All of my British friends have told me that they barely learned anything about the empire at all. They spend a lot of time on kings and queens, rather than learning about how the British empire came to be

I've found that a lot of British people, even lefty ones, are just ignorant about the crimes of the British empire because it's not something that ever comes up in school. Most of them have no idea that Cromwell committed genocide in Ireland or that the potato famine was an extremely intentional genocide or that the black and tans burnt Cork to the ground, and so on

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It might have gotten better recently but in the UK, while there's heavy emphasis on showing how the British were among the first to end slavery (William Wilberforce, the Slave Trade Act and sending out the West Africa Squadron etc.), very little gets said about how the slavery was legal in the first place and who benefitted from it. When I got taught about the Atlantic slave trade there was no urgency to tell you which 'europeans' would go down to Africa to trade slaves, the fact that the major slave trading ports were London, Bristol and Liverpool gets ignored (I know folks in Bristol who only learned this when the statue of Edward Colston was thrown into the harbour).

You're probably lucky if they spend any more time than that on the empire, so much of the history curriculum gets reserved for pointless lessons on medieval monarchies and wars. I got a few lessons on Ireland and home rule and a few on India and that was it for teaching about the empire. A lot of the British believing their empire was wholesome comes from how warped those mandatory history lessons are, most aren't going to keep studying history past 16 so they don't even get taught how to interpret history other than take whatever your teacher told you as hard fact.

It's not in the UK we skip straight from castles and tudors to WWI.

Thankfully, I don't have to carry the burden of being an european, so I don't know what is going on inside that wretched place. I live in the Global South and, if I may, I want to share my opinion on this.

I don't think european nations that engaged in colonialism will ever become critical of said institution, let alone offering actual reparations, for a number of reasons. First is simple, since the rise of Nationalism countries have been "writing their official story" and in there, you're not critical of your actions. It happens everywhere, as you said, in the US the genocide of the native inhabitants is whitewashed, so the role of Portugal in the colonization and extraction of people to be sold into slavery will be absolutely whitewashed. Peoples from a country need to come to terms with the actions of their country, because your country is what it is thanks to colonialism (and this applies to both sides, colonizer and colonized), and nationalism must still be kept alive for states to function, so no, ain't gonna happen any time soon.

There's the second reason I'd like to add: capitalism. To attack the colonial and slavery institutions is to attack capitalism as well. This is no secret: capitalism is what it is THANKS to colonialism and particularly slavery, trying to imagine capitalism without them is hard, if out outright impossible. Simple equations, europeans had control of rich soil with excellent climate in the Americas, local workforce was "unreliable" because they spoke the same language and had the same culture, so rebellions were bound to happen often, manpower shipped from europe was also unreliable. Thus, they looked upon Africa for slaves, from outright kidnapping to state-level transactions between european countries and african nations in which both elites regarded human beings as mere products, and exchanged them as such. Said people, taking from all over western and central africa, were sent to the plantations to work as slaves with minimal risk of rebellions due to them not sharing languages, culture, traditions, and so on. Of course, slavery produced MASSIVE returns for the europeans (Britain, in particular) and this helped kickstart capitalism BY A LOT. Cotton is industrial revolution, and cotton industries were almost exclusively owned by Britain.

Of course, there are other elements. India was not directly subjected to mass slavery like in the Caribbean, but slowly but surely the East India Company (which was "yet another trader" when they initially arrived) took political and military control of the country, imposed tariffs, forbid Indian textile products to be shipped into England (free trade for me, not for you) and at the end of the day, the nation's industry was gone and it went back to being an agrarian nation, a receptive nation for British textiles and of course, opium production to wage economic war against China.

And China, as we know, was devastated by the Opium Wars. Britain never had something to offer to China, while China had a lot to offer to Britain, so the British were desperate to get into the Chinese market at all costs. Somewhere there's a quote from a chinese emperor that says something along the lines of "We don't need anything else from Britain, we can produce everything we need here"... except for one or two things: silver and opium. Silver was extracted from the Americas with slave labour involved and opium was cultivated in India and forcefully pumped into China via Hong Kong. This also generated ridiculous amounts of returns for europeans, yet again, Britain in particular.

Lastly, why attack colonialism when these countries are still doing it to this day? Sure they changed the way they do it, but it's still colonialism, add "neo" to it I don't mind, it's still the same shit.

