The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  Mountbatten saw British victories in Southeast Asia as a triumph of civilization over the depraved barbarism of imperial Japan. He believed that Britain’s colonies welcomed the return of the Union Jack (which for the most part they did),4 while also believing it necessary to accommodate nationalist, and usually leftist, native forces. For Britain’s Labour government (elected in July 1945), Mountbatten’s position and progressive sympathies made him the natural choice to replace Lord Wavell as viceroy of India in 1947.

  Wavell had given up trying to reconcile India’s Hindus and Muslims. After the Hindu-dominated Congress Party refused to accept a federated India—and Muslims responded with sectarian massacre—Wavell thought Britain was left with two unpalatable choices: scuttle and run, or massively reinforce the Indian army and put off independence for another decade and a half. Mountbatten’s assignment was to guide the subcontinent into independence, and to do so swiftly.

  Labour’s Viceroy

  Mountbatten was already well-regarded by Indian nationalists. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had met him in Singapore, had remarked to Aung San, the Communist-nationalist leader of Burma, that Mountbatten was “a very noble speciman of British imperialism.”5 He was sworn in as viceroy in March 1947 with a deadline of 1 June 1948 to bring India to independence. There were two main parties to the negotiations: Nehru, leader of the Congress Party, whom Mountbatten found congenial and willing to negotiate, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, whom he found cold and intransigent—Jinnah had plumped for partition, for an independent Muslim Pakistan. As Jinnah would not budge, and as the deadline was inexorable, it was a fait accompli, in Mountbatten’s opinion, that British India would not become independent whole and entire. The major loser in this was the Indian people themselves, as millions were forced to flee their homes and hundreds of thousands were killed as Muslim and Hindu butchered each other freed from the constraints of effective British peacekeeping. 6 Another casualty was the Indian princes whose rights, privileges, and semi-autonomous status were crushed by the governments of India and Pakistan. The Hindu maharajah of Muslim-majority Kashmir delayed declaring his loyalty to either side for as long as possible. He hoped against all evidence that Britain would stay. When he finally declared he would join India, it sparked the first Indian-Pakistani War in 1947–48, leading to Kashmir’s own partition between the two states.

  Churchill held Mountbatten partially culpable for the disaster of independence—and for the death knell it sounded for the British Empire. The result might have been inevitable, given the policy of the Labour government, but Churchill was appalled that Mountbatten would lend his hand to it, and only with the passage of time could he reconcile with his former favorite. Churchill well knew the difficulties Mountbatten faced, yet could but mourn in 1947 that “We are of course only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another, men, women, and children, with the ferocity of cannibals, by races gifted with capacities of the highest culture and who had for generations dwelt side by side in general peace under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament.”7 Churchill did not see how the removal of that broad, tolerant, and impartial rule—to be replaced by fanatic sectarianism—could possibly be a good thing.

  Mountbatten believed that history—no less than the praise he received from Nehru, Jinnah, the Labour government, and much of the liberal press—would vindicate his viceroyship, if for no other reason than that he had contrived to bring both India and Pakistan into the British Commonwealth. If that seems a trifling bauble today, it was thought to be worth much more in 1947 (so much so that Indian nationalists suspected it and British politicians and civil servants fretted about it overstretching British resources and commitments). In Mountbatten’s vision, India and Pakistan would join Australia and Canada as real and lasting allies of Britain, tied to the Mother Country by mystic chords of memory. Mountbatten was as sentimental in his progressive liberalism as Churchill was in his nostalgic conservatism; both thought Britain and India (and Pakistan) belonged together.8 As a reward for his service, Lord Louis became Earl Mountbatten of Burma.

  There were other consolations. His nephew, and fellow naval officer, Prince Philip took on his maternal grandparents’ surname of Mountbatten and married Princess Elizabeth, future queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; Mountbatten became a mentor to the couple’s first-born son, Prince Charles. And there was the sea and his career as a naval officer, which reached its apotheosis in his elevation to First Sea Lord (1955–59), after a stint as commander in chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and promotion to the highest naval rank, Admiral of the Fleet. It was followed by his appointment as Chief of the Defence Staff (1959–65), his last military posting. He was instrumental in Britain’s adoption of nuclear-powered submarines, advocated nuclear arms reductions (but not unilateral nuclear disarmament), pushed for interservice cooperation, and argued for a mobile British strike force based on aircraft carriers.

