Empire Ways: Aspects of British Imperialism 9780755621798, 9781350153882

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To the memory of my father Cyril George Porter 1907 – 1962

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

GG Scott’s original and final designs for the new Government Offices; from The Builder, 29 August 1857; and The Illustrated London News, 29 September 1866.

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INTRODUCTION

The British Empire was many things. It is this that accounts for the controversies that still rage over it – in part, at any rate. (Other reasons are ignorance, misunderstanding, prejudice, lack of evidence, and the fact that there are many valid ways of looking at anything.) Multiplicity is not easy to grasp. Most of us who write about the history of the British Empire, and about British imperialism – not necessarily the same thing, incidentally – seek to make them manageable by simplifying them in one way or another. To explain something you need to reduce it to some kind of order. We do this by concentrating on broad areas or themes which seem to us to be more important than others. My own earlier books on imperial history were like this. They were structured to tell a story or make an argument. Things that did not fit were skated over. It was not done with any deliberate intent of falsifying or smoothing out the picture – I had persuaded myself that the omissions were objectively less significant than the events and ideas that had been included – but it had that effect, to an extent. As a result, they gave a misleading impression of the subject, which is not structured, or at least to the degree implied in the major histories. Most of us imperial historians are aware of this (we are a self-critical bunch, on the whole), and do sometimes try to warn our readers of it. But I thought the point might be made better with a collection of essays like this, which is not governed by the rules and restrictions that ‘through-written’ books are subject to. Confusing it might be; but confusion is part of the essence of history. And it can be genuinely illuminating in ways that more structured and simple-to-grasp accounts are not. A century ago the subject seemed less muddled. The Empire was easily defined, in terms of the areas of the world coloured in red, or sometimes pink, on those iconic late-Victorian world maps. That may still be a widespread popular view of it – the visual impact of those maps is very beguiling; but it has been out of favour in historical circles for many decades now. ‘Imperialism’ took other forms than formally governing peoples – ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’

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domination, for example; and across a wider area of the world than the colourcoded parts. This also however worked the other way. Not all the red-coloured areas were equally ‘imperialised’. Some were scarcely so at all: substantial areas hardly touched by British power or influence; others ruled only weakly (pinkly) or ‘indirectly’; and many colonies, long before the formal demise of the British Empire, effectively ruling themselves. Those who served British imperialism, directly or indirectly, ran almost the full gamut of human – woman as well as man – kind. (Though men were dominant; as they usually have been in British history.) Their circumstances and motives varied widely. Very many of them were not even British. Imperialism was always contested. In other words: the British Empire was never as ‘imperial’ as that very big word implies; that is, a system, a power structure, an entity. It was always a hotchpotch, a mess, partly fortuitous, constantly changing, informed by widely disparate events and influences, viewed and remembered differently by different people; and called an empire only to make it easier to handle, conceptually. The other way of making it easier to handle was by spinning great explanatory ‘theories’ for it. For example: it was an accident, the result – as the historian JR Seeley put it, though he did not himself believe this – of a ‘fit of absence of mind’. It was an instrument of God for Christianising the world. (That was quite rare.) It was a sign of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ racial superiority. It was ‘cultural’. (You can find coded signs of it in Shakespeare.) It was a hangover from a less enlightened age. It was an instrument of progress, the Victorians’ common substitute or name for God; that is, for the spread of enlightenment throughout the world. That also grew out of favour post-Victoria, until the economic historian Niall Ferguson resurrected it a century later for a television series that was later turned into a controversial book: Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. By contrast – or so it seems – it was seen as a function of the spread of exploitative capitalism, driven by its internal contradictions to force open new markets for its overproduced goods and over-accumulated capital beyond the area (Europe and America) in which it had originated. That has been the dominant antiimperialist view. ‘So it seems’, because in fact these two ideas are closer than they look. Both are economic, and both stress the centrality and even the inevitability of capitalism. Which side you come down on depends, essentially, on whether you approve of international capitalism – what today is called ‘globalisation’ – or not. Both are handles by which to understand and control the ‘muddle’ which is ‘imperialism’, as are all the others – chance, God, culture, and so on. They may do this fairly satisfactorily. (I broadly adhere to one of them, as it happens.) But they do not detract from the fact that imperialism was confusing, as well.

INTRODUCTION

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This book may help bring this out. It will not be a total muddle. Though it was not originally planned as a book – most of the chapters have appeared in other guises – there is a structure to it, deriving from the way the essays in it are arranged. It starts with some broad and general pieces on what the British Empire was, how it arose, and how it was run. These are followed by a number of shorter essays on particular imperial events (mostly wars), and imperial personalities. (Not ‘subject’ personalities, I’m afraid, which are of course vital to an understanding of the whole colonial experience; but this is a book about the imperialists rather than the imperialised.) After this we have a section of four extended essays on the impact of the Empire on British society and culture, building on my book The Absent-Minded Imperialists; including one on architecture (the design of the new Foreign Office building in Whitehall), and another on music (Edward Elgar). After that comes a section on the last days of the British Empire, including the problems (to put it mildly) that accompanied them; and a final piece (before the Conclusion) on what I call its ‘after-life’, or the images of the Empire and imperialism today, which are still very potent; explaining, probably, the interest, controversy and strong feeling alluded to at the start of this introduction. My hope is that a book of this kind may bring out some of the colours and flavour of British imperialism that more thematic books usually do not. How many general imperial histories, for example, apart from frankly polemical ones, find room to do emotional justice to the horrors described in the pieces here on the American and Opium wars, the Amritsar massacre, and the Kenya ‘Emergency’ of the 1950s? Or, for that matter, to the more sympathetic sides of imperial adventurers like Bogle, Stanhope and Raffles, also pictured here? No-one can truly appreciate the history of the Empire who has not rejoiced at it, benefited from it, callously exploited it, suffered at the hands of it and loathed it at least vicariously. Secondly: this book, because of all its loose ends, may possibly stimulate some new ideas about British imperialism, which might even undermine some existing general theories and explanations, including my own in my other books. I’ve always believed that one main purpose of history is to complicate things; to show how much more confusing but also richer and more interesting the course of human events is than most generalisations or theories allow for; which is not to say that there are not generalisations one can make about it, but only that these should always be open to doubt and amenable to testing, if possible. They can sometimes be tested by looking at exceptions. This wide-ranging collection of essays may suggest one or two ways. (I shall give some pointers at the end.) Any readers who want a way out of the confusion could turn to my other broad histories of British imperialism, The Lion’s Share, which I wrote near the beginning of my career, which is more narrative; and British Imperial, a short ‘ideas’ book

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published at roughly the same time as the present one (giving rise to some repetition, scarcely avoidably), which is designed to undermine some of the popular misunderstandings and ‘myths’ about the British Empire I’ve met in the 40 years since then. That does contain a broad theme or two, I am afraid. In a way it can be regarded as complementary to Empire Ways. I may not be an entirely reliable guide through all this. We are all children of our times: historians less than some others, I like to think, because of our awareness of other times, and of the ways they have impacted on earlier historians; but inescapably nonetheless. It is through our realisation of this that the custom has recently arisen among historians of prefacing or appending to their books short accounts of their personal backgrounds, with particular reference to the origins of their interests in the topic they are writing about – in so far, that is, as they are aware of them. (They may not be.) The idea is to alert their readers as to where they are ‘coming from’ (or think they are). I’m not fully convinced of the value of this. It can provide hostages to fortune. (‘Ah, so that’s why he takes this line.’) However, it can also prevent preconceptions. (‘He’s a white English male, so he must be a British imperialist.’) So I’ve provided a very brief ‘where I come from’ essay at the end of this book, as an Appendix. I then acknowledge the many debts I owe to others, including the editors of journals in which many of these essays have previously appeared in one form or another. Details of their sources will be found there. In what follows I have tried to keep endnotes to a minimum. Where quotations appear unreferenced in chapters that originated in ‘review articles’, they can be assumed to come from the books under review, unless otherwise indicated. Other citations appear at the end of the book. Fuller references for the chapters on Elgar and on Architecture will be found in the academic journals they first appeared in.

CHAPTER 1 CUTTING THE EMPIRE DOWN TO SIZE

With the British Empire finally dead and buried – give or take a Falkland or two – now may be a good time to pause and try to take stock of what it was while it still had breath in it. This will not be easy. For a start, it may be too early. Historical judgments take a while to bed down properly. Even then they are subject to revision by successive generations, influenced not only by new discoveries, but also by those generations’ own historical environments. This is partly because large events like ‘imperialism’ are complex, and can be approached from many different angles. In the case of the British Empire the problem is exacerbated by the fact that its death is still too recent to be looked on dispassionately, and its legacy too present to be ignored. Hence the controversy that has raged in recent years between – to take two extremes – the broadly pro-imperial Niall Ferguson (Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, 2003), and the uncompromisingly antiimperialist Richard Gott (Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt, 2011). That debate could not be so heated, if the ghost of the old empire were not felt to be haunting us still. It may be that the spectre of yet another empire lurks behind that. British imperialists often made comparisons between their empire and the much longer-dead Roman one. It is the image of that great empire, present in contemporary school syllabuses much more than the British ever was, as well as in popular culture right up to the present day, that largely determined popular perceptions of ‘imperialism’ generally, and consequently of the British sort. It was where the word ‘imperial’ and its derivatives came from: a Latin term (imperium) associated with notions of power, authority and control. It is a big, strong, singular word, implying therefore a big, strong, singular thing, like the ancient Roman Empire was conceived (perhaps wrongly) to be. That is why British imperialists liked it. But it may have been

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misleading in their case. One of the issues that needs to be determined before we can come to any assessment of the effects and legacies of the British Empire, good, bad or indifferent, is how big, strong and singular it really was. * The first thing to say here is that we should not be fooled by appearances. All those great red-bedaubed world maps that became fashionable in Britain around 1900, for example – not before then – give an impression of uniform British power that is certainly false. A truer picture would have been conveyed by colouring most parts a much lighter pink, and some with only the faintest blush. (To be fair, cartographers often did this with Egypt and the Indian Princely States.) If we are measuring British imperialism in terms of informal influence, certain countries outside the Empire can be pinked in too. You might also put a few drops of red into the oceans, to reflect Britain’s naval dominance. Another image of imperial strength and unity to be wary of is the great public show the Empire made around 1900 (again, much less before): the fantastic gubernatorial uniforms; the ceremonial puffery – Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee of 1897 is a good example; the occasional outburst of popular enthusiasm, called ‘mafficking’; some stridently imperial songs and literature; and so on. But in 1900 the Empire was coming to seem under threat. Many of these displays of loyalty to it were nervous reactions to this. It was only around then, too, that British imperialists began thinking of their colonial possessions as a unity; of the Empire as an empire, that is, in order to strengthen it against these threats. Before, it had been a much more messy affair. In fact, those red patches on the map covered an extraordinary variety of relationships between the colonies and the ‘mother’ country, which would require a whole new palette to colour-code them accurately. These ranged from absolute despotisms and racist tyrannies; through colonies ruled paternalistically in intention, at any rate, and territories simply ‘protected’ by the British; to colonies whose (white) people were far more ‘free’ than stay-athome Britons, and those whose (non-white) subjects were so little touched by the system that they could barely have been aware that they were colonies at all. Beyond these there were disguised colonies like Egypt (which is why it was coloured pink); ‘mandated’ territories after World War I, in one of which – Palestine – Britain’s role was mainly a thankless peace-keeping one; her ‘informal’ colonies – nominally independent, but dominated, for example, by British commercial companies; and Ireland, which could be said to straddle both sides of the imperial-colonial divide. And that is without taking any account of what is called, more vaguely and problematically, British ‘cultural imperialism’: problematically because if ‘imperialism’ means

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anything at all, it must surely involve some sort of duress or domination, which is difficult to show in the case of – for example – Brazilians choosing to play football. To bundle all these together under the rubric of ‘empire’ or ‘imperialism’ appears perverse. Certainly it is with regard to its subject peoples. To equate the experience of a colonial Nigerian with a New South Waleian’s, for example, which is what you get when you categorise them both as imperial victims, makes no sense at all. In so far as they were victims (and there are of course other ways of looking at them), the latter, certainly, were no more so than most stay-at-home Britons, and victims of the same classes and underlying forces. My old grandad in Essex was probably more exploited there than he would have been if his grandad had made the journey to Australia that was apparently at one time planned for him. (Family legend has it that he narrowly escaped transportation for keeping a muck-heap outside his house in Writtle.) In most of these cases there were other forces at work in addition to – and I would say ahead of – the discretely ‘imperial’ one. In my grandad’s it was industrial capitalism. The same applied in many colonial cases, too. * The association of capitalism with imperialism is of course well-known. It used to be denied by imperialists in more social democratic times when ‘capitalism’ was a term of implied abuse, but is acknowledged by all now that it has become respectable again. But the precise relationship between the two is not always understood. The expansion of British trade and finance into the wider world came before the more formal kind of imperialism, in the main. As it was put at the time, the flag followed trade rather than vice-versa. That is when it followed it at all, which was not invariably. You could have foreign trade without imperialism; or, at least, that is what contemporaries believed, before modern historians decided that that should be called ‘imperialism’ too. Whether this is a valid extension of the meaning of the word is a matter of opinion: ‘imperialism’ does not have one, set definition, and can be used almost any way one likes; although, again, my own preference is for a usage that preserves the notion of compulsion or pressure. (Some commercial relationships were like this; others were not.) For the Victorians, however, there was a clear distinction between imperialism and mere commercial expansion, which was why, until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, they so often denied they were engaged in the former. That was not easy, in the light of the formal colonies Britain already possessed then; which were often however regarded as embarrassing obligations incurred in less enlightened times, to be shed as soon as could be done respectably. (Canada would be the first.) Even in them, the flag

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was not supposed to give Britain any particular commercial advantages, with their markets open (usually) to all other nations too. So this was not ‘colonialism’ in the eighteenth-century mercantilist sense. ‘Free trade’, in fact, was widely supposed to be both the antithesis and the antidote to imperialism, bringing an end to – as the great anti-Corn Laws agitator Richard Cobden put it in 1846 – ‘the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; [and] for gigantic armies and great navies – for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour’; all this ‘as man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man’.1 Today it is possible to read all kinds of ‘imperialist’ inferences between the lines of that: who are we to tell the world, for example, what is best for it? – but it is easy to see how it could persuade contemporaries that they were embarking on an entirely different and more ethical course. This was what was supposed to differentiate midnineteenth-century Britain from all previous ‘imperial’ times and nations; and did in fact distinguish the type of her ‘imperialism’, if you want to call it that, from most others. It was also a highly convenient way of looking at these things, from two practical points of view. Firstly, this type of expansion in the wider world, being (theoretically) peaceful, was well suited to a nation whose military capacities at this time (as opposed to naval) were not of the highest order, by comparison with three or four continental European armies. Luckily European armies at that time (before the 1880s) were by and large not interested in challenging Britain in these distant commercial theatres; which left her with only technologically backward ‘native’ opponents when it came to defending her economic interests outside Europe. Even then she was often worsted by their superior bravery and generalship, or only succeeded with the help of local allies. On the whole, however, Britain’s commercial expansion into the wider world, and the formal imperialism that sometimes – reluctantly – rode on the back of that, were cheap and relatively easy. Cheapness was the other practical convenience. ‘Free trade’ was more than a merely commercial policy. It was tied in to a whole economic ideology, called ‘political economy’ then – ‘free marketism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ today – one of whose beliefs was that enterprise worked best if it was not taxed. Anything that required tax revenues therefore was discouraged. That is partly why the British Army was so relatively skimpy; and why colonies could not be allowed to become a direct burden on the British Treasury. They had to be ‘self-sufficient’; their revenues, even for their defence, raised locally. This had profound implications for the way the Empire was ruled, subsequently. The main one was that when it had to be ‘ruled’, it could only be done on the cheap. Sometimes this was done by sending out men (always men, of

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course) from the public schools (nearly always the public schools) in pith helmets and khaki shorts, or more exotic clothing – tall plumed hats and the like – if they went as ‘Governors’, to keep the natives in order at its lowest, or more if they had the inclination and the means. One notable thing about these imperial proconsuls is that they did not generally share the ‘free market’ ideology of the people whose activities had given rise to the necessity of their presence in the first place, at any rate to the same degree; firstly because true free market capitalists did not reckon much to ‘governing’, in any circumstances, at home as well as abroad: it was a waste of their talents and wrong in principle to work at an occupation that was neither productive nor profitable; and, secondly, because the values they had imbibed at their public schools were more old-fashioned paternalistic than new capitalist. (‘He’s in trade’ was a common put-down among this class.) As a result, many of them actually obstructed the capitalist exploitation of the colonies they were in charge of, or tried to; partly as a result of this principle, or prejudice, and partly in order to avoid unsettling their charges, and so provoking rebellion. At the very least it was not they – the highest-profile and most conventionally ‘imperialist’ of the imperialists – who were responsible for spreading capitalism to Africa, Asia and elsewhere; or ‘democracy’, which they scarcely understood; or any of the other features of ‘modernisation’, which present-day imperial apologists attribute to British imperial rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The main point to notice about this cadre of men, however, is how few they were. This was because more of them could not be afforded, without inflicting unacceptable taxation either on the British, or on their colonial subjects. Taxes for colonial purposes could provoke rebellions in both places: there was a ‘Hut Tax war’ in Sierra Leone in 1898, for example, and a Commons revolt against a tax to police and govern Mesopotamia (Iraq) in 1921. All in all there were just 2,000 British imperial servants ‘in the field’ over the whole of British India in the 1900s, plus about another 2,000 for the rest of the Empire: just 4,000 to control hundreds of millions of native subjects; which does not sound very many. Of course they had soldiers behind them: many in India, albeit a minority metropolitan British, but far fewer elsewhere; and local collaborators to help them with the more mundane tasks. Collaborators, however, need to be collaborated with. This in fact was crucial to Britain’s governance of her ‘Crown’ colonies (the directly ruled ones), which was generally ‘indirect’, as it became called in the early twentieth century, in the senses both of using local traditional rulers, and of generally preserving the natives’ own customs and cultures. Again, this was found to be less unsettling than trying to change them would have been: the Indian ‘Mutiny’ (1857) was supposed to be a lesson in the dangers of that; though some British colonial officials did grow to

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genuinely value Indian and African cultures – sometimes patronisingly, but not always. The common idea, therefore, that British imperialists invariably set out to ‘Westernise’ their subjects is not altogether sound. Even if they had wanted to, they could not have. * Economy with regard to colonial government was achieved elsewhere by delegating its duties to others. Most of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire was what we would now call ‘privatised’; and for two of the three reasons usually adduced for privatisation today: to save money and to shed responsibility. (The third reason, the ideological belief that ‘private’ always works better, was not so much in evidence.) The three main sorts of beneficiary were local rulers – Indian princes, for example; European settlers in Australasia, British North America, the ex-slave islands of the West Indies for a brief period, and southern and eastern Africa; and (thirdly) ‘chartered’ capitalist companies in India (going back centuries), Africa and the Pacific. The Liberal governments of the 1880s were particularly keen on this last device, chiming in as it did with their particular free market principles, and also – they thought – with their anti-imperialism. In 1906 they even granted representative government, with a racist constitution none of them approved of, to a people – the Transvaal Boers – whom they had just beaten in a bruising war. The reason they gave was that they were powerless to do anything else. This could be regarded as a sort of anti-imperialism. These were colonies where metropolitan control – ‘imperialism’ by one definition – was minimal, allowing the forces of capitalism and settlerism to operate freely and, you might say, ‘naturally’. These were the major forces here, with the Empire’s main role being a negative one, not to hold them back. All this clearly undermined Britain’s effective control over her Empire, and her ability, therefore, either to do good there, or to prevent harm. A leading example is Southern Rhodesia, outsourced in the 1880s to both a private company (Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company) and the white settlers who came in its train, who did all the ‘ruling’ there, over the black African majority, with the Colonial Office hardly getting a look in; until its genuine independence, as Zimbabwe, in 1980. This is not of course to absolve Britain from moral and even probably legal accountability for what went on in Rhodesia during that period, or even, to an extent, in Zimbabwe later; any more than a government that privatises railways, say, or schools, or health provision, can avoid either the credit or the blame for the way they operate subsequently. The responsibility – a hugely serious one – was hers. But she had willfully surrendered that responsibility to others, who as a result became the prime determinants of what actually happened in all these colonies.

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The effects of this – of the licence that settlers and capitalists were given in so many of the British colonies – were mixed, and are controversial. They were the main agents of ‘modernisation’, economically, culturally, socially and in other ways; they rather than the conservative and paternalistic proconsuls. If you think that was a good thing, or perhaps a regrettable necessity (which was the way a lot of ‘progressive’ Victorians regarded it), you will look on these enterprising colonists indulgently. Against this there are two main arguments. The first is to question the value of capitalism in this form for the good of these countries, and even of the world: encouraging unbalanced colonial monocultures, for example; exhausting soils with intensive and largescale farming methods; and uprooting native societies. (It was that last consequence that set the paternalists against it.) The second is to point out the sheer human suffering – way beyond ‘uprooting’ – that came in the train of these developments. The history of the British and of other European empires is punctuated by dreadful ‘atrocities’: slavery, mass killings, avoidable famines. Most of these (not all) were inflicted by settlers – against the Aborigines in Australia, for example, the natives of southern Africa, and also (earlier) the native Americans across the Atlantic; in the West Indies; in Kenya; and in French Algeria; or (secondly) by capitalist entrepreneurs: Atlantic slave traders; the BSAC in southern Africa; Malayan planters; King Leopold’s rubber-tapping ‘concessionaires’ in the Congo ‘Free’ State. If you count the British East India Company as a capitalist one – which is stretching things a little for the mid-nineteenth century, by which time it had lost its trading function, but it was still largely independent of government – you can debit the several Indian wars that culminated in the Indian ‘Mutiny’ to this. (Britain took over directly in 1858 as a result.) With a bit more ‘stretch’ we might even include the great Irish (1840s) and Bengal (1940s) famines as exacerbated, at any rate, by contemporary economic-liberal theory, which in its most severe form taught that these things were best left to the market, even when people were dying. The main point, however, is that they were not directly caused by the kind of ‘imperialism’ represented by those pithhelmeted, khaki-shorted young prefects. If they had had their way, and the numbers, they might have tried to prevent such things. All this may seem to point to a paradoxical conclusion: that the less imperialism you had, in the sense of genuine and formal colonial government, the worse things were likely to be. Indeed, it was for exactly this reason that the most thoughtful anti-imperialists of the early twentieth century, prime among them the great JA Hobson, were against Britain’s simply withdrawing from her colonies, which wouldn’t genuinely ‘liberate’ them, but would simply leave them even more vulnerable to red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalist imperialism; and called instead for international ‘trusteeship’ over European

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empires until their subjects could be properly prepared for self-rule. This was one of the purposes of the post-World War I ‘mandates’ system; though in the event that did not work out terribly well, particularly in the Middle East. But by then Britain was too weak even to perform a mandatory role. Her imperial weakness was of course finally exposed between the world wars and in the 20 years after the second, when the Empire became impossible to defend against rising nationalist movements, helped from outside; without a degree of firmness, or brutality, that people in Britain – whose attachment to their Empire was predicated on the belief that it was an essentially ‘liberal’, even voluntary one: a ‘Commonwealth’, to use the new buzz word of the time – were reluctant to tolerate. Repression was tried at first: in Kenya, Malaya, Cyprus, elsewhere. (These were the occasions of many of Britain’s worst colonial ‘atrocities’.) But its failure, and the remarkably rapid dismantling of the Empire that followed, without half the fuss made about it in Britain as the French made about Algeria, for example, shows just how basically weak the Empire had been for years; and how little its disappearance affected the majority of the British. It was presented by their governments as ‘granting’ self-rule to the natives, in India a ‘transfer of power’: almost the culmination of the old, Cobdenite liberal project; but that fooled no-one. * All this must undermine the notion of a British ‘imperium’ in the Roman (or perceived Roman) sense. Britain was only able to ‘rule’ most of the Empire on the sufferance of local collaborators: native chiefs and princes, empowered settlers and companies, even many of her ‘prefects’, who might be given wide discretion ‘in the field’; all of whom had agendas of their own. This was a cause of weakness to her in other ways too. Diplomatically it was mainly a liability. It was arguably a source of military strength – that is, of Dominions and Indian soldiers – in the two world wars; against which, however, one needs to put, firstly, the advantage that colonial nationalists seized of both wars to push their own anti-imperialist claims, often effectively; and, secondly, the possibility, at least, that the first of those wars was partly provoked by German jealousy of the existence of the British Empire, and consequently indirectly the second, which grew out of it. At other times the problems the Empire continually threw up, due to Britain’s underlying potential weakness within it, several times skewed her diplomacy dangerously: drawing her unproductively into Afghanistan and the Nile Valley, for example, in order to defend India and the routes thereto; tying up military forces that might be needed for her own island defence; giving rival European nations (and later Soviet Russia) points of irritation they would not have had otherwise; and

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overall restricting her freedom of movement on the European stage. This was certainly the imperialists’ fear, around the turn of the twentieth century. The Empire’s great size was misleading if it was thought to reflect British world power. If it could only be organised and consolidated to realise its full potential, thought the imperialists – tariff, defence and political unions were mooted – it might be made something of. Also if ordinary Britons themselves could become as committed to it as the imperial zealots were. (The jury is still out on how committed they were; but it certainly was not enough.) Most efforts in this direction, however, came to nothing. The Empire continued to disappoint, on these grounds at least. (Later its successor, the multi-racial selfgoverning ‘Commonwealth’, acquired a certain moral authority; but that was not the same.) It was just too much of an organisational mess to make this kind of impact. It was never organised or even loosely administered centrally. At least three separate government departments were involved. There was little training offered for the young men sent out to run it, beyond the occasional university summer school; nothing on the pattern, for example, of France’s Ecole coloniale. You learned your governing on the job. Of course you had your public school education to guide you initially: lessons from Classical history that were supposed to be good for all time; hints about ‘character’ – ‘stiff upper lip’ and the like; a tradition of noblesse oblige; maybe some prejudices against the working classes that could be carried over to ‘natives’ (they were very similar); but beyond that your attitudes and policies were largely formed by, firstly, your experiences in the field and, secondly, how you regarded your function there. It could be a pretty steep and rocky learning curve. That is why you needed ‘character’. This applied especially to racial attitudes. It is commonly assumed that imperialism and ‘racism’ went together, with the racism deriving from the whites’ home-taught feelings of racial superiority; but this is an oversimplification at best. For a start – though this is really only a debating point – the most racist Europeans at this time were often anti-imperialist: like the French writer de Gobineau, who was afraid of the racial mixing that might ensue; and Charles Dickens, who saw no point in trying to do good for inferior races that were doomed in any case (and at the expense of the British working classes, who deserved it more). At the other end of the imperial– anti-imperial spectrum, some people became working imperialists because they believed in human equality. This was true of most Christian missionaries, who have not been mentioned in this account yet, but were probably the major agents of cultural Westernisation in the colonial field: hence the suspicion and even hostility shown to them by many of those conservative colonial officers; and whose whole purpose in life

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rested on the assumption that the peoples they were there to convert were at least convertible. The missionaries’ prejudices tended to be cultural rather than racial. For government officers it was different: they needed to respect native religions and hierarchies in order to work through them. Some of them believed these were racially determined: that animism, for example, was in the West African’s genes; but it was possible, theoretically at any rate, to hold that they were ‘separate but equal’: to use a term later beloved of apartheid politicians – which indicates how treacherous the idea could be. Public school ‘paternalism’ also of course carried the implication that their wards were ‘children’; but children grow up. (The question was, ‘when?’) Small traders, who had to negotiate with their customers, generally got along with them pretty well. So did most (not all) explorers. The most conventionally racist of the colonialists were the European settlers, whose attitudes again conformed to their function: they needed to believe in the natives’ racial inferiority in order to justify taking their lands and forcing them to labour. That is quite apart from the military, whose prime function was to kill them. We know from recent wars what that can do to soldiers’ perceptions of their enemies. Hence the settlers’ and military’s disproportionate involvement in colonial ‘atrocities’. Colonists’ race attitudes were mainly acquired on the spot, not brought with them from ‘home’; where, incidentally, the teaching of ‘racism’ in schools was far less common than in European countries that did not have colonies. This might suggest that the effect of having an empire, or at least one that needed to be ‘collaborated’ with, was to undermine racial prejudice, rather than the opposite. (But that needs more comparative research.) * The ‘British Empire’ was the name that was given, quite late in popular parlance, to Britain’s territorial possessions beyond her shores, in order to create the image of unity and power the imperialists desperately wanted for it, but which was always illusory. Of course the Empire existed, together with ‘imperialism’ – or, rather, various imperialisms (plural). Of course, too, Britain’s general influence in the world during the nineteenth century, especially, was immense. You can still see it today. The omnipresence of her language (or one of them) is probably the major example, albeit boosted by the twentieth-century hegemony of the United States. (But then the United States is originally one of Britain’s products, too.) Her peoples’ DNA is widely spread; as well as other DNAs transported between continents as slave or ‘contract’ labour for the whites. Towns, cities, lakes and waterfalls all over the world bear British names. Many developing countries have frontiers, often awkward ones, negotiated between Britain and other powers. The industrial revolution started in Britain, and expanded out from there.

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Many of the world’s railways bear witness to this. Cricket and association football may be thought to be, if not her greatest contributions to world civilisation, at least the ones that are least alloyed. The constitutions and legal systems of several countries bear the mark of Britain’s, including of course, again, the United States’s. British missionaries played a great part in the worldwide spread of Christianity from the turn of the nineteenth century on. There are some gaps. Britain’s cuisine does not appear to have caught on so widely, by comparison with France’s, Italy’s, China’s, India’s and McDonald’s. (Even if you can buy ‘fish and chips’ abroad, it’s usually wrong: breaded fish, dry chips, and round peas.) Other countries have been far more influential artistically, with the exception of literature. The point is, however, that very little of this required an empire, or anything that can usefully be called ‘imperialism’ (implying compulsion or pressure), to achieve it. Frontiers – yes. Migrant settlers, and certain markets, needed protection from the Royal Navy and just a few land troops. Cricket may have required a longer period of imperial tutelage to establish it than football because it is more complicated (which is why the two games have such different geographical spreads). Most of the rest, however, could have done – and possibly done better – without the Empire, or ‘imperialism’ in the limited sense of the word that I prefer. At most, the formal Empire was just a part of this; and not nearly as potent a part as these other softer kinds of influence; including the great natural force of unfettered (‘privatised’) capitalism; which of course is still going on. * Why should this any of this matter to us, in these post-imperial days? Of course to me as a historian it is irritating when these things are misunderstood; but then so is much of history – or deliberately distorted, in some cases – and the world still goes on. In this case, however, it may not help the world’s progress to believe that so much in its present state is to be blamed on, or credited to, British (and by extension European) imperialism. This is not about accountability in a moral sense – whether imperialism was a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ thing, which is what people usually look for in books about the British Empire (including this one, I am sure); but about understanding what has brought the present situation about. ‘Imperialism’ is an easy scapegoat. (The ways it has been used recently will form the subject of a later chapter.) It can divert attention from some of the real villains (or heroes) of recent history. ‘Privatisation’ is one that has been suggested here; you may be ideologically disinclined to accept that, but you should be able to see the general point. ‘Imperialism’, even in its muddled British form, covers a huge range of global phenomena, some of them contradictory (like capitalism and paternalism),

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whose causes and effects are better studied separately, without preconceived red-bespattered images (those world maps) distorting or over-simplifying the picture. I once suggested, at a conference in America, that we imperial historians place a moratorium on the ‘i’ and ‘e’-words – imperial, empire, and so on – for, say, five years, to see how we get on without them. My guess is that the picture that emerged would be far more complex, but also more illuminating. But it will not happen. ‘Imperialism’ is far too convenient a shorthand, and whipping-boy.

CHAPTER 2 WEALTH OR COMMONWEALTH? THE HISTORY OF A PARADOX

The British Empire was more than just a muddle. It was built on a fundamental contradiction. What that contradiction was will be made plain in a page or two. It explains nearly everything about the Empire: its origins, its growth, its nature, its decline – especially its decline; and the attributes and some of the problems of its successor, the Commonwealth of Nations, today. To discover the contradiction we need to go back to the early nineteenthcentury history of British capitalism, out of which modern imperialism, in a curious way, sprang. The curiosity derives from the fact, which is well known, that early nineteenth-century British capitalism was supposed neither to sanction nor to need imperialism, which was regarded by its leading theoreticians (like Adam Smith) as a costly survival from less enlightened times. The anti-imperialism of early free market capitalism was central to it: a cardinal tenet of the faith of men like Richard Cobden, for example, who believed that the whole spirit and ultimately the material effect of his free trade movement was inimical to the establishment of one nation’s authority over another. Establish free trade worldwide, he claimed in that great speech of January 1846, and ‘the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires’ would melt away. In their place would blossom a world of interdependent yet entirely free nations, living together in prosperity, amity and concord, with only the historical memories of empires and imperialism to remind them of their more primitive past.1 It was similar, of course, to liberal capitalism’s other vision, of the ultimate domestic free market economy and polity. Both derived from the early political economists’ belief in the universal beneficence of the system they advocated: its advantages not only to the urban industrial middle classes, which were obvious, but also to every other class in society once the manna sifting through the fingers of Adam Smith’s famous ‘invisible hand’ had filtered

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down. This had political implications, as well as economic. The ‘filter down’ effect would increase everyone’s prosperity. (Many of the early political economists – strikingly unlike today’s – believed it would also make them more equal.) As they became more prosperous, people would also – naturally – grow more contented with their lot. This would make them less likely to rebel. The means, therefore, to prevent or curb rebellions would become less necessary; which meant the gradual withering away of the state in a political sense too. In the middle of the nineteenth-century economic and political freedoms were regarded as indivisible; economic liberalism automatically gave rise to a condition of political liberalism, or even anarchy (in its truest sense), in which men and women regulated themselves in their relations with one another, and required only the very weakest of state apparatuses to lubricate what was essentially a self-powered, or free-wheeling, economic machine. (Again, this is less the view today.) The same applied to international relations. The great free world market which was Cobden’s – and Britain’s – fondest foreign policy ambition would render power politics superfluous. It followed that empires, which were an expression of power politics, were also superfluous, and must soon themselves wither away. But of course the British Empire did no such thing. Instead it grew and proliferated from the 1840s onwards, mainly in Asia, Africa and the South Seas, either by the outright annexation of territory to the British crown, or else, especially in the early stages, by what today have come to be called ‘informal’ means. To a free marketeer this was unsettling. There were – and are – three possible ways of looking at it. The first was to regard the imperialism of the later nineteenth century as part of a reaction against free trade. The second was to see it as a transitional step along the path to eventual free trade: necessary temporarily in order to secure customers who later would come to realise the advantages of the connection without its needing to be secured. The third was to view imperialism as more intrinsic to British capitalism, and an expression of some fundamental tensions that lay at its heart. That, of course, was the Victorians’ own least favourite solution. But it may take us to the root of the contradiction on which their Empire was built. The problem was not usually thought to arise in connection with the ‘informal’ portion of that Empire, which was not recognised as such at the time. ‘Informal’ imperialism means the domination of one country by another by means short of overt annexation and administration: most typically through economic pressures from powerful customers or supplies or lenders of capital, sometimes via an intermediary native collaborating class. This notion has virtually no meaning to a free trade purist. Commercial transactions – so long as no artificial constraints are placed on them – can only be fair and free. The market sees to that, by setting the criteria for fairness. Consequently all

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contracts entered into between the buyers and sellers of goods, for example, or of financial services, or of (non-unionised) labour, are matters of reasonable choice on every side, and entirely free from the kinds of pressures that words like ‘domination’ and ‘empire’ imply. This was what justified the midVictorians’ professions of anti-imperialism, which were genuine, and prevented them from seeing the quasi-imperial bonds under the free trade surface that tied so many of their customers to them. It was different when those bonds cut through the skin. That happened when ‘colonies’ that had been informally dominated by Britain came to be incorporated into the Empire proper, either because they would not collaborate any more, or because a rival nation threatened to displace Britain as the power that dominated them. It was then that Britain sent soldiers to subdue and governors to administer them, and the contradiction became plain to all. This happened on a wide scale during the 1880s and 1890s, and then again in the two or three years following World War I, which were the periods of greatest expansion of the formal British Empire in modern times. Usually the immediate stimulus and cause of any new annexation in one of these periods were political, but with a long-established economic motive underneath. The economic motive was always ambivalent, mainly because many economicallymotivated people preferred to exert informal influence over the areas in which they had their economic interests rather than for Britain to march in and turn them into colonies: but this, of course, is where the political factor screwed things up. If British commercial and financial capitalists could have continued doing their business ‘freely’, without the Union Jack to back them, they would have done so: but they could not in situations where either the natives, or European rivals, refused to play ball. It was irritating and irrational that they should refuse to play ball, in a game – the free exchange across national boundaries of goods, money and services – which was so plainly beneficial to everyone who participated in it; but the last years of the century had shown that people – especially continental Europeans – could be sadly irrational at times. Britain kept control of her own reason by sticking with free trade, even in her newly-acquired colonies, when everyone about her was pushing up tariff barriers, and some of her own citizens were beginning to have doubts; but it would have been impossible for her, without immense damage to her interests, to remain aloof from this other, political trend. So, although imperialism and free trade were supposed to be antagonistic principles, she was forced to resort to one in order to safeguard the other; which was rather like eating meat in order to stay alive to be a vegetarian, and just as distasteful for some. Of course it may have been inevitable. Free marketism’s vision of a nonimperialist world was predicated, as we have seen, on the assumption that the

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market really did work to the benefit of everyone, which may well have been a fallacy that would have been bound to surface eventually, to the detriment or even the destruction of the system. If this is so, then it makes the contradiction that is the subject of this chapter an even deeper one. Empire, the antithesis of free trade, was also the product of it: simply because free trade could not work without, somewhere along the line, the conditions for it needing to be imposed. As the poorer and less ‘developed’ countries of the world came to be more and more ‘exploited’ by Western capitalist enterprise they naturally began resisting, which was bound to provoke stronger measures in order to keep them exploitable. In much the same way liberal capitalism on the domestic level may always metamorphose ultimately into illiberalism – what in Margaret Thatcher’s time came to be called the ‘strong state’ – simply because its natural evolution is not such as to endear it as ubiquitously as was once thought. That is as may be. Clearly there is no room to explore this theme here. But in any case it need not matter greatly to us. The important fact is that, whatever caused it, the peaceful and unfettered expansion of British trade and investment in the wider world in the nineteenth century very often gave rise to what at the time was considered to be its opposite. And this had implications which were of enormous significance thereafter: to the Empire itself, to the British trade that was at the bottom of it; and arguably to the whole subsequent history and nature of the British state. It created two main problems. The first was economic. The trouble with imperialism was that it cost. Britain in the nineteenth century did her best to ensure that as little as possible of that cost fell directly on the shoulders of her own taxpayers, by making it a firm principle of policy (almost her only one) that colonies should be ‘self-supporting’. But that did not solve the difficulty. In the first place, there was no way the taxpayer could avoid some of the cost: of military and naval establishments, for example, which were strictly British, not colonial, but were only as large as they were – and growing larger – because of Britain’s responsibilities overseas. Secondly, even that proportion of the cost that fell on the colonies could be regarded as a burden on British capitalism in the long run. In many colonies it was the capitalists who had to pay the lion’s share of the taxes to pay for their administration, simply because it was only the capitalists who had sufficient disposable cash; or else their native customers, which came almost to the same thing. However the money was raised, it came ultimately out of the pockets of individuals or companies, which – in free market ideology – could have made better and more productive use of it than government; it was money wasted, and so a brake on Britain’s rising prosperity, which in the end was the basis of her true strength. Again, this mirrored another and more familiar contradiction that is

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supposed to have beset the British domestic economy over the past 100 years: between the need for low taxation to enable capitalism to prosper, and for high state expenditure, on items like defence and social security, to enable it to survive. This dichotomy may have lain at the root of Britain’s long and still continuing relative economic decline. It affected her more than other industrial countries because she depended more on foreign trade than they. In a way it was rather bad luck. When Britain had originally pioneered the industrial revolution she had no significant rivals, and so a free commercial run in the world outside. By and large (of course there were exceptions) she could extend her markets to the far edges of the earth, without needing either to betray her non-interventionist principles, or to incur unacceptable costs thereby. That was when the broad pattern of her trade was established. By the late nineteenth century that pattern was vital to her prosperity and possibly her very existence, but was also coming under a variety of threats. To cope with those threats Britain had to betray her principles, and the ultimate interests of liberal capitalism, increasingly. From this dilemma there was no conceivable escape. This was the scale of one of the two main problems that arose from the contradiction of her situation as an imperial power. * The other problem was to do with ethos, and may have been even more serious. It derived from the fact that the commercial men in whose interests the Empire was primarily acquired were not the sort of people who could run it, chiefly because they did not believe in ‘running’ other people in this way. Much the same reason lay behind the fact that the Victorian House of Commons, and Victorian cabinets even more, were far from representative of the middle classes who are supposed to have been their masters after 1832, but were made up largely of gentry and professionals: simply because the middle classes were far too busy doing what seemed natural and right to them – producing things – to want to waste their talents and energies on what their ideology told them was no better than a regrettable necessity. To a great extent this did not matter, because the gentry and professionals to whom they delegated power had imbued their values anyway. But this indoctrination was by no means complete. Martin Wiener has described the way in which residual anti- or non-capitalist values re-emerged in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, encouraged largely by the public schools (in themselves another contemporary ‘contradiction’: for who would have thought that one of the most successful products of a free educational market would have been something so subversive of the values of that market?), to the considerable detriment of the ‘entrepreneurial ideal’ in Britain, by contrast

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with Wiener’s own United States.2 The creation and acquisition of wealth became less respected than, for example, landed status, or any of the other traditional qualities of the aristocratic class. That was in Britain. Outside, beyond the ken and consequently the sanction of the middle-class majority, the situation was worse. In a way it made sense, if you had an empire, to have it ruled by the unproductive classes, because that way they stopped being merely an incubus. Besides, they liked doing it, and – especially after going through the public school mill – were good at it. But it was also dangerous, because they could not be trusted. Hundreds of capitalists with interests in the colonies found this, to their cost. Governing colonies was in itself an interference in the free play of the market. It could have been done minimally, to limit the damage. But the governors had other ideas. They believed – most of them – that they had a higher duty towards their wards, beyond facilitating the exchange of goods and labour among them. Some of them even had their doubts as to whether facilitating exchange was in all circumstances desirable. One example was in Lord Lugard’s pre-1914 Nigeria, where capitalism, in the shape of Sir William Lever’s huge Liverpool-based soap manufactory, was actively obstructed, and forced to seek a more sympathetic field for its enterprise in the Belgian Congo. Lever was stymied because of an idea that had grown up in the Colonial Office that native Nigerians should be encouraged to produce co-operatively, rather than be ‘enslaved’ – the word was sometimes used – to market forces. In India the British patrician class had a similarly low view of unrestrained exploitation. This was usually the case in those colonies that had the strongest colonial superstructures. They illustrate a pervasive trend that is often ignored today, of anti-capitalist imperialism in some parts of the Empire. Elsewhere, of course, it was very different. Many colonies were quite ruthlessly exploited – or, by another way of looking at it, modernised – by capitalists. They were mostly the colonies over which the British Colonial Office had least direct control, as we saw in the last chapter; the prime example given there was Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe). As a general rule, therefore, more formal imperialism meant less capitalist exploitation, and vice-versa. This was partly due to the fact that the formal imperialists themselves were imbued with a significantly different ethos from the informal ones. At the bottom, of course, it all boiled down to ‘duty’ and ‘service’, and all those other notions that are commonly associated with the old-fashioned dictum ‘noblesse oblige’. Hopefully when the time has come for truly dispassionate histories of the British Empire to be written, proper credit will be given for the sincerity – even if it was not always wisely directed – of this motive among thousands of the men who actually governed the colonies. The

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attachment of the best of them to the welfare of their subjects was as great as the attachment of the best of the home-based British gentry to the welfare of their peasantry, and sometimes as beneficial (though of course the free marketeer would have to dispute this). It was this that cemented what at first sight might seem to be their unlikeliest alliance, right across class and political lines, with paternalistic socialists in the 1930s and 1940s, under the aegis (mainly) of Rita Hinden’s Fabian Colonial Bureau. That alliance was largely responsible for the two most remarkable developments in the history of the British Empire in the twentieth century (decolonisation cannot be classed as remarkable, because it was inevitable): which were the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts of 1940 and 1945, and the Commonwealth. Both went right against the free market capitalist grain. ‘Welfare’ is wrong because it uses money unproductively and discourages individual self-reliance. The Commonwealth is simply unnecessary. It could be harmful if it imposed obligations on members that were irrational in market terms, rather like European diplomatic alliances had done in the nineteenth century, which is why free trade Britain had struggled so hard to avoid them then. Ideally, individual men and women only needed to relate to one another as buyers and sellers – via what Thomas Carlyle was the first to call (disparagingly) the ‘cash nexus’ – in order to maximise profit and therefore happiness all round. Therein lay freedom, and – if it was done on a wide enough scale – true internationalism. No other international organisation could possibly be as extensive as this implied. Some less extensive ones might be tolerated, if they did not meddle in the market too much. That for many years was the position of the Commonwealth, despite various preferential commercial treaties among its partners, which still did not make much difference – and less, for example, than the EEC did when Britain joined it – to the ‘natural’ pattern of her world trade. Free marketeers could never have much enthusiasm for the Commonwealth; but at this stage they could happily leave it be. The enthusiasts in Britain were, mainly, antediluvian imperialists, romantics, humanitarians and Fabian socialists; people who in former times had positively welcomed the Empire for what they believed to be its contribution to the good of mankind, or else wished at least to see its successor making up for the bad it had done. Most of them had few problems adjusting to their own loss of authority in the new grouping, which some of them saw as the logical culmination of all the best imperialists’ (from Macaulay onwards) ideals and aims. An analogy often used was that of a family, whose ‘children’ had now achieved their majority and had to be accorded equality with their parents; an image that fitted in neatly, albeit patronisingly, with the strong thread of paternalism that this kind of commonwealthism had evolved from.

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In the 1950s and 1960s this warm beverage of ideals and sympathies flourished healthily in Britain, encouraged by a plethora of Commonwealth institutions and societies, continuing Commonwealth trade links, and a steady flow of university students from Commonwealth countries subsidised, without audible complaint (probably because they did not know about it), by British taxpayers. * That subsidy was one of the first casualties of the revolution that took place in British politics in 1979, when the ideology of the free market staged a remarkable comeback against a previous trend which the EmpireCommonwealth itself had done much to establish. The way had been prepared for it by the dissolution of most of the Empire in the 20 years after the war, and the fundamental dislocation of Britain’s external trade, which was one of the effects of her adhesion to the European Economic Community in 1973, both of which undermined the Commonwealth’s practical utility to Britain, and consequently left her free to drift away. As she did so, the contradiction that had bedeviled her policy for at least 100 years began to disappear. The oldfashioned paternalists returned home, tried to run things paternally there for a while (one became registrar of one of my universities), but in the end grew old and retired. They were not replaced: or at least, not in such numbers. Their spawning-grounds, the public schools, adapted to the new needs of the market, for what one of their headmasters in 1980 called ‘pirates’ instead of ‘prefects’,3 and began breeding more entrepreneurs to fill the gap left by the falling gubernatorial demand. America looked on, and approved. The House of Commons was transformed by an influx of marketing consultants and estate agents into something far closer to the nineteenth century’s ideal (though ‘ideal’ seems a strange word to use in connection with estate agents) than the nineteenth century’s own parliaments had been. Restraints on trade, especially trade unions, had their wings clipped or even amputated. Universities, hospitals, and other similarly ‘unproductive’ concerns were marketised. Notable exceptions were made of the army, the police, and the security services: which may have sown the seeds of another serious contradiction later on. (You can never avoid contradictions altogether.) By these means, and others, what was called ‘socialism’ – a foreign virus, apparently – was to be ‘squeezed out’ of the British body politic; in order to create a new, vibrant ‘enterprise society’, harking back to Victorian times, but safeguarded now by a very un-Victorian security fence. The jury is still out on whether it worked. This was ominous for Britain’s relations with the Commonwealth. The very word ‘common’ (implying ‘shared’) went down badly with individualists. It also enjoined toleration, which did not come easily to ideologues who were

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too convinced of the correctness of their own way of life and government to feel the need to condone ways that diverged too greatly from it. It was irrelevant to two of the professed priorities of British foreign policy: which were to extend the area of ‘freedom’ in the world, and to take measures to defend it against the enemy outside. (The ‘enemy within’ was the concern of the paranoid paternalists in MI5.) On one occasion the Commonwealth became a positive menace to those priorities. That was in the summer of 1986, when the Commonwealth games in Edinburgh were endangered and in the event gravely crippled by the withdrawal of whole contingents of athletes in reaction to the British government’s refusal to impose effective trade sanctions on South Africa. Some critics read into that refusal a covert sympathy for the policy of apartheid, but that inference is not strictly necessary. South Africa’s importance for Britain was that she was a bastion against communism; sanctions would both undermine her defences, and weaken the influence of the factor most likely to liberalise her: the free exchange of goods and services. That, of course, was a classic Cobdenite position. The wheel had turned full circle; though it had shed a spoke or two and taken on some iron cladding since Cobden’s time. What Cobden would have thought of all this is difficult to say. It might have disillusioned him. In a way the only thing that had made imperialism – in the broader of the two senses we have used it in – as tolerable as it was to its subjects or victims in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the ‘formality’ of certain parts of it. That formality was, as we have seen, both a product of Britain’s commercial and financial expansion in the world, and its antithesis. It served to protect, albeit imperfectly, the subjects of Britain’s capitalist empire from the full repercussions of their new relationship with it, and by so doing gnawed away at the roots of capitalism, with deleterious long-term results. In the 1950s and 1960s, during the process that was called ‘decolonisation’, this formal side of the Empire was dismantled. The Commonwealth was supposed to preserve some of its most beneficial features; but those who hoped so reckoned without the impact of the great British reaction of the following decades. With its old imperial contradiction now removed, British policy could get back firmly on to its former ideological rails. Thesis had given rise to antithesis, but then returned to the original thesis (though with added riders) once again. Market values ruled OK. International capitalists could get on with their proper work of ‘developing’ weaker economies, responsible to no one but their shareholders, and free from the misdirected sympathies of all those old colonial fogies who had not yet grasped the cold realities of life. All this might have been fine by Cobden. Alternatively, it might have made him think again.

CHAPTER 3 THE MEN ON THE SPOT

The men who actually ruled the Empire in person – khaki shorts-clad and pith-helmeted – were a race apart. (That is of course to use the word ‘race’ loosely; as was often done at the time.) Class-wise, they are probably best categorised as ‘upper-middle’, but without the dominant middle classes’ commercial or professional qualities. They were almost self-perpetuating, with colonial officers breeding new little colonial officers, and so on down the generations. When the demand for them dried up soon after World War II, they entered the mainstream of British society uneasily, taking inappropriate attitudes with them into boardrooms, for example, probably to British industry’s detriment. (That in any case is one charge often laid against them.) That was, if they had not ‘gone native’, as the saying went, and stayed behind among their ex-subjects, adapting to their ways. They were much mocked as a class, and often caricatured. Major Bloodnok in the 1950s radio comedy series The Goon Show is an example. Recently some of them have published memoirs, which seem on the whole, it has to be said, to confirm the caricature. Malcolm Milne’s memoir of his time as a colonial administrator in West Africa, No Telephone to Heaven (Meon Hill Press, 1999), is a case in point: exactly as it should be – full of stiff upper lip, jolly good chums, super sports, great japes, a plucky little wife, bringing good government to the natives, don’t you know – and by golly didn’t they need it! – and so on. Young people today would not stick it. But they were tougher in his day. And knew right from wrong. All came of being soundly thrashed at school. Made a man of you. Trouble was, they were not given time to make a proper job of it. Let go too early. All the fault of those bloody Yanks. Jealous of us. (Pass the Gordon’s, old gal.) Remember those ‘fatting houses’ for the nubile women round Anam? And the ‘cock boxes’ the men used to wear? Good chaps, though. Liked their sport. Brothers under the skin. Were sorry to see us go, though they could not say so. Bloody nationalists. Bloody Yanks. Everything gone downhill

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since. – Hence the subtitle: From Apex to Nadir. (‘Pass the Gordon’s’ is my addition. But all the rest is there.) We should not mock. These men held down an empire. They had few resources, and were sparing of those they had. They were filled with public spirit, and generally incorruptible. (Milne admits to cheating in an Ibo language exam, but that was different.) They endured much, both physically and mentally. They loved ‘their’ natives, and sought what they believed was the best for them. They felt they were ‘achieving something worthwhile’. They have been unfairly denigrated in retrospect. One can understand their bitterness. It must be terrible to sacrifice yourself for others, only to be told you have been exploiting them all along. ‘The blame of those ye better, the hate of those ye guard. . .’. Anthony Kirk-Greene’s Britain’s Imperial Administrators 1856 – 1966 (Macmillan, 1999) puts this in context. It was the first of two volumes he planned on the men who actually ran the British Empire, in what was called ‘the field’. It is an insider view – Kirk-Greene is an ex-colonial hand, with some of the same Blimpish attitudes – but leavened by an academic’s broader and more critical approach. The second volume will be biographical. This one is about how men like Milne were recruited and organised in the three main British colonial agencies: the Indian Civil Service, the Sudan Political Service, and the Colonial Administrative Service itself. Again, it tends to back up the stereotype. Men were chosen for their social backgrounds, and what could be gauged – in their early twenties – of their ‘character’. The latter was acknowledged to be ‘imponderable’, but skilled interviewers knew it when they saw it. They were told to look mainly at the ‘eyes and mouth’, for – as their confidential Handbook put it, weakness of various kinds may lurk in a flabby lip or in averted eyes, just as singlemindedness and purpose are commonly reflected in a steady gaze and firm set of mouth and jaw. Learning was mistrusted, and it was definitely a mistake to show it off. One candidate for the Sudan Service probably scuppered his chances by leaving his copy of The Times ostentatiously open to show that he had completed the crossword. A better ploy there was to sport your Hawks club tie - the Sudan Political Service went for sportsmen in a big way. (The Hawks Club consists of Cambridge ‘Blues’.) The ICS – the only colonial service for which you had to pass an exam – was more intellectual. Still, character was always to the forefront. That was inculcated at school. (‘The pre-school and school years, to my mind, largely form the man’, writes Milne. University was unimportant. He cannot even remember what he read at Cambridge.) That meant of course

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the public schools, Britain’s oh-so-peculiar institution, which produced nearly 100 per cent of this ruling class. Kirk-Greene insists this produced a broader social mix than is sometimes thought, with ‘lesser’ public schools coming very much into the picture in the late nineteenth century, together with one or two pretentious grammars, and the important point being what they made of the various material they were given to work upon, which included the odd (very odd) pleb; but it will still seem highly exclusive to most modern readers. That may have been the secret of its success. Thinly stretched, in an intrinsically vulnerable situation, you had to have confidence in your colleagues. That was easier if they were ‘your own kind’. Public schools taught esprit de corps, quite explicitly. That was helpful in another way: by presenting a united front to their subjects, which as Milne’s uncle Jack once wrote to him ‘is very important in dealing with alien races’. The schools also taught the exercise of authority, through the prefect system, which – as Kirk-Greene shows – was easily transferable to the colonies. Likewise the gentry attitudes to the lower orders they encouraged could be adapted to ‘natives’ almost entire. Even sport had its uses. Milne once floored a Nigerian absconder with a rugby tackle. He also insisted on the importance of games – especially cricket and polo – to race relations. Physical exercise was essential in the bush; otherwise, as the Nigeria Handbook warned, one was open to all kinds of dangers, including ‘nostalgia, tedium, isolation and over-indulgence of alcohol’. One might add to this list simple thought. What on earth entitled these young men to rule over so many millions? Sudan officers apparently could ‘laugh’ at themselves ‘from a position of supreme self-confidence’, according to one of their number, but there is little sign that this degree of awareness ever afflicted Milne and the rest. Perhaps that was just as well. It may also, however, have contributed to their own downfall. Most even marginally self-critical colonial hands confessed to the sin of arrogance. That was part of the ‘caste’ thing. It also separated these people from the bulk of British society – which explains much of the unfair fun we have at their expense today. It was difficult for ordinary Britons to feel solid with these types. Thirdly, there is a lack of imagination apparent in most of this class of men, which clearly made it difficult for them to foresee and adapt. Milne first realised the game was up – that they did not have 50 years ahead of them to complete the job of ‘preparing’ their natives for self-government – ‘about 1953’. That’s a little bit late. A more critical education might have sowed doubts earlier. But then you would not have had the esprit. Kwasi Kwarteng’s more recent Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2011) adds an important gloss to this. It seems to have been written as a riposte to Niall Ferguson’s claim that it was these men

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who ‘made the modern world’ (the subtitle of his Empire, 2004); in other words, were responsible for spreading the benefits of liberalism and capitalism worldwide. Kwarteng shows that they could not have done. The mistake, he thinks, is to believe that the British ever wanted to spread freedom (of any kind). ‘The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twentyfirst-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics.’ (There’s the dig at Ferguson.) In fact it was not the prelude to anything at all – unless it’s the chaos and confusion that came to succeed it in many places, like Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria, to take five of Kwarteng’s six case histories. (The other is Hong Kong.) That chaos arose from the fact that Britain never had any consistent policy for running her Empire: liberal, dictatorial, or anything else. It was all left to the ‘man on the spot’ – men like Milne – with ‘very little supervision and without any real central philosophy’. Local governors did roughly as they liked. ‘Always in the British Empire, it was the individual that mattered.’ This is Kwarteng’s Big Idea, and it’s a highly thought-provoking one. If you want to understand British imperial history over the past couple of hundred years, beyond simply knowing, lauding or condemning it, it offers a novel and promising approach. The novelty lies less in the idea itself – the agency of ‘men on the spot’ has always featured in imperial histories – than in the way Kwarteng brings it to the front of the stage. This may be because of his own (vicarious) colonial experience: his father came from the Gold Coast, before it became Ghana. There the level of colonial rule that actually impinged on its subjects was that of the local officials: district officers (and their junior ranks) up to governor. But he has a second source of insight. Unusually for boys of African origin – though not uniquely, and probably more commonly today – he was educated at a public school and one of England’s older universities: Eton and Trinity College Cambridge, no less. So he is intimately acquainted with the values those institutions imbued then, and may not have changed very much since: hierarchy (Kwarteng has a very fine sense of the pecking-order of public schools, for example, with Eton at the top, naturally), paternalism, snobbery, and what he calls ‘anarchic individualism’. That last was the key to the whole governing process. It is well known that most public schools undervalued intellectual pursuits. They existed to instil – or to draw out – ‘character’ in their pupils. (Hence the importance of games.) Then they set them loose to govern lesser breeds – at home, as well as abroad. The idea was that the character traits learned on the playing fields of Eton would automatically make for good governing choices. Wind them up – picture a huge key sticking out of the back of the scrum – and set them down in India, or Africa, or wherever. Their initiative and enterprise, allied with the vocation to ‘serve’, incorruptibility, and the pragmatism that would be forced

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on them by their situations, would ensure that things went OK. Outside interference – from the Colonial or India Offices, government, parliament or the British people they were supposed to answer to ultimately – would only risk upsetting that. This had two broad implications. The first was that these people’s ideas of governance were almost entirely derived from what they had learned, and even experienced, in these very odd educational institutions. What they had learned mainly came from the Greek and Roman classics, beyond which their political education had never much developed. It was there that they picked up the notion that the ideal form of government was aristocracy, or ‘the rule of the best’. Living among so many modern aristocrats themselves will have boosted this. So did the rigidly hierarchical structures of the schools themselves. It was hard for them to escape from this narrow conditioning, though a few mavericks did. Remember that they lived in their schools, and so were subjected to this conditioning 24 hours a day. That gave them the natural empathy that David Cannadine writes about in his Ornamentalism (OUP, 2001) with the aristocratic elites they discovered in the colonies they were sent out to rule, and vice-versa. (Many of the latter sent their own children to English public schools.) It certainly gave them no feeling for democracy; or, in this earlier period, for economic liberalism. This is why they could not be expected to further ‘freedom’ in their colonies, in a Western sense. That was almost the last thing in their minds. It is this that partly explains the common colonial policy of the time of bolstering the ‘natural leaders’ already in place in Britain’s new colonies: chiefs, princes, emirs and the like. In Milne’s Nigeria this became dignified with the name ‘indirect rule’. Elites are not always unprogressive, and there are good arguments for keeping them in place to ease transitions: Kwarteng blames much of the subsequent turbulence of Burma on the fact that the native royal family was ousted there; but the effect was usually political stagnation. It also lay at the root of a number of particular decisions that were to prove disastrous in the post-colonial period: chief among them the imposition of a Hindu princely house on the predominantly Muslim state of Kashmir, which then plumped for India when the choice came between that and Pakistan in 1947; and the decision to place Iraq under a Hashemite king (and not even one of its own) in 1921. For good or ill, it is difficult to think of a colonial policy, or practice, less conducive to ‘modernisation’ than this. Its second broad effect was inconsistency. Hence much of the postindependence confusion. Even the ‘indirect’ policy was not implemented all over, or at all times. Burma is one example. It could have become a ‘native princedom’ – ‘advised’ by a British agent – like so many others in India; had it not been (Kwarteng claims) for the decision of one man: not this time a

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‘man on the spot’ – most of whom were against outright annexation – but the Secretary of State for India in Whitehall, Lord Randolph Churchill. Yet again, ‘the individual temper, character and interests of the people in charge determined policy [. . .] There simply was no master plan.’ Another place where individual decisions were crucial was Hong Kong, where a form of democracy might have been introduced much sooner than it was (in the dying stages) had one particular governor not been replaced by another in 1947. Instead Hong Kong chose the path of free market fundamentalism; attributed here to another powerful individual, John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of the colony in the 1960s. In the end that could have been a blessing, in realpolitik terms. Democracy might have proved an awkward stumbling-block when Hong Kong reverted to China (as it was bound to) in 1997. Luckily, ‘British civil servants were even more “Chinese” in their philosophy of government than the Chinese themselves.’ That eased the transition, from one colonial status to another. In this connection, Kwarteng is scathing about Margaret Thatcher and Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor, for not comprehending this; and Patten in particular – ‘among the least qualified graduates of Balliol College, Oxford ever to hold office in the British Empire’ – for his foolish belief that the spread of liberal democracy had been the Empire’s raison d’eˆtre in the past. Of course it was not. Kwasi Kwarteng is (or was at the time of writing) a Conservative MP. He is tipped in some quarters to become the first black member of a Tory cabinet. If so he will have had to live down some of this book: its criticisms of Thatcher, Patten and Michael Gove’s favourite historian (Ferguson), for example, and its general lack of enthusiasm for the old British Empire. If he does achieve that eminence, however, let us hope it is as Foreign Secretary. On the basis of this insightful book, and with his understanding of Britain’s true legacy in the world, I would trust him in that role more than most foreign ministers of the past 50 years, Conservative or Labour.

CHAPTER 4 SCIENCE IN AFRICA

A popular view of British imperial rule is that it invariably involved imposing ‘Western’ ways on colonial subjects, or at least trying to. But this was not always so, for a number of reasons. The chief one was simple lack of means, for an empire run on a shoestring. Another was the imperialists’ fear of provoking dangerous conservative reactions among the ‘natives’, making them more difficult to ‘hold down’. A third, however, was a developing sense of empathy with indigenous ways of doing things as the imperialists got to know them better. This was even true of government scientific advisers, whom one might expect to be particularly confident of the superiority of their ‘Western’ ways, in view of the objectivity claimed for science, and the demonstrable advances it had contributed to in Europe and America; but who in fact could be some of the least arrogant ‘modernisers’ in colonial situations. This may have been because they were scientists – honest empiricists, that is – before they were imperialists. A book by Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870–1950 (University of Chicago Press, 2011), exemplifies this. Tilley challenges the common notion that ‘science’ was always the mere creature of colonialism, trapped within the dominant imperial ‘discourse’ of its time, and so distorted and directed to serve governing, economic and racial ends. This may have been what governments and exploiters wanted of the scientists. But the latter did not always deliver; and could occasionally be actually subversive of the whole imperial idea. * At the centre of Tilley’s study is the great quasi-official ‘survey’ that was undertaken of sub-Saharan Africa (not just British) between 1929 and 1939, chaired by Malcolm (later first baron) Hailey, who was chosen because he had imperial experience, but in India, not Africa, so he could shed a fairly fresh eye on it; and whose findings were published as one huge volume, An African

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Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, together with a spin-off, Science in Africa: A Review of Scientific Research relating to Tropical and Southern Africa, both in 1938. The British Colonial Office’s attitude toward this enterprise was initially wary. ‘The whole scheme wants watching carefully, not to say suspiciously’, wrote one official in 1930. It could, warned another, ‘prove a thorn in the side of the CO’. The department was in an awkward position. It needed greater and more reliable information about Africa to help it rule and (in particular) ‘develop’ the continent. Poor local knowledge, and you could easily come a cropper. That’s why the Colonial Office co-operated with Hailey. But it felt it could not trust the informationgatherers to go along with this. When an early draft of Science in Africa was submitted in 1935, for example, it seemed ‘very poor stuff’ to the assistant under-secretary charged with liaising with the survey, mainly on account of the ‘misleading’ inferences for ‘policy’ he felt could be drawn from it. That was the problem. Scientists were not always willing to be ‘tools of empire’ (the title of a book on this by Daniel Headrick).1 Some of them could be downright awkward. This was especially so on the ‘development’ front. At that time ‘development’ was seen (writes Tilley) as ‘synonymous with the task of exploiting natural resources’, both for Britain’s and – it was claimed – the African’s benefit; presumably through large-scale production on European lines. Agronomists and geographers were put on to this. Their findings, however, hardly helped. One of them wondered why on earth the Africans should want to ‘change their methods of growing their foodstuffs’, when ‘they are able to produce all the food they require’ in their own ways. Most regarded large-scale production methods for the export market – what the government, capitalists and settlers most desired – as directly inimical to native welfare. One influence on this was the revelations of horrendous atrocities in the Congo Free State in the 1900s, which were widely blamed on the large-scale plantation method of agriculture practised there – not just wickedness; and had the Colonial Office obstructing Lord Lever’s plans to introduce palm-oil plantations into Nigeria, for example, long before the scientists came along. Western methods could also be counter-productive in strictly agricultural terms. A Northern Rhodesian expert in 1938 reckoned that, contrary to local settler opinion, which blamed it on the Africans, ‘erosion was almost invariably due primarily not to the native but to the European who had introduced tillage in certain areas and had encouraged the production of economic crops’. Science in Africa thought these methods were hardly ‘worthy to be designated farming’ at all, but better termed ‘soil exploitation’. Nearly all the scientists, when they came to study them, found that African methods were superior: more flexible, better adapted to local

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ecologies, even more ‘progressive’; which was of course the last word the more racist colonialists wanted to associate with the ‘native’. They had to recognise, Science in Africa concluded, that ‘the Africans still know more about it than we’. Some humility was called for. Tilley calls this a ‘counter-colonial ecology’. It was also, in its implications, anti-capitalist. When the medicos stepped ashore they found the same thing. Coming to Africa puffed up with the benefits their exalted science could convey to the Africans, and with a highly condescending view of indigenous therapies – ‘witch-doctors’ and the like – many of them nonetheless changed their tunes as they came to see how well those therapies worked in local conditions. Stung by a reference to African ‘quacks’ in an early draft of Science in Africa, Tanganyika’s medical director protested that ‘native practitioners are not “quacks” to their own people: and western medicine still has much to learn about the treatment of [disease] to arrogate to ourselves an exalted position in connection with its cure’. The ‘quack’ slur was edited out; and Science in Africa concluded instead with the observation that ‘Europeans may have something to learn [from Africa], as well as to teach’. That still seems a bit grudging. Apparently they learned a great deal – stuff that was useful in European conditions as well as in African; although it is Tilley’s contention that neither the native healers nor the many highly-qualified African ‘assistants’ who interceded between them and the researchers have been given proper credit for this, because of ‘the “machinery of knowledge” that connected territories to the metropole’. (In other words, it was Europeans who wrote it up.) The most valuable medical lesson drawn from Africa and then taken back to Europe was probably the importance of ‘ecology’ (the wider physical environment) for the understanding, control and treatment of diseases. That was another way in which conventional science, far from being imposed on Africa ‘imperially’, could be crucially modified by its colonial African experience. Central to this ‘ecological’ way of thinking was the new discipline of anthropology, which sought to explain the human and social environment in which agriculture, medicine and the rest operated. Early on anthropology was the science the Colonial establishment trusted least. They already knew ‘their’ natives. No ivory-tower academic with a foreign name (Bronisław Malinowski was the most prominent of them) could teach them anything. They had little interest, said the Colonial Office, when asked by anthropologists for access to colonial governors, in ‘having our officers delivered to be prey of wild enthusiasts’. Philip Mitchell of Tanganyika was one of those enthusiasts’ most colourful critics. If an inhabitant of a South Sea Island feels obliged on some ceremonial occasion to eat his grandmother, the anthropologist is attracted to

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examine and explain the ancient custom which caused him to do so: the practical man, on the other hand, tends to take more interest in the grandmother. The one calls it aviophagy and the other murder: it depends on the point of view.2 (‘Aviophagy’ isn’t in the OED. He probably made it up.) The Colonial Office’s most serious objection, however, was to what it saw as the anthropologists’ agenda not only to try to understand native cultures and systems, which was fair enough, but also – because of the greater respect for them this brought – to preserve them, as ‘museum specimens’. That of course would be fatal to ‘development’ of any kind – political, ‘human rights’, or market-driven. It was also, however, a problem for the other side. Few of the graduates of Fourah Bay College (in Sierra Leone, founded to impart Western education to Africans long before the anthropologists came along) were likely to warm to an approach that implied that they never should have left their villages. Even Africans who took up anthropology themselves (Jomo Kenyatta is the most famous one) resented the fact that it was generally a case of Europeans looking at ‘primitive’ peoples – looking ‘down’ on them, therefore – and never the other way around. Modjaben Dowuana, later one of the first African administrators on the Gold Coast, suggested in 1934 that it might be a good idea if some African students could be trained in anthropology, specifically to ‘study the white peoples, especially the English, their customs and institutions, and interpret them to the world’. Touche´. In later postcolonial historiography it became commonplace to regard the anthropologists as colonial collaborators pure and simple: tainted by the cosy relationship they needed to cultivate with suspicious colonial officials (in order to be enabled to study ‘their’ natives); and by the part they were supposed to have played in bolstering the essentially conservative and controlling policy of ‘indirect rule’. There was also thought to be more than a whiff of ‘racism’ about them. You can of course respect alien cultures at the same time as believing that ineradicable racial differences determine them. (That way apartheid lies.) Here modern anthropology may not yet have lived down its early association with measuring skulls. Skull-measuring was still done; but usually now by eugenicists, who were a separate category. They were also a relatively small and diminishing one. In Tilley’s book their most prominent representative is Dr Henry Laing Gordon, an amateur psychologist and an early champion of ‘IQ’ testing, who claimed to have discovered that only Africans subjected to ‘some kind of European education’ exhibited ‘the mental affliction known as dementia praecox’, or schizophrenia; which of course was convenient for those who thought they should not be educated at all. These included most of the white

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settler community of British east-central Africa; which as it happens was the tribe Gordon came from. In Britain however his methodology and conclusions were roundly rejected by most other scientists, including even prominent members of the British Eugenics Society. More generally, it appears that establishing the racial inferiority of the African played no part in any officially-sponsored science in the inter-war years; with the Colonial Office pointedly refusing funding to a Kenyan proposal to institute research into African ‘mental capacity’ and ‘backwardness’, for example, in 1934. By then this sort of ‘pseudo-science’ was coming to be generally associated with Nazi Germany and segregationist America; and probably defiled by those associations. When race was discussed at all in colonial and scientific circles in Britain, it was generally in terms of race prejudice: ‘the burning problem of world politics’, as Malinowski called it; which of course put a totally different angle on it. If the Colonial Office ever had been tempted to embrace ‘scientific racism’, the anthropologists would soon have come down on them. At the First International Conference of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, held in 1933, the Australian anatomist and anthropologist Grafton Elliot Smith expressed what seems to have been the consensus view, when he claimed that what he called the ‘Aryan fallacy’ (by which he meant the whole gamut of racial deterministic ideas) came ‘into flagrant conflict with the generally recognised teaching of anthropological science’. That teaching was, essentially, that differences between people and peoples (individuals and ‘races’, that is) were rooted in culture, not biology. The purpose of anthropology was to tease out some of these cultural effects, which were often hidden (or ‘latent’), which was why Europeans often derided them as merely ‘primitive’. (Africans, as several anthropologists pointed out, regarded European customs in much the same way: ‘just mad’. By the end of their studies some western scientists had come to agree with them.) What colonial governments then did with this knowledge was up to them. It did not follow that cultural institutions that had been shown to have latent functions must be preserved. Mitchell’s rhetorical grandmother had claims too. By the 1930s anthropology had taken on board the point that cultures were always changing, through contact with changing environments and with other cultures, including (in these African cases) imperial. There was no way of stopping ‘progress’ in this sense. This incidentally applied as much to what Malinowski called the ‘detribalized tropical European’ as to the African. (He thought it might explain ‘the pathological forms of Kenya lunacy’, as well as the ‘ordinary idiocy of the average Colonial administrator.’) The trick was to try to manage the transition, so as to ease its more brutal effects. This required a sympathetic understanding not only of the original, threatened cultures, but also of the interfaces between the two (or more) cultures, which were usually

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complex, and often created brand new cultures (or syntheses). That was the line British anthropologists increasingly pursued in the inter-war years: what Malinowski called the ‘anthropology of culture change’. There can be no doubt that it was an ‘imperialist’ line in one essential respect. ‘Managing’ culture change required authority over it. African ‘big men’, Arab slave-raiders, European capitalists and white settlers wouldn’t do it; and missionaries didn’t have the means to. It is for this kind of reason, incidentally, that the most passionate and responsible British critics of the Empire at this time were rarely out-and-out anti-imperialists. They knew that non-imperialism was not an alternative. If you had no political imperialism, or, alternatively, no system of international safeguards, you would find some other more ‘informal’ kind of imperialism – most likely at this time international capitalism – running roughshod. Malinowski was horrified by this prospect: ‘one of the greatest crises in human history’, he called it; ‘the westernization of the world’. He was anticipating ‘globalisation’ here, of course. He went on: the ‘whole trend of modern economic development was to stimulate increased production and consumption. The assumption underlying present economic conditions was that the greater the volume of trade, the better it was for humanity.’ (Doesn’t this sound familiar?) In this situation, ‘it was for the anthropologist to see [. . .] that the [native] was not forced to labour on products he did not wish to produce so that he might satisfy needs that he did not wish to satisfy’; and, in addition, to preserve or adapt what was best in his or her culture along the way. But ‘practical anthropology’, as he called it, could only achieve that on the back of an enlightened imperialism. Which is what links them together; though ideally with empire as the ‘tool’ of science in this instance, rather than vice-versa. As things stood, however, British imperialism was not the servant of an enlightened anthropology, and never likely to be. Hence the anthropologists’ scathing criticisms of it: of the ‘travesty of European rule’ it represented; the ‘misguided actions’ of its ‘impatient, revolutionary white men’, with their ‘unquestioning belief in the inherent superiority’ of their own social customs; their destruction of indigenous political structures that had been ‘profoundly democratic’, though the stupid white men had not realised this; and of their ignorant contempt for the Africans’ superior – more ecologically sensitive – practices in so many fields. This was hardly comforting to imperialists. It may have borne out their initial mistrust. They had taken the anthropologists on board originally in order to ‘grease the wheels of empire’, as Tilley puts it; only for them to ‘use their tools to chip away at it once on the inside’. It is this that establishes anthropology’s anti-imperial credentials. *

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Africa as a Living Laboratory is a revelatory book. It will surprise some readers, who may be expecting from the title yet another stricture on the way Britain ‘used’ her colonies and their peoples simply as a research facility for their own imperial purposes – the word ‘laboratory’ conjures up images of guinea-pigs, or even rats, being poked about (or worse) by a superior species in white coats – only to find that it turns out to be not at all like that. Tilley is far too aware of the nuances, ambivalences, weaknesses, and even basic contradictions of British imperialism to be seduced by such foolish simplifications. As she is at pains to emphasise repeatedly, she is not defending imperialism (what a bore it is that one has to give such assurances every time one offers up any kind of revisionist account of it!); the effect of her analysis, however, is to provide a much more reliable basis for any critique of it that others might want to make. The relative non-racism of colonial agents in Africa is one example; or rather, the variety of attitudes towards ‘race’ that were found there. Usually these depended on what the colonialists were doing in Africa, precisely, and what they wanted from the Africans. This explains why the white settlers (including Dr Gordon) were the most racist of the lot. ‘Culture change’ – their own ‘detribalisation’ – may have played a part in that. The culture they had come from originally (assuming that was Britain) was less racist, or less deeply so; and the scientific community least of all. That’s because the scientific discourse that mainly governed them had not been overlaid or undermined by any ‘imperialist’ one. Even when they brought preconceptions with them from Europe, it enabled them to modify these when they conflicted with their observations and experiments on the ground. Tilley admits (again, it is strange that these days one has to ‘admit’ it) that she is a ‘defender of “science”’; the scientific method, that is, rather than all the weird conclusions (like Gordon’s) that ‘bad’ science sometimes throws up. The same method informs her own research: rigorously empirical, in contrast with the airily ‘theoretical’ approaches that mar so much recent work in this area. (‘Many a generalisation would have been avoided,’ she quotes an 1890s geographer as saying, ‘had political thinkers been trained in knowledge of the earth they live in’. That could apply to some recent ‘post-colonial’ studies too.) In general, science in Africa pursued its own agendas, irrespective of the purposes to which the colonial authorities (not to mention the settlers) wanted it put. The results were as likely to be subversive of colonial rule as supportive of it; or, at least, of some of its methods: ‘development’, Europeanisation, settlement, and the rest. (Of course, it can still be argued that pulling back in these areas made it easier for Britain to hold on.) One of her findings that Tilley thinks will most surprise modern critics is that many of these subversive ideas and policies, which the critics attribute to

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the post-colonial reaction, in fact originated far back in colonial times, and from ‘within the epicentres of colonial and metropolitan control’. Not only that: they did not always survive the dismantling of that control. African governments often abandoned them. Tilley has her own explanation for this; which is that Africans inevitably associated the new ‘ecological’ methods, for example, with the imperial structures that had imposed them in the inter-war years, when Africans had been allowed almost no voice in the process. They did not feel they ‘owned’ them. That is yet another argument against even trying to do ‘good’ at the point of an imperial sword. But there is also another way of looking at it. Removing the Empire’s control also took away its protection. That was not effective everywhere: in colonies with large settler populations, for example; but it had the potential to be. Without this, the new, weak successor states were laid open to the full blast of global market forces. Tilley makes a telling comparison between a famous British dispatch of 1945 on ‘Colonial Development and Welfare’, and a report on the first meeting of the new World Bank the following year. The word ‘welfare’ is significant in the former; as was its emphasis on ‘broad and interdisciplinary scientific research’ – exactly the approach that had been honed in the inter-war years. By contrast, ‘the World Bank meeting stressed economic and financial knowledge and looked no further’. That was what Malinowski and many others of the ‘experts’ sent out to Africa in the 1920s and 1930s had warned of. Take away the British Empire and the economists would flood in. The result was not the end of imperialism, but the replacement of one sort by another. Those who believe that imperialism ‘made’ – or messed up – the modern world need to be aware of the differences between the two. And also, of how vulnerable the British kind was; in the face of not only rivals and rebels, but also the critical doubts of many of its own scientists, who danced to other ‘discourses’ than the imperial one.

