by Jan Morris
1 It was modelled upon Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, and when in 1898 Lord Curzon of Kedleston became Viceroy he found himself particularly at home.
1 The bridge, which could be seen from the windows of the India Office, was the last work of James Rendel (1799–1856), engineer of the East India Railway and father of Alexander Rendel (1829–1918), one of the greatest Indian railway-builders. It was wickedly demolished in 1957, but the view from its successor, though modified by taller buildings in the background, remains as magical as it was in 1897. The imperial buildings now house the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices: the Colonial Office has been absorbed into the latter, and of the India Office only the magnificent library survives.
1 This led to an odd paradox. If an Englishman, subject to British law, returned a runaway slave to his owner, he was guilty of participation in slavery: if a native returned him, it was common assault.
1 Buchan was still at Oxford in 1897, but was already imperially minded—he won the Newdigate Prize with a poem about the Pilgrim Fathers. He was to become, by way of administrative service in South Africa, Governor-General of Canada and a leading exponent, in many popular novels, of the Empire’s stiff upper lip. He died as Lord Tweedsmuir in 1940, and is buried outside Oxford with his faithful manservant near by—across a hedge.
1 The best-remembered example of his eloquence was his advice to the shady Mr Gluckstein, defrauded by his own accomplices, in the case Gluckstein v. Barnes: ‘He can bring an action at law if he likes. If he hesitates to take that course or takes it and fails, then his only remedy lies in an appeal to that sense of honour which is popularly supposed to exist among robbers of a humbler type.’
1 ‘Whichever’, cynics used to add, ‘is the less.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Imperial Complexity
Across the wave, along the wind,
Flutter and plough your way,
But where will you a Sceptre find
To match the English Sway?
Its conscience holds the world in awe
With blessing or with ban;
Its Freedom guards the Reign of Law,
And majesty of Man!
Alfred Austin
11
TWO celebrated monuments stood near the lake in Kandy, the sweet mountain capital of the last Ceylonese kings, toppled off their thrones only thirty years before. One was the Temple of the Tooth, a confectionery structure of white marble, in whose moat guardian crocodiles loitered, and in whose inner shrine a large discoloured chunk of ivory was claimed to be a tooth from the mouth of the Lord Buddha. The other was the audience chamber of the Kandyan kings, an unpretentious but beloved structure, built with the skills of Portuguese captives in the seventeenth century, and so a monument to the lost power of the kingdom. Around these two buildings the life of the little city fragrantly revolved, the monkish litany echoing across the lake at dawn, the aromatic shambles of the bazaar, the fireflies wavering haphazard in the shrubberies as the sun went down: but immediately beside them, overshadowing the one and not in the least abashed by the other, the British built the headquarters of their administration in central Ceylon—a vaguely Palladian, four-square, sensible office block, deposited there with uncompromising firmness, as if to say that no memory of vanished kings, no relic layered in gilt and sandalwood, could logically resist the power of the Raj.
One feels among the writings of the New Imperialists a hunger for this sort of absolutism, as they tried to reduce the complexities of the Empire to some comprehensible order. But there was no true order to the thing. It had no real logic to it, no very definable purpose, no formula. It was, as Richard Ford wrote of Spain, a kingdom of exceptions. Even in Kandy the nature of British rule was not so clear-cut as the juxtaposition of those three buildings seemed to imply, for down the road there was a fourth, a wooden kiosk beside the lake, which was the headquarters of the village headmen—Ceylonese of substance and inherited dignity who had been absorbed into the British system of government, and were almost as important under Queen Victoria as they had been under King Wikrama Raja Sinha. Very peculiar, Disraeli had thought this Empire. What was true of one colony was seldom true of another: and there were, in 1897, forty-three separate governments within the British Empire, displaying every degree of independence and subjugation, and all manner of idiosyncrasy.
2
At one end were the great self-governing colonies, virtually nations in their own right. Their emancipation had come easily, because until a decade or two before the British had been chiefly anxious to reduce their imperial burdens, relied upon Free Trade for their continuing prosperity, and were very willing to release colonists who were only British anyway. The last thing London wanted was another Boston tea party. There were eleven of these semi-nations: Canada, the six Australian colonies, New Zealand, Cape Colony, Natal and Newfoundland. None of them was absolutely independent. Their foreign policies were still decreed by the Imperial Government, whose diplomats represented them in foreign capitals, and they still depended upon Great Britain for their security at sea. But they were not obliged to go to war for London, and they had their own local defence forces, their own agents in England, and their own tariffs, sometimes directed against imports from the United Kingdom. These outstations of Greater Britain had two-chamber Parliaments, faithfully reproducing the rituals of Westminster, and they appointed all their own public officers, except only the Queen’s representative (though even in the choice of Governors they had their say, generally suggesting noblemen of limitless pedigree and resource).
