The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Despite the fact that most of the harrowing direct testimony by Congo natives was edited out of the report and buried in the Brussels state archives, and even though Leopold managed to hoodwink many international papers into publishing a ‘summary’ of the report which he had helpfully supplied himself and which contained no allusions to systematic atrocities, the damning findings of his own commission bore out Morel’s accusations in all important aspects, and they soon became known. Leopold, who was by now a septuagenarian given to riding around the park of his palace on a tricycle and to terrorizing his court with his monumental hypochondria and his fear of germs, finally decided that his colony (much less lucrative now that other rubber producers had appeared on the world market) was not worth keeping any longer. He generously agreed to sell it to the Belgian government. For its monarch’s gesture, Belgium took on 110 million francs (£330 million in today’s money) of debt, agreed to finance all of the King’s ongoing building projects, and pay him an additional 50 million francs ‘as a mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices in the Congo’. Leopold II died in December of the following year.

  After a decade of strenuous work, Edmund Morel, the clerk who dared to take on a king, had won his contest. His crusade was the first international human rights campaign, his Liverpool study the first NGO (non-governmental organization) financed by often modest private donors and carrying its pressure right into the heart of the world’s greatest powers. This had been possible because the new mass media had democratized power to a degree. Even in countries such as Austria-Hungary and Russia where press censorship was still in force, the sheer volume of printed matter often rendered the censors practically redundant. Information and ideas spread like wildfire in the cities and reached even the remotest farms within a matter of days. Their power could force through change by overwhelming pressure, ultimately imposing an uncontrollable climate of opinion.

  It was not only Morel who benefited from this sea change in power politics. Captain Dreyfus had been retried and exonerated due to a press campaign, though his had been a national affair, pushed forward ‘from above’ by powerful members of Parisian society, politics and the military. Another important example of the increasing levelling power of the press was the Beylis case in Kiev in 1913, in which a Jewish bookkeeper of a local factory, Mendel Beylis, stood accused on an absurdly trumped-up charge of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. The rabidly antisemitic Tsar had taken it upon himself to instruct the judges to find Beylis guilty and every pressure was applied on the court. Here, too, the attention given by the international press to the case ensured that the accused was promptly acquitted.

  The sham trial with its bought ‘witnesses’ and bogus experts was followed and commented on by the whole world. It eventually collapsed under this weight. The mass media had put power on a different footing. The image of power, always paramount in politics, was no longer the domain of official artists and grand projects but was decided in newspaper offices. ‘Modern’ monarchs like Wilhelm II of Germany did their best to court and use the media and to project a persona invented for this purpose, but he too had to learn that this was a dance with a devil who could veer off in a different direction without any prior warning. Spin doctors in every era have known that perception is infinitely more potent than mere fact.

  The Costs of Power

  Morel’s success illustrated the importance of winning the image war, and almost a century later the image of colonialism itself and its importance for Europe has been thoroughly reassessed by historians. There can be little doubt that colonial possessions were crucial for the self-image of the great powers. The colonies were of the greatest importance for countries like Britain, Germany and France. They created a club of ‘Major Powers’ with substantial empires, and a sense of historical mission and national greatness.

  The much-highlighted dark side of this race for global power and prestige was that colonialism left a profound and often profoundly damaging legacy for those who had been colonized. In the worst cases, such as the Congo, it bled dry a region already suffering from centuries of slavery (by Arab traders, mostly, who robbed the Congo of half a million people a year even before the Europeans arrived) and set them up for a post-colonial history of cruelty, misery, dictatorships, and civil war. In the best instances colonialism left behind largely arbitrary borders but also railway systems, schools, judicial systems and a semblance of democracy, but no home-grown elite trained to administer them. In all cases, it left behind huge questions.

