Empire Ways

Aspects of British Imperialism

Bernard Porter

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784534462
• eBook ISBN: 9780857739599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The British Empire was an astonishingly complex and varied phenomenon, not to be reduced to any of the simple generalisations or theories that are often taken to characterise it. One way of illustrating this, and so conveying some of the subtle flavour of the thing itself, is to descend from the over-arching to the particular, and describe and discuss aspects of it in detail. This book, by the well-known imperial historian Bernard Porter, ranges among a wide range of the events and personalities that shaped or were shaped by British imperialism, or by its decline in the post-war years. These include chapters on science, drugs, battles, proconsuls, an odd assortment of imperialists including Kipling, Lady Hester Stanhope and TE Lawrence, architecture, music, the role of MI6 and the reputation of the Empire since its demise. Together the chapters inform, explain, provoke, and occasionally amuse; but above all they demonstrate the kaleidoscopic variety and ambivalence of Britain s imperial history."

IV

THE EMPIRE AT HOME

CHAPTER 21

FURTHER THOUGHTS ON IMPERIAL ABSENT-MINDEDNESS

To what extent did ‘imperialism’ permeate domestic British society and culture in the nineteenth century and after – even, perhaps, up to the present day? This is currently one of the thornier issues in British imperial history, and will be the subject of the next four chapters of this book. The starting point is a work I published in 2004, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, which stimulated – or provoked – a great deal of discussion afterwards. The tone of some of the debate is illustrated by two reactions: from the leading post-colonialist historian Antoinette Burton, who dismissed the book as not ‘worth arguing either with or about’;¹ and from the excellent empirical historian John MacKenzie, who wrote: ‘some reviewers may be taken in by this, but I am not’.² Other reviews, of course, were more positive. The present chapter has grown out of this. It is partly a reply to some of the more critical reviews; but it also seeks to place the general debate on the domestic impact of British imperialism in context; and will finish with a suggestion for moving it forward in a new way.

*

First, it may be worthwhile briefly summarising the argument of the book, for the benefit of those who have not read it – put off, perhaps, by Burton’s and MacKenzie’s reviews; and in order to clear up what may have been some misunderstandings of it. The Absent-Minded Imperialists was mainly a response to certain scholars (and some others) who, I felt, had hitherto simplified and exaggerated the impact of ‘imperialism’ on Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after years in which, except by empire specialists like myself, it had been rather ignored and underplayed. It is worth emphasising that it is not a book that seeks to deny the reality of the British Empire in the world, which would be ridiculous; or its qualitative impact on certain highly significant areas of British domestic life. Nor, incidentally, was it intended to bear at all on the matter of British ‘national identity’, which is currently a vexed question both within the academy and beyond. This is because it is at least arguable that ‘national identity’ has very little to do with the realities of national life; in most cases it is an elite construction, erected for an ulterior purpose (usually social control), and largely founded on historical myths. It is the ‘realities’ that my book is concerned with; and in particular the breadth and depth of the imperial impact in Britain from circa 1800 to 1940. That may be a somewhat superficial way of looking at it, as I now suspect, and as I shall elaborate later. The reason for it however was my feeling at the time – which I still hold – that that breadth and depth had been generally overrated.

As against that, the main argument of the book was this: that the ordinary Briton’s relationship to the Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was complex and ambivalent, less soaked in or affected by imperialism than these other scholars claimed; to the extent that many English people, at any rate, possibly even a majority, were almost entirely ignorant of it for most of the nineteenth century. (The Scots may be a different matter; they are only marginally included here.) The book gave reasons why this was probably so (we cannot of course be certain that it was), which basically came down to the fact that there was little opportunity and no need for most Britons to be aware of their Empire before around 1880: the Empire did not require them, or many of them, and they did not knowingly require it. Class had a great impact here, with awareness of and support for the Empire (or anything that could reasonably be called ‘imperialism’) depending very much on one’s social situation, and so one’s material relation to the thing itself. The book tried to show that imperialism made a very small showing in the broad culture (or, more properly, cultures, plural) of the time, despite some cultural scholars’ claiming to read it between every line and beneath every brush-stroke. It put some emphasis on the fact that the Empire and empire-related matters were almost never mentioned in schools, at any level. There was a fundamental reason for this: they were not seen as a good means to instil patriotism, which would be the main motive for harping on them. That stemmed from the fundamental nature of British society, and the way it was supposed to adhere together: not through a sense of common national identity (each class saw its ‘patriotism’ differently), but by how the classes – their duties and responsibilities – complemented each other. The book also drew a crucial distinction between an ‘impact’ and an ‘influence’: imperialism and the Empire undoubtedly impacted on Britain mightily – there is a chapter on this, which even extends the usual catalogue – but not in ways that necessarily percolated through to people’s thinking or even their unconscious. Of course there were ‘imperialists’ in British society, and more of them after around 1880 than before; but even for them, their ‘imperialism’ could signify many different things, some of which were not really ‘imperialist’ in any truly ‘imperialistic’ sense. (The book’s first chapter devotes some time to discussing the semantics of that word. Burton called it ‘meandering’. We older-fashioned historians call it ‘defining our terms’.) Other very different national discourses informed and distorted it. One was ‘liberalism’. To regard Britain as an essentially ‘imperialist’ society, therefore, ‘steeped’ in empire, was to oversimplify the picture, at the very least.

