Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  The Boer War was a catalyst of a powerful movement within the British settlement colonies to develop what has been called a ‘Britannic nationalism’.46 The idea had been developing for some time that there was a solidarity based on English or British nationality in those Dominions dominated by settlers from the home country and which – often for this reason – enjoyed a good degree of self-government. This made them different from parts of the Empire like India, which had next to no white settlers. ‘Greater Britain is an extension of the English nationality’, said Cambridge professor J. R. Seeley in 1885. ‘The English Empire is in the main and broadly may be said to be English throughout.’ He contrasted this with India, where there was ‘no community of blood, no community of religion. And lastly no community of interest […] England conquered India and now keeps it by means of Indian troops, paid with Indian money’.47

  A ‘colour line’ was constructed between white and non-white populations, and the superiority of one over the other was asserted. In the Dominions this was often articulated by immigration control. Australia imposed restrictions on Chinese immigrants coming to work in the gold mines from the 1850s and in 1896 the New South Wales government banned ‘all persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the continent of Asia or the continent of Africa or any island in the Pacific Ocean or Indian Ocean’.48 On becoming a federation in 1901 Australia passed an immigration restriction act and Australian prime minister Alfred Deaken announced in 1906 that the Empire was ‘divided broadly into two parts. One occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled. Australia and New Zealand are determined to keep their place in the first class.’49 The distinction was also dramatised by discrimination and franchise reform. The young Gandhi, who qualified as a barrister at London’s Inner Temple and went to South Africa in 1893 to practise, was thrown off a train in Pretoria for sitting in a first-class carriage. The following year he complained to the Natal parliament that the Indian was ‘a despised being’ in South Africa. ‘The man in the street hates him, curses him, spits upon him. The press cannot find a sufficiently strong word in the English dictionary to damn him with’, although the most common term was ‘coolie’. He also protested at the disqualification of 41,000 Indians in Natal under the new franchise law, leaving only the 43,000 whites with the vote. A vote for the 500,000 Africans there was not even considered.50

  The situation of the black populations and the emergence of this white consciousness did not go unnoticed in the wider world. A first Pan-African Congress was held in London in July 1900, the initiative of Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams. Ten representatives came from the Caribbean, eleven from the United States, and only four from Africa. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first African-American to take a doctorate from Harvard, declared that ‘the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line’.51 Ten years later he denounced ‘this new religion of whiteness’ which portrayed non-whites, in Kipling’s words, as ‘half devil and half child’. He concluded that its pretended superiority derived from claims of ownership. ‘What is whiteness that one should so desire it?’, he asked. ‘Whiteness is the ownership of the earth, forever and ever. Amen.’52

  In the French Empire, there was equally a dominant discourse of white superiority, but it was usually articulated in terms of the mission civilisatrice, the civilising mission. Jules Ferry, the republican politician who presided over France’s colonial expansion in the early 1880s, defended the intervention in Tunisia in 1882 as ‘the triumph of civilisation over barbarism’.53 Four years later, explaining France’s entanglement in Indo-China that had forced his resignation, he declared, ‘We must proclaim openly that the superior races have a right vis à vis the inferior races because they have a duty towards them. They have a duty to civilise them.’54

  The French Empire, like the British, was divided into colonies where there was considerable French settlement and those where there was very little. In fact, the only real French settler colony was Algeria, and even here there were not enough French settlers to underpin France’s control of the indigenous Algerian population. Even these were outnumbered by other European communities, Spanish, Italian and Maltese. To remedy this, in 1889, France decided to naturalise the children of all European settlers in Algeria. This was the founding charter of the pieds noirs, distinguished from indigenous Algerians because they largely lived in towns and wore shoes, who would dominate the life of French Algeria for the next seventy years.55

  A first step of the civilising mission was the ‘fusion of races’ in terms of settlers of European origin. A second step, which animated the pieds noirs in the 1890s, was to remove the vote from the long-established Jewish population of Algeria, the members of which had been made citizens in 1870. Despite their huffing and puffing, they failed to achieve this. A third phase, to civilise the indigenous Algerians, never happened. Only a very narrow stratum of Algerians who received a French education and were prepared to relinquish their status as Muslims became French citizens, because they were seen to be betraying the Muslim community. The vast majority was rigorously excluded from any question of citizenship on the basis that it was a conquered Arab race and of Muslim religion. After 1881 Algerian Muslims were subjected to the Code de l’Indigénat, a discriminatory penal code that punished offences such as refusing to do forced labour on public works or to pay taxes with internment or expropriation. This code was arbitrarily administered in the Algerian countryside by sabre-carrying administrators who behaved more like satraps. The Algerians were indeed subjected to their own system of taxation, inherited from Ottoman rule, while European settlers, who lived off those taxes, paid much lighter French taxes themselves, and were accused of ‘eating the native’.56

