EMPIRE- did you know this history?

I don't think this is really possible under the national curriculum, in England at least. As part of the their KS3 study they need to cover challenges for Britain, Europe and the world since 1901, and there is a requirement that the Holocaust is part of that study.

Extraordinarily difficult to do this without teaching them anything about WW2.

I'm often a fierce critic of the national curriculum and the way history is taught, but the KS3 history curriculum is actually pretty good and certainly gives a much better chronological view of how society has developed than I got at school. I'm also very lucky that my year 9 DS is at a school with a really great, imaginative history department that appears really committed to turning out critical thinkers who can debate historical questions effectively.

The KS2 history curriculum, by contrast, belongs in the bin.

A book worth reading is "Colonialism' by Nigel Biggar. Apparently he had many problems getting published because he manages to see the good and the bad of the British Empire, he doesn't just highlight the bad things, which is what publishers seemed to require.
The countries being colonised weren't all sunshine and happy days before Britain took over, especially for women. Widows were burnt alive on their husband's funeral pyres in some counties and FGM in Africa was mainly brought to the attention of the world by Christian missionaries from various Western European empires.
The Industrial Revolution created so much misery for people in Britain with slave like living conditions and horrible working conditions.

I was part of a history project with some schoolkids recently Smart, engaged year 7s. Not one of them had heard of the Reformation or had any idea when it was. Most ideas were 20th century. Most barely knew who Henry VIII was. They had no idea we used to be Catholic and were now Protestant. They were shocked to discover Catholics were persecuted and that antisemitism was still a thing. We did talk anout slavery and they knew a bit about empire and slavery and had heard of Mary Seacole.

Most people know FA about history and the lack of knowledge about empire and slavery is not a racist conspiracy its because curriculum time is very very tight and most people learn almost no history at school. In fact these days they are more likely to have heard of Mary Seacole, who was objectively quite a minor figure than the most important religious, political, cultural event in our history that affected every single person i this country directly, and the impact of which was felt for centuries, up until today.

@Glystl but they will be missing out on something else to make room for it. Whatever history is focused on, something else loses out. Lots of kids now are dropping it at 14 and know nothing at all about WWII ..including the reasons why and how Nazism gained traction.

I was at school in the 90s and did history GCSEs and A-levels (home counties England). We never learnt anything about the empire at school. I'm actually pretty angry about it because it's such a vital part of understanding why so many people from round the world want to come and live here and I do think people are much less aware than you think they should be. I loved history and read widely as a child, was taken to loads of museums and national trust properties by family and I don't remember it being addressed much. I'm sure the information was there if you looked for it, but i really don't think it was widely available unless you were interested. Grateful my kids are getting a more rounded knowledge at school now.

Actively shaking off as in referendums to cut ties with Britain/commonwealth.
I certainly wish Canada would do this.

I think this is the point, not just cotton but vast array of raw materials, cheap labour (despite the expense of running the empire) and also markets that could be controlled. But also tje needs of empire and conflict stimulated innovation and the need for new technology.

I am a British person of South Asian heritage - born and bred here.

Ive been a hard working, professional my entire working life and given in more than I take out.

I don’t understand this comment - please clarify how you think I could possibly be exploiting the UK system- which is my country?

He is interesting to watch. When he did A House Through time in Bristol, he mentioned Edward Colston, who was a slave trader then, when he saw the error of his ways, became quite the philanthropist and supported and endowed schools and other public institutions in Bristol, London and elsewhere.

The Colston Hall has now been renamed as Bristol Beacon.

I'm not sure what to think of the hectoring tone of some of the posts on here admonishng posters for now knowing evrvrything about our involvment in empire building and the slave trade.

I have read a number of books about it - fact and fiction (Philppa Gregory's A Respectable Trade is about the slave trade in Bristol), but I still don't know everything. I really don't recall learning about our involvement in the slave trade at school in the 1970s. For O level we covered the industrial revolution, Gladstone and Disraeli and their boring ministeries, the suffragettes and both world wars. Vietnam was still ongoing when I did history O level, which I failed,

DD is a student in Liverpool and I really wanted to visit the International Slavery Museum on one of my visits, but is is closed for refurbishment until 2028. I have visited Wilberforce House in Hull though.

Whilst not as abhorrent as slavery, building staggering wealth on the backs of miners and steel workers is also something that should draw raised eyebrows.

You are right @BoudiccaRuled The mine owners owned the mines, the pubs, the houses and the shops, so any wages they paid out they got back.

I live in South Yorkshire in an area that was mainly a coal mining area.

