Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  PART I - IRAQ: OIL AND POWER

  Chapter 1 - The Spoils of War

  Chapter 2 - Rivals

  Chapter 3 - Monarchy and Revolution

  Chapter 4 - Saddam Hussein and Beyond

  PART II - KASHMIR: MAHARAJA’S CHOICE

  Chapter 5 - Land for Sale

  Chapter 6 - The World of Sir Hari Singh

  Chapter 7 - Deadlock

  PART III - BURMA: LOST KINGDOM

  Chapter 8 - White Elephant

  Chapter 9 - The Road from Mandalay

  Chapter 10 - Twilight over Burma

  PART IV - SUDAN: ‘BLACKS AND BLUES’

  Chapter 11 - Kitchener: An Imperial Hero

  Chapter 12 - ‘The Finest Body of Men’

  Chapter 13 - North and South

  PART V - NIGERIA: ‘THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD’

  Chapter 14 - Indirect Rule

  Chapter 15 - Yellow Sun

  PART VI - HONG KONG: MONEY AND DEMOCRACY

  Chapter 16 - Hierarchies

  Chapter 17 - Democracy Postponed

  Chapter 18 - Red Dawn

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Liber dicatur hic parentibus meis

  amore grati filii piissimo

  The extent of the British Empire at its height, c. 1925

  Introduction to the US Edition

  To many Americans, the British Empire must seem remote and obscure. Yet no nation faced such similar problems to modern America as Britain at the height of its imperial glory. The British Empire, like the modern United States, was the world’s pre-eminent superpower. It held sway over a large portion of the global population; for decades, Britain was the financial and commercial centre of the world. One American writer, Walter Russell Mead, has correctly identified the fact that the ‘two most recent great powers in world history were what Europeans still sometimes refer to as “Anglo-Saxon” powers.’ In Mead’s words, the ‘British Empire was, and the United States is, concerned not just with the balance of power in one particular corner of the world but with the evolution of what we today call “world order”’1.

  The notion of ‘world order’, of course, is problematic and can be defined in various ways. Yet what can be asserted is that both the modern United States and the British Empire sought to project their power across the whole world. Anyone who wishes to understand the nature of American power today will profitably find parallels and similarities with Britain’s own experience. As a consequence of interest in world order, the focus of this book is on the colonial empire, not the white dominions. Much of the debate about the British Empire in the first decade of the twenty-first century has really been a kind of proxy debate about the role of the United States. Recently, some historians and political scientists have openly suggested that the United States should follow Britain and try to impose its own ‘Pax Americana’ on the more anarchic parts of the planet. The model the United States is being asked to follow is one of administration and military occupation. Even the most strident neo-conservatives, the historians who say that empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before, have never suggested that millions of Americans should emigrate to places like Iraq on a permanent basis and establish their families there.2 Such a programme follows the pattern set by Britain in the administration of its colonial empire, and not the example of the ‘white dominions’ whereby large numbers of British settlers developed broadly democratic systems of self-government. Aggressive modern imperialists do believe that an empire can keep the world safe and better administered; imperialism is sometimes offered as an answer to the problem of maintaining world order.

  I contend that the example of the British Empire shows the opposite: empires, through their lack of foresight and the wide discretion they give administrators, lead to instability and the development of chronic problems. In addition to this, the idea of creating an avowedly interventionist American empire now seems, especially after the defeat of the Republican party in the 2008 presidential election, as absurd as the notion of absolute monarchy seemed to Britons of the nineteenth century. It also misunderstands the nature of empire. Britain’s empire was not liberal in the sense of being a plural, democratic society. The empire openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn from a tiny proportion of the population in Britain. The British Empire was not merely undemocratic; it was anti-democratic. The United States, in comparison, despite its difficult history, openly proclaims itself to be democratic, plural and liberal. Its avowed values could not be further removed from those of the British Empire.

  The colonial empire inevitably brings up the hoary issue of race. People inevitably ask, ‘how racist was the British Empire?’ Clearly, it is difficult to answer this question satisfactorily, because issues of race and its treatment differed widely across the expanse of the empire both in terms of time and space. My contention is that in terms of administration itself, while there was clearly a great deal of racial arrogance among the administrative class as a whole, notions of class and hierarchy were as important, if not more so. In this respect I am happy to follow the work of David Cannadine, whose Ornamentalism (2001) put class very much to the foreground of analysis of Britain’s empire. Cannadine argued that Britons during the empire saw themselves as ‘belonging to an unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations . . . hallowed by time and precedent’.3

  In this book, I have tried to show what the British Empire was really like from the perspective of the rulers, the administrators who made it possible. As one recent historian has said, the task is to recover the ‘world-view and social presuppositions of those who dominated and ruled the empire’.4 This does not mean that the ‘victims and critics’ were unimportant, but it does mean that any understanding of the empire should start with trying to capture the mentality of those who bore responsibility for an empire that was the largest the world has yet seen. Ghosts of Empire may be described as a post-racial account of empire, in so far as it does not regard the fact that the administrators were white, while the subject people were from other races, as the key determinant in understanding empire. Indeed, if one were to consider Ireland in its role as a subject nation under British rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, notions of race, in the narrow sense of skin colour, would simply not apply. Yet, the imperial arrogance, the high degree of status-consciousness and the self-assuredness of the administrative class would still be distinctive features of British rule. There is clearly more to understanding the British Empire than racial politics, important though this was.

