Ideas

by Peter Watson

  But the imperial presence did grow, aided by the retreat of the Muslims, and in time commerce triumphed, the East India companies growing in strength and influence. In India the company eventually emerged as the effective ruler of large parts of the country but even then, according to Anthony Pagden, India was always different from America and from later colonies in Africa. ‘India, and Asia generally,’ he says, ‘was always a place of passage, not of settlement…No sense of being a distinct people ever emerged among the Europeans in India. There was never a Creole population or very much of the interracial breeding which transformed the population of many of the former Spanish American colonies into truly multi-ethnic communities.’8

  Even so, there were risks inherent when two very different cultures rubbed up against each other. We saw in Chapter 29 how the activities of the Bengal Asiatic Society helped to kick-start the Oriental renaissance, when Sir William Jones drew attention to the deep similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and when Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, attracted Hindu scholars to Calcutta to research the Hindu scriptures (he was himself fluent in Persian and Hindi). But in 1788, three years after his term as governor-general had ended, Hastings was impeached by Parliament in London, accused of having ‘squirreled away’ an enormous personal fortune, filched partly from the East India Company itself and partly from the rulers of Benares and Avadh. Though Hastings was eventually acquitted, seven long years after the impeachment began, his trial ‘was a great theatrical event’, largely stage-managed by Edmund Burke, and the former governor-general never really recovered. Burke was convinced that the East India Company had betrayed its aims, which, as well as trading, were ‘to spread civilisation and enlightenment in the empire’. Instead, he said, the company under Hastings’ leadership had become tyrannical and corrupt, ‘subjugating Indians and betraying the very benevolence it was ordered to propagate’. (Later historians have concluded differently, that the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became.9) The way Burke spoke, Hastings had betrayed a high ideal of empire, the benevolent spread of Western civilisation, an attitude echoed in Napoleon. This was perhaps disingenuous of Burke (and of Napoleon). What Hastings’ impeachment really showed was a priggishness in the imperial mind: whatever high-flown aims they arrogated to themselves, they were not so different as they thought from the more naturally aggressive colonialists of the first empire. Niall Ferguson lists nine ideas on which the ‘second’ British empire was based, which they wished to disseminate most. These were: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team games, the limited or ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty.10

  Then there was the contentious issue of slavery. Empires had always involved slavery of one kind or another. We can never forget that both Athens and Rome had slaves. At the same time, to be a slave in ancient Greece or Rome did not necessarily involve degradation. Unlucky slaves were sent into the army or the mines; lucky ones might serve as a tutor to children.

  Modern slavery was not like that: the very idea of the slave trade was itself degrading and horrendous. ‘It began on the morning of 8 August 1444 when the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos. A rudimentary slave market was improvised on the docks and the confused and cowed Africans, reeling from weeks confined in the insalubrious holds of the tiny ships on which they had come, were herded into groups by age, sex and the state of their health.’11 No trading was allowed until Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ had been notified and arrived at the quayside. As sponsor of the voyage, he was entitled to a fifth of the booty, in this case forty-six humans. This is how the traffic in ‘black gold’ (as slaves became known) began.

  While it was new to Europe, a slave trade had existed in Africa for hundreds of years. What changed now was the size of the demand. The European slave trade was driven by a new form of commercial enterprise–the sugar plantation. And Europe’s taste for sugar turned out to be such that, between 1492 and 1820, according to Anthony Pagden, ‘five or six times as many Africans went to America as did white Europeans’. This statistic, however well-known, still has the power to shock. It shaped the Americas and provided the United States with, arguably, its most intractable problem. One deep reason for this abiding American dilemma arose from the fact that modern slavery involved a new understanding of the relationship between master and slave.12 Neither Aristotle nor Cicero was ever comfortable with the idea of slavery. On occasion they tried to argue that slaves were a different ‘type’ of person, but they knew that was unconvincing when in many cases slaves had merely been on the losing side in a war. The main monotheisms took much the same view. Both the Old Testament and the Qur’an authorise the taking of slaves, but only after a ‘just war’.13 The early Christians did not look favourably on the enslaving of other Christians but did not extend the same charity to non-Christians. In the early years of the trade, there were some attempts by Catholic clerics and jurists to claim that the wars deep inside Africa were ‘just’ but few took their arguments seriously and an advance of sorts was made in 1686 when the Holy Office condemned the slave trade. But, significantly, it did not condemn slavery itself.14

