A whole empire excised from our history

A list like this would have contained some famous imperial names: Clive, Rhodes and Raffles

Of course, we could go on mocking the BBC's 100 Greatest Britons poll indefinitely; any list compiled from the suggestions of listeners and turned into a telly spectacular presented by the egregiously ignorant Anne Robinson is bound to contain moments of hilarity. We could amuse ourselves all day by wondering out loud about the sort of people who take Diana Wales, Michael Crawford and Robbie Williams more seriously than such apparently obscure and forgotten figures as Gladstone, Disraeli or George Eliot.

For one dizzying moment, I suddenly realised the only explanation; it must be a list compiled from suggestions made by the French. But no; we have to accept, alas, that it is exactly what it purports to be.

As an insight into historical significance, it is, of course, perfectly useless and uninteresting. But taking it as a popularity contest, it does raise some curiosities. Apart from anything else, it does demonstrate what incredibly short memories people have; 53 out of the hundred are specifically 20th-century figures, and the further back you go, the fewer and fewer names come up. The entire 17th century has left nothing for anyone to admire, it seems, but Cromwell, Shakespeare, Newton, and Guy Fawkes (what?).

The biggest oddity, however, is something that certainly would not have happened 30 or even 20 years ago. What was once one of the most exciting and extraordinary features of our national history has, it seems, either been completely forgotten or surgically removed out of good taste. From beginning to end, there is hardly a name that is principally connected with the great adventure of the Empire.

It's fair to say that this would have seemed absolutely extraordinary to the Victorians. They would have had no doubt at all that they were producing some of the greatest heroes of British history as they were conquering the world. I don't know whether they were right or not, and certainly some of the people they greatly admired look rather tarnished now in the eyes of historians. But the point is that this is not the judgement of historians, but a popularity contest. A list like this, in the very recent past, would have contained some famous imperial names; Clive, Rhodes, Kitchener, Raffles, perhaps even Job Charnock, Napier, or Gordon.

There are a few names on the present list with imperial connections, but it' s safe to say that Baden-Powell is there as the founder of the scouts, Churchill as a wartime Prime Minister, and the nominees meant the actor when they suggested Richard Burton. Perhaps the only names which can be assumed to represent anything in the way of imperial power are those of TE Lawrence, who was a complete maverick, and perhaps Queen Victoria.

This seems fairly peculiar. Whatever the judgements of American historians on the subject may be, I had always assumed that the British were at root quite proud that they used to possess so gigantic an empire, and maintained something of a sense of the romance of the whole enterpriseagainst current-day strictures. The Empire, of course, supplies us with some shameful episodes, but also with some undeniable moments of military genius and noble intelligence; the Empire in India, surely, does not just mean the Amritsar massacre, but the Sanskrit grammars of Sir William Jones and the visionary ambition of Job Charnock.

I don' t want to return to the opinions of 100 years ago, and figures like Gordon or Rhodes are, rightly, never again going to be the object of hagiography. But it does seem deplorable that so enormous a part of our history has been forgotten; either that, or that we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that the whole long episode was carried out by villains and pirates, bent on nothing else but murder and robbery.

You can find piracy and robbery, of course, but it is quite simply wrong to say that is the whole story. Of course, you will find many historians prepared to say exactly that; I read, quite recently, an article by a supposedly respectable historian describing the entire British empire as motivated by what they themselves called "butcher and bolt". Really? Was that the motive of Clive, Burnaby, Curzon or William Jones? Have we really allowed ourselves to be persuaded that there is no moral difference whatever between the conduct of administration by the Indian viceroys and Leopold II's slash-and-burn progress through the Congo?

The time for the Empire has probably passed now, and at this point we English are right to be saying that it was not such a wonderful thing as we all thought at the time. But there is no doubt at all that on an individual level, the figures that built it are worthy of our fascination, and sometimes even of our admiration. The BBC list is predictably full of anti-imperialists like James Connolly and Owain Glyndwyr, whose violence and brutality somehow doesn't count; in the end – in the real list – there ought to be a place for those whose idealism is one we don't share any more. At the very least, I have to say that Clive is more worthy of our lasting admiration than Robbie Williams.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk