The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes To Other Cultures in the Imperial Age 9781350223233, 9781783604296

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In memory of Nazir Ahmad, a former Principal of Government College, Lahore, and of excursions to Dovedale, the Khyber Pass, the Oval, the tomb of Hafiz, and other places east and west.

PR E FATORY NOT E h e at h e r k i e r na n

On the morning of 17 February 2009 I received a note from Eric Hobsbawm: Dear Heather,   What can I say at this moment? Only that I loved and admired him too, and the world is not the same without him. But that is nothing to what you have lost, who renewed his life.   All love   Eric

I was a Jilly-come-lately, having only arrived on the scene in 1984, but it was clear from the beginning that Eric and Victor enjoyed a very deep camaraderie – a camaraderie formed during the political, economic and social upheavals of the early 1930s, and one that endured for over seventy years, though they rarely saw one another after Victor settled in Scotland. ‘I am glad – I am always glad – to hear from you, if only to confirm that you are still holding your own,’ Eric wrote in an email when they were both infirmed and near the end of their lives. ‘The important thing is that we should keep up the correspondence one way or another while we can.’ Eric Hobsbawm and V.G. Kiernan stood out among the twentieth-century British Marxist historians for their ability to look at history with a global vision. While their contemporaries Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton and E.P. Thompson primarily tackled English topics in their mature historical work, Eric and Victor made ambitious forays across time and continents. Eric admired Victor for a historical imagination that exposed proto-socialist practices among Jesuits in Paraguay, scrutinized the performance of colonial armies in various lands, and distilled the lessons of Urdu, Greek and English literature. He also believed that Victor’s persistent criticism of ideologically orthodox arguments inadequately supported by scholarship had an enormous influence on the early debates of the Communist Party Historians Group, citing Victor as ‘our chief doubter’.

x  Prefatory Note Victor too always enjoyed receiving books and articles by Eric and would send him letters filled with elaborate notes and observations. (Looking at his journal for October 1956 I see that he was going to write Eric ‘a stiff letter’ about one he had written to The Worker.) They shared what they jokingly referred to as a mutual admiration society. Over the next twenty-five years there was Eric’s invitation to join him in Belfast for the Wiles Lectures, a shared semester at UCLA, Eric’s birthday dinner for the surviving members of the CPHG, and Victor’s 85th birthday celebration at Edinburgh. Then there were the annual Christmas and New Year telephone calls to Woodcroft from Wales. In late 2011 Eric wrote saying, ‘I’ve been asked to do an entry for Victor in the Oxford DNB – So I’d need to get lots of information from you.’ We corresponded for the next six months despite Eric spending a month in hospital. When the entry was published posthumously, in January 2013, Eric credited Victor for contributing to the immense success of the journal Past & Present (founded by key figures of the CPHG in 1952). Victor was ‘probably refereeing more contributions to it with greater assiduity than anyone else’. But perhaps the greatest testament to their friendship was the letter Eric wrote for me to read at Victor’s Memorial in Edinburgh University’s Old College. It provides a closing rhetorical flourish about one of his proudest life accomplishments: convincing Victor Kiernan to write The Lords of Human Kind.

A T R I BU T E TO V IC TOR K I E R NA N e r ic hob s b aw m

This is not the occasion to talk at length about Victor’s contribution to history. There will be other times when we discuss this. This is the moment to pay tribute to a remarkable and enchanting man. Anyway, some of us will not be able to do so for much longer. Memory is a curious thing. Victor and I were comrades and friends for seventy years or so, though generally divided by very long distances. Apart from the short spell between his return from what was still India and his departure for Edinburgh, when both of us were in Cambridge, there was no time when we lived in the same place for more than a day or two. We met at more or less regular intervals: in the early postwar years at the Communist Historians’ discussion in a Clerkenwell that was still closer to Dickens than to the world of the Financial Times’ ‘How to Spend It’ supplement; later on at the Oxford editorial board meetings of Past & Present, of which he was a member in the 1970s and 1980s. For the rest we only met on the infrequent occasions when he came to London and the even rarer occasions when I found myself in Edinburgh. And, in the mid-1980s, at an enjoyable conference on nationalism in war-torn Belfast in connection with the Wiles Lectures, enlivened by the sponsor’s main product, Bushmills whiskey. Then why do I remember him so vividly? Why do occasions when nothing particularly memorable happened live on like photographs in my memory – a visit to the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, a walk with him and a Pakistani friend in Belsize Park, a ride in a hired car through the Ulster countryside, a moment on the bridge watching the salmon leaping up the Tweed? Why was I so glad every time I heard his voice on the phone or received one of those single-spaced typed missives which somehow made even typescript seem to reflect the unmistakable Kiernan hand? Let me say again what I wrote on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. He was

xii  Tribute to Victor Kiernan a man of endless sincerity, charm, warmth and surprise. A double surprise. On the one hand he surprised the friends who loved him, but who had trouble in understanding what went on inside this apparently open and welcoming person, but one who kept his emotions very much to himself – at least until his fortunate marriage to Heather. On the other hand I always had the impression that he himself was constantly surprised by a world that was not quite like his, a world where people did not travel with Latin editions of Horace or Virgil or treated every human being with good-tempered courtesy, or wrote English with beauty and correctness but no concession to colloquialism. Instead he found himself in a world where it was common to drive cars, go to the movies, go to pop concerts and live with children.