  In his retirement, Mountbatten acted as an unofficial ambassador for Britain, devoted himself to a vast number of worthy organizations and charities, and became president of United World Colleges, which were meant to spread the progressive spirit of internationalism. The denouement of Mountbatten’s life was appropriately, if unfortunately and gruesomely, imperial. He kept a summer home in Ireland, from which he enjoyed boating. On 27 August 1979, the IRA blew up his boat, killing Mountbatten, his grandson, another young boy, and an eighty-three-year-old woman, as well as seriously injuring three others. It was a typical pointless and bloodthirsty act of murder by the IRA, timed to coincide with an ambush on a British patrol in Northern Ireland that left eighteen paratroopers dead. Mountbatten might have appreciated the irony that, in assassinating him, the IRA had killed an impeccable liberal who actually, if privately, supported the idea of a united Ireland.

  Part V

  AFRICA

  Chapter 15

  THE DARK CONTINENT

  The irony of the British Empire in Africa is that while it started with slave ships tapping into the millennium-old slave trade of the Dark Continent, Britain became the most powerful force in the world for ending slavery and the slave trade, and the anti-slaving campaign drove the expansion of the British Empire.

  British slave ships plied the Atlantic in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, bringing their human cargo to work the plantations of the West Indies and continental North America. But by 1807, Britain’s parliament had banned the slave trade, and in true imperial nanny fashion prohibited it for everyone else too, declaring slavery a crime—like piracy, at which the British had also formerly excelled. The Royal Navy now had as one of its chief and most dangerous duties the patrolling of West Africa against the slavers. As the British flag traveled across the continent, so too did its mission to squelch the slave trade, convert the heathen, and deliver law, ports, and roads. In addition, in southern Africa the British unearthed diamonds and gold; in eastern Africa they established farms and ranches; in northern Africa they took command of the Suez Canal; and everywhere in Africa they were motivated by something else: a desire for discovery—most famously, to find the source of the Nile.

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Britain’s primary interest in Africa in the mid-nineteenth century was abolishing the slave trade

  Sub-Saharan Africans never invented the wheel or a written language (the British gave them both)

  Jan Smuts, a South African who fought against the British in the Boer War, became a British field marshal and a leader in the creation of both the League of Nations and the United Nations

  * * *

  Ashanti

  Britain’s West African colonies—the Gambia, the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), Nigeria (which didn’t become an official British protectorate until 1901), and Sierra Leone—were established as outposts for the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery missions, with Sierra Leone set aside as a colony for freed slaves. West Africa was
dangerous largely because of disease, but there was also the danger of hostile tribes—the conflict with one such tribe created the epic conflict of British West Africa, the Ashanti Wars.

  The Ashanti, the great inland kingdom of the Gold Coast, had fought the British repeatedly (with long intervals of peace), largely over strips of shoreline where the British protected coastal tribes. Sir Charles MacCarthy (1764–1824), an Irish soldier-of-fortune whom the British made governor of Sierra Leone, was one of the Ashanti’s most celebrated early victims.

  In 1821, the British Crown absorbed the Gold Coast from the British African Company of Merchants, which was judged too feeble in suppressing the slave trade. It was put under the jurisdiction of MacCarthy, who fought slavers and established schools for children orphaned by the slave trade. But for all his good works he came into conflict with the Ashanti, and in a punitive expedition against them he was killed; his corpse was decapitated, and his skull, gold plated, became a goblet for the Ashanti king.

  But the great Anglo-Ashanti War is reckoned to be the one of 1873–74, which pitted the Ashanti Empire and its 100,000-strong army (though only 40,000 took the field) against a British force led by Garnet Wolseley. The immediate cause of the war was the British Empire’s acquisition of another strip of the Gold Coast, this one formerly held by the Dutch. The Ashanti refused to recognize Britain’s claims. The British—eager to avenge the decapitation of MacCarthy and, among other frustrations, punish the Ashanti kingdom’s refusal to countenance free trade—braced themselves for the Ashanti assault.

  The Ashanti army was well-organized and led, and equipped with ill-aimed (actually not aimed at all) muskets that the warriors seemed to value as much for their gunpowdery bang as for anything else. For the British troops, the Gold Coast was known as the “white man’s grave,” made such by tropical disease. But Wolseley, a forty-year-old major-general—the modern major-general of future Gilbert and Sullivan fame—was, as ever, prepared: his troops were issued quinine and a pamphlet on tropical warfare, written by Wolseley himself, which was chock full of tips for keeping bugs and disease at bay.

