This is Britain's colonial Empire from the Antarctic to the Tropics with
dependencies in every continent and every ocean.
So what we think of as the collapse of the British empire took place more or
less around the middle decades of the 20th century
and we normally mark this from the end of the Second World War in 1945
up until let's say the mid to late 60s, although there were in fact
decolonization moments happening after that
Nkw from 1945 to that period sort of mid-late 60s, what you saw was the
formal political legal independence of
countries in Asia and Africa, particularly South Asia
beginning with India and going through Africa
starting with Ghana in 1957 and moving on through from there.
So why did Empire collapse? There are many competing explanations but we can
group these broadly into thinking about what's happening inside Britain
and what's happening outside Britain. Inside Britain
of course at the end of the Second World War the country was pretty devastated
in a material sense and people were keen to
focus efforts and energies on rebuilding the country.
There was more a sense that the national economy needed to be rebuilt
and so the imperial trading arrangements the preferences that had gone before
began to become less important. The other idea that circulates about the end of
Empire within Britain was the sense that the the time was
changing, that the period of its imperial rule was coming to an end, and it chose
to withdraw from those colonies. Now these explanations are very
contested and that's particularly done by looking
at factors from outside Britain. So this would emphasize the role of resistance
against Empire in a political and a military sense
across the world. Now if you think about India, you had a
lot of mass movements there that tried to render the country
ungovernable. If you look at places like Kenya, there
were insurgencies against the colonial government. So you had resistance. You
also had the Cold War which meant that the West was particularly keen to make
sure that countries didn't go communist and therefore attempted to manage the
process so that they wouldn't become more aligned with the Soviet Union.
Beyond this you had ideological shifts at the level of the United Nations where
the questions of racial equality and
decolonization were becoming pressed by newer and newer members who became more
and more numerous. So in 1960 the UN passed its
declaration on decolonization setting the agenda for rapid
decolonizations thereafter
Why do we need to talk about empire today? Well first there's a strong sense
in which many structures from Empire such as
the hierarchies in the world economy and the differential treatment of people
with different racial backgrounds and also the ways in which political
institutions work continue to have this kind of
hierarchical structure that they inherited from
empire. So those are issues and areas in which people
want to probe whether we've really decolonized. There's a tension
fundamentally between the hierarchical structure of an empire
and what we think of as a more equal democratic structure in the world as
enshrined in things like the right to self-determination
and racial equality and so on now those things are intention and what
we're negotiating at the moment is how the hierarchies that were
produced in one age impact on and shape this idea of
equality that we have now.
So why are statues contentious? On the one hand
probably most of us walk past statues all the time and especially when we walk
past them every day we don't even notice them
Yet they're part of the everyday fabric of our lives and part of the symbolic
order in which we celebrate public figures. Now
as we've begun to reappraise empire and begun to reappraise
what values we think public space should celebrate
it's right that we should think about what statues there are and what they
celebrate and what they represent. Now this is particularly important
because Britain is not, if it ever was, that fantasy of a
single national entity. It's always been transnational in
some sense, think about Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and
transnational in a more fundamental sense if you think about its atlantic
spread and its its Empire. So thinking about Britain as
a kind of transnational entity a country which has all these
connections how do different parts of that entity
relate to the ways in which it represents its past
and what it celebrates about its past. So the debate about statues is about who
gets to belong, who gets to matter, what kinds of
violence we're comfortable with and not comfortable with
and what we choose to uphold going forward.
It's not unusual in the wake of reassessing historical periods for
memorials and other kinds of things to be re-evaluated
If we look at what happened in Germany after the Second World War, certainly
there was a massive re-evaluation of how the public space
understood fascism and understood German imperialism
So when we talk about decolonization now in relation to the curriculum
or public space what we're really thinking about is how to
firstly have a sort of critical awareness of colonialism and empire and
how these things shaped the way we think about the world and second to think
about whether there are alternative perspectives or points of departure
which we can use to articulate our meanings and our interpretations
So let's think of an example: in history and in
fields of social science we're taught to think about countries as being ahead or
behind each other we think of a country as being advanced and other countries is
catching up, and this is a language which actually
just updates the idea of civilized and backward countries right. And so these
ideas are pretty pervasive: let's think about the idea of
international development or national development
but when we understand that these were forged with certain assumptions about
what societies should look like and which societies
were good and which were not so good, then we start to challenge whether we
should even be comparing countries and societies in that way
and it's through a critical reappraisal of some of these ideas that we can
actually make progress in how we think about things.