Kenan Malik, columnist for The Guardian newspaper, invites us to examine the changing nature of Britishness, and the things in which the Anglophone nations take pride – or feel a sense of shame. The concept of Britishness, based on an identification with Britain’s imperial past, has declined over recent years.

Malik elaborates on a study of social attitudes towards identity in Britain today. Commissioned by the National Centre for Social Research, their report can be read in full here. The findings are interesting in and of themselves, but one particular trend has raised the hackles of the Tory Right. The survey found that pride in Britishness has declined sharply since 2013.

Pride in the British empire has declined, you say? That to me is a commendable achievement. As more of the crimes of the British empire have come to light, a debate has occurred around notions of what it means to be British. For too long, we have allowed the conservatives to define what is worth commemorating in British history.

Over the decades, the conservative movement has attacked what it calls the wokeness campaign. Billionaire libertarian tech-bro Elon Musk, in a colourful turn of phrase, calls it the ‘woke mind virus’. Ah, a clever riposte, devoid of any meaning. What is being confronted is not British history per se, but an imperial mindset cultivated by a decades-long empire-nostalgia narrative.

When statues of slave traders are torn down, it enables us to see English history more clearly.

Cultural imperialism is an enduringly fascinating subject. It makes people consider the empire from the imperialist point of view. It makes us identify the project of empire building as either benign, or uplifting for the colonised peoples, or a bit of both. The obsessive flag-waving, pageantry, film-making and cultural output conceals the sword upon which empires rely, to paraphrase Lord Salisbury’s words.

An imperial mentality among the general public helps acclimatise that public to the atrocities and crimes committed by that empire. Offensive and predatory actions are presented as purely defensive in origin, thus creating a lopsided sympathy for the foot-soldiers of empire.

Now, a philosophical turn….the late great Edward Said, writing in his magisterial book Orientalism, portray themselves as positive, or at least modernising enterprises. It is worth considering his following words:

Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest [civilizing mission]

I am quite certain we have all heard the objection that while the British empire may have been periodically violent, it did run the colonies efficiently. The British built railways, road, electric telegraph networks and taught English. This objection is a kind of mental balm applied to soothe the wounds on our collective conscience.

I wonder what benefits English colonisation brought to the indigenous people of Tasmania. The Black War (1824-31) involved the full scale destruction of the indigenous Tasmanians. While the numbers of people killed may have been on a smaller scale than the fatalities in other regions of Australia, the cultural and historical losses of the indigenous are incalculable.

It is only in recent years that this particular war of extermination is coming to light, casting the role of the British empire is a different way intended by its supporters. In the early years of Tasmanian colonisation, the numbers of settlers was quite small. With transportation from Britain increasingly used by the London authorities as a means of social control, the convict population in Tasmania steadily increased.

Conflict with the indigenous was at first infrequent. As the numbers of white colonists increased, (men outnumbered women six to one), the Tasmanian colonial authorities launched expeditions to kidnap indigenous women for the purpose of procreation. That was the proximate cause of increased conflict.

The colonists faced staunch resistance from the indigenous, but the firepower of the English (including convict and settler auxiliary forces) proved to be overwhelming in the end.

These ferocious frontier wars are largely ignored in the retelling stories of the British Empire as a glorious civilising project. Even when indigenous resistance is acknowledged, the actions of the English army are portrayed as purely defensive in nature (check out the 1964 film Zulu as an artefact of this kind of misrepresentation).

Let’s also stop circulating the myth, perpetuated by the English authorities, that the Palawa people (as indigenous Tasmanians are known) went extinct with the death of Truganini in 1876. The passing of the last ‘full-blooded’ Palawa woman, so the story goes, marked the extinction of that particular nation. Indigenous Tasmanians have been demanding a truth-telling commission to quash that slanderously false claim.

The purpose of this article is not simply to recite a catalogue of British atrocities and compel readers to feel a sense of shame. It is to confront the deliberate misreading of imperialist history as a source of pride. If we want to take pride in English history, then there is no shortage of episodes – the peasant uprising in 1381 against the feudal nobility and English monarchy; the Chartist movement; the solidarity of the English working class with the American anti-slavery movement.

The British empire is dead, but its imperial mindset lives on in the Anglophone nations. The United States is only the latest practitioner of the longstanding technique of cultural imperialism.