Durability of Empire: The Self-Reinforcing Bundle

Having laid out what I consider the four key elements of the British Empire, I re­turn to our question of why the empire survived so long. Similar elements were apparent in many historic empires, including the Spanish and French.

As I said earlier, there has been a tendency in recent works, especially those written in the United States and in India, to portray European empires as homoge­neous and violent forms of occupation of other societies.

I. The Period of Reform and Reaction: 1815-1840/1845

The first period I will discuss is the generation immediately after the end of the rev­olutionary and Napoleonic wars, ca. 1815-1840. During this period most of the key discourses of colonial reform and conservative answers to them were first devel­oped. More important, a few non-European spokesmen began to outline critiques of the British Empire, of Western ideologies and racial prejudice that were to persist through the era of high imperialism and into the twentieth century.

Initially, both the American and French revolutions strengthened the militaristic and autocratic tendencies within the empire associated with the first and third of my “elements”—the naval fortress element and the colonial province.^[2207] The East India Company, frustrated by the loss of its American trade, intervened on the China coast, redoubling the sale of opium there. The worldwide struggle with Napoleon expanded the empire into new colonial provinces.

Yet pure autocracy scarcely outlasted the war. Ideas of citizens' rights, dramatized by the American Revolution, spread rapidly, disseminated by a massive expansion of English-l anguage newspapers and later Bengali, Chinese, and Arabic ones.^[2208] After 1815, the postwar depressions sent large numbers of British and Irish settlers to Canada and Australasia, and these took with them the notion of English liberties and the common law. Numerous “new Europes” developed in the colonial world, and the conflicts between settler assemblies and royal governors were resolved in ways that allowed “distant sovereignty” to persist.^[2209] The best example here was the case of Lord Durham's settlement in Canada in the 1840s. The influence of French

Catholics in Quebec and American and Irish influence from across the border in the United States seemed likely to tear the remains of British North America apart. But the colonial authorities compromised. The settlers contributed to the empire's defense, but otherwise retained local self-government. Other adjustments which allowed the empire to continue to function emerged in the East. The Anglican Church was disestablished in Australia and later in other parts of the empire, as it had been in the Americas. This allowed members of other Christian faiths, and particularly Roman Catholics, to operate within the empire without too much tension. A full 60 percent of all white soldiers in India in 1830 were Irish, and the majority of these were Catholic and most spoke Gaelic, not English. They had their own chaplains and British India had its own Catholic hierarchy.

The proponents of colonial reform during this period raised four other issues which were to have a long-lasting influence, not only among supporters of empire, but later colonial nationalists.

A second movement of the period 1815-1845 was Protestant Christian evan­gelization.^[2210] This again had two sides. Missionaries sometimes extended educa­tional facilities to non-Europeans in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific and mobilized them against the abuses of colonial governments. Yet at other times, missionary zeal buttressed the case for attacks on indigenous regimes that were described as despotic and heathen. Third, the experience of revolution and the re-emergence of autocracies after 1815 strengthened the proponents of the liberty of the press, the liberty of trade, and the liberty of British subjects. This was the high point of British liberal thinking, illuminated by Jeremy Bentham and James and John Stuart Mill. Here again, we sense ambivalence. Liberal ideologies sometimes empowered non­European peoples and enemies of monopolies, such as the East India Company.^[2211] But on the other hand, free trade and an end to despotism could easily become justifications of aggression not dissimilar to the cries for “democracy” that echo around the world today. In the nineteenth century, Muhammad Ali's Egypt and Qing China both suffered British economic penetration and military aggression justified in terms of free trade.

Finally, this ambivalent era of reform saw, as already suggested, the development of ideas of local representation and colonial legal autonomy. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Caribbean—the settler element of empire—saw an extension and consolidation of local constitutions and brakes on the arbitrary acts of royal governors and even naval captains.^[2213] As I have argued, in some senses this reform had the effect of strengthening empire. Yet it also laid the foundations of non­European anti-colonialism and local nationalism. I will take here the case of the Bengali Brahmin religious reformer and constitutional liberal, Rammohan Roy.^[2214] You will be interested to know that a reissue of the liberal constitution of Cadiz in 1812 was dedicated to “El noble, sabio y virtuoso Brahma Ram-Mohan-Roy.” Roy participated in an extraordinarily wide imagined community of transnational lib­eralism. He held dinners in Calcutta for the Portuguese constitution and the rev­olution in Goa. He corresponded with the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. He did not argue for immediate home rule in India, but he did want Indians in the British parliament, Indian equality on juries in India, and a free Indian press. He argued for reform of the British parliament and visited the citizen king Louis Philippe. He urged the purging of Hinduism to take it back to what he saw as its pristine mon­otheism. Roy even envisaged the creation of a kind of United Nations as early as 1831. Roy represented a remarkable Indian eruption into modern political thought. He was followed by more radical pupils in Bengal and other parts of India. Within the next generation, indigenous liberal public figures were to emerge in Malay, Ceylon, on the West African coast, and in the Caribbean.^[2215] Reform, therefore, both strengthened the British Empire and also created the grammar of protest and self­assertion that would undermine it, but only in the very long term.

