How Do British Schools Teach About the British Empire?

At its peak, the British Empire was the largest Empire in history, encompassing nearly one quarter of the Earth’s surface and more than one quarter of its population. Throughout its history, this massive geopolitical entity was perceived by its proponents as a beacon of civilization, an engine for trade and building local infrastructure and prosperity, a source of military and national pride. Needless to say, however, populations under its rule may have had a VERY different opinion about things, and keen to point out a lot of things glossed over in popular history. In previous episodes of TodayIFoundOut, we covered how the national school curricula in Germany and Japan teach their pupils about the shadiest parts of their respective history- the periods before and during WWII. But what about good ol’ Blighty? How do schools in the UK teach about the British Empire? Do history teachers also cover its most negative aspects? Or do they gloss over them?

To beg with, the national curriculum’s approach to the British Empire is extremely complex and subject to change, and is currently undergoing a pretty major change, as we’ll get into later in this video. But first, let’s now take at a quick run through of the topic at hand, starting with a very brief overview of the British Empire itself.

The British Empire can be defined as a Global system of territories under the sovereignty of the Great British Crown and Government. These territories include colonies, protectorates and dominions. It is interesting to note that most of these early settlements were established by private enterprise, with no direct strategic oversight from the Crown or the Government.

For most of the history of the Empire, until the mid-19th Century, the Crown had some limited powers of supervision over the acquired territories, but the colonies themselves were largely self-managed and self-sufficient.

But let’s rewind a little. England first started its colonial path by invading Ireland in 1169, fully re-conquered by the Tudors in the 16th Century. And yet, the official start and end dates of the Empire have been set at 1601 and 1997. So what happened here? In the 17th Century, England established its first trans-Atlantic colonies in North America and the Caribbean, mainly driven by commercial ambition and a strategy to stem French influence over the area. Around the same time, the privately owned East India Company began establishing trading posts in India and South East Asia.

Continuing the trend, in the 1660s, England extended its reach into the African continent, by settling into modern-day Gambia. Over the following two centuries, England first, and Great Britain later, colonised much of Africa, establishing a chain of territories from Cairo to Cape Town.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, the Brits were on a roll. The Treaty of Paris of 1763 unlocked the door to what would become Canada and the East India Company continued its expansion, at the expense of their French counterpart and local Bengali rulers.

There was the occasional, yet major setback, of course, such as the loss of the 13 American colonies following the Revolutionary war of 1776. But even that came with some major advantages, as Britain very purposefully gave the new nation insanely favourable terms in the deal, as we’ve covered in one of personal favourite videos we’ve ever done: That Time Ben Franklin and John Adams Slept Together and the Hilarity That Ensued, which goes in depth into the start, middle, and end of the revolution and the rather fascinating and hilarious two contrasting individuals in those two men who played such critical roles, as well as covers in detail why Ben Franklin advocated so strongly that elderly women were the best to sleep with.

But going back to these colonists and the terrorist organisation that took control of them and subsequently mass murdered so many British soldiers just there trying to earn a living, France and the newly minted United States were bosom buddies at this point, which was a major problem for the British both at that time and very possibly could have turned into a catastrophic problem in the future if that was allowed to continue. Thus, in a bit of a double cross, which honestly what more can you expect from already traitors to king and country, the colonists decided to throw France, without whom they’d have definitely lost the war, completely under the bus at the last minute in exchange for those insanely favourable terms from Britain

As for the British side, then British Prime Minister Lord William Petty, Earl of Shelburne felt that in granting the United States such favorable terms, they also positioned the U.S. to prosper to a great degree, while simultaneously helping to open up very favorable trade with them which would benefit British merchants, as well as help supply the British Empire with much needed resources. This would also all hopefully foster a decent amount of goodwill towards Britain from the new nation, and potentially help ensure that the relationship between France and the U.S. didn’t continue to mature unchecked at the expense of Britain. And in retrospect, while the now dubbed “special relationship” between the British and Americans wasn’t always smooth in the aftermath, on the whole, such friendly relations with their former colonies has served the U.K. extremely well, and been a boon to the United States as well. So much so that the U.S. Department of States’ webpage on the relationship between the U.S. and the U.K. starts off,

“The United States has no closer Ally than the United Kingdom. Following the end of the American Revolution in 1783… in 1785 our two countries established diplomatic relations. Other than a brief break in relations during the War of 1812, the United States and the United Kingdom have remained durable partners and Allies. Our partnership is a foundation of our mutual prosperity and security.”

