Isn't it curious that in England and Wales, Jeremy Paxman's Empire (BBC One, Sunday, 10.25pm) was shown in a prime-time 9pm slot on a Monday, but that in Scotland the programme was taken gently by the arm and shown to the graveyard slot on a Sunday?
One explanation for this might be that the schedulers think the British Empire is of less interest, or of less relevance, to Scotland, which would be to ignore a fact that's uncomfortable for some: the hands that gripped the Empire's guns, swords and whips were very often Scottish.
An alternative explanation for this backwater scheduling might be that – just as the independence debate is getting started – BBC Scotland is vaguely embarrassed by a programme about something so British presented by someone so English. If that's true, it would be a pity because even those who want to split up Britain shouldn't be embarrassed by the British Empire. As Paxman says, the Empire has had a bad press but did many good things.
I heard this for myself the other day while I was visiting Bangladesh and stopped to watch some kids playing cricket in a field. One of the locals got to praising the British for inventing the game, but I asked him if that was the only good thing the British left behind. Was the Empire, I asked, a good or bad thing?
Considering the cack-handed way we divided the region up when we left, he could hardly say that the Empire was all good, but we did talk about some of the positives: roads, railways, a legal system, democracy.
In the first episode of Empire, Paxman got pretty much the same response when he visited the headquarters of India's Madras regiment. There, he met Captain Dilip Shekhar who listed the conflicts his regiment had fought in – on the British side. Paxman thought Shekhar might have a sense of unease about this, because he was a proud Indian nationalist but also proud of his regiment and of what it had done. This clearly clicks neatly into Paxman's philosophy, which is that if you're going to be colonised by anybody, it's probably best to be colonised by the British.
This doesn't mean the programme avoided the nastier sides of the Empire. Quite the opposite: it laid them out for us in gory detail. Like a cat that puffs up its fur to look more threatening, the key to empire-building was making yourself look bigger and more impressive than you really were – and, also like a cat, being willing to violently lash out when required. The result, as Paxman points out, was that a small country ended up with a big head.
The longer-term consequences of this are even more interesting. Standing on a beach in India, Paxman listed the wars we've fought in the last 30 years – Falklands, Gulf, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya – and asked if they were all a result of empire. Which is a good question. Would we really have got involved in these wars if, at some level, we weren't just trying to recreate all that stomping around in big hats telling people what to do? All that glory. That exciting violence. Isn't war, in the end, just us trying to show off to our ancestors? Isn't it just us trying to prove that anything they can do, we can do better?
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