Sulking at ‘Civilization’
One of the most trenchant voices to articulate a position critical of both the motivations for such imperial incursions and their impact on Britain was not that of an iconoclastic ‘Tory Democrat’ like Blunt, or of an avowed socialist, but rather of the Positivist intellectual and writer Frederic Harrison, briefly discussed in Chapter 2. Harrison did not share Blunt’s Oriental enthusiasms, his travel experience, or his personal engagement with Egypt and Egyptians, but had studied the situation extensively in addition to discussing it with Blunt. Regretting that they had not met earlier, Blunt described Harrison as ‘the soundest and most courageous man on foreign policy then in the Liberal Party, and by far their most vigorous pamphleteer’.148 Harrison had, of course, been a relatively young member of the Jamaica Committee, and had produced the six ‘Letters’ on martial law which, as we have already seen, were particularly concerned with the question of the rebounding impact on the British psyche and body politic of violent suppression in the further reaches of the Empire. This concern resurfaced in his powerful indictment of ‘Englishmen fighting to rivet on a weak people the chains of a debt-slavery’ in Egypt.149 Delivered first, as a speech to the Anti-Aggression League, in 1882, just before the bombardment of Alexandria, Harrison’s essay ‘Egypt’ also provides a succinct counter-history of events leading up to that fateful moment. The forensic critique he laid out in it is marked by an unsparing scrutiny of the language used to justify the unjustifiable, but the thrust of the argument focuses on Egyptian resistance born of ‘the irritation of the native mind at the European exploitation of their country’.150 If the colonial enterprise was indeed to be understood as one based on spreading liberal values, as Gladstone was claiming, how strange was it that ‘the Egyptians grew sulky at so much civilisation’?151 Perhaps the answer lay in more grossly material realms:
A native pays tax of 12 per cent annual value on his house; the European lives tax free. The native fly-driver pays a heavy tax on his carriage; the European banker drives his pair tax free. Next, the civilisers having obliged the country with some 115 millions sterling at 7 and 10 per cent, obtained ‘concessions’ for about thirty-five millions more. Then they kindly exempted themselves from taxation, were good enough to set up local courts in which they had the right to bring their civil and criminal affairs to a judge of their own nation. An army of European judges, and secretaries, and assessors, and barristers were called in at very liberal salaries, who kindly undertook to do the law for the Egyptian people.152
Even ‘the worst exactions of his native Mahometan tax-gatherers never imposed on him so hopeless a burden as the cool, scientific, book-keeping sort of spoliation of his European civilisers’, Harrison observed, in direct contradiction of the claim that European rule was less exploitative of the ordinary Egyptian than native despotism.153 As the despoiled Muslim population ‘conceived what is called a “fanatical” objection to the foreigners; they even blasphemed the value of the civilisation; they murmured it was rather too dear’.154
In a trenchantly sardonic style, Harrison drew out a feature of the Egyptian rebellion that had been deliberately obscured in official accounts of the Egypt crisis: shifting loyalties and complicated internal relations notwithstanding, it was fundamentally a polarized struggle between the agents and allies of European commercial and financial interests, on the one hand, and the diverse indigenous forces which came together to resist them, on the other. It suited ‘the European ring’ to reduce this challenge to a military mutiny which, Harrison scoffed – far less uncertain than he had been in 1857 – was simply ‘a wild and silly calumny’; Egypt was hardly, he noted pointedly, the first place where a ‘national rising’ had been headed by soldiers.155 On the contrary – and the link to Blunt’s advocacy of the Egyptian cause is clear here – its inspiration could be found