How do you feel about the British Empire?

I used to think similar myself as a bolshy working class boy but then you realise even the work in working class was built on blood and plunder

I remember a phone-in to Radio Merseyside from my childhood in which one of the topics of discussion was a proposal to name a new housing development after members of The Beatles (I guess this was the late '70s, before the FabFourification of everything in the city had really kicked in). One irate caller suggested that "You'd be better off calling it Kunta Kinte Crescent! They built this city!"

irate caller otm

must be nice tho to live in a mental state where you can accept the reality of a spate of recent suicide bombings on uk soil without drawing a clear line back through the country's history of rah-rah adventurism in the middle east

(by the way, I haven't seen the word 'ochone' used in print since the old Angus Og cartoons that used to run in the Sunday Mail.)

It's a mindset yknow

Well, Angus didn't have his troubles to seek, true.

ShariVari, the Shama doc I mention is from 2000. You could easily mount a case that the worsening media climate since then has had an effect, though, as I remember a year or so ago some terrible wanker doing a show on BBC4 straight-up praising Victorian missionaries as the spiritual fathers of Doctor Who and Live Aid (wish I was making this up).

He, kinda surprised to hear that, Daniel, since I've spoken to a few post-colonialists who said stuff like 'yeah, my country was really bad, but admittedly we weren't Portugal...' I heard a story that in Mozambique, everything that couldn't be brought back to Portugal in 75 was basically destroyed, people even put sugar in the gas tanks of government vehicles. I would have thought Portuguese was more open to talk about it as well, since it was done under Salazar, and as I understood it the wars in the seventies were a contributing factor to the unrest that led to the Carnation revolution. Portuguese also much more open than other countries to discuss this legacy in cinema (which is where I know all I know about it from...) with films like Tabu and of course the cinema of Pedro Costa really delving into it.

The colonial war is one of the biggest taboos in Portuguese society, only recently has it started to be discussed more fully, in literature and cinema (and of course ppl like Miguel Gomes and Pedro Costa only speak to a small cinephile elite - hardly representative of the general feeling). A generation of men were forced into service and then came back to conditions that were basically Vietnam vets x100; no treatment for PTSD, a very hostile political climate. A lot of middle class (predominantly white, natch) people fled Angola and Mozambique during this era as well, lotta lives ruined. The fact that the post-revolution Portuguese government didn't manage much in the way of assuring peace comes into this - a lot of Angolans for instance are as angry or angrier about the shoddy decolonisation process as about colonialism in the first place. Angola after Portugal left had decades and decades of CIA and KGB sponsored civil war so a lot of Portuguese people believe, with varying degrees of bigotry, that things would've been "better" if Portugal had stayed.

Add to that the fact that Portugal did historically have a policy of miscegenation (in India especially, but pretty much everywhere) and a racial hierarchy that was somewhat more flexible than most; these factors were cleverly embraced by Salazar when it came to rebrand the Portuguese empire for a post-colonial era. In this he was helped enormously by a sociological theory called luso-tropicalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusotropicalism), which propped up dictatorships both in Portugal and Brazil. Basically the idea is that the Portuguese mixed with natives peoples and exhibited less bigotry, as such couldn't be compared to other Imperial powers. Nonsense of course, but it helped Salazar immensley politically, because he could dismiss attacks in the UN by claiming that Angola, Mozambique, etc. weren't "colonies" but part of Portugal, and their inhabitants citizens. It's true that there was never a rigid system of apartheid installed, and black Africans could rise reasonably high, as long as they basically forsook their culture - converted to catholicism, wore Western-style clothes, didn't associate with anyone who spoke local dialects, etc. So a sidestep from basic racism to a kind of cultural supremacist position.

Luso-tropicalism itself is pretty obscure now, we don't get it taught in school or anything, but talk to the average Portuguese person and very often their opinion will come directly from that ideology, though they almost certainly don't know it.

"Lost Empire" though, is something that we are very happy to discuss, as it feeds into a narrative of decadence that has been going on at least since the 19th century, sort of an indulgent self-pity that we'll never be as great as our seafaring ancestors. It's such a cliché in Portuguese society that people rarely notice the racist premises behind it.

Ah yes. And 'Fifth Empire' and Dom Sebastiao and stuff like that, right? That's an Oliveira-film :) I should really read more about that, it's really fascinating.

Yeah, all of that stuff looms large, first as a typical fascist Return To Glory narrative, and then more as a justification for decay - there's a very strong feeling in Portugal that things are bad <i>because</i> it's Portugal, that we're hopeless and there's no turning back. I think a lot of latin cultures have that to some extent, <i>Il Gattopardo</i> has that scene of the main character explaining to a reformer that modernity is all well and good for the rest of the world but Sicily just won't be able to take it.

