And the empire changed not merely the political sentiments of the United Kingdom, but the very genetic make-up of its citizens. Since history began, Britain has been a nation of immigrants, whether Romans, Scandinavians, Irish, French, Jews, Italians or Dutch. But the empire drew migrants from across the planet. The world’s oldest Chinatown is in Liverpool. Hundreds of thousands of Irish poured into English and Scottish cities in the middle years of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century there were about 50,000 Germans and perhaps 150,000 Russian Jews in the country. Immigrant families built banks such as Rothschilds, Barings and Warburgs, gave us high-street retailers like Marks and Spencer, Moss Bros, Burtons and Top Shop, and supermarkets like Tesco. The first British Indian MP was elected in 1892. In the second half of the twentieth century, vast numbers of migrants from one-time colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent landed in Britain and changed the look and feel of many cities. These communities produced writers and artists who invigorated the native arts, sportsmen and women who raised standards of performance, and cooks who did the national cuisine a big favour.
The traffic in the other direction had been enormous, too. The distinctive character of the British Empire – unlike its Russian or Austro-Hungarian counterparts – was its immense geographical spread, from tiny atolls to entire continents. This was partly because its perpetrators lived on an island: it is striking that the age of imperialism begins only after Queen Mary had lost Calais, the last English possession in France, in 1558. Thereafter, the European concern of most British governments was merely to see that no individual power became strong enough to menace British possessions overseas. That the English had seawater in their veins tended to make overseas adventures more attractive than they might have seemed: when you are surrounded by sea, any journey anywhere involves travelling by water – the difference between visiting Norway and visiting New Zealand is merely one of degree.
There is no completely reliable estimate of how many people left Britain for a new life overseas during the years of empire, but most of them never returned, and by 1900 a majority of English-speakers were living outside Europe. The British diaspora created a network of family connections stretching from a grey, damp island in the North Atlantic to dusty sheep stations in Australia, rough-and-ready mining towns in Africa and snowy wildernesses in Canada. So while at any one time the imperial life was being lived only by a minority of the population, the colonial experience was familiar to many more. The awareness of ‘abroad’ lives on in the fact that more than three-quarters of the British population hold passports. In the United States – great immigrant nation that it is – the figure is less than a third.
When the British went to live in the lands they conquered they were confronted immediately with the question of what it was that made them distinct from the people among whom they lived. The number who asked the difficult question ‘What’s so special about us?’ must have been small. Indeed, when you read the popular literature of the period its most offensive characteristic is the assumption of racial superiority over ‘brutes’ and ‘savages’. As Cecil Rhodes put it, ‘We are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ As the empire matured, a peculiar illogicality seized the British: we rule more of the world than any other nation, therefore we must be superior to any other nation. In fact, of course, it was technological advance and entrepreneurial flair which gave birth to the empire. But a belief in some moral pre-eminence offered reassurance to the anxious imperialist. For the majority of empire officials – district officers and magistrates, policemen, teachers, farmers and engineers – the role was perhaps justification itself. Yet it was a role in an alien land, and the customs and conventions of Hove or Huddersfield were absent. So the daily business of living in a British community – even a community of one or two, out in the bush – required the invention of a set of norms, of things which were done at certain times of the day, and things which were definitely not done at any time. These communities were obliged to define what being British meant. In the bungalows and clubs, the sundowners on the verandah and the suet puddings at the dinner table, they were acting out a version of what life was like at home. But it was a not-quite-perfect representation.
Creating and running this enormous enterprise required a certain type of individual, which gave Britain its idiosyncratic public-school system, designed to produce not intellectuals but ‘sound chaps’ – capable, dependable, resourceful. They were to be oblivious to discomfort and able to inspire respect, for through them was the reality of the British Empire to be made clear. Parents understood the job of the school. In Tom Brown’s School Days, Squire Brown knew what he wanted from the education his son was to receive at Rugby. ‘What is he sent to school for?’ he asks. ‘If only he’ll turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ Add in a firm handshake and an ability to play cricket and you have the makings of a district officer. That such a key part of the British educational system was for generations geared not to mental achievement but to something else – ‘pluck’ is perhaps the best word for it – seems at odds with the fact that Britain has nearly twice as many Nobel Laureates as France, five times the total of Italy, Russia or Japan. But these men and women of intellectual pre-eminence are a memorial not to the famous Victorian public schools, created expressly with the empire in mind, but to the country’s grammar schools and to the huge intellectual contribution made by refugees and migrants. Let Yorke Harberton, the hero of G. A. Henty’s With Roberts to Pretoria, stand for all of the products of the imperial educational system:
a typical public-school boy – straight and clean-limbed, free from all awkwardness, bright in expression, and possessed of a large amount of self-possession, or, as he himself would have called it, ‘cheek’ … a little particular about the set of his Eton jacket and trousers and the appearance of his boots; as hard as nails and almost tireless; a good specimen of the class by which Britain has been built up, her colonies formed and her battle-fields won …
Not all Henty’s heroes came from such privileged backgrounds, for at most the public schools could educate only about 20,000 boys a year. But one of the lessons Henty and other imperial authors tried to teach was that the empire gave opportunities for anyone who had the guts to seize them with both hands. By the 1950s, total sales of Henty’s novels were reckoned at about 25 million and they had become an important means of passing on the values of imperial education to anyone who could read.
