As owners are sought for unidentified photographs from Dutch Indonesia’s lost colony, Simon Kuper argues that western colonial nostalgia is finally being challenged by brutal facts
Most Europeans today hardly think of empire at all. The topic is barely taught in British schools, for instance. But for those who do think about it, the accumulated legends add up to a nostalgic popular memory of empire. No wonder the historian Niall Ferguson has won such a following in the UK for his thesis, plugged in books and on TV, that, on balance, the empire “was a Good Thing”. And in France in 2005, a law was passed ordering secondary schools to teach “the positive values” of colonialism (the clause was repealed within a year). Such sepia-tinted views of empire have global influence because most books and TV series are still produced in western countries, not former colonies.