  For the colonizers, too, the image and the reality of colonialism split apart and a closer investigation shows how much our own perception of colonialism is beholden to the rhetoric of a century ago: the colonies were nowhere near as vital to the great powers as they would have their subjects believe. Britain, of course, was the country most influenced by the reality of empire, ruling one fifth of the world and one quarter of its population. Imperial culture reached its apogee with the gigantic diamond jubilee celebrations for Queen Victoria in 1897, which went on across the globe, and mobilized huge crowds. The empire was an important trading partner for the mother country, as well as a place for young men in search of a career and a fortune, and, to some extent, to confirm the superiority of the English race. The empire, we are told, made Britain what it was.

  This is true, up to a point. If Britain played a great role in most areas of the empire (farmers in rural India who were still directly ruled by an ‘approved’ local ruler will have noticed relatively little of their colonial administrators), the empire played much less of a role in Britain itself. The balance of trade was in Britain’s favour (not least because of London’s brutal tactics in the Opium Wars and the resulting highly profitable drug-running to China), with India absorbing around a fifth of British exports and producing valuable goods such as tea, cotton and opium. But it also had a cost for the colonizers. It depressed the textile industry at home and took a great deal of money to administer. Seen from a longer-term perspective, the £270 million invested in India around 1900 also meant that these funds were not available for upgrading ageing British industrial plants and competing with European neighbours.

  In addition to this, the Jewel in the Crown made it necessary to maintain the world’s largest and most powerful navy, armed with successive generations of ruinously expensive fighting vessels. Falling behind the competition, notably Wilhelm’s Germany, would have meant the end of empire. Securing Britain’s strategic predominance also necessitated investments in much less lucrative areas of the world: without control of the Suez Canal, rule over India and its attendant trade was impracticable; without control over Egypt and Palestine there was no security for the Canal itself. And ruling Egypt (de facto though never officially a colony) meant securing its vast southern hinterland, including the notoriously war-torn Sudan, an area which created its own mythology by making the reputation of military ‘heroes’ like Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, but which also dragged the empire into endless, smouldering military confrontations and was never a profit-making proposition.

  If the empire very probably created as many obligations as opportunities, it remained a source of great national pride - or did it? It depends on whom one asks. There certainly was an important colonial lobby and a widespread belief in the ‘white man’s burden’, in Britain’s historical mission, a paternalistic vision summarized by Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary: as ‘the duty of a landlord to develop his estate’. The presence of the empire in the everyday life of the middle classes may also be inferred from the innumerable knick-knacks cluttering Victorian and Edwardian houses, many of which had colonial overtones. The house of the composer Sir Edward Elgar, for instance, contained numerous such mementoes, heirlooms from Lady Elgar’s family: some Indian brass candle-snuffers, a carved Bombay rosewood square footstool, a marble group of two elephants fighting, an elephant with howdah, a marble idol with dog, etc., etc.

  This enumeration may be evidence of the presence of empire in everyday life, but m
aking such a claim is problematic: when Max Nordau caricatured the contents of a grand bourgeois home in Vienna, Prague or Budapest he painted a similar, oriental picture of Turkish tassels, Persian rugs and Indian daggers, although Austria-Hungary possessed no colonies at all. The taste for exoticism was a strong force at the time, an outlet for fantasies of freedom, eroticism and primitive dignity, something akin to Edward Said’s ‘orientalism’; it was not necessarily evidence of colonial pride.

  Colonial pride (and, latterly, shame) as embodied by Cecil Rhodes, the African Colossus and prime instigator of the Boer War, was imperialism at its most visible and at its crudest, but it was not representative of British culture, or British thought. If foreign politics and government rhetoric were at times dominated by matters imperial, these matters had, in fact, relatively little presence in people’s everyday experience. Unsurprisingly enough, the historical record shows that citizens were rather more concerned with their own lives, with class, work and politics at home, than with societies thousands of miles away. News was published about the colonies in the papers, but the popular imagination was at no point particularly preoccupied with Her or His Majesty’s foreign possessions. There was the Boy’s Own culture, of course, but neither music hall songs (with the possible exception of the popular number ‘The Boers Have Got My Daddy’) nor West End plays, neither literature nor painting devoted much attention to the colonies.

