The Great War and the British Empire

Culture and society

Michael Walsh, Andrekos Varnava, Michael J.K. Walsh, Andrekos Varnava, Michael Walsh, Michael J.K. Walsh, Andrekos Varnava

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472462275
• eBook ISBN: 9781317029823
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1914 almost one quarter of the earth's surface was British. When the empire and its allies went to war in 1914 against the Central Powers, history's first global conflict was inevitable.

It is the social and cultural reactions to that war and within those distant, often overlooked, societies which is the focus of this volume. From Singapore to Australia, Cyprus to Ireland, India to Iraq and around the rest of the British imperial world, further complexities and interlocking themes are addressed, offering new perspectives on imperial and colonial history and theory, as well as art, music, photography, propaganda, education, pacifism, gender, class, race and diplomacy at the end of the pax Britannica.

Part I
The Great War and the British Empire

Chapter 1
The Great War and the British Empire

Conflict, culture and memory

Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose. ¹

William Blake

This collection is derived from the conference The British Empire and the Great War: Colonial Societies/Cultural Responses, which took place in Singapore in February 2014 to mark the centennial of the outbreak of the Great War. ² The meeting placed emphasis on a decentralisation of socio-cultural analysis away from the more predictable metropolitan perspectives, to enable an analysis of the contrasts and complexities of the various responses throughout the geographical and ethnic extremes of both the ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire. From around the British imperial world, complex and interlocking themes were addressed examining how different strata and subsets of colonial society shaped and were shaped by the experience of total war and how disparate societies and cultures – in all their manifestations – shaped and were shaped by it.

The essays presented in this volume deal specifically with historiography, propaganda, literature, theatre, film and television, photography, fine and applied art, architecture, music and memorialisation. They traverse the globe from Cyprus, Singapore and New Zealand to Canada, Mesopotamia and the vast expanses of Australia and India, prising open fields of enquiry that are yet to be fully investigated in that ‘heyday of new imperialism with its attendant controversies, vicarious exhilarations, and anxieties of decline’. ³ Holger Hoock concludes his admirable study on the art of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the basic assertion that ‘[a]esthetically performed politics and politically inflected art and culture interacted in multifarious ways.’ ⁴ By combining this fundamental assumption with Jeffrey Grey’s insistence that ‘[i]f war defined the British nation, it also fundamentally defined the relationship between the British world and Britain in the course of the twentieth century,’ ⁵ the raison d’etre for this particular collection of essays becomes clear.

Part 1: a distant, uneasy, gaze

A measure of the unease with which commentators approach the cultural history, and indeed the memory of the British Empire, can be felt when perusing the reviews of the exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, which was shown at Tate Britain (itself a site/family with a significant imperial history) in London from November 2015 to April 2016. Far from a celebration of a distant, resolved, and possibly even rich seam of cultural history, the critics lined up to take aim at the show itself and the rationale behind it, or to staunchly defend it (and, by default, the empire). The initial tone was set cautiously with Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, who stated:

The British Empire has become invisible. It is an abstraction that people argue about. Right and left lay claim to its pride or shame, but the historical entity – whose rights and wrongs patriots and radicals now debate – lies cold in its grave, its banners, medals, statues and pith helmets neglected and ignored. ⁶

This eulogy was followed by Mark Hudson in The Telegraph who asked ‘[w]here do you stand on the British Empire? Was it our nation’s greatest glory or its greatest shame? Or has it become simply a self-evident historical fact, too distant to excite strong feelings either way?’ ⁷ Matthew Collings mocked the catalogue for preparing audiences for an ‘art that faces Britain’s imperial past as if it were a strenuous bout of psychotherapy that the reader is about to embark on’, ⁸ while William Dalrymple, less flippantly, insisted that the time had come to confront a less than glorious, traumatic historical reality through the lens of art (ranging from John Thomas’ The Siege of Enniskillen Castle in 1593 to Andrew Gilbert’s All Roads Lead to Ulundi in 2015):

It is difficult to think of a subject that is surrounded by a more formidable minefield of potential awkwardness than the art of imperialism… the British need to know about their empire, to face up to what the country did, and the reasons why so many people, in so many different parts of the world, actively resent, dislike and distrust them. While there are things the imperial British did that can be celebrated, these have to be weighed against a long succession of what today would be regarded as war crimes, stretching from Virginia to New Zealand. ⁹

From across the Atlantic, came the mildly more sympathetic observations of the Wall Street Journal (accompanied perhaps by a wry smile on the part of the writer):

‘Artist and Empire’ is the result of three years of planning and hand-wringing by the 19th-century curatorial team at the Tate Britain. The first year consisted almost entirely of talks about how to sensitively approach the topic: How could the museum display the items without either celebrating or condemning them? ¹⁰

In Jonathan Jones’ closing comments a final, but extremely important, point was made when he noted: ‘But we are different people. We do not have those square jaws and chilling looks. General Gordon stands frozen in his imperial mission, while we wonder at his utter strangeness.’ ¹¹

The empire has gone. So has the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol (as of 2008). Millions of former imperial subjects and generations of their children are now British citizens ‘at home’ in a post-EU United Kingdom which in itself has devolved governments. ¹² Questions of culture, identity, nation and empire therefore have come to sit side by side while history and histories are debated with renewed vigour. Neo-colonialism jostles with post-colonialism while past lives and imperial recollections breathe influentially in modern national politics and policies. There now exist dichotomies of globalisation and migration, supranational states and the rights of small nations, ethnic conflict and racial belonging, making Timothy Parson’s remarks germane when he concluded that ‘the empires of the last century were short-lived engines of globalisation that left behind new and vital networks of migration, commerce, and cultural exchange.’ ¹³ It may also be worthy of note that the British Council published a report as recently as 2014 titled Remember the World as Well as the War: Why the Global Reach and Enduring Legacy of the First World War Still Matter Today, ¹⁴ suggesting that the long-term reverberations of Parson’s ‘engines of globalisation’ were and are practical as well as academic. It is because of this kind of relationship that the essays presented here focus attention on how the Great War and the British Empire affected each other and why investigating both synchronously is important.