And – I may add – in a world where people pursued personal ambitions and elbowed each other aside, even in universities. He made his friends smile and feel better for helping him to navigate its strange waters. I miss him and shall go on missing him. It was good to be his contemporary – a man not exactly life-enhancing, but confirming that goodness, honesty and virtue, with the lightest of touches, are still to be found in the world. If the good lord were to ask me (Richard Dawkins permitting) for a good deed that would help to get me through the narrow gate on Judgement Day (assuming that’s where I wanted to go), I’d say: ‘I knew there was only one man capable of writing The Lords of Human Kind, and I got him to write it.’ Goodbye Victor. 28 February 2009

FOR E WOR D joh n t ru m pb ou r

Historian in the Battle against Empire Victor Gordon Kiernan, professor of modern history at Edinburgh University in the postwar twentieth century, stood out as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. A man of letters close to the Edwardian era, he became infused with a radical consciousness from the desolation of the Great Depression and from a decade of witnessing anticolonial struggles in the Indian subcontinent. While his middle name came from one of British imperialism’s greatest heroes, General Gordon of Khartoum, Kiernan emerged as one of the nation’s foremost ideological warriors against Empire. V.G. Kiernan made immense contributions to the postwar flowering of British Marxist historiography that transformed the understanding of social history. Seeking escape paths from a congealing Stalinism, this intellectual movement grew from several figures, among them the Blakean visionary E.P. Thompson, the don of seventeenth-century radical dissent Christopher Hill, the radical medievalist Rodney Hilton, the encyclopedic Kiernan, and the scholar of primitive rebellion and large-scale economic change Eric Hobsbawm. Brash and confident in wielding the best of the Left’s cultural arsenal, they welcomed open-ended dialogue with non-Marxist traditions. Kiernan in his lifetime received fewer public accolades than Thompson, Hilton, Hill or Hobsbawm, provoking the last two to proclaim that they had created a Victor Kiernan Appreciation Society. Writing in the Telegraph of Calcutta on 22 February, Rudrangshu Mukherjee reflected that most of the British Marxist historians ‘believed that [Kiernan] was the most erudite and widely read among them all’. His mastery of Persian and Urdu, as well as an array of modern European languages and classical Greek and Latin, contributed to his intellectual mystique. He wrote works ranging from the classical verse of Horace to the

xiv Foreword social context of Shakespeare’s plays to historical dissections of European empires and the ‘new imperialism’ represented by the United States, as well as translations and analyses of the golden age of Urdu poetry.

The Lords of Human Kind Best known for The Lords of Human Kind (1969), Kiernan created a work ‘concerned with the impressions and opinions of Europeans and non-Europeans about one another, their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, in the century or century and a half before the First World War, the epoch when Europe’s importance in the world was greatest’. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said regarded it as a central influence in developing his modern-day classic Orientalism (1978). Kiernan’s work has many haunting themes, including the contrast between liberty at home and tyrannical oppression abroad: ‘It did not escape comment that the Dutch were no sooner gaining their freedom at home than they were depriving other people of theirs, an inconsistency repeated by several European nations later on.’ The techniques of oppression abroad brought a pack of plagues back to Europe, observed Kiernan, whether in Lord Salisbury’s crass judgement that the Irish were no more fit for home rule than Hottentots or in the imperial manner of warfare that relied on hard-charging offensive techniques designed ‘to hypnotize and paralyse the enemy by asserting the firmer will and higher morale of the attacker’. As millions of Europeans were later slaughtered in World War I, the military officers failed to see ‘that machine guns and barbed wire were not so easily hypnotized as half-armed’ Asians and Africans. The generals doggedly stuck to the bayonet-charging techniques that once worked for them in their youth on the campaign grounds in the overseas colonies. Kiernan’s work also examined a variety of racial hierarchies on display in European literature, perhaps most graphically in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913). In this work, there is a table of ranks among the races, an order of fitness to survive … implied in the sequence in which they succumb to the mysterious etheric poison that the planet has swum into. Africa and the Australian aborigines are speedily extinguished, followed

Foreword   by India and Persia, while in Europe the Slavs collapse sooner than the Teutons, and southern France sooner than the north, after ‘delirious excitement’ and a ‘Socialist upheaval at Toulon’.

The Mythologies of Imperialism Kiernan carried out a relentless unmasking of imperialist ideologies and white European supremacist justifications for rule over South Asians, Africans, East Asians, and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Kiernan noted in particular how British colonialists used existing hierarchies in India to portray their rule as more benign than that of their predecessors. ‘The aristocratic streak in these English rulers made for an aloof and chilly manner’, he wrote in The Lords of Human Kind, ‘and Indian environment stiffened it. They came to think of themselves, it has been remarked, as a caste, infinitely above the rest. If Hindus complained of being looked down on, they could always be reminded that their own treatment of one another, especially of untouchables, was worse.’ Thomas Paine in 1792 paused to remark about the depredations from British rule, ‘The horrid scene that is now acting by the English Government in the East Indies is fit only to be told of Goths and Vandals.’ The famine of 1770 in Bengal may have wiped out a third of the population. And yet there are still historians who eagerly portray British colonial rule as quite benign, most notably Niall Ferguson, who was rewarded in 2004 with a lifetime tenured chair of history at Harvard by then-university president Lawrence Summers. When rival historians bragged of British contributions to India’s progress, Kiernan put the gains into perspective through historical verdicts rendered with poetic justice. Of the benefits from the British Raj, he wrote: ‘Dacoits and highway robbers were suppressed, absentee landlords who filched far more were caressed.’ Recognizing that European-style colonialism was not the only game in town, Kiernan explored the neo-imperialist patterns mastered by the United States in his America, the New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony (1978; and republished in 2005, with a new preface by Hobsbawm).

xvi Foreword

The Folklore of Capitalism and Conservatism In essays for New Left Review such as ‘Problems of Marxist History’ and ‘Shepherds of Capitalism’, Kiernan called attention to the ways in which feudal remnants and survivals shape the economic order. Capitalists talk a lot about the entrepreneurial spirit, but many of them are quick to abandon industrial investment for speculative and rentier pursuits. As Kiernan expressed it, There have always been easier ways of making money than longterm industrial investment, the hard grind of running a factory. J.P. Morgan preferred to sit in a back parlour on Wall Street smoking cigars and playing solitaire, while money flowed towards him. The English, first to discover the industrial highroad, were soon deserting it for similar parlours in the City, or looking for byways, short cuts and colonial Eldorados.

