cultures may have been inter-connected, but they thought of their own part of oikoumene as unique and their own particular polis as the centre of the world. And although Dr Miles showed us lots of evidence of ancient travel, the vast majority of the world's population never left their own village.



Above: the Sumerian exhibits in the British Museum.

The part of the programme I most enjoyed was the section on the Sumerians. Often I go to the British Museum to look at the Sumerian room. I'm not sure what it is about this early culture that attracts me so much.



Above: a ram caught in a thicket - Genesis 22, verse 13.



Above: steps of the British Museum (picture taken in the summer).

A recent post by Grant McCracken (http://cultureby.com/2010/11/a-marketing-miracle.html) made me think about the purpose of the great London museums and galleries. Grant had been disappointed by the glass cases of the Victoria & Albert Museum ("everything ranged coldly on shelves" as Dr Aziz would say). Is this a cultural difference between the New World and the United Kingdom?

Why do British people feel satisfied with a purely visual experience? Is there something about the objects being captured and contained in a glass case that adds to the sense of satisfaction? On a sub-conscious level are we seeing a cultural reflex at work?

The big London museums present themselves as international centres of scientific learning, and to a certain extent that is true. But they are also undoubtedly filled with the plundered treasures of imperium. Walking in these galleries must have seemed, to our great-grandparents, as if they had entered the allegorical world of The East offering its riches to Britannia (http://www.flickr.com/photos/22955235@N00/638426578/ ).

In that respect the British Museum is the curiosity cabinet of the nation (like the millions of glass display cabinets in British sitting rooms, filled with knick-knacks, holiday souvenirs and Coronation mugs).

There is also the sense that the Victorians were attempting to dominate and subdue The Past itself, as if all the unknown jumble of history and archaeology could be captured, analysed and explained in a continuous progression of improvement (with the unspoken implication that the United Kingdom was the final and logical expression of that process - "and here we are today...").

What is to be done?

Should we sweep the old museums away and replace them with institutions that more fully represent who we are now? Or do we leave them, accepting that who we are now is more or less who we were then, both good and bad (including a genetic disposition to dominate others). Freudian psychology suggests that if you try to repress aspects of yourself those repressions tend to burst out in unexpected ways - the supposedly socialist government of the last twelve years carried out no less than five neo-imperialist wars.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00w0dqx/Ancient_Worlds_Come_Together/

The future?

Did the people of the Middle Ages speculate about how lives would be different in the future?

No, they believed in a static society.

Even though the period from 1100 to 1480 (fairly arbitrary dates I know) saw huge technological, economic and social changes, this didn't register in the popular mind.

Society was perceived as timeless and eternal (and as Marshall McLuhan said, perception IS reality). People believed they lived in the best of all worlds. And that is probably why they were a lot happier than we are today.

Rebecca West defined the paradox: is it better to let someone continue in a dreamworld where they are happy or wake them up into the real world where you know they will be unhappy?

And what is the real world anyway? Perception is reality. And in advertising we know how evanescent perception can be.

PS the other historical enigma is the Roman period. Huge empire (all the "known world"), vast timespan (27BC to 410AD ) and almost no technological progress. And yet no-one could call the Romans primitive.

The Story of England on BBC 4

Last night I watched the The Story of England on BBC 4 (first in a six-part series).

I had very mixed feelings about the production. Ever since the launch in the 1990s of Tony Robinson's Time Team, documentaries of this kind seem to fall into a high-camp archaeological-dig-as-panto parody. It's reached the point where you can't take anything they say seriously.

All the stock elements were included.

Thus you had the brightly-striped knitwear (in a scarf around Michael Wood's neck); a sinister character in a pentangle t-shirt identifying with absolute certainty tiny flakes of potsherds; various hairy diggers interacting with Tory blue-rinse lady gardeners etc.

Presenter Michael Wood (whom I used to respect) adopted the Cillit Bang style of narration, shouting at the camera.

Some parts of the programme were very dodgy - twice someone said "my guess is" and the programme went on to accept the guess as complete truth.

At least there was a proper consideration of placename evidence.

Anyone who has been on an archaeological dig will know that they are tedious, inconclusive and open to all sorts of bias and interpretations (the reports, if the excavation ever gets written up, will usually display the veiled prejudices of the writer).