Children of the Dark: Life and Death Underground in Victoria's England by Alan Gallop is an eye opening and stark description of what life was like for coal miners and their families. After the Huskar Pit Disaster in 1838 when 26 children died Lord Shaftesbury introduced the Mines and Collieries Act in 1842 to outlaw the employment of women and children underground in coal mines. The Clarke family who owned the mine did not treat their employees well.

Another book worth reading is Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty by Catherine Bailey. It is a fascinating account of the Fitzwilliam family and their employees at Wentworth Woodhouse. Compared to other mine owners the Fitzwilliams did treat their employees reasonably well.

Back to slavery, I can recommend Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. It is an autobiographical account of her horrific life as a slave in the Southern states.

If you are enjoying life in Britain you are enjoying the proceeds of the Empire. We didn't become one of the worlds top economies from selling apples from our green and pleasant land. I just thought everyone realised this at some point.

You're being disingenuous. Do you really expect every single person to think this?

"the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" Edmund Burke

Dehumanisaton was swift and brutal: 3 million transported Africans, categorised as livestock, for over 300 years.

What agenda?
And which historians dont? Their job is interpretation of history.

Where did the cotton come from, @NotDavidTennant?

The Empire induspitably made some individual families wealthy but the extent to which it benefited the country as a whole is much more debatable.

If you look at a graph of UK GDP over time what causes it to shoot up is not the onset of colonialism but the onset of industrialisation. Innovation has driven wealth creation far more than exploitation.

And yet many retain the monarch as head of state and remain members of the commonwealth.

The Empire improved certain things but made other situations worse.

As with every other nation on earth, Britain has a chequered history.

That was how it was then.

Evidence?
Many countries are now regretting their links to the U.K and actively trying to shake off those links

If you are enjoying life in Britain you are enjoying the proceeds of the Empire.
We didn't become one of the worlds top economies from selling apples from our green and pleasant land....
I just thought everyone realised this at some point...

It is. I don’t think he covers it, but racism really emerges at this point as a means of justifying this. If you look back to the 16th century, aside from the fact that there was less contact with people from outside Europe, the general paradigm for judging people as being what you might crudely call ‘fully human’ and worthy of being afforded the same dignity as they would afford their neighbours, was whether they were Christian / believed in God in a recognisable way. Quite soon after the Atlantic slave triangle started missionaries travelled to the new world with the ambition to save the souls of new people and introduce them to the glories of Christianity. They were very successful. There’s a lot about the Christian message that resonates with the enslaved and the destitute. But that meant slave owners had to justify their continued enslavement some other way.

I think most of the first travellers travelled without passports at all. They didn’t need passports, just some form of ID to travel between different parts of the British empire and Britain. HMS Windrush arrived before British citizenship was created at a time when passports declared the holder a subject of the monarch, not a citizen. My parents had a friend who was only eligible for a British Indian passport until after 1947 because he was born there while his father was working there. He was then described as ‘British by descent’ which always riled him because, as he saw it, he was of 100% British ancestry and born in a place that was British at the time.

I’ve only watched the first episode, but it struck me as pretty sensitive. It deals with the Jamestown plantation in Virginia in part by talking to descendants of the displaced indigenous people speaking their languages. It explores the beginnings of slavery in Barbados by focusing on an African burial ground on an estate and a planned memorial. And on Clive and the East India Company by talking to British Asians.

Thanks for this context!

I thought people were having a general discussion about Empire.

I haven’t watched the series (though I am aware of it) - I find it all triggering as it’s too close to home.

I am a descendant of enslaved people.

Yes. For me the single most interesting thing about the Barbados section of the first episode of Empire was the difference between two documents dated 14 years apart from a particular sugar estate. The first one listed the full names and rights and how much time they had left to serve of European indentured workers. The one from 14 years later had no indentured workers, but a whole new category of enslaved Africans whose names weren’t given, just the Anglo nicknames they’d been given since being enslaved, who had no rights, because they were racialised estate property, not employees, and who had no amount of time left to serve, because their slavery had no endpoint.

It’s a disturbingly quick shift to the wholesale dehumanisation of an entire category of people to fuel a growing appetite for sugar. There’s some astonishing stat like Britain consuming six times as much sugar in 1770 as it had in 1720, almost all from the Caribbean colonies.

It really isn't.

Great post.

And though technically not enslaved the ones in the worst circumstances often didn't have much freedom, nor the time or good health to enjoy what freedom they had, without autonomy over things like employment or housing, justice system stacked agai st them etc And of course for much of history didn't have the vote. And working class women were horrifically abused, working while bringing up children without the welfare state.