There are more things, of course, but the bottom line is: We live in a capitalist society, this society as we know it was built on the backs of millions of slaves who were sent to work on plantations owned by colonial powers. You can't make an honest critique of colonialism without being critical also of capitalism, you're attacking it's root.

So no, they probably whitewash it like the cowards they are and have always been.

when i was at school, it was kinda-sorta acknowledged that the empire was bad, but couched in a bunch of "it had some upsides" shit

In the UK at gcse level there is almost zero coverage of what occurred during the colonial period, instead what is actually covered is a focus on the monarchs themselves. Which kings and queens there were, what fashions they wore, what architecture they did. You can fill up the education time rather quickly by focusing on trivial stuff.

Oh and castles. Plenty about castles and their design.

Been a while since school but in :france-cool:, the subject was broached, relatively quickly; and in a very aseptized manner. It's vaguely recognized as having sometimes been wrong, but most of the times as having issued from good intentions in the first place. Racism is not discussed, or only as the actions of a regrettable few, and if the state itself is ever assigned some level of responsibility (often with some recognition resources were stolen) it is of course concluded that today, things have been settled and are different.

The Algeria war coverage was more in depth and was more honest and critical of the actions of the state, especially outlining torture from French forces; though with a hefty amount of both-side-ing.

Haiti was not discussed IIRC. The wholesale exploitation of Africa, barely. Stuff like the franc CFA was presented as an economic stability tool (!!), too, if I remember correctly - I think I especially remember one lesson were it was presented as a positive gesture towards Africa, which is insane. Oh, and I never learned about Thomas Sankara in school, obviously.

I suspect things have evolved slightly for the better since I was in school but not that much. Also, the above describes the official program; I had the chance to have at least two (especially one) very leftist history teachers, which were extremely vocal and critical of - a rarity at this time - both NATO and the US. A lot of teachers in France are, thankfully, leftists.

It's not. That the British empire existed, and that India was part of it, was about the extent of our education about our colonial past. We watched Zulu in one class too.

Edit: that being said, in our final year we did modern history and studied the events leading up to 9/11. We even read Osama Bin Laden's statement about why he did it; We must have touched upon the Balfour declaration, but we didn't cover the Coup we sponsored in Iraq or how that lead to the rise of Saddam, or how we sponsored the Shah and gave both sides weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, or the Gulf war (as far as I can remember). This was 10 years ago mind you, so I'm stetching my memory a bit.

we were taught about the slave trade but it's kind of hard to teach about all of Britains colonial past as well as convey the British history that is needed to understand British society

also it's very much dependent on the school until you get to the nationally set history curiculum which when I did it was about nazi germany, soviet russia, and the pension and labour law changes of the early 20th century

I can't comment on it in education, but I visited the slave market museum in Lagos, Portugal (the site of the first European slave market) once and it was very clear that there was no apology on the behalf of slavers (the exhibits made very clear they knew what they were doing was wrong, and that they were wrong for doing it), but at the same time they had some Red Cross materials soliciting donations for Ukraine that said "Lagos: People are our greatest resource".

When I went to school in the 1990's Denmark's colonial history wasn't taught at all. We didn't learn anything about colonialism done by other nations as we simply didn't learn anything about non-Danish history. At best we learned that we used to have some islands in the west indies that were sold to the US, oh and there were some slaves there but they were freed earlier than in many other places so we're the good guys. We also learned that Greenland and the Faroe Islands were part of the Danish commonwealth but never why.

It is my impression that things are better today but not much. There has been some begrudging recognition of Danish complicity in colonialism among certain parts of society that has also permeated into education. The general popular attitude however remains an grumpy anti-woke unwillingness to even discuss the issue, let alone assume a moral responsibility as a nation.

Portugal probably has a better education on colonialism than France and England since they had a revolution that ended the dictatorship

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Uh I think it was like 4 hours max attributed to it, switzerland didn't really have colonies so one session was about the slave trade and early colonialism. And the other was basically the scramble for Africa as a sort of prelude to ww1. The maximum it amounted to was "Slavery was a really widespread system and even though switzerland didn't have colonies that still financially participated and profited from it, given that you can't grow cacao in switzerland." and looking at the different african colonies and how each of them were administrated.