Day of Empire

by Amy Chua

  In 1946, civil war broke out among India's Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs. India was now an albatross for the British. In 1947, London announced the partition of the subcontinent; thus were born the independent states of India and Pakistan. The following decades saw an exodus of British business, capital, and personnel.

  It is of course impossible to know how history would have unfolded had the British behaved differently. Powerful forces like socialism, nationalism, and anticolonialism were gaining momentum in the early twentieth century. If not in 1947, India would certainly have achieved independence at some point. The days of European colonialism were numbered.

  But perhaps India could have wrested itself from Britain in a way that was not so angry, so violent, so destructive of British interests. Throughout the ninety years of the British Raj, opportunity after opportunity to accept Indians as equals was squandered. After World War I, Indian business interests made repeated efforts to form interethnic alliances and partnerships with the old British firms, only to be snubbed. After independence, the new Indian government singled out these firms for attack, denouncing them as enemies of egalitarianism. Most of the Anglo-Indian firms eventually divested or shut down.

  But it was not just British business that missed opportunities. The British government too, despite its belated push for Indianization and murky promises of “responsible government,” fell grossly short. There was a glaring difference in the way the British treated its white and nonwhite colonial subjects. As late as 1922, Winston Churchill, then colonial secretary, disparaged the idea of “granting democratic institutions to backward races which had no capacity for self-government.” In stark contrast, starting in the 1840s—at the same time that they were using sepoys in India as cannon fodder—the British voluntarily began granting its white subjects in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand the same rights and liberties won by the American colonies in the 1770s. According to the famous Durham Report of 1838, Britain's Canadian subjects were entitled to control their own destinies, free from rule by a distant authority. This principle was later applied to Britain's other white dominions. By the 1860s, all of Britain's white colonies had effectively been granted independence, with real power lying with the colonists’ elected representatives. In Niall Ferguson's words:

  So there would be no Battle of Lexington in Auckland; no George Washington in Canberra; no declaration of independence in Ottawa. Indeed, it is hard not to feel, when one reads the Durham Report, that its subtext is one of regret. If only the American colonists had been given responsible government when they first asked for it in the 1770s—if only the British had lived up to their own rhetoric of liberty—there might never have been a War of Independence. Indeed, there might never have been a United States.38

  We can go further. Had Great Britain in its Victorian heyday been able to overcome its racial and ethnic prejudices, had it been able to extend the same tolerance to its “dark-skinned” colonies that it extended to its white dominions, then the modern histories of not just India and Pakistan but Rhodesia, Kenya, Iraq, Egypt, Burma, and a long list of other imperial holdings might have played out very differently.

  BRITAIN'S DECLINE, AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

  Like that of every world-dominant power before it, Great Britain's rise to global hegemony was fueled by—and almost certainly would not have occurred but for—a dramatic shift from destructive internal ethnic and religious infighting to policies of striking openness and tolerance, judged against the standards of the time. It is no coincidence that the period of Britain's uncontested global supremacy, usually dated to roughly 1858-1918, was also a time when Jews, Huguenots, and Scots were on the whole prospering and participating at virtually every level of British society, including Parliament and the prime ministership. Not only did the Jews and Scots in particular help Britain fund, conquer, and administer its colonial empire overseas; they contributed pivotally to Britain's industrial, financial, and naval supremacy.

  Britain's decline did not stem from or even coincide with rising domestic intolerance. If anything, as the first half of the twentieth century unfolded, Britain at home displayed greater tolerance toward its ethnic and religious minorities, at least if immigration policies and the expansion of suffrage are any indication. While historians differ over whom to blame and what to emphasize, most agree that Britain's decline stemmed from some combination of the crippling costs of World Wars I and II; escalating government spending on the welfare state; a crushing foreign debt burden; the devaluation of the pound; the relative stagnation of British industry; and the increasing costs of maintaining control over far-flung colonies, especially ones rocked by anti-British hostility, nationalist insurgencies, and (sometimes British-fomented) ethnic or religious violence.

  Nevertheless, in a larger sense Britain's collapse also stemmed from its failure of tolerance abroad. Paul Kennedy is surely right that by the mid-twentieth century Britain's position in its remaining colonies was militarily and economically untenable. As the Labour chancellor Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary in 1946: “When you are in a place where you are not wanted, and where you have not got the force to squash those who don't want you, the only thing to do is to come out.” But the question is, how did Britain reach this position?

  My point is emphatically not that, “alas, had only Britain been more tolerant it might still have colonies in Asia and Africa.” But there were other, more visionary possibilities that went untapped. Even in 1931, when India's leaders were already committed to independence, Gandhi was asked, “How far would you cut India off from the Empire?” Gandhi replied, “From the Empire, entirely; from the British nation not at all, if I want India to gain and not to grieve.” He added, “The British Empire is an Empire only because of India. The Emperorship must go and I should love to be an equal partner with Britain, sharing her joys and sorrows. But it must be a partnership on equal terms.”39

  What would have happened if in 1931 Britain had formed with India the “equal partnership” Gandhi sought? After all, Britain had done just that with its white ex-colonies, creating a British Commonwealth of Nations in which the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, and Australia all were recognized as “equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another.” What would have happened if the Anglo-Indians, if only for instrumental reasons, had overcome their racism, integrated their firms, and merged them with Indian interests?

