Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Of course, in this context, any notion of democracy was far from anyone’s mind. The British Empire was hierarchical and highly structured in its social organization. Mere snobbery formed an important part of this organization, as many of the tribal leaders and local potentates, like Yoruba chiefs in 1930s Nigeria, vied for audiences with the King in London, or lobbied extensively, like Sir Robert Ho Tung in Hong Kong, for differing ranks of knighthood. To the likes of Sir Robert Ho Tung there was a world of difference between being a mere knight bachelor and being a KBE or the even more exalted KCMG.

  Despite hierarchy and class being central to the British Empire, we cannot be blind to the fact that the British Empire did bring justice and order to often anarchic parts of the world. To say that the empire was undemocratic is not to say that its effects were wholly negative. It is common for people involved in history and politics to see institutions, with the best intentions, as wholly good or wholly bad. Such institutions as slavery, or ideas such as fascism, can be put into these simple categories with some justification. Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.

  Others, while recognizing the hierarchical nature of the British Empire, have said that conditions in the empire merely matched conditions in Britain itself. This is not strictly true. While Britain was a country famously obsessed by class, after 1918 there existed mass democracy, and certainly, by the 1930s, democracy existed in Britain on the same basis as it does today, except for the lowering of the voting age in 1967. If one were to look at the British prime ministers of the 1920s and 1930s, the discrepancy between heads of government in Britain and colonial governors in places like Sudan and Hong Kong becomes obvious. David Lloyd George, the son of a Baptist schoolteacher from Wales, could become prime minister in 1916. It is inconceivable that a man of his background, without a university education or a military career, could have become governor of Nigeria, for example. The same could be said of Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid, who became the Labour Party’s first prime minister in 1924. Without a public school education, and without a university degree, it is very unlikely that anyone like Ramsay MacDonald could have got anywhere in the colonial empire. The British Empire was undoubtedly more snobbish, more hierarchical and more deferential than the mother country. It is wrong to argue, as some have done, that British administrators were merely projecting the class distinctions of Britain’s society on to the colonial empire. Britain was changing at a much faster rate than the empire, and recruits to the Imperial Civil Service towards the end of the empire, in the 1950s, were only too conscious of this.

  In the colonies themselves, distinct rules of precedence applied which bore no relation to status in the mother country. If these distinctions were derived from Britain, they took on a totally independent life in the colonies which, by the early twentieth century, had a completely different scale of values and preoccupations. This realization forms part of Kitty Fane’s frustration in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and it informs her observation that ‘it is rather funny when you think of all the people who used to come to our house at home [in South Kensington] that here [in Hong Kong] we should be treated like dirt’.2 Hong Kong, as Fane saw, had its own rules of hierarchy and precedence. It is important to remember that, at a time of increasing democracy and Labour governments in Britain, the colonial empire, especially in places like Hong Kong, remained much the same. Hong Kong would be governed in the same autocratic way for 150 years. In the Sudan, public schoolboys still dominated the administration in a way that often surprised civil servants in London.

  The power exercised by district commissioners in places like the Sudan, where young men in their mid-twenties would rule a land the size of Wales, as judges, lawgivers and policemen rolled into one, was immense. The arrogance of provincial governors in Sudan was legendary. This aspect of empire shows the extent to which there was a predisposition to strong individuals, leaders who, by sheer force of character, could impose their will on circumstances. The late Victorian hero-worship of Lord Kitchener is a conspicuous example of this tendency.

  This individualism was, I have noted, anarchic, in that there was very often no policy coherence or strategic direction behind the imperial government as experienced in individual colonies. Often strong-minded officials and governors would, by a metaphoric sweep of the hand, reverse the policy of decades, thereby creating more confusion and instability. Such reversals occurred in Burma, in Sudan and in Hong Kong. In Burma, the policy which the British government had pursued in India, since the Mutiny of 1857, was reversed by Lord Randolph Churchill, who was committed to the outright annexation of the country. This step was not only contrary to the policy followed since 1857, but had been opposed by the Earl of Mayo when he was viceroy of India in the early 1870s, and had been viewed suspiciously by the Marquess of Ripon, viceroy in the 1880s. Even as late as the 1940s, officials were not convinced that Lord Randolph had done the right thing when he abolished the Burmese monarchy. In Sudan, the ‘Southern Policy’ of Harold MacMichael was reversed in the late 1940s. That policy has been seen by the Sudanese in the north as the cause of many of the problems which their country has confronted in the half-century since independence, years which have been dominated by civil war. In Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young’s sincere plans for greater democracy were reversed by his successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and this suspended any progress towards democracy in Hong Kong for thirty years. As it happened, democracy, even by the late 1980s, had never been seriously practised in Hong Kong. This lack of any democratic progress in the colony, over the three decades immediately after the Second World War, made Chris Patten’s aggressive stance in the 1990s bewildering not only to the Chinese government in Beijing, but to British diplomats in China and in Whitehall.