Below them came the Crown Colonies, in almost every stage of development. Some had no legislature at all, but were ruled simply and squarely by the Governor and his officials: such were Gibraltar, for instance, and St Helena. Some, like Gambia or the Seychelles, had legislatures whose members were all officially nominated. Some, like Jamaica or Malta, had legislatures that included some elected members. Barbados and Bermuda had fully elected Assemblies—relics of the self-governing constitutions, like those of the old British colonies in America, which they had enjoyed before the emancipation of the slaves. But in all the last word lay with the Governor, who could veto all legislation anyway: and in most the degree of public intervention could be manipulated easily enough by a switch of the franchise, reducing it as often as not to that airy upper-crust likely to be in sympathy with imperial ideas. (In Malta the franchise was limited to about one-eighteenth of the population—as the geographer Hereford George wrote, ‘so important a military station is necessarily governed, to a certain extent, in accordance with the needs of the Empire’).
Many imperial territories were officially Protectorates, and technically foreign countries still. Most of them were run, nevertheless, more or less as Crown Colonies, except that since their citizens were not British subjects they were conveniently unentitled to British legal rights—your Ashanti agitator could not cry habeas corpus, when the district officer decided to let him cool off in the lock-up for a day or two. In three territories—Rhodesia, North Borneo, Nigeria—chartered companies were paramount, as all-powerful agents of Empire: the charter of the Royal Niger Company, granted without any reference to Parliament in London, declared that the kings, chiefs and peoples of the Niger basin, ‘recognizing the virtues of the Company’, had ceded the whole of their territories to it, and that the British Government had authorized the company to govern them, and to acquire ‘by all lawful means’ other territories in the same region.
And magnificently separate as always was India, which was an Empire of its own—vast and unmanageable almost beyond conception, a third of it ruled by native princes under British suzerainty, the rest governed by the British themselves as an unwavering autocracy. ‘Whatever is done for the people,’ Bryce wrote of India, ‘nothing is done by the people’: British rule there, somebody else said, was ‘a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their leave and without their help’. In British India
, more colossally than anywhere, the Crown was absolute.
3
Nothing was uniform. Consider the Government of Ceylon, which was thought to be the ultimate refinement of the Crown Colony-system. Ceylon was not the sort of possession that could reasonably expect self-government. Its native population was half Tamil from India, half indigenous Sinhalese, part Lowland part Kandyan, partly Buddhist partly Hindu, with Muslim and Christian minorities and a sizeable white community. Beneath the authority of the Governor was an officially nominated council intended to reflect at once this diversity of the Ceylonese and the grand fact of British domination. It comprised the commander of the imperial forces in the island; the Attorney-General; the principal Collector of Customs; two senior District Officers; the Director of Public Works; and representatives of the Tamils, the Sinhalese, the Muslims, the Kandyans, the Burghers, the Europeans and the merchant community. Eight Government Agents, one for each province, translated the decrees of Governor and Council into action: they and their senior assistants were nearly all British members of the Ceylon Civil Service, but below them the ancient hierarchy of headmen and village councils still held local authority. This was held to be a model administration. It gave the natives a share in the running of things, it respected indigenous tradition, it allowed every local faction a voice at Government House: but just as there was no mistaking which of those buildings in Kandy was of most immediate consequence, so there was no mistaking the fact that the British were absolute rulers of Ceylon.
Other possessions were less tractable—Burma, for instance. Ceylon was a compact, fairly developed, accessible island on a familiar trade route, a genial and easy-going kind of colony. Burma was described by Sir George Scott, the principal British authority on the country, as ‘a sort of recess, a blind alley, a back reach’. Much of it was still wild and unmapped, and its people had never really accepted the values of the Raj, remaining remotely detached, seldom volunteering to serve the Flag, and never demeaning themselves with second-hand Western manners. Lower Burma the British knew well enough; upper Burma contained large tracts of jungly tribal territory where successive British missions had been massacred or molested. Though it was governed as a province of British India, Burma was accordingly split into several different kinds of possession. On the one side a straightforward colonial administration governed the settled areas—commissioners, deputy commissioners, assistant commissioners, township officers down to village headmen. On the other side a queer congeries of arrangements was devised to keep the tribes quiet and happy. In the remote tribal territories British rule was rudimentary, and local power was left in the hands of chieftains—the Sawbwas, Myozas and Ngwe-kunhmus of the Shan States, the Duwas of the Kachins, the tribal paladins of the Chin peoples, the red Karens, the Bwè and the Mano. Some of these principalities were vast—Kengtung was as big as Belgium: some were the size of large private estates in England. All were allowed, in varying degrees, to look after their own affairs, the Raj only interfering when necessary to keep the peace or enforce justice.