Not just teaming up in matters of war and security, the two nations are among each other’s biggest trade partners. They also share the world’s largest foreign investment partnership. And, as UK Foreign Secretary William Hague noted in 2013, “every day almost one million people go to work in America for British companies that are in the United States, just as more than one million people go to work here in Great Britain for American companies that are here.”

Most significantly of all in the history between these two nations, around 2014 an exceptionally awkward and nerdy American with a major beard envy complex and a silky toned and beautifully bearded balding British individual teamed up to start this channel.

But going back to matters of lesser importance in the nations’ respective histories, even in defeat on this one, the British Empire was advancing and the building of the Empire resumed in the following decades. Australia was settled in 1788 and Malacca in 1795. Then, the outcome of the Napoleonic Wars resulted in the acquisition of further former French territories. These were mainly island colonies such as Ceylon, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia and Malta, which made for great trading posts and bases for the Royal Navy.

New Zealand was colonised in 1840, followed by expansion in the Pacific. In 1857, as a consequence of the Mutiny of East India Company’s private troops, the Crown assumed control in the Subcontinent. And, as mentioned earlier, in the late 19th and early 20th century, Britain completed its expansion in Africa.

I am sure everyone will have great fun at pointing out in the comments which territories not mentioned and wars of conquest ironically glossed over. But the point we wanted to make is that the history of the British Empire is an extremely long and complex topic that quite literally spans the globe.

In all this, contrary to extreme points of view on the other side, there were undeniable positive effects at points, some intentional, others less so. And when it comes to controversy and ramifications, one should acknowledge what could be considered the positive aspects of imperialism, as well as its most sinister consequences.

On the former, British civil servants and private enterprises developed modern infrastructure in the colonised areas. They created a global trade network, allowing colonies, dominions and protectorates to access lucrative markets on the other side of the world. Colonial administration standardised education across the Globe, created job opportunities in the civil service and the military, and introduced modern legislature and administration practices.

The process of building the Empire is a remarkable achievement in itself, a testament to the skill, competence, courage and leadership of the British military, merchant sailors and explorers.

OF COURSE, in all this the British Empire was also responsible for some of the worst atrocities and violation of human rights in relatively modern history… Even if glossed over in their own history books, as we are going to get into shortly.

Which, to be fair, as we outlined in our unfortunately age restricted 2 hour long documentary: Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust, which is the best video we have ever produced, not just the Japanese, but the United States too committed mind boggling amounts of crimes against humanity during the Pacific Theater as something of a matter of course, yet virtually none of this is ever mentioned in either country’s academic history books, generally left to university lecturers and the likes of us to dig into. This is a theme with basically every single nation in history with how they cover their own history in schools, with the stark exception being Germany. Who some, perhaps rightly, have argued go too far the other way. Hammering their own atrocities home so much that the youth of today not only have learned the lessons from them as is very good, but also have unfortunately developed a bit of a collective major guilt complex about it even though neither they, nor their parents, nor even in many cases their grandparents, had anything to do with any of it.

Going back to the British Empire, the atrocities of their own have nonetheless been confirmed by the UK Government itself. For example, in 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office confessed to keeping 20,000 classified files which included incriminating evidence of murder and torture by British colonial authorities.

So, before we cover how all this is taught specifically, we should probably also very briefly dive into those imperial atrocities so little discussed.