As capitalism was shaken by the new financial crisis, Kiernan had withering observations about the ascendancy of financial capital: England was the first country to undergo capitalism, first agrarian and then industrial, but it is also (if we leave out Holland) the first to relapse from industrial into financial, speculative, usurer capitalism. Long-drawn landowning ascendancy must surely have something to do with this. … England’s old ruling class was too busy chasing foxes and poachers, and its chief share in production was to keep up the tone of the labour force by sending objectors to Botany Bay, much as Russian landowners sent recalcitrant serfs to Siberia. It was a class essentially parasitic, like our City sharks and sharpers and harpies, many of them its lineal descendants.

One of Kiernan’s most controversial moves was to rebuff the common conservative charge that the Left is soaked in treason. Commenting on ‘another outburst of barking and braying about “Cambridge traitors”’ for cooperating with the Soviet Union during the Second World War and the early Cold War, he observed in the London Review of Books (25 June 1987) that ‘it has come to be a perennial resort of reaction, when it is left without any fresher topic for claptrap, to indulge in these spasms of virtuous indignation about the wickedness of a small number of idealists of years ago.’ The Right’s shamelessness is remarkable given how

Foreword  xvii ‘We saw pillars of British society trooping to Nuremberg to hobnob with Nazi gangsters; we saw the “National” government sabotaging the Spanish Republic’s struggle, from class prejudice, and to benefit investors like Rio Tinto, blind to the obvious prospect of the Mediterranean being turned into a fascist lake and the lifelines of empire cut.’ Kiernan noted how the Right has short memories, able to forget how many Tories gave enthusiastic support to army mutinies ‘when a Liberal government was again about to concede Home Rule’ to Ireland or later when ‘numbers of officers refused … to take part in any coercion of Ulster’. British officers ‘received unstinted sympathy from the overwhelming majority of Tories’ when they ‘would decline to act against white rebels in Rhodesia’. He added that in the 1980s Tories ‘continued to cherish fraternal feelings towards the white savages of South Africa, their partners in upholding the natural right of capitalism to exploit its victims: quite indifferent to the moral damage to Britain, but also to the material losses to be expected from an alienation of black Africa and most of the Commonwealth.’ He added how often these British patriots have given support to Washington in destabilizing democratic governments around the world. He thought that the Right had repeatedly deployed accusations of treason to delegitimize the Left, and it was time to deliver a few bruising counterpunches.

Literature and Social Change Rejecting R.H. Tawney’s belief in Social History and Literature (1949) in the absence of links between the art of an epoch and the economic order, Kiernan fought back against the tendency to see genius as beyond any social explanation. ‘It may be conceivable, but is extremely unlikely, that Shakespeare could have written as he did about war, death, property, all the while contemplating their grimness from an Olympian peak of detachment’, he countered. Though seeking to avoid moralizing in his own works, Joseph Conrad conceded that ‘even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence.’

xviii Foreword

Kiernan and Urdu Poetry While steeped in Western literature and the classical heritage of Horace, Kiernan called for an appreciation of Urdu poetry, as he translated works from its literary golden age spanning from Ghalib (1796–1869) to Iqbal (1877–1938) to Faiz (1911–1984). He elevated writers from the East who had been largely banished by guardians of the Western canon and then overlooked by stylish postmodern literature professors prowling for more transgressive exemplars of literary craft. Kiernan’s friendship with Faiz began in the late 1930s, and he translated the poems with flair. Faiz conveyed the world of canines in the poem Dogs (1943): With fiery zeal endowed – to beg, They roam the street on idle leg, And earn and own the general curse, The abuse of all the universe; At night no comfort, at dawn no banquet, Gutter for lodging, mud for blanket. Whenever you find them any bother, Show them a crust – they’ll fight each other, Those curs that all and sundry kick, Destined to die of hunger’s prick. – If those whipped creatures raised their heads, Man’s insolence would be pulled to shreds: Once roused, they’d make this earth their own, And gnaw their betters to the bone – If someone made their misery itch, Just gave their sluggish tails a twitch!

Faiz then returned to the plight of humans under repressive regimes when in the opening stanzas of Bury Me under Your Pavements (1953) the canines return, this time with renewed overtones of impending menace: Bury me, my country, under your pavements, Where no man now dare walk with head held high, Where your true lovers bringing you their homage Must go in furtive fear of life or limb; For new-style law and order are in use; Good men learn, – ‘Stones locked up, and dogs turned loose.’

Foreword  xix Kiernan wrote that Faiz sought to convey that ‘citizens are allowed no means of defending themselves against persecution.’ Kiernan might be regarded as a historian of great colonial wars and distant repressive regimes, but poignant moments emerged when themes of solitude and suffering of individuals came alive in his social criticism. In ‘The Politics of Pain’, written for The Nation (4 January 1971), he spoke of the fifteenth-century Hussite heretic Hieronymus of Prague, ‘a man of strong build who struggled and screamed in the flames for a long time’. When Richard Friedenthal in his study of Luther (1970) observed that ‘There were many who screamed’, Kiernan retorted, ‘There are many today.’ He admitted, ‘We have lost a great deal of our pleasure in cruelty, but have acquired a faculty for shutting our eyes to it.’ In the USA of the Old South, Urban slave owners … would often send their slaves to the police station to be given so many strokes of the whip, rather than have them whipped at home. Modern Americans would rather trust special police cadres in Latin America to do whatever the safeguarding of their investments may require. It is indeed one of the recommendations of neocolonialism, by contrast with direct imperial control, that a civilised country is not compelled to do the uncivilised part of its work itself.

