Bagehot's notebook

British politics

The British Empire

A new take on the British Empire

Sep 2nd 2011, 11:44 by Bagehot

KWASI Kwarteng, elected in 2010 as the Conservative MP for the safe seat of Spelthorne, is by common consent a rising star of the right. His CV bears academic distinctions in the same way that a Russian general's chest bears medals: scholar at Eton, good degree then a history PhD at Cambridge, Kennedy scholar at Harvard, even a place on the college team that won University Challenge, a brainy television show. He has positioned himself on the crunchy right of the new intake, and is co-editing a book to come out soon setting out a new vision for the right, with a title that amounts to the slapping down of a gauntlet, "After the Coalition". The left of centre Observer, in a very friendly profile, notes that he is tipped to be the "first black Tory cabinet minister", a tiresome millstone of a prediction that must dismay as much as it cheers, I'd have thought.

Before his policy book, though, Mr Kwarteng has just published a work of history, "Ghosts of Empire", which is less a conventional history of imperial rule than a biography of the men (and a few women) who built the empire: an ambitious, often hard-driving caste of minor grandees, younger sons, clergymen's offspring, middle class strivers and (often) oddballs who—far from their theoretical masters in Whitehall—ran vast tracts of foreign territory more or less as they pleased.

A truly ambitious Tory MP might be tempted to join the recent revisionist chorus of historians arguing that the British Empire was essentially a Good Thing, and a marvellous vehicle for promoting democracy and liberal free trade. Mr Kwarteng promises in the opening of his book that he is not about to take sides in what he calls the rather sterile debate about whether the empire was good or bad.

I think he breaks that promise, and have written a review to that effect in the latest print edition. The nub of his argument is that—after wading through reams and reams of old colonial office memorandums, papers and letters in the British national archives, and poring through shelf-loads of long-forgotten memoirs—he finds that the old imperial elite damned itself in its own words. There was no liberal master plan, or democratic ideal at work. Instead, he finds an empire run by free-traders and protectionists, good men of missionary bent, bad men of missionary bent, philanthropists, racists, sadists, commercial visionaries, crooks, wise and gentle scholars, snobs and nutcases. And crucially, the "anarchic individualism" of the empire allowed them all pretty full rein. That was not a flaw of the system, Mr Kwarteng argues, it was the system. He traces how policy could be reversed and re-reversed by the arrival of a new colonial governor or political secretary. He examines, convincingly, how some thorny geopolitical crises, from Sudan to Kashmir, have their roots in decisions taken by British colonialists, often in some haste or in response to personal prejudice or self-interest.

I found the book pretty damning. Interestingly, it is clearly more of a Rorschach blot that I realised, because shortly after filing my review to the books editor, I read in the Daily Telegraph a review by Charles Moore that finds that on balance:

his book proves how snobbery can be a good way of keeping order without violence. The Indian princes were gripped by how many guns each was allowed in their salutes. General Wavell invented the mnemonic, Hot Kippers Make Good Breakfast, to remind himself of the precedence – Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior, Baroda. These five alone were entitled to 21 guns.

The immensely rich Hong Kong middleman, Robert Hotung, was knighted in 1915. But he fretted for a grander order of knighthood, and wrote to the King's private secretary in 1927 a long letter demanding a KCMG. He had to wait another 28 years, by which time he was 92, to be made a KCB. The power of the mother country to bestow and withhold marks of favour was useful

Though I agree with Mr Moore that Mr Kwarteng is too harsh on the last governor of Hong Kong, the politician Chris Patten. "Ghosts of Empire" criticises Mr Patten for his 11th hour move to extend something close to a universal franchise for elections to Hong Kong's Legislative Council, and gives much space to a brilliant, learned but dessicated Foreign Office Sinologist, Sir Percy Cradock. Sir Percy accused Mr Patten of "inexcusable self-indulgence" for defying the Chinese government in Beijing, two years before Hong Kong was to be handed over to them, when Mr Patten knew he was leaving in the royal yacht, leaving the people of Hong Kong behind to face the consequences.

Mr Kwarteng notes that the Chinese simply dissolved the LegCo elected under the Patten rules, and then held new elections under the old, colonial rules that packed the place with establishment-friendly types chosen by business and professional lobbies. He thus writes of Governor Patten:

His friends argued that he had brought democracy to Hong Kong; his detractors thought it was a pointless and futile gesture. In terms of what actually happened, his detractors were proved right.

