The British Empire

A History and a Debate

Jeremy Black

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317039877
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 19th Century History

What was the course and consequence of the British Empire? The rights and wrongs, strengths and weaknesses of empire are a major topic in global history, and deservedly so. Focusing on the most prominent and wide-ranging empire in world history, the British empire, Jeremy Black provides not only a history of that empire, but also a perspective from which to consider the issues of its strengths and weaknesses, and rights and wrongs. In short, this is history both of the past, and of the present-day discussion of the past, that recognises that discussion over historical empires is in part a reflection of the consideration of contemporary states. In this book Professor Black weaves together an overview of the British Empire across the centuries, with a considered commentary on both the public historiography of empire and the politically-charged character of much discussion of it. There is a coverage here of social as well as political and economic dimensions of empire, and both the British perspective and that of the colonies is considered. The chronological dimension is set by the need to consider not only imperial expansion by the British state, but also the history of Britain within an imperial context. As such, this is a story of empires within the British Isles, Europe, and, later, world-wide. The book addresses global decline, decolonisation, and the complex nature of post-colonialism and different imperial activity in modern and contemporary history. Taking a revisionist approach, there is no automatic assumption that imperialism, empire and colonialism were 'bad' things. Instead, there is a dispassionate and evidence-based evaluation of the British empire as a form of government, an economic system, and a method of engagement with the world, one with both faults and benefits for the metropole and the colony.

Chapter 1
Debating Empire

This is a call to reject a slavish adherence to fashion, to recognise the complexity of Britain’s imperial past, and to avoid being ahistorical in passing judgement on it. History is both the past and the accounts in the present we provide about it. Empire and notably Britain’s imperial past, have been very much affected by this interaction. Much of the modern popular discussion of empire, and part of its academic construction, especially by some scholars of colonial literature, rest on a criticism of empire and imperialism, these generally equated with rule by foreign powers, as inherently undesirable and therefore unnatural. Indeed, the very word empire has been demonised, and both across the political spectrum and with reference to popular culture. It is no coincidence that the Star Wars films chose ‘the Empire’ as the enemy, or that Ronald Reagan stigmatised the Soviet Union in 1983 as an empire. Empire is at once a term of abuse, or, at least, criticism, as well as a means of analysis, and the same is true for related words such as imperial. In contrast, supporters of empire, past and present, have often shied away from the term imperialism.

This situation makes discussion of empire difficult, and that is compounded by the apparent need to adopt a position on the British empire, in other words a single position. To do so, however, is not only to risk adopting anachronistic and ahistorical criteria, but also to look at a situation that lasted for many hundreds of years and is therefore difficult to treat as a single and unchanging unit or as a simple process. That, obviously, is not the case. Instead, it is the shifting character of what is discussed that is most apparent, that character, moreover, reflecting changes in the imperial metropole, in the colonies, and in the context provided by developments elsewhere.

Aside from disagreements in assessing these changes and their interaction, they engage the sympathy of commentators in very different fashions. In part, there is the problem that this response comes to the fore. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be favourable to empire, although not invariably so; today, the situation is the opposite. In each case, the opinions of those who were/are outside the mainstream are of particular interest, but the normal view is more apparent and instructive. It is unclear, however, why present-day criticism of empire should automatically command more approval than nineteenth-century support for empire.

Imperialism, today, is frequently presented, explicitly or implicitly, in Britain and across the world, as a pathology of power and as an anachronistic and redundant state in human development, each apparently helping to define the other. Because the British empire was the largest in world history, its purpose and reputation have proved topics of particular attention, indeed criticism, if not condemnation. This criticism is crucial to the foundation accounts and, therefore, public histories of many of the countries of the world. Indeed, linked to this, much of the debate about empire involves a contemporary struggle for dominance. One side, which sees itself as progressive, uses the history of empire in order to deny the moral legitimacy of its real or apparent opponents. That approach imposes a highly presentist view of history that is not historical at all. It is not only politics that is at stake. A strand of the current discussion of the British empire is essentially neo-Whiggish, with present commentators showing every bit as clear a sense of their own judgement as the Whig commentators of the past; only with human rights, transnationalism, and diversity all replacing the older values of constitutional liberal democracy and nationalist self-determination as both goal and means. More generally, there is a widespread tendency to see the present as considerably more moral than the past, and to write as if it is necessary to condemn the actions and beliefs of those who have gone before them.

