British Empire: Heroes and Villains A Timewatch Guide

Less than 100 years ago,

the British ruled a quarter of the globe

and one in five of the global population.

The British Empire was the biggest there's ever been.

And even though it's long gone, its powerful legacy remains.

It used to be the case that people were happy, proud even,

to declare themselves imperialists.

But now, across great swathes of the world,

that sounds like a badge of shame.

In this film, I'm going to examine not whether the Empire was a force

for good or for ill, but instead,

how it's been portrayed on television over the past 60 years.

Using the history series Timewatch and other gems from the BBC archive,

I'll discover how film-makers have altered their perspective over

succeeding decades.

I'll span the globe, like the Empire itself.

I'll see how Britain's Caribbean colonies grew rich on slave labour...

Slaves were expendable.

The life expectancy of a slave was seven years.

..how chaos gripped India when independence came...

Britain, the once great colonial power, looks on as India burns.

..how Africa was plundered for her mineral wealth.

Millions of pounds worth of diamonds represented not money, but power.

They called it the Empire upon which the sun never set.

Though it's now gone, the arguments,

the divisions over the British Empire

are very far from being settled.

Oxford is where many of the masters of Empire came for their education.

The colonial officials, the district officers,

the viceroys even.

But one Oxford graduate left his mark on the Empire in a way that

overshadowed almost all others.

He's a figure who provokes bitter controversy

more than a century after his death.

So, there he is, Cecil Rhodes, the man who had the audacity,

the arrogance, not just to seize countries,

but to have one named after himself.

It's his statue, here at Oriel College,

which some say recalls the very worst side of the Empire.

And because of that, he has no right to remain.

They say, Rhodes must fall.

So, let's look first at some of these Empire builders.

Often heroes in their own time,

but perhaps less heroic with the hindsight of history.

The actor and historian Kenneth Griffith

was one of the first to take on Cecil Rhodes,

more than 40 years ago.

Oxford University, England.

He wanted to take a degree at University College.

The master wouldn't wear it,

but introduced him to the Provost of Oriel,

saying, "They're less particular there."

The Provost of Oriel received him glumly saying,

"All the colleges send me their failures."

What stops the laugh before it has started is that this young man ended

his short life with 850,000 square miles

of the Earth's surface

in his own name.

Rhodes named his conquest Rhodesia,

now the country of Zimbabwe.

Cecil Rhodes is a good poster boy

for these kinds of debates about Empire, good or bad,

particularly because he was just one of those figures who was

a colossus in terms of British imperial expansion

and debates about the nature of British imperialism

at the time and, of course, ever since as well.

The conquered land had belonged to the Matabele tribe,

under their king, Lobengula.

But spears were no match for machine guns and artillery.

The British opened up with their field guns,

and the best of Lobengula's warriors were no more.

One regiment, the Imbizo,

lost 500 of its 700 men.

A witness to this carnage was Rhodes's young friend Willoughby,

who recorded the so-called battle rather sportingly.

He wrote,

"The Imbizo and Ngobo regiments were practically annihilated.

"I cannot speak too highly of the pluck of these two regiments.

"I believe that no civilised troops could have withstood

"the terrific fire they did for at most half as long."

Bear in mind that this film appeared in 1971,

when a guerrilla war was waging between African nationalists,

including descendants of the Matabele,

and descendants of the white settlers...

..in a country which didn't abandon the name Rhodesia until 1980.

Rhodes seemed to epitomise the worst of the power hungry imperialists,

come to strip Africa of her wealth.

Money, money,

money is ever the key to Rhodes's power, and in the year 1886,

at a place which was to be named Johannesburg,

the biggest gold deposit that the world has ever known was discovered.

Rhodes was now 33 years old, immensely wealthy and therefore,

as he had predicted, immensely powerful.

He loomed over this gold field, they called him The Colossus,

and was poised to monopolise and grab the lot.

And then a strange thing happened.

Rhodes loved a young secretary at De Beers, his diamond company,

very much. The young man's name was Neville Pickering.

Now, I'm not suggesting that

this was necessarily a homosexual relationship.

Anyway, it doesn't matter,

love is love and scarce enough not to quibble about, don't you agree?

Whatever, Rhodes so loved young Pickering that, in 1882,

he left him his entire vast fortune.

The will simply reads, "I, CJ Rhodes,

"leave my worldly wealth to NE Pickering."

At that very time,

Rhodes was informed that Neville Pickering

was mortally ill in Kimberley.

Rhodes, to his eternal credit,

turned his back on his gold options and fled to Pickering's bedside.

Rhodes personally nursed and cherished young Pickering

while other money grubbers grabbed the gold.