To begin with, British troops – and their colonial units – were enthusiastic proponents of using concentration camps to control hostile local populations. The tactic was first used against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th Century.

During the 1950 Malayan Emergency, camps known as ‘New Villages’ were built to keep Chinese civilians under tabs, lest they support the local independence movement. And then again in 1964, up to 1.5 million Kikuyu people were detained in camps in Kenya, as a means to quash the Mau Mau uprising.

When not forcibly locking up astounding numbers of people for no morally justifiable reason, Imperial troops distinguished themselves in massacring civilians to quell unrest, or slaughtering poorly armed local militias in the context of unprovoked invasions. An example of the former case can be illustrated by the massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, which took place on April 13th, 1919. That’s when the British Indian Army fired over an unarmed crowd, killing upwards of 1000 civilians. Yet another is the 1903 British invasion of Tibet. This was staged to pre-empt a potential Russian offensive. The operation resulted in a massacre via machine gunning 700 local militias armed with flintlock muskets.

When not causing death by bullets, the British Empire also had another common human weapon of mass destruction at their disposal: incompetence – often compounded by callousness. Through a combination of poor administration, carelessness, disdain towards populations perceived as inferior, or plain idiocy, British colonial authorities annihilated hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lives through their actions, even if that wasn’t really the original intent of said actions.

The most blatant example is the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India. An operation so mishandled that it caused the mass migration of 10 million people, and the death of 1 million as a consequence of sectarian violence. Other examples include the introduction of smallpox to Australia, and the mismanagement of crop failures in India and Ireland, which led to terrifying famines of catastrophic proportions.

This carousel of colonial horrors would not be complete without a mention of the Transatlantic slave trade. Sure, other European powers took part in this practice. And undoubtedly African kingdoms took an active role by happily selling captured prisoners of war into slavery. But the role played by England first, and Britain later, is pivotal. The first English ship transporting slaves from Africa to America set sail in 1562, captained by John Hawkins. Hawkins sold his human cargo to Spanish colonists in America, raking in an enormous profit. Over the 17th Century, demand for unpaid labour skyrocketed also in the English possessions in the New World, propelled by the expanding demand for sugar cane crops.

By the late 18th Century, more than half of all the African slaves transported across the Atlantic were carried by British ships. Around the same period, in 1787, campaigners Thomas Clarkson and Granville Sharp founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, which raised awareness about the inhumane conditions of African slaves, boycotted goods produced thorugh slavery and petitioned Parliament.

Petitions were led by MP William Wilberforce and after years of failed attempts, in 1807, the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire. But, up to that point, some 11 thousand ships had sailed from British ports with the purpose of transporting and selling people across the Atlantic, with countless thousands dying along the way, and the ones who made it left to a life of slavery, sometimes under extremely brutal conditions.

To their credit, following that date, the Royal Navy took an active role in patrolling the Atlantic waters, cracking down on those traders who defied the ban, as we discussed in our recent video The True Story of the Amistad. However, slavery itself was not abolished until 1838, after which the slave-owners – not the slaves – received compensation from the Government.

Again, you can have a field day by pointing out which atrocities we failed to include in this list. Because had we covered it all, or in any further detail even than we did, this video would likely have set the world record for longest YouTube video of all time. And been not only demonetized, but age restricted as well, as happened to our aforementioned phenomenal video Swept Under the Rug: The Truth About the Japanese Holocaust. But, please be our guest discussing as many such things as you can come up with in the comments.

All that out of the way, let’s now, finally, look at the British Empire in the UK Syllabus

To begin with, on this, Aneira Roose-McClew, former teacher and member of Facing History & Ourselves UK, a charity that uses the teaching of history to challenge bigotry and racism, states, “The history we learn in educational institutions and wider society concerning the British Empire is incomplete. The stories that dominate tend to amplify the voices of the colonisers, depicting the ‘Imperial period’ as a time of glory and greatness – while the plunder, oppression and destruction of indigenous peoples, and their societies and cultures, often occupies, at most, a footnote. We hear of how Britain’s Empire left behind sporting traditions, train networks, education and democracy (as if those subjected to colonialism wouldn’t have come to these themselves), but learn little of how much of Britain’s current wealth can be traced back to the suffering, exploitation and enslavement of millions of fellow human beings in overseas territories.”

