BOOKS

The will to lose

Philip Hensher

THE ORIGINS OF EMPIRE edited by Nicholas Canny OUP, £30, pp. 440 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY edited by P. J. Marshall OUP, £30, pp. 650 Now that it is a truth universally acknowledged that imperialism is always very embarrassing and naughty and wrong, that we would all be much better off if none of us had ever left our own houses and never made the slightest attempt to go and mind somebody else's business, it might seem somewhat tactless of Oxford University to bring out this splendid and endlessly fascinating history of the most splendid and fascinating of all empires. Its tone cannot throughout be constructed as undiluted mea culpa, and, despite being written by academics, and in places by American academics, it shows both an interest in the imperialist project which goes well beyond denunciation and, at times, even sympathy for what the imperi- alists were, quite sincerely, trying to achieve; what, from time to time, they actu- ally did achieve. On the whole, at a time when we are constantly being invited to see nothing but brutality and cruelty in the imperial project as a whole, this looks like becoming a useful and generally very fair survey which should help even academics distinguish between the ethics of the British in search of empire and those of, let us say, the French.

The awkward fact is that, though it is never exactly easy to justify imperialism at the time, it is sometimes clear that it leads, in the end, to cultural enrichment and to a considerable improvement in the lives of the subject peoples. Not always, of course, as the thought of the dreadful things the Belgians did in Africa, the British in Tas- mania or Genghis Khan will immediately show. But — something most casual com- mentators on the subject will never admit — there are counter-examples. Certainly, it can never have been pleasant to have been ruled by foreigners, but Britain was, in the end, enriched by the presence and rule of the Roman Empire; the Prophet's empire immensely improved the lives of the law- less Arabs; the mediaeval Iberian peninsula was frankly a much more civilised place to live in under Islamic rule than before or, one is tempted to say, since; and can any- one seriously deny that the Mughal emper- ors, who were no more Indian than Edwina Mountbatten, considerably raised the tone of 16th-century Delhi? When the 18th- century Indian poets wanted to bemoan the advent of the 'white-faced upstarts', they reached for the language of an earlier invader, and used the Persian word inqilab — the world turned upside down. We have no difficulty, unless we happen to be Home Secretary, with the proposition that immi- gration constitutes enrichment, so it is odd that we resist the notion that imperialism, too, may add value, in the end, to the culture of the unwilling host.

The Empire arose out of a variety of convictions. There was a general convic- tion, of course, of the superiority of the British way of life, the desire, as Pitt said, `to give law to nations', a desire which by the apogee of the Empire had risen to a point where Britons sometimes seemed to feel themselves qualified to meddle in any- one's business at all. Off the top of my head I can't remember where Captain William Pakenham was when he disembarked from his ship and instructed his interpreter, 'Tell these ugly bastards that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits', whether he was in China or Turkey or perhaps even in Calais; it was just immediately apparent to him that, as an Englishman, he was qualified and entitled to put things right among foreigners. What academics mean by 'imperialism', the brutal Belgian urge to despoil and strip a country of its assets, was not, I think, ever the primary impulse of the Empire. Its growth may much more convincingly be put down to the wish to seek markets overseas for British goods — if the British could not make the case for Free Trade to the out- side world, then, very well, it would estab- lish an empire within which goods could move freely. Surely, the most immediate pressure for the establishment and mainte- nance of the Empire was simply that of stopping other European powers laying their hands on the emptier parts of the world, a motive now much underrated. It is extremely telling that Kipling's line about the 'lesser breeds without the Law' is now always read as if he were talking about Africans; he was, of course, thinking about the Germans.

And if, for much of the Empire's history, the British people generally assumed that its possession was making them richer, that is not an assumption which always holds up under close examination. From the very beginning there were those who, like Mon- taigne's teacher George Buchanan, argued that imperialism would make the state more fragile: 'If the fury of war or the raging sea shuts down the pepper stall, that great king of so many names will . . . borrow money or go hungry.' More- over, the picture of dozens of overseas vas- sal states pouring income into the British coffer and consequently living in abject poverty is quite false; from the 18th century onwards it was a cardinal rule of the Trea- sury that income from India, say, should stay in India, and not be usefully diverted to pay for a new railway in Wales.

In short, the British Empire was always a most unusual thing, an empire which arose out of desires much more complex than the simple one of enrichissez-vous. And, the more one thinks about it, the more appar- ent it is that the secret desire of the English in establishing an empire was not one of dominion but of strange personal subjec- tion to the subjected peoples. The history of empire is full of examples of great men who, in the distasteful term, 'went native'. A man like Alexander Burnes in the 1830s, a hero of mine, found the culture, mind and civilisation of the great Afghan leader Dost Mohammed as important and valu- able as that of any European leader. No one can read the accounts of Burnes's rela- tions with Dost Mohammed and not con- clude that here was a man who went to the East not to convert the Afghans, nor to indulge in imperialist asset-stripping, but in full and in the end slightly naive sincerity — he paid for his fascination with his life — to sit at the courts of the khans and, at some level, to learn from them. If his overt motive in his finally catastrophic involve- ments was to exert British influence in regions where the Russians were showing an unwelcome degree of interest, his pri- vate motives were surely a matter of immersion in what he in no way saw as an inferior way of life.

