This is indeed the popular British narrative -- that Britain's role in the slave trade was to end it, that the British empire decolonised so much more peacefully than the nasty Europeans -- and the fact that it is **entirely incorrect** does not make it any less pervasive. https://twitter.com/danny__kruger/status/1273509592195051520

I often talk & write about the British attitude to empire -- including in my book. This is a clear example of a popular framing, which allows both the expression of pride in imperialism *and* a reluctant concession that imperialism & the slave trade (!) should not be celebrated.

British exceptionalism -- which I have also written about -- is always applied to imperialism in this way. British imperialism was supposedly not like the other empires, the European empires, because British imperialism was built on "British values".

People who are far more expert that me have written a lot about Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade and about how wrong-headed this attitude is. I am a contemporary historian and work more on decolonisation. Britain did not decolonise peacefully or willingly.

The Amritsar "massacre", the Mau Mau "uprising", the Malayan "insurgency" all must be read within a narrative of decolonisation -- as well as countless other examples of British violence against colonial subjects and suppression of demands for independence.

Ghanaian independence, often listed in imperial history books as an example of Britain's peaceful & swift transfer of power, took a decade of sustained action. It was repressed by the British and the leaders of the movement imprisoned. Nkrumah was in prison when he was elected.

The British *at the time* were constructing this as a success story of peaceful democracy - although their idea of peaceful perhaps looks different to ours. Charles Arden Clarke, governor, praised the colonial police for creating 'plenty of 'bloody cox-combs', but no bodies'.

In other words, the British imperial idea of a peaceful transfer of power was that the leaders of independence movements were imprisoned and the people who attended protests beaten by the police, but *nobody was murdered*. And that image has been sustained, historically.

The "salient fact" is that, surely. The British empire was built on violence and oppression and exploitation -- justified by supposed British values, it existed explicitly to deny these values to those it ruled over -- and that applies as much to its ending as anything else.