CHAPTER 5 CANNABIS AND EMPIRE

The cultural relationship between British imperial rule and narcotic drugs exemplifies some of imperialism’s ambivalences. The story is well told in James Mills’s Cannabis Britannica. Empire, Trade and Prohibition 1800– 1928 (OUP, 2003). Until comparatively recently drugs taken for recreational purposes were mainly associated with the ‘Orient’. They only appeared in Europe among ‘orientals’ living there, some adventurous and transgressive literati, and hidden in patent medicines and tonics. In Asia and Africa, however, their use was fairly widespread. They thus became part of the imperial discourse of the time, helping to define the ‘other’ in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason why drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the United States from the 1960s on. They threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In particular, they were thought to undermine self-control, which is an essential prerequisite, of course, for controlling others. By most accounts cannabis and its variants (hashish, marijuana, bhang, ganja, charas) are milder drugs than opium and cocaine, with fewer undesirable side-effects, like addiction. They probably cause less personal and social damage than either alcohol or tobacco, which were the West’s equivalent to these other drugs, and – to be fair to many Westerners – acknowledged as such by them. (Several critics of Oriental drug use cautioned against any British feeling of superiority in this regard. ‘Where is such habitual temperance?’ asked Whitelaw Ainslie in 1835. ‘In England? No!’) Despite this, cannabis had a fearsome reputation, equivalent to that of opium. William Caine, an 1890s abolitionist MP, claimed it was ‘the most horrible intoxicant the world has yet produced’. The Egyptian statesman Mohamed El Guindy called it ‘a terrible menace to the whole world’ in 1924. A moral panic in the 1920s and 1930s, mainly in the United States but with occasional reverberations in Britain, portrayed it as creating literal

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monsters. The popular image of cannabis from the 1880s onwards usually featured its consumption in smoke-infested ‘dens’, usually by villainouslooking Arabs or Chinese, but sometimes – horror of horrors – by English men and women who had been lured into them. The women were generally portrayed semi-naked and with legs akimbo: a horrifying picture of lack of self-control where it mattered most. That was in the tabloid press of the day (or its equivalent). For the better-educated the association of hashish with the eleventh- and twelfth-century Muslim cult of the assassins (‘hashashin’) may have left a mark. Assassins were supposed to have imbibed the drug, for moral strength, before going out on their killing sprees. (That is almost certainly a myth.) Hashish fulfilled the same function in nineteenth-century India, according to Caine: ‘When an Indian wants to commit some horrible crime, such as murder or wife mutilation, he prepares himself for it with two anna’s worth of bhang from a government majoon shop.’ It followed that even if consumers did not take it take it for this deliberate purpose, it could turn them to murder. Indian police reports regularly associated the drug with major crime. It was also thought to induce madness of other kinds. Insane asylums claimed that substantial proportions of their inmates had come to them through this route. You could tell which they were simply by looking at them, wrote Surgeon Hutchinson of the Patna asylum in 1869; the bhang drinkers had ‘a peculiarly leery look which, when once seen, is unmistakable’. Other illeffects attributed to the drug were indolence, violent excitement (it obviously reacted differently on different constitutions), emaciation, stupidity, melancholia, forgetfulness, hallucinations, ‘double consciousness’, brain lesions, ‘running what they call a muck’, coughing ‘until one’s belly bursts’, heart failure, laughing at things that were not funny, sexual debauchery, and – in spite of this – to ‘dry out the genital seed’. No wonder that the nations where cannabis was rife were so corrupt, enervated and politically ‘sick’ (the American Bishop Brent’s description of China in 1923), and needed the clearer-headed Western nations, therefore, to take them in hand. It is clear that the evidential basis for these claims was extremely flawed. Mills does a good job of demolishing the Indian asylum statistics in particular, which were disgraceful by any standard. Many were based on the diagnoses of policemen who had the job of committing the inmates, but who had no expertise in this area, and were usually merely guessing. Often if a patient was known to take cannabis his illness was automatically attributed to that. In other cases they could be put down as imbibers when there was no evidence that they were. It was an easy way to complete the necessary forms. Medical officers did not question them because they fitted their preconceived ideas. The same applies to similar statistics supplied later from Egyptian

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asylums by John Warnock, the head of the Lunacy Department there from 1895 to 1923. Mills does an effective hatchet job on him too. Warnock admitted to a ‘total ignorance of Arabic’, which must have made sensitive diagnosis difficult; diagnosed Egyptian nationalism as ‘an infectious mental disorder’; and took the denial of hashish use by his patients as prima facie evidence of ‘weak-mindedness’ caused by the drug. That was one way of boosting the figures. Links between cannabis and crime were similarly almost never founded on expert or first-hand knowledge. ‘I have never had experience of such a case’, confessed one Indian police chief who had asserted such a connection in the 1890s; ‘I only state what I have heard.’ A Bengal magistrate who made the bold claim that ‘cases of homicidal frenzy’ under the influence of cannabis were ‘innumerable’, later, when quizzed on this, admitted that he had never actually come across one in his court; ‘my remark [...] is merely based on newspapers’. Such is the power of prejudice. At the same time as this a mass of contrary evidence was appearing that suggested that cannabis was relatively harmless, and might even be beneficial. This may, of course, have been no more reliable. Mills is in fact quite properly even-handed in raising questions about the motives and methods of those on all sides of the argument, especially those beholden to the government of India, who included the celebrated William O’Shaughnessy, the most enthusiastic of the early Indian champions of cannabis, whom he suspects of simply looking for a way to make a name for himself. One convenient finding for the Indian government was that cannabis use enabled coolies on tea plantations, and also ‘palki-bearers, porters, and postal runners’, to work harder and longer for their European masters. It was also coming to be prescribed – following Indian and other precedents – as a medicine. Early psychiatrists took to it as a treatment for – rather than a cause of – insanity. In 1883 William Strange claimed to have cured a woman of the desperate urge to kill her children by dosing her with it three times a day for a fortnight. It was also found useful in physical cases. Administered in small doses daily, reported George Playfair in 1833, quoting an Indian Materia Medica, it could have remarkable effects in as little as two months: Strength and intelligence will have become increased and every propensity of youth restored; the eye sight is cleared, and all eruptions of the skin removed; it will prove an exemption from convulsions and debility and preserve the bowels at all times in a state of order. It will likewise give an additional zest for food. Back in Britain doctors experimented with it to ease menstrual and labour pains; to prevent miscarriages and premature births, or, alternatively, to

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induce delivery; to cure insomnia, migraine, fevers, rheumatism, rabies, tetanus, cholera, piles, diarrhoea, infantile convulsions, delerium tremens, hydrophobia, tightening of the muscles, and sores of the scrotum; as a sedative, painkiller and ’nervine tonic’; and – if all else failed – to ‘strew the path to the tomb with flowers’ (ease the trauma of death). Students trying it on themselves (in the interests of science) found that their bodies ‘glowed’. It was recommended as an aphrodisiac (for some Victorians, of course, that may have been a point against it), and a cure for premature ejaculation. It also caused hens to lay more eggs. (So much for the dried-up seeds.) Queen Victoria’s physician J Russell Reynolds was an enthusiast for it. (Mills thinks however that he probably did not administer it to the Queen.) While one set of experts was castigating cannabis as a scourge of civilisation, therefore, another was hailing it as the ‘wonder drug’. For non-experts this must have been all very confusing. The Empire’s role in this is complex. It was where the British first came across cannabis as a significant drug, and conducted most of their early scientific experiments with it. This was at a time when it seemed not to threaten (if it was a threat) Britain herself. That may have been an aid to objectivity. On the other hand imperial interests were involved. An early one was the importance of hemp – the source not only of cannabis but also of fibres – to Britain’s maritime interests as material for the manufacture of ropes and sails. But that was different: hemp cannot be cultivated in the same way for both purposes. The main benefit Britain gained from the drug was through the taxes the East India Company, and later the Government of India, levied on its cultivation and sale. This did connect it to crime, of course, through smuggling. Another imperial use of cannabis could have been to keep the natives down, or happy, which comes to much the same thing; but there is little plain evidence for this. (Mills does not mention it.) However, it could be said that the British did not have the same incentive for restriction in the Empire as they did – with regard to alcohol – in Britain, where the spectre of imminent democracy made a sober and rational electorate a desideratum. In the colonies this was not a consideration. So long as cannabis did not incite anti-social conduct it could be tolerated. And most imperial doctors, and the important Indian Hemp Drugs Commission of 1893– 4, were reassuring as to that. Mills is full of praise for the latter, whose report remains, he says, ‘one of the most complex surveys of a cannabis consuming society to this day’. It was thorough, travelling throughout India and producing eight thick volumes of evidence; sensitive to the cultural and economic context of cannabis consumption in India, and its several variations (many sections of Indian society abjured it altogether); and properly sceptical of the anti-cannabis lobby’s wilder claims. It was the 1893– 4 Commission, in fact, that first

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nailed those dreadful asylum statistics. Mills says it was ‘staggered by its own findings’ on this. Its philosophical position was the classic John Stuart Mill one, that anything that did not harm others should be allowed. Overall it gave hemp drugs an almost clean bill of health in this respect. In particular, it found no evidence of a link between moderate use of cannabis and insanity, and absolved it from any responsibility at all for crime. This was the work of active imperialists, all of them either direct employees of the (British) Indian government, or trusted native Indians. Interestingly, two of the latter (out of three) were the only members who dissented from the report. Both insisted that hemp drugs were more harmful than their European colleagues claimed, and wanted them restricted or banned. One even tried to rehabilitate the asylum figures. He was shot down by the majority, who pointed out that he had been absent, through illness, from one of the Commissioners’ major fact-finding tours of India, and so was less informed than the rest. It is significant, however, that this was where the main opposition to cannabis came from. It was part of a critique of British imperial rule. Mills suggests that the same applied back in England, where opposition to the government’s lax policy on drugs in the Empire was tied up with criticism of British imperial policy more generally. The same situation was repeated later, when, at a session of the new League of Nations Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium and Other Dangerous Drugs in 1924, the initiative for adding cannabis to this category came from the delegate of the newly (partly) decolonised state of Egypt, Mohamed El Guindy. This is a well-known story – it is covered in William McAllister’s Drug Diplomacy in the 20th Century (Routledge, 1999), for example – but is worth repeating. El Guindy has been quoted on the ‘menace’ of hashish already. His reason for raising the matter here was that if opium were eradicated, which was the way the signs seemed to be pointing, its users would turn to cannabis as a substitute, which would be no improvement as it was just as harmful: a ‘scourge’, as he put it, ‘which reduces man to the level of the brute and deprives him of health and reason, self-control and honour’. Mills suggests that this opinion may have been informed by the ridiculous Warnock’s work. But there was an anti-imperialist attitude implied here too. ‘I know the mentality of Oriental peoples’, said El Guindy; ‘and I am afraid that it will be said that the question was not dealt with because it did not affect the safety of Europeans’. That clearly moved other anti-imperial delegates, irrespective of the strict merits of the cannabis case. ‘While I know next to nothing about the subject,’ said the Chinese representative, revealingly, ‘[...] I wish to assure the Egyptian delegate that it can count on us to do all we can to support its efforts.’ The US delegate – no less ill-informed – also welcomed this chance to have a dig at the imperial Brits. This was an

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important stage in the eventual implementation of strict – often draconian – worldwide laws against cannabis, starting so far as Britain was concerned with its earliest classification as a ‘poison’ in that same year, and then the first legislation restricting its sale (the ‘Coca Leaves and Indian Hemp Regulations’) in 1928. Mills suggests the British government agreed to this partly to divert critical international attention away from its record on opium. (Before then, incidentally, cannabis had been banned for troops in the World War I, presumably because it was thought it would undermine their fighting qualities; though this does not tally with the ‘assassin’ precedent, or even the experience of most American soldiers, apparently, in the Vietnam War.) If cannabis is relatively harmless, it was unlucky to have been caught up in these extraneous debates. Part of its problem was its low profile in Britain at this time. This was why the 1928 law was passed so easily. There were some little press-inspired scares in the 1920s, one involving a report that Ogden’s ‘St Julien’ cigarettes were being laced with the stuff; but nothing to compare with the contemporary furore over ‘dope’ in the United States. This meant that the domestic discussion of it was overshadowed by two other substances that were much better known about: alcohol and opium. Cannabis’s main opponents in Britain were temperance reformers, who objected to any artificial stimulant, however mild, on moral and social grounds (most of them were a rather puritanical brand of Christian); and the anti-opium lobby, brought into being by the ‘Opium Wars’ of the 1830s to 1850s, when Britain had forced Indian opium on an unwilling Chinese government at the point of a sword; who tended to confuse the two drugs. Most opinions were based on massive domestic ignorance of cannabis per se. In the colonies, by contrast, where cannabis was known, studies of it (like in 1893– 4) were usually more thorough, balanced and tolerant, and probably therefore reliable. Present-day cannabis champions will find much to admire here. The problem was that these researches were also tarred with the suspicion that a secret imperialist agenda lay behind them, or a patronising one at best. Why should self-control be less important for the East than for the West? That was an insufferable inference, for the sort of colonial nationalists whose main objection to imperialism was that it prevented their becoming Westernised too. Cannabis’s association with Europe’s image of Asia and Africa as reactionary, stagnant and sunk in torpor made it difficult to defend by those who desperately wished to show how wrong that image was. That the original demonisation of cannabis in Britain was based on ignorance and error – ‘little more,’ writes Mills, ‘than innuendo and suspicion’ – seems indisputable. This does not of course mean that a better case against cannabis could not be made. Mills never claims it does. He does however think that all this has a significant present-day relevance, because the

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original errors – those asylum statistics, for one – are still percolating dimly through. The Blair government, for example, ‘defended its policy using the assumption that its predecessors had good reasons for arriving at their assessments of cannabis and that their judgements were based on solid ground’, which of course is not so. ‘History was at the heart of policy’. That may be too large a claim. But by reminding us how prejudice can trump reason, and ignorance override knowledge, this particular history may be salutary in the current cannabis debate. Mills promises us a second volume shortly, taking the story on from 1928 to the present day. That will be welcome, especially if it trawls rather more broadly for evidence than this book does: in popular literature, for example, and for other parts of the Empire than India. (Southern Africa and the West Indies, both important markets, get almost no mention here.) It will be interesting then to see whether the Empire plays as important yet ambivalent a role in the history of cannabis legislation in Britain after 1928 as it clearly did before then. It is curious to see cannabis liberals on the same side as imperialists, and hardliners in bed with anti-colonialists, in this earlier period. But one can see how it could have happened.

CHAPTER 6 THE WAR OF 1812

The British attitude to war, and to their fighting forces, has always been ambivalent. Nineteenth-century liberals prided themselves on having outgrown ‘militarism’. A general belief was that it was only kept alive by the upper classes of society: Cobden implied in order to give them something to do. Enlisted men were usually looked down on in their local working-class communities. People were proud of their avoidance of European wars for most of the period between 1815 and 1914, with the only significant exception having been fought miles away, in the Crimea: almost out of Europe altogether. But of course this took no account of the dozens of wars Britain was involved in beyond Europe, in defence (as she always liked to portray them) of her commercial or imperial interests. Two of them – if we go back a little, into the later eighteenth century – were with America. The first we all know about – it was the war that secured the colonists’ independence (1775–83). Mark Urban’s Fusiliers: Eight years with the Redcoats in America (Faber, 2007) is about one British regiment’s experiences – the Royal Welch Fusiliers – in that campaign. (Most of them were not Welsh, incidentally.) The second war scarcely anyone in Britain has heard of, and even Americans seem to be rather hazy about it. It ran from 1812 to 1815 (the peace that formally settled it was actually signed on Christmas Eve 1814, but because news took so long to travel then not everyone knew this until April the following year); it was the occasion when British troops burned down the presidential mansion in Washington – the one thing most Americans are aware of; and it ended with the restoration of the status quo ante, which makes it look pretty pointless. In some American history books it is known as the ‘Second War of Independence’, which is nonsense. Britain was not threatening that independence in any serious way – only the United States’ trade, temporarily, and in so far as that was seen to be aiding Britain’s major enemy at that time, which was Napoleon’s France. If it was a war for anyone’s independence, then it was the Canadas’: it started with

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an American invasion of that country – to ‘liberate’ it, naturally. (‘We will conquer but to save’.) So from the point of view of the Canadians, who did not want to be ‘saved’, it was far from pointless. That’s why Jon Latimer, in his 1812. War with America (Belknap Press, 2007), where the ‘but to save’ quote appears, regards it as a British victory on balance. And it is probably why the Americans do not make all that much of it, apart from that sacking of Washington DC, plus the occasional examples of heroism it threw up (some of them mythical), Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British at New Orleans, which was pointless (it was one of those battles fought after the peace treaty), and the fact that it gave rise to what later became the American national anthem (the words, not the tune, which was an old English drinking song). It was originally called The Defence of Fort McHenry (near Baltimore, 14– 15 September 1814); today it’s The Star-Spangled Banner. Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light, What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight, O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say, does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? Well, yes, it did, happily. But there was never any question about that. On the British side, neither of these wars was popular. In the first case this was because so many Britons sympathised with the rebels – even some of the officers who were supposed to be putting them down. In the later case it was because the war was felt to be diverting resources from the much more important struggle Britain saw herself engaged in just then on behalf of the whole world (including the United States) against Napoleon’s imperialism. It was a bit as if – though analogies like this should not be pressed too far – the United States had decided to take advantage of Britain’s involvement in the war against Hitler to attack Canada. (There was, as it happens, a plan for that, secretly drawn up in the 1930s.)1 This will have accounted for much of the bad feeling that was manifested on the British side against the Americans, together with the occasional ‘atrocity’: though these were often exaggerated, and in any case do not even begin to measure up to many of today’s. Soldiering was relatively gentlemanly then. (Houses were emptied of people, for example, before they were bombed.) But there were some (little) ‘massacres’, quite a lot of looting and raping (below), and one or two military and naval tactics the Americans used that were not considered quite cricket. One was ‘torpedos’:

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hulks filled with hidden explosives designed to ‘dispose of us by a wholesale six hundred at a time’, as one indignant naval officer complained. Firsthand acquaintance with the United States also made many British sceptical of the ‘freedom’ thing. ‘American liberty’, wrote one Royal Naval officer in 1813, ‘consists in oppressing the blacks beyond what other nations do [. . .] and working them worse than donkeys. “But you call this a free country, when I can’t shoot my nigger when I like – eh?”’ ‘Holy hypocrites’ was how one British officer characterised them. (All these examples are taken from Latimer.) But disliking a people does not necessarily mean you want to fight them. The Americans were also split. Latimer points out that the Congressional bill authorising the 1812 war gained the smallest majority of votes in both Houses of any war bill in American history. Once that war started, however, many Americans were (like the British) fired up by lurid stories of enemy atrocities, some of them true; and by Britain’s deployment of native American warriors, very largely because of the terror she knew they stimulated among the whites: scalping, and all that. Often the latter would flee, or surrender, simply at the sight or rumour of them. From the American point of view, this – the use of ‘savages’ – was the worst atrocity of all; another way of looking at it, however, is to see the ‘Indians’ using the British to help defend their lands from the far more predatory and equally bloodthirsty colonists. They fought as allies, with Britain promising the ‘Indians’ their own nation, north of the Ohio River, if she won – a useful buffer state, from her point of view. (Because of the war’s stalemate ending that came to nothing.) For similar reasons thousands of African-Americans supported the British in both wars, which Southern slave-owners also resented. In other words: most of the hatreds that accompanied the wars were the results of the wars, and the way they were fought (or perceived to be fought), rather than pre-existing. Americans and British were cousins, after all. * Cousinship however carried other problems. It undermined commitment on both sides. America was never a favourite posting for British troops. ‘Though I must confess I should like to try what stuff I am made of’, Urban quotes one officer writing home in 1774, ‘yet I would rather the trial be with others than these poor fellows of kindred blood.’ Ordinary soldiers and sailors were easily seduced over to the Republican side: by money, the promise of better conditions than in the pretty brutal British Army and Royal Navy (though both these authors think this has been exaggerated), or democratic principle. But this could work the other way, too. The Thirteen Colonies were full of ‘loyalists’ in the 1770s, and still had some left – quite apart from the Native Americans and blacks – in 1812. Several turned coat, or acted as informers

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and spies. Even Americans who were generally happy with their independence from Britain might not feel comfortable about fighting her again. It is quite clear (from other accounts as well as these) that national feeling was fairly weak in these early days of the Republic, with most Americans emphasising their state rather than their federal loyalties: reflected in the reluctance of militias to serve outside their state boundaries (and so chase the Brits into Canada); figures of desertions from the American Regular Army (three times as many as from the British, though of course it was easier for the former to melt away); and in the generally cool feeling that prevailed in the north-eastern states in 1812 towards their hawkish president’s (Madison’s) war policy in toto. New Englanders insisted on retaining their commercial links with their Nova Scotian, New Brunswickian and Que´be´cois neighbours throughout that conflict, for example, and would almost certainly have signed a separate peace with Britain in 1814 if their national leaders had not. Many Americans were happy to sell supplies to their British invaders (on one occasion sleds, when the British advance was held up by snow). ‘They do say it is wrong to supply an innimy and I think so too’, said one American militia officer, no less; ‘but I don’t call that man my innimy who buys what I have to sell, and gives such a genteel price for it. We have worse innimies than you Britishers.’ (This is from Latimer.) That’s one of the drawbacks of being a predominantly commercial people. (The main American slogan in the conflict of 1812, hardly an inspiring one, was ‘Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights’.) So these were messy wars, to put it mildly. Friend and foe were not always clearly demarcated. This in fact was one of the American motives (or pretexts) for the 1812 War: the impressment of Americans into the Royal Navy (hence ‘Sailors’ Rights’), which Madison issued a dodgy dossier on in January 1812. The truth was, however, that nationality was an imprecise thing at that time, and there was a flourishing trade in forged American papers for hapless British sailors: so it was difficult to really tell. These difficulties continued into the war. As one officer observed: ‘the ridiculous mistakes which could occur fighting an army speaking the same language were laughable though serious. Who goes there? – A friend. – To whom?’ (Latimer, again.) There were incidents of ‘friendly fire’. As well as this, there was incompetence on both sides, and quite a lot of sheer cowardice, desertion and treachery, to set against the occasional examples of tactical brilliance and bravery. * All this is covered in these two books, which are very much in the ‘military history’ genre (both authors are enthusiasts, with Regular or Territorial Army backgrounds), and so mostly concentrate on the battles themselves, described in loving detail, illustrated with little battlefield maps (all rectangles and

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broad arrows), and in a wealth of jargon (especially, in Latimer’s book, naval) which non-enthusiasts (like me) may struggle with. (I was inoculated against all things military by my own compulsory service in my school’s ludicrous CCF.) It all reads pretty authentically, however, even to a non-enthusiast; partly because – as is becoming customary now in the genre – neither author romanticises his subject to any great degree. They are both good on the ordinary lives of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century soldiers, and on the boring bits, for example, between battles. They mention (and Latimer has quite a bit about) the many women involved, mostly as wives, seamstresses, cooks, nurses and prostitutes, but a few in trouser roles. (Five women are supposed to have illicitly joined the British and American forces in 1812– 15 as combatants.) Latimer also gives Britain’s native American allies prominent billing. Neither pulls punches. Latimer is particularly gory. Here is one example, from a contemporary memoir of the battle of New Orleans. ‘A few yards behind sat a black man, with all the lower part of his face shot away, his eyes were gone and the bones of his brow all jagged and dripping blood. Near him, in a ditch, lay one of the 43rd, trying to hold in his bowels.’ There is much more in this vein. ‘Oh that the King and President were both here this moment to see the misery their quarrels lead to’, cried one American wife nursing her dreadfully wounded husband; ‘they surely would not go to war without cause that they could give as a reason to God at the last day, for thus destroying the creatures that He hath made in his own image.’ Her husband died. Another’s fiance´ survived the Battle of Lake Erie, but in a terribly mutilated state. He wrote to her offering to release her from their engagement in view of this. She replied that ‘if there was enough of him left to contain his soul, she would marry him’. There was, and she did. There was true female devotion. Many of the soldiers themselves seem scarcely to have deserved this. Urban characterises several of the British officers in the early stages of the Revolutionary war as ‘gamesters and boozers’, and high-ranking idiots, cowards and rogues feature frequently in these narratives, on both sides: though not – as both authors are at pains to point out – typically. The ordinary squaddies come out of most contemporary accounts even worse, though this may be because the main witnesses are their upper-class officers. ‘Figure to yourself the dirtiest and most slovenly looking blackguards you have ever seen, and there you have our army’, wrote an American captain before one battle. ‘They remind me very much of the water street Hogs of Norfolk, well fed and lazy and muddy as the devil’ (Latimer again). The reputation of the British soldier was no better. One Hessian ally in the Revolutionary War thought he was paying his British comrades a compliment

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when he wrote that they had ‘only the vices of cussing, swearing, drinking, whoring, and stealing, and these more so than almost all other people’. Some did not stop at whoring (which incidentally provided great business opportunities for towns where they were billeted); rape seems to have been fairly common too – strictly outlawed by army regulations, and even punishable by death, but perhaps for that reason clearly under-reported, and not always taken seriously. One British officer thought part of the problem was that American girls were ‘so little accustomed to these methods that they don’t bear them with the proper resignation’. (All this is from Urban.) Even in battle British soldiers could be undisciplined; as could the American militiamen. In the latters’ case this was supposed to be compensated by their superior patriotism, but that could run a little thin, especially for example at harvest time. ‘It will never answer to invade a country with militia,’ wrote one Virginian; ‘some will not cross the line – others will not submit to any kind of subordination and, in fact, would rather be at home than courting fame on the embattled field’ (Latimer). So the interesting question – debated much at the time (it was an ideological one, really) – of the comparative virtues of professional regular units (British) as against volunteer militias (American) is not really settled in these books. The professionals were not professional enough (the most professional were serving in Europe), and the volunteers were unreliable. These, then, are notably unheroic accounts of the American wars. Both are written ‘from a British perspective’ (Latimer’s American publisher makes a big deal of this), but they certainly do not flatter the Brits. Neither side could be unreservedly proud of its part in the 1812 affair, especially. * The outcomes of the earlier campaign are pretty obvious. The American victory freed the new Republic from British imperial control, such as that was, and enabled it to carve out an imperial future for itself: westwards at the expense of the Indians, southwards at the expense of the Spanish, French and Mexicans, and northwards – potentially – at the expense of the loyal Canadians. The repercussions of the 1812 war however are harder to assess. It put a stop to the last of these thrusts. The best way of looking at it, therefore, may be as a temporary blip in one of the main trends of US history over the past 200 years, if not the main one, which is American territorial, economic and cultural expansion – or ‘imperialism’, if you like. (It depends on your definition.) That looks like a setback. But it was not how the war was universally regarded in America itself. How it became transformed into that ‘second war of independence’ is intriguing. The sack of Washington DC clearly contributed to it. If you did not know the context, that could appear as a piece of unprovoked aggression.

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(The British saw it as an act of retribution – after all, the Americans had fired the Ontario parliament building just 16 months previously – and of deterrence.) Washington was surrendered with scarcely a fight – this really was shaming – but aside from that, and in the rest of the war, there were enough bright American victories, and examples of individual American bravery, to fuel a heroic view of it if you wanted one; and heroism always looks better in defence of one’s own country than in pursuit of empire. (At any rate, it does to democrats.) The disposition of the two sides encouraged this. How could America be the aggressor, when she was so small (in population), against the British Empire’s might? It also made an American victory, if you could spin one out of all this, so much more terrific, against one of the world’s ‘great powers’ – if you forgot for the moment that this particular great power had other, much bigger, things on its hands just then. So it was worth the effort. And the effort was needed. The United States was neither a strong nor a united nation during the first few years of its existence, as the war of 1812 had painfully revealed. It badly required a new national trope to pull it together. So this one was constructed: of brave free Americans fighting under a single flag to defend their land against the ‘foul footstep’s pollution’ of their old tormentors (The Star-Spangled Banner again). Never mind the history; feel the myth. That myth still of course carries resonances, which must be why The Star-Spangled Banner remains so popular. The idea that American liberties are constantly assailed by enemies and ‘pollution’ from abroad, and require therefore to be defended by military force and courage, is certainly no less potent today than it was in 1812. The flag – the Banner itself – is just as much of an icon; probably even more so now than then. Glaring rockets and bursting bombs still stir many Americans’ blood. (Look almost any night at TV.) American Anglophobia may have waned a little in recent years, thanks to Thatcher and Blair, but was pretty persistent before them, largely because of the 1812 war, claims Latimer (the scars left by that Washington humiliation in 1814 never quite healed), and could well surface again. All this is to be found in Francis Scott Key’s poem; inspired by a minor engagement in the War of 1812, but possibly the most significant thing to come out of that whole unnecessary, confused and undistinguished event. The British have mercifully forgotten it. The Americans have this to remember it by, however distortedly. Only the Canadians have probably got the right angle on it. It was their war for colonial freedom, but fought against American imperialists, and mainly by British redcoats and bluejackets: a fascinating reversal of roles from 1775 – 83.

CHAPTER 7 THE OPIUM WARS

‘The Opium War is a pretty shameful story,’ wrote Michael White in the Guardian in 2010, uncontroversially. ‘Perhaps it has slipped your memory? It certainly hasn’t slipped China’s.’ Indeed not. There it is taken to mark the beginning of its modern history, no less, seen as a continuous process of national humiliation under the heel of Western imperialism, bravely but hopelessly resisted by the peasantry, until Chairman Mao came along. It takes pride of place in all school history courses. There are monuments, museums, books, films, and TV documentaries devoted to it, and now even a computer game, where you can play at bashing the British at Canton. One assumes that David Cameron was not aware of this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 sporting a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole. Or the rightwing press, when it heaped praise on him for refusing to back down when the Chinese asked him to remove it (allegedly). That will have stirred up historical memories, too. Much of the diplomatic row over the opium issue in 1839– 42 – the ‘First’ Opium War – revolved around who should ‘kowtow’ to whom. Apparently little has changed. On the other side, it seems hardly surprising that the event has slipped our (British) historical memory. Quite apart from the ‘shame’ of it, which one imagines will not make it a first-choice topic in any future ‘patriotic’ school history syllabus, there is little about it to stir the blood. Even at the time Britain’s military and naval victories in China were seen as something of an embarrassment. A war ‘undertaken against a nation so puerile in that art’, wrote one military official, ‘would better deserve the name of murder, and could certainly add no laurels to British valour.’ Murder seems an apt word for it, with tens of thousands of Chinese killed (some by themselves, out of their own shame), against a relative handful of British (and Indian auxiliaries). Julia Lovell describes it horribly in her Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador, 2011), from eye witness accounts: the ‘brain-besplattered walls’ of the forts they stormed, ‘bent, blackened, smouldering, stinking’ human

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remains, ‘the bodies of the slain [. . .] found literally three and four deep’, the sea ‘quite blackened with corpses’ and so on; as well as the excesses of the rampaging British troops afterwards: pillaging, desecrating holy sites, shooting prisoners, and raping women (as soldiers do). This may help flesh out (almost literally) the ritual condemnations to be found in most British history books. It was too easy. And all in the interests of a scurvy bunch of illegal drug-pushers. Hardly any of British participants at the time felt proud of it; which I suppose was to their credit. The other thing that may have banished it from our memories is the fact that in the broader context of British imperial history it seems so marginal – if you do not know about those blackened corpses, that is. It did not expand the area of the Empire by very much: just the tiny island of Hong Kong (80 square kilometres, before it was enlarged with the lease of the ‘new territories’), which was virtually uninhabited when Britain took it over, incredible as that now seems; plus some coastal factories and commercial treaties – and that’s not echt ‘imperialism’, is it? Britain did not gain – because she did not demand – any exclusive trading rights with China; only ‘free trade’ for everyone, including in Indian-grown opium. The main instigators of the quarrel were not the British government, but those selfsame opium traders, especially the Scottish firms of Jardine and Matheson; whose (merged) company, incidentally, is still engaged in ‘Eastern’ trade, though it now keeps the drug-smuggling on which its fortunes were founded very quiet. (The ‘historical’ section of its website does not breathe a word of it.) The underlying rationale for it was a very specific commercial one: Britain wanted Chinese goods, especially tea and pretty things; the Chinese did not want anything in return except opium; which meant there would have been a huge trade deficit without it, paid for in silver. The British government got involved because of perceived insults and trumped-up treaty violations. Palmerston, the foreign secretary, was at the height of his ‘civis Britannicus sum’ braggadocio at the time: British citizens, like the Romans of old, should always be able to count on the State getting them out of foreign fixes. In this case the fix seemed a trivial one, and the imperial responsibilities incurred minor. The huge bulk of the Celestial Empire remained as independent as (say) Britain is now. When ‘imperialism’ was taken to mean ‘painting the map red’, it was difficult to see where the Opium Wars fitted in. The irony – in view of its importance to the Chinese now – is that at the time it was not taken all that much more seriously by them. On the Emperor’s part this was largely due to his ignorance, both of the world outside China generally – ‘where is this England?’ he once asked, quite late on in the war; and of the actual progress of events, with his officials constantly lying to him. ‘It’s just empty bluster’, wrote Niu Jian in July 1842; ‘I have the situation

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perfectly under control – they are not going to attack.’ But they did, and the Chinese were routed. ‘Niu Jian turned white and ran away.’ Such defeats were scarcely surprising, with poor troop morale (men had to be bribed to turn up), incompetent generals, antiquated and rusting artillery, and ‘secret weapons’ such as hundreds of women’s chamber-pots floated out towards the enemy boats (don’t ask), and monkeys flung on to the ships with firecrackers strapped to their backs. Even the worst defeats were not reported back to the emperor, but misreported as victories. (An account of one such engagement claimed that 500 British soldiers had been killed – the real figure was three – including ‘their chief Palmerston’.) So the Emperor had no way of gauging the true seriousness of the affair, until the very end. When at last in 1842 someone had the guts to tell him, he was understandably cross. ‘My anger and hatred are inexpressible’ he wrote (in Imperial vermilion ink) on the report. Shortly afterwards he authorised the Treaty of Nanjing, which gave the foreigners almost all they wanted, though not without leaving some wriggle-room. Another reason why the First Opium War did not seem all that big an event to the Chinese at the time was that they had other things on their minds. ‘Our Emperor has innumerable great problems to consider every day’, one of his negotiators told him. ‘Certainly it is not worthwhile to bother his mind with such petty business.’ At the same time he pointed out how expensive it would be to strengthen China’s coastal defences. The Empire was not the huge rock-solid monolith it was usually painted at the time, and still sometimes is today, but an inherently unstable mix of different races, cultures and religions, ruled over by a foreign dynasty, and continually plagued by civil conflicts, especially at its edges. Lovell’s term for it is a ‘crossbred state’. She also expresses surprise that it did not collapse at one of a dozen times during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (which rather begs the question: why didn’t it?). In this context, the British attacks did not seem anything particularly special. The foreigners in their sleek ships and odd costumes were just another bunch of ‘rebels’. That was what they were invariably called, which must be significant. ‘Invaders’ might have rung different bells. Lastly, when it came to explaining their humiliations, the Chinese tended not to blame the invaders so much as themselves, or their Manchu rulers, or other Chinese. They were embarrassed by their own cowardice, scathing about their military leaders, suspicious of their compatriots (the Cantonese, especially) for cosying up to the foreign traders, and constantly espying traitors in their midst. They also blamed themselves for the opium trade: if it had not been for their own corrupt local officials willing to disregard the ban on it, and Chinese wanting to smoke the stuff, it stood to reason that it would not have gone on. China’s wounds were self-inflicted. ‘Worms only appear in a

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rotten carcass’, was how one Xia Xie put it in the 1860s. This seems to have been the common Chinese reaction to the Opium Wars for years. ‘If a people is dispirited and stupid’, wrote Yan Fu half a century on, ‘then the society will disintegrate, and when a society in disintegration encounters an aggressive, intelligent, patriotic people, it will be dominated.’ That at least spread the responsibility. It was only much later that Western capitalist imperialism came to the front of the stage as the real villain of the piece, in the 1920s, following its discovery by Lenin, and then – Lovell suggests – Sun Yat-sen’s desperate need for Soviet Russian funding for the Nationalist revolution he was leading. It was the ideological fee he was expected to pay. It was then too that the First Opium War came to be seen as the opening salvo of a deliberate imperialist ‘plot’ to befuddle the minds and then enslave the bodies of the Chinese; which of course it was not. * As for the British back home, they never took to it. The fact that it was called an ‘Opium War’ almost from the beginning saw to that. There were attempts to soften the drug’s image – upper-class aesthetes in England, after all, had been experimenting with it for years, and it was widely used in patent medicines, especially apparently in the Fen country – but that cut little ice with Britain’s puritan tendency, and generally the idea of forcing it on other people against their express laws was deplored. You could blame the Chinese, as many Chinese themselves did. ‘If your people are virtuous’, they were told by Henry Pottinger, the most unbending of Britain’s agents in China, ‘they will desist from the evil practice; and if your officers are incorruptible, and obey their orders, no opium can enter your country. The discouragement of the growth of the poppy in our territories lies principally with you.’ He went on to suggest that they legalised it, to stamp out the smuggling that way; which seems to be the pure liberal position on drugs today. Most British, however, were not having this. Opium demeaned and disgraced the whole enterprise. The Radical Richard Cobden thought it showed them up as ‘bullies’ and ‘cowards’. The imperialist Lord Elgin claimed it revealed ‘how hollow and superficial’ were ‘both their civilisation and their Christianity’. Gladstone thought it ‘covered this country with a permanent disgrace’. Even The Times was ashamed, at least initially. So excuses had to take other forms. One was to demote opium in the pecking order of motives for the war on the British side, below Chinese ‘insults’ that needed to be avenged, and the broader and essentially ethical principle of spreading the benefits of ‘enlightenment’ through free trade. Palmerston used the first of these approaches, typically outrageously, to get temporary backing in the House of Commons; thereafter it was the second that reconciled most British to it in

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retrospect. However wrong they admitted the War to have been in its origins, by ‘opening up’ China it had worked out well in the end. ‘We weep over the miseries’ of the Chinese, proclaimed a Protestant missionary in 1857; ‘but we cannot shut our eyes to the fact, that nothing but the strong arm of foreign power can soon open the field for the entrance of the Gospel’. One or two persuaded themselves that the Chinese were crying out to be ‘liberated’ from their tyrants (a` la Iraq in 2003). There was also the argument that if Britain could force free trade on China, and so cultivate a taste there for other British exports (pots, textiles, pianos), it might do away with the need for opium to balance the books. This was the great boon of the free market system. That unfettered trade leads to liberty, prosperity and happiness in theory was a common liberal shibboleth then, of course, and remains so in powerful quarters at the present day. Whether it worked in the particular case of China in the nineteenth century is open to dispute. China remained a tough commercial nut to crack even after the Opium Wars, outside the ‘Treaty Ports’. It could be that Britain’s particular way of ‘opening’ the country – with gunboats – was counter-productive. Charles Elliot, a far gentler envoy than Pottinger, for which Palmerston eventually sacked him, thought it would have been (in Lovell’s paraphrase) ‘better for the long term to bank good will than hard cash’. In the very long term those have turned out to be wise words. * Lovell’s is a wonderful account of the First Opium War, from Chinese sources as well as Western, by a writer who seems admirably sensitive to the confusing cultural differences that have always made understanding China generally so difficult for Westerners, and vice-versa. Of course the war itself did nothing to help that. On the Chinese side it pushed them further into their shell, until very late on in the century (and after more Western invasions), when reformers like Yan Fu and Sun Yet-sen had the idea of visiting Europe to discover what made it at any rate materially superior. Yan Fu took on board almost everything he found there: Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Montesquieu, ‘impartial justice’, patriotism. Until then, however, prejudice and hostile stereotypes persisted. ‘The English’, announced placards posted up in Canton just after the first war, ‘are born and grow up in wicked and noxious villages beyond the pale of civilisation, have wolfish hearts and brutish faces, the looks of the tiger and the suspicion of the fox’. The Chinese made huge fun of the ‘heavy, greasy meat dishes for which they have such a passion’ (fair enough); their obsession with exercise: ‘one Chinese official is supposed to have once asked a British consul why he did not pay someone to play tennis on his behalf’; and their tight trousers, which must surely give their enemies an

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advantage in battle: ‘once fallen down, they cannot stand up again.’ Racial (or cultural) misunderstandings are not only, of course, an occidental thing. On the British side we find the same. Charles Dickens’s sneering dismissal of the ‘glory of yellow jaundice’ he encountered at an exhibition of chinoiserie he visited in 1851 (to coincide with the ‘Great’ Exhibition) – products that had ‘made no advance and been of no earthly use for thousands of years’ – is notorious. (Dickens was really not very sound when it came to matters of ‘race’.) This in fact was the main charge that was generally levelled against the Chinese at this time: that they had frittered away millennia making silly toys, and ‘progressed’ not one inch. Their abject humiliation in the recent war was supposed to bear this out. But it also, according to Julia Lovell, had another effect. It added ‘opium’ to the noxious xenophobic mix. This might seem less than reasonable in view of Britain’s responsibility for the trade. Lovell’s explanation is that it was a way of shifting some of the shame the British felt for that on to the Chinese. ‘War guilt’, she writes, can lead to ever more militant acts of self-justification. Once blood has been shed in dubious circumstances, those involved often try to brazen it out: first, through blaming the injured party for forcing them to act thus; and second, through affirming the validity of their violence by persisting with it. So, the Chinese had deserved it. One of the reasons for this was their drug habit. Hence the emergence of the ‘opium den’ as a key element in popular images of China in the later nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. When Chinese opium dens were found (or alleged to be found) in British cities, at a time when many upper-class people were panicking about ‘national degeneration’ in any case – stunted growth, crime, hooliganism, illegitimacy, homosexuality, masturbation and so on – this seemed ominous. The Chinese were not only a threat to themselves, but to ‘us’ as well. It is easy to find evidence of this, in the popular culture of the day. Trashy papers featured semi-pornographic woodcuts of English women lounging about, usually de´shabille´es, in smoky opium dens. You could not get much more nationally threatening than that – poisoning the womb of the English race. Apparently some English women actually married Chinese opium den proprietors, with the result that their skins yellowed, and eyes narrowed, just through contact with them. Of course we only have sensational journalists’ words for this, so it may not (!) be true. (And Lovell is certainly wrong to say that ‘strict British immigration policy which prohibited Chinese workers from bringing their families with them’ was to blame for these inter-marriages.

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There was no such thing.) Later on we get Sax Rohmer’s ‘Dr Fu Manchu’ as the embodiment of the modern Yellow Peril, in Britain and America. All nonsense, of course, but a powerful image. And evidence, Lovell thinks, of the lasting legacy of that awful war. She may exaggerate this. Lovell is not quite so sure-footed on the British side of her subject as she seems to be on the Chinese. There are errors – like the one about British ‘immigration policy’. That may be important; it was the ‘open’ nature of its society – mid-nineteenth-century Britain had no means of excluding or expelling any immigrants, even terrorists – that gave Britons the moral right, as they thought, to object to China’s insularity. Lovell’s sources for British ‘opinion’ about China, too, are rather thin. Almost the only newspaper she has consulted directly is The Times, which she takes to be representative of ‘the press’, but of course was not at all. (There used to be some excuse for this when The Times was the only newspaper that was indexed, but not now that most of the others have been digitalised, and so are wordsearchable.) This has led her to miss a great deal of British commentary from the middle of the nineteenth century which was rather pro-Chinese on the whole, taking Dickens and the other sinophobes to task; just as she ignores the many later fictional ripostes to ‘Fu Manchu’, like Earl Derr Biggers’s sympathetic and even heroic (albeit still stereotypical) ‘Charlie Chan’. (Biggers, unlike Rohmer, knew something of China.) Western images of China have always been complex and varied. Not all can be blamed on Jardine and Matheson. What does seem to have survived into modern times is another image, of China as a sleeping giant, potentially vigorous and resourceful (forget the opium), whom it may have been impolitic, therefore, for the West to have provoked all those years back. Exactly a century ago The Times predicted this future China, ‘teeming with vitality [. . .] slowly modernised, then eager for expansion, perhaps for conquest, for world-power, if not for revenge for wrongs inflicted on it by nearly every European power’. Today that reads presciently. It encompasses most of the fears that Americans have of China today: teeming, certainly; rapidly industrialising; expanding (economically) into Africa; Orientally cunning in its manipulation of financial markets; over-exporting, just as it did in the mid-nineteenth century, though with no hope this time (one presumes) of balancing the deficit with drugs; widely tipped as the United States’s successor as one of the world’s great ‘superpowers’; and yet still not properly understood by Westerners, any more than the Celestial Empire had been. As for that ‘revenge for wrongs inflicted’ warning: we can only hope that the Chinese have forgiven us. There may be reasons for thinking that. One of the most interesting findings reported in this book comes not from any

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documentary evidence, but from conversations Lovell has had with history teachers and pupils in present-day Chinese schools. Officially the ‘patriotic’ line there is that everything bad that happened to China in the last 170 years, starting with the Opium Wars, was the fault of Western imperialism. Lovell sat in on a class where that was being taught. ‘Soon, the only way I could keep myself awake was by sitting at the back and keeping a count on all the students who had obviously fallen asleep.’ When it came to class discussion, however, they all perked up: not in denunciations of the wicked imperialists, but in vigorous self-criticism. ‘We lost because we were too weak, too closed up.’ ‘We had no backbone.’ ‘Our weapons were three hundred years behind the West.’ ‘We were too cowardly, too backward, too isolated.’ They were returning, in fact, to the line their ancestors had taken in the nineteenth century. This may be one of the most remarkable and distinctive features of these events: that both sides’ perceptions of them at the time, and historical memories of them since, are so inglorious. (All the more reason, I think, for making the Opium Wars a first-choice topic in British schools after all.) There may be room for hope here; so long as we tread carefully, when it comes to what we wear in our buttonholes, for example, when visiting China in the month of November.

CHAPTER 8 THE ZULU WARS

The story is well known – or used to be. On 22 January 1879 a British Army was routed by a Zulu impi at Isandlwana, in Zululand. It was one of the worst reverses in British military history. Some of the survivors then marched west to Rorke’s Drift, where they had a base. The next day the Zulus attacked them there. This time the British held out, and the enemy retreated. This is better known in British mythology than the earlier defeat, mainly thanks to the 1963 film Zulu, starring Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins and Michael Caine. That is mainly memorable for its image of brave Welsh soldiers keeping their spirits up under fire by singing hymns. One of the shock revelations of Saul David’s new book about this, Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879 (Viking, 2004) is that very few of them, in fact, were Welsh. Nor may all of them have been as brave as the legend has it. One of the merits of David’s account is that it portrays both officers and men as human, not as heroic paragons. Examples of cowardice abound: officers and men ‘in a funk’ as the Zulus advanced (who could blame them?), disobeying orders, fleeing for their lives (some of these being shot in the backs by their furious comrades as they galloped off), and failing to come to the aid of their brother officers in distress. The most embarrassing example of the last surrounded the death of the 23-year-old Prince Louis Napoleon, only son of the recently deposed French emperor, described by Disraeli privately as ‘that little abortion’, but also a bit of a madcap, who accompanied the British Army in Africa to see some ‘action’, and got speared to death by Zulus on 29 May. ‘Then you ought to be shot’, General Buller told Captain Carey when he brought him the news; Carey had been supposed to be looking after the prince. Garnet Wolseley suggested he leave the army and become ‘a greengrocer’, a ‘line of life more congenial with his cowardly heart’; which for someone of his class will have sounded an even worse fate. Even some of the heroics had their dubious sides. Much was made afterwards of Lieutenant Melvill’s saving of the Queen’s Colour from the Zulus at Isandlwana, an event

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pictured famously by the French military painter Alphonse de Neuville, and for which he was granted a posthumous Victoria Cross; but ‘a more cynical assessment of his action,’ suggests David, ‘is that he took the Colour to provide himself with an excuse for leaving the battlefield’. Even Stanley Baker et al. had their detractors. Eleven VCs were awarded for the relatively minor Rorke’s Drift engagement, compared with just one, as David points out, for the Battle of Britain. ‘We are giving the VC very freely’, wrote the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British Army, testily. Wolseley was even less charitable. ‘It is monstrous’, he wrote, ‘making heroes of those [. . .] who, shut up in buildings at Roorke’s Drift [sic], could not bolt and fought like rats for their lives, which they could not otherwise save.’ The line between heroism and cowardice may be narrower than is usually supposed. This is a refreshing account in other ways. The battle scenes go along at a cracking pace. There is the smell of cordite about them, as well as of the putrefying corpses on the battlefields afterwards (‘the sour odour of stale death’, wrote an observer); the sound and even the feeling of shells whizzing past, and of assegais tearing into flesh. All this seems authentic. It is what raises this book from the merely gung-ho. Bodies break into pieces – ‘heads, legs and arms flying in the air’ – when they are hit. The British dead are looted and disembowelled, or ‘subjected to much ghastlier mutilation’ – never spelled out in the contemporary accounts. Their cricket pads (!) are strewn around. British African troops commit atrocities, especially killing the wounded as they lie. ‘It was beastly, but there was nothing else to do. War is war and savage war is the worst of the lot.’ It is also mainly a muddle. Officers are at odds with other officers, on both sides. On the British side their differences go on long after the war itself, with leading participants hurling charges of incompetence and worse at each other, often in public prints. Lord Chelmsford, the original C-in-C in South Africa, is ‘not fit to be a corporal’, according to Redvers Buller. Even when he wipes out the ‘stain’ of Isandlwana, as he thinks, by capturing King Cetchwayo’s capital at oNdini (‘Ulundi’), just before being relieved of his duties, he spoils it by marching out again. Then he spends the next few years lying to protect his reputation. (This is David’s verdict.) Luckily for him the Queen has a soft spot for him, and even makes him a Gold Stick (a what?) at court. It is not all like this. There is much bravery on the British side – ‘my men stood to their guns like bricks’ – and some genuine acts of heroism. Officers are not always quarrelling. Indeed, several touching relationships are fostered under the hail of enemy fire, especially between senior British officers and younger ones whom they come to regard ‘like sons’. The British Army prevails in the end, by dint of ‘overwhelming firepower’. (‘Whatever happens we have got / The Gatling gun, and they have not’: Hilaire Belloc. In fact this was the first

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British war in which the Gatling – or machine – gun was used.) But it is not a particularly edifying picture from any point of view; even if one could accept that the British cause was just, which David – rightly – disputes. On this, he pins the blame on the British government, disputing the conventional wisdom that the latter was dragged into the war by ‘men on the spot’; but most of his own evidence, in fact, does not quite bear this out. Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of the Cape, remains the villain. He wanted to defeat the Zulus, and regarded the British government as ‘week-kneed and cowardly’ for trying to hold him back. He was able to get away with his insubordination by the slowness of communications between Britain and South Africa (even the telegraph, because of gaps, took 16 days), and by his extraordinary perception of the duties of public servants, whose responsibility to their superiors, he wrote, ‘should always be retrospective in the shape of praise or blame for what is done, and should never involve the necessity for previous sanction’. When the time for blame came, however, it was often too late to turn around. ‘Bearing in mind all I have written to you against the Zulu war,’ wrote the Colonial Secretary to Frere on Christmas Day 1878, ‘I think you will see how awkward a position you have placed me in’ – by his ultimatum to the Zulu king Cetshwayo, which brought the war on. One of the results of Isandlwana was to make it all the more necessary for the British to defeat the Zulus afterwards, if only to save face, and ensure that British ‘blood’ had not been ‘shed in vain’ – a familiar argument (if an irrational one). David’s analysis of the pre-war diplomacy does not really challenge this. One of the reasons for the initial British difficulties was that they underestimated the abilities of the Zulus. ‘I can tell’, wrote a private to his parents before Isandlwana; ‘although large and powerful, they have not the pluck and martial spirit of Englishmen’. He was soon disabused. ‘I never thought niggers would make such a stand’, wrote Colour-Sergeant Burdett of the 99th afterwards. David reproduces a Tenniel cartoon in Punch showing John Bull being given a lesson by a (rather stereotypical) Zulu, who has written on the blackboard ‘Despise not your Enemy’. Even after this, however, there was a tendency in popular British accounts to attribute the Zulus’ successes to sheer numbers: waves of savages with spears overwhelming the more disciplined British soldiers by not minding the slaughter their rifles caused, and just ‘coming on’. David, in line with most more recent accounts of colonial wars, is much fairer on the African forces: their organisation, generalship, and tactics; so that the picture given here is of a more equal battle between armies, which it was, rather than between an army and a ‘horde’. He is also insistent that Cetshwayo was not a threat to the Natalians, and consistently sought a negotiated peace. He is not blind to Cetshwayo’s failings (and brutalities), and the mistakes and occasional ‘funk’ of his own generals

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and troops, including at Rorke’s Drift. This however also puts the Zulus on a level with their British enemies. They after all were merely men, too. One difference may have been that the Zulu warriors included the (male) pick of their nation, whereas the British ones did not. Ordinary British soldiers – ‘men’, as opposed to ‘officers’ – were not chosen for their soldierly abilities, but because of their poverty. Only the most desperate joined up. Why they should be expected to turn from this into ‘heroes’ is not clear. So far as the officers were concerned, many of them appear – from this account, as well as others – to have been among the dullest of their class. ‘A more uninteresting or stupid-looking fellow I never saw,’ said Wolseley (again) of one of the Rorke’s Drift heroes, Lieutenant Chard. ‘Wood tells me he is a most useless officer, fit for nothing.’ Even greengrocers might have done better. But of course that could not be admitted in Britain. This may have been one reason for all those undeserved Rorke’s Drift VCs. David says they were meant to wipe out the memory of Isandlwana. Another way of regarding them is as a means of restoring the reputation of British manhood after that. It did not do the recipients much good in the long term, incidentally. There is a sad little ‘epilogue’ here describing, among other things, what became of some of the ‘heroes’ of Rorke’s Drift afterwards: two descending into unemployment, one shooting himself, another going mad, one having to pawn his VC, another having his stolen, and the luckiest (probably) ending up as a cloakroom attendant at the old British Museum Reading Room. But that did not matter. The impression given at the time was that British men could be counted on. They were superior to ‘savages’ after all. If that meant ‘cheapening’ the VC, and abandoning its recipients afterwards, then so be it. The significance of all this for modern South Africa is pretty plain. The Zulus still dwell on it. David quotes Chief Buthelezi as saying that had it not been for Britain’s aggression, they would still have been an independent nation – or at least a quasi-independent one, like Swaziland – today. For them Isandlwana cemented their reputation as a great warrior people, the equals of the British on a level battlefield, and so is a matter of continuing pride. David supports this; ‘the Zulus’, he concludes, ‘were conquered in 1879, but not defeated.’ For Britain the conquest of the Zulus sucked her into South Africa more than most of her leaders, pace David, would have preferred. The war policy was controversial among the political classes in Britain, and may have contributed to Disraeli’s electoral defeat in 1880. (This question is not properly addressed here.) David’s account reads like sheer derring-do; but it is very well done, commendably even-handed, and with all the blood, guts and ‘funk’ left in. It seems to bring the reality of war – or this kind of war – home in a way

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other accounts do not. It is mostly old-fashioned military history, though it might not appeal to militarists. One might wish for more: on the diplomacy, for example, and on what these events meant to the majority of the people of Britain, outside the political class. There is almost nothing about women here. (This may be just as well, in view of David’s quip at one point about the French prince’s sexual interest: ‘he would sooner have been aboard a horse than a woman’ – or is he satirising nineteenth-century attitudes here?) This is all boys’ games; but as it was only boys who actually fought in the Zulu Wars, we should not cavil at that. This book punctures some myths, highlights an old injustice, and is a ripping yarn. That should be enough.

CHAPTER 9 VICTORIA'S OTHER WARS

I wasn’t at all surprised when I reached Saul David’s ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of his Victoria’s Wars: The Rise of Empire (Viking, 2006), to learn that his ‘fascination with Victoria’s wars began as a boy reading the Flashman novels’. I have only read one of those (it is not really my tipple), but much of Saul David’s writing is redolent of that: tremendously exciting, full of local colour, vivid. That is when he comes on to the set battle-pieces. I’ve never come across more convincing accounts of old-fashioned fights than these – apart from David’s own Zulu. I’ve not been in a war, but I imagine it must be like this: confused, terrifying, bloody, but mysteriously exhilarating too. You can smell the sweat and the smoke and the fear. It almost gave me a taste for it. Perhaps I should give the Flashman books another go. Away from the battle front, it has to be said, this book has its weaknesses. David’s analyses of the political and diplomatic background to the wars he describes here – in India, including the Mutiny (going over old ground for him), Afghanistan, Burma, China (the ‘Opium Wars’), and the Crimea (some more recycling here: he has already written a biography of Lord Cardigan) – have not moved on much further than Flashman’s time (or from his own Zulu). The subtitle, ‘Victoria’s Wars’, is revealing. Of course David knows that the Queen did not actually rule the country, but you could get the impression from this that she, and her beloved consort Albert, were pretty influential when it came to foreign policy. Albert apparently also had his finger in the military, designing a silly helmet for them – ‘a cross between a muff, a coal-scuttle, and a slop-pail’, as Punch described it – which was actually worn for 13 years. The book spans the years from 1837, when Victoria succeeded to the throne, to 1861, when Albert died. The last chapter is mainly about that sad event. Each of the earlier ones begins with an account of events in the Queen’s personal life, mostly irrelevant to the main story, followed by her relations with her chief ministers, before it hurries on to ‘her’ army, and its wars. Almost no-one else in Britain figures. Ordinary people

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(that is, below the rank of lord or foreign secretary) appear as a kind of offstage chorus, usually loyally cheering their sovereign (‘Gawd bless you, Ma’am!’), or egging governments on to more aggression. All this comes of reading this history from the ‘top’. The book is a little better on the local backgrounds of the wars themselves, though even here David’s accounts are rather conventional, and from limited (and usually dated) sources. Again, he concentrates on elites and their machinations – emperors, chiefs, maharajas, and so on – as of course did Victoria herself. ‘I always feel much for these poor deposed princes’, she once wrote. (That was when one of them was exiled into luxury, while thousands of his subjects lay cut up on the battlefield.) Most of these events are viewed through British eyes – he has gone to no ‘native’ sources – though to be fair he does try to allow for the inherent bias of this. On the British side, the slightly less elitist Florence Nightingale and (unusually) her Jamaican co-worker Mary Seacole also get their dues. But much of the ‘ordinary’ history here must be approached cautiously. It is clear that David does not really understand Palmerston’s wider foreign policy, for example. And I really would have liked some rationale, or at least a source, for his claim that the British Empire nearly quintupled in size during this period, and as a result – it is implied – of these campaigns. (It depends, of course, on how you measure it.) There’s a sentence in the ‘Prologue’ which highlights these weaknesses: where David finds it ‘incredible’ that ‘the greatest industrial nation in the world’ was so militarily vulnerable. If he had understood the nature of Britain’s society and economy better, below the level of the Queen and her court, he would have known why. In fact Britain was weak because of her industrial prowess, and vice-versa. In a nutshell: prosperity was supposed to depend on not spending your money on armies. That is partly why, as David rightly points out in his ‘Epilogue’, so many of these colonial wars were not initiated by British governments, who were alive to this, but provoked by ‘men on the spot’, who were not. None of this, however, should be allowed to detract from the quality of the military history here, where David is clearly most comfortable. What are best about his battle descriptions (apart from the vividness) are, firstly, the credit he generally gives to Britain’s enemies in the field for – in very many cases – their superior generalship and bravery: this is not just a modern disciplined army against inferior savage hordes; and, secondly, the emphasis he places on the dreadful aspects of these conflicts, over and over again. The slaughters are horrendous, with dismembered corpses scattered all over, soldiers ‘running about disembowelled’, and rivers frothing with blood. British troops ‘show no quarter’: ‘an orgy of pillage and murder’, David describes one order to kill all the males over the age of 14 in a village; though a general of the time thought

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this sort of thing was allowable – ‘the just retribution of an outraged nation’. (He was killed and cut up shortly afterwards.) They also rape women routinely: ‘particularly in the heat of a battle with Asiatics’, and if they’re given access to alcohol. Needless to say, their enemies can be just as savage – though there are some impressive examples of chivalrous conduct here too, especially by Muslim military leaders towards captured British women and officers. During the First Afghan War, for example, ‘John Nicholson, recently released from Afghan custody, had the misfortune to discover his brother’s mutilated corpse with its severed genitalia protruding from its mouth in accordance with local custom.’ Ugh. Despite all this, it was clearly a supremely thrilling experience for many. This is another virtue of David’s account: that it conveys much of the attraction – even ‘beauty’ – of this kind of war, even to someone like me who is generally left cold by ‘ripping yarns’. ‘Murderous, but glorious’, wrote one young lieutenant after the battle of Ferozeshah (1846); ‘the feeling is catching’ – this is Garnet Wolseley describing the thrill of a charge; ‘it flies through a mob of soldiers and makes them, while the fit is on them, absolutely reckless of all consequences. The blood seems to boil, the brain to be on fire.’ You could not get that in civvy street. Lastly, Victoria’s early wars provided a stage for some wonderful characters. There was the ‘biblethumping’ Sir Charles Napier, for instance, rigged out in a helmet looking like a jockey’s cap, a blue frock coat covered in gold braid, and a beard down to his waist; Sir Hugh (later Viscount) Gough, who ‘preferred brute force to clever tactics in the sure knowledge that British courage and discipline would eventually win the day’, and always wore a white coat into battle so that his men could pick him out (it must have been a help to the enemy too); and Lieutenant Thomas Oliver of the 5th Native Infantry – ‘grossly overweight, he presented an easy target’ – whose wife had had six children by a brother officer. That must have been Flashman. That’s another thing this book taught me: that George MacDonald Fraser’s hero (or anti-hero) is not as implausible as I had always assumed.

