The historian David Olusoga has said the UK is the one country left in the British empire as he likened it to being the last oblivious person at a party.
Asked at Hay festival on Sunday whether the British empire had ended, the broadcaster said: “There’s one country left in the British empire that needs to liberate itself and have its independence day from its own history, and that’s Britain.”
He added: “It’s like we’ve had a party and everyone else left and we haven’t noticed. It infects our view of ourselves; it complicates and confuses our view of the rest of the world; it stops us from fully understanding how the rest of the world relates to us.”
Olusoga said the attitude “infects” Britain’s institutions and was one of the reasons why there were debates over the honours system. “It’s just silly to have national honours named after an empire that doesn’t exist. It’s like having it named after Narnia,” he said.
Asked if he had an OBE, Olusoga said: “I have, yeah, and it’s utterly silly.”
Britain had not dealt with or been “open and honest” about its history, which led to such “ridiculous contradictions”, he said.
At the same event, Sathnam Sanghera, the author of Empireland and Empireworld, said that for him the British empire “did end with Hong Kong [in] 1997”.
He highlighted that Tony Blair talked about handing back Hong Kong to China in his memoirs but was only dimly aware of the history. “You can bet that every Chinese person there was very aware of the opium wars,” said Sanghera. “It’s typical that our prime minister arrived in Hong Kong to give back a colony and didn’t know about the history. Isn’t that deeply shameful? And it continues.”
Britain had never had a “dark night of the soul”, said Sanghera, “where we’ve had to reflect about what we did”.
Olusoga noted that Britain did not have an empire museum, and Sanghera said the Victoria and Albert Museum would be a “brilliant basis” for such a museum because of its historical links to the East India Company.
In 1879, about 19,000 objects given to, bought or looted by the East India Company for the India Museum in London were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, the predecessor of the V&A.
Sanghera said the online abuse targeted at the writers was “not fair. We’re just writing history books.”
Olusoga added that “shoot the messenger” attitudes had emerged because it was easier to accuse historians of “hating Britain” than to examine the history. “I’m accused of hating white people, which is bad news for my mother and my wife,” he said.
Sanghera said one of the “common motifs” in the rightwing press was that American racism was worse than British racism, which was considered “twee and cute”, despite the fact that Britain “played a huge role in the development of racism”.
