Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  The British Empire was not simply a forerunner of the modern pluralist democracy, so valued in the West. It was something entirely different. It is simply misleading to describe the British Empire, as one historian has done, as the champion of ‘free market liberalism’ and democracy.10 Such a judgement gives too little attention to what the empire was really like, or to the ideas that motivated the people who actually administered it. Notions of democracy could not have been further from the minds of the imperial administrators themselves. Their heads were filled with ideas of class, loosely defined, with notions of intellectual superiority and paternalism. ‘Benign authoritarianism’ would be a better description of the political philosophy that sustained the empire.

  Ghosts of Empire attempts to show how the ‘anarchic individualism’ and paternalism that underpinned the British Empire led to messy outcomes. Transitions from British rule to independence were difficult, as the Pax Britannica imposed in the first place was itself transient and without any firm foundation. The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture but often had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in the story of Britain’s empire. It was grand and colourful but also highly opportunistic; it was dominated by individualism and pragmatic concerns. The British Empire is a bizarre model to follow for fostering stability in today’s world. Indeed, much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policy making.

  PART I

  IRAQ: OIL AND POWER

  1

  The Spoils of War

  The speaker was self-assured and confident. With a lifetime of public service behind him, Lord Curzon was fully in command of his audience. The Inter-Allied Petroleum dinner, given on 21 November 1918 at Lancaster House in St James’s, was a festive occasion. The Great War, which had cost over 900,000 British lives, had been over for ten days. It had been a close-run thing. For a considerable period during the war itself, Germany had looked invincible, with its great coal deposits and manpower. But oil had saved the day for the Allies. One of the most ‘astonishing things’ Curzon had seen during the war in France and Flanders was the ‘tremendous army of motor lorries’, all powered by oil. ‘Even before the War’, he boomed, ‘oil was regarded as one of the most important national industries and assets.’ It was clear that the ‘Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil’.1

  Curzon was by now a seasoned imperial statesman. His career achievements had been celebrated, even from his Eton days, where he had been a competitive and successful student; he had finished his time there by becoming the captain of the Oppidans, the senior boy in the school who was not one of the seventy King’s Scholars (King’s Scholars were from less distinguished social backgrounds but were generally academically more able); as captain of the Oppidans, Curzon was the most academically distinguished of the affluent, fee-paying boys who formed the large majority of the school. At Oxford, Curzon’s contemporaries had composed a famous ditty about him which referred to his ‘sleek’ hair and the fact that he dined at the country seat of the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace, ‘once a week’. In many ways Curzon was an archetypal imperialist of his generation. Unlike many of his fellow aristocrats, he was well travelled and curious about the world. In 1882, immediately after leaving Oxford, he had visited Constantinople, Palestine and Egypt. In 1885, still only twenty-six, he was in Tunis, and in 1887–8 he explored America, China and India. His energy, his curiosity and his ambition were boundless. More significantly, he was wholly committed to the imperial cause. In 1898, he became viceroy of India (that is, the British monarch’s representative) at the age of thirty-nine. When Curzon was appointed foreign secretary in October 1919, he was regarded by Harold Nicolson, a Foreign Office official, as ‘the last of that unbroken line of Foreign Secretaries who had been born with the privileges of a territorial aristocracy and nurtured on the traditions of a governing class’. An important characteristic of this ‘unbroken line’ was the narrowness of their education and the certainty with which they held their values. ‘Eton and Winchester, Christ Church and Balliol [elite colleges at Oxford University], Trinity and King’s [equivalent colleges at Cambridge] had moulded these calm, confident and unassuming men.’ They thought the same thing. ‘Upon the main principles of Imperial and Foreign Affairs they felt alike; they thought alike; they acted alike.’2 Not that anyone would accuse Lord Curzon of being ‘unassuming’. His manner, according to Nicolson who worked under him at the Foreign Office, ‘created the legend of a man, conceited, reactionary, unbending and aloof ’. His imperialism ‘above everything’ was based upon the doctrine of ‘responsibility’, upon the conviction ‘that Great Britain had been entrusted with certain moral and practical obligations towards her subject races’.

