John Westmoreland recommends six books that demolish the myths of imperialist history, and can inoculate us against imperialist ideology in the new year.

There is no escape for the British ruling class for the blood it has spilled in the Middle East in recent years, and the wider world before that. There is a sense in which Britain’s imperial past is catching up with it.

Britain’s empire has brought millions of immigrants to our shores along with their own knowledge of Britain’s bloody role in the world, while former imperial colonies are demanding redress for British crimes. From Britain’s role in founding the state of Israel, founding South African apartheid, and murdering rebels in Kenya, India, and Malaysia, the birds are coming home to roost.

Karl Marx told us long ago that the dominant ideas in society are those of the ruling class. History is important. The capitalists want to show that their rule has been benign and well-intentioned. Their control of the history we are taught is a prop to their political power.

The British Empire was once the pride and glory of the ruling class. But now the past is coming back to haunt it. The defeat of British imperialism, past and present, is something to celebrate on every anti-war demonstration. The notion of Britain’s empire bringing democracy and justice to the peoples they conquered, championed by the likes of Winston Churchill and Boris Johnson, stands exposed.

Over the past few years we have been blessed with a series of highly readable, myth-busting accounts of what the British Empire was really about: the subjugation of peoples in order to plunder their resources and promote British exports.

Here are six books that the Tories don’t want you to read, and that will make excellent Christmas gifts. Treat yourself too.

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery

(Penguin Modern Classics 2022), 304pp.

Republished in 2022, Capitalism and Slavery is a classic. Liberal historians have tried, unsuccessfully, to ridicule the Marxist analysis of the author since it was first published in 1944.

Eric Williams’ pioneering study established the links between capitalism and slavery. Slavery was the mode of production favoured in colonies that profited from plantation agriculture. He showed that the capital generated by slavery built Britain as the first industrial nation and ingrained the racist attitudes of the ruling class into British politics and culture. Early capitalism turned human beings into commodities that could be worked to death in the production of sugar, tobacco and rum.

Capitalism and Slavery is highly readable with a line of argument that recent studies are increasingly endorsing. The truth about the abolition of slavery, and a truth that liberal historians hate, is that slavery was not ended by middle-class humanitarians like William Wilberforce. Slavery and the slave trade were abolished because modern capitalism preferred wage slavery to chattel slavery. Slave rebellions in the colonies and mass campaigning in Britain propelled the debate to a conclusion. Economic efficiency and free-market ideology saw increased profits in freeing slaves and leaving them to fend for themselves as ‘free labour’.

Capitalism and Slavery was a pioneering work in 1944, and it inspired a generation of left historians thereafter. That’s one reason why it remained out of print in Britain until this 2022 edition. Every page you read will be one in the eye to the apologists for empire and you will enjoy it all the more for that.

John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire

(Bookmarks 2006), 256pp.

John Newsinger’s book is a masterly Marxist account of British imperialism. It is the antidote to Niall Ferguson’s Empire, a book that idealises the British endeavour to ‘civilise foreigners’.

As a Marxist, John Newsinger writes much in the same spirit as Eric Williams, only his scope is much greater. It deals with the British Empire in full, stage by stage and country by country. However, like Capitalism and Slavery, The Blood Never Dried exposes the systematic violence of an empire that often left a legacy of brutal dictatorships when it withdrew. The heroic struggles against British imperialism get a comprehensive coverage that does honour to the fighters that have gone before.

The Blood Never Dried needs to be on your bookshelf. It is both an analysis and an encyclopaedia of the crimes of empire, weapons we need to keep at hand.

Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India

(Penguin 2016), xxvii, 295pp.

Apologists for the British Empire like to list the imagined gifts of civilisation that the British bequeathed to their conquered peoples, and this is precisely why Shashi Tharoor makes the list.

Shashi Tharoor is not a Marxist, he is a former diplomat and an Indian politician. Nevertheless, Inglorious Empire is a riveting read that demolishes British pretensions to have been a civilising force. Tharoor takes aim at the aforementioned Ferguson and that other blustering snob, Lawrence James, whose Rise and Fall of the British Empire is a hymn to British superiority in science, culture and politics.