in the great university of Cairo, ‘the intellectual centre of the Mussulman world’.156 Instead of being cowed by the bombardment of Alexandria, the Egyptians ‘were roused to fury by it’.157 Rather than crush such justifiable resistance, Harrison wonders (in inevitably gendered language) whether it ought not to be possible, instead, to ‘honour the Egyptian people that they were capable of such manly indignation’.158 The emphasis on the feelings and consequent actions of the Egyptians is of no little significance; much as Ernest Jones once did in his editorials on the Indian uprising, Harrison asked his readers to reflect on the feelings that might arise in their own breasts if French and Russian fleets sailed up the Thames to serve an ultimatum on the queen to exile Gladstone to Australia and dissolve the House of Commons. Far from being evidence of a strange fanaticism, Harrison suggested, the fury of the Egyptians was evidence of shared sensibilities and values: ‘Well, the Egyptians have feelings, and they resented, as was natural, this insolent and impotent menace’.159 As he had in his letters on martial law, Harrison was able to map the topoi of colonial apologetics deftly, in a plea to Gladstone not to betray his earlier avowed Midlothian principles:
India, the Empire, British interests, commerce, our countrymen in personal danger, English capital sunk in Africa, the large financial interests at stake, our international obligations, the harmony of Europe, the cause of good government, the emancipation of the slaves, the amelioration of the lot of the fellah, the jealousies and ambition of France, with a general background of ‘civilisation’ … It is the old story; the same grand phrases which so often did duty on the Danube and the Bosphorus, on the Vaal and the Indus.160
‘Sonorous’ and self-serving civilizational discourse, Harrison was perhaps one of the earliest to articulate, was deployed in the interests of ‘certain rich men in London and Paris’ with determinate financial interests in Egypt, India and beyond, so that war became ‘a shallow and shameless pretext’ to protect ‘one hundred and fifty millions or so of Western gold trembling for its dividends and interest’.161
That it was Egyptian resistance, rather than just his own allegiance to a species of English Liberalism which inspired these reflections on commonality is evidenced by the fact Harrison was not at all immune to the racial hierarchies of his time. Initially protesting only Britain’s assumption of the governance of what he himself called ‘semi-civilised nations’, Harrison certainly did not arrive at his reflections on Egypt through a presupposition of cultural equality, but found himself conceding parity of aspiration by coming to an understanding of the aspirations and claims that drove the rebellion. Given that he did not have personal experience of engagement with other cultures, Egyptian resistance appears to have had a significant role in shaping Harrison’s critical asseverations on empire. This human tendency to self-assertion in the face of attack, he even tried to tell Gladstone in an open letter, would render any civilizational mission inevitably incendiary: ‘You can always produce anarchy anywhere by goading a people to frenzy where any spark of courage or independence is left them.’162 There can ultimately be no such thing as a cooperative and accommodating colonialism; the forces it unleashes are necessarily polarized: ‘The ascendancy of a foreign race, even where they have much to offer the natives … cannot be permanently secured without conquest; and it must be maintained by a protracted struggle for supremacy’.163 For Harrison as for Blunt, this was a marked shift in perspective. In relation to Afghanistan and Jamaica, Harrison was more concerned with the exercise of imperial terror, which, in its illegality, undermined the English as a ‘civilised and honourable people’.164 The ‘Egyptian imbroglio’, in contrast, impelled Harrison to experience something like shared indignation, and no small degree of identification, with the Egyptian rebels. It appears to have been a sensation akin to ‘solidarity’.