As young Pickering died, he looked at Rhodes and whispered,

"You have been father, mother, brother and sister to me."

You see, it is impossible to totally dislike Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes was an extremely controversial figure.

He was a hero to some,

but a villain to many, and not just to the people he oppressed,

many people in Britain also found him a deeply controversial figure.

His obituaries were extremely critical when he died so

in his own time he was widely criticised.

The film suggests Rhodes even had a touch of Hitler about him.

So, how fair is that?

I don't think that even someone as imperialistic as Rhodes

quite had that approach in South Africa.

There was a broader kind of civilising mission,

and I'm not sure that the Nazis had that.

I don't think they thought they were civilising inferior people,

they thought they were in a life and death struggle with them.

That heartfelt critique of Rhodes,

the man who planted the seeds

for the 1970s turmoil in southern Africa,

feels as pertinent today as when it was first broadcast 45 years ago.

That film pretty much set the pattern

for debunking imperial heroes.

And the following year, 1972, in a wide-ranging series on the Empire,

film-makers once again homed in on Cecil Rhodes.

Rhodes' personality still dominates this club.

There are some 27 pictures of him on its walls.

A fitting tribute to the man whose mastery of business deals astonished

and discomforted many.

He played company off against company...

..until, finally,

he took the jackpot.

He was a multimillionaire by the time he was 35.

But diamonds as jewellery, as adornments for royal crowns,

or women, did not interest him...any more than women did.

For him, the millions of pounds' worth of diamonds

that passed through De Beers' sorting rooms

represented not money, but power.

Rhodes restated the imperial creed.

"I contend that we are the first race in the world,

"and the more of the world we inhabit, the better.

"Every acre added to our territory provides for the birth of more

"of the English race.

"I have viewed the people of the world and have come to the

"conclusion that the English speaking race has the highest ideal

"of justice, liberty and peace.

"Therefore, I shall devote the rest of my life to advancing the English,

"the greatest people the world has ever seen."

In the post-imperial early 1970s, with Britain's economy on the slide,

Rhodes's racist creed seemed particularly out of place

to many historians.

Preoccupations of the time affect history.

Every historian is completely influenced by his or her time.

In the '60s and '70s, we might be interested in Marxism,

obviously there's a Cold War going on.

So, you have a Marxist interpretation of empire.

It's inevitable that, in the historiography of something

as vast as the British Empire,

there are going to be different generations of historical

approach and interpretation,

and vicious debates within each generation.

But, it would be wrong to think that the failings of these giant

characters, like Cecil Rhodes, only emerge long after they're gone.

Controversy has always swirled around certain empire-builders,

as the BBC found in 1998 when it examined Earl Kitchener of Khartoum.

Once the most famous face in the world, Kitchener,

Britain's military chief in the First World War,

played a controversial role a decade or so earlier in the South African Boer War.

His legendary organisational skills seemed to have deserted him.

He was nicknamed Kitchener of Chaos.

His own troops were stricken with illness, made worse

by the harsh climate and Kitchener economising on medical care.

British losses mounted, and the guerrillas were still fighting.

Suddenly he was faced with a dreadful conundrum.

Here was an enemy which would not get into the field and fight him

in a pitched battle.

It was a hidden enemy,

and so he had to flush it out.

Kitchener needed to starve the guerrillas of all supplies - farms,

crops and livestock were burned by British troops.

Boer women and children were evicted

from their land and sent to makeshift concentration camps.

By the end of the war,

at least 26,000 women and children had died from hunger and disease.

It caused appalling suffering, which was quite unnecessary.

He didn't need to deny

proper supplies and medical arrangements

for women and children.

He just wasn't interested.

This was just callous Kitchener.

He was not too fastidious about the means.

He was very much like an engineer.

I mean, he was trained as an engineer and he took...

Every problem he solved and took apart, in the way an engineer did,

regardless of the consequences.

So, he thought, "Well, we need to isolate these communities,

"so we'll put them in internment camps."

He didn't think of the humanity,

that wasn't how his mind was structured.

Kitchener's concentration camps did come in for extensive criticism

at the time, and lots of people felt the conduct of that war

wasn't really acceptable. Of course,

now the phrase concentration camps is so loaded for us by World War II

that we have a kind of extra horror, perhaps.

As that film showed, almost 20 years ago,

Kitchener's reputation is still in flux, a century after his death.

I know from my own work that there is no such thing as a verdict of history.

Just a fascinating, but never-ending, trial process,

where we historians are always desperate to uncover new evidence.

It's absolutely a driver, if you like,

a motivating factor in a historian's work.

If you want to provoke and stimulate debate,

there is an impetus to try and say something different,

something slightly unusual.