As much of the world once held out hope that the presidency of Barack Obama might bring an end to outsourced torture, this putatively progressive US administration reassured the national security apparatus that the programme named Rendition remains sacrosanct. The US option of sending captured prisoners to third-party nations will not be repudiated, with administration figures waxing comfortably about business as usual. While consoling themselves that they are far more humane than Nazi architects of oven-ready torture and final solutions, the contemporary national security oligarchs and their liberalprogressive enablers are still eager to preserve the repressive mechanisms of statecraft, this time in the name of democracy and humanitarian interventionist uplift. Kiernan showed us the hellish horror that results from their high-minded projects, but he also let us see there could be better paths for humankind.

xx Foreword Marx wondered whether human progress might find a new face, a visage more attractive than ‘that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink nectar but from the skulls of the slain’. Though recognizing that imperialism had incredible staying power, aided and abetted by a vast entourage of court intellectuals and supine journalists, Kiernan left us with historical resources and literature with the power to inspire resistance. He urged us not to stay silent when killers and torturers are among us. In such moments, Kiernan turned to his messenger Faiz in the poem Speak (1943), verse with the simplicity to be his epitaph: Speak, for your two lips are free; Speak, your tongue is still your own; This straight body still is yours – Speak, your life is still your own. See how in the blacksmith’s forge Flames leap high and steel glows red, Padlocks opening wide their jaws, Every chain’s embrace outspread! Time enough is this brief hour Until body and tongue lie dead; Speak, for truth is living yet – Speak whatever must be said. John Trumpbour is research director for the Labor and Worklife Program, Harvard Law School. This introduction is adapted from obituaries that appeared in Frontline: India’s National Magazine and The Nation online, with special thanks to T. Rajamoorthy and Lean Ka-Min of Third World Resurgence magazine for editorial suggestions.

PR E FAC E TO T H E F I R ST E DI T ION

This book is concerned with the impressions and opinions of Europeans and non-Europeans about one another, their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, in the century or century and a half before the First World War, the epoch when Europe’s importance in the world was greatest. It is a subject on which many very different works could be written, and no writer could claim more than a fragmentary knowledge of it. The materials drawn on here come from years of miscellaneous reading, not always well directed, unpublished papers from British and French diplomatic records, conversations with many people from many lands. The literature drawn on is predominantly English, and the only countries outside Europe that I have lived in are India and Pakistan. Britain, however, played the biggest part in the modern expansion of Europe, and its Indian empire was the most important single area of European contact with the world. The theme of the book was suggested to me by my friend Dr E.J. Hobsbawm. I have made some acknowledgements in the notes to other individuals, but in so wide a survey much must be owing in a more general way. Anyone who has the good fortune to belong to a large and sparkling department of history like the one at Edinburgh University is bound to pick up a good deal from his colleagues’ daily talk. As to the errors and omissions that a work of this kind cannot be free from, the best apology any writer can make is Dr Johnson’s – ‘Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.’ Edinburgh 15 February 1968

PR E FAC E TO T H E 1995 E DI T ION

For us, who happen to live while the World-Phoenix is burning herself … Creation and Destruction proceed together. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1838), Book III Chap. 7

The Lords of Human Kind was written half-way between the close of the Second World War and today, when it reappears in a landscape in many ways much altered. All kinds of new debates have sprung up about Homo sapiens and his destiny, some of them running back to his first beginnings, the question of where he was born – in Africa, perhaps. Argument of a more acrimonious sort has raged over the final stages of the colonial empires, and their legacies. Wherever imperialists were determined to hold on to their possessions, directly or by proxy, the concluding scenes were likely to be more violent than any that had gone before them. Worst and longest drawn out were the French wars in Vietnam and then Algeria, and the American in Vietnam. One of their features was the regular use of torture, in Algeria ‘the standard electric-shock treatment’.1 Europe had prided itself on having left torture behind in the museums, or relegated to sensational novelettes about villains like Fu Manchu. Western relapses into barbarism helped to spread the practice over most of the globe, where it still flourishes. Sadly, those who fought hardest for freedom have not been the best rewarded. Active struggle, Fanon hoped when Algeria rebelled, would have a purging, purifying effect, freeing a nation from old bad ways and habits of mind. But since independence the blighting effects of armed conflict there have been more in evidence. From the most heroic of all such wars in history emerged a Vietnam capable of beating off an unprovoked attack from, of all countries, China; but economic advance has been inadequate, and north–south fissures have not yet been overcome. Of the Portuguese colonies, in Mozambique the South Africans were able to foment and keep going a vastly destructive civil war;

Preface  xxiii in Angola they did the same with American backing. In Guinea Bissau the leadership of Amilcar Cabral raised high expectations among sympathizers abroad.2 But he was murdered in 1973; when freedom came, and his brother Luis was made president, things quickly deteriorated. After an army coup in November 1980 mass graves of his opponents were discovered. Among other newly independent countries India, the biggest of all, has combined adherence to a parliamentary form of government with state-promoted economic growth; but population increase has ensured that poverty is still rampant. Pakistan has had far less success in industrializing, in political life none at all. Far Eastern colonies freed, or partially freed, by the Second World War and its sequel, have had Japan as pacemaker and the USA as custodian; they have done formidably well economically, much less well otherwise. Africa has fared worst. Most of it lacked the commercial and financial skills which the Far East has always been familiar with. Leadership has been poor, for one reason at least because Britain, tutored by Cold War Washington, took steps to push the ablest candidates out of the way before granting independence, as too much inclined to Communism.3 Financial aid to former colonies has been inadequate, viewed as compensation for wealth extracted by the former rulers, and not always well directed. There has been much neo-colonialist pressure, not excluding military pressure at times. It seems that the Khmer Rouge, harassing the Vietnamese-sponsored government of Cambodia, may have received arms from America as well as from China. Clichés from Western thinking about Asia have haunted some Asian minds too. A bygone Shah of Gujarat, according to one Indian historian, was ‘fond of displaying the trappings of royalty and like many an eastern monarch loved magnificence and power’.4 Indian historians are no longer guilty of such aberrations. But Pakistan’s first dictator, Ayub Khan, could remark to a Western reporter in 1967 that Chinese representatives were usually easy to hold discussions with, though ‘As oriental people they are affected by their emotions.’5 To hear a Sandhurst graduate from the North-west Frontier talking in this strain might be simply quaint; a graver matter was the behaviour of West Pakistan officers and officials like him in East Pakistan (now

