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Prepare for an outbreak of culture wars if Michael Gove's appeal to colonial apologists to rewrite school history is taken up

David Cameron's coalition government likes to present itself as consensual, even touchy feely. However threatening its policies, the message is "we're all in this together". But if the latest plans of his close ally Michael Gove were to come to fruition, prepare for an outbreak of culture wars under the new regime: conflicts that would be fought out in classrooms across the country.

Last week the new education secretary publicly appealed to pro-empire TV historian Niall Ferguson to help rewrite the history curriculum for English schools. Considering this is a man who has unashamedly championed British colonialism and declared that "empire is more necessary in the 21st century than ever before", letting him loose on some of the most sensitive parts of the school syllabus in multicultural Britain might have been expected to provoke uproar.

Instead it passed almost without comment. The same was true when the neoconservative Gove suggested in March that Ferguson should join the even more extreme Andrew Roberts to bring school history teaching into line with Tory thinking. The passivity won't last. Given the education secretary himself believes history lessons should "celebrate" empire, Roberts is clearly the right man for Gove. The British empire was an "exemplary force for good", Roberts has claimed, and imperialism "an idea whose time has come again".

When it comes to the failings of the school history syllabus, Gove and Ferguson in fact have a point â€" and one shared by historians across the political spectrum. The delivery of disconnected gobbets, the fixation on Nazi Germany and the Tudors, the practical exclusion of vital swaths of history including empire, and the lack of any long-term narrative are certainly an obstacle to understanding the modern world â€" even if Gove's other agenda of making children chant the kings and queens of England in rows of desks evidently belongs in a Tory 1950s theme park.

But the question, as Colin Jones, president of the Royal Historical Society, puts it, should be: "Which narrative?" If Britain had genuinely come to terms with its imperial history, no senior politician would have dared suggest celebrating it or mobilising apologists to sanitise its record for schoolchildren.

The British empire was, after all, an avowedly racist despotism built on ethnic cleansing, enslavement, continual wars and savage repression, land theft and merciless exploitation. Far from bringing good governance, democracy or economic progress, the empire undeveloped vast areas, executed and jailed hundreds of thousands for fighting for self-rule, ran concentration camps, carried out medical experiments on prisoners and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions of people.

When British colonialists arrived in Bengal, it was one of the richest parts of the world. Within decades it had been reduced to beggary by the deliberate destruction of its economy through one-way tariffs. In late 19th-century and early 20th-century India, whose economy barely grew in two centuries of British rule, 30 million died of hunger as colonial officials enforced the export of food in the name of free market economics â€" as they had earlier done in Ireland.

And far from decolonising peacefully, as empire apologists like to claim, Britain left its colonial possessions in a trail of blood, from Kenya to Malaya, India to Palestine, Aden to Iraq. To this day, Kenyan victims of the 1950s campaign of torture, killing and mass internment are still trying, and failing, to win British compensation during a "counter-insurgency" war that, by some estimates, left 100,000 dead.

No wonder Hitler was such an enthusiastic admirer of Britain's empire, which he described as an "inestimable factor of value". The echoes of Nazism in the colonial record are unmistakable. But while there is of course no plan to amend textbooks to include a balance sheet of positive and negative features of the Third Reich, that's exactly the approach favoured by Ferguson, Roberts and Gove when it comes to the swashbuckling "island story" they want to construct out of colonial barbarism.

This drive to rehabilitate empire has its origins in the aftermath of the cold war. Influential voices on both sides of the Atlantic began to press for new types of colonies in the US-run world order, and liberal interventionism was all the rage. But it really took off after 2001, as the US neoconservatives masterminded the occupation of first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Mainstream figures such as Robert Cooper, former adviser to Tony Blair and now a senior EU official, called for a "new kind of imperialism"; Ferguson demanded that the US learn from the British empire and crush resistance in Falluja with "severity"; and even Gordon Brown insisted that the "days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over".

In fact there had never been any such apologies. But as the scale of the Iraqi catastrophe became apparent, cheerleaders for both new and old empires gradually fell silent. Now it looks like they're about to be given a new lease of ideological life in Britain's classrooms.

Part of the motivation appears to be a doomed and perverted attempt to create a sense of national identity out of a historical inheritance that should be utterly rejected. But this is also being mooted at a time when British troops are fighting a modern colonial war in Afghanistan and the government is backing intervention and occupation in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Palestine â€" all former British colonies. When General Sir David Richards, head of the army, insists the Afghan war is a "signpost" for future conflicts, the case for softening up future generations to the demands of empire might seem appealing to some in power.

But it's a poisonous fantasy. What is needed are not expressions of guilt or apologies so much as genuine exposure to the historical record, to serve as an inoculation against falling into the imperial trap of the future. Not only will any attempt at an "even-handed" rehabilitation of empire be rejected by historians, teachers, students â€" and perhaps even Liberal Democrat ministers. But, in contrast to the colonial period, there are now millions living in Britain whose families had direct experience of colonial tyranny â€" as well as powerful successor states who will object vociferously to any imperial whitewash in British schools. If people like Ferguson and Roberts are allowed to get their hands on school history, it will be contested every step of the way.