Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  This was the general attitude until the mid-1880s. It is true that hotheads in British Burma, in Rangoon especially, wanted to get rid of the Burmese monarchy and annex Upper Burma outright. The officials on the ground, however, were more cautious. By coming into the India Office, Churchill changed this situation. In 1885, Lord Randolph Churchill was only thirty-six years old. After a typical, if unspectacular, aristocratic education at Eton and Oxford, where he distinguished himself as a chess player, Lord Randolph’s career in Parliament had started in 1874, when he was elected the member for Woodstock in Oxfordshire. The Woodstock seat, being practically in the grounds of Blenheim Palace, the country seat of the Spencer-Churchill family, belonged to him almost by right, but, despite his hereditary advantages, he had spent his first six years in Parliament without achieving much in the way of fame or notoriety.

  After 1880, however, Lord Randolph’s natural exuberance began to reveal itself. He was a brilliant mimic and satirist, who delighted in poking fun at graver, more seasoned politicians. His energy was as forceful as his mind was scattered and unfocused. In the words of his famous son, Lord Randolph was ‘capable upon emergency of prolonged and vehement exertion, of manifold activities and pugnacities, of leaps and heaves beyond the common strength of men’, and yet ‘he suffered by reaction fits of utter exhaustion and despondency. Most people grow tired before they are overtired. But Lord Randolph Churchill was of the temper that gallops till it falls.’2 His attitude to Burma was more in the ‘galloping’ style. Without Lord Randolph, the annexation of Burma might never have occurred. As Winston Churchill wrote in his hagiography of his father, ‘Lord Randolph Churchill was for annexation simple and direct.’ The timid bureaucrats of the imperial service might have ‘preferred the establishment of a native prince under British advice’, the old policy of supporting ‘native princes’. Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, fretted about the cost, but, in the end, ‘the Secretary of State for India prevailed’.

  The annexation itself was announced in a perfunctory way, in a style that was both brutal and clear: ‘By command of the Queen-Empress, it is hereby notified that the territories formerly governed by King Theebaw will no longer be under his rule, but have become part of Her Majesty’s dominions, and will during Her Majesty’s pleasure be administered by such officers as the Viceroy and Governor-General of India may from time to time appoint.’ Winston Churchill observed that it ‘is one of the shortest documents of the kind on historical record’. The annexation was proclaimed on New Year’s Day, 1886, a fitting present for the Queen-Empress. Lord Randolph was good enough to announce this important event at a party, as the clock, ushering in the new year, struck twelve.3

  The comparative fluidity of British politics in the years 1885 and 1886 meant that there was no firm policy direction coming from Westminster, a political uncertainty that was a key ingredient in the development of imperial policy thousands of miles away in the Irrawaddy delta. The year 1885 witnessed two governments in London. In early June Gladstone’s Liberal administration, which had been in office since 1880, was defeated in a vote of the House of Commons on an amendment the Conservatives had moved to the Liberal budget. Seventy-six Liberal MPs were absent from the vote, a sign of lax party discipline, while Charles Stewart Parnell led his cohort of Irish Nationalist MPs into the opposition lobby. An immediate election was not practicable, because the recent parliamentary reforms passed earlier in the year had not been fully implemented. Despite this lack of an election, the Conservatives immediately formed a minority government as a consequence of the Liberal defeat in the Commons. The general election which finally took place in November brought no decisive result, and so the Conservatives continued in office until the end of January 1886, when they, in turn, were defeated in a Commons vote. The ensuing Liberal government proved to be one of the shortest lived in British history, as it fell on the defeat of the Home Rule Bill for Ireland in June that same year.4

  Against this constantly shifting background of domestic politics, a decisive character prone to bold gestures, like Randolph Churchill, could in the absence of determined opposition affect the direction of the empire. As Gladstone himself remarked, in a speech in the House of Commons at the end of January 1886, ‘Parliament usually prorogues at the end of July, and meets again six months after,’ which had the result that the whole of the Burma campaign had begun and ended while MPs were in their constituencies or country estates. Churchill had used the Crown’s prerogative to annex the kingdom of Burma, bypassing the House of Commons. As an MP of more than fifty years’ standing, Gladstone immediately understood the significance of what had happened. The seventy-five-year-old Liberal leader knew that ‘the prerogative of making peace or war is in the hands of Her Majesty’, yet he appealed to the common practice and tradition of parliamentary sovereignty on the question of whether to wage war. He argued that, despite the royal prerogative, in practice matters pertaining to peace and war were for the House of Commons to decide. On the whole, ‘the wars made by this country are generally, through the privileges and rights of this House, practically under an effective prior control’.5

