British Empire - 16 comments
I always find the whole "biased BBC" thing a turn-off, as, I suspect, do most on our side of the fence, but things like this makes you wonder.
The whole story?
It's an article about the British Empire - which the Fabian Society believes should be given more coverage in school history - which contains no references whatsoever to slavery, but which is illustrated (without explanation) by a picture of black people being whipped, as if that represents an accurate summing up of several hundred years of history spread across every continent on the globe. What a way to close off all interesting discussion in advance.
Maybe the Fabians could offer special lessons to BBC Online journalists? Update: Hmm, maybe that wouldn't be such a good idea...
![[Valid Atom]](http://www.bloggers4labour.org/images/valid-atom.png "Validate my Atom feed")
16 comments so far...
Since when has the picture posted on each BBC news page supposed to be an "an accurate summing up" of the story under discussion, or represented "the whole story" as your caption suggests it should?
What image would you have posted to illustrate this particular story? A picture of Gordon Marsden, perhaps? Or maybe one of Queen Victoria?
And I'm not sure the story does contain no reference to slavery. It's implicit, but it's there: John Denham is quoted as saying that "We need to learn to tell our history so that it explains why so many people have roots in other parts of the world", and it'd be difficult to tell the story of West Indians in this country and of their roots without discussion of the ways in which their ancestors were abducted and transported across the Atlantic to work as slave labour in the sugar plantations of the British West Indies.
Anyway: anti-imperialism has great Labour tradition, which you ought to want to celebrate on this site. Someone's supposed to have said to Keir Hardie that the sun never set on the British Empire, and got the reply, "And the blood never dries."
(These issues are being debated in France right now, too: Chirac, I think, recently withdrew the decree from earlier in the year demanding that the "positive aspects" of French colonialism be taught in schools.)
Anyone who gets involved in discussions of history syllabi is going to get shot down from one side or the other, due to their intense politicisation. I don't want to get into whether history should be dovetailed into contemporary politics, should be taken in isolation, or indeed dropped entirely below University level, but surely there must be a case for covering the subject in an independent manner, rather than taking an "explaining contemporary racism" approach, or a contemporary anti-imperialistic perspective (even if we happen to take that view ourselves).
I criticised the choice of picture because, whatever the evils of past and present slavery, I donât think we should be encouraging people (in advance of taking the new course) to take the view that the British Empire was entirely 19th Century, entirely a colonial exercise, entirely racist, that black Africans were the only ones to suffer, or that the suffering of past/present black Africans can generally be pinned on the British Empire. It reduces the scope of the subject, encourages hyper-sensitivity to slave issues, misses other negative aspects, and, yes, rules out the possibility of positive aspects.
Of course whether this vast topic can be made comprehensible in just a couple of years of History lessons is another matter, especially so if the Fabians believe it will additionally tackle the root causes of racism among the youth.
I wish the BBC had more clearly stated that the picture was an attempt to sum up the British empire in its entirety. Indeed the first picture ever to attempt such a feat. How devious of them.
Thanks for teasing that one out for the rest of us!
Shut up, troll.
Chris wrote:
'Since when has the picture posted on each BBC news page supposed to be an "an accurate summing up" of the story under discussion, or represented "the whole story" as your caption suggests it should?'
I wonder how you and/or other visitors to the site would have reacted if a picture of slaves had been used to accompany a news story concerning the economic history of the Arab world?
Perhaps we should quote Nelson Mandela, that well-known imperialist lackey:
"You must remember I was brought up in a British school, and at the time Britain was the home of everything that was best in the world. I have not discarded the influence which Britain and British history and culture exercised on us. We regarded it as the capital of the world and visiting the place therefore had this excitement becuase I was visiting the country that was my pride...you must also remember that Britain is the home of parlimentary democracy and, as a people fighting against a form of tyranny in this country, we look to Britain to take an active interest to support us in our fight against Apartheid"
This quote is from The Rise and Fall of British Empire by Lawrence James who ends his book with "Few empires have equipped thier subjects with the intellectual wherewithal to overthrow their rulers. None has been survived by so much affection and moral respect." One only has to look at the way the French left Algeria and the existance of the Commonwealth to see that the British Empire was not all bad.
I wonder how you and/or other visitors to the site would have reacted if a picture of slaves had been used to accompany a news story concerning the economic history of the Arab world?