This programme was entertaining, but not to be taken seriously. It was as sexed-up as an Iraqi dossier. And perhaps just as dishonest (or am I being unfair?).

Mayavision made the series.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/leicester/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_9024000/9024160.stm

The Normans on BBC2

Above: writing about the programme in The Guardian, television critic Lucy Mangan says she "swallowed it whole", which is an unsettling image.

I watched the second in the series The Normans on BBC2 last night. Last week's programme I thought was a fairly workmanlike production but oddly old-fashioned. It seemed to be a rehash of the Victorian view that the Norman Conquest was an absolute dividing line in English history, with the ubermensch short-back-and-sides Normans utterly dominating and subduing the backward long-haired Anglo-Saxons (this view was popular with the Victorians as it provided a justification for 19th century colonialism).

The "Conquest" theory of history has been comprehensively debunked by many distinguished historians, so it was strange to see the presenter Professor Robert Bartlett putting this forward as a credible thesis. It was as if Professor Henry Loyn (that gentle intellectual giant) had never lived. It was as if Professor Robert Bartlett had never been put in an invigilated room and asked to write for three hours on the topic The Norman Conquest - continuity or change? Discuss.

Anyway, I watched the second programme last night and realised that for all its heavyweight endorsements this is not a serious production. Professor Bartlett was telling us Anglo-Saxon culture was eradicated (when in fact both the Domesday Book and the Bayeux Tapestry were almost certainly produced by Anglo-Saxons); that Scotland was a multi-ethnic state (Scotland in the 11th century was many things, but it was not a cosmopolitan society); that the Normans in Ireland were developing a blueprint for "colonialism" (when in fact they intermarried and went native within a couple of generations).

This is not a serious production. This is a stealthy attempt at diversity-awareness propaganda. My suspicians were reinforced when I saw that the producer was Fatima Salera (whose body of work includes Black Women the experience of Muslims around the world; and Southall Stories).

And on Domesday (also last night) I almost laughed out loud when historian Michael Wood told us the Anglo-Saxons were "economic migrants".

To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, the subtext seems to be: there was no such thing as Anglo-Saxon society, there were only immigrants.



Above: not all historians are media whores re-editing and politicising the narrative of history with an abandon that would shame Orwell's Ministry of Truth. In the latest Transactions of the Ancient Monument Society there is a fabulous article on Medieval Muniment Rooms by John Steane. This is history at its best.

Rediscovering Traces of Memory, Jewish Book Week

Above: left to right, Kate Craddy (Director of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow), Janusz Makuch (founder of the Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow) and Professor Jonathan Webber (author of Memory and Revival).

Yesterday I went to the talk Rediscovering Traces of Memory. The talk was held in the ballroom of the Royal National Hotel in Bedford Way. It was one of the events surrounding Jewish Book Week.

It was a really interesting talk, not just if you are interested in Jewish history, but also if you are interested in wider historical themes.

The general view is that little remains of the thousand-year Jewish culture in Poland. Janusz Makuch, who is not Jewish but may qualify as one of Ruth Gruber’s “virtual Jews” began to take an interest in the fragments of the former Jewish presence that survived. The more he looked, the more he saw:

“I used to spend weeks of the summer vacations traveling from village to village, from market town to market town, and everywhere I would meet people who would show me things…”

Professor Webber described Janusz Makuch as a “culture broker”. Poland as a centre of Jewish culture was compared to Babylon during the Captivity and early medieval Spain. The Jewish Cultural Festival in Krakow now comprises two hundred events over nine days.

Most importantly, there was for me a “eureka moment” when a throwaway remark by Janusz Makuch illuminated an intellectual issue I have been struggling with for some time (entirely unrelated to the Jewish history of Krakow).

Very enjoyable afternoon – hearing about books, looking at books, being among other people who like books.

Afterwards I browsed the several hundred new Jewish books on display, and despite my previous resolution (no more books, absolutely no more books) purchased two. Then kosher sandwiches and a cup of tea in the café. And then out into the cold Sunday afternoon street.

Battle of Gododdin

Very interesting programme on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday evening about the Battle of Gododdin in 600 (probably). The battle was between the remnants of the Brythonic kingdoms (successor statelets created after the departure of the Romans) and the invading Anglo-Saxons (the Anglo-Saxons won). The text is fragmentary, with a disputed timeline, and split between "Scribe A" and "Scribe B".