The fate of many of the products of these schools is captured in one of Rudyard Kipling’s most resonant poems about empire, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ (‘A great and glorious thing it is / To learn, for seven years or so, / The Lord knows what of that and this …’). It describes what happens when a young public-school subaltern is sent to the North-West Frontier.
A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
The walls of churches across Britain are plastered with memorials to young men who died in inconsequential ambushes like this, or were carried off by fever in some obscure location the churchgoers at home could not place on a map of the world. The memorials to these imperialists created a sense that there really were corners of foreign fields that were forever England. The deaths of grander figures created a distinctive empire iconography, as familiar in its way as stained-glass representations of the Passion of Christ. Tableaux depicting the last moments of General Wolfe during the battle for Quebec, surrounded by his grieving officers and native Indian guide, of the mortally wounded Horatio Nelson lying in the bowels of HMS Victory, or of General Gordon serene on the steps of the palace in Khartoum, about to be speared to death, became familiar to countless numbers of
citizens. The streets of our cities are peopled with statues and monuments to these generals, admirals and explorers who died to ensure that Britannia’s bounds were set wider still and wider.
But the most vibrant legacy of empire evident every day is not its now deeply unfashionable poetry, music or paintings but the sports which were either invented or codified to keep its young men fit and occupied and somehow to pass on to the colonized, through cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis or golf, some of the imperial values. These sports were also supposed to inculcate personal courage and collective loyalty in the builders of empire. The supreme imperial game was cricket – as an 1868 guide to outdoor sport put it, ‘We even think that square-leg to a hard hitter is no bad training for coolness at the cannon’s mouth.’ The belief is best expressed in Henry Newbolt’s extraordinary poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (The Torch of Life), an account of a close-run battle in 1885 Sudan, which he saw through the prism of his days as a scholarship boy at Clifton College:
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
The sand of the desert is sodden red –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks –
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
It is absurd, of course – British victories against tribal peoples were so often the triumph of guns against spears. But it is the authentic language of empire. At the battle of the Alma in the Crimean War, Sir John Astley of the Scots Guards watched as a Russian cannonball cut through his company. He recalled in his memoirs that he had shouted to one of his men ‘who was our best wicket-keeper’ to catch it. The man replied, ‘No sir! It had a bit too much pace on. I thought you was long stop, so I left it for you.’ The cricket analogy was ever present. During the siege of Ladysmith in 1899 – two years after Newbolt had composed his famous lines – one Old Etonian wrote to his parents: ‘I think we “played the game” in keeping the Boers busy with us here.’
A couple of generations have now grown up ridiculing that sort of attitude. Everyone knows that war is not a game, and no one is much interested in the idioms which made it possible for our ancestors to deal with danger and death. It has been a long time since the age and beliefs of empire seemed an attractive subject for creativity. From E. M. Forster and J. G. Farrell to Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, the stuff of fiction is the end of empire and its aftermath. In 1960, you might have gone to the cinema to see Kenneth More playing a polished British army captain smuggling a six-year-old Hindu prince out of danger in North West Frontier. By 1970 you were more likely to be watching Carry On up the Khyber, with Sid James as the military governor, Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, and Charles Hawtrey as the scandalously underpanted Private Widdle in the 3rd Foot and Mouth Regiment. In fiction, the hero of the hour was now Tom Brown’s tormentor, the cad Harry Flashman. By the turn of the millennium, there was hardly an imperial hero who had not had a few buckets of mud thrown at him. The great explorers of Africa, such as Richard Burton, were racists. Captain Scott had condemned his men to icy deaths in Antarctica by vainglorious bungling. The sexuality of the hero of Khartoum, General Gordon, was suspect. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, was cracked. The tone of movies had changed, too. David Lean’s portrayal of a troubled egotist in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was much less about grand imperial designs than about a romantic, misunderstood loner. The new heroes were the men and women who fought against the British brutes – the Mahatma in Gandhi (1982), the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace in Braveheart (1995) or the modern Irish revolutionary in Michael Collins (1996).