That would depend on whether I thought the image was being used to propagate or reinforce racist images of Arabs or not.
Eric: if you're interested in how the British governed one of their major African settler colonies in the 1950s, you might like to read either David Anderson's Histories of the Hanged or Caroline Elkins's (less good, but still good) Britain's Gulag, both of which discuss the war in Kenya in the 1950s.
Personally, I wouldn't be comfortable arguing that the British Empire was drastically more high-minded, tolerant, or more careful with subject's lives, than other European empires. It does still get a better press in this country - at least from some quarters - many of the more unsavoury incidents are long-forgotten, and the ruthless actions of the 1950s and 1960s (Kenya, Malaya, Aden, etc.) haven't had the domestic political/social consequences France reaped from their actions in Algeria.
My main point is that, by choosing that picture, the BBC was saying: "the British Empire is a euphemism for black African slavery and appropriation of the world's resources. Our kind of people take that as read, that racism today (at least, the media-friendly white on black sort) is a consequence of this, and that the main focus of education for children be the slave trade, with racism and greed as its driving force, rather than, say, politics, trade, industrial development, the balance of power in Europe, etc." I'm sure these issues would be covered if the syllabus was extended/amended, but if politicised - or approached with the simplistic assumptions the BBC have made - then the exercise would be a waste of time.
I think the use of that picture is misleading at best. The British were the one who stopped, eventually, the cross-Atlantic slave trade...
Chris,
I'm not about to defend the actions of the British state in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising, and you assume I was ignorant of Elkins' book, but you are deluded if your think the British Empire was as bad as it could have been.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1749539.stm
Simply contrast the treatment and text by the BBC of the Ottoman empire to that by the BBC of the British empire.
Chris Brooke said...
'Since when has the picture posted on each BBC news page supposed to be an "an accurate summing up" of the story under discussion,'
Since it sets the tenor and 'primes' your frames of reference. It is propaganda of the highest calibre.
Bestial treatment of minorities by the British in the past, dovetails precicely with the current standard BBC fare; institutional racism, discrimination against minorities, etc, etc.
On the other hand, the picture on the BBC website about the Ottoman empire might lead one to think they were magnificient architects. And from the text magnanimous rulers.
Also they manage to put a favourable gloss on the subjection of women in the hareem. Touching on it purely from the perspective of the 'lucky' sultan. 'Iffy' ground there for the BBC, so it is only a fleeting reference.
They don't for example, mention the castration of males to guard the hareem [volunteers anyone?], nor the slavery on which much of the Ottoman and to a larger extent the Arab economy depended.
In short excellent propaganda and a complete whitewash.
I'm sure these issues would be covered if the syllabus was extended/amended, but if politicised - or approached with the simplistic assumptions the BBC have made - then the exercise would be a waste of time.
The BBC used that picture because the Fabians have suggested that school children should learn about the way populations were migrated under the British Empire, and that means teaching about slavery and the use of cheap, quasi-enforced labour (Indians in Africa, for instance) that pertained after slavery was abolished. What other pictures could the BBC have used to illustrate the point the Fabians are trying to make? The only thing I can think of would be pictures from post-imperial migration, but this is already on the National Curriculum, quite widely taught, and not what the Fabians are talking about.
Rather than leaping on this as a way to partake of the warm, fuzzy myth of BBC bias (sixty years people have been complaining about this now, and the only person to come up with a concrete example to date is Tony Benn during the miners' strike), wouldn't it have been better to enagge your brain and find out what the story was about?
Oh, and I nearly forgot...
Could anybody except the BBC write an article about the Ottomans without mentioning the Armenian holocaust?
Silly me, the Armenians are by an large European and Christian. Racism and bigotry are, according to BBC revealed doctrine, the exclusive preserve of European Christians.
An aside in ther puff piece on the Ottoman empire couldn't possibly include the slightest hint of the less savoury charateristics of the Ottomans. Why it might even make them seem very similar or worse than the British in terms of their cruelty and ruthlessness.
In summary, lets look at the Ottoman empire and review some of its characteristics.
Subjection of women and their use as sex slaves.
Systamatic mass and involuntary castration of slaves and their subjugation.
Slavery as an integral part of their economic system.
Mass murder in their dependent domains particually where the subject people were not Moslem.
Class act.
And finally, of course, there is the commonwealth of now independent former colonies of the Ottoman empire, that freely associate to get together and chat about the good old Ottoman empire.
