Was there 'One Empire'? Should we rethink how we think of, and teach the British Empire?
In our second #BeBoldHistory blog post, committee members @SOJBolder (Sam Jones) & @JHMcGarva (John McGarva) explain how a webinar with Prof. Jon Wilson prompted a rethink of how they teach Empire at KS3.
Full disclosure, at Bolder Academy, we’re obsessed with the history of the British Empire! Empire is one of four ‘golden threads’ running through our KS3 curriculum (power and the development of democracy; local, national, global; Empire; global conflict). From September 2021, we’re teaching Migrants to Britain (OCR B) at GCSE, alongside a History Around Us unit about Osterley Park. Both allow us to talk about various aspects of the Empire. We believe Empire is the most crucial story we tell at KS3.
Back in April 2019, we were pretty happy with how we taught the Empire. We’d taken the bold decision to spend most of year 8 focused on aspects of Empire; we were committed to giving the topic real ‘air time’. We taught Empire across seven enquiries:
Sugar through time (from the Hodder KS3 textbook)
Two enquiries from Justice2History (https://justice2history.org/)
How ‘inglorious’ was the British Empire in India? (EIC and British Raj, using Shashi Tharoor and Niall Ferguson)
How far was Britain ‘unaltered’ by the Empire? (migration through time)
Why have British people said different things about the Empire at different times?
Then, a spanner in the works. In April 2019, we also held our first #BeBoldHistory webinar. We were joined by Prof. Jon Wilson (KCL) who had a pertinent message for all history teachers – stop moralising the Empire:
‘Why do we moralise the Empire? Well, because we think in Britain it is our history, and it matters to us in ways that other modern histories don’t… The British Empire ends up being a proxy for arguing about Britain now… When we have this debate about Empire in terms of good or bad, I’m not sure we’re really doing history at all, I think we’re doing something different, something interesting, but not history.
We assume that Britain is an unchanging entity, it doesn’t change through time… When we pose this question about the morality of the Empire we forget to ask the most important question which is through time what was Britain.’
You can watch a recording of the webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH_FHcxWiIA&t=1s
The Empire was incredibly diverse in the way it was constructed, organised and run, as of course, were both indigenous people and colonisers who experienced the Empire, it was not one single entity. The Empire also spans a large expanse of time, from early-modern colonisers in Ireland and the New World, to Victorian Empire builders in Africa in the late 19th, early 20th century. Britain itself changed immeasurably across that period. The Empire was not one thing. It was different. everywhere. Therefore, for Wilson, questions about morality and the balance sheet are rendered not only impossible, but totally useless. We concluded we should never ask our students to consider questions that historians might dismiss as ‘useless’.
Wilson’s suggestion? ‘Teach what the Empire meant to different people, in different places, at different times.’
Clearly, we needed to rethink. When we looked at our existing lessons and enquiries focused on the Empire, many of them seemed to moralise the Empire. Asking ‘How ‘inglorious’ was the British Empire in India?’ for example, quite obviously was not appropriate.
Unperturbed, we’ve set about a vast amount of reading and listening (a reading and podcasts list is offered at the end of this blog). We’ve also run a number of webinars linked to aspects of Empire this year on the #BeBoldHistory network which were also incredibly useful. All are freely available in our British Empire playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTFtyGdvusT-zMUlloTWp6Y6HmSzWlip2).
This led to a redesign of our Empire curriculum from September 2020, summarised in figure 1 below. At Bolder Academy we teach in four 16 week teaching cycles across the year (A, B, C and D) we have two lessons a week. We’ve omitted enquiries not linked to aspects of Empire.
Figure 1: Bolder Academy, KS3 enquiries linked to the British Empire, 2020/2021
We’ve worked very hard to steer clear of moralising the Empire (asking questions like ‘Was the Empire a force for good?’). This has sometimes been very tough and has led to much ‘professional wrestling’ as Michael Riley might term it. Nevertheless, we’ve been generally pleased with the results. Our most successful enquiry (albeit interrupted by the second national lockdown) was ‘How ‘similar’ was the British Empire?’ which we taught to year 8. We decided to focus on similarity and difference as we felt the concept would give us the best chance of directly teaching ‘what the Empire meant to different people, in different places, at different times’.
In the first lesson we teased ideas from students about what they thought the Empire might have needed to function (soldiers, workers or immigrants from Britain, governmental control from Westminster) and what Brits might have believed the Empire was for (making money, a ‘Civilising Mission’, power). This was possible because we had already covered the basics in year 7 and earlier in year 8.
Thereafter, each lesson focused on a different ‘stopping off point’ in a different geographical location (colony). Students were first given a timeline, briefly outlining Britain’s involvement in that colony. We then tried to select ‘moments in time’ which might help students to consider how far each of the six aspects was present in that colony. In India, we used the exploits of the Child family (who owned nearby Osterley Park). In Ireland, our stop-off point was the famine in the 1840s. In the Caribbean students considered slave rebellions from the 1770s up to the Baptist Rebellion (1831-2). In Australia we utilized the ‘squatting’ of New South Wales. Africa was the trickiest given the vast geographical expanse and sea of difference in the ways the British colonised the continent and treated indigenous populations. We decided here we needed to involve students in this dilemma by covering the whole continent, but in a small time period (1890s) at the height of the Scramble for Africa.
Figure 2: Hexagon worksheets used by students to capture short stories
In all lessons, we used an anthology of short stories. Students read these stories and added them on a hexagon worksheets (figure 2) next to the aspect/s of Empire the story exhibited, alongside a brief explanation as to why they feel the story demonstrates that aspect. From the second lesson onwards, we also encouraged students to write in a different colour pen if they felt the story showed the opposite of that aspect (i.e. exhibiting there was not a Civilising Mission) or if that aspect was happening, but is was not the British perpetrating it (e.g. enslaved/emancipated Baptist preachers in the Caribbean). We ensured that the stories used related to various historical actors, both colonisers and colonised. It was important to us that we introduced students to a wide variety of voices; ‘different people, in different places, at different times.’
On the whole, we feel our teaching of the Empire has been much improved this year by working hard to not moralise the Empire. So job done, surely? Well, no, not quite yet.
Following more reading, more listening to podcasts and more #BeBoldHistory webinars this year, we’ve had another rethink. We’re also working on two really exciting enquiries with the Wallace Collection (highlighted in yellow in figure 3 belwo). Figure 3 shows our KS3 curriculum plan for next academic year (2021/22). Again, enquiries not linked to Empire have been omitted:
Figure 3: Bolder Academy, KS3 enquiries linked to the British Empire, 2021/2022
We’ll keep ‘wrestling’ and an update on our progress will follow in another blog post next academic year. In the meantime, we’d love to hear from fellow teachers trying to tackle the same issues and the novel approaches you’re taking.
You can Tweet us @BeBoldHistory or using #BeBoldHistory or email us (beboldcpd@gmail.com).
Comments
Post a Comment