  The Vatican’s view reflected what was for a time the general opinion–that the slave trade was more offensive than slavery itself–but protests continued to snowball and drew attention to the fact that, underneath it all, there was a paradox. It was held by many that Negroes were ‘an inferior type of people, little better than animals’, and as if to confirm this they were often given the names of pets–Fido, Jumper and so on. Yet this attitude was flatly contradicted by the fact that masters often required their slaves to undertake tasks that demanded a full mental equipment.15 No less dangerous was the possibility that female slaves would be found sexually attractive by their masters, producing mixed-blood offspring and a new type of social problem. So the new relationship was fraught with inconsistencies and tensions.

  Racist views remained strong, right up to and beyond the time slavery was finally abolished. William Wilberforce was just one of the abolitionists who could not dispel his belief that European Christian culture was a civilising force. At one point he confessed that the emancipation of the slaves ‘might actually be less important than that the reign of light and truth and happiness might be brought among them through Christianity and British laws, institutions and customs’. But Wilberforce did join the sponsors of an experimental colony, Sierra Leone, founded in 1787 to ‘introduce civilisation among the natives and to cultivate the soil by means of free labour’. Sierra Leone flourished and its capital, Freetown, became one of the bases for the new Royal Navy anti-slaving squadron.16 In the event, it was Denmark which, in 1792, became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade. Britain took action to end the trade in 1805 and slaving had become a hanging offence by 1824. But elsewhere it went on for another half-century–the last landing was made in Cuba in 1870.17

  The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815, to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. Attitudes were very different then from now. For the British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, one of the architects of the new Europe, Italy was no more than a ‘geographical concept’, and its unification as one state ‘unthinkable’.18 A German at the congress had much the same view about his own country. ‘The unification of all the German tribes in a single, undivided state,’ he said, was no more than a dream that had ‘been refuted by a thousand years of experience and ultimately cast aside…It is incapable of realisation by any operation of human ingenuity, nor can it be enforced by the bloodiest of revolutions; it is an aim pursued only by madmen.’ He concluded that if the idea of national unity gained the upper hand in Europe, ‘then a wasteland of bloody ruins will be the only legacy that awaits our descendants’.19


  The main aim of the Congress of Vienna was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about recreating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. ‘Spain and Portugal were restored under the former ruling families, Holland was enlarged by the former Austrian Netherlands, later to become Belgium, Switzerland was reconstituted, Sweden stayed united with Norway, and since the Pentarchy, the club of five major European powers, was unthinkable without France, the latter was left intact with its 1792 border.’20 But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented, diffuse and powerless.21 Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were very disturbed by the so-called ‘Germanophiles’, who were determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord wrote to Louis XVIII from Vienna: ‘They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority. Allied with them are people from the universities, youngsters who have been primed with their theories, and all those who ascribe to German particularism all the sufferings that have been inflicted on the country in the course of the wars that have been fought there. The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan, their faith and their religion, they are ardent to the point of fanaticism…Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive? Who can say where a movement of that kind might stop?’22

  At that point, in other words, the principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden–north and western Europe. The German-speaking lands, and Italy, were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order. One only has to look at the map to see why. ‘From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.’23 No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become ‘mistress of the entire continent’.24 For many, the minuscule Italian and German states guaranteed freedom. Although Italy and Germany were in a similar situation, in this regard, much of Italy was occupied by a foreign power (Austria in the north, the Bourbons in the south), and this too explains why modern nationalism began in Germany. In fact, the unification of Germany, and of Italy, were two of the seminal political events of the nineteenth century which–together with the Civil War in America–did so much to bring about the great industrial rivalry in the last decades of the 1800s, fashioning our modern world, but which also led eventually to the First World War, setting the stage for the calamitous twentieth century. How prescient Talleyrand was.25

  The first person to identify what we may call ‘cultural nationalism’ was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), though the great German historian Friedrich Meinecke said that Friedrich Karl von Moser had first found signs of a ‘national spirit’ in 1765 ‘in those parts of Germany where 20 principalities could be seen during a day’s journey’. The stage had been set, as we saw in Chapter 24, with the emergence (not just in Germany) of a self-conscious ‘public’ in the late seventeenth century. ‘Nature,’ Herder said, ‘has separated nations not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but most particularly by languages, inclinations and characters, that the work of subjugating despotism might be rendered more difficult, that all the four quarters of the globe might not be crammed into the belly of a wooden horse.’26 For Herder the Volk was irreducible, incompatible with the idea of empire, which he said went against the grain of the ‘natural plurality’ of the world’s peoples.27 The Germans wanted unification, a nation-state, and this had to be ‘cultivated’ because they had for too long been the theatre of war for the European powers, where ‘today’s ruler might turn out to be tomorrow’s enemy’.28 In place of the ‘jumbled patchwork’ of states that had occupied central Europe for centuries, the nineteenth century saw two massive powers come into being. The nature of this change cannot be overestimated.