  Individualism was a guiding principle of the British Empire. This is shown by the career of Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Withdrawn and aloof, repressed and driven, Kitchener was an idiosyncratic loner who became a hero of empire. His administrative talents were uneven, and he was clearly bored by the routine of day-to-day government, but his image, the drooping moustache and clear blue, wide-set eyes, was compelling, while his autocratic manner gave people assurance in uncertain times. The cry for Lord Kitchener to be given high office at the outbreak of the war in 1914 was deafening and prompted Asquith, the Prime Minister, to appoint him secretary for war, a decision which Asquith often regretted.

  The British Empire allowed individuals, the civil servants and imperial administrators who worked within it, a wide degree of freedom; the man on the spot was often, quite literally, the master of all he surveyed. A Kitchener in the Sudan, or a Lugard in Nigeria, for example, could rule like a benign dictator with very little supervision from Whitehall. Even as late as the 1950s, when he was in office in Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham described the power and authority of the governor in terms usually reserved for the Almighty.

  In the Classical Greek sense, the British Empire was an aristocratic empire, and it openly celebrated ‘rule by the best people’. There was a meritocratic element to imperial government; selection for the imperial service followed rigorous exams or interviews, designed to select those believed to be the best. Yet that selection was confined to a very
narrow range of schools and universities; the products from a magic circle of public schools–the fifteen schools George Orwell remembered from his prep-school days–enjoyed the lion’s share of the best imperial postings. This process produced a class of colonial administrators drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-middle, professional classes, and yet there was a broad range within this class, as Orwell himself knew. In the Sudan, the sons of peers might serve as district commissioners; in Hong Kong the sons of impoverished clergymen or schoolmasters could be cadets; the imperial class did have some wide variations within it, even though, compared to the rest of the country, the pool from which it was drawn outwardly seems shallow.

  This was only natural, in the thinking of the time. Such people were born leaders. They were the ‘best of our race’ and represented the ‘highest athletic and mental culture’ of the British people, as Lord Cromer said of the Sudan Political Service. These administrators would rule over native populations like Plato’s guardians–whom, given the Classical education many of the civil servants had received, they consciously imitated. In this sense of natural rulers, or rule of the best, whether those ‘best’ men came from the British Isles or from the colonies, an aristocratic principle ran right through the empire. Coupled with the idea of rule by the best there is also the implication, in many of the letters written by colonial governors, that the empire was seen as something of a school of virtue, where character, discipline and willpower would be trained to prevail. The colonies were regarded as providing a suitable arena for the display of talent for the best of the imperial breed. Like any aristocratic oligarchy, imperial administrators believed theirs to be a high calling, requiring self-discipline and ability.

  In its individualism, its elitism and its snobbery, in the audacity of its self-belief, the British Empire was not the precursor of the world of the early twenty-first century. Its values and the mental universe of its administrators, educated as many of them were in the languages and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, could not be further removed from the largely Americanized world we now inhabit. The British Empire, in its scale and ethos, was completely unlike any system of government that the world has known. It is highly unlikely that such an enterprise will be undertaken by any nation, no matter how powerful, ever again. The phenomenon of British imperial rule must be understood in its own terms.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 Mead, Walter Russell, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World, New York, 2001, p. xvi.

  2 Ferguson, Niall, Colossus, London, 2005, p. 24.

  3 Cannadine, David, Ornamentalism, London, 2001, p. 4.

  4 Ibid., p. xx.

  5 Cromer, Earl of, Political and Literary Essays, London 1913, first series, “The Government of Subject Races,” from Edinburgh Review, January 1908, p. 17.

  6 Quoted in Judd, Gerrit Parmele, Members of Parliament 1734–1832, Chicago, 1972, p. 36.

  7 Dictionary of National Biography (DNB).

  8 Orwell, George, Essays, London, 2000, p. 425.

  9 Cannadine, Ornamentalism, p. xix.

  10 Ferguson, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, p. xxii.

  Chapter 1: The Spoils of War

  1 Yergin, Daniel, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, New York, 1991, 2nd edn 1992, p. 183; Delaisi, Francis, Oil: Its Influence on Politics, trans. C. Leonard Leese, London, 1922, p. 86.

  2 For Curzon, see Gilmour, David, Curzon, London, 1994; Nicolson, Harold, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925. A Study in Post-War Diplomacy, London, 1934, p. 49.

  3 TNA, CAB 21/119.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Stivers, William, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order 1918–1930, London, 1982, p. 47.

  6 Lawrence, T. E., letter to The Times, 22 July 1920.

  7 Leslie, Shane, Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters, London, 1923, pp. 13, 17.

  8 Ibid., pp. 163, 94.

  9 Ibid., p. 62.

  10 Ibid., pp. 147, 151.

  11 Fromkin, David, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, New York, 1989, p. 375; Hewins, Ralph, Mr Five Per Cent: The Biography of Calouste Gulbenkian, London, 1957, p. 128.

  12 Monroe, Elizabeth, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956, London, 1963, p. 60; Kent, Marian, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil 1900–1920, London, 1976, p. 146.

