Have empires ever been a force for good?

Yasmin Khan

“The British empire transformed trade and drove the growth of cities. In short, it made the modern world”

Historians are pretty squeamish about the idea of empires as a force for good. That’s because we prefer hard facts that we can find in archives to thrashing out counterfactuals. What would the world have been like without the British empire? It’s an interesting question but not one historians can easily answer.

We can say, though, that the British empire stood against a lot of the things that we now cherish. Take the rule of law, liberal democracy or the education of young children, for example. The ‘rule of law’ was patchy across the empire, and there were different rights for jury trial depending on whether you were white or black. Censorship was rife. Nowhere in Asia or Africa had full democracy under empire until independence, and the money spent on primary education and literacy was pitiful. If you are in favour of racial equality or democracy today, it’s hard to think of the empire as a golden age. Fundamentally, the British empire rested on the idea that some groups of people are simply better than others.

That’s not to say that there weren’t extraordinary people who believed in imperial expansion, or that the imperialists themselves were immoral. There was an astonishing outpouring of creativity in the Victorian age. Like international development projects today (which often do good, but can also backfire and have unintended consequences), imperialists often wanted to do the best for colonised people. The forces driving change – the rise of