Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  Microscopic, telescopic, Bushmen or Sioux, black, brown or yellow: in the public mind the colours and peculiarities blurred. It infuriated Queen Victoria to hear her Indian subjects called niggers,1 but to the man in the street in London the distinction was shadowy between a porcelain princeling from Rajasthan and some swathed worthy out of Ashantiland. Nor was anybody very self-conscious about race. The word ‘native’ was only beginning to acquire its undertones of mockery and condescension. The natives themselves were not often sensitive to racialism—only among educated Indians and Chinese did the idea of white supremacy much rankle, and even the most terrible of the African potentates recognized that the fittest to survive mostly seemed to be white.

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  The immediate problems of race arose only in the tropical Empire. In the temperate zones of white settlement there were, for most purposes, no subject peoples. The Red Indians of Canada were either shut away dispirited in their reserves, or else were fast being assimilated into the white culture. The aboriginals of Australia were no more than weird familiars of the Never-Never. The last of the Maori wars had ended in an inevitable British victory thirty years before, and there were now Maori representatives in the New Zealand Parliament. The Eskimos were irrelevant. The Irish did not count.

  Elsewhere in the British Empire a few thousand white men ruled or worked among several hundred million coloured people: throughout the dependent Empire racial supremacy and imperial supremacy were synonymous. Racial separation was employed by the British as an instrument of Government, and there were few places in the tropical Empire where rulers and governed lived side by side in partnership. The British kept their distance now—paternal nearly always, fraternal very seldom, sisterly almost never. Cruelty was rare, and almost never official. Those mutineers were not shot dead from guns because it was a particularly horrible death, but because the British considered it more soldierly than hanging. Private Britons, trafficking in Asian labour or blazing themselves a trail in Africa, might do terrible things to their natives. Schooner captains commissioned to take indentured labourers home to their South Sea islands, at the end of their service in Australia, sometimes did not bother to make the voyage at all, but simply dumped their passengers on the first available atoll. British private soldiers in India often behaved abominably towards Indians, hitting them at small provocation, and forcing them to salaam and remove their shoes before entering a mess-hall or barracks-room. But Britons in the civil services were horrified at such conduct. Physical violence was seldom to their taste, paternalism was their forte, and anyway to be distant was enough. Their most vicious weapon had always been contempt. ‘Foreign conquerors have treated the natives with violence,’ wrote Thomas Munro of the East India Company as long before as 1818, ‘and often with great cruelty, but none has treated them with so much scorn as we.’

  Nobody, of course, denied that natives could be clever. Old Thomas Cook, introduced to a Sudanese magnate called the Mudir of Dongola, thought him ‘one of the ablest and cleverest men I have ever met’. No, it was character the coloured peoples were thought to lack—steadfastness, fairness, courage, sense of duty, such as the English public schools inculcated in their pupils. ‘Don’t you believe that the native is a fool’, a colliery manager told Kipling in the Giridih coalfields of India. ‘You can train him to everything except responsibility.’ Nothing irritated the British more than a veneer of Western education without, as they thought, any real understanding of the values it represented. The emergence of Western-educated Indians, speaking a flowery English of their own, casually failing to recognize their own pre-ordained place in the order of things—the arrival on the scene of these bouncy protégés did nothing to draw the British closer to their wards, but only exacerbated their aloofness.

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  Yet this very class of Anglicized Asians and Africans was a deliberate product of the British imperial system. The Education of the Native was one of the basic purposes of philanthropic imperialism, and the British had long ago decided that a Western education was the only kind worth giving him. It was Macaulay who had defined the object of educational policy in India as being ‘to form a class of interpreters between us and the natives we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’. From this conception had sprung the use of English in public instruction in the Empire, and ever since the purpose had been to produce a gentlemanly élite of pseudo-Englishmen, subjects in their rulers’ image, who would eventually perpetuate the Britishness of the Empire, and in the meantime act as imperial subalterns or under-masters. Elementary and technical education was neglected almost everywhere in the dependent Empire. In India, after half a century of Crown rule, there were only 12 million literate people in a population of about 300 million: only 1 per cent of Indians of school age went to school at all, and three out of four Indian villages had no school anyway. In Africa, where the production of an Anglicized élite generally seemed premature, the primary education of the natives was left almost entirely to missionaries, a cheap system with mixed results.

  But all over the Empire there were private boys’ schools in the English manner, generally Anglican of atmosphere, with blazers and rugby caps, first elevens and prefects, corporal punishment and even fagging—the whole oddly twisted or foreshortened, so that with their pallid expatriate masters, their fragile natives or husky young white colonials, they were like English public schools seen in a distorting mirror. They were assiduous and highly successful brainwashers. As the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh said of its curriculum, its object was not merely the formation of character and the encouragement of manly pursuits, but the fostering among the boys of ‘an active sense of their duty as loyal subjects’. Often the anti-intellectual prejudices of the lesser English schools were faithfully reproduced, as was the Spartan discipline: when a new headmaster turned up at Trinity College, Kandy, in Ceylon, he found 100 boys waiting to be caned as an opening duty.

