Seumas Milne:

British Finance Minister Gordon Brown’s declaration in Africa that Britain should stop apologising for its colonial history must give an unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have marked Prime Minister Tony Blair’s leadership.

Apparently it is meant to be part of an attempt by the minister to carve out a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair play, freedom and tolerance. Quite what modernity and such values have to do with the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even more bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for the empire or the crimes committed under it. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been no apologies. Official Britain put decolonisation behind it in a state of blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to come to terms with what had taken place. Indeed, there has barely been a murmur of public reaction to Brown’s comments and what public criticism there is of the British imperial record has increasingly been drowned out by tub-thumping imperial apologias.

The rehabilitation of empire began in the early 1990s at the time of the ill-fated US intervention in Somalia, used by maverick voices on both sides of the Atlantic to float the idea of new colonies or UN trusteeships in Africa. But in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, what had seemed a wacky rightwing wheeze was taken up in Britain with increasing enthusiasm by conservative popular historians with sections of the press cheering them on. The call for “a new kind of imperialism’’ by Blair adviser Robert Cooper brought this reactionary retro chic into the political mainstream, and Brown’s endorsement of empire has now given it a powerful boost. The outraged response to South African president Thabo Mbeki’s recent denunciation of Churchill and the empire for a “terrible legacy’’ was a measure of the imperial torch-bearers’ new confidence.

It would be interesting to hear how Roberts squares such grotesque claims with the latest research on the large-scale, systematic atrocities carried out by British forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in colonial Kenya during the 1950s: the 320,000 Kikuyu held in concentration camps, the 1,090 hangings, the terrorisation of villages, electric shocks, beatings and mass rape documented in Caroline Elkins’ new book, Britain’s Gulag — and a death toll now thought to be over 100,000. This was a time when British soldiers were paid five shillings for each African they killed, when they nailed the limbs of Kikuyu guerrillas to crossroads posts and had themselves photographed with the heads of Malayan “terrorists’’ in a war that cost 10,000 lives. Or more recently still, as veterans described in the BBC Empire Warriors series, British soldiers thrashed and tortured their way through Aden’s Crater City. And all in the name of civilisation: the sense of continuity with today’s Iraq could not be clearer.

But it’s not as if these end-of-empire episodes were isolated blemishes on a glorious record of freedom and good governance. Britain’s empire was built on vast ethnic cleansing, enslavement, enforced racial hierarchy, land theft and merciless exploitation. Some empire apologists like to claim that, however brutal the first phase may have been, the 19th and 20th century story was one of liberty and economic progress. But this is nonsense. In late 19th and early 20th century India, up to 30 million died in famines as British administrators insisted on the export of grain, and courts ordered 80,000 floggings a year; four million died in the avoidable Bengal famine of 1943.

Modern-day Bangladesh was one of the richest parts of the world before the British arrived and deliberately destroyed its cotton industry. When India’s Andaman islands were devastated by the tsunami, who recalled that 80,000 political prisoners were held in camps there in the early 20th century and routinely experimented on by British army doctors? Perhaps it’s not surprising that Hitler was an enthusiast, describing the British empire as an “inestimable factor of value’’ even if, he added, it had been acquired with “force and often brutality’’.

But there has been no serious attempt in Britain to face up to the record of colonialism and the long-term impact on the societies it ruled. The modern world history textbook has chapter after chapter on the world wars, the cold war, British and American life, Stalin’s terror and the monstrosities of Nazism but scarcely a word on the British and other European empires which carved up most of the world between them, or the horrors they perpetrated.

What are needed are not apologies or expressions of guilt so much as education, acknowledgement, some measure of reparation and an understanding that barbarity is the inevitable consequence of attempts to impose foreign rule on subject peoples. Like most historical controversies, the argument about empire is as much about the future as the past. Those who write colonial cruelty out of 20th century history want to legitimise the new imperialism, now bogged down in a vicious colonial war in Iraq. If Brown really wants to champion British fair play and create a new relationship with Africa he would do better to celebrate those who campaigned for colonial freedom rather than the racist despotism they fought against. — The Guardian