Decolonising History Project: Interview with Dr Richard Drayton (2/2)
Poster design courtesy of Jeanet Alessandra Tapia Huertas for KCL Latin American Society
Professor Richard Drayton was interviewed on the 24th of June by our Cultural and Outreach Officer Emily Arama Sánchez, as part of a Decolonising History Project organised by the King’s College London History Department. This project was coordinated by Professor Laura Gowing and Decolonise KCL Society President, Lauren Fernandes.
Dr Drayton’s interview analyses the complex nature of decolonisation in Latin America; examining how it continues to affect current politics and how we approach historical teaching.
This is Part Three of a three-part collaborative series.
Click here to read the previous part of our interview with Professor Richard Drayton. For our Part One interview with Dr Francisco Bethencourt, click here.
Why do we still teach European history as distinct from African history, and Latin American history as distinct from Asian history and so on, when we know that all histories are inherently integrated?
Histories are integrated, but histories are also separate. Even, I think with the most sophisticated global history programme, I at least and I think most of my colleagues would want to be respectful of the fact that there are particular kinds of experience which have to be understood in terms of the local and in terms of the characteristics of the local. There has been a kind of shared and common history of the European, although of course the European has been entangled with the histories of other parts of the world. So it is possible I think to have a focus which is on these things that are separate at the same time as thinking of them as connected.
“Histories are integrated, but histories are also separate.”
The contents of the British Museum, as you are well aware, are hardly British. What is it, in your opinion, that gives Britain the false sense of entitlement to the histories and lives of those that it exploited? Would returning these historical sources back to the countries of origin help Britain to realise its role in colonisation?
Yes, 'The history of the world in 100 stolen objects'. to paraphrase Neil MacGregor. Well, the claim of museums like the British Museum and the various German museums in Berlin, at Louvre and so on, is that they deserve to keep their collections in their entirety because they are 'universal museums'. That is to say that they happen to be situated in Britain or Germany or France, they are serving mankind as a whole. They lean hard on the idea of the Enlightenment, and the idea that the Enlightened West is the vanguard and guardian of this exalted project of seeing human culture as a whole. Well. My feeling is that if you are going to argue that you can’t at the same time describe the British Museum or the Louvre or the Humboldt Forum in Berlin as belonging to the British, French and German people. In other words, if you are going to play that card and say that these are universal museums, then in some significant way, the management and the organisation of these collections, and how they use their collections, should be organised in a way to serve people in every country of the world. Whereas in fact, as we know, 90% of these collections are kept in storage and are not actually even put on exhibition within the countries where they’re held. That is the kind of predicament that we are in.
I think that there are various options which are open, there is the option of creating a simulacrum which is kept in Britain while the original object is returned to its place of usually religious or sacred or political importance. The Golden Stool of the Ashanti has an important ritual place in Ghana, various Buddhist heads belong back in Indonesia not in the British Museum, etc.
Would returning these objects help Britain realise its role in decolonisation? I think one would have to come before the other. I think that the process of return would be part of a kind of renegotiation of what it meant to be British relative to the rest of the world. I think to begin with, if the British Museum should begin by offering a full and clear history of provenance of all of the objects on display, how they came to enter the collection of the British Museum – that in itself would be an enormous step forward.
At the moment, there’s a quite deliberate obscuring of how it was that objects were acquired since of course, they were often acquired in the midst of either military raids and taken as plunder or were ‘purchased’ in inverted commas in a context in which the seller, the vendor, was not in full liberty to refuse the transaction.
“There are particular kinds of experience which have to be understood in terms of the local and in terms of the characteristics of the local.”
Does decolonisation require steps beyond the curriculum?
I think it does, I think that decolonisation of the curriculum should be linked to a decolonisation of power, wealth, and imaginaries, that is to say forms of culture and cultural ideas. So, the curriculum is only part of the story. It has got to be linked to a kind of idea of renegotiating the identity of the institution. So, take for example, at King’s, we have at kind of the climax of the Strand Campus this system of neo-classical sculptures, these pseudo-Greek and Roman sculptures which adorn the entry way to the Great Hall at King’s. What might it take to find ways of presencing in that space Africa? The Caribbean? Latin America? Asia? Australia? via objects, works of art, concessions of one kind or another to another root for the university. Specifically when thinking about the university, we can ask how the names of things can be changed, how new kinds of people can be recruited, how resources can be redirected, how spaces can be reimagined, how ways of thinking can be inaugurated not just in terms of the curriculum but in terms of the self-conception of the institution.