CHAPTER 10 THE FALKLANDS WAR

By any rational way of looking at it Britain’s continued possession of the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands in 1982 was, frankly, ridiculous. Even at the British Empire’s height they had been one of the least important and favoured of its colonies. At the Great Exhibition of 1851 they were represented by a showcase containing some tufts of wool and dried grasses. Dr Johnson’s famous description of them in 1771, which Lawrence Freedman uses to open his Official History of the Falklands Campaign (2 vols, Routledge, 2005), was scarcely challenged by any non-Falklander at any point over the next 200 years (though Freedman claims it was unfair: the islands for example are not always as cold as this): A bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not even southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expence will be perpetual, and the use only occasional; and which, if fortune smiles upon our labours, may become a nest of smugglers in peace, and in war the refuge of future Buccaniers [sic]. That last bit, about ‘expence’ and ‘use’, remained the gist of the objection to them by rational British policy makers thereafter – the men at the Foreign Office, for example; together with the fact that, as they knew full well, but did not always let on, Britain’s legal title to the Falklands was highly dubious. It was anomalous that they still remained colonies (or ‘overseas dependencies’) long after most of the rest of the Empire had gone. It was not because Britain valued them, even for their potential. (Offshore oil was a rather desperate and unconvincing rationale for them at the time of the 1982 war. If it is ever found in quantities, it will need Argentine co-operation to exploit it.) No particular pride was attached to having the Falklands; any more than to an old sock left

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behind after all one’s ermine has been unceremoniously stripped from one. They were ‘a nuisance’. The situation was a nonsense. In 1982 it looked more nonsensical than ever. There were only 2,000 people living in the Falklands. They wanted to be British, but they could only remain so either at huge cost to the British Treasury (already subsidising them heavily), or by reaching some accommodation with their Argentine neighbour. Alternatively they could be shipped off somewhere else. That would be cheaper than securing them in the Falklands, which nearly all military experts thought was almost unthinkable: impossible to defend them if they were invaded, and ‘barely militarily viable’, or at least prohibitively expensive, to take them back. It would also dangerously divert Britain’s forces from their new, more urgent Cold War role in Europe. This was why the main thrust of Foreign Office policy in the 20 or 30 years before the war was, reasonably enough, to negotiate some form of transfer. A condominium was mooted; or a ‘lease-back’ scheme; or an arrangement rather like the A˚land islands’ with Finland. (The Swedish-speaking A˚land islanders had been ceded against their will, but with special privileges internationally guaranteed, which seem to work satisfactorily.) These mainly foundered on the ‘primitive antipathy’ of the islanders towards the Argentinians, and also, it has to be said, to the British Foreign Office, which they suspected (rightly) of scheming behind their backs. But there was also another factor. The British population of the islands was in decline. The young people were leaving, bored – according to one clearly jaundiced visitor (a Fabian) – with ‘an unending diet of mutton, beer and rum, with entertainment largely restricted to drunkenness and adultery, spiced with occasional incest.’ If present trends continued, their ‘fragile economic and social structure’ would collapse. That would force them to come to terms with the logic of their situation: either compromise; or what one governor called ‘euthanasia by generous compensation’ – i.e. paying them to leave. If Britain wanted to get rid of what Callaghan called this ‘poisoned chalice’ without a fuss, as the Foreign Office certainly did, that was the way to do it. Time was on the Argentines’ side. That was if they did not rush it. But of course they did. Misled, perhaps, by the FCO’s pussy-footing over the Falklands; sharing the British military’s assessment of the islands’ indefensibility at a distance of 7,000 miles; taking the wrong signals from the Thatcher government’s defence cuts, and decolonisation elsewhere (Zimbabwe); convinced of their own case for sovereignty (although, in truth, it was not much better than Britain’s); and fired by local nationalism – or maybe exploiting it to divert attention from Argentina’s domestic problems – Galtieri’s junta decided to force the issue. The invasion started on 2 April. We know what the British government’s

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response to that was: the Task Force; ‘Rejoice!’ (Thatcher’s order to the nation when South Georgia was recaptured); Goose Green; and the eventual Argentine surrender on 14 June. All this took Galtieri by surprise. That was the short-term sequel. Medium-term, the result was actually to strengthen Britain’s hold over the islands (‘Fortress Falklands’), increase her determination to hold them, and also, as it happens, produce an economic plan for them that made them more self-sufficient than they had ever been before. (It was based not on oil, but on fishing licences.) It also helped to topple Galtieri and restore democracy to Argentina. That must make the Argentine invasion of the Falklands one of the great counter-productive acts of all time. It was inevitable that critics, especially foreigners, would see the British response as an imperialistic throwback, but that may not be fair. There are superficial resemblances: the technically colonial status of the Falklands, obviously; and the tabloid jingoism that accompanied the whole event, redolent of ‘Mafeking night’ in the (very imperialist) Boer war. In some cases imperial nerves probably were touched: among old Tory pro-Rhodesians smarting from Britain’s just having caved in to Mugabe, for example, and now from this humiliating tweak that Galtieri was giving to Britain’s mangey imperial lion’s tail. Much of Thatcher’s later rhetoric – the ‘putting the Great back into Britain’ stuff – may also reflect this. Strictly speaking, however, the ‘imperialist’ charge cannot really be made to stick. Imperialists seek to expand, grab, exploit, rule; Britain was clearly motivated by none of these things. There was, to repeat, nothing for her in the Falklands. For the broad mass of the British people this certainly was not an imperialist war. Freedman quotes Anthony Barnett on some of the ‘symbols’ that surrounded it: ‘an island people, the cruel seas, a British defeat, Anglo-Saxon democracy challenged by a dictator, and finally the quintessentially Churchillian posture – we were down but we were not out’. These essentially defensive tropes go back further, and have always been far more powerful in the British historical consciousness, than ‘imperial’ ones. This was why Labour came on board too: remarkably, in view of their detestation of Thatcher; together with the majority of British public opinion. It helped, of course, that Galtieri’s government was a murderous right-wing one. This also explains why so many of Britain’s ex-colonies – and not only the ‘old Commonwealth’ – lined up behind Britain, for example in the UN. That was another surprise to the Argentines, who had expected the ‘anti-colonial’ card to trump all. In fact the main reason for the war was what Thatcher always claimed it to be: resistance to aggression, whatever that might cost Britain materially. Freedman is aware that this might seem naive to some:

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Scholars of international relations are often sceptical when it is suggested that countries can go to war for the sake of principle – but democracies find it difficult to go to war for anything else, especially when national survival is not directly threatened. Of course, ‘principle’ is often used as a cloak for more disreputable motives by those seeking to hoodwink the ‘democracy’ (Suez? Iraq?); but that doesn’t seem to have been the case here. The worst that can be suspected is that Thatcher contrived the whole crisis in order to rescue her domestic political position, but even that looks highly unlikely in view of the risks that her policy seemed to involve at the start. She was, says Freedman, ‘taking an enormous gamble’. The first ‘principle’ was self-determination – the right of the Falklanders to decide how they wanted to be ruled, which was clever, because it neutralised the ‘anti-colonial’ argument: though it can argued to be inappropriate in this case. One British diplomat felt it was ludicrous that the interests of less than 2000 persons [. . .] should be allowed to be a thorn in the flesh of Anglo/Latin American relations, damaging the interests of the more than 50 million population of the United Kingdom. This seems to me to be the case where our principle of self-determination ought to take second place behind the principle that in a democratic society the minority have to bow to the majority. There is something in this. Argentina never accepted that the islanders’ ‘wishes’ should be paramount; only their ‘interests’ (which they might not know themselves). Secondly, however, and more powerfully in winning over opinion, there was the simple anti-appeasement principle: that disputes like this – whatever the merits of them – should not be settled by aggression. It was this latter argument that marshalled most of the international community on Britain’s side; even those who thought that, on the issue itself – sovereignty – Argentina might be right. Much of that support was predicated on the assumption that a resolute response by Britain – the Task Force – would persuade the Argentines to think again. Apparently most of those on the ships that sailed south from Britain in April 1982 expected this to happen, and to be ordered to turn back for home long before they reached the Falklands. During this whole long period (six weeks from embarkation to arrival) negotiations continued to try to get the two sides together; brokered by the United Nations, the United States (Alexander Haig), and latterly Peru. These foundered on intransigence from both sides, though part of the game was to try to make the other side seem more intransigent, for propaganda reasons. Anthony Parsons, British

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ambassador to the United Nations – ‘it is rapidly becoming a question of who wrong-foots whom when the negotiations break down’ – was consummately skilful here. (He was one FCO man Thatcher had time for.) One of these negotiations is particularly controversial: the Peruvian, because it was claimed at the time that the British had deliberately sunk the Argentine battleship Belgrano, with huge loss of life, in order to scupper it. Freedman is certain that this cannot have been the case, and argues that the sinking was strictly justifiable under the current rules of engagement, though he also confirms that the MoD lied about it (so only had itself to blame for the conspiracy theories). In the end Thatcher was undoubtedly relieved that she did not have to compromise. Again, ‘principle’ was a key factor here. Whatever had been the situation before, Britain could not give in – even a whit – to force. When British soldiers started getting killed, it upped the ante. They could not be seen to have died in vain. ‘We were prepared to negotiate before but not now’, Thatcher told her Washington ambassador at the end of May. This was in irritated response to an appeal from Reagan to bend a bit. ‘We have lost a lot of blood and it’s the best blood. Do they’ – the Americans – ‘not realise that it is an issue of principle? We cannot surrender principles for expediency.’ To be fair, however, Freedman believes the Argentines were even stiffer. ‘We would rather die on our feet than live on our knees’, said Galtieri (possibly drunk) to the Peruvians on 3 May. Machismo was a factor on both sides. In the end ‘principle’ won out; though these volumes confirm that the actual fighting was a fairly close-run thing. Generally Freedman is impressed with the professionalism and bravery of the officers and men involved; though he is not convinced, incidentally, that the most celebrated example of heroism – Colonel ‘H’ Jones’s gung-ho charge at an Argentine trench at Goose Green on 28 May – really did ‘completely undermine the will to resist’ of the enemy, as his posthumous VC citation claimed. It probably did more for his own side’s morale. Overall, Freedman concludes, what in fact made the difference between victory and defeat for the British forces was superior firepower. That was despite frequent failures of tactics, materiel, and (especially) communications, which could have been more serious if the Argentines had not suffered similarly. (Several more British ships might have been sunk, for example, if the bombs that fell on them had been properly fused.) One gets the impression from this that the Argentines could and possibly ought to have won. Thatcher was a brave lady, al right. In other ways too this account corroborates the popular picture of her: firm, determined, workaholic, fast-learning, in control, impatient of doubt or compromise, supportive of her admirals and generals, dismissive of the clever and reasonable Foreign Office (its memos peppered with her angry ‘No!’) – the complete ‘Iron Maiden’ of legend. Only once does Freedman show the

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mask slipping, and this may have been a mis-observation by the UN Secretary-General: The Prime Minister appealed to me to keep ‘her boys’ from being killed. I sensed that this was the woman and the mother who was speaking to me – a very different person from the firm, seemingly belligerent leader of the British government. From this call I was certain that Margaret Thatcher was not, as so much of the press was reporting, hell-bent on war. Well, maybe. But she soon got over it. The dominant picture painted here is of toughness, high principles, resolution. She will have liked that. Of course this raises a problem. This is an ‘official’ history, so one would not expect it to be too critical. In fact, however, modern ‘official’ histories are usually no longer the slavish apologias they used to be, and Freedman insists that he was not constrained in what he was allowed to see and write. He is pretty kind to nearly everyone on the British side (not so much to the Americans). Even ‘poor old Notters’ (Alan Clark’s description of the Defence Secretary) comes out of it quite well. This is a highly empathetic account of the British campaign, therefore; but none the worse, I think, for that. And it is not as though Freedman pretends otherwise. ‘It has expressly not been my task’, he writes at the start of volume II, ‘to highlight the failures of individuals, sensationalise events, or take the opportunity to get as many secrets as possible into the public domain’. If readers want that, they can go elsewhere. However, here they will get a full and comprehensive account of the tactics and the fighting – Freedman fears that this may be found ‘tedious’, but it is no more so than it needs to be; plus much more on its diplomatic and presentational aspects than one finds in traditional official histories, which is right and proper, because these were just as important to the ‘campaign’. (It is interesting, incidentally, to see how continually sensitive the military men were to this wider context.) There is some criticism: Colonel ‘H’ Jones’s VC citation is a minor example, the Franks Report a much bigger one; and even some amusing passages. (The picture of the Dean of St Paul’s suggesting Thatcher read out Micah 4, 1 –4 at the postwar ‘Thanksgiving’ service is priceless. Look it up.) Overall this is masterly stuff. It is more sketchy on the after-effects. Thatcher was of course the second major beneficiary – after the islanders – of her own, very personal Falklands victory. It is widely supposed to have at least boosted her margin of victory at the next election. (Freedman discusses this.) Beyond that, what else did it do? A total of 253 British and perhaps 1,000 Argentine lives were lost in the effort to reclaim the islands, and hundreds of others blighted thereafter by

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injury, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Half of the British combatants reported experiencing some form of this; around 250– 300 – Freedman cannot find the exact figure – later committed suicide. Despite this, the basic problem of the islands – their post-imperial incongruity – remains. A ‘rational’ solution is as far away as ever it was; further, probably, than if the Falklanders had been left to wither away. So it remains ‘a time bomb for future crises’. However, as Freedman points out, the conflict did not do the lasting harm to Anglo-American relations with South America that the ‘Latinos’ in the US administration had feared. Nor were the Soviets able to make much hay. Thatcher claimed that standing up to Galtieri would make other dictators pause before launching aggression on weaker neighbours, but that did not seem to work with Saddam Hussein. So far as Britain was concerned, one thing it did was to boost the reputation of the military, which was something comparatively new in her history; it is probably safe to say that Britain had never generally been a particularly militaristic society – domestically – before then. It also put a premium on a new kind of ‘leadership’, which again had been rather alien to the main British tradition previously: one that emphasised strength and single-minded determination over, for example, consensus and compromise – or, by another way of looking at it, over democracy. (Did Thatcher not once define ‘democracy’ as ‘leadership, not followership’? A curiously Orwellian reversal of the truth.) That has remained. Thatcher also believed that her Falklands victory had breathed a new confidence into the British people, after all those years of demoralisation and decline under ‘socialism’; and had engendered a new respect for Britain abroad. Both these effects are difficult to measure. Many Americans were impressed, and took on the ‘leadership’ thing too. In the case of other countries, the effect was slightly spoiled by what still seemed to be the ludicrous nature of the conflict: a struggle, as Jorge Luis Borges famously put it, between two bald men fighting over a comb; and by its seemingly anachronistic aspect. It harked back to the time when Britain had hair. It was of no relevance to these new, Cold War times. That was while the Cold War was still on. Connected with the Cold War, of course, was the row over ‘colonialism’ in the world, which the Soviets were keen to exploit. It was these two great conflicts that confused and bedevilled the diplomacy of the Falklands campaign, especially in the case of the United States, most of whose vacillation over what Thatcher regarded as the ‘principle’ of the conflict derived from its obsession with communism, and its anxiety, in pursuit of that, not to put itself on the wrong side of the ‘imperial/ anti-imperial’ divide. With the end of the Cold War, however, this situation obviously changed. Freedman’s last word (in a little ‘Envoi’) is intriguing on this. He points out that as early as 1982 he suggested that the Falklands War

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‘might turn out to be a precursor of things to come’, by virtue of its independence from the old East– West and North–South dualities, and also in ‘the role allotted to the United Nations’. He was mocked then, he says, but no longer. Further, he claims, the ‘traditional military virtues’ that he sees displayed in the war seem to have more relevance now than they did in the old days of nuclear stalemate, and the rest. What he seems to be suggesting is that the Falklands conflict, marginal and old-fashioned as it undoubtedly was, can also be regarded as the first post-modern war. It was also a rare ‘principled’ one. But it’s still a shame – for Thatcher’s poor ‘boys’, and for the ultimate peace of Dr Johnson’s ‘bleak and gloomy solitude’ – that reason could not prevail.

CHAPTER 11 GEORGE BOGLE

It is when we come to look at the personalities implicated in British imperialism that we can see what a complex and contradictory, as well as colourful, enterprise the whole thing was. Of course there were stereotypes: the archetypal governor, for example (Chapter 3); racist settlers; arrogant missionaries; ignorant and brutal soldiers; and – above all, perhaps – greedy capitalists. But there were many free-minded individualists too, and of course – being British – ‘eccentrics’; whose attitudes did not appear to conform to type at all. This applies especially in the field of cultural contact between ‘imperialists’ and their subjects, or neighbours, or victims; which was often more complicated and ambivalent than one might gather from some scholars’ accounts of the crude simplicities of what is called the ‘orientalist’ discourse. This is especially true of the eighteenth century, when imperialism was not an exclusively or even predominantly European thing – as Kate Teltscher points out in The High Road to China (Bloomsbury, 2006) the Chinese was the largest unified empire in the world in the mid-eighteenth century, still expanding, and militarily powerful – and when there was a good deal of genuine and, so far as one can see, fairly humble curiosity about ‘other’ cultures on both sides of the divide. Teltscher has discovered, or, rather, rediscovered, a splendid example of this: the Scotsman George Bogle’s friendship with Lobsang Palden Yeshe´, the Third Panchen Lama of Tibet, whom he visited on a trade mission for the British East India Company in the 1770s, but soon came to respect and even love, in a way that Teltscher suggests could have been incompatible with that. (If a steady commerce had been established, it might have undermined the very qualities in Tibetan culture Bogle admired. Was he aware of these ‘contradictions’, she asks?) In the end it did not matter, because the mission failed in the long run, with Tibet closing its borders to the West again for a hundred years after the Panchen Lama’s death – in China, from smallpox – in 1780. Bogle died, in Calcutta – drowned in a rainwater tank, at the age of 34 – a few months afterwards. Later his successors tried to claim

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that because the Fourth Panchen Lama was supposed to be a reincarnation of the Third, the promises the latter had made to Bogle must have been reincarnated too. But it did not wash. A few years on, the Chinese Empire expanded further, to exert a tighter hold over Tibet. So that was that. Commercially and politically, therefore, this was a dead-end event. But it is still a wonderful story; which is why Teltscher has decided quite deliberately to write this ‘popular’ narrative of it. (Academics need not fear, however; the scholarship is sound, and well sourced; and the only concessions to vulgarity are a few novelistic touches like: ‘As he settled at his desk, Bogle turned his attention wearily to his papers.’ She gives no source for the ‘wearily’.) She also claims it had a later significance, when Bogle’s own account of his travels – heavily edited and published posthumously – fed into the ‘Shangri-La’ mythology of the region. Its main value, however – and, for me, even more fascinating than the ‘story’ itself – is in the window it opens on to the cultural attitudes of the two leading actors in it. There are two other men who feature prominently too: Purangir, a Hindu monk who was Bogle’s companion and guide; and Quinlong, the Chinese Emperor, whom Purangir visited afterwards on the latter’s behalf. Apparently Purangir also wrote a journal of these expeditions, in Sanskrit, which sadly has been lost. So Teltscher’s main source, apart from the published account, is Bogle’s letters home. Those to his sister Mary are generally fairly superficial – if we only had these, it would be easy to assume that George was superficially ‘Orientalist’ too. But of course all historical texts need to be assessed and analysed with a view to their audiences. It is George’s letters to his brother Robert that reveal the more inquisitive, thinking, tolerant side of him. These are immensely rich. Of course Bogle had ‘Western’ prejudices. His patronising attitude to his sister should prepare us for the sexism that almost inevitably appears here: his disapproval of the women he sees working (and drinking) in Bhutan, for example, which he takes to be a sign of ‘low’ civilisation: though that, of course, was by no means an exclusively European bias. Much of his admiration for the ‘simple’ life he found in Tibet and Bhutan smacks more than a little of the ‘noble savage’ trope that was so common in Europe at that time: Farewell ye honest and simple People. May ye long enjoy that Happiness which is denied to more polished Nations; and while they are engaged with the endless pursuits of avarice and ambition, defended by your barren mountains, may ye continue to live in Peace and Contentment, and know no wants but those of nature Bogle is also highly intolerant of ‘monkish’ religion, which does not help him much in Tibet. But of course these are not particularly ‘Orientalist’ traits. As a

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child of the Scottish Enlightenment, Bogle is if anything more anti-Catholic than he is anti-Buddhist; and, as Teltscher points out, his ‘noble savage’ feelings are not confined to exotics: ‘Bogle discovered Highlanders in Bhutan’. Otherwise there seems very little doubt at all, from his writings, that he tried hard to acculturate himself, and largely succeeded. Asked to describe Europe to the Panchen Lama – whose notion of the ‘Fringies’ (Europeans) was every bit as ‘occidentalist’ as many Western views of the East were ‘Orientalist’ (they lived at the edge of the world; were all the same; many were cannibals) – he found himself having to ‘fancy myself a Thibetan’, in order to be able to make the translation. That was a good start. He was also highly self-critical, which is partly why he never completed his own version of his travel journals for publication. He was never sure that he had got the Tibetans right. That helped too. It is the opinionated who are most prone to cultural stereotyping and intolerance. What is remarkable about the comparisons Bogle made between the two cultures is how sympathetic he was to the Tibetan: not just its ‘noble savage’ virtues, like the purity, honesty and natural democracy he found there, but also its technical sophistication in many areas of manufacture – surgical instruments and milk-churns are two examples he gave; and how critical of his own country: its ridiculous clothing, for example; drunkenness; gambling; duelling; superstition; and Britain’s punitive and savage penal laws. (But, as he pointed out to the Lama, France was even worse.) His general attitude can be summed up by this sentence – written for the Lama, perhaps to gain favour, but it is also consistent with his whole approach: ‘as every Country excelled others in some [. . .] particulars, it was the business of a Traveller to inform himself of those, and to adopt such as were good’. One could not ask for better advice. This sort of approach was almost certainly more common than Kate Teltscher implies at the end of this book, when – clearly surprised by this degree of cultural empathy from the ‘imperialist’ side – she dismisses it as ‘perhaps the exception that proves the rule’. The real lesson of this fascinating book, however, is that we should not make rigid and generalised ‘rules’ about ‘Western’ attitudes towards the ‘Orient’; especially for the eighteenth century, before European imperialism began to be truly dominant. The full picture was far more varied, interesting and thought-provoking than that.

CHAPTER 12 STAMFORD RAFFLES

Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of modern Singapore, comes out of Victoria Glendinning’s new biography, Raffles and the Golden Opportunity (Profile, 2012) rather well. Of course he was an imperialist – no two ways about that – and imperialists are not much loved in progressive circles these days. But if you have to have them – and colonial expansion of one kind or another has been the rule rather than the exception in world history right back to the CroMagnons – Raffles seems a decent sort. This is one of the reasons why he was considered such a failure, by and large, by other imperialists before his Singapore coup (1819). The East India Company, whose servant he was, only wanted him to squeeze profits out of the stations he was put in charge of. (It was a capitalist company, after all.) But all of them ended up in debt. Raffles wanted to do good for their inhabitants, and could not see how that could be done without putting money in. He insisted that this would pay dividends eventually – happy populations would produce more – but the company’s shareholders did not do ‘long term’. So he was sacked from his posts in Java and Sumatra, and criticised for exceeding his orders – for example in abolishing slavery there off his own bat. When he retired through ill health, and lost almost everything in a shipwreck on his way home, he received no compensation and no pension, and was required to pay back some of his salary. Most canny 1800s imperialists did better for themselves than that. (But then most of them – every one of Raffles’s colleagues, according to Glendinning – were Scots.) Raffles was a poor Londoner – though he was born at sea – with almost no formal education, who at fourteen got a job as a clerk in East India House, and then went on – and up – from there. Most of that was through his own native charms and abilities, some influential connexions, though he had to cultivate these, and luck. He was distinctly ‘pushy’. That caused jealousy and resentment, of course, among his competitors for jobs, especially when it pushed him higher than his social origins seemed to merit. ‘Though a clever

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man’, wrote one of his detractors, he ‘was neither born nor bred a gentleman, and we all know that the nicer feelings and habits of a gentleman are not to be acquired.’ When the Prince Regent knighted him in 1817, some of his colleagues referred to him as ‘Sir Knight’. It was not meant kindly. (He on the other hand thought he should have been made a baronet.) There’s an interesting general point to be made here: many of the leading lights of the British Empire in the nineteenth century are not easily categorised as upper or middle or lower class, but came from the interstices between the classes: men and women uncomfortable with the social positions they were in. This often gave them more independent views than those who were more conventionally one thing or the other. Raffles’s views certainly came in this category. As well as being anti-slavery (not so rare then), he also opposed cock-fighting, gambling, and the death penalty – except for murders ‘by Amok’ (in the course of riot). That might seem to place him among Evangelical Christians at that time; but in fact he was hardly at all religious, and was dead against missionary proselytism. ‘I am a good deal more inclined than you are’, he wrote to his vicar cousin Thomas, ‘to let people go to heaven in their own way.’ He was for free trade, but against large-scale capitalist exploitation in agriculture: ‘when I see every man cultivating his own field, I cannot but think him happier far than when he is cultivating the field of another’. His main virtue, and the reason for any success he had in the East Indies, was his interest and genuine empathy for other cultures than his own. He learned the local languages, for example, and got along on terms of perfect equality with indige`nes. It was this, together with an omnivorous curiosity about everything, that lay behind his great collection of Javanese natural specimens and cultural artefacts, which – minus those lost in the shipwreck – can now be found in the British Museum. He brought them back, he said, to prove to the people of England ‘that the Javanese are not savages’. (He also brought back some instruments of torture used by Java’s former – and later – colonial masters, to show that the Dutch were.) One of his reasons for picking on Singapore Island for the East India Company’s great new entrepot between India and China was that it had once been, 600 years before, the great ‘Lion City’ of the original – pre-Muslim – Malayan civilisation. When he took it over (by treaty) it had declined to just a few fishing villages; so he was hardly expropriating a going concern. Within three years it had 10,000 inhabitants. Today it has five million. Victoria Glendinning’s biography is unusual in including almost as much about Raffles’s relatives and friends as about him. This is as it should be, as they were crucial to his career as well as to his happiness; especially his two wives, the beautiful and vivacious Olivia, who died in 1814, and then the pretty but strong and resourceful Sophia, who bore him his children, and

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fanned his reputation, and her own, after Raffles’s death. (Her ‘Memoir’ of him hardly mentions Olivia.) He loved them dearly, and they him, accompanying him everywhere, over mountains and through bug-infested jungles in terrible humidity, even when Sophia was heavily pregnant. (One of their babies, like Raffles himself, was born on a ship.) They also loved their children, maybe to excess. One of the reasons for the deaths of four of them at a young age in Sumatra was that Raffles and Sophia could not bear the idea of shipping them off to England, as was the usual practice, for the sake of their health. Health-wise Sophia proved to be stronger than her husband, who died of a kind of seizure in 1826. He was small and slight, prone to over-exertion, both mentally and physically, and often laid low by fevers and headaches, the latter of which may have been due to a huge ‘arteriovenous malformation’ found during an autopsy on his skull. (Glendinning’s book carries a picture of it.) That may also account for the flaming rows he had latterly with his erstwhile friend Colonel William Farquhar (another Scot), who claimed, justly, that he should have given equal credit for the foundation of Singapore. Raffles had a dark side. But it is his statues that grace Westminster Abbey and Boat Quay in Singapore (or used to); and his name that adorns the famous club. And it is he who has attracted most of the biographies; including this relatively straightforward – there is not much analysis here – but marvellously readable, personally illuminating and highly entertaining new one. They don’t make them like Raffles any more.

CHAPTER 13 LADY HESTER STANHOPE

If Raffles was remarkable, Lady Hester Stanhope – the subject of a recent biography by Kirsten Ellis, Star of the Morning (HarperPress, 2008) – was a wonder. She was a legend in her own lifetime: Alexander Kinglake claimed that when he was a child in the 1820s her name was as well-known to him as Robinson Crusoe’s, though he thought Crusoe was more believable. A century later her table-talk (retailed in six volumes by her doctor-companion, Charles Meryon, and first published in 1845 – 6), was still being studied for the school certificate. She was admired as an intrepid aristocratic Englishwoman who conquered the East (figuratively), even the male chauvinist parts of it, by the sheer force of her personality, her intelligence, and especially her conversation; but was also widely vilified in Britain for her social unconventionality (wearing male Arab dress, for example, and riding astride); the sexual liberties she took (several male partners, none of them proper husbands); her views on English society and Christianity, both of which she came to loathe; her temper; her huge debts (which she expected the British government to settle); and her supposed ‘madness’. It was hard to dismiss the last, in view of her much publicised belief in the imminent collapse of the world into chaos, as a prelude to the coming of the Messiah (either Jewish or Muslim she wavered on this), whose triumphant entry into Jerusalem she would accompany, ‘up to my waist in blood’, riding a curiously-shaped white horse, as his ‘Queen’. Hence the dominant and highly patronising image of her, as ‘poor mad Hester’. Successive biographers – and there have been a number of them, though curiously Ellis does not mention the last and best of them, Lorna Gibb, Lady Hester, Queen of the East (Faber, 2005) – have struggled with this. Ellis does it by frankly admitting most of her oddities (though not all of them, as we shall see), and by making a claim for her as a powerful mind on Middle (then ‘Near’) Eastern matters, even if she achieved little practically. In this Ellis is aided by the fact that she is writing for the twenty-first century, from which vantage point many of Hester’s eccentricities seem merely ahead

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of her time. Serial lovers for example are hardly problematical today – and it may be worth noting that Hester seems to have been pretty faithful to each of hers in his turn. So is the idea of female eroticism. (She claimed men had been created by God to arouse women.) The way she expressed her scorn for Christianity can still perhaps shock, but not (surely) widely offend: I asked, ‘What is it for that I am to eat the body and drink the blood in Christ?’ and they told me it was to show our love for our Redeemer. I remarked that I loved my poor mother who was dead but I was not going to show it by digging her up and eating a bit of her flesh and drinking her blood. And as I would not do it out of love, I am sure it must be disgusting to do for anything else. The idea that Britain was ruled by ‘monsters’, its political system ‘doomed’, does not seem unreasonable now, for those dangerous and repressive years between the end of the French Wars and the beginnings of Reform. And of course it was worse for her, as a woman. When a visitor to her in Syria suggested she might like to return to Britain, she immediately snapped back: What would he have her do, ‘Knit or sew like an Englishwoman?’ (Ellis thinks she was an ‘instinctive’ feminist, expressing the contemporary views of Mary Wollstonecraft ‘by her actions’.) Most acceptable today, however, though problematical in the nineteenth century, is the tremendous empathy she developed towards Arab cultures, especially Bedouin, Sufi and Druze. Her critical attitude towards her own country probably prepared her for this. Among European nations, for example, she always favoured the French. But the East topped even France. There can be little doubt about this. Her admiration was genuine, not I think ‘orientalist’ in the derogatory sense of the word, or incipiently ‘imperialist’. Indeed, she came to see the East as a source of ‘purification’ for the ‘rotten’ West. That may have been too much for her Western contemporaries, though their political leaders could have benefited from her insights (she frequently remarked on their cultural narrowmindedness); today, however, it may strike more of a chord. She was obviously a fascinating personality. That was why the Younger Pitt (her uncle, and a bachelor) chose her to be his companion and society hostess during the final years of his life. (She started her travels after he died.) Most men were bowled over by her; women less so, but that was because she was less interested in them, understandably if all they had to talk about was knitting and sewing. In the East the adulation was even greater. Here her gender seemed to matter less; a European woman dressed in male ‘Turkish’ attire, armed to the teeth, and outriding most of the local men (she was a terrific horsewoman), was clearly so startling as to push aside any prejudices the latter

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might have felt against any of their own women behaving in this way. Hester thought her sex was actually a boon, giving her ‘every advantage that belongs to both Man and Woman, having sometimes passed for one, sometimes for the other’. In fact she was proud that the Arabs looked upon her as neither, ‘but as un eˆtre a` part’. She was also enormously courageous. As a result she found herself feˆted on all sides. Her entry into Palmyra in 1813, for example, was greeted by pretty girls singing and throwing rose-petals at her as if she were their ancient heroine, Queen Zenobia, returned. All kinds of flowery names were bestowed on her: not only ‘Star of the Morning’, but also (as she recalled) ‘the sun, [. . .] the pearl, the lion, the light from Heaven, and the Queen: which all sounds well in its way’. And all this quite apart from the ‘Queen of the Jews’ soubriquet that was first conferred on her by a mad millenarian back in England in 1795 (when she was 19), and which may have fed into her messianic delusions later on. In her defence over this, it is worth pointing out that Hester was not blind – or not all the time – to the fact that these might be delusory. But, as she wrote to Meryon in 1818: Here without any stir on my own part, there come from various quarters, dervishes, priests, rabbis, Druzes and all descriptions of people saying I am the Messiah or the forerunner of him. Am I a fool to admit of the possibility to wait and see what it all means? Yes, she probably was. But one can see how all this adoration could go to one’s head. * It really is a pity about the Messianism. Later it grew worse. She began to believe that ‘God has given me the extraordinary faculty of seeing into futurity’, and even magic powers; which she was loathe to demonstrate, however, in case it made God cross. (Her visitors must have been disappointed.) Meryon thought that all this was her only mad side, and did not affect her mental state in any other way. That may be so. But this was because Meryon was so hugely impressed with the qualities of her mind, as exemplified in her conversation; which just about everyone else who was privileged to hear it also praised to the skies. Even the misogynistic Byron, who met her in Athens in 1810, did not deny it; indeed, it only seemed to confirm his disapproval of ‘that dangerous thing, a female wit’. But what was it about her conversation that was so remarkable? Apparently she talked interminably – for six to eight hours non-stop. Visitors claimed they were never bored, but it is difficult to understand from the surviving records of her conversations – certainly the examples quoted here by Ellis – why not. Most

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of those records were penned by Meryon. Certainly, Meryon was no Boswell – the supercilious Lytton Strachey characterised him, unfairly I think, as ‘a poor-spirited and muddle-headed man’ – but one would have thought that in his six biggish volumes at least a glimpse of her brilliance might have shone through. He was troubled by this himself. Looking through his transcriptions, he saw how much flatter her speech read than it had sounded. There was a reason for this. ‘The flexibility of her features’, he explained, ‘the variety of her tones, her person, her dignified manner, her mimicry – all contributed towards the effect.’ In which case it seems at least possible that she was not really saying very much. Her listeners were so carried away by the music of it, that they were, quite simply, fooled. Of course her conversation will have had some substance, as well as the style. She was refreshingly open-minded, at least in some areas, as we have seen; and transgressive in her thinking as well as in her conduct – sometimes shockingly so. Ellis credits her with ‘remarkably progressive views’ for her time. These will have appeared novel and exciting. She had wide knowledge in two particular areas: British politics in the time of Pitt, and Middle Eastern culture and politics. This gave her what one observer (a lover, admittedly) called ‘a perfect insight into the history of the times’. She was also reputed to be a great judge of character, including the characters of the great men she had met while in Pitt’s employ. * But there were limits to all this: the open-mindedness, the progressiveness, and the knowledge. Her proto-feminism certainly would not pass muster today. (She thought wives should defer to their husbands; or at least pretend to.) On matters of class and race she was very much a creature of her own social situation, despite her father’s renunciation of his aristocratic title in line with French revolutionary doctrine (he took to calling himself ‘Citizen Stanhope’), and her early support for anti-slavery. She was profoundly undemocratic, deferring to royalty, both European and Eastern, and below that level only tolerating people who flattered or submitted to her. In England she despised what she called the ‘swinish multitude’. In the East she treated her Arab servants abominably – Meryon claimed she chose a high hilltop to live on during her last years, surrounded by wolves and jackals, to prevent their escaping: despite which all of them tried to at one time or another; and latterly kept African slaves, who she thought were sub-human (‘these nasty black beasts’) and only responsive to the whip. (Ellis omits most of this. Maybe she has reasons to distrust Meryon, but if so she does not give them here.) So far as ‘judging character’ is concerned, most of her judgments seem to have been coloured by how she felt she had been treated personally by the

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people she was judging (she accumulated a great number of grievances over the years, and spent most of her later letters giving vent to them); and, for the rest, there’s a remarkable letter in Meryon’s memoir, instructing him what to look for in some new servants she wanted him to recruit, which must make one wonder how reliable her judgments really were: Wrinkles at the eyes are abominable, and about the mouth. Eyebrows making one circle, if meeting, or close and straight, are equally bad [. . .] Eyes long, and wide between the eyebrows; and no wrinkles in the forehead when they laugh, or about the mouth, are signs of bad luck and duplicity. Eyes all zigzag are full of lies. A low, flat forehead is bad; so are uneven eyes, one larger than the other, or in constant motion and so on. And that was only the face. Pages later we come on to the feet. You could read ‘character’ in them too. Her political opinions may have been of much the same superficial stamp. Throughout her life she was fascinated by conspiracies: the revolutionary plots that she thought were responsible for all the French upheavals, the Freemasons, British and French intrigues in the East, and so on. ‘I have been bred in the work of revolutions since I was first with Mr. Pitt. How many plots did he crush [. . .] of which not a syllable was ever known!’ This of course would have been fascinating to her listeners, and given them an impression of the unique depth of her knowledge. Early on she contemplated becoming a ‘double agent’ herself, in order to assassinate Napoleon. (Her Jacobin father would give her credibility.) In Syria she saw conspiracies everywhere, mostly directed against her. As a result, she corresponded with Meryon in code. On the broader political front, she harboured ambitions of being an Eastern spymistress herself, a significant actor in the ‘Great Game’; but only on her own terms: ‘I will be no man’s agent.’ Even her servants got to know about her ‘feverish greediness’ for intelligence about plots; so that, according to Meryon, ‘there was not a fellow in her establishment who did not return home every night with some cock and bull story’, to feed it. So far as she was concerned, this was how the world worked. This too was typical of her class. Transgressive she may have been; but not in everything. * This may have been the whole extent of her political understanding. Meryon credited her with ‘the most enlarged political views’, but none of these appears in his memoir, or in Ellis’s book. They may be thought to be unlikely, because she read almost nothing that might have added any depth to her thought. This may have been partly her father’s fault. In obedience to Rousseau’s

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‘natural’ principles of education (as he understood them), he actively discouraged book-learning in his children, and instead (the story goes) sent Hester off to mind turkeys. Later on Meryon claimed that the only books she looked at were a Bible, a Peerage, a volume on domestic cookery, and a couple of medical works. She refused to read history because it was ‘all a farce’. Hence what even poor Meryon perceived as her ‘narrow views of general policy, of the rights of mankind, in fine, of politics and ethics in the abstract’. It was all just political (and religious) chit-chat; fine so far as it went (it is what fills the political media today, after all), but with no real substance or wisdom to it. Hester may have been aware of this, too. She knew that ‘superficial knowledge and flash’ were not enough, when for example it came to her young lover Michael Bruce’s preparation for what she hoped would be a career in British politics. She excoriated travellers’ tales of the East which only scratched surfaces, including Alphonse Lamartine’s celebrated Voyage en Orient (1833), which was largely responsible for romanticising her. For much the same reason she destroyed her own writings before her death, ordered Meryon to burn those he had, and roundly forbade him to write the memoir he was clearly contemplating: ostensibly because she did not think he was up to it, but possibly also because she realised the material’s intrinsic weakness. (Meryon of course disobeyed.) She repeatedly announced plans to write accounts of her own: ‘a manifesto which will be superb, and open people’s eyes in all directions’, together with ‘a great book against Christianity’; but these never came to anything. If she did not read profoundly, how could she hope to write a great and true work? The same self-knowledge may have lain behind the frustration of many of her other bold plans: to set up a ‘Lancaster’ school in the East, for example; to found ‘an association of literary men and artists’ to study the Ottoman lands; to find hidden cities and buried treasure; to make ‘sublime and philosophical discoveries’; to lead an Arab revolt; to find a cure for the plague; and, of course, to prepare the way for whichever Messiah happened to come along. Hence her failure to turn her undoubted knowledge of and sympathy for the Arabs to any substantial end. The one exception – a major one – was the asylum she afforded to hundreds of Druze refugees, fearful for their lives, during Ibrahim Pasha’s siege of Acre in 1831. On the other side of the picture she is also reputed to have secured a terrible revenge on a Syrian village for the murder of a French friend of hers: the slaughter of perhaps 300 people, mostly innocent, many of them beheaded. All that showed what she might have done, on a larger scale, and for good or ill, if she had been more single-minded; less imperious; more willing to work with other people; less distracted by all that millenarian nonsense; and possibly – though Ellis does not mention this, either – less partial to datura,

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a local drug that induced delusion and delirium. Maybe it was this that made her seem mad. * It was ten days after she died that Lady Hester’s body was discovered in her mountain redoubt: pale and serene according to Ellis, decomposing by other accounts. (This seems more likely, in that heat.) Her last days were terrible. Almost more terrible, in view of her feelings on these matters, was the insult afforded to her afterwards, when her body was given a Christian burial by a visiting American missionary – well-meaning, no doubt. No-one saw her die, so Ellis’s description of her ‘in her garden at Djoun, her body suddenly weightless, her arms outstretched, and spinning as though the divine trance had taken hold of her at last. Then she was gone’ must be poetic licence. It makes a bathetic end to an enjoyable biography, though not an altogether reliable one, of a woman whose importance always lay in what she was, and the feelings she aroused in people – shock, admiration, thrill, envy – rather than in anything she did. Other intrepid women travellers followed her to the East over the next century, several of whom achieved more. None however was quite so romantic, exciting, outrageous or frankly unbelievable as Lady Hester Stanhope. The wonder is that she was real.

CHAPTER 14 RUDYARD BLOODY KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling is the archetypal imperialist poet. He is also an easy man to dislike. He was not much loved in his own time, apparently, even by people – schoolmates, for example, and neighbours in Vermont – whom he thought he was rubbing along with well. In his later years he lost many of the friends he had, except the most reactionary ones and King George V, who found he was the only literary figure he could get on with at all. This was due not only to his right-wing views, but also to the mood they put him in, of dark and unattractive pessimism, and the way he expressed them, often with extraordinary viciousness. In 1893, for example, hearing of the death of an MP, he hoped that if he was an Irish Home Ruler he had gone down with the cholera; on being told that the Liberal prime minister Campbell-Bannerman had had a heart attack in 1907 he reacted ‘with joy’; and he wrote a poem in 1918 hoping the Kaiser would die of throat cancer. He also claimed the Liberal government had killed King Edward VII. David Gilmour, who in his The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling (John Murray, 2002) does the best he can to defend him against his detractors, often quite fairly, insists that some of this was not intended ‘personally’; but it is hard to see how that could be. In fact the main reason Kipling comes over as a deeply unsympathetic character in this biography – as in most others – is the hatred he nurtured almost throughout his life. Gilmour calls the years 1905 –14 his particular ‘decade of hating’, but also acknowledges that he had ‘learned to hate long before then’, and was to carry on hating long afterwards. One of his chief complaints about the English (of which more in a moment) was that they ‘did not know how to hate’. ‘I love him’, he said of Andrew Bonar Law, almost the only politician he had any time for, ‘because he hates’. Add to this a list of the objects of his hatred – Liberals, socialists, Irish home rulers, the Irish Free State (the ‘Free State of Evil’), possibly the Irish themselves (‘the Orientals of the West’), colonial nationalism generally, educated Indians, missionaries,

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Germans (he blamed the foot and mouth outbreak of 1919 on a plot by German POWs), most politicians, artists, intellectuals, democracy, women’s suffrage, and cricket – and it is easy to see why many people are unlikely to warm to him as a person. He also hated the United States. (‘Barbarism plus the telephone’ and ‘brutal decivilisation’ are just two of his bons – or perhaps not so bon – mots about the place.) There may have been private reasons for this. Like many who hero-worship men of action, he may have felt uncomfortable with his own slight, darkskinned (suspiciously so, thought some of his more unpleasant critics), goggle-eyed, rather runtish appearance. He was impractical and bad at sports. His father was an artist, which ran right against the utilitarian and philistine prejudices of the circles he wished to be accepted by in India, where he was of course born and began his literary career. All his life he affected to despise his own calling – writing – by comparison with what he called ‘real work’, and insisted on calling it a ‘craft’, no more, for fear of being associated with the ‘feminine’ pursuit of ‘art’. This was why he was able to get on so well with the famously philistine George V; but it must have created unbearable tensions. (Edward Elgar suffered from much the same syndrome.) He went through hell at the home in England he was sent away to for his education as an infant, the ‘House of Desolation’ in his memoirs, where it has been suggested he acquired his interest in cruelty. He claimed to be happier at his secondary boarding school, Westward Ho! in Devon, but it may have bugged him that it was not a proper public school – no uniforms, cadet corps or ‘beastliness’ (homosexuality) for a start – like Haileybury, where he might have gone if his father had been better off. (Later he developed a hatred for the proper public schools, too.) As a journalist in India he rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, including army officers who found him ‘bumptious’ and once hissed at him at his club, and newspaper editors who predicted he would never make a go of literature. His marriage seems to have been a disaster; Gilmour says he has tried to find something nice to say about Carrie, or ‘the Commandress-inChief’, but cannot. A contemporary described her as ‘a fat and dowdy woman who gobbled her food’, and there are well-based stories attesting to the tyrannical power she exerted over him. One has her interrupting his afterdinner conversations with ‘Rud, it is time you went to bed’, which he obeyed meekly. Later she used to threaten to throw herself out of the window if he did not do as she wanted. But one can rarely tell with marriages. Two of their three children died young: one at the age of six on a transatlantic trip, which will not have improved Kipling’s feeling towards America; and the other – his only son – at the battle of Loos in 1915, after his father pulled strings to enable him to enlist under-age, and possibly cajoled him into it. ‘It’s

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something to have bred a man’, was one of his reactions to the loss; but he was also desolated. His third child – a daughter – never produced the grandchild he craved, which must have been doubly wounding for one who believed (‘The Female of the Species’) that this was woman’s only function. He resented paying ‘super-tax’ to subsidise the idle. During his last years he was constantly ill and in pain, partly possibly due to the hatred (it was a stomach ulcer), but also to the medicines he was prescribed. All this could help explain Kipling’s personality; except that much of it (apart from the artistic stigma) was the common lot of many middle-class late Victorians, who did not all become as bigoted and malevolent as he. The root cause may be much more fundamental than this. Kipling never fitted in. He knew it. Gilmour thinks he was a child of his time in the 1890s and early 1900s, who then failed to change with the times thereafter; but in fact he was always out of place. It is arguable that he was already this in Anglo-India, among all the ‘hairy-chested heroes’ (Gilmour’s phrase) of the army and the Indian Civil Service. It may have been this that sent him to seek out the two other ‘Indias’ that he is widely credited with an uncanny empathy for (though this is also disputed): the ‘ordinary’ natives of his own part of the sub-continent (mainly the Punjab), and the common British soldier, or ‘Tommy Atkins’. He also however soaked up the typical prejudices of the British ruling classes there, which first appear – together with the trademark hatred – in his opposition to the Ilbert bill (allowing native judges to try Europeans) when he was 18. That was an early indication of the huge gulf that yawned between him and the majority ethos of Britain, where the Ilbert bill of course originated, but which only struck him when he moved there, in pursuit of his literary fortune on a wider stage, in 1889. Thereafter he was always at odds with the real (as opposed to the Indian) Britain, loathing its climate – for ten years he escaped with his family to South Africa for at least part of the winter – and, in particular, appalled by the lack of imperial feeling he found there. Gilmour thinks he may have exaggerated this, but that is based on a view of the ubiquity of the ‘colonial discourse’ in Britain then which is fashionable today, but may be misleading. Kipling singled out special groups for blame here: seditious socialists masquerading as Liberals, long-haired degenerates calling themselves aesthetes, and effete aristocrats playing at being statesmen; but he never made the common contemporary right-wing error of thinking that they were the only non-imperialists, and that the British working man, for example, was ‘sound’ underneath. He made little effort in fact to understand British workers, even when they became (European) Tommy Atkinses: Gilmour perceptively points out that there is no World War I equivalent in the Kipling canon to the extraordinarily sympathetic ‘Barrack-room Ballads’ he wrote to

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celebrate the squaddie in India, perhaps because the soldier in Flanders did not usually live long enough for him to get to know. The workers for their part seem to have largely ignored Kipling, if Jonathan Rose’s path-breaking work on The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2001) is any guide. Populism does not necessarily make a person popular. The following is only one example, appearing as a footnote in Gilmour’s book, but it may say more about Kipling’s reception at this social level than the guesses of a score of literary critics. The ticket collector at Etchingham station sees Kipling trying to jump a queue, and reproves him. ‘Do you realise who I am?’, asks Kipling, indignantly. ‘I know who you are, Mr Rudyard bloody Kipling,’ comes the retort, ‘and you can bloody well take your place in the queue like everybody else’. No wonder he hated democracy. He was also a controversial figure in ‘high’ literary and political circles, as might be predicted from his view of them, but is also rooted in these more fundamental differences. The seaminess of many of his stories, his fascination with cruelty and sex (especially brothels), his liberal attitude towards the latter, the tales based on jungle-heat infidelities, his sympathy for sinning soldiers and ‘fallen’ women, and what Oscar Wilde characterised – presumably approvingly – as his ‘superb flashes of vulgarity’, were fuel for his political enemies, and a source of unease even for his respectable middle class allies. Gilmour gives examples: one is his cousin Oliver Baldwin’s description of ‘Mary Postgate’ (a World War I story) as ‘the wickedest story ever told’; and I can add another: Elgar, sometimes dubbed ‘the Rudyard Kipling of music’ (unfairly), but who found some of his tales ‘too awful to have ever been written’.1 Public schoolboys may not have always responded to his inspiration as he would have wished, and not only because of the blasphemy he famously uttered against their most sacred religion – that line in ‘The Islanders’ on ‘the flannelled fools at the wicket [and] the muddied oafs at the goals’. Alaric Jacob’s autobiography recalls ‘the horror’ he felt on finding ‘an illuminated copy of “If ”’ – the one about being ‘a man, my son’ – ‘lying among the jars of gentlemen’s relish in the first tuck-box I received’ at his minor public school (this is around 1920), ‘put there, through an inexplicable error of taste, by my mother – and the ingenuity I had to use to hide it from my fellows until I could safely burn it in the lavatory’.2 ‘If’ may have inspired many people (Gilmour even speculates jocularly that it could have brought America into World War I: ‘perhaps the “arid pacifist”’ – Kipling’s description of Woodrow Wilson – ‘finally decided to go to war after reciting “If” at his shaving mirror’); but it could also embarrass and repel. Kipling was essentially a foreigner in the Britain of his day. One of his purposes in coming to England in the late 1880s was to wake its people up to the great work being done in their name in India. On his way there he got

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bitten by a broader imperial bug, the ‘white Dominions’ one, centred in his case on Canada, the ‘flagship of the Empire’ as he called it. But he never got to love Britain, save as ‘the Head Quarters of the Empire’; or to understand it; or – arguably – to get it to love India or Canada as he thought it should. He once described England as ‘the most wonderful foreign land’ he had ever been in, which is telling; and even the ‘wonder’ soon waned. In this context it referred to its ancient history, which he developed a new interest in after his move to Sussex in the 1900s, but mythicised dreadfully, perhaps in order to compensate for the imperfections of contemporary Britain. (His History of England, co-authored with the reactionary Oxford don CRL Fletcher, is rightly described by Gilmour as ‘an embarrassment’.) To Cecil Rhodes – predictably one of his heroes – he described England as ‘a stuffy little place’. Visiting Egypt in 1913, his nose assailed again by ‘the mixed delicious smells of frying butter, Mohammedan bread, kababs, leather, cooking-smoke, assafetida, peppers and turmeric’, he felt he had returned to ‘my real world again’. Back abroad – in England – he started plotting openly against the British state, in company with other right-wingers, over Ulster, as a first step towards turning Britain into the properly imperial polity he wanted. He presented it as a ‘revolt of the English’; but it was an ‘English’, of course, of his (and Fletcher’s) own imagining. The truth is that in order to create his imperial Britain in the early twentieth century all kinds of competing British traditions – liberalism, certain freedoms, magnanimity, pacifism: the ones he despised or was blind to – would have had to be snuffed out. Britain would have needed to be remoulded in the Anglo-Indian image. That was – thankfully – never on. Of course Kipling had redeeming qualities, though some of them are problematic. He was never consistent in his awfulness. Gilmour points out that ‘a great deal that Kipling said and wrote can be contradicted by other things he said and wrote’. His vigorous defence of the oppressed women of native India – the burkah and all that – may be an example; or it may have been simply a stick to beat what he famously called the ‘lesser breeds’ with. (Actually this is a misreading of the phrase, which as Gilmour points out was originally directed at the Germans.) His imperialism, claims Gilmour, was not the militaristic and aggrandising sort, but rooted in a sense of ‘service’ to others, and of tolerance (except in the matter of women) towards other cultures and creeds. That does not make it any the less arrogant, of course; or the less racist, if the underlying reason for the tolerance was less a genuine respect for other customs (cultural relativism) than a belief that the people who practised them could not aspire to anything ‘higher’. In view of Kipling’s strictures on Western (especially American) culture, I am willing – with Gilmour – to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. Gilmour may also be

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right to say, in defence of Kipling’s imperial ideal – though it is an uncomfortable thought – that ‘when all the appropriate qualifications are made, minorities usually fare better within imperial or multinational systems than in nations dominated by the ethos and ethnicity of a majority’. The recent history of the Balkans has taught us that. On another front, Kipling liked some aspects of American life, especially ‘the scale and the enterprise’, and greatly admired the swashbuckling imperialist Theodore Roosevelt. He was a great Francophile, and pro-Muslim. He was wonderful with children. And his attitudes to sex and sin look enlightened to modern eyes. For Gilmour, however, his ultimate atoning quality is his prescience, especially in predicting World Wars I and II, South African apartheid, and the end of the British Empire; though it has to be said that he was by no means unique in any of these. Gilmour seems to believe that in the end this justifies his right-wingery, and even his nastiness. Pessimists and reactionaries make the best prophets because they are without illusions [. . .] Prophets, as the Old Testament reveals, say unpalatable things and say them in provocative and unpleasant language. So did Kipling [. . .] There was an excuse for his bitterness, as there was with Jeremiah: he knew what was going to happen. Alternatively he might just have struck lucky, or been right for the wrong reasons. His reason for predicting the two world wars, for example, was a belief that the ‘Hun’ was inherently and irredeemably evil. Some of the others who predicted these wars did so on better grounds than that. There remains, of course, the literature. It is entirely possible to delight in that despite the personality behind it, as one does with Wagner (or Larkin, or Waugh). Many Britons still do, if we can trust a BBC poll that – Gilmour tells us – recently voted ‘If’ the nation’s most popular poem: ‘the one most often displayed in people’s homes, framed and illuminated in medieval script, hanging balefully on the wall as an exhortation to self-improvement’; though I have to say I have never seen one of these myself. (Whom was the BBC polling? Pensioners?) Most people have fallen under some of Kipling’s spell, if only in bastardised Boy Scout or Disney versions. I remember being bewitched by the Just So Stories as a child, and exhilarated by the music – rather than the content – of much of the poetry. (Since then I’ve had to read him professionally, which I find takes the delight out of it.) Gilmour’s book is mainly on his imperial politics, but it does come to some insightful judgements about the stories and verses, which it thinks are uneven, and generally worse the more political they are. If Kipling’s imperialist agenda did harm his literary standing, on the other hand, he should not really have

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minded, holding the views on ‘art’ and ‘real work’ that he did. His influence is impossible to measure, but was certainly much less than he hoped it would be. Hence the pessimism. He was, of course, a terrific wordsmith, some of whose lines and phrases have infiltrated British literary and even everyday culture quite deeply, though sometimes (as with ‘lesser breeds’) in misunderstood forms. The important thing, however, is not to be misled by this into assuming that he was more typical of later nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Britain – British Britain, that is, as opposed to Anglo-India – than he really was. If he had been more ‘British-British’ he would not have needed to hate so much.

CHAPTER 15 LORD CROMER

The American– British invasion of Iraq in 2003 had many commentators rummaging back in history for precedents. The British occupation of Egypt in the 1880s was a favourite one, largely because its imperialist character was similarly denied at the time. Britain was going in to rescue the Egyptians from tyranny and mismanagement. She had no desire for territory. No sooner had she set up a ‘reformed’ local government than she would be out again. There were other similarities: suspected economic motives; an assertive Islam; Christian religiosity on the Western side; international difficulties (especially with France). For a while we wondered whether one further aspect of Britain’s earlier imperial history might repeat itself in our new protectorates: the way she was sucked into Egypt in the 1880s so that a temporary occupation became a long-term and more overtly colonial one. Many of the later Victorians believed this was inevitable. The longer you stayed, the more you were needed – or thought you were, at any rate. It was an iron law of empires. It appears not to have happened like that. But that could be why Iraq is still in such a mess. Of course there were other differences. The ‘Mahdi’ – Muhammad Ahmad, the Sudan’s fearsome rebel leader, and General Gordon’s nemesis – was no Osama bin Laden. Likewise Egypt’s Ismael Pasha, whom Cromer saw as a ‘monster’, never threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction – even imaginary ones. The worst Egypt could do to Britain was default on her debts. American military power was enormously greater in the 2000s, even relatively, than Britain’s was in the 1880s. Britain’s own role, of course, has changed out of all recognition. Formal imperialism was more acceptable in the late nineteenth century than it is now. Britain was used to ruling other peoples. Indeed, she had a special class of men trained up to do just that. Modern America has not. This may account for some of her undoubted blunders in postwar Iraq.

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Lord Cromer, born Evelyn Baring, the subject of Roger Owen’s fine and much-needed new biography, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul (OUP, 2004), came from that class. He was one of a trio of great imperial proconsuls in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the others being Curzon and Milner (also Lords). He has always seemed the dullest of them, which may be why there has not been a substantial biography written of him (before this one) since 1932. ‘Though he is a very shrewd and industrious man he is not a star of the first brilliance’, was one contemporary judgment of him. His own mother thought he was not the brightest of the Barings. (It is interesting that he should have been the only one of the trio to change his name on being ennobled, perhaps to lose the stigma of ‘trade’ – and even Germanness – it inevitably carried.) That is why she did not send him to public school, like his brothers, but to military college – the usual place for Victorian dum-dums – instead. He distrusted intellectualism, believing it inhibited ‘action’. In public life he appeared taciturn, with few social graces, and was a poor speaker. He also grew ‘immensely large’, due perhaps to the French chef he always took around with him, and which gave him terrible stomach problems in later life. (At one point he could only eat Bengers baby foods.) His portrait by John Singer Sargent, which adorns the cover of this volume, makes him look, in the view of Sargent’s biographer, like ‘a business executive’. (His family of course was the famous banking one.) He attracted neither the adoration nor the hatred that were the much more charismatic Curzon’s and Milner’s lots. Edward Lear once addressed him as ‘beneficial and brick-like Baring’, which sums up the best opinion of his friends. He was a hard worker. Everyone, friends and enemies alike, agreed about that. Early in his career it seemed unlikely that he would even be this. During his first military posting, on Corfu (then British), he spent most of his time partying, sailing, shooting, and impregnating at least one mistress. (Owen has found out about the child, but not its mother.) Then he met the ‘good woman’ who was to change everything for him, according to his own autobiographical account, and consequently – as Owen warns us – the gloss that he wished to put on his life. He now had to work in order to be able to afford to marry. (He had had some Baring money, but had blown that on a yacht.) At the same time he made up for his abysmal education – and the inferiority complex it gave him among his brother officers – by learning Classical Greek. That shows he was not a dunce. Fourteen years later he wed his Ethel, who furnished the human warmth he had never had as a child. (His elderly father had died when he was seven. His mother had constantly ridiculed him, and thought the best way of bringing him up was to leave him to his own devices: at the age of 12, for example, she dumped him in Salzburg to make his way home alone. At school he mainly remembered being thrashed. Thus were

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Britain’s imperial rulers forged.) His family life from then on seems to have been idyllic, despite Ethel’s frequent bouts of illness, and the fact that Baring found it hard to communicate his feelings for her verbally. (He wrote her letters apologising for this.) It also belies his cold and awkward public image; as does his friendship with Lear, both of whom became ‘tremendous gigglers’, apparently, when they were together. He was also sensitive to Lear’s recurrent depressions. But none of this, of course, befitted his public role. When he came to rule Egypt – his main claim to fame – he had to be more ‘brick-like’. Anything else smacked of weakness; more specifically, of orientalism. ‘What a curious and emotional man’, he once noted of one of the Egyptians he had to work with (Nubar Pasha), when he spied him shed a tear. It was one of the things that eventually persuaded him that ‘Orientals’ (a word he used a lot) were incapable of ruling themselves. Initially that seems not to have been his view. One of the reasons Baring was sent to Egypt in the first place was the understanding that he was not this kind of imperialist at all. One of his duties in Corfu had been to help hand the island over to Greece. He seemed happy with that. Later on, when assisting Lord Ripon as Viceroy of India in the early 1880s, he attracted the enmity of the local (British) bureaucrats by reminding them that their ultimate goal was to hand power over to the Indians, which they did not want to hear, and, in particular, for his support for the Ilbert bill (allowing Europeans to be tried by Indian magistrates), which they loathed on racial grounds. One local Anglo newspaper accused him of ‘the malignity of a fiend’ over this; a stripe that he doubtless sported with pride. His broader political views were unusual for the patrician class he came from; due perhaps to his somewhat Rousseauian early upbringing (all that self-reliance), his lack of a public school education, and his family links with the commercial world. He was a dogmatic free marketist, a self-styled ‘anti-Jingo’, and an enthusiast for European nationalisms, at least. He flirted with the radical wing of the Liberal party. He fully backed Gladstone’s original scheme to leave Egypt to the Egyptians as soon as possible: within two or three years, initially. He never expected to remain there for more than 20. (His original plan had been to return home quickly and become a Liberal MP.) But then the iron law kicked in. It operated like this – this is an oversimplification, but it is roughly true, and would have worked for Iraq too if America had stayed. The longer Britain occupied Egypt, the more she was resented by the Egyptians for that reason alone, which made it less likely that she could transfer power to a native party that would stay friendly to her afterwards. Cromer was afraid of Muslim ‘fanatics’ in particular. The occupation, in other words, was counter-productive, for those who had only wanted to set up a liberal Egyptian state. It also complicated Britain’s

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diplomacy with Europe. Hence the apparently genuine regret that many British politicians of all colours expressed afterwards that they had ever had anything at all to do with the place. ‘I heartily wish we had not gone into Egypt’, wrote Lord Salisbury once. ‘Had we not done so we could snap our fingers at the world.’ Present-day Britain and America must regret their invasion of Iraq for both these reasons. Writing to his Liberal political masters in February 1886, Cromer claimed to share these regrets. ‘I think it is a great pity that we came to Egypt and I should be very glad if we could get away. But the facts have to be looked at in the face, and looking at the facts as they are now, I do not see the smallest possibility of our being able to get away for the present at all events.’ This marked the beginning of his slide into more conventional imperialist mode. The length he put on Britain’s occupation then was a few years. Later this became decades, then ‘generations’. At the same time he grew more and more disenchanted with the Liberal party, ending up as a pretty reactionary Tory – a virulent anti-suffragist, for example – after his return to Britain in 1907. (Owen speculates that his second wife, Katherine, may not have thought much of that.) This of course is not an unusual mutation, especially for men with bad digestions. But it also mirrored a more general late nineteenth century transition in British imperial policy, and in the ethos that sustained it. Cromer does appear from this book to have followed the trends of his time more than he helped mould them: another function of his dullness, perhaps. (This is how he saw it himself. In 1884 he wrote of the ‘cruel fate’ that was pulling him to the imperialist Right.) One of those trends was a shift from optimism to pessimism with regard to the capacity for ‘progress’ of other peoples. His long experience in Egypt came to convince Cromer that Egyptians, at any rate, were less capable in this way than he had initially hoped. The reasons he gave for this avoided racial differences, though they often seem to be implied. The major ones were what he took to be Egypt’s ‘unique’ ethnic divisions; the fact that its inhabitants had been a ‘subject race’ (to the Turks) for so long; and – crucially – ‘their leaden creed and [. . .] the institutions which cluster around the Koran’. (Like other imperialists he liked to cite the status of women in Muslim countries to illustrate this.) None of this meant that ‘Orientals’ were incorrigible; but it clearly suggested – as it was intended to – that their correction would take time. In fact it took the time it did in Cromer’s Egypt, Owen implies, because of Cromer’s own huge limitations of vision (that dullness again). These stemmed less from any racism he may have acquired in Egypt or India, than from the social prejudices he brought with him originally from his native Norfolk, and the ‘pre-industrial simplicity of social relations’ that had seemed to exist

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there. There it was all masters and servants, lords and peasants: the British governing classes’ ideal society, which they then found again, ‘or, rather, imagined they had found it, in the villages and among the tribes of Africa and Asia, making life among those distant peoples something like an agreeable home from home’. One might have expected Cromer’s Baring family background to have modified this view a little for him; unless it spurred him to emphasise it more in order to compensate, rather as Disraeli’s background had done for him. At any rate his view of Egypt was definitely feudal, with the advantages that came from this attitude, but also its drawbacks. It was infused with a sense of duty (‘noblesse oblige’), chivalry, and honesty. Cromer was a model of financial probity himself, and tried to encourage the same among his underlings. His main duty, as he saw it, was towards Egypt’s poor peasants, for whom he did a great deal: reducing their tax burden, abolishing the ‘corve´e’ (forced labour), and providing an education fitted to their station (i.e. not much). Obviously they could not be trusted to govern the country, partly because they were so vulnerable to ‘agitators’, including the ‘religious fanatics’. All this applied to Britain too, if for ‘religious’ one reads ‘socialist’. One of Cromer’s reasons for opposing votes for women was that they would be the thin end of the wedge for universal male suffrage, ‘which would be disastrous’. He was anti-democratic everywhere. The government of any society was the proper role of that society’s betters, which meant its native upper classes, once they had (in Egypt’s case) been ‘reformed’. The best form of rule was one exercised for all its members, rather than by them. These included, incidentally, the European capitalists operating there. That is what Cromer meant by ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’. He called it his ‘Whig’ view. One can see how it can be squared, in theory, with imperialism. Cromer’s rule in Egypt exemplified this. It was full of display – what David Cannadine calls ‘ornamentalism’1 – designed to impress both aristocrats and peasants on the ground. Cromer also had to compete with Egypt’s formal (or puppet) ruler, the Khedive, in this field. Owen suggests that another purpose of all this showing off was to hide the real fragility of Britain’s position there. (Technically, of course, Cromer was just meant to be ‘advising’ the Khedive.) Carriages and cavalry were especially prominent. The former were always preceded by ‘a syce (quwwas) who ran before shouting his name and ordering people out of the way’. So the natives will have known who was boss. Ethel and Katherine presided over terrific banquets, with food ‘served by Indian servants in white turbans and gold-embroidered breastplates’. (One of their menus may go far to explain Cromer’s gastric troubles: ‘reindeers’ tongues and peach bitters followed by the chef’s renowned prawn curry’.) These were mainly for the resident Europeans, visiting dignitaries, and a very few local royals and aristocrats. Cromer seems

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to have been little interested in Egyptians for themselves, never bothering to learn much Arabic, for example, though other British rulers of Egypt did, and his mastery of Greek in his twenties suggests that he could have managed it if he had tried. Later in his life he acquired a reputation for ‘understanding the Oriental mind’; but probably only among those who believed in such a (homogeneous) thing. He made no real study of it. Owen criticises Cromer for neglecting the Egyptian middle classes in particular, not only socially but also educationally, and by refusing nascent Egyptian businesses any state protection or help. He had dogmatic reasons for this, of course: however reactionary he became, he always stuck to his free market principles; but it also confirmed his convenient image of Egypt as ‘a mongrel nation full of peasants and sheikhs’ (Owen), as well as the Empire’s basically complementary role in the British economy. (Colonies produced raw materials; Britain made them up into goods.) The middle classes were also self-interested, and likely to be ‘unrepresentative’ nationalists, that constant imperial bugbear; not, therefore, proper ‘Whigs’. Cromer would have nothing to do with them. Yet they were probably the best hope for the growth of a genuinely independent and also pro-British Egypt. Hence the failure of that original agenda. One of Cromer’s Conservative critics, in fact, maintained that Egypt was even further from self-government in 1907 than it had been when he arrived. The middle classes served Cromer poorly in Britain as well as in Egypt. He never felt they were imperialistic enough for him, which – however empire-minded they may have been in other ways – was certainly true. Like most imperialists he despised British politicians, latterly fixing the blame on them directly for the refusal of Egyptian nationalist agitation to go away. It was only because they encouraged it. Less than half the House of Commons voted to thank him (with money) for his services in Egypt when he returned, though there were enough abstentions to get the measure through. That came shortly after the scandalous Dinshawai affair, an appalling example of British military arrogance and cruelty, which because it came on his watch he had to defend publicly. Privately his instincts were more liberal; his opinions on General Gordon (a drunken fanatic) and Kitchener (‘the most arbitrary and unjust man I ever met’), for example, as well as his earlier stance on the Ilbert bill, show how distant he was from the contemporary proto-fascist seam of British imperialist thought; but it did him no good. Cromer’s reputation declined steadily from the day of his resignation – effectively forced on him by his critics, Owen claims – onwards. On top of his indigestion, rampant democracy in Britain, and with Egypt still showing no sign of ‘deserving’ the self-government Gladstone had intended for it, that must have been hard to bear. Only the coming of World War I cheered him up. He died during the

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course of it, after seeing an apparition of a man carrying a ladder. (Even his near-death visions were dull.) Whether that original Gladstonian agenda was ever feasible must be doubted. As Alfred Lyall warned Cromer as early as 1882: ‘I know of no instance in history of a nation being educated by another nation into selfgovernment and independence; every nation has fought its way up in the world as the English have done.’ We might heed that today. Even if Cromer had been more sympathetic – towards the Egyptian middle classes, for example – it might not have worked. No people likes to be told how to behave by another, especially at the business end of a gun. It smacks of ‘imperialism’, however differently it may appear to the imperialists themselves. There is no avoiding this. It is not only a question of motive. Even if we take Gladstone at face value – forget his Egyptian shares, for example, which gave him hands as oily as George W Bush; disregard the ‘crusading’ aspects of both adventures; and accept both men’s own words that they only wished to ‘free’ Egypt and Iraq and then withdraw – intervention of this kind is bound to have imperialist features. Imposing Western standards and institutions can be seen as imperialist per se. You can claim they are ‘universal’, not merely ‘Western’, which may take some of the ‘imperialist’ edge off them; but they are almost bound to be coloured by your own ideological limitations and prejudices. Who was Cromer to say, for example, that the Egyptians could not adopt protectionism if they wished? Or America, to bundle the ‘free market’ in with all those other universal ‘human rights’ for Iraq? Liberation is a tricky business. It cannot be left to business executives. It needed someone with more imagination, depth of thought and breadth of vision than Cromer to stand any chance of succeeding with it in Egypt a century ago; or, for that matter, in Iraq and Afghanistan in more recent times. Even then, that is no guarantee of success.

CHAPTER 16 STANLEY

For a biographer looking for a really unlikely imperial reputation to rescue, they do not come much unlikelier than Henry Morton Stanley. Widely excoriated in his own time as one of the most brutal of African travellers, condemned by historians for his part in the creation of the Belgian King Leopold II’s vile ‘Congo Free [sic ] State’, and derided both then and since for his famous but embarrassingly arch greeting to David Livingstone when he ‘found’ him in Ujiji November 1871 – ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ – as well as for his silly ‘Stanley cap’ (like an inverted chamber-pot with holes in and a tea-towel flapping at the sides), he has always been every historian’s least favourite British explorer. (Obviously some foreigners were worse.) This is despite the fact that, as the subtitle of Tim Jeal’s Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa’s Greatest Explorer (Faber, 2007) indicates, he was undeniably a ‘great’ one, if greatness is measured by geographical mysteries solved (the source of the Nile, for a start) and hardships endured (countless bouts of malaria, dysentery, gastritis, flesh-eating ulcers, being shot at, and never finding the love of a good woman). To be honest, the evidence for the prosecution looks pretty damning. Stanley was a dreadful and serial liar: about his humble (and Welsh) origins, for example; his nationality; his name – he stole that from someone else – and most of the treaties he was supposed to have made with African rulers. He was a great flogger, caner and hanger of African porters who stole from him, or tried to escape. This was despite the fact that at an earlier stage of his career, fighting in the American Civil War, he had himself deserted, twice – once from each side. He shot quite a lot of other Africans dead, usually because they objected to his marching through their countries – with huge entourages, which made the Africans suspect, reasonably enough, that he might be a slave-raider. He also burned villages. Occasionally this was to ‘set an example’; and in at least one case (his second battle with the people of Bimbireh in August 1875) there was a strong suspicion that he did it out of revenge.

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On his Congo expedition of 1887– 8 (to ‘rescue’ Emin Pasha from Islamic fundamentalists, though Emin turned out to be a bounder, and did not want to be rescued), he connived with Arab slave-traders, even selling them guns; stole food and canoes from Africans, shooting one old man when he tried to retrieve his; and left half his party stranded along the way under the command of two British officers – Major Edmund Barttelot and James Sligo Jameson (of the Irish whisky family) – whom he knew to be rotters, and were found later to have inflicted the most appalling atrocities on the Africans in their care, including flogging to death, sex slavery, and selling a young girl to cannibals so that Jameson could observe her being killed and eaten. He was also certainly largely responsible for the establishment of the notorious Congo Free State. It was for these reasons that, after Stanley’s death, the Dean of Westminster refused him burial in the Abbey next to his beloved David Livingstone: what the Dean called his ‘violence and even cruelty’, which he claimed marked his achievements off from the ‘peaceful successes of other explorers’. These are just the solider charges against him, most of which Jeal concedes. They do not take account of some of the wilder ones: such as that he never really ‘found’ Livingstone, or was even rescued by him; and forged the latter’s letters. These were some of the rumours going the rounds at the time; indicating, incidentally, that he was by no means the straightforward late-Victorian ‘hero’ that some have assumed. Later, in an age unable to credit that his attachment to men younger than himself could be other than physical, he has been ‘accused’ of being a closet homosexual. There is no evidence (or need) for that. If I were Stanley’s defence attorney I think I would throw in the towel at this point. Jeal however is made of more heroic stuff. He is also genuinely convinced that – despite all this evidence – Stanley has been hard done by. (I don’t think he’s doing this just to be perverse.) Here’s how he mounts his case. He has several different levels of defence: as one proves clearly inadequate, he passes down to the next. This just about covers all Stanley’s flaws. Firstly, there are the charges against Stanley that are simply not true: the ‘forgeries’, the homosexuality, some of the killings, his direct responsibility for the later Congo atrocities, and so on. Often these were the products of jealousy and prejudice against him: for ‘finding’ Livingstone before the official (‘Royal’) Geographers could, for example; or because of his (supposed) Americanism. On other occasions they – some killings and beatings, for example – were his own exaggerations, in newspaper articles and books. That is curious. Why should he should he puff his own crimes? Jeal thinks it was in order to please a bloodthirsty readership (he started off as a sensational journalist, remember); or else to create a particular image that he seems to have craved, of the ‘hard man’ – the Vinny Jones – of the exploring world. (But why did he need that?

