The singer Lily Allen has recently been in trouble with the
populist press in the UK for apologising for her country’s behaviour and
attitudes young refugees in the ‘Jungle’ camp at Calais – recently
dismantled. I have likewise had the
feeling that I should apologise in a similar way to some of those I have met of
late. But the difference is that Lily
Allen was apologising for things that the UK is doing now: I felt like
apologising for things done by my country in the past – and quite a long time
in the past at that.
Whilst travelling in the
Far East and Australasia recently I have come up against the history of
Britain’s dealings with the Maori peoples of New Zealand, and of Britain’s
relations with China over Hong Kong.
Whilst in New Zealand I visited Waitangi, the site of the Treaty of 1840
that brought the land of the Maoris under British control, and I also learned
more about the relationships through visiting museums in Auckland (an excellent
and even-handed account), Rotorua and Wellington. In Hong Kong what knowledge I already had of
the history of the old British Crown Colony was supplemented by a visit to the
Hong Kong Museum of History in Chatham Road South, Kowloon.
The events I felt like apologising for took place in the
1840s, and there is a remarkable coincidence of dates. The Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris was
signed in February 1840. Less than a
year later the Convention of Chuenpi was concluded with the Qing Dynasty,
leading to the cession of Hong Kong to Britain the following year as a Crown
Colony. Both these treaties were signed during the period when Lord Melbourne
was Prime Minister back in London – a man normally seen as something of a
liberal reformist (for example through his reductions in the number of offences
carrying capital punishment, or his reforms of local government).
Yet to today’s eyes Britain’s actions in New Zealand and
Hong Kong in the 1840s look
distasteful. Versions of the Waitangi
Treaty were signed in both English and Maori, yet there are important differences
in wording between them. Was this just a
problem of translation at a time when the two languages had only been in
contact for around 70 years, or was there an intention to deceive? There were certainly differences between
Maori and British understandings of what land ownership meant, and different
views on the meaning of the English word ‘authority’ in the Treaty, with the
British view being that the Maori had put themselves under the authority of the
British crown, whilst the Maori felt they had entered into an equal
partnership. There followed massive
transfers of land from the Maori to the Pākehā (whites), often for derisory
sums of money via what was in effect a compulsory purchase order. The ramifications of the Treaty and its
ensuing relationships are still being played out, as the Auckland Museum made
particularly clear, with legal structures in place to adjudicate on claims and
to right some of the wrongs done in the decades following the Treaty.
Yet the depiction of the Waitangi Treaty in various places
still seems to me to play down its negative consequences. A number of references to it concentrate on
celebrating the Queen’s presence at the 150th anniversary
celebrations in 1990, which was actually the occasion of protests by Maori (not
depicted in museum exhibits).
But perhaps I don’t need to apologise for the actions of my
country in New Zealand back in 1840. The
Queen has already done it. In an
unprecedented move the Queen in 1995 issued an apology to the Maori peoples for
injustices they had suffered as a result of the Waitangi Treaty – the only
known occasion when the British crown has ever said sorry.
The story of Britain in Hong Kong at the same period as the
Waitangi Treaty is perhaps even worse.
China was selling large quantities of goods to the west, but China was
self-sufficient and bought little in return.
So the British tried to force China to buy opium from the East India
Company: when this was rejected by the Chinese Emperor Britain launched the
First Opium War to enforce the trade.
The War was only concluded by the hand-over of Hong Kong to the British
as a trading base. Late nineteenth
century English fiction depicted the depravity of opium-taking Chinese settlers
in London and other ports, but it was British interests that had encouraged the
habit amongst the Chinese population at large, doing untold damage to health
and social relations. There followed a
Second Opium War between 1856 and 1860 when the British (and other western
powers) declared that China was not opening up quickly enough to the opium
trade controlled by Britain. These are
unsavoury episodes in British imperial history that I think are not very well
known in the UK, and which don’t feature greatly in textbooks of the period.
But those that do cover these events match closely in their interpretation with
the exhibits and the narrative of the Hong Kong Museum of History.
There is a repeating element in the story of the west’s
attitudes to China in the 1840s. Today,
just as then, there is a massive trade imbalance with China with the country
exporting very much more than she buys from outside. In the single month of August 2016 alone
China had a USD 52 billion surplus on external trade. What can China now be persuaded to buy from
elsewhere (other than the foodstuffs and raw materials that constitute its
biggest imports – and with many of the materials being processed for export as
manufactured goods)?
Should we now apologise to China for the Opium Wars? In one obvious sense yes, but in another way
the fact that Hong Kong remained a British crown colony until 1997 provided a
haven for refugees from China after the 1949 Revolution and has continued to
act even now as something of a fulcrum between China and the West. Certainly there was a difficult colonial
history up until the Second World War of racism, the sexual exploitation of
women, gambling and drug taking, but more recently Hong Kong has played a more
benevolent role on the global stage – albeit with some of its freedoms now
threatened by the China of which it is now a part.
So I won't apologise to those standing around me in the
museums of New Zealand and Hong Kong who come from Maori or Chinese
backgrounds. But I would love to get
inside their heads and understand what they are thinking as they read about the
British actions of the 1840s, and examine related exhibits. As the French proverb has it – perhaps it is
just a case of autres temps, autres mœurs
(other times, other standards). Or
perhaps L.P. Hartley had it right at the start of his 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign
country: they do things differently there.”
But does everyone recognise that attitudes can change?