My final contribution to this thread:
First: the Fabians. Andrew's original post says that "the Fabian Society believes" that the Empire should be given more coverage in school history. That's not true. The Fabian Society - of which I've been a member for more than a decade - doesn't have this kind of corporate belief. Rather, it publishes stuff that it thinks deserves to be discussed inside the Labour movement, and on this occasion it published an issue of its quarterly magazine, devoted to the general theme of "Britishness", one article in which, by Gordon Marsden MP, said a few things about teaching history in schools. There will also be a panel on the subject at the Fabians' New Year conference at Imperial College, London on 14th January, at which Humayun Ansari, Paul Gilroy, Tristram Hunt, Francesca Klug, Seema Malhotra and Gordon Marsden will speak, but they will all give their personal opinions, and none of these can be transformed into Official Fabian Opinion: there is no such thing (thank goodness).
Second: Gavin Ayling said, "I think the use of that picture is misleading at best. The British were the one who stopped, eventually, the cross-Atlantic slave trade..."
Whether or not this fact alone makes the picture misleading, in the face of other relevant facts, for example, that about half the Atlantic slave trade (i.e., about three million Africans) was carried on British ships in the period 1660-1807, is unclear. But the question of the abolition of the slave trade would seem to me to be an excellent topic for study in history lessons in schools: there are, broadly speaking, two competing interpretations to explain what happened, one which concentrates on the moral crusade for abolition led by Wilberforce, the other which concentrates on the strategic and economic reasons as to why the British elite could afford to dump the slave trade by the early 19th century, and, as so often, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, though quite where in the middle isn't terribly clear. Well, topics like that are ideal for classroom teaching.
Third, I'm glad to hear, Eric, that you're not about to defend British actions in Kenya. Your final point, though, is trivial: of course the British Empire wasn't as bad as it could have been -- nothing, not even Hitler / Stalin / Saddam Hussein [/ insert name of other evil dictator here ] was as bad as they could have been. So I rather took you to be implying something less trivial, like "the British Empire wasn't that bad, after all", and if I was wrong to do so, then apologies.
(Anonymous said many things, but life's too short to exchange opinions with anonymous people on the interwebnet, and especially with anonymous people who want to talk about the Armenian genocide in a thread about the British Empire.)
Chris brooke: "anonymous people who want to talk about the Armenian genocide in a thread about the British Empire."
Nice cop out Chris. I don't have a blogger id, I would think most people in the UK don't have a blogger Id.
Anyway, to the substantive issue. The bias or otherwise of the BBC in it's treatment of the British empire...
Is clearly illustrated by its treatment of a similar, more or less contempory non British empire.
The picture employed by the BBC to illustrate its 'story' on the British Empire' when compared with the picture employed by the BBC to illustrate its 'narrative' of the Ottoman empire clearly illustrates favourable bias to the latter.
Furthermore, the BBC chooses the worst aspects of the British empire, that it employed slavery, as the defining characteristic of the British empire. Nothing about aspiring to freedom, the idea that Ghandi employed in his struggle for independence, nothing about human rights, taken a step further by the Americans, nothing about the ideal of equality before the law.
The point Eric raises about Mandela, is a good one. The principles the British elected to inculcate in their subject people resulted in those people arguing their way out of the Empire. The BBC could have put a image of Mandela or Ghandi to represent the Empire, they were as much products of the British Empire as Eunechs were of the Ottomans.
Chris brooke: "...not even Hitler / Stalin / Saddam Hussein [/ insert name of other evil dictator here ] was as bad as they could have been."
Cool! Hitler who tried to eradicate an entire race, was not as bad as he could have been. I suppose he could have succeeded, but it is worth pointing out, some of the people who fought against Hitler were those terribly oppressed folk in the British Empire and former British colonies.
Stalin, who is responsible for the murder of more than 60 million people, that is, a population the size of the UK, "could have been worse".
How could these two have been worse?
Just a few points (weightier things are on my mind @ present):
* re. "The Fabian Society believes...": that's a "think before you type"on my part. Will replace it as/when I can think of a better version.
* Anonymous commenters: totally with Chris on this one. Getting an ID is free and reduces the likelihood that other people will think the other is a troll.
* Finally, "could have been worse" is a terrible argument, whatever the issue at hand. It's fatalistic, and puts you with the prosecution, not the defence.
That's it for now.
Post a Comment
<< Home