That what had emerged in Egypt was both natural and universally legitimate – and ought to be treated as such – was also the insight that drove the Scottish–Indian businessman, administrator and politician John Seymour Keay’s j’accuse, uncompromisingly titled Spoiling the Egyptians. Keay, a supporter of Indian native claims to a greater share in governm
ent, and later a member of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress, noted that suppressing the fact of Egyptian resistance to spoliation was vital to the myth-making of the colonial mission. Colonial discourse had routinely to deny the existence of indigenous conceptions of rights in order to make the case that justice was the gift of colonial rule. In fact, colonialism resulted in the forced abrogation of those customary rights:
Among all the Eastern races … a great variety of different customs, tenures, and privileges have grown up connected with the land, all of which, however ill-defined, have, among the people, the force of absolute rights. We may imagine, then, the feelings of those people, when a corps of aliens appears, and spreads itself abroad over the country, placing in every village its representative, whose express duty is to dispute and confiscate those rights.165
Colonial officialdom, in Keay’s critical view, had
made most determined efforts to convince the English nation that nobody in Egypt dislikes them, or has raised any issue with them, except a few mutinous soldiers … It would never do for those who existed only for the Bondholders to admit that a really National feeling had arisen against their organized extortions, whereby one half of the income of the Nation was expropriated.166
Like Harrison, Keay identified emergent colonial mythologies, such as that the ‘Egyptian peasantry were formerly more grievously oppressed under Native rule than they have been since European dictation began’; that the country itself had now ‘been raised from misery to unalloyed happiness by the Deus ex machina of the European Control; and that ‘there existed a real longing for its beneficent presence among all classes’.167 All these colonial fantasies rely on a chilling moral relativism: ‘The Egyptian eel was a reptile so accustomed to be skinned, that it rather enjoyed the process!’168 For both Keay and Harrison, this colonial denial of parity through a deliberate refusal to imagine the lives and feelings of others had disturbing moral implications. Urabi, who ought to be seen ‘as a political liberator’ and ‘a political leader of the people’, had himself appealed to England in her capacity as a slave-freeing nation ‘to sympathize with the Egyptians in their attempt to obtain liberty’.169 This liberty had been denied because the first use Egyptians would make of it ‘would, no doubt, be to check the wholesale depletion of their country by the foreigner’.170
Charged with being unpatriotic, Harrison too would counter that criticism of empire was continuous with antislavery – an idea that would surface periodically in British anticolonial thought:
What slavery and the slave trade once were to our grandfathers here, what a slave industry and a slave society were to the Americans of yesterday, that empire is becoming to Englishmen to-day. A cry of emancipation, as of a religious duty to redress the sufferings of humanity, is rising up here too. Our people have no share in this guilt, as they have none in the gain or the glory.171
Unsurprisingly, it was Harrison who was most exercised by the implications for his country of crushing political self-assertion in other lands: ‘England is not herself, whilst she is forced thus to keep anxious and suspicious watch across Africa and Asia over her huge and precarious prize.’172 The ‘hard mechanical pressure’ it would take to secure and hold the Empire in the face of resistance would only work for a limited time, ‘breaking every now and again into further seas of blood, more conquests, more vengeance, ever sliding down the slope of tyranny, cruelty, and panic’.173 Much as Congreve had done with the Indian uprising, Harrison would suggest to working-class listeners that the energies consumed in repressing resistance elsewhere provided a subterfuge for avoiding a legion of domestic problems; they needed to tell their politicians that ‘civilisation’ which ‘is making the tour of the world on board ironclads with eighty-ton guns … is terribly wanted in the three kingdoms at home’.174
The opposition was eloquent but offered in vain, Harrison would note: ‘The party system, the financial interests, and the thirst of Empire are forces that do not listen to the voice of reason and of justice.’175 Urabi and others tried with him for ‘rebellion’ received commuted death sentences and ‘perpetual exile’ to Ceylon; he himself would eventually return to Egypt to live and die quietly. Within days of the verdict, the deposed leader would write to The Times a letter dated 4 December 1882, included in full in Broadley’s memoir, in which he would note that he could ‘leave Egypt with perfect tranquillity and confidence in the future, because I know that England cannot any longer delay the reforms which we have struggled for’.176 Despite protestations of gratitude, a quiet but unmistakable defiance – astonishing given that he was virtually a British prisoner at this point – also marks the deposed leader’s insistence that any reforms undertaken by England in Egypt would have derived ultimately from native initiative. They would include, he predicted correctly, the abolition of the Anglo-French Control, legal and judicial reforms, more representative government ‘with a voice’ for the Egyptian people, and the end of foreign domination of gainful employment: ‘Egypt will be no more in the hands of a myriad of foreign employees filling every available post, to the exclusion of the Egyptians’.177 It is not, however, a narrowly anti-Western declaration; on the contrary, ‘Arábi the rebel’ addressed himself, across national boundaries, to a commonality of understanding and, amazingly enough, urged the English to ‘complete’ the work he had commenced: ‘The English people, when they see all these things, will then be able to realize the fact that my rebellion had a very strong justification.’178 His words and the movement he led were only temporarily defeated; that resistance would once again find expression in the 1919 revolution that would eventually force the British out of Egypt.