Perhaps part of the reason as to why colonised thinking is still practised is because of what we see on a daily basis. Africa is viewed across millions of TV screens in the UK as a charity case, a place that British people, through their donations, can ‘civilise’ much in the same way they did through paternalistic imperialism not that many years ago. How do we decolonise this, whilst attempting to establish a diplomatic relationship between Britain and Africa when the stakes have never been equal?
That’s a very tall order. I think particularly in the current political conjuncture, I hardly think that there’s likely to be any kind of improvement in terms of what is broadcast on British television screens. There should be small and large acts of confrontation with the forms of conventional wisdom via alternative media, of which there is a growing amount because of the ease of production with digital tools. The information space can be taken from below.
We need forms of counter-commentary to what is broadcast by the offical media. To a considerable extent its already happening in terms of popular culture. Something like the Mash Report, which the BBC bosses hated so much they closed it down, arguably had more influence on public opinion younger people than the BBC’s official news broadcasts. And after its removal from our screens, Mash has a second influential life via social media.
What do you see your role as a global historian to be?
Now that’s a big one. I’ll separate it into three steps.
First of all, my role as a historian is to speak to the truth of the past. Then, in the midst of speaking that truth, to play an active role as, to use a complicated metaphor, a pruner in the vineyard of the collective memory. So, operating to open up where a particular path of consciousness or self-consciousness has died; sort of opening it up with a deliberate act of intervention where people are suddenly made aware of a particular past and its relationship to other aspects of the past and the present. So, the historian’s work is one of connection, of mediation. And within that, the role of the global historian has a kind of technical responsibility to shape forms of comparative and connective historical thinking where one compares and connects phenomena in different places. And to do so towards a kind of ethical end which is the long journey towards a world in which human beings will be equal participants in a kind of commonwealth. A commonwealth of resources and of culture.
“My role as a historian is to speak to the truth of the past.”
Has the notion of decolonisation affected how we teach and learn history? If teachers see elements of Eurocentrism in a student’s work and interpretations of history, how do you think they ought to approach it?
The notion of decolonisation has begun very vaguely to touch how we teach and learn history. But only slowly for historians who work on Europe. It is still early days. What does one do with Eurocentrism? One tries to engage the student or students into thinking about the ways in which this involves a kind of oversimplification of a particular problem. Additionally, one tries to make them aware of other ways of seeing the problem in more complex and multi-perspectival ways.
Sometimes decolonised teaching has been seen to vary based on the different places and periods that have been focused on. For example, in my first year, decolonised teaching was more evident in the “Worlds of British Empire’ module than the ‘Politics and Society in Britain’ module. How do you think we could rectify this?
I think that we’re just at the beginning of doing this and its very interesting that we’re now in the midst of the process of reimagining what the first-year curriculum is going to be like. So we’re creating these new medieval, early modern and modern history foundational courses which will seek to integrate the non-European and the European in a kind of whole. But I think that the way in which we can rectify this in part through the pressure of people like you. I think in some ways it is the students who need to lead the teachers in terms of really awakening to a recognition that this could be something which they could address. I find that even with the best of wills, people may not in fact recognise that there’s a particular problem in how they construct the course.
As is clear, the legacy of colonisation is best seen in the modern day in the system of knowledge production and dissemination whereby colonial nations were able to dominate and essentially rewrite the historical narrative based on notions of white saviourism. Do you think that the education system we have today, wherein ancestors of those colonised have less access to information about their predecessors because of current socio-economic inequalities than ancestors of those who colonised is a legacy of colonialism?
I do think that forms of inequality which were created in the world which are anchored in structures of property, social class (which is entangled with race, ethnicity, gender and all these other things). I think this has led to unequal forms of cultural capital, that is to say relative to what is the majority culture, and we have forms of educational and cultural inequality which indeed are reproduced in terms of having less access to information. What can be done about this? Again, I think that’s something that has to be addressed from the ground up. I think it’s unlikely to be addressed from the centre, at least not at the current political moment.