xxiv Preface Bangladesh), men to whom Bengalis were inferiors, virtually colonial subjects. Hence the movement for independence, which the government tried to suppress by brutality. In this sphere Iraq, with its persecution of Kurds and Shia Arabs, may be said to share the palm with Indonesia. There another dictator has followed up a huge massacre of opponents in 1965 with the seizure of Portugal’s old colony of East Timor, and terroristic crushing of resistance.6 To nearly all of these doings the enlightened West has turned a resolutely blind eye. Arms are always available to well-disposed dictators, to strengthen armies whose sole purpose is to put down opposition. According to a recent Congressional report in Washington, 70 per cent of all armaments exported in 1994 went to the Third World, with a total value of £15.8 billion; France took the lead from the USA, now eager to catch up. Of American arms sales to the Third World in the past four years, another report tells us, 85 per cent went to non-democratic governments.7 The enormous world trade in armaments feeds a horde of profiteers, and reeks of bribery and corruption at every stage. This has been so for a long time, and helps to explain the recommendation in the Covenant of the League of Nations that manufacture of arms should never be in private hands – a principle always ignored and long since forgotten. Some special note deserves to be taken of a large category of the Third World’s inhabitants, and the most hapless, the aboriginal peoples. These had fellow-sufferers in Europe, like the Lapps, pushed further and further into the Arctic by the Finns and others,8 or the Highlanders as they used to be looked down on by Englishmen and Lowland Scots. ‘Primitive races’ were of only marginal interest to colonial governors. There were always frictions between them and the ‘higher races’ who often exploited them, and they seldom found a place in the nationalist movements and their gains. They had been forced into the least desirable homelands, jungle or hill. There were ‘Montagnard’ tribesmen in the hilly fringes of Vietnam, whom the Americans were able to make use of against the Vietnamese. In various parts of the world encroachment by the stronger on the meagre portion of the weaker, which has gone on time out of mind, is still going on; against the Indian populations of

Preface  xxv Central America, and by ranchers and gold-prospectors in the Amazon basin, or against ‘tribals’ in the Chittagong hills by land-hungry Bangladeshi settlers. Here and there, behind an imperial screen, some clan as unknown to the great world as ignorant of it would be waging an obscure contest against those in power. In forest areas of British India officialdom professed to be protecting woodland from dwellers on its edges, who depended on it for materials to build huts and cook food. Really it seems they were often being shut out so that more timber could be sold to businessmen licensed to cut it down. It may be added that independent India is one of the few countries which have tried to make special provision for neglected peoples or castes, to help them to cope with change; sometimes to the discontent of better-off classes who feel that their opportunities are being curtailed, to make room for them. An aboriginal people scattered across southern and western China, the Miao, many of whom had been compelled to retreat into the mountains, launched rebellions in 1735–36, 1795–1806, and 1855–72. A Chinese historian compares their fate to that of the Amerindians.9 In October 1992, when the new possessors of the New World were celebrating the arrival of Columbus five hundred years before, there were mass demonstrations in protest by some of the forty million Amerindians. For them it was a disaster, portending massacre, degradation, enslavement; inflictions that have never ended, and in recent years may have been worst in Guatemala, home of the ancient Maya civilization, and in the Peru of the Incas. In the central square of Mexico City a large meeting denounced the imprisonment of six thousand ‘Indians’. A strong enough impression was made to induce Latin American governments, and those of Spain and Portugal, to set up a fund for indigenous development; and the United Nations designated 1993 the International Year of Indigenous Peoples. Since then however there has been revolt in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, largely aboriginal. There have been successes of late in several countries originating from the British empire. There has been growing recognition (which a fresh discovery of Stone Age cave-paintings in France will strengthen) of what ‘primitive’ peoples have been capable

xxvi Preface of, in spite of narrow resources. In North America old tribal ceremonies have been reviving, and visitors have flocked to watch them and plumed themselves on being admitted to secret rituals.10 This may often be simple curiosity, but there is also nowadays serious interest in the religious or philosophical conceptions of an ancient race. At the same time there has been a move towards a coalescence of scattered tribal grievances into something like a national movement, with intelligent organization, and complaints about old treaty rights and their violation, and lost territories, have won some rewards. Most important materially in the USA has been a Supreme Court decision entitling Indian tribes on their reservations, as heirs to formerly sovereign nations, to set up gambling casinos, elsewhere banned by some states. They bring in fabulous profits; it is an odd experience to see white Americans flocking by the thousand to spend their money at Indian gambling tables – much as too many Indians have flocked to the white man’s drinking haunts. An arrangement has thus been found which makes both sides happy; and at Green Bay in Wisconsin, for instance, on Oneida land, the enquirer is assured that the money flowing in is being sensibly invested in new schools, hospitals and community centres. This implies a renewal of the collectivist spirit formerly animating Amerindian life, with all land belonging to the clan. White rule did its best to break this down, and privatize land and other property. Appeals to competitive self-interest only resulted in an ambitious, adaptable minority being skimmed off, leaving too many to sink into idleness and become derelicts. It was much the same in Canada, where a royal tour speech on 5 July 1973 deplored with unwonted frankness the poverty of the ‘Native Americans’, their scanty share in Canadian prosperity. Something has been won by them since then; and a dramatic alteration is now taking place in the status of their companions in misfortune, the Inuit or Eskimos. A vast Arctic territory is being handed over to them as their own homeland, whose mineral wealth they will be free to lease out. There are very few of them to confront the task of building a nation in such a wilderness; if they are even half successful, man’s most optimistic hopes of mankind will be encouraged.