Mr Moore argues:

What he forgets is that the Governor's duty, ex officio, was not to the British government but to Hong Kong. Patten did right to try to entrench more rights for Hong Kong people, making it harder for China to trample all over everyone after 1997

And Mr Moore is right. Mr Kwarteng is correct that when it comes to changing the LegCo election rules, Mr Patten's efforts were futile. But they were not pointless. Given the chance, the Hong Kong public showed Beijing (and perhaps most importantly) themselves that they strongly supported democratic parties, and were not simply a collection of worker ants, only interested in money and getting rich (the common charge levelled by drawling tycoons in their company junks, or at the bar of the Mandarin hotel).

That experience, and the experience of a governor who behaved like a modern politician in his openness to the media, or in his willingness to meet and debate with ordinary voters, left a legacy, long after Mr Patten sailed away on the Royal Yacht Britannia. You can see it in the way that the people of Hong Kong chafed under the aloof, out-of-touch shipping magnate chosen to be Beijing's first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa. You can see it in the way that Hong Kongers essentially rebelled against a troubling internal security law which democratic activists said would have given the authorities the right to crack down on vaguely-defined "subversion", eventually causing Beijing to back down.

Anyway, that is probably enough detail about Hong Kong in a blog about British politics. Apologies. Here is my review:

IN MODERN Britain, it is bad form to speak too highly of the British empire. Yet beneath such squeamishness, an undercurrent of relative pride still pulses, defiantly. Of course, today’s educated Briton murmurs, the empire was wrong. But at least the British learned the languages, schooled the sons of native chiefs and tried to do some good, didn’t they? Surely, other imperialists were worse, the British tell themselves: those savage Germans or outright villains such as King Leopold II, running the Congo not as a Belgian colony but his own private property, unaccountable to any parliament back home?

A new work by Kwasi Kwarteng, a bright young Cambridge-trained historian (and rising political star of the right since his recent election as a Conservative member of Parliament), purports not to take sides in what he languidly terms this “rather sterile debate” about whether the British empire was a good or a bad thing. He explains that his intention is to recapture the world view of the men (and a sprinkling of fearless, extraordinary women) who shaped and ran the empire, with the aim of teasing out the imperial roots of some of today’s thornier geopolitical puzzles, from Kashmir to Myanmar or Sudan.

Mr Kwarteng’s ambitions are only partly achieved. His book is a successful and convincing biography of the empire’s ruling elites and their modern-day legacies. Where it promises neutrality, it fails.

Ghostly ranks of imperial warriors, administrators and diplomats stand exposed and damned by their own memoirs and memoranda to London, and by their carefully minuted actions. Time and again, these “men on the spot” are observed taking decisions for reasons of caprice, snobbery, cynicism or—in the case of the British police chief obsessed with photographing the exact moment a bullet punctured the skin of Burmese rebels sentenced to death—something bordering insanity.

Still more damningly, Mr Kwarteng concludes that the arbitrary, individualistic nature of so much imperial decision-making was not a weakness of the system, but the system itself. There was no “master plan”, he writes at one point, after observing how policy could be reversed by the appointment of a single colonial governor, or even by the lobbying of energetic mavericks, such as Gertrude Bell, an Arabist caught exulting “We’ve got our King crowned” in a letter home after planting a Hashemite prince, Faisal, on the newly invented throne of Iraq.

Wicked King Leopold looks less of an outlier after a while. If his Congo was a personal fief, the British empire stands revealed as a scarcely more representative oligarchy, organised on avowedly “aristocratic” lines by a clique of white men on the make. In theory, Whitehall officials and ministers back in London oversaw the empire. In practice, professional imperialists ruled through a caste system alien to anything seen at home.

In Sudan, a notably snobbish spot, one-third of all colonial political officers were the sons of clergymen and half of those recruited between 1902 and 1914 had a “Blue” (a sporting distinction) from Oxford or Cambridge, leading to the quip that Sudan was a land of “Blacks ruled by Blues”. In the 1930s, only officials able to play polo could hope for advancement in the Sudanese province of Darfur: in the same period, Darfur had just one primary school. In 1916, Mr Kwarteng notes, David Lloyd George, the humble son of a Welsh Baptist minister, could become Britain’s prime minister, but would have stood no chance of being governor of colonial Nigeria.