You can't just keep saying the same thing.

Fortunately, for us historians,

the story of Empire is dotted not only with giant iconic characters,

but also iconic milestone events, often ripe for revisionist analysis.

Timewatch followed this trend for debunking, by tackling what some

moviegoers would have considered one of the Empire's finest hours.

In 2003, half a century after the movie Zulu appeared,

Timewatch asked,

how much of the movie is accurate?

And came up with a startling answer.

It turns out the victory we see, in reality masks a military disaster.

Once again, southern Africa was the battleground.

A British army marches across the plain,

seeking out an enemy they regard as native savages.

January 11th, 1879.

Under the command of Lord Chelmsford,

the British cross the border from Natal into Zululand.

The whole British Army was driven on by a mixture of self-confidence and

contempt for their foes.

They're a murderous looking crew.

We look upon them as wild animals.

The Zulus will fly away for their lives because they haven't got the weapons that we have.

Chelmsford made the first of a series of blunders,

splitting his forces to pursue what he believed was the main Zulu army,

leaving 1,700 men exposed at the camp at Isandlwana.

11.00am, and British scouts made a terrifying discovery.

20,000 Zulu warriors within spitting distance of the undefended camp.

The Zulus were given then to a low musical murmuring,

which gave the impression of a gigantic swarm of bees

getting nearer and nearer.

The British Army suffers its most humiliating defeat.

Extraordinary military blunders allow Zulus,

most armed with just spears,

to crush a modern British Army.

95% of the British soldiers had been killed.

It was a source of huge shock to the British Empire.

And in lots of ways one can see, in that image of Isandlwana, an icon,

if you like, for the progress of the British Empire across southern

Africa. It really stands as a moment of the great resistance of the Zulu

kingdom against white intervention.

Timewatch shows how this major defeat

would be followed later the same day

by a second, much smaller victory.

A small breakaway band of Zulus spontaneously moved

to attack a supply depot in British-controlled Natal,

bordering on Zululand.

It was called Rorke's Drift,

a name which, for many, symbolises the Zulu War.

The clash here at Rorke's Drift is the story told in the film Zulu.

The garrison held off their attackers for ten hours

and were awarded 11 Victoria Crosses.

Though, compared to the earlier catastrophe, it was a sideshow.

Yet, it was this action that came to define the conflict,

celebrated by every Briton, including Queen Victoria.

There is no doubt about the valour of our troops.

They have shown the utmost devotion and bravery.

It seems that people should take more pride

in such a memorable victory

instead of bemoaning the tragedy of Isandlwana.

I'm entirely of Your Majesty's opinion that the British people

should dwell as little as possible...

Elevating the strategic significance at Rorke's Drift wipes out

some of the stain of the very real disaster,

the real defeat here at Isandlwana earlier in the day.

One of the most notable things about this period of colonial warfare was

the fact that the British always had columns of troops, gunboats here,

there and everywhere. We were always operating somewhere in very large

numbers. And the losses were usually very, very small.

So when you get things like Isandlwana,

when you're losing sort of hundreds of troops in one day,

these things, of course, really stand out.

And that's why they try and, if you like,

sort of switch on the victory narrative.

But the shock of this defeat went far beyond

its military significance.

It threatened the deepest beliefs of some empire builders.

The idea of Africans armed with spears,

thrashing the technically superior British,

ran counter to contemporary racist theorising.

Jeremy Paxman explored that theme in 2012.

He looked at how some imperialists had tried to exploit the idea

of a master race.

In 1863, the members of

the Anthropological Society of London gathered to hear

what was billed as a scientific lecture.

It was a momentous and, as it turned out, hugely controversial occasion.

The speaker was the president and founder of the association,

Doctor James Hunt.

The title of his paper was The Negro's Place In Nature.

"I propose to discuss

"the physical and mental characteristics of the Negro,

"with the view to determining not only his position in nature,

"but also the station he should occupy.

"I shall also dwell on the analogies between the Negro

"and the anthropoid apes."

What followed was over an hour of racist nonsense dressed up in

the pseudo-technological language of scientific observation.

"The skull is very hard and unusually thick, enabling Negroes

"to fight or carry heavy weights on their heads with pleasure."

There were hisses and boos from the audience,

but his ideas struck a chord among more fanatical empire builders.

Because the Empire had been such a huge success story,

they began to talk about how they had,

and this phrase was pretty widely used, a "genius for empire".

But what was this genius?

It's got muddled up with Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution.

The champions of empire argued that the British had evolved naturally

to rule over others.

"Everywhere, we see the European as the conqueror

"and the dominant race, and no amount of education

"will ever alter the decrees of nature's laws."

In 2012 such views, of course,

sounded not just offensive, but ridiculous.

