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By Root 1195 0

what you thought the violence was. The British preferred to call the everyday bombings, gunfights, murders, military funerals and armoured cars on the streets ‘the Troubles’. It might look like a war, but it wasn’t. To the IRA, the violence was definitely part of a war to force the British out of the last corner of their Irish colony. The ‘loyalist’ settler community, almost exclusively the descendants of Scots and others who had been brought to Ireland to make the place safe for England, fought for the right to remain British, despite not living in Britain. The epithet ‘Brits’ referred to the apparatus of imperialism, specifically the army, and by extension all of us who came to Ireland from England, Wales or Scotland, although it was really the English who were hated. I did not much like the term.

I had arrived in Ireland woefully ill-equipped to understand what was happening there. Anti-colonial wars belonged to another time in history. This is even more the case for many British people now: the average age in Britain is forty, which means that apart from a vague awareness of the war to reconquer the Falkland Islands or the ceremonial handing back of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, most citizens have little sense of Britain as an imperial power.

Anyone who has grown up or grown old in Britain since the Second World War has done so in an atmosphere of irresistible decline, to the point where now Britain’s imperial history is no more than the faint smell of mothballs in a long-unopened wardrobe. Its evidence is all around us, but who cares? It is the empty fourth plinth at the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square that interests us, not the three that are occupied by a king and a couple of imperial generals. Ask us what those generals did and we’re lost. Even the most exotic empire-builders have sunk from our minds. Charles Gordon is a good example. His unhinged mission to Khartoum and subsequent beheading raised him to saint-like status in Victorian Britain. A statue, showing the great martyr befezzed and cross-legged on a camel was placed in the middle of the traffic at the main crossroads in Khartoum, to remind the Sudanese who was boss. At independence in 1956 they took it down and sent it back to England, where it was re-erected at the school in Woking founded at Queen Victoria’s behest as a memorial to the general. It stands there, grey and unexpected, to this day. They used to tell the story of a small boy taken after church each Sunday to admire the national hero. After several weeks’ veneration, the child asked, ‘Daddy, who is the man on Gordon’s back?’ But even the jokes have passed into history now.

And yet the sense of being British is clearly very different to being, say, Swedish or Mexican. No one would have a Mexican up against a wall in Ireland because of his nationality. Ever since the moment when I realized that there were people who saw me differently because of my country’s history, I have wondered what that history has done to us as a nation. We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?

For the most part, we look back on our imperial history simply as the actions of men and women we cannot identify with, the product of motives we do not really understand. It is emotionally easier and politically more convenient to inquire no further. But it is not particularly helpful. If we accept – as any thoughtful Indian does – that the British Empire had a shaping influence on India, then where is the common sense in claiming that the same history has not had at least as important a role in Britain? Can we seriously pretend that a project which dominated the way that Britain regarded the world for so many hundreds of years has had no lasting influence on the colonizers, too? Without understanding how we looked at the rest of the world, we cannot really understand ourselves. It is nearly fifty years since the then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, minted the only remark for which he is remembered in Britain, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found