Instead of education being based on a system of meritocracy, we see a price tag attached to it. Where you live, what schools you can go to, and what resources you have, all tie into your experience of education. Articles, for example, that academics such as yourself have published, are not accessible to a wide range of students who want to learn about their own history because of how much they cost. So how do you think that we can go about making access to such histories equal?
Academics need, first, to make available as much as possible all their work, and the archives which underpin their work, where they can be accessed without paywalls. The problem of the paywall was already a huge problem. During the pandemic, however, it has become even more critical. It was once the case that students anywhere could go to a public library and at that public library acquire access to things that were behind the paywall. In the midst of the 'austerity' which followed 2010, the budgets of public libraries have been slashed, at least in this country, and such libraries are much less well-resourced than they were say 10 or 15 years ago. Meanwhile the cost of these digital collections continues to rise in ways which drain university library budgets. There are big questions to be asked about the future of academic publishing and how we can distribute these materials outside of the paywall in some significant way. Pressures to do this are coming from the funding bodies towards 'open access', which has become a kind of mantra, towards which people have been striving. In some ways some of the natural scientists have gone furthest with open access publishing. But there remains a hugely unequal distribution of access to information both within and across societies even in the midst of the apparently 'flat' digital world.
“There remains a hugely unequal distribution of access to information both within and across societies even in the midst of the apparently ‘flat’ digital world.”
Moreover, it seems that decolonisation has been seen as a term that is relatively optional. But if colonialism did effectively reshape the world that we all live in, do you think that colonial history should be compulsory in teaching? Why does the current curriculum make modules regarding Europe mandatory and global modules optional?
Any history of the modern period should have at least in some part of it, a recognition of the significance of the colonies and of the colonial. I personally do think that colonialism should be part of the curriculum, should be a central part of the curriculum because it was so central to the making of the modern world.
To jump the gun to your next question about the current curriculum, I think that one of the things that is at least the aim of the new first year modules being created to be lodged not this year coming but the year after, would be exactly to integrate Europe and the world so there would be this kind of structural inequality with European modules as mandatory and global modules as optional. But there remain all kinds of structural inequality in the availability of these modules. Simply because we have one Latin Americanist; one person represents the billion plus people of Latin America, whereas we have multiple historians for Britain with its 60 million people and multiple historians of Europe. We have no historian of Indonesia even when there are more Indonesians than in any European country. We have no historian of Japan. We will have a historian of China, but that person would have to represent a billion Chinese over the course of 2000 years even though they’re hired as a modernist. We have a couple of South Asianists, but again relative to the population of India, pretty small. So, I think that there’s much work to be done.
Why do you think the university has a lack of non-European historians in the staff?
This is part of the historical legacy of how universities like this were created. So for example when I came to King’s in 2009, all that we had were historians of Britain and Europe, plus two historians of Australia for particular historic reasons, one historian of India, plus one historian of Africa and the British Empire – but really the Africa and the British Empire through the British imperial perspective. We didn’t really have historians of the rest of the world. In the course of my first 5 years at King’s we pushed hard to try and change that structure of representation and we hired Latin Americanists, two US historians, a historian of the Middle East and Iran, two historians of Africa and we’re a lot better off than we were 10 years ago. But it’s really about redressing what was a much older set of assumptions about what parts of the world were thought to have an important history, and what parts of the world were thought to have an unimportant history.
“But it’s really about redressing what was a much older set of assumptions about what parts of the world were thought to have an important history, and what parts of the world were thought to have an unimportant history.”
Finally, what do you see as the future to decolonising the curriculum?
We need to interrogate every module, every year’s course offerings, the structure of the degree, the personnel of the teaching staff, the options for dissertation modules and for masters’ courses, the library provision; all these things need to be systematically interrogated on a year-to-year basis to ensure that things continue to move in the right direction. Change rarely happens simply through the good will of people. It usually is something that has to be driven from below and demanded by its future beneficiaries.