Yet the whole was one province of Empire, from the ordered logic of the Rangoon municipality to the head-hunting country of the Wa, only once penetrated by Britons, where the villages of the Wild Wa were approached by avenues of human skulls, the Intermediate Wa, so Scott tells us, indulged only in ‘fits of head-hunting’, and the Tame Wa actually wore clothes. Indirect rule, the employment of existing authorities to do the governing for you, was not always popular among the New Imperialists. It clashed with their theme, and meant that people went on living in the old way, denied the full elevating benefits of white civilization. This was a very large Empire, though, its British cadre was small, it was growing constantly, and in many parts the British found it expedient to modify their civilizing mission and enlist the authority of a myriad chiefs, kings, emirs and paramount princes. In Africa they would try, more subtly than they ever did in Asia, to weld the ancient orders into the structure of Empire, exactly fitting each measure of responsibility into an imperial pattern, so that the pettiest pagan wizard could play his part in the grand design. But by these visionary means nobody was satisfied. The Empire lost part of its point, and the Africans found themselves stuck in a bog of tradition, from which before long all the more intelligent ones did their best to escape.
4
Consider the island of Ascension, 7° 53’ S., 14° 18’ W., half-way between Africa and Brazil in the South Atlantic Ocean. Acquired by the British, 1815, as a garrison island. Area 38 square miles, length 7½ miles, breadth 6 miles, circumference 22 miles. Population 380, with 60 women and children, consisting of seamen and marines with their families, and Kroomen labourers from Liberia. No indigenous vertebrate land fauna. No industry. No known minerals. Half covered with lava.
Ascension was eight hundred miles from the next British territory, St Helena, and not particularly on the way to anywhere else. In deciding how best to administer the place, the British accordingly took a practical if unorthodox step: they declared it to be a ship. It was borne on the books of the Admiral Superintendent, Gibraltar. Darwin described it as ‘a huge ship kept in first-rate order’, when he visited the island on the Beagle in the 1830s; it was the only British possession under the control of the Admiralty (though the French Ministry of Marine had once governed most of the French Empire). Ascension had enjoyed a brief importance as a coaling station, before the opening of the Suez Canal. Now it was a naval sanatorium and a cable station on the South African line—its traditional function in a way, because for centuries mariners had left mail in bottles on this island, to be picked up by ships passing in the opposite direction, and there was a headland still known as the Letter Box.
A captain of the Royal Navy was normally in command, though sometimes it was a colonel of marines. He enforced and occasionally made the laws, punished offenders, presided over inquests, kept the registers and was president of nearly as many local societies as was Cecil Rhodes in Salisbury. The military garrison had long been withdrawn, but in 1897 there were still ten naval officers aboard Ascension, and everything about the island was nautical. The Commander lived in Admiralty Cottage, the light outside the police station was an old ship’s lamp, every wall of St Mary’s Church was crammed with naval memorials. On the long track up Green Mountain, the parkland of the island, two sawn-off gigs acted as milestones—‘One Boat’ and ‘Two Boats’. The Navy had brought tons of earth and innumerable trees to soften that austere volcanic landscape: gums from Australia, yews from the Cape, castor-oil from the Caribbean, Scotch firs and Port Jackson willows. On the summit of the mountain they had made a dewpond, with frogs and goldfish in it, and a farm with roses, geraniums and English vegetables—it was a tradition that every officer posted to Ascension took with him some useful plant.
The island was orderly, surprisingly homely, and modest. When one naval officer’s wife arrived there, legend said, she accosted a seaman on the jetty and asked haughtily where Government House was, and where the Governor’s carriage would be awaiting her. ‘There’s the Captain’s cottage, ma’am’, he replied, ‘and this here is the island cart.’1
5
Here are a few less spectacular anomalies of Empire. Gibraltar, Malta, Bermuda, Guernsey and Jersey all had military governors, appointed by the War Office. Cyprus was governed by a High Commissioner, because it was ostensibly still part of the Turkish Empire: there were Mudirs and Mukhtars in its administration, the Turkish Majlis still had a say in taxation, and Cypriots were liable to conscription in the Turkish Army unless they paid a poll tax. The New Hebrides were governed as a condominium by an Anglo-French naval commission. Tristan da Cunha was more or less run by the chaplain of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Sarawak, though a British Protectorate, was still ruled by the White Rajah. British Guiana had a legislature called a Court of Policy, inherited from the Dutch, and in Gibraltar the only local authority of any kind was the sanitary commission. Guernsey and Jersey had their own Etats, 15th century assemblies of
Norman origin. The internal laws of the Isle of Man were framed by an archaic assembly called the Tynwald, Ireland was divided into baronies, relics of the septs and clans of Celtic antiquity. On the Burmese frontier the British rented territory from China. At Quetta the greatest of all Empires was the tenant of the Khan of Kalat, at a quit-rent of 25,000 rupees a year.
6
And oddest of all the imperial phenomena was Egypt, which Napoleon had called ‘the most important country’, and which possessed for the British an almost pathological fascination. To them it seemed to hold a mysterious, treacherous grip upon the jugular of the Empire. Egypt stood astride the way to India, and it had long been inextricably linked in the British mind with the story of the Pax Britannica: Nelson at the Nile, the romance of the Overland Route, Gordon’s death, Gladstone and Alexandria, the passage of the liners down the Suez Canal—all these spelled Egypt for the British, and made them always aware of the place. It was alternately a beacon and a blind spot.