Yeah, all of that stuff looms large, first as a typical fascist Return To Glory narrative (Pessoa ties into this somewhat - like a lot of modernists he had quite fashy impulses), and then more as a justification for decay - there's a very strong feeling in Portugal that things are bad because it's Portugal, that we're hopeless and there's no turning back. I think a lot of latin cultures have that to some extent, Il Gattopardo has that scene of the main character explaining to a reformer that modernity is all well and good for the rest of the world but Sicily just won't be able to take it.

Speaking of Oliveira, one of his best is No, Or The Vain Glory Of Command, featuring a group of colonial war soldiers discussing Portugal's past, and it's kind of a critique of Portuguese imperialism, though even there Oliveira throws in a scene from the Lusíadas, an epic poem praising Portugal for discovering the naval route to India, as a kind of alternative - as if it wasn't instrinsically connected to empire building.

de Oliveira is complicated, isn't he? A Talking Picture could be easily read as a paean to European values under assault - from Islam, it seems... I really should watch a lot more of him, have never seen No either.

Oh, sorry for the derail, everyone. Back to Britain :)

Before remounting the British imperial rail, can you Daniel recommend some non fiction in English on this aspect of Portuguese history/identity?

Not really :( I've picked this stuff up here and there, from a TV documentary series on the colonial war, novels, liner notes, one history of Angola...

On a tangent, the only person who would get documentaries about history made on Portuguese TV regularly was a) a minister under Salazar's regime, b) boring as fuck and c) often just made shit up, and has been dead for years now. Which might partly account for why I'm fonder of Shama than many here on ILX.

Good taste in intros tho:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVPulIGBgMw

Someone has pointed out on Twitter that of the 139 speakers at the UK's largest history festival, there is one member of a minority group (talking about the Koh-i-oor) and three members of the Wehrmacht.

https://programme.cvhf.org.uk/festival-programme/speakers/

quite a line-up. i forget in my ivory tower that this is what history is to a lot of the GBP/suburban home-owners

I don't really know what if anything I would want the british public to feel about the british empire in general. the sentiments itt largely a kickback against the chauvinist nationalist narratives (& studious silences), but beyond the remedial waryness I'm tempted to say a lack of sentiment is probably a good thing

An awareness of the atrocities commited and how they enriched the nation? A general consensus that empire was in the end A Bad Thing no matter how you slice it? I don't think all that needs to descend into performative self-flagellation or anything of the sort.

an appropriate corrective to unreflective nationalism, a better-informed sense of "our" place in the world that might influence people's views on what our nation-state ought to think about in terms of its obligations to non-nationals and nationals from immigrant backgrounds

if we're fantasizing wildly

awareness & context seem like the most unambiguously good aims. memorialising atrocities isn't that instructive by itself but instilling a useful understanding of the colonial system (& crucially how much of that still continues decentralised in the private sector) is quite a tall order. looking at how the spoils of empire were shared seems like mb the most illuminating angle. 'empire was in the end A Bad Thing' is v abstract, and morality on that scale seems to me, an amoral creature of my times, kind of absurd and uselessly vague (as suggested by the capitalisation). recognising injustice suggests a need for some sense of responsibility, for someone to own it (self-flagellating or not), and that's in conflict with the general long-term quiet disintegration & transmutation of british identity. the deeper structural legacy [economic/political/religious/moral/racial/social] seems like the most widely useful level to bring attention to

idk how you would create an audience for that though, even though the empire is extremely interesting

I wonder if a "useful understanding of the colonial system" and the "deeper structural legacy" isn't something that comes more easily after a moral societal consensus has been reached on a topic - like it's relatively easy to talk about the structural qualities of the Third Reich and the Soviet Bloc I think in part because there's the moral urgency of "how could this happen?", and that's a really motivating energy for that type of analysis?

"in conflict with the general long-term quiet disintegration & transmutation of british identity" - I don't have the knowledge to disagree with this, but do feel like you could say that about anything in history ever. Mainstream history still works within the frame of nation-states, a collective We that is to blame or to applaud or to be shaped by events is the first premise.

further to what I said in the first para there, I come from a German family (though raised in Portugal) and there's a pretty direct line for me of "this was terrible -> but regular people, like my grandparents, were involved in it -> how could that be? which encourages a search for deeper (and not just moral) answers. Probably wouldn't have been as much of a priority for me if my notion was "oh, some history thing, had some good and some bad stuff, others would've done the bad if we hadn't".

not that I think the Empire should be treated with the same degree of moral horror as the third reich, to be clear

there's this contrary pull between alterity & identity, & it seems to me the twin move of getting people to identify with the empire at the same time as condemning it is probably unrealistic. history can & should work within all sorts of frames besides nation states & any serious national history will obv pick at nationhood.

the british empire is perhaps less of an aberration than the third reich & the soviet bloc, prefiguring the current world system rather than operating outside of it & this makes the sense of moral judgment difficult. if ppl don't feel the need to condemn the foreign depradations of british petroleum & BAE then it seems hard to see how they'll summon a sense of moral outrage about empire. the sense of empire is subtler, and foggier for a lot of british ppl without connections to colonies beyond perhaps grandparents being posted round the world in the war. that might go some way to explaining the lack of motivating energy for imperial history, there's never been the same sense of crisis within the UK

history can & should work within all sorts of frames besides nation states & any serious national history will obv pick at nationhood.