Selected publications:
Material Conditions and Ideas in Global History
Drayton, R. & Motadel, D., 7 Dec 2020, (Accepted/In press) In: British Journal of Sociology. 15 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review
Commonwealth History From Below?: Caribbean national, federal and Pan-African renegotiations of the Empire project, c. 1880- 1950
Drayton, R., 2 Jul 2020, Commonwealth history in the twenty-first century. Dubow, S. & Drayton, R. (eds.). London: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 41-60 21 p. (Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies Series). Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41788-8_3
Commonwealth History in the Twenty-First Century
Drayton, R. H. (ed.) & Dubow, S. (ed.), 1 Jul 2020, Palgrave Macmillan. (Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies) Research output: Book/Report - Book - peer-review
Race, Culture and Class: European Hegemony and Global Class Formation, c. 1800-1950
Drayton, R. H., 3 Dec 2019, The Global Bourgeoisie: The Rise of the Middle Classes in the Age of Empire.Dejung, C., Osterhammel, J. & Motadel, D. (eds.). Princeton: Princeton University Press Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review
Rhodes must not fall? Statues, Post-colonial 'Heritage' and Temporality
Drayton, R., 25 Oct 2019, In: Third Text. 33, 4-5, p. 651-666 16 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1653073
Biggar vs Little Britain: God, War, Union, Brexit and Empire in Twenty-first century Conservative ideology
Drayton, R. H., 25 Jul 2019, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain . Ward, S. & Rasch, A. (eds.). London: Bloomsbury, p. 143-155 12 p. Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding - Chapter - peer-review
Discussion: The futures of global history
Drayton, R. & Motadel, D., 1 Mar 2018, In: Journal Of Global History. 13, 1, p. 1-21 21 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000262
Federal utopias and the realities of imperial power
Drayton, R., 1 Aug 2017, In: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. 37, 2, p. 401-406Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4133001
The Commonwealth in the 21st Century
Drayton, R., 2 Jan 2016, In: The Round Table: the commonwealth journal of international affairs. 105, 1, p. 21-277 p. Research output: Contribution to journal - Article - peer-review. DOIs: https://doi.org/10.1080/00358533.2015.1126964
Expertise:
Professor Richard Drayton is Senior Research Associate of the Centre for World Environmental History of the University of Sussex. He was a member of the Academic Advisory Committee on the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. With Megan Vaughan he edits the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series of Palgrave-Macmillan and he is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the American Historical Association and the Association of Caribbean Historians. He served as External Examiner for the University of Bristol (2007-10). He is a co-convenor of the Imperial and World History seminar at the Institute of Historical Research.
Public Engagement:
Dr Drayton believes that it is important for historians to communicate with the wider public, and in particular to speak up where their work on the past has relevance to the present. He has appeared on BBC radio on 'Nightwaves' and 'In Our Time', has participated in public debates on Britain's imperial past and present, and has published op/ed pieces in the Guardian (including An Ethical Blank Cheque and Africa and the wealth of the West).
He has been invited to give many distinguished lectures including “Hybrid time: The Incomplete Victories of the Present Over the Past”, Throckmorton Lecture at Lewis and Clark College (2007); ‘The Problem of the Hero in Caribbean History’, 21st Elsa Goveia Lecture, University of the West Indies (2004); and ‘What happens when two ways of knowing meet?’, the Elizabeth T. Kennan Lecture at Mount Holyoke College (2003)
Research interests and PhD supervision:
After c. 1500 European imperial systems began to link together the human communities around the Atlantic basin, and ultimately in the Indian Ocean and Pacific regions, into one world society. This was a complex process, mediated by extraordinary violence, which reached its culmination c. 1750-1900, when new technologies allowed the command and exploitation of continental interiors. Its product was modern Europe and its postcolonial diasporic extensions in North America and Australasia, and their still unequal relationship with modern Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Professor Drayton’s research addresses this world historical process from several directions. In his earlier work he looked at the interactions of science, Christianity, political economy, and British expansion, and the emergence in the European Enlightenment of myths of Empires as engines of development and universal improvement. One dimension of this, he argued, was the rise of the idea of ‘scientific’ enlightened government in eighteenth-century France, and of the influence of this on British domestic and colonial ideas of enlightened reform after c. 1780, and in particular on the colonial patronage of science. Professor Drayton would welcome applications from research students interested in working on topics relating to any aspect of the history of any European empire, or on the imperial experience of any region of the world, including Europe itself. He is comfortable supervising research in any period of modern history, and with sources and historiography in any major European language.