  From school, with luck, the chosen vessel went on to university—if not in England, then to one of the colonial universities, on British lines, then springing up elsewhere in the Empire. In India there were five, originally simply examining bodies, later full-blown teaching institutes. There, all too often, the system flagged: manly pursuits were neglected, and the sense of loyal duty often went awry. At best the Indian universities were simply crammers, at worst they were sordidly corrupt. Some Fellows of Bombay University could not sign their own names. Intellectually examinations were all that counted—socially, too. With a degree a young Indian could claim a higher dowry with his wife: an M.A. was worth substantially more than a B.A. Students who failed in their examinations commonly killed themselves, for as one of the Calcutta vernacular newspapers asked in 1897: ‘What is a failed candidate? He is a doomed man! He is as doomed as a life convict. He knows he is not wanted in society.’

  The British distrusted the product of this system, but their reasons were complex. On the one hand they saw him, perhaps, as an eventual threat to their own supremacy. On the other they were repelled by the spectacle of a familiar culture grafted on to an alien root. And in these reactions, too, they were confused, because for the most part they did not think the indigenous cultures worth preserving. Macaulay, again, had set the pattern. To him the sciences, languages and literatures of the east were contemptible—‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding-school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter’. Macaulay’s prestige was towering still, and his influence lingered. For the most part the British could not take the subject cultures very seriously. In his travel book From Sea to Sea Kipling mischievously throws in a characteristic Anglo-Indian assessment of the city of Jaipur, that pink prodigy of Rajasthan: ‘A station on the Rajputana-Makwa line, on the way to Bombay, where half an hour is allowed fo
r dinner, and where there ought to be more protection from the sun.’

  The British cheerfully appropriated, without malice, the monuments of conquered civilizations. Government House in Lahore was the former tomb of Muhammad Kasim Khan, cousin to the great Emperor Akhbar: the British Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab entertained his guests in a noble domed room that had once been the sarcophagus chamber. In Mandalay, the former royal capital of Burma, the private audience hall of the Burmese kings was occupied by the Upper Burma Club, while the throne room became the garrison church. A few weeks before the Jubilee a British punitive expedition attacked and burned the city of Benin, south-east of Lagos, a place of dreadfully bloodthirsty custom which had nevertheless produced the noblest sculptural art of negro Africa. The British were rightly horrified at the tales of barbarism the expedition sent home, with all their deliriously macabre embroideries of twitching corpses, skulls and witch-doctory, but their disregard for the art of the place was absolute. You would never guess, from the newspaper accounts of the affair, that anybody in Benin made anything skilful or beautiful at all. African history seemed to the British, as an Oxford professor once put it, no more than ‘unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but unrewarding corners of the globe’.

  This celestial detachment led to insensitivity. Often there creeps into the reports and debates of Empire a tone of frigidly impersonal lordliness, and the traditional British concern for the welfare of aboriginal peoples seems to be in abeyance. ‘The advantage of limiting our rivalry to an Asiatic or African tribe‚’ Lord Salisbury once remarked dryly to the House of Lords about some imperial initiative, ‘is one which those who are engaged in these enterprises appreciate very highly’—and thus, with a bloodless quip, he reduced the indigenous inhabitants of the tropical Empire to faintly comic insignificance. Lord Kimberley often wondered whether African disputes were worth taking seriously, since they mostly concerned ‘barren deserts of places where white men cannot live, dotted with thinly scattered tribes who cannot be made to work’. The Government of India announced, during the famines of 1899, that ‘while the duty of the Government is to save life, it is not bound to maintain the labouring population at its normal level of comfort’. It was this cold superiority that was most disliked about the British imperialists. They too often forgot the need to preserve face, common to all humiliated peoples, whatever their colour and culture.

  But in an Empire so firmly based upon racial differences it was inevitable that people were sometimes treated as less than human. The British once coolly proposed to transfer several thousand Maltese to Cyprus; they habitually played the destinies of African tribes as bargaining counters in the diplomatic game. The superb Masai of the Kenya highlands were forcibly moved away from the line of the Uganda railway ‘because they did not need railway facilities’—and white settlers did. The aboriginal prisoners shipped to the island of Rottnest, off the coast of south-west Australia, died in their hundreds—twenty-four in one day—because the British, unable to think of such convicts in altogether human terms, condemned them to a strange diet in an unfamiliar climate, their tribal customs ignored and their taboos unwittingly defied.

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  Among the settlers and planters of the tropical Empire there were harsher reasons for aloofness. The Empire had been built upon a plenitude of native labour willing to do manual work, and not anxious for a share in Government. However liberal the theorists at home, or the career men of the administrative services, the settlers on the spot were determined to keep it thus. In the West Indies, in South Africa, in the plantation areas of India, in tropical Australia, men were already alarmed by the dangers of race. The old Caribbean sugar colonies had never recovered from the unhappy reconstruction period which had followed the emancipation of the slaves: segregation was so complete that when Anthony Trollope visited Jamaica the Governor’s was the only table in the island where white men and black dined together. The catchwords of racial fear—‘yellow peril’, ‘miscegenation’, ‘white civilization’—were already commonplace: there were 372 million people in the British Empire, but only about 50 million were white.