Men from the same narrow, middle-class band of society crafted oligarchies with the British crown at the top and, at the bottom, a tier of native chiefs, maharajahs and princelings granted wide and autocratic powers over their own peoples. They then inserted themselves in between as viceroys, governors and pith-helmeted district commissioners: raised to a form of quasi-aristocracy by their race and education. The same colonial officials who liked sporting, Harrow-educated native princes actively disliked educated Africans and Asians, above all those shifty, resentful urban “examination passers” who made it to British universities or law schools. I suppose we felt the local intellectuals were aiming to take our place, Sir James Robertson, a former Sudan official candidly reflected, years later.

When the British scrambled for the exits, lingering chaos was often the result of this hearty ad-hoccery, Mr Kwarteng sadly concludes. It is a surprising moral for an ambitious young Tory politician to draw. Pop-psychology is always dangerous, but Mr Kwarteng is himself quite the examination passer, the son of successful Ghanaian émigrés who became a star scholar at Eton. That tension is the making of the book: it reads like the guide of an outsider who is also an insider. Witty and cool, it is immune to nostalgia, and in the end rather angry. That anger is to its author’s credit.

Readers' comments

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great uncle clive

You're getting mystifying again, Doug

You know how I go on... and on... about a homemaker allowance... always forced to explain myself

In the big picture... the corporations want to exploit women for their labour potential... They can't give a toot about personal fulfillment, homes or society... The corporations want men and women clawing at each others' throats... They don't want us co-operating... and Feminism is music to the corporate ear!

And the Feminist agenda was pushed through on the basis that the breadwinner and homemaker marriage was an unacceptable aberration... not to be encouraged or acknowledged even... even The Economist will allow no allusion to the efficiencies of the single-income marriage

(I should hate to be accused on ingratitude, Bagehot... After forty years of being bottled up, I really appreciate the freedom of expression these blogs allow... )

The nano-second the breadwinner and homemaker marriage is acknowledged, Feminism fall flat... Women as singles and second-wage earners cannot expect the jobs and wages that belong to men as breadwinners with wives and families to support... That's double-dipping... and asking for a free ride

I guarantee you, Doug... I feel like a Hindu in the British Empire... in the face of the crushing might of the supra-national financial corporations... How is anyone to explain the bleedin obvious?!

Does that communicate, Bagehot?... Does that come across?... To think is to communicate... If I'm not communicating, I'm not thinking... Can what I've just said be allowed to stand?

Doug Pascover

See, now, here's the thing, Clive. You are assuming that you have to explain yourself because you are white and Christian. I assume you have to explain yourself because the decision is a political one and the right outcome unclear.

To provide a counter-example, I am fiercely opposed to regular season interleague play in Baseball and I regularly have to explain myself. I don't think I'm asked to explain myself because of my race or my religion, but because people wonder why I'm still harping on about it a decade later. Actually, now that I think about, I'm not sure I'm ever asked to explain myself.

But here's the thing...

great uncle clive

Doug... That was one of your few posts I didn't find... well... mystifying...

As an example of having to explain ourselves to our rulers... How about having to explain why Turkey shouldn't be in Europe?

To appearances... our economic rulers, the supra-national corporations... who attach zero value to silly old European civilisation... want Turkey in Europe regardless of the consequences

And the Europeans are forced onto the defensive... having to explain what it means to be one of the family... to be under your guard

Almost the essence of British rule in India was... we were under their guard... we could swipe at them with impunity, while they couldn't take a swipe at us without hurting themselves

Government by trouble-makers in a position to try one on... That's the horror of colonialism

methil

Taking a holistic view of Colonialism,I feel that that the British Empire has done a fairly good job.Compare it to the French,Dutch,Portuguese,Belgian and other Western colonial powers,and the differences are very striking.There is no doubt that the motive for "Empire" was self interest,and a lot of harmful things were done to the subjects of Empire.But the British have left their former dependencies with a modicum of self reliance.This was not the case with other Western Colonists who left their "Empire" in total disarray.In fact the British Empire has brought several countries from a medieval situation into more modern nations.I suppose this sort of modernization is part of all types of colonisation whether it it is political,financial or whatever.

