: Interview: Priya Satia on the ‘earnestly deliberate hypocrisy’ of the British Empire #IndiaNEWS In 18th and 19th century Britain, historians didn’t just record history, they made it. Historians

Interview: Priya Satia on the ‘earnestly deliberate hypocrisy’ of the British Empire #IndiaNEWS
In 18th and 19th century Britain, historians didn’t just record history, they made it. Historians doubled as advisors to political leaders and were often policy makers or political leaders themselves, with Winston Churchill – who won a Nobel Prize in literature in part for his historical writing – being the prime example. And by abetting or actively wielding power, the historians of this era helped create the violent-beast-wrapped-in-liberal-garb that was the British Empire. Historian Priya Satia’s book Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire argues that you cannot tell the story of the British Empire without also recounting the “narrative of the rise and fall of a particular historical sensibility??? – one that assumes history is progressing towards a liberatory end and that political actors have to play their role in shepherding the world towards this preordained destination. Because both linear progress and a glorious endpoint were predetermined, Satia argues that policymakers of the Empire found it easy to set aside ethical considerations and carry out monstrous deeds while insisting that they always had good intentions. “In public memory, redemptive myths about colonial upliftment persistently mask the empire’s abysmal history of looting and pillage, policy-driven famines, brutal crushing of rebellion, torture, concentration camps, aerial policing,...Read more

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