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The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997
By Piers Brendon
Alfred A. Knopf 2008
Why does English have the worst orthography in Europe? Several explanations have been proposed, such as the coincidence of the Great Vowel Shift with the invention of printing, or the supposed need to gloss over regional pronunciations. The real explanation is more interesting: a deep feature of English culture is a resistance to systemization. At almost every point in their history, the English have preferred patching to reconstruction and improvisation to theory. There are merits and drawbacks to this way of managing things. In any case, the effect on British history has been to create a society of frozen accidents. Piers Brendon, noted biographer and one-time Keeper of the Churchill Archives, has little to say in this book about spelling, but we can see that a similar pattern, or lack of it, was also true of the British Empire. At the empire’s height, when it included about a fourth of the world’s population and about as much of its land area, every territory had its peculiar relationship to London and its own eccentric internal “constitution,” even long before there was any thought of self-government. There were entities (and not necessarily the most primitive: Hong Kong was the best example) that were ruled autocratically by governors. In India the native princes were more like feudal vassals than like imperial subjects. Plantation colonies were ruled by tiny white oligarchies through fanciful legislatures, until London began to attempt to temper home rule with justice. The major settler colonies, New Zealand and the gaggle of territories that were later federated into the Dominions of Canada and Australia, were seen to be more like the United Kingdom than like subject territories, and were treated accordingly. When this confederal accumulation began to unravel, each bit similarly detached from the center in its own fashion and at its own pace, each with some different combination of peaceful evolution and violence. Nonetheless, the end was quick and almost simultaneous. Ireland and the Dominions were practically independent after the Statute of Westminster of 1931. In the remaining empire, there was a population of 700 million in 1945 and 5 million in 1965. When Prime Minister Edward Heath decided in 1967 to withdraw all British bases east of Suez, it was all over bar the shouting, which in this book is represented by the visit of Prince Charles to the ceremonies marking the turnover of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China: the royal yacht sailed away with the band playing “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory.” The book is really a history of the “Second British Empire,” the one that arose after the loss of the American colonies. The new empire was centered on India. In fact, protecting the sea lanes to India was the most frequent justification for acquiring everyplace else. But why did the author start the tale of the empire’s “decline and fall” in 1781, before its classical form had even begun? Apparently in order to include Edmund Burke’s formulation that the newly solidified British hegemony in India was essentially a trusteeship. This empire, in Burke’s view, should be wound down as soon as its subjects were ready for self-government. Unlike the first British Empire, which was founded on piracy and could in principle last as long as its rulers oppressed its subjects successfully, the second empire was an enterprise of the Enlightenment. By its own terms, it was not intended to be eternal. Thus, to the extent the empire succeeded in spreading the finer sentiments that allegedly justified it, the empire was spreading the seeds of its own dissolution. The problem is that the concept of the book requires an account of the rise of the British Empire, but the author’s heart just isn’t in it. What we get are humorous anecdotes evidencing the racism and arrogance of the British empire builders, sprinkled with sober acknowledgements that these people did often provide a measure of good government, or at least less bad government than their disgruntled new subjects had hitherto enjoyed. Doubtless many of the Victorian empire-builders were racists and incurious bigots, but a few stories about the Flogging Parson go a long way. Frankly, this book could have been easily improved by confining itself to the 20th century, when the survival of the empire really was becoming problematical, and the author’s own interest is more obviously engaged. (Plus that is also when the material starts to include all that gorgeous Edwardian prose about hallucinogenic places in East.) Like the empire itself, the story of its end is the story of the end of the Raj in India, and the book actually handles that very well. The author puts most of the blame for the ragged partition of India and Pakistan on the last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten. He could probably have averted much bloodshed had he not insisted on reaching an agreement with the Congress Party and the Muslim League in an unworkably short time. Still, it was Congress who were chiefly responsible for rejecting a loose confederal model that the Muslim leader, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, had tentatively accepted. That would have kept India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan all under the same roof, and prevented several major wars. Of course, it would also have made control of the central government much less worth having, which was why it did not appeal to Congress. After the Second World War, the empire succeeded in putting down several major insurgencies, notably in Malaysia and Kenya. The defeat of the Kenyan Mau Mau movement in particular involved the commission of notable human rights violations. Nonetheless, in each case where an insurgency was defeated, the insurgents did much of the work of defeating themselves: their attempts to terrify the larger population into submission backfired when the government showed that it could offer credible security. Unlike the other European empires that were closing down at about the same time, the British Empire did not experience fighting retreats or outright defeats. The closest that came to happening was in Yemen and, perhaps, Palestine. In those places, there was not so much a turnover of power as a ceasefire among local factions that permitted an orderly British withdrawal. A theme to which the author returns again and again is the contrasts between the British and the Roman empires. (The theme is easy to recur to; to judge by this book, every British subject from 1790 to 1950 had read Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and quoted from it at least once a week.) The Romans did not keep themselves separate from the peoples of their empire. They intermarried freely and were as eager to learn as to teach. This was not the case with the British Empire. Kipling might note that the celebrations in London of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was like Judgment Day, with every tribe and tongue and nation assembled, but these ethnicities were indissoluble. The subjects of the empire never became an imperial people. The Roman Empire in its maturity could claim to be cosmopolis, the legitimate political embodiment of the essential unity of the human race. The British Empire never made the leap to a theory of universal government.
Except sometimes it did; at any rate certain of the empire’s subjects had thoughts along these lines. The author does not mention the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, but of course he has a great deal to say about Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder of southern Africa who absorbed the Movement’s Romantic ideology of social reform at every level. Rhodes’s great project, which has not been altogether unsuccessful, was to foster a special relationship among the major anglophone states, with an eye to world government, or at least world governance. In the 1920s and 1930s, prominent British persons of a speculative bent, such as H.G. Wells or George Bernard Shaw, would echo variations of these ideas. As the author points out, however, such notions did not displace Burke’s model of temporary imperial trusteeship. The English were losing interest in their own empire, even though it was larger than it had ever been and, until the rise of fascism, never more strategically secure. Towards its end, the empire justified itself chiefly as the best alternative for its subjects in a dangerous world. The argument had merit, until the empire defeated its enemies. Then the empire had no reason to exist at all. There is another way in which the British Empire differed from that of Rome. Rome looked back to no predecessor, but Britain was acutely conscious of the Roman precedent. The British loved to contemplate the Fall. Gibbon’s great history did not so much cause this fascination as reflect it. In the early morning light of their second empire, the English were already building make-believe Greco-Roman ruins on their estates, to remind them of the mortality of civilization. The vision of a future London in ruins, half covered by forest, recurred in Victorian and Edwardian literature. In the minds of its elites, the British Empire did not have to exist; when the thought occurred to them that it might, they did not find it interesting, perhaps in part because the notion lacked narrative drive. Eternal Empire would be tedious.
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