  It is impossible to know. But if imperial Britain had made different choices at critical junctures in dealing with its nonwhite subjects, decolonization might have taken place on terms far more advantageous to both Britain and its former colonies. The commonwealth, for example, might not have developed into what it is today: a largely symbolic entity known principally for its athletic competitions and literary prizes. Embracing nearly a third of the world's citizens, spanning Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, all linked by long-standing economic interrelationships, the commonwealth could conceivably have become a formidable trading bloc and political union—resembling the European Union, but with the advantage of a common language—with Britain at the hub.

  Instead, having alienated its colonies and fomented intolerance within them, Great Britain fell from world-dominant empire to second-rate power while its former “nonwhite” colonial subjects descended into third world pathologies. Meanwhile, another power was rising—an immigrants’ nation, pluralistic by necessity, built from its founding moment on principles of religious tolerance.

  THE FUTURE OF

  WORLD

  DOMINANCE

  NINE

  Tolerance and the Microchip

  [I]t does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

  — THOMAS JEFFERSON, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-1785

  [Whereas a computer] like the ENIAC today is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh only IV2 tons.


  — Popular Mechanics, MARCH 1949

  In its heyday, the British Empire governed a quarter of the earth's surface and nearly a quarter of the world's people. The empire ruled by the grandsons of Genghis Khan was even larger in terms of territorial expanse. By contrast, the United States today governs a paltry 6.5 percent of the world's land surface and 5 percent of the world's population.1 And yet America is today's hyperpower.

  Is America an empire? Americans have debated whether the United States should strive for imperial power since the country's founding. That question continues to be debated today, even after the United States has achieved global preeminence. I will explore the question of what kind of power America is—and what it should strive to be—in Chapter 12. But before turning to the future, we should first examine the past.

  Why has the United States been so extraordinarily successful economically and militarily? Its rich agricultural land certainly contributed, as did its bountiful raw materials, geographic separation from foreign threats, and its institutions, however imperfect, of private property, free markets, democracy, and the rule of law. But as with every preceding hyperpower, the real secret to America's strength lies in its human capital.

  If relative tolerance is the key to world dominance, the United States has always had a huge advantage over the nations of Europe. Not only has America attracted immigrants; it is a nation of immigrants. The country's Founding Fathers were the sons and grandsons of immigrants, if not immigrants themselves. (Born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, Alexander Hamilton arrived in New York at the age of sixteen.) More than 95 percent of Americans today descend from someone who crossed an ocean to get here.

  Of course, many who crossed the ocean did so in leg irons. For them, as for America's native peoples, the birth of the United States was a story not of tolerance but of ruthless oppression. The “nation of immigrants” was founded by—and for generations defined as a nation of—largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. As late as 1909, when Israel Zangwill, a Russian Jew, wrote his celebrated play The Melting Pot, he envisioned only “the races of Europe” in the crucible.2

  Compared to all other contemporaneous powers, the United States has always been remarkably tolerant of religious diversity. In a truly revolutionary act, the United States in 1789 not only embraced religious freedom—as had countries like Britain and the Dutch Republic—but declared as a constitutional principle that there would be no national church. On the other hand, despite its generally open immigration policy, the United States for much of its history demonstrated extreme racial and ethnic intolerance toward certain groups, most notably Native Americans, African Americans, and other non-“whites.” Notwithstanding repeated declarations that “all men are created equal,” slavery, segregation, discrimination, and inequality of citizenship were long-standing American realities. It was only after World War II that the United States developed into one of the most ethnically and racially open societies in world history. Not coincidentally, this was also the period in which the United States achieved world dominance.

  This chapter will trace the United States’ transformation from ragtag colony to continental power to superpower and finally to hyperpower. This ascent was a direct product of America's continuing ability to attract, reward, and absorb the energy and ingenuity of vastly diverse groups. By accepting other countries’ pariahs, and later by draining rival powers and developing nations of many of their best and brightest, the United States generated unprecedented economic dynamism and technological innovation, which in turn gave rise to the greatest accumulation of wealth and the most fearsome military the world has ever seen.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY SEPARATION

  OF CHURCH FROM STATE

  The Puritans had their virtues. Epitomizing Max Weber's “Protestant work ethic,” they were famous for their thrift and industry. They placed tremendous value on education. Puritans such as John Harvard founded America's earliest universities. Increase Mather, who served as president of Harvard from 1685 to 1701 and later helped found Yale, was able to read the Old Testament in ancient Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

  It's often forgotten, however, that the Puritans were not religiously tolerant. Having escaped persecution in Europe, the Puritans became persecutors in colonial America. Seeing themselves as God's chosen people—the carriers of the “true religion”—the Puritans denied religious liberty not only to Catholics and Jews but to Anglicans, Quakers, Baptists, and any other Protestants who did not conform precisely to their beliefs. According to Mather, “The Toleration of all Religions and Perswasions, is the way to have no Religion at all.” Puritan fanaticism reached a fever pitch in the Salem witch trials of 1692, when more than one hundred men and women were jailed on charges of devil worship and witchcraft. Before the hysteria passed, nineteen “witches” were hanged at Gallows Hill in Salem Town, and two dogs executed as “accomplices.”