II. The Period of High Imperialism, 1880-1920

The second period that I shall use to illustrate the main points of this talk is the era of “high imperialism” from about 1880 to 1920. The period witnessed the partition—the dismemberment—of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Ottoman Empire. It saw heightened competition between the great powers that culminated in the First World War. It also saw the demise of some European empires: the Spanish, the Empire of the Tsars, the German. Huge new territories were added to the British Empire during these years: Burma, Cyprus, Egypt, the Sudan, East and West Africa. In the course of the First World War, the British occupied what was to become Iraq and Palestine. British and British Indian troops briefly occupied Istanbul.

At first sight, the period of high imperialism seems paradoxical in the British case. For this was the period when Britain's world power was beginning to wane. The great impetus of the industrial revolution was slackening. The United States and Germany had overtaken Britain as industrial powers, if not yet as financial ones. German goods began to penetrate what had once been British markets in Asia and the Middle East. Simultaneously, nationalist movements took on a more threatening aspect in India, in Egypt, and along the China coast. In some cases, young nation­alist leaderships turned to terrorism and assassination. Actually, there was no par­adox here. British imperial expansion had often taken place against the background of relative diplomatic weakness, as for instance during the French and Napoleonic Wars. Exploiting colonial markets and investing capital in the dominions was a ra­tional tactic as Britain's power began to wane. Yet our two questions remain. Why did the empire continue to survive, even expand, for another 80 years after this weakness became evident? How does the history of this long period—and the ideas generated within it—help to explain today's world?

The ideology and practice of empire over the years 1880-1920 was largely socially conservative. Both Liberals and Tories (conservatives) in government elaborated an ideology of tutelage and paternalism. The progressive ideological rhetoric of the early nineteenth century wore off with the Indian rebellion of 1857 and the emer­gence of colonial nationalism. Colonial governors had always veered between lib­eralism on matters such as slavery and conservatism in regard to native rights. Now they became more conservative yet. A range of viceroys and proconsuls, notably Lord Curzon in India and Lord Milner in South Africa, enunciated an ideology of conservation, insisting on the importance of “natural leaders of the people” or the protection of the peasantry. Commercial people, lawyers, and the evolues of the towns were anathematized as greedy or “inauthentic.” British power aligned itself with princes, sultans, and chiefs in India, Malaya, and Africa, respectively, under the rubric of “indirect rule.” A range of neo-conservative thinkers such as James Fitzjames Stephen and racial ideologues assailed the liberal principles of the early nineteenth century. Yet the liberals themselves were absorbed into the imperial consensus. John Stuart Mill, at least when interpreted by Europeans, seemed to deny representative government to “barbarians.” And it was, after all, the great liberal statesman W. E. Gladstone who occupied Egypt in 1882.

The new conservatism of royal governors melded together with the interests of my second element, the settler colonies, during this period. Settlers wanted a free hand to deal with their own indigenous populations in the second half of the nineteenth century after their numbers had greatly increased by emigration. These emerging republican societies were yet more ruthless in depriving native com­munities of their lands, or racially segregating them into a tame labor force. The tacit deal can best be seen in South Africa after the South African War. The white settlers were left a free hand with which to deal with the black and Indian popula­tion. They accepted British suzerainty, and British mining and strategic interests in the Cape were protected through to the days of apartheid in the 1960s. Two elements of empire with very different ideologies achieved a tacit agreement which allowed empire to perpetuate itself.

An important aspect of the ideology of empire in the late nineteenth century that drew all its elements together was the notion of the “martial race.” This was an unsteady amalgam of contemporary race theory with the politics of “divide- and-rule.” Soldiers and statesmen lauded the supposed martial characteris­tics of the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic races. This was turned to advantage when the Mother Country needed to draw on resources of manpower in the white dominions during the military conflicts of the later nineteenth and twen­tieth centuries. The idea of the martial race was especially cultivated in the Asian Empire. Here Muslims, Sikhs, tribal peoples from Burma, and even Dyaks from Malaya were recruited into the colonial armies and rewarded for their “ loyalty,” integrity, and physical strength. Other Asian citizens of the British Empire, particularly those among whom anti-colonial nationalism had taken root, were excluded from the armed forces because of their supposed “effemi­nacy.” The same principles were applied in East and West Africa. These martial races were poured into the British war fronts during the First World War: into Iraq, Palestine, and France.

Yet this very strengthening of the “new imperialism” between 1880 and 1920 gave new cohesion and new organization to the forces of anti-colonialism.^[2216] Not all liberals had become colonialists. The most revered British philosopher of the era, Herbert Spencer, was an anti-imperialist. He believed that imperialism “re- barbarised” advanced societies which should be made up of capitalist individualists. After the 1890s, socialists and communists began to actively contest “imperialist wars” in Britain, as in most European countries. Asian and African nationalists looked on the rise of Japan with admiration. The early nineteenth-century model of liberal constitutionalism was widely abandoned. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, and the Egyptian political opposition both moved to a more intransigent and aggressive phase after 1900, partly as a result of the aggressive policies of British administrators. Cults of the resurgent motherland, movements to boycott Western goods, and terrorist movements sprang up in several parts of the British Empire.