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Social pressures? Personal – perhaps masculine – insecurity? Who knows?) – Secondly, if these stories were true, they were justifiable: the theft of food because his party was starving; the shootings out of self-defence, or to forestall even larger massacres, or in the greater interest of ending the Arab slave trade. Thirdly, if they might not have been strictly justified, they may nonetheless have been excusable, usually because of his sufferings: either on his expeditions (the fevers and so on); or because of his background. The ordeals of African exploration at this time really were frightful – you were lucky if you returned with two-thirds of your original body weight and able to hold a glass steadily – and needed very special qualities, in Europeans and their African servants alike. ‘She is cruel and wild and demands the best of man’s parts to enjoy her’, Stanley once wrote to one of his travelling companions, who was getting fed up with ‘her’; ‘but once a man has conquered himself – Africa has as much loveliness as another continent. The fault lies in the man.’ (There is a lot to unpack there.) Stanley managed to conquer himself – the travelling companion did not, dying a few weeks later, as so many of them did – but clearly at a cost. Stanley’s background is the other factor that elicits Jeal’s sympathy. He makes a great deal of this: the workhouse boy who never knew his father and was rejected by his mother (which is why he tried so hard to keep this Welsh stage of his life so secret, and indeed denied it more than once); the grown man ‘hooted, reviled and calumniated’ by polite society and spurned by women because he was a ‘base born churl’. This again strikes one as odd. Stanley did spend some years in America (mainly in the South), and learned a lot from that country: from its democratic spirit, for example; possibly its gun culture; and its showmanship. It is a little surprising that he did not also take on board the typical American pride in having worked one’s way ‘up’. (Some of his upwardly-mobile English friends felt he ought.) Still, there is no doubt that the sensitive soul beneath the ‘hard’ masculine exterior that Stanley felt he needed to erect was tormented by these things. His was a deeply damaged personality. In an ideal world, perhaps people like this should not have been allowed to travel in places like Africa with guns. (But then that might have excluded everyone who wanted to.) To pass further down the line of justifications: even if we cannot bring ourselves to excuse some of these ‘crimes’ of Stanley’s, we need to put them in perspective. Most nineteenth-century African explorers behaved much as Stanley did, pace the good Dean; they just have not been found out. Even Livingstone was no perfect saint in his treatment of Africans, as Jeal’s 1973 biography of him showed (Jeal is as adept at pulling down saints as at raising up villains). Ironically, it was Stanley who was chiefly responsible for establishing the latter’s sanctity, papering over his less attractive side; mainly because – as Jeal puts it – ‘to have “found” a forgotten saint made a better

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[newspaper] story than to have found an embittered recluse’. That then rebounded on Stanley, as his exploits were measured against his own Livingstone myth. His mistake was to have admitted to his excesses, as General Gordon – another Christian ‘hero’, who was nonetheless responsible for far more atrocities than he – once pointed out: ‘these things may be done but not advertised’. Jeal also reminds us that floggings were common in British society at that time, in public schools and the navy, for example, so it would not have struck British contemporaries as so remarkable for Africans (except that many Britons opposed flogging domestically too); that African polities could be just as cruel, which is undoubtedly true, and is presumably meant to imply that Africans would not have been too shocked either (except they were); and – here we reach the very bottom line – that the deaths inflicted by Stanley and all the other explorers pale into insignificance by comparison with ‘official’ British killings: the 11,000 Sudanese slaughtered by Kitchener’s army, for example, in the Battle of Omdurman alone. It is difficult to argue with that. Incidentally, Jeal also believes that Stanley cannot have been the model for the awful Kurz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Most modern Conrad scholars would agree. (I am told that current research favours Le´on Rom.) The point about literary models, however, is surely that they can be multiple. There are also some more positive points to be made for Stanley. For a start, he deplored the ‘needless slaughter of wild animals’ for sport; and found it ‘simply incredible that because ivory is required for ornaments and billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste’ – though that did not stop him adding a billiard room to the mansion he bought in Pirbright, Surrey, just before his death. Secondly, though his motives may not always have been of the best – self-advertisement was clearly one of them, at least at the start – neither were they the worst, like material greed; and some could be even considered noble in certain lights: scientific enquiry, for example, and putting down the Arab slave trade. He did not exploit African or Arab women sexually, as most of his European companions did, partly out of revulsion at his own mother’s promiscuity (he was illegitimate), and partly from fear of contracting VD. (He was clearly tempted, though; one passage in his diaries refers to ‘vile thoughts that stained the mind’.) More importantly for our times (and for liberals in his own), Jeal claims he was not racist, generally preferring Africans to Europeans – especially to upper-class Brits – for company, and speaking of them admiringly, and not merely patronisingly, on many occasions. He liked them better if they were trustworthy and faithful (he was fond of dogs, too); but the same could be said of his preferences among Europeans. He was highly critical of foreign explorers’ and officers’ racist attitudes, and believed Britons could never treat Africans as badly as, say, the

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Belgians (the worst): though how he could persist in this view after the Berttelot and Jameson affair rather beggars belief. It also reads oddly in the light of his own treatment of many Africans, and of some racist passages in his own public statements – referring to Africans as ‘natural hewers of wood and drawers of water’, for example – unless these were just meant to boost the Vinny Jones image too. So there are clearly difficulties here. However, he does seem to have been truly shocked by the gruesome horrors he encountered of the Arab slave trade, and was probably genuine in his ‘mission’ to continue Livingstone’s ‘crusade’ against this evil. (Interestingly, however, he also claimed that Arab slavery itself – as opposed to the trade – was gentler than, say, it had been in the American South; or even than wage labour in British factories.) Like Livingstone, he believed the slave trade and other barbarities (like tribal wars) were best eradicated by the introduction of ‘legitimate trade’ to Africa. That is a credible view. It certainly was not a mean or merely greedy one at the time. It only became that in the hands of monopolistic exploiters like Cecil Rhodes, whom Stanley met once, and disliked. International competitive trade, between free agents on all sides, was widely thought to be the solution to most of the world’s ills. Stanley never doubted that it could be the salvation of Africa. Unfortunately, it was this belief that led him to put his weight behind King Leopold’s Congo scheme in the late 1870s and 1880s: mainly because it was presented, misleadingly as it turned out, in exactly these terms. It was an internationalist enterprise – the ‘International Association of the Congo’, it was called – not a colonial one. That’s why it employed non-Belgians, like Stanley. It was also supposed to be philanthropic. Jeal argues that Stanley’s involvement with the International Association, and later with the Congo Free State, was entirely innocent. None of the treaties he personally signed on behalf of the Association with African chiefs got them to alienate their lands. (Later Leopold doctored some of them to suggest they did.) He only supported the switch from ‘Association’ to colony (the ‘Free’ State) because he trusted Leopold to honour the Africans’ rights and free trade more than the colonialist and monopolistic French – the perceived villains at the time – who were pressing hard. It could have been Stanley who first gave Leopold the idea of exploiting the Congo’s rubber: ‘Almost every branchy tree has a rubber parasite clinging to it’, he told the King in 1890. ‘A well organised company will be able to collect several tons annually.’ It was ‘Red Rubber’,1 of course, that produced most of the later atrocities – African children having their hands cut off to make up for shortfalls, and so on. But Stanley could not have anticipated that. Jeal finds it unsurprising that he should have had no idea that Leopold was plotting to renege on all his good intentions eventually, in view of the fact that others were fooled too: except that some were not fooled,

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including Bismarck – ‘Schwindel!’ he wrote against one of Leopold’s more pious statements about his ‘civilising mission’ in 1885; and Stanley’s diaries show him having slivers of suspicion of his own as early as 1879. By the mid-1890s he was persuaded (by men there he trusted) that atrocities were being committed in the Congo, but still believed they were without Leopold’s authority, and urged him to appoint an international tribunal to enquire into them. (Leopold was indignant. Why not send one to Ireland, he asked? Or the Philippines?) So there can be little doubt that, in his early journeys there, Stanley had no idea that he was contributing to the hell on earth that the Congo later became. It seems likely that the only reason he went along with Leopold for so long afterwards was that ‘the pill of having been utterly deceived was too bitter to swallow whole’. Stanley was, after all, often deceived. Jeal thinks he was deceived by his eventual wife, Dorothy (ne´e Tennant), who comes out of this book very badly: resembling ‘a great actress’ who feigned love for him (she really loved Sir Alfred Lyall, but he was already married), then wickedly took control of him – never giving him peace to write, forbidding him to accept an invitation to rule British East Africa, as he wanted, dragging him along to hateful ‘society’ occasions, and forcing him to become an MP, which he loathed, and was not good at. (The air in the House of Commons, he said, smelled worse than a tropical swamp.) This image of a henpecked Stanley is a little surprising (Dorothy said what she had originally liked about him was his ‘powerfulness’), and should maybe be taken with a pinch of salt. He might have used her as an excuse; after all, he turned down an earlier opportunity to become the chief administrator of the British East Africa Company before she ever came on to the scene. It is a foolish biographer who ever thinks he or she has got to the bottom of a marriage. Most of us have never managed to fathom our own. But at least Dorothy appreciated her husband’s heroism. Jeal’s final defence of him is an onslaught on the politically correct thinking (though he does not use that phrase) that devalues ‘masculine heroism’ these days, under the influence of ‘sexual equality’; attributing it to chauvinism, or masochism, or worse. Even at the time it was not fully comprehended. ‘The only thing I cannot quite understand is your incentive’, wrote Dorothy to him (before they married). ‘What is the fuel which makes the water boil, the steam rise and the paddles move?’ (Now there’s a suggestive metaphor!) But she did not doubt that there was something great and noble there. More than a century later – now that such people, Jeal claims, are ‘an extinct species’ – it is even more difficult for us to grasp their willingness to suffer and endure in pursuit of ‘missions’, their ‘longing to solve mysteries’, and their ‘belief that God had sent them’. Instead we explain them away. ‘What was wrong with these

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explorers, we ask, knowingly, these days.’ Jeal deplores this. He is probably right, in the sense that this kind of cheap psychoanalysis seems inadequate to really get to terms with them. Whether Jeal’s own constant harping on the poor workhouse lad’s continual search for the love of a lost mother explains Stanley any better, or makes him more ‘heroic’, is a matter of opinion. In the last resort it is more important to understand Stanley than to judge him, and Jeal’s book, based as it is on a rich new archive (masses of papers released only in the last few years, many from the grip of the wicked Belgians), goes a long way to achieving this. You can disregard the huge special pleading that runs through it, and still gain some fascinating insights into a remarkable man. Judging him is to miss the point. The most perceptive of his contemporary critics realised this; like HR Fox Bourne, Secretary of the Aborigines Protection Society – often twitted for being an ‘armchair critic’ – who wrote this in a review of one of Stanley’s books: The Society is not condemning Mr Stanley or his subordinates so much, but the mounting of an expedition with aims and methods which almost necessitated the cruelties and slaughters that were incident to it [. . .] It seems better to remain in armchairs and pass resolutions than wantonly to embark on perilous enterprises, which can only be carried out by means that degrade Englishmen. Stanley also had something to say about the ‘degrading’ impact of exploration. Men like Barttelot and Jameson, he wrote, were not ‘originally wicked’. It was the circumstances of their exile – ‘deprived of butcher’s meat & bread & wine, books, newspapers, the society & influence of their friends’ – together with their sufferings – disease, danger and so on – that brought out in them the ‘natural savagery’ that lay safely dormant in most other men. African exploration was almost bound to lead to this. It was the fault of the whole concept. It could be criticised on other grounds too. What was the necessity for it? Science was often cited as its justification; but not everyone swallowed that. ‘Perhaps,’ the Saturday Review commented in 1878, with heavy sarcasm, ‘the Geographical Society cannot exist without rivers, and it may be so noble an institution that all the horrors of war must be perpetrated rather than it should perish’. Lastly, there was a legal point. Who gave these expeditions the authority to go into other people’s countries, asked one commentator in 1891, and take the law into their own hands – hanging miscreants, for example? What legally-constituted government? If none, they were merely ‘piratical’. In his more reflective moments even Stanley acknowledged this: ‘we went into the heart of Africa self-invited – therein lies our fault’. Of course Africans had every right ‘to exclude

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strangers from their country’. So they were fully justified in shooting at him. Self-defence (by the strangers) was no defence at all. The best excuse for missions like these was probably the humanitarian one, which Stanley of course milked for all it was worth, probably honestly – though it is difficult to be sure in the case of so devious a man. (With all his lies and exaggerations, he had only himself to blame for this.) He will have got that from Livingstone, whom he admired hugely, even adopting him as a surrogate father (he always ached for a Dad as well as a Mum), and who Jeal believes softened and deepened him from the mere Yankee journalist (‘that damned penny-a-liner’) that he was when they met. We should not forget that central Africa was already suffering terribly long before the new breed of European imperialists chanced on it in the later nineteenth century: from indigenous tyrannies, inter-tribal wars, the after-effects of the Atlantic slave trade, and the impact of the Muslim Arab slave trade, which was its greatest scourge now. It was this that led Stanley to dub Africa the ‘unhappy continent’, a reputation it still, of course, bears. It also stimulated his belief that Livingstone’s death (in 1874) had ‘left an obligation on the civilised nations of Europe and America, as the shepherds of the world, to extend their care and protection over the oppressed races of Africa’. That could be seen as the beginning of what later came to be called ‘liberal imperialism’. Whether or not he truly believed in this (and Jeal is pretty convincing that he did), it was not an ignoble ideal. Stanley’s tragedy was that of many later liberal imperialists: good (internationalist) intentions being subverted by a less scrupulous and altruistic kind of colonialism. Jeal cites western Sudan to show us that the underlying ‘unhappiness’ of Africa is still with us. But Stanley’s plainly was not the answer to it.

CHAPTER 17 MORE EXPLORERS

Stanley was not the only one. It all started with a quest to solve the ‘greatest geographical mystery’ of the age. It ended, more than a century later – and if you follow the rather narrow logic of Tim Jeal’s Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and the Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure (Faber, 2011) – with ethnic cleansing in Darfur. The ‘mystery’ was the source of the River Nile, which had exercised Europeans and Egyptians ever since Ptolemy in the second century CE . It was this that drew Jeal’s main protagonists – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel Baker, David Livingstone and (again) Stanley – to central Africa in the 1850s and 1860s; together, of course, with the allure of the fame that being the first to crack the riddle would bring. On their way they were shocked by the atrocious slave raiding they found there, provoking a campaign against it that came to bear some of the attributes of a literal crusade – the slave traders were mostly Muslim Arabs – and later colonialism, ostensibly to protect the Africans but with exploiters and Great Power ambitions also muscling in. It was this that gave rise to the drawing of Sudan’s present artificial border with Uganda, which has caused such an ‘incalculable amount of suffering’ in all these countries in modern times. That’s the final link to Darfur. The first part of the story has been told often before: hagiographically in contemporary books and memoirs; classically in Alan Moorhead’s The White Nile (1960); and most recently in Jeal’s own biographies of Livingstone (1973) and Stanley (2007), which he draws on heavily here. As mentioned, those two last books offered revisionist assessments of both their subjects, the first pulling the missionary Livingstone down a little, the second making some interesting excuses for the usually excoriated Stanley. This book does much the same for Burton and Speke, originally travel companions, who however came to loathe each other over various imagined slights and betrayals. They also disagreed on the question of the ‘source’. The battle between them over that should have come to a head at a meeting of the British Association in September 1864, had

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not Speke killed himself the day before on a partridge shoot. It was almost certainly accidental, but Burton hinted that Speke had taken his own life, scared of the confrontation. In fact Speke had been right about the source of the Nile, and was the one who should have been awarded the palm for discovering it; but his reputation never recovered from Burton’s slanders. Jeal puts this right, puffing Speke and demolishing Burton – not an echt explorer, he thinks. Baker also comes out of this account badly, being mainly responsible, in Jeal’s view, for the switch from humanitarian protection to a more formal and brutal kind of imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s. Jeal is right to insist that this stage should not be confused with the earlier, more ‘innocent’, one, when most of Africa’s explorers were motivated not by greed or the urge to control, but by simple curiosity, competitiveness, and the desire to pit their bodies and minds against the appalling hardships that African travel at that time involved. Jeal is very graphic about these: the climate, terrain, diseases, dangerous animals (especially the tiny ones), and natives understandably suspicious of interlopers after their experiences of the slavers, and of others who sought to ‘eat their countries’. Most European explorers suffered terribly, and many died horrible deaths. At least one had his genitals cut off first. But this only spurred the others on. Jeal wonders whether the Christian doctrine of ‘redemption through suffering’ may have had something to do with it. Others might suspect an over-developed machismo, were it not for the several women who went out there too. Jeal restores these to the picture – Baker’s mistress ‘Florence’, for example; and also the contributions of their hundreds of African and Arab guides, translators and porters, without whom the Europeans would have got nowhere at all. Often they were carried by them. (Is that not cheating?) Still, as Livingstone heroically understated it in April 1873: ‘It is not all pleasure this exploration’. That was just a few days before his own wretched and lonely death, near the edge of the Bangweulu swamp in present-day Zambia. Livingstone’s abject personal failure as a missionary is well known. (He made just one African convert, who later relapsed.) He was also wrong about the source of the Nile. Even if he had been successful here, however, what would it have mattered? ‘Suppose you get to the great lake’, Chief Commoro of the Latuka asked Samuel Baker in 1863, ‘what will you do with it? What will be the good of it?’ Baker’s own great chief, Lord Palmerston, thought much the same. ‘No doubt Speke has at much personal trouble, risks and expense, solved a geographical problem, which it is strange nobody ever solved before’, he responded to those lobbying for a knighthood for him. ‘On the other hand [. . .] the practical usefulness of the discovery is not very apparent.’ (So Speke was never knighted; though later his family was allowed to include a hippopotamus in its coat of arms.) In the end the source of the

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Nile turned out to be roughly where Ptolemy had put it. So no great surprise there. But that may have been immaterial. It was the hopeful travelling, rather than the arrival, that stirred the explorers, and fascinated their contemporaries when they read about them back home. They might have been even more fascinated by Jeal’s splendid account here. One of his discoveries is early manuscript and proof versions of Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863), which reveal the excisions his publisher insisted on. (Speke called it ‘gelding’.) These include some shockingly favourable judgments of African societies – shocking because they left no room for the renovative powers of Christianity; a passage on sex advice he gave to the son of a chief (basically, that size doesn’t matter); and a touching account of his love for a Bagandan woman, Me´ri, which was unrequited. Her chief could not understand why he did not force himself on her; Speke’s reply was that ‘cords of love were the only instruments white men knew the use of’. If only.

CHAPTER 18 LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Is anyone now much interested in ‘Lawrence of Arabia’? Michael Korda’s new biography, Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (Harper Perennial, 2011), claims he still exerts ‘a remarkable hold on the imagination of people even three-quarters of a century after his death’; but then Korda has been away from Britain a long time. Besides, he has something of a family stake in Lawrence, as the nephew of Alexander and Zoltan, who originally bought the film rights to his story, though in the end they never made the movie (it was meant to star Leslie Howard), out of respect firstly for Lawrence’s feelings when he was alive (he feared Hollywood might feel it necessary to insert a female ‘love interest’, which would have been most inappropriate); and later for government ministers who worried about its impact on Britain’s relations with the Turks, the villains of the piece. In the end it was David Lean who made the famous Peter O’Toole version, released in 1962. Why is that still the only one? Maybe it was felt it could not be improved on; but that has not prevented remakes of other great films. (One example is The Four Feathers, 2002, similar to Lawrence of Arabia in many ways, and a third remake of the original.) Or it may be that there is little popular appetite any longer for Lawrence’s sort of hero: the leader of men, including in his case men of an entirely different culture from his own (the Bedouin Arabs), winning them over by his bravery, stoicism, tactical brilliance, and the sheer magnetism of his personality, in order to save them from themselves, and so from the awful Turk. It all seems a bit embarrassing, in this rather more debunking age. Korda seems immune to this; a genuine hero-worshipper, which may be why he wrote this book. That, and the family connection. It is interesting, incidentally, how important Hungarians were in the projection of the ‘heroic’ British imperial image in the last century; another, apart from the Korda brothers, was Imre Kiralfy, who organised Barnum-like ‘imperial exhibitions’ all over Britain before World War I. Most native Britons did not seem to have this in them. It was chatting with uncle Alexander as a teenager, Michael

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tells us in a footnote, that first got him interested in Lawrence, though at that time the extent of the influence was limited to his buying a motorcycle, and joining the RAF. (Lawrence of course enlisted in the RAF incognito after his Arabian adventures, and killed himself on his bike. The Lean film starts with this.) In all these cases there were also American connections, which is true of Korda neveu too. He has lived in New York since the 1950s, working as a publisher (at Simon and Schuster). Americans are less debunking. (Look at the apotheosis of Ronald Reagan.) It may be that they constitute a likelier market for all this ‘hero’ stuff. The book is not original; but then it does not pretend to be. There is no fresh material in Hero – Korda in fact has hardly glanced at any archival sources, being content merely to mine the existing biographies and Lawrence’s own books and published letters for his text; and no special insights, apart from what he has to tell us, from his publishing experience, about Lawrence’s relations with his publishers. Needless to say he has looked at no Arabic accounts. His grasp of context is poor. The book is far too long, partly because of irrelevant diversions – what on earth has Basil Liddell Hart’s fascination with women’s lingerie got to do with anything, for example? – and partly through repetition, the result of starting with 100 pages on the most exciting point of Lawrence’s career (imitating Lawrence’s own Revolt in the Desert), before returning to it later on – after the ‘early life’ chapters – with many of the same descriptions and quotes. In this regard, it is a shame that Korda’s publishing experience seems not to have taught him the need for rigorous editing. Much of the book will grate with British readers, including some rather silly comparisons between Lawrence and Princess Di – both adored, both killed in crashes – and simplistic views of present-day British society, which may be what led Korda to think that Lawrence still means anything at all to us, but really just demonstrates how out of touch he is. On the question of unoriginality, however, Michael Korda has his answer; and it is a fair one. ‘However many books there have been about Lawrence’, he writes at the end of this one, ‘his is still a story worth telling, a life that needs to be described without prejudice and without a fixed agenda’. That is especially so, he goes on, at the present critical juncture of events in the Middle East, which Lawrence could be said to have influenced, but less than he wanted to, which is why (it might be argued) the place is in such a mess. Well, this is not a bad re-telling of the story. The derring-do is quite well done. On the matter of prejudice, there is plenty of that here; overwhelmingly in favour of Korda’s ‘hero’, true, but without skating over the problematical aspects of his personality: like his immaturity, even childishness; the relish he got from war; his revulsion against bodily contact, including sexual, unless it was with whips; and his political duplicity; but also his frequent episodes of

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despondency over all these things, especially the last. One characteristic it is useful to be reminded of, if our image of him comes from the film, is how short he was (five feet five inches), but with a disproportionately large head; earning him the soubriquet in some quarters of ‘the gnome’. Peter O’Toole did not quite convey that. Of course some of these weaknesses – or quirks, or disadvantages – could also be seen as assets for a guerrilla leader; even the sado-masochism, if it enabled him to endure pain and privation in a better cause. And Lawrence had others. He took no account of formal rank and status, regularly rubbing up much older and ‘superior’ officers and public figures the wrong way, except those who were big enough to be able to disregard his insolence, and facilitate his plans, with whom he got along on terms of perfect equality. They included the King. Coupled with this was his rejection of any ‘honours’ for himself; there is a wonderful story recounted here – which may be apocryphal, but it comes from the royal horse’s mouth – telling how at one investiture ‘Lawrence unpinned each decoration as soon as the king had pinned it on him, so that in the end the king was left foolishly holding a cardboard box filled with the decorations’. Korda takes this as evidence of Lawrence’s natural democracy; but there is evidence here that it did not extend to the working classes, unless they were doing his bidding; and especially (towards the end of his life) when he had to share army or RAF huts with them: ‘a black core [. . .] of animality’, he called them once. So far as rank, titles and medals were concerned, he simply thought his ‘heroism’ set him above them. His other great asset in pursuit of the particular kind of heroism he hankered for – leading the Arabs in the Holy Land – was an entire absence of racial or cultural prejudice; at any rate towards them. He fitted into their society comfortably, easily shedding his Western values when necessary. When chided for allowing ‘his’ Arabs to slit the throats of their prisoners, for example, he merely replied that ‘it was their idea of war’. And on one occasion he personally executed a young man, Hamed, without trial, realising that if he did not the family of Hamed’s victim would turn it into a blood feud, which would be bad (to say the least) for Arab unity. The trouble with Westerners in the Middle East, he wrote, especially French and Americans, was that they ‘come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn’. He criticised some Canadian priests he met for being ‘too narrow to get outside their civilisation, or state of living’. It probably helped that he himself had always resisted his evangelical mother’s efforts to pump religious belief into him. Later, after she gave up a missionary career in China after meeting increasing obstruction there, he wrote to her that ‘probably there will not be much more missionary work done anywhere in the future. We used to think foreigners were black beetles, and coloured races were heathen: whereas now

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we respect and admire and study their beliefs and manners. It’s the revenge of the world upon the civilisation of Europe.’ However, he seems not to have extended this toleration and empathy to other non-European ‘races’. He disliked Egyptians, loathed Turks (understandably, perhaps, especially after being terribly tortured and raped by one – the incident is described in sadistic detail in his The Seven Pillars of Wisdom), had little feeling for ‘negroes’, whom he mainly came across as Arab slaves, and took no interest in Indians, despite being stationed on the North-West Frontier for a while. The first time he met Indian troops he noted how ‘puny and confined’ they seemed, ‘so unlike the abrupt, wholesome Beduin [sic ] of our joyous Army’. So he was hardly a modern, enlightened man, in this sense. In fact he was the reverse. He was an English medieval. This seems to me to hold the key to most of his social and also his political attitudes, though Korda appears not to have noticed it. (Critics of Western ‘orientalism’, too, sometimes miss the more potent ‘medievalism’ that often lay behind it.) It was not an uncommon identity among people of Lawrence’s background in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; stemming partly from their aversion to ‘modern life’ – cities, capitalism, corruption, mechanisation, mass-production, consumption, luxury, democracy: the quantities in the mix could vary – which naturally led them on to, or may have led on from, nostalgia for earlier, allegedly purer times. Medieval Europe and ancient Greece were the two most common foci for this nostalgia. Lawrence was avid for both. He read Aristophanes in the desert, in the original, and his last book was a translation of the Odyssey. But it was the Middle Ages (or his idea of them) that really got to his soul. He read Mallory’s Morte D’Arthur repeatedly, together with Spenser, William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (Korda does less than justice to Morris by describing him merely as an ‘aesthete’), and several popular novels set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins, and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles, apparently to disprove Sir Charles Oman’s theory that the Gothic pointed arch came from Europe to the Middle East, rather than vice-versa (although according to this account he ended up agreeing with Oman: probably wrongly, as it happens); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic career, was all set to embark on an Oxford BLitt thesis on ‘Mediaeval Lead-Glazed Pottery’. The architecture of Oxford itself must have been another influence. (But not the day school he attended, Oxford High, which Korda describes as in the ‘Victorian high Gothic style’, but is not. It’s neo-Renaissance.) After his death it seems appropriate that he should have an effigy carved of him (by Eric Kennington), lying on his back, hands crossed over his sword, looking – apart

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from the Bedouin robes and the curve in the sword – exactly like a medieval knightly tomb-lid. There were also rumours around then that he was not dead, but only sleeping, in a cave somewhere, waiting for a moment of national crisis to emerge and rescue his people – this time his own; which takes us back to King Arthur, Frederick Barbarossa and Owain Glyndwr. (Perhaps now is the time to ask him to come out.) It should be easy to see why this drew him to the East, and to the Bedouin Arabs in particular. They lived sparely, healthily, openly. By contrast, modern England was ‘fat – obese’. It was so green that no-one there could appreciate greenery, unlike in the desert. The true Arabs had no cities – those sinks of iniquity in the West. Egypt had Cairo, which may have been one of the reasons he disliked that Arab land. Battles were conducted with a ‘chivalry and panache’ that contrasted with ‘the endless casualty lists and the sheer horror of mechanised, muddy, anonymous death’ on the Western Front. It also corresponded with Lawrence’s notion of medieval warfare. And it offered him scope for the kind of ‘heroism’ he had craved for himself ever since his adolescent reading of the great Greek and medieval epics: knightly charging (albeit on camels rather than horses), gorgeously costumed, impervious to danger. He also clearly liked the Arabs’ social arrangements: hereditary leaders, but needing to prove their leadership qualities to their proud, independent-minded subjects; and the place those social arrangements offered to him. ‘For the foreigner’, he wrote, Arabia ‘is too glorious for words: one is the baron of the feudal system’. When it came to deciding on a system of government for his free ‘Arabias’ once he had helped them liberate themselves, no other alternative seemed to occur to him, than that they should be ruled by kings, of ancient lineage. That is how it had been done in medieval England, after all. Of course medievalism cannot explain everything. Lawrence’s personality, attitudes and career were also influenced by a dozen other contemporary discourses and pressures; and from the inside by some very obvious personal hangups, almost screaming for a psycho-historian to probe. There’s the sadomasochism to factor into the picture, for example; the sexual ambivalence; and the obsession with self-control. (His greatest shame on being tortured and raped, he wrote, was the ‘delicious warmth, probably sexual’ that he experienced during the course of it.) His striving for achievement could have been a compensation mechanism for his odd, gnomic appearance; or for his illegitimacy (his father and mother had never married, and he had doubts about his paternity); or a response to his domineering mother. But who can tell? Guilt obviously played a great part. He was wracked with it before, during and after his part in the Arab Revolt, latterly because of what he saw as his betrayal of it. ‘We are calling on them to fight for us on a lie, and I can’t

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stand it.’ The ‘lie’, of course, was that the Arabs would be given Arabia to rule for themselves, when he knew it had already been secretly parcelled out (by the Sykes– Picot agreement) among the victorious Great Powers. That was the reason he gave George V for refusing his medals; together with the possibility that he might have to fight against the King’s armies one day, for his beloved Arabs, when it would obviously be inappropriate to have the ribbons on his chest. Officially Britain supported the Arab Revolt because it could help defeat German’s ally Turkey, and so release Allied troops for the Western Front; and also – more cynically – in order to extend Britain’s imperial sway in the Middle East. (Oil was starting to be a factor here.) Lawrence went along with the first of these objectives, but emphatically not the second. Escaping imperialism, in fact, was the main purpose of his key strategy during the Revolt, which was for his Arab army to liberate Damascus before the European armies, which he thought would give it a moral claim to establish the city as the capital of an independent Arab nation. He narrowly failed; a few French and Australians got there first. This could be seen as his fundamental political tragedy: to have aided a colonial seizure that he was deeply against. It is the more tragic if it has given posterity the idea that he was simply one in a line of British imperial heroes, following on from (say) Gordon and Kitchener. In fact there can be little doubt about Lawrence’s fundamental anti-imperialism, in almost every sense of the word. We have seen how much he was against what is called ‘cultural’ imperialism: happy to spread Western military technology to the Arabs, for example (especially explosives), but dismissive of Western values. I suppose that might be regarded as imperially patronising; but it is difficult to avoid the charge if so. So far as ‘formal’ imperialism is concerned, he was hugely against French colonial methods, especially Algerian-type settlement, which is why he was particularly anxious to keep France out of Syria; but he was not much fonder of the British sort. He wanted Britain out of India, for example. One telling indication of his transgressive stance on these issues may be the idea he considered late on of writing a biography of Roger Casement: British consul, and knighted, but also the revealer of Belgian colonial atrocities in the Congo, and an Irish nationalist who was hanged for treason during the War (and known to be gay); whose ‘heroic nature’ appealed to him. A genuine imperialist would not have touched Casement with a barge-pole. It was imperialism that stymied Lawrence’s fondest hopes for the Middle East. If anything was saved from the wreckage, it was probably the three eventually independent nations of Syria, Jordan and Iraq. They, however, hardly measure up against his grand ambition for the creation of a ‘United States of Arabia’ stretching from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf; with

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the help of the Jews in Palestine, who would contribute their expertise in agriculture, science, medicine and finance – on their way to possibly achieving their own ‘nation’, with the blessing of the Arabs, but very much later. It is hard to disagree that this would have been an improvement on the present state of affairs: ‘one of the most interesting “might have beens” in modern Middle Eastern history’, Korda calls it; but also difficult to imagine its ever happening. Whether it shows Lawrence to be ‘ahead of his time’, or simply a creature of it – over-confidence in the ability of peoples to rub along with each other was a common British delusion then – is difficult to say. It must also be doubtful whether Lawrence’s way of achieving these ends – through personal leadership and ‘heroism’ – was ever viable, or at least sufficient. There can be little doubt that he contributed much to the Arab Revolt, in terms of guerrilla tactics, for example, especially quick surprise raids rather than frontal assaults; and the use of dynamite. Liddell Hart compared him to ‘Marlborough, Napoleon, Sherman and Stonewall Jackson’ in terms of military genius. Korda claims his ‘legacies’ in the Middle East today include the ‘improvised explosive device (IED), the roadside bomb, and the suicide bomber’: though the last of these is, surely, a little unfair to pin on him. He helped pioneer the policing of countries by bombing them from airplanes: a tactic that was controversial at the time, because of the peril to civilians; became notorious when Saddam Hussein did it in the 1980s; but is still widely employed today, for example in Afghanistan. (Later Lawrence came to have doubts about it.) All this however was merely technical. Where he put his own main emphasis was on his personal leadership qualities. In letters written in 1927 he claimed that if he had known ten years earlier as much as he did then, he could have ‘got enough’ Middle Eastern people ‘behind me to have radically changed the face of Asia’: simply by walking unannounced into Emir Feisal’s headquarters – ‘he’d not likely kill an unarmed, solitary man’ – and persuading him, ‘in two days guesting’, to rally the Bedouin again. ‘Such performances require a manner to carry them off. I’ve done it four times, or is it five?’ It would be nice to think that this might work: for example among the fractured and undisciplined rebels of North Africa and the Middle East today. But it’s to put an awful lot of weight on charisma. Lawrence may well have exaggerated the impact of his own charisma, at least on those who did not share his medieval, hero-worshipping propensities. So far as the Arab Revolt is concerned, the jury is still out on his personal contribution to whatever success it may have had, with the Arabs themselves, understandably, not much liking a version that paints them as a rabble that needed to be guided by a European before they could fight their own battles. In England Bernard Shaw, a friend and admirer, told Lawrence in

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no uncertain terms that ‘like all heroes, and I must add, all idiots, you greatly exaggerate your power of moulding the universe to your personal convictions’. Korda, when he comes on to Lawrence’s magnum opus The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (sic), has to admit the same. In his own time and country Lawrence did not bewitch everyone. Among those who were immune were Beatrice Webb (who called him ‘an accomplished poseur’), Leonard Woolf (described here merely as Virginia’s husband, though he was important in his own right), many on the Labour side in Parliament, who once burned him in effigy; and children who met him, who were disappointed by how tiny he was. It may or may not be significant that Kennington’s full-length sculpture of him, originally done for St Paul’s Cathedral, was turned down by them, and then by Westminster Abbey and Salisbury Cathedral, apparently because of the controversy that surrounded him in the 1930s, before it landed up in the little Saxon church of St Martin’s in Wareham, Dorset; which is in fact probably better suited to it, quite near as it is to his old Arthurian heroes’ supposed stamping ground. Most academic historians will be sceptical of Lawrence’s claims, either because they know enough about the complicated military and diplomatic contexts of Middle Eastern affairs between 1914 and 1920 to at least muddy Lawrence’s role; or because they are fashionably averse (with good reason) to ‘great man’, or ‘heroic’, explanations of anything. There is no doubt that Lawrence cut a heroic figure; indeed, deliberately cultivated it, from an early age. He seems to have been an attractive person; an attraction perpetuated later by Peter O’Toole’s portrayal of him, with the help of his blue eyes (which were Laurentian), and those few extra inches. (If O’Toole had looked any prettier, Noe¨l Coward is said to have remarked after seeing the film, ‘they would have had to call it Florence of Arabia’.) He obviously hoped his fame would reverberate through the ages. It probably will not. People may remember the name, but little else. Few can now be inspired by him, like he was by his heroes. He is no longer epic film material. But it cannot harm to be reminded, at intervals, of his huge fascination in his own time.

CHAPTER 19 THE BUTCHER OF AMRITSAR

The Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919 is the most notorious atrocity in British imperial history. Lord Birkenhead – no bleeding-heart antiimperialist, he – believed it was unique ‘in all our long, anxious and entirely honourable [sic ] dealings with native populations’. Churchill thought it stood ‘in sinister isolation’. Confronted with a large crowd of peaceful Indian protesters in the Jallianwala Bagh, General ‘Rex’ Dyer ordered his (‘native’) troops to fire into it, and did not stop them until their ammunition ran out. He gave no warning. The people were already fleeing as he opened fire, scrambling to get out through the narrow exits; most were shot in the back. Afterwards Dyer made no effort to aid the wounded, and forbad the Indians to return to the square to help their own. Hundreds lay there, bleeding, until the next day. At least 379 died, including children, one a baby of six weeks. That was followed by wholesale floggings of suspected malefactors, and an infamous ‘crawling order’, whereby Indians were forced to shuffle on their bellies along a narrow street. Sometimes this penalty was imposed by Dyer for not ‘salaaming’ him as he drove through the town. Immediately afterwards Dyer claimed he had opened fire because, in the heat of the moment, he feared an attack by the crowd. That might furnish some kind of excuse for him: like many soldiers in such situations, he panicked. Later on, however, he modified this line. He could have dispersed the crowd peaceably, he admitted; or even prevented the meeting. (It was illegal.) But he did not want to. He wanted the demonstration to go on, in order to be able to fire at it, and kill as many people as he could. If he had had more ammunition, he said, he would have killed more. So it was all premeditated. It was meant as a ‘lesson’, to ‘nip’ what Dyer was convinced was an incipient re-run of the 1857 Mutiny ‘in the bud’. It was this extraordinary admission that ruined him. It set the Government of India against him; every member of the British cabinet; the House of Commons; all the native Indian papers (of course), and most of the metropolitan press. He was drummed out

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of the army, and only escaped court-martial for homicide because of a technicality. Unfortunately he also had some vociferous supporters: most of the Anglo-Indian community, especially women and Christian ministers; the Morning Post and Daily Telegraph (later to merge); most of the army, including many of his own ‘sepoys’, especially Sikhs; the usual right-wing reactionaries in Britain; and the House of Lords – who were generally more pro-Dyer the more lordly they were. These seem in retrospect a pretty unrepresentative bunch of people, but their blimpish defence of Dyer had a drastic effect on opinion in India. This whole affair turned Gandhi, for example, from an imperial reformer, content to work for Dominion status, into an out-and-out enemy of the British connection. It is arguable that it was the turning point against the British Raj. In his excellent new biography of Dyer, The Butcher of Amritsar (Hambledon, 2005) Nigel Collett does not go this far, but believes that when the time came to hand over power in 1947, Amritsar made it impossible for Britain to do it ‘with honour and with the affection or respect’ of the Indians. That would have tortured Dyer, whose main motive on 13 April 1919, he claimed (surely sincerely), was to save the Empire for Britain; and whose underlying personal insecurity, as Collett paints it, made him crave ‘affection and respect’. Collett’s picture is a convincing one, despite the lack of personal evidence about Dyer (he left no papers), for which he compensates with some wellresearched reconstructions of the milieus in which he lived and worked. (Hence all the ‘he will haves’ and ‘must haves’ and ‘probablys’ on almost every page.) Collett is hugely helped here by his own background as a commander of Gurkhas: so he knows the army and Indian aspects inside out. Dyer was clearly a problematical character. The son of a brewer, and so without social status; sent away to a very minor school in Ireland when he was 11; not seeing his parents again for 12 years; awkward and unsocial, ‘a fish out of almost every water’ he swam in; hot-tempered; probably rather stupid; with a Boy’s Own Paper approach to soldiering and the Empire; dangerously chivalric (the ‘crawling order’ was to avenge an assault on a woman missionary); impatient of orders; loathing politicians; depressed at the signs of imperial decline all around him (in Ireland as well as India); but also – on the more positive side – strong, hard-working, brave, loved by his ‘men’ (they cheered him as he left India for disgrace in Britain), racially tolerant in a paternalistic kind of way (he resigned from a club that refused to admit ‘native’ officers), a bit of an inventor (a new range-finder), and with some real military achievements to his credit (though his annexation of eastern Baluchistan, which he wrote a Boy’s Own Paper-style book about, was against orders, and had to be undone): all this tells us an enormous amount about the man, and, by extension, the event.

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Perhaps the key factor, however, was Dyer’s total immersion in the AngloIndian community from birth. He was born and brought up in India, and mainly served there: initially, as it happens, on stations with powerful Mutiny resonances. His occasional trips to England, on furlough or for training, were when he felt most out of water. He was like Kipling in this regard. One person who met him there noticed that there were even some English words he did not know. He certainly imbibed all the authoritarian prejudices of the Anglos in India. It was probably to this gallery that he was playing when he made all those damaging admissions about his motives at Amritsar. He knew his own people would approve of his ‘terrorist’ methods (the word used at the time). None of this, of course, was bound to lead to atrocity. But it may explain why Dyer’s atrocity was, in Churchill’s opinion – it was his reason for regarding Amritsar as sui generis – so essentially ‘un-British’. (We may not agree.)

CHAPTER 20 THE MERCENARY

Imperialism bred imperialists – it was usually that way around – who did not necessarily disappear when the Empire itself came to an end. There was too much cultural detritus left over to allow that. We shall find examples of this in the final (post-imperial) section of this book. One other sort of imperial survivor was the military adventurer, for whose adolescent male urges the colonies had used to provide such thrilling scope, but who now found he had to divert them elsewhere. Remarkably, Africa – his old imperial stampingground – remained open to him, due to the post-colonial chaos that reigned in many parts of it, and the ambitions of powerful forces outside. Still inspired by the juvenile literature that the Empire had left behind it, these men – always I think men – organised and joined mercenary armies there, as a suitable outlet for their gung-ho. Simon Mann was one such. Mann’s story, related in his memoir Cry Havoc (John Blake, 2011), is a remarkable one. It reads like a novel; indeed, like one particular novel, Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War (Arrow, 1975), which it appears to be imitating – with one crucial difference. In the novel the hero, ‘Cat’ Shannon, is hired by a capitalist, Sir James Manson, to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangoro – Equatorial Guinea (EG), thinly disguised – and replace its tyrannical president by another who will hopefully be less tyrannical, but in any case will grant Sir James a highly profitable platinummining concession he craves. The operation goes like clockwork – no problems, no mistakes – though there is a twist at the very end. (I won’t spoil it for anyone hasn’t read the book.) Because it is so efficient it makes for boring reading, except, I presume, for military wonks. This is where Cry Havoc has the advantage. It looks like a copy of the Dogs of War scenario – same place, roughly the same plot, 30 years later – but is much more fun because Mann’s attempted coup turned out to be, in his own words, ‘a swash-buckling fuckup’. Best-laid plans are always more interesting when they gang agley.

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This one went very agley. Mistrust, quarrels, betrayals, defective intelligence, security leaks, mechanical break-downs, changes of plan (there were five altogether) and money troubles beset it at every stage. Mann himself never even made it to EG, being arrested en route in March 2004 at Harare airport, Zimbabwe, where he and his men were supposed to pick up their weapons; charged, and imprisoned in Chikurubi prison, near Harare, in appalling conditions for three years. Then he was extradited to EG to be tried again, and sentenced to another 34 years there. That terrified him; he was convinced that President Obiang intended to eat his testicles. In the event he served only 14 months of that term, in better conditions than in Zimbabwe, before being pardoned by the tyrant he had plotted against, and flown back to the United Kingdom in November 2009. After that he began working on this book, which started out however as a ‘love-letter’ to his beloved wife, Amanda – ‘the Bitch of War as she now likes to call herself’ – while he was in gaol. Mann’s account does not add much to what we know already about the attempted coup, and indeed in some respects tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup (Profile, revised edn 2009). Roberts names more real names than Mann does, for example, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some pretty broad hints as to the identity of Mann’s own ‘Sir James Manson’, here just called ‘the Boss’, who is supposed to have master-minded the whole affair. Apparently Mann has ‘legal reasons’ for omitting all this. We are told that two reported conversations with Margaret Thatcher have also been cut, on similar grounds. Her son Mark however is not spared, mainly because he had already admitted his complicity in the affair as part of a plea-bargain in South Africa; and because of Mann’s enormous animus against him. Mark’s plea was that he bought a helicopter for Mann, but on the understanding that it was to be used as an air ambulance (or some such; he kept changing his story), and knew nothing about the plot until the very end. Mann is not having any of this. Thatcher was in it from the start. ‘He nearly bites my hand off [. . .] Not only does he want to share the spoils of our EG adventure. He wants to play an active role [. . .] He can become “one of the boys”. SAS.’ ‘Mark thinks that the SAS walks on water [. . .] I think he’s lonely. He doesn’t seem to have many friends. So he’s seized upon me.’ He also promised to try to bail Mann out if he got ‘collared’. ‘Thatcher has the money, and the political connections – in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK – to help me [. . .] We even shake hands on it.’ It is his failure to redeem this pledge that eats into Mann as he languishes in his Zimbabwean and Equatorial Guinean hell-holes. Cry Havoc is partly Mann’s act of revenge against him, and the others who failed him in his hour of need, including ‘the Boss’. Those readers who may come to this

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book less for its account of the ‘Wonga Coup’ than for what it says about ‘Scratcher’, perhaps as a way of getting at his late mother, will not be disappointed. He does not come out of it well. Thatcher fils cannot be blamed for the original fiasco, however. Mann has other ideas about this. He admits to poor judgment on his own part in not aborting the coup when he might have done, towards the end when it was clearly going pear-shaped. Otherwise, however, his ‘leadership’ was OK. His main culprits are the Boss, who simply failed to produce the ‘wonga’ (money) when it was needed, and the CIA, with whom the Boss was in cahoots, but who chickened out when news of the plot leaked out, with details – like the hiring of an ex-USAF aircraft – that seemed to show American finger prints. It was they who reined the Boss back. It does not occur to Mann that both the Boss and the CIA might have become disillusioned with him. More broadly, he implies that the oil companies the Boss represented were not really interested in liberal regime-change in any case. ‘Political and economic stability is simply not in the interests of big oil or big business.’ ‘What these Barrel Boyz want is fear and loathing.’ At a seminar at Chatham House in November 2011 to mark the publication of his book he agreed with a questioner that ‘from [his] description of “the Boss” he doesn’t sound like the sort that would be hugely interested in governance and human rights issues’. Ultimately it was all ‘about oil’. But not for Mann. Much of this book is devoted to trying to persuade us that his own motives were – as he puts it – far more ‘PC’. Obviously the ‘wonga’ was not to be sneezed at. ‘Sure we’ll make money – loads.’ One had to live, after all; and in his case to maintain at least one wife (he had two exes), seven children, posh educations for all of them, expensive homes, James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 (which he used for rallying), and his subscription to White’s, which must cost a pretty penny. (Yes, ‘I know White’s is a shits’ club, of course it is’, his father had once told him; ‘but at least we’re the best shits.’) But that was not enough. He needed more. One thing was the excitement – the ‘craic’, as he calls it. (‘Go and have your lovely adventure’, Amanda tells him at one stage.) Another was the sense that he could be ‘a real power for good in one of the worst parts of Africa [. . .]; make a difference, make some lives better’. Hence before going in to depose President Obiang of EG, he had to check that he really was the evil monster he was made out to be. He is also at pains to emphasise that he is against assassination, which was ‘plain wrong’; unlike Forsyth’s ‘Cat Shannon’, incidentally, who is far less squeamish. All this is in order to persuade himself – and now his readers – that he is in fact that rarest of creatures: a moral mercenary. It is easy to be cynical at this. But it is not unlikely that in Mann’s case simple greed was not a sufficient motive, or excuse, for his getting into these

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scrapes; especially when, as he himself points out, ‘I’ve got loads of bloody money anyway. I’m a multi-millionaire, for fuck’s sake.’ (Of course, multimillionaires can be greedy too.) It also fits in with his upbringing; his times; and the British historical tradition that he reflects in many ways. Mann is a creature of all of them, albeit an unusual one. * His upbringing was peculiar by the standard of the huge majority of Britons. He was born into privilege. Roberts calls him an aristocrat, but he could never be an echt one, with his fortune deriving from ‘trade’ (the brewing firm). Perhaps that made him court acceptance more. His father and grandfather had served in the world wars, and also – both of them – as captains of the English cricket team. His mother hardly appears here, except as a hallucination while he is in prison. ‘A Thing comes out: bright green, furry, long-legged [. . .] The size of a dinner plate, and very cross. It’s Mummy. I stamp. Squelch. Yuk.’ He was brought up by a nanny who used to take him for walks in his pram following marching guardsmen, which may have given him his first taste for soldiering; and who introduced him to war comics and boys’ imperial adventure stories, which will have bedded it in. ‘What Nanny didn’t tell me was that these books were for enjoyment, to get me reading; they were not training manuals for life.’ At eight he was sent away to a prep school, North Foreland Court in Kent, which ‘took seriously its duty of preparing small boys for life’s unpleasantness’, and where he was predictably miserable. Maybe that prepared him to endure the horrors of Chikurubi 40 years on. He went on from there to Eton, at a time – the 1960s – when it was still turning out ‘prefects rather than pirates’, to use one contemporary Head of Westminster’s sneering phrase. No doubt traces of noblesse oblige still lingered there. We see that in Zimbabwe too. (His fellow prisoners often called on him to be the ‘judge’ in their disputes.) He says little in this book about Eton, apart from retailing a piece of advice from his shooting instructor, an ex-chief petty officer, which obviously struck him: ‘An ’ard ship’s an ’appy ship, sir [. . .] an’ that’s all thar is to it’; and lamenting his poor showing at cricket. So ‘I hoped that I’d be good at war [. . .] That way, I could live up to being a Mann in one way at least.’ There’s enough motivation implied here, surely, without necessarily having to fall back on greed alone. So he went to Sandhurst; then into the Scots Guards (his father’s and grandfather’s regiment), and the SAS, after a meeting at White’s with its legendary founder David Stirling: ‘a man of beautifully dangerous ideas’, who became a kind of godfather to him. Stirling tried to recruit Mann to a mercenary operation in the Seychelles, but the army would not let him go. When it did, a rich friend wangled him into his oil firm, to ‘earn some real

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money’, and use his military expertise to try to win one of its Angolan fields back from rebels. That’s how he started his mercenary career. Again, he claims he needed to know that the rebels (UNITA) were the baddies before he would agree. The ‘real money’ was not enough on its own. Much of this book is an account of that operation, and a later one he undertook in Sierra Leone, interspersed awkwardly among his narrative of the Equatorial Guinea attempt. The object seems to be to keep these successes, as he sees them, constantly in the eye of the reader, to leaven the impact of the EG fiasco, and to make the case for irregular military interventions of this kind. Here he was riding another wave. ‘Intervention’ for humanitarian purposes, and to get rid of tyrants, was starting to be talked about; generally with Western governments in mind to do the intervening, but the underlying principle was the same. As Mann put it himself: ‘Regime change is in vogue.’ He had links himself, through David Hart (a Thatcher adviser and plotter), with leading American neo-Cons. He even took on one important part of the neo-Con ideology: that democracy established in one part of (in this case) Africa would then naturally spread. ‘ARC’ (assisted regime change) appealed to him terrifically – though he felt uneasy about the ‘Born Again mumbojumbo’ that accompanied it in the cases of Blair and Bush. (He dislikes religion.) He thought it was straightforward. In the case of Iraq, for example, there was ‘no question in my mind. Saddam is a war criminal. He’s a mass murderer. He’s a despotic madman who needs to be brought down. A bully that needs to be fought. Fast. Not having a go against a Saddam is like not having a go against a street mugging.’ All that was needed was someone in the West to ‘have the balls’. So he decided to try to ‘sex up’ the situation himself with a couple of ‘schemes of derring-do’, which he saw as his forte. One involved mounting a commando raid on small Iraqi town to ‘fly the flag of rebellion’ there, in order to provoke Saddam to retaliate, which he thought must trigger UN action; the other was to sail his own cargo ship carrying nuclear weapons-grade fuel into Basra, which would seem to confirm US suspicions of Iraq’s WMDs. Apparently Blair liked parts of the scheme, but Mossad was dismissive. Later, questioned about the problems that the Iraq invasion had triggered, he acknowledged that ‘it’s blindingly obvious that what happened next is a disaster’, but still maintained that the war was morally right. ‘Abuse of power equals bully. Bully means: “You’ve gotta fight”.’ It was as simple as that. * It is the simplicity that is troubling about Mann’s approach to ‘bullies’, tyranny and the rest, rather than any amorality (greed) that might have been mixed up with it. It is easy to see the influence of his childhood reading here:

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clear-cut villains, to be brought down by bravery, resolution and determination, even against the odds. It’s St George all over again: UNITA was ‘my dragon, my worthy cause’, he says in the case of Angola; or Biggles; or a dozen Boy’s Own Paper fighting heroes. It is this position he always falls back on when things look bad, as in the final stages of the EG operation, and he is tempted to give in. ‘It’s “Who Dares Wins”. Isn’t it?’ And (repeatedly): ‘That’s not how the West was won. Was it?” (Do the interrogatives here hint at some doubt?) He also relies much on his own past experiences. ‘In my heart of hearts I know it: this is how big fuck-ups happen. But each time I think that, I think back to our other times: the Ops before, when I felt the same.’ Then, quite suddenly, it all seems ‘a piece of piss’ (meaning easy) after all. ‘Piece of piss’, in fact, is one of his favourite phrases, and typical of his writing generally. In the first three pages of this book alone we have ‘arse’ (twice), ‘bollocks’, ‘fuck-up’, ‘shit’ (twice), ‘wanker’ and ‘whore’s drawers’. The other main characteristic of his style is its short staccato sentences, often verbless, like machine-gun fire. It reads like a comic book for macho adults; all cheap and shocking effect, no joinedup thought. It is the sort of book that you can imagine Action Man writing. Which is appropriate, as Action Man appears to be Mann’s main role model for life. He was, he writes proudly – this is after Sierra Leone – ‘the “Go To Guy” for military coups. The most notorious and best-paid mercenary of my generation.’ And Go To Guys are not required to think. This may have changed for him in prison. There he had time – five tedious years of it – to think. Indeed, when he was eventually released this was one of the things Amanda feared for him: ‘that I will have lost my marbles, or become wildly intellectual: [. . .] pretty much the same thing.’ And there are glimmerings of that here. His reading broadens, for example, to take on Paul Johnson’s History of the Jews, Paradise Lost, the Iliad, Nigel Benson’s Introducing Psychology, the Scientific American, and Simon Schama’s History of Britain. That last should have been a revelation, if, as I suspect, most of his boyhood history had been of the old-fashioned patriotic and heroic kind common in public schools then – ‘Builders of the Empire’, and the like. (Some prep schools were still using Fletcher and Kipling’s notorious A School History of England at the time Mann was at North Foreland Court.) ‘I am deeply struck by the English people’s struggle to win their freedom, which Schama describes as “the English Epic”’, he writes from Chikurubi. This may have been the first democratic history he had encountered. He learns more about Africans (including the shona language), spending much of his time assuring them – patronisingly – that they are just as good as white men really; and is terrifically chuffed when they dub him Shumba, or ‘lion’. He also has time to muse about ‘tyranny’. ‘You can’t become a tyrant on your own. It’s a pact.

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Tyranny is a pyramid, and the pyramid is made of petty tyrants.’ There’s an opening here for a more subtle analysis of the requirements for ‘regime change’ than Mann had clearly been working by previously. But by then, of course, it was too late. What Mann’s derring-do actually achieved is questionable. He gives the impression that he saved Angola and Sierra Leone virtually single-handed, but others will dispute both parts of that: the ‘saved’ and the ‘single-handed’. Even in the case of Equatorial Guinea he maintains that things improved there after his failed coup, and so – implicitly – as a result of it. That may be felt to excuse his really pretty abject surrenders to Obiang while in prison, in order to secure his release: betraying all his co-conspirators eventually, for example – ‘I will do anything to fuck them over, because they are my Brothers-In-Arms who betrayed me. Four long years, still no postcard. They are my enemies’ – but also including a local plotter, whose name he wormed out of a fellow prisoner in order to present it to Obiang. ‘Now you owe me a pardon.’ He then wrote a ‘six-page security paper’ for the tyrant to help him forestall more coups. Well, it worked, securing his release. If that was not justified by a pretty remarkable conversion to the side of the angels by Obiang, however, it must undermine Mann’s claim to be the better class of mercenary he tries to appear in this book. You can see Mann fitting into the British imperial tradition, or, at least, the version of that tradition that used to be taught to the upper classes. In that version, the good that Britain did in the world in the old days was achieved by remarkable individuals (Drake, Clive, Livingstone, Lawrence – there are dozens of them) with the bravery, tenacity and morality to succeed, on behalf of poor ‘natives’ trodden underfoot by their own or foreign tyrants, from whom they needed to be ‘saved’. Some of the ‘treading underfoot’ was real, as was undoubtedly the case later in Obiang’s Equatorial Guinea. The question, however, was whether private military intervention was the right solution. Usually it brought problems of its own. Would the chosen replacement be any better? (There were doubts about Severo Moto, Mann’s candidate for EG.) What would those who bankrolled the intervention want out of it? Could their promises of better things for the natives, as well as for themselves, be relied upon? (As we have seen, Mann’s critics thought ‘the Boss’s’ could not.) Could you reform a whole society simply by cutting off its head? What if the attempt failed? Mann once described the EG plot as ‘the biggest private military company screw-up since the Jameson Raid’ (so he knows about imperial precedents); that fiasco had certainly made things much worse for Britain in South Africa around 1900. More than a century later, and in the light of their colonial experiences in the past, race-conscious Africans were bound to resent coup attempts officered by white men, even if they succeeded.

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That Mann was dimly aware of this is evidenced by his preference for black recruits for his little company over white, on the grounds that they were ‘much less provocative’. But after it all, when asked whether he would be in favour of a similar white-led coup attempt to oust Mugabe, he said yes. God knows what effect that would have, in a country paranoid about its ex-colonial masters’ designs against it in any case. That in fact was what Mugabe had originally suspected Mann’s flight to Harare was all about, when he had had him arrested. Rich gun-toting Etonians whose mental developments were arrested at the age they were reading Biggles and Hornblower are probably not the safest people to be entrusted with the fates of poor countries in Africa. Simon Mann’s old nanny has a lot to answer for.

CHAPTER 21 FURTHER THOUGHTS ON IMPERIAL ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

To what extent did ‘imperialism’ permeate domestic British society and culture in the nineteenth century and after – even, perhaps, up to the present day? This is currently one of the thornier issues in British imperial history, and will be the subject of the next four chapters of this book. The starting point is a work I published in 2004, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, which stimulated – or provoked – a great deal of discussion afterwards. The tone of some of the debate is illustrated by two reactions: from the leading post-colonialist historian Antoinette Burton, who dismissed the book as not ‘worth arguing either with or about’;1 and from the excellent empirical historian John MacKenzie, who wrote: ‘some reviewers may be taken in by this, but I am not’.2 Other reviews, of course, were more positive. The present chapter has grown out of this. It is partly a reply to some of the more critical reviews; but it also seeks to place the general debate on the domestic impact of British imperialism in context; and will finish with a suggestion for moving it forward in a new way. * First, it may be worthwhile briefly summarising the argument of the book, for the benefit of those who have not read it – put off, perhaps, by Burton’s and MacKenzie’s reviews; and in order to clear up what may have been some misunderstandings of it. The Absent-Minded Imperialists was mainly a response to certain scholars (and some others) who, I felt, had hitherto simplified and exaggerated the impact of ‘imperialism’ on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after years in which, except by empire specialists like myself, it had been rather ignored and underplayed. It is worth emphasising that it is not a book that seeks to deny the reality of the British Empire in the world, which would be ridiculous; or its qualitative impact on certain highly

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significant areas of British domestic life. Nor, incidentally, was it intended to bear at all on the matter of British ‘national identity’, which is currently a vexed question both within the academy and beyond. This is because it is at least arguable that ‘national identity’ has very little to do with the realities of national life; in most cases it is an elite construction, erected for an ulterior purpose (usually social control), and largely founded on historical myths. It is the ‘realities’ that my book is concerned with; and in particular the breadth and depth of the imperial impact in Britain from circa 1800 to 1940. That may be a somewhat superficial way of looking at it, as I now suspect, and as I shall elaborate later. The reason for it however was my feeling at the time – which I still hold – that that breadth and depth had been generally overrated. As against that, the main argument of the book was this: that the ordinary Briton’s relationship to the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was complex and ambivalent, less soaked in or affected by imperialism than these other scholars claimed; to the extent that many English people, at any rate, possibly even a majority, were almost entirely ignorant of it for most of the nineteenth century. (The Scots may be a different matter; they are only marginally included here.) The book gave reasons why this was probably so (we cannot of course be certain that it was), which basically came down to the fact that there was little opportunity and no need for most Britons to be aware of their Empire before around 1880: the Empire did not require them, or many of them, and they did not knowingly require it. Class had a great impact here, with awareness of and support for the Empire (or anything that could reasonably be called ‘imperialism’) depending very much on one’s social situation, and so one’s material relation to the thing itself. The book tried to show that imperialism made a very small showing in the broad culture (or, more properly, cultures, plural) of the time, despite some cultural scholars’ claiming to read it between every line and beneath every brush-stroke. It put some emphasis on the fact that the Empire and empire-related matters were almost never mentioned in schools, at any level. There was a fundamental reason for this: they were not seen as a good means to instil patriotism, which would be the main motive for harping on them. That stemmed from the fundamental nature of British society, and the way it was supposed to adhere together: not through a sense of common national identity (each class saw its ‘patriotism’ differently), but by how the classes – their duties and responsibilities – complemented each other. The book also drew a crucial distinction between an ‘impact’ and an ‘influence’: imperialism and the Empire undoubtedly impacted on Britain mightily – there is a chapter on this, which even extends the usual catalogue – but not in ways that necessarily percolated through to people’s thinking or even their unconscious. Of course there were ‘imperialists’ in British society, and more of them after

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around 1880 than before; but even for them, their ‘imperialism’ could signify many different things, some of which were not really ‘imperialist’ in any truly ‘imperialistic’ sense. (The book’s first chapter devotes some time to discussing the semantics of that word. Burton called it ‘meandering’. We older-fashioned historians call it ‘defining our terms’.) Other very different national discourses informed and distorted it. One was ‘liberalism’. To regard Britain as an essentially ‘imperialist’ society, therefore, ‘steeped’ in empire, was to oversimplify the picture, at the very least. It is clear from many of the reactions to the book, both critical and favourable, that the impression this gave was overwhelmingly negative; but this may have been partly due to the fact that readers were approaching it from modern accounts of the relationship between imperialism and British society which were so uncritically positive. The book was careful all through to mark up exceptions and uncertainties, and ways of reading even its own evidence that could support the ‘other side’. As well as this, it tried to paint a subtler picture of the impact of imperialism on British domestic society – that it was uneven, variegated, took different forms – than may have got through to readers who, after immersion in the ‘steeping’ assumption for so long, were mainly impressed – even shocked – by its account of the gaps in this steeping, or at least in the evidence for it. Richard Price made this point: that the book is so concerned with demolishing an argument that it never gets round to saying what should be built in its stead.3 That I think is fair criticism. It is in response to it, in fact, that I shall be making some more constructive suggestions at the end of this chapter. But the argument itself, it seemed to me, was not very remarkable. It sought to build on and refine the researches of other scholars, especially MacKenzie, rather than in any way to undermine them; in much the same way as I shall be suggesting later in this paper its own arguments might be refined. It was certainly not dogmatic. It may have seemed to carry a ‘polemical and contentious edge’, which will have annoyed some readers (a couple of critics remarked on this). I now regret that. But I did not feel that the argument itself was essentially provocative. Why, then, did it so provoke? * There may have been extraneous reasons for this – reasons, that is, that had little to do with the argument of the book itself. These will be familiar to most historians working in this field. One was certainly politics. This is scarcely surprising, for two reasons: first, what was widely seen as the revival of ‘imperialism’ in the early twenty-first century, for example by the United States in Iraq, which made the whole question topical once again, in a way it had not seemed to be 20 or 30 years ago (though many of us would dispute

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that); and second, the rehabilitation of the older sort of imperialism by a number of historians, most notoriously Niall Ferguson,4 and also several politicians, including the Labour Prime Minister of the day and his Chancellor,5 again with a contemporary political motive: to bring an end to what was seen as the flagellation Britons had been inflicting on themselves for the evils of imperialism ever since the British Empire had come to its (formal) end, and to restore at least a degree of ‘pride’ in it. And of course this was not only a British phenomenon. At around the same time French schools were being instructed to treat France’s imperial history more ‘positively’;6 Japan was writing her colonial atrocities in northern China out of her textbooks;7 right-wing Americans were penning ‘patriotic’ histories of their country to counter the damage done by decades of dangerous self-criticism there;8 and in the far-away antipodes an almost comically rough-edged reactionary Prime Minister (John Howard) was inveighing against the ‘black armband’ view of colonial Australia’s treatment of her Aborigines that ‘Leftists’ had been foisting on her schools for the past 30 years.9 All this was bound to affect the reception of any new book on the subject of British imperialism at this time, however ‘academic’ it might present itself as being. The Absent-Minded Imperialists, possibly inevitably, was thought to be part of this trend. The title probably did not help. Seeley’s dictum has often been misread, of course, to indicate that he believed the Empire had been acquired ‘absentmindedly’: in fact he was making the opposite point. That error is pointed out early on in the book, but this could not stop certain people jumping to conclusions before then.10 What the book was supposed to be saying was that if Britain picked her Empire up ‘accidentally’, so to speak, she could not be ‘blamed’ for it. Even many of those who avoided this trap, however, persisted in seeing the book as exonerating or excusing imperialism in some way. This only seemed to be confirmed by its early reviews, most of which were glowing, but appeared in British ‘establishment’ papers like the Sunday Times and the (notoriously blimpish) Sunday Telegraph, or were written by old empiresentimentalists like Jan Morris in the Observer (though Morris did admit, disarmingly, that she had not read the book properly).11 Several hostile reviewers picked up on this. The book was supposed to be giving ‘comfort’ (MacKenzie’s word) to present-day political reactionaries. Burton even claimed that it would ‘likely be a balm, if not a full-fledged propaganda instrument’ for present-day Americans, which she believed to be dangerous in view of the ‘rampant Anglo-American imperialism’ that was going on then.12 That seemed a heavy burden of guilt for an academic tome to bear. The reason for it is a little difficult to understand. It could not have been that the book was thought to be defending the deeds of imperialism. No-one who read it could be under any illusions about that. Indeed, the point is

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repeatedly made there that the view that Britons at home took of the Empire was much rosier than the often sordid reality on the ground, which was how they were able to square it with what I argue was the more dominant ‘liberal’ domestic discourse of most of this period. The problem was slightly different. It was that the book appeared to exonerate a large slice of the British people from complicity in these deeds, by pleading either ignorance or ‘rosiness’ on their behalf; which was clearly thought to let them off too lightly for some people’s liking. Some critics clearly could not credit this: that so ‘great’ an empire as Britain’s could not have implicated almost every Briton. It seemed counter-intuitive. (On the other hand, if all we needed to do was intuit, we wouldn’t need scholarship.) Americans in particular, for whom Britain has usually been defined in imperial terms, for obvious historical reasons of their own, found this difficult to digest. Others suspected that if the British (or their progeny) were not willing to admit their guilt, it was for nefarious reasons. They were hiding their complicity; or maybe even celebrating it. It was not the crime, therefore, but the ‘cover-up’ that was the issue. That suspicion appears to have been widespread. An extreme example of it (in a different but related context) is a passage by the Yale sociologist Paul Gilroy, in a book called After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004), which, in the course of arguing that imperialism was responsible for modern British racism, attacks the historian Linda Colley for daring to claim (in Captives, 2002) that the impact of the British Empire might have been more patchy than many people assumed. This of course is what The Absent-Minded Imperialists tried to do for the domestic scene; Colley however was referring to its effects on its subjects (or victims). She wrote: In other contexts, however [that is, apart from the slave trade], the impact of empire was more uneven, sometimes very shallow and far more slow. Environments, economies, customs, power relations, and lives were sometimes devastated; but by no means always, because these intruders were frequently limited in number, and dependent often on a measure of indigenous tolerance. Gilroy’s response to this: These telling words illuminate a larger cultural problem. They encapsulate what has become a widespread desire – to allocate a large measure of blame for the Empire to its victims and then seek to usurp their honoured place of suffering, winning many immediate political and psychological benefits in the process. Much of this embarrassing

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sentiment is today held captive by an unhealthy and destructive postimperial hungering for renewed greatness.13 This is problematical – to put it mildly. Colley’s was a valid argument, supported by a great deal of evidence. Gilroy addressed neither the argument nor the evidence, but instead indulged in an ad hominem ( feminem?) attack on her suspected motives, which he probably got wrong, but in any case is not the kind of argument that serious academics should ever descend to. But it illustrates the traps that lie in wait for any historian today who wishes to paint a nuanced picture of the imperial past. In fact, anti-imperialists may do no service to their own cause by exaggerating the impact of British imperialism. In Gilroy’s case his comments can be seen as surprisingly Eurocentric and even ‘imperialist’: if they are meant to imply, for example, that Europe’s colonial ‘subjects’ had no more positive role in the colonial process than to ‘suffer’ it. That seems disparaging; and, more important, could not have been true. A more ‘nuanced’ historian would at least allow them some agency. On the British side, the dangers of overstating people’s complicity in the ‘crimes’ of imperialism are slightly different. It is certainly disparaging to those people: to believe that they were all (or nearly all) unthinkingly entrapped within a dominant discourse in this way. My view is less condescending; indeed, one perceptive commentator suggested that what I was really doing was apply a ‘subaltern studies’ approach to them.14 Secondly, there is of course no logical reason why one should want to implicate the whole of Britain in imperialism in order to deplore the latter’s effects; any more than one’s condemnation of Nazism needs to be affected by whether one takes Daniel Goldhagen’s view of the ordinary Germans’ involvement in it (‘Hitler’s willing executioners’), or the last Pope’s (‘a ring of criminals’).15 You can be an anti-imperialist without believing that every Briton was soaked in imperial gore, or is caked with the crust of it now that the Empire has gone. The two questions are different. (The logic behind blaming successor generations for these crimes is of course even weaker.) Of more practical importance, however, is that it could be a distraction. For the implication of the idea that ‘imperial’ or empire-related sentiment was ubiquitous at home must be the assumption that imperialism itself – that is, as policy abroad – is invariably supported by a distinctive imperialist culture; from which it could be held to follow that practical imperialism is unlikely or even impossible without such a culture – which my version of events in Britain suggests may not be true. My view is (broadly) that imperial policy invariably arises from material circumstances, which then, if it needs popular support at home (and remember, I claim that it did not in Britain’s case for most of the nineteenth century), gets that by appealing to other values and

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discourses, which could be (and were, I maintain, in Britain’s case) more dominant domestically than any essentially ‘imperialist’ one. Almost any value-system can be adapted and harnessed in this way: racism, masculinism, cultural arrogance and militarism certainly, but also race-egalitarianism, cultural relativism, liberalism, the ‘free market’ (or globalisation), humanitarianism, ideas of ‘progress’, socialism, even pacifism (the bigger an empire was, the fewer independent nations there were to go to war with one another) and anti-imperialism (America’s ‘liberation’ of the Philippines from Spain). This analysis may seem rather old-fashionedly radical (even Marxist) to some critics. It may also be wrong. But it is at least worth considering; not least because, if you are against imperial aggression, but believe it needs to be rooted in an imperial culture, you might well miss the signs of it creeping up on you if that – the ‘culture’ – is all you are on the lookout for. One other thing this reading does, of course, is implicitly to devalue the importance of ‘culture’ generally. This may have been a second broad reason for some of the criticism The Absent-Minded Imperialists encountered. For cultural ‘theorists’, so-called, the book must have appeared irritatingly anachronistic, pedantic, and naı¨ve. A ‘turf war’ element may have come into this too. Much is invested in ‘cultural studies’ these days: whole schools, departments, conferences; a massive production of theses, articles and books. Consequently it would be understandable if some cultural students felt threatened by The Absent-Minded Imperialists’ approach – it might be thought to bring down the price of the stock. It is difficult to know whether this is indeed a factor: it would be embarrassing to admit, hard to test, and may be patronising (ad homines?) even to suggest. Of course the same can be said (equally patronisingly) of the other ‘side’, with the older generation of imperial historians feeling put out by these strange young Turks with their new ideas and jargon straying into its territory – especially when they showed little signs of having read the older historians’ books. At present these two camps still seem far apart, and mutually uncomprehending. They need to be brought together. Unfortunately, regarding certain opposing ideas as ‘not worth arguing with’ hardly augurs well for this. * The key to the more traditional approach to these questions is the idea that theories must be tested against the evidence; which of course is what The AbsentMinded Imperialists tried to do. The idea that ‘imperialism’ may have been a more important ‘discourse’ than many more parochial historians used to assume, even a ‘hegemonic’ one, is interesting, and may even seem likely, but still needs to be held up against the ‘facts’ in order to see how it fits. It should be used as a hypothesis, not a formula. It seemed to me that many cultural

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‘theorists’ fell short here, in two ways. First, they merely assumed the primacy of the imperial discourse, without ever arguing logically (the basic prerequisite of a ‘theory’, surely) why it should be privileged over other discourses in this way. Secondly, they rarely had any great knowledge of British history apart from the ‘imperial’ side of it (and sometimes not even that), which clearly gave them less material to test their ‘theories’ against. This certainly applied to Edward Said, who was the originator of many of these ideas.16 It was for this reason that I thought that an historian who had also worked on many other aspects of British history, apart from imperial, and so had a broader view of it, might be able to help out here. One of the things that The Absent-Minded Imperialists did was try to measure the significance of imperial and empire-related factors by the side of other discourses in the complex and changing culture that was Britain’s in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was this that appeared, at any rate, to diminish the former’s significance. But of course this is not as straightforward as that makes it sound, as the cultural scholars are right to point out. The ‘facts’ rarely ‘prove’ very much. Most older-fashioned historians are aware of this. (We are all ‘postmodernists’ in this sense; or perhaps ‘pre-modernists’.) It depends on which facts you select, how you regard them, and how you frame your hypotheses.17 We can never be sure of the ‘truth’ (which is not to say, along with some of the extremer post-modernists, that ‘truth’ does not exist; or that it is not possible to establish probabilities or reveal untruths). It is this that makes history intrinsically controversial, ultimately unfathomable, and eternally fascinating. And it is why of course my reading of the influence of imperialism on British domestic society and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be questioned, and plausibly so. In every one of these respects the book is vulnerable. There can certainly be doubts, for example, over its evidence. John MacKenzie’s main argument against it is that it leaves too many ‘silences’, which, if they were filled in, would give a very different impression of the imperial feeling of the period covered: the celebrity of Lord Nelson and David Livingstone, for example; imperial reporting in the Illustrated London News; monarchy; missionary societies; memoirs by old colonial hands; theatrical productions – ‘If he had actually taken the trouble to read any plays, as I did, he might have come to a different conclusion’ – and more.18 He may be right. There must indeed be seams of evidence which, if they had been mined more diligently – I could not cover everything – would have altered my picture; and indeed at several points in the book there are expressions both of nervousness about this, and of hope that others might look these deposits out. Andrew Thompson, whose new book The Empire Strikes Back? (note the mark)

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is very similar to The Absent-Minded Imperialists in its methodology, and probably bears out the latter’s conclusions for 90 per cent of the ground that the two books share, has raised legitimate doubts in my mind in some areas: middle-brow literature, for example, and the professional classes.19 Other suggestions – including MacKenzie’s theatrical one – I have been rather less impressed by.20 But of course this is not the end of the question either. In fact it simply takes us on to the more difficult problems of, firstly, semantics – defining what constitutes the ‘imperialism’ you are testing your samples for: knowledge of the British Empire? positive enthusiasm for it? simply knowledge of and interest in other countries? feelings of superiority? – and, secondly, deciding what may be the signs of the ‘imperialism’ you are looking for, granting (as we surely must) that it might not be overt. This, of course, is what much of the ‘meandering’ in that first chapter was about. The end result of that was a definition of imperialism which is clearly too narrow for some people – it insists on an element of ‘domination’, in one form or another; others are perfectly entitled to reject this: the point is, however, that if you broaden the definition much more you undermine its utility21 – and a burden of proof for those imperial signs which, again, may put the barrier too high. ‘It is worth pausing to ask’, writes Thompson, ‘why the onus of proof should always rest on those arguing for rather than against the popularity of imperialism’.22 That is a fair question, to which it is not an adequate answer to point out that for the cultural ‘theorists’ and the MacKenzie-ites the onus always seems to go the other way. Of course it is impossible to know what matters to any large number of people at any time. Even if most English people had mentioned the Empire every day of their lives, which of course they almost certainly did not, we could not be sure that it was a crucial part of the discourse of the time (although obviously in that case the onus would need to be shifted somewhat). When the imperial signs were disguised or ambivalent – prints of Livingstone looking down on lower-middle class families from their livingroom walls, for example, or Tipton’s tea-vans drawing up outside their houses every week – we can be even less sure. It was for precisely this reason that The Absent-Minded Imperialists took its radically different approach to this problem. (Some critics appear to have missed this entirely.) Despairing of finding out what people thought and felt from the conventional material evidence, it stood back and looked into their social situations more broadly; their whole lives, and the other discourses operating on them, together with their material relationship with the Empire and vice-versa: in order to find out how likely it was that people would have been as affected by their Empire as the MacKenzie-ites and cultural ‘theorists’ claimed. This is where a broader

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immersion in nineteenth and twentieth-century British history helped. And it is when the idea that imperialism could have played very large a part in their lives and thoughts began to look – to me – very shaky indeed. Of course, this is still only in the realms of likelihood, not a confirmed fact. Yet again, it could be wrong. But it is surely incumbent on those who disagree with it now to at least take this new methodology on board, in order to explain why the results it appears to have thrown up may be false. * Was all this necessary? One criticism of the book was that it was not, and that I was tilting at straw dolls.23 That may be so. There does seem to be something of a reaction under way just now against what Gautam Chakravarty in a recent book on Anglo-Indian novels called ‘the shallow channels of post-colonial speculation’ (note the word ‘speculation’ there, rather than ‘theory’), and in particular Said’s ‘unhistorical compendiousness’;24 and against what Stephen Howe characterises as the main purpose of post-colonial theory, to give ‘moral instruction in the evils of racism, sexism and colonialism’, rather than to seek out the ‘truth’.25 One scholar has described this whole approach as ‘a historical cul-de-sac’.26 Let us hope that this is so, and that those who have driven down it are now turning round and coming back. The scenery, after all, is so much more varied and interesting seen from the main road – not so unremittingly ‘imperial’; and the intellectual challenges far greater. Non-‘theorists’ started reversing straightaway. Before The Absent-Minded Imperialists came out the ‘cultural-imperial’ orthodoxy was, I believe, so entrenched that many ordinary ‘Eng. Lit.’ scholars were clearly simply unaware that there could be any doubt about the ubiquity of the imperial discourse in Victorian society. Several have subsequently admitted this, and have begun to examine their material again, with this possibility (only) in mind. When ‘a researcher who has looked into the matter finds that Said’s claims about the hegemony of the imperial discourse in British culture do not hold up,’ writes one of them, ‘[. . .] we ought to take notice’.27 Even Antoinette Burton admitted, grudgingly, that it was useful to be told that the attitudes going around Britain circa 1900 did not typify the whole of the nineteenth century; though her crediting me with the idea that there was a change around 1880 makes one wonder whether she has read any ‘traditional’ imperial history at all.28 (This is almost the oldest idea in the book.) The ‘New’ imperial historians, so-called, had already backed up quite a long way, even before The AbsentMinded Imperialists appeared. Here for example is Kathleen Wilson. Certainly it is warranted to question the ahistorical ways in which ‘empire’ has been used by some writers as a shorthand to describe the

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entire range of global, national, and local processes set in motion by European ‘discovery’ and settlement from the sixteenth century onwards, dramatically conflating disjunctive historical processes, intentions, and outcomes. It may also be appropriate to be sceptical of the enthusiasm with which British printed and unpublished sources have been scoured for evidence of expansionist intentions so that even the mildest expression of interest in the wider world, or curiosity about its wonders, is flagged as nascent colonialist ambition.29 (Wilson also incidentally notes ‘the unevenness of metropolitan [colonial] power’, which of course is exactly the sort of comment that provoked that shameful attack by Gilroy on Colley.) Burton’s reaction in particular leads one to think that the book may have stimulated some reconsideration and readjustment of assumptions (or hypotheses) even among those who were most provoked by it, and who may consequently never acknowledge the debt. In that case the work put into it will not have been wasted. The proof of this will come later on. I cannot imagine many ‘Eng. Lit.’ doctoral theses in five years’ time being predicated on the assumption that British culture was ‘steeped’ in imperialism. At the very least, they will have to make out a case. * Probably the most valuable service The Absent-Minded Imperialists did for the debate on the domestic impact of British imperialism was to clear the ground of a great deal of rubbish (including perhaps some straw dolls) that had been littering it before. In the process it may also have kicked away some small artefacts that were worthy of preservation; but they can be restored. A second service, however, was to suggest one rather more sophisticated approach to this whole question. It was Richard Price, an old toiler in the ‘domestic imperial’ field, of course,30 who picked this inference up, at a session of the North American Conference of British Studies held to discuss the book (without me; the convenor claimed I had ‘cried off’, but in fact I had not been invited in time) in Boston, Mass., on 19 November 2006. Price was impressed – as everyone who has studied both Britain and the British Empire in any depth must be – by the different perceptions there were of the Empire at home and in ‘the field’. In reality, the Empire was highly vulnerable, to a great extent ‘run by the colonized and not by the colonizers’ (one hopes that Gilroy was not listening at this point), and often brutal. ‘Violence, humiliation, murder, the perversion of the law were all integral to [its] everyday functioning [. . .] as was military atrocity’. Colonists on the ground, of course, were aware of much of this. People at home, however – except when some particular atrocity story leaked out – were generally not.