The presenter and various commentators on the programme all seemed to be following a pro-Welsh agenda (at the end the presenter quoted, with seeming relish, that the Anglo-Saxons were "evil men". Also irritating were the comparison's made with soldiers fighting today in Afghanistan. The list of names that prefix Prime Minister's Questions each Wednesday cannot compare with the genealogical grandeur of the Battle of Gododdin's individual commemorations.

There was no reference (not even in passing) to JNL Myres theory that after the Romans left the province of Brittania regressed into anarchy, and therefore the incoming Saxons may have been regarded as the better option for the average British family. The poem seems to disprove Francis Pryor's tendentious and highly-suspect theory that there were no Anglo-Saxons in the first place (presumably he hasn't read the Battle of Gododdin). There was too much jabbering by "experts" and not enough of the poem itself.

But these are minor points - it was a very stimulating programme.



Above: excellent retelling of the ancient legends by Kathleen Herbert - privately printed and now almost unobtainable.

Above: big picture book on the history of the Celts. We are used to thinking of them as a marginal people on the edges of the British Isles, but they have a fascinating pan-European history. I was given this book over a year ago and I still have not found the time to read it, although it is more pictures than text.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Gododdin

“Supermen”

Above: in the recent economic crisis Gordon Brown has been portrayed as a Nietzschian superman – as in this cartoon by Steve Bell.

Very interesting discussion on the Today Programme this morning between Matthew Bishop and Michael Edwards. I was able to listen to it as I was the first into the office this morning (my new office, which is back on the middle floor, more or less where I was a few months ago, but with different people). The discussion focused on whether strong and powerful (ie wealthy) individuals such as George Soros, Warren Buffet and Bill Gates are better than elected representatives at solving the world’s problems.

And it make me think about the way in which cultures long for “supermen” in times of crisis and uncertainty.

Given the historical record of these “supermen”, I think we can do without them, no matter how philanthropic they seem to be.

British culture seems to have an in-built mechanism for getting rid of supermen/women when they become too powerful. Little remained of Cromwell’s severe “legacy” barely a couple of years after his death. Oswald Mosley’s movement never really got off the ground. Arthur Scargill was crushed. Margaret Thatcher was bundled out the door in a way that must have been humiliating for her. Even Winston Churchill was politely asked to leave when the war was won.

If I had the time I would like to study what this self-correcting mechanism is – it is more than just democracy I think.

Above: another “Brownman” cartoon, this time showing “Gordon” as the Laocoon in the grips of the serpentine Lord Mandelson and a constricted Shadow Chancellor George Osborne.

Today Programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00dywqn (the discussion comes right at the end).

More: http://tacticalphilanthropy.com/2008/07/philanthrocapitalism-micahel-edwards-vs-matthew-bishop

A vindication of the Pirenne thesis!

As the news of the Paris summit on the new Mediterranean Union filtered out, my mood gradually became exultant (in an understated way).

Forty-two (forty-two!) heads of government gathered in Paris to discuss extending European Union “access” to the countries of north Africa and the middle east so that the entire Mediterranean becomes a medium for commercial, cultural and intellectual exchange.

Finally (I thought) we shall see a vindication of the Pirenne thesis!

Henri Pirenne argued that the Roman Empire did not “fall” as a result of the “Barbarian” invasions, but withered away as a result of disruption of Mediterranean trade routes following the Muslim invasion of north Africa and the middle east. His thesis was very controversial and has been challenged over the years since its publication in 1935 (even the “partial Pirenne thesis” has its critics). With the restoration of the Mediterranean as a medium of exchange the fall of “Rome” (using that word to mean Byzantine civilisation in its widest sense) will presumably be reversed - with all that that implies.

At this rate even Gregorovius might come back into fashion.

As an aside, The Times today had a big editorial on the Paris summit (prominent Editorial on the inside front cover) but no actual report. It seems typical of the newspaper (and News International in general). All opinion and no facts.

The editor of The Times is James Harding (he replaced Robert Thompson late last year).

More on the Pirenne thesis: http://www.webster.edu/~corbetre/personal/reading/pirenne-mohammed.html

More on Gregorovius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Gregorovius

Also on the subject of the (much earlier) Roman empire, the podcast of today’s Start The Week is worth listening to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/stw/ - a new book on the Emperor Hadrian is reviewed.



