Empires of the Mind
‘The empires of the future would be the empires of the mind’ declared Churchill in 1943, envisaging universal empires living in peaceful harmony. Robert Gildea exposes instead the brutal realities of decolonisation and neo-colonialism which have shaped the postwar world. Even after the rush of French and British decolonisation in the 1960s the strings of economic and military power too often remained in the hands of the former colonial powers. The more empire appears to have declined and fallen, the more a fantasy of empire has been conjured up as a model for projecting power onto the world stage and legitimised colonialist intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. This aggression, along with the imposition of colonial hierarchies in metropolitan society, has excluded, alienated and even radicalised immigrant populations. Meanwhile nostalgia for empire has bedevilled relations with Europe and played a large part in explaining Brexit.
Robert Gildea is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He has written extensively on French and European history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the many awards his publications have garnered, Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize and Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation won the Wolfson History Prize.
Empires of the Mind
The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present
Robert Gildea
University of Oxford
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DOI: 10.1017/9781316671702
© Robert Gildea 2019
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First published 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gildea, Robert, author.
Title: Empires of the mind : the colonial past and the politics of the present / Robert Gildea, University of Oxford.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 201804277 | ISBN 9781107159587
Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism – History. | Imperialism – Social aspects. | Postcolonialism – History. | Postcolonialism – Social aspects. | International organization. | World politics – 21st century.
Classification: LCC JC359 .G465 2019 | DDC 325/.32–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042770
ISBN 978-1-107-15958-7 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction
1.Empires Constructed and Contested
2.Empires in Crisis: Two World Wars
3.The Imperialism of Decolonisation
4.Neo-Colonialism, New Global Empire
5.Colonising in Reverse and Colonialist Backlash
6.Europe: In or Out?
7.Islamism and the Retreat to Monocultural Nationalism
8.Hubris and Nemesis: Iraq, the Colonial Fracture and GlobalEconomic Crisis
9.The Empire Strikes Back
10.Fantasy, Anguish and Working Through
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Figures
1.1Armed trade: episode of the Second Opium War in China. Drawing by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), illustration from Le Musée Français, no. 41, May 1858. Getty Images / DEA / BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA / De Agostini / 931218102/
1.2The myth of white settlement: the Great Trek of the Boers into the African interior. ‘The bullock-waggons wound slowly over the billowy plains’ (c.1908) from H. E. Marshall, Our Empire Story (1920). Getty Images / Hulton Fine Art Collection / 533389780
1.3A romanticised image of colonialism in Africa: the French attack on Kana, Dahomey, Africa, 1892. Artist Henri Meyer, Le Petit Journal, 19 November 1892. Getty Images / Art Media / Hulton Archive / 463929521
1.4The Empire in perfect order: King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary at the coronation durbar in Delhi, 12 December 1911.Getty Images / Hulton Royals Collection / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 3307019
2.1Colonial fantasy: North African tribesmen parade on camels at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris.Getty Images / Roger Viollet / 55756837
2.2The prehistory of the Iraq War: British tanks and aircraft in Mesopotamia, 1922.Getty Images / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 2665034
2.3The British Empire humiliated: the surrender of British forces to the Japanese, 15 February 1942.Getty Images / Modadori Portfolio / 141556273
3.1Colonial repression: Mau Mau suspects under police guard in Nairobi, 24 April 1954.Getty Images / Popperfoto / 79036598
3.2The French Empire humiliated: French POWs escorted by Vietminh after the defeat of Dien Bien Phu, July 1954.Getty Images / Bettmann / 514677668
4.1Colonial violence in Paris: racist reaction to the Algerian demonstration of 17 October 1961.Getty Images / Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / 107421806
4.2The brutality of colonial supremacy: the Sharpeville massacre, 21 March 1960.Getty Images / Universal History Archive /UIG / 513686235
4.3Margaret Thatcher portrayed as a pirate in the Argentinian press, 30 April 1982.Getty Images / SSPL / 90764586
5.1A show of colonial force in London: dockers march in support of Enoch Powell, 23 April 1968.Getty Images / Evening Standard / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 3398988
5.2The March for Equality from Marseille to Paris, 1983.Getty Images / Jean MUSCAT / Gamma-Rapho / 847658590