Part 2: empire, culture, conflict

To be sure ‘[t]he arts did not just stimulate the pleasures of the imagination in the cultural market place. They also served the aesthetic performance of politics and helped shape political culture,’ and so ‘Arms and Arts!’, as Holger Hoock suggested, was a successful cri de guerre. ¹⁵ For him ‘building empires in the[ir] cultural imagination’ ¹⁶ was not random, nor mere propaganda. Instead it was a device to legitimate expansion, explain the magnitude of the imperial project, and when necessary to mask defeat. Art in its widest sense could, he argued, anticipate the future and prepare for it through the creation and reinforcement of notions of masculinity, heroism and imperialism combined with political certainty and aesthetic refinement. ¹⁷ Later it would take its part in creating both memory and history. David Dimbleby, in his popular series the Seven Ages of Britain, made a similar case when he stated that ‘[a]rt implanted the British Empire in the national consciousness,’ ¹⁸ claiming that through the medium the British and their imperial servants were simultaneously flattered and reassured of their mission to govern and civilise. He went on to claim that ‘[e]very image of empire reminded the public that Britain was engaged in a great enterprise which was enriching the nation, raising its international prestige and bringing peace and regeneration to the rest of the world.’ Like the empire it represented, the art was commercial, competitive, didactic, ideological and ‘the servant of education’. ¹⁹ Nicholas Dirks was therefore quick to acknowledge:

In certain important ways culture was what colonialism was all about. Cultural forms in newly classified ‘traditional’ societies were reconstructed and transformed by and through colonial technologies of conquest and rule, which created new categories and oppositions between colonizers and colonized, European and Asian, modern and traditional, West and East, even male and female. ²⁰

And so when studying the cultural hybridity and intellectual complexity of the arts, critical ordering and understanding of its components must be borne in mind, as must the professionalisation and institutionalisation of its practitioners in order to create meaning in a relatively unfettered public forum. Hoock warned that ‘[c]ulture is not merely a reflection or expression of social experience or political reality; nor is it an autonomous entity.’ ²¹ So imperialism, in its entirety, clearly ‘involved not only territorial acquisition, political ambition and economic interests but also cultural formations, attitudes, beliefs and practices’. ²² Tim Barringer and Geoff Quilley invite us to think further and to acknowledge that imperial flows were not unidirectional, emanating solely from the British Isles. Indeed, the empire in all its cultural diversity was also transported into the heart of Britain and the reverberations widely felt:

London’s ports, and its markets for trading stocks and commodities, made it the empire’s indispensable nexus, a status protected by harshly enforced legislation as well as by economic logic. Less fully acknowledged, until recently, has been London’s status as a cultural centre, a place for meetings of ideas and representations, a space for the making, selling and viewing of art. ²³

Writing in 2014 Timothy Parsons took issue with this and, building on the arguments of Bernard Porter, ²⁴ claimed that ‘[a]t the imperial centre, metropolitan Britons knew very little about what actually went on in the untidy empire.’ ²⁵ Far from benefitting from a subtle and nuanced blend of ideas and aesthetics filtering into the United Kingdom from around the globe, Britons would have known little and cared less about what was going on beyond the Channel.

This ‘untidy empire’ was presented by Catherine Hall in her impressive Cultures of Empire: A Reader²⁶ as being made up of colonies of settlement (Australia, New Zealand and Canada), protectorates and dependencies (from the Ionian Islands to India), despots, advisors, commercial companies, governors, hereditary rajahs, commissioners, consul generals and so on. To this heady administrative mix and vast geographical horizon can be added the impact of what Patrick Deer calls ‘war culture’, which in the early twentieth century ‘capture[d] and colonize[d] the national imagination’. ²⁷ Now the various and diverse populations of the empire were moving and converging on an unprecedented scale (and motivated by a common, potent stimulus): India contributed around 1,400,000 recruits up to December 1919, and the dominions – including Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland – contributed a further 1,300,000 men. ²⁸ Even places considered small and militarily insignificant by comparison were major contributors: Cyprus contributed a quarter of its male population between 1916 to 1920 mainly as mule drivers in the Balkan theatres of conflict. ²⁹ What is much less certain though is whether these vast movements of people led to meaningful cross-cultural encounters. Perhaps it is an act of historical naïveté to believe that physical proximity of different people and races to one another necessarily results in some sort of sophisticated cultural transfer. Indeed, the opposite might be the case, leading to tensions and reinforcing previously held negative views of ‘the Other’.

In any case, the further we get away from the living memory of the empire (like the Great War itself) the closer we can get to drawing our conclusions about it and the more comfortable we feel about discussing and debating it, even if many matters remain unresolved. ³⁰ Although siding with John M. MacKenzie in his debate with Porter, we agree with the latter when he claimed in an earlier study that his aim was ‘to sophisticate people’s understanding of an important historical and current phenomenon that is too often viewed simplistically and crudely’. ³¹ We can no longer accept simplistic assertions like those of Boris Ford who summed up the intricate multifaceted relationship b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Foreword
• PART I THE GREAT WAR AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE
• PART II IMPERIAL RESPONSES, IDENTITIES AND CULTURE
• PART III ART, MEMORY AND FORGETTING
• Index