In her article, Roose-McClew quotes a March 2020 survey, in which 33% of respondents believed that former British colonies were ‘better off overall’ for having been part of the Empire. She then goes on to comment that, “If the brutal realities of the colonial past of the British Government were taught in schools and discussed more within wider society, those survey results would no doubt be very different.”

Historian William Dalrymple chimes in on all this: “The British history curriculum moves suddenly from Florence Nightingale to the Nazis, so that Britain always seems to be on the side of liberation, freeing people. You learn about the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, all sorts of empires — just not the British Empire. The fact that we conquered half the globe was, bizarrely, left off the curriculum.”

He goes on, “Now, more than ever, we badly need to understand what is common knowledge elsewhere: that for much of history we were an aggressively racist and expansionist force responsible for violence, injustice and war crimes on every continent.”

As for more specifics, up until the period post-WWII, history lessons dedicated ample time to the Empire, with a nationalistic approach. In other words, teachers and teaching material covered the glorious exploits of British politicians, administrators, sailors and soldiers, emphasising military victories against rival colonial powers and invaded territories. As a consequence, the most unsavoury aspects of British colonial rule were mostly ignored.

In the 1950s and 1960s another school of thought took hold, called ‘New History’. This approach stressed the importance of understanding and analysing the experiences and point of view of the populations involved in historical events, rather than their leaders. Monarchs and Generals faded in the background, in favour of a ‘bottom up’ method founded on empathy for those who suffered from the tidal waves of history.

In this context, any patriotic or nationalist feelings were expunged from the classrooms. The history of the British Empire was mostly sidelined or downgraded, with the exception of Britain’s role in the slave trade. This was and still is an incredibly important subject to tackle. But the history syllabus was not standardised across the nation, and it was up to the discretion of the individual teacher whether to include slavery or not.

In 1991 Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher introduced a ‘National Curriculum’ to introduce some standardisation across all subjects. In her memoirs, Thatcher claimed that it had been easier to fight the Argentinians in the Falkland Islands than to agree on a National History Curriculum with teachers and historians.

Her Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, had some clear views on how to portray the Empire in the new curriculum: ‘Pupils should be taught about the spread of Britain’s influence for good throughout the empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries… These things are matters in which we should take great pride’

But the end result was a syllabus which covered the history of Great Britain in chronological order, yet leaving ample discretion to teachers on what topics to cover in detail. Once again, a holistic history of the Empire was largely left out, with the exception of slavery.

The National Curriculum for History was revised in February 2013, by David Cameron’s Conservative government. The proposal for renewal of the syllabus included topics such as English colonisation of the Americas and India, the occupation of Ireland and a large module called ‘Britain’s global impact’ in the nineteenth century ‘, which would span the scramble for Africa, expansion in central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent and the Boer Wars.

Despite it mentioning ‘the 19th Century’, the module would also include the post-WWII independence movements and the immigration into Britain of citizens from Commonwealth countries. The overall intention was to accord more importance and time to the Empire, with exhortations from the cabinet to present it in a largely positive light.

The end result was a syllabus which did include some imperial topics, but, once again, it was up to the individual teachers to decide what and how to teach their pupils – if anything at all!

All that said, in very recent years, the issue of Imperial instruction has taken centre stage in the British parliament. Following an online petition, the House of Commons held a debate on Monday 28 June 2021, to discuss how Britain’s colonial past was addressed in UK schools. Labour MP Chris Evans quoted Dr Deana Heath, who teaches Southern Asian and Imperial Colonial History at the University of Liverpool: “I face an uphill struggle at the start of each new academic year. Many of the undergraduates who greet me know virtually nothing about any of the subjects I teach.”