It's hard to believe that even in the heyday of Empire,

ideas like that were taken seriously.

Let's not get too, with the benefit of hindsight, judgmental.

But, yes, I mean, there was social Darwinism,

the survival of the fittest.

You've got genetic theories emerging.

And there is scientific racism, definitely.

That's part of the mix, the intellectual mix.

There was certainly a sense in the air that, you know,

the British were the top nation.

If you look at the coverage of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 1897

in American newspapers,

there was one editorial which was saying, you know,

"We must acknowledge that the British are in charge of the world,

"they are the kingpins."

The movies and television have, I would argue,

pretty much defined our image of the Empire as it was

in its Edwardian heyday.

It's those crazy bright red soldiers' uniforms and sola topee.

It's the world of ripping yarns, of Carry On Up The Khyber,

of Corporal Jones and his Fuzzy-Wuzzies,

who don't like it up 'em.

In one sense, it's made the whole thing appear a bit comic.

That sort of humour is something that we relate to.

The whole idea of sending up a figure in authority,

or someone who is quite self-important and is a big cheese,

as it were, that's something that's quite British.

But as I've learned on my trawl through the archives,

there are some subjects that provoke argument, not laughter.

And Britain's record in India, the jewel in the imperial crown,

is one of them.

The BBC's 1972 series on the British Empire

was one of the most ambitious history series ever made.

This 13-hour analysis of the Empire took 2.5 years to complete.

It cost the then-huge sum of half a million pounds,

in an era when the Prime Minister was paid £20,000 a year.

In one episode, film-makers tell the story of the 1919 Amritsar massacre.

A seminal event which hardened sentiment

against British rule in India.

Amritsar, in the Punjab.

The holy city of the Sikh religion.

In 1919, it was to be the inappropriate setting

for a historic moment of violence,

which would detonate a prolonged struggle between the British Raj

and Indian nationalists for control of India.

Punjab had always been one of the most loyal of provinces.

It supplied over half the Indian Army's recruits.

But in 1919,

its cities were torn with rioting born of post-war discontents.

There were attacks on Europeans and on government buildings.

A town crier was sent round the city by General Dyer,

the local British commander,

to announce that all public assemblies were banned.

A large crowd gathered in this park, the Jallianwala Bagh,

on 13th April, 1919.

General Dyer, with fewer than 100 troops,

called on the crowd to disperse.

It failed to do so. Unknown to Dyer,

this narrow alley was the only exit from the Jallianwala Bagh.

GUNSHOTS

General Dyer said later,

"I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed.

"I consider this is the least amount of firing which would produce

"the necessary moral and widespread effect."

379 people were killed and 1,200 injured.

The wife of the Assistant Commissioner recalls

what happened after the shooting.

General Dyer came in looking very sad, and we gave him a drink.

And then he said, "I am for the high jump,

"but I've saved your women and children."

Swift retribution,

that was how the Raj had always maintained its authority.

But at home, the sentiment which prevailed was of horror and outrage.

For post-war Britain was liberal,

humanitarian in its climate of opinion.

Dyer was disavowed by the government and sacked.

This story of the massacre recalls perhaps Britain's most shameful act

during the Raj.

And the film-makers seem to underline that sense of shame

once the Raj had ended in 1947.

This was once the mansion of Lord Clive,

the first Governor-General of British India

nearly two centuries before.

The Honourable East India Company, the Empire of India,

governors-general, viceroys, king emperors, all was over now.

The British had said farewell at last,

and India had returned to herself.

Once these pillars had proclaimed a conqueror's pride,

now they serve to dry the hand-moulded cakes of cow dung

which are the staple Indian fuel.

Eternal India's epitaph for an empire.

For some viewers, the film seemed to mock the very idea of Empire.

A former official of the Raj, Lord Ferrier,

launched a debate in the House of Lords

which unleashed fierce criticism of the BBC.

In the official record, Hansard,

there are pages and pages of complaints.

The Lords, many of them quite elderly,

turned out to be the most critical audience imaginable.

The BBC was compared to Lord Haw-Haw,

the radio propagandist for the Nazis during World War II.

We tend to think by 1972, the Empire was over

and that that was, you know,

a new era in British politics.

And of course, to some extent it was.

But historical memory doesn't die immediately.

A lot of the people who were objecting to this

in the House of Lords and so on

had lived through it, had worked in it.

You know, many British families had spent not only their lifetimes,

but generations, working in the Empire.

It was still a very live political issue for people at that time.

The irate politicians would have been astonished to learn

what had been going on behind closed doors at the BBC.

This series almost didn't make it to the screen.

