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There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

The story of benign imperialism, whose overriding purpose was not to seize land, labour and commodities but to teach the natives English, table manners and double-entry book-keeping, is a myth that has been carefully propagated by the rightwing press. But it draws its power from a remarkable national ability to airbrush and disregard our past.

Last week's revelations, that the British government systematically destroyed the documents detailing mistreatment of its colonial subjects, and that the Foreign Office then lied about a secret cache of files containing lesser revelations, is by any standards a big story. But it was either ignored or consigned to a footnote by most of the British press. I was unable to find any mention of the secret archive on the Telegraph's website. The Mail's only coverage, as far as I can determine, was an opinion piece by a historian called Lawrence James, who used the occasion to insist that any deficiencies in the management of the colonies were the work of "a sprinkling of misfits, incompetents and bullies", while everyone else was "dedicated, loyal and disciplined".

The British government's suppression of evidence was scarcely necessary. Even when the documentation of great crimes is abundant, it is not denied but simply ignored. In an article for the Daily Mail in 2010, for example, the historian Dominic Sandbrook announced that " Britain's empire stands out as a beacon of tolerance, decency and the rule of law ... Nor did Britain countenance anything like the dreadful tortures committed in French Algeria." Could he really have been unaware of the history he is disavowing?

Caroline Elkins, a professor at Harvard, spent nearly 10 years compiling the evidence contained in her book Britain's Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. She started her research with the belief that the British account of the suppression of the Kikuyu's Mau Mau revolt in the 1950s was largely accurate. Then she discovered that most of the documentation had been destroyed. She worked through the remaining archives, and conducted 600 hours of interviews with Kikuyu survivors - rebels and loyalists - and British guards, settlers and officials. Her book is fully and thoroughly documented. It won the Pulitzer prize. But as far as Sandbrook, James and other imperial apologists are concerned, it might as well never have been written.

Elkins reveals that the British detained not 80,000 Kikuyu, as the official histories maintain, but almost the entire population of one and a half million people, in camps and fortified villages. There, thousands were beaten to death or died from malnutrition, typhoid, tuberculosis and dysentery. In some camps almost all the children died.

The inmates were used as slave labour. Above the gates were edifying slogans, such as "Labour and freedom" and "He who helps himself will also be helped". Loudspeakers broadcast the national anthem and patriotic exhortations. People deemed to have disobeyed the rules were killed in front of the others. The survivors were forced to dig mass graves, which were quickly filled. Unless you have a strong stomach I advise you to skip the next paragraph.

Interrogation under torture was widespread. Many of the men were anally raped, using knives, broken bottles, rifle barrels, snakes and scorpions. A favourite technique was to hold a man upside down, his head in a bucket of water, while sand was rammed into his rectum with a stick. Women were gang-raped by the guards. People were mauled by dogs and electrocuted. The British devised a special tool which they used for first crushing and then ripping off testicles. They used pliers to mutilate women's breasts. They cut off inmates' ears and fingers and gouged out their eyes. They dragged people behind Land Rovers until their bodies disintegrated. Men were rolled up in barbed wire and kicked around the compound.

Elkins provides a wealth of evidence to show that the horrors of the camps were endorsed at the highest levels. The governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, regularly intervened to prevent the perpetrators from being brought to justice. The colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, repeatedly lied to the House of Commons. This is a vast, systematic crime for which there has been no reckoning.

No matter. Even those who acknowledge that something happened write as if Elkins and her work did not exist. In the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan maintains that just eleven people were beaten to death. Apart from that, "1,090 terrorists were hanged and as many as 71,000 detained without due process".

The British did not do body counts, and most victims were buried in unmarked graves. But it is clear that tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of Kikuyu died in the camps and during the round-ups. Hannan's is one of the most blatant examples of revisionism I have ever encountered.

Without explaining what this means, Lawrence James concedes that "harsh measures" were sometimes used, but he maintains that "while the Mau Mau were terrorising the Kikuyu, veterinary surgeons in the Colonial Service were teaching tribesmen how to deal with cattle plagues." The theft of the Kikuyu's land and livestock, the starvation and killings, the widespread support among the Kikuyu for the Mau Mau's attempt to reclaim their land and freedom: all vanish into thin air. Both men maintain that the British government acted to stop any abuses as soon as they were revealed.

What I find remarkable is not that they write such things, but that these distortions go almost unchallenged. The myths of empire are so well-established that we appear to blot out countervailing stories even as they are told. As evidence from the manufactured Indian famines of the 1870s and from the treatment of other colonies accumulates, British imperialism emerges as no better and in some cases even worse than the imperialism practised by other nations. Yet the myth of the civilising mission remains untroubled by the evidence.

* A fully referenced version of this article can be found at www.monbiot.com
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Deny the British empire's crimes? No, we ignore them | George Monbiot

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There is one thing you can say for the Holocaust deniers: at least they know what they are denying. In order to sustain the lies they tell, they must engage in strenuous falsification. To dismiss Britain's colonial atrocities, no such effort is required. Most people appear to be unaware that anything needs to be denied.

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When Lord North, prime minister at the time of the American revolution, received the news that British forces had lost the war, and with it the American colonies, he was reported to have been physically struck by the magnitude of the news, as if hit by a musket ball. "Oh God, it's all over," he wrote in his diary.

The loss of the American colonies was the first time the process of British empire building had been put significantly into reverse, and became the starting point for a nostalgic yearning for lost colonies - and the wealth and global influence that came with them - that has become part of our national psyche. Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain's imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.