7.1Global Islamism: mujahideen fighter with rocket-launcher advancing on Jalalabad, Afghanistan, March 1989.Getty Images / David Stewart-Smith / Hulton Archive / 76309285
7.2The ‘clash of civilisations’: an American soldier inspects the carbonised bodies of Iraqi soldiers on the ‘highway of death’ from Kuwait to Baghdad, February 1991.Getty Images / Peter Turnley / Corbis Historical / VCG / 640507099
9.1The colonial fracture: ‘Nous sommes Charlie’ demonstration in Paris, 11 January 2015.Getty Images / Dan Kitwood / 461343474
9.2The colonial fracture: Senegalese Muslims declare ‘Je ne suis pas Charlie’, Dakar, 16 January 2015.Getty Images / SEYLLOU / Stringer /AFP / 461637124
10.1‘Make Britain great again’: Brexit supporter at UKIP conference, 16 September 2016.Getty Images / Matt Cardy / Stringer / 606180624
10.2Emmanuel Macron as Napoleon: carnival float in Mainz, 12 February 2018.Getty Images / FABIAN SOMMER / AFP / DPA / 917363126
/> Introduction
In February 2016, during the run-up to the British referendum on Europe, former Mayor of London Boris Johnson boasted, ‘We used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen’, ‘Are we really unable to do trade deals?’1 A year later, in February 2017, French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron visited Algiers and declared his country’s colonialism ‘a crime against humanity, a real barbarity. It is a past that we must confront squarely and apologise to those we have harmed.’2
These two comments encapsulate a tension at the heart of thinking about empire. On the one hand it stands for prosperity and greatness on a vast geographical scale. It invites comparison with other empires, above all the Roman Empire. And it suggests that even if the British Empire is a thing of the past, its heirs claim entitlement still to act as a major force in international affairs. On the other, particularly when empire is called ‘colonialism’, a quite different narrative is conjured up. It is pilloried as a ‘crime against humanity’, a project that accumulated wealth and power by war, plunder, expropriation, torture and massacre. Empire was thus both a fantasy of glory and a chronicle of anguish. Taken together, however, the two comments suggest that the terms ‘empire’ and ‘colonialism’ have multiple resonances today. They refer to things that happened in the past but they also express ways in which the contemporary world has been constructed in terms of power, violence, money, inequality and exclusion.
Speaking before 6,000 uniformed Harvard graduates on 6 September 1943, on the occasion of his being awarded an honorary degree in laws, Winston Churchill spoke of a world council that would bring together both the nations which were emerging victorious from the Second World War and those which had been subjected to oppression. ‘The empires of the future’, he declared, ‘would be the empires of the mind’.3 What he meant by this was that future empires would not be armed titans at war with each other, but rather universal empires living in peace and harmony. The concept of ‘empires of the mind’ is nevertheless a fluid one and has been taken as the title of this book in order to explore how empire has been imagined, mythologised and contested.
Empire was never a single thing. It was protean, taking many forms. It was improvised before it was ever thought of as a whole. It drove forward but was resisted and driven back. When it failed in one form or in one domain it did not withdraw but was reinvented, reconstructed in a different way. Such was the anguish of loss and the drive for power and prosperity that the lessons of defeat were rarely learned. Instead, there was a tendency to repeat what had gone before, in terms of practices or institutions, and thus to run the risk that defeat would follow once again.
Though empires were protean, they generally took one of three forms: empires of trade, colonies of settlement and territorial empires. Myths of empire held that intrepid sailors and bold investors forged new trade routes, that pioneering colonists cleared virgin territories and made them fertile, and that enlightened administrators followed them to ensure the benign rule of the mother country. The purpose of these myths was to make colonisation palatable to peoples at home concerned about the costs and risks of war, but they concealed the realities of empire. The most profitable trade in the eighteenth century was the slave trade, providing slave labour for the plantations of the Caribbean and American colonies. Trade was generally imposed on reluctant non-European empires or their vassals by force, sending in the gunboats where necessary and imposing ‘unequal treaties’ which enshrined the privileges of the Europeans. Colonial settlement did not take place in virgin lands but entailed the displacement, often the massacre of indigenous populations, and subjection of the rest to segregation and exceptional laws. Imperial rule over large territories was authoritarian. While the colonies of white settlement – from Canada to South Africa and Australia, and the French and European settlers of Algeria – acquired substantial powers of self-government, and imperial rule was always happy to work with local princes and tribal rulers, the vast majority of indigenous peoples were systematically excluded from the prospect of exercising power and, if they laid claim to it, were brutally suppressed.
