{"id":170480,"date":"2025-11-08T22:50:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T22:50:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/170480\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T22:50:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T22:50:12","slug":"empire-with-david-olusoga-is-stuck-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/170480\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Empire with David Olusoga\u2019 is stuck in 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are all scions of the British Empire in one way or another. As the historian David Olusoga puts it in his new BBC documentary series<\/a>, Empire with David Olusoga: \u201cThere are literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story\u201d.<\/p>\n

A series on the British Empire is always welcome, given the scope and historical richness of the period, yet this one feels ever so slightly outdated. Olusoga justifies the programme by pronouncing that questions about the country\u2019s colonial history have \u201cbecome more urgent and more contested than ever before, because the ghosts of the British Empire have been re-awoken\u201d. It then cuts Black Lives Matters protesters taking down<\/a> Edward Colston\u2019s statue in 2020, before dumping it into Bristol Harbour. If this series had been made in 2021, 2022, or even in 2023, when national and historiographical<\/a> wrangling with imperial legacies was prominent in public discourse, this framing might have packed more of a punch.<\/p>\n

Still, the central question which occupies Olusoga\u2019s series is an interesting one: how is it that a small island in the North Sea \u2014 that was little more than a middling kingdom in the late 15th century \u2014 became a wealthy, industrialised society and the first global superpower?<\/p>\n

The answer given here is that Britain simply plundered and enslaved its way into that position, from the colonisation of North America and the Caribbean to the conquest of India. Many of the ordinary people with ancestral links to this history, who are brought on to offer their opinions, underline this argument. One of them says that \u201cblack bodies were violated for the growth and maintenance of that wealth to the West.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, is Britain the product of slavery and the atrocities of colonialism? In part, yes. The Atlantic slave trade was an important pillar of Europe\u2019s pre-industrial commercial society and a consumer economy built on commodities including sugar, tobacco and coffee. Olusoga rightly highlights some of the more gruesome episodes. One such is the life of Truganini<\/a>, who became an object of fascination among Europeans as the last of the dying race of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Despite her wish that her body not be handed over to race scientists, her skeleton was publicly displayed at the Tasmanian Museum until 1947; three decades after that, her remains were finally returned to the Aboriginal community and cremated.<\/p>\n

Yet that is only one side of the story. Modern Britain, and the West more broadly, is the product of labour, including that of the enslaved and conquered. We\u2019re not talking about the ill-gotten gains of white Europeans at the expense of black and brown \u201cbodies\u201d that must somehow be atoned for. Many colonised people, such as the early-19th century Indian reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy<\/a>, saw the newness and utility in Western ideas and education as a means to critique elements of their own societies, including the sati ritual and the caste system. Such stories should receive closer attention in teaching about the Empire. This is the deep, knotty and tortuous history that belongs to us all, and upon which we must build.<\/p>\n

The sun has long set on the British Empire, but it never seems to set on vexatious quarrels about the merits and iniquities of the imperial past. Indeed, this heavy history continues to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Olusoga\u2019s series, intended as a counterpoint to more apologetic treatments of the subject, unfortunately showcases a narrow, superficial and tendentious history of the British Empire, coloured by a notably post-2020 sensibility. If anything, this demonstrates how stagnant the BBC is. Though the discourse has evolved since, the broadcaster remains stuck in that moment of anger, all the while pretending that it is at the vanguard of the national debate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We are all scions of the British Empire in one way or another. As the historian David Olusoga…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":170481,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[97472,63830,97473,95961,18,117,97474,5489,19,17,5279],"class_list":{"0":"post-170480","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-blm","9":"tag-british-empire","10":"tag-colonialism","11":"tag-david-olusoga","12":"tag-eire","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-george-floyd","15":"tag-history","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-ireland","18":"tag-uncategorized"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115516527298863493","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170480\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}