JEREMY PAXMAN
Empire
What Ruling the World Did to the British
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
By the same author
Friends in High Places
Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (editor)
The English
The Political Animal
On Royalty
The Victorians
For Elizabeth, Jessie, Jack and Vita, for whom the imperial project meant long periods of either mental or physical separation. Independence is at hand
List of Illustrations
p. viii Map of the British Empire in 1815, from Historical Atlas, published by W. & A. K. Johnston Limited, 1911 (Reprinted by permission of Ken Welsh/The Bridgeman Art Library)
p. 1 Photograph of royal lunch in the jungle, Nepal, c. 1911 (Reprinted by permission of Getty Images)
p. 15 East India Company Ship (oil on canvas) by Isaac Sailmaker, 1685 (Reprinted by permission of the National Maritime Museum, London)
p. 38 Captain James Cook (Reprinted by permission of Getty Images)
p. 54 Reception of the Diplomatique and his Suite at the Court of Pekin (colour etching) by James Gillray, 1793 (Reprinted by permission of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
p. 70 Robert Clive, 1st Baron Clive of Plassey, Governor of Bengal (oil on canvas) by Nathaniel Dance, c. 1773 (Reprinted by permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London)
p. 98 Photograph of Obaysch the Hippopotamus, by Don Juan, Comte de Montizón, 1852 (The Royal Collection © 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)
p. 113 David Livingstone reading the Bible, Africa, nineteenth century (Reprinted by permission of the Stapleton Historical Collection/Heritage Images)
p. 127 Photograph of Mrs Hugh Raynor at the Algiers Golf Club with a four-year-old caddie (Reprinted by permission of the Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
p. 148 Publicity poster for the Uganda Railway (Taken from Out in the Noonday Sun by Valerie Pakenham)
p. 167 General Gordon’s Last Stand (oil on canvas) by George William Joy, 1885 (Reprinted by permission of the Leeds Museums and Galleries, City Art Gallery UK /The Bridgeman Art Library)
p. 191 Indian princes and British army officers in the Hyderabad contingent polo team, c. 1880 (Reprinted by permission of Getty Images)
p. 214 ‘The Empire Needs Men’ advertisement, 1915 (Reprinted by permission of the Museum of London)
p. 241 Postcard of the Burmese Pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition, London, 1924
p. 274 The Remnants of an Army (oil on canvas) by Elizabeth Butler, 1879 (Reprinted by permission of the Tate, London, 2011)
MAP
The British Empire Throughout the World 1905
Introduction
‘It seems such a shame when the English claim the Earth That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth’
Noël Coward, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, 1931
‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’ It was an accusation. His face was twisted, angry and only about six inches away from mine. His breath was beery. I was backed against a wall outside a drinking club in west Belfast, and two of his friends stood on either side – there was no chance of running for it. This is how it begins, I thought, starting to panic. It ends with a beating in a lock-up garage or the back of a pub somewhere. Or worse.
It didn’t, of course. Within less than a minute an older man had said something and the three youths laid off, sauntering away without a word: next time it really might be an undercover British soldier. I knew what a ‘Brit’ was, all right. But I had never been called one until I arrived in Northern Ireland to cover the war there in the 1970s. Belfast was a dark place – and not just because its street lights had been knocked out in the many battle-zones across the city. It was a conflict murky with injustice, bigotry, exploitation, long memories and short fuses. The terminology reflected what you thought the violence was. The British preferred to call the everyday bombings, gunfights, murders, military funerals and armoured cars on the streets ‘the Troubles’. It might look like a war, but it wasn’t. To the IRA, the violence was definitely part of a war to force the British out of the last corner of their Irish colony. The ‘loyalist’ settler community, almost exclusively the descendants of Scots and others who had been brought to Ireland to make the place safe for England, fought for the right to remain British, despite not living in Britain. The epithet ‘Brits’ referred to the apparatus of imperialism, specifically the army, and by extension all of us who came to Ireland from England, Wales or Scotland, although it was really the English who were hated. I did not much like the term.
I had arrived in Ireland woefully ill-equipped to understand what was happening there. Anti-colonial wars belonged to another time in history. This is even more the case for many British people now: the average age in Britain is forty, which means that apart from a vague awareness of the war to reconquer the Falkland Islands or the ceremonial handing back of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, most citizens have little sense of Britain as an imperial power.
Anyone who has grown up or grown old in Britain since the Second World War has done so in an atmosphere of irresistible decline, to the point where now Britain’s imperial history is no more than the faint smell of mothballs in a long-unopened wardrobe. Its evidence is all around us, but who cares? It is the empty fourth plinth at the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square that interests us, not the three that are occupied by a king and a couple of imperial generals. Ask us what those generals did and we’re lost. Even the most exotic empire-builders have sunk from our minds. Charles Gordon is a good example. His unhinged mission to Khartoum and subsequent beheading raised him to saint-like status in Victorian Britain. A statue, showing the great martyr befezzed and cross-legged on a camel was placed in the middle of the traffic at the main crossroads in Khartoum, to remind the Sudanese who was boss. At independence in 1956 they took it down and sent it back to England, where it was re-erected at the school in Woking founded at Queen Victoria’s behest as a memorial to the general. It stands there, grey and unexpected, to this day. They used to tell the story of a small boy taken after church each Sunday to admire the national hero. After several weeks’ veneration, the child asked, ‘Daddy, who is the man on Gordon’s back?’ But even the jokes have passed into history now.