Doug Pascover

Clive, are you sure? I can't remember the last time I was asked to explain myself to a ruler. It's mainly fellow blog commenters who find me mystifying and other people at church.

chinachip

It was, is, and will be all just stepping stones towards one world with one efficient, functional, probably win-win, and probably happy dream far in the distant future, long after we are all dead. Why not get with the forward looking plan a little as opposed to always looking back at all those ancient plans of yore looooong before you were born? You chicken? I suggest a sentence or two stuck in here and there as such every now and then would be a good thang. Think Clive et al and gang realized their great gift to the world would be ESL courses, etc? (English as a Second Language)
;-)

;-)

great uncle clive

Yes, bampbs... Many a true word is spoken in jest... I too have always been impressed with that crack about the British Empire being won in a fit of absence of mind... Certainly in India, we were drawn into the vacuum created by the collapse of Moghul power assuming willy-nilly a role we had no right to... The same Brits doing the same things in the 1730's as in the 1690's... but in 1690 we were honest while by 1740 we were shysters... We didn't change... The line moved... One moment we were on the lawful side of the line... the next moment we were an unlawful occupying foreign elite... The guest had become the master of the house

And the collapse of Protestantism in the 1960's opened a vacuum in western civilisation into which foreign supra-national corporations similarly are being drawn... assuming a role they have no right to

Bagehot... Will you indulge me while I pursue this line of thinking... I appreciate it's cutting pretty close to the bone

The so-called 'new world order' is just old world colonialism lightly warmed over... And the native white christians are being kicked around like the Hindus in India... always in the wrong... always blamed... always having to explain ourselves to our rulers

And ultimately... the mess is due to our lack of any core belief comparable with the protestant work ethic

This may sound weird, Bagehot... but you said you always read our comments, no matter how deranged... so you must know I keep pushing for a homemaker allowance... which in my hyper-moments I see as a way of defining the core of western middle-class civilisation... as a way of filling the void created by the collapse of protestantism... and stopping this drift into mortgage peonage and economic servitude

I crave your indulgence, Bagehot

Stephen Morris

That’s (at least) two Rorschach blots in a fortnight.

The Rorschach blot seems to be evolving into that most valuable of rhetorical weapons: The Universal Rebuttal, a supercilious way of dismissing any argument which might threaten the writer’s own comfortable beliefs.

KPATOΣ

It is not made clear why the author wrote his book though one may assume he was interested in the subject matter and in need of a PhD for his further advancement. Did he set out, despite protestations, to make or strongly imply judgments. Again, not clear.

Allow me to suggest that there is one overarching judgment that can be made about the British Empire's net merits and demerits apart from happy accidents like the fact that so many people have learned the language which America made sure would be the most important one in the world. It is that Great Britain represented, on balance, the best state of civilisation that could have predominated in any imperial country at the time when it was powerful. The fact that British middle class virtues (including the influence of all those families of clergy, not least the evangelicals) were protected by the Channel, North Sea, Atlantic and the Royal Navy was undoubtedly important for a couple of hundred years or more. Americans had the same advantages but a manifiest destiny to provide for vast immigration at the expense of the Native Americans and Latinos and, of course, the little problem of slavery to confuse their minds (on the whole they didn't do as badly in the Phillipines as they might have - and did where they didn't actually rule as in Latin America). The Russians weren't even in the same contest and the Japanese demonstrated from the 1930s, if not in Korea earlier, that their traditions didn't make them the ideal imperialists. So.....

Given that imperialism was, before birth control reined in the natural consequences of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, almost part of the order of nature it was fortunate that it was Britain which was the leading imperial country. Putting and end to suttee, policing the end of the Atlantic slave trade and setting one precedent after another for self-government are amongst some of the signs of its strictly relative beneficence.

Sherbrooke

Let me confess: I'm a big fan of Somerset Maugham, in particular - his colonial novels. I also have to admit that I read extensively the stories in that time setting, most notably - South Sea Tales by Jack London. I also read quite a bit about contemporary life in the dominions, like Canada or Australia, which, I think, would be somewhere in between the life in UK and the life in colonies.

To be fair, I think there's too much empire bashing, in particularly - today, when we can see what sort of a mess places like Africa became.