  Lord Randolph Churchill, by contrast, had presented the annexation of the kingdom and the prior campaign as a fait accompli. Gladstone protested vehemently against this flouting of parliamentary privilege. ‘Under these circumstances, I say that we have no Parliamentary control whatever over these wars.’ With regard to the hiatus of six months in the parliamentary year, the ‘Indian Forces may be operating to any extent during the whole of that period’. Then there would be ‘nothing for the House of Commons to do but say in the subsequent session whether they will or will not pay the bill’. Lord Randolph Churchill, by his impulsive actions, had surprised the Liberals on the opposition benches. Ever the pragmatic politician, Gladstone realized that his party had no ‘power remaining, except to condemn the Government’. Other Liberal MPs followed his lead in the last weeks of January and the beginning of February 1886. The brief parliamentary debate over Burma gives an interesting insight into the dynamics of British politics in the last decades of Queen Victoria’s reign.

  Burma was annexed in a period during which a minority Conservative administration was in power; it is doubtful if such a decisive expansion of the British Empire would have been accomplished under a Liberal government. It is also interesting to note that, during the parliamentary debate on issues arising out of the annexation, it was Liberal MPs from Scotland and Wales who were most vocal in denouncing Randolph Churchill’s bold stroke of imperial policy.

  William Hunter, the MP for Aberdeen North, was a professor of Roman law at University College London. Born in 1844, he had just been elected to Parliament in 1885, at the age of forty-one. A brilliant Scottish lawyer, he began his parliamentary career by moving an amendment to a bill ‘expressing regret that the revenues of India had been applied to defray the expenses of the military operations in Ava without the consent of Parliament’. With his keen lawyer’s mind, Hunter spoke very bluntly about the Conservative government’s latest imperial adventure. He saw that ‘a great territory had been added to this Empire without the consent of the people of Burmah, and without the consent of the people of England’. More particularly, the government had ‘met overwhelming defeat in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales’ and there had been no parliamentary consent given to use money from the government of India against Thibaw and his cronies in Mandalay. Hunter made an impassioned plea in support of subject colonial peoples everywhere when he said that the ‘Burmese people, like all other peoples, would rather bear the vices of their native rulers than the virtues of foreign officials’.6

  Despite the creation of a new Liberal government in February 1886, the Conservative policy was not overturned. The annexation of Burma had been a major development in imperial policy. In early 1886, having failed to win a clear majority in the general election held the previous November, the Liberals were not strong enough politically to reverse the annexation proclamation. Glads
tone appreciated this. His ministers and MPs were not enthusiastic about the situation which Churchill had left them and, in the House of Lords, the new Secretary of State, Lord Kimberley, beat the old Liberal anti-imperialist drum: trade was an ‘unjustifiable’ reason for war. One senses that Kimberley uttered through gritted teeth his pledge to ‘maintain Burmah under the direct administration of the British Crown’. He very correctly observed that recently ‘we have wisely made it our policy to avoid as much as possible the annexation of Native States’. The implication was clear: Churchill had not been ‘wise’.7 Yet the Liberal government was in no position to undo what Lord Randolph, in his exuberance, had done.

  Some Liberal MPs in the House of Commons were more openly hostile to this latest expression of imperial adventurism than their pragmatic government. Henry Richard, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, is perhaps little remembered today and, although his statue stands proudly in the centre of his former constituency, he remains an obscure figure on the national stage. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, however, he was known not only as the ‘Apostle of Peace’ but also as the ‘Member for Wales’, so completely identified was he with the interests of that country. A Nonconformist minister, now well into his seventies, he had represented Merthyr Tydfil since 1868. He has been described as ‘not only the consummate Victorian radical, but also the consummate Victorian Welshman’.8 His intervention in the debate on Burma would provide a fitting conclusion to his legacy of liberal pacifism. He had spent his career denouncing what he called the ‘war system’. ‘My hope for the abatement of the war system lies in the permanent conviction of the people, rather than the policies of cabinets or the discussions of parliaments,’ he once declared.

