The left is degrading the subject of history with its anti-Western political correctness
A pity that the Royal Historical Society has fallen into the trap of confusing historical diversity with the narrow political correctness of a vociferous loony left lobby in our universities. It’s a laudable aim to root out racism in the recruitment of academics or students, but that has nothing to do with the absurd goal of a recent RHS report to “promote and embed racial and ethnic equality in UK-based history”.
History is not some race equality project, but the study of complex and often contradictory realities about our past, which rarely lend themselves to simple ethical stereotypes. Those who profess to “decolonise” the curriculum are fighting a dangerous battle to purge the past of the iniquities they dislike and present us with a sanitised version, censored according to the values of the present…
How could any truly diverse study of slavery ignore the fact that the transatlantic slave trade, for which Western Europe rightly stands condemned, was a historically minute fragment of the global history of slavery, dating back several millennia and still surviving in parts of the Arab world?
How many schoolchildren know about the thousands of white British men, women and children who were sold in Middle Eastern slave markets during the 16th and 17th centuries after being kidnapped by Barbary Corsairs, Arab pirates from North Africa, who regularly raided villages along the coast of Cornwall and Devon?…
Should the Aztecs or Inca only be treated as victims of Spanish conquest and not also as conquerors and builders of their own past empires? Should we not study the British Raj as the most recent of many empires imposed on the subcontinent by foreign invaders?
Most important of all, shouldn’t a racism-free history curriculum celebrate the positive legacies of imperialism, whether in democratic institutions, law courts, science or technology, or even in its unintended consequences?