  Ghosts of Empire is an unusual book about the British Empire in other ways: it examines aspects of Britain’s legacy in parts of the world that are diverse in terms of geography and culture. The countries or territories that form the subjects of this book are, in many ways, still influenced by their connection with Britain. Many of these areas, like Iraq and Kashmir, have been prominent in the international press for some years; others, like Nigeria and Sudan, have been less widely written about, but all the countries, in my view, reveal certain similar characteristics of British rule.

  The choice of Hong Kong was the easiest, since the departure of the British from Hong Kong in 1997, watched by millions of people on television, has been understood to be a symbol of the formal end of the British Empire. More relevantly, to readers in the twenty-first century, Hong Kong’s destiny is now bound up with that of China, the most rapidly emerging super-power of the new c
entury. Iraq’s history as a dependent territory of empire was strictly a twentieth-century affair. Handed over to Britain in 1920, after the First World War, Iraq remained under formal British rule for only twelve years. Yet, for the next twenty-five years, Iraq was ruled by a monarchy that affected British manners and style. In Kashmir, a Hindu family was established to rule over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years. Yet Burma, which, like Kashmir, formed part of the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for India, was treated in a completely different way from Kashmir. In Burma, an ancient monarchy was toppled and replaced by direct British rule. The contrasting treatments of Kashmir and Burma, both of which were part of the Indian Empire, reveal the many inconsistencies of imperial policy. On the continent of Africa, within the boundaries of both Nigeria and Sudan, there existed ethnic and racial animosities that were only exacerbated by imperial rule. These animosities have haunted the post-imperial destinies of both countries.

  The British Empire has always been with me. My parents were born in what was then called the Gold Coast in the 1940s and had experienced the empire firsthand. My father entered secondary school in January 1956, less than fifteen months before the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in March 1957. My father’s secondary school was designed on traditional Anglican lines, and although the school had been founded in 1910, it imitated more traditional, older English establishments. The headmaster of the school was an Englishman, of a type familiar in the colonies; he was a product of Winchester, England’s oldest boarding, or ‘public’, school and Cambridge University.

  I visited the school, Adisadel College, in 2001 for the first time. I was struck by the grace and tranquillity of its environment, as the school stands high on a hill in Cape Coast, Ghana’s oldest town, which had been colonized by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I realised that very few schools in Britain enjoyed such a pleasant setting. And yet the story of the school since independence in 1957 reflected the turbulent, unsettled history of the country since that time. In 1960 there had been 600 boys at the school; there were now over 2,000, and yet the facilities and infrastructure had remained the same. The shortage of money had not really changed the ethos of the place—even though the school tried to shake off its imperial past, and had done this successfully by abolishing, for example, the teaching of Ancient Greek in 1963, there were still many of the traces of the old order. The school had been transformed, but many vestiges of the empire could still be seen; the house system, favoured in British boarding schools, and the honours boards in the dining room were still all there. The empire in a certain sense still existed, although it now clung on only in a twilit afterlife that conveyed but an eerie echo of its original character.

  This book tries to describe some of that afterlife through an account of an aspect of a country’s experience before independence and afterward. The character of the British Empire is portrayed through the forgotten officials and governors, without whom the empire would not have survived a few weeks. I have not tried to write one of those endless number of books that tries to show whether the empire was a good or a bad thing. Instead, I have tried to transcend what I believe to be a rather sterile debate as to its merits and demerits. I have simply tried to enter into the mentality, as best as I could, of the empire’s rulers, to describe their thoughts and the character of their ideals and values. I argue that individual officials wielded immense power and it was this unrestrained power that ultimately led to instability, disorder and chaos.

  Officials, as I hope to show, often developed one line of policy, only for their successors to overturn that policy and pursue a completely different approach. This was the source of chronic instability in many parts of the empire. In many ways, the British Empire was too individualistic, and the vagaries of democratic politics meant that a consistent line was seldom adopted. This type of individualism I have called ‘anarchic individualism’, in that there was often nothing to stop the ‘man on the spot’, as he was called by the Colonial Office civil servants, from pursuing the course of action he thought best. It is often forgotten how important the idea of individualism was to Victorian Britons. As Lord Cromer, who administered Egypt as the British Consul-General under the nominal government of the Khedive, or later King, of Egypt, observed, ‘Our habits of thought, our past history, and our national character all, therefore, point in the direction of allowing individualism as wide a scope as possible in the work of national expansion’.5

  From Nigeria, where Lord Lugard dominated the scene, to Hong Kong, where Sir Alexander Grantham successfully ended any move to more democratic institutions in the 1950s, powerful individuals directed imperial policy with little supervision from London. Such a system was ultimately ‘anarchic’ and self-defeating, since in Nigeria, Sudan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, policies developed over years were simply put aside as a new governor took his place.