In his letter, Urabi also thanked those, including members of parliament, who had ‘often and nobly spoken on [his] behalf’.179 The most stentorian of these voices was, of course, Blunt’s. He would continue to speak out on Egypt and on colonial issues for the next four decades, until his death in 1922. The Egyptian revolution had been as much a baptism of fire for him as it had been a watershed historical passage for Egyptians. Gone was the naively benevolent writer of The Future of Islam, with an unexamined sense of empire’s liberalizing potential. Travelling in India after the Urabi Rebellion (he was not allowed to disembark in Egypt), Blunt wrote uncompromisingly in the Manchester Guardian: ‘That Asia is awake and politically self-conscious and desperately in earnest for self-government cannot any longer be denied … The vast millions of Asiatics denied their aspirations under British rule must in the end break the strength to coerce them of the British empire.’180 In The Wind and the Whirlwind, a long and angry poetic jeremiad of disputable quality, Blunt would lay out the case against imperialism in Egypt in copious verse. What is of interest about the poem is the emphasis it places in its opening on the uses (and abuses) of voice, the first line repeated throughout the text:
I have a thing to say. But how to say it?
I have a cause to plead. But to what ears?
How shall I move a world by lamentation –
A world which has not heeded a Nation’s tears?181
How can the case against imperial power be made? Blunt’s sense of himself as a lone voice, ‘unthanked’ and ‘unhonoured’, veers into bombast, of course; but, once again, his target is, in part, the selective apostrophizing of freedom in English verse. Why should the cause of ‘freedom / Lost on the Nile’ be any less worthy of a poet’s hymning than the liberty Milton or Dante might have sung of?182 The language of freedom was not English alone: ‘Its utterance / Was in that tongue divine the Orient knew’; the Egyptians – ‘Jew, and Copt, and Moslem’ – join the chanting chorus, catching and echoing words that speak to shared aspirations.183 Though his plan to bring Urabi himself to London to plead the Egyptian case failed, Blunt would also continue to facilitate engagement with anticolonial figures such as Afghani and Abdu, hosting them in London and introducing them to political players such as Randolph Churchill. While staying with Blunt in 1884, Abdu gave a startlingly frank intervie
w to the Pall Mall Gazette in which he rubbished all English claims to benevolent influence in Egypt: ‘Your liberality we see plainly is only for yourselves, and your sympathy with us is that of the wolf for the lamb which he designs to eat.’184 After the invasion of 1882, Egyptians ‘know that there are worse evils than despotism, and worse enemies than the Turks … There is no Mohammedan in Egypt so oppressed as to wish for any more of your help.’185 Calling for British troops to be withdrawn from the country and for Urabi to be returned to Egypt from exile, Abdu closes the interview with a devastating pronouncement: ‘But do not attempt to do us any more good. Your good has done us too much harm already.’186
On Christmas Eve, 1899, looking back on the century just gone, Blunt penned a short but magnificent polemic from his Cairo home in the form of a letter to The Times titled ‘The Shame of the Nineteenth Century’.187 It is worth quoting at some length not only because it shows how far he himself had come from his days as an Orientalist traveller and aristocratic horse-trader, but because it cuts sharply through the narratives of empire that, at the turn of the century, held Britain in their grip:
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