And yet the sense of being British is clearly very different to being, say, Swedish or Mexican. No one would have a Mexican up against a wall in Ireland because of his nationality. Ever since the moment when I realized that there were people who saw me differently because of my country’s history, I have wondered what that history has done to us as a nation. We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?
For the most part, we look back on our imperial history simply as the actions of men and women we cannot identify with, the product of motives we do not really understand. It is emotionally easier and politically more convenient to inquire no further. But it is not particularly helpful. If we accept – as any thoughtful Indian does – that the British Empire had a shaping influence on India, then where is the common sense in claiming that the same history has not had at least
as important a role in Britain? Can we seriously pretend that a project which dominated the way that Britain regarded the world for so many hundreds of years has had no lasting influence on the colonizers, too? Without understanding how we looked at the rest of the world, we cannot really understand ourselves. It is nearly fifty years since the then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, minted the only remark for which he is remembered in Britain, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.’ The remark has since become tediously familiar, but the fact that the observation remains true all these years later reflects the continuing significance of the imperial experience. ‘Finding a role’ has (along with not going bankrupt) been the main task of every British government for the last sixty years. In a strange way, the one place which has yet properly to decolonize itself is Britain.
It is most obvious in international affairs, where the imperial habit remains a very hard one to break. When a British prime minister puffs out his chest and declares he ‘will not tolerate’ some African or Middle Eastern despot, he speaks not as a creature of a twenty-first-century political party in a dilapidated democracy but as the latest reincarnation of Castlereagh or Palmerston – somehow, British foreign policy has never shaken off a certain nineteenth-century swagger, and the implied suggestion that if anything happens to a British citizen, a Royal Navy gunboat will be dispatched to menace the impertinent perpetrators. It is not entirely their fault that British politicians bluster in this fashion – the frayed old frock coat comes with the job. The merest glance at regimental battle honours in the British army discloses a roll-call of colonial wars, from Abyssinia to Zululand, by way of everywhere from Canada to New Zealand. This long history of fighting in faraway places of which we know next to nothing has left the British army positively eager to be deployed across the world. When, for example, the Grenadier Guards were sent to Afghanistan in 2007, they arrived sporting battle honours from the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, a campaign against Islamist forces in Sudan in the 1890s, another to subdue the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, and a ‘temporary’ British intervention in Egypt which began in 1882 and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Once you’ve got that sort of pedigree you’re keen to measure yourself against it. And perhaps, at another level, this history of involvement overseas also helps to explain why it is that British charities play such a disproportionately large role in international development and disaster relief.
When Edward Gibbon said, ‘I have no way of judging of the future but by the past,’ he acknowledged the determining influence that history has on the present. Can we, for example, understand the European Union without recognizing the French fear of the Germans and the Germans’ fear of themselves? And in the United Kingdom it has proved very hard – if indeed anyone has really tried – to discard all that stuff about how Britannia rules the waves. It is the imperial heritage which gives the Foreign Office the supercilious vanity that it somehow understands the developing world better than countries which have not had the sola-topi experience. Despite being the biggest and most prosperous country in Europe, Germany does not command a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, because it lost the Second World War. Britain may have emerged from that conflict battered and broke, but it still possessed sufficient imperial presence to become one of the Permanent Five. And, had the United States not once been part of the British Empire, the much fetishized ‘special relationship’ would never have become such an obsession in the minds of British governments.
It goes much further. It was their empire which convinced the British that they were somehow special. Yet the disappearance of their empire has failed to persuade them that they are not so very different from much of the rest of Europe. Is it any wonder that Britain’s relations with the continent are so tortured and its commitment to the ‘ever closer union’ sounds so hollow, when its relations with the rest of the world are managed by an institution housed in a great neo-classical building whose very design was intended to impress upon foreigners the unique splendour of British rule? The interior walls are covered in murals portraying ‘Pax Britannica’ as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire. (In the 1960s there were plans to pull the whole place down and replace it with something of glass, concrete and steel as a sign of Britain’s new role in the world. The money ran out before the demolition contractors could move in, which was a rather better demonstration of the country’s new status.) These heavy public buildings designed to make a statement about the solidity of British purpose can be found everywhere from Dundee to Dunedin: schools, parliaments, stock exchanges, police stations, railway termini, all executed in neo-classical or neo-Gothic style, regardless of whether or not either was appropriate for local conditions. Like the Foreign Office, they stand there still, slightly shabby on the outside, traceried with electric wires and plastered with plastic notices within, reminders of a vain and vanished glory, recalling the desert ruins of Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’). In the one-time colonies these buildings speak of the past. In Britain they are where the business of the present is transacted, and to suggest that we have somehow developed an ability to ignore the influence of our physical surroundings is to ask us to believe a great deal. As Winston Churchill remarked, ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ We tiptoe into the future down marbled corridors ringing to the clip of Victorian heels.