  The other European nations responded to these German and Italian sentiments with what Hagen Schulze has called ‘patriotic regeneration’.29 This was especially true in France, for example, where the entire education system was placed in the service of the nationalist cause. The teaching of history and national politics was to be the cause of national regeneration after revolution and repeated defeat. The most obvious–one might say the most lurid–example of this was G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: devoir et patrie. This was the story of a fourteen-year-old boy, André Valden, and his brother Julien, aged seven. The story is set in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War after the two boys have been orphaned and stranded in their home-town of Phalsburg, which has been annexed by Germany. They escape and journey throughout France in the course of their adventures, ultimately finding a new home in the country, which, thanks to those adventures, they now see in all its glory. Appearing first in 1877, the book went through twenty reprints in the next thirty years. Another example of the fervent nationalism of the times is that while Jules Ferry (1832–1893) was education secretary, every classroom was required to display a map of France with Alsace and Lorraine shown surrounded by black mourning crepe. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) wrote about France as the ‘pontificate of modern civilisation’, meaning that it was the pioneer of the modern enlightened state: ‘the French idea of civilisation had thus become the very core of a national religion.’ (The Marseillaise was adopted as the national anthem in 1879.)30

  England responded too, but in a different way. The colonial expansion of the British empire achieved unprecedented dimensions between 1880 and the First World War, as this table makes clear:

  Colonial dependencies (in thousands of square kilometres)

  Great Britain

  France

  Germany

  Spain

  Italy

  1881

  22,395

  526

  0

  432

  0

  1895

  29,021

  3,577

  2,641

  1,974

  247

  1912

  30,087

  7,906

  2,907

  213

  1,59031

  Here are some contemporary comments, quoted at length, to show not only their tenor but how widespread they were. ‘Imperialism has become the very latest and the highest embodiment of our democratic nationalism. It is a conscious expression of our race’ (the Duke of Westminster). ‘The British are the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’ (Joseph Chamberlain.) On seeing the port of Sydney, Charles Darwin wrote ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’ ‘I claim that we are the leading race in the world, and the more of the world we populate, the better it will be for mankind…Since [God] has obviously made the English-speaking race the chosen instrument by which He means to produce a state and society based on justice, freedom and peace, then it is bound to be in keeping with His will if I do everything in my power to provide that race with as much scope and power as possible. I think that, if there is a God, then He would like to see me do one thing, that is, to colour as much of the map of Africa British red as possible’ (Cecil Rhodes).32

  The downside to this outbreak of nationalism, which looks inevitable with the benefit of hindsight, was yet more racism. Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in France and Germany. This partly had to do with the envy of Britain33: the French and German empires were so small, compared with the British, that the view formed, as Paul Déroulède, founder of the League of Patriots in France, put it, ‘We cannot hope to achie
ve anything abroad before we have cured our domestic ills.’34 And there was no doubt who was internal enemy number one–the Jews. In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In amongst this intolerance, the role of Jews was inevitably discussed.

  Nationalism reached its ultimate form at the turn of the century in Maurice Barrès’ trilogy, Le roman de l’énergie nationale (1897–1903). Barrès’ idea was that the cult of the ego was the main cause of the corruption of civilisation. ‘The nation ranked above the ego and had therefore to be regarded as the supreme priority in a man’s life. The individual had no choice but to submit to the function assigned to him by the nation, “the sacred law of his lineage”, and to “hearken to the voices of the soil and the dead”.’35 As Hagen Schulze has rightly pointed out, nationalism, the idea of a nation, which at the turn of the nineteenth century had been seen as a form of utopia, as a natural political and cultural entity, had become by the turn of the twentieth century a polemical factor in domestic politics. ‘It no longer stood above the parties uniting society, but itself turned into a party and divided society.’ The consequences were to be catastrophic.