The rows backstage, inside the BBC,

about what to say about the Empire

were the same as those raging outside,

among historians and politicians.

According to one of the producers on the series, then in his 30s,

the BBC wanted to glorify and celebrate the Empire.

But the young producers were having none of it.

They even talked about resigning en masse, before they got their way,

to tell the story warts and all.

The Empire is still an incredibly political thing to discuss,

because echoes are still with us so strongly.

You know, it still affects so much of the world today,

certainly if we're talking about, say, the Middle East,

parts of Africa or South Asia.

There is the British Empire at the root of a lot of those problems.

Of course, those political situations have evolved

since the end of that empire.

But part of what we now know as current events is rooted in that

history, so it is still incredibly political for many people.

More than a quarter-century after that row over the Empire series,

India was still a controversial topic.

In 1998 Timewatch invited one of our best-known historians

to argue the case for the benefits of British rule.

It was during the Queen's visit last year that the British role in India

was once again brought to the world's attention.

There were calls for the Queen to apologise for the Amritsar massacre

in 1919, and implicitly, for two centuries of British colonial rule.

How should we assess the British Raj?

Is it an episode of which we should be proud, embarrassed, or ashamed?

Andrew Roberts highlights what he believes to be historical myths of

British rule in India.

The viceroys, whose effigies are carefully preserved

in a secluded estate outside Calcutta,

governed the country with foresight and wisdom.

English prevailed as the language of the law and of the administration,

helping to unite as a single nation

the once disparate peoples of the subcontinent.

The young men of the Indian civil service came out here to dedicate

their lives to the teeming multitudes of India.

They did so with fairness, and decency,

and astonishingly little interest in personal gain.

The building of over 40,000 miles of railway track connected the country

in a way never before possible.

Of all the enduring achievements of the British in India,

this railway system was one of the greatest.

Throughout Britain's dominion over India,

the British military establishment was tiny.

It rarely numbered more than tens of thousands in a country

of hundreds of millions.

If our rule here had really been tyrannical, as is now made out,

it could never have survived with Indians outnumbering Britons

by 1,000 to one.

Sir Winston Churchill, a great servant of the Raj,

thought it Britain's greatest achievement.

He was right, and rather than apologise for our record here,

we can and should be proud.

First of all, what's your overall attitude to his proposition?

That it's sneering, snivelling,

supercilious and silly.

It's unhistorical, and totally unworthy of a history don.

Turning to you, Patrick French. Do you take Andrew Roberts' view

that it was a benevolent kind of government?

Well, it's like Mani Shankaraiya says.

It's such a grotesque caricature of what actually happened that it's

hardly... I mean, I honestly don't know where to begin, to be frank.

I'm startled that he could have made a film saying some of the things

-that are in there.

-Does it disturb you at all that Hitler admired

what the British had done in India,

and in fact used it as an example when he was wanting to march

into Russia? To say that, in fact, this was his India?

Does that not disturb you dreadfully?

Of course not. Look what he did in Russia.

He did the absolute opposite of what the British did in India.

He depopulated, he killed people completely arbitrarily.

The absolute opposite of what we have done for a century.

I think that just because Adolf Hitler is said to have admired

the British Empire... I mean, he admired Wagner,

does that mean we are never to listen to Wagner?

That lively exchange took place half a century after the British quit India.

One result of their leaving was the partition of India,

with disputed territory like Kashmir still the cause of bloodshed today.

Film-makers have consistently returned to the events of 1947

as historians constantly reassess the roots of the tragedy.

On the 60th anniversary of partition,

the BBC showed just how bitter the conflict had become.

In British India, the 255 million Hindus were in a majority.

India's 92 million Muslims were concentrated in the north-west and

north-east of the country.

The six million Sikhs lived mostly in the Punjab,

one of the richest and most diverse provinces in India.

Muslim fears that Hindus would dominate an independent India

drove the demand for a separate Muslim homeland.

With religious hatred and suspicion growing,

the dream of a united India seemed to be falling apart.

The task of managing the handover had been given to Earl Mountbatten,

the last Viceroy of India.

And he was in a hurry to get the job done.

At a press conference, Mountbatten dropped a bombshell.

Britain would not be leaving in June 1948 as had been planned,

but on August 15th, 1947.

Just three months away.

The whole problem was that Mountbatten tried to do this job

in too short a time.

To expect a country to be partitioned,

a new country to be created

and within two months,

everything went out of control.

It was no question of it being too soon, it was much too late.

Because in fact when he arrived,

he saw the situation

was so much more volcanic

than he'd been led to believe in England.

Communities that have lived together for centuries turn on each other

in one of the worst communal massacres of the 20th century.

Britain, the once great colonial power, looks on as India burns.