  Puritanism was only one of many denominations in early America. Between 1607 and 1732 the English “planted” thirteen colonies in North America. Because colonization was largely financed by private entrepreneurs, the religious character of the colonies varied, depending on the predilections of the financiers and the composition of the original settlers. Thus, while New England was largely Puritan Congregationalist, Pennsylvania was dominated by Quakers, New York had a significant Dutch Reformed populace, Maryland had a fair number of Catholics, and Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas were mostly Anglican. At the same time, Presbyterians and Baptists could also be found, along with tiny Jewish communities in some of the large cities.

  Nevertheless, despite this geographical religious diversity, religious freedom in colonial America operated on the stingy principle of “if you don't like our religion, you're free to go somewhere else.” As the Massachusetts pastor Nathaniel Ward put it, “[All non-Congregationalists] shall have free Liberty to keepe away from us, and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner the better.” With the exception of Rhode Islanders, colonial Americans had little compunction about establishing the majority's religion and denying basic rights to nonbelievers. By 1732, when the era of the founding of new English colonies came to an end, some 85 percent of Americans lived in towns or states with established churches. Typically, dissenters could not vote or hold public office. Sometimes they were run out of town. Any Quakers who happened to arrive in Anglican Virginia, for example, were immediately “imprisoned without baile” until they “with all speed” departed the colony, “not to returne again.”3

  But great changes were looming. Even while men like Nathaniel Ward were defending religious “purity” and “simplicity,” America was undergoing a chaotic transformation. In the 1700s and 1800s, the population soared as immigrants from all over Europe flooded in, fueling a commercial explosion and bringing with them heterodox ideas and new religious denominations. Suddenly, alongside Congregationalists and Anglicans were German Pietists, Swedish Lutherans, French Huguenots, and Ulster Presbyterians.

  Commerce was a powerful catalyst of religious toleration. Influential merchants championed religious freedom because exclusion was bad for business. After all, their agents, customers, suppliers, financiers, and trading partners included people of all faiths—even non-Christians. This was precisely the thinking of the English parliament when in 1740 it passed a general act enabling the naturalization of Jews in the American colonies. As Lord Chancellor Philip Hardwicke explained, “Even with respect to the Jews, the discouraging of them to go and settle in our American colonies would be a great loss, if not the ruin of, the trade of every one [of the colonies].”

  Around the same time, a “consumer revolution” in religion— better known as the Great Awakening—swept the colonies. Led by charismatic men like George Whitefield, dozens of itinerant evangelical preachers began hawking their own new “brands” of gospel, ignoring parish lines and defying the orthodoxy of the established churches. Like today's “teievangelists,” these itinerants were mass-market entrepreneurs. They aggressively ad
vertised their “product,” offering messages of hope and stressing individual choice. Salvation, they taught, could be achieved only through personal experience, not church dogma. They self-promoted, over-reported, and were wildly successful. Preaching from wherever they could draw a crowd—courthouse steps, street corners, public parks, even racecourses and taverns—they won over the souls of tens of thousands of colonists.

  Traditional churchmen were dismayed. According to one Anglican minister from South Carolina, “Pennsylvania and New England send out a Sett of Rambling fellows yearly…among this Medley of Religions—True Genuine Christianity is not to be found If there is a Shilling to be got by a Wedding or Funeral, these Independent fellows will endeavor to pocket it.” Virginia's Patrick Henry, also an Anglican minister, felt the same way: “ [T]hese itinerants…screw up the People to the greatest heights of religious Phrenzy, and then leave them in that wild state, for perhaps ten or twelve months, till another Enthusiast comes among them, to repeat the same thing over again.”

  Then, in a flash, it was all over. By the close of the 1740s, the Great Awakening had largely petered out—but not before dramatically altering the colonial landscape. Many of the itinerants and their followers started their own congregations or joined minority sects like the Baptists; the ranks of dissenters exploded. Because the converts included not just “lower” and “middling” sorts but some prominent citizens, dissenters were no longer as stigmatized. Even strict Massachusetts became pluralistic. In 1747, one Bostonian reported that the churches in his city included three Episcopal congregations, ten “Independent],” “one French, upon the Genevan model, one of Anabaptists, and another of Quakers.” The Puritan dream of a single, uniform established church had been extinguished.4