Don’t mistake nostalgia about the British Empire for scholarship

Spot on: and worse, these Empire-apologists will drag us all into a terrible mess again. We don't want a repeat of the 19th to mid-20th Centuries...

How can Kim Wagner and James McDougall claim the high ground on historical scholarship when the best they can offer is unabashed character assassination of a colleague who dares disagree with their blanket condemnation of empire? Their diatribe illustrates precisely the sort of leftwing hysteria that’s allowing half-truths, fake facts and wildly exaggerated “atrocities” to dominate the teaching of imperial history. It’s revealing of the reverse racism involved that McDougall and Wagner have very conveniently airbrushed from their racist-white-male conspiracy theory the fact that the forthcoming Times panel on empire on 8th May will be joined by two Indians, myself as a political historian of the nationalist movement and the eminent economic historian Professor Tirthankar Roy of the LSE, who’s been debunking simplistic shibboleths about Indian de-industrialisation and drain of wealth during the Raj. Are we really “historically illiterate” for recognising that empires were once the default mode of governance worldwide and that empires, like nation states, varied enormously in their ethical standards and institutional impact? Can we really take seriously as historians those like McDougall/Wagner who want to shut down such debate and even seek to silence us by raising the absurd spectre of Powellism, blaming us for the completely unrelated coincidence of the BBC airing his “Rivers of Blood” speech? As an Indian immigrant myself and a Remain voter, I take strong exception to being tarred with the brush of Brexit and racist xenophobia. Zareer Masani (DPhil Oxford, 1976)

A little too easy perhaps to stridently pick apart some strident articles in the Daily Mail. That newspaper is not the most challenging target for an alleged critique of a modern avenue of scholarship. Wagner and McDougall point out, in a tone of regret, "None quotes from, or seems to have read, any of the scholarship they denounce". Ironic, then, that this article does not deal substantively with the scholarship it criticises, only quoting once from a single article by Professor Biggar in The Times without any effort to unpack the quotation. Surprisingly, there is also no effort to scrutinise the methodology of Biggar's Ethics and Empire project, presumably because it is easier to simply dismiss such work as the creation of "privileged white men of a certain age and class". Most quotations in this article are from single words or phrases from the page advertising The Times event "The legacy of the British Empire with Ben Macintyre". Wagner and McDougall mix up phrases from The Times website such as "real meaning" with other words and phrases in quote marks such as "uncivilised", without making it clear which are their own invention. The words "excess" and "benefit" sound like direct quotes but I was unable to locate them on the page they link. Indeed, it is rarely clear when the authors are quoting a source (and if so, which source) or simply using scare quotes to problematise certain terminology. This is sloppiness at best and misleading at worst. I admire the rhetorical nerve of the final paragraph attempting to connect modern scholarship on colonialism with the current sad problems faced by some of the Windrush generation, but I hope the authors are aware that it does not constitute an argument.

Kim Wagner and James McDougall have quite a lot to say. One of the things they do is to characterise the viewpoint that they oppose as emanating ", almost invariably, from privileged white men of a certain age and class". Now both could be said as occupying privileged positions - one at Queen Mary, University of London and one at Trinity College, Oxford. They can also both be characterised as white men, of a certain (young) age and of a certain class. So their line "almost invariably, from privileged white men of a certain age and class" applies perfectly well to themselves. And the rest of the article seems to be pure polemic and rhetoric. Is this what we can now expect from todays Academia?