Preface  xxvii Australia’s aborigines have been the only ones to be so labelled in common speech. Their criminal treatment for many years after the white man’s arrival was deplored by Lord Lansdowne, Foreign Secretary, in the House of Lords on 9 May 1905, as likely to discredit the criticisms often made by Britain of misrule in other empires. His admission came in useful to Germany during the recriminations set off by the First World War.11 Pots calling kettles black were a regular feature of the imperial scene. It was long believed, wrongly we now see, that these indigenous people were a dying race, who would soon carry their troubles away with them to a better world. This was a conviction shared by Daisy Bates, a remarkable woman who dedicated herself to benevolent work among them, not with any hope of improving them but simply to ease their passage. She reacted sharply to an incipient mutiny among some of her protégés, indignant at the white man stealing their land.12 Their outcry has been taken up in recent years by a genuine movement, making claims for restoration of tribal lands and of sacred places bound up with tribal consciousness and unity. White Australians have been criticized by one of themselves for not caring about anything but a long enough lunch break to go surf-riding;13 all the same, a new page is being turned. Maoris were a better organized people, if somewhat too one-sidedly for warlike purposes. Their country was annexed, one of its historians observes, at a time when evangelical and philanthropic influences on colonial policies were at their strongest; but the good relations talked of did not materialize.14 After the years of conquest there was some improvement, but too much of it appears to have been on the surface only, and lower down there have been familiar symptoms of the degeneration that sets in when a people is reduced to existing on the margins of a society in which it has little part. In 1994 a striking film, Once Were Warriors, showed a Maori woman trying to rescue herself and her family from a drunken brute of a husband. 1995 has seen an impressive act of contrition on the part of white New Zealand: restoration into Maori hands of a large tract of land, with a large sum of money to go with it, and an apology – to be signed, some suggested, by the Queen herself. Empires have always set in motion a mixing up of peoples, languages, cultures. Much Afro-Asian blood must have entered

xxviii Preface the Roman empire, willingly or in chains, and deposited genes still circulating in Europe. Arab occupation of Sicily and Iberia brought numerous settlers, among them a large Jewish community. Massive reshuffling, outside Europe, was one consequence of modern imperialism, and left grave problems to former colonies, alien minorities like the Chinese in Malaya, the Indians in Ceylon, even, as in Fiji, a majority of outsiders. Now analogous difficulties have been visited on Europe itself, and on the USA. Armies withdrawing from the colonies have been followed by a host of migrants, obeying a medley of motives. It has been an unforeseen tit-for-tat, or rejoinder to colonialism; a new kind of invasion, sometimes legal, often not. France forced its way into north Africa by years of war, and now has a strenuous anti-immigrant party protesting against the consequences. Even the good done by imperial rule now turns against the doers: their medical services have swelled population, but not resources. Britain has been equally unprepared. Whether or not it acquired its empire in a fit of absence of mind, that is certainly a faithful account of how it has acquired its sudden army of strangers. Yet such a situation is new only in its scale. As Osbert Sitwell said, Britain was for centuries before America ‘the European melting pot’.15 North America is showing, more than Europe, a two-sided development, an influx of hungry folk in search of jobs and food, and another of professionally qualified men and women looking for better rewards than they can expect at home, whether in Europe or in Asia. The former, the needy, are often repulsed, the latter welcomed. Canada has been more liberal than the USA, because still not adequately peopled; so that today in whole quarters of Toronto street names are in languages like Greek or Chinese. Both there and in the USA in recent years there has been much talk of ‘multiculturalism’, as preferable to the old insistence on all newcomers being fully assimilated. European countries face the same alternative. There are obvious merits in diversity, so long as all citizens have something to share in common. Without this it is too likely to mean, for some of them, a ghetto existence, with no culture at all that can have meaning in an alien environment.

Preface  xxix Throughout this century reasons in favour of some kind of European union have been multiplying. There is something ridiculous in the thought of a small continent divided into a score of states, each with what is called a Defence Ministry piling up armaments for the benefit of manufacturers and exporters. Some practical beginnings of a coming-together were made not by the winners in the Second World War, as the League of Nations had been made by those of the First World War, but by the three defeated countries, France, Italy and Germany, with encouragement from America and from a neo-Catholic ideology. It was at the same time a re-establishment and consolidation of a badly-shaken capitalism, soon to enter on the most prosperous years of its history. Part of the price that has had to be paid for this has been a jettisoning of older standards of conduct; a gospel, no longer veiled, of egotistic pursuit of wealth as the summum bonum, the only activity worthy of a man or woman of spirit; and with this a spread of financial and political corruption. Capitalism has always found generous room for bribes, perquisites, palmgreasing; but there must be limits beyond which it will cease to be viable. European ‘sleaze’ has been overflowing into other regions, and worsening similar maladies there. Until not many years ago Indians had a feeling that whatever its defects as a ruling power, Britain was strong by virtue of national character and honesty. ‘Nation-building depends on character-building’ became the watchword of the Jan Sangh party, and earned it much esteem.16 Only Indians with eyes and ears tight shut can have any such impression of Thatcherite Britain today and its elite, ‘the choice and master-spirits of the age’, with one foot on a parliamentary bench and the other in the pork-barrel. Germany too used to be considered more trustworthy than most of its neighbours, but has been revealing itself as no better than the rest. American and Japanese businessmen and politicians have never been thought squeamish about breaking pedantic rules. Union and mutual criticism may offer a kind of remedy. On the political side, constant harping on ‘democracy’, as a virtue not to be found in the USSR, has invested the word with a degree of reality. Spain and Portugal were obliged to abjure fascism in order to win admission to the European Union, as

xxx Preface an unregenerate Turkey is trying to do. Eire has benefited from membership by being jerked forward some distance out of its clerical-conservative bog. England, so long accustomed to accuse others of backwardness, may benefit likewise, if it can close its ears to the siren songs of pseudo-patriots. Union can be recommended also as a counterweight to German preponderance, increased by Russia’s eclipse. In one light European history since the Romans might be summarized as the steamrollering of Celts and Slavs by Teutons: in the west the Germanic conquest of Gaul and the British Isles, in the east the German and Austrian ascendancy over the fragmented Slav peoples. But if there is to be a union of peoples, not merely of governments, the gravest impediment will be another sort of inequality, between classes, especially in countries like Britain where it has been growing steadily wider. On a bus in a London area where the working class has been got rid of to make way for dwellings fit for stockbrokers to live in, a City gent was heard asking a fellow-settler ‘Are there any locals left where you are?’ to which the reply was ‘Yes, there are still a few savages.’17 In Bosnia, ‘ethnic cleansing’ has been going on, in London social cleansing. Such divisions are a negation of civilized life, which must be a society of equals. A ‘Star Trek’ parable of October 1986 carried us to a remote planet that was being reduced to ruins by hostilities between a dominant race and an inferior one, discontented and mutinous. Yet the only difference between them was that one had a face black on the left, white on the right, and the other the converse. It was an aim of my book to emphasize the kinship between prejudices of race and of class. There have always been individuals conscious of the lingering trauma of class division as a cleavage within the human family; artists and writers may have been more sensitive to it than others. It comes out very distinctly and recurrently in Thackeray’s sketches of London life in the 1840s.18 One of these shows us young working-class women gathering at Fenchurch Street Station at the start of a journey that will carry them to Australia, a long exile but in a land free from the divisive castes and snobberies that Thackeray lamented but could see no hope of removing. All calculations about Europe’s and the world’s future must be deeply affected by what happens in Russia, and how soon

