Rule of Darkness

British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914

Patrick Brantlinger

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801467028
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

A major contribution to the cultural and literary history of the Victorian age, Rule of Darkness maps the complex relationship between Victorian literary forms, genres, and theories and imperialist, racist ideology. Critics and cultural historians have usually regarded the Empire as being of marginal importance to early and mid-Victorian writers. Patrick Brantlinger asserts that the Empire was central to British culture as a source of ideological and artistic energy, both supported by and lending support to widespread belief in racial superiority, the need to transform "savagery" into "civilization, " and the urgency of promoting emigration.

Rule of Darkness brings together material from public records, memoirs, popular culture, and canonical literature. Brantlinger explores the influence of the novels of Captain Frederick Marryat, pioneer of British adolescent adventure fiction, and shows the importance of William Makepeace Thackeray's experience of India to his novels. He treats a number of Victorian best sellers previously ignored by literary historians, including the Anglo-Indian writer Philip Meadows Taylor's Confessions of a Thug and Seeta. Brantlinger situates explorers' narratives and travelogues by such famous author-adventurers as David Livingstone and Sir Richard Burton in relation to other forms of Victorian and Edwardian prose. Through readings of works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, John Hobson, and many others, he considers representations of Africa, India, and other non-British parts of the world in both fiction and nonfiction.

The most comprehensive study yet of literature and imperialism in the early and mid-Victorian years, Rule of Darkness offers, in addition, a revisionary interpretation of imperialism as a significant factor in later British cultural history, from the 1880s to World War I. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with Victorian culture and society and, more generally, with the relationship between Victorian writers and imperialism, 'and between racist ideology and patterns of domination in modern history.

PART I DAWN

Dawn in the South Pacific. A typical missionary conversionist fantasy, from Rev. William Wyatt Gill,Life in the Southern Isles (1876).

1. From Dawn Island to Heart of Darkness

England cannot afford to be little.

—WILLIAM HUSKISSON, 1828

i

Studies of British imperialism as an ideological phenomenon have usually confined themselves to the period from the 1870s to World War I, in part because those years saw the development of a militantly expansionist New Imperialism. In the 1870s Germany, Belgium, and the United States began an intense imperial rivalry against the older colonial powers, above all Great Britain, for their own “place in the sun.” Russia (like France) represented an older, more continuous threat to Britain’s imperial hegemony, but the Bulgarian crisis of 1876 and the Second Afghan War of 1878–80 marked an intensification of that threat. Declining industrial growth and the “Great Depression” from 1873 to the 1890s also lent urgency to imperial issues in Britain, as did the increasingly divisive question of Irish Home Rule. Perhaps more than any other events before the Boer War, the invasion of Egypt in 1882 and the death of General Gordon at Khartoum three years later raised imperialist sentiment to a fever pitch that hardly abated even after the “revenge” for Gordon at Omdurman in 1898.

Literary historians have noted the jingoist trend in late Victorian and Edwardian writing, finding it most prominently expressed by Rudyard Kipling, H. Rider Haggard, and a few others, but for the most part they have tended to portray it as background or as one theme among many and to ignore it altogether before the 1880s. Such a narrowing of focus used to be encouraged by political and economic historians, who subscribed to a belief in a hiatus between the breakdown of the old Empire, signaled by the loss of the American colonies, and the emergence of the New Imperialism after about 1880. Occasionally historians even claimed that this hiatus was anti-imperialist. The chief evidence offered for this view was the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery in all British territory by 1834; the establishment of partial self-government in the white settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope); the alleged influence of the free trade arguments of John Bright, Richard Cobden, and the Manchester School; and the traditional reluctance of governments to pursue policies of imperial aggrandizement.1 Lord Palmerston, for example, both as foreign secretary and as prime minister, was a frequent advocate of gunboat diplomacy, but also he was often reluctant to follow displays of naval power with military annexations. Palmerston and many of his contemporaries believed that British overseas interests should be secured whenever possible without formal imperialization.

