Reflection: Painted with its ‘Natives Coloures’

Summary

The Tudor historian and media personality David Starkey explained the riots that engulfed parts of England in the summer of 2011 in this way: ‘The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England that is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.’ Starkey's fellow commentators on BBC Newsnight challenged his crass racial profiling, while others – including more than one hundred academics who signed an open letter to the BBC – wondered that anyone expected Starkey to offer thoughtful or informed comment in the first place. Starkey rejects both race and class as historical approaches, and later suggested that history teaching in British schools should reflect the dominance of its white monoculture, leaving immigrants to adjust. Critics have long maintained that this version of ‘Our Island Story’ takes too narrow a view of British History for citizens in a multicultural society and interconnected world.

Implicit in the criticism is that Starkey should just stick to the Tudors, where questions of race–ethnicity and multiculturalism are not likely to trouble monocultural assumptions. It begs the question, when did Britain become multicultural? Post-war migration certainly changed the complexion of Britain and stoked the fears that prompted Enoch Powell's infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, forewarning (wrongly) the nation's descent into American-style race wars. Taking a longer view, perhaps Catholic or Jewish emancipation in the nineteenth century formally recognized a future of cultural diversity. Yet for Leland, Lesley, Camden, Lhuyd, and their fellow travellers, multicultural Britain long predated the racialization of skin colour and post-colonial migrations. It embraced the island's first and successive settlers, the formation or identification of ethnic groups (Britons, Gaels, Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Norse, Normans) and nations (English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, even British), and face-to-face encounters with the cultural complexity that lay beneath in the pays. Travellers painted Britain with native colours that were rich, vibrant, and, above all, complex.