The British love to proclaim that freedom of speech is at the heart of their identity, and a gift given to the rest of the world. But throughout British history, there are examples of speech being limited or constrained, with radical movements often building their demands around the rejection of censorship.

This was usually connected to limits on political and religious belief and practice: the Levellers, one of the most radical groups during the English Civil War, consistently framed their demands around the right to political and religious freedom, with writers like John Lilburne repeatedly calling for the end to literary and press censorship. Conservatives who today claim that individual freedom generally or freedom of speech specifically are an inherent or innate part of British history need to reckon with the fact that for centuries it was the radical left making these demands.

In fact, historically the British state was far more comfortable as an agent of censorship than as an enabler of speech. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Empire. The history of British politics is unavoidably the history of British imperialism: the Empire overseas and the British at home were co-constitutive. Empire was the space in which the British state’s urges to discipline and control went most unchecked.

There is an enduring idea that imperialism was somehow motivated by a desire to spread democracy and other freedoms, but British rule in India, for example, was marked by constant censorship of the press. The Gagging Act, passed during the Indian Rebellion of 1857, regulated printing presses and the ‘tone’ of published material; the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 controlled any writing considered ‘seditious’ written in a ‘vernacular language’ (i.e. any language other than English); the Press Act of 1910 sought to control rising support for Indian nationalism by forcing publications to deposit large financial securities with the government, which could be confiscated if anything was published that was critical of the British Empire, army, or ruling class, or that incited violence or contempt of government. During the Second World War, and particularly after the Quit India campaign, press freedom was even more tightly curtailed, with any coverage of political parties forbidden.

It was not only colonial India that saw censorship — a similar law requiring the deposit of a bond that could be withheld if a paper printed seditious information was introduced in Trinidad in 1894, for example, as well as in a number of other colonies — and neither was this controlling legislation limited to newspapers. The British were also concerned with the cultural products being consumed by imperial citizens, who they saw as vulnerable to influence against imperialism from pernicious messaging. In the African colonies, this concern was particularly prevalent in countries with a large white population, who were themselves very anxious about black African political activism, and were therefore keen to restrict information and even cultural imagery that they believed likely to provoke unrest.

White officials were also extremely cautious around issues of morality; they were convinced, for example, that African minds would be easily corrupted by films or plays showing scenes of a sexual nature. Northern Rhodesia established a Native Film Censorship Board in 1937, which became increasingly politically motivated after the Second World War. The Board inspected all films to be shown to a black African audience and erased any scenes containing references to political insurrection, violence, or rioting, as well as storylines depicting women of easy virtue (particularly those which depicted white women as unvirtuous or louche), and stories demonstrating the capture and tying up of Europeans by any ‘native’ actors, including Native Americans. This censorship purported to protect vulnerable black Africans from corrupting influences, but was clearly motivated by a desire to shape the worldview of African colonial subjects and limit their political and intellectual freedoms.

Censorship continued as a tool of white supremacy in British imperial spaces into the late twentieth century. In 1978, the far-right independent government in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) under Ian Smith passed a law that prohibited journalists from reporting anything that deviated from the official version of events in the civil war that had then been raging in the country for five years; it also limited the ‘acceptable’ sources for reporters to official government statements, discussions in the white parliament, evidence presented in court, or material approved by the white Rhodesian military command. Smith’s government believed it was a bastion of British values in an African continent that had been, by the late 1970s, largely handed over to black African majority rule. Given the long history of censorship in British imperial and domestic history, he was perhaps correct.