Martin J. Wiener, ‘The Idea of “Colonial Legacy” and the Historiography of Empire’, Journal of The Historical Society 13, 1 (2013).

bit in lieu of abstract:

During the last half-century of the British Empire, few historians outside the political Left expressed concern about how British rule would be judged by future generations. To most scholars, at least through World War II, the empire appeared to be building a solid legacy of progressive political and economic institutions, which were gradually rooting both the “rule of law” and commercial, agricultural, and industrial development in native soil. As the Cambridge historian Eric Walker summed up in his wartime work, The British Empire: Its Structure and Spirit, the empire was “a great human achievement.” As historiography, this view had a number of basic flaws. It was morally and empirically one-sided, taking little account of the complaints coming from the governed or the criticisms from British scholars of the Left; it exaggerated not just the empire’s beneficence but its power and influence upon the colonized; it had no place for the agency of these colonized people themselves; and it treated the long centuries before British arrival as unimportant and irrelevant.

Nowadays, this view of empire and its influence has been widely and justly rejected; but, more problematically, it has been inverted. The idea of a strong “colonial legacy” remains pervasive, but now in highly negative terms. If one googles the phrase, one finds over twelvemillion entries, the great majority of them pejorative. Most of the problems new states have encountered have been attributed at some point to the legacy left by former European colonial rulers. Not surprisingly, criticism of European empires has been widespread in these states, but it has also been widespread in the West. Films representing heroic colonial battles, once very popular, have gone completely out of fashion. In the 1960s films like Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966) were great successes in both Britain and America, but nowadays only disillusioned or straightforwardly anticolonial films are made—one might cite Gandhi, A Passage to India, Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, Empire of the Sun, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, and a good many others. In 2003, Channel Four’s documentary series, “Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World,” was far more balanced than the almost purely positive approach of previous generations, but nonetheless drew sharp criticism from journalists and historians for sugar-coating imperial history.