  Despite this high-mindedness, however, Iraq was different. The Allies’ success in obtaining oil during the war had been a result of the participation of the United States of America in the conflict. America had supplied them with 80 per cent of the oil used in the war effort and, as a consequence, the British did not want to be dependent on American oil in the future. Sir Edmund Slade, a retired admiral, who had been born in the same year as Lord Curzon, in 1859, had written a paper for the Cabinet on this very subject that summer. The paper was entitled ‘On the Petroleum Situation in the British Empire’, and it was dated 29 July 1918, three months before the war’s end. Oil was needed–there was no doubt about that. It was ‘twice as economical as coal’. The problem was that there was very little to be found in the British Empire. Even before the war, Slade argued, Britain got 62 per cent of its oil from the United States. Romania and Russia were responsible for nearly 20 per cent, while the rest was obtained from far-flung, unreliable places like Mexico and the Dutch colonies in the Far East.

  The only way to secure the strategic position, or, in Sir Edmund’s stately phrase, to keep ‘our hold over the sea communications of the world in the event of another war’, was to find oil within the British Empire. If such a source could be found, then ‘the predominance now enjoyed by foreign oil corporations will be a thing of the past’. The British would then be ‘masters in our own house’. Slade had a pretty shrewd idea where this oil would be found. The oil of Persia (modern Iran) and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) would in the future, he believed, ‘provide a supply equal to that now given by the United States’. The conclusion was obvious enough. Whoever controlled the ‘oil lands of Persia and Mesopotamia’ would control ‘the source of supply of the majority of the liquid fuel of the future’. This memorandum made an immediate impression. The next day, on 30 July, the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Maurice Hankey, wrote to Sir Eric Geddes, who had been a general manager of the North Eastern Railway before being brought into Parliament and the Cabinet in 1917, stating that the ‘retention of the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Persia . . . [was] a first-class British War aim’.3

  This was all very straightforward. Oil was vitally important to the navy and to the new air force. F. H. Sykes, a major general, and also Chief of the Air Staff, agreed with Slade and told the Cabinet on 9 August, only ten days after the admiral’s initial report, that the whole ‘future of air power is dependent upon adequate supplies of liquid fuel’. There were a few dissenting voices. Edwin Montagu, a Liberal member of the Cabinet, wrote in December 1918, after the war was over, that the Iraqi state should at least ‘participate’ in any new company which might be created to get the precious oil out of the ground. In his view, Britain was concerned merely with ‘safeguarding’ the interests of the new state.4 Yet Montagu was suspected of being a bit soft on ‘natives’; he was Jewish, people muttered, and not all that ‘sound’ on imperial questions.

  It was very clear that oil was essential to Britain. The war offered a great opportunity, because the Middle East had been dominated by the Ottoman Empire; and the Ottomans, to their detriment, had sided with Germany during the conflict. Th
e defeat of Germany and its allies had, therefore, also meant the end of the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France could divide the spoils. The ‘most alluring of the Ottoman spoils’ happened to be the oil of Iraq.5

  There were a few problems. There were British officials on the ground who had not been made fully aware of the importance of Iraq in the new world after the Great War. There was also the fact that the Iraqis themselves had been led to believe that, after the defeat of the Ottomans, they would enjoy independence. As T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ himself, observed in a letter to The Times in July 1920, the Arabs ‘rebelled against the Turks [the Ottoman Empire] during the war not because the Turk government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence’. They had not risked their lives ‘in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own’.6