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To most of them – if they thought about it at all – the British Empire was a powerful, even hegemonic entity (all that red paint on the map), and with a liberal, benevolent and ‘civilising’ agenda (David Livingstone). The ‘disjunction’, as Price calls it, was huge. It was one reason why – as is mentioned in The Absent-Minded Imperialists – old colonial hands felt so disorientated, out of place, when they returned to Britain on furlough or to retire, with no-one there seeming to them to understand the Empire, certainly as they understood it; and so kept very much to their own kind, with little social contact with (and hence influence over) the natives. (Either that, or they turned into curmudgeons, like Kipling.) That is the aspect of this that is emphasised in the book. But Price puts his finger on a far more interesting one. If domestic Britons’ perceptions of the Empire did not reflect the reality, then those perceptions must have been constructed, he says; and for a purpose. That purpose did not always need to be strictly ‘imperial’. Price gives an example: that of ‘missionary culture’ in Britain, which used a travesty of the genuine imperial experience – even the actual missionaries serving abroad would not have recognised it – for ‘purposes of identity and social action that were domestic rather than imperial’. It is this phenomenon that Price thinks we should be looking at now. How was the empire constructed in British culture and society? [. . .] What social and cultural and political processes went into this process? What purposes did these images serve in British domestic culture? What was their ideological, their social, their cultural function?31 This fits in well with one of the major points made in The Absent-Minded Imperialists: which was that domestic ‘imperialism’ was as much influenced by other, extraneous discourses as it affected them. For, if these ‘disjunctive’ images of the Empire were ‘constructed’, then they must have been constructed at least in part by something – material needs, pressures, rival ideologies – outside of the Empire itself. Chapter 11 of the book gives another example of this: the way in which presentations of the ‘EmpireCommonwealth’ (as it was now coming to be called) in schools were radically transformed after World War I, because of the strength of the alternative discourses of ‘liberalism’ and ‘internationalism’ at that time. This nearly always happened to the imperial ‘discourse’ in British society, I would guess: that it was changed, sometimes out of all recognition (imperialism turning into internationalism, for pity’s sake!), by its contact with others. And vice-versa. It is possible – indeed, there cannot be much doubt of this – that many people’s perceptions of both liberalism and internationalism in Britain

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were coloured by their experiences or ideas of empire, too. The process was complex, subtle, two-way, and mutually transforming. Linda Colley describes it as ‘messy, plural, composite, intermittent and inconsistent’.32 In the outcome, it is sometimes hard to see the traces of the original influences there. This has important implications. For a start it makes all those efforts, including my own, to ‘measure’ imperial (or any other) influences rather artificial, and even possibly redundant. How can you measure something that is always subtly transmogrifying and metamorphosing in this way? What is the point of it? You might just as well try to measure the egg in a well-mixed mayonnaise: you may know how much you put into it, but by now it has been utterly (and tastily) transformed. How can you say which of the ingredients in the mixture is ‘dominant’? And if it is dominant, is it dominant in anything like the way you might have expected from it when it started out? Has it retained any of those original characteristics? So what does it mean to point them out? By the same token (secondly), this way of looking at it renders much of the semantic debate about ‘imperialism’ superfluous: where we set the bar for our definition of it, for example – the topic of those ‘meanderings’, and the main problem with The Absent-Minded Imperialists for many critics – if the nature of the beast is bound to change in any case. Thirdly, as Price implies, it must be at least as important to examine the factors that acted on the ‘imperial’ influence as to draw attention to the ‘imperialism’ itself. These can take a number of forms: social needs, material pressures (or even inevitabilities), what he calls ‘functions’, and of course other cultural, political and social ‘discourses’, originating either here (in the needs and pressures), or elsewhere ‘outside’. (These other extraneous discourses, incidentally, are a surprising and unfortunate casualty of the present-day obsession with domestic ‘imperialism’. Continental Europe and the United States were arguably far more important sources of influence in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – continental politics, French food, Hollywood films, and so on, and on – than the Empire ever was; they were certainly more in the public eye, as I think is shown in the book. Yet they seem to have been lost sight of in the battle that is currently being waged between parochialists and ‘New’ imperialists over their heads.)33 In all this me´lange (or mayo) of influences it certainly cannot be assumed that the ‘imperial’ one was dominant, even if the idea of ‘dominance’ had any useful meaning in this context. That of course backs up my original thesis. Lastly, however, the lesson seems to be that the really important thing for us to study must be neither these ‘influences’ themselves, nor the materials they acted upon, but the process of interaction between them, and the new, very different discourses their merging and osmosis gave rise to; the dynamics of what the anthropologists – and specifically in relation to the impact of colonialism on its subjects abroad,

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as it happens – used to call ‘culture change’. That is where the future of the ‘New’ imperial history should lie. This I think is what The Absent-Minded Imperialists could be seen as preparing the way for, though I did not fully realise it at the time. It must be a promising approach. It rises above the current petty and unproductive squabbling over the degree or even the ways in which British society may have been imperialised (‘steeped’); undermines the need to ‘define’ imperialism – the thing I stressed so insistently in the book; and must reflect how things really work. First of all, however, we all need to shift a little; to rid ourselves – on all sides – of our obsession with ‘imperialism’ in isolation; and to look at British society more essentially, which is what The Absent-Minded Imperialists tried to do. Secondly, we might try looking at this question in a more international context: see how Britain compares with, say, France and the Netherlands in this regard. John MacKenzie made a start on this, with the book he edited recently called European Empires and the People.34 Then we can start building anew; on the basis of a proper awareness of the complex, changeable, interactive and evolving nature of all human societies, but especially one as cosmopolitan – but not only empirecosmopolitan – as the British.

CHAPTER 22 IMPERIALISM CONTESTED

That British imperialism was contested by its colonial subjects, or victims, is of course universally accepted today. The only differences among British imperial historians are over whether conflict, violence and even atrocity were endemic to the enterprise: which is the position taken, for example, by Richard Gott in his Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (Verso, 2011); or whether they were just unfortunate lapses in a more generally beneficent process. This was not always the case, however. When the British Empire was nearing its final stages, in the 1920s and 1930s, a totally different version of its history was widely disseminated in Britain, in which nearly all the conflict was air-brushed out. The Empire – now re-branded the ‘Commonwealth’ – was presented by imperialists as a mainly voluntary organisation, of equals (or soon-to-become equals), upholding common British liberal values; as though its constituent colonies and Dominions had volunteered to become members of it, rather than being ‘conquered’ (‘please can we join your Empire?’), and, of course, proud and happy to remain in the club. You can see this in the schoolbooks that were published about the Empire in the inter-war years. It was of course grotesquely misleading. What interests me more about it, however – because it is not conflict in the colonies I shall be mainly concerned with in this chapter – is why it came to be so disseminated in Britain. There can only be one reason for this: which was to reassure people in Britain who were not comfortable with the idea of an empire of conquest. And that in turn suggests that empire as conquest was contested territory in the mother country too. A significant number of Britons believed that ‘imperialism’, as the word was generally understood then, was wrong. Some of this of course arose from the particular circumstances of the time, after the horrors of World War I, which rather took the shine off the idea of ‘conflict’ generally, and was, in addition, widely thought to have been provoked by competing European imperialisms. Nonetheless, it also goes much further back. Indeed, there was not a time in the whole broad history of

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the British Empire when the existence of it, and even more its expansion, was not opposed, resisted and criticised by significant sections of the British public, and simply ignored by – I think – a majority of them. This is the ‘conflict’ that will be discussed here. Sometimes it was hidden – for reasons we shall come on to. But it was always there, beneath the surface of Britain’s seemingly triumphant imperial progress, sometimes influential, in rubbing some of the sharper corners off imperialism, and potent enough to help destroy the Empire in the end. To read some modern accounts of the domestic scene in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, you might not credit this. It was about 25 years ago that the idea was born, and then grew into an orthodoxy, that British society, politics and culture then were almost entirely besotted with ‘imperialism’: ‘steeped’ in it, in the word of one historian, or ‘imbricated’, to use the – rather more opaque – word of another.1 It started with John MacKenzie’s path-breaking Propaganda and Empire of 1984, which revealed to us how much more imperialist propaganda was carried out among the working and middle classes in Britain than most of us had been aware of before. Ergo, the reasoning went, the broad mass of the population in Britain ‘must’ have been imperialised. (‘Must have’ is one of the most treacherous phrases in History. It’s the job of the historian to check which ‘must have beens’ in fact were.) Then followed Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism of 1993, following on his more celebrated (but now largely discredited) Orientalism of 1978, purporting to show how the imperialist ‘discourse’ also pervaded ‘high’ British culture, even in those areas where it seemed to be notably absent. Those two initiatives gave rise to two new ‘schools’; one, in History, called the ‘New Imperial History’; the other, under the aegis of Literary or Cultural Studies, dubbed ‘Postcolonial Theory’. Both propagated the idea that imperialism was the dominant, even a ‘hegemonic’, discourse in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain. Said even claimed it infected people who regarded themselves as anti-imperialists. That was because, as he wrote elsewhere, it is literally impossible for anyone anywhere to escape the dominant discourse of his or her place and time.2 It was from these two directions that the idea formed that there was scarcely any disagreement at all in Britain over empire, or, at least, that what there was, was not significant, by the side of the hegemonic imperial discourse of the time. The Absent-Minded Imperialists – and the article that formed the previous chapter of the present book – tried to unpick this idea. What they did not attempt, however, is an assessment of how widespread criticism of empire may have been in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; as nor did my own first book, Critics of Empire, which analysed the philosophy of ‘anti-imperialism’ but without measuring its extent. That is the purpose of the present chapter.

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Some of the problems that face us in trying to measure the extent of ‘antiimperialism’ are the same as those that muddy our measurement of its opposite. The semantic one is identical. What do we mean by ‘imperialism’ when we talk about people who oppose it? Can all ‘anti-imperialists’ be lumped together? Even at the time people could be keen on one kind of imperialism – the free democratic colonies (so far as European emigrants were concerned) of Australia and Canada, for example – while opposing the more authoritarian sort. Can they still be classed as ‘antis’? What does the degree of imperial propaganda of the time really tell us about people’s views: perhaps that they needed to be propagandised, because of their distaste for empire? In other words, there could be a converse relationship between the two things. ‘The noisier the loudspeakers of officialdom’, writes one recent popular author, referring to imperial propaganda between the wars, ‘the more reverberant the empty echo.’3 But how can we know this? More generally, how can we tell what anybody really thought about these things, pro- or anti? And if they never mentioned the Empire, does that mean they were necessarily unsympathetic to it, or that – as Patrick Brantlinger has claimed4 – it was too deeply internalised by them to need mentioning? Lastly, and most relevant to our present purpose: what did it take to be an anti-imperialist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If you simply wanted Britain to abandon her colonies, that seems straightforward. Or is it? In the nineteenth century if you did that, the almost automatic result would be that another colonial power would snaffle them up, or – possibly even worse – that they would be left prey to unregulated, red-in-tooth-and-claw, global capitalism to exploit even more atrociously. There was also a third possible scenario: that the colonial subjects you handed them back to would then go off on colonizing and even genocidal sprees of their own. (This is what essentially happened in the case of the 13 American colonies.) So it was not quite as simple as it looked. Of course the picture is complicated still further by the fact that this kind of consideration could also be used as an excuse for imperialism, and often was. But the underlying dilemma was a genuine one. It was difficult to be an out-and-out anti-imperialist, without tacitly condoning imperialism in other forms. * Any understanding of the contentious nature of imperialism within Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has to take all this on board. The ‘contest’ that we are concerned with here was not primarily between people who are easily categorised as ‘imperialists’ on the one side, and ‘antis’ on the other. There were of course those who could be put in those simple categories. On the imperialist side there were quite a lot around the year

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1900 (about 15 years on either side) and a few before then. Look closely at these, however, and you will find some curiosities. Many of the very keenest British imperialists were not British at all, or very British; they included one of their most strident propagandists, J Ellis Barker, born ‘J Eltzbacher’ in Cologne, the famous imperial impresario Imry Kiralfy, a Hungarian, and – a little later on – the Korda brothers, also Hungarians, who were responsible for most of the imperial adventure films made in England between the wars. Also in this category – classed as not ‘very British’ – could be put Anglo-Indians like Rudyard Kipling, and Anglo-Irish, like Lord Meath, with British lineages, perhaps, but brought up in very different environments from the more typical English liberal one. The same might be said of all the public (that is, of course, private) school-educated men (always men) who mainly ran the British Empire; the public schools, of course, being a very peculiar institution in themselves, largely quarantined from the broader society around them. On the ‘extreme’ anti-imperialist side you also found a motley crew, similarly rather outside the mainstream of British society: Marxists, vegetarians, pacifists, intellectuals and so on. You also found a number of racists, who were anti-imperialists for that reason: because they thought ‘savages’ were not worth saving or helping, or that there was any point in exterminating them because they would die out of their own accord. (Charles Dickens came close to this.) We must not make the mistake of assuming, from a present-day liberal point of view, that the outright anti-imperialists were always the goodies. Let us leave these two extremes aside, as they were probably not very influential. The main debate about Empire in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain took place in the broad area that lay between them, and was between relative imperialists and relative antis. Despite the fact that they did all occupy this ‘middle ground’, the differences between them could be very sharp. They usually centred on particular colonial events and episodes. There were celebrated rows over, for example, colonial slavery; the Opium Wars with China (with almost certainly a large majority of the British population deeply shocked by them); the South African War of 1899– 1902 (where the noise that the pro-imperial side made at the time – ‘jingoism’ – clearly obscured the strength of the opposition that lay beneath); the Amritsar massacre of 1919 – again, with the critics in the majority; the Kenya concentration camp atrocities in the 1950s (once they became known about); and of course the Suez crisis and the Iraq war (if you count that as an ‘imperialist’ event), which provoked huge public protests. In order to give rise to this degree of conflict, however, the events had to satisfy at least two of three criteria. Firstly, they had to be generally known about. That may seem obvious, but it is worth noting how many great

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colonial events were not. That is because, until the later nineteenth century, very few people read newspapers; the newspapers were very poor in reporting colonial events in any case: imperial news came a long way behind domestic, European and American, and the people who did become acquainted with these events mainly came from the British governing and officer class, which had an interest in covering shocking events up. The main exception was the colonies of settlement, which figured in emigration literature, though there is evidence that emigration was not regarded as ‘imperialism’ essentially – Britain did not effectively ‘rule’ Australia, after all – by people who usually preferred the United States to emigrate to in any case. Secondly, to arouse real anger in people, these episodes had to involve them directly, materially and adversely, through a cost that needed to be borne by the British taxpayer, for example; involuntary service in the armed forces; or relatives (like regular soldiers) getting killed. In Britain’s case this rarely happened before 1914, with colonial costs usually being borne by the colonies themselves, no military conscription before 1916, and the Gatling (machine) gun generally ensuring that her own casualties in colonial warfare were low. Interestingly, one of the most effective instances of anti-colonial resistance in Britain – over the acquisition of Mesopotamia (Iraq) in the 1920s – was provoked by a mutiny of conscripted soldiers who resented being kept on in uniform after World War I had ended, coupled with another of middle-class taxpayers, organising themselves in Parliament as the ‘Anti-Waste League’, who resented paying for them. Thirdly, in order to arouse protest at home, colonial incidents had to be seen to offend against certain values that the British prized as part of their essential national identity, and in particular the liberty, liberalism and moderation that they believed defined them. Breach these, and people at home could become ashamed of what was being done in the Empire in their name. It was the ‘liberty’ thing that was most problematical for Britons in connection with their Empire, for obvious reasons. Since ancient Roman times, imperium et libertas were considered to be direct opposites, antithetical to each other, impossible to accommodate in the same polity. In early and mid-nineteenth-century Britain, up until the 1870s and 1880s, imperium was widely believed to be characteristic of a primitive stage of history she had passed through and left behind. When the word ‘imperialism’ was used, it nearly always referred to the aggressive and essentially reactionary policies of the two Napoleons (the First and Third), who were also, of course, tyrants. Britain was the country of progress, of non-imperialism, therefore, of ‘free trade’, whose operation depended on her trading partners being as free as she was, and of pacific internationalism. (This of course was before it had occurred to anyone that ‘free trade’ might be effectively ‘imperialistic’ too. We are

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dealing with perceptions here.) Britons also prided themselves on being more politically free than other peoples; free, that is, in the sense of being less in thrall to governments. It really was difficult to reconcile all this with keeping other peoples in thrall. Still, they were keeping peoples in thrall even then: 200 million Indians, for a start; and were expanding the boundaries of their Empire, both formal and ‘informal’, throughout these ‘free trade’ years. How did they cope with that? The fashionable modern position – the New Imperial Historians’ and PostColonialists’ – is to argue that this shows how ‘imperialistic’ the broad mass of people must have been really; otherwise, they would not have sanctioned it. However, this does not follow. The broad mass of people did not need to sanction it because – to put it simply – they did not have the vote. (The Victorians were liberals, but not democrats.) The Empire was run by a public school-educated e´lite. Theirs was the only sanction that mattered. I have noted already that most of the rest of the people were kept in general ignorance of it and were not in the position of having to pay for it. The idea of ‘informal’ or ‘free trade’ imperialism will of course have been meaningless to them. The existing colonies (like India) will have posed a problem, but even they were little known about – India was hardly celebrated at all in popular literature before Kipling came on to the scene, for example – and could be put down to the sins of Britain’s less enlightened, pre-free trade past, like an illegitimate child conceived in one’s immoral youth. That gave Britain an immediate responsibility towards them – you could not just throw the child on to the streets – but it was an unfortunate one, and not the sort of thing you wanted either to celebrate or to encourage. * As the nineteenth century wore on, and the British Empire expanded – not necessarily faster or more widely than in the past, but more noisily, dangerously, better reported and in a more democratic environment – these excuses came to seem less adequate. It was then that the first great wave of imperial propaganda emerged, from that minority of dedicated imperialists who realised for the first time that they would need the support of their lower- and middle-class compatriots to keep their Empire going and were deeply worried, most of them, and rightly or wrongly, about the ‘imperial patriotism’, as it was called, of the working classes in particular. Most of them, incidentally, did not think their propaganda was effective. The workers and many of the middle classes were still unreliable: the workers because they were turning to socialism, the middle classes because of their liberal scruples. Of course the imperialists may have been over-anxious here. (Right-wingers often are.)

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In case not, however, the imperialists thought of two new ways to reconcile the ‘people’ to their Empire. The first, directed at the middle classes, was the idea of ‘liberal imperialism’, which was supposed to combine imperium and libertas – previously, as we have seen, thought to signify opposites. The idea goes back some years before this, in early nineteenth-century liberal thought,5 but it took on a new life in the 1900s, with a book by Bernard Holland, actually called Imperium et Libertas, purporting to show that the two concepts were in fact reconcilable, and indeed had been reconciled in the form of the contemporary British Empire. The argument, of course, was that empire could spread freedom. That became a very powerful idea in the twentieth century, infusing the inter-War ‘Commonwealth’ ideal, and even into the twenty-first, with the American neo-Cons and Britain’s Tony Blair, though by that time it had changed its name to ‘liberal interventionism’. (The Americans have never felt comfortable with the idea that they might be imperialists too.) The second ploy of these early twentieth-century imperialists was directed more to the working classes. The socialists among the latter were complaining that imperialist adventures abroad militated against social reform at home. So a new ideology was formulated for them, called ‘social imperialism’, which argued that the possession of colonies was in fact essential to uphold British working-class living standards and could be used to fund social reform. These were the two main forms of ideological imperialism preached in the early twentieth century. Both were undoubtedly seductive. How many of the middle and working classes were actually seduced by them, however, is impossible to tell, for the reasons given earlier. Politically they had relatively little overt impact. The number of members of the early twentieth-century Liberal Party who called themselves ‘Liberal Imperialists’, for example (or Lib-Imps; or ‘Limps’ by their opponents), was always a minority, and efforts to create ‘social imperialist’ trade unions and Labour parties to rival the official ones never got properly off the ground. That of course does not mean that their ideas were not influential in other ways. For our immediate purpose here, however, this does not really matter. The point to be made is that if these were believed to be the best ways of winning the middle and working classes over to imperialism, it does not seem to say much for the attraction of imperialism to those middle and working classes on its own. If a majority of Britons had been genuinely imperialistic – if imperialism had really been the ‘hegemonic discourse’ it is often taken to have been – there would not have been any need to coat it with liberalism or socialism in this way – or with ‘Commonwealthism’, or with propaganda – in order to make it palatable. The idea of ‘liberal imperialism’, in particular, seems to me to indicate the primacy of the liberal discourse in British society, over an ‘imperialistic’ one.

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The tension between them – between imperium and libertas – had always been there. Prior to the 1880s and 1890s it had been hidden by the factors mentioned already: lack of publicity, lack of democracy, huge public apathy and the Empire’s minimal cost, financially and in man- (or woman-) power, to people back home. In a nutshell, the contradiction did not touch them. That is: until around 1900, when a cluster of colonial events, some of which could be classed as ‘atrocities’, suddenly burst on to the scene. These included the Jameson Raid of 1896, when a British millionaire staged a totally illegal invasion of an independent country in southern Africa; the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898 – an industrial-scale massacre followed by the deliberate desecration of sacred Islamic sites; a stand-off at Fashoda in the Sudan, also in 1898, between Britain and France which nearly led to war between them; several atrocities arising out of the South African (or ‘Boer’) War of 1899– 1902, including farm-burning and what at the time were called ‘concentration camps’ for Boer women and children; the introduction of what was widely criticised as ‘Chinese slavery’ in the Transvaal in 1903; the brutal suppression by British forces of a village uprising at Denshawai in Egypt in 1906; the denial of the vote to African subjects in Britain’s newly-conquered South African provinces (at the Afrikaners’ insistence) in 1910; together with – though this may seem rather less atrocious to us – the British Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain’s, startling abandonment of liberal Free Trade in favour of a Tariff Union (or Zollverein) which was explicitly designed to bind the Empire together in 1901. After all this, no thoughtful person could be unaware of the underlying potential dichotomy, at the very least, between imperium and libertas. ‘Liberal imperialism’ was no longer the effective fig-leaf it had been. The organ it had been designed to hide was too erect. * The liberal reaction to this, however, was not straightforward. On the one hand you had a sudden florescence of political anti-imperialism, with its roots in traditional liberal ideology, some of the Christian churches, and – two new actors on the stage – the Labour movement and socialism. This marked the beginnings of true ‘anti-imperialism’: opposition to the phenomenon generally, that is, as opposed to what someone else’s imperialism was doing to you. (That must say something about ‘dominant discourses’ in nineteenthcentury Britain.) What the socialists brought with them was a new reason for opposing imperialism, which was that it was all part of a capitalist plot to stave off the final crisis of capitalism that was, they hoped, just around the corner. The crisis was one of over-production, to which the imperialists’ answer was to seek out colonial markets for their surplus goods. Because different European nations (and the United States) were competing for these

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markets, the likely outcome of this could be world war. (1914 seemed to bear this out.) Curiously, the originator of this idea, which came to dominate in left-wing circles throughout most of the twentieth century, was not a Socialist, but a Liberal: John Atkinson Hobson, who saw imperialism as a sign that capitalism was not working properly, rather than that it could not work at all. His solution to ‘over-production’ was for British employers to pay higher wages, or for the State to create employment directly, thus stimulating demand in Britain itself and doing away with the need for colonial markets. (This is where John Maynard Keynes got the idea of ‘Keynesianism’ from, as he acknowledged in the Introduction to his General Theory.) Marxists, who also took over the basic ‘capitalist imperialism’ notion from Hobson, believed that was impossible. Imperialism marked a ‘final stage’, as Lenin put it, in the inevitable self-destruction of the capitalist system. Soon we may find out who was right. Anti-imperialism, however, was only one response to the dramatic events of the fin-de-sie`cle and the red-in-tooth-and-claw imperialism they had suddenly revealed. Indeed, it was not entirely Hobson’s response, despite his reputation as the great anti-imperialist guru of these years. For Hobson was basically against capitalist imperialism, and capitalist imperialism, as he realised – and we can see even more clearly today – was not dependent on formal empires and indeed could work much better, and more exploitatively, in their absence. So his solution was not immediately to liberate the colonies, but to start ruling them more altruistically. He realised that this was a lot to ask of their colonial masters, who were generally more motivated by national self-interest and personal greed, and would have liked the eventual solution to be some kind of international trusteeship over them. However, there was no international agency qualified to do this yet (in 1902). (Hobson incidentally was involved in the moves that eventually culminated in the League of Nations after World War I and its ‘Mandates’ system, which was superficially close to his ideas.) Still, in the meantime, they should try. This was the position taken by most other thoughtful British critics of imperialism after 1900: that the Empire could not be abolished (which would merely pass it into the hands of worse kinds of imperialism), but should be reformed. It is here that the notion of ‘liberal imperialism’ came in particularly useful. It suited both sides within this broad ‘middle ground’ of opinion. If you were a liberal but felt you had to have an empire, then better it be run liberally than not. And if you were an imperialist forced to come to terms with the liberalism or even socialism of the time, then better to keep your empire on their terms than not at all. After 1900, and even more after 1905, when a Liberal government replaced the old imperial-Conservative one, you can see the libertas at last

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breaking through to the surface and working to modify the imperium of the day – theoretically, at least. For a start British imperial expansion came to a sharp stop after 1902 (apart from the exceptional circumstances following World War I – and the ‘mandates’ Britain gained then were always more trouble than they were worth). The two new colonies Britain had acquired in the Boer War were given internal self-government in 1906 and 1907, to the outrage of the imperialists who had brought the war on. True, only whites had the vote there, which all Liberal and most Conservative MPs in Britain – anti-racists almost to a man – deplored, but the only alternative by that stage was thought to be to fight the Boer War all over again, and if you were a true liberal you believed that liberal enlightenment would come even to the Afrikaners after a while. ‘Chinese slavery’ in South Africa was brought to an end. India was given a small degree of municipal self-government by the ‘Morley – Minto’ reforms of 1909. In tropical Africa all eyes for most of the pre-World War I period were on the Congo Free State (so-called), the protest movement against the atrocities of which was centred in Britain. That had an impact on British African policy too. People would be looking harder at the British West African colonies to make sure they did not replicate the horrors of King Leopold’s rule. To prevent that, the Colonial Office came up with the ‘philosophy’, as it was called, of ‘Indirect Rule’, meaning not only that power was devolved to native rulers, but that they should rule in ‘native’ ways – preserving their indigenous cultures, either in toto, or as the startingpoints for their adjustment to the ‘modern world’. In some places that meant obstructing capitalist exploitation. This is not to claim that all these measures turned out to be as liberal as they were intended. They did not. (Indirect Rule, in particular, was problematical.) Yet again, however, they show how ubiquitous the liberal and critical discourse in Britain must have been, if it had such an impact even on the presentation, only, of contemporary imperialism. Imperial atrocities certainly did not come to an end. From that point – we are at about 1918 now – to the 1960s, you get, in fact, some of the very worst ones: Amritsar, the Bengal famine, Kenya and so on. That was for two basic reasons: because of the difficulties a weakened Britain experienced in resisting newly emergent colonial nationalist movements, which could provoke her to over-react (to put it kindly), and because so many of her colonial rulers ‘in the field’ were unreconstructed imperialists of the old sort, not affected by ‘liberalism’ at all. The point is, however, that these atrocities were nearly all (again, if they reached the newspapers) strongly and passionately contested in Britain. This bears out the main theme of this essay: that there were always two sides (at least) to the colonial debate in Britain, one representing imperium, and the other libertas.

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The strength of the libertas (or anti-imperial) thread may have been hidden in the nineteenth century, mainly under the popular ignorance and apathy that prevailed then. But it came to the surface in the early twentieth century, as we have seen, and then after World War II came into its own properly, contributing – surely – to the fact that Britain’s imperium was dismantled as quickly as it was, and with so very little trauma at home – less than in the case of France. This degree of anti-imperialism (or imperial criticism) was not new. It had always been there. British imperialism was always fundamentally conflicted. We cannot understand modern Britain, or its imperialism, without grasping this.

CHAPTER 23 ELGAR AND EMPIRE

Edward Elgar’s ‘imperialism’ has dogged him for years. It still does. Among many non-musical Britons, and most foreigners, he has the reputation of being little more than a jingoistic tub-thumper, a manifestation of the worst aspects of late Victorian and Edwardian bombast. This started in his own time, and even among some of his own friends, who warned him against this tendency; and it found probably its most extreme expression in an onslaught launched against him in 1924 by the music critic Cecil Gray, who pictured the tune of Land of Hope and Glory – the melody on its own, note, not the words – arousing ‘such patriotic enthusiasm in the breast of a rubber planter in the tropics’ as to lead him ‘to kick his negro servant slightly harder than he would have done if he had never heard it’.1 That is quite a load of responsibility for a mere tune to bear. Some people have been put off Elgar entirely by this kind of thing. Others may have been attracted to him by it, though many of them must have been perplexed by some of his other music – the ‘deeper’ stuff, if you like – and were (we have evidence of this) disappointed when he failed to furnish them with new Land of Hopes when the Empire needed them.2 For most genuine music lovers, however, his jingoism is an embarrassment, much as Wagner’s anti-semitism is to liberal Wagnerians, though of course to a much lesser degree. Until now there have been three main lines of defence of Elgar over this question. The first is I think irrefutable. That is that, if he was a jingo, he was also much more than that, with most of his music expressing a range of emotions and aspirations that goes far beyond what appears to be the cruder message of Land of Hope.3 For those who do not know Elgar’s wider corpus there is no way of demonstrating this, except to get them to listen. Most people’s entry to his profounder world is the cello concerto. Anyone who regards that, or the violin concerto, or the symphonies, or the great oratorios,

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or the late chamber music, or Enigma (with the possible exception of the finale) as ‘jingoistic’ is probably incorrigible. The second ‘defence’ of Elgar, which is usually presented as a rider to this, is that his lighter patriotic works were aberrations, probably provoked by the ethos of his time. Imperialism was in the air all around him, infecting everyone. He could not escape it, and so (by implication) cannot be blamed for it. That I think is questionable, as I shall try to demonstrate in a moment. The third common defence of him is I think unacceptable. This is that his supposedly ‘jingo’ pieces have been misinterpreted. That argument mainly rests on the words of Land of Hope and Glory, which were – it is pointed out – not Elgar’s own; were added to the melody only two years after the latter had been published and become popular (for Edward VII’s coronation); and were – according to some accounts – disowned by Elgar.4 It is that last assertion that simply will not stand up. There is no evidence that Elgar disapproved of AC Benson’s words. He accepted them, when he could have rejected them if he had wanted to: it was his call. There is, true, no direct testimony that he liked them either; but there is in the case of an earlier text he set, which was also criticised for being too nationalistic: to which his response was robust. The piece concerned is his oratorio Caractacus, the Finale of which suddenly transplants us from ancient Rome to modern times, bidding Britons be ‘alert’ to the dangers surrounding them and their Empire. (This was in 1898.) It is quite stirring, but most music critics have found it anomolous, at the very least: rather like the end of Lohengrin. They included many of Elgar’s contemporaries. But he took them on. ‘I knew you would laugh at my librettist’s patriotism (and mine)’, he wrote to his friend Jaeger in June 1898; ‘never mind: England for the English is all I say – hands off! There’s nothing apologetic about me!’5 At another time he complained that his countrymen were even too restrained for his liking. ‘It’s no good trying any patriotic caper on in England’, he wrote to Jaeger again in November 1899; ‘we applaud the “sentiment” in other nations but repress it sternly in ourselves: anything like “show” is repugnant to the real English’.6 And this, mark, was at the beginning of the great jingoistic Anglo-Boer war: which may make one wonder what degree of patriotic expression would have satisfied him. This certainly seems to damn Elgar from his own mouth. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, will not be to exonerate Elgar from charges of ‘imperialism’. That would be absurd. But I should like to try to modify those charges a little. I shall be concerned with two things here: firstly, the origins, and secondly the type of his imperialism. These things matter for our appreciation of Elgar, for neither of them has been fully understood before now. Beyond that, however, I believe they will also tell us something about Elgar’s environment: his place and time. Nowadays Elgar is usually taken by

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historians as exemplifying one very simple proposition about late Victorian and Edwardian society: the force and ubiquity of the imperial discourse then. But I do not think it tells us that at all, as I shall now endeavour to show. * So: where did the ‘imperialism’ come from? Some writers do not find this problematical. ‘We should remember’, writes one of them, ‘that most of Elgar’s life was spent in the reign of Victoria and that he witnessed the ascendancy of the Empire.’7 The implication is that he just soaked it up. In fact if we look at Elgar’s early life more closely we will find that this is extremely unlikely. There were not many explicit signs of the Empire around in his day and in the circles he moved in. He came from Worcester: a sleepy provincial town. He was a Roman Catholic. His father was a tradesman. The main influence on his early life was a beloved mother, whose own ideological world we know about in remarkable detail from the commonplace books – cuttings from popular journals – that are still preserved at the Elgar birthplace, and none of which indicates the slightest interest at all, even indirectly, in things imperial.8 (The nearest they come is the theme of ‘chivalry’, of which more later.) By all accounts of Elgar’s childhood he was weak and sickly, avoiding the usual boys’ games, and loving nothing better than immersing himself in his beloved Malvern countryside, daydreaming of spirits and fairies and the like.9 We can see this in his early attempts at musical composition – 150 that we know of before his mid-twenties10 – most of which feature magic, or dancing, or babies (lullabies), or nature (especially the wind), or love, or his religion, or jokes, or small dogs. There is not the slightest trace of ‘imperialism’, or anything related to it here; not a single march, no whiff of ‘orientalism’, no mention even of ‘England’ in a patriotic way. The reason for this is that Elgar came from a part of Britain that was relatively untouched by empire. I do not mean this only geographically, but socially too. As a provincial, the son of a shopkeeper, a Catholic, and an aspiring artist, he belonged to a different nation from the one that is most closely associated with the Victorian Empire: which was metropolitan, upper class, Church of England and profoundly philistine. He certainly felt this himself, keenly. His sense of social alienation from that ‘higher’ class was almost pathological, and tormented him all his life. As we shall see, this had an indirect bearing on his decision to take up with imperialism later. For the moment, however, the striking un-imperialism of his early environment should remind us of the variegated nature of British society then; the different and even conflicting ‘discourses’ that constituted it, not all of which – indeed, I would say, not many of which – were even compatible with the imperial ethos, in any sense.

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He became an imperialist, then, quite late on. His first unambiguously ‘imperial’ compositions – the first to mention the Empire – date in fact from 1897, when he was 40 years old. They are The Banner of St George, whose Epilogue celebrates the ‘great [British] race, whose empire of splendour/ Has dazzled a wondering world!’; and his first proper march, which is called the ‘Imperial’. I don’t however want to be pedantic about this, and only accept works with the ‘e’ or ‘i’ words in them. Imperialism does not always call itself such. Its presence can be indicated by other tell-tale signs, references to other values – or even language – which are commonly associated with it. I think we have to be careful here, because some of those values – what John MacKenzie terms his ‘ideological cluster’11 – can also be used for entirely different purposes. Some ludicrous errors have been made by cultural scholars who, glimpsing a flash of a dolphin’s fin in the water, have assumed it belongs to an imperial shark. In this case however I think we can say it does, because we get a closer view of the shark later on. In the late 1880s the character of Elgar’s music suddenly changes. It becomes more confident, celebratory and bold. The best-known example is his concert overture Froissart, completed in June 1890, whose brassy, leaping opening is unprecedented in Elgar’s output. There are definite pre-echoes of Land of Hope here. So this is where it starts. There are two possible reasons for its starting then. Two things happened at around that time, which clearly affected Elgar. The first was in the public sphere. There was a surge of popular interest in imperialism in the middle 1880s, surrounding three main events: the controversy over Irish home rule, which had an imperial dimension; the first Anglo-Boer war, which Britain lost; and the death of General Charles Gordon at the hands of Islamic jihadists on his mission to rescue British– Egyptian troops from Khartoum in the Sudan. We have no idea what Elgar thought of these things at the time they happened – we know that his general political stance then was Tory,12 but that tells us nothing at all about his attitude to the Empire – but we do know that he felt deeply about the Gordon issue a little later on. He toyed with the idea of writing a symphony about it, though that came to nothing.13 Nonetheless Gordon is an obvious tangible link between Elgar and imperialism. Another possible way of looking at it is as a manifestation of a more general imperialistic ethos in Britain which, however weak it may have been before this time, was overwhelming now. This of course is a very traditional view – a sudden birth of a ‘new’ imperialism in the 1880s, after years of apathy. It could also however be seen as a persuasive argument in favour of the newer idea of ‘imperial hegemony’, if even sissy wimps like Edward Elgar, who previously had shown no interest at all in empire, could be swept away by it. We shall return to this.

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The other event of this time that affected Elgar was more private. That was his marriage to Alice Roberts. That took place on 9 May 1889, 30 months after they met. I believe this was crucial to his ‘imperialism’ in a number of ways. The first is very private indeed, and you may feel it is far too intrusive, if not frankly distasteful. One of the new qualities to be inferred from Froissart is its stirring, exhilarent, masculine tone. The same is true of many of the more minor pieces he wrote at this same time – of his meeting with Alice – often to words by Alice, and on patriotic and military themes. There is a great deal of ‘thrusting’ in them (of ‘flashing swords’). The first time this kind of thing appears is in a song called The Wind at Dawn, again to a poem by Alice, which is fairly calm and conventional for three stanzas, but then bursts out exultantly with this: To his tawny mane and tangle of flush Leapt the wind with a blast and a rush; In his strength unseen, in triumph up-borne, Rode he out to meet with the morn! Is it only my mind that sees in that, and also, of course, in the motto he attaches to Froissart – ‘When Chivalry lifted its lance on high’ – a hint, at any rate, of Freudian undertones? The completion of Froissart coincided with the birth of the Elgars’ daughter, Carice. They may have had the same genesis. Elgar was almost certainly – of course I cannot prove this, but it would certainly be expected of a young man of his background – a virgin when he married Alice. She therefore – as the phrase goes – ‘made a man’ of him. Masculinism and imperialism are supposed to be related. But this course is treacherous ground for the historian. In any case there is a far more direct and obvious ‘Alice’ link. She was an overt imperialist. There can be no dispute about this. She came from an Indian army family – father, brothers – and had even been born in the subcontinent.14 She was very definitely a part of that ‘other’ Britain, from which Elgar had been rigidly excluded before now. In linking his life with hers, Elgar was laying himself open for the first time to that Britain’s cultural influence. Alice helped it along with the patriotic verses that, initially, came more naturally from her than from him. That was when – if you regard this as a retrograde step – he fell. * Except that he did not, entirely. This is where I would like to move on to the second theme of this chapter, the type of Elgar’s imperialism, before returning briefly at the end to this question of its origins, which I do not think is quite

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resolved yet. For Elgar was never the complete imperialist. He did not absorb either all Alice’s influence, or that of his time. He was picky. In particular, he did not embrace the Empire’s expansionism – ‘England for the English’ is not obviously imperialistic; its militarism; its racism; or the capitalism that is usually associated with it. Take expansionism, for example: the only explicit reference to that in his post-1900 music are two of the lines Benson supplied for Pomp and Circumstance No. 1: Wider still and wider May thy bounds be set – which happen to be the two lines that Elgar clearly did feel queasy over – they were omitted from the 1902 Coronation version, for example – and which he eventually blue-pencilled out. (The evidence is at the Elgar Birthplace.)15 The rest of Land of Hope and Glory, of course, celebrates Britain as ‘mother of the free’. It could be seen as a democratic anthem, though Elgar would not have approved of that. There is nothing in the melody that is inherently aggressive, and indeed many of Elgar’s contemporaries complained that Benson’s upbeat lyrics fitted its descending cadences rather badly. Certain of its key phrases are first found, in Elgar’s notes, in a setting he contemplated, but then abandoned, for Kipling’s poem Recessional, which of course is a gloomy warning against national triumphalism.16 It has been employed later as a soccer supporters’ chant – ‘We hate Nottingham Forest’ etc.; as the theme tune for the Spanish Socialist party in the 1980s; and even to accompany American university commencements. Pomp and Circumstance No. 4 – the other one with a ‘big tune’ – has had at least three very different sets of lyrics put to it: the first, by Alice in 1910, celebrating the opening of a London street; the second, by Alfred Noyes in 1928, more conventionally patriotic; and then these words, supplied by AP Herbert in 1940: All men must be free, March for liberty with me, Brutes and braggarts may Have their little sway, We shall never bow the knee. It works all ways. I think it works best as an expression of human idealism. And I’m sure that’s how Elgar preferred to see it. For Elgar’s brand of imperialism was quintessentially idealist. It was also – it almost automatically follows from this – extremely naı¨ve. The basis of it was the ideal of ‘chivalry’ which he first learned about at his mother’s knee,

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and which is explicitly celebrated in the Froissart overture. Later it becomes a recurring theme in his work, sometimes quite openly, as in the Banner of St George, the Black Knight, the Crown of India masque, and several songs; at other times disguised, but still apparent, as in the three ‘recitations’ he set to music during the Great War to highlight the plight of ‘poor little Belgium’ – a typical damsel in distress. It was almost certainly what first attracted him to the Gordon affair: not the expansionary or military aspects of it, but the pervasive contemporary myth of Gordon as martyr-hero, which was heightened for Elgar when either his fiance´e or his priest – we cannot be sure which – gave him a copy of Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius that Gordon was supposedly reading and annotating before his death.17 Whether Elgar would have responded to the Sudan adventure without that allusion to his religion cannot be known. Chivalry of course is one of those notions – it appears as part of John MacKenzie’s ‘ideological cluster’ – which can easily be prostituted for less honourable imperial ends. But in Elgar’s case this is unfair. Chivalry was not a tawdry excuse for empire. It was the only thing that could justify it. Every mention of Britain’s ‘might’ in his works ties it in with the ‘good’ it is supposed to do. Hear this, for example, from that patriotic Finale to Caractacus. And where the flag of Britain In triple crosses rears, No slave shall be for subject, No trophy wet with tears, But folk shall bless the banner, And bless the crosses twin’d, That bear the gift of freedom, On every blowing wind. In case there is any doubt, the Banner of St George specifically warns against the use of British power in an un-chivalric way. O ne’er may the flag belove`d, Unfurl in a strife unblest, But ever give strength to the righteous arm, And hope to the hearts oppressed! The message is plain. Elgar believes the British Empire to be a force for good in the world. But it is the good he is fundamentally interested in, not the force. This is salutary, not celebratory.

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Chivalry – together early on with the spectacle, though he grew tired of that – were the only aspects of empire that appealed to Elgar. After Khartoum he showed no interest in any colonial matters that we know of, save – briefly around 1910 – Ulster and tariff reform. Though he was fairly well travelled he visited only one British colony, Canada, which he found ‘drearily cold’.18 (To be fair he loathed his trips to the United States – one to receive an honorary doctorate at Yale – even more.) When everyone else was apparently getting in a frenzy over the Boer War in 1899– 1900, and one or two other composers were writing music for it (Sullivan, for example, a Te Deum to be ready for the victory), Elgar was immersed in very different worlds: those of the Enigma Variations, the Chanson de Matin, Sea Pictures, the Serenade Lyrique, Three Characteristic Pieces, some songs, and the Dream of Gerontius. One wonders whether the Boer War may have been a disillusioning experience for him, as it was for many others who found the British Army’s treatment of Boer women and children (the ‘concentration camps’) difficult to square with their ideals, too, of ’gentlemanly’ or chivalric warfare.19 Be that as it may, he never celebrated battles after that, and was only depressed by the Great War when it came.20 Despite all Alice’s efforts, and her own much more strident tone during World War I,21 he remained impervious to militarism. Continually pestered for military pieces, by contemporaries who misunderstood this side of him as much as posterity has, he strove unhappily, and usually in vain; ‘I am truly grieved about these marching verses’, he wrote to his publisher in 1907; ‘but I cannot really feel any of them.’ When he did manage to turn something out it was often risible. (A typical example is The Birthright of 1914.) He did not have his heart in it. The best ‘war music’ he wrote is The Spirit of England of 1916, which sounds from the title as if it should be a tub-thumper, and starts a little like that, but then turns into a kind of war requiem, in much the same spirit (and even style) as Benjamin Britten’s. As imperialists go, Elgar was a pretty toothless sort of one; more dolphin, really, than shark. * There remains one final puzzle, however. Elgar did not mind being taken for a jingo. He even encouraged it. His whole life after the age of 30 was a performance, choreographed to make him appear ‘blimpish’, ultra-patriotic, militaristic, stupid, even – for goodness sake! – a philistine. Hence the soldierly bearing, the moustache (to make his upper lip look stiffer), the country sports, the outrageous political opinions, and the pretence that he did not understand the technicalities of musical composition when strangers tried to discuss them with him. Everyone close to him knew that this was a huge bluff, a mask.22 In front of them it could sometimes slip. ‘Thus’, recalled

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Rosa Burley, ‘when [Alice] complained that since her marriage she no longer had access to the Army & Navy Stores, he said abruptly, “No; because I don’t make it my business to kill my fellow men.”’23 It also, of course, slipped quite frequently in his abstract music, where however – so long as it remained abstract – it was not widely noticed. It might surprise modern Elgarians to read some of the contemporary reviews of the Second Symphony, for example, which saw it as grand and joyous and carefree, obviously because that was what they expected from him.24 Elgar grew irritated and even depressed at this; it probably lies at the root of his feeling that his music was neglected after around 1909, which historians have shown to be not literally true.25 (It was the real Elgar, perhaps, that was neglected.) But he only had himself to blame. Why, then, did he do it? Again, the ‘obvious’ answer is that it was to conform to the dominant discourse of the time; but that will not wash, even for the 1890s and 1900s. Most of his fellow musicians managed to avoid it. The main exceptions are ‘lighter’ composers like Arthur Sullivan and Edward German, who did write some patriotic stuff, though it’s arguable whether it can also be called ‘imperial’. (It should not need to be pointed out that the two terms are not interchangeable, especially when you take your main inspiration – as these two composers did – from Good Queen Bess’s time.)26 Most of Elgar’s more serious contemporaries were less ‘English’ than he, of course (Stanford, Delius, MacKenzie, McEwen, McCunn), but that by no means disqualified them from sharing in the imperial enterprise at that time.27 The reason why they (and Parry, Cowen and Corder) abstained was that this was thought to be not a proper artistic concern. Art was above politics, and certainly above this crude, boisterous, tribal sort. This was Elgar’s deepest conviction, too, illustrated in two lateish works of his: the Music Makers of 1912 and the song Shakespeare’s Kingdom of 1924, both of which contrast the endurance of great art with the dust into which all earthly empires eventually crumble. Over on the imperialists’ side there was nothing but distrust of – even hostility to – the world of art. Britain may have been a uniquely philistine society in the nineteenth century. Art was widely considered useless and effeminate. (There was a genuine fear of what was called the ‘Oscar Wilde tendency’.) Artists were made to feel this, including Elgar, whose friend Jaeger once wrote to him that ‘England ruins all artists!’28 It would certainly have been possible – even natural – for Elgar to have rejected this England. He would have been in good contemporary company. The reason he did not was, I believe, social. We know about his enormous lack of social self-confidence throughout his life, deriving from his ‘shameful’ class origins. Class was a far more powerful force in British life in the later

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nineteenth century than patriotism, which more often than not was an artificial device exploited by the upper classes to try to defuse the dangers of class conflict, usually in vain. This was where the ‘Alice’ factor really kicks in. Whether or not this was why he married her (he seems to have loved other women more), her great value to him was her class. She rescued him from social ignominy; but at a price to them both. Alice’s relatives disapproved of her marriage, believing it dragged her ‘down’. Elgar – sensitive flower that he always was – was painfully aware of this, and determined to prove them wrong. The obvious way to do this would be to give up his work as a musician entirely, and take up farming, or join the stock exchange. But that was out of the question. (Quite apart from the violence it would do to his muse, he simply did not have the capital.) So he tried as far as he could to reconcile his music with her class. That was difficult, as we have just seen. It involved the most terrible contortions, like affecting philistinism himself. Some he just could not manage convincingly, like the militarism. In other ways, however, he succeeded quite remarkably, as evidenced by the honours he garnered during his life, including the knighthood. (There is a story that when Alice died he threw all these into her grave, saying that he had sought them only for her; but that may be apocryphal.)29 His imperialism was a means to this personal, social end, and – I believe – only that. It was useful in three ways. Firstly, it got him the honours, and a reputation in British high society that no considerable artist save perhaps Tennyson had managed to achieve before in his own lifetime; though Elgar never stopped suspecting people of sneering at him – ‘his father kept a shop, you know’30 – behind his back. He was a terrific acquisition for them: someone they were told wrote ‘great’ music, which redounded to the glory of Britain, therefore (it was nice to have someone at last to put up against the Germans); but without any of that distasteful ‘artiness’ that was so often associated with this sort of thing. What neutralised the ‘artiness’ were two things. Firstly: Elgar’s music was ‘healthy’ and ‘masculine’, and so unlikely to lead adolescent boys down the Oscar Wilde path. Elgar himself, in his writings, made much of the ‘healthy, out-door’ thing, which he believed was one of the characteristics of English – as opposed, one assumes, to Continental – music.31 Marches of course are explicitly healthy and out-door; as are sea-songs, which Elgar also tried his hand at: with Fringes of the Fleet, 1917, with the soloists at the first performance dressed in sou’westers and sprayed from hoses.32 The other thing about Elgar’s music was that it could be presented as useful. That was tougher. Keeping soldiers in step is not a very useful thing to do, and is probably better done with a drum. But art had to be useful, to appease the philistines. This certainly exercised Elgar. In his early oratorios Caractacus and King Olaf he gives very practical roles to bards or

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‘skalds’, who are the wise men of their tribes, respected even by kings and chiefs. But there was no hope for that in nineteenth-century Britain. So Elgar settled for something less: which was the idea of the musician as what he called a ‘troubadour’, who could ‘step in front of an army and inspire the people with a song’.33 Critics who have taken that well-known quotation as evidence of his nationalism miss the utilitarianism that is implied in it too. It was this that was supposed to endear him to the no-nonsense British. * Was Elgar a genuine imperialist? I am sure he thought he was. I hope I have done enough to show, however, that he was not a ‘natural’ one; not a very deep or fierce one; and not an inevitable one because of the dominant imperial ethos of his time. He came to imperialism accidentally, through his marriage, and because it offered a solution to his overriding problem: which was how a poor and ultra-sensitive genius could survive in the stifling social and artistic environment that was England then. His life and works tell us much more about these aspects of British life than they do about its imperialism. The superficiality of his imperial beliefs may also tell us much: if they reflect, as I believe they do, the uneven spread of the imperial spirit in Britain more generally. For a small minority of people in fin-de-sie`cle Britain – mostly upper-class – the Empire was their religion, dominating their whole lives and values and ‘discourses’; they desperately wished the majority of their countrymen to share it with them, in order – apart from anything else – to ensure its preservation, and worked hard to persuade them: but with mixed success. As the last two chapters have argued, the majority of Elgar’s compatriots were of course affected by empire, but there is no reason to suppose that it took them over completely, any more than it took over him. They had other priorities, other interests, other – sometimes conflicting – value systems. Occasionally imperialism could be harnessed to one of these; a well-known example is the way Labour MPs played on the imperialists’ fears of national ‘physical deterioration’ to secure social reform.34 Sometimes it might distract them from those priorities, temporarily. More often than not it was a fac
ade, or abjectly misunderstood, or simply a source of entertainment, or of harmless pride. There are probably not many cases where it came with marriage, as a kind of dowry, and as a means of gaining social acceptance, to counter the stigma of being an artist in a philistine land; but the triviality of that explanation must have been repeated in a thousand other ways. For Elgar, as for others, imperialism was a veneer.

CHAPTER 24 `

ARCHITECTURE AND EMPIRE: THE CASE OF THE BATTLE OF THE STYLES'

Architecture is the most public of the arts, at least in the sense of being the most difficult to avoid. If ‘imperialism’ or empire in any shape or form was a big thing in British public perception in the nineteenth century, therefore, as is very often claimed, you might expect to find it reflected here. Yet almost none of the now considerable range of work linking imperialism with British domestic society in this period has very much at all to say about architecture. Buildings do not feature at all in Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, for example, and only very marginally in John MacKenzie’s books, or the series he edits for Manchester University Press. Why is this? There are two possible reasons. One is that the ‘New Imperial History’ has simply not got round to architecture yet. Another is that there is nothing (or very little) there for it to get round to. Architecture, for some reason or other, was relatively empirefree. It will not surprise readers familiar with my previous work in this area, including some earlier chapters of this book, to find that I incline to the latter view. I shall be briefly adumbrating it here. But I also hope to go beyond that, to do two further things. One is to explore some of the reasons why the architecture of that earlier time did not reflect the Empire, which are not altogether obvious: it was not for example, in my view, necessarily because there was no imperial feeling for it to reflect. Secondly, I should like to explore some other connections there may have been between Victorian architecture and imperialism, apart from this rather simplistic one – that the one expressed or reflected the other. I think the true picture was slightly more complex than that, and very much more interesting. The third and final part of this chapter will be about this. For most of it I shall be concentrating on one particular building, which is the present Government Offices in Whitehall, erected in the 1860s. There are

GG Scott’s original and final designs for the new Government Offices; from The Builder, 29 August 1857; and The Illustrated London News, 29 September 1866.

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three reasons for using this event as a particularly apt case study of the imperial dimension of architecture. The first is that the Government Offices were a great national building – the only major one of its kind built in nineteenth-century Britain apart from the new Houses of Parliament, started in the 1830s; and consequently the most likely, if any building of the time was, to express national – and hence by implication, one imagines, imperial – aspirations, values and identities. We can add to this the fact that four of the five Departments of State it was originally designed to house were the four most directly concerned with Britain’s overseas presence: the Foreign, War, Colonial, and India Offices; which are consequently the ones we would go to first to look for imperial resonances in any case. The second reason for focussing on the Whitehall project is its timing. It was planned in the later 1850s, when Britain was arguably at the height of her national and imperial self-confidence, if not quite of her imperial extent; and when one of the two major imperial wars of the nineteenth century was fought: the one between Britain (or the British East India Company) and the so-called Indian ‘mutineers’ of 1857– 8. The 1850s and 1860s also happen to be the period when the extent of British domestic and cultural imperialism is most contested, unlike for example the 1880s and 1890s, when no-one would want to deny that ‘imperialism’ was a powerful domestic presence. Lastly – the third reason for focussing on this event: it provoked a considerable discussion, which can be followed in a wide array of pamphlets, periodical articles, newspaper leaders and reports of Parliamentary debates. This was unusual for architectural projects at this time, but is easily explained. In the first place, the building was financed out of public taxation, and so needed to be approved by the representatives of the public in Parliament. Hence the Commons debates. Secondly, the project happened to come at a key moment in a great architectural war that was going on just then, between ‘Classicists’ and ‘Goths’. The result of all this, fortuitously, is that we have reams of evidence for people’s overtly-expressed opinions, at any rate, about the whole project: whether it should go ahead at all; how grand the new building should be; what style it should be in; how – with what images – it should be decorated; and what exactly it should symbolise or express generally, about Britain’s national identity, or anything else. So, if one of the things it was supposed to express was Britain’s imperial identity, or any aspect of that, we should surely expect to find this stated, or at least hinted at, in this material. Not necessarily, however, in the building itself. We need to be clear about this at the outset: that the debate about the Government Offices should not be confused with the Government Offices themselves. The reasons why the latter turned out as they did were largely fortuitous, and so less related to contemporary dominant discourses than the prior debate over them was.

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There is no room to go into details about this here (it can be followed in my The Battle of the Styles, 2011); but it is an entertaining story, involving a rigged competition, a prejudiced old peer (Lord Palmerston), a spineless and avaricious architect (George Gilbert Scott), a hint of scandal, and – perhaps most fortuitously of all – the smell of ordure that came off the nearby Thames on the day of the key Commons debate on the matter. (The point here is that the inadequate air-conditioning system of the newly built House of Commons, requiring the windows facing on to the notoriously polluted Thames to be opened on hot days, was widely blamed on the building’s ‘Gothic’ style; which aided the Classical cause.) The upshot of all this was a building that no-one wanted: not the House of Commons; nor the British people, nor Lord Palmerston, who thought merely that it would ‘do’; nor even the architect himself, who had desperately wanted to build it in Gothic, and only changed his mind when he was told he would not get his money if he did not, and so never had his heart in it. Its appearance, therefore (in Italian Renaissance style, strictly), was purely accidental; which means that very little more than this can be read into it. If we really want to find out what this whole affair tells us about the dominant discourses of the time we need to turn away from the building that was ultimately erected, back to the debate that preceded it. * It is this that may be thought to contain the surprises; even to those of us who are inclined to doubt the domestic cultural resonances of nineteenth-century imperialism generally, but would want to make exceptions of the upper and upper-middle classes of British society, who were the main protagonists (together with the architectural profession, of course) in this great debate. They were aware of their Empire, and even took pride in it. Yet on this occasion they are hardly ever found arguing, for example, in favour of a building that would be worthy of that empire, as one might expect. Of course there are some exceptions. Here for example is Sir Charles Trevelyan, the great mid-nineteenth century reformer of the civil service, among whose reasons for giving that civil service ‘a beautiful range of public buildings’ to conduct its business in was this: This city [London] is something more than the mother of arts and eloquence; she is the mother of nations; we are peopling two continents, the Western and the Southern Continent, and we are organising, christianising and civilising large portions of two ancient continents, Africa and Asia; and it is not right that when the inhabitants of those

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countries come to the metropolis, they should see nothing worthy of its ancient renown.1 So there we have it, from the horse’s mouth. But we should notice two things about this quotation. Firstly, it comes from someone you would have expected to be particularly aware of the British Empire, having served there (in India) for thirteen years before returning home to reform the Civil Service, and then returning there afterwards, as Governor of Madras. These sorts of men, as is argued in The Absent-Minded Imperialists, were a very small number, usually cut off from metropolitan society, and so atypical of British society generally. No British politician or higher civil servant is to be found arguing in this way – not even Palmerston. Secondly: if the quotation is examined carefully, it will be found that although it sounds ‘imperialistic’, it really is not. Trevelyan is not saying that the new buildings should express the spirit of the Empire, but rather the growth of English ‘freedoms’ (this is clear from the context of the quotation) in such a way as not to disappoint any returning colonials. They should be a means of celebrating Britain to the peoples of her Empire; not the Empire to the British. This is not to say that there were not a few who argued in a more genuinely imperialistic kind of way; but they really were a very few. My own researches have involved trawling through literally thousands of articles, speeches and private letters, among which perhaps half a dozen direct references to the ‘e’ or ‘i’ words (‘empire’, ‘imperial’ and so on) can be found, and perhaps another dozen less direct ones inferred between the lines: allusions for example to Britain’s ‘greatness’ or ‘influence’ on the world stage. Most of these come from upper-class lips or pens, in the letter columns of The Times, for example, which of course was atypical of the population as a whole. Almost no-one argued that the new building should represent or express or celebrate Britain’s power (or whatever) in the world; and this despite the fact – to repeat – that that power was going to be exercised from there. The working classes did not (they were totally uninterested); the middle classes, by and large, were against the building in any case; and even upper-class ministers (and the leader-writer of The Times) wanted the building to be simply serviceable, and never mentioned ‘imperial’ considerations. Nearly all the arguments put forward for the building itself, or for one or another style for it, were of different kinds entirely. Some bore on what today we would call Britain’s ‘national identity’; but in almost no case was that identity seen as an imperial or expansionary one, or to have anything at all to do with power. Usually it was all about ‘freedom’, or England’s historical ‘roots’. Even this sort of argument – the nationalistic one – was marginalised by others: to do with ‘truth’, for example (favouring Gothic), religion (ditto),

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reason (favouring the Classical), modernity (claimed by both sides), and utility. Gender also came into it. ‘Imperial’ discourses, on the other hand, featured hardly at all. This is because they were not there, either explicitly, or in ways that we can plausibly tease out of the material; as unstated assumptions, for example, underlying the rest. And of course the style of the Offices as they were eventually built is not ‘imperial’, or even ‘British’, at all. It is Italian; and not even Roman Italian, which you might have expected in an ‘imperial’ building: but then – though this may surprise some readers – the Roman Empire was thought to be an association to avoid in the 1850s.2 There are exceptions in the case of the India Office building: statues, friezes and internal decorations that do (of course) celebrate the Raj in India; the point about the India Office, however, was that it was not paid for by British taxpayers (but by the poor Indians), so it was not debated in the country, at all. The imperialists had a free run here. And the exterior of the India Office is Italian too: to fit in with Scott’s Foreign Office next door. But then we know that the style of that was purely accidental; so we can disregard it. * So (to pass on to the second part of this chapter): why was this? One reason was that most British were in a state of denial about their ‘empire’ at this time. They did not recognise it as such, and so were hardly likely to want to celebrate it, at least explicitly. One difficulty was the words ‘empire’ and ‘imperial’, which at that time were mainly associated with the Emperor Napoleon III, who at the height of the ‘Battle’ over the Government Offices was thought to be threatening Britain with a battle of a very much hotter sort. Beyond that, however, the orthodox view of the day was that Britain had moved beyond what she regarded as ‘imperialism’ on to a higher plane of political existence: of free, equal, cosmopolitan internationalism, famously represented by the Great Exhibition of 1851. All they wanted now was to trade with folk. Today we can understand the ‘imperialist’ implications of this, using terms such as ‘informal’, ‘free trade’ and ‘cultural’ empire. No scholar for 50 years now has defined ‘imperialism’ as narrowly as the midVictorians did. The point is, however, that the latter did not understand these more ‘informal’ activities as having anything to do with ‘empire’, and so will not have wanted to express ‘imperialism’ in their public buildings. This is not an argument (of course) against the reality of mid-Victorian imperialism; but against the domestic cultural expression of it. Indeed, in many ways the sort of imperialism Britain practised in the midnineteenth century was quite fundamentally anti-‘culture’ (in the sense we are using that word now). It was a common view then that the reason why Britain was so successful and dominant in the world was that she did not waste either

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her money or her energies on ‘culture’, but used them in other ways. One of the arguments of those who wanted a grand new building in Whitehall was that London then was so impoverished architecturally: Hausmann’s Paris, just then under construction, was constantly held up as the example to put Londoners to shame; but many other British actually welcomed the impoverishment. It meant that they had their national priorities right, and probably contributed to their prosperity. Britons invested money in industry and commerce rather than wasting it on ‘show’. They were a ‘practical’ and ‘rational’ people, wrote an anonymous pamphleteer in 1857, and wanted nothing to do with foreign architectural ‘Utopias’ – meaning Hausmann’s.3 Examples are cited in The Absent-Minded Imperialists of this perceived antipathy between ‘culture’ and ‘empire’ (Carlyle and Charles Kingsley were two); and this affair, of the ‘Battle of the Styles’, throws up another rather unexpected one. This is John Ruskin, whose famous (or notorious) encomium to British imperialism at the beginning of his 1870 Oxford Slade lecture Edward Said does cite, claiming that it ‘frames nearly everything in Ruskin’s copious writings on art’, though without saying how exactly it could be said to ‘frame’ (whatever that means) The Stones of Venice and The Seven Lamps of Architecture. (It is not obvious.)4 Clearly Said had not noticed a lecture Ruskin gave in January 1858 at the Architectural Museum in London where he claimed that culture sapped the energy, honesty and bravery from peoples, so that only uncultured peoples could build empires. He was clearly troubled by this, according to the Builder magazine’s report on the lecture, and (quote) ‘proceeded to reply to the difficulty he had [with it], but the answer was of too subtle a character to be seized in our notes.’5 No wonder. Ruskin was an unpredictable and inconsistent genius, of course. What however comes out of all this – what you might call ‘philistine’ – discourse of the time, is that whether you called what Britain was doing in the world ‘imperialism’ or not, it was not the sort of imperialism that could be celebrated in stone. It is not as though the early and mid-Victorians were reluctant to express anything in stone. Their religion was celebrated in this way repeatedly, of course. So was their sense of civic pride, in those glorious town halls they erected in the north of England; and their national freedoms, represented in all kinds of obvious ways in the new Palace of Westminster (from the 1840s). (Incidentally, almost none of the historical friezes and tapestries commissioned for that building celebrated imperial events, either.) The Victorians liked their ‘freedom’. They did not like their government; still less their bureaucracy. This was one other disadvantage that the new Government Offices laboured under: that they were not for the people, but for the men who ruled them (as well as the colonials). They were sometimes dubbed a ‘Palace of Administration’, to make them seem more attractive; but it did not.