  Meanwhile the settler community began to flex its muscles and demand a greater measure of self-government. In 1879 the succession of military governors-general ended and civilian governors-general, responsible to the Ministry of the Interior, took their place. Even this was only a start. In 1896 the settlers in Algeria saw off Governor-General Cambon who presumed to interfere in their affairs, sacking mayors for corrupt practices and seeking to silence anti-Semitic agitation. This actually increased under the leadership of a young extremist of Italian origin, Max Régis, encouraging the looting of Jewish shops and synagogues and calling for Jews to forfeit their citizenship. In 1898 Régis was elected mayor of Algiers and four out of six Algerian deputies elected to Parliament were rampant anti-Semites, including Édouard Drumont, author of La France juive. Anti-Semitism served to bind the European settler community together and to assert their demands for greater self-government. In 1898 they achieved budgetary autonomy through a ‘colonial parliament’ of Délégations financières, composed of forty-eight Europeans and only twenty-one indigenous Algerians. This enabled them to formalise their tax-light regime and to perpetuate the tax-heavy regime on the Arabs.57

  The only French colony where the civilising mission worked successfully was in Senegal, and that only in the ‘four communes’ along the coast, including Dakar. These had a population of French and mixed-race families and of French-educated Muslims, the so-called évolués. They were granted French-style municipal government in 1872 and the right to elect their own deputy to parliament in 1879. Such generosity towards French-educated Muslims did not last. In 1912 the Algerian model was imported and Muslims were deprived of citizenship. Moreover, the rights of the four communes did not extend into the interior, where the Code de l’Indigénat and arbitrary administrators held sway.58 One more chance came with the formation of French West Africa in 1895. This federated Senegal, French Sudan, French Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Niger, Upper Volta, Togo and Dahomey. In 1904 governor-general Ernest Roume announced that ‘we wish truly to open Africa to civilisation’. This would entail the provision of railways and schools, reducing the power of ‘feudal’ lords and the abolition of slavery.59 Within a few years, however, it became clear that to reduce the power of feudal
lords was immensely destabilising, and the French state was better served by working together with ‘traditional’ authorities, which should be preserved. In this sense, the French model of ‘direct rule’ was discarded in favour of the ‘indirect rule’ theorised by Lugard in Nigeria, where working with the Muslim chiefs of the north was held up as a shining example. The indirect model was transferred to Morocco when it became a French protectorate, provisionally in 1906, formally in 1912. Hubert Lyautey, who had served under Galliéni and spent years ‘pacifying’ the country, decided to work with the sultan and his traditional administration of pashas and caïds, who were both administrators and judges, under the supervision of French administrators.60

  One of the contradictions of the civilising mission is that it excluded from power the educated elites it created. In India, British rule was increasingly challenged by Calcutta lawyers, journalists, teachers and administrators, the Parsi business community of Bombay and the Brahmin priestly caste of the former Maratha confederacy interior, who joined to form the All-India National Congress in 1885. They demanded greater self-government on the dominion model, including a voice for Indians in the legislative councils and higher posts in the Indian civil service.61 Some concessions were made in the Councils Act of 1892, but there was a backward push against them when Lord Curzon became viceroy in 1899. Curzon was obsessed by the threat of Russian expansion into Central Asia, knocking on the doors of India. India, he argued, was ‘the pivot and centre’ of the Empire, and for that reason its security could not be endangered.62 In 1905 he tried to undercut the influence of the Calcutta political class by partitioning Bengal, and advised moving the capital from the ‘heated atmosphere’ of Calcutta to the old Mughal capital of Delhi. This took place in 1911 when the young George V presided over a durbar that brought together the princes through which the Empire must once again rule (Figure 1.4).

  Figure 1.4 The Empire in perfect order: King-Emperor George V and Queen Mary at the coronation durbar in Delhi, 12 December 1911.

  Getty Images / Hulton Royals Collection / Hulton Archive / Stringer / 3307019

  Two significant developments were nevertheless triggered by this ‘feudal reaction’. First, the partition of Bengal favoured the formation of an All-Indian Muslim League in 1906 and opened the way for a return of Muslim power for the first time since 1857. Second, the moderates in the Congress Party were outflanked by extremists led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who launched a Swaraj or self-rule movement backed up by a boycott of foreign goods, taxes and military service. Violence broke out in Bengal, and Tilak was tried for sedition and imprisoned in Burma in 1908–14.63

  By 1914 empire had been reinvented as formal rather than informal, sustaining great powers with global reach. It became more structured but arguably more oppressive. Wars for the control of Africa, India or China were undertaken by regular armies rather than the private armies of trading companies. Expropriation and massacre gave way to states founded on racial segregation and racial hierarchy. Self-government was increasingly imparted to settler colonists who could be entrusted with the interests of the British and French Empires. But it was systematically denied to the Indian educated elite and Algerian Muslims were subjects not citizens, under a discriminatory tax and legal regime. Ironically, empires became better at legitimising themselves. Britannic nationalism, the recovery of national grandeur after the defeat of 1870, the white man’s burden and the mission civilisatrice were developed as smoke-screens to hide brutal realities. Power was magnificently orchestrated in colonial capitals and largesse dispensed to keep a ruling group of princes and chieftains on side. Imperial rule was nevertheless contested, and those who were keen to contest it had no better moments than the two world wars in which the great empires would now became embroiled.

