Legacies
Yet the legacy of the British Empire remains with us. It is seen partly in great economic disparities across the world. At one extreme, there were the prosperous colonies of white settlement, now the dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and by a long stretch of the historical memory, the United States.
At the other extreme are the poor countries of Africa and the parts of the Indian subcontinent which have so far failed to register its economic boom: Bangladesh, the state of Bihar, the northwest territories of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nepal. More important, perhaps, is the legacy of ideas. On the one side, we see the echoes of ideas of reform, tutelage, and the fostering of “democracy,” which inspired liberal imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries apparent in the thought of Bush and Blair. On the other hand, there are the ideas of violent nationalism and separatism, of Islamic, Hindu, or Buddhist revivalism, which emerged quite late in the history of the British Empire and now struggle against American or wider Western hegemony. The idea of imperial dominion created innumerable forms of elite and popular mobilization that tore apart the accommodative ideologies and social formations that had characterized the older imperial structures that you have heard about in earlier lectures in this series (and in the previous parts of this volume). It was the experience of empire and of modern political mobilizations that drew more sharply the distinction between Sunni and Shi‘a, between Hindu and Muslim, between Malay and Chinese, between Hausa and Ibo. Some indigenous idealists now argue for a return to the supposedly unbounded “neighborliness” of former times. But this is futile. Supposedly authentic communities of the ancient empire and the pre-colonial era had generated their own distinct forms of oppression. There was no pre-colonial harmony. What is certain, however, is that the casual use of armed force—even when supported by a new imperialism of “democracy”—as we have seen it deployed in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, or in the frontier territories of Malaysia, Burma, Pakistan, and Ghana, will not resolve these complex claims to rights and political identity. They will only serve to deepen and perpetuate the more malign aspects of the legacy of the once great empire “on which the sun never set.”30
See Roger Louis 1999.
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More on the topic Legacies:
- CASE 212: Just Like a Legacy
- Acknowledgments
- No Single Line Across the Ocean
- India
- Diversity within Religious Communities, Caste and Scheduled Tribes
- CASE 181: Partial Disinheritance
- CONTENTS
- Becoming National
- Conclusion
- Conclusion