  The debate on Burma was actually about whether the government of India, under the Viceroy, should pay for the campaign. As Gladstone had realized, it was difficult for Parliament to undo what had been executed under the royal prerogative. For Parliament to do this would undermine the Crown. Yet despite this constraint, Richard denounced what had happened in what would in the ensuing decades become a standard liberal critique of imperial wars. He baldly stated that ‘the summary annexation’ of Burma ‘was an act of high-handed violence for which there is no adequate justification’. It was unjust but it was also ‘an act of flagrant folly’. ‘By suddenly overthrowing the existing government,’ he went on, ‘it looks as though we had consigned the country to . . . a prolonged anarchy.’ The Liberal government, in Richard’s opinion, should have ‘reversed the policy as they did in Afghanistan and the Transvaal’ (a reference to the second Afghan War and the Anglo-Zulu War, fought in the late 1870s). He dismissed the idea that it was Thibaw’s misconduct that had caused the war. The truth was simply that ‘we coveted his possessions and were determined to have them at any cost’.

  Winding up his powerful speech, Henry Richard made the point which anti-imperialists have frequently made–that the costs of invading and occupying a country always exceed, often by a considerable margin, initial expectations. ‘We are told it would only be £300,000. But we always begin our wars with very modest demands.’ Richard pointed out that when ‘we entered upon the Abyssinian War [of 1868] we were assured that the expenditure would not amount to more than £2,000,000 or £3,000,000 whereas it had not been much less than £9,000,000’. When it came to Afghanistan, Richard remembered, the same wildly over-optimistic assessment of the costs of war had been made. ‘The Government said the Afghan war would cost £1,250,000 but that had swollen to £18,000,000 or £20,000,000.’ What security was there ‘that the Burmese War might not lead to such a sum’?9

  The general principle of annexation worried some Liberal MPs. Although he was Scottish by birth, Lewis McIver was one of the few Liberals representing an English constituency to speak against the annexation of Burma. McIver showed some insight into the relationship the people of Burma had with their king when he observed that in ‘the Burmese mind, no social scheme was conceivable without a King’. The King, in McIver’s understanding of Burmese culture, was a ‘semi-Divine’ figure. Britain had respected these sentiments in the past. Upper Burma was, the MP observed, relatively settled. ‘Nothing was to be gained by annexation which could not have been equally well secured by a strong Protectorate.’ Gladstone felt he had to redirect the debate; the question before the House was about who would pay for the fait accompli, not about policy. Dr G. B. Clark, the Liberal MP for Caithness, another Scottish constituency, agreed with the honourable members ‘who felt very strongly at the injustice of the war’.10 Clark had a ‘strong opinion that the war was altogether unjustifiable. It was a kind of freebooting expedition undertaken against Burmah.’11 Perhaps, in his heart, Gladstone agreed, but he was reluctant to reverse the decisive action Lord Randolph had taken. The Liberals quietly acquiesced in a policy which had not been sanctioned by Parliament and which ran counter to the stated British policy of non-intervention in native states. This had all been due to Churchill’s dramatic intervention. Churchill, like modern politicians in the war against Saddam Hussein, assumed that only the best results would ensue. He believed that, once Thibaw was gone, an administration would remain in place that would be stable and that would be amenable to British interests. He thought that it would be a ‘cheap war’, but the best results did not happen.12