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‘Administration’, or government, at home or abroad, did not deserve a ‘palace’. Nor did ‘empire’. Two things need to be made clear at this point, before moving on. The first is that nothing in this chapter so far should be taken to prove, or even to suggest, that ‘imperialism’ was not an important or even a dominant discourse in mid-nineteenth-century society. There may be evidence for this, as I have argued elsewhere; but this is not it. The fact that this ‘Battle’, and even more the building that emerged from it, show almost no imperial marks at all does not mean that the imperial creature (meaning imperial awareness or sentiment) was not around. All it means is that this particular aspect of the culture of the time did not reflect it or show it up. This in fact is quite common with ‘culture’, at all ‘levels’, and is why culture on its own can never be a reliable guide to the dominant social and other discourses of its time. The second point to be noted is that the question of the relationship between architecture, empire and mid-Victorian society more generally does not end there. There were connections; but most of them were indirect. That is to say: architecture and imperialism were linked through other discourses that acted on both of them, not through their effects on each other. It is a couple of these links that will be pursued, briefly, in the remainder of this chapter. * The first is this. The Gothic versus Classical ‘Battle’ in the 1850s mirrored a number of different competing discourses of the time, some of which were class-based, and political. In a nutshell: each style reflected different concepts of ‘rule’ or ‘government’. Classical was mainly (though not exclusively) the style of the ruling classes, and represented, quite plainly, the order, hierarchy and immutability that informed their preferred ways of ruling. Classic was a perfect style, unsurpassed since the Greeks, and consequently static. In much the same way Classical history was supposed to teach Britain’s young ruling classes all the principles of ‘ruling’, which they could then apply everywhere and at any time. That is why they were not taught British history in their public schools before they joined the Civil Service, let alone anything at all about their colonies for those who went out to rule them; it had all been said by Cicero, or Marcus Aurelius, or whomever. The Classical buildings they erected in India and elsewhere reflected this; almost exact replicas of the ones they erected for themselves in Hampshire or Kent or Argyllshire. Gothic, however, was very different. It was mainly a middle-class choice (though again, there are significant – chivalric – exceptions). It was not an ‘ideal’ or ‘perfect’ architecture, but a ‘progressive’ one; a style that in its original (medieval) manifestation had developed continually and rationally, and which consequently was capable of further adaptation to any new demands the

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present and future might throw up. It was also a notoriously irregular style, balanced but rarely symmetrical; its forms growing out of its function and materials; dynamic and thrusting – ‘masculine’ was a word often applied to it, contrasted with Classical’s female (one presumes) ‘serenity’; Christian, of course, as against the pagan origins of its rival; built from the ground up, by honest craftsmen happy in their work, rather than imposed from above by dull Palladian pattern-makers; and so at least quasi-‘democratic’. Although this cluster of ‘Gothic’ values gave no clear guidance on imperial matters, it implied some very different ways of looking at the latter from the ‘Classicists’. If British society was seen as changeable and ‘progressive’, it followed – unless you were a racist – that non-British societies were at least potentially equally so. That had implications for the way they should be ruled; or for the images the more liberal middle classes in Britain created of them, in order to reconcile their Empire with their progressivism. Just ‘ruling’, the Classical method, was not enough. Britain needed to develop her subjects, in a progressive way, but along their own lines; just as the Gothic style often changed when it was transplanted to the colonies. (We shall return to this.) These were not especially ‘Gothic’ ideas, but they were similar, because they grew in the same ideological, social and economic soil that had given rise to the latter. It is this that makes it instructive to compare them; and then to contrast both of them with the Classical-Tory cluster on the other side. In particular, it throws into relief the domestic imperial confusion that reigned at this time; unsurprisingly, it should be said, in a period of such intense class warfare in Britain: between the upper and the middle classes, that is. Classical versus Gothic mirrored this; and also the two classes’ very different imperial discourses. * The second ‘imperial’ point to be made here is this. Both these styles were extraordinarily cosmopolitan: very much less ‘British’ or ‘English’ than might be expected, that is, if it is assumed that the establishment or confirmation of a ‘national identity’ was one of the leading considerations in the ‘Battle’ between them. ‘Classical’ was obviously ‘foreign’ in its origins; and even more so in the form that most of the prize-winning Classical entries in the competition for the new Government Offices took, which was French Second Empire (with Mansard roofs, and so on). The final version, as we have seen, was Italian. Gothic had originally been championed because it was more ‘English’; but, again, the winning Gothic entries in the competition were all covered with Flemish, French, Lombardic and even Byzantine features; to the disappointment and scorn of more patriotic critics, which may indicate – yet again – a disjunction between the architecture of the time and its social

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context. On the other hand there was a lot of cosmopolitanism around in the 1850s, more perhaps than at any other time in British history; especially among artists, who seem to have been a particularly cosmopolitan bunch. By this time architects were getting their inspiration from all over: mainly from Europe, because that was as far as any of them travelled; and also seemed quite happy to accept what had now become a common theory: which was that one of the totemic features of Gothic, the pointed arch, no less, had originally been a ‘Saracenic’, or Islamic, importation. Another source of inspiration for Goths was countries like India, where the sort of craftsmanship that had all but died out in Britain under the relentless heel of capitalist factory production was still alive. Indian craftsmanship was a source of great wonder at the Great Exhibition of 1851, for example. Of course it is possible to see this as patronising. There is a tradition, going back at least to the eighteenth century, of Westerners purporting to admire more ‘primitive’ societies for the freshness, naturalism, morality and so on of their lives and cultures: the ‘noble savage’ trope, for example; but who would run a mile if they were asked to live like noble savages themselves. The ‘real’ India, or Africa, or wherever, was romanticised, but not in a way that did any real favours, in the modern world, to its peoples. We find a lot of this in British imperial thinking and practice later on: as in the common postMutiny disdain for ‘educated Indians’, or ‘babus’; and in the early twentieth century administrative philosophy of ‘Indirect Rule’. Sharp-eyed watchersout for tell-tale ‘imperialist’ hints in the cultural attitudes of nineteenthcentury Britain are probably right to be suspicious of this. However, one cannot really dismiss as ‘patronising’, advice which the adviser genuinely believes should apply to him- or herself too. And this view – that English architecture should become more indigenous and natural – more ‘native’, if you like – was a deeply-rooted one among the whole ‘Gothic’ community of the time, from Pugin to Ruskin; before it was taken up by the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement towards the end of the century. Tim Barringer has given it – the idea of recapturing old skills and cultures from the imperial periphery – the name of ‘Colonial Gothic’: ‘colonial’, that is, in the anti-imperial sense, as in ‘colonial resistance’.6 This might be a better way of looking at it. Does this cosmopolitanism overall make English architecture more ‘imperialistic’, or less? This is not really a question of substance, so much as of semantics. To repeat: ‘imperialism’ can be taken in many ways, almost any of them permissible; but it becomes less useful as an analytical tool the further one departs from its root meaning, which implies some kind of control, or dominating influence. A better, more neutral word for Britain’s relations with the wider world in the early nineteenth century might be ‘outward-lookingness’; a neologism implying an interest in other countries,

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predominantly as it happens in continental European countries (which both parochial national and the ‘New Imperial’ historians often lose sight of); probably originating in the enormous expansion of British trade in these years, but sustained by a number of other factors: Britons holidaying abroad, for example, and European immigration into Britain; which sometimes turned to something we can more properly call ‘imperialism’, but not invariably. Architecture illustrates this quite well: its aficionados’ very generous interest in foreign countries, for what they could learn from them, and certainly not as a preliminary to colonising them; and in Europe more than the wider world, though the latter was starting to come into view too at this time. This was mainly through the work of James Fergusson, who published the first extensive history of world architecture at this very time; starting with Indian architecture, which was what originally stimulated his interest in the subject, as an indigo planter in Bengal, and remained the benchmark by which he measured other, including European, styles. Fergusson was also, incidentally, deeply unsympathetic to British imperialism, which he feared would destroy any chance of fine architecture in England, just as Augustan imperialism had in ancient Rome.7 * Lastly, however: how about the expansion of the Gothic revival from its undoubted centre in England to so many other parts of the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Can that be seen as a kind of imperialism? This was not confined to British colonies, of course. Continental Europe also took to it in a fairly big way. So did the United States: in its prestigious college buildings, for example (both Yale and Chicago universities sport Magdalen College towers),8 probably because Gothic signified academic prestige. This is especially remarkable because Britain had never before been regarded as a cultural trend-setter, partly because she appeared so inferior to Continental countries artistically. Neo-Gothic is the one exception to this. England was indisputably the world leader in this genre. France and Germany never took to it so early or enthusiastically. But on the occasions they did, it was often to English architects they turned for designs. One can call this ‘cultural imperialism’ if one likes; but it was a very ‘soft’ kind, unconnected with any element of ‘power’: neither expressing it, nor requiring any more overtly imperial form of power to back it up. It was more a matter of what DC McCaskie has termed ‘inculturation’ (as opposed to ‘acculturation’): other peoples sucking in artistic fashions, rather than having them imposed on them.9 If one insists on using the ‘i’-word for this, one is diluting it very thinly indeed. (And one would have to apply it to Renaissance Italy.)

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Of course it was different in the British colonies, where British colonialists of one kind or another – government officers, capitalists, settlers, etcetera – were responsible for most of the major building, and where consequently the cultural imperialism involved was ‘harder’. Hence the Gothic-style buildings erected in the colonies during the second half of the nineteenth century: from the great cathedrals, churches and universities of Sydney and Melbourne, for example; through Canada’s extraordinary neo-Gothic Parliament building in Ottawa – the style there probably chosen to link British North America with the fount of its ‘liberties’ in Westminster;10 the imposing university and ‘Victoria’ railway terminus buildings in Mumbai; through to the hundreds of small churches, especially, scattered all over Britain’s dependent colonies, sometimes in rather crude forms of Gothic (through lack of resources), but recognisably ‘pointed’ all the same. In the case of the settlement colonies there is no mystery about this: Gothic architecture simply – as Thomas Metcalf puts it – ‘reassured their inhabitants that, even though far from “home”, they remained British.’11 One should not underestimate the deep imperial loyalties of most British settlers in the nineteenth century. It is only fairly recently that Australians, for example, have come to refashion themselves historically as a ‘subject’ people of the British (and so a country that had its architecture ‘imposed’ on it). Elsewhere it was different. (We shall return to this.) But in any case, neo-Gothic architecture was one of the most visible signifiers of the British presence throughout her Empire; up there with afternoon tea, arrogance, and cricket. Of course this does not mean that it was inherently, originally or essentially ‘imperialistic’, any more than tea, cricket and arrogance were. On the other hand there were some intriguing imperial parallels; one of which will conclude this chapter. * This derived from Gothic’s universalist pretensions: the idea – among advanced Gothic theorists, at least – that the style was not just an English or European one, but expressed fundamental ‘truths’ that were applicable universally. This way of thinking always carries the seeds of imperialism within it, though they are not necessarily imperially sown, and do not always flower imperially. (Some cultures are happy to keep their ‘fundamental truths’ to themselves.) What can turn them imperialistic is when people with the power to do so decide that universally applicable principles should be universally applied; with the universalism acting both as their justification for this, genuinely or otherwise, and also as a way of blinkering them to its ‘imperialist’ attributes. (After all, they are only trying to enlighten, not to control.) Many ‘imperialisms’ in history have either started or been sustained in this way, from the Iberian conquest of the Americas (Catholicism), through Napoleon’s (enlightenment),

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to the American neo-Conservatives’ in the early 2000s (markets and democracy). The worldwide spread of neo-Gothic, of course, was nowhere near as portentous as these events; nor was it instrumental – so far as we can see – in furthering Britain’s own contemporary ‘formal’ imperialism in any significant way. Other ‘universalist’ principles were far more important. At most, it may have been symptomatic of these: of many Britons’ beliefs, firstly in general principles generally; and secondly that they had discovered them. The ‘imperial’ implications of this were probably insignificant, and certainly not a prime reason behind the support for Gothic in the midnineteenth century. But they were there. There was one more imperial implication to this, however. Gothic universalists of course did not argue that Gothic was universally applicable exactly as it appeared in Britain, or even in Europe; but only that the underlying principles of the style – and especially what were perceived as its structural and functional honesty – could be adapted anywhere. This was also because of its capacity for ‘progressive development’; which was the thing that laid it open to accommodation to other cultures than the one it was rooted in. Its propagandists were very insistent over this. Gothic, wrote one of them, ‘is applicable, not only to all purposes, but, with some modification, to all climates. [. . .] It would not be exotic even in the tropics.’ After all, ‘Saracenic’, which was really only an ‘inflexion’ of Gothic (or vice-versa), flourished there.12 In 1859 the Building News spoke of the ‘elasticity and almost universality of Gothic architecture, which does not consist alone in pointed arches, clustered columns, and floral ornaments, but in its useful and practical character, in its constructional truth, and in the broad measure of liberty which it accords to all who practise the style’.13 Gothic in other words was not simply a ‘style’, and certainly not one over which England wished to claim any sort of ‘ownership’; but a body of principles, applicable anywhere, and which if they were applied everywhere would produce a rich variety of indigenous styles. This could be said to mirror another strand in the complex web that constituted British imperial ideology in the later nineteenth century: the more ‘liberal’ sort, which saw Britain’s role as facilitating the free development of her colonies, eventually, in their own ways. So far as colonial architecture was concerned, this is largely what happened. Scott’s original Government Offices plans were designed, expressly, to show that Gothic was so universal and flexible that it could even be adapted to sorts and scales of building the original Goths could never have even imagined. In much the same way, Gothic architects set to work to begin adapting the Gothic style to other countries and climes. In 1856 the Ecclesiologist magazine even produced a design for a prefabricated iron Gothic church to be shipped

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out to the tropics.14 In fact when Gothic reached the colonies it did often diverge quickly and substantially from the English pattern: least of all in the countries of Anglo-Celtic settlement, including the United States, as we have seen (all those Magdalen towers); but quite substantially in India, for example, where the greatest monuments of Victorian neo-Gothic would look just as ‘oriental’ if they were transported to an English setting, as they seemed English in Mumbai. Most of these were not simply examples of British buildings set down in the sub-continent, but of an architecture essentially ‘negotiated’, as Preeti Chopra has argued, between the two cultures and sides.15 British imperialism was a bit like that, too. * So, to sum up. One of the reasons why the new Government Offices were projected and built was to enable the government to take care of all the new business that was coming its way, to which the colonies contributed, but not in any exceptional or much remarked-upon way. The style of the building owed nothing at all to the Empire. In the widespread discussions over it, imperial considerations were barely raised, or even hinted at, either as reasons for building it at all, or as arguments for building it in one or other particular style. This may seem odd to us, even counter-intuitive; but it was not atypical of most of the nineteenth century. The Empire only began to be celebrated monumentally in Britain itself towards the very end of that century; and to be plausibly reflected in the style of other buildings later still, with the advent of ‘Edwardian baroque’. As well as this, London boasted almost no ‘oriental’ architecture in this period, at least in its public buildings, which, if there had been more of it, might have been seen as another way Britain’s Empire was reflected in her culture. It must be emphasised, yet again, that none of this proves, on its own, the unimportance of the Empire to Britons in the midnineteenth century. There are better reasons for this neglect. The first has to do with the nature of the British Empire at this time, at least as perceived at home: unassertive, apologetic, cheaply run, in denial, sheltering behind other terms (so as to avoid the ‘i’-word), distorted by other value-systems than essentially or obviously imperial ones: unlikely, therefore, to dominate the discourse or (more accurately) discourses of the day, in competition with other spirits of the age. The second relates to the nature and place in Britain at this time of ‘culture’, meaning in this context ‘artistic’ culture; which was hardly ever a reliable indicator of the broader society it was rooted in, as we have seen. The fact that the mid-nineteenth century Empire is not reflected in the metropolitan architecture of its time, therefore, is more likely to indicate apathy towards architecture, than towards the Empire.

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This then is a cul-de-sac. But there are other ways of relating these two phenomena. One is to see what the architecture of this period can tell us about the forms of contemporary imperialism; not through any way in which the former might have been affected by the latter, or vice-versa, but in the ways that both reflected discourses that were independent of each of them, but nevertheless underlay them both. The ‘Battle of the Styles’ shows how contested they were vis-a`-vis architecture; they were in the imperial field too. We have seen how there was a ‘Classic’ way of ruling, and a ‘Gothic’ way: in other words, how the domestic discourse that inclined the British upper classes to rule authoritarianly also inclined them towards Classical revival architecture; and so on. There was also, incidentally, a ‘plague on both your houses’ way: that of the ‘free trade’ imperialists, who did not really want to ‘rule’ their markets at all, but only to be allowed to trade with them, and with as little as possible of the government interference that was symbolised by the building of ‘Offices’ for it. We have also seen elements in Gothic architectural theory, especially, which reflected other imperial discourses: cosmopolitanism, for example (all those Flemish and Byzantine features in Scott’s original drawings); anti-capitalism and anti-modernism (‘Colonial Gothic’); and ‘Liberal Imperialism’, whose equivalent in the sphere of architecture was the export abroad of the universal principles of Gothic, to be developed indigenously thereafter. All of these constituted alternative discourses, which had nothing originally to do with either architecture or imperialism, but affected both, commonly. In these ways the ‘Battle of the Styles’ can be used to illuminate the nature of mid-Victorian ‘imperialism’ quite usefully. But only if we do not expect to find ‘imperialism’ in it.

CHAPTER 25 ATROCITY IN KENYA

Then came the fall. It is supposed to have been softer, more ‘civilised’, in Britain’s case than with other European empires; but that was not always so. Kenya is a case in point. In Niall Ferguson’s virtual panegyric to British colonialism, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Penguin, 2003), Kenya gets just one significant mention. It comes in the Introduction, and is a description of his time there as a boy with his doctor father. It was three years after independence, but, happily, ‘scarcely anything had changed’ since colonial days. ‘We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango. I suspect my mother was never happier.’ Glasgow, where the family returned after just two years, was inevitably a come-down. ‘To the Scots, the Empire stood for bright sunshine.’ You can see that in the book. Yet less than a decade before Fergusson’s idyllic stay there, Kenya had been wracked with war, accompanied by horrendous bloodshed and unspeakable atrocities on all sides. Most Kikuyu women were sobbing or shaking their fists, not singing. So a great deal had changed since colonial days. Of course one cannot expect wee Niall to have been aware of that in the 1960s. He will have been too busy playing with the ‘carved wooden hippopotamus, warthog, elephant and lion’ that were his ‘most treasured possessions’, and that he tells us he still has. By the time he came to write his book, however, some of this should have percolated through. The Kenya ‘Emergency’ is a major incident in the history of the end of the Empire. It makes a difference to the whole story of it. But there is nothing at all about it in Empire. Not a squeak.

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Perhaps we should not be too hard on Ferguson over this. I cannot offhand think of another modern general history of British imperialism or decolonisation that leaves 1950s Kenya out of the picture entirely, but none of them (including my own) makes as much of it as we shall clearly need to now, after the recent publication of two meticulously researched and shocking books: David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); and Caroline Elkins, Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (Jonathan Cape, 2005). It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is most startlingly revealed here. We always knew about the Mau Mau atrocities, of course: assiduously retailed to the British public by the authorities in Kenya through the Colonial Office, and right-wing newspapers like the Daily Mail. (Elkins calls the Daily Mail a ‘tabloid’, incidentally, which is not strictly true for this period, but seems to fit in other ways.) But for years the equally savage abuses by British officers and their African collaborators in the camps, controlled villages and courtrooms of Kenya were mostly hidden from people at home. They knew some of it – indeed, did what they could to put an end to it after the Hola camp massacre revelations of March 1959; but nothing like the whole. Alan Lennox-Boyd, Colonial Secretary for much of this period, and one of the clear villains of both these books, can be largely credited with this: firstly denying abuses, then when that was no longer possible dismissing them as exceptional (‘bad apples’), and appealing to his critics to remember what they were up against in Kenya: not an ordinary policing situation, but an outbreak of atavistic ‘evil’ – that favourite word when you are confronting something you do not understand. ‘Duplicity at its finest’, Elkins calls this. Lennox-Boyd also had a nice line in character-assassinating whistle-blowers. Much of this was effective. Then, when the British eventually left Kenya, they made bonfires of most of the incriminating material about the detention camps. Jomo Kenyatta, their successor, connived in this, anxious in the interests of national unity to ‘erase’ the past, and not encourage the ‘hooligans’ of Mau Mau. (It was a bit like South Africa’s ‘truth and reconciliation’, but without the truth.) Elkins is puzzled that not more people at the time saw through all this; but really she should not be, in view of her own admission that she, too, was taken in by the propaganda at the beginning of her research, leafing through Colonial Office files at the Public Record Office, and only came to the stunned realisation that those files might be telling porkies when she went out to Kenya to see and hear for herself. This may be part of the reason for the anger that suffuses her narrative, unlike Anderson’s more clinical, dispassionate one. No-one likes to have been duped. However, there is much here to be angry about. Firstly, there are the trials that took place of Mau Mau suspects, which are Anderson’s main focus, and which reveal (when you read through the

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transcripts, as he has laboriously done) injustice on the most appalling scale. Defendants were poorly represented, convicted on highly dubious evidence (often by dodgy informers, or after having confessions beaten out of them), by judges who were usually highly prejudiced, and in one case was even (effectively) bribed to come to a guilty verdict. (He was paid £20,000 to come out from Britain to put Kenyatta behind barbed wire.) One thousand and ninety of them were hanged, usually for much more minor offences than murder, and often innocently. That was, as Anderson points out, a record for any British colony of the time, and more even than were executed by the French in Algeria. Even the reprieved and acquitted did not go free. Most were sent to camps of various sorts, for interrogation, ‘re-education’ (though that was mainly ‘a sham’), or just to rot away out of sight of the fearful Europeans. Most of the rest of the Kikuyu population (including thousands from Nairobi) were herded into ‘emergency villages’ enclosed in barbed wire. All this turned Kenya into what Anderson calls ‘a police state in the very fullest sense of that term’. This is where Elkins comes in. Her main concern is with life in the camps and emergency villages. Some of her evidence comes from rare surviving documentation; but the most vivid is from the recollections of surviving Kikuyu themselves. There are problems with this kind of testimony, of course. ‘Virtually all Kikuyus claim to have belonged to the Mau Mau’, writes Kwamchetsi Makokha in his review of these books in the New Statesman, ‘regardless of whether they were even alive in the 1950s. Africans love stories; they tell them and retell them over and over again. Tales are communally owned, and it is not considered an abominable act of plagiarism to present another person’s story as your own. All this makes Elkins’s reliance on oral testimonies problematic.’ There may be something in this. But Elkins says she is aware of these pitfalls, and has done what she can to avoid them. She is convinced that her sources opened up to her more than they might have done otherwise because she is an American. Many of her accounts corroborate each other, and are corroborated in their turn by the surviving written evidence. More telling, perhaps, is that they are often also confirmed by ex-white settlers she has also interviewed, and who ‘still seemed to take delight in their handiwork during Mau Mau. They spoke of heinous tortures as if they were describing yesterday’s weather; for them the brutality they perpetrated during the Emergency is as banal today as it was some fifty years ago.’ In case we think that they are merely winding her up in some perverse macho way because she is a woman, Anderson has found exactly the same thing. As well as confirming many of the victims’ accounts, this seems to indicate that the brutality was systematic, endemic in what Anderson calls the ‘culture of impunity’ of the time; which in itself gives the lie to Lennox-Boyd’s ‘bad apples’ defence. I’m inclined to believe most of this material.

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The picture that emerges from it all is of systematic beatings, starvation, killings (the hanged represented only a small fraction of those who died in British custody during the Emergency), and tortures of the most grotesque and obscene kinds. (Squeamish readers should perhaps skip the rest of this paragraph.) Alsatian dogs were used to terrify the prisoners, and then ‘maul’ them. That of course brings to mind Abu Ghraib. There are other similarities. Various tortures and indignities were devised using human faeces. African men were forced to sodomise one another. They also had sand, pepper and water stuffed in their anuses. One apparently had his testicles cut off, and was then made to eat them. ‘Things got a little out of hand’, one (macho European) witness told Elkins, referring to another incident. ‘By the time we cut his balls off he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.’ Women were gang-raped, had their nipples squeezed with pliers, and vermin and hot eggs thrust into their vaginas. Children were butchered and their body parts paraded around on spears. Then there were the pettier deprivations: women forbidden to sing hymns in Komiti camp, for example, because they were putting ‘subversive’ words to them. All this, incidentally, was while detainees were having anti-Mau Mau and proBritish propaganda blared out at them through loudspeakers. This is extreme stuff – much worse than Abu Ghraib, if these particular accounts are true. Even if not, the constant beatings and casual killings admitted to by many of the Brits are terrible enough. This example, from the proud testimony of a European officer in 1962 quoted by Anderson, will do for the scores of other such accounts. He was interrogating some ‘Mickeys’ – a slang name for the Mau Mau. They wouldn’t say a thing, of course, and one of them, a tall coalblack bastard, kept grinning at me, real insolent. I slapped him hard, but he kept right on grinning at me, so I kicked him in the balls as hard as I could. He went down in a heap but when he finally got up on his feet he grinned at me again and I snapped, I really did. I stuck my revolver right in his grinning mouth and I said something, I don’t remember what, and I pulled the trigger. His brains went all over the side of the police station. The other two Mickeys were standing there looking blank. I said to them that if they didn’t tell me where to find the rest of the gang I’d kill them too. They didn’t say a word so I shot them both. One wasn’t dead so I shot him in the ear. When the subinspector drove up, I told him that the Mickey’s [sic ] tried to escape. He didn’t believe me but all he said was ‘bury them and see the wall is cleared up’.

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The significant thing here (apart from the brave resistance of these three prisoners) is that the officer had no qualms about telling this. He seemed to relish the memory, still. Elkins has been criticised in some reviews for using the ‘Nazi’ analogy too freely to describe all this. But nearly all the references in her book to ‘concentration camps’, the ‘Gestapo’ and so on come from contemporary accounts. Most were by critics, including some from inside the system (the ‘whistle-blowers’); but in March 1953 a British policeman wrote a letter to his old buddies back at Streatham Police station actually bragging about the ‘Gestapo stuff’ that was going on in his new posting in Nyeri. All this happened, of course, just a few years after the overthrow of Nazism, which is why these analogies came so easily to mind. The critics – many of whom had fought against Nazi Germany – knew what they were talking about. Moving to another front, one relatively liberal police chief in Kenya claimed that conditions in the detention camps were far worse than those he had suffered as a Japanese POW. Other comparisons made were with the Soviet gulags, and, later on, by a former defence lawyer for the Mau Mau, with ‘ethnic cleansing’. These events are certainly comparable in many ways with those much better known atrocities. This is why is these two books are so important, to enlighten especially us British about them. The accepted picture of Britain’s decolonisation hitherto has been that she did it in a more dignified, enlightened and consensual way than other countries – meaning of course France. It will be difficult now to argue this so glibly. Kenya was Britain’s Algeria, in spades. * Was it typical? Possibly not. Anderson makes a big point of Kenya’s ‘exceptionality in the use of judicial execution’ compared with other British colonies, as well as in other ways. Elkins, the American, is more inclined to regard it as an essential aspect of British imperialism – ‘it was there that Britain finally revealed the true nature of its civilizing mission’ – but even she acknowledges that Kenya ‘stands apart’ from Britain’s other colonies in many respects. Granted that this kind of appalling behaviour is one of the inevitable risks of imperialism – that is, of countries seeking to rule (or exploit or even ‘liberate’) other peoples – it does not always turn out this way, and did not do so to quite this degree in any other part of Britain’s evaporating Empire. There were, pace Elkins, special circumstances in the Kenyan case. One was the nature of the Mau Mau phenomenon. That was certainly misunderstood at the time: demonised by those who resolutely refused to acknowledge the Kikuyus’ huge land grievance, which both these authors agree was at the root of the revolt, and consequently widely seen in terms of a disease (even Kenyatta used this term for it), or a peculiarly African,

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‘primitive’, psychopathology. Elkins interestingly points out that this was the view of it in the United States too. One reason for it may have been a racist predisposition to this kind of analysis, though Anderson shows that it was certainly not the predominant image of the Kikuyu before Mau Mau. The thing about Mau Mau was that many of its early manifestations genuinely were brutal and savage. The Daily Mail did not make it all up. Anderson gives more detailed attention to this than Elkins: to the high-profile killings of white men, women and children around the turn of 1952– 3, for example; the original massacre of Kikuyu ‘loyalists’ by Mau Mau at Lari in March 1953 (before the even more brutal loyalist reprisals that followed), and so on; and also to the practice of clitoridectomy (FGM) among the Kikuyu, which was one of the main issues between them and the Christian churches early on. Mau Mau violence, as he points out, was more often directed towards other Kikuyu – ‘traitors’ – than against the British authorities or the Kenyan settlers. So it was also a civil war. Although Elkins denies none of this – ‘we should not romanticise the anti-colonial struggle’, she says at one point – she does not elaborate on it; which has the effect of making it more difficult to understand the panic that grabbed settlers, the colonial administration and the African loyalists at this time. The impact of this terrorism can perhaps be compared with the effect of Hamas suicide bombings on Israelis today. It did not conduce to a calm and considered response to the challenge of Mau Mau. Not that the white population of Kenya was likely to respond calmly and with consideration in any case. It is well known that settlers are generally the most problematical of colonists, to put it mildly. (Look at Israel.) In Kenya this was exacerbated by one very peculiar thing about them: which was their class. Most of them were upper-middle class or even aristocratic; down on their uppers before they left Britain, possibly, but then social status in Britain never has been measured by wealth. A surprising proportion of them had been educated at prestigious English public schools, including Eton. This is unusual in the history of British emigration. In Kenya, settled on fertile lands taken from the Africans, and with a huge pool of cheap African labour therefore to call on to work on their farms and as domestic servants, these odd characters could live the sorts of lives that even their better-off chums in ‘socialist’ Britain were increasingly struggling to afford. The hedonistic, decadent lifestyle of many of them is notorious today, through films and novels – Happy Valley, and all that. That may have been overplayed. More important in this context, however, is the fact that they were cut off culturally from the majority of society in Britain, or even the world, except perhaps the white-dominated countries to the south of them; ‘strangely out of step,’ as Anderson puts it, ‘with everywhere else’. They were very often arrogant, brutal, and accustomed to treating their ‘natives’ like dirt. This was long

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before the Mau Mau revolt; it was they who started the violence. Their upperclass kin in Britain, on whom they relied to defend them in Kenya (Elkins calls them the ‘Old Pals Protection Society’), ultimately lost patience with them. Churchill thought they were as much ‘the problem’ in Kenya as Mau Mau. (Churchill also had a surprisingly favourable view of the Kikuyu, incidentally: ‘not the primitive cowardly people which many imagined them to be,’ he told one of the settler leaders, ‘but people of considerable fibre, ability, and steel’.) The man he sent to sort the settlers out in 1953, General ‘Bobby’ Erskine, soon got the latters’ measure: ‘I hate the guts of them all’, he wrote to his wife just a few months later; ‘they are all middle-class sluts.’ (How they would have hated that ‘middle-class’.) Kenya was ‘a sunny land for shady people’. By 1960 even the most reactionary of the upper classes back in Britain were ‘too embarrassed’ by their ‘excesses’ to defend them any longer. The final nail in their coffin – though it turned out to be a pretty comfortable coffin, with Kenyatta letting them stay and hold on to their farms if they wanted – came when Lord Lambton, just about as kosher an aristocrat as you could find in Britain just then, turned against them over Hola. Few others in Britain had ever had much time for them. * The puzzle is why they were allowed to get away with their barbarities for so long. It was not as if there were no protests in Britain. The British people have never been terribly interested in their Empire, one way or the other, so we cannot expect a huge surge of feeling on the Kenya issue; but the latter had more of its fair share of coverage in this period, both in parliament (spearheaded by Barbara Castle, ‘that castellated bitch’, as a Kenyan attorneygeneral called her) and in the left-wing press. Castle and the others were helped by a stream of testimony from whistle-blowers in the colony itself, which indicates a considerable fund of unease there, among people who were decent (they would say ‘British’) enough to be repelled by what was going on. These included missionaries, as one would expect, although Elkins is critical of their unwillingness to speak out publicly, mainly she opines because they needed government co-operation for their work of saving Mau Mau souls, and she accuses the Catholics of actually backing the colonial authorities; a number of (especially Appeal Court) judges; some soldiers and top policemen, mainly those who were sent in from Britain; administrators like the Quaker Eileen Fletcher; and even a few liberal settlers. These were some of the good eggs among the bad apples. They did not succeed, at least in time to save tens of thousands of African (and a few European) lives, but this was not for want of trying, or (probably) because Britain as a nation supported the Kenyan regime.

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One reason was the critics’ lack of leverage over the Colonial Office, especially when the duplicitous Lennox-Boyd was in charge; compounded by the Colonial Office’s own perceived lack of leverage over what was happening on the ground. The latter is an important and often underestimated factor in much British imperial history; one thinks of an ‘empire’ as a system of control before anything, but in Britain’s case, running her Empire on a shoestring, the reality of that control was very often compromised by needing to rule through – or at least with the passive connivance of – people on the ground. In Kenya the problem was that neither major local group of people – the shady settlers and the aggrieved Africans – was an ideal vehicle for that ‘indirect’ rule. The result was, as district officer Terence Gavaghan (nicknamed ‘Big Troublemaker’ by the Africans) put it, that ‘the gap between the supreme policy makers with their grave political concerns, and the actions of local functionaries in a small remote place, was too wide for mutual comprehension or proper control’. In other words, London would have found it difficult to change things even if it had wanted to. However, it seems clear that many in the Conservative government then did not want to change things very much. Elkins has two, slightly contradictory, explanations for this. The first is the conventional antiimperialist one, that they simply wanted ‘to maintain colonial rule’. This seems highly improbable at that time. Britain had already begun the process of decolonisation elsewhere, including in Africa; it was unlikely that that would not come to embrace Kenya soon. Lennox-Boyd certainly wanted to slow down the process; and there seems to have been a ‘flicker of hope’ among some white settlers that self-government, when it came, might give them disproportionate power, like in South Africa and (effectively) Southern Rhodesia; but that just shows how out of touch they were. (There were simply not enough of them.) The main consideration in Whitehall was something different, and far bigger. Elkins alludes to this too. It was the place of the whole British Empire in the annals of history, no less. That depended not only on what it could be claimed to have achieved while it was still living, but also on what kind of death it made. It had always been the proud boast of British imperialists (rather like American imperialists today) that their Empire was uniquely beneficent; that its effect, even if not its original purpose, was to spread ‘civilisation’ and even ‘freedom’ in the world. The upper classes believed they were specially fitted for this task. Anderson and Elkins both quote Barbara Castle’s observation that Lennox-Boyd was ‘imbued with the conviction that the British ruling class, both at home and overseas, could do no wrong.’ Even many of those who witnessed the Kenyan atrocities firsthand, and deplored them, clung on to this: ‘I knew, I knew’, an anguished Thomas Askwith (another good egg)

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confided to Elkins in 1997; ‘but how can I say it? [. . .] I just believed in our higher purpose; [. . .] we had so much better to offer them. I thought our own bad hats would come around.’ But they did not. That seemed to threaten the whole ethical basis of imperialism. James Cameron, reporting back from Kenya for the Daily Mirror, saw among the settler community there ‘the death of colonial liberalism, and the loss of the moral order that gave empire its only possible justification’. It seemed a terrible way to go. The Economist put it directly and succinctly in February 1959. ‘The one over-riding consideration in treating any present-day colonial question must be what last memories of the British way of doing things are to be left behind before the connections with Westminster are severed.’ The thought of leaving this open wound in Kenya – colonial and civil war, atrocity, repression – as the last impression the world would have of the ‘British way of doing things’ there, was unbearable. It certainly ruled out any idea of simply upping and leaving; ‘scuttling’, it would have been called. Britain’s broader colonial aim at this time was to transfer power to ‘moderate’ local leaders. In Kenya that meant defeating Mau Mau. That was broadly achieved from around 1956, though probably no thanks to the repression, which was more counter-productive than otherwise. Hola finally tore away the government’s earlier papering over of that – the evidence in this case was just too glaring – and a new broom at the Colonial Office, Ian Macleod, made sure that there would be no more foot-dragging on African independence. (So it could be done.) There still remained the problem of that ‘wound’, of course: the recollection of those dreadful ‘Emergency’ years; but that was solved with Kenyatta’s reconciliation policy. This is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this whole affair. It was almost a miracle. The beleaguered British opened their eyes, and the sunshine, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mangoes came suddenly flooding back. Not only the horrors, but all memory of the horrors, were gone. It was like a bad dream. This particular stain on Britain’s imperial character was hidden from view – for the time being, at any rate. The myth of a ‘dignified’ decolonisation was able to endure. It was, writes Elkins, ‘a scenario that the British colonial government had fantasized about for years’. She seems rather angry about it. The Mau Mau did not get the recognition due to them (there is still no official memorial to them in Nairobi), and Britain never got the comeuppance she so richly deserved. Half a century later a ‘revisionist’ historian like Ferguson, seeking to rehabilitate the Empire after a decent period of time, could still blithely ignore the whole affair. With one bound, the reputation of the Empire was free. Until now, that is. This is the importance of these two books. They must undermine that myth. There is still room to argue about the general morality

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and impact of British imperialism generally, of course – not every colony was like 1950s Kenya, not even Kenya most of the time – but from now on no historians are ever going to be able to disregard these horrors when they come to make their assessments, and especially when they compare Britain’s decolonisation record with that of other twentieth-century imperial powers. It must of course be taught in our schools: not in order to show how uniquely bad the British Empire was, but to demonstrate how any people can go bad, in certain circumstances. We could start with Eton, in view of the part that Old Etonians played in all this, and its role today in the education of, for example, our young Prince Harry. Then, hopefully, the idea of a fancy-dress party on the theme of ‘Colonials and Natives’, which Harry notoriously attended in 2005, wearing a swastika armband, might not seem such spiffing fun.

CHAPTER 26 THE CENTRAL AFRICAN FEDERATION

The Central African Federation was one of the most bizarre creations of very late British imperialism. Formed controversially in 1953 out of the colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (today Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi), it never looked like succeeding, and spluttered to an ignominious death just ten years later. Everything about it was wrong. It was not even a proper ‘federation’ in the accepted sense of the word. ‘Normally the term implies a voluntary surrender, or merging, of separate powers and authorities by states which are broadly comparable’, wrote one top civil servant in 1959. There was nothing at all voluntary about this arrangement, however, whose constituent parts were like ‘oil and water’. Southern Rhodesia was a white-settler dominated colony that had enjoyed effective self-government ( for the whites) for 30 years. In London it came under the Commonwealth Relations Office (nominally), which otherwise looked after places like Australia and Canada. Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia on the other hand were ruled (genuinely) by the more paternalistic Colonial Office. Nyasaland was obviously headed for black majority rule at some point in the future; Northern Rhodesia was supposed to be making for a form of ‘multi-racial partnership’. (It all depended on how many whites lived there; basically, on whether they were enough to keep the blacks down on their own.) Philip Murphy, the editor of two published volumes of official documents on the Central African Federation episode (British Documents on the End of Empire, Series B Volume 9, in two parts; Stationery Office, 2006), confesses himself at a loss to explain why Nyasaland in particular was ever included, unless it was simply to justify the name ‘federation’, for which three countries would seem to be the minimum requirement. (Otherwise, presumably, it would be just a ‘partnership’.) It was very odd. It also seems obviously out of kilter with the times, at least in retrospect. Everywhere else in the 1950s the British Empire was on the retreat: the Raj

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lost, ‘black’ Africa hurrying along the same route, the Commonwealth hardly providing the sort of empire-substitute some old imperialists had hoped. In central Africa, however, it was still consolidating, developing, even contemplating growing bigger: one of the most extraordinary of these documents is a report of Sir Roy Welensky, the larger-than-life leader of the white Rhodesians, admitting that it was probably ‘impractical’ for British Central Africa to take over the Congo, Angola and Mozambique ‘at this stage’. (This is in 1946.) During the Congo civil war (1961) several Rhodesian whites clearly had their eye on Katanga as a possible new province. So even expansionary British imperialism was not quite dead, in this part of the world. Even less dead was the idea – another essentially imperialist one – that white men were the only people who could rule black men and women properly (and probably white women too). That was the main rationale behind the creation of the Federation. ‘Anachronism’ seems an understatement. ‘It is just not on,’ wrote Noel Watson of the Central Africa Office in 1962, ‘in this day and age, for an “Imperial” power arbitrarily to partition an area of Africa, with the purpose of establishing a white dominated Dominion for all time.’ This was also the reason why the Federation failed; leaving only the most settler-intensive part of it, Southern Rhodesia, to carry the flag of white supremacy on for a few years more. The basic problem was that the northern Africans never approved of the Federation, and for one simple reason: their ‘deep-rooted distrust’, as a Governor of Nyasaland put it, ‘of Southern Rhodesian native policy’. They feared, of course, that under Federation this would spread to them. Many of them had worked in the south, so they knew what they were talking about. This hostility was never in doubt from the beginning to the end of the Federation, certainly at the Colonial Office. Dozens of documents in this collection attest to it. Of course you could deny it. Many of the Central African whites did. Articulate Africans – the ones whose opinions were being heard – were ‘unrepresentative’. This applied especially to the nationalists among them, many of whom had been nobbled by the communists. The nationalists in their turn were ‘intimidating’ others. Nationalism was alien to African culture in any case. ‘Genuine’ (or ‘tribal’) Africans felt differently. Any governor of a colony, wrote Lord Swinton, ‘probably has a much truer view of the opinion and interest of millions of non-vocal Africans’ than the agitators. For that, you needed to go into the country areas. One Native Commissioner did just that, with excellent results; explaining the Federation in simple terms in Chipinga, he got this reply from the elders: ‘When we go hunting lion we go in large numbers. We must have large numbers. This is a good scheme.’ Another came back with a positive result from the Chief and Council of Barotseland; or at least, as he reported, ‘that was the corporate decision, though

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a majority of the Councillors, numerically, were against.’ In his opinion that served to ‘smash the legend of the universal African opposition to federation’. (Not exactly, minuted a Colonial Office man wryly; ‘a “corporate decision” [. . .] when a majority of Councillors were opposed does not cut much Parliamentary ice.’) There is an interesting memorandum here from 1955 by Sir Arthur Benson, Governor of Northern Rhodesia, claiming that most Africans would support Britain’s policy against the Nationalists if she would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Later, just before the (Southern) Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) (1965), Ian Smith took the same general line when recommending ‘indabas’ of chiefs rather than a referendum as a true test of African opinion on his regime. The Nyasaland Nationalist leader Hastings Banda’s riposte to this kind of argument was to ask what the British (in Britain) would think if it were claimed that their ‘feelings desires and aspirations’ were best represented by their ‘dukes, earls and barons’. Later Harold Wilson used exactly the same analogy to Smith. Most Colonial Office personnel seem to have taken Banda’s and Wilson’s side on this. Benson’s memo for example is peppered with internal minutes saying what rubbish the ‘tribal’ argument was. In March 1965 the British High Commissioner in Southern Rhodesia attended some of Smith’s ‘indabas’, and found them to be ‘carefully manipulated set pieces’, with the chiefs all ‘carefully schooled’. Almost no-one in Whitehall was under any illusions as to the breadth and depth of the Africans’ opposition both to Federation, and to Rhodesian independence on Smith’s terms. Of course you could always overrule them. ‘We must, I suggest’, wrote the influential Sir Andrew Cohen in 1950, ‘not simply take the line which is likely to be most popular with Africans. It is also our business to do what we believe is in the genuine interest of Africans.’ It went almost without saying that they were incapable of working this out for themselves. The most charitable way of explaining that was in terms of political ‘immaturity’. The 1951 Conservative government would certainly have liked to override the Africans on these grounds. Lord Home, for example, thought it could be done quite safely because ‘the Nyasas were a docile people and respected firmness’. There was a problem with this, however; which was that past British governments had repeatedly and unambiguously promised not to impose Federation on them, or Rhodesian independence, against their express wishes, nobbled or not. Not only the Africans, but also left and centre opinion in Britain and most of the world, would be outraged if these pledges were broken. So there were only two alternatives. One was to try to bring the Africans on board. The other was to scrap the whole federation idea. ‘Education’ might have done something to reconcile the Africans; though it is remarkable how many officials thought this was a lost cause from the

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start. Any campaign would be ‘useless’, wrote the Governor (no less) of Nyasaland in 1951; ‘the chance of converting Africans’, confirmed a civil servant, ‘does not any longer exist.’ The spanner in this particular works was the inflexibility of the settlers. Several Colonial officials pointed out that if there was to be any hope at all of the scheme’s succeeding, the Southern Rhodesian whites would have to give a little too. But that was the last thing they intended. There are as many despairing reports in these volumes of European as of African intransigence; often attributed to particular groups of settlers, especially Afrikaners and the lower classes – the latter reminding one governor, for example, of ‘a people used to travel third class now travelling first class, and not knowing quite how to behave towards porters’ – but clearly extending beyond these. The aristocracy, however used they were to dealing with porters, were certainly not immune. The Duke of Montrose – and you couldn’t get much more aristocratic than that, although according to one report, ‘as a gesture to democracy in a democratic colony’ (the Duke’s own words) he ‘persistently declines to call himself anything other than Lord Angus Graham’ – suggested solving the Southern Rhodesian labour shortage by forcing all unemployed blacks into labour camps, ‘which, to please the British, we shall call “hostels”.’ So much for fabled upper-class ‘paternalism’. ‘Pleasing the British’ was always a problem for these people. ‘Loyal’ as they professed to be to their land of origin, they usually despised its inhabitants, especially, as one would expect, the bleeding hearts and socialists, who – as the complaint generally put it – simply did not understand ‘their’ Africans. The worst you could say of any Southern Rhodesian politician was that he had been infected by some of this metropolitan feeling. Sir Edgar Whitehead for example was supposed to have lost an election in 1958 because of rumours that he was ‘rather “long-haired”’, and had ‘studied at the London School of Economics’, according to a British High Commissioner. (He had not.) ‘There is really no measuring the bottomless stupidity’ of many of these people, wrote Colonial Secretary Ian Macleod to Harold Macmillan in 1960. The settlers’ greatest antipathy, however – one under-secretary called it ‘pathological’ – was directed against the Colonial Office, which did not ‘understand’ their Africans either, and was doing appalling things in other parts of the continent, like granting self-government to black countries, dammit, ‘at a fatally breakneck speed’. Indeed, it was the prospect of the Gold Coast’s achieving Dominion status before them that really riled the whites in Southern Rhodesia, and began the wild talk about ‘a Boston tea-party’ that eventually culminated in UDI. Their main fear was that Colonial Office concern for the natives of the two northern colonies would lead to the south’s being ‘swallowed up by the “black north”’ if federation were achieved on the CO’s terms. That of course was the mirror-image of the northern Africans’ fear.

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A common analogy drawn was with the United States. The Southern Rhodesian whites ‘feel about Africa,’ reported their governor in January 1950, just as the early settlers in America might have felt if the Colonial Office of those days had insisted on North America developing into a Red Indian State, or as the first settlers in Australia, if the policy of the Home Government had been to set up an aboriginal Government there. They would not argue that it was right to have eliminated the Red Indians and the aboriginals, but would urge that their own liberal policy to the native was a great advance on that, and a more correct policy than that of the British Government. (It is good to know that the Rhodesians were not in favour of genocide.) But the Colonial Office never seemed to cotton on to this. Nor did they give the settlers credit for ‘the sweat of their brows’ that had gone into ‘adding Southern Rhodesia to the Empire and developing it’: something of which every Briton ought to (but clearly did not) feel proud. This is why one of the ‘principal features’ of this story, as Murphy tells it, is the ‘fierce suspicions’ that existed not only between the races, but between British settlers and British ‘officials’. This led to a curious reversal of roles in this situation, technically, at any rate; with the white colonists being the strict ‘antiimperialists’, and the African nationalists the colonial ‘collaborators’. ‘Africans’, Banda told the Colonial Office in July 1951, ‘felt that they must remain directly under the Imperial Government’: until, that is, they had been sufficiently prepared to rule themselves, and to resist the whites. (He was particularly keen for Britain to educate more Nyasas; especially girls, he wrote, whose education should be ‘identical with boys’, because of the importance of women in Nyasaland’s ‘matrilineal tribes’. Perhaps Britain could have done with some of that at home.) The Colonial Office broadly agreed. That is why the settlers went ahead with their ‘Boston tea-party’, at last. In view of all this, and looking back on these events with the advantage of hindsight, it is not easy to understand why the Federation was not scrapped much sooner. Not that there were not some points in its favour. It is of course a simple matter to find economic reasons for almost any union. (The problem is reconciling these with democracy.) One can see why many (not all) of the Rhodesian settlers wanted federation, on their terms. Southern Rhodesia had its greedy eyes on Northern Rhodesian copper. Benson claimed that Huggins, its charismatic early prime minister, needed that to bail his colony out of the bankruptcy he had brought it to. The northern territories were a useful source of cheap labour. A white-dominated Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland would keep the black nationalists – and communists – safely away from the south.

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Several documents here emphasise the blinkered vision of the central African settlers, for whom, as Lord Alport put it in 1961, ‘the real horizon of politics stretches not much further than the Equator to the north and the Cape of Good Hope to the south’. The British authorities, however, surely had less interest in indulging this fantasy; especially in view of the harm it was bound to do to Britain’s reputation in the world outside southern Africa; and when their policy in most of the rest of the dependent Empire (and let us not forget this) was turning in a different direction entirely: independence and genuine majority rule. Two of the arguments often deployed in defence of the Federation in Britain appear, from these documents, to be more flimsy than they seemed at the time. One was that it would prevent Southern Rhodesia’s being sucked into the Union of South Africa, which was thought to be gunning for it. This was given some credence by immigration into the Rhodesias by Afrikaners from the south, who were suspected of being a kind of fifth column. That played two ways, explains Murphy: geo-politically, by threatening Britain’s influence in Central Africa; but also morally, in view of South Africa’s more overtly racist (‘apartheid’) policies. Conservatives presented it as a threat to ‘the British way of life’ in Central Africa – though how truly ‘British’ that could be regarded was questionable, at the very least. Most objective observers saw it as much closer to the South African. With regard to ‘native policy’, for example, one British High Commissioner claimed in 1958 that the only difference between the two countries was that ‘whereas in the Union apartheid is the declared policy of the Government with the force of law behind it all the way, in Southern Rhodesia it is [. . .] much more a matter of custom and habit’. Nonetheless, settler politicians banked on the anti-apartheid argument striking a chord with Labour in particular. Whitehall, however, was more sceptical. ‘I suspect that Sir Godfrey Huggins is not averse to “making our flesh creep” over this possible danger’, minuted one under-secretary in 1951. After Verwoerd became South African Prime Minister it was thought to be absolutely out of the question, because of Southern Rhodesia’s relatively multiracial franchise. Verwoerd would not want to swallow that. To give in to the settlers, wrote one official, ‘allegedly’ to safeguard the Africans ‘from the tentacles of an imaginary octopus genus Afrikaner, would be madness’. Banda argued that a better way of keeping South Africa at bay would be to Africanise the British territories. That would really stick in the creature’s craw. A second argument, that Federation would stem the spread of ‘communism’ in Africa, appears similarly disingenuous. Considering what was made of it publicly, and the ‘Cold War’ atmosphere of the time, there is surprisingly little about this ‘danger’ in these documents. The Rhodesian leaders were always rabbiting on about it, of course (especially Smith); but

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Whitehall seems not to have taken them seriously. Welensky asked Sir Roger Hollis, Head of MI5, to brief him on it in 1962, and must have felt very let down to hear that in the latter’s opinion the communists’ ‘influence was still comparatively small’ in Africa, and that ‘the greater part of the activities [. . .] which embarrassed the Federal authorities sprang from African nationalism and not from communism’. (That may come as a surprise to those who think that spooks are invariably paranoid.) A little later the Foreign Office agreed that there was little evidence of Chinese subversion in Africa either, and suggested that there was ‘a danger of our crying wolf too often’ about it. He seems to have been referring here to Britain’s own propaganda. That – propaganda – may have been all this was. A more genuine reason for Britain’s persistence with the Federation may have been the particular colour of her government at the time. Central African union was not initially a party issue in Britain – ‘multiracialism’ especially appealed to a broad swathe of opinion; but the Federation’s whole sad life was, in fact, completed under Conservative administrations, and it lost the bipartisan support of Labour early on, when the new government dropped a proposal for a Federal ‘Minister for African interests’ in deference to settler opposition. One cannot necessarily infer from this that if they had been in power Labour would have acted significantly differently; but that, of course, was not for them to prove. Julian Amery thought the ‘natural jingoism of the country’ would make the socialists rue their ‘anti-colonialist’ stand eventually, but there must be doubts about this. It was Ian Macleod who pointed out to Macmillan in 1960 that in a recent public opinion poll on Banda’s release from detention, ‘overwhelmingly the largest vote was “Don’t know”, and I suspect this means also “Don’t care”’; which indicated, he thought, ‘how little people really know or care about these matters’. Tory MPs, however, were another kettle of fish. Macmillan reckoned that 200 of his backbenchers were on the side of the white supremacists in 1963. So were most of the concerned Conservative ministers. There were some notable exceptions: Ian Macleod, Colonial Secretary from October 1959, whose contribution to the government’s change of tack on decolonisation is justly celebrated, though it also predictably provoked much ire – and some very ‘dirty tricks’ – from the Central African settlers; then, when he was removed in October 1961 – Murphy is not sure whether the dirty tricks were responsible for this or not – Reginald Maudling, who disappointed them by turning out to be ‘plus noir que les ne`gres’, as Macmillan charmingly put it; and latterly, Macmillan himself. Before and after these, however, most of the men with political responsibility for Central African policy were pretty ‘backwoods’, including Lord Home; Lord Salisbury (‘Bobbety’ to his imperialist friends, including in Southern Rhodesia); Lord Swinton; and Alan

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Lennox-Boyd, Macleod immediate predecessor. Murphy describes Home as ‘instinctively sympathetic towards the plight of the Rhodesian settlers’, and the same is true of most of the others. There can be no doubting their underlying racism, though it was always necessary at this time to deny it. This is a well-known factor: ‘kith and kin’. Sometimes it was buttressed by reference to the white Rhodesians’ support for Britain in the last war. Banda’s reminder that Africans, too, had ‘twice in less than fifty years [. . .] contributed to the defence of the Empire with their blood, labour and treasure’ did not seem to resonate so much. Later a great deal was made of this as a reason why British troops might not (the hypothesis was never properly examined or tested) be willing to be deployed against a white rebellion in Rhodesia, if it ever came to that. But there must have been more to it than this. One factor was simple impotence, or, rather, the sense of it. In Southern Rhodesia for example, for all its ‘colonial’ status, Britain had no effective presence on the ground at all, bar the person of her ‘governor’ there; and even his despatches back to London, as Murphy comments, read more like ‘the detached musings’ of a ‘relatively well-informed newspaper correspondent’, than reports from someone who was supposed to be governing. Britain still technically had ‘reserve’ powers, designed to safeguard the African against even more discriminatory legislation; but she almost never displayed the ‘courage’, as Banda put it, to use them. (This was why Banda did not trust any talk of ‘safeguards’ in respect of the Federation.) The main reason was that any such interference always had the Europeans flexing their muscles: threatening to pull out of this or that committee, dissolve their legislature, join South Africa, or hold their ‘Boston tea-party’. ‘Government by blackmail’, Lord Stanley called it. Of course Britain – or those of her ministers who were not ‘instinctively sympathetic’ to the settlers – might have responded to this with force. Morally, that was probably the right course. As African leaders pointed out, she had often done this with them. Successive governments looked into this possibility from quite early on – specifically, how to react to a threatened Federal or Southern Rhodesian UDI. Their conclusions are presented in a number of reports here. It is difficult of course to know how really objective they were, or how much coloured by the ‘distaste’ that many civil servants and military men admitted to feeling for the prospect of ‘our having to take arms against our countrymen in Central Africa because (and I think this is what it comes to) we felt that we had a duty to the Africans’. Even leaving aside the fear of mutiny by like-minded British soldiers, and the ‘difficult psychological problem’ that would attach to the use of African troops, it was also claimed that a Rhodesian campaign would be hard, and not assured of success, in purely military terms. The Royal Rhodesian Air Force was particularly feared.

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This of course got ministers off the moral hook: even if they had wanted to crush a rebellion, they could not. Harold Wilson was undoubtedly persuaded by these arguments, to famously publicly renounce the use of force even before UDI. (Replying to criticism of this, Murphy suggests that another motive may have been to encourage the Africans to make concessions, which they might not do if they thought they had the backing of the British Army.) Sanctions, similarly, were presented as ineffective and double-edged. In other words, the Southern Rhodesians had Britain over a barrel – apparently. Impotence, however, could work both ways. Britain felt just as vulnerable in the northern territories against African pressure, and world opinion. Publicly she denied this, especially to the African nationalists, to whom she repeatedly spun the tale that rebellion and violence were ineffective, even counter-productive; largely, one suspects, in order to cling on to the illusion that she was still in control of decolonisation – that it was Britain’s choice, the aim of empire, perhaps, all along. But it is quite obvious from these documents that this was not so. There is a revealing account here of a meeting between Macmillan and Welensky in March 1962, in which Welensky chided Macmillan with having given in to ‘violence from the African extremists’, and Macmillan more or less admitted it, though he called it something else: The Prime Minister said that the whole point of democratic government lay in deciding how fast to proceed in yielding to public opinion. One could not turn the tide. The French had tried this in Algiers and had failed. The British could have held Cyprus if they had been prepared to adopt certain measures but it was unlikely that British troops would have been prepared to carry out the orders necessary to execute these measures. One could not really solve political problems by the simple exercise of power. This is interesting, because it refers to the moral pressure that was felt to inhibit Britain, as well as the merely physical. British troops did not like having to be atrocious. When they were, and the atrocities were discovered – as with the Hola camp massacre in Kenya in 1959 – British public opinion resiled. The latter, it seemed, did not have the stomach for it. Nor did it have the commitment to empire that would see Britain through crises like this. In fact, it probably never had. There is a deep-seated historical reason for this; and for the mess, therefore, that Britain made of Central Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. Hers was always a cheapskate empire. She had never wanted to spend money on it, or commit more than the minimum of personnel to it, or trouble the British people with it too much. That meant cutting corners. The best way to do

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this was to devolve the actual ruling of her colonial possessions (and the expense of it) to others: often settlers, as in the Rhodesias; or local ‘traditional’ rulers (chiefs). This had its advantages – from her point of view, and arguably from her subjects’ also – but it also diluted her power. In Southern Rhodesia this was obvious. But it was no less so in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Generally the Colonial Office’s position on the Africans here was pretty enlightened (if usually patronising); which is why, of course, the white settlers loathed the CO so much. It was prepared to see African political ‘advancement’. The problem here, however, was that it had so little to show for this. Again, history was largely to blame. Nyasaland in particular was years behind many other African colonies in this respect; due perhaps to staff shortages (particularly during the war); the assumption that was rife before the war that Britain still had decades left to bring the African on, so there was no hurry; and possibly, in some minds, the hope that the settlers might take over eventually, like in Southern Rhodesia, which would mean there was no need. Whatever the reasons, when Sir Geoffrey Colby arrived in Nyasaland as its new governor in 1948 – from West Africa, which he said might have ‘coloured’ his reaction – he found himself ‘very surprised at the backward state of development of Africans in general’, and their political progress in particular. It was true. That was why Banda wanted Britain to hang on. In one way that flattered Britain; in another, however, it was a clear indictment of her previous neglect. Northern Rhodesia was the same. When it became self-governing as Zambia in 1964, Britain’s Deputy High Commissioner there suggested that ‘no British Colony had previously been given its independence with such a deficit of locally trained manpower’. That was also the fault of years of penny-pinching, and resulting impotence, on Britain’s part. Her betrayal of the Southern Rhodesian Africans had the same essential historical cause. For those who miss the British Empire, these events might make them pause. Britain’s colonial record generally is a mixed one. Central Africa was not one of her greatest successes. On the whole it shows her up rather badly: not as a particularly malevolent colonial power, I think, but as a pathetically ineffective, often duplicitous and not very brave one. No wonder so many of its records, as Murphy reports, were ‘closed’ to public access much longer than is usual; some still are, in fact. (It should be emphasised that these volumes are not an official enterprise, so he was not given unrestricted access, though he has managed to ferret some ‘closed’ papers out.) Admirers of the British Empire could do worse than get hold of these volumes, to get a flavour of what the Empire was really like, from the ‘ruling’ end of it, on at least one little patch of the ground. In the previous chapter I chaffed Niall Ferguson’s revisionist Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World for leaving out entirely

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the Kenya Emergency; looking through that book again, I see it omits all these Central African events too. That is a shame, because they illustrate not only the downside of British imperialism, but also – and much more importantly – the limitations of its power. That must affect one’s judgment; particularly of whether the Empire could really be said to have ‘made the modern world’, or something less. By the same token, these events cannot be said to unambiguously point an anti-imperialist lesson. A case could be made for saying that the problem with the Rhodesias and Nyasaland was not that they had too much imperialism, but too little – too weak control by the metropole (especially in Southern Rhodesia), too feeble a commitment, not enough dedicated ‘nation-building’; too few, perhaps, of the men in khaki shorts – Hence Banda’s plea for more. Perhaps there is a general moral to be learned from this: ‘first rule of empires – do not take them on unless you are prepared to run them properly.’ Certainly not through settlers. That is the worst way.

CHAPTER 27 DECOLONISATION IN ASIA

The collapse of empires – indeed, of any kind of government – almost invariably leads to chaos, hardship, deaths, atrocities. It is why we need government. It can even be seen to justify bad government. ‘Things were never so bad in Saddam’s time.’ ‘At least under the Soviets the Chechyans were at peace.’ ‘All the trouble started when the British left.’ Some of this is true, and it creates a real dilemma for those who support freedom, but not the freedom to be robbed, enslaved, raped and killed. The difference with the British Empire was that it was justified not merely as a way of imposing order, but as a means of preparing its subjects to be able, eventually, to keep order themselves. Then its job would have been done. This was a common thread (though sometimes a thin one) in British imperial rhetoric from the early nineteenth century onwards, and became the dominant one towards the end. It may have been unique to the British Empire, at least until the American ‘imperialism’ of very recent years – nation-building, and the like. (The pretensions of French revolutionary and Soviet imperialisms are other possible comparisons.) This is why it was important to the British that their colonies did not collapse into chaos when they were ‘liberated’, but continued functioning efficiently and tolerantly. No-one today who might wish to rehabilitate the British Empire is entitled to argue for it simply on the basis that things were ‘better’ under it than afterwards, even if that were true. The problems that imperialism left behind are just as much its responsibility. If it made a poor death, then it failed. In the long string of British possessions that stretched almost uninterrupted from Ceylon and India round through Burma to Singapore, making a good death was the British government’s main priority from the 1940s on. One reason for this was that by then hanging on no longer seemed an option to most rational people, after these colonies’ conquest by Japan in 1942. Of course there were other ways of looking at it. Some of the less rational imperialists of the time (including Churchill and Ernest Bevin)

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thought that Britain’s South East Asia Empire could be regained and ruled anew as though nothing had happened, and even perhaps extended – at the expense for example of the Thais in the middle or the Dutch to the south. ‘Keep a bit of India!’ Churchill ordered Lord Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy, in 1945. Others sought more plausible ways of preserving Britain’s hegemony and material interests, through local puppet rulers (usually Cambridgeeducated), and by means of economic and defence treaties. More altruistically, Clement Attlee (Haileybury-educated, of course) thought the burden of looking after ‘backward peoples’, as he still called them, might now be shared with other white men: ‘why should not one or other of the Scandinavian countries have a try? They are quite as fitted to bear rule as ourselves.’ The bottom line, however, was to make it appear as though the ‘transfer of power’, as the British insisted on calling it in India’s case, was orderly, under Britain’s control, and delivered into the hands of national governments she could take a paternalistic pride in; so justifying imperialism in retrospect. It was what today would be called a question of ‘legacy’. It became a kind of myth afterwards that this had in fact been achieved. (It was one of the things that was supposed to distinguish Britain’s decolonisation process from France’s.) The Commonwealth, which most ex-colonies joined, seemed to confirm that impression. But it was a misleading one. ‘The end of empire’, write Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, ‘is not a pretty thing if examined too closely.’ Their two volumes on the process in South East Asia – Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2004), and Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2007) – show how very ugly it could be. It seems uglier here than in most other books on this topic because of the authors’ insistence on describing these events not only from the point of view of their leading participants, but at ground level – the ‘darker underside’ – too. It is this that makes both volumes so original and compelling. The ‘forgotten armies’ referred to in the title of the first one include not only the troops Britain sent to the East during World War II and afterwards, who justifiably felt ignored back home by contrast with the heroic armies of the European and North African fronts, but also the Indian and local ‘native’ battalions that fought alongside them, usually in more leading roles; the Japanese and then the nationalists who fought against them; and sundry other large groups of people whose mere size probably entitles them to be classed as ‘armies’: prisoners of war, forced labour gangs, ‘comfort women’, women more generally, the starving victims of war (partly) in famine-stricken Bengal, fleeing refugees, and so on. Those expecting a straightforward military history of this period and region may be taken aback by this. (The ‘customer reviews’ of Forgotten Armies on Amazon.co.uk show that at least a couple of its readers

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were.) All this can make for an uncomfortable, sometimes sickening, read. But that’s the nature of war. We should not be allowed to forget it. It is also good to be presented with a different geographical angle on World War II from the one that we in Europe are mainly accustomed to. Bayly and Harper make a convincing case for saying that the really ‘great’ war of the twentieth century ran from 1937 to 1975, and was fought in Asia. (1937 was the time the Japanese began seriously going for China; 1975 the year America withdrew from Vietnam.) This is not to undervalue (if that is the word) the European wars of this period, or even the Cold War, but simply to put them into perspective. In terms of scope, suffering, heroism and casualties there probably wasn’t much to choose between them (I have not attempted the gruesome calculations); and those other wars obviously had huge implications for their participants. They also crucially affected the more eastern one. But it is arguable that both at the time and in the longer run this ‘Great Asian War’, as Bayly and Harper call it, was more significant. That will certainly be so if the common prediction, that Asia is about to supersede the West in terms of world power and prosperity, turns out to be true. Britain’s leading part in this story comes in the middle. In 1942 Japan attacked and overran all her south-east Asian colonies, plus Hong Kong. Britain’s response to this was pathetic, as is well known, and is another of the reasons why these particular theatres are so conveniently ‘forgotten’ in present-day British war mythology. She then recovered, but due less to her own troops’ efforts than to those of the Indian army and various local guerrilla bands – plus Japanese over-stretch, and American help. AngloAmerican military relations, incidentally, were always somewhat strained, especially while the US troops were commanded by ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who regarded his British allies as ‘mother-fuckers’, and their commander, Lord Louis Mountbatten, as a ‘childish pisspot’. (‘One knows what he meant’, comments Ronald Hyam, in Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918 – 1968: CUP, 2006.) In the 1940s and 1950s Britain remained active in the war in Malaya, putting down the communists who had been of such help to her in the war. She also helped re-establish the French in Vietnam and the Dutch in Indonesia in 1945 – 6. Then however she dropped out of the picture, having patched up her ‘legacy’ as well as she could. How well was that? Not very, judging by these accounts. But then she did not have a great deal to build on. So far as South-East Asia was concerned, Britain had not been there very long as a proper colonising presence: just 56 years in the case of Burma. ‘Like everything British’, write Bayly and Harper, ‘starting with the British Isles themselves, the crescent was an administrative jumble [. . .] No Napoleon had tried to impose order on its constitutive elements.’ Officials

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were thinly spread. Over large areas they ruled ‘indirectly’ – through local sultans and rajahs, for example, or by allowing the hill ‘tribes’ their head. ‘Many outlying areas scarcely saw a British civil servant from month to month.’ ‘There was a curious insubstantial quality to Britain’s Asian Empire [. . .] The British governed, but they did not, strictly speaking, rule.’ In the Malay States it was done ‘by smoke and mirrors’. For military back-up they depended hugely on local soldiery, and the Indian army, which was predominantly ‘native’ in its composition. Much of this also applied to India itself, especially the ‘princely states’. Britain did not do much in most of this vast region, beyond trying to stay put. As imperial governments go, these were pretty flimsy ones. And that is before taking into account the quality of some of their personnel. British Malaya, claim Bayly and Harper, ‘was built on a viciously insidious form of apartheid’. The white community there was ‘frozen in its bubble of class and race-consciousness’. Ordinary British and Australian soldiers, over there to defend them, were also banned from their all-white clubs. The British were ‘mean-spirited’, and could be brutal, for example in crushing labour unrest. They dealt in stereotypes: ‘the Tamil was childlike and needed discipline’; the Chinese secretive; Malays work-shy; and so on. Colonial nationalism was put down to ‘adolescence’, criminality, sheepishness, intimidation, or, in one case (in a pep talk by an old Burma hand to British soldiers), constipation. Words like ‘extremist’, ‘fanatical’ and ‘terrorist’ were routinely hurled at it from the mid-1940s onwards, thus betraying ‘a fundamental lack of comprehension’. Many of the British were arrogant and culturally insensitive to a fault. For instance, when Lady Diana Cooper took off her shoes before entering the great Shwedagon pagoda in Rangoon, as you were supposed to do, she claimed she was upbraided by the governor (the awful Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith) for dealing ‘such a blow to white prestige that the British might lose Burma.’ (Hyam has some harsh words for DormanSmith too: ‘aloof and blimpish [. . .] typical of a certain type of ineffably awful old Harrovian’ – despite his Irishness.) Rubber planters had a particularly poor reputation in Britain, which they tended to resent, but was clearly largely deserved. That most of these people were reactionary goes almost without saying. The Americans and Australians, when they came on to the scene around 1943, could scarcely credit what they found: ‘an antiquarium of Colonel Blimps’, as the radical Australian war-correspondent Wilfrid Burchett described them later: thousands of British and Indian troops had to be sacrificed before the idea was drummed into the Delhi Brigade that a tank is stronger than a mule, a motor launch faster than a sampan, a concrete pill box is

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resistant to bayonets, even if the tanks, launches and pillboxes are manned by undersized people with yellow skins and buck teeth, who have not even heard of the playing fields of Eton or a cricket match. Obviously all this made things worse. Of course there were exceptions: some of them very exceptional indeed – like those famed maverick ex-imperial civil servants who ‘went native’ and radical, such as JS Furnivall (a leading actor here); and even some of the newer recruits, who no longer had the ‘dependable’ backgrounds of the previous generation – old ‘Indian families’, public school, and the like – and so lacked the ‘natural allegiance to the Empire’ of that class; one of whom, Sydney Bolt, a Communist (!), saw his function as being to ‘bore into the raj from within’. Assam tea-planters (mainly Scots) also seem to have been good eggs. In general, however, the ‘government’ of Britain’s eastern empire on the eve of the Japanese attack does not come out of these accounts too well. Nemesis was swift. The primary obligation of any government, surely, is to protect its subjects. This the British regimes in South East Asia signally failed to do. Singapore fell like the proverbial straw house at the first puff of the big bad wolf in May 1942. (Apparently the old story that its guns could only point out to sea, and could not be turned round to face the Japanese land invasion, is only partly true; they could be turned, but did not have the right shells to use against an army.) Thereafter its inhabitants had to fend for themselves. That fatally undermined the imperial government’s legitimacy, as well as everything else. Even where the British administration remained, it proved incapable of fulfilling its basic duties, as in Bengal in 1943 where imperial neglect, incompetence and occasionally sheer malevolence contributed significantly to the huge toll of people who died in the Great Famine of that year. Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India at the time, at first tried to put the blame on the Indians, for over-breeding. In fact it was a largely government-made tragedy, comparable in its effects (three million deaths) to the Nazi holocaust (six million). (Bayly and Harper use the ‘h’word for it.) In the light of all this, one can only marvel at the sheer nerve of those who condemned those erstwhile subjects whose response to this situation was to exploit it in order to fight British colonialism, as ‘traitors’ to the ‘King-Emperor’. A defence witness at the trial of one Singapore resident charged with treason compared the Japanese regime to ‘a stepfather after the real father, the British, left their children behind. The stepfather was brutal [. . .] Now, alas, the stepfather has returned and is blaming these leaders for obeying their stepfather.’ The analogy is blatantly patronising, which may be why the (Japanese) witness chose it – he knew it would strike a chord with the British. But the point seems a fair one. What – as the

