Pre-Debate Vote: There was everything to play for with 191 for, 136 don’t knows and 68 against.

Between them, they’d published enough books to stock a small Waterstones, and yet such is the nature of their subject is that they fail to agree on anything, often opening new avenues of argument to sidestep each others points. It is Cadogan Hall, the speakers an array of respected historians and the subject ‘Britain’s former colonies should stop blaming the Empire for their ills’. The issue is one that transcends political chasms, with the Labour MP Tristam Hunt taking the traditional pro-imperial stance while the left Guardian columnist Richard Gott and the Conservative MP Kwarsi Kwarteng hold the opposing position.  

Tristam Hunt played the opening gambit, reminding us that Wedgewood pottery scattered over the globe is a reminder of the legacy that Britain has left behind. He shrewdly acknowledges the undeniable ‘crimes of empire’ and the ‘private accumulation’. He progresses to say that seeing a country’s present state as an entity merely formed by recent colonial history is fallacious, that ‘pre-colonial history’ can greatly influence the importance of the legacy of the Empire. The buzzword however is ‘agency’, that saying the Empire entirely shaped their history in the colonial years overlooks the work of the native people in shaping their own history in this time.

Ashley Jackson joked that all the Empire gave the colonies was football and the phrase ‘fuck off’. Later he acknowledged that we left behind ‘state apparatus’ but claimed that ideas of nation-state were thrust upon African nations that were incompatible. The exacerbation of the pre-colonial ethnic and tribal system by colonies were also mentioned, along with the psychological cost of Empire.

Gita Subrahamanyam challenged the idea that Britain’s colonies are actually blaming Great Britain for their ills any more, proposing that the focus of blame has been swung round to the United States. Controversially, she suggested that many former colonies are not particularly vocal in blaming the Empire because the indigenous populations that would have complained were eradicated. She mentioned additionally that the colonial natives did not blame the far off entity of ‘Britain’ but the white settlers who became Australians or South Africans.

Richard Gott suggested that the Empire was a Christian entity against Muslims, and that people were ‘forced to participate’ in Empire. He highlights that the Empire was one of violent conquest. That over a two hundred year period there was a revolt against the Empire every single year, suggesting its unpopularity.

Ramachanda Guha began by assuring Jackson that the Hindi and Urdu languages had more explicit phrases than ‘fuck off’. He addressed Gott’s bizarre accusation of the Empire as an overtly Christian one, given that it clearly failed to convert the majority of the population in India. He came to bury Empire, rather than defend it, claiming that his nation’s identity, achievements and failures are uniquely Indian and independent of Empire.

Kwarsi Kwarteng was the last to take the podium, and agreed that the nations would not necessarily have been lands of ‘milk and honey’ but the Empire did not help. He made some linkages between the recent Gulf Wars in Iraq and British management of the Iraqi oil industry in the 1920s. With the various examples, such as Kashmir and Nigeria, it was suggested that they blamed the British for their conflicts.

Patriotism reigned and the motion was passed with 245 for, 20 don’t knows, and 135 against.