  There was also the problem that Sir Mark Sykes had created in 1916. He established, in negotiations with his counterpart François Picot, the Sykes–Picot line which had divided up the Middle East between Britain and France even before the war had ended. Sykes had been careless enough to give the French control of Mosul, the northern province of Iraq, where most of the oil was suspected to be. The French hadn’t actually taken possession of the province: while the war raged, this allocation was a theoretical consideration. Sykes was not really trusted by the British government, as he was considered to be too imaginative and dreamy, too exotic even. The only son of an eccentric Yorkshire baronet, he had been influenced greatly by his mother, a Roman Catholic, who had a consuming passion for French culture and literature. It was said that she ‘could have passed an examination in Balzac’ and that she knew French literature as well as a Frenchman. A consequence of this passion was that her son would often spend months on the continent of Europe, being educated unsystematically at various schools there, and consequently avoided the traditional British educational establishments favoured by families of his class and background. She had been estranged from her husband, partly as a result of the wide discrepancy between their ages; they had married in 1874 when he was forty-eight and she only eighteen. They had one child, Mark, in 1879, after which they led separate lives. Mark attended the school of the Italian Jesuits for a few months in Monaco, where perhaps he acquired, in the words of one friend, ‘his considerable knowledge of sexual matters combined with innocence’. He had plenty of talent, but no mental discipline. ‘The usual monotonous drill in the Classics or Mathematics’, his biographer argued, ‘creates a certain capacity and aptitude for detail which Mark ever lacked.’7 He had after all escaped the systematic, rigorous, often pedantic training favoured by the High Victorian education system. He succeeded to his father’s baronetcy in 1913.

  Sykes had travelled widely in the area which was known at the time as the Near East. He knew only a hundred words of Arabic and he simply ‘acted his way through the East’. He had been to Mosul, the northern province of Iraq, as early as 1899, where he found Arabs with the ‘minds of mudlarks and the appearance of philosophers’.8 All this travelling hadn’t really tempered some of his more extreme views. He was mildly anti-Semitic and violently anti-Armenian. ‘Even Jews had their good points,’ he remarked in his book Through Five Turkish Provinces, ‘but Armenians have none.’9 At Sledmere, his impressive country seat in Yorkshire, he insisted on attending daily Mass. He was eccentric, unworldly, aristocratic and literary. In the Boer War, he had irritated his soldier comrades by reading Shakespeare aloud while they were digging trenches. While still in South Africa, he wrote to his fiancée, encouraging her to ‘read eighteenth century literature a good deal’, on the ground that this period was the ‘climax of the Christian Era. Now you will find that the French Revolutionary year was the commencement of the present era of progress, grab, commercialism . . . blood, villainy, ignorance, disbelief, and science.’10 It is difficult to recognize the ‘Christian Era’ to which he referred, given that Voltaire, Montesquieu, Gibbon and Fielding had all been published many years before the French Revolution.

  Sykes was not a materialist. He despised ‘grab’ and ‘commercialism’, yet his masters in Whitehall were all too motivated by these considerations. He had been Conservative MP for Hull since 1911, and was an acknowledged expert, by House of Commons standards, on Eastern and particularly Islamic questions. His parliamentary career was cut short by the war and by February 1919 he was dead, killed by the influenza epidemic which gripped most of Western Europe at that time. He was only thirty-nine. The Sykes–Picot line didn’t last much longer. On 1 December 1918, barely three weeks after the end of the war, Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, had met David Lloyd George, his British opposite number, at 10 Downing Street. There they both agreed that Mosul should form part of British-controlled Iraq. By way of compensation, France was to get 25 per cent of the oil produced in the province.11

  On the ground in Iraq itself, Arnold Wilson, the man on the spot who ‘slept and ate in his office’, recognized the need for oil but believed that it should remain the property of the Mesopotamian administration, in other words of the British government, and not be put in the hands of any existing commercial company.12 Wilson, though not an intellectual man, was typical of the imperial cast of mind. He was practical, not without idealism, but generally unhampered by reflection or any real intellectual influences. Born in 1884, he had been educated at Clifton College, one of the newer so-called public schools which had been established in the Victorian era. He joined the Indian army in 1902, after winning the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst, an award given to the top cadet (both academic and practical) in a graduating class. Unusually, he had also won the King’s Medal which is given exclusively for the top academic performance in the class. He had enjoyed a meteoric career as an imperial soldier in the East, and would receive a knighthood in 1920, when still only thirty-six. He was well described, on a brief return to England in 1907, as ‘a self-confident, egotistical, clean-living, intensely ambitious, rather philistine young man’, while his Christianity was ‘centred on Clifton chapel’.13

