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The impact of empire on Britain's identity

Madeleine Bunting

Two anniversaries will feed into the British national sense of self-doubt this year, but also offer a chance for a reality check.

A SPATE of soul searching is guaranteed by two major anniversaries that loom this year: the abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807, and the Act of Union of England and Scotland in 1707. Both will feed into Britain's nagging sense of self-doubt: who are we? As the debates around integration and multiculturalism show no sign of flagging, both anniversaries will be mined for their contemporary relevance.

Television programmes, books, ceremonies, conferences, and newspaper supplements have been in the planning for months.

Some might regard this self-referentialism as tedious; they might advocate an apology for the slave trade and let's be done with 2007's anniversaries. But our reckoning with British history has been so limited that these two anniversaries provide us with a good opportunity for an overdue reality check.

Any chance of reinventing a plausible national identity now (as many are keen to do) is only possible if we develop a much better understanding of how our nation behaved in the past and how nationalisms (English, Scottish, and British) were elaborately created over the past few hundred years — and how incomplete and fragile that process always was.

The coincidence of these two anniversaries is fortuitous. The abolition of the slave trade is a painful reminder of British imperial history, which we have, incredibly, managed to largely forget. Who remembers the Bengal famine or Hola camp, the empire's opium trade with China or our invention of concentration camps in the Boer war? We too easily overlook how empire was a linchpin to British national identity, vital to welding Scotland and England together. Indeed, historian Linda Colley suggests three ingredients for British identity: "Great Britain is an invented nation that was not founded on the suppression of older loyalties so much as superimposed on them, and that was heavily dependent for its raison d'etre on a broadly Protestant culture, on the treat and tonic of recurrent war, especially war with France, and on the triumphs, profits and Otherness represented by a massive overseas empire."

Props collapse

These three props for Britishness have collapsed: Protestant Christianity has declined sharply, war with France is the pastime only of a few drunken football fans, and the empire is no more. No wonder Britishness is on the decline; over the past couple of decades, people have become increasingly likely to define themselves in polls as English or Scottish rather than British.

This is the social trend in defining identity that politicians such as Gordon Brown watch closely. Could this re-emergence of the older loyalties to which Ms. Colley refers have political consequences? Could the Scottish National Party translate that into significant electoral gains in the Scottish elections only a few days after the official commemoration of the Act of Union in May?

It's not just the Scots who could decide they've had enough of the English — the feeling could become mutual. The grumbles are getting louder about Scottish MPs who vote on legislation affecting the English and the disproportionate amount of public spending swallowed up by the Scots.

Mr. Brown clearly has a vested interest in stilling such complaints. He's been at the forefront of an establishment attempt to redefine Britishness on the grounds of "common values" such as fair play and tolerance.

Who is going to define Englishness? Julian Baggini has a stab at it in a book to be published in March, Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind. He spent six months living in Rotherham to get beyond the metropolitan, liberal elite's perceptions of Englishness and establish what most people (that is, the white working class) understand by their Englishness.

Parochial, tightly knit, focussed on family and local communities; nostalgic, fearful of the future and insecure; a dogged belief in common sense: these are his conclusions. Mr. Baggini confesses to feeling that his six months in Rotherham was like visiting a foreign country, and no doubt many of the people he met would regard six months in London as profoundly alienating. How do you weld national identities out of global metropolises disconnected from their hinterland? Englishness is riven with huge regional and class divides. The stakes are high — for example, a rising British National Party vote, a fear of asylum, and hostility to Islam. The anniversary of the Act of Union will provide a stage for all this to be played out. It's just as painful a commemoration for the English as for the Scottish. It required one nation to lose its sovereignty and the other its identity.

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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