Suella Braverman, the Reform UK MP and former Home Secretary, has been in the news for declaring that “the British Empire did so much good for the world,” and that “former colonies should pay the British back for the considerable investment, effort and contribution that this country made, which laid the foundations for many flourishing democracies today.” She wrote this on X in reply to fellow MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who had noted that a Jamaican delegation was travelling to the UK to lodge a formal slavery reparations petition with King Charles, and that “it is getting harder and harder for British institutions to maintain their favoured tactic of simply ignoring calls for repair.”
It would be easy to dismiss this as a routine clash between politicians of opposing camps. But the question of what colonisation actually gave its victims, and what it took, has recently been debated well beyond Westminster, including among citizens of former colonies themselves. That debate deserves a proper accounting.
Did the colonised actually benefit?
Much of the case for colonisation rests on the claim that Britain and other empires brought education and health infrastructure to their colonies. This is true as far as it goes, but entering it in a ledger as a net “advantage” has historically been dishonest. The colonised did not need British rule to gain access to schools or hospitals. They needed trade, and many were actively seeking exactly that.
When Sultan Muhammad Bello of the Sokoto Caliphate, in what is now northern Nigeria, met the British envoy Hugh Clapperton, he was ready to negotiate the arrival of British doctors to train his own subjects. That is education and health, offered on his own terms. Clapperton and his government had no interest in supplying either so freely. Their aim was submission, not partnership.
This reminds one of the oft-repeated case of Nineteenth-century Ethiopian rulers such as Emperor Tewodros II and Menelik II actively seeking European engineers, technicians, and teachers to help modernise their state. What Europe sent instead, more often than not, were missionaries.
Back in the empire, the British were not responding to a request for development. They were imposing “modernisation” on their own terms, which raises the real question behind any claim about colonial education: education in what, and for whose benefit? Africans readily recognised European advances in technology and medicine. However, they never accepted that their own social norms and institutions were inferior. What colonial education actually taught, alongside literacy, was the doctrine of cultural superiority.
The same applies to British governance and law, which colonialists describe as bringing “fairness and justice.” Whatever praise this system earned from those who lived under it, decades of independence have shown that most former colonies are no better governed than they were left. What colonialism produced, in practice, was a new class of bureaucrats trained to imitate the coloniser rather than a functioning indigenous system. By presenting the imported model as inherently superior, colonial rule both dismantled existing systems of leadership and left successor states with no clear way back to their own.
The long-term benefits, and who actually kept them
Some historians have tried to draw up a balance sheet for empire, arguing that Britain spent more on its colonies, particularly on military and naval defence, than it ever recovered. Well, one would have asked what their ships were doing far away in other people’s land. Unfortunately, however, these monetary figures inform the argument of the likes of Braverman. Nevertheless, it mistakes the ledger for the whole story. It would be naive to think that the gains of colonisation were confined to the colonial period itself, or that they are solely material. Independence was not a gift freely given. It was a strategy for running the same relationship at a lower cost.
Take trade. For decades after independence, the United Kingdom remained the single largest trading partner for many of its former colonies, and it still ranks among the top partners for most of them today.
After independence, Britain created the Commonwealth. It is not a formal economic bloc, but it still delivers real economic benefits, and it was not created because member states asked for a club. It became necessary. Commonwealth states are estimated to trade around 20 percent more with each other than with non-members, and at roughly 21 percent lower cost, largely because so many share common-law legal systems and speak English.
Talking of the language. The empire’s language has become the world’s lingua franca, not because anyone was cool with it, but because much of the world was compelled to learn it at some point in its history. That has, in turn, entrenched British institutions long after the colonial flag came down. Everyone still pictures prestige as a degree from London, Edinburgh, or Oxbridge. The language itself has become a permanent revenue stream: the British Council profits from IELTS exams, and Oxford and Cambridge sell an endless supply of new textbooks to a world still learning the coloniser’s tongue. Even football, something as ordinary as sport, channels billions of pounds into the British economy, in no small part because the colonised mind still looks first to an English club.
It is also worth stating plainly that without the colonies, Britain may not have won either world war. The empire did not only supply soldiers for its most difficult campaigns. It supplied raw materials, Nigerian steel and Iranian oil among them, extracted through taxation regimes that pushed colonised populations to the brink of famine to fund a war that was not theirs.
Then there is cultural colonisation, which resists any accounting at all. A child born in a former colony still inherits a default assumption of British superiority, taught that the coloniser built everything of value, even when the achievement was his own people’s. He learns to speak the coloniser’s language and spends a lifetime perfecting it to the standard of a BBC broadcaster.
The exploitation of oil followed the same script. Colonial land clauses and protectionist policy gave British Petroleum a head start it never relinquished. Today, BP and other British companies still control billions of barrels of oil thousands of miles from London, a direct inheritance of colonial rule.
The killings
No accounting of colonisation’s costs and gains is honest if it omits the killings carried out by British officials. The record includes protest after protest crushed by mass violence, from India to Africa. Frederick Lugard killed and displaced thousands to establish British rule in Uganda before being placed in charge of creating Nigeria, where he ordered killings on a similar scale to bring an end to the Sokoto Caliphate. The precise death toll of the 1952–1960 Mau Mau uprising in Kenya generally ranges from 11,000 to 20,000, and that figure does not account for the countless other places where indigenous populations were decimated outright.
Against that record, any “competitive balance sheet” argument collapses.
There is room for serious debate about whether African or American nations should now pursue reparations, and much of that debate can be conducted on purely economic terms. But to dismiss the pain of colonisation as though it were simply an entry on the credit side of history is not analysis. It is inhumane, it is insensitive, and it is proof that the mentality of empire has never actually ended.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
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