Above: the Emperor Hadrian is the subject of a major exhibition at the British Museum this summer (I think it opens next week). John Boorman’s film Memoirs of Hadrian is due for release this year. It is based on the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar.

I was in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge a while ago ordering some new books. There was a queue behind me, and the assistant was obviously having a difficult day and wanted to get me out of the way (“are you sure it’s not on the shelves” as if I hadn’t made much of an effort). Anyway, we came to a Yourcenar book and she totally changed. She couldn’t have been kinder or more helpful. Ignoring the other waiting customers she took me to the back of the store and explained that the Yourcenar books sometimes got shoved onto an overflow shelf (being “Y” they were at the end of the line). She asked me what other Yourcenar books I had read, what I thought of them - she was obviously a Yourcenar scholar working part-time to make ends meet.

It was absolutely dire

Another lecture in yet another remote church in the east of county. This one was not as erudite as others I have been to recently. In fact, there was something fraudulent about the whole set-up.

The village was set on level lands which had originally been long strips of flat land rising from the marshes. The Sunday afternoon was warm, with gentle sunshine. I drove there through well-kept farmland, the hedgerows subtly becoming more gentrified and displaying specimen trees as I neared the settlement, the whole landscape shape-shifting into micro Edwardian suburbia as I entered the village itself.

Although the village was big, it was not so big that it justified such an enormous medieval church - one of truly vast proportions. The medieval economy had been based on wool, transported by water since the land routes were (and still are) constricted by strategic natural bottlenecks. The wealth generated by the wool paid for the church and the draining of the marshes.

Entering the building, the construction was on such a scale that I felt like a citizen of Lilliput among the towering columns. Most of the windows were of clear glass, so light fell down on you from all angles. The acoustics were particularly good, which meant that the slightest noise (footsteps, whispered conversations, clinking of tea cups) was accentuated and magnified.



The chief treasure of the church is a medieval ladder (see above) that goes forty feet from the ground to the first level of the tower. The area under the tower was a sort of kitchen where ladies were preparing cups of tea (rows of teacups on a trestle table, very big white enamel teapots, immaculate tea towels). One of the ladies told me the ladder was made of primeval wood reclaimed by medieval monks from the ancient marsh (this marsh wood was greatly prized in the medieval period as it had lain in the mineral-rich water for several millenia and in the process had acquired an extremely tough, pliable, boiled quality that resembles modern plastic).



Above: another view of the ladder (note the sun streaming through the gothic arched window to the left). Apparently the ladder is still in use. Pevsner writes gleefully about this survival from the pre-industrial age.

Gradually other people arrived for the talk. They stood around in couples and small groups, drinking tea and whispering to each other. A large number of foreigners (unusual for such an out-of-the-way place) were attending the lecture - I heard them talking in French, Spanish and German (or was it Dutch?).

The lecture was on the career of a very minor sixteenth-century explorer who had been born in the village. This historical connection had been obscure and unremarked until “discovered” by a Rector in the 1950s who single-handedly built it up into a tourist attraction, bringing a buoyant level of income into the village. The result was a Festival-of-Britain-style mixture of earnestness and frivolity (like orange-flavoured cod liver oil - the nasty taste of the history disguised by dressing-up and silly re-enactments).

The lecture was delivered by a retired local headmaster. It was absolutely dire. Every suspicion I have ever harboured about the abysmal teaching of history in state schools was confirmed. Disjointed, laboriously politically correct, WRONG. I felt like heckling him. He walked up and down the low stages set up in the side-aisles (where an Oberammergau-like play is performed at weekends on the subject of the explorer) beaming at us as he showed off. It was all garbage from start to finish.

Eventually I just walked out.

I left the group clustered round the declaiming teacher. I walked past the ladies at their trestle tables loaded with tea cups. I walked through the great gothic entrance arch and down the long avenue of yew trees, back to my car.

One of the richest regions in the world

Above: Kanthapura is one of the best novels focussing on the Congress movement for Indian independence, written from the Indian point of view. The author very convincingly portrays the mentalité of a village in rural India. It helps explain how the enthusiasm for independence gained popular support among the ordinary people.

Today is the 60th anniversary of independence for India and Pakistan.

For the past few weeks the serious television channels have been featuring programmes relating to the sub-continent (some very high quality, some appalling). Newspapers and magazines have taken up the theme. This reflects the fact that nearly three per cent of the British population is of Indian or Pakistani origin.