Yet there has long been a vaguely defined notion that, somehow, Britain might reassemble chosen fragments of the empire. Winston Churchill talked of a global alliance of the English-speaking peoples, which included America, and generations of politicians and historians of all political stripes have from time to time nursed similar ideas, latterly calling the concept the Anglosphere.

Part of the problem with such schemes today is that they emerge out of a national conversation about the lost empire that is all too often an internal monologue, largely focused on what "we" did or did not do, and whether or not "we" should be proud of it. What "they" - the peoples of the former empire and the current Commonwealth - felt about it then, and think about it now, rarely enters into this solipsistic debate.

But since last week - when it was reported that Whitehall officials had described plans for Britain's post-Brexit trading relationship with the Commonwealth as "Empire 2.0" - "they" have had a lot to say. African and Indian journalists and bloggers have had a lot of fun at our expense, ridiculing the idea. Worse still, the phrase - which might have been used ironically - emerged when the formidable Indian diplomat turned historian Shashi Tharoor was in the UK, promoting his damning new book on Britain's colonial exploitation of India. Strident as ever, Tharoor was in no doubt that the idea of Empire 2.0 would go down in India "like a lead balloon".

This newfound focus on the Commonwealth feels uncomfortably akin to recent divorcees looking up their former partners on Facebook; and being shocked to discover that they have got married, had kids and moved on. They might have fond memories, they might even want to be on good terms, but don't really miss us. Former colonies, like old flames, build new relationships, based on their own needs and ambitions. Some may well be up for a better trade deal or more freedom of movement, but they don't want to be part of Empire 2.0, any more than most of them wanted to be part of Empire 1.0.

But this is not the only neo-colonial fantasy to have been recently taken out of the deep freeze and hastily reheated. Another is the Canzuk concept, the dream of a free trade and free movement zone between the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - three nations from what used to be called the "white dominions". The theory suggests that because these countries have similar institutions and cultures it is natural for them to be brought closer together.

We've been dreaming these same dreams for more than half a century. In 1962, the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell gave a party conference speech on the Commonwealth, in which he talked of the bonds that had been forged between Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand during the first world war battles of Vimy Ridge and Gallipoli. As we mark the passing of a century since those battles, it's impossible not to recognise that in Ottawa, Canberra and Wellington they are remembered as milestones in the journey towards independence and nationhood; moments when those former dominions began to move away from Britain rather than closer to her. Once again, "they" have their own memories, and they do not always tally with ours.

Ultimately, what makes Empire 2.0 a fantasy are the forces of geography and history. While Canada, for example, has undoubted cultural links to the UK, she also has a 5,500-mile border with the US. This, and her membership of Nafta, means that her key trading partner is, inevitably, the US, not the UK. Australia and New Zealand have perhaps even stronger emotional and cultural links to Britain, but as the economies of Asia have risen, the antipodean nations have found themselves on the doorstep of the greatest manufacturing region on earth. Australia has just been through a mining boom akin to the gold rushes of the 19th century, and it is to Beijing, not London, that their importers and exporters look.

In anglophone Africa, the game is already up. The motorbikes on the freeways of Accra and Lagos are Chinese, assembled by local mechanics from kits shipped direct from Shandong. West Africa's new convenience food is Chinese instant noodles, not fish and chips, and the supermarkets that sell them are South African-owned. Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London.

Yet the most jagged rock upon which the Empire 2.0 fantasy flounders is history itself. Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing. While the empire, especially India, undoubtedly helped make Britain rich, even at the height of our imperial power we traded more with Europe and the United States than with the colonies. It was to the booming cities of America, and to the slave-driven cotton economy of the deep south, that British capital surged in the 19th century. And while much of Africa was painted imperial red on the maps that famously hung on every classroom wall, Britain did more trade with tiny Denmark than with Nigeria, one of her biggest west African colonies.

The empire, even at its height, never came close to absorbing the majority of our exports or providing the bulk of our imports, and neither will the Commonwealth, no matter how good a trade deal we win. Empire 2.0 is a fanciful vision of the future based on a distorted misremembering of the past. It's a delusion and, like all delusions, has the potential to lure us into a false sense of security and lead us to make bad decisions.
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Empire 2.0 is dangerous nostalgia for something that never existed | David Olusoga

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When Lord North, prime minister at the time of the American revolution, received the news that British forces had lost the war, and with it the American colonies, he was reported to have been physically struck by the magnitude of the news, as if hit by a musket ball.

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1. What are Chamberlain's views on the English and on white/black colonies?

2. What is Pax Britannica?

3. What does "Greater Britain" refer to?

4. What's the deal with the eggs?

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Joseph Chamberlain: "The True Conception of Empire" (1897)

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Joseph Chamberlain: "The True Conception of Empire" (1897)

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The colonial secretary in the Conservative cabinet of Lord Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) addressed the annual dinner of the Royal Colonial Institute in March 1897. In his speech, he presented a defense of the British Empire as an evolving mission of civilization that had become an obligation of the British nation to humanity rather than a project of selfish plunder.

Instructions

1. Read a paragraph

2. Paraphrase it in Danish

3. Then write down a heading (in English) for each paragraph

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the true conception of empire by joseph chamberlain. great britain: iii. (1865-1906). vol. v. bryan

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The True Conception of Empire by Joseph Chamberlain. Great Britain: III. (1865-1906). Vol. V. Bryan, William Jennings, ed. 1906. The World's Famous Orations

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The True Conception of Empire by Joseph Chamberlain. Great Britain: III. (1865-1906). Vol. V. Bryan, William Jennings, ed. 1906. The World's Famous Orations

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The Difference between the UK, Great Britain & England Explained