By then, the British thoroughbred had become a rattle-ribbed old nag. The country had been exhausted and impoverished by two world wars, had withdrawn from its colonies and was demonstrably unsure quite where its future lay. The United States, the new global policeman, professed itself an enemy of imperialism and, in first undermining British attempts to manage the Palestine issue, and then seeing off the duplicity behind the plot to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, delivered mortal blows to the country’s self-confidence. Colonies seemed to belong to another time in history.
And it had all passed so quickly. The fate of the crumbling Ottoman Empire worried European politicians for the best part of a century: the British Empire’s illness was speedy and fatal and carried it off in a few decades. The British came out of both world wars on the winning side, and so never had the need to reimagine themselves as anything other than what they had once been, nor the need to think much about the legacy of their actions. All that was required was a readiness to accept themselves much as they had been beforehand, but in a diminished state. How much better it might have been to have had the chance to devise another destiny.
Chapter One
‘To plunder, to slaughter, to steal – these things they misname empire’
Tacitus, c. AD 98
There is not much to Port Royal these days, just a scrabble of streets, a couple of bare-shelved stores and an open sewer running down to the sea. It is certainly not royal, and – apart from the odd fishing boat pulled up on the black beach – not much of a port either. Half a dozen barefoot boys play cricket in the dirt, their wickets a plastic beer case and an up-ended table with two legs missing. There is a policeman, but nothing for him to do, for nothing much happens in Port Royal. A young man pushes a trolley through the rutted streets, a bowl of goat stew kept warm on some glowing charcoal. He has ambitions, he says: one day he plans to have his travelling restaurant mounted on full-sized bicycle wheels. Apart from a betting shack where improbable numbers of dollars are staked on unlikely outcomes, the poverty-stricken fishing village of today bears little relation to what went before. For once this collection of dilapidated buildings at the south-eastern tip of Jamaica was one of the most notorious places on earth. A couple of earthquakes, a terrible fire and numerous hurricanes – each said to be God’s judgement on the loose morals of earlier residents – have removed most traces of its time as ‘the wickedest city in the world’.
‘This town is the Sodom of the New World,’ wrote a seventeenth-century clergyman who made the mistake of visiting the newly established English colony, ‘and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk.’ He departed on the same ship that had brought him, leaving the place to its vagabonds, escaped jailbirds and prostitutes such as the notorious ‘No Conscience Nan’, ‘Salt-Beef Peg’ and ‘Buttock-de-Clink Jenny’. The place floated on a sea of rum – by 1661 the town had stirred itself to acquire a council, which, in the month of June alone, issued over forty new licences for drinking dens. (There was no need of visiting clergy because the rum they served was so strong it was known as ‘Kill Devil’.) A governor of Jamaica drily observed that ‘The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew of the strength of their drinks, but then they wondered more that they were not all dead.’ Port Royal made the wild towns which grew up around nineteenth-century gold strikes seem like quiet country villages, for one simple reason. It was built not on digging gold out of the ground but on stealing it. This tropical Klondike flourished on maritime gangsterism. Jamaica lay ‘in the Spaniard’s bowels and in the heart of his trade’.
The
parasitic process went like this. The Spanish robbed the Aztec and Inca empires of Central and South America, and then transported the precious metals under armed guard to the Caribbean coast, where they were loaded on to ships to be carried back to Spain. The thugs of Port Royal simply put to sea, mugged the Spanish and then scuttled back to Jamaica as fast as possible. The British were not the first into this uncertain but often immensely profitable business, for French pirates had begun falling upon Spanish convoys soon after they started to sail for Europe from the Americas. But the British were the most ruthless, and Sir Francis Drake’s prayer ‘I know many means to do her Majesty good service and to make us rich, for we must have gold before we see England,’ can stand as a mission-statement for all of them. When Drake finally reached home – after plundering a mule train on the Panamanian isthmus loaded with gold and silver in 1573 – not only was he rich but he soon became an English national hero. There was something about the man’s freebooting spirit that chimed with the mood of a sixteenth-century England, a nation beginning to feel that being an island gave both security and opportunity: when you have no troublesome land borders (the Welsh had been ‘pacified’ and the Scots were increasingly more envious than dangerous), all foreigners are exotic and it is easy to feel indifferent about what your citizens do to them. For anyone willing to face the risks involved, piracy was free enterprise, red in tooth and claw, open to anyone and offering the prospect of great wealth.
Empire Page 2
