There has for the past 30 years, or more been a steady
rise in what used to be called political correctness and is now called woke.
But it massively accelerated in 2020 with the death of George Floyd and the
rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Suddenly topics that had previously
been at best peripheral such as colonisation and decolonisation and the
wickedness of the British Empire, became in certain schools and universities
not so much the main topic as the only topic.
But the topic of decolonising the curriculum is only
ever presented in terms of Europeans colonising and migrating to other places.
No one else ever migrated anywhere. There are no colonisers apart from white
people. So, if large numbers of people from Africa or the Middle East attempt
to come to Britain we are wicked if we attempt to stop them. They after all
cannot be colonisers and they cannot be migrating.
But human migration and empire are as ancient as
humanity. In the Declaration of Arbroath, we are told how the Scots came from somewhere
in Central Asia and migrated first to Ireland and then to Scotland. But what is
this if not colonisation? Whoever lived in Ireland before the Scots was either
killed or absorbed and whoever lived in Scotland, i.e., the Picts was also
either killed or absorbed. But whoever lived in Scotland before the Picts. A
people of whom we know almost nothing apart from the archaeology they left
behind, was likewise either absorbed or killed. But I don’t think any schools
or universities in Scotland will be telling us this story.
But there are no goodies and baddies in this sort of
story. Europe at some point probably spoke a pre-Indo-European language, that
might have been similar to Basque. We know little about this, because every
speaker was either absorbed or killed by the Indo-Europeans who migrated like
the Scots from the steppes of Central Asia or the area around the Black Sea.
There is no point blaming our ancestors for the waves
of migration that created modern Britain, because without them we wouldn’t
speak the language that we do, English and we wouldn’t be the people that we
are.
But it is not only we that are the result of
migration. Everyone else is too. The original peoples of North and South
America migrated there across the Bering Strait. People from Africa were the
original human beings and migrated everywhere else. The Russians migrated from
a small medieval set of kingdoms all the way to Vladivostok. Muslims spread
from Mecca and Medina and colonised all the way from Spain to Indonesia. Polynesians
colonised New Zealand and were then colonised by British people.
It is folly to regret for instance that the USA was
colonised. What is the alternative? Let’s say that everyone in Europe made an
agreement in 1492 to not return to North America. Would the people living there
really be better off if we had left them alone? The USA today is an advanced
society making great contributions in science, medicine. Would the original
inhabitants prefer to be living like they were in 1492 without the wheel?
The same goes for Australia. Captain Cook could have
left Australia alone, but the idea that a continent with people who had
developed minimal technology and only primitive weaponry could have survived
without conquest for ever is preposterous.
The reason Europeans were able to form empires and
colonise much of the world is that they had better weapons and military than
the people they were fighting. But if Europeans had refrained from using our
technological advantage, someone else would have. It could have been the
Chinese, or the Indonesians or the Japanese that conquered Australia, but
someone was going to eventually.
The focus is all on the wickedness of empire and
colonisation and how dreadful it is that in parts of the world there were
slaves. But every place that was colonised is what it is today because it was
colonised. Every descendant of every slave taken to North America exists
because his ancestor was taken into slavery. If this had not happened the
descendant of that slave would be living in Africa today and the person in
North America would not exist at all. We are all the result of the chance
circumstances of our ancestry including where they lived. My grandmother would
never have met my grandfather if they had lived on different continents.
So, while the British Empire might have been wicked it
also created modern day India, USA and Australia. They would not exist in their
present form and their people and level of knowledge and language might be
vastly different. To condemn the British Empire is therefore the equivalent of
condemning the waves of migration of Celts, Anglo Saxons and Normans that
formed Britain. By all means condemn, but what’s the point?
Everywhere that was colonised would not be what it is
today if it had not been colonised and if it had not been colonised by
Europeans it would have been colonised by someone else, who might have treated
it worse.
Every slave that ended up in North America, might
instead have been enslaved by Arabs in which case the slave would have been
castrated and would have had no descendants. So put the history of slavery into
context. Everyone in Britain is the descendant both of a slave (a serf) and an
owner of slaves (a lord). But none of us go on about it because it is just who
we are and a matter of ancient history. The so-called winners of the light skin
lottery too owe their existence both to their slave ancestors and to slave
owners. Without the latter they would not exist.
People migrating to Europe today have just the same
right to migrate as all the other human beings throughout history. But let us
be clear that in the course of the past 70 years the demographics of the United
Kingdom have changed more than during the first 70 years of either the Anglo-Saxon
migrations, the Roman migrations or the Norman migrations. But the cumulative
result of these migrations was that Britain ceased to be a Celtic speaking
island and the Celts were pushed westwards into Wales and the outer Hebrides.
Mass migration eventually leads to the near extinction
of the original inhabitants. This is what happened in North America, Australia
and New Zealand. There are few people living in these places who speak the
languages of their ancestors.
It may not be possible to stop mass migration. It is a feature of human history. It starts off slowly with the Pilgrim fathers making friends with the locals, but a few decades later there are no more locals. The Mayflower was a small boat bringing colonisers, they seemed friendly at first, but they brought with them disease and destruction. The locals should have fought the Pilgrims and sunk their boats, but this would only have delayed their destruction. We have the technology to defend our island, but we lack the will to do so.
