Imperial sickness
J. ENOCH POWELL
The Fall of the British Empire 1918-1968 Colin Cross (Hodder and Stoughton 55s) The British Empire was an historical accident, a by-product of the first contacts between the vigorous people of Europe and the remainder of the world. The surprising thing is less that the British Empire fell than that it ever arose and could ever have seemed to be stable.'
'The Empire was irrelevant to much of the reality of British life, and energies were free for things which in the long run were to matter more. The British Empire did not adulterate the basic character nor even the basic economy of the imperial people.'
'The imperial concept itself hardly existed before the 1890s.'
I have taken these three statements from the end and frbm near the beginning of Colin Cross's new book. To think that if those three statements were thoroughly digested and assimilated by the British of today—no, by the British politicians of today —this country would be well on the way to recovery from 'the English sickness'! One feels like a doctor sitting in the middle of an epidemic with the sovereign vaccine on his shelves, and the popu- lation will not take it. Here are highly intelligent and patriotic British politicians who in 1968 talk about 'helping to preserve stability' in the Far East with a garrison in Singapore, and who believe, what is more, that votes would be lost if they did not talk so. Why can they not see that it would be no more preposterous if Chinese or Japanese politicians talked about preserving stability in Europe with a garrison in Gibraltar?
The reason why, and (pray Heaven) the cure, is to be found in the story itself of that 'historical accident' and of the 'imperial con- cept' which 'hardly existed before the 1890s.' How the gigantic improbability, which actually occurred for a generation or two, produced a correspondingly gigantic hallucination in the minds of the inhabitants of this group of North Atlantic islands, whereby they are apparently incapable to this day of seeing the outside world except through the windows of that delusion, needs to be told, and told again. The improbability of the empire, and the swift inevitability of its disappearance: these are the two halves of the story, and Colin Cross has written the second half, taking V-Day 1918 as the starting point.
He has made a remarkable success of the job in 350 pages. It meant covering that most inaccessible period, our own lifetime, in areas as diverse and complex as India, the Crown Colonies, Africa, the West Indies, the Middle East, with few of which any one writer can have direct personal contact and in all of which he is bound to be. dependent on secondary, not to say tertiary, sources. Judging by those parts which I can test from per- sonal knowledge, the standard of accuracy and —at least as important—of 'feel' is excep- tionally high. For someone who was only nineteen in 1947 to give an instantly recognis- able picture of the psychology of the British Raj in India encourages the hope that, after all, it might be possible for future generations to believe that it happened and to have an idea what it was like.
The emphasis upon India, both in bulk and in content, is wholly rigfit. The key insight into the history of the British empire, and into the persistent imperial hallucination of the British politician, is to grasp the central im- portance of the two-hundred-year-long link be- tween Britain and India. It was for the sake of India, or rather of the supposed necessities of that link with India, that literally every other British possession in the Old World was ac- quired and maintained. Only late in the day did Joseph Chamberlain and his contemporaries interpret the resulting assemblage as a world- wide empire, outfacing the K-und-K empires of the Continent. So the psychoanalysis through which lies the cure for Britain's sick- ness has to be twofold : first, we must identify and overcome the mythology of the late Vic- toria, empire; then, we must penetrate to deeper levels and eradicate the fixation with India *on) our subconscious. Colin Cross's book will be a valuable instrument in this catharsis.
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