  For painters, the fashion had simply passed. The high Victorianism of Frederic Lord Leighton’s English maids in obscure harems and the riotously coloured crowds and wallowing bosoms of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema belonged firmly in the nineteenth century. By 1900 a more sober mood had set in. The new generation of artists did not look to India or Africa but into the English countryside, or across the Channel, to France.

  With the exception of Rudyard Kipling, British authors had never really exploited life in the colonies as a subject, and around 1900 the empire found very little literary resonance. From Thomas Hardy’s timeless England to the utopian nightmares of H. G. Wells, the topics chosen by literary novelists stayed clear of colonial themes. The Island of Doctor Moreau by Wells (1896), in which a scientist attempts to transform the animals on a remote island into a humanlike ‘race without malice’ by surgery, then rules over them with the iron hand of a dictator, can be read as an allegory of imperialism. But it is precisely its allegorical character that makes it a comment on the debates raging about the ideas of Darwin and Malthus, and a mirror of British society itself in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson and Francis Bacon.

  If and when the colonies or colonial figures appeared, they often did so in a subordinate role - very much like ex-Indian army Dr Watson, in fact, the faithful but never scintillating friend of Sherlock Holmes. Many of the great detective’s cases have a colonial background, in fact, but this background is useful only as a repository of unusual poisons, opium, rare snakes, unexplained fortunes, and men returning to their country with their health ruined. They are a bag of tricks, not a presence immanent in everyday life. Much of what we think of today as the culture and imagery of empire - Lawrence of Arabia, Noël Coward’s Private Lives (‘I’ve been around the world, you know ...’ ‘How was it?’ ‘The world? Very enjoyable’), E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924) - dates from after the First World War. In an amusing intellectual manoeuvre (but without humorous intent), the late Edward Said attempted to stand this argument on its head by postulating that it was exactly the absence of any reference to empire before 1914 that showed how deeply suffused Britain was by an imperial, orientalist ideology - so deeply that it was simply assumed as an implicit subtext. The historical evidence, however, does not bear this out.

  In the state-run schools successive imperially minded observers found to their dismay that the children knew hardly anything about the colonies. In fee-paying private schools, the picture was very similar: boys crammed Greek and Latin verbs, studied their Shakespeare and Tennyson. If they took modern languages, they were most likely to learn German or French. Their socialization in an institutional, often militarized context of boarding schools and cadet corps may have prepared them well for future roles in the imperial administration, but few of their essays or school debates dealt with imperial matters. The empire remained a hazy affair for many of them, despite the institution of ‘Mafeking Night’, a patriotic springtime anniversary celebration of the relief of the British stronghold during the Boer War, which for schoolboys was an ideal occasion, not only for burning effigies of President Kruger, but also for general mayhem and disorder. In the schoolyard children played, as Bernard Porter remarks, not ‘settlers and Zulus’ but ‘English and Romans’, before ‘Cowboys and Indians’ were introduced. Stanley and Livingstone were national heroes, but so were Shackleton, Scott and even Amundsen some years later, though their exploits were of no value as colonial enterprises and Amundsen was not even British. They were gallant heroes, sportsmen of a kind, adored by a nation that venerated sports.

  Colonial administrators were trained at Britain’s universities. Oxford was famous for its oriental studies, as was London’s Imperial College. Institutions like these taught Indian and African languages and cultures, edited Sanskrit texts and studied everything from art to agriculture, but their students remained in the ivory tower or went out to govern. There was little interchange with the country’s wider culture. In chapter eleven we will encounter the fascination of many artists with ‘primitive’ cultures as a counterbalance to the modern, hyper-civilized world and the rootlessness of life in the big cities. It is interesting, however, that hardly any of these imaginative thinkers turned to the colonies of the countries they lived in. Pablo Picasso was fascinated by objects from French central Africa which helped him discover a new aesthetic in tribal masks and sculptures, while others, like Vassily Kandinsky, who went to live with shamans in the Urals, or Igor Stravinsky, who relived imaginary rituals of ancient Russians, looked for inspiration closer to home. In Britain it was particularly William Butler Yeats who sought a truer, original spirituality, yet he turned to ancient Irish myth and the occult, not to the temples of India. ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind,’ Sir John Seely, the Cambridge Regius Professor of History, famously sighed.