It is true that general lack of accountability created a problem thorugh the empire. However, that would be incorrect to say that there were no accountability whatsoever; besides, the British standard was pretty high no matter how you slice it. It is also true that a lot of offices in the empire operated essentially as white boys club; however, in some cases this was a blessing in disguise, since in a lot of places the relative colour blindness of white boys actually resolved conflicts, as they served as outside intermediates actually free of internal local prejudices. Racism is not always white, and in more than one instance it's a lot worse elsewhere, you know. Fur traders of the Hudson Bay Company actually helped ending many local wars; plus, it is often European diseases (most notably - smallpox, which was endemic in Europe, and to which Europeans have much better resistance than anyone else) that devastated the countries, not the action of European settlers.

Besides, a lot of empire-bashing comes from the post-war times that generally thought that states should be relatively self-sufficient. What was done by European colonists is hardly different from today: just like back then major European corporations set up shops offshore to do stuff like mining and plantation, today's corporations set up shops to make cheap sneakers. And, don't get me wrong, these days most countries are ran on personal income tax, not corporate income tax.

Currently, we have truckload of populist one-party states that actually make sure that nobody else from the state outside of the ruling clan could take the power. In empire, there was an alternative: incompetent rulers could be removed, and there was a rotation of people. Jesus, I think that in more than one case getting rid of the state administration and putting the British in charge would be a better option!

DAULATRAM

Alas, Kwarteng is nointellect. Just a cheap Tory exam-stuffed battery hen.

These "black" wunderkind are always the same. All alike and all trash, as Tolstoy observed of zsome snobs he knew.

One reader on the Daily Telegrapgh site catches the worthlessness of Kwasi well:

"The simple truth is that like most long-lived regimes, the British Vampire did both some good and immense evil.

Killed about 30 million Indians in famines - the last overseen by Churchill on a scale that would make Hitler blush with envy.

But also united India.

Ruthlessly pillaged Africa, but also turned it into governable bits.

Enriched the UK with inestimable wealth and left Zambia with 4 secondary schools.

Left India with less literacy than when it began.

Go celebrate, Kwarteng."

bampbs

"We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind."

- Sir John Seeley

A J Maher

It isn't clear from this review what Mr. Kwarteng was angry about.

The usual reason for anger is the sheer and wanton injustice embedded in the conquest, occupation and exploitation of colonies by the imperial power. But this isn't mentioned in the review.

Instead we are offered snobbery, lack of system, over mighty local commissioners versus a weak and underpowered central authority, lack of ideology, futility etc.

Snobbery - both social and intellectual is an operating ideology. It even exhibits sufficient consistency across it's many practitioners to qualify it as being systematic. Similarly a high (if unwarranted)degree of self confidence, even complacency, probably made these colonial officials more independent of direct authority than would otherwise be the case. But the rules of the club were the same from Bengal to Bulawayo. The official "type" was remarkably consistent whilst the laws, administrative divisions and processes were virtually identical.

Futility is surely a feature of government as a general human enterprise rather than a particular characteristic of these colonial Sahib's, Effendi's, Tuan's and Bwana's. What is astounding is the sheer futility of a handful of colonial officials attempting to administer such vast and alien territories in the first place.

To me the amazing thing is not that the British Empire was governed in this casual way by a tiny and self regarding caste - but that it was governed at all!....

pool1745

'Instead, he finds an empire run by free-traders and protectionists, good men of missionary bent, bad men of missionary bent, philanthropists, racists, sadists, commercial visionaries, crooks, wise and gentle scholars, snobs and nutcases.'

The above largely applies to many, if not most, of those who have run their countries since independence from Britain. I suppose it may be a benefit to be pillaged by ones own countrymen, as opposed to colonials.

This type of book is typical of much shallow historical analysis which judges those of the past, by the standards of today. Rather like a drama set in the 40s which pretends that smoking did not exist then. People should be judged by the standards and morals of the times in which they lived. Of course there were people on the make in the Empire, but there were many who genuinely believed they were doing good. Just like everywhere today, except that the standard of what is acceptable has changed.

FFScotland

I think Chris Patten basically had the correct approach, although he could have been more circumspect in confronting the Chinese Government. More importantly, I believe the people of Hong Kong agree with this assessment, including the caveat.

Chris Patten approached his governorship as a politician rather than an administrator, which resulted in his approval ratings being rather higher than the two chief executives that followed him.

About Bagehot's notebook

In this blog, our Bagehot columnist surveys the politics of Britain, British life and Britain's place in the world. The column and blog are named after Walter Bagehot, an English journalist who was the editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1877

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