“Unveiling the Forgotten Lessons: How British Schools Shape the Narrative of Empire”
Going back to the British Empire, the atrocities of their own have nonetheless been confirmed by the UK Government itself. For example, in 2011, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office confessed to keeping 20,000 classified files which included incriminating evidence of murder and torture by British colonial authorities.
So, before we cover how all this is taught specifically, we should probably also very briefly dive into those imperial atrocities so little discussed.
To begin with, British troops – and their colonial units – were enthusiastic proponents of using concentration camps to control hostile local populations. The tactic was first used against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th Century.
During the 1950 Malayan Emergency, camps known as ‘New Villages’ were built to keep Chinese civilians under tabs, lest they support the local independence movement. And then again in 1964, up to 1.5 million Kikuyu people were detained in camps in Kenya, as a means to quash the Mau Mau uprising.
When not forcibly locking up astounding numbers of people for no morally justifiable reason, Imperial troops distinguished themselves in massacring civilians to quell unrest, or slaughtering poorly armed local militias in the context of unprovoked invasions. An example of the former case can be illustrated by the massacre in Amritsar, Punjab, which took place on April 13th, 1919. That’s when the British Indian Army fired over an unarmed crowd, killing upwards of 1000 civilians. Yet another is the 1903 British invasion of Tibet. This was staged to pre-empt a potential Russian offensive. The operation resulted in a massacre via machine gunning 700 local militias armed with flintlock muskets.
