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

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.