Books
Showing the flag
John Terrame Britain's imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion Ronald Hyam (Batsford £10.00) Captain Shakespear: A Portrait H.V.F. Winstone (Jonathan Cape £4.95) Interpreting the defunct British Empire is au industry. To dissect it, analyse it, lament mock it, occasionally (with apologetic asides) to admire some aspect of it (but not often) and even possibly, as a final benefit, to make television programmes about it, is the endeavour of many contented souls. Unfortunately, the subject itself is somewhat intransigent; it rarely lends itself to these activities, no matter how painstakinglY pursued. Mr Ronald Hyam's Britain's Imperial Century is certainly painstaking; sixty pages of source references show that he is not a Cambridge Fellow and librarian for nothing. If only he had sifted all this Material a little more! What he has preferred to do with it is to reduce it to a series of essays, first on general themes—`The foundations of Power', `Racial attitudes', 'The export of surplus emotional energy', 'The proconsular Phenomenon', etc.; nice up-to-date titles—then on specific areas. Unfortunately again (the word will recur) if there is one generalisation that can be made about the British Empire, it is that it does not encourage generalisation. After all, by any real definition of the word, it was scarcely an empire at all, more a collection of dreams and circumstances. The only reality was a Patchwork of territories and peoples, all differing drastically from the 'mother country' and from each other. All they ever had in common was a supposed allegiance (whatever that might mean) to the same Monarch, an ultimate subjection to the same Court of Appeal (but with infinite possibilities of digression on the way to it) and an ultimate dependence on the Royal Navy for Protection. What the British Empire never had at any time was the kind of central urge and direction that enabled Bismarck, for example, to tound the German overseas empire in 1884 by a simple volte-face of policy, or France ,deliberately to enter Algeria to avert loss of Lace in the 1830s, and embark upon further d. eliberate expansion in the 70s and 80s for the same reason. It is thus virtually impossible to talk about a 'British attitude' towards empire. It ought to be absolutely Impossible for a Cambridge lecturer to
The settled attitude of Victorian Government towards humanitarian pressure was
slightly scornful.
What, Castlereagh and Glenelg? Sydney Herbert and Joe Chamberlain? Disraeli and Gladstone? The truth is that there never was a 'settled attitude', either of Victorian Government, or of Victorian people, or of their predecessors and successors. That is why there never was a proper 'empire'. Chiefly, I think, it iS a sense of being adrift from chronology that makes me uneasy with this book. Of India, for instance, we read: 'As late as the 1860s land settlement work fell a long way short of official theory.' Well it might, when we consider that the Raj was only born in 1858, prior to which British India was administered by a trading company. But India is evidently a puzzle to Mr Hyam. On page fifteen we read of 'the continental power-house of the Indian Army' ; but on page two hundred and six, 'by 1900 it had become an enormous military liability'. Resolving such contradictions as these is what I mean by sifting.
There is a lot in Mr Hyam's book that is thought-provoking, a lot that is merely provoking; there are some very fine gobbets, calculated to set one off in the pursuit of deeper knowledge in many directions. Unfortunately, there is also this daunting lack of chronological spine—and certain other surprising inexactitudes. It really will not do to talk of 'the grant of self-government' to Australia in the 1850s, when what one means is the self-government of the colonies of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland, entities so separate that they used three different railway-gauges, and as late as 1883, when the Melbourne-Sydney line was opened, there was a gauge-break at the frontier.
Very arresting, but equally misleading is such a sentence as: 'Relations between New Zealand and the mother country became so embittered that by 1869 the New Zealand Herald openly expressed the view that it would have been better if France had been the first to plant its flag in the islands'. However, it would surely have been helpful to be told that this bad feeling coincided with the worst of the Maori Wars, and that the dispute was about how these should be paid for, and what to do about the Maoris.
Mr Hyam's book, unfortunately, abounds with such curiosities. Military historians, for example, will be amazed to see that Singapore was 'destined to become a great bastion of empire'. Less amazing but not very illuminating is the statement that 'The empire was a boon to the brokenhearted, the misogynist and to the promiscuous alike'. Perhaps the prize sentence of the whole book is the next : 'The enjoyment and exploitation of black flesh was as
powerful an attraction as any desire to develop economic resources'. This would be news to the godly settlers of Dunedin, the squatter clearing the Queensland bush, or the miner in the Rockies.
It would be news, too, to Captain William Henry Irvine Shakespear, described by his biographer as 'the prototype man of Empire,' although the most important part of his life was spent outside it. Mr Winstone has done a real service in bringing to light the lost story of Captain Shakespear's achievements in Arabia. It was Shakespear's misfortune to die young; also, as Mr Winstone says, to back causes which proved to be better-founded than those supported by his superiors, so that when official policy 'collapsed in a predictable heap of recrimination and despair, Britain did not hurry to revive the memory of a man who fought for a contrary cause'. It was his further misfortune that the Arab Revolt which he had predicted should be guided and chronicled by such a magnetic personality as T. E. Lawrence.
Shakespear was born in 1878, entered the Indian Army and then the Indian Consular Service, and became Resident at Kuweit in 1909. During the remaining six years of his life he became one of the most valuable of Arabia's few European travellers. Between 1909 and 1913 he made a number of journeys into the unknown interior, surveying all the way; in 1914 he crossed the whole vast peninsula from east to west.
It may be added that on all these journeys Shakespear indefatigably photographed everything he saw, and thus created a unique record, some of which is happily incorporated in Mr Winstone's book. But his potentially most important work—had it not been for the wilful blindness of British policy at the time—was the friendship which he built up with the Wahhabi Amir of Najd, Abdul Aziz ibn Abdur Rahman, generally known as Ibn Saud. It was in one of Ibn Saud's minor battles that Shakespear was tragically killed in January 1915. This was more than a personal tragedy; it meant that when the Arab Revolt broke out eighteen months later, there was no experienced voice to guide British policy in Arabia; the result was the alienation of Ibn Saud, whom Shakespear recognised as the true leader of the Arabs. When Ibn Saud defeated all his rivals in 1926, British policy lay in ruins. This, as Mr Winstone sadly points out, is partly why Shakespear is so unknown: . . . the fact remains that out of the trust and friendship which flourished between this Englishman and the Amir of Central Arabia in the first decade of this century, Britain was offered the custodianship of a poor and desolate kingdom. It was too late when that kingdom became the richest on earth to regret the patronizing scorn with which the offer was received ... I do firmly believe that one learns more about the British Empire from straight forward narratives like Mr Winstone's than from any number of bright studies and generalisations.
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