Very recent visitors from Mars may not know of the regular attacks on the National Trust for being “woke”, but the rest of us have heard plenty. The trust’s latest onslaught on British values has something to do with the lack of butter in the scones. Never mind that they have been made like this for years; Tory MPs and other critics perceive the keen threat to British values posed by margarine.
Such stories never stop coming. This week, Kemi Badenoch, the trade secretary, opined that the UK did not grow rich through “colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever”, but owed its success to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This is the kind of half-digested, badly regurgitated history that leads to a forlorn Tony Hancock asking if Magna Carta died in vain.
Despite this chatter, some major institutions are examining the part they have played in Britain’s history of slavery and empire. The Royal Academy of Arts is yet to be condemned by the usual suspects, but rest assured: they will not be pleased.
Like the British Museum, the Royal Academy was created in the mid-1700s, as Britain began industrialisation and colonial dominance. Established by George III, the institution and its members have enjoyed proximity to British power, which means a state that has exploited peoples at home and around the world. Over the past few years, the Royal Academy has found that at least one of its Academicians owned enslaved people, another inherited family wealth gained through slavery, while many others were patronised by men who had got rich either through the slave trade or empire. Johann Zoffany, for instance, returned from India with a small fortune from painting serene portraits of British colonialists, who were amassing larger fortunes through the bloody conquest and looting of a foreign land.
Alongside this research, the Royal Academy has mounted Entangled Pasts, a large exhibition open until the end of April. That euphemistic title sets the tone: no statues were harmed in the making of this exhibition. Yet by displaying the work of Royal Academicians and others over two and a half centuries, the curators make a subtly damning case. First, they illustrate again that, long before the Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury, black and Asian people were here, albeit ignored or marginalised. In the corner of the early pictures stands an ayah (nanny) who herself looks little older than a child; in other portraits black sitters are left unnamed or unfinished. Second, some of those enriching themselves through slavery and colonialism knew the money was tainted: a picture from 1783 of commissioners negotiating a peace treaty between America and Britain includes an area of white space, probably because one of the British delegates had made a fortune from slavery and, sensing the tide was turning, did not want to sit.
Finally, even today black and Asian artists in Britain do not get the same recognition as their white peers. Frank Bowling’s painting of the Middle Passage, the journey across the Atlantic of enslaved Africans crammed in British slaving ships, reminds us that the artist had to wait until he was 85 for his first major retrospective – in a creative industry that had spent decades cooing over Damien Hirst and other YBAs. From the arts to journalism and finance, British institutions still have many problems with ethnicity and its representation, and fine exhibitions are only a small part of the answer. Sadly, this is not old history.