Preface  xxxi it can find a new purpose instead of sinking into the happy hunting-ground of foreign capitalists that it was before 1917. All the conservative West had longed to see the Soviet Union and its great adventure running down, very much as in the nineteenth century, when the USA was a beacon-light for all Europe’s democrats and radicals, its enemies hoped to see it broken up by civil war, and rejoiced to see it taken over by gluttonous machine-politicians. Yet it is well to remember that in both world wars Russia was on the same side as the West, and in the second bore the heaviest brunt of the fighting. A British government memorandum of early 1918 discussed Russia and Turkey as ‘the bridge between Europe and the East’.19 As Trotsky was to write, ‘Russia stood not only geographically, but also socially and historically, between Europe and Asia.’20 A bridge is likely to be vulnerable on more than one side, and Russia underwent centuries of harassment by Mongols on the east, Turks to the south, Poles and Germans and Swedes from westward. It was a frequent gibe in later days that most of the Russian nobility was descended from foreigners, European or Asiatic. From Western example Russia learned empire-building, but it was wiser than its Western compeers in not resorting to force to prevent the break-up of the Soviet Union. Only under a new capitalist regime did it go to war brutally to prevent the Chechens from seceding. A Europe incorporating Russia would be a match for any other of the super-powers among which the world runs a risk of being partitioned, as old Europe virtually was among the half-dozen ‘Great Powers’. It ought to see its mission now not as fomenting a senseless competition for first place, but as joining in all efforts towards disarmament and world unity. Tom Paine could think of himself long ago as ‘a citizen of the world’, and Tennyson could hail ‘the Parliament of man, the federation of the world’, though he too often slipped back into paeans to such exploits as the British conquest of Egypt, as more in line with a Poet Laureate’s duties. This planet is too small to be safely left divided among jostling super-powers, each with a nuclear arsenal and an equally perilous tally of rabble-rousing demagogues. Modern communication systems may seem to be preparing the way forward automatically. They bring us magically closer.

xxxii Preface Often indeed the miraculous vibrations seem to have no better work than to report the latest murder in Chicago or the tremors of ticker-tapes and gamblers’ pulses. Little of a true meeting of minds may be conjured up by a British Airways advertisement showing the chief of the McLeod clan in Skye and the chief of the Caddo and Wichita tribe in Oklahoma beaming at each other in full rig. Yet television lends life to many happenings when the average imagination cannot; and an Anti-slavery Society representative could report in 1967 that the transistor radio was finding its way even into the sealed prison of the Eastern harem, bringing with it thoughts never breathed there before.21 We can watch football or cricket matches going on anywhere, and competitive games and athletics have become a great career open to talents, where Africans, above all, have come into their own, and a Miss Goolagong has displayed some of the abilities of Australia’s native race by winning the ladies’ championship at Wimbledon. Sex has perhaps been sufficiently demystified to be put in the same kind of entertainment category. Its magnetism seems always to have overleaped boundaries of nation or race. A rugged Yorkshire squire and naturalist, Charles Waterton, wont to explore South American jungles barefooted, was heedless of English prejudices when he visited the USA in 1824. He was meeting, he felt, ‘an immense number of highly polished females’,22 a phrase suggestive of a butler burnishing the family silver, or a pasha’s dream of the perfect seraglio. British troops ransacking Nana Sahib’s palaces at Bithur during the Mutiny in 1857 came on heaps of affectionate letters from Englishwomen to a man named Azimullah Khan who had been Nana’s agent in London.23 Graham Greene touring Africa was struck by the charming colour of young African women, and ‘the most beautiful backs of any race’.24 Contrariwise, women in Thailand are reported to have expressed a preference for Americans, as more blonde and good-looking than their own men.25 Social reasons too may be guessed, but if men and women are left to the guidance of Nature, the ‘One World’ we hope for may in not many centuries from now be inhabited by one race. At the height of its missionary drive, in the years before 1914, the West could look to Christianity as the instrument for

Preface  xxxiii uniting the world, under its leadership; though it was signally failing to unite Europe. Its own belief in its religion has waned since then, but in the minds of America’s Born Again Christians, Christianity itself is having a rebirth, as a twin to right-wing Republicanism. In Latin America well-endowed Protestant missions have been seconding the efforts of dictators, and the US corporations they protect, to counteract the ‘liberation theology’ of a progressive Catholic movement, and crush peasant resistance. Up and down the world a rapidly growing army of missionaries, estimated in 1995 at 100,000, is astir, most of them from the USA.26 Many are at work in eastern Europe, helping, intentionally or not, to obliterate any traces of its socialist past. Albania, the latest country to open its doors, is overrun by missioners from both Christian sects and Muslim fundamentalists, with pledges of material aid to recommend their doctrines to a famishing people. Islamic fanaticism, like Christian, is well-funded, and with lavish supplies of arms from the USA and Pakistan it turned Afghanistan into an even bloodier battleground than any of Born Again Christianity’s in Central America. It is a relief to be able to turn to South Africa, as an afflicted country where Europe’s Christianity has been its true self. But in its homelands old dogmas and practices have lost their appeal, while that of the individual bringing a new message has grown. In 1919, in the revulsion from the First World War, D.W. Griffith made a film called Broken Blossom, incongruously anti-racist for the director of Birth of a Nation. In it an idealistic young Chinese Buddhist came to the West to save it from itself by preaching peace and harmony. He made no headway, and ended a suicide. The chief supplier of spiritual guides however has been Hindu India, with its wealth of myth and speculation, and a flexibility that allows anyone to take the stage with a doctrine of his or her own, and play the role of teacher, prophet, even divinity. There is something in this elasticity that American faith in free enterprise has found congenial, and some of the idle rich led the way in making a hobby of mystic orientalism. The Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock wrote an early story about a pair of burglars masquerading as holy men.27 Since then some handsome fortunes have been made in the business, along with its stable-companion astrology; as no doubt they were in Rome