The phase of empire that lasted until the end of the nineteenth century has often been called ‘informal empire’ or ‘free trade imperialism’ based on ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. The ‘race for empire’ between the great powers in the later nineteenth century obliged them to strengthen their grip on their possessions as they moved from ‘informal empire’, based on alliances with local rulers, to the ‘formal empire’ of direct rule. Imperial rivalry was also a major factor in the outbreak of war in 1914, when European empires of Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and Russia were arguably at their height. Imperial powers claimed to be fighting for freedom and civilisation and colonised peoples, who were drafted by the hundreds of thousands into their armies, soon claimed the same from their colonial masters. They also appealed to new forms of legitimacy endorsed by the United States and the League of Nations that all nations were equal and had claims to self-government. After 1918 territories taken from the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East or from the German Empire in Africa were divided up between the victorious powers as mandates, theoretically on a path to self-government. Few lessons, however, were learned by the imperial powers. Concessions made to colonial peoples were minimal and often withdrawn, and when those peoples resisted, in the mandates of Syria and Iraq just as much as in the colonies, they were forcibly put down.
In the Second World War Germany tried to rebuild its lost colonial empire on the Continent, while imperial Japan all but destroyed the British and French Empires in the East. The United Nations set up in 1945 endorsed a programme of decolonisation by which self-government was finally accorded to the colonies. Financially crippled by the cost of war, and facing resistance and revolt in their colonies, Britain and France were obliged to let some of their possessions go. The trauma of losing some colonies, however, only increased the desire to hold on to those that remained, if necessary by the maximum use of force and fraud. The French fought a brutal war between 1956 and 1962 to hold on to French Algeria, while the British perpetrated atrocities in a bid to retain Kenya.
Even after the rush of decolonisation in the 1960s the strings of economic and military power often remained in the hands of the former empires. This became known as neo-colonialism. It was practised by the French south of the Sahara in what became known as Françafrique and by the British in Southern Africa. The 1982 Falklands War and French military intervention in New Caledonia in 1988 were perfect examples of neo-colonialism. South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1960 but British financial investments remained secure, defended by the apartheid regime. This opened the way to a form of empire which might be called global financial imperialism. Military power was hidden while the world’s richest countries used the financial levers of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to require indebted countries to concede what was effectively indirect rule and to open themselves up to exploitation by multinational companies.
After Iran became an Islamic republic in 1979 and the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1980 imperialism reinvented itself once again. Initially the West supported Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviets, but this only served to attract, train and spread networks of Islamic fighters opposed to Western imperialism. In the face of new global threats from Islamic powers and Islamism, a new edition of neo-imperialism, led this time by the United States, justified colonialist intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, which had formerly been parts of the British or French empires, and where the British and French had brutally intervened in the 1920s. The consequence, however, was the ‘blowback’ of Islamist jihad, forming an Islamic state on the rubble of Iraq and Syria and inspiring Islamist attacks on the continent of Europe.
Empires existed not only ‘out there’, in the Americas or Caribbean, Africa, Asia or the Antipodes, but also ‘back here’, in the metropolis. After the Second World War large numbers of Britons went to live in the former colonies of settle
ment, while subjects of the British or French Empires, many of whom had fought in the imperial armies during the war, were invited to live and work in Britain or France, in order to rebuild economies shattered by that war. Those who arrived on the Empire Windrush from the former slave colonies of the Caribbean, from an India violently partitioned or from French colonies where they were denied citizenship and subject to an arbitrary penal code came with dreams of a better life. Jamaican singer Louise Bennett described this wittily as a process of ‘colonisation in reverse’, by which the former colonisers were themselves colonised.
For most British or French people of the metropolis, however, this ‘colonisation in reverse’ was no joke. The loss of empire ‘out there’ seemed to coincide with the arrival of former colonial peoples, threatening their jobs, their communities, their ‘way of life’. The response in the metropolis was to reimpose colonial hierarchies, colonial segregation and colonial laws of exception. Black and Arab populations were confined to ghettos in inner-cities of suburbs, denied access to education and jobs, and subjected to the arbitrary powers of the police. Parties such as the National Front in France and the UK Independence Party set the political agenda by arguing that the country was being overrun by immigrants who could not be assimilated. The perceived threat of immigration from the colonies stimulated redefinitions of British or French national identity which explicitly or implicitly excluded immigrant populations. The possibility that Britain or France might become multicultural nations in which all ethnic communities were respected was flirted with, then rejected. Histories were written which posited the continuous existence of homogeneous white nations who dominated colonial peoples. ‘British values’ were asserted which immigrant populations were deemed not to understand or to share. In France citizenship was open to individuals who accepted the values of the Republic, above all its laïcité or secularism. Muslim veils were banned from public spaces such as schools and town halls. Attempts by minorities to hold on to their religious or ethnic identities were rejected as a ‘communitarianism’ which undermined the universal Republic which all citizens were required to embrace.
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