Recent historians, however, following the work of John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, have recognized that in the Victorian years down to 1880, British overseas expansion went on apace, even though the official attitude was frequently to resist that expansion.2 British hegemony in India, dating from the Battle of Plassey in 1757, both grew and was consolidated up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. The loss of the American colonies was partly offset during and immediately after the Napoleonic era by sizable gains in South Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and Canada. To designate patterns of political, economic, and cultural domination—patterns that involved annexation and the creation of new colonies only as a last resort—Robinson and Gallagher offer “informal empire” and “free trade imperialism,” but they cite numerous instances from the early Victorian years of formal imperial expansion as well: “Consider the results of a decade of ‘indifference’ to empire. Between 1841 and 1851 Great Britain occupied or annexed New Zealand, the Gold Coast, Labuan, Natal, the Punjab, Sind, and Hong Kong. In the next twenty years British control was asserted over Berar, Oudh, Lower Burma, and Kowloon, over Lagos and the neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, over Basutoland, Griqualand, and the Transvaal; and new colonies were established in Queensland and British Columbia.”3 Furthermore, though the major areas of white settlement were granted partial self-government between 1840 and 1870, they remained tied to Britain in many ways. As Goldwin Smith argued in The Empire (1863), independence for the colonies of British settlement could lead to a stronger imperial alliance: “That connexion with the Colonies, which is really part of our greatness—the connexion of blood, sympathy and ideas—will not be affected by political separation. And when our Colonies are nations, something in the nature of a great Anglo-Saxon federation may, in substance if not in form, spontaneously arise out of affinity and mutual affection.”4 In contrast, especially after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, arguments for the independence of the largely nonwhite parts of the Empire grew scarce. The Mutiny was a key event, according to Francis Hutchins, in the emergence of an “illusion of permanence” about the British occupation of India.5

The word “imperialism,” Richard Koebner concluded, was used through the 1860s only with reference to the French Second Empire and the autocratic policies of Napoleon III.6 But between 1830 and the 1870s “the colonies” and “colonial interests” were familiar terms, and throughout the period there was frequent discussion in the press and in Parliament about the condition of the “British Empire.”7 For most Victorians, whether they lived early or late in the queen’ reign, the British were inherently, by “blood,” a conquering, governing, and civilizing “race”; the “dark races” whom they conquered were inherently incapable of governing and civilizing themselves. Racist theories of history were prevalent well before the development of social Darwinism, and these theories were often used to explain Britain’s industrial and imperial preeminence.8 In The English and Their Origin (1866), Luke Owen Pike declared: “There are probably few educated Englishmen living who have not in their infancy been taught that the English nation is a nation of almost pure Teutonic blood, that its political constitution, its social custom, its internal prosperity, the success of its arms, and the number of its colonies have all followed necessarily upon the arrival, in three vessels, of certain German warriors under the command of Hengist and Horsa.”9

Sixteen years earlier, in The Races of Men (1850), Robert Knox had set forth a pseudo-scientific theory of race which explained why some peoples were the imperialists and others the imperialized in history. Knox is cynical about war, empires, and genocide; he is no patriotic praiser of everything British:

See how a company of London merchants lord it over a hundred millions of coloured men in Hindostan…the fact is astounding. Whilst I now write, the Celtic [French] race is preparing to seize Northern Africa by the same right as we seized Hindostan—that is, might, physical force—the only real right is physical force; whilst we, not to be behind in the grasp for more acres, annex New Zealand and all its dependencies to the British dominions, to be wrested from us by-and-by by our sons and descendants as the United States were and Canada will be, for no Saxon race can ever hold a colony long. The coolness with which this act of appropriation has been done is, I think, quite unparalleled in the history of aggressions.10

It is not clear whether the Saxon race as rulers are unable to hold their empires for long or whether, as colonists and pioneers, they are too energetic and ruthless to remain under home rule. In any case, Knox goes on to excoriate “that den of all abuses, the office of the Colonial Secretary,” for “declaring New Zealand to be a colony of Britain.” He speaks of “organized hypocrisy” as the source of the idea that “the aborigines are to be protected”—he recognizes, apparently, that they will be not protected, but robbed and murdered. Yet he equivocates; he is no humanitarian. Although he seems to disapprove of organized robbery and murder, might makes right, and what happens to the dark races of men around the world is simply their racial destiny. “Why is it,” he asks, “that destiny seems to have marked them for destruction?” They are physically and mentally inferior, he answers, doomed to perish while “feebly contending against the stronger races for a corner of [the] earth” (147).

Knox appears to argue that Saxons—his own race, as he is fond of pointing out—should keep out of other parts of the world and desist from robbing and murdering the dark races of men. Actually, however, he argues that European colonial expansion and the demise of the “weak races” are inevitable. “Since the earliest times…the dark races have been the slaves of their fairer brethren.” Nothing has changed in the nineteenth century except that genocide is now masked in terms of “protecting the aborigines.” Perhaps it is only hypocrisy that Knox objects to—not imperialism, not even genocide. Knox speculates that the Colonial Office has greedily wanted to establish “another India in Central Africa,” so that “the wealth, the product of the labour of many millions of Africans, in reality slaves, as the natives of Hindostan, but held to be free by a legal fiction, might be poured into the coffers of the office.” He rejoices, however, that “climate interfered” with this scheme, at least as attempted by the Niger Expedition of 1841, and “exterminated the crews of their ships” (150: Knox’s apparent satisfaction with this disaster is of a piece with his view of history as a vast charnel house of race war and racial extinction).

