By Dr. Shahridan Faiez
THE audacity of empire never truly dies. It merely hibernates, waiting for the right moment to reassert itself in new, grotesque forms. That moment, it seems, has arrived with Suella Braverman.
The former British Home Secretary, now safely ensconced in the far-right Reform UK party, recently took to social media to deliver a proposition so staggering in its historical inversion that it demands more than a dismissive snort.
Her argument? That Britain’s former colonies should pay reparations to London for the Empire’s “investment, effort and contribution” in building them.
The British Empire, she insists, “did so much good for the world.
This is not merely a clumsy political gaffe. It is a statement that emanates from a very specific provenance – a rising tide of neo-imperialist sentiment that seeks to drag the world backwards to an age when the West lorded over the Global South with impunity.
Braverman’s words are the ideological ammunition of a resurgent nostalgia for domination, dressed in the threadbare robes of a “civilising mission” that was always, at its core, a project of plunder.
To understand how such a position can be articulated in the 21st century without immediate and universal revulsion, one must examine the cultural architecture that made it possible.
The late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, in his seminal work Orientalism, demonstrated how Western hegemony was achieved not merely through military might and economic coercion, but through the production of knowledge itself – a vast intellectual project that constructed the “Orient” as backward, irrational, and in need of the firm, guiding hand of the European master.
This was the cultural arm of what Rudyard Kipling infamously termed the “white man’s burden” – the notion that it was the moral obligation of the white races to govern and “civilise” the darker peoples of the earth.
It was, and remains, an ideology of racial superiority, a scaffolding of white supremacy that justified the most brutal exploitation as a benevolent act. Braverman’s claim that the Empire “invested” in its colonies for their benefit is a direct descendant of this orientalism.
The coloniser, in this telling, is recast as the benefactor; the colonised, the ungrateful debtor.
The stark contradiction, of course, is that the West grew rich precisely by exploiting the global South. The British Empire did not “invest” in India, Malaya, or Ghana out of altruism.
Colonial economies were built to extract resources, labour, and wealth for London, not to develop colonised societies on their own terms. The evidence is overwhelming. Research by economist Utsa Patnaik, based on almost two centuries of data, found that Britain looted approximately US$45 trillion from India alone during colonial rule.
That is not investment but theft – on an industrial, intergenerational scale. And this theft was accomplished with untold violence and cruelty.
The Great Bengal Famine of 1943, which claimed an estimated three million lives, occurred while Churchill deliberately diverted food supplies from India to feed British troops.
This was not a natural disaster; it was a man-made calamity engineered by colonial policy. Communities were destroyed, traditional economies were dismantled, and entire civilisations were subjugated so that British industry could flourish.
To suggest that the victims of this system now must repay their tormentors is not just historically illiterate – it is morally obscene.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Braverman’s tirade is her own biography. She is a woman of Indian heritage, whose parents migrated from former British colonies in Africa.
One is reminded of Malcolm X’s searing critique of the “house negro” – the enslaved person who, by virtue of living in the master’s house and eating near his table, came to identify more with the oppressor than with her own people in the field.
The house negro would defend the master against the field negro, for her proximity to power granted her a hollow status.
Braverman’s defence of the British Empire, her eagerness to absolve it of its crimes and demand that its victims pay for the privilege of having been subjugated, is a chilling contemporary manifestation of this twisted syndrome.
She has internalised the logic of the oppressor and now serves as its most passionate advocate.
We cannot simply shrug and brush away the hypocrisy of people like Braverman. Her words are not an isolated outburst; they are part of a broader ideological project that seeks to rewrite history, to rehabilitate empire, and to reassert the moral and political supremacy of the West over the rest.
It is a vision of taking the world backwards to the age of imperialism, a vision that must be confronted with the full force of historical truth and moral clarity.
The British government itself only finished repaying a £20 million loan in 2015 — a loan taken out in 1835 to compensate slave owners after abolition, not the enslaved. British taxpayers spent generations servicing a debt created to enrich those who traded in human flesh, while the descendants of the enslaved received nothing.
This is the true legacy of empire: a system designed to ensure that the coloniser is always compensated, and the colonised is always in debt.
Malaysia’s own landscape bears the invisible scars of this great extraction – our rubber and tin built the foundations of British wealth, fuelled by forced labour and the manipulative division of our communities.
Let history record that it was Malayan rubber exports that rescued a bankrupt post-war United Kingdom, generating more critical US dollar revenue than all of Britain’s domestic industries combined.
While ideologues like Braverman choose the comfort of historical amnesia, the Global South remembers the true arithmetic of empire.
The long-overdue reckoning with colonialism must never be demanded from its victims; it belongs solely to those who still look back at the master’s whip and mistake it for a gift.
* The writer is chairman of Citizen’s International, a Penang-based civil society organisation dedicated to building solidarities for the pursuit of peaceful coexistence and global cooperation in a just world –
