We are all scions of the British Empire in one way or another. As David Olusoga put it in his new BBC documentary series, Empire with David Olusoga: “There are literally billions of people whose ancestors, in different ways, were part of this story”.

A series on the British Empire is always welcome, given the scope and historical richness of the period, yet this one feels ever so slightly outdated. Olusoga justifies the program by pronouncing that questions about the country’s colonial history have “become more urgent and more contested than ever before, because the ghosts of the British Empire have been re-awoken”. It then cuts Black Lives Matters protesters taking down Edward Colston’s statue in 2020, before dumping it into Bristol Harbour. If this series had been made in 2021, 2022, or even in 2023, when national and historiographical wrangling with imperial legacies was prominent in public discourse, this framing might have packed more of a punch.

Still, the central question which occupies Olusoga’s series is an interesting one: how is it that a small island in the North Sea — that was little more than a middling kingdom in the late 15th century — became a wealthy, industrialized society and the first global superpower?

The answer given here is that Britain simply plundered and enslaved its way into that position, from the colonization of North America and the Caribbean to the conquest of India. Many of the ordinary people with ancestral links to this history, who are brought on to offer their opinions, underline this argument. One of them says that “black bodies were violated for the growth and maintenance of that wealth to the West.”

So, is Britain the product of slavery and the atrocities of colonialism? In part, yes. The Atlantic slave trade was an important pillar of Europe’s pre-industrial commercial society and a consumer economy built on commodities including sugar, tobacco and coffee. Olusoga rightly highlights some of the more gruesome episodes. One such is the life of Truganini, who became an object of fascination among Europeans as the last of the dying race of Aboriginal Tasmanians. Despite her wish that her body not be handed over to race scientists, her skeleton was publicly displayed at the Tasmanian Museum until 1947; three decades after that, her remains were finally returned to the Aboriginal community and cremated.

Yet that is only one side of the story. Modern Britain, and the West more broadly, is the product of labor, including that of the enslaved and conquered. We’re not talking about the ill-gotten gains of white Europeans at the expense of black and brown “bodies” that must somehow be atoned for. Many colonized people, such as the early-19th century Indian reformer Raja Ram Mohan Roy, saw the newness and utility in Western ideas and education as a means to critique elements of their own societies, including the sati ritual and the caste system. Such stories should receive closer attention in teaching about the Empire. This is the deep, knotty and tortuous history that belongs to us all, and upon which we must build.

The sun has long set on the British Empire, but it never seems to set on vexatious quarrels about the merits and iniquities of the imperial past. Indeed, this heavy history continues to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Olusoga’s series, intended as a counterpoint to more apologetic treatments of the subject, unfortunately showcases a narrow, superficial and tendentious history of the British Empire, colored by a notably post-2020 sensibility. If anything, this demonstrates how stagnant the BBC is. Though the discourse has evolved since, the BBC remains stuck in that moment of anger, all the while pretending that it is at the vanguard of the national debate.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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