Episode #9: Imperial nostalgia — Tomorrow Never Knows

IMAGE CREDITS: Rhodes Has Fallen by Sydelle Willow Smith // 3Dperson // Call The Midwife (BBC) // Chris Ofili ‘Union Black’ // Unceded Voices // Unknown

IMPERIAL NOSTALGIA The sugarcoating of violence, national myths and the relentless echoes of empire. Plus: why your favourite TV show will have been filmed in South Africa

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EPISODE FOOTNOTES

Maynard W. Swanson’s article on ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909’ in the Journal of African History, vol. 18, No. 3 (1977) is a good place to look for links between the British Empire and apartheid laws. We also recommend Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995) edited by Professor William Beinart and Professor Saul Dubow;
Read more about the abolition of the slave trade on the National Archives’ website;
Want to know more about the Labour Party and the British Empire? Read Charlotte’s chapter on ‘The winds of change are blowing economically: the Labour Party and British Overseas Development, 1940s-1960s’ in A. W. M. Smith, & C. Jeppesen (eds.), Britain, France and the Decolonization of Africa: Future Imperfect? (London: UCL Press, 2017). It's available as a free PDF here;

Here's Jeremy Corbyn getting arrested outside South Africa House in 1984. The photo was taken by Rob Scott; read more about it here.

Factual error klaxon! The Charles Bridge in Prague was named for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. It was the scene of a battle between Swedes and the Holy Roman Emperor's forces in the Thirty Years’ War in 1648, however (so, instead of building it, Swedes damaged it...);
Here’s Wikipedia on Sweden’s overseas empire. St Barths was a Swedish colony 1785-1878;
Professor Chris Evans (University of South Wales) and Professor Göran Rydén (Uppsala University) have just published an article on Sweden’s connections to the transatlantic slave trade: ‘“Voyage iron”: an Atlantic slave trade currency, its European origins, and West African impact’ Past & Present (2018). Follow Dr Evans on Twitter @cevans 3;
‘Sweden's indigenous Sami people win rights battle against state: Court grants Arctic village rights over hunting and fishing after lawyers for state were accused of “rhetoric of race biology”’ The Guardian 3 February 2016;
Dr Yasmine Khan wrote about the role India and Indians played in WWII for the BBC in 2015. Read more about her work - including her fantastic book The Great Partition: the Making of India and Pakistan (Yale University Press/Penguin India, 2007) here, and follow her on Twitter @oxfordyasmin;
Madhusree Mukerjee wrote about the Bengal famine in Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (New York: Basic Books 2010). Read more about her here and follow her on Twitter @Madhusree1984;
The Mass Observation Archive is a good place to start if you want to challenge the concept of WWII as a unifying event, and the Blitz Spirit. Follow them on Twitter @MassObsArchive;
Here’s the deeply worrying YouGov poll that showed more than a third of the British public thinks the empire is something to be proud of;
Alan Lester is a professor of human geography at the University of Sussex; in 2016 he wrote ‘Britain should stop trying to pretend that its empire was benevolent’ for The Conversation. Read more about Professor Lester here and follow him on Twitter @aljhlester;
Zara Hyder wrote ‘I learnt more about colonial history from Facebook than I did in school’ for gal-dem on 14 August 2017 – read the article here. Follow the gal-dem team on Twitter @galdemzine;
The Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database can be found at www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs; it was led by Professor Catherine Hall and featured in a David Olusoga-presented BBC series called ‘Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners' in 2016;
Professor Gurminder K Bhambra is a sociologist at the University of Sussex. Her article ‘Brexit, the Commonwealth, and exclusionary citizenship: Brexit is the second time Britain has moved to strip citizenship rights from many of its existing citizens’ was published by OpenDemocracy on 8 December 2016. Read more about Professor Bhambra’s work at http://gkbhambra.net/ and follow her on Twitter @GKBhambra;
We recommend Professor Mary Hilson’s The Nordic Model: Scandinavia Since 1945 (London: Reaktion Books, 2008) if you want to know more about Swedish nation-building. Read more about Professor Hilson here;
Kenan Malik recently published an article that outlines some of the violence used by the men and women of the British Empire to extend its reach and control its subjects. Read that here and follow Kenan on Twitter @kenanmalik;
Want to know more about the creation of the white working class? Here’s Professor Jonathan Hyslop’s ‘The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself ‘White’: White Labourism in Britain, Australia, and South Africa Before the First World War’, Journal of Historical Sociology Vol. 12, No. 4 (1999), pp. 398-421. Read more about Professor Hyslop here;
Professor Lucy Bland has showed that the British state was very worried about, ahem, ‘race-crossing’ in interwar period. See ‘British eugenics and "race-crossing"; a study of an interwar investigation’ New Formations, Vol. 60 (spring 2007). Read more about Professor Bland here;
‘Michael Gove wants ‘British values’ on school curriculums’ The Guardian, 9 June 2014;
The Education Policy Institute on the attainment gap: “At the current rate of progress it would take a full 50 years to reach an equitable education system where disadvantaged pupils did not fall behind their peers during formal education to age 16.” Read the report here;
‘Stop and search eight times more likely to target black people’ The Guardian, 26 October 2017;
Here’s a thing about Call the Midwife’s 2016 Christmas special in Radio Times; and here’s Fariha Róisín on ‘Why Hollywood’s White Savior Obsession Is an Extension of Colonialism’ in TeenVogue, 14 September 2017. Follow Fariha on Twitter @fariharoisin;
Read more about David Olusoga’s BBC documentary Black and British: A Forgotten History here; Black and British: A Forgotten History was published by PanMacmillan in 2017 and won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. Follow David on Twitter @DavidOlusoga;
Dr Miranda Kaufmann’s Black Tudors: The Untold Story was published by OneWorld in 2017. Read more about Dr Kaufmann here and follow her on Twitter @MirandaKaufmann;
We mention Homeland (on Channel 4 in the UK) and the BBC’s Last Post. Amrou Al-Kadhi wrote ‘Victoria and Abdul is another dangerous example of British filmmakers whitewashing colonialism’ for The Independent on 16 September 2017 – follow Amrou on Twitter @glamrou;
Dr Shashi Tharoor's Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India and Dr Kim Wagner’s The Skull of Alum Bheg: The Life and Death of a Rebel of 1867 were both published by Hurst in 2017. Read more about Dr Tharoor here, and follow him on Twitter @ShashiTharoor; read more about Dr Wagner here and follow him on Twitter @kimatiwagner;
‘Theresa May and the DUP deal: What you need to know’ by Alex Hunt for BBC News, 26 June 2017;
‘No, Jeremy Corbyn did not refuse to condemn the IRA. Please stop saying he did’ by Jonn Elledge, New Statesman, 22 May 2017. Follow Jonn on Twitter @JonnElledge;
Imagined Communities by Professor Benedict Anderson, originally published in 1983, was a ground-breaking and very influential study of the creation of nations and nationalism. It has its own Wikipedia page;
The poem is Professor Merle Collins’ ‘When Britain Had Its Great’ – originally published in her collection Rotten Pomerack in 1992:

“Put the GREAT back into Britain
and my GREAT GREAT GREAT grandparents’
ghostly hands
touch my face
and ghost faces claim my restless
roving eyes to whisper
And you
would you, then,
be part of the GREAT British nation, too,
when Britain regains its GREAT?”