And then there are Britain’s constitutional arrangements, not least the country’s continued possession of a monarchy. The anthropologist Arthur Hocart spent years attempting to understand the origins of kingship and concluded that all he could say with certainty was that when history began, there were gods and there were monarchs: the earliest-known religion was a belief in the divinity of kings. No rational person has believed that nonsense for centuries. But the fact that Britain is still ruled by a representative of this prehistoric institution is in large part the consequence of empire. Giving Victoria the bombastic title of empress in 1876 had been an empty, cost-free gesture by that great regal flatterer Benjamin Disraeli. But the monarchical tone of empire was useful in co-opting the support of other kings, from Bangalore to Zululand, enabling a form of colonization in which the new subject state might claim hardly to notice that it had been emasculated. One Basuto king is said to have told Victoria, ‘My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people the lice upon it.’ Across the world, cities, provinces, lakes, mountains, gardens, parks, highways, stations, puddings and flowers were named after Victoria, and many of her people assumed that the Great White Queen was an integral part of the empire’s success. She was not: she just got lucky. Her sons and grandsons, with their imperial tours, durbars, colonial statues, tributes and tiger-hunting were lucky, too. By the same token, you could say that Queen Elizabeth II was unlucky. Her role has been to preside over the disappearance of empire, as the number of British possessions has shrunk to a few curious dots in the seas and oceans of the world. But just as lands were claimed in the name of a British queen, so their independence required a royal witness, with Elizabeth or one of her family on hand to watch as the British flag was lowered and the flag of the new state raised. Look at any photograph of Commonwealth leaders since the early 1950s and the one face you can almost guarantee to find there is that of Elizabeth II, and it is largely due to her that the institution, such as it is, survives at all: like the empire, it smells of monarchy. Elizabeth may never have enjoyed her great-great-grandmother’s title of empress of India, but the fact that other nations have taken her seriously has encouraged the British to do likewise.
And the empire did more than consolidate the position of the monarchy. It did much to make the political identity of Britain, too. Of the many elements which came together to create a ‘British’ identity – Henry VIII’s break with Rome, say, or the adoption of a Scottish king when Elizabeth I died childless – the importance of England’s growing basket of overseas possessi
ons cannot be exaggerated. In the seventeenth century, as they watched the English begin to pile up overseas possessions, Scots had dreamed of a colony or so of their own and attempted to establish a settlement in Panama. They reckoned without the difficult terrain, the pestilential climate and the perfidious English. The scheme collapsed in 1700, and with it ambitions for a Scottish empire. Henceforth, the Scots would become some of the most effective builders of the joint enterprise of a British empire. In the first fifty years after the 1707 Act of Union, 30,000 Scots settled in America. Others would pour into Canada, Australia and New Zealand. By 1776 there were 220 Scots employed at the highest level of the administrations in Madras and Bengal: Sir Walter Scott would come to describe India as ‘the corn chest for Scotland’. Explorers like Mungo Park cut through jungles. David Livingstone left Lanarkshire to become the most famous missionary in history. Scottish traders like William Jardine and James Matheson built a trading network across the Far East. One-third of colonial governors between 1850 and 1939 are said to have been Scots.
The army became the most visible means by which the distinctive characteristics of the subjugated Welsh, Scots and Irish were channelled into the British identity. By the early nineteenth century both Ireland and Scotland were sending disproportionately large numbers of soldiers to fight Britain’s colonial wars. Irish formations like the 18th Regiment of Foot saw combat in North America, Egypt, China and South Africa, the Connaught Rangers in South America, India and in both wars against the Boers. The 1st Battalion of the 24th Foot, which became the South Wales Borderers, lost 540 of its men at Isandlwana in the Zulu Wars. The Royal Welch Fusiliers, who had battled American revolutionaries at Bunker Hill, Yorktown and Lexington, remained inordinately proud of the archaic spelling of their name: Robert Graves, who served with them in the First World War, thought that it recalled the Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower. A similar integration of separateness happened in Scotland, where ordinary Scots were prohibited from wearing the tartan after the suppression of the 1745 rebellion, with the exception of the nation’s regiments in the British army, all of which adopted them. The ‘thin red line tipped with steel’ that the Times correspondent William Russell saw repulsing Russian cavalry at Balaclava in 1854 was made up of kilted Highlanders of the 93rd Regiment. A genuinely new British political identity had been forged by the empire. Is it any wonder that, with the empire gone, increasing numbers ask what is the point of the Union?
Empire Page 1