It is clear from many of the reactions to the book, both critical and favourable, that the impression this gave was overwhelmingly negative; but this may have been partly due to the fact that readers were approaching it from modern accounts of the relationship between imperialism and British society which were so uncritically positive. The book was careful all through to mark up exceptions and uncertainties, and ways of reading even its own evidence that could support the ‘other side’. As well as this, it tried to paint a subtler picture of the impact of imperialism on British domestic society – that it was uneven, variegated, took different forms – than may have got through to readers who, after immersion in the ‘steeping’ assumption for so long, were mainly impressed – even shocked – by its account of the gaps in this steeping, or at least in the evidence for it. Richard Price made this point: that the book is so concerned with demolishing an argument that it never gets round to saying what should be built in its stead.³ That I think is fair criticism. It is in response to it, in fact, that I shall be making some more constructive suggestions at the end of this chapter. But the argument itself, it seemed to me, was not very remarkable. It sought to build on and refine the researches of other scholars, especially MacKenzie, rather than in any way to undermine them; in much the same way as I shall be suggesting later in this paper its own arguments might be refined. It was certainly not dogmatic. It may have seemed to carry a ‘polemical and contentious edge’, which will have annoyed some readers (a couple of critics remarked on this). I now regret that. But I did not feel that the argument itself was essentially provocative. Why, then, did it so provoke?

*

There may have been extraneous reasons for this – reasons, that is, that had little to do with the argument of the book itself. These will be familiar to most historians working in this field. One was certainly politics. This is scarcely surprising, for two reasons: first, what was widely seen as the revival of ‘imperialism’ in the early twenty-first century, for example by the United States in Iraq, which made the whole question topical once again, in a way it had not seemed to be 20 or 30 years ago (though many of us would dispute that); and second, the rehabilitation of the older sort of imperialism by a number of historians, most notoriously Niall Ferguson,⁴ and also several politicians, including the Labour Prime Minister of the day and his Chancellor,⁵ again with a contemporary political motive: to bring an end to what was seen as the flagellation Britons had been inflicting on themselves for the evils of imperialism ever since the British Empire had come to its (formal) end, and to restore at least a degree of ‘pride’ in it. And of course this was not only a British phenomenon. At around the same time French schools were being instructed to treat France’s imperial history more ‘positively’;⁶ Japan was writing her colonial atrocities in northern China out of her textbooks;⁷ right-wing Americans were penning ‘patriotic’ histories of their country to counter the damage done by decades of dangerous self-criticism there;⁸ and in the far-away antipodes an almost comically rough-edged reactionary Prime Minister (John Howard) was inveighing against the ‘black armband’ view of colonial Australia’s treatment of her Aborigines that ‘Leftists’ had been foisting on her schools for the past 30 years.⁹ All this was bound to affect the reception of any new book on the subject of British imperialism at this time, however ‘academic’ it might present itself as being. The Absent-Minded Imperialists, possibly inevitably, was thought to be part of this trend.

The title probably did not help. Seeley’s dictum has often been misread, of course, to indicate that he believed the Empire had been acquired ‘absent-mindedly’: in fact he was making the opposite point. That error is pointed out early on in the book, but this could not stop certain people jumping to conclusions before then.¹⁰ What the book was supposed to be saying was that if Britain picked her Empire up ‘accidentally’, so to speak, she could not be ‘blamed’ for it. Even many of those who avoided this trap, however, persisted in seeing the book as exonerating or excusing imperialism in some way. This only seemed to be confirmed by its early reviews, most of which were glowing, but appeared in British ‘establishment’ papers like the Sunday Times and the (notoriously blimpish) Sunday Telegraph, or were written by old empire-sentimentalists like Jan Morris in the Observer (though Morris did admit, disarmingly, that she had not read the book properly).¹¹ Several hostile reviewers picked up on this. The book was supposed to be giving ‘comfort’ (MacKenzie’s word) to present-day political reactionaries. Burton even claimed that it would ‘likely be a balm, if not a full-fledged propaganda instrument’ for present-day Americans, which she believed to be dangerous in view of the ‘rampant Anglo-American imperialism’ that was going on then.¹² That seemed a heavy burden of guilt for an academic tome to bear.