  Back in Burma, it was the officials on the ground who had to deal with the consequences of Churchill’s bold stroke of policy. One of the first problems was what to do with the palace in Mandalay. What would it be used for, once Thibaw and his wife had been exiled? The palace also contained many valuable objects–gorgeous jewels, finely lacquered furniture and the like. Already in February 1886, only three months after Thibaw’s overthrow, tourists were rushing to see it and the various monasteries in Mandalay and the surrounding area. Many of these tourists would have taken trinkets and souvenirs from the precincts of Thibaw’s palace, which had already been ransacked by soldiers in the wake of the fall of Mandalay. In 1964, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London returned 154 of these items.13 Dufferin, as viceroy, gave strict instructions at the end of February 1886 about what should be done with the royal possessions: ‘The goods in the palace at Mandalay . . . which it may be desired to dispose of, should be sold to the best advantage either at Mandalay itself, or at Calcutta, or elsewhere.’ On the other hand, the high-quality pieces or, in the Viceroy’s convoluted words, ‘the jewellery that is not manifestly of a comparatively unimportant character’ should be ‘collected together and sent to England’. The goods dispatched to England also included objects whose value was not yet determined. The British government had been warned by Professor Nevil Maskelyne, the Professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, that there would be ‘many priceless articles’ found in the palace. The government had made a serious mistake when Ranjit Singh, the Sikh ruler, had been deposed in 1849, as many of Ranjit’s treasures had been ‘sold through ignorance as to their character much below their value’. This waste should not be allowed to occur again.

  Professor Maskelyne believed that the Burmese palace would contain ruby, sapphire and jade specimens of great value, which would be worth retaining. The Viceroy was less sanguine but nevertheless suggested that ‘the suggestions of the Professor should be carefully attended to’.14 Dufferin, as a loyal subject of the Crown, had set aside certain jewels for ‘Her Majesty the Queen’ and two carved ivory tusks for the ‘Prince of Wales’. He was also eager to obtain ‘a good bell’, if one could be procured ‘without in any way offending either the feelings or the religious sentiments of the Natives’. The palace of Mandalay itself ‘should be carefully preserved as a Public Building’, although it might be ‘desirable to transfer to England one or two of the small detached houses which, while they form no essential part of the building, are very fine representations of Burmese wooden architecture’.15

  Alongside the difficult question of deciding which objets d’art should be sold and which taken back to England was the even more advanced problem of maintaining some sembla
nce of internal order in the country. At the start of the occupation there was the scandal about the abuse of Burmese prisoners. When Parliament opened at the end of January 1886, MPs were already complaining of the actions of Colonel Willoughy Wallace Hooper, the Provost Marshal, a police officer in Burma who was obsessed with photography. The British authorities were then shooting prisoners in order to suppress incipient rebellion in Burma, which had been fomented by bands of young men, dacoits as they were known, still unreconciled to the British annexation of their country. The Provost Marshal wanted to capture the precise moment when the bullet actually entered a prisoner being shot. The story broke in The Times on 21 January. The next day, in the House of Lords, Lord Ripon, the former Viceroy and ultra-Liberal, denounced the incident as ‘very outrageous’. Lord Randolph Churchill, in the Commons, adopted a pompous tone of outrage. He could not ‘bring himself’ to believe ‘that any officer wearing the Queen’s uniform would have allowed himself to perpetrate actions which really would have disgraced the officers of Thibaw’.16 Dufferin, the current Viceroy, in February could only express his ‘deep regret at the unfortunate incident which accompanied certain capital executions which were carried out at Mandalay’. Hooper’s behaviour was indeed outrageous. ‘The photographing by the Provost Marshal of prisoners in the act of being shot was a most lamentable occurrence.’

  Dufferin countered the argument that the act of photographing people who were in the ‘act of being shot’ didn’t actually add to their suffering. As he put it, in the dignified, rather stiff style so often used in these official documents, it is ‘no good alleging that the fate of the unfortunate themselves was not aggravated, inasmuch as they were ignorant of what was happening’.17 The problem, however, was with the policy of executions. After getting rid of Thibaw at the end of 1885, it was clear that the British had immediately adopted a policy of repression. The whole fabric of Burmese administration fell apart; the Burmese army was ‘disarmed and disbanded’; the police force was ‘dispersed’ and there existed ‘no centre of administration’.18 There emerged, as a consequence, a movement against the British which was expressed in general lawlessness and sporadic violence. This was a guerrilla war waged against the British occupation by dacoits. The movement itself became known to the British as dacoity, an Anglicized version of the Hindi word dakaiti, meaning roughly ‘armed robber’. To the Burmese it was a movement of resistance; to the British it was mere lawlessness. Rudyard Kipling’s idealized soldiers in his Plain Tales from the Hills were campaigning against dacoits in Burma.