Speaking of the Labour manifesto and how to teach the history and legacies of the Empire - here is the revised version of the (provisionally) 12 guidelines of how to discuss the subject (with thanks to those of my colleagues who chipped in): https://twitter.com/KimAtiWagner/status/1199413594380734464

1: Be informed - yes, you do actually need to read (and personal anecdotes don’t count).

2: Be nuanced - If you’re informed, it should be pretty evident that neither ‘The Case for Colonialism’ nor ‘Crimes of Britain’ are likely to produce anything resembling a meaningful debate, let alone historical insights.

3: Be critical - a critical approach to the Empire, however, is not the same as a critique of the Empire, and to highlight instances of oppression and violence is no more political than to study the railways or law.

4: No balance-sheet – the past cannot be reduced to ahistorical and over-simplistic moralistic notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, which are incompatible with a dispassionate and nuanced historical inquiry.

5: No whataboutery – while analytically meaningful comparisons can be illuminating, ‘What about Belgian Congo/But the Nazis were worse’ etc are not.

6: Don’t say anything about the British Empire that you wouldn’t also say about the Nazis – not because they were similar, which they weren’t, but because the actual implications of what you’re saying becomes very clear when you replace one with the other.

7a: ‘But everyone was racist back then’ is not a legitimate point (and probably not historically accurate either). A critical perspective does not mean that we criticise people in the past simply for having different views than we do today - that is not what history is about...

7b: But we do point out that maybe there is some dubious calculation being made if you insist on ignoring certain aspects of your historical hagiography to highlight only what you find admirable.

8: Feeling pride or shame in the Empire is not an obligation – interrogating those very sentiments, however, is. (I stole this from @daniel_todman who was speaking of WWII commemoration)

9: Think critically about concepts like “progress,” “modernity” and “advancement” and how these terms have been defined, in the past and present, in far from value-free ways, that are shaped by colonialism. (with thanks to @HinchyJessica)

10: If you make Empire an integral part of British/French/Dutch etc history, you also need to acknowledge the outcomes of Empire in postcolonial states as an integral part of the metropole’s history: eg. Partition as British History, or postcolonial migrants as European history.

(#10 is with thanks to @willgupshup)

11: ‘It was acceptable by the standards of the time’ simplifies complex contemporary responses to imperialism. Facile comparisons with the Roman Empire are meaningless. Stop going on about abolition of sati and slave trade as if these things prove overall benevolence - they don’t

(#11 courtesy of @AndreaMajor19)

12: Acknowledge the role that race, notions of embodied difference and various forms of ‘othering’ plays within the specific historical context – such ideas are likely to be structural and pervasive rather than idiosyncratic.

That's it - the list can of course be extended.

Thanks for coming to my teach-out! See you on the picket-line tomorrow.