  Such reversals of policy show that the empire was an intensely pragmatic affair. Apart from a common educational background and a sense of shared style, individual governors and officials had a wide range of interests and beliefs. Some were motivated by a strong evangelical Christianity, others were outright atheists; some governors were highly conservative, while others were more liberal, even radical. What bound these individuals together was a very similar educational background, which leads inevitably to the idea of class.

  The empire was extremely hierarchical. In each colony, there were highly detailed tables of precedent that showed exactly where everyone stood in the pecking order. These tables sometimes revealed whether the superintendent of the Botanical and Forestry Department took precedence over the director of the Royal Observatory, but this hierarchy was not really the type we associate with feudal society. What tends to be overlooked in discussions about class in Britain is the extent to which class was often merely a synonym for money and education. In a feudal society, class is associated with the idea of family and breeding, yet even as early as 1775, Topham Beauclerk could tell James Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer, that ‘now in England being of an old family was of no consequence. People did not inquire far back. If a man was rich and well educated, he was equally well received as the most ancient gentleman, though if inquiry were made, his extraction might be found to be very mean’.6

  This is a vital point that explains the prestige of the public schools. What your grandfather did for a living was, by the early nineteenth century, largely irrelevant. What really mattered was whether you had gone to the right schools and universities. In this regard, there was a clearly defined pecking order, with Eton and, to a lesser degree, Harrow at the top of the scale, and perhaps about fifteen other schools that were regarded as being acceptable. Education at this sort of school would very often be followed by a stint at either Oxford or Cambridge University.

  Once admitted to a ‘decent’ public school, and after obtaining a degree at either Oxford or Cambridge, or perhaps after a stint in the army, the young man who wanted to make a career in the colonies could really go as far as luck and talent would take him. Once the right educational background had been established, the system was quite meritocratic. The ultimate imperial civil servant was Alfred Milner, who was born in Germany in 1854, the son of a medical student and a widow twenty years his senior. Milner’s background was obscure, but by dint of talent and industry he ended up as a viscount and was elected chancellor of Oxford University, even though he died before he could be officially installed. Milner owed his success initially to his prowess in Oxford’s examination halls. He had won the top classical scholarship to Balliol in 1872 and had steadily picked up awards and prizes during his career there. Armed with his double first, he dedicated himself to a ‘life of public usefulness’. His one brush with democratic politics failed, when he was unsuccessful as the Liberal candidate in Harrow, a suburb of London, in the county of Middlesex, in 1885. Thereafter he sought power as an administrator.

  Milner’s career touches on another important point.
It is mistaken to think that administrators were motivated by liberal ideas of democracy. In many cases they chose careers in the empire precisely because they were not democrats. They were elitists who sought to wield power without having to undergo the inconvenience of winning votes. Milner himself remained ‘profoundly distrustful of the enfranchised’.7 To argue that Milner and his colleagues were promoting democracy stretches the truth. The empire stood for order and the rule of law, but we must not pretend that its character was something other than what it was. The imperial administration was highly elitist, stratified and snobbish. It was the very opposite of the egalitarian, plural and liberal institution that some recent historians have portrayed. As George Orwell remembered about his own education, ‘it was universally taken for granted . . . that unless you went to a “good” public school (and only about fifteen schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life’.8 The people who ran the empire would have tacitly agreed with this statement. Yet the narrow educational field did not preclude men of modest means, brought up in obscure families, from climbing the ladder. Among the administrators there were the sons of parsons, the sons of university lecturers and civil servants. In fact, the majority of the administrators were from middling anonymous families, without the pride of lineage associated with true aristocracies. It was at the public schools and, to a lesser degree, at the universities that the elite swagger and famously lofty sense of superiority were cultivated.

  This sense of superiority was as much a manifestation of cultural superiority as purely social snobbery. An interesting feature of this sense of superiority was the extent to which native princes and rulers were made to fit into this pattern. In the ‘native’ societies the British administrator encountered, it was often class, money and education that counted more than race. This explains why Colonial Office civil servants would spend time arranging for a Nigerian chief’s stay in Claridge’s, one of the most exclusive hotels in London, in the 1930s. The hierarchical view of the world was exported to the colonies, and, in many ways, the empire was a ‘vehicle for the extension of British social structures’.9