“Much of the instability in the world is a product of the legacy of individualism and haphazard policy-making,” concludes Kwasi Kwarteng in Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, published a few months after his election in 2010 as MP for Spelthorne. . He claimed to avoid the “sterile debate” about whether “empire was a good thing or a bad thing,” but the book’s conclusions are quietly, forcefully critical. There is nothing questionable about his arguments, and his narrative has none of the fury of Sathnam Sanghera’s Country of Empire, but the book is still described as controversial by some critics upon publication, simply because it was considered surprising that that a Conservative MP would reject Niall Ferguson’s words. then the recent reinforcing revisionist attitude to the empire. Ghosts of Empire has received less scrutiny than Kwarteng’s follow-up, Britannia Unchained, which he co-wrote with fellow MPs including Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Dominic Raab. But now that he is widely expected to be named chancellor within days, the business secretary’s list is being scrutinized for information about his political worldview. The Conservative party’s culture war against empire continues to rage. While Kwarteng’s rejection of nostalgia for empire is hardly remarkable, it makes him an outlier among senior Tories. In a Spectator article in 2002, Boris Johnson wrote that the African continent “may be a stain, but it is not a stain on our conscience”, adding: “The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are no longer in charge.” . Michael Gove has said that the over-teaching of history has been informed by post-colonial guilt, and these sentiments have been echoed by younger ministers. Suella Braverman recently claimed that “the British Empire was a force for good”, pointing to its “administration, public services, infrastructure, ports, railways, roads”. Kemi Badenoch said that while “terrible things” happened under the empire, there were also “good things” and “we have to tell both sides of the story”. Nadhim Zahawi agreed that children should be taught about the supposed benefits of empire, arguing: “Iraq was left with a legacy of a British civil service system that actually served the country incredibly well for many, many decades.” In his book, Kwarteng rejects any attempt to portray the British empire as an enlightened liberal force promoting democracy around the world. “Far from being harbingers of liberal pluralism, servants of empire were naturally at home with the idea of human inequality, with notions of hierarchy and status.” What else does the book reveal about Kwarteng? As the new prime minister’s closest colleague, how can this perspective help shape the new government’s thinking? First, he is very well informed on this subject. It is unfortunate that this is being noted, but it is important at a time when it is accepted that civil servants and politicians have been so ignorant of Britain’s colonial past that the Home Office is in the process of devising a training module which will designed to guide officials on the legacy of the empire. Accepting a series of recommendations designed to ensure her department avoids a repeat of the Windrush scandal, Patel promised to launch mandatory training on race, empire and colonialism for all staff. There was official recognition that the ignorance of politicians and officials on the matter had partly led to the scandal in which thousands of people who moved to Britain from its former colonies were wrongly classified as being in the country illegally. Apparently Kwarteng’s readiness to confront the failings of empire will make him dislike the enthusiastic patriotism of his colleagues – an unrelenting positivity that has led, for example, to officials refusing to release a history of immigration legislation commissioned by the Department Domestic that concluded: The British Empire depended on racist ideology to function.’ Kwarteng’s book studies six areas in detail – Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria and Hong Kong – examining how the disastrous mistakes of British colonial administrators continue to make large parts of the world dangerously unstable. He describes how the establishment of the puppet Hashemite dynasty in Iraq was a disaster, and how the hasty decision of the British colonists to install a Hindu maharaja to rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir had dire consequences. He has a particular fascination with his analysis of the governors’ damaged roots (we learned a lot about which prep school, public school and Oxbridge college the colonists attended, and whether they were more taken with five-a-side cricket or Eton). His chapter on the Sudan reveals that of the 56 senior administrators appointed between 1902 and 1914, 27 had Oxford or Cambridge degrees. they played polo in Darfur, organized lavish balls in Khartoum, and their chaotic administrative decisions had disastrous results. You would hope that his familiarity with the mistakes of colonial administrators might give him a different perspective on Britain’s responsibility towards people crossing the Channel to seek asylum in the UK. There are currently up to 1,000 people from Sudan and South Sudan in Calais hoping to cross to the UK, according to Care4Calais. The vast majority do not have the money to pay smugglers for places on the small boats that cross the Channel, and spend more time trying to smuggle themselves into trucks. Will his understanding of the roots of the conflict make him more thoughtful about the wisdom of threatening to send those risking their lives to seek refuge here to asylum processing centers in Rwanda? The book is well written and full of memorable details. We learn that Lord Kitchener’s eccentric father had such an aversion to bedding that he forced his family to use newspapers instead of blankets. We find that General Charles Gordon was happy to be posted to the Sudan, declaring before he left: “I dwell in the joy of never seeing Great Britain again, with her horrible, tiresome dinners and miseries.” If Kwarteng’s budget statements are written in a similarly lively style, he will be a source of happiness for lobby correspondents. Kwarteng (educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, and born to Ghanaian parents) offers a scathing analysis of the hierarchy and snobbery that shaped the empire, detailing which class of Indian princes were allowed to send Christmas cards or albino skins tiger to Queen Victoria and setting the table of precedence in the colonial administration of Hong Kong, which made it clear that the inspector of prisons was seven places lower in rank than the director of railways. It divides managers between cads and limits and reliable, unassuming, underrated operators. Colleagues should assume that he will watch for any modern echoes of bureaucratic absurdity and save them for his memoirs. His sharpest criticism of empire is the “anarchist individualism” that ran through it. “Reliance on individual administrators to conceive and execute policy with very little strategic direction from London often led to contradictory and self-defeating policies, which in turn brought disaster to millions,” he writes. There are times when you wonder whether criticism of the inconsistent, haphazard way in which Britain’s imperial rule has been enforced can be equally applied to the heavily reformist Conservative Party rule in the UK over the past decade.