The reason for it is a little difficult to understand. It could not have been that the book was thought to be defending the deeds of imperialism. No-one who read it could be under any illusions about that. Indeed, the point is repeatedly made there that the view that Britons at home took of the Empire was much rosier than the often sordid reality on the ground, which was how they were able to square it with what I argue was the more dominant ‘liberal’ domestic discourse of most of this period. The problem was slightly different. It was that the book appeared to exonerate a large slice of the British people from complicity in these deeds, by pleading either ignorance or ‘rosiness’ on their behalf; which was clearly thought to let them off too lightly for some people’s liking. Some critics clearly could not credit this: that so ‘great’ an empire as Britain’s could not have implicated almost every Briton. It seemed counter-intuitive. (On the other hand, if all we needed to do was intuit, we wouldn’t need scholarship.) Americans in particular, for whom Britain has usually been defined in imperial terms, for obvious historical reasons of their own, found this difficult to digest. Others suspected that if the British (or their progeny) were not willing to admit their guilt, it was for nefarious reasons. They were hiding their complicity; or maybe even celebrating it. It was not the crime, therefore, but the ‘cover-up’ that was the issue. That suspicion appears to have been widespread.

An extreme example of it (in a different but related context) is a passage by the Yale sociologist Paul Gilroy, in a book called After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004), which, in the course of arguing that imperialism was responsible for modern British racism, attacks the historian Linda Colley for daring to claim (in Captives, 2002) that the impact of the British Empire might have been more patchy than many people assumed. This of course is what The Absent-Minded Imperialists tried to do for the domestic scene; Colley however was referring to its effects on its subjects (or victims). She wrote:

In other contexts, however [that is, apart from the slave trade], the impact of empire was more uneven, sometimes very shallow and far more slow. Environments, economies, customs, power relations, and lives were sometimes devastated; but by no means always, because these intruders were frequently limited in number, and dependent often on a measure of indigenous tolerance.

Gilroy’s response to this:

These telling words illuminate a larger cultural problem. They encapsulate what has become a widespread desire – to allocate a large measure of blame for the Empire to its victims and then seek to usurp their honoured place of suffering, winning many immediate political and psychological benefits in the process. Much of this embarrassing sentiment is today held captive by an unhealthy and destructive postimperial hungering for renewed greatness.¹³

This is problematical – to put it mildly. Colley’s was a valid argument, supported by a great deal of evidence. Gilroy addressed neither the argument nor the evidence, but instead indulged in an ad hominem (feminem?) attack on her suspected motives, which he probably got wrong, but in any case is not the kind of argument that serious academics should ever descend to. But it illustrates the traps that lie in wait for any historian today who wishes to paint a nuanced picture of the imperial past.

In fact, anti-imperialists may do no service to their own cause by exaggerating the impact of British imperialism. In Gilroy’s case his comments can be seen as surprisingly Eurocentric and even ‘imperialist’: if they are meant to imply, for example, that Europe’s colonial ‘subjects’ had no more positive role in the colonial process than to ‘suffer’ it. That seems disparaging; and, more important, could not have been true. A more ‘nuanced’ historian would at least allow them some agency. On the British side, the dangers of overstating people’s complicity in the ‘crimes’ of imperialism are slightly different. It is certainly disparaging to those people: to believe that they were all (or nearly all) unthinkingly entrapped within a dominant discourse in this way. My view is less condescending; indeed, one perceptive commentator suggested that what I was really doing was apply a ‘subaltern studies’ approach to them.¹⁴ Secondly, there is of course no logical reason why one should want to implicate the whole of Britain in imperialism in order to deplore the latter’s effects; any more than one’s condemnation of Nazism needs to be affected by whether one takes Daniel Goldhagen’s view of the ordinary Germans’ involvement in it (‘Hitler’s willing executioners’), or the last Pope’s (‘a ring of criminals’).¹⁵ You can be an anti-imperialist without believing that every Briton was soaked in imperial gore, or is caked with the crust of it now that the Empire has gone. The two questions are different. (The logic behind blaming successor generations for these crimes is of course even weaker.) Of more practical importance, however, is that it could be a distraction. For the implication of the idea that ‘imperial’ or empire-related sentiment was ubiquitous at home must be the assumption that imperialism itself – that is, as policy abroad – is invariably supported by a distinctive imperialist culture; from which it could be held to follow that practical imperialism is unlikely or even impossible without such a culture – which my version of events in Britain suggests may not be true. My view is (broadly) that imperial policy invariably arises from material circumstances, which then, if it needs popular support at home (and remember, I claim that it did not in Britain’s case for most of the nineteenth century), gets that by appealing to other values and discourses, which could be (and were, I maintain, in Britain’s case) more dominant domestically than any essentially ‘imperialist’ one. Almost any value-system can be adapted and harnessed in this way: racism, masculinism, cultural arrogance and militarism certainly, but also race-egalitarianism, cultural relativism, liberalism, the ‘free market’ (or globalisation), humanitarianism, ideas of ‘progress’, socialism, even pacifism (the bigger an empire was, the fewer independent nations there were to go to war with one another) and anti-imperialism (America’s ‘liberation’ of the Philippines from Spain). This analysis may seem rather old-fashionedly radical (even Marxist) to some critics. It may also be wrong. But it is at least worth considering; not least because, if you are against imperial aggression, but believe it needs to be rooted in an imperial culture, you might well miss the signs of it creeping up on you if that – the ‘culture’ – is all you...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• I Empire and Imperialism
• II Imperial Wars
• III Imperialists
• IV The Empire at Home
• V The End of Empire and After
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Where I Come From
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Further Reading