Other MPs, from both Labour and the Scottish National Party agreed that schools oversimplified Britain’s role in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as well largely omitting the contributions of non-white historical personalities. This omission extends also to the struggles of the lower classes, with Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy suggesting that this exclusion is both racially and class-driven.

The response from the Conservative majority was simply to point out that, as of 2021, the British Empire and Britain’s colonial past were a statutory theme for the Key Stage 3 history curriculum.

To clarify, Key Stage 3 corresponds to pupils aged 11 to 14. And a statutory theme indicates a theme which must be covered as part of history lessons. The selection of the specific topics within a statutory theme, however, is, once again, down to the choice of the individual teacher.

So, we took a peek into the current national syllabus for the UK, and as of June 2023, the Key Stage 3 curriculum includes two statutory themes related to the Empire. The first is “Ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain 1745-1901”. Topics contained within include the transatlantic slave trade, the Seven Years war, the American Revolution, the relationship with Ireland and ‘the development of the British Empire with a depth study’

The second theme is ‘Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world, 1901 to the present day’. Which features topics such as the world wars, Indian independence, and the end of the Empire.

So, in theory, the Empire should be part of what pre-teens and early teens learn about in school. And in theory, there are plenty of chances to discuss all facets of imperialism, including Britain’s role in rather extreme crimes against humanity. But in practice this is not always the case.

In preparation for this video we asked a small sample of students, teachers and one retired headteacher about their individual experiences. In all cases, they replied that these themes and topics simply had not been touched. More than a concerted effort to sweep a shameful past under the carpet, it appears that history teachers do not have the time to fit these supposedly statutory themes into an already packed curriculum.

And yet, there is plenty of available resources for some teachers to develop lessons on our colonial past. For example, educational consultant Neil Thompson, through his company Key Stage History, provides a good sample of imperial topics which may have been taught by Key Stage 3 teachers as part of the statutory themes.

Examples include an in-depth module about the slave trade, and how it was propelled by the soar in demand for sugary products, which required a massive, unpaid workforce for the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. This module would then delve deep into the horrific conditions of the individual slaves, the status of African servants in rich households, and how they were portrayed in 17th and 18th century art. The lessons would then conclude with the abolitionist campaigns and Britain’s role in policing illegal slave trade.

Another wide-ranging topic, apparently largely ignored, is British rule in India. Thompson recommends a module spanning four centuries of history, from the birth of the East India Company, to Indian independence, without shying away from events such as the Amritsar massacre or the recurrent famines.

Finally, Thompson proposes for teachers to stimulate classrooms discussion on the British Empire as a whole, for example by asking, “How did Britain achieve to conquer such a large Empire; how did the Empire eventually dissolve; and to discuss the pros and cons of the Empire itself”

At this stage, we would really like to hear from you, our esteemed audience. If you hail from the UK, let us know if and what were you taught about any of these subjects when you were at school? More interestingly, if you hail from a country formerly part of the Empire, how were you taught about British colonisation?

Moving on from there, there is potentially good news on the horizon of relatively accurate history being taught in UK schools. Back in March 2022, the Department for Education announced the preparation of a new “model history curriculum”, which should be issued by 2024. This curriculum should, to quote, ‘Equip [teachers] with the skills to lead lessons that cover migration and cultural change …[and] To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their own place within it.’

In other words, the future curriculum should provide a more comprehensive view of Britain’s colonial policies and their relationship with the rest of the world. By shedding light on this past, pupils today will be better placed to understand their present.

In the end, we think Professor Terry Haydn of East Anglia University summed all of this up best, stating in 2014:

‘Whether teaching about the British Empire, Empire more generally, or any topics where there are controversies of interpretation, history teachers, history didactics, and policymakers responsible for the formulation of history curricula should devote some attention to trying to cultivate in learners the dispositions of open-mindedness, respect for evidence and veracity.’

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