Hindus and Muslims were

in the grip of madness, you know.

Lunacy, lunacy.

In the coming months,

around 15 million people made the journey from one side to the other.

At least one million were dead.

Thousands more lay abandoned in makeshift refugee camps,

stuck on the wrong side of the border.

In only a few months, India had been divided along religious lines.

The Indian part of the Punjab was cleared of nearly all its Muslims,

while Pakistan was emptied of most of its Sikhs and Hindus.

The border created in 1947

would become the focus for three wars and 60 years

of animosity between the governments of India and Pakistan.

There was very much at the time, certainly looking back,

a "dammed if you do, damned if you don't" scenario.

There were some senior British politicians in government

who would have liked to have stayed for another 15 years

to make the handover more successful, but of course,

nationalist politicians, quite rightly,

want the power now.

From an historian's point of view,

films like this may not always break new ground.

Sometimes, they tell a familiar story,

revived to meet a significant anniversary.

Yet even then,

they serve a valuable purpose in outlining the key moments

of history for a new generation.

I've seen how the imperial legacy in Africa and India has been the

subject of often controversial film-making for many decades.

Cecil Rhodes appears to have few defenders,

while the motives of the masters of the Raj were mixed,

and that's borne out in the television archive.

But, in another part of the Empire,

the motive of the masters was quite clear.

and their methods despicable.

An episode of the 1972 British Empire series

looked at how, for 200 years,

Britain drew riches from the Caribbean,

using enslaved Africans.

It took three years to break an African tribesman

into an efficient field slave.

It was known as the seasoning period.

One in three of the slaves died during seasoning,

of disease, overwork, ill-treatment and suicide.

They worked from dawn to dusk, with a short break for breakfast

and a longer one at midday.

Though the work in stifling cane fields was backbreaking,

crop times seemed the best in the year to the slaves.

Then at least they could stave off hunger by chewing cane.

And they were even given rum to keep them going.

Slaves were expendable.

The planters reckoned it more economic

to import new slaves from Africa

rather than prolong the life of those they had

by better treatment.

The life expectancy of a slave was seven years.

Eventually, after decades of campaigning,

the abolitionists won their moral crusade against slavery.

In 1833, the reformed House of Commons decreed

the end of slavery in the British colonies.

In the West Indies, half a million slaves rejoiced on the great day.

In 1972 film-makers largely accepted that the slaves were freed

on moral grounds. Since then, some historians have suggested

that slave rebellions and cold economics also played a role.

Industrialisation is far more productive than having slave labour.

It's not a humanitarian thing.

People worked out that slave labour actually isn't that productive.

You've got to feed them,

you've got to look after them when they get sick,

you've got to house them,

and actually, the industrial system,

if you like, where you pay people and then they look after themselves,

in theory, who are not looked after,

was far more productive and profitable.

The film appeared in the early 1970s

at a time when Britain's relationship

with its former colonies was hotly debated.

Although the sun had finally set on the Empire,

there remained a legacy of those imperial citizens who claimed their

rights to settle in Britain, which many regarded as the mother country.

Immigration was THE big issue,

and film-makers in the 1970s began to ask whether high levels of

immigration were desirable, and also,

if those who came were getting a fair deal.

There have been blacks in Liverpool since the 1770s,

a consequence of the shipping trade with West Africa.

In those days, black slaves could be bought in Liverpool.

Later, African seamen settled here, and then, in the 1940s,

the wartime government recruited West Indians to work in British factories.

For generations, these black men

have married and lived with white women,

producing a half-caste community that is British by birth

and Afro-British by race.

What is life like in this estate?

It's all right, you know. I've got friends with the woman next door,

so we're all friendly in the neighbourhood.

But the woman next door is very friendly, you know.

-Is she white?

-Yes.

Yes, she is white.

But locally born Liverpool blacks

want more than neighbourly tolerance.

They want equality of opportunity,

a fair share of whatever jobs this depressed area has to offer.

According to race relations workers here,

many Liverpool employers have discriminated

against the black community

for so many years that the practice has become an accepted fact of life.

Even in its better days,

Liverpool has always had twice the national rate of unemployment,

and always the blacks have found themselves at the end of the queue.

There has got to be a policy of positive discrimination.

They have got to come forward

and they have got to allocate jobs to black people.

They have got to recognise that black people exist

and black people need to be catered for.

Kids of 17, 18, 19, they have got a right to say,

"What is this white society doing for me?"

Film-makers were keen to explain in the simplest terms the new law to

protect the rights of immigrants, which had just come into effect.

It is an attempt to change people's attitudes.

Take employment first.

This man is after a job for which he is qualified

and which he knows exists because he has seen it advertised.