Inglorious Empire is a highly entertaining polemic. It not only destroys the arguments for Britain having well-meaning intentions, it shows how the opposite is true. To take just one example. Britain, far from building India’s economic power – through railways, science and reform – actually destroyed it. Before the British takeover, India was a world leader in textile production, but the British destroyed that industry to flood the market with inferior British cloth.

Tharoor brilliantly exposes Britain’s method of government based on divide and rule. We learn how the Muslim-Hindu enmity that we see today was the direct result of British policy. British snobbery could only understand other peoples in terms of hierarchies, and what advantages Britain could get from exploiting them. British racism stubbornly prevented any Indians of talent from gaining government positions, which in turn led to the fight for Indian independence.

Inglorious Empire is easy to read and extremely entertaining. It fills a vital space in our understanding of how Britain came, saw and destroyed a flourishing portion of the globe.

Padraic X. Scanlan, Slave Empire, How Slavery Built Modern Britain

(Robinson), 464pp.

Slave Empire is centred on Britain’s Caribbean slave colonies. I found this an especially intriguing book and thoroughly enjoyed it. It adds much to the work of Eric Williams by delving into the minds of those Britons who opposed and defended slavery.

After reading this book you will be in no doubt how those progressive Whigs who opposed slavery in the eighteenth century were forever in thrall to the civilising power of the free market. Scanlon takes aim at a number of annoying ideas that the abolitionists were obsessed with – Christianity and trade as civilising virtues in particular – and lays bare their hypocrisy and smugness.

I particularly enjoyed his taking down of British civility – the invention of a form of language and manners that stressed a polite and cultured outlook, but which overlayed the cold-hearted calculations that were at the heart of every imperialist.

This was particularly important after the slave trade was abolished in 1807 and the abolitionists, shocked by the numerous atrocities carried out by Caribbean planters, began to think about what the colonies might look like after slavery was abolished.

I don’t want to spoil a fascinating read, but it was a capitalist abolition that ended slavery in Britain’s colonies. The civilising mission of Christianity, the free market and the imposition of low pay (to maintain the discipline of hard work) was the fate of those freed from bondage.

Michael Taylor, The Interest, How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

(The Bodley Head 2020), xvii, 382pp.

This is another very readable nail in the coffin of British Empire mythology. Michael Taylor provides an historical shaming of British pretensions, and provides an epilogue that calls out for an end to the crippling economic and social injustices that Britain foisted on her freed Caribbean colonies. The title refers to a period in British politics when elections were corrupt and political office was bought. Parliament served the interests of wealthy groups (even more blatantly than today) that formed themselves into lobbying ‘interests’. The West Indian slave lobby has left its imprint on our world today, especially its manufactured anti-African racism.

The Interest covers the period from the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 to the abolition of chattel slavery in the British Empire, and, in Taylor’s own words, offers the ‘history of conspiracy, espionage, rebels, and radicals; intrigue and backdoor deals; upheavals in politics, religion and society; and the ultimate victory of radical campaigners and Caribbean rebels over the might of the British Establishment.’

We need more and more stripping away of the British Establishment’s sanitised history and this book makes an excellent starting point.

Caroline Elkins, Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

(Vintage 2022), 896pp.

Confession time – I have only just started this one – but so far it is a cracker. Reviewers are praising it to the sky and it is going to be mainstream reading for anyone wanting to get to grips with the bloody history of Britain.

Hopefully the recommendation on the back cover will stimulate the interest Caroline Elkins’ work deserves.

‘This searing, landmark study draws on more than a decade of research on four continents to reveal the dark heart of Britain’s Empire: a racialized, systemised doctrine of unrelenting violence, which it used to secure and maintain its interests across the globe. When Britain could no longer maintain control over that violence, it simply retreated – and sought to destroy the evidence. Legacy of Violence is a monumental achievement that explodes long-held myths and deserves the attention of anyone who seeks to understand empire’s role in shaping the world today.”

That concludes my list of recommendations. Remember that every time we read a book that explodes the myths of empire, we are also calling time on the political system it created. We can’t save the planet without breaking the imperialists’ monopoly of resources and capital. We need to learn about how imperialism grew, the deadly distortions of morality and justice it imposed, and kick away the historical crutch of our ‘glorious past’ that capitalist power rests on.

Happy Christmas and a revolutionary New Year.