I wonder if I’m alone in thinking: “Shouldn’t we be proud of the achievements of the British Empire”?
Yes, there was a lot wrong with it, and we did many bad things, including our share of the slave trade. We had the arrogance to assume that the white man’s culture was superior to those of all other lands, including the civilisations of China and India which had been going for more than a thousand years before civilised life began in this country. This arrogance resulted in one of our worst crimes, the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1842, which forced the Chinese to accept a drug trade in Opium.
However, isn’t it time we took into account the balance of the good we achieved?
Which country was it which abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1807? Britain , of course. Whose navy enforced the abolition of the slave trade? Why, of course it was the British navy. We built roads and railways, introduced western medicine, technology and sound administration. We freed the world’s main sea routes from piracy, united India under a single government for the first time since Asoka’s empire of the third century BCE.
We brought peace and stability (particularly to tribal areas) which enabled trade to flourish with the benefit of imperial preference. We provided a common currency, and governed the subject nations according to a rule of law under which women are seen as equal to men and class distinction does not prevent a lower caste or lower class individual from getting justice.
And when we eventually withdrew, we bequeathed democracy to the newly independent states, which in most of them has lasted to this day. So, it strikes me that, if it was possible to weigh the acknowledged benefits against the Indisputable wrongs of British rule, the balance would probably be to our credit. Why then should we be ashamed?
Greece was never part of the British or any European Empire. Instead we helped to liberate Greece from the Ottoman Turks who had occupied the country for four hundred years.
When the Greeks rose up in revolt in 1821, many distinguished Europeans went to Greece, joined the rebels and fought against the Turks. From the UK there came, for example, the English poet, Lord Byron, and the scot, Thomas Gordon. Byron in particular gave his name, prestige and wealth to the cause of Greek independence, and organised funds and supplies for the rebels. Through the influence of poets like him and artists such as the French Delacroix, Europe’s politicians were eventually moved to intervene and British ships took part in the battle of Navarino which destroyed the Turkish fleet and gave the rebels a decisive advantage.
The Greeks themselves have long acknowledged their debt to Europe. You only have to look at the street names and count how many are named after Byron.
More recently, British troops liberated Greece from Nazi occupation and intervened to prevent a communist take-over. So, by all accounts, Greece owes Europe and cannot claim they have been hard done by “British colonialism”.
In the fifth century BCE democracy was invented in Greece, and the triumph of democratic Athens against an autocratic Persian emperor gave Greeks the confidence to produce splendid works of literature and art. The Elgin marbles, carved by Phidias, represent one of the highest artistic achievements of democracy in Classical Greece. They were part of the Parthenon. This pagan temple became a church in the Byzantine period, and then a mosque and a munitions store under the Turks. Over the centuries, these magnificent sculptures had been weathered and vandalised.
The Parthenon had been badly damaged by the Venetians in the seventeenth century, and Ottoman policy was to burn sculptures which fell from their fixings to make lime. So, when Lord Elgin removed these sculptures between 1801 and 1812 with the permission of the Turkish authorities, he believed he was rescuing them from destruction, and indeed the condition of the marbles on display in the British Museum is better than the condition of those left behind.
Greece has many fabulous museums, all exhibiting exceptional sculptures. You can spend hours wondering around them, gazing at amazing, imaginative, awe-inspiring works of art. Greece is not short of fantastic monuments, friezes and statues and should not envy other countries which have collections of their own. In a way, the Elgin marbles represent the free, innovative, enterprising spirit of democracy. They have universal appeal and belong to all free nations. They are as well kept in London as in any other democratic capital.
The great days of the empire will never come again, and we should not be ashamed of them. The foreign aid budget should certainly be increased for those countries which need it, but there is little moral justification for paying compensation or giving away our most highly valued national treasures.