Knox rails against humanitarian efforts to protect the aborigines: “How I have laughed at the mock philanthropy of England!” (161). Genocide is the way of history, and the Saxon race, though closely followed in its murderous proclivities by other European breeds, is better at it than any other. “What a field of extermination lies before the Saxon Celtic and Sarmatian races! The Saxon will not mingle with any dark race, nor will he allow him to hold an acre of land in the country occupied by him; this, at least, is the law of Anglo-Saxon America. The fate…of the Mexicans, Peruvians, and Chilians, is in no shape doubtful. Extinction of the race—sure extinction—it is not even denied” (153). Certain races—the dark, nonprogressive ones (but what can “progress” mean to Knox?)—seem to have been produced by nature simply to be liquidated, swept aside by the Saxons and other white, progressive races. And there is nothing to be done about it; “hence the folly of the war carried on by the philanthropists of Britain against nature” (153). No late Victorian social Darwinist could have stated this racist theory of history in more explicit, more dismal terms.

Knox’s extreme cynicism was quite idiosyncratic for mid-century, however, though both his racism and his thesis that might makes right seem partly to echo Carlyle. Nevertheless, racist theories of history quite similar to his, though more positively expressed, were just as common in those years as in the eighties and nineties. That the early and mid-Victorians did not call themselves imperialists, moreover, suggests merely that they did not feel self-conscious or anxious about their world domination. They could be imperialists without subscribing to any formal doctrine, so thoroughly were the patterns of expansion and hegemony established at home and abroad. Freedom and free trade were for equals; John Stuart Mill assumed quite readily that the liberal theses he expounded in On Liberty (1859) and Representative Government (1861) did not apply to Indians or to other “lesser peoples.” And although James Mill believed that colonies in general were a bad idea, emigration and the founding of new, independent communities were another matter, as was the governance of India.11 Like his son after him, James Mill did not believe that freedom and democracy made any sense as categories in the context of India, or that they should be applied to other nonwhite peoples. In The Colonies of England (1849), J. A. Roebuck, Benthamite radical and parliamentary ally of the Mills, could write: “I say, that for the mass, the sum of human enjoyment to be derived from this globe which God has given to us, it is requisite for us to pass over the original tribes that we find existing in the separate lands which we colonize…. When the European comes in contact with any other type of man, that other type disappears…. Let us not shade our eyes, and pretend not to see this result.”12

Imperialism may not have had a name before 1870, but though nameless it did more than provide mere background in the writings of the early and mid-Victorians. India was important for Macaulay, the Mills, and Thackeray as well as for Kipling, and certainly it was just as central to the greatest Anglo-Indian writer before Kipling, Philip Meadows Taylor, who published his bestselling Confessions of a Thug in 1839. Though he had never been to India, Sir Walter Scott tried his hand at an oriental novel in The Surgeons Daughter (1827), and both Robert Southey in The Curse of Kehama (1810) and Thomas Moore in Lalla Rookh (1817) contributed to the growing stock of stereotypic images of India. Standard histories of the Romantic movement either ignore these works or treat them as examples of literary exoticism, a minor trend compared to the major themes pursued by “great” writing. Such histories have also downplayed the eastern travels of Byron’s Childe Harold and Don Juan, and the orientalism of such poems as “The Giaour.”

When we turn from poetic to economic discourse, emigration to the colonies had been urged as a solution to unemployment and depression as early as the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Thomas Malthus thought that emigration could never be more than a temporary palliative to the problem of “redundant population,” but Wilmot Horton and other theorists disagreed. In the early 1820s Horton proposed to alleviate pauperism through government-subsidized emigration to the colonies, and later emigration schemes such as Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s also aimed at improving the economic situation at home while simultaneously developing the colonies.13 Responding in Chartism (1839) to these issues, Carlyle wrote: “How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannahs of America…? Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still growing, still expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and like firepillars guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steam-engine and plough-share?”14 This sort of Lebensraum argument was not invented by German propagandists in the twentieth century; it echoes throughout the era of industrial and imperial expansion.

Emigration as an urgent national issue was an idea shared by many writers from about 1815 onward. Coleridge believed that colonies were the answer to Malthus: “Colonization is not only a manifest expedient for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain. God seems to hold out his finger to us over the sea.”15 Coleridge understood that not only surplus population but surplus capital needed to be exported: “I think this country is now suffering grievously under an excessive accumulation of capital, which, having no field for profitable operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with itself” (216). The colonies and most other parts of the world, even when populated by “natives,” Romantic and early Victorian writers often perceived as virtually empty—“waste places”—if not exactly profitable areas for investing surplus capital then an almost infinite dumping ground for the increasingly dangerous army of the poor and unemployed at home. “We have Canada with all its territory,” wrote Robert Southey; “we have Surinam, the Cape Colony, Australasia…countries which are collectively more than fifty-fold the area of the British isles, and which a thousand years of uninterrupted ...