He applies for the job, but the employer turns him down.

That rejection could be against the new law.

An employer may not refuse a man a job, or deny him promotion,

or pay him less simply on grounds of race.

The same man is now looking for somewhere to live.

He goes to a boarding house and he asks for a room.

If the owner turns him down, apparently on grounds of race,

he can take the owner to court.

The law applies to hotels.

Indeed, it is now unlawful to deny a person any goods or service

on racial grounds.

Whatever the law said,

not all of the recent arrivals felt welcome in Britain.

It is now 25 years since Commonwealth nations

first came to Britain in sizeable numbers.

First, the men came alone, uncertain whether they'd stay.

But later, most of them sent for their wives

and transplanted their roots and their culture.

And now there is a second generation of British Asians

that knows no country but this.

The British don't accept me because they say,

"Although you possess a British passport..."

And although I have lived all of my life,

almost all of my life, in this country, they will not accept me.

We are stuck in a sense between the two cultures,

the West and our own culture.

The old Jewish quarter at Whitechapel,

now occupied by one of the least favoured immigrant groups

in Britain - the Bengalis of Bangladesh.

The parts of Bangladesh they come from

are among the poorest in the world.

They face bigger problems of adjustment to British society

than any other immigrant group.

The result is tension and sometimes violence.

The window has been broken, and the one upstairs.

When they throw the bricks, you know,

the glass went everywhere in the room,

and the baby was sleeping in the cot.

The baby had bruising in the face, marks.

Two men, my back, on the top.

And one is pulling a knife.

They cut this that way.

In 1994, using newly released official papers,

Timewatch explored the history of immigration from the former Empire.

In an episode which resonates today,

politicians apparently underestimated how many people

would take the opportunity to settle in Britain,

causing concern in some communities.

By the early 1960s, some of those who lived in the communities

where the black immigrants had settled

felt emboldened to speak their mind.

It's no good folk saying people will mix, they just won't.

They are a nuisance at work, they won't work,

and for folks who've got them living by them,

there is more nuisance still.

I think they should live in a district all to themselves

because I have got to bring this little boy up amongst them.

The problem arose from a miscalculation

made in the late 1940s.

British subjects numbered nearly 800 million people.

From whichever country they came,

they had the right to work and settle in Britain,

a right enshrined in the British Nationality Act of 1948.

It was assumed that only a few of those subjects

would actually exercise their right.

But, with the passing of the new act,

the children of the Empire began to come home.

Leaving behind poverty and unemployment,

they were hoping for a better tomorrow in Britain.

Timewatch revealed how quickly the policy of open-door immigration was

called into question,

and how the whole subject became mired in politics.

Official documents that have recently been the subject

of academic study reveal that,

within months of enacting the 1948 act,

the authorities were already alarmed by its implications.

In April 1954, a meeting was convened to build a case for legislation

intended to withdraw the automatic right of abode in the 1948 act.

In November 1961, amidst heated debate,

the government introduced a bill to limit immigration

from the old Empire.

Despite those first measures to control immigration

more than 50 years ago, the subject remains very much alive.

As recently as 2012, film-makers were able to demonstrate

just how firmly shut the once-open door has now become.

The children of those who would once have claimed an entitlement to enter

Britain, face a treacherous journey, and a cold reception.

Illegal migrants from India, trapped in the UK without a home, work,

or even an identity.

They pay people-smugglers thousands of pounds,

yet sometimes end up penniless and destitute.

Punjab, one of India's richest states.

They call it the food basket of India.

In the first decades after independence,

hundreds of thousands of mainly Sikh Punjabis

settled in the UK to fill huge gaps in Britain's workforce.

Today, the criteria they must meet

for a British work visa is much tougher.

Agents charge up to 15,000 for a visa

and the services of traffickers.

There are no refunds.

This is Southall in West London.

It is home to a huge South Asian population,

one of the biggest concentrations outside India.

Over the last 20 years,

illegal immigrants from India have added to that population.

But, for new arrivals, life here is tough.

From sunrise, hundreds of illegal immigrants descend

on the train station car park,

a regular pick-up point for cheap, illegal labour.

A lack of work is pushing illegal workers into the very poverty

they hoped to escape.

They live here, in Britain's 21st century slums.

Across Southall, 2,500 poorly constructed buildings,

hidden at the end of suburban gardens.

They call them sheds with beds.

Many built without planning permission,

others converted garages.

This is just one street,

and on the end of each garden, there are brick buildings like this one.

All with windows and doorways leading to this alleyway.

And they just go on and on and on.

Increasing numbers of illegal immigrants are giving up

on their life in Britain.

But getting home isn't easy.

