I was an omnivorous reader of history long before I started researching and writing historical novels. Indeed, it was that love for the stories of the past, and for what they can teach us in the present, that led to my current writing focus. Those who don’t learn from history, the old saying goes, are doomed to repeat it. In my books, I try to cast a spotlight on issues that are relevant today by showing them through the lens of a different place and time.

I write about a time when Napoleon had built an empire that had absorbed most of Europe as well as their colonial outposts, when the British empire was just beginning to flourish, when the nascent empire of the United States was less than half a century old as an independent political unit, when the empire of China was attempting to retain autonomy against the encroaching western newcomers. I try to write about real people facing eternal issues against genuine backgrounds.

The world has seen many empires rise and fall. Like the humans that build them, they’re all different and at the same time, all share common characteristics. They’re based on power and economic inequalities that allow some people to accumulate more wealth and leisure than others. This wealth and leisure permits a flowering of art, literature, and science that those in power celebrate as the result and evidence of their manifest worthiness. They exploit others, both inside and outside of their borders, to maintain their uneconomic lifestyle. They justify this exploitation by dehumanising and blaming those exploited. Over time, the gap between the poor and the wealthy grows until it become untenable. The Vandals pour over the borders. The colonies rebel. The sans-culottes storm the barricades.

(NOTE: I’m using the term empire to mean a sovereign political entity and its subsidiary nation states, including client states rather than those directly ruled. By this definition, I’m calling the hegemony of the United States an empire. Its boundaries shift and morph as nation states move in and out of client status. Empires also have a cultural impact far beyond their borders. As far as I can see, most empires have happily used their cultural influence for political and economic gain.)

The unworthy poor

Empires, then, thrive on two factors–wealth accumulation through exploitation, and institutionalised discrimination against the exploited–and these two factors will eventually (within two or three hundred years, commonly) pull the empire to pieces. This is how predatory capitalism (defined as economics for the benefit of a few) is inevitably linked to racism or some other form of discrimination by stereotype.

Think of the British Empire: one of their management strategies was to demonise the Irish as poor, shiftless, and unworthy; the Chinese as crafty and near-demonic; the natives of the Indian sub-continent as lazy, stupid, and child-like. But never fear, oh inadequate people of the world. The British Empire was prepared shoulder ‘the white man’s burden’, and take over those places, stripping them of their resources and reducing said sub-human lifeforms to tenants in their own land (or worse).

I’m not picking particularly on the British. All empires do it. But I’m five generations from British ancestry, and those attitudes came down to me through my cultural ancestry. I had the good fortune to be born to a man who was a reverse racist; who collected people of all races to flaunt them as part of his rebellion against his family, and who insisted that all men (I choose the pronoun advisedly) were equal. I grew up with a much broader range of acquaintances than most white middle-class females of my age. Even so, I have spent a lifetime shedding preconceptions that I picked up from my elders and from the books made available to me.

To take just one example, my people were colonists. It was to their advantage to believe that they were on the side of the angels in New Zealand’s Land Wars. My elders were certain that Maori deserved to be on the bottom rung of our society because they were poorly educated and unsophisticated. It took more than a 100 years for New Zealand as a political entity to acknowledge that the government and the colonists were the aggressors in the Land Wars, and that repeated racism at every level of society, including in education and health, had maximised the impact of the theft of land by blocking any opportunity to succeed except by becoming a pseudo white person. (This is another standard strategy. Allow a few carefully selected individuals to fight their way into white positions and then blame everyone else for not doing so.

The Waitangi Tribunal provided a venue for hearing historical injustices. For all its faults, it has performed sterling service. Nearly 50 years on, we are still working our way towards reconciling the two views of history; that of the oppressors and that of the oppressed; but we’re trying.

Ancestral guilt

I’m inclined to think that guilt underpins our reluctance to believe in the ills of the past, or to deny their impact on the present. I’m not guilty of the casual racism of my ancestors and successive governments that ruled before I was born. I can’t take responsibility for things I can’t change. I am guilty of actions of my own that display unconscious bias. I am guilty if I support others in their bias. I can do something about those, so they are my responsibility.

Is this the reason why discrimination and racism are often strong in those cultures whose ancestors practiced the worst forms of chattel slavery? Ancestral guilt? The link between predatory capitalism and slavery is obvious. History tells us to expect slavery to be justified as being economically necessary and, in any case, for the good of the slaves. Justifying the last means regarding the slaves other and less; claiming that they are less than human, less than adult, dangerous to ‘normal’ people, morally defective, and so on and so on. The greater the guilt, the stronger the justifications that come rippling down through the centuries into the hearts and minds of descendants.

(Ironically, in both the United States and South Africa, DNA tests indicate that many who consider themselves both white and superior have unrecognised slave ancestors. But that’s another story.)

Where to from here?

Anger is growing, and so is fear. Is it too late to learn from history? We’re well into the decline. Is the fall inevitable? What do you think?