xxxiv Preface when its conquests set loose a flood of Eastern mystery cults, and its own civilization, like ours, was on the wane. Freakish ideas, mumbo-jumbo rituals, inspired seers, help to bring a remote unsympathetic heaven nearer, and testify to the West’s declining faith in its own ability to exorcize its ills. India itself, racked like the West by tumultuous change, shows the same craving for supernatural assurances that its cherished past is not disappearing, that heaven and earth are still in their old places, even when everything seems to be upside down. One new cult, much favoured by successful families with modern education, was founded by a Sathya Sai Baba, who has been called ‘Hinduism’s most significant jet-age holy man’. He works miracles, claims limitless powers, and has promoted himself step by step to the rank of an incarnation of the supreme god Shiva. His secret it appears is an ability to infuse into others a ‘fundamentally confident’ attitude to life under unfamiliar stars.28 Japan too has sprouted some new cults, or old ones refurbished; in 1995 one of them, the Aum Shinrikyo, has had an explosive denouement. A melting-pot of superstitions is stirring; on the level of hocus-pocus, it seems, mankind finds it easier to come together than in more mind-taxing ways. Fortunately the faculties of the mind have not been lulled to sleep altogether, but on many sides have been making genuine progress. It was an observation of Herbert Spencer that we often find our motives and actions incomprehensible to people of alien backgrounds, but constantly overlook our own difficulty in comprehending them.29 But more and more of them have been making themselves comprehensible to others, and cultures apparently very simple have been revealing hidden depths. Africa, once analphabetic, has been learning, as India learned much earlier, to speak for itself, through scholars, novelists, leaders of its own. An example is Wole Soyinka, who has expounded the conceptions underlying mythic drama and tragedy in western Africa.30 The world has made him Africa’s first Nobel Laureate for Literature, his government has made it necessary for him to abandon his university chair in Nigeria and flee the country. Europeans have learned very much from one another, and are learning now from the rest of the world, which has been compelled to learn so much from them. There are no pure civilizations now any

Preface  xxxv more than pure races. Japan sends out conductors to lead Western orchestras, as well as managers to set up factories. In the lurid light of this century’s wars and crimes, all over the globe, the profound Christian distrust of human nature is undeniably justified. Any region presuming to offer guidance to the others will do well to put strict self-examination first. Whether or not the ‘civilizing mission’ claimed by the West had much improving effect on other lands, it is high time now for it to set about civilizing itself. Europe can at least claim the merit of having brought the idea of socialism into a world where, in spite of many persecutions, it has found fertile soil. Europe will be giving another wholesome lead when it is seen to be steering towards a future of social justice and equal rights as well as international amity. The notion of lower races is not likely to disappear while that of lower classes, and an inferior sex, is allowed to persist. Stow, 22 August 1995

notes The place of publication of works cited, when not given below, may be assumed to be London. 1. Maurice Larkin, France Since the Popular Front. Government and People 1936–1986 (Oxford, 1988), p. 259. 2. See Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea. An African People’s Struggle (1969). 3. Frank Füredi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (1994), p. 222. 4. Ishwari Prasad, The Life and Times of Humayun (Bombay, 1956), p. 89. 5. Observer, 12 February 1967. 6. See Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia (Notting­ham, 1975). 7. Guardian, 9 August 1995. 8. For a traveller’s impressions, of a generation or two ago, see C.J. Cutliffe Hyne, Through Arctic Lapland (n.d.). 9. S.Y. Teng, The Taiping Rebellion and the Western Powers (Oxford, 1971), pp. 366 ff. 10. Ruth Adam, Guardian, 10 July 1971. 11. German Colonial Office, The Treatment of the Natives and Other Populations (Berlin, 1919), p. 57. 12. Daisy Bates, The Passing of the Aborigines (1938; new edn, 1972), pp. 200 ff.

xxxvi Preface 13. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore. A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868 (1987). 14. K. Sinclair, The Pelican History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth, rev.edn, 1980), p. 130. On the expropriation of Maoris from their lands, see Dick Scott, Ask That Mountain: The Story of Parihaka (Auckland, 1975). 15. Osbert Sitwell, The Four Continents (1955), p. 52. 16. From a letter from my friend Dr P.D. Tripathi, 14 February 1969. 17. Guardian, 11 November 1987. 18. W.M. Thackeray, Sketches and Travels in London (1844–50: Gloucester edn, 1989), pp. 161 ff. 19. Cabinet Papers, CAB 24/39, January 1918. PRO. A copy was kindly given me by the late Mrs T. Brotherstone. 20. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution (1930: London edn, 1967), Vol. 1, p. 22: see also Vol. 3, Chapter 2, ‘The Problem of Nationalities’. 21. BBC, 6 May 1967. 22. Charles Waterton, Wanderings in South America (1825: new edn, 1906), p. 184. See also Julia Blackburn, Charles Waterton 1782–1865 (1989). 23. F.S. Roberts (later Field Marshal Earl). Letters Written During the Indian Mutiny (1924), p. 120. 24. Graham Greene, In Search of a Character (1961), p. 59. 25. BBC programme on Thailand, 2 April 1973. 26. Observer, 27 July 1995. 27. Stephen Leacock, ‘The Yahi-Bahi Oriental Society of Mrs RasselyerBrown’, in Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (Toronto, 1914). 28. L.A. Babb. ‘The Puzzle of Religious Modernity’, in J.R. Roach, ed., Indian 2000: The Next Fifteen Years (Riverdale MD, 1986), pp. 71, 76. 29. Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (15th edn, 1889), p. 116. 30. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge, 1976).

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of human kind pass by.      goldsmith, The Traveller (1765)