All this is to jump slightly ahead of the story, but from the beginning of the Empire, it will be found, a figure like Burnes would not have been particularly unusual in his warm and human sympathy for the subject people; a regard which, one may readily grant, was not often returned. There was no particular reason, for instance, for the East India Company to sponsor investigations into Indian culture; Richard Drayton suggests here that it was simply that to the public the directors wanted to show themselves as virtuous, both in India and England. I think it was simpler than that; they were very curious about India. Warren Hastings was not car- rying out an exercise in public relations when he asked his impeachers whether I have shown a disregard to science; or whether I have not, on the contrary, by public endowments, by personal attentions, and by the selection of men for appointments suited to their talents, given effectual encour- agement to it, he was stating the plain truth; and Our pre- sent understanding of Indian languages and art would not be as full as it is if it had not been for the Company's sponsorship of scholars such as Sir William Jones.

Of course, it was always easier for a European to submit himself to the intricate and fascinating courts of the maharajahs than to understand ways of life for which he had no intellectual model than the idea of savagery. Peoples without a court drip- ping in jewels and opulence tended to come off much worse at the hands of the imperialist; when the British came across native North Americans or — a particularly appalling and tragic case of casual genocide — Tasmanians, they often failed to see anything resembling civilisation, in much the same way that the Zionists, much later, somehow failed to notice that there was anyone living in Palestine.

But though a splendid collection of dia- monds or a distinguished school of poets or painters more readily qualified a nation to be treated well by the British, that, it seems to me, was only part of the story. If we look at the literature of empire, some very odd conclusions leap out. It has often been said that it is curious that Britain, with a great empire, never managed to produce a great imperial epic. But from the start the English never had the heart for celebration of Empire. The great fictions of empire in English go swiftly into loss, renunciation, and subjection to the subject peoples. Like a powerful businessman whose sexual fan- tasies run, when he is out of his pinstripes, to thoughts of humiliation and degrada- tion, the British Empire always relaxed with the vicarious fantasy of giving it all up, of failing, of submitting to the native civili- sation. The Tempest, written at the very beginning of the whole enterprise, is already fantasising about returning Bermu- da to its aboriginal inhabitants while Gul- liver's Travels is, in the end, an exploration of the strange desire of the explorer to sub- mit himself to the wisdom of the foreign peoples — the king of the Brobdingnag or those boring horses — which Burnes or T. E. Lawrence would have understood.

`Empire Follows Art & Not Vice Versa as Englishmen Suppose', as Blake wrote in the margin of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses. And these pervasive fantasies did shape the idea of empire, the sense that, as has been said, the Empire was acquired in a fit of absent-mindedness, that it was full of possessions (Fiji?) of no interest other than providing an agreeable coaling-station, and that the English were never really happy until they had lost it again. The Empire, when the time came, was got rid of with faintly alarming and, in some instances, disastrous haste; but the honourable way in which the British did not hang on through the use of force might have been predicted by a close reading of the imperial fantasies, from The Faerie Queene to A Passage to India, all of which balance a thrilled sense of the riches of Out There, a very English vision of a jew- elled crimson court by the side of a hot blue sea, with an acute and indulgent sense that we aren't there for ever, that soon the time will come to go home again, to retire gracefully.

The English were never ones to indulge witless visions of a 1,000-year Reich, and their most cherished historical moments are not, exactly, moments of triumph but episodes of near disaster like Rorke's Drift, or complete disaster like the retreat from Kabul at the end of the First Afghan War, an entire army reduced in a week to a single survivor, the famous Dr Brydon; fan- tasies not of the acquisition of land or the demonstration of power, but revelations of the strength of the English character. The episodes in English imperial history of undiluted triumph, by contrast, are always rather embarrassing to dwell on; Trafalgar is all right because Nelson died, but the popular imagination has never been able to do much with the Seven Years' War, the glorious course of which established the ascendancy of the British. Even at the time, the tendency of every single English commentator was to leap on the few con- cessions to the French in the concluding Peace of Paris, and gratefully go round describing it in the public prints as the usual bloody shambles, a complete waste of time, handing over practically the whole of North America to a lot of unwashed Frenchmen, and thus extract the usual enjoyment of defeat from the jaws of what, in any normal perspective, was a consider- able military success.

The Empire was a strange, marvellous dream, which shaped all of us, and which is of almost inexhaustible interest. These excellent volumes, the first two of a pro- jected five, constitute a series of essays of generally very high quality about particular issues; there are some absorbing papers on apparently recherché matters of shipbuild- ing as well as the occasional authoritative overview of the story so far. Perhaps one would have welcomed a few more narrative papers — I found myself skipping about a bit to piece together all the interesting stuff about that extraordinary and wonder- ful thing, the East India Company. The reader should be warned that in a scholarly enterprise like this the human element is somewhat submerged, and he will probably find himself wandering off halfway through to read a biography of Warren Hastings.

Only occasionally does one feel that oversensitivity to political concerns has influenced a conclusion, which is remark- able considering some of the rubbish customarily written on this subject by Americans in recent years. But there is the odd over-compensation. For instance, the atrocity committed by Siraj-ud-Daula in 1756 on taking Calcutta, the 'Black Hole', turned in the end into a useful casus belli for the English, the scale of which they exaggerated for their own ends. But it's still wrong of P. J. Marshall to write mere- ly: After the fall of the city an unknown number of prisoners, probably not more than fifty, perished in the Black Hole ... Siraj-ud- Daula had every reason to view the activities of the British with dislike and apprehension in 1756.

Fifty people is 50 people, and Siraj-ud- Daula was a disgusting man, even if the propaganda said so; no historian would write in this tone of the Amritsar massacre.

But in general this does what a serious history should do, and allows the reader to come to his own conclusions. I know what mine are; the Empire was something embarked upon for the best of reasons, and run with the serious motive of wishing to improve the world, in which aim it very largely succeeded. Organising other peo- ple's business is never, I know, a very attractive characteristic, but let us face an embarrassing fact: if we hadn't done it, it would have been done by somebody much worse.