In 1772, a crowd gathered outside court to hear the decision on a case that had captured the public imagination. It was the case of James Somerset, an enslaved man who had escaped from his ‘master’, Charles Stewart, in England in 1771. Stewart had Somerset arrested and placed aboard a ship bound for Jamaica, then a British slave colony. Somerset was able to contact Granville Sharp, a humanitarian lawyer and abolitionist, who brought the case to court. The presiding judge, Lord Mansfield, reluctantly agreed that Stewart must be discharged.
Sharp dedicated much of his life to the movement to abolish slavery and supported the resettling of former slaves in Sierra Leone. But he also believed in fundamental differences between white Britons and Africans. As Catherine Hall, the historian, has noted in the London Review of Books, Sharp felt it important to stop slave-owners bringing their enslaved attendants to Britain.
Migration from the ‘periphery’ of the British Empire to the UK has been contested for hundreds of years and remains so. Sharp was certainly radical and progressive for his time but he still believed in racial hierarchies. History is complicated and few are solely heroes or solely villains. But that is all the more reason why we should have an honest appraisal of our past.
Migration and empire are not marginal events: they are central to Britain’s national story. Events that may feel far off, consigned to the past, have longstanding ramifications. For example, following the abolition of slavery in 1808, the British government of the time had to borrow £20 million – equivalent to £17 billion in today’s money– to compensate the slave owners for the loss of their human ‘property’. These included the ancestors of former prime minister David Cameron. The taxpayer was paying this back until 2015.
The Black Lives Matter movement has brought the issue of Britain’s selective amnesia about its colonial past – we tend to celebrate the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade while playing down the central role of slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation in enriching the empire – into the mainstream.
At the first weekend of Black Lives Matter protests in London following the murder of George Floyd, young people filled the streets. On Sunday May 31, I attended the march and spotted numerous signs held by young people, masks on, who looked no older than 20 urging the teaching of empire in schools. One sign read: ‘Why did I only learn about the Tudors?’ Calls for reform of the school curriculum have now gained urgency from the Black Lives Matter movement. Small-scale studies in recent years have uncovered a strong appetite from students of all backgrounds for history teaching that reflects a broader range of voices. Now, young campaigners such as The Black Curriculum, Re:rooted and Fill in the Blanks are leading the charge.
A YouGov poll last year found that 69 per cent of British people agreed that historical injustice, colonialism and the role of the British Empire should be taught as part of the national curriculum. We should be cautious of how the question is worded but it signals a potential shift in public attitudes.
There is also a political case for making the links between migration, empire and British history widely understood. The Windrush scandal of 2018 was caused in part by a lack of understanding by government officials and successive British governments about the ‘winding up’ of the empire. British subjects, who had predominantly moved from the Caribbean to the UK as children, were wrongly detained, deported and denied their legal rights. Many lives were ruined as a result, some dying in the Caribbean unable to return to the UK before the scandal broke in the national press.
Wendy Williams, who led an independent review into the scandal, recommended that ‘existing and new staff learn about the history of the UK and its relationship with the rest of the world, including Britain’s colonial history, the history of inward and outward migration and the history of black Britons’.
Despite its centrality to our history, the teaching of migration and empire is a lottery in British schools, leaving the story we tell incomplete.
How migration and empire have been taught in schools and represented in textbooks has shifted with changes in government. Until the 1960s, the curriculum implicitly supported the merits of empire and remained evasive on its exploitative or violent realities for colonized people. The result is colonial amnesia. A 2014 YouGov survey found that 59 per cent reported that they were proud of the British Empire, while 49 per cent believed that former British colonies are now better off for having been part of the empire. This is not the reality. India held a 23 per cent share of the world economy in the 18th century, which had fallen to 3 per cent when the British left. The current National Curriculum states that school students must learn how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world as part of the history curriculum before the age of 14. There is a lot of flexibility, giving teachers the scope to teach a number of topics to ensure students understand Britain’s past.
Suggested topics include: the Norman conquest, the Act of Union of 1707, Britain’s first colony in America, the development of the British Empire, Britain’s transatlantic slave trade, and Indian independence and the end of empire.
Notable omissions from this list of suggestions include the development of British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, the nature and impact of British colonialism or histories of decolonization across the globe. At primary level, the only statutory topics related to migration are the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Scots and Vikings. At Key Stage 3, that is ages 11-14, only the Holocaust is compulsory.
Flexibility for teachers is a good thing. I have met teachers who are deeply committed to teaching migration and empire and do so within this framework. But there are institutional challenges with this model. For one, it makes it difficult to track what is being taught in schools. In 2014, the Department for Education admitted that it didn’t know how many schools were teaching Britain’s involvement in the slave trade.
Second, focus groups and workshops run by my colleagues at the Runnymede Trust uncovered a pipeline problem. Teachers tend to teach the history they have been taught at school and university. What they don’t know, they don’t teach. And there are few training opportunities to assist teachers who might want to teach migration and empire but do not feel confident teaching what can be fraught and difficult topics. In our survey of teachers, 78 per cent wanted training on teaching migration, and 71 per cent on teaching empire. Our joint project with the universities of Manchester and Cambridge, ‘Our Migration Story’, was started in part as a response to teachers’ requests for resources.
To make sure migration and empire are taught widely, it needs to be made a compulsory part of the curriculum at Key Stage 3. And to ensure it is done well, high quality training and support for teachers must be in place before these changes to the curriculum are made. Much can be learnt from the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education. Teaching the history of the Holocaust is compulsory and the centre provides a national programme of Initial Teacher Education for early-career teachers, as well as online materials and resources. Feedback shows that teachers who have participated in their courses hold them in high regard. This is an excellent blueprint for teaching migration and empire and supporting teachers in the process.
When we talk about teaching migration and empire in Britain, concerns are raised that we want to erase history. This is simply not the case. Calling for an honest appraisal of the past is not erasure. Granville Sharp can be both an abolitionist and a biological racist and also progressive for his time. We do our young people, and ourselves, a disservice by pretending otherwise. Our school curriculum is in theory open and flexible; in reality plagued with omissions.
Britain is facing a new dawn; a reconfigured relationship with Europe and the wider world. There has been renewed interest in the Commonwealth, as Britain searches for new, post-Brexit allies in once-familiar places. As we begin to redefine ourselves as ‘Global Britain’, a realistic appraisal of our past and present relationships with other nations has never been more urgent.
To move forward, we must look back. But the lens we look through must be clear.
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