The scholarly discussion of the imperial past is deeply grounded in the archives and in an understanding of the cultural mores and ideological precepts of the past. That does not preclude value judgements, but they tend to be measured.¹ This scholarly approach, however, does not dominate public attention. Instead, the latter has been, and is, affected by views and images that are more clear cut. At times, the theme has been one of imperial nostalgia. Lagaan (2001), an ahistorical Indian film with the most important Bollywood actors, set at the end of the nineteenth century, deals with taxation and a cricket match for which the stake is the taxes due. In the match, the Indian peasant team beats a team of British officers. The British are bad chaps, but not too bad; rather, they are somewhat comical. Nevertheless, in recent decades, the general note, both in popular works and on film, has frequently been more critical. The tone has often been strident. To give an example, one that can be readily duplicated in the ‘history wars’ to which empire has given rise, Richard Gott, the author of Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (2011), in essence an account of 1755–1858, declared:

Throughout the period of the British Empire, the British were for the most part loathed and despised by those they colonised … Resistance, revolt and rebellion was a permanent fact of empire, and the imperial power, endlessly challenged, was tireless in its repression.²

In practice, resistance in any given colony was not a permanent feature. Comparison in Gott’s book with Attila the Hun (c.406–53), who, while wide-ranging in his campaigning and devastation, scarcely created a lasting empire nor one with any positive features, did not apparently suffice, and the text,³ back cover and catalogue copy of the book, was happy to rank the leaders of the British empire alongside Adolf Hitler, a highly inappropriate comparison:

This revelatory new history punctures the widely held belief that the British Empire was an imaginative and civilizing enterprise. Instead, Britain’s Empire reveals a history of systemic repression and almost perpetual violence, showing how British rule was imposed as a military operation and maintained as a military dictatorship. For colonized peoples, the experience was a horrific one, of slavery, famine, battle and extermination … the British Empire provided a blueprint for the annihilation of peoples in twentieth-century Europe, and argues that its leaders must rank alongside the dictators of the twentieth century as authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale.⁴

Gott, himself a former Latin America correspondent and features editor for The Guardian, is the somewhat partisan author of works on Cuban history and Hugo Chávez, the left-wing authoritarian President of Venezuela from 1999 to 2013, and therefore has a committed position on American imperialism. It is interesting to note that the London publisher Verso, which claims to ‘challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital’, brought out, at the same time, an attack on capitalism and the ‘imperialist-dominated Kyoto regime’ in the Planet or Death: Climate Justice Versus Climate Change by Evo Morales, President of Bolivia. This comment is made not to suggest a conspiracy theory, but, rather, to imply an agenda.

Gott’s book, ironically, had on the book cover (and in the catalogue) illustrations relating to the British conflict with Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782–99), which led, finally, to the overthrow of the latter in 1799 with the storming of his capital, Seringapatam. Tipu is a longstanding symbol of resistance to imperialism, but both he and his father, Haidar Ali, a soldier of fortune who took over the territory of Mysore in 1761, were also Muslim imperialists whose brutal expansion was a cause of great instability in southern India. Gott, however, was not really interested in contextualising British or Western imperialism in terms of a wider pattern of such rule across history and the world.⁵ Nor was he concerned with the widespread discussion of the ‘middle ground’ of empire, the practice of relations that were not simply those of conquest.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (2011) by the Conservative MP Kwasi Kwarteng was far less strident. Nevertheless, he argued that the empire was poorly run (which, in practice, is the case with most government), and that the malign consequences are still apparent today. Kwarteng’s focus on Iraq, Nigeria, Burma, Sudan, and Kashmir, however, again produced a somewhat slanted view, as British rule in all of them was short lived, and notably so in Iraq. None of Kwarteng’s choices, moreover, comprised settler colonies. To a varying degree, these colonies were characterised by the harsh, sometimes murderous, treatment of the indigenous populations. Nevertheless, the former settler colonies can be regarded as a vindication of the hopes of imperialists. If imperialism is to be judged by legacies, some of which are very bleak, it is appropriate to note that, alongside the grim fate of the indigenous populations, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have become highly successful countries. That, however, was not the case for many other colonies. Kwarteng again lacked much wider contextualisation in terms of other empires.

There were also popular histories on the Right that offered problematic accounts. In particular, Niall Ferguson’s celebration of the empire as ‘Anglobalisation’⁶ was, at times, as presentist and simplistic as some approaches on the Left. The right-wing approach to Britain’s recent imperial history is amplified by the range of books on Churchill, most of which are favourable.