Of course, many millions of Commonwealth citizens

have come to Britain and thrived here.

The nation that 70 years ago offered an open door to all its

former subjects is no longer so welcoming.

But Britain today has been shaped by its imperial past.

The multicultural world we live in today

is a consequence of the Empire.

My parents were from Ghana, or the Gold Coast as it then was.

They wanted to continue their education

in what was even then called the mother country,

the kind of seat of empire, if you like.

I mean, I wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for the British Empire.

Delving into the Empire archive has reminded me of

one important principle - history can never be entirely objective.

Historians and film-makers must select which facts to work with,

how to interpret them, and therefore the message they convey.

There is a particularly robust debate in Britain about Empire

and about our supposed heroes or villains of our history.

Now there's actually a great fashion for people saying it wasn't that bad

after all. That's been going for some time,

and then there's a counterbalance to that.

But I think this is all part of a healthy debate.

You wouldn't want to restrict what points of view

people are allowed to take.

I've seen how, in the 1970s, film-makers were keen to expose

the excesses of Empire.

Fast forward a few decades, and in two more recent high-profile series,

their authors take a much more benign view,

at least giving Empire builders the credit for a noble enterprise.

The men and women who had sat at their desks and danced

in the club were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference.

They had, many of them, only the very best of intentions.

They had, in fact, a vision that their empire was the best

the world had ever seen because it was built on virtue.

Its power was to be measured not in Gatling guns,

but in an unselfish dedication to eradicating poverty,

ignorance and disease.

We would take whole cultures crippled by those maladies

and stand them on their own two feet.

The more British India could become, the better.

The country would be turned into one vast school run.

Western education was the instrument by which India was going to be

transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars

into the progressive Victorian dynamic world of the telegraph

and the locomotive.

English would be a way to bring Indians,

divided by so many faiths and languages, together.

The film recognises that those noble aims were only partially achieved by

the time Britain decided to call it a day.

In 1947, when India became independent,

all New Delhi's statues of the king-emperors

and viceroys and generals,

the great and good, and the not-so-good,

were rounded up and taken here, where they were interred

like so many forlorn hostages to that old joker, history.

But perhaps the last word on the British Empire

hasn't been Britain after all.

At least if that Empire is thought of

not in terms of scarlet tunics and flashing sabres, but language,

law and liberal democracy.

Not just in Calcutta and Madras, but also in Oldham,

Leicester and Bradford.

Remember, in 1972,

film-makers were accused of treason more or less

in their judgment on India.

This 2002 judgment seems far more charitable.

But, as always,

there will be a voice to challenge each new interpretation.

Even today, I think there's very much a desire in a country

like Britain not to be told that key aspects of our past

were desperately iniquitous.

People want to believe that generally it was all OK,

even if some nasty things happened.

Well, unfortunately, when you begin to look at the very underpinnings

of British imperialism,

the underpinnings were often remarkably suspect.

So, even if some more benign things happened at certain junctures,

that really isn't the bit of the story

that necessarily should be focused upon.

A more rounded story is needed,

and I think the tail should never be allowed to wag the dog.

In 2012 Jeremy Paxman cast his critical eye over the Empire and wrapped up his

inquiry by urging that we re-engage with this critical part of our past.

The sun had most definitely set on the Empire.

It had taken centuries to accumulate.

It was gone in a couple of decades.

The Empire brought blood and tears and dispossession to millions of

people, but it also brought roads and railways and education.

For good or ill,

much of the world is as it is today because of the Empire.

From the way it looks...

..to the sports people play.

From the religion they practice...

..to the language they speak.

It has changed the very genetic make-up of Britain.

If only we can look at it clear-eyed,

it can tell us a lot about who we are.

It is a story that belongs to all of us.

We have been through pride, we have been through shame.

Mostly nowadays we seem to be in denial.

But if we really want to understand who we are,

it's time we stopped pretending the empire was nothing to do with us.

As I've gone through the archive,

I've seen historians being attacked by their peers.

I've seen film-makers pilloried in the House of Lords.

Wouldn't it be wiser just to steer clear of the empire and stay out of

trouble? Quite simply,

it is so full of such astonishing stories that it's a constant source

of material for documentary film-makers,

as well as dramatists and screenwriters.

And when the pendulum of historical interpretation swings so violently,

it means that familiar subjects never lose their appeal.

Ironically, it's now almost as controversial

to defend characters like Cecil Rhodes

as it was four decades ago to denounce them.

It seems to me that the documentary archive demonstrates

that there is no historical subject more exciting and colourful,

nor more treacherous and controversial

than the British Empire.

And if it gets people thinking and caring passionately about who we are

and where we have come from, is that a bad thing?