Two courses I studied this semester have thrown into sharp relief the failures this university has had at decolonising our practices of knowledge production. The Anthropology course ‘Empires’ and the History course ‘Britain, Ireland and Empire,’ both for very different reasons, have unintentionally reformulated colonial practices in our education and demonstrate wider problems with decolonisation.
‘Britain, Ireland and Empire’ seeks to explore the British nation in an imperial context and how Britishness, as an identity, evolved from 1800 to present day. It inevitably centres Britain at its heart while the colonised exist on the periphery both in the content of what we were taught and the sources through which we understand the history. For example, in one particular week, and one of the few instances when we talked about the Empire itself, we discussed slave emancipation through the lens of the British abolition movement.
We understood slave emancipation to be motivated by largely positive impulses rather than the reality, while the colonised response to emancipation was completely ignored. In actuality slavery was seen by the British establishment as an inefficient mode of production, and abolition was an easy way to undermine French interests, an aspect of abolition which was never considered by the course. In this way, an understanding of the British Empire as a flawed but ultimately progressive institution was allowed to develop in the mind of the student while the colonised were completely denied any agency in their history, as the narrative was focused away from them. Therefore, ‘Britain, Ireland and Empire’ has made very little attempt to decolonise.
‘Empires,’ a course far more critical of Empire, also demonstrates the difficulty that even a more progressive approach has at achieving successful decolonisation. ‘Empires’ seeks to demonstrate how empire has a totalising effect, colonising not only the material but also the psychological and, in doing so, argues that empire persists to this day. However, it is this emphasis on the totality of empire that, like ‘Britain, Ireland and Empire,’ removes the colonised of their agency. At no point do we consider how the colonised resist their oppression; again, empire is a process which happens to a passive colonised.
Therefore, a very brief exploration of these two courses reveal how Edinburgh needs to do more to decolonise its curriculum. In this decolonisation, it must both recenter the colonised and acknowledge them as actors in their own histories, not simply one-dimensional victims.
“Main Venue” by DaGoaty is licensed under CC BY 2.0.