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nationalists might have asked, and did ask, in other ways – had the KingEmperor ever done for them? Luckily for Britain (but not for many of her subjects), the special brutality of the Japanese alienated most of the nationalists, and ensured that at least as many of them helped Britain against Japan as vice-versa. But of course it was not for love of the Brits. There were some exceptions. At one point in the war, for example, Indian army troops were entertained with this little ditty, sung by Manipuri dancing girls: We love the British Empire, We love it very much, It gives us peace and happiness, It gives us clothes and such. But that could have been for their officers’ benefit. (They were in the audience too.) Obviously most of the British themselves (not all) welcomed the Empire back, and many of the Eurasians they so despised. There were also the old feudal rulers the British had propped up in Malaya and elsewhere; but even they could no longer count on the support of their subjects, for exactly the same reason that the British could not. By failing to protect them, the rajas had ‘committed derhaka [treason] against the people’, so justifying popular rebellion against them too. (Even being divinely ordained was no protection.) Otherwise scarcely anyone in Asia wanted the British to stay after they had seen the Japanese off. One reason was that they seemed to have shed none of their arrogance while they had been away. ‘I can hardly believe’, wrote one official turned away from the NAAFI in post-war Singapore because he was Chinese, ‘that racial discrimination still exists’. One young army captain (later Dirk Bogarde) recalled, on his arrival in Calcutta 1945, seeing an Indian porter being beaten by ‘a fat, ginger-haired, moustached, red-faced stocky little major [. . .] Screaming. Thrashing at the cringing Indian with his swagger cane [. . .] My first sight and sound of the Raj at work.’ Apparently little had changed. Assaults on women by drunken British and Indian soldiers added to the locals’ anger; one Kuala Lumpur newspaper professed to see no difference between these and the ‘Japanese fascists’ outrages’. Otherwise, ‘if the populace were happy to see us’, as one British officer in Kuala Lumpur put it in September 1945, ‘they proved adept at concealing their emotions’. One Chin Peng recorded his own resentment, that ‘we are letting them back unimpeded to reclaim a territory they have plundered for so long’. Some of that resentment struck home. As Eric Stokes, later a distinguished historian of India, complained in 1946: walking around Calcutta in uniform he was

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made to feel ‘rather like a Nazi officer must have felt walking along a Paris boulevard’. That must have been hard. Britain had other dire burdens. She was stretched at home after the (European) war, both economically and militarily. In particular, very few ordinary British troops (if any) had much enthusiasm for fighting wars in other people’s countries, especially hot, steamy disease-ridden ones like parts of Burma and Malaya, just to keep the Empire up – or, as one Scots Guards officer was heard to say in 1950, ‘to chase bare-arsed niggers around’. That was not why they had joined the forces in the first place. Many of them (probably not the Scots Guards officer) empathised with the nationalists. ‘I am all in favour’, wrote one soldier from India in 1945, ‘of giving India her freedom if these chaps I have mixed with and spoken to are an example of her qualities’. This of course is one of the characteristics of a conscript army: it tends to be more broadly representative of its metropolitan society, and more left-wing. Morale was poor. There were mutinies. Local troops were unreliable. The great Indian army, which had done so much of the hard policing work in Britain’s imperial outposts in the past, became unavailable after Indian and Pakistani independence (1947), though Britain did manage to cream some Gurkhas off. The United States was not keen on propping up the British Empire, at least before communism hove into view, and then only until the process of non-communist nation-building could be completed. The new Labour government was supposed to be committed to colonial freedom. Lord Mountbatten, its chosen instrument in Asia, was also sympathetic. (‘As a member of the royal family’, say Bayly and Harper rather snidely, ‘he could afford to strike the vaguely leftist note which was so common amongst the British rank and file.’ Poor ‘Dicky’; he gets quite a bit of flak in these books. But he did some good things.) A scuttle was inevitable. Very little of this was under Britain’s control. This is not a story of Britain’s ‘granting’ independence, rather of peoples seizing it. Which is how it is presented, in great (sometimes relentless) detail, in Forgotten Wars. Not that the nationalists, either, were totally in control of their fates. They had constraints too. Firstly, there were the effects of those 50– 200 years of British colonialism to cope with: the pervasive neglect – scarcely any serious effort to implant self-governing institutions, for example; and all the artificialities that imposed governments generally entail. This is one of the main arguments against empire. It relates to communities, in particular. Living under foreign umbrellas, peoples do not need to accommodate to each other as they must if they rule themselves. Without the Raj, for example, Indian Hindus and Muslims would have had to reach some modu¯s vivendi, either separately or together, which, however occasionally bloody they might have been, would almost certainly have avoided the sudden mass exchanges of

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population and communal slaughters that so blighted that particular ‘transfer of power’. This is not a bad aspect of empire per se, incidentally. Indeed, there is something rather admirable, almost utopian, about the cosmopolitanism that it could sometimes nurture, especially in Malaya and Singapore. (There are other historical examples: Spain under the Caliphate, for example – or so we are told.) The British sought the same for Palestine. But, again, a ‘liberal’ empire needs to be judged by the legacy it leaves, not simply by how it works with the lid on. If colonial utopianism makes post-colonial dystopias more likely, I am afraid it flunks the test. On top of all that, the nationalists also had the legacy of the war and the Japanese occupation to come to terms with. This could be positive as well as negative – which is not to say that it was necessarily good. An aspect that Bayly and Harper emphasise is the way nationalist movements were militarised by the wars; the creation of what they called ‘parade-ground nationalism’, based on the idea that ‘being a nation meant having an army’; especially among those ‘races’ that British imperialists had rather sneered at in the past for not being ‘martial’ enough, like the Burmese, to whose sense of (masculine) self-esteem, and proud history, this was a particular affront. Burma is still largely ruled by its military today, of course. Lastly – among these general constraints on the nationalists’ freedom of action – there was Communism: firstly as an ideology that was bound to inspire millions in south-east Asia, exploited as they undoubtedly were by Western capitalists (this was another implication of Britain’s light colonial touch), and oppressed by the silly macho hierarchicalism of the colonial order – communism offered equality especially for women; and secondly in its Cold War guise, as yet another putative ‘empire’, dragging the region yet again into the purview of other, greater powers, and limiting the roles of its native actors thereby. It was of course the perceived need to combat Soviet and Chinese-backed communism that kept Britain in Malaya for longer than she had been allowed to stay in the subcontinent and Burma; and also gave rise to some of the worst excesses of British imperialism, in its latest stages. These included literal state terrorism (Sir Henry Gurney, British High Commissioner, justified British army policy there on the grounds that the Chinese were ‘notoriously inclined to lean towards whichever side frightens them more and at the moment this seems to be the government’); gunning down insurrections; forced resettlements and collective detentions (on the Boer War ‘concentration camp’ pattern, later to be repeated in Kenya); a ‘police state’ regime at one stage (Bayly’s and Harper’s term); and a number of what must count as clear ‘atrocities’, one of which in particular (Batang Kali) was hushed up at the time, but was later compared to My Lai. (‘It is most important,’ wrote Gurney in justification of the cover-up, ‘that police and soldiers who are not saints,

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should not get the impression that every small mistake is going to be the subject of a public enquiry or that it is better to do nothing at all than to do the wrong thing quickly.’) This policy is conventionally supposed to have been a great success nonetheless, with British tactics in Malaya – something called ‘hearts and minds’, rather than the atrocities – often contrasted with the blunter methods later employed so unsuccessfully by the Americans in Vietnam. These authors, however, true to their approach of also looking at things from the underside, credit the locals more. Ironically, another effect of this stay of execution that Britain enjoyed in Malaya was to enable her to turn her ‘rule’ there into a proper liberal-imperial one for almost the first time. (This is where Labour’s and especially Attlee’s ‘white man’s burden’ instincts kicked in.) The state started doing things: like setting up a university in Singapore, and various political, economic and welfare reforms; so making up for a little of the time it had wasted during the first 60-odd years of its presence. Bayly and Harper, clearly no great fans of strong government, call this ‘potentially overbearing’. But it helped ensure a relatively stable and prosperous outcome for the decolonisation process there in the medium term. Still, the general south-east Asian picture is not a pretty one; nor, if it is set in a wider context, does it appear unique in this regard. Ronald Hyam’s lively, readable and subtly provocative new account of the decolonisation process overall – Britain’s Declining Empire (CUP, 2006) – approaches it from a different direction – metropolitan, rather than colonial – but broadly complements Bayly’s and Harper’s work. Hyam’s great advantage is his close familiarity with the official British documents of this period, many of which he has edited for publication; and which clearly show how little control officials in Britain privately felt they had over most of these events, however they chose to present them in public. Like most imperial historians these days he dates the writing on the wall to World War I (some of us would push it back even earlier), by which time, as he points out, Britain’s had already become ‘a declining, dysfunctional empire on the road to liquidation’. The Indian Raj was an anomaly by the 1930s; ‘the transfer of power in 1947 was, on any objective criterion, at least ten years too late.’ ‘You can’t bluff if you’ve nothing to bluff with’, wrote Lord Ismay, an aide to Mountbatten, round about then. ‘We hadn’t anything.’ The more incurable imperial optimists thought they might have one or two cards left: an ‘east of Suez’ role still with the help of Singapore, for example; a continuing colonial presence in eastcentral Africa; the Commonwealth as a kind of empire-substitute as a last resort – but these all melted away, sometimes bloodily, in the 1960s. All that remained then was that bottom line: that decolonisation was the Empire’s consummation, fulfilling what had been its fundamental purpose all along; that, in the words of a Colonial Office statement in 1950: ‘the transfer of

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power is not a sign of weakness or of liquidation of the Empire, but is, in fact, a sign and source of strength’. That might possibly have carried conviction if the process had been prettier, and the end-results happier for everyone. But, as Bayly and Harper conclude in the case of South East Asia: ‘nowhere down the length of the crescent did relinquished or devolved British authority pass quietly into the hands of homogenous nation-states. The divisions of colonial politics were to scarify the region for two generations.’ So much for Britain’s ‘legacy’ there. It is a risky business, taking on an imperial mission with a view to leaving something good behind. Of course, so far as most British imperialists were concerned this was not their major motive, which is one reason why their Empire did not on the whole turn out like that. A second is that it was, and always had been, far too weak and flawed for its (supposed) liberal purpose: maintained largely through bluff, collaboration and the occasional brutality (especially when its legitimacy was questioned, which is why the atrocities built up in those final days); constantly having to trim, compromise and ‘appease’ in order to avoid crises; run on a shoestring by a minimal staff whose altruistic dedication (in very many instances) never quite outweighed their lack of imagination, illiberalism, and rough, racist edges; and hardly supported at all by the mass of the population in Britain, unless they could be persuaded that it was a wholly altruistic venture: and hence emphatically not when they went out as soldiers to places like India and Burma (Captain Bogarde, for example) and saw what it was really like on the ground. You need much more than this to establish liberal successor states that will do you proud. No empire yet has ever managed it: has succeeded, that is, in doing much better than merely keep things going while it stood. Malaya and Singapore may be the nearest Britain got to this, mainly because by the 1950s liberal (or liberal-ish) imperialism was the only sort of imperialism she had left. (Even so, both still have some damaging post-colonial legacies.) Otherwise however British decolonisation was a pretty damn disaster, seen from this perspective. That must affect our judgment of the Empire itself. Even if things had been better under it, it would not justify an imperialism whose aspirations were so much higher than this.

CHAPTER 28 SECRET SERVICES: THE LAST PENUMBRA OF EMPIRE

The role of her ‘spooks’ in the final, dog days of Britain’s (formal) Empire has been kept strictly under wraps until recently. You can see why. The reason usually given is ‘national interest’ (always unspecified, or it would not be secret, would it?); but that does not generally work after 50 years, and is more often just an excuse, to cover ministerial ‘embarrassment’, which is something altogether different. Another reason is that blowing the gaff on past secret operations would do more than simply ‘embarrass’; it could also reveal some very dirty tricks indeed. In the case of decolonisation, which is the subject of Calder Walton’s Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (Harper Press, 2013), such revelations might do irreparable damage to the myth that was deliberately cultivated around the process at the time: which was that in Britain’s case, unlike France’s, say, or the Netherlands’, or Belgium’s, she parted with her empire in a pretty friendly and bloodless way, as the culmination of her imperial rule, which had always had this – ‘Empire into Commonwealth’, as the old history books used to put it – for its ultimate aim. If for no other reason, that was needed in order to make ordinary Britons feel better about the whole thing. It meant that people like me, who met our first Indians and Africans at university (in the days when governments welcomed them more generously), could make friends with them without the guilt on the one side and resentment on the other that might have come between us had we known. Of course this was frustrating; firstly to proud old members of the secret services who felt that some of their activities ought to be known about: those clever codebreakers of Bletchley Park are the best-known ones today, and richly deserving of retrospective credit, as I think we would all agree; and secondly, to historians who wanted to get to the bottom of past events, and suspected that Britain’s secrecy laws might be keeping something really important back. This

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used to be a sensitive area. A few years ago if you voiced this suspicion you could be labelled a ‘conspiracy theorist’, which was not helpful if you were an academic historian; it put you in the same boat as the ‘Prince Philip is a reptilian shape-shifter’ loonies, which would almost certainly sink your chances of that senior lectureship. Besides, great historical events had ‘bigger’ causes, did they not? That started to change when some of the suspicions (not all of them) came to look more plausible, as quite ‘respectable’ people came to corroborate them; and the Government decided to change tack, abandoning its old blanket denial rule and replacing it by the strategy of (secret) ‘information management’ described in Christopher Moran’s recent Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (CUP, 2013). ‘Reliable’ historians – that is, those mainly sympathetic to the intelligence services – were granted privileged access to ‘closed’ papers to in order to produce ‘official’ histories of each of them. One was Christopher Andrew, who employed the author of this book, Calder Walton, to help him with his The Defence of the Realm (Penguin, 2009), which was about MI5. Suddenly, one kind of ‘conspiracy history’ – dealing with official plots and cover-ups – became acceptable. So, Walton can now assert at the end of this book that ‘the history of British decolonisation is a story of deception’, without presumably endangering his chances of academic promotion today, if that were what he wanted. (In fact the book’s flyleaf tells us he left academia to become a barrister.) At the same time many of the dirtiest secrets of decolonisation were uncovered independently, by other historians, journalists, and lawyers seeking redress in the courts for some of their elderly – Kenyan and other – victims; and so the myth of an ‘orderly’ British retreat from her Empire became far more difficult to sustain. It may also have become less necessary, as time has healed the old wounds (or should have done), and we Brits have matured enough as a nation, surely, to be able to accept that we – or our forebears, or some of them – could have done atrocious things half a century ago. So many books have been published recently about the dark and bloody side of British imperialism from its beginning to its end as to leave no more doubts about that. Any school or college imperial history syllabus that left this out would immediately be seen as the propaganda such courses used to be. (The same should be said of entirely negative ones.) That’s why imperial history can no longer be taught ‘patriotically’. Which is all to the good, if it teaches students the much more valuable historical lesson: that any people, in certain circumstances, can be beastly. It is not just the Germans. * This book does not shy away from the ‘atrocities’ accompanying decolonisation, and indeed adds one or two more examples. The part they

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play in it however is interesting. Walton’s new revelations have come as a result of his researches into newly-released MI5 and JIC (Joint Intelligence Committee) files; but not, usually, as the responsibility of MI5 and the JIC. (MI5, incidentally, usually seen as the domestic arm of the British intelligence services, also had responsibility for the Empire. SIS – otherwise known as MI6 – covered ‘abroad’ proper, including the ex-colonies after independence.) Walton knows his MI5 well, of course, as Andrew’s right-hand man, and seems to have taken a shine to it. Throughout the book he seeks to distance it from the worst British late-colonial failures and atrocities. It performed two basic roles during the decolonisation process. The first was to provide intelligence on nationalist leaders while they were in London, where most of them came to study (usually at the LSE) and to discuss their plans before their battles began. The second was to advise colonial governments on how to gather their own intelligence. In the first of these roles MI5 comes over here as fair, moderate and reassuring, not the paranoid blimps you might expect from its reputation in some circles (and from its earlier history). In the second its problem, apparently, was that local governments took little notice of its advice until it was too late. Hence the atrocities in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and elsewhere. Walton even suggests that if MI5 had been given the ‘lead’ intelligence role in Northern Ireland before the 1990s, as it wanted, the ‘Troubles’ would have been less troublesome. Similarly, things only went downhill in the newly-independent colonies when SIS – or, worse, private security firms – supplanted MI5 there. In other words, if the authorities there had listened to their domestic intelligence boys, far fewer of these awful things would have happened. It is easy to be cynical about this; but it makes some sense. The primary duty of any intelligence agency is to report objectively on ‘enemies’ – actual, potential or imagined – in order for governments to be able to counter them, if necessary, in the most effective ways. It must be fearless about this, speaking against the prejudices and wishes of its employers if necessary. For example, if it finds that Nkrumah (or whoever) is not a communist, in hock to Moscow, as most on the right assumed in the 1950s, then it must say so. Walton is impressed – as am I, on this evidence – by the sensitivity of MI5’s reports on men like Nkrumah, despite his trips to the USSR, reading of Marx, and leftleaning generally; able and willing as the spooks were to distinguish between ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’, and between both of them and the ‘nationalism’ that, they concluded, was a far more important factor in his ideological make-up. Later on (as we saw in Chapter 26) it was MI5’s Roger Hollis who brought the unwelcome news to the government of the ill-fated Central African Federation that Soviet communism was not the threat in their part of Africa that they liked to paint it, mainly in order to get American support for their efforts

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to turn the imperial clock back. This is not what you might expect from the reactionary old buffers that Stella Rimington, no less, a future MI5 DirectorGeneral, pictures in her memoirs, Open Secret (Arrow, 2001) ‘working’ there (actually mostly lunching and drinking) when she joined the agency in the 1970s. Perhaps they really were masters of disguise. Or, more likely, this was actually what the wiser heads in the British government at that time wanted to hear, committed as they were to decolonisation in any case, ill able to afford many more costly counter-insurgencies like Malaya and Kenya, and so only too pleased to be told that there was no ‘Cold War’ reason for doing so. Colonial governors, however, thought they knew ‘their natives’ better; which is why they so often disregarded MI5’s reports, or cherry-picked them to suit their own preconceived ideas. That often happened, to the frustration of the spooks themselves, who were likely to take the blame. (Walton pretty broadly hints that this is his reading of that notorious ‘sexed-up’ Iraq dossier of 2003.) The most blatant example given here concerns Aden in 1963, whose governor, Sir Kennedy Trevaskis, actually doctored the raw intelligence he was given, without making this clear to anyone, in order to fit his preconceptions. There was also another spanner in the works. In the case of British Guiana, MI5’s assessment of Cheddi Jagan, that his supposed ‘Marxism’ should be no barrier to his acceptance as prime minister after independence, was ‘sidelined’ under pressure from the United States, who did not want any kind of Commie in its back yard, and so plotted to remove him covertly with Colonial Office connivance. It was Harold Macmillan who remarked on the irony of an ‘anti-imperialist’ America pleading with Britain here to ‘stick to “Colonialism” and “Imperialism” at any cost’. Walton also cites it as an early example of Chalmers Johnson’s theory of ‘blowback’, in view of what became of Guyana afterwards. The Iran coup of 1953 was another. If Iran had been in MI5’s bailiwick, instead of SIS’s, they might have advised against. The same may be true of the Suez fiasco. (The evidence here is incomplete.) MI5 knew all about ‘blowback’ even then. Independence, wrote the director of MI5’s ‘E’ (Overseas) division in 1961, could ‘so easily go sour on us’ if the ex-colonial subjects should ‘identify us in, or even suspect us of, activity behind their backs.’ That was wise. Walton also claims that all the most disreputable methods employed to hang on to the Empire in its last days – resettlement of entire populations, mass detentions, collective punishments, agent-provocateurs, and in particular those horrendous tortures that we now know were carried out in Kenya and elsewhere, including something very close to ‘water-boarding’ – went right against MI5’s advice, or what would have been its advice if it had been sought. MI5, it appears, was quite clear about torture. ‘Guidelines’ produced in 1961 (but only available here in the form of lecture notes) called

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it ‘short-sighted – like wilfully damaging engine of car wanted for long journey – under violence anyone will talk – you may get a confession to prevent torture but it will not be the truth.’ Obviously it was even more pointless if you wanted ‘turn’ your victims into ‘double agents’ for your side: which had been MI5’s speciality and one of its great triumphs in both world wars. When suspects were tortured, Walton claims, it was invariably by men on the front lines of the action, often as acts of revenge or to terrorise them and their comrades into submission; by local police and militias (especially the ones recruited among local white settlers); and justified by their bosses in terms of the old Adam: As far as ill-treatment, rough treatment on capture [are concerned], I think that it is something which inevitably does happen. After all if you’ve got troops or police who are engaged in an anti-terrorist operation and they’ve seen some of their comrades killed in action, well then they capture some of the enemy responsible, naturally they are liable to be roughly handled, and that is a perfectly natural thing to happen, and not something you can regulate against. [. . .] And that’s something which is perfectly natural, and to my mind, acceptable. That was Sir John Harding, Governor of Cyprus in the 1950s. But he was there, on the spot. MI5 generally wasn’t, except occasionally as a solitary ‘SLO’ (security liaison officer): supposed to be helping out, as well as reporting back to London; but often not. This seems to let it off the hook. * In fact, Walton appears to be arguing – and this is of course consistent with his status as a Secret Service ‘trustie’ – that spookery can only be a good thing, so long as it is politically neutral; and that most bad things happen when there is not enough of it. This is seen to justify many of MI5’s undisputed illegalities in the 1950s and 1960s, like the files it built up on perfectly innocent people: ‘alarming’, he writes – this may be the barrister talking – ‘from the perspective of civil liberties’; and its widespread ‘bugging’ of the places where they met. One of these was Lancaster House, where many of the negotiations over self-government took place (it was thought the decor would impress the natives), as Ian Smith suspected during the Rhodesia talks of 1965. (As a result he used to meet his aides in the ladies’ lavatory, convinced that MI5 would be too gentlemanly to plant mikes there. Walton thinks this was ‘almost certainly wrong’.) In these particular cases it may have smoothed the diplomatic waters. In more general terms one might argue that good intelligence is always preferable to the absence of it, which is what usually

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fuels the worst kinds of paranoia. If Harold Wilson was the ‘paranoid conspiracy theorist’ Walton paints him as, for example – it is the almost obligatory description of him in books like this; Walton uses the word ‘paranoid’ about him four times on a single page – then this was why. They kept him largely in the dark, too. In fact this book does little to allay all the suspicions that less trusting people might still have about the Secret Services and their part in decolonisation, if only because the latter are not yet as ‘open’ with their records as they might be. Walton has found a lot of great new material, at a hidey-hole called Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, the survival of much of which was flatly denied until recently (this has happened to me too; they have found it is the best way of getting those pesky researchers off their backs); but he acknowledges that he has only been granted access to the ‘first tranche’ so far. Hardly any of these papers goes further than 1965. What other tranches will tell us we cannot know. SIS is still more secretive. All these files need to go through a process of vetting and selection before even the trusties are allowed to see them, which must cast doubt on their reliability as anything like a full record of what went on. One of the most shocking revelations here for an historian – though the more conspiratorial of them will not be too surprised – is that in certain cases the departing colonial regimes not only weeded out ‘embarrassing’ documents, but also forged ‘innocent’ ones to take their places. (Papers in government files are usually numbered. When the sequence is broken you know that something has been removed, which can set bells ringing. Not here.) These were called the ‘legacy files’. In other words, ‘the British government deliberately doctored the historical record of its end of empire’. If that is not a ‘conspiracy’, I do not know what is. Obviously I have no way of knowing what they are covering up; but Walton gives a few tantalising hints. Towards the end of World War II, MI5 was involved in what today would be called ‘extraordinary rendition’ of suspected enemy agents from colonies to the notorious ‘Camp 020’ in south London for interrogation, which was illegal then too. We still do not know the full truth of what went on there. We learn here that it was not only nationalists who were spied on by MI5, but also British MPs. (Barbara Castle had her luggage mysteriously spirited away when she visited Cyprus in 1958. It was called a ‘black bag op’.) In Palestine SIS placed limpet mines on (Jewish) refugee ships, and then may have forged documents purporting to show they were the work of Arabs or the Soviets. In West Africa we have little written-down evidence that MI5 was involved in dirty tricks, but in the cases of the rigged Nigerian elections of 1960 and Nkrumah’s fall from power in 1966, it is, writes Walton, ‘not beyond belief’. Some files on the Kenya atrocities, probably detailing the worst of them, are still being held back.

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Walton thinks the intelligence services may have been more directly involved in these than they let on. It seems pretty certain that SIS co-operated more with the Apartheid South African government than it admitted at the time. It may also have helped Ian Smith’s Rhodesia; although, again, Walton has no proof. MI5’s Dick White claimed that SIS had collected ‘evidence’ of homosexuality to blackmail Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios with; but again, the papers are not yet available to back this up (or otherwise). We know about SIS involvement in the ousting of Mossadeq in Iran in 1963, but not the official details yet; and about those ingenious plots to assassinate Nasser in Egypt in the 1950s – exploding chocolates, and the like – but do not know whether any of them was authorised. Dick White claimed it was he who pulled the plug on these when he was transferred from Head of MI5 to Head of SIS, uniquely, in 1956. But we cannot be sure. And another Head of MI5, Howard Smith – though this was before he joined the agency – apparently advocated killing Patrice Lumumba of the Congo; which of course happened in 1961. ‘Still’, concludes Walton, ‘the question remains whether British plots to assassinate Lumumba, or other troublesome leaders who died in suspicious circumstances, ever amounted to anything. At present we do not know.’ (Or do we? Shortly after this essay was first published Lord Lea of Crondall wrote to the London Review of Books telling them he had heard from Daphne Park herself – MI6’s agent in Kinshasa – that she had ‘organised’ the killing. Others then denied it, naturally.)1 And of course there may be other skeletons: the ‘unknown unknowns’. Most embarrassingly of all, for governments, Walton is pretty certain that as yet unreleased papers will ‘reveal that ministers and officials in London knew more about the worst crimes and abuses committed by British security personnel in colonial Emergencies than historians previously thought, and were not as innocent about colonial crimes as they liked to portray themselves’. Which would obviously explain their reluctance to come clean. ‘If we are going to sin’, wrote the British Attorney-General to Governor Baring of Kenya in 1957, ‘we must sin quietly.’ Which they have done, up to now. * The overall impact of all this is difficult to assess. The record of British decolonisation is mixed. The ‘Empire to Commonwealth’ narrative is not complete nonsense. There were some relatively successful ‘transfers of power’, though unravelling decades – sometimes centuries – of alien governance was never going to be an easy matter. One way in which MI5 may have made the transition smoother was by advising successor governments on how to set up domestic intelligence agencies of their own, modelled on the British pattern. Sometimes British SLOs stayed on for a while to help. MI5, and GCHQ, also

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shared a certain amount of their own intelligence information with the new governments, which seemed a friendly thing to do. On the other hand this could be double-edged. There can be no guarantee that secret services will not be abused, even in Britain. They almost call out for it. It is the reason why for example MI5’s Percy Sillitoe was apparently reluctant to assist South Africa’s new Nationalist government in setting up its own Security Service in 1948, in case it turned it into a ‘Gestapo’ (his word) against the blacks. Elsewhere this, or something like it, happened. ‘Once national governments had gained full independence from Britain, many of them adopted and deployed the same black arts of intelligence that they had inherited from the British, but now against their own enemies.’ With regard to counter-insurgency more generally (not just intelligence), Walton traces many of present-day Israel’s more severe methods back to the British, who had used them to combat Irgun and the Stern Gang in Palestine: the first modern terrorists in the Middle East, as it does no harm to be reminded occasionally. That too must be regarded as part of Britain’s imperial legacy. It was not just parliamentary democracy and cricket. It could also be seen as a kind of imperialism in itself: ‘we are the last penumbra of empire’, as SIS’s Sir Gerry Warner put it to the Queen in the 1990s; and there was of course a payoff for Britain; which was the information she got from her ex-colonies in exchange. Most valuable in this respect were the GCHQ listening posts she was allowed to keep in many of them, furnishing both her and the United States (who largely paid for them) with irreplaceable Cold War intelligence in the pre-satellite age. In Walton’s view this enabled London to ‘punch far above its weight’ diplomatically in the years after decolonisation. What real good that did for Britain must be debateable. Essentially it meant being taken seriously as an ally by the United States. This however could be a bind; especially when it meant taking on America’s Cold War obsessions, which did not always help – in Guyana, for example. Some of those obsessions seeped into the intelligence services themselves, especially SIS (the right-wing conspirator George Kennedy Young was one of them), and even MI5, despite its apparent relaxation about colonial ‘Marxists’ and the like. This was what got Peter Wright so het up that he even suspected his own Director-General, Roger Hollis – the one who gave that sceptical advice to the whites of Rhodesia – of being a Soviet ‘mole’. (He thought the same of the relatively liberal Sir Andrew Cohen, Governor of Uganda in the 1950s.) Wright of course got all this from the notorious CIA molehunter James Jesus Angleton. Clearly there were divisions in MI5 about how far to go along with the Americans. This was not helped by the temptation to pander to them to get their support for essentially colonial undertakings – like safeguarding British economic interests – by presenting

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them in Cold War rhetoric. Many of the messier features of decolonisation might be put down to this. Maybe MI5 really were the least to blame for this. For most of us, however, these historical turf wars do not matter very much. We know that conspiracies were going on at various levels of government in the face of anti-colonial resistance, and that an awful lot of conspiracy has been going on since then to cover up the dirtiest tricks – and most heinous crimes. If it was not MI5, it was someone else: SIS, IRD, the Colonial Office, local Special Branches, the army, irregular troops, ill-trained and panicky squaddies. Where MI5 failed in this postwar period was in doing more to prevent all these others from operating – as the wiser heads in the agency would put it – so counterproductively. Maybe that was always impossible. Or perhaps MI5 lacked the courage of the convictions that Walton attributes to many of them. Or thirdly: could it have been because they did not hold these convictions very strongly? Walton points out (as other historians have done) that most of Britain’s ‘spooks’ came from colonial backgrounds, even before they joined the secret service. It was one of the things – together with their class – that marked them off from ‘ordinary’ Britons, and consequently from some of the latter’s more liberal values. ‘MI5’s working culture and outlook’ write Walton, ‘undoubtedly [. . .] had a colonial feel’. This revealing and fascinating book makes a very good case for it; but it does little to allay one’s natural suspicions of this shadowy, ex-colonial world.

CHAPTER 29 AFTER-IMAGES OF EMPIRE

The impact of the European imperialisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on their victims (or beneficiaries), on their perpetrators (the European colonial powers themselves), on what one might call their collaborators (European nations that did not have significant empires of their own but were still involved in the movement or one way or another, economically, for example, or culturally), and on the rest of the world (extraEuropean countries that were never formally or even informally colonised but were obviously affected indirectly by the colonisation that was going on around them), is a controversial topic, and a complicated one, as my statement of it here suggests. Even more controversial is the question of European imperialism’s after-effects: its lasting legacy in all the different areas just listed; a question that is muddied still further by the – again contested – issue of whether in fact these should rightly be called ‘after’-effects, or whether ‘imperialism’ is really still going on – in more subtle, indirect ways, perhaps; in the guise of ‘globalisation’; or in the hands of the Americans. As if this were not enough, we have problems of context: the difficulty that any historian dealing with the ‘causes and effects’ of things has of extricating one causal factor from another – ‘imperialist’ from other entirely different but nonetheless compatible motivations, for example – in the bewildering confusion of tendencies, motives and discourses that makes up nearly all human history. This is a veritable minefield. This chapter will venture into it; but from a rather different direction from most. For as well as after-effects, empires – in common with most other historical events – leave behind them after-images: like the bright shape of an electric light filament we can still see afterwards, for a while, when we close our eyes. It is these that will form the subject of this chapter; mainly in relation to the images left by the British Empire, but that empire as seen – or remembered, or imagined, or invented – not only by Britons themselves, but also in the larger or former ‘British’ community: in Britain’s ex-colonies, for

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example, including the United States. Its argument will be that ever since the formal demise of the British Empire, the idea of it has taken on a life of its own; related of course to the reality that preceded it, but sometimes only very loosely, and occasionally unrecognisably. This chapter will also argue that this new life – or ‘after-life’, or rather, as we shall see soon, ‘after-lives’ – has become an important historical factor in its own right, entirely separate from any lasting effect we believe the Empire itself may have had. Imperialism is not unique in this regard, of course. All great historical events react on later events as myths as well as realities, sometimes hugely influentially. Look at the common United States founding myth, for example (1776 and all that); deeply flawed as history, as most academic historians will tell you, but with an immense potency all of its own. Something similar is happening now in the case of European imperialism in general, and British in particular. The myth has sprouted wings. And also some rather sharp teeth. * The most common present-day myth about the British Empire – probably – is the one that was mooted in the first essay in this collection, critically; and has been touched on in several of the subsequent chapters. This is, quite simply, that the Empire was a ‘big thing’: as big, strong, and hence potent, in many ways, as its name – the ‘E’-word again – suggests, and as those 1900s red-bespattered world maps made it appear. The problem that faces a British imperial historian who dares to cast doubt on this is, of course, that he or she may be suspected of excusing it, hence avoiding his or her moral responsibility for it: it did not really hurt; or, however, in the eyes of imperial nostalgists, of diminishing its glory. It probably does both of those things; but that certainly is not my motive (unless it’s a very subconscious one) in arguing in this way, feeling as I do no sense either of shame or of pride for anything ‘my’ nation has done in the past. Why we should be expected to identify with people whose only connection with us is that they happened to live on the same patch of ground as we do now, but many years ago, and in widely different circumstances, has always seemed illogical to me. (Surely this is self-evident?) I am proud of certain things about my country, and ashamed of others; but only those things I might have had some part in or influence over, if only through voting. That does not extend to the 1812 war, the Amritsar massacre, or the Kenya concentration camps (I was too young then), let alone slavery or its abolition; or even – sadly – the invention of cricket. It does include the Iraq war, which happened in my time, and which I was against, but which I obviously did not do enough to put a stop to. That is not to say, incidentally, that it is not right for British governments to apologise, on occasion, for past atrocities, on behalf of their institutions; or for the seamy

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sides of British imperialism to be taught in schools, if only to show children that any people, of whatever nationality, can do seamy things. But we need to get it right. Which has not always been the case, I believe, in the case of British imperialism. Whether it is blamed or credited with what is happening in the world today, its influence is usually exaggerated; making little allowance for Britain’s essential vulnerability in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the extreme thinness of the ‘red line’ that represented her administration in most colonies; the extent to which her control over ‘subject peoples’ depended on negotiation and accommodations with them; and consequently the degree of agency that was exerted by those ‘subjects’ in most colonial situations. Another reason for exaggeration is the privileged status that has been accorded to imperialism, or what is called ‘imperialism’, by both its enemies and its new friends, and by ‘post-colonial theorists’, in preference to the huge plethora of other possible determining factors in modern world history. That probably has something to do with the socialists’ appropriation of the idea in fairly recent times (from Hobson via Lenin) in order to explain and excuse their failures to achieve socialism as quickly as they would have liked: it was imperialism abroad that gave a new lease of life to a declining capitalism at home. It also gave colonial and people in developing countries something outside themselves to blame – often justifiably, but it was a convenient excuse too; and played on ‘Western’ liberal guilt about the way they, and in particular their racist compatriots in ‘the field’, had treated Africans and others in earlier days. Whatever the Mugabes and others got up to, who could blame them, after what they had suffered under the Brits? * Why does this matter? It is after all ‘merely’ history now, all done and dusted, water under the bridge. Except that it is not. There are two sorts of harm it can do. The first is purely – ‘merely’, if you like – academic; but important therefore, or it should be, to academics and intellectuals. The point is this: that when the factor of ‘imperialism’ is emphasised so much, for example by the ‘po-cos’, it tends to stifle any more sophisticated analysis of the complexities and varieties of the phenomena that are supposed to be covered by it. ‘Imperialism’ is often employed as a kind of trump card in discussions of – for example – foreign policy and cultural contact, bringing the game to an end; label the expansion of McDonald’s overseas as ‘American imperialism’, for example, and the tendency is to see that as the last word, the complete answer, rendering any more complicated examination unnecessary. But of course ‘imperialism’ covers a multitude of evils (and possibly some goods), all of which have characteristics, contexts and significances of their own, and other influences and discourses acting on

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them besides ‘imperial’ ones; which it is surely important to examine before we can fully understand them. Reducing them all to ‘imperialism’ does not get us very far. (It also, incidentally, diminishes the crucial importance to Britain of her clearly non-imperial relationships – with countries in continental Europe, for example. This is greatly misleading.) I have mentioned already the proposal I made some years ago at a conference that we historians agree to a moratorium on the ‘e’ and ‘i’-words for five years, denying ourselves the use of them, so that we would be forced to describe the phenomena that are usually placed under that rubric in other terms, which would be bound to be different terms in different situations, thus indicating how complex (again) the phenomenon was (or, more properly, the phenomena were). But there is of course little chance of that. In addition, however, there are some clear practical dangers. Here are some examples. The first relates to America. We have seen already that the after-image of a great, powerful British Empire appears to be particularly widespread there, for historical reasons. It has had two major (albeit contradictory) repercussions. One is to give the United States something to define itself against – its origin was an anti-colonial rebellion – which has made it difficult for her to see herself in ‘imperial’ terms. ‘We don’t do empire’, as Donald Rumsfeld once famously said (just before invading Iraq); which only makes any sense at all if you regard ‘empire’ in maximalist terms. By defining their national identity against this ‘other’ of the British Empire, as they (mis) understood it, Americans blinded themselves to what was undoubtedly imperialistic in their own international conduct.1 (This self-delusion is in fact quite extraordinary. In 1812 the United States launched one of its many imperial wars, against Canada. In popular American mythology, however, that has become the ‘Second War of Independence’ from the British, see Chapter 6.) In fact the United States pursued policies in the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which came very close indeed to what in Britain’s contemporary case is always called ‘imperialism’; if Rumsfeld had had a better idea of that latter kind of empire he might have been able to learn some lessons from it. Gladstone’s invasion of Egypt in 1882 was the precedent for the Iraq invasion that all of us imperial historians were screaming at him from across the Atlantic – the similarities are quite close – but of course he could not admit that, and the warnings it implied. Instead he took another ‘precedent’, from one of America’s ‘good’ wars: the liberation of Paris in 1944, with American GIs being welcomed joyously by girls and women waving flowers. That is what he confidently predicted in Baghdad; with of course disastrous results. Without this huge blind spot, about the nature of the British Empire, it may not be too fanciful to speculate that the United States might have at least thought twice about repeating Britain’s Egyptian mistakes in Iraq.

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In another neck of the American neo-Con woods, however, dwelt those who did recognise the imperial analogy, and actually embraced it; men like Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Max Boot, egged on by Niall Ferguson, whose after-image of the British Empire is the ‘beneficent’ (on the whole) red-painted map kind. They wanted America to follow in Britain’s tracks. What ‘Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for’, wrote Boot in 2001, was ‘the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.’2 Quite apart from the historical howlers involved here – the British did not actually rule in jodhpurs: they were for playing polo in; and of course never in Afghanistan, where they were nearly always soundly beaten (militarily, that is, not in polo), just like the Americans – the problem with this view is that it gives far too much credit to the capacity of the British to do ‘good’ in this way. In both these cases we can see dangerous practical conclusions being inferred from this over-blown re´manence of the old British Empire. Other examples are easy to find. Here are just a few. President Mugabe of Zimbabwe gained a great deal of the electoral support he certainly once had from his claim that Britain is plotting to ‘colonise’ his country again; a ludicrous idea, of course, and based on an entirely false view of the power Britain had over ‘Rhodesia’ even in the past, but potent all the same. In 2004 a journalist writing in the Guardian blamed the British Empire for the persistence of homophobia in the West Indies, though in fact the opposite is just as likely to have been the case.3 (Even if it were true, 40-odd years after their independence, could not the West Indians think for themselves?) That is not atypical. My fourth example is a little different. Late in 2007, BBC4 showed a TV documentary series, made by a private production company, called Clash of Cultures, about three incidents in British imperial history: the Indian Mutiny, the Sudan campaign of 1898, and the British mandate in Palestine. All these events showed the British Empire up in a pretty disreputable light: generally overbearing, greedy and insensitive – perfectly justifiably (in my view). The difficulty was, however, that they were also presented as parts of a deliberate and systematic British Christian crusade to destroy the Muslim religion: which – again any imperial historian will tell you – is a travesty of the truth.4 The producer of that series was not, of course, an historian, and engaged no general historical adviser; but instead projected modern – and especially modern American Fundamentalist Christian – ideas on to the past. Again, part of the problem was this after-image that he clearly had of an all-powerful, proselytising British Empire. The ‘danger’ of that, of course, comes from the way it plays to the existing paranoia of Islamic extremists, who always suspected this in any case.

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My final example is the most important. I can best introduce it by referring to the row that is currently going on in the Church of England – the good old, tolerant, ‘broad’ Church of England, as it used to be – over homosexuality: in particular gay marriage, and the ordination of ‘practising’ gay priests. The ‘traditionalists’, as they call themselves, abhor all this; especially homosexuality, which the book of Leviticus tells them is an abomination before God. (Leviticus also tells us, a few verses down, that the eating of shellfish is an abomination before God; but we hear less of that.) The details of this controversy are thankfully of no relevance to this paper; what is relevant, however, is the fact that the wing of the Anglican Church that is most virulently homophobic is the (mainly tropical) African one, and that it is currently charging that the rest of the C of E’s more ‘modern’ outlook on these matters, and its efforts to persuade other Anglicans to embrace it, are yet another example of ‘Western Imperialism’. (Clearly, in view of the West Indian example quoted earlier, ‘imperialism’ takes radically different forms in different ex-colonies.) Which it may be, by some ways of looking at it; but this brings us on to a much more serious aspect of the way the ‘e’ and ‘i’ words (‘empire’, ‘imperialism’ and their derivatives) are used these days: stemming once again from this fundamentally exaggerated view of the efficacy and significance of the British imperialism of the past. * The problem here is the association of ‘imperialism’ with ‘modernity’. Among the other achievements of imperialism, certainly for its champions but also for many of its critics, is widely supposed to have been the spread of modern ideas and institutions – democracy, the rule of law, secularism, liberalism, toleration, technology, capitalism, rationalism, human rights, shirts and ties, football, and so on: just about every ‘modern’ trend you can think of – from Europe, where they all originated, throughout the rest of the world. This of course is Niall Ferguson’s ‘How Britain Made the Modern World’ scenario. It is an extraordinarily widespread set of assumptions, this: firstly, that all ‘progress’ has stemmed from ‘the West’; and secondly, that it was ‘imperialism’ that facilitated its diffusion into the more benighted – endemically backward, stagnant, reactionary and so on – extra-European world. The latest stage of this, of course, is the recent US mission to forcibly spread ‘democracy’ (by which it meant, of course, its own peculiar capitalist form of it) throughout the Middle East. But it is based, again, on an incredibly simplistic and maximalist reading of European imperialism: its monopoly of ‘modernity’; the part played by it in the spread of the latter; its ability to enforce ‘modernity’ on other peoples; and lastly, what ‘modernity’ really consists of.

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These are very big questions, especially the last; which cannot be adequately investigated in this chapter. The point to be made, however, is that they are, intrinsically, enormously problematical. First of all there is the question of how ‘modern’, by many ways of looking at it, the ‘West’ is by comparison with many non-Western societies and cultures. It is doubtful whether the inmates of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, for example, would see it in quite this light. Egyptian Muslim at the time of the French imperial invasion there under Napoleon were impressed by his troops’ military efficiency, but shocked by what they regarded as their ‘barbarity’: ‘barbarism’, of course, being one antonym for ‘modernity’.5 The Austrian sociologist Joseph Schumpeter believed that imperialism generally was a sign of social regression.6 Everyone can think of non-European customs and institutions that they would like to regard as more ‘progressive’ than Europe’s or America’s – Arab hospitality, say. Second, it is extremely questionable whether such ‘Western’ institutions as have caught on elsewhere, ‘modern’ or not, did so on the backs of ‘imperialism’: unless you want to define imperialism as, simply, the spread of Western culture. Most would almost certainly have spread – and are likely to have spread less problematically (with more adaptation to the requirements of the receiving societies, for example) – through what we might call ‘normal’ intercourse between peoples, including trade. In several instances it has been a case of societies voluntarily adopting foreign customs, rather than their being forced on them; and both ways around: West adopting East, as well as East adopting West – inculturation, again. Lastly, and most importantly: the idea that the ‘Western’ institutions and values listed a couple of paragraphs up – capitalism, democracy and the rest – only arose in the West is astoundingly Eurocentric, and even incipiently racist. Most of them are found flourishing elsewhere, even before they ever took root in Europe or America. Sometimes it was European imperialism that snuffed out the indigenous versions of them. (Indian cotton manufacture is a good example; African forms of popular rule another.) The Cambridge historian Jack Goody has been indefatigable in recent years in pointing this out: tracing the independent traditions of freedom, capitalism, individualism, the rule of law and so on that are found in China and India in particular. A recent book of his is called The Theft of History (CUP, 2006): by which he means the way in which Westerners have dishonestly appropriated so many of these ‘modern’ achievements to themselves. A work that complements this is John Darwin’s recent After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (Penguin, 2007), which shows firstly how close Europe and Asia were in terms of ‘modernity’ until around the middle of the nineteenth century – well into ‘modern times’; and secondly, how very un-modern the majority of European nations and regions

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remained after then. This should give us pause for thought, at the very least, on the question of imperialism’s ‘modernising’ function. But the most serious outcome of this may be the complementary acceptance by many of Europe’s ex-colonial subjects of this double-headed myth: firstly, that ‘modern’ institutions like democracy and capitalism are essentially ‘Western’; and secondly, that they were only able to be imposed on them – the non-Europeans – by this all-powerful imperial force. Naturally that leads them to reject modernity (no-one likes the idea of being forced to do anything); and strengthens the hands of those with reactionary views – like our West African Anglican bishops, and Islamic fundamentalists – who can now paint it as something alien. (An imperial yoke is alien by definition.) One can see this happening today right across the Middle East: liberal ideas resisted largely because they are associated with Western imperialism. Of course this was (and is) the imperialists’ own fault; but it was an unintended one. If there is a prime argument against imperialism, in fact, it must be this: that it is basically counter-productive, even in terms of what you, the imperialist, want to do. That is especially the case when it is presented as having been such a ubiquitous and powerful force in world history; that is, when the re´manence, that after-image of the once-glowing filament, is such a vivid one.

CONCLUSION

One thing this collection of essays will have demonstrated is how complex, multi-faceted and frankly untidy the British Empire was. Indeed, it has been suggested here that the term itself may be a misnomer, if it is taken to imply – as it almost must – that the Empire was something more straightforward and potent than this. ‘Imperialism’, a word that took on its modern, mainly critical meaning around the turn of the twentieth century, can be similarly misused: as a catch-all expression embracing all kinds of policies and events, some deleterious, others not, most of debateable efficacy; which in reality had widely different characters, motivations and origins. It is only by disentangling these strands, discriminating between them, tracing them all back, and analysing their relationships to one another, that we can partially understand the phenomena (plural) that ‘imperialism’ and the British Empire represented. It was not one thing, a single institution or event or root determinant of modern history; but a mix. Nothing illustrates this better than the accounts, given in the middle chapters of this book, of some of the very particular events that characterised the Empire, and of the personalities who participated in it. Their subjects were chosen somewhat randomly; but no alternative selection would have been any less arbitrary, bearing in mind that this was the way the Empire was. ‘Empire builders’, to use a term that became popular in the later nineteenth century, were not a single genus, but represented almost the gamut of British humanity, with very little in common, and certainly not any desire to ‘build’ an ‘empire’, which came to only some of them quite late; but with a variety of different motives, and in circumstances that also differed for each of them. Apart, that is, from one thing: a factor common to many of them that sprang out at me as I was putting that section of the book together; and which it may be worthwhile some young scholar’s looking into more systematically in the future. That is the fact that so many of them seemed to be insecure in their social or class identities in Britain, the home country; coming as they did

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from the interstices between the classes, rather than from the solid, gelled masses of upper, or middle, or working. This idea is not entirely new; it first occurred to me on reading a sociological study of missionaries in southern Africa, most of them aspiring upper-working or lower-middle class;1 what is interesting however is how many other imperialists, apart from the missionaries, shared this characteristic. Every one of my featured personalities did. If this is generally true, and not just the result of an atypical sample, or perhaps a reflection of the insecurity that most Victorians felt in their class situation, it could be significant, at both ends of the imperial spectrum: explaining why certain British men and women became active imperialists, and also their attitudes and behaviours in those roles. If it is reasonable to infer that imperialism abroad was a reflection of British domestic society in some ways, it must modify our view somewhat if it should turn out that the society it reflected was none of the mainstreams, but this ‘intersticial’ one. Imperial attitudes were just as complex. My The Absent-Minded Imperialists sought to show how very varied were British domestic views of the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: ranging from keen enthusiasm for one or another vision or perception of empire, through to outright opposition, but with various degrees of ignorance and apathy in between, which latter probably (I argued, though this is disputed) characterised most British attitudes then. What largely determined these were the very different class, national, religious and (to a lesser extent) gender loyalties that so divided Britain in this period – enough, I think, to undermine any idea of a true ‘British national’ identity then (or now) – which extended to their more adventurous compatriots abroad, as well. There, however – in the colonies or wherever – these were quickly overlaid by another factor: the functional relationships they had with the indigenous populations they now lived among. In the colonies this generally meant exploiting them (sometimes to the extent of enslaving them), ‘exploring’ them, trading with them, governing them, disciplining them (the army), converting them to a ‘higher’ religion, or in a few cases endeavouring to ‘liberate’ them from colonial rule; each of which ‘functions’ conduced to a different attitude towards, for example, ‘race’. (So, in a nutshell, exploiters thought ‘natives’ were so inferior as to deserve being exploited; missionaries that they were equal – otherwise it was pointless persisting with them – but deluded. Hence the frequent rows between these two kinds of imperialist in particular.) British views of the African or Asian, I would suggest, depended far less on any pre-suppositions they may have brought with them from Britain, which were likely to be shallow in any case, than on this. The essay here on ‘Science in Africa’ shows one group of imperialists’ prejudices changing sharply when confronted with realities in the field: in this case

CONCLUSION

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arguably beneficially, though it was not always so. So, not only were the Britons who colonised these places probably not typical Britons; they became even less British over there. Whether or not these observations can be erected or fed into any broader theory of British imperialism has yet to be seen. Personally, I think they fit quite comfortably with the general explanation for the phenomenon that I still favour, somewhat old-fashionedly; which is the economic one. Beneath everything – sometimes quite a way beneath, admittedly – lay the material imperative of expanding capitalism, which was (and still is) dominant, despite some stumbles along the way; and which all these peculiar individuals rode, perforce, in one way or another: sometimes spurring it on, occasionally seeking to rein it back (the governors in Chapter 3), or at least to minimise the harmful impact it was deemed to have on colonial subjects, by modifying or adapting it. Social and cultural influences were no more crucial to it than that. My ‘intersticial’ and ‘functional’ factors are mentioned here not in order to challenge this or any other ‘general’ theory, but simply to show that, however much truth there may be in any of them, British imperialism was far more complex on the ground than will appear if we reduce everything to a theory or a single way of looking at it. Although the prime determinant of modern imperialism was expanding capitalism, for example, it by no means follows (of course) that every imperialist was a capitalist. And some of the other things they were, can tell us a lot. By the same token, many of them were decent people, by almost any way of looking at it. One or two of the ‘goodies’ feature here. That should be obvious, too. (They could not all be bad.) What may be less obvious is that this may not make them the more admirable, judged (in hindsight) by their works. One of the most common instincts among critics is to assume that everything bad in the world is done for unworthy motives: it makes their perpetrators easier to criticise; so that for example the 2003 invasion of Iraq had to be about oil-wells really, rather than the seemingly more honourable motive of liberating the Iraqis from a tyrant. That may have been so (motives are notoriously difficult to untangle in cases like this); the point is, however, that it did not need to be. It is arguable that at least as much damage in the world has been done by people with the best of motives, by their lights, as by sheer villains. Poor judgment, insensitivity, self-delusion, obstinate faith, a narrow perception of what is ‘right’: all can lead to far more disastrous consequences, in any field but especially this colonial one, than cupidity or cheating or hypocrisy. That may have been Tony Blair’s failing, relying as he seemed to on the purity of his motives (to be judged, he said, only by his God) when defending himself for what most people saw as his own contentious decisions vis-a`-vis Iraq in 2003; as if that made them all right. It is important to

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remember that benevolent motives do not always produce beneficent results; with the reverse being occasionally true also – replacing bene by male. That however is less likely. Indeed, most of the atrocities that accompanied the rise and – even more – the fall of the British Empire can be put down to malevolence to a great extent. Three of them are discussed in these chapters: the First Opium War, the Amritsar Massacre, and the suppression of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, with others being referred to more incidentally; but there were of course many more. A number of books has recently appeared analysing them in sanguinary detail: including two on the Kenya ‘Emergency’ (discussed here); one on the ‘End of Empire’, Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon’s Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and two more general ones by John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried (Bookmarks, 2000), and Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (Verso, 2012), which however stops in 1850. That my reviews of those last three books have not found their way into in this collection does not indicate a desire on my part to ‘deny’ or cover up these atrocities (as anyone who might want to look up the original reviews will see);2 but I am more concerned, as an historian, to place them in context, in order to explain them more convincingly than by reference to the old Adam (or Eve) that no doubt lies within all of us. The question is, why did the old Adam come to the surface in these colonial (and Irish) situations, more often – probably – than at home in Britain? (There were atrocities there, but not quite so blatant.) One obvious factor was race: blacks (and Celts) were considered more expendable than whites. Another, however, was the need to take a degraded view of an enemy that one’s function, again – this time as a soldier – was to kill; as certainly happened in the Indian and Kenyan cases, and could be seen recently in the way American troops demonised Iraqis and Afghans. A third was fear, born of the colonists’ small numbers, and so basically of the Empire’s weakness; and often aggravated by the demonisation. Settler greed and upper-class arrogance also played their parts. The significant point, however, is that in most cases it was the colonial environments they found themselves in (and their functions there) that turned ordinary soldiers and others into devils. They had not all been like that when they left home. (Well, perhaps Flashman.) If that might seem to be excusing some of the more dreadful aspects of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century British Empire, then so be it. I may be wrong; but it makes more sense to me to blame circumstances, some of them arising from the fundamental contradictions of imperialism, than the individuals who were caught up in these circumstances, or the cultures from which they sprang. ‘Blame’, however, is an uncomfortable word for an historian. That is not what we are here on this earth for. New books on the British Empire are often

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scrutinised initially to determine whether they are ‘for’ or ‘against’ it. I hope in the case of the present book that the scrutineers will be left nonplussed. It is neither ‘pro’ nor ‘anti’. It simply – together with my other books on the subject – seeks to explain. Of course I have my own views on various modern manifestations of Western – and Eastern, and for that matter Islamic – ‘imperialism’, as a concerned citizen and amateur observer of world affairs. Some of these views will probably have half-surfaced in the previous pages. But I would not like to be judged by them; only by whether I have furnished an accurate enough picture of certain aspects of historical British imperialism to allow others to come to fair and sophisticated judgments about it, one way or the other, rather than ignorant or superficial ones. * It will be obvious from all the loose ends left dangling from this book – more than would be expected from a through-written history – that there is much more work to be done in this field; especially, I would suggest – if only because it bears on my own most recent area of imperial archival research – on the relationship between imperialism and its wider British societal context. That this was also complex should go without saying. It is wrong to assume that simply because the British Empire was – or was presented as – so large and powerful, it must have ‘dominated’ British domestic society and culture. (The chapter here on ‘Imperialism Contested’ has something on this ‘must have been’ trap.) It is also jejune to think that simply trying to quantify imperial or colonial references or effects in any area of British society, culture and politics, in order to measure them against others, will tell us much more about the degree and nature of their impact. This is partly because ‘imperial’ references can be ambivalent: take John MacKenzie’s ‘imperial cluster’, for example, which assumes monarchism, militarism, hero-worship, the cult of personality and scientific racism to be clear signs of imperialism, when they might not have been, even in imperial times;3 secondly because some even undoubted imperial references may be superficial – who for example is significantly reminded of the Empire by Cusson’s Imperial Leather soap, or India pale ale, or Ceylon tea; and lastly because it is perfectly possible that imperial enthusiasms could (but not ‘must’) have been left unsaid: taken for granted, perhaps. (This would of course undermine one of the central arguments of The Absent-Minded Imperialists; but it has to be acknowledged as a possibility.) More than that, however, this static and quantitative way of looking at the impact of imperial ideas ignores the way discourses are affected by other contemporary discourses, in ways that can quite fundamentally transform them, and thus make it impossible to distinguish the relative importance of

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any of them. This is touched on in the ‘Further Thoughts’ chapter earlier, where I use mayonnaise-making as a simile to illustrate this: with the raw egg being the ‘imperial’ discourse, but so mixed with and transformed by the other ingredients as to make it impossible to determine which of them is even relatively ‘dominant’, and rather meaningless to try. The same thing is true at the other end of the colonial relationship, as the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski argued in the case of culture contact between ‘Western’ and other societies, leading generally to new cultural syntheses among the latter, or what he called ‘culture change’. For him, this was what made the researches of the anthropologists vital. It was they who could uncover the contexts that governed the indige`nes’ reception of the new cultural practices being introduced to them.4 The same is required, I would say, on the British domestic front. Before we can assess the importance of ‘imperialism’ to stayat-home Britons in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we need to take full account of the broader discursive context in which it may have operated; not simply in order to determine which discourses (if any) were ‘dominant’, but to discover how contact among them modified – even metamorphosed – them all. In other words, we need social, cultural, political and many other kinds of historians, not just imperial, to help us with the job. At the end of the ‘Further Thoughts’ chapter I suggest this as a possible path for the future: a way to pull the debate on ‘domestic imperialism’ out of the rut of assertion and counter-assertion into which it has become stuck recently (partly my fault), and take it forward in a more constructive and genuinely illuminating way. In all types of history, context is all. In this case there is an awful lot of context to take on board – all those competing and reacting discourses – and so an awful lot of work, as well as a wide range of historical skills, involved. It is too much for me, at my age, and almost certainly too much in toto for any younger and cleverer historian. Probably the best way to approach it is piecemeal. I made a start to this with my book on the debate over the building of a new Foreign Office building in the 1850s and 1860s, The Battle of the Styles (Continuum, 2011), of which the ‘Architecture and Empire’ chapter here is a spin-off; in the book itself ‘Empire’ appears as just one of the discourses that fed into that debate, and not as it happens the major one. As well as this, future historians might like to look abroad for another kind of context: foreign imperial comparisons that could also throw light on the British picture. It is John MacKenzie – ever the pioneer - who has made the start here, with his recent edited volume European Empires and the People (MUP, 2011), covering ‘popular imperialism’ (or the lack of it) in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy as well as Britain; and highly suggestively. (For a start, it has a bearing on the ‘must have been’ point.)5 Non-imperial nations (ostensibly) might also be looked at; for

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example, to see whether they exhibited any of MacKenzie’s ‘imperial cluster’ of ideas without empires to link them to. This must be the way to go. Other lines of enquiry have also been suggested here, albeit more tentatively. Most of them arise from the need, as I see it, to disaggregate the various strands that are so often lumped together indiscriminately as ‘imperialism’, in order to make better – if more complex – sense of the whole phenomenon. For example, the differences between directly ruled colonies (Chapter 3), and those that I describe (Chapter 1) as ‘privatised’, were sharp enough to suggest that it was ‘privatisation’, or unfettered capitalism, that was the crucial factor in the latter case; which would link it more closely to what today is called ‘globalisation’, and its effects (‘privatisation’ at home), than to the other and rather more exceptional formal kind of imperialism. The motor power of nineteenth-century European and American imperialism in the world was undoubtedly (it seems to me) the growth of capitalism; but the people who administered it were rarely capitalists themselves. Indeed, many of them had been brought up – in their ‘public’ schools – to rather despise the activities and values of the business classes: ‘he’s in trade, you know’ (with a sneer); seeing themselves as heirs to an earlier and more moral tradition, of noblesse oblige, paternalism, feudalism – call it what you will. In some of the most formally-ruled colonies they actually managed to hold back the process of capitalist exploitation. It was where this kind of ‘imperialism’ was weak or absent – settler colonies, in particular – that most of the cruder exploitation, for good or ill, took place. In cases where this was problematic, therefore, it could be said that it was because there was too little ‘imperialism’, rather than too much (see Chapter 26). ‘Privatisation’ – a distinct strand from the ‘imperial’ one – was the real villain (or, by the other way of looking at it, the hero) of the piece. And of course it is still going on. This may seem to be splitting hairs; but the distinction is important, in helping account for the ‘muddle’ that I see as one of the main features of the British Empire, and of its legacies, in the modern period. Other hairs that need to be split – mentioned already – are those between the classes in Britain and their ‘interstices’; between colonists’ functions overseas; and between different kinds and degrees of anti-imperialism – which was what my first book was about – and their relationships with alternative discourses, including the pro-imperial ones. All this with a view to complicating the picture, disabusing us of the idea that ‘British imperialism’ was an homogeneous – let alone hegemonic – factor, explicable in its own terms; and encouraging a more sophisticated appreciation of it, and of its context. The subject is by no means played out yet. *

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Its importance as an area of study has if anything increased in recent years, with the emergence of certain powerful myths about the Empire and imperialism (discussed in Chapter 29). History is valuable; but it is myth that usually wins out in the public arena. The Old and New Testaments and the stock American view of their nation’s origin and early history are examples. We all saw the harm that could be done, or at least exacerbated, by imperial and other myths at the time of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003: the false parallels that were drawn from what the Americans took to be their experience of World War II (Baghdaders welcoming their liberators with flowers like Parisians in 1944); and the examples that several neo-Cons drew from British imperial history to justify ruling their new de facto subjects for their own good. Max Boot’s appeal (see Chapter 25) to those ‘self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’ whom he thought Americans should emulate, in order to save Afghanistan, was an example of that. Of course these readings of history, or of its implications, are highly flawed. So are many of the versions of Britain’s imperial past being peddled today for what sometimes seem to be deliberately propagandistic reasons: in order to foster a sense either of national guilt, or, on the contrary, of self-confidence and pride. Both are misleading in two ways. The first is that they exaggerate and over-generalise, albeit on different sides of the story. The second is that they make too much of the British Empire’s potency, either for good or for ill. The subtitle of Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, says it all. The main error there is not that it attributes too much good to the British Empire, but that it attributes too much to it – full stop. That is why it is nothing for a Briton to be particularly proud or ashamed of; together with the point already made in this book, that no-one has responsibility for anything that occurred before his or her time; and one other, that we cannot know anything for sure. Unfortunately this is where academic history often comes into conflict with the kind of history some politicians would like disseminated, particularly in schools. They see it as a means to impart a sense of national or cultural identity in children, to cement and strengthen the ‘nation’, or ‘society’, for the tasks that they believe lie before it: in other words, to teach ‘patriotism’. This is not new. One of the first and most famous histories of British imperialism, JR Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883), was written with an overt political motive: in order to remind his compatriots, and especially the schoolchildren of his time, of what they seemed to be unaware of: that they had a great empire, that it was central to an understanding of British history, and that it had emphatically not been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. Something like this was Niall Ferguson’s purpose too, especially in his third book on this general theme, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Penguin, 2011), written,

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as he said, for ‘a 17-year old boy or girl’ – ah, that impressionable age – to ‘get a lot of history in a very digestible way, and be able to relate to it’; and in particular to put over to him or her a grand narrative (he calls it the ‘big story’): which was the domination of the modern world by ‘Western’ civilisation. This was in order to bolster Western children’s sense of cultural identity, and consequently their ability to defend that identity against external threats. Otherwise, he feared, ‘civilisation’ (without the ‘Western’ now) could very quickly collapse. This was what they should be taught. Unfortunately that lesson was being lost under the malign influence of modern ‘educational theorists’, with their ‘aversion to formal knowledge and rote-learning’; their preference for ‘everyone’s history but our own’, usually in ‘chunks’; and their obsession with ‘study skills’ and textual analysis. Ferguson’s general approach also appealed to the former Conservative Education Minister, Michael Gove, who, when seeking to devise a new history syllabus for the schools under his charge, took him on board. All this might be acceptable if the proper purpose of history teaching were to instil patriotism. But of course no modern educationalist – ‘theorist’ or otherwise – would subscribe to this. (Most history teachers in Britain, unlike in some other countries, have always resisted this idea.) In any case no grand narrative is strong and certain enough to bear this weight. Ferguson must have known that his own ‘big story’ was only one way of looking at modern world history: idiosyncratic in many ways, and far to the right – or one of the rights – of the political spectrum. Even Civilization’s subtitle was highly problematical (just as Empire’s was). The West and the Rest sets up a dichotomy that is profoundly false in many ways, and of course patronising to the people he lumps together as (his word) ‘Resterners’. That is quite apart from his appropriation – in his main title – of the word ‘civilisation’ to cover only the (mainly) capitalist world and the materialist values associated with it. And – lastly, so far as these big issues are concerned – there is his claim, repeated throughout the book, that ‘Western’ predominance in the world has lasted 500 years, no less. That of course is emphatically not what most imperial historians believe. A mere 150– 200 years is their usual estimate.6 But even if they are all wrong, this at least shows that there can be no agreement about the ‘facts’ of even the grandest narrative. (I would have the same objection to more left-wing narratives, like Richard Gott’s. Of course it might be OK if pupils read both, critically.) That is why schoolchildren need to be taught ‘study skills and textual analysis’, alongside anything else. I am sorry if this does little for ‘patriotism’; but that is not the purpose of history. To me it looks more like prostituting it. Thankfully in this little contest Gove soon saw the sense in what the professionals were telling him,7 and shortly afterwards left the Education Ministry in any case; so that the history syllabus,

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when it appears, may not be so dire. (This is written in December 2014.) But the ‘patriotic’ angle is bound to come up again. This is not to say that there are no valuable lessons to be learnt from the history of the British Empire, approached in this critical sort of way; albeit none of them with absolute certainty, because of the complexity (‘muddle’) of the subject, and the different interpretations this can give rise to. The first is one that will not appeal much to Conservatives and patriots, but is all the same almost certainly valid, and of immense importance to the way we look at the world. We have seen that ‘atrocities’ happened under British colonial rule; some of them rivalling, in seriousness, any of the worst crimes committed by other nations elsewhere or at any other time. There is no hiding this any more. The British could be beastly just like anyone else: no more so, perhaps, and this is not to ignore the ‘better’ side of British imperialism; but not much less than most other nations; to which exactly the same generalisation applies. Beastliness is a human characteristic, not a national – let alone, I think (though I am not sure) a gendered – one; it depends on circumstances and acquired cultures, and any group of people is liable to it. It does little harm to any country, in its relations with others, to be reminded of this. Britain’s colonial (and Irish) history can perform this function in her case. It could also serve as a warning. Colonial atrocities were usually unintended originally. Few if any Brits went into a colony with the object of slaughtering or starving or torturing or (after 1807) enslaving its people; most of them went there either with the object of doing ‘good’, or with the comfort of believing that ‘good’ would be a significant side-effect. The situations they found themselves in, however, together with their ordinary human weaknesses, and infection from the cultures and prejudices of the groups of other colonialists they found themselves among, often changed all that. Even if it did not produce ‘atrocity’, the results could be outcomes radically different from what had been intended, or could have been predicted. One reason is the ‘muddle’ factor again. Human societies are highly complex and diverse organisms. Imperialists, of most kinds, tended to assume not: that they were all the same basically, at different ‘stages’ of ‘development’, perhaps, but those stages common to them all; and that consequently one pattern or theory of social organisation must fit them all. The American neo-Cons were some of the worst offenders in this regard, with their touching (and highly egalitarian) faith that everyone was naturally democratic and capitalist, so that all that had to be done was to remove the ‘tyrannies’ that were holding these qualities back in order for Iraq, for example, to revert to universal type. It did not work; firstly because democracy and capitalism, at least in their American forms, may not in fact be the best or most ‘natural’ forms of social organisation there are; secondly because they might not fit every case; and

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thirdly because they are likely to be resented anyway, if they are imposed from outside. Alien intervention to enforce new customs, religions and forms of government is always fraught with peril. The new ‘liberal imperialists’ of the Iraq– Afghan war era found that to their cost. It might have been less costly if they had been less arrogant, idealistic even; been more culturally sensitive; and – dare I say it? – read my Lion’s Share, or one of a number of other good academic histories of British imperialism. These would have told them where to look out for the mantraps. Most of those derived from the fact that imperialism is essentially artificial. Not for the imperial powers themselves, perhaps: territorial expansion has been going on for so long (probably since the Cro-magnons) as to suggest that there must be something ‘natural’ about it; but from the points of view of their subjects, or victims, whose ordinary progress (or lack of it) is thereby interrupted and turned into other channels than the ones they would have followed otherwise. This is imperialism’s greatest drawback, the source of its most intractable problems and egregious errors, and probably therefore the best argument against it. There are of course several points that could be made on the other side. One is that it is the only way to spread ‘progress’, in the so-called ‘progressive’ sense of the word. Without the West imposing democracy, free markets, human rights and the rest on all those ‘Resterners’, the latter would have remained stuck in their backward, primitive ruts. It is a pity about the disruption, but there is no gain without pain. It is not confined to colonies, after all; ‘backward’ subcultures in Western societies have been ‘modernised’ equally brutally – look, in recent times, at the South Yorkshire coalfields in Britain. To which the answers may be – there is no room to go into the details of them here – that these changes may not be all that ‘progressive’ really; that ‘progress’, in these forms and in others, is not the sole prerogative of the ‘West’, but to be found in many other cultures (Jack Goody, cited in Chapter 29, is the authority here); that there are instances where Western imperialism did not even attempt to ‘modernise’ its subjects (see Chapter 3); and that it is possible – even likely – that the rest of the world could have ‘modernised’, therefore, without Western imperial intervention, at least of the most interventionist kind, and in more successful ways, especially if it felt it was its own choice, rather than an alien imposition: look at Japan. In other words, even where imperialism could be said to be an agent of ‘modernisation’, it might not have been the most efficient one. The wider world might have been more happily democratic, entrepreneurial, liberal and the rest – or any other set of arguably preferable qualities – if it had been left to itself. One can imagine a counter-factual history along these lines. Between these two scenarios, there is a third; which is that the West might have been more sensitive in imposing its ways, working with the local cultural

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grains rather than against them, respectful of those local customs that were not fatal to its agenda, and building on the seeds of ‘progress’ it found in its colonies: tribal democracy in Africa, craftwork enterprise in India, Arab trading systems, and so on. That would have required a more empathetic study of non-European cultures than the ideologues – Christian, Americandemocratic, free market – clearly believed was necessary, in view of what they perceived as the superiority, even perfection, of their own ways. To be fair: this was occasionally sought after in the British case: firstly by a number of imperialists after some time living in – and so learning to appreciate – their new environments; and secondly by the anthropological profession from the 1920s on. Anthropology in particular was seen as a possible means of adapting and easing the transition from ‘primitivism’ to ‘modernity’, in ways that would prevent the friction – so damaging and expensive to the colonial power – that imposing change so often provoked. The downside was that anthropologists – living among the societies they studied (this was their distinctive methodology) – too often came to respect those societies too much to want to change them. The results, carried into policy, were some of the more stagnant examples of what the British called ‘Indirect Rule’. The other problem with what might be regarded as the ‘ideal’ solution to the problem of imperialism – that is, ‘anti-imperialism’, or abstinence – was that it failed to cater to the humanitarian impulse that undoubtedly motivated many ‘Westerners’ and others in the twentieth and early twentyfirst centuries – we are focussing just on these ‘goodies’ for the moment – when they read about massacres and abject tyranny in various parts of the world (including the West: the Balkans, for example), and felt they ought to ‘do something about’ them if they could. That is not an ignoble motive. (I am sure it was genuine in Blair’s case.) Armed intervention is the traditional, ‘liberal imperialist’ solution to this. It is sometimes difficult to know what more ‘abstinent’ policy could effectively take its place. Sometimes it can be argued that the root of the tyranny or massacre or civil war in question lay with a past era of European imperialism: Sudan’s southern border, for example (Chapter 17); but that is not much help today. The problems are the same as with any other kind of imperialism: a ‘good’ cause hijacked by the ‘baddies’ (oil interests, for example); insensitivity provoking reaction, typically today by Islamic fundamentalists; intervention labelled as the more acquisitive sort of imperialism, even if it is not; and that exasperating ‘law of unintended consequences’. Does that mean, then, that the Iraqis, or Tutsi, Kosovans, Syrians or whoever should be left to their dreadful fates, without other countries lifting a finger to help? Hopefully not. The trick may be to intervene in ways that seem less ‘imperialist’: if possible internationally (this was JA Hobson’s dream, see Chapter 22), with clear and limited objectives, aware of and sensitive to local

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susceptibilities, and, in most cases, stopping short of ‘regime change’. Better to tame a tyrant, if possible, than to replace him with a puppet, or – through the imposition of an imperfect ‘democracy’ – to open the gates of bloody anarchy. Human lives, after all, are the main consideration. Ultimately it all comes down to wise diplomacy. (But most diplomats, if not their political masters and mistresses, will know this.) * It is all too easy to attribute many of the troubles of today’s world to British imperialism: which is questionable not only because other imperialisms were also involved, as well as factors that had little to do with imperialism; nor because British imperialism can be said to have contributed some good things too (the spread of cricket being probably the least contentious example); but rather because ‘imperialism’ was not just one thing, but – to repeat – a bundle of factors and trends and influences roughly marshalled under that name mainly for convenience, all of which had a mix of different origins and motives, which need to be carefully unpicked before deciding on the responsibility of any of them for anything. The ‘Empire’ that vaguely emerged from all this was a huge, untidy mess; uneven; undeliberately – even, yes, absent-mindedly – acquired; retained only with a degree of luck, for what in broad historical terms was really a very short time; ‘unfinished’, to use John Darwin’s word for it;8 contradictory; unevenly appreciated by the British (let alone its subjects); basically vulnerable, even at its height, whenever that was; and so doomed to decline (much earlier than it appeared to) and then to fall. On the more positive side, it is equally evident that the British Empire’s part in ‘making the modern world’ has been exaggerated. Other things ‘made’ the modern world more. One is the growth of capitalism, which the British Empire sometimes facilitated, but just as often held back. And there are others. British imperialism simply rode these grand imperatives of history. It was not responsible for most of them. That is my – sub-Marxist – take on it, anyway. This is why it needs to be deconstructed, in the sense of taken apart, before we can come close to understanding it. If nothing else, the essays in this collection may have facilitated this. They illustrate the variety of forms that British imperialism took in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the multiplicity of causes and motives behind it; and the highly confused ‘muddle’ it left afterwards. They may also carry some warnings – those mantraps; which is the best, I think, a historian can do by way of drawing ‘lessons’. Alien rule or domination is always problematical. (It was in Britain’s own case, under the brutal Romans and Normans. Some of us still have not forgiven them. What did the Romans do for us? Or the Normans? We would

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probably still have had Durham Cathedral without the latter. And perhaps a less snooty aristocracy.) Of course if you are just out for glory, and you think that ‘bigness’ contributes to that, you will not mind. The problem for the British Empire – the reason it gave up the ghost eventually – may have been that not enough Britons felt that way.

