In the ongoing Historikerstreit regarding the legacy of British colonialism, one of the most determined advocates of what some describe as “Imperial miasma theory”, i.e. the viewpoint that the Empire poisoned everything, is Alan Lester, Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. It’s difficult not to have some admiration for Professor Lester’s indefatigability. Over the last few years, and while recovering from cancer, he has pounced with pitbull-like ferocity upon those he sees as propagating the wrong-headed view that the British Empire was something more than a four-hundred-year-long atrocity. While his opponents complain of “woke scones”, Professor Lester writes blog posts, composes Twitter threads, appears on podcasts, and writes and edits books on British imperial history.
Naturally, he does not see himself as a mere culture war warrior. Such vulgarity is the preserve of his opponents. The sort of folk who get funding from private companies — a key indicator for Lester that someone is up to no good. He’s particularly scathing about the History Reclaimed project and its executive editor Professor Lawrence Goldman, whom he has accused of “not bother[ing] to check” evidence before making assertions, making “basic historical mistakes” and even commenting on books without reading them first.
Lester is influential. In a recent booklet, Hodder Education thanked him for his input into their new KS3 textbook on the history of the British Empire. Incidentally, this publisher felt compelled to enlist Lester and his ilk after one of Lester’s ideological allies, fellow miasma enthusiast David Veevers, harangued the publisher into cancelling their then-current textbook on the history of the British Empire because it “white wash[ed] European colonialism”.
Although Lester sees himself as being dedicated to disseminating The TruthTM about colonialism, he shows little concern for historical inaccuracies so long as they paint colonialists in a negative light. When UCL scholar Jenny Bulstrode’s article — which claimed that Henry Cort stole industrial processes from slaves — was debunked, Lester focused more on Bulstrode suffering from “highly personalised attacks” than her historical chicanery.
Professor Lester garnered even more attention than usual in December last year when Yuan Yi Zhu authored a negative review of his book The Truth About Empire. Zhu’s less-than-laudatory remarks prompted Lester to launch a two-week campaign against that reviewer. Eventually, Lester deleted his spiteful blog post about his critic, ostensibly because he wanted to do the reviewer a favour and not because the sordid saga made him look like a petty fool. Lester then dramatically announced his departure from Twitter, before quietly returning to regularly scheduled tweeting after about a month.
Lester’s views are predictable but worth commenting on because they give us some idea of how activists will use imperial history in the future. In his writings, Lester is commendably candid about his political objectives.
In the international arena, Lester believes that Britain should submit to the reparations shakedown. He at least accepts that showering the Third World with British taxpayer gold is likely to be a non-starter. Instead, he supports Caricom’s 10-point plan for reparatory justice which includes a formal apology for slavery, a “development plan”, paying for new cultural institutions for the African diaspora, gifting the Third World advanced technology and cancelling Third World debt. Why is any of this in the interests of the British people? Is it even meant to be?
On social affairs, Lester takes the arguments of BLM at face value and wants the government to accept their analysis at face value as well. Nick, 30 ans, who has to schlep three hours into London each day for work might object to Lester’s argument that disproportionate rates of council housing being awarded to black people shows how downtrodden that community is. I’m not sure what society Lester inhabits which suffers from an over-policing problem as far as crime is concerned, but I wish I lived there.
The end goal is to break down what it has meant to be British
The most important changes that Lester advocates for are cultural ones. “The new government should embark upon symbolic, rhetorical and material changes to reflect an emergent British identity”, he writes. The end goal is to break down what it has meant to be British and replace it with a bland, centrist narrative of Britishness to enable the country to effortlessly assimilate new arrivals be they Pashtuns, Slavs or Yoruba.
In other words, Lester sees his work as providing the ideological buttress to a process that online sociologist and anthropologist Kunley Drupka has described as “Yookayification” — the transformation of Britain into a cultural and political entity that is distinct from historical Britain. That this transformation must happen Lester declares to be a good thing ex-cathedra. To question why it must be so, he considers gauche. To forge this new Yookay, we have to obsess over real and imagined crimes committed by white people in distant lands long ago. More recent atrocities committed against white people in this land must be downplayed, lest it upset the applecart. In his few public remarks about the grooming gang scandal, Lester gave off the impression that he’s more annoyed that coverage of the issue will fuel Islamophobia.
Despite his loathing for the “far right” Tories, Lester endorses their “retain and explain” policy. This isn’t surprising as such a policy empowered activists to recontextualise statues, using misleading or erroneous plaques, to be monuments of shame. Right-wing think tanks, and those who work for them, should be excluded from the public conversation on the Empire, according to Lester.
Lester has described recent polling showing that pride in Britain’s history has plummeted since 2013 as “encouraging”. He’s not completely blind to the fact that a cohesive society should take some pride in its past but has postulated that as pride in colonialism falls, it will be replaced with pride in social reformers like the suffragettes. There are two issues with this hypothesis. Firstly, those campaigners also had views that are now beyond the pale so it’s hard to see treating them as totems will endure as a basis for national pride. Secondly, Lester’s hope manifestly hasn’t borne fruit otherwise, pride in British history wouldn’t have dropped precipitously. The British people think that statesmen, warriors, conquerors and explorers just make for better heroes than people who poured acid onto golf courses or set fire to churches. Recent research by More in Common suggests that nearly half of “Progressive Activists” — who think the Empire was a bad thing and support reparations for slavery — are not proud of being British compared to only 16 per cent of the general public. The conclusion is inescapable. If you teach people that their ancestors were mainly thieves and murderers, or benefitted from theft and murder, then they stop being proud of their ancestors.
Lester’s writings show the danger of conservatives ceding ground to historians cum progressive activists
Culture War sceptics might question the value of engaging with the claims of people like Lester and those in his camp. Debating melancholy historical matters such as the death toll in Tasmania’s Black War will hardly address, for instance, Britain’s productivity crisis. But Lester’s writings show the danger of conservatives ceding ground to historians cum progressive activists. Lester’s goal is to cultivate a degraded sense of Britishness, in which national identity amounts to little more than supporting the right sports teams and proclaiming loyalty to vague liberal-left values. As recent history has shown, such a society will not be cohesive. To manage sectarian problems, authorities are already bringing in a kind of millet system. Race relations will not be improved by filling the heads of new arrivals and minorities with tales of real and imagined misdeeds that Britain inflicted upon their ancestors. Self-flagellation on the world stage will not improve Britain’s diplomatic position. We ignore Lester and his kind at our peril.