  As a military man, Wilson recognized the commercial and strategic interests of the British Empire. Iraq was important primarily because of its potential oil reserves, but very little oil had actually been produced. Everyone knew it was there. As a Cabinet memorandum of 2 August 1918 had pointed out, the Germans themselves, in a paper on Mesopotamia written in 1916, had observed that ‘the greatest importance after that of the Suez Canal, attaches to the possession of Mesopotamia’, where ‘petroleum wells’ had been known for ‘thousands of years’.14 More generally, there were wider, strategic considerations too. Britain had an interest in protecting the route to India and the Indian trade. The possession of Iraq made sense for Britain.

  It therefore came as no surprise that the San Remo conference of the main Allied powers, which took place at the end of April 1920, should grant Iraq as a mandate to Britain. The term ‘mandate’ was unusual and, even today, people still think it had less than imperial status, yet it served to disguise the reality of power. Curzon himself admitted this when, in a Cabinet memorandum written as early as September 1917, he had suggested that ‘some form of civilised tutelage is required to lead up to the goal of national autonomy’. Clearly, the mandate was precisely this ‘form of civilised tutelage’. Curzon expressly declared that the surrender of the Iraqi port of Basra ‘would be fatal to the British position in the Persian Gulf which is the maritime frontier of the Indian Empire’.15 An early political analyst observed as early as 1937 that the British government was ‘unwilling to give up its favoured position in Iraq’ until it had achieved three aims: ‘control of the land route to India’, the ‘extension and protection of British commerce’ and ‘control of the existing and potential oil-producing districts of Iraq’.16 Curzon himself, with characteristic realism, had said that the term ‘mandate’ could have a ‘terminological variant such as perpetual lease’, so long as the ‘reality which we must not abandon’ was safeguarded.17 Ev
en more explicitly, Curzon had argued, in a memorandum of December 1917, that there ‘should be no actual incorporation of conquered territory’ but the absorption should be ‘veiled’ by ‘constitutional fictions’, as a ‘protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state, and so on’.18

  Behind these fictions, there existed much idealism about the British civilizing mission in the East. There was a genuine belief that British rule was better for Iraq than subjection to the rule of the Ottoman Turks. Curzon, while remaining a clear-eyed champion of imperial interests, could speak as eloquently as anyone about the British achievement in Iraq. In the House of Lords in February 1919, when he had been foreign secretary for little more than a month, he boasted about the ‘advance that has been made in the last two years in the development of Mesopotamia’. It had been simply ‘amazing’, and Britain had done more ‘for those places’ in two years than the Turks had done ‘in the five preceding centuries’. There was no ‘more proud experience for any Englishman than if he were now to go to Mesopotamia and see what is being accomplished there’.19

  Many of the British officials themselves would have agreed enthusiastically with Lord Curzon’s high-flown rhetoric. Perhaps none would have been more elated than Gertrude Bell. Much has been written about Bell. Her achievements, which had been overshadowed in the Middle East by those of T. E. Lawrence, are now being celebrated. Women historians feel that Lawrence’s fame had eclipsed hers merely because he was a man. Her story was extraordinary. She had been born in 1868, the granddaughter of Sir Lowthian Bell, a self-made Victorian industrialist with brains, titanic energy and drive. The family fortune was impressive, but Gertrude had combined material wealth with learning and physical grace. She was the first woman to gain a first in Modern History at Oxford University in 1888. More remarkably, she was only nineteen years old when she sat the examination, at least two or three years younger than her classmates. She could swim, fence, row, play tennis and hockey. Fluent in Persian and Arabic, she was a passionate archaeologist and explorer, and by the end of the First World War she had spent nearly twenty years in the Middle East. She never married. An early love-match had been thwarted by her father Sir Hugh, who believed that Gertrude’s young suitor was too poor to support her in the appropriate style. This doomed relationship had blossomed in 1893, when she was twenty-five, and since then, despite a number of love affairs, she had remained single. Her deepest and most enduring relationship was that with her father. Indeed, the closeness of the relationship might well have been the cause, rather than an effect, of her never getting married.