APPENDIX WHERE I COME FROM

Every historian is a product of his or her own history, which is bound to have an impact on their history writing. In my case, I’ve been writing about British imperialism now, on and off, since the late 1960s. But I came to the field accidentally. Here I differ, I think, from most other imperial historians, who can usually point to some connection with the Empire that sparked their interest in it early in their lives. I knew virtually nothing about the British Empire as a child. I had early neighbours who emigrated to New Zealand; so far as we were concerned they just disappeared. There were no other personal or family connections with the colonies that I remember. I read Kipling, but just the stories about how the elephant got his trunk, and so on; none of the overtly imperial or macho stuff, like If. . . I vaguely knew he was connected with India, but assumed – from his portraits – that he was an Indian; as he was, in a way. (See Chaper 14.) I don’t remember ever reading Henty, or any of his ilk. I preferred the Dan Dare comic strip, which I can now see was tainted with (liberal) imperialism – though more, I think, by World War II. (Rockets looking like Lancaster bombers shorn of their wings, the Mekon as a kind of Hitler, Dan’s ‘batman’ Digby – very 1940s – and much more. Even futurology is a child of its time.) I don’t remember Dan Dare ever colonising a planet. We were taught nothing about the British Empire at my (‘Direct Grant Grammar’) school, though I remember Trevor Huddleston once coming to talk to us about apartheid. (But South Africa was a foreign country.) My church (Methodist) never invited missionaries along to talk. I must have been aware that ‘we’ had colonies, but they meant nothing to me, at a conscious level at least. (Of course I may have soaked some of this up unknowingly.) I was dimly aware of the Suez crisis, but not that it had anything to do with ‘imperialism’. Vietnam and South African apartheid had a greater impact, from the 1960s on. Even then, CND was my favourite

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‘cause’. I was the only undergraduate in my Cambridge college to join the Labour Club. I remember – or think I do – always being instinctively anti-racist, and unimpressed by patriotism. If I had been ‘proud’ of being British it wouldn’t have been because of ‘our’ empire. I was – and am – prouder of the fact that ‘we’ invented cricket. (Actually not ‘we’: what did I have to do with it? Which is my reason for not taking ‘pride’ in, or for that matter accepting blame for, anything that happened before my time.) I followed cricket avidly, and so knew of the existence, at least, though not quaˆ ‘colonies’, of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the West Indies, India and Pakistan. But that was all. Was I unique in this? Sometimes, reading similar autobiographical introductions by other imperial historians, with doctor-fathers in Africa and the like, I think I must have been. Or was it more typical of my class – lowermiddle, recently emerged from ‘working’ – than of theirs? Or maybe of that particular, immediately postwar time? As an undergraduate I studied no imperial history at all. This was at the very moment that the British Empire was being dismantled; which is maybe why. The only imperial course taught at Cambridge – tellingly entitled ‘The Expansion of Europe’ – was offered only as a marginal alternative to the History of Political Philosophy, which did interest me; ‘Expansion’ was generally regarded as a safety-net for students who couldn’t cope cerebrally with ‘Thought’. I didn’t want to be considered one of those. My decision to turn to the Empire later stemmed from this. Wishing to embark on postgraduate work in some area of political ideology, and doing the rounds of friendly dons for advice, I met the great imperial historian Ronald (‘Robbie’) Robinson, who told me he thought that the history of anti-imperialism was a glaring gap in his subject, which someone with my proclivities might fill. So I started work on JA Hobson, at first; which eventually led to my PhD thesis, under Robbie, and to Critics of Empire, my first book. It also got me meeting colonial ‘subjects’ – other graduate students in Robbie’s imperial history seminars – for the first time. Obviously working on anti-imperialism meant that I needed to bone up, rather late in the day, on British imperial history itself. As I did, I grew dissatisfied with the general accounts of it available then; most of them by old colonial hands, or men (always men) with more empire in their backgrounds than I had. Their main theme was usually the evolution of the present-day ‘Commonwealth’, with the Empire as a kind of prologue to this, which is how imperialists had liked to present it ever since imperialism as conquest came to be rather disapproved of internationally, around 1918. The only other sort of imperial histories around then tended to be polemically anti; with a great deal of justification, I thought (Hobson had left his mark on me), but written in a

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tone likely to put uncommitted readers off, and grotesquely oversimplified. To me, approaching the subject from a different direction from theirs (or so I thought), there seemed to be another ‘gap’ here. So I set to work on my second book, The Lion’s Share, originally subtitled A Short History of British Imperialism, though in the course of four further editions it has now grown rather long. It took ages to write (later on, under pressure from short-termist university ‘research assessment exercises’ and the like, I would not have been given the time to do it), but I think it was worthwhile. I then wandered into other historical areas – political refugees, policing, secret service, relations with Europe; but in a way that I think usefully informed my understanding of British imperialism, when I returned to that subject with The Absent-Minded Imperialists around 2000. It enabled me to view the subject from outside, in context. Together with my own empirelite background, it led me to question the idea, which by then had become fashionable, that the Empire must have permeated almost everything in British nineteenth and twentieth-century society and culture, simply because it was there. The Absent-Minded Imperialists came as a result of these doubts, after long labour in the archives, which merely confirmed them – more so than I had expected (believe me). For someone who had written the leading textbook history of British imperialism it might seem odd to seek to downplay his subject and so endanger his royalties in this way: indeed, one reviewer commented on this; and it turned out to be a highly controversial thesis – more so than I had anticipated. My reply to the controversy, thus far, is printed as ‘Further thoughts on imperial absent-mindedness’ here. By then we were well into the Iraq war; which seemed to me, in common with most other British imperial historians, immensely redolent of a number of events in our own history (the favourite parallel was Gladstone’s invasion of Egypt in 1882); which prompted me to write Empire and Superempire, a short book designed to show the similarities and continuities between the two kinds of ‘imperialism’. (The problem, as I saw it, was that Americans like Donald Rumsfeld – ‘we don’t do empire’ – had little understanding of the British Empire they were trying to distance themselves from.) That’s my history as a historian. What more might readers need to know? I was brought up in the south of England, but now identify more with the north, where I have been based since 1968. I’ve lived and worked abroad a lot, especially in the United States and Australia, and currently live in Sweden much of the time, with a feminist and post-modernist academic, which has broadened my outlook even more. (I have no problems with the feminism.) It has also made me aware of the depths of most foreigners’ ignorance of the realities of British imperialism. I’ve mixed a lot with different ‘classes’ of British society – working-class

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relatives, middle-class schoolmates, some pretty upper-class university friends, especially as a fellow of an almost laughably reactionary college. (I resigned my fellowship over this – it was to do with their admissions policy, favouring public schools.) So I may be a little ‘interstitial’ (see the Conclusion) myself. I have links with Scotland and Ireland via my Scots-Irish former wife. Politically I’m still Labour, except when Labour becomes too conservative. But I think that has been as a result of my study of history, more than an influence on it. (I could be wrong.) I can’t think of anything else that is pertinent to the matter in hand – taste in music, hobbies, favourite football team, ethnicity (‘white’ English with a bit of Celtic), age (pretty old), gender (I’m sure that’s important) – but of course anything might be. I do try to compensate in my work for my personal political and other leanings. But, again, only those that I am conscious of.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’ll try to keep my thanks and acknowledgements brief, though after a longish career I obviously owe debts to many people I shall not have room to mention here. The book originated in a suggestion of Lester Crook’s, of I.B.Tauris, who knows his imperial history, and to whom I owe an enormous debt for seeing the project through. Secondly, I must thank Wm Roger Louis for his support, advice, hospitality in Austin Texas (where some of these papers were first delivered), and for setting an example for me with his much more substantial and masterly collection of essays, Ends of British Imperialism, published by I.B.Tauris in 2006. I owe a great deal to my early schoolteachers, especially Alan Mould and Peter Watkins, and to (the late) ‘Robbie’ Robinson at Cambridge; to many of my academic colleagues over the years, especially at the University of Hull, whom it would be invidious to single out; and to generations of the students I have taught, and have taught me much in return, at Cambridge, Hull, Newcastle, Yale, Sydney, Stockholm and Copenhagen universities. All their libraries, plus the Bodleian in Oxford and the British Library and PRO (as I still prefer to call it) in London, have been immensely helpful. The British Academy has given me financial help at crucial times. Many of the chapters in this book are based on essays previously appearing in journals, albeit usually reworked to fit them for their present role. The editors of these journals deserve especial thanks, both for giving space to and in many instances commissioning them, and for allowing their re-publication (freely) here. I’d like to single out Paul Laity at the London Review of Books here; it was he who originally and unexpectedly picked me out of a thousand boring academic historians and launched me on my new career as a (kind of) journalist, and then later took me with him to the Guardian. I shall be ever grateful to him for that. I owe further debts to some very pro-active editors of journals, especially Mary-Kay Wilmers of the London Review of Books, but also David Horsfall of the Times Literary

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Supplement and Paul Lay and his predecessors at History Today. One of the great virtues, from my point of view, of all three of these journals, but especially the London Review of Books, is that even in the case of ‘review essays’ they allow their contributors to ‘hang’ their own arguments on their reviews – just as Victorian essayists like Macaulay did. That’s what I have done with these. (Not that I should want to compare myself with the great Lord M.) The details are as follows. From History Today comes ‘Cutting the Empire Down to Size’ (October 2012). From the London Review of Books come ‘Science in Africa’ (10 May 2012); ‘Cannabis and Empire’ (4 March 2004); ‘The War of 1812’ (21 February 2008); ‘The Opium Wars’ (3 November 2011); ‘The Falklands War’ (20 October 2005); ‘Lady Hester Stanhope’ (23 October 2008); ‘Rudyard Bloody Kipling’ (25 October 2002); ‘Lord Cromer’ (18 November 2005); ‘Henry Morton Stanley’ (5 April 2007); ‘The Mercenary’ (18 January 2012); ‘Atrocity in Kenya’ (3 March, 2005); ‘The Central African Federation’ (May 2006); ‘Decolonisation in Asia’ (2 August 2007); and ‘Secret Services’ (21 March 2013). From the Times Literary Supplement come ‘The Men on the Spot’ (12 May 2000, and 6 January 2012); ‘Victoria’s Other Wars’ (21 July 2006); ‘George Bogle’ (8 June 2006); and ‘The Butcher of Amritsar’ (22 July 2005). From the Guardian come ‘Stamford Raffles’ (8 December 2012); and ‘More Explorers’ (27 August 2011). A version of ‘Wealth or Commonwealth’ first appeared in Richard Maltby and Peter Quartermaine (eds), The Commonwealth. A Common Culture? (University of Exeter Press, 1989). ‘Further Thoughts on Imperial AbsentMindedness’ was first published in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 36 (2008). ‘Elgar and Empire’ was first published in Wm Roger Louis (ed.), Still More Adventures with Britannia (I.B.Tauris, 2002); a shortened version of a much longer paper, appearing in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 29 (2001). ‘Architecture and Empire’ originally appeared in The British Scholar, vol. 2 (2010). ‘Imperialism Contested’ is an unpublished paper read to a conference on ‘Reviewing Imperial Conflicts’, University of Lisbon, 28 October 2011; ‘After-Images’ is a paper read to a Franco-British Council conference on Colonial History, Paris, 29 January 2009. The remainder – ‘Zulu Wars’, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, and the ‘Conclusion’ – have not previously appeared in any form. On a more personal note, I’m afeared of naming my friends in case I miss anyone out; but Haroon, Anne, John, Diana, Robin, Sally, Theo, Glen, Philip, Howell, Gaynor, Deirdre and (going further back) Alan and Jill will know who they are. Even closer to me, and wonderfully supportive, have been my children and grandchildren, and my partner Kajsa and her progeny – my bonusbarn and bonusbarnbarn. Lastly, I’m very grateful to have been brought up

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during the great period of the British welfare state, without whose support I can’t imagine myself doing the half of what I have done in my career. I might have skipped university (at £9,000 a year) and become a banker. Then you wouldn’t be reading this book. Whether or not that would have been a great loss is for you to say. (I’d have made a worse banker, believe me.)

NOTES

Chapter 1 Cutting the Empire Down to Size 1. John Bright and Thorold Rogers (eds), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden (1870), vol. 2, pp. 362–63.

Chapter 2 Wealth or Commonwealth? The History of a Paradox 1. John Bright and Thorold Rogers (eds), Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by Richard Cobden (1870), vol. 2, p. 10 2. Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850– 1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 3. John Rae, ‘Teach British to be Pirates, not Prefects’, in Observer, 6 April 1980.

Chapter 4

Science in Africa

1. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). 2. Africa, vol. 3 no. 2 (April 1930), p. 217.

Chapter 6 The War of 1812 1. John Major, ‘War Plan Red: The American Plan for War with Britain’, in Historian, vol. 58 no. 1 (1998).

Chapter 14

Rudyard Bloody Kipling

1. Letter to Frank Webb, 27 March 1892; in Percy M. Young (ed.), Letters of Edward Elgar and other Writings (1956), p. 55. 2. Alaric Jacob, Scenes from a Bourgeois Life (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).

Chapter 15

Lord Cromer

1. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (London: Allen Lane, 2003).

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Chapter 16 Stanley 1. See E.D. Morel, Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Slave Trade on the Congo (Manchester: The National Labour Press, 1906).

Chapter 21

Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness

1. In Victorian Studies, vol. 47 no. 4 (Summer 2005). 2. In The Round Table, vol. 94 no. 379, April 2005, p. 281. 3. Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, its Empire, and their Imperial Culture’, in Journal of British Studies, vol. 45 (July 2006), p. 620. 4. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2003). 5. For Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s views on the British Empire, see John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: Free Press, 2003), p. 4; and Daily Mail, 15 January 2005. 6. See Anthony Daniels, ‘Liberte´, Egalite´, Colonialisme’, in National Review, 31 December 2005. 7. ‘Japan’s rising nationalism enrages Asia’, in Observer, 15 July 2001. 8. For example, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin, 2005). 9. See for example Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash. On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), pp. 3 – 4; and Windschuttle’s own ‘In defense of colonialism’, in American Outlook, vol. V no. 3 (Summer, 2003). 10. Most of these, it has to be said, were internet ‘bloggers’, commenting before the book was even published: ‘I have no idea what The Absent-Minded Imperialists is really like, having not read it, but I can make some wild conjectures’: ‘Detrimental Postulation’, 9 December 2004; but they also include Alejandro Cola´s, in his Empire (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 7. 11. David Cannadine in Sunday Times, 21 November 2004; Noel Malcolm, ‘Empire? What Empire?’ in Sunday Telegraph, 12 December 2004; and Jan Morris, ‘By jingo, he’s got it’, in Observer, 5 December 2004. 12. MacKenzie in The Round Table, loc. cit., p. 283; Burton in Victorian Studies, loc. cit., p. 628. Others to make this point were Dane Kennedy, ‘Are Imperialists Zealots?’, in HAlbion, June 2005; Richard Price, ‘One Big Thing: Britain, its Empire, and their Imperial Culture’, in Journal of British Studies, vol. 45 (July 2006) and Stuart Ward, ‘Echoes of Empire’, in History Workshop Journal, issue 62 (2006). 13. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 103. 14. ‘Would Porter be surprised if I called his project the English Subaltern Project? He is, after all, reading the silences of the working class living in the metropoles of England.’ Chapati Mystery (blogsite), 20 February 2005. 15. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1996); speech by Pope Benedict XVI at Auschwitz, 28 May 2006. 16. The origins of Said’s particular viewpoint (or bias) become clear when one reads his autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2000). He lived in Egypt, Palestine and America. His experience of Britain and the British seems to have been mainly confined to a crazy English-type ‘public’ school he attended in Cairo, and the cruelty of British soldiers there: in other words at the sharp end of British imperialism. He held no post in any British university. The bibliography for Culture and Imperialism includes few histories of either Britain or even the British Empire, apart from a book of mine, which he misreads (see Critics of Empire, re-issue, 2007, new Introduction). His

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18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

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understanding of the overall impact of imperialism on British society, therefore, was almost bound to be defective. I should add that I had a tremendous admiration for Said’s work and activities in every other area he involved himself in, including political. A number of other critics, I think, made too much of my own ‘facts’. In particular, Burton (Victorian Studies, loc. cit., p. 637), Richard Price (Journal of British Studies, loc. cit., p. 618), and Stuart Ward (History Workshop Journal, loc. cit., p. 272) seized on my count of column inches in Hansard (Absent-Minded Imperialists, p. 356n.) to indicate a far more pedantic approach than I had really taken, and totally misread the significance I was supposed to have claimed for them. In fact the only conclusion I drew from these calculations was that they did ‘not indicate any great neglect’ of the Empire (p. 89) – the opposite of what Burton and Co. inferred. MacKenzie in Round Table, loc. cit., p. 281. Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2005). On the theatrical point, John later referred me to Edward Ziter’s The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for evidence of enormously more ‘imperialism’ than I had been able to discover. In fact when I got round to it I found that it features only three plays with even marginally ‘imperial’ (Egyptian) themes, and that Ziter himself expresses surprise that, for example, India does not appear more (p. 11). I also found MacKenzie’s other examples mainly unconvincing, because they seemed less discriminating choices than either Thompson’s or mine, with their imperial credentials not quite so firmly established. Nelson, Livingstone and the monarchy, for example, were not necessarily admired (in so far as the last of these was admired) for their imperial aspects. And the ILN – an expensive paper – was mainly read by the classes whose imperial enthusiasm is acknowledged throughout my book. This is why I had already dismissed many of them. However, this kind of argument may soon appear less relevant, in the light of the approach I shall be suggesting shortly in this paper; and which could bring MacKenzie and me together again. This is the main burden of Stuart Ward’s criticism: History Workshop Journal, loc. cit., pp. 268– 71. I take his general point, which indeed I discuss at some length in the book; but he exaggerates the narrowness of my definition here. It is emphatically not confined to ‘imperialism as a pure lust for conquest’ (p. 269) – very far from this. One of my reasons for wanting to limit the definition of ‘imperialism’ to situations that involve an element of ‘domination’ is that the word as it is used in ordinary speech generally carries that implication in any case. So, for example, if one describes foreign travel or tea-drinking or the spread of Macdonalds as ‘imperial’ phenomena, whatever more subtle definition of the ‘i’-word one may have in one’s own mind, it is difficult to avoid a whiff of cordite attaching to it. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, p. 94. For example Stuart Ward in History Workshop Journal, loc. cit., p. 273. Gautam Chakravarty, The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press, 2005), p. 11. Stephen Howe, ‘The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History’, in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 29 no. 2 (2001), p. 139. This is from a paper, ‘Knowledge Brokers of the Empire’, that Manan Ahmed of the University of Chicago delivered in Cambridge (UK) in August 2006. The post-colonialist approach, he complains, reduces all imperial experiences to ‘a universally hegemonic colonialism, impervious to the ever-changing geographical, political and temporal

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realities. [. . .] Colonialism, in this context, was often viewed as a flat landscape under a uniform imperial power.’ That of course is exactly my objection to this school’s view of the domestic British scene. Lee Sterrenberg in Victorian Studies, vol. 46 no. 2, Winter 2004, p. 280. Victorian Studies, loc. cit., p. 638. Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History, Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire 1660– 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15. Richard Price, An Imperial War and the British Working Class: Working-Class Attitudes and Reactions to the Boer War, 1899– 1902 (London: Routledge, 1972). This is from the ‘Notes’ for the NACBS Session that Richard Price kindly sent me. From a tape made of the NACBS Conference session. Linda Colley calls this ‘the great recurring black hole of British studies’: NACBS Session Tape. John M. MacKenzie (ed.), European Empires and the People: Popular Responses to Imperialism in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Italy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). In my view this bears out my thesis better than it does his original one. See my ‘Popular Imperialism: Broadening the Context’, in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 39 (2011). It is only fair to point out that MacKenzie has replied to my original ‘Further Thoughts’ paper, in ‘Comfort and Conviction: A Response to Bernard Porter,’ in Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 36 no. 4 (December 2008).

Chapter 22

Imperialism Contested

1. ‘Steeped’ is in Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); ‘imbricated’ in Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects (London: Polity Press, 2002). 2. Edward Said, ‘Yeats and Decolonisation’, in T. Eagleton et al. (eds), Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 3. Jeremy Paxman, Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British (London: Viking, 2011). 4. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 5. See for example Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), arguing that imperialism was a product of the British kind of Enlightenment liberalism.

Chapter 23 Elgar and Empire 1. Cecil Gray, A Survey of Contemporary Music (London: Books for Libraries Press, 1924), pp. 79 – 81. 2. See for example reviews of The Crown of India kept in the Elgar Birthplace, EB 1332. 3. See for example Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), ch. 9. 4. For example, Guardian, ‘Corrections and Clarifications’, 25 June 1999. 5. Elgar to Jaeger, 21 June and 12 July 1898, in Percy Young (ed.), Letters to Nimrod (London: Dennis Dobson, 1965), pp. 13, 16. 6. Christopher Redwood, An Elgar Companion (Ashbourne: Sequoia Publishing, 1982), p. 144. 7. Ian Lace, ‘Elgar and Empire’, in Elgar Society Journal, vol. 10 no. 3 (November 1997), p. 130. 8. Elgar Birthplace, MS EB 1556. 9. See Jerrold Northrop Moore, Elgar: A Creative Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 68, 131.

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10. Listed in Christopher Kent, Edward Elgar: A Guide to Research (New York: Garland, 1993). 11. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Opinion, 1880– 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 2. 12. See for example Elgar to C.W. Buck, 29 November 1885, in Percy M. Young (ed.), Letters of Edward Elgar and Other Writings (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956), p. 21. 13. See Jerrold Northrop Moore (ed.), Elgar and his Publishers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 93 – 4, 96, 108, 111, 114, 123. 14. See Percy M. Young, Alice Elgar: Enigma of a Victorian Lady (London: Dobson Books, 1978). 15. Elgar Birthplace, MS EB 139. 16. Moore, A Creative Life, pp. 338– 9. 17. See Redwood, An Elgar Companion, p. 48; Kennedy, Portrait of Elgar, pp. 24 – 5; Robert Anderson, Elgar (London: Dent, 1993), p. 18; and Moore, A Creative Life, p. 120, fn. 141. 18. Elgar to Alice Stuart-Wortley, 18 April 1911, in Moore, A Creative Life, p. 612. 19. See Paula M. Krebs, Gender, Race and the Writing of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chs 2 – 3. 20. See for example Andrew Neill, ‘The Great War (1914 – 1919): Elgar and the Creative Challenge’, in Elgar Society Journal, vol. 11 no. 1 (March 1999). 21. For example, Young, Alice Elgar, p. 178. 22. For example, Rosa Burley and Frank Carruthers, Edward Elgar: Record of a Friendship (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), pp. 43, 45, 60; Moore, A Creative Life, pp. 354, 358; Diana McVeagh, Edward Elgar: His Life and Music (London: Dent, 1955), pp. 86, 90. 23. Burley and Carruthers, Record of a Friendship (1972), p. 60. 24. See Gardiner, ‘The Reception of Sir Edward Elgar 1918– c.1934: A Reassessment’, in 20th Century British History, vol. 9 no. 3 (1998). 25. Ibid.; and Ronald Taylor, ‘Music in the Air: Elgar and the BBC’, in Raymond Monk (ed.), Edward Elgar: Music and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 26. For example, German’s operetta Merrie England (1902), and Sullivan’s ballet Victoria and Merrie England (1897). 27. See John MacKenzie, ‘Scotland and the Empire’, in International History Review (1993); and the chapter by David Fitzpatrick in Andrew Porter (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 28. Jaeger to Elgar, 8 January 1905, quoted in Moore, A Creative Life, p. 452. 29. Burley and Carruthers, Record of a Friendship, p. 202. 30. Ibid., pp. 25 – 6, 44 – 5. 31. Redwood, An Elgar Companion, p. 123. 32. The Voice, October 1917 (copy at Elgar Birthplace: EB 1333); Moore, A Creative Life, pp. 708– 9. 33. Elgar’s first Birmingham lecture of 1905, quoted in Moore, A Creative Life, p. 459. 34. See Bentley B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Britain (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1966).

Chapter 24 Architecture and Empire: The Case of the ‘Battle of the Styles’ 1. Trevelyan in 1856, quoted in Ian Toplis, The Foreign Office (London: Continuum, 1987), p. 27. 2. In brief: the Roman Empire’s bad odour among architects and architectural writers at this time was for two reasons, one political, the other aesthetic, but with a link between them.

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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In Britain Roman imperialism was more often than not associated with (England’s own) ‘ancient humiliation’, as one commentator put it (Anon., The Gothic Renaissance. Its Origin, Progress, and Principles (1860), p. 4); among architectural writers there was a consensus at this time that Roman building marked a drastic decline in quality from the Greek it had originally sprung from; and – here is the link – the explanation often given for that was Rome’s diversion from art into imperialism under the emperor Augustus. Again, sources for these arguments will be found in The Battle of the Styles. ‘A Practical Man’ Remarks on the Designs proposed for the New Government Offices (1857), pp. 4, 9. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993; this edn. 1994), pp. 123–6. Ruskin, lecture (untitled) delivered at the Opening Meeting of the Architectural Museum in Westminster, 13 January 1858, reported in the Builder, 16 January, pp. 45 – 6. Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Yale: Yale University Press, 2005), ch. 5. James Fergusson, An Historical Enquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art, More Especially with Reference to Architecture (1849), p. 8. Magdalen College, Oxford, that is. Christ Church Episcopal church in New Haven (1898: not strictly part of Yale University, but surrounded by it), and Mitchell Tower in Chicago (1903), are close copies, though slightly shorter. Yale and Chicago also both have versions of the ‘Boston Stump’ in Lincolnshire: Harkness Memorial Tower at Yale (1921), and the Victor Lawson Tower at Chicago (1928). These are all extraordinarily late, of course. D.C. McCaskie, ‘Cultural Encounters: Britain and Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, Andrew Porter (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 665. This is just a guess at present. Thomas Metcalf, ‘Architecture in the British Empire’, in Robin W. Winks, Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 5, Historiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 590. WJ Cockburn Muir, Pagan or Christian? Notes for the General Public on Our National Architecture (1860), p. 242. Building News, 16 September 1859, p. 834. Illustrated in its Instrumenta Ecclesiastica supplement, vol. 2 (1856). Preeti Chopra, University of Wisconsin-Madison, ‘Decoding Victorian Bombay: The Construction of Meaning by the City’s Local Inhabitants’: paper read at the Annual Meeting of the North American Victorian Studies Association at Yale University, 14 November 2008.

Chapter 28 Secret Services: The Last Penumbra of Empire 1. The letter was published on 11 April 2013, and for a time went viral in the media and on the internet. The denials – which appear quite convincing to me; but I do not have any special knowledge – were expressed in the correspondence pages of succeeding issues of the LRB. Of the CIA’s complicity there is no doubt.

Chapter 29

After-Images of Empire

1. See my Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (Yale: Yale University Press, 2006). 2. Sources for these quotations, and of others, can be found in Empire and Superempire.

NOTES

TO PAGES

248 –259

275

3. Jeremy Seabrook, ‘It’s not natural’, in Guardian, 3 July 2004. If anything the Empire was a more tolerant and comfortable environment for homosexuals than was the metropole. See Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); and Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London: Routledge, 2003). 4. There is no room to elaborate this here, except to say that the general thrust of British colonial policy was to respect and indeed to use Islamic cultures. In Northern Nigeria this was called ‘Indirect Rule’. The only significant exception was the immediately pre-Indian Mutiny years, when Christian evangelicals were given their heads in India to an extent not found anywhere else, especially after the Mutiny taught Britain, very clearly, the dangers of this approach. 5. John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London: Penguin, 2007). 6. Joseph Schumpeter, ‘The Sociology of Imperialism’ (1919; republished in various collections).

Conclusion 1. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Colorado: Westview Press, 1992). 2. In History Today, November 2011 (Grob-Fitzgibbon), and TLS, 6 January 2012 (Gott). 3. John MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 2. 4. Bronisław Malinowski, The Dynamics of Culture Change (Yale: Yale University Press, 1965). 5. See my ‘Popular Imperialism: Broadening the Context’, in JICH, vol. 39 No. 5 (December 2011). 6. See for example John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 (2006). Some of this section is taken from my review of Ferguson’s book, in the Guardian, 26 March 2011. 7. See Richard Evans, ‘Michael Gove’s History Curriculum is a Pub Quiz Not an Education’, in New Statesman, 21 March 2013. Evans was a prime mover in this. 8. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Penguin, 2012).

FURTHER READING

For anyone who wishes to follow up any of the themes in this collection further, the chapters themselves will furnish some guidance, particularly those that began life as review essays. For anyone new to the subject, and who might require a more organised general account of British imperialism, I’m bound to recommend two of my own books, The Lion’s Share: A History of British Imperialism 1850 to the Present (1975; 5th revised edn: Pearson, 2012), and British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t (London: I.B.Tauris, 2016), a shorter and racier distillation of my nearly 50 years of research and musing on the topic. The former book was the first to cover the history of British imperialism, objectively (or so I thought); as opposed to that of the British Empire, in ‘Empire to Commonwealth’ mode. Since then scores of others have appeared, some of them popular and superficial, others – like Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003) – popular and controversial. Ferguson’s book grew out of a television series – Empire – he wrote and fronted for Channel 4 in 2004; since then two other similar series have appeared: Jeremy Paxman’s Empire (London: BBC, 2012), also accompanied by a tie-in book, Empire: What Ruling the World did to the British (London: Viking, 2012); and Stefan Piotrowski’s Ruling the Waves, 2015, which has not yet been aired on television, though it deserves to be, but can currently be viewed online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oM8GAuS_no&feature=youtu.be. (To declare an interest: I’m in it.) The most insightful recent general histories of British imperialism, superseding mine, I think, must be John Darwin’s The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); The Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012); and After Tamurlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London: Penguin, 2008), which last sets these events in a much broader but necessary context. For a shorter summary (but covering a longer

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period) WR Nasson’s Britannia’s Empire (Stroud: History Press, 2006) is clear and fresh. I also have a great affection for Jan Morris’s popular trilogy about the empire, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London: Faber, 1973), Pax Britannica, The Climax of an Empire (London: Faber, 1968), and Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (London: Faber 1978), despite – or perhaps because of – its veneer of nostalgia. At the heavier end of the scale is the Oxford History of the British Empire (general editor Wm Roger Louis, 5 volumes, Oxford University Press, 1998– 9): a valuable compendium of information and approaches to British imperial history. Vol III (ed. Andrew Porter) covers the nineteenth century; vol. IV (eds Judith M Brown and Wm Roger Louis) the twentieth; and there are also several ‘supplementary’ volumes on various sub-topics, like the ‘Black experience’, women, and the parts played in the Empire by Scotland and Ireland. These should make a good start.

INDEX

Aborigines (Australian), 148, 213 Aborigines Protection Society, 118 absent-mindedness, ch. 21, 248, 251– 2 Abu Ghraib, 202, 245 Acre, 96 Aden, 233 Afghanistan, 14, 71, 111, 243, 250, 254, 257 Africa, 12 – 13, 16, ch. 4, chs 16 – 17, ch. 20, 168, 230, 244, 246; see also names of different countries/regions African-Americans, 53 African guides, 121 Afrikaners, 166, 168, 212, 214 agriculture and agronomy, 35 –6, 89 Ainslie, Whitelaw, 42 air bombing, 129 A˚land Islands, 75 Albert, Prince, 71 alcohol, see temperance reform Algeria, 13, 14, 128, 201, 203, 217 Alport, Lord, 214 America, North, 12 – 13, ch. 6, 192; see also Canada; United States American Civil War, 112 American independence, ch. 6 Amery, Julian, 215 Amery, Leo, 224 Amritsar, ch. 19, 162, 168, 240, 250 Anderson, David, ch. 25 Andrew, Christopher, 231– 2 Angleton, James Jesus, 237 Anglo-Indians, 100, 104, 107, 132– 3, 154 Angola, 138– 40, 210

anthropology, 36 – 9, 157– 8, 252, 258 anti-capitalism, 24, 126, 166 anti-imperialism and criticism of empire, 12, 13– 15, 21, 24, 36, 39, 46, 48, 57, 61, 76, 100, 107, 128, 148, 150– 1, ch. 22, 172, 186, 215, 219, 224, 226, 233, 238, 241– 4, 253, 258 anti-slavery, see slavery anti-suffragism, see feminism Anti-Waste League, 163 apartheid, 16, 37, 103, 214, 223, 236; see also South Africa apathy, 215, 248 apologies for colonial misdeeds, 240– 1 appeasement, 229 Arab Revolt, ch. 18 Arabia and Arabs, 39, 43, ch. 13, 113– 16, 119, 121, ch. 18, 235, 245 Arabic, 44, 124 Archer, Jeffrey, 135 architecture, ch. 24, 252 Argentina, ch. 10 aristocracy, 32, 100, 137, 204– 5, 212, 260; see also upper classes Aristophanes, 126 army, see military Arthur, King, 130 Arts and Crafts, 190 Asia, ch. 27 Askwith, Thomas, 206 Assam, 224 assassins, 43 atrocities, 13, 14, 16, 53, 55, ch. 7, 67, 72– 3, 96, 110, 112– 18, ch. 19, 148, 155, 159, 162– 3, 166, 168, ch. 25,

280

EMPIRE WAYS

217, 224, 227– 9, 231– 3, 235– 6, 240, 250, 256, 258 Attlee, Clement, 221, 228 Australia and Australians, 9, 12 – 13, 128, 148, 161, 163, 192, 209, 213, 223 ‘aviophagy’, 37 Baganda, 122 Baker, Samuel, ch. 17 Baldwin, Oliver, 101 Balkans, 103, 258 Baluchistan, 132 Banda, Hastings, 211, 213–16, 218–19 Bangweulu swamp, 121 banking, 106 Barker, J Ellis, 162 Barnett, Anthony, 76 Barotseland, 210 Barringer, Tim, 190 Barttelot, Edmund, 113, 116, 118 Batang Kali, 227– 8 Battle of the Styles, ch. 24, 252 Bayly, Christopher, ch. 27 Bedouin, 92, ch. 18 Beijing, 58 Belgium and Belgians, 116, 118, 128, 176, 230, 252 Belgrano, 78 Belloc, Hilaire, 67 Bengal, 44, 168, 191, 221, 224 Benson, AC, 171, 175 Benson, Sir Arthur, 211, 213 Benson, Nigel, 139 Bevin, Ernest, 220 Bhutan, 86 – 7 Bigger, Earl Derr, 64 Bimbireh, 112 Birkenhead, Lord, 131 Bismarck, Otto von, 117 Blair, Tony, 48, 57, 138, 165, 249, 258 Bletchley Park, 230 blowback, 233 Boers, 12 Bogarde, Dirk, 225, 229 Bogle, George, ch. 11 Bolt, Sydney, 224 Bonar Law, Andrew, 98 Bond, James, 136 Boot, Max, 243, 254 Borges, Jorge Luis, 80

Boy Scouts, 103 Brantlinger, Patrick, 161 Brent, Bishop, 43 British Association, 120 British East Africa, 117 British East India Company, see East India Company British Guiana, 233 British Museum, 89 British South Africa Company, 13 brothels, 56, 101 Bruce, Michael, 96 bugging, 234– 5 Buller, General, 66 – 7 Burchett, Wilfrid, 223 Burdett, Colour-Sergeant, 68 Burley, Rosa, 178 Burma and Burmese, 31 – 3, 71, 220, 222, 226–7, 229 Burton, Antoinette, 145, 148, 154– 5 Burton, Richard, ch. 17 Bush, George W, 111, 138 Buthelezi, Chief, 69 Byron, Lord, 93 Caine, William, 42 – 3 Calcutta, 225 Callaghan, James, 75 Cambridge, Duke of, 67 Cambridge University, 29, 31, 221 Cameron, David, 58 Cameron, James, 207 Camp 020, 235 Campbell-Bannerman, Henry, 98 Canada and Canadians, 9, ch. 6, 102, 125, 161, 177, 192, 209, 242 cannabis, ch. 5 Cannadine, David, 32, 109 cannibalism, 113 Canton, 58, 60, 62 capitalism and capitalists, 2, 9, 11 – 13, 14, 17, 19 – 24, 27, 35, 39, ch. 7, 85, 88 –9, 109, 115– 6, 134, 136– 7, 150, 161, 166–8, 175, 190, 227, 241, 244– 5, 249, 253, 255– 6, 259 Cardigan, Lord, 71 Carey, Captain, 66 Carlyle, Thomas, 25, 187 Casement, Roger, 128 Castle, Barbara, 205– 6, 235

INDEX castration, 121 Central African Federation, ch. 26, 228, 232 Central Intelligence Agency, 136 Cetshwayo, King, 67 – 8 Ceylon, 220 Chakravarty, Gautam, 154 chamber pots, 60 Chamberlain, Joseph, 166 Chard, Lieutenant, 69 Charlie Chan, 64 chauvinism, 117 Chelmsford, Lord, 67 Chicago, 191 Chikurubi prison, 135, 137, 139 Chin Peng, 225 China, 33, 43, 46 – 7, ch. 7, 71, 85 – 6, 89, 125, 148, 162, 215, 222– 3, 227, 245 Chinese, 43, 225 Chinese slavery, 166 chivalry, 109, 127, 132, 174–7, 188 Chopra, Preeti, 194 Christianity, 2, 15 – 17, 39, 47, 61 – 2, 85, 89, 91 – 2, 96 – 7, 98, 105, 115, 121–2, 125–6, 138, 156, 166, 172, 189, 204–5, 243– 4, 248, 254, 258 Church of England, 172, 244, 246 Churchill, Lord Randolph, 33 Churchill, Winston, 76, 131, 133, 205, 220–21 civic pride, 187 civil liberties, 234 civilizing mission, 203, 206, 220, 256 class, 23 – 4, 28, 88 – 9, 94, 109– 10, 114–15, 125, 146, 153, 172, 178– 9, 189, 204, 223, 238, 247– 8, 253 classical architecture, ch. 24 clitoridectomy, 204 Clive of India, 140 Cobden, Richard, 10, 14, 19 – 20, 27, 51, 61 Cohen, Sir Andrew, 211, 237 Colby, Geoffrey, 218 Cold War, 75, 80, 214, 222, 227, 233, 237–8 collaboration, 11, 14, 16, 20, 37, 200 Collett, Nigel, ch. 19 Colley, Linda, 149– 50, 155, 157 Colonial Development and Welfare, 25 Colonial Gothic, 190, 195 colonialism, see imperialism colonists, see settlers

281

Colonial Office and Service, 24, 29 – 30, 32, 35 –8, 40, 68, 168, 183, 188, 200, 204– 7, 210–13, 218, 228– 9, 233 Commonwealth, 14, 19, 25 – 7, 76, 132, 159, 165, 221, 228, 230, 236 Commonwealth Games 1986, 27 Commonwealth Relations Office, 209 Commoro, Chief, 121 communism and communists, 27, 210, 213–15, 222, 224, 226– 7, 232– 3, 237 concentration camps, 166, 177, 201– 3, 227, 240 Congo Free State and successor states, 13, 24, 35, 112– 13, 116– 17, 128, 168, 210, 236 Conrad, Joseph, 115 Conservative Party and governments, 33, 167, 173, 206, 211, 214– 15, 255, 256 conspiracies, 95, 231, 235, 237– 8 Cooper, Lady Diana, 223 Corder, Frederick, 178 Corfu, 106– 7 corruption, 60 cosmopolitanism, 189– 90, 227 Coward, Noe¨l, 130 Cowen, Frederic, 178 Cowperthwaite, John, 33 craftsmanship, 190, 258 cricket, 17, 67, 99, 101, 137, 192, 224, 240, 259 crime, 44 –5, 63 Crimean War, 51, 71 Cro-Magnons, 88, 257 Cromer, Ethel, 106– 7, 109 Cromer, Katherine, 108– 9 Cromer, Lord, ch. 15 Crusoe, Robinson, 91 culture and cultural theory, 146, 150– 4, 160, 188, 194 cultural differences and empathy, 38, 62– 3, 85– 7, 89, 92, 102, 125– 6, 151, 168, 190, 194, 252 cultural imperialism, 8 – 9, 15 – 16, 128, 186, 191, 241, 245 culture change, 38 – 40, 157– 8, 252 Curzon, Lord, 106 Cyprus, 14, 217, 232, 234– 6

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Daily Mail, 200, 204 Daily Mirror, 207 Daily Telegraph, 132 Damascus, 128 Darfur, 120 Darwin, John, 245, 259 datura, 96 – 7 David, Saul, chs 8 – 9 death penalty, 89, 112, 118, 128, 201– 3 decadence, national, 63, 127, 180 decolonisation, 14, 26 – 7, 32 – 3, 75, 103, 132, 160, 169, 199, 203, 206– 10, 214, 217, chs 27 – 28, 250, 259 defence, see military Defence, Ministry of, 78 Delius, Frederick, 178 democracy and anti-democracy, 11, 31, 32– 3, 45, 57, 76 –7, 87, 99, 101, 109–10, 114, 125– 6, 138–9, 164, 166, 193, 213, 217, 244– 5, 256–9 Denshawai, 166 development, 35, 39 – 41 Diana, Princess, 124 Dickens, Charles, 15, 63 – 4, 162 Dinshawai, 110 dirty tricks, 230, 235, 238 disease, 112, 114, 118, 121; see also medicine Disraeli, Benjamin, 66, 69, 109 Djoun, 97 Dominion status, 132, 210, 212; see also Commonwealth Dorman-Smith, Reginald, 223 Dowuana, Modjaben, 37 Drake, Francis, 140 drama, see theatre drugs, see cannabis; datura; opium Druze, 92 – 3, 96 Dutch East Indies, 89, 221– 2 Dyer, Reginald, ch. 19 East India Company, 13, 45, 85, 88, 183 eccentrics, 85 ecology, 36, 39, 41 Economist, 207 economy, 217– 18, 226 educated natives, 190 education, 96, 106, 109, 146, 148, 156, 208, 211–13, 255 Edward VII, King, 98, 171

Edwardian Baroque, 194 Egypt and Egyptians, 8, 14, 42 – 4, 46, 102, ch. 15, 126–7, 166, 236, 242, 245 Elgar, Alice, ne´e Roberts, 174– 5, 177– 9 Elgar, Carice, 174 Elgar, Edward, 99, 101, ch. 23 Elgin, Lord, 61 Elkins, Caroline, 200 Elliot, Charles, 62 Ellis, Kirsten, ch. 13 emigration, 161, 163 Emin Pasha, 113 English language, 16 equality, 20, 227 Equatorial Guinea, ch. 20 Erie, Lake, 55 eroticism (female), 92 Erskine, Bobby, 205 ethnic cleansing, 120, 203 Eton College, 31, 137, 141, 204, 208, 223 eugenics, 37 – 8 Eurasians, 225 Europe, 108, 157– 9, 163, 166, 190– 1, 242, 244–5 European Union (and predecessors), 25, 26 exile, 118 exploration, 16, chs 16 – 17, 248 extraordinary rendition, 235 Fabian Society, 25, 75 Falkland Islands, 7, ch. 10 famine, 13, 221, 224 Farquhar, William, 90 Fashoda, 166 Feisal, Emir, 129 female genital mutilation (FGM), see clitoridectomy feminism and anti-feminism, 92, 94, 99, 108–9, 117 Ferguson, Niall, 2, 7, 30 –31, 33, 148, 199, 207, 218, 243– 4, 254– 5 Fergusson, James, 161 Ferozeshah, Battle, 73 feudalism, 109, 127, 225, 253 finance, 21 – 2, 64 Flashman, 71, 73, 250 Fletcher, CRL, 102, 139 Fletcher, Eileen, 205 food, 17 football, 17, 101, 244

INDEX Foreign Office, 74, 78, ch. 24 (illust. 182), 215, 252 Forsyth, Frederick, 134, 136 Four Feathers, 123 Fourah Bay College, 37 Fox Bourne, HR, 118 France and the French, 15, 51, 92, 96, 103, 105, 106, 116, 125, 128, 148, 157–8, 166, 169, 189, 201, 203, 217, 220–1, 230, 252 Franks Report, 79 Fraser, George MacDonald, 73 free marketism, 10 – 13 passim, 19 – 27 passim, 31, 39, 107, 110, 151, 258 free trade, 10, 19, 21 – 3, 25, 54, 62, 89, 163–4, 166, 186, 193, 195, 257 Freedman, Lawrence, ch. 10 freedom, see liberty Freer, Bartle, 68 French Revolution, 95 French wars, 57, 92 frontiers, 16 –17 Frum, David, 243 Fu Manchu, 64 functions, 15 – 16, 40, 248– 50, 253 Furnivall, JS, 224 Galtieri, General, 75 – 6, 78 games, see sport Gandhi, Mohandas, 132 Gatling gun, 67 – 8, 163 Gavaghan, Terence, 206 gender, 186, 189, 248, 256 genocide, 161 George V, King, 98 – 9, 125, 128 German, Edward, 178 Germany and Germans, 99, 102– 3, 106, 128, 179, 203, 231, 252 Gestapo, 203, 237 Gibb, Lorna, 91 Gilmour, David, ch. 14 Gilroy, Paul, 149–50, 155 Gladstone, WE, 61, 107, 110– 11, 242 Glendinning, Victoria, ch. 12 globalisation, 39, 239 Gobineau, Count, 15 Gold Coast, 31, 37, 212 Gold Stick, 67 Goody, Jack, 245, 257 Goon Show, The, 28

283

Goose Green, 76, 78 Gordon, General Charles, 105, 110, 115, 128, 173, 176– 7 Gordon, Henry Laing, 37 – 8, 40 gothic, 23, ch. 24 Gott, Richard, 7, 159, 250, 255 Gough, Sir Hugh, 73 Gove, Michael, 33, 255 Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), 236– 7 Government Offices, Whitehall, ch. 24 (illust. 182), 252 governors and governing, 11, 15 – 16, 21, 24– 5, ch. 3, 85, 105, 152, 156, 163, 188, 205, 210, 216, 223, 233, 249 Gray, Cecil, 170 Great Exhibition 1851, 63, 74, 186, 190 Great Power rivalries, 120, 128, 227 Great War, see World War I Greece, 107, 126– 7, 188 Grob-Fitzgibbon, Benjamin, 250 Guantanamo, 245 guerilla warfare, 129 Guindy, Mohamed El, 42, 46 Gurkhas, 132, 226 Gurney, Henry, 227 Guyana, see British Guiana Haig, Alexander, 77 Hailey, Lord, 34 –5 Haileybury, 99, 221 Hanslope Park, 235 Harding, Sir John, 234 Harper, Tim, ch. 27 Harrow, 223 Harry, Prince, 208 Hart, David, 138 hashish, see cannabis Headrick, Daniel, 35 Heart of Darkness, 115 hearts and minds, 228 hemp, 45; see also cannabis Herbert, AP, 175 heroism, 117– 18, 121, ch. 18 Hinden, Rita, 25 Hinduism, 226 history, 17, 48, 51, 79, 86, 96, 146, 152, 231, 241, 245, 252, 254 Hitler, Adolf, 52 Hobson, JA, 13, 167, 241, 258

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Hola camp, 200, 205, 207, 217 Holland, Bernard, 165 Hollis, Roger, 215, 232, 237 Hollywood, 123, 157 Home, Lord, 211, 215– 16 homosexuality and homophobia, 63, 99, 113, 202, 236, 243– 4 Hong Kong, 31, 33, 59, 222 House of Commons, see Parliament Howard, John, 148 Howard, Leslie, 123 Howe, Stephen, 154 Huggins, Godfrey, 213– 14 human rights, 244, 257 humanitarianism, 119, 121, 138, 151, 256, 258; see also anti-slavery Hungarians, 123, 162 hunting, 115 Hussein, Saddam, 80, 129, 138, 220 Hutchinson, Surgeon, 43 Hyam, Ronald, 222–3 Ibrahim Pasha, 96 Ilbert bill, 100, 107 Illustrated London News, 152 images of empire, ch. 29 immigration, 63 – 4 imperial ideology and ideological imperialists, 8, 11, 15, 16, 24 – 6, 46, 102– 3, 106, 108, 110, 134, 146– 7, 162– 5, 168, 174, 183, 253 imperial nostalgia, ch. 29 imperialism, definition and varieties of, 7, 9– 10, 12 – 13, 14, 16 – 18, 21, 39, 40– 1, 56, 59, 61, 65, 76, 80, 87, 88, 92, 105, 107, 119, 121, 128, 134, 140, 146–51, 153 –5, 157– 8, chs 22– 23, 181, 186, 190– 1, 195, 203, 206– 8, 219, 240– 2, 244–5, 247, 249, 253, 256–60 imperialism, domestic, chs 21 –24, 205, 248, 251– 2, 259–60 imperium et libertas, 163, 165– 9 India and Indians, 11 – 14 passim, 32 – 3, ch. 5 passim, 58 – 9, 71, 89, 98 – 102, 108, 126, 128, ch. 19, 164, 168, 174, 185–6, 190– 1, 194, 209–10, 220–6, 228–9, 230, 245, 250 Indian Civil Service (ICS) and India Office, 29, 32, 45 – 6, 100, 131, 183, 186

Indian Hemp Drugs Commission 1893– 4, 45– 6 Indian ‘mutiny’ (1857), 11, 13, 71, 131, 133, 183, 190, 243 indirect rule, 11 –12, 32, 37, 168, 190, 206, 218, 223, 258 industrial revolution, 16 – 17, 23, 72, 126, 187 industry, British, decline, 28 industry, Indian and Tibetan, 87, 245 informal empire, 2, 20, 39, 186 insanity, 43 – 4, 46, 91, 93 intelligence, see secret services internationalism, 25, 116, 119, 156– 7, 167, 186, 258 interstices, 248– 9, 253 Iran, 233, 236 Iraq, 11, 31 – 2, 62, 77, 105, 107, 111, 128, 138, 147, 162– 3, 233, 240, 242, 249– 50, 254, 256– 78 Ireland and the Irish, 13, 98, 102, 117, 132, 232, 250, 256 Isandlwana, 66 – 9 Islam, 43, 89, 91, 103, 105, 107– 8, 119, 166, 190, 193, 226– 7, 243, 245– 6, 251, 258 Ismael Pasha, 105 Ismay, Lord, 228 Israel, 204, 237 Jackson, Andrew, 52 Jacob, Alaric, 101 Jaeger, 171, 178 Jagan, Cheddi, 233 Jameson, James Sligo, 113, 116, 118 Jameson Raid, 140, 166 Japan, 148, 203, 220– 2, 224– 5, 227, 257 Jardine and Matheson, 59 Java, 88 –9 Jeal, Tim, chs 16 – 17 Jerusalem, 91 Jews, 93, 128, 235 jihad, 173 jingoism, 8, 76, 162, 170– 1, 215 Johnson, Chalmers, 233 Johnson, Paul, 139 Johnson, Samuel, 74, 81 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), ch. 28 Jones, Colonel ‘H’, 78 – 9 Jordan, 128

INDEX journalism, 113– 15, 119, 163, 205 judgments, 250– 1 juvenile literature, 134, 138–9, 141 Kashmir, 31 – 2 Katanga, 210 Kennington, Eric, 126– 7 Kenya, 13, 14, 38, 162, 168, ch. 25, 217, 219, 227, 231– 3, 235– 6, 240, 250 Kenyatta, Jomo, 37, 200– 1, 203, 207 Key, Francis Scott, 57 Keynes, John Maynard, 167 Kikuyu, 199, 201, 203– 5 Kinglake, Alexander, 91 Kingsley, Charles, 187 Kipling, Carrie, 99 Kipling, Rudyard, 29, ch. 14, 133, 139, 156, 162, 164, 175 Kiralfy, Imre, 123, 162 Kirk-Green, Anthony, 29 –30 Kitchener, Lord, 110, 115, 128 kith and kin, 216 Korda, Michael, ch. 18 Korda brothers, 123– 4, 162 Krauthammer, Charles, 243 Kuala Lumpur, 225 Kwarteng, Kwasi, 30 –33 Labour Party and governments, 76, 130, 165–6, 180, 214–15, 226, 228 labour unrest, 223 Lamartine, Alphonse, 96 Lambton, Lord, 205 Lancaster House, 234 Land of Hope and Glory, 170– 1, 173, 175 Latimer, Jon, ch. 6 Latin America, 192 law, 62, 118, 244 Lawrence, TE, ch. 18, 140 leadership, 80, 129 League of Nations, 46, 167 Lean, David, 123– 4 Lear, Edward, 106– 7 Lee of Crondall, Lord, 236 legacy of empire, ch. 29 legacy factor, 206– 7, 220– 2, 227– 9, 230–1, 235 legal trials, 200– 1 Lenin, VI, 167, 241 Lennox-Boyd, Alan, 200– 1, 205– 6, 216

285

Leopold, King of Belgians, 13, 112, 116–7, 168 lessons, 256 Lever, Lord, 24, 35 Leviticus, 244 liberal imperialism, 119, 136, 138, 165– 7, 176, 195, 207, 220, 227– 9, 256– 8 Liberal Party, 12, 100, 107– 8, 165– 7 liberalism (political), 20, 110, 115, 136, 147, 149, 151, 156– 7, 159, 162– 3, 165, 168, 185, 193, 195, 205, 238, 241, 244 liberty, 163– 5, 175, 185, 187, 248 Liddell Hart, Basil, 124, 129 literature, 134, 153– 4 Livingstone, David, 112– 14, 116, 119, ch. 17, 140, 152– 3, 156 London, 184– 5, 187, 194 London Review of Books, 236 Louis Napoleon, Prince, 66, 70 Lovell, Julia, ch. 7 Lugard, Lord, 24 Lumumba, Patrice, 236 Lyall, Alfred, 111, 117 McAllister, William, 46 Macaulay, Lord, 25 McCaskie, DC, 191 McCunn, Hamish, 178 McDonald’s, 241 McEwen, John, 178 MacKenzie, Alexander, 178 MacKenzie, John, 145, 147– 8, 152– 3, 158, 160, 173, 176, 181, 251– 3 Macleod, Ian, 207, 212, 215 Macmillan, Harold, 212, 215, 217, 233 Madison, President, 54 madness, see insanity Madras, 185 mafficking, see jingoism Mahdi (Muhammed Ahmad), 105 Makarios, Archbishop, 236 Makokha, Kwamchersi, 201 Malaya and Malays, 13, 14, 89, 222– 3, 225–9, 232– 3 Malawi, 209 Malinowski, Bronisław, 36, 38– 9, 41, 252 Malory, Thomas, 126 Malvern, 172 man on the spot, 31, 33, 68, 72

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mandates, 8, 14, 167– 8, 243 Manipuri dancing girls, 225 Mann, Amanda, 135– 6 Mann, Simon, ch. 20 Mann’s mother, 137 Mao Tse Tung, 58 maps, 8, 18, 156, 240, 243 Marx, Karl, and Marxists, 162, 167, 232–3, 237, 259 masculinism, 114, 117, 121, 134, 139, 151, 174, 179, 189, 227 masturbation, 63 Mau Mau, ch. 25, 250 Maudling, Reginald, 215 Meath, Lord, 162 mediaevalism, 126– 7, 129, 188 medicine, 36 – 7, 43 – 5, 61, 96, 129 Melbourne, 192 Melvill, Lieutenant, 66 – 7 mercenaries, ch. 20 Meryon, Charles, 91, 93 – 6 Mesopotamia, see Iraq Messianism, 91, 93, 96 Metcalf, Thomas, 192 MI5, MI6, see secret services middle classes, 109– 11 Middle East, 14, ch. 13, ch. 18, 237, 244, 246; see also separate countries militarism, 51, 80, 102, 151, 175, 177, 179, 227 military, 10, 14, 16, 21, 22 – 3, 26, chs 6 –10, 85, 99, 100, 105, 106, 131, ch. 20, 163, 174, 216– 17, ch. 27, 238, 248 Mill, John Stuart, 46, 62 Mills, James, ch. 5 Milne, Malcolm, 28 –30, 32 Milner, Lord, 106 Milton, John, 139 missionaries, see Christianity Mitchell, Philip, 36 –8 modernity, 13, 186, 244– 6, 257– 8 Montesquieu, 62 Montrose, Duke of, 212 Moorhead, Alan, 120 Moran, Christopher, 231 Morley-Minto reforms, 168 Morris, Jan, 148 Morris, William, 126 Mossad, 138

Mossadeq, Mohammed, 236 motivation, 249– 50, 259 Moto, Severo, 140 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, 222, 226, 228 Mozambique, 210 Mugabe, Robert, 76, 141, 241, 243 multi-racialism, 209, 215, 227 Mumbai, 192, 194 murder, 44 Murphy, Philip, ch. 26 Muslims, see Islam My Lai, 227 myths, 146, ch. 29, 254 Nairobi, 201, 207 Nanjing Treaty, 60 Napier, Sir Charles, 73 Napoleon Bonaparte, 51 – 2, 95, 163, 192, 245 Napoleon III, 186 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 236 Natal, 68 national identity, 146– 7, 163, 183, 185, 189, 240, 242, 248, 254– 5 nationalism, colonial, 14, 61, 98, 110–11, 168, 210, 213, 215, 217, 221, 223–7, 232, 235 nationalism, European, 107 native Americans, 53, 55, 213 Nazism, 38, 150, 203, 208, 224, 226 Nelson, Horatio, 152 neocolonialism, 239 Neo-Cons, 138, 165, 193, 243, 254, 256 neo-liberalism, see free marketism Netherlands, 158, 230, 252 Neuville, Alphonse de, 67 New Brunswick, 54 New England, 54 new imperial history, 154– 5, 157– 8, 160, 164, 181, 191 new imperialism, 173 New Orleans, 52, 55 New York, 124 Newman, Cardinal, 176 Newsinger, John, 250 newspapers, see journalism, and individual titles Nigeria, 24, 31 – 2, 35, 235 Nightingale, Florence, 72 Nile, 112, ch. 17 Niu Jian, 59 – 60

INDEX Nkrumah, Kwame, 232, 235 noble savage, 87, 190 Normans, 259– 60 North Foreland school, 137 Nott, John, 79 Nova Scotia, 54 Noyes, Alfred, 175 Nubar Pasha, 107 Nyasaland, 209– 13, 218 Obiang, President, 135– 6, 140 official history, 79 Ogden’s cigarettes, 47 oil, 74, 76, 128, 136– 8, 258 Oliver, Lieutenant Thomas, 73 Oman, Charles, 126 Omdurman, 115, 166, 243 Ontario, 57 opium, 46, ch. 7 Opium Wars, 47, ch. 7, 71, 162, 250 orientalism, 43, 46 – 7, 85 – 7, 92, 98, 107–8, 110, 126, 160, 172, 194 Orwell, George, 80 Osama bin Laden, 105 O’Shaughnessy, William, 44 O’Toole, Peter, 123, 125, 130 Ottawa, 192 over-production, 166– 7 Oxford, 33, 126 Owen, Roger, ch. 15 Pacific, 12 pacifism, 151, 162 Pakistan, 32, 226 Palace of Westminster, see Parliament Palestine, 8, 128, 227, 232, 235, 237, 243 Palmerston, Lord, 59 – 62, 72, 121, 184– 5 Palmyra, 93 Panchen Lama, 85 – 7 paranoia, 235, 243 Paris, 187 Park, Daphne, 236 Parliament, 23, 26, 61, 92, 110, 117, 131, 163, 183, 187, 192 Parry, CH, 178 Parsons, Anthony, 77 – 8 paternalism, 11, 13, 15 – 17, 24 – 6, 29, 31, 137, 212, 221, 253 Patna, 43

287

patriotism, 56 – 7, 58, 146, 148, 164, 171– 2, 174, 179– 80, 231, 240, 254– 6 patronisation, 47, 190, 224 Patten, Chris, 33 Peru, 77 – 8 Philippines, 117, 151 philistinism, 99 – 100, 172, 177– 80, 186– 7 piracy, 118 pirates and prefects, 26 Pitt the Younger, 92, 94 –5 Playfair, George, 44 poetry, ch. 14 police, 26, 43 police state, 201, 227 political correctness, 117 political economy, see free marketism; free trade poppies, 58, 61 popular imperialism, 76, 110, 150, 173, 248, 252; see also imperialism, domestic post-colonialism, 40, 100, 154, 160, 164, 241 post-modernism, 152 Pottinger, Henry, 61 – 2 press, see journalism Price, Richard, 147, 155– 7 primitiveness, 38, 190, 203 private security firms, 232 privatisation, 12, 17, 26, 253 progress, 38, 108, 151, 163, 188– 9, 193, 244–5, 257 propaganda, 161, 164, 215, 254; see also MacKenzie, John protectionism, see tariff reform psychiatry, 44 Ptolemy, 120, 122 public opinion (British), 14, 101– 2, 215, 217, 226, 229 public schools, 11, 15 – 16, 23 – 4, 26, 29– 32, 99, 101, 106, 107, 115, 137, 139– 40, 162, 164, 188, 204, 208, 224, 253 Pugin, Augustus Welby, 190 Punch, 68, 71 Punjab, 100 puppet rulers, 221, 259 Purangir, 86 Quebec, 54 Quinlong, 86

288

EMPIRE WAYS

race attitudes, race relations and racism, 8, 15– 16, 30, 37 – 8, 40, 53, 62 – 3, 85 –7, 94, 108, 115– 6, 125, 132, 140– 1, 149, 151, 154, 162, 168, 175, 210, 214, 216, 223, 225, 229, 241, 248, 250 Raffles, Sophia, 89 – 90 Raffles, Stamford, ch. 12 Rangoon, 223 rape, 56, 59, 73, 126– 7 Reagan, Ronald, 78, 124 records, destruction, hiding and forgery of, 200, 218, 230, 233, 235– 6 regime change, 138, 259 religion, 86, 138, 187; see also Christianity; Islam Reynolds, J Russell, 45 Rhodes, Cecil, 12, 102, 116 Rhodesian Air Force, 216 Rhodesias, 12, 24, 35, 76, 206, ch. 26, 234, 236–7, 243 Rimington, Stella, 233 Ripon, Lord, 107 Roberts, Adam, 135, 137 Rohmer, Sax, 64 Roman Catholicism, 172, 205 Roman Empire, 7, 14, 59, 186, 191, 259 Roosevelt, Theodore, 103 Rorke’s Drift, 66 – 7, 69 Rose, Jonathan, 101 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95 – 6, 107 Royal Air Force, 124 Royal Geographical Society, 113, 118 royalty and royalism, 94, 226 Royal Navy, 54, 115 Royal Welch Fusiliers, 51 rubber, 116, 223 Rumsfeld, Donald, 242 Ruskin, John, 187, 190 Russia, 14, 61, 80, 203, 220, 232, 235 sado-masochism, 114, 125, 127 Said, Edward, 152, 154, 160, 181, 187 Saint George, 139, 176 Salisbury, Lords, 108, 215 sanctions, 217 Sandhurst, 137 Sargent, John Singer, 106 savagery, 118, 162 Scandinavia, 221 Schama, Simon, 139

school syllabuses, 58 – 9, 65, 208, 231, 241, 254–5 schools, see education Schumpeter, Joserh, 245 science, ch. 4, 45, 114, 118, 248– 9 Scotland and Scots, 59, 87, 88, 90, 146, 199, 224, 226 Scots Guards, 137 Scott, George Gilbert, ch. 24 Seacole, Mary, 72 secret services, 26 –7, 95, 215, ch. 28 Seeley, JR, 2, 148, 254 self-government, colonial, 168 self-supporting, 22 semantics, see imperialism, definition settlers (colonists), 12 – 13, 14, 16 – 17, 38 – 41, 53, 85, 163, 192, 201, 204– 7, ch. 26, 250, 253, 256 Seychelles, 137 sex, 43, 101, 103, 113, 115, 122, 124– 5, 127 sexism, 86, 91, 154 Shaw, George Bernard, 129– 30 Sierra Leone, 11, 37, 138– 40 Sillitoe, Percy, 237 Singapore, 88 – 90, 220, 224– 5, 227– 9 skull-measuring, 37 slavery, slave-trading and anti-slavery, 13, 16, 39, 53, 88 – 9, 94, 112– 16, 119, 121, 126, 162, 166, 240, 248, 256 Smith, Adam, 19, 62 Smith, Grafton Elliot, 38 Smith, Howard, 236 Smith, Ian, 211, 214, 234, 236 social imperialism, 165 social reform, 165, 180 socialism, 25, 26, 80, 98, 100, 151, 162, 164–7, 204, 212, 215, 232, 241 South Africa, 12 – 13, 27, 48, 100, 103, 135, 140, 166, 200, 204, 206, 214, 216, 236–7, 248 South African wars, 76, 162, 166, 168, 171, 173, 177, 227 South Georgia, 76 Soviet Union, see Russia Spain, 227 Special Air Service, 135, 137 Speke, John Hanning, ch. 17 Spenser, Edmund, 126 sport, 27, 29 – 31; see also cricket; football

INDEX Stanford, CV, 178 Stanhope, ‘Citizen’, 94 – 5 Stanhope, Hester, ch. 13 Stanley, Dorothy, 117 Stanley, Henry Morton, ch. 16, 120 Stanley, Lord, 216 Star-Spangled Banner, 52, 57 Steyn, Mark, 243 Stilwell, Joe, 222 Stirling, David, 137 Stokes, Eric, 225– 6 Strachey, Lytton, 94 Strange, William, 44 Sudan, 29 – 31, 105, 115, 119, 120, 166, 176, 243, 258 Suez, east of, 228 Suez invasion 1956, 77, 162, 233 suffragism, see feminism Sufi, 92 suicide, 79 –80, 121 suicide bombers, 129 Sullivan, Arthur, 177–8 Sumatra, 88 Sun Yat-sen, 61 – 2 Swaziland, 69 Sweden, 75 Swinton, Lord, 210, 215 Sydney, 192 Sykes – Picot, 128 Syria, 92, 95 – 6, ch. 18, 258 Tamils, 223 Tanganyika, 36 tariff reform, 166, 177 Tariff Union, Imperial, see tariff reform taxation, 11, 20, 22 – 3, 26, 45, 100, 163, 183, 186 television ducumentaries, 58, 243 Teltscher, Kate, ch. 11 temperance reform, 42, 47 Tenniel, 68 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 179 terrorism, 133, 223, 227, 237 Thailand, 221 Thames, 184 Thatcher, Margaret, 22, 26, 33, 57, 75 – 6, 78– 80, 135, 138 Thatcher, Mark, 135– 6 theatre, 152– 3 theory, 151– 2

289

Thompson, Andrew, 152– 3 Tibet, ch. 11 Tilley, Helen, ch. 4 Times, 61, 64, 185 torture, ch. 25, 233– 4, 256 trade and traders, 9 – 10, 16 –17, 23, 26, 39, 51, 54, ch. 7, 85, 106, 116, 191, 248, 253 trade unions, 165 travel, foreign, 190– 1 Trevaskis, Sir Kennedy, 233 Trevelyan, Sir Charles, 184– 5 trusteeship, 13 – 14 Turkey and Turks, 108, 123, 126, 128 Uganda, 237 Ujiji, 112 Ulster, 177 Ulundi, 67 Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), 211– 13, 216– 17 UNITA, 138– 9 United Nations, 76 –9, 81, 138 United States of America, 16, 26, 38, 42, 46– 7, ch. 6, 64, 77, 80, 99, 102– 3, 105, 107, 111, 112– 14, 116, 119, 125, 136, 138, 147– 9, 151, 157, 161, 163, 165–6, 177, 191, 193– 4, 201, 203, 206, 213, 220, 222, 226, 228, 232–3, 237–45, 250, 253– 4, 256 universalism, 192– 3 universities, 26, 228, 230, 232 upper and upper-middle classes, 24, 28, 51, 100, 115, 132, 137, 140, 153, 172, 179–80, 184 –5, 188, 204–6, 212, 250 Urban, Mark, 51 USSR, see Russia utilitarianism, 179– 80, 186– 7 Verwoerd, Hendrik, 214 Victoria, Queen, 8, 45, 67, 71 – 2 Victoria Crosses, 67, 69, 79 Vietnam War, 47, 222, 227–8 Walton, Calder, ch. 28 War of 1812, ch. 6 Wareham, 130 Warner, Sir Gerry, 237 Warnock, John, 44, 46

290

EMPIRE WAYS

Washington DC, 51 – 2, 56 –7 Watson, Noel, 210 Wavell, Lord, 221 Webb, Beatrice, 130 Welensky, Roy, 210, 215, 217 welfare (domestic), 23; (colonial), 25, 35, 41, 228 Welsh, 51, 66, 112, 114 West Indies, 12 – 13, 48, 243– 4 western decadence, 127 Westernisation, 12, 15, 34, 37, 39 – 40, 47, 128, 244– 5, 255; see also cultural imperialism Westminster, Dean of, 113 Westminster Palace, see Parliament Westminster School, 137 Westward Ho! 99 White, Dick, 236 White, Michael, 58 white man’s burden, 228; see also civilizing mission White’s Club, 136–7 Whitehead, Sir Edgar, 212 Wiener, Martin, 23 – 4 Wilde, Oscar, 101, 178– 9 Wilhelm, Kaiser, 98 Wilson, Harold, 211, 217, 235 Wilson, Kathleen, 154– 5 Wilson, Woodrow, 101

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 92 Wolseley, Garnet, 66, 69, 73 women, 43, 55 – 6, 63, 70, 73, 86, 89 – 90, ch. 13, 100, 102, 106, 108– 9, 114– 15, 121, 166, 202, 210, 213, 221, 225, 227 Woolf, Leonard, 130 Worcester, 172 working classes, 30, 94, 100, 125, 164– 5, 185, 212 World Bank, 41 World War I, 8, 14, 21, 47, 99 – 101, 103, 110, 123, 127, 156, 159, 163, 166–8, 176–7, 228 World War II, 28, 103, 169, 216, 218, ch. 27, 235, 242, 254 Wright, Peter, 237 xenophobia, 63 Xia Xie, 61 Yale University, 177, 191 Yan Fu, 61 – 2 Yorkshire, 257 Young, George Kennedy, 237 Zambia, 121, 209, 218 Zenobia, Queen, 93 Zimbabwe, 12, 24, 75, 135, 137, 209, 243 Zulus, Zululand, Zulu Wars, ch. 8, 71