alanlester.bsky.social
British Empire Professor, University of Sussex. Co-editor, MUP Studies in Imperialism series. Views here own.
Blogs on politics of colonial history here: https://alanlester.co.uk Editor https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-truth-about-empire/
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4/4 The other reviews are written by people who have no political axe to grind and have researched British colonialism. They appreciate its contributing historians’ nuance and see the outlines of their specialist research areas as “excellent summaries … that serve to educate readers”.
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3/4 With an ironic postmodern relativism, they caricature the book as just a counter narrative to Nigel Biggar’s project of moral exculpation for colonisation. One historical narrative is as good as another; take your pick according to political preference 🤷♂️
alanlester.co.uk/blog/a-lesse...
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2/4 The reviews of www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-tru... have split into two clusters. The first is from conservative writers who’ve never researched British colonies. Cocooned from the Empire’s voluminous archives, they feel entitled to see it any way they like.
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3/3 The most obvious examples are Holocaust & climate change denial. But denialism is more widespread, British Empire justification (rather than understanding) being a prime example. Both-sideism risks endorsing it if not handled proficiently.
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2/3 We need to understand why people act and believe the way they do.
There’s a potential trap though: Understanding different positions should not necessarily mean according them equal validity.
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3. The Church of England’s £100m reparative scheme is not based on a misunderstanding of its complicity in slavery:
alanlester.co.uk/blog/south-s...
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2. Putting down slavery was not a great national sacrifice in the interests of humanity:
alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-wes...
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Sorry - sarcasm.
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That’s great but shame that he is so determined to misrepresent The Truth About Empire as the mirror image of Biggar’s explicitly moralising book simply because we critique it, & me as nothing more than his opponent. Lazy & wrong to say I ‘laud’ Andrews for example.
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3. The housing & dispersal centre shortage & reliance on private contractors & costly hotels.
4. The reluctance to disperse due to threat of far right mobilisation.
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2/2 Added to which, a total failure to think through the consequences of The Spectator, under his editorship, persistently attacking anti-racism as ‘woke’. What happens when you de-legitimise antiracism? He helped lay the pitch for Farage & his unequivocally racist party as much as anyone else.
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The loot from yuanming yuan (Emperor's Summer Palace) included an imperial yellow silk cushion cover plundered by Lt. Col. Garnet Wolesley and left to V&A by his wife along with gold treasures looted by her husband from Asante: see history by @alanlester.bsky.social: alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-ver...
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Agreed. Tracing the rhetoric is very different from tracing commitment
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12. The record since has been uneven but one thing is for sure: the European empires were not especially interested in addressing the poverty of their colonised subjects. Not until their control was threatened and not until it was too late to save their empires. As you’d expect.