The thesis of this book is that there is a need, as part of the public debate, to contest what may be seen as the ‘politically correct’ version of British empire history and to offer a narrative of the empire that will have greater complexity and that will avoid a simplistic moral condemnation of the past. In doing so, there is no intention to overlook the extent to which violence was involved both in imperial expansion and as a systematic and integral instrument of British imperial government. However, that imperial rule does not match current understandings of how human beings ought to organise themselves has been, and is, read back, in popular accounts of the past that very much offer the present as both superior and a frame of judgemental reference. This owes much to the extent to which the modern treatment of human and state development towards the present is largely focused, not on the role of empires, but, instead, on self-determination, democracy, and human rights. The last is understood in a collective as well as an individual fashion, and with this collective character being particularly clearly expressed in, and through, self-determination and democracy. During the 1950s and 1960s, anti-colonialists made use of the language of human rights to advance their central demands of self-determination and racial equality, and even to redefine human rights according to anti-colonial principles; although more in international forums (most obviously the United Nations) than domestically.

In contrast, as a reflection of the justifications of power, by the 1970s newly independent African and Asian states were increasingly apt to discredit what was called Westminster-style parliamentary democracy as an expression of Western imperialist and neo-colonial designs. As a result, they were able to rebut foreign criticism of an authoritarianism that was sometimes more marked than that of colonial powers. This pattern continues to this day, with the criticism more commonly focused on the application of human rights legislation. Thus, in 2013–14, there was African criticism about the International Criminal Court at The Hague, notably as it sought to prosecute senior Kenyan politicians, such as Uhuru Kenyatta, for murderous electoral violence at the time of the presidential election of 2007. There was a cruel irony that this rejection of international jurisdiction by Kenya took place at the same time that the British courts and press were used, and more successfully, to pursue claims for redress arising from the brutal treatment of Kenyans during the Mau Mau insurrection against British imperial rule in the 1950s.

As a consequence of the emphasis on self-determination, indeed of the present politics of knowledge, imperialism appears as an undesirable ‘other’, an intrusion and interference on the history of peoples, and a stage that had to be overcome to reach the present and/or a desired future. The Hegelian–Marxist tradition of analysis in terms of thesis and antithesis ensures that this theme of overcoming is presented as necessarily involving strife and struggle, and thus as entailing the overthrow of empires. More specifically, imperialism is not only seen as ending self-determination by ensuring foreign rule. It is also presented as compromising internal liberties, either explicitly or implicitly, not only in colonies but also in imperial metropoles or homelands, and as creating a false superiority/inferiority between ‘equal’ peoples, and thus as blocking democracy and appropriate development. In addition, imperialism serves for many critics as an equivalent to, or surrogate for, capitalism, and, indeed, is commonly treated as a particularly brutal and coercive aspect of capitalism. Appropriation is a key term for critics of imperial rule.

The undesirable character of imperialism is taken further as a result of the foundation or origin-accounts of many states, governments, political movements, and social and cultural tendencies. These bodies frequently present themselves, and assert their legitimacy, in terms of the overthrow of alien imperial control; alien and imperial being seen as conditions of each other. The necessity of overthrow becomes an explanation of past, present, and future, at once teleological and self-serving. It is very attractive for countries to have a heroic foundation born from self-liberation, the pattern seen with the USA. A gender dimension is added, and has been so increasingly in recent decades, by arguing that imperialism is quintessentially a form of aggressive and dangerous masculinity, and notably one that ravishes the colonised.⁷ Such attitudes are then looked for in imperial conduct and attitudes.

Blaming imperial rule served, and serves, a variety of intellectual and political strategies. Within former imperial metropoles, such as Britain, for example, it can be employed to try to integrate immigrant communities as part of a rejection of a past. This rejection plays a related role in stigmatising aspects of the present that are undesirable: thus opposition to imperialism is used to characterise and condemn racialism, while racialism is held to characterise, and thus to condemn, imperialism. In practice, imperialism was about far more than racialism, and many racists, moreover, operated, and operate, in non-imperial contexts. A similar point can be made about imperialism and slavery.

At the global level, criticism of empires serves a similar purpose to that within specific states. It is employed in order to try to transform, or at least ease, political relations between one-time imperial powers and colonies, notably as an aspect of an explicit or implicit truth and reconciliation process. Specific political strategies build on a longer-lasting hostility to imperialism as a process that supposedly distorted both the imperialists and the colonists, and, in doing so, represented the full toxicity of imperial rule. Each of these views also represents a rejection of the one-time culture of imperialism. Thus, the debate over imperialism constitutes a prime instance of what is otherwise termed culture wars or history wars.⁸

Anti-imperial origin-accounts are the case not only for the states in the Third World that replaced European colonies after 1945, particularly India, which became independent from Britain in 1947, but also for other groups of countries. These include those countries in the Americas, from the USA to Chile, that, between 1775 and 1825, defeated attempts to maintain European imperial rule; and the nations that, in 1989–91, won independence as a result of the overthrow of Communist power in Eastern Europe (1989) and the collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia. This list, which can be extended, capture...