By John Plowright
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement there has been an increased demand that Britain should face up to the darker aspects of its colonial past by making the transatlantic slave trade and other aspects of Empire part of the compulsory curriculum in schools and by removing from public spaces the statues of figures such as Colston, Milligan, Churchill, Baden-Powell and Rhodes.
There is undoubtedly what might crudely be termed a triumphalist ‘Tory’ view of Britain’s history in which the empire is either largely absent or appears only in order to highlight the alleged blessings of British rule (such as the railways, English language and cricket) or to reinforce the image of British moral superiority (as, for example, the first nation to abolish the slave trade and slavery within its dominions).
There is an equally crude left-wing version of England’s past. It too is intended to generate pride but the focus here is on the defining moments and movements which allegedly advanced the cause of democracy, including the Peasants’ Revolt, the English Revolution, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the suffragettes. The British Empire is here too marginalised in favour of our island story, with figures like Gandhi basically appearing offstage as honorary Englishman in the democratic tradition when championing decolonisation.
I would like to focus on a particular liberal-left article of faith, namely, the belief that violent direct action and riots in particular invariably produce results. Expressions of this belief are not hard to find on social media at present. This is a typical example:
“gay ppl acquired rights through rioting, remember stonewall? Women acquired rights through rioting, remember the suffragettes? Do you think slaves were just freed out of kindness, or did they revolt? Don’t act like it doesn’t work, or that it’s only something black ppl do”
No one, of course, with any historical sense could deny that rioting can bring about positive change. The 1969 Stonewall riots certainly helped to convince the gay and lesbian community of the need to organize to campaign for their rights, some of which have belatedly been conceded. The link between the militant campaign of the suffragettes (they didn’t really riot) and women getting the vote seems even more supportive of the thesis that protest straightforwardly works but actually isn’t.
Some women in the UK got the vote in 1918 but this was only after the four years of the Great War during which Mrs Pankhurst’s WSPU had suspended its campaign of direct action, and when the vote was conceded it was done on the grounds that women had shown, by their contribution to the war effort, that they deserved to be treated as full citizens, on a par with the men who’d fought for their country, significant numbers of whom also lacked the vote prior to 1918. It’s true that a few, notably Sylvia Pankhurst, had broken ranks with the official wartime line of the WSPU, and it may well be that rewarding war work merely provided a convenient excuse for the government to pre-empt a full-scale resumption of militant suffragette activities by making concessions but it’s equally plausible to argue that pre-war militant suffragette tactics were almost wholly counter-productive insofar as they were taken by many men as justifying their belief that women were not fit to have the vote. Certainly, no self-respecting government can afford to be seen to be making concessions in response to force. The final irony for those on the left who applaud Mrs Pankhurst is that she ended up as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Whitechapel and St Georges.
Do I think slaves revolted? Of course, I do. Did those revolts sometimes result in freedom? Yes, with the Haitian revolution being the best example, but it would be a very peculiar history that attributed the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire or the United States to slave revolts. In the latter case it has far more to do with Lincoln’s need for manpower (and international support) during the Civil War. In Britain’s case one could discount the altruism of the likes of Wilberforce and other abolitionists but even Eric Williams’s ‘Capitalism and Slavery’ does not credit slave rebellions with having secured freedom, on the contrary writing that “The West Indian planters … saw in these slave revolts nothing but an opportunity of embarrassing the mother country and the humanitarians.”
I would not presume to say that people should never engage in violent protest. Sometimes there will be no other means of engaging with those in authority. At the very least it will provide a channel for anger, unify like-minded people and possibly raise public consciousness. It may even, on occasion, secure some or all of the protesters’ aims. However, there is no guarantee of success. Indeed, there will always be many more examples of failure than success for the obvious reason that the odds will always favour those in power.
In short, reform of school History curricula is long overdue, not only to correct the whitewashed and rose-tinted version of the national past that supports the smug complacency of many of those on the right but also to disabuse some on the left whose naivety and historical ignorance leads them to spout equally smug and simplistic certitudes.