Earlier this month, British author Nikesh Shukla tweeted about his experience of watching Viceroy’s House – Gurinder Chadha’s historical drama about the Mountbattens set in 1947 India – in an almost empty cinema. When the idea of partition is first suggested in the film, he says, an old white couple sitting behind him commented “now that’s diplomacy”. Could there be a better metaphor for many British citizens’ ahistorical, rose-tinted view of the British Raj than the idea that an event that caused the largest mass migration in human history (10m people), the deaths of over a million, and sowed the seeds for a simmering conflict that has continued for over 70 years, was “good diplomacy”?
I was reminded of Shukla’s tweets a couple of days later, when the Times reported that Whitehall officials had dubbed International Trade secretary Liam Fox’s plans to increase trade relations with the Commonwealth as “Empire 2.0”. The officials may have been using the term sarcastically, but such offhand references to empire betray a widespread – and deeply flawed – view of the British Empire. In this view it is a largely benign phenomenon, even one that Britons should be proud of.
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