  The situation in France, endlessly anxious about manliness and national decline, was very different. La gloire de la France was inextricably linked with the fate of its empire, and had been since Napoleon. This was partly due to the fact that, according to French law, the overseas territories were France, and Frenchmen were expected to feel just as much chez eux in the jungles of Indochina and the deserts of Algeria as they were in Picardy or on the Champs-Elysées. The press did much to keep colonial themes and images before the public eye. In 1904, for example, the popular journal l’Illustration carried not only extensive stories about the Russo-Japanese War (with a notable admiration for the Japanese), but also long reports, serialized stories, photos, drawings, cartoons and other items on the French colonies and their populations in almost every issue. The Petit journal, a newspaper with a daily circulation of around a million copies, even dedicated its edition of 6 March 1910 to the ‘heroes of colonial expansion’. As in French politics, there was also a vocal anti-colonial faction. The satirical Assiette au beurre mercilessly lampooned the colonial idea (as well as everything else), and the Revue socialiste polemicized furiously in the name of the ‘pained cries of a violated humanity’.

  La France d’outre-mer was a constant presence in French life: the Paris Exhibition of 1900 had a large colonial section complete with mock-up native villages, and it was followed by two dedicated colonial exhibitions, in Marseille in 1906 (1.8 million visitors) and in Paris one year later, with 2 million visitors. Exhibitions of ‘real people’ in a parodic semblance of their home setting and garnished with a surfeit of exotic animals, dances and rituals were hugely popular all over Europe. It had been the business acumen of Carl Hagenbeck, the founder of the Hambu
rg zoo, to import living exhibits from countries as different as Finland, Ceylon and East Africa and to show them off in their ‘natural habitat’ in Hamburg and during extended European tours from 1874 onwards. Here, a gaping public could enjoy watching, amongst other things, ‘Australian cannibals, male and female. The only colony of this savage race, which is strange, disfigured, and the most brutal ever to have emerged from the interior of savage countries. The lowest order of humanity.’ Some thirty of these ethnographic spectacles went through Europe before 1914, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors.

  Visitors to these shows were driven by plain curiosity. In France, however, their interest was based on a long history of orientalist exoticism reaching back to Eugène Delacroix’s forceful fantasies, the languishing women painted into the harems of Jean Auguste Ingres or described in Flaubert’s Salammbô, and further, to the Egyptomania that had seized the country after Napoleon’s brief conquest of Egypt and even the Lettres persanes written in the eighteenth century by Montesquieu. The Orient was close to France, not only in terms of geography. Writers like André Gide, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jules Verne and Guy de Maupassant all followed in the creative footsteps of Victor Hugo, who had declared with characteristic megalomaniac aplomb and well-tuned sexual undertones: ‘Go, peoples! God offers Africa to Europe. Take her …’

  One writer who followed Hugo’s advice (in the Orient, not in Africa) in the most personal sense possible was the popular writer and French Academician Pierre Loti (1850-1923), who immortalized his love affair with a Turkish woman whom he describes in perfect orientalist fashion: ‘Her eyebrows were brown, slightly curled, so close they almost touched; the expression of her eyes was a mixture of energy and naiveté; one would have said a child’s look, so much freshness and youth was in it.’ The writer’s love for the beautiful Aziyadé became an abiding theme of his life - especially as she obligingly died after his navy duties called the young officer elsewhere. He was convinced that she had expired of a broken heart. Loti, who liked to sport a fez in his portraits, fed the public’s appetite with exquisitely written sentimental tales set in exotic locations, which he adored. His house in Rochefort, on the Atlantic coast, is an orientalist fantasy turned to stone, with Turkish and Arabic rooms, intricate ornaments and arches, sumptuous fabrics and the soft murmur of fountains.