There’s a meme, showing a cuddly dog next to a terrifying, giant snarling one, labelled “The Brits in British History Books” and “The Brits in Every Other History Book” respectively. It’s fair, but also kind of misleading, I think, because it gives the impression that the British education system is still teaching British kids that the British Empire was just spiffing. But it’s not 1890, and that is not, best one can tell, what is happening. The British education system is just ducking the issue entirely.
This sounds like a joke, but I promise that it’s not: it is genuinely possible I learned more about imperialism from Doctor Who than I ever did at school. There’s a period of the show in the early 1970s, when the production team, like the country they were living in, started fretting about Britain’s place in the world. So suddenly there are stories about the rise and fall of the Earth Empire. It is largely an economic venture which gives terrifying amounts of power to exploitative corporations, which oppresses its subject populations and in which a lot of other made-up things are extremely subtle allegories for depressingly real ones. Remarkably few of those things actually came up at school.
Content from our partners
