It’s undeniable that Britain had the largest empire of the last round of empires in the history of the world. And it’s also undeniable that the cost of empire was borne by the subordinated peoples, wherever those people might find themselves. For me it’s also self-evident that the idea of empire and of monarchy are irrelevant in the modern world, not just because empire produces misery for the subordinated and because monarchy produces ridiculous ideas of genealogical superiority, but also because both empire and monarchy make it hard, if not impossible for equality to flourish.
At the same time, it seems to me that the past can’t be judged on the basis of the present. That’s the latest academic fashion, presentism, that sees the whole of the past from the perspective of what is currently accepted as true and undeniable. When I was a young whippersnapper, the academic fashion was exactly the opposite. We set about estranging the past, as we called it, in recognition that things back then were just absolutely different from things nowadays. That was not intended to excuse horrible behavior in the past, but rather to recognize that the horrible behavior was the product of complicated social interactions.
Some of my favorite passages in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me are what he says about Queen Nzinga, whom he initially admires because of the power she exercised in response to the insults directed towards her by Dutch traders. Later he reconsiders the admiration when he recognizes that she exercises her power by making one of her retainers into a human chair so that she, “heir to everything she’d ever seen, could sit.”
I love those references in two different ways. First because Coates finds a source of pride in his past. That seems to me pretty important for everyone. Second, though, I love the references because they also point to the idea that the past is different from the present, and that it’s also important, maybe crucial, to understand the difference.
So was Britain—indeed, all of Europe from 1492 to the present, which continues to express European hegemony—horrible in exercising imperial control over the whole of the world? Yes indeed. Can, or rather should we judge that horror from the perspective of the present?
Yes and no, I think.
The yes depends on recognizing that folks in the past are as ethically engaged as we are. In Notes on the State of Virginia, for instance, Thomas Jefferson lays out pretty clearly just how evil slavery is, for the slaves as well as for the slave owners. He knows that the practice of slavery from which he benefits is horrible. But he continues to own his slaves and to rape his slave mistress and then enslave his own children. In terms of his own ethical framework, he’s positively evil.
The no depends on recognizing that folks in the past contend with relations among each other that dictate behavior. I don’t know enough about Queen Nzinga to say that her own ethical framework condemns her behavior. But how else is Nzinga going to demonstrate her power to the Dutch? How else is Jefferson going to demonstrate his social standing to the other plantation owners of Virginia? Again, I don’t think that recognizing those differences from the past mean that I excuse Nzinga’s objectification of her subjects or Jefferson’s commodification of human beings. But Nzinga’s royal standing makes it possible for her to reject the Dutch insolence and Jefferson’s patrician privilege makes it possible for him to write the Declaration of Independence.
So too the European imperial framework, I think, albeit more complexly and more fraught with a mixture of evil and “good.”