  This was a dilemma never to be resolved: how to have your cake and eat it; how to induce your coloured labour to work for you, but not live among you; spend money, but not earn profits; mend the public highway, but not vote in the public elections. In the tropical Empire the pioneers, however humble their circumstances at home, soon came to regard themselves as a master race. The process was familiar, almost allegorical. Boldly the Briton had hacked his way through bush or jungle, to find some hospitable spot for settlement; and sooner or later the spindly natives crept furtively out of the trees in loincloths or tiger-skins; and presently some enterprising primitive, bolder than the rest, sidled into camp to examine a billy-can or wonder at a wagon-wheel; and before long two or three were there, helping with the dishes; and almost before the scrub was cleared the British had a labour force. Soon they began to feel that scrubbing pans or washing laundry was not proper to their dignity: in a year or two no white man, still less a white woman, would even consider manual labour: and so the gulf that already existed between the races, of colour, and climate, and religion, and custom, and language, and experience, was irremediably deepened by a rift of caste.

  There was no pretence at equal pay for all races, except at the highest level in India. It did not often arise anyway, for the skills of the coloured people were mostly so rudimentary that all the better-paid work was necessarily done by whites: but as time passed what had been logic became dogma. By the end of the century, in most parts of the tropical Empire, the difference in rates of pay was so great that a white man could not accept one of the simpler jobs without cutting himself off from his own fellows, and degrading himself alike in European and in native eyes.

  It is curious to see how low in the social or technical scale these prejudices applied. In Canada, Indian pilots were employed on the St Lawrence River, but in India the Bombay and Calcutta pilots were all very British—important men with substantial salaries, some of them from old Indian Army families, bronzed and moustached in their blue uniforms, and often awe-inspiring to the less assertive masters of small ships from minor maritime nations. In the technical branches of the Indian railways the white cadre went down as far as signalmen and platelayers. A European mail driver of the East India Railway in the nineties was paid 370 rupees a month (rather more, incidentally, than the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp): his Indian colleague, confined to shunting engines and petty branch lines, earned 20 rupees a month. In Johannesburg the newsboys of the Transvaal Mining Argus were all tough and gay little white urchins, wearing floppy hats like cricketers at English preparatory schools. In the West Indies a class of poor whites had, since the emancipation of slaves, replaced the black men in the most menial office jobs. In the Gold Coast, where a sizeable class of educated Africans existed, it had been decreed in 1893 that a third of the doctors should be Africans, but the system was soon abandoned—it was ‘pretty clear to men of ordinary sense’, Chamberlain himself commented, that British officers could not have confidence in native physicians.

  The white inhabitants of Salisbury, in 1891, had sent a petition to the Administrator demanding that no further contracts should be given to Kaffirs while white artisans were unemployed: the Administrator accepted the argument at once, declaring that he ‘fully recognized the prior claim for consideration of the white population’.1 In most British colonies there was little hope of a coloured employee, however educated, becoming anything more than a junior clerk: sooner or later he was confronted by a defensive barrier which no amount of push or ability would enable him to surmount—the barrier of self-interest (which, having probably come from a society in which the hierarchical divisions were much more rigid than anything in Britain, he perfectly understood). The most notable exceptions occurred in West Africa, where a ghastly climate kept European numbers down, and many Africans held responsible commercial jobs.

  In the
ir older possessions the British were still able to depend upon Europeans for many of the services of life. In Calcutta, which the Empire had virtually created, there was a sizeable British petite bourgeoisie, down to English shop assistants in the more delicate departments of the big stores. The principal boarding-houses were those kept by Mrs Walters, Mrs Pell, Mrs Monk, Mrs Baily and Mrs Day—some of them Eurasian ladies, some authentic lodging-house British. There were two English lady doctors in the city, and at least six English tailors, besides dressmakers, opticians, photographers, hoteliers, house agents, dentists, chemists, lawyers, booksellers, jewellers and gunsmiths.1 It was settlers, rather than transient rulers, who chiefly supported this expatriate Englishness. Settlers all over the Empire fought hard to keep their own little Englands intact, and were often at odds with the imperial authorities, whom they considered ‘soft’ on race. In 1883, when Lord Ripon was preparing a reform—the Ilbert Bill—which would give Indian judges the right to try European accused, the Assam tea-planters were so infuriated that they hatched a plot to kidnap the Viceroy, and opposition in Bengal was so intense that the Bill was drastically modified.1

  During their Jubilee visit to London the Colonial Premiers discussed the free circulation of British subjects throughout the Empire, but they did not reach agreement. They knew that their electorates would never tolerate the free entry of Indians, Africans or Chinese into the temperate colonies. The Canadians had already passed their own legislation to prevent the immigration of Asians, and the Australians were even alarmed by the numbers of Lascar seamen on British ships putting into Australian ports. How did those digger troopers feel, one wonders, 5 feet 10½ inches and 38 inches round the chest, when they found themselves marching through the imperial capital with such a pack of brown, black, and yellow men?