Two (opposing) historical views are emerging:

View 1) India was historically one of the richest regions in the world, and produced a glittering civilisation that reached its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries. The British arrived in the Indian sub-continent as traders and by a policy of divide and rule, gradually made inroads into the region, eventually taking it over. Two centuries of plunder and misrule followed during which almost all of India’s fabulous wealth was transferred to the United Kingdom, reducing the country to poverty. The British in India behaved appallingly, with an arrogance that could not be tolerated. Famine relief was inadequate, social inequalities were ignored, feudal systems were propped up so long as the princely rulers collaborated with the British. The Indian Army was used by the British to help fight two world wars and numerous minor wars. Led by an inspired leader, the Indians freed themselves through an innovative campaign of passive disobedience. Freed from colonialism, India is once more achieving wealth and international respect. India is resuming its rightful place as a world power.

View 2) India was a network of warring divided states before British rule and became a network of warring divided states after the British left. In the fifty years after 1947 the country went through a period of near tyranny, far worse than imperial rule (commentators point out Mrs Ghandi killed roughly the same number of people at Amritsar as General Dyer did). During the two hundred years of British rule the area acquired stability, democratic institutions, free press, independent courts, an administration that was free of corruption, a modern infrastructure of railways, ports and modern cities, and was integrated into a global state with an international outlook. By the 1930s India was already on the road to self-government and would probably have acquired dominion status in the mid-1970s, the whole sub-continent united and far richer than it is now (the example of colonial Hong Kong is usually cited at this point). India’s present wealth is merely a re-adoption of the western capitalism that Nehru abandoned in 1947 - the same western capitalism that projected Japan from Year Zero bombsite to world’s second largest economy in the same sixty years we are talking about.

Probably the truth lies between the two viewpoints.

Professor Stockwell has demonstrated that economic exploitation of the British Empire was inept, and that net capital was transferred from Britain to the colonies rather than in the other direction. AJP Taylor also calculated that no net profit was made from the aggregate territories of the British Empire in the last hundred years of colonialism. In 1995 I read a draft thesis (by a former student of Stockwell's) that matched expenditure on the National Health System with stages of colonial withdrawal, arguing that imperial expenditure was cut to pay for the set up and running costs of the new NHS (Indian independence was brought forward by a year specifically to save money, which leads to his tendentious conclusion that the NHS was paid for in Hindu and Muslim blood - “across the disintegrating Empire in the 1950s, 60s and 70s the ideology of Fenner Brockway killed more than the ideologies of Hitler, Stalin and Mao put together”).

And what does the imperial episode mean in the United Kingdom today?

Mostly it has been forgotten. Britain is now a small island off the coast of Europe. The days when the British Empire covered a quarter of the world are long gone.

And yet there are some curious statistics:

Queen Victoria was head of state over 10,800 million acres of the world’s land area (United Kingdom, colonial empire plus self-governing dominions such as Canada and Australia).

Queen Elizabeth II is head of state over 8,800 million acres of the world (United Kingdom, independent countries such as Jamaica and Canada, and the colonial residue of mostly tiny islands, but also including a huge slice of Antarctica which was “acquired” formally in the 1930s).

Possession of Antarctica means that the (never mentioned) current British Empire is only marginally less than the Victorian one. And with global warming apparently unstoppable, Antarctica might turn out to be valuable. Defending it, however, might be another matter - is that why we held onto the Falkland Islands and are renewing the Trident nuclear weapons system (since there is no other conceivable use for such massive destructive capacity)?

Even the colonial residue of tiny islands comprises ten of the world’s off-shore banking centres, processing incredible amounts of money (according to the Bank for International Settlements about one fifth of the world’s money is held in the offshore system - some of the largest cash flows and capital accumulations on Earth, effectively making Britain the world’s banker).

And yet none of this is ever mentioned. British imperialism is officially a spent force. The OBE is just a harmless award given out to sports people, district nurses and minor celebrities.

I used to enjoy going to Professor Stockwell’s lectures, even though my period was Medieval not Modern. He always made you think (and not always pleasant thoughts). He came into one lecture, looked at the rows of seats unusually packed with students (other lecturers would only get a handful turning up), and said with very heavy sarcasm: “We’re all imperialists now!”

Kim Blacha's Song of the Day: Mamacita by Collie Buddz.