Salman Rushdie – still recovering from the attack last year that cost him the sight of one eye – has never been shy of confronting the excesses of British imperialism. Nor, quite rightly, has he been alone in doing so. Critiques of Britain’s imperial ambitions are as old as the empire itself. Think of Edmund Burke’s attack on the East India “nabob” Warren Hastings, or Samuel Johnson’s critique of American slave-drivers. Even Enoch Powell made a Commons speech, in 1959, about the brutalities of the Hola internment camp in Kenya.
This long and noble tradition has recently been reinvented, with considerable commercial success. In writing Imperial Island, Charlotte Lydia Riley, a historian of modern British history at the University of Southampton, is seeking to join a coterie of critics of empire – some historians, some not – who have found a new (and often youthful) audience by expounding the rather simplistic thesis that the worst aspects of modern Britain can be traced directly to its imperial past.
Riley’s book does this by examining, with considerable skill, Britain’s post-war retreat from empire – in which successive British governments were strikingly acquiescent – examining events afar, in Malaya, Kenya and Suez (for example) and their effect back home. She recounts, with particular sympathy, the experiences faced by immigrants from the former empire, and the challenges they faced, then largely overcame. Riley draws on sources both obscure and familiar, and offers an ample bibliography for those who wish to educate themselves further.
One suspects, however, that she doesn’t cast an entirely cold eye upon the evidence she gathers. Her handling of the Rushdie affair is revealing. The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, was one of a clutch of fine novels published at the time that were critical of empire. Rushdie fell foul of the murderous intolerance of the Iranian regime, yet Riley argues that, in the British media, “Khomenei and his followers were demonised [my emphasis] as enemies not just of free speech, but of progress, civilisation and democracy, all values that were supposedly bound up with British society (and, for those who were sensitive to history, Britain’s former imperial mission).” The affair, she claims, “highlighted the fact that migrant communities were tolerated only if they worked to ‘fit in’, to ‘integrate’ and to adopt ‘British values’”.
The alternative explanation, one I prefer, could be that a majority of Britons of all colours and creeds weren’t, and still aren’t, much bothered about “British values” – whatever those are – but they strongly support the principle that a novelist such as Rushdie should not be murdered for expressing heretical views, however distasteful some may find them.