What has the past ever done for us? Anne Rooney

For a long time, I have wanted to write a book about the shameful roots of the UK's success — indeed the whole edifice of western culture. Of course, no publisher wants such a book for children; it undermines the national curriculum view of Britain and it has only a UK market. No one wants (or wanted, until this week) to admit that much of the wealth of Europe rests on slavery. (Though remember that Western Europe was already dominant and rich before slavery; the USA's wealth has slavery as its bedrock. We need to look further back, at other abuses, too, to understand Europe. We have a long history of criminal treatment of others.) No one wants to know that the entire American space mission and much of its technological success is built on whisking Nazi scientists away from Germany at the end of the Second World War and giving them immunity in exchange for their ideas and expertise. No one wants to know about the atrocities committed in Imperial India or colonial Africa, or how Europeans, possibly deliberately, infected indigenous Americans with diseases that would wipe them out, and certainly did nothing to prevent it, because it was a quick and easy way of freeing land from its troublesome owners.

Keren David said here yesterday that she didn't learn about slavery in school. I did, though I grew up in white rural England. And not only slavery. In ways that weren't apparent at the time, I was lucky to go to a large comprehensive (one of the first) with a very mixed intake. (Socially but not ethnically mixed; there were few pupils who were not white.) Even luckier, there was no national curriculum and the headmaster and his wife, who also taught there, were both historians. 

Our history began with anthropology, and how modern humans first emerged in Africa. The first picture in my history exercise book, drawn when I was eleven, was of a naked black man standing behind a rock and throwing a spear at an animal he wanted to eat. We did not do the Stone Age as white people wearing furs and living in caves. (I would now take issue with the idea that men were always the hunters, but no matter.) History didn't start with Romans; it started in Africa, with prehistory. Then we did Mesopotamia before we did Egypt, before we did a tiny bit on the Greeks and then quite a lot on Romans because it's easier to inspire a bunch of 12-year-olds to make a model gladiatorial sword or Colesseum than to get them to write a tragedy or establish a democracy — though we did have a democratic school council.

We did Saxons and Vikings, of course, and the Middle Ages and then all the usual Tudor stuff. I don't remember how those parts were presented as they have been overlaid by what I have done since, though there was a fair bit of plague death and emancipation of serfs. But then we did slavery, beginning with the terrible conditions in slave ships, and we did the Industrial Revolution with a major focus on abuse of the urban poor. We learned about England's part in the shipping of slaves. We did no American history except the plantations. We did abolition. I think we mostly stopped there, because the GCE curriculum started at 1848 so we would get enough of modern Europe. Britain didn't feature heavily in GCE, but it was all revolutions and wars: unification of Italy and Germany, Franco-Prussian war. A little bit about colonialism in Africa, but only as it fed into European conflicts. The First World War, the Treaty of Versailles, and a tiny look ahead at the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism, but only as consequences of Versailles. A fair amount on Russia, the overthrow of the monarchy, the Bolsheviks, the rise of Communism. No mention of 1918 flu. No mention of the USA, Australia, India, the Far East — except a lesson the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium Wars because that could be called European. This was a curriculum set by an exam board, no longer by an enthusiast who wanted his pupils to understand where they came from. (We did Florence Nightingale and the Crimean, the great London fogs, and the cholera epidemics, but i think that was in biology.)

My father was disappointed that I couldn't give the dates of key battles, that I didn't know all the kings and queens of England in order and that I knew more about the slaughter of North American Indians (bad thing to know) than the glories of Empire dominating Indian Indians (good thing to know). He felt it unpatriotic to highlight the bad things in our history, and this, I fear, is at the root also of how history is usually taught in this country (and probably many others).

If you mix history with patriotism, it seems, you have to miss things out. Your own glories are writ large. The defeat of the Nazis was no doubt a great and essential achievement, but we are not allowed to examine it too closely. We aren't allowed to point to the fire-bombing of Dresden or the starvation of post-war German civilians in Berlin and ask if we can learn something useful about avoiding so many civilian casualties in future (especially when the war was actually over). Why do people now talk of the 70-year peace in Europe, supposedly achieved by crushing the Nazis? Why do we have to have an unmitigated story of success? What peace? Why did Europe stand by and let Srebenica happen?  Where were those peace-proclaimers looking when Greece was ruled by the Generals? During the Portuguese revolution? While Ceaușescu, Tito and Hoxha killed their own nationals in vast numbers?  *While we killed our own citizens in Northern Ireland, ffs?* Our prosperity and our teaching of history are rooted in ignoring the people who aren't like 'us' — 'us' being privately-educated, rich, white men — and drawng a veil over our more shameful acts. Actually, it's even worse than that: sometimes, it's not even recognising the shameful acts for what they were, but glorifying them.

The picture at the top of this post hangs in the Houses of Parliament. It shows Elizabeth I delivering a commission to Raleigh in 1584 to go and steal the lands of the indigenous North Americans and slaughter or subjugate the inhabitants: 'to discover unknown lands, to take possession of them in the Queen's name, and to hold them for 6 years'. The painting is, like, Colston's statue recently toppled in Bristol, a product of empire and imperial pride, this one produced in 1925, 30 years after the statue. This is the sort of thing our MPs see on the walls, reinforcing — at best, not challenging — the idea that this was a Good Thing. It is in the series of works that, according to parliament's website, shows how our nation was built. Not even a hint of 'maybe it wasn't a good idea?' We now venerate the abolitionists (yes, they had their limitations, but still an improvement) and the suffragists, yet dare not, somehow, ask why they were needed and what that says about the events we glorify in 'building our nation'.

I don't claim any credit for knowing about slavery as a child. It was ENTIRELY down to good teaching. At the time, of course, I had no inkling how lucky I was, or that I had an amazing teacher, doing his best in a definitely very right-wing region to chip away at the carapace of complacency. I have recounted my patchwork of historical education only to show that if we can cover some of this, which is more important than the Battle of Trafalgar or some other white-men-kill-each-other history, maybe future children will look at such statues and paintings and ask why the hell we are venerating this shit? I was lucky — or was I privileged? I am very uncomfortable with the word 'privilege' as it's currently used, as it's lazy. I think it was a privilege to be taught by a humane, erudite, compassionate history teacher. If I had gone to a public school, I would have learned the invasion of America as a success story, not a violation that spawned further atrocities. In common parlance that would be considered 'privileged', yet I would consider it deprived — or deceived, lied to, misled, intellectually abused... We need to redefne privilege in a way that doesn't validate the views of the so-called privileged.

I'm not sure whether patriotism and honest history are really at odds. I would not say I am patriotic: I feel primarily European, so I'm not qualified to comment on nationalistic patriotism. But if patriotism is a kind of biggified local interest, it must surely benefit from forensic examination of its past, including — especially — the mistakes. We mustn't sweep them under the carpet. Or into the sea. Personally, I think the statue should be hauled out and left to moulder on the quay with a new plaque owning up to its disgraceful history. Or, as an archaeologist friend suggested yesterday, put in a museum, lying down, with its triumphant desecration intact and with a proper explanation. Out of sight is out of mind, all too soon. In sight, as we see with the painting of Gloriana's commission, is very much in mind.

If you feel that history should be taught more in this vein in the UK, there is a petition here you might like to sign.

Anne Rooney

Latest book (as far as I can tell, but who knows, these days?)
HarperColllins, May 2020: