Prices spiraled out of reach of the masses, Viceroy Lord Lytton, recentlyĪppointed from his former post as ambassador to Portugal, was preoccupied with a To supply food for other parts of the world”. Period noted, “It seems an anomaly that, with her famines on hand, India is able
Davis provides detailed accounts of the hugeĮven once the famine started – “Londoners were in effect eating India’s Jonathan Steele is quite correct in observing that “recognizing our true history is what the Chancellor’s Britishness campaign should focus on” (20 th January 2006, The Guardian).ĭrought in Southern India in 1876, rice and The quest for Britishness would be better served through honesty about the past, in particular the brutal racist nature of the British empire. What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre”. “the European empires, together with Japan and the United States, rapaciously exploited the opportunity to wrest new colonies, expropriate communal lands, and tap novel resources of plantation and mine labour. Mike Davis provides an account of imperial arrogance and indifference: Such a one-sided glorification of the past does not stand up to the facts and figures presented in ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’. Gordon Brown – who has a PhD in history – alsoĬalled for more history teaching in schools as a means of coalescing a common In a recent African tour, Chancellor Gordonīrown observed that “the days of Britain having to apologise for itsĬolonial history are over. Teachers and missionaries who had come to his native Uganda. The world parliamentary democracy and he was personally indebted to English Rosy picture: “Not all the Empire was a bad idea”. The Archbishop of York, John Sentamu on his enthronement In other words ‘Empire’ had a civilizing rather than exploitive Liberal values, education and human respect to backward societies sufferingĭespotic rule. Recently been a chorus of voices seeking to rehabilitate the legacy of the British Empire and present it as a benevolent and
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