  2

  Empires in Crisis: Two World Wars

  On 29 May 1924 Virginia Woolf visited the British Empire Exhibition which had been erected at the end of the Metropolitan Line at Wembley. A thunderstorm was in full spate, garishly lighting up the sky and sweeping dust around the military bands and pagodas. ‘Colonies are perishing and disappearing in a spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay’, she wrote. ‘The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins. For that is what comes of letting in the sky.’1

  These comments now seem uncannily prescient but at that moment few foresaw the end of empire. The interwar period was one of high imperialism for both the British and the French Empires, and there was much to celebrate. The British Empire Exhibition of 1924–5 was organised to convey its size, wealth and glory to a public that was arguably more interested in the football played in the new stadium than in George V’s speech opening the Exhibition. On St George’s Day the king spoke to the crowd and broadcast to the nation and to ‘my dominions across the seas’, exalting the Empire’s material and moral power. The Exhibition featured a maharaja’s palace, a Burmese pavilion and a mud-baked African walled town. There was an Empire pageant of 1,200 performers, accompanied by Elgar’s Empire March, a Torchlight Tattoo of 1,000 military bandsmen, and a Boy Scout Jamboree. It was attended by over 17 million visitors in 1924 and nearly ten million in 1925. The underlying message was that Britain was bestowing civilisation on a world that remained backward but full of potential if it remained under her guidance. This message was bitterly contested by Indians and Africans who experienced the Empire in other ways. The Bengal lawyer Chitteranjan Das, who had just founded the Swarajaya or independence party, criticised the Exhibition as a vehicle of colonial exploitation. Ladipo Solanko, a Nigerian student at University College London, held meetings that launched a West African Student Union, espoused Pan-Africanism and called for a ‘Negro Empire’ in Nigeria.2

  Four years earlier, in 1920, the French Minister of Colonies, Albert Sarraut, unveiled plans for a Colonial Exhibition that would be ‘the living apotheosis of the overseas expansion of France under the Third Republic’. It finally opened in Vincennes in 1931, designed as a testimony to the French ‘genius for civilisation’, and was attended by eight million people (Figure 2.1). They delighted in colonies that were each represented by a pavilion, with their native art, exotic costumes and culinary delights. Equally exotic animals from Africa and Asia were on show in the zoo. The centre-piece of the Exhibition was a reproduction of the Cambodian temple of Anghor Wat, which suggested that many colonies enjoyed their own civilisation. The dominant narrative, however, was that through trade, the army and the Church, France radiated a much higher civilisation. As in Britain, there were marginal but passionate voices of protest. Vietnamese students handed out tracts denouncing the colonial brutality of France which the previous year had brutally repressed risings in Indo-China, while the French Communist Party daily L’Humanité pilloried the Exhibition quite simply as ‘the apotheosis of crime’.3

  Figure 2.1 Colonial fantasy: North African tribesmen parade on camels at the 1931 Colonial Exhibition in Paris.

  Getty Images / Roger Viollet / 55756837

  These exhibitions were mounted between the two world wars which demonstrated the fragility of the European empires. The First World War destroyed the German overseas empire, its scraps shared between Britain, France and Belgium. In the Second World War Germany, which built a new empire in Europe, and Japan, expanding in the Far East, all but finished off the French and British Empires. The resources of empire in terms of men and materials were mobilised for wars fought both in Europe and beyond. Appeal was made to the solidarity felt by colonial peoples with their metropolitan rulers. This had some purchase, but more telling was resistance to demands for their men and their money for what seemed to be someone else’s war. This resistance was put down by force, and often extreme violence. Empires experienced not only an existential crisis but a crisis of legitimacy. The pageantry and propaganda rolled out to persuade millions that empire was at the service of wealth, civilisation and glory ceased to persuade so readil
y. Other forms of legitimacy were asserted: the self-determination of peoples and the equality of nations. These were advanced at the end of the First World War by the Bolshevik revolutionaries, the League of Nations and US President Wilson, in the Second World War by President Roosevelt and the United Nations and were taken up by the colonial peoples themselves. Two big questions remained. Would the imperial powers learn from their new challenges or would they attempt to rebuild their empires regardless? And how far would international bodies and the United States insist on their ideals of liberty and equality when confronted by the imperialist interests and prejudices of their British and French Allies?