The most important opponent of the new imperialism, however, was Pan­Islamism, and this was pregnant for the future.^[2217] Islamic purists had already begun to campaign against what they regarded as corrupt Muslim governments from the eighteenth century, first in Arabia and later in Egypt and India. Such movements began to take on an anti-Western form. In the 1820s, Indian Muslim purists fled to Afghanistan and tried to set up an Islamic Caliphate directed against the Sikh rulers of the Punjab. Some have noted the uncanny parallel between this and the later saga of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. By the late nineteenth century, Muslim leaders throughout the Islamic world, but especially in Egypt and India, were creating political movements that tried to rebuild the ancient unity of the

Islamic world and fend off Western cultural dominance. Most of today's assertive Islamic movements trace their origins, not to the days of the Prophet, or to the Crusades, but to the later nineteenth century. Their ideologies of Shari'a-based law and Islamic brotherhood directly challenged the French, the Dutch, but above all the British Empire.

III. The First Period of Decolonization, 1945-1955

The final period I want to discuss is the first, and most important, period of de­colonization in the British Empire, which took place between 1945 and 1955.^[2218] Over these years, India, Burma, and Palestine became independent. British interests were driven from Egypt and neutralized in China. The Gold Coast, now Ghana, and other parts of West Africa saw a relaxation of colonial control, while the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya revealed the limits of British control in East Africa. The important point to make is that this retreat of empire was not pre-ordained in 1945, either in its timing or in its form. Of course, the British economy was se­riously damaged by the Second World War and it was essential to retrieve man­power from overseas rather than squander it in colonial warfare. Yet in 1945, both Labour and Conservative members of Parliament believed that the empire would last for at least a generation. Moreover, Britain was in a much stronger position than France, Holland, or Belgium at the end of the war. All these powers fought military campaigns to hold their colonial possessions, which in the case of France lasted for another 15 years. So why did Britain, where the different elements of empire which had bonded and contended for so long to extend imperial rule, decolonize relatively quickly and with relatively little loss of blood and treasure to itself? Please note that I said “to itself,” for British de-colonization was accompanied by massacres and civil wars in India-Pakistan, Israel, Kenya, Sudan, and Malaya, whose consequences re­sound across today's world. Yet only a tiny number of white Britons perished in these great conflagrations.^[2219]

To try to explain this, I will return again to my four elements of empire. The answer lies in ideological as much as economic and political change. First, there is no doubt that the victory of the Labour Party and the ousting of Churchill in 1945 was of great significance. The Labour politicians were liberal paternalists and not socialists. But they had fostered close ties with the moderate socialist politicians in India and West Africa, many of whom were, like them, products of Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics. Many Labour Party politicians still believed that Burmese, Africans, and others needed British tutelage over decades. But they felt they could “do business” with these men. It was better to begin to devolve power to men such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Aung San of Burma than risk a lurch toward communism or anti-Western nationalism. The vague idea of the Commonwealth under Britain's moral leadership also soothed the pain of imperial loss.³⁰

Equally important, the military-naval and royal governor complex that I have discussed throughout this paper began to discern empire as a dead weight in the new ideological battle with Soviet and Chinese communism. Though the old imperialism died hard, especially in the Conservative Party, military modernizers such as Lord Louis Mountbatten were proponents of de-colonization. What would now be important were nuclear capability, international naval and air power, the American alliance, and the support of pro-Western statesmen across the world. Old units such as the India or African armies, based on imperial provinces, were costly and redundant. If they were retained, they would have to spend most of their time and resources fighting national liberation movements and would therefore be una­vailable in the fight against communism. The white settler colonies, too, went their own way after 1942. Australia and New Zealand formed a new American alliance that was at least acceptable to the British. Troops from these countries did not fight in Britain's few wars of decolonization: Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, or Aden. Instead, they fought alongside the Americans in Vietnam and later Iraq and Afghanistan. The worldwide US anti- communist alliance replaced the British Empire as the ideo­logical lodestone of the old, conservative “white colonies.” As for my fourth element of empire, the protected indigenous monarchies, they simply appeared redundant in the new age of democratic rule, socialist modernization, and Islamic populism. The British simply abandoned the Asian princes and the chiefs of East and West Africa, though a few survived for reasons of local culture—in Malaya or Buganda, for instance.

You will remember my metaphor of the British Empire as the real fascist state— the bundle of elements. Well, after 1945, the fasces did not break separately; they simply fell apart as the unity that they once represented became ideologically and economically redundant. Empire limped on for another decade or so, but there was little value in holding on to the remaining colonies. Indeed, they became a drain on domestic resources at a time when the United Kingdom needed to compete with the revived countries of the European Economic Community.