Sure, which is why I qualified with "mainstream"; I don't think non-expert discussion and (crucially) the way history is taught in schools has gone beyond the nation state model...anywhere yet, really, and the possibility of that happening soon is probably as fanciful as anything else being discussed here

I think total defeat - of the kind the Reich and the Soviet Union experienced - certainly helps, as does the fact that they're fresher in mind than the Empire, which spread out over centuries. But in the end the question was about what change would be desirable, not what would be probable

Also perhaps relevant that third reich and soviet bloc can be assessed after they ended. British empire winding down since idk the seventies probably hasn't yet provided the necessary end point

XP

definitely, there's a greater awareness of empire in former colonies where that sort of reckoning has occurred but for (most?) ppl in the uk there's been more continuity than disruption & it's harder to disentangle what is & isn't imperial (another thing that makes a straightforward moralistic approach a tricky proposition)

the way history is taught & understood has changed a lot so there is room for optimism there imo. my little brother is doing a-level history atm & is doing a bit on early colonialism & the church, it seems pretty good!

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/dont-mistake-nostalgia-about-british-empire-scholarship#survey-answer

"On 8 May, The Times will host an event on “the legacy of the British Empire”, at which participants will debate whether Britain’s empire was “a force for good or a force for evil”"

"Reappraising the British Empire in this vein has become a way in which race-thinking, if not outright racism and masculinism (The Times panel, we’re told, will examine the “men and motivations” of empire), if not misogyny, can be rehabilitated in a celebratory story that excuses occasional “excess” by evoking overall “benefit”."

This Empire nostalgia shitfest was brought to you by The Times, surprise surprise.

Good to see it can only be considered as a binary either/or, no room for subtleties in modern Britain. Salute the flag, carry on up the khyber, brexit mean etc etc etc

calling academics who take a nuanced and humanist stance on the excesses of colonialism a "left-wing fifth column" and then moaning about them stifling the debate is rather fucking thick and hypocritical, but I think they know that tbh and are playing to the "anti-pc gallery" - or something like that.

even weirder that the dutch had an empire

well the countries that had a colonial empire are exactly the ones you would expect from their geographical position in europe, i.e. atlantic coastline. even sweden did a bit of colonizing as the dominant scandinavian power. meanwhile, the italians started it all but went the other way, to the black sea.

Only the swiss keps their paws off eh?

they devoted their energies to magnificent clocks, and the world was a better place for it.

when you have such nice mountains, why go anywhere?

don't mention what Swiss did in the mid 20th Century tho!

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Journals/Military_Affairs/13/4/The_Dutch_Invasion_of_England_in_1667*.html

and this Dutch invasion and military defeat of UK forces on UK soil isn't often mentioned.

True but they stayed put

If the Dutch were to attack UK today it would be a toss up

This came up in SNA and I half-wondered if it was one of

promising thread titles that turn out to be on ILM

Like "How do you feel about British Sea Power?"

If the Dutch were to attack UK today it would be a toss up

Tbf our brave women and men for some years now have to practice shooting while voicing the sound of a bullet/shotgun because there's no money for actual bullets. A situation I wholly approve.

Still a toss up though probably.

even sweden did a bit of colonizing as the dominant scandinavian power.

― Roberto Spiralli, 20. april 2018 17:34 (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck the world. no.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_colonial_empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darien_scheme

Danish vikings trashed the place near where I was born, which granted me the opportunity to run an April fools story in my newspaper about a Danish viking helmet being found in our soil (our soil being polder land, reclaimed long after the vikings actually set sail here). The supposed exhibit of said helmet attracted a big enough crowd for it to be a successful April fools gag, and some people I know here still hold the Danish accountable for whatever insufferable fate seemingly bestowed upon them. It is a lie, and yet it is the truth. I am at peace with both coexisting.

Tom, I don't think Fred is doubting that Scandinavia has colonialist skeletons in its closet so much as taking offense at casting Sweden as its dominant power.

I know.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUzzw1IW4AE9hdO.jpg
30 year War era Europe is an absolute fucking clusterfuck. I really admire historians who can talk authoritatively about all the different players on the board. In this pic here is the size of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1619 ... absolutely huge!

scottish people still cheap to this day after being burned financially with the hapless darien scheme

We've never been good away from home.