By no means am I defending colonialism, least of all the British Empire in India. I’m an Indian, FWIW.

I see two main obstacles to this apology.

1. Teaching kids history. Currently British kids learn all about Henry VIII’s wives ... and then it’s straight to the World Wars. It’s hard to tell a nation of 70 million people to reckon with their past when they know nothing about it.

2. Philip himself was quite old. He grew up at a time when the Empire was a great thing, something that helped resist the tides of Nazism. Britain could not have managed it without the colonies. And later, he became old. I’m willing to give older people the benefit of the doubt - they can’t change their minds easily.

But if his grandson can’t come to grips with it either when he becomes monarch, I won’t be making any excuses for him.

We did Celts (Bronze and Iron age), some on ancient Greece, Romans, Vikings, Tudors (briefly, we didn't do Henry VIIIs wives, more about Shakespear), Spanish Armada, colonialism, slave trade, and then loads on WW1 and WW2.

I do agree that more should be taught about the details of colonialism but the idea that British history started with Henry VIII and skipped to WW1 is nonsense.

It might be worth noting that your experience can differ from theirs without it being untrue.

I can say that I did Ancient Greece, Romans, Tudors, touched a little on the Spanish Armada before skipping straight to WW2.

Neither of the two schools I attended touched on Colonialism in any recognisable degree, and Slavery was more "We stopped slavery, good job england", when in reality it wasn't done from a place of morality, and instead was driven by mass slave revolts, a decline in plantations culminated by an era of overproduction by slavery, which was leading to economic decline.

I think there was at least some morality at play from the likes of the Quakers, Wilberforce etc. It seems unnecessarily reductionist to say only one or the other force was present, and probably historically inaccurate.

I should clarify my earlier statement, I didn't mean to say there wasn't some form of morality involved, as you pointed out it's likely to some degree there was, just that I don't personally believe it to be a major contributing factor. Just that it was what I was personally taught, that England suddenly realised they were being immoral and sought to right that.

I think it's part of the picture, but like you I wasn't educated enough in the colonial period of British history to have any great certainty.

When we were very young it was the tudors and earlier, then there was a little social history where we covered things like the building of canals and the invention of the spinning jenny, the industrial revolution, enclosure etc, then Cold War history IIRC. Big blank spot where colonial history might have been. You'd think it might be relevant...

The Empire was never great, and the best you can say about it is they weren't always as terrible as the Belgians in the Congo.

Recent history in England is taught only really in Key Stage 3 and there is a lot to cover...

It is mandated that pupils learn about "ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain, 1745-1901" [1]. Some examples schools can choose are the transatlantic slave trade, the American civil war, Ireland and Home Rule and the development of the British Empire with a depth study (for example, of India).

For 20th century history, only learning about the Holocaust is actually mandated. But Indian independence and end of Empire can be chosen by schools and is quite a common choice.

Kids are learning about these things. Maybe not as much as they could be and likely with some bias, but it's not true that it jumps from Henry VIII's wives to world wars.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

> a time when the Empire was a great thing, something that helped resist the tides of Nazism.

I feel like "The Empire was great otherwise we would all be living under Naziism" is a poor take.

It assumes that whatever features of the world existed then must have been necessary to accomplish whatever was accomplished.

Imagine the US was still a British colony, and Hitler was still defeated. It would stand to reason then, that it was because the US was still a British colony that Hitler was defeated, right?

In a made-up timeline when Britain had already voluntarily broken up the empire, we're in a very different world, once that perhaps wouldn't include Germany trying to expand its power and/or wouldn't have felt itself under threat from the surrounding pre-WWI European empires.