  13 Marlowe, J., Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson, London, 1967, pp. 35, 36.

  14 TNA, CAB 21/119.

  15 TNA, CAB 21/61.

  16 Ireland, Philip Willard, Iraq: A Study in Political Development, New York, 1937, p. 451.

  17 Quoted in Mejcher, Helmut, Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928, London, 1976, p. 49.

  18 TNA, CAB 24/4.

  19 House of Lords debate 20 February 1919, quoted in Wilson, A. T., Mesopotamia 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties. A Personal and Historical Record, London, 1931, p. 163.

  20 Bell, Gertrude, Letters of Gertrude Bell, selected and edited by Gladys Bell, London, 1987, pp. 468, 400.

  21 Philby, H. St J., Arabian Days, London, 1948, p. 131.

  22 MECA, Bowman papers.

  23 Storrs, Sir Ronald, Great Britain in the Near and Middle East, Cust Foundation Lecture, University College, Nottingham, 1932.

  24 MECA, Bell papers, box 1, letter to Lord Allenby, 13 August 1920.

  25 Philby, Arabian Days, pp. 173–4.

  26 Bell, Letters, p. 460, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 1 November 1920.

  27 MECA, Bowman papers, diary entry, Basra, 24 August 1918.

  28 Abdullah, Thabit A. J., Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos, London, 2006, p. 13.

  29 Bell, Letters, p. 393.

  30 Luizard, Pierre-Jean, La Formation de l’Irak contemporain, Paris, 1991, pp. 373, 380 (translations are my own).

  31 Quoted in Stivers, Supremacy and Oil, p. 35.

  32 Haldane, Sir Aylmer, The Insurrection in Mesopotamia 1920, Edinburgh, 1922, pp. 30, 314.

  33 MECA, Bowman papers.

  34 Simon, Reeva Spector, and Tejirian, Eleanor H. (eds), The Creation of Iraq 1914–1921, New York, 2004, p. 29.

  35 Wilson, Mesopotamia, p. 253.

  36 Luizard, La Formation de l’Irak, pp. 374, 422.

  37 Bell, Letters, p. 404.

  38 Quoted in Ireland, Iraq, p. 243.

  39 Luizard, La Formation de l’Irak, p. 402.

  40 Marr, Phebe, The Modern History of Iraq, 2nd edn, Boulder, Colorado, 2004, p. 23.

  41 Simon, Reeva Spector, Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny, New York, 1986, rev. edn 2004, p. 46.

  42 The Times, 7 August 1920, quoted in Bennett, G. H., British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period 1919–1924, London, 1995, pp. 106, 107–9.

  43 MECA, Bell papers, letter dated 23 March 1921.

  44 For Churchill remark, see Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 1; Kedourie, Elie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire, London, 1987, p. 88.

  45 Lawrence, T. E., The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, selected and edited by Malcolm Brown, London, 1988, p. 384, letter to Sir Gilbert Clayton, 9 October 1928.

  46 Ibid., pp. 349–50, letter to Mrs Charlotte Shaw, 18 October 1927.

  47 Bell, Letters, p. 468.

  48 Ibid., p. 500.

  49 Main, Ernest, Iraq from Mandate to Independence, London, 1935, p. 44.

  50 Howell, Georgina, Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell, London, 2006, pp. 447–8.

  51 Bell, Letters, p. 536, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 30 January 1923.

  52 Lawrence, Letters, p. 353, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 4 November 1927.

  Chapter 2: Rivals

  1 Mejcher, Helmut, Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928, London, 1976, Preface.

  2 Ibid., p. 136.

  3 Kent, Marian, Moghuls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East in Brit
ish Foreign Policy 1900–1940, London, 1993, p. 1.

  4 Earle, Edward Meade, ‘The Turkish Petroleum Company: A Study in Oleaginous Diplomacy’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 39, no. 2, June 1924, pp. 265–79, at pp. 272–3.

  5 McMurray, Jonathan S., Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway, London, 2001, p. 134, n. 5.

  6 McBeth, B. S., British Oil Policy 1919–1939, London, 1985, p. 7.

  7 Nicolson, Harold, Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925. A Study in Post-War Diplomacy, London, 1934, p. 330.

  8 Hewins, Ralph, Mr Five Per Cent: The Biography of Calouste Gulbenkian, London, 1957, pp. 129, 77.

  9 Gulbenkian, Nubar, Pantaraxia, London, 1965, p. 38.

  10 Ibid., p. 38.

  11 Ibid., p. 229.

  12 Bennett, G. H., British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period 1919–1924, London, 1995, p. 115.

  13 Delaisi, Francis, Oil: Its influence on Politics, trans. C. Leonard Leese, London, 1922, pp. 15–17.

  14 McBeth, British Oil Policy, p. 34.

  15 Stivers, William, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order 1918–1930, London, 1982, p. 59.

  16 Monroe, Elizabeth, Britain’s Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956, London, 1963, p. 66.

  17 Meade, ‘The Turkish Petroleum Company’, p. 274.

  18 Delaisi, Oil, pp. 42–3.

  19 Quoted in Mejcher, Imperial Quest, p. 106.