  When Wolseley’s force of 1,500 British and 700 black troops arrived ashore in January 1874, the Ashanti were already withdrawing, racked by sickness. So the chase was on—the Ashanti hoping to lure Wolseley into the interior and sure defeat; Wolseley looking to strike hard and fast so that he could crush the Ashanti quickly before disease caught up with his men. The first engagement, the Battle of Amoaful, was fought in dense jungle. Wolseley had made allowances for the terrain, dividing his army into small units, each led by an officer. The British came “creeping through the bush... gaining ground foot by foot... pouring a ceaseless fire into every bush which might conceal an invisible foe.” As war correspondent G. A. Henty (later a famous author of adventure stories for boys) observed, “Nothing could have been better than Sir Garnet Wolseley’s plan of battle.... Where [the enemy] attacked us he found himself opposed by a continuous front of men. . . . ”1 The British juggernaut cut through to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi, torched it (in lieu of finding anyone with whom to negotiate), and then quick-marched to the coast in hopes of keeping the sick list from exploding. The Ashanti had troubles of their own—not only had British martial vigor surprised them, but subject tribes had risen in rebellion against the Ashanti king. Ashanti ambassadors caught up with Wolseley, agreed to the principle of free trade, and signed a peace treaty.

  Wolseley called the Ashanti war “the most horrible war I ever took part in”2 (and he took part in quite a few, stretching from Burma to Canada, India to South Africa, China to Egypt, and the Sudan). British casualties—dead, wounded, or invalided home—amounted to more than 40 percent of his force, and more than 70 percent were sick over the course of the two-month campaign. In January 1896, the British formally (and forcibly) annexed the Ashanti kingdom into the British Empire (among those leading troops on that campaign was Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts). The final act of the Ashanti wars was an Ashanti rebellion, the so-called “War of the Golden Stool,” the stool being the sacred throne of the Ashanti monarchy. The Ashanti royal family was exiled to the Seychelles, but the golden stool was hidden and not rediscovered until 1920. In the interest of peace, the British let the Ashanti keep it.

  Lord Lugard and “Indirect Rule”

  The crucial figure in the development of British West Africa was Frederick Lugard (who was made a baron for his service, though like all too many empire-builders he left no heir to his title). The son of a clergyman (an army chaplain), Lugard started life as a soldier. He was educated at Sandhurst and saw duty in Afghanistan, the Sudan, and Burma, though soldiering did not—or so he believed—suit him; he thought of himself as having a “woman’s character,”3 too emotionally soft to be a soldier. Nevertheless, he hired himself out to fight against slavers in Nyasaland—hoping to get himself killed as a cure for a broken heart, but instead only managed to get badly wounded.

  He found his niche as an imperial troubleshooter, conqueror, and administrator. It was a role Lugard first took up with the Imperial British East Africa Company, which hired him to open Uganda to British trade and influence. He did this with aplomb and a single Maxim gun.

  Lugard was a model Victorian—serious, active, with a deep moralistic strain. His methods were sometimes harsh, he was an imperialist of the most ardent stripe, but he also recognized the Empire’s hold on Africa would be temporary: “For two or three generations we can show the Negro what we are; then we shall be asked to go away. Then we shall leave the land to those it belongs to, with the feeling that they have better business friends in us than in other white men.”4

  Sorry, Anti-Colonialists, You’re Wrong

  “The merchant, the miner, and the manufacturer do not enter the tropics on sufferance or employ their technical skill and energy and their capital as ‘interlopers’ or as ‘greedy capitalists,’ but in the fulfillment of the mandate of civilization.”

  Sir Frederick (later Lord) Lugard, governor of Nigeria (and earlier of Hong Kong), quoted in James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (The Folio Society, 1992), p. 323

  The key phrase was “we can show the Negro what we are.” Lugard was the man who shaped the British civil service in West Africa, and he shaped it in his own upright, paternalistic image. A District Commissioner had to be courageous and strong, a man with moral force and a Maxim gun to back it up: “we do not intend to be fooled . . . we come like men that are not afraid,”5 as he said when he marched into Uganda. The District Commissioner had to be a fair and disinterested dispenser of justice, and he had to advance the cause of civilized standards and economic development and enterprise.

  Lugard’s method was indirect rule—ruling through local elites who had been won over to the imperial cause—which was a common enough British imperial strategy but one that he developed, expounded, and made his own as a practical political philosophy. It meant that the hundred disparate tribes of Nigeria could be governed in ways that preserved their traditions and cultures, while a British representative was kept on hand to make sure that all due obeisance was given to fair play, free trade, and the requisite moral decencies (though these sometimes required a sliding scale, as even the anti-slavery-minded Lugard tolerated, up to a point, the limited practice of slavery in Islamic northern Nigeria).

  Lugard envisioned African self-government at a local level, leading eventually to self-government at a regional level, and after some considerable time at the highest level in independent states. Africa was his passion, but unlike later liberals he did not clothe the Africans with any sort of inherent moral superiority; on the contrary, his view, based on his long, adventurous experience on the continent, was a justification for imperial paternalism. The average African, he said, tended to be a “happy, thriftless, excitable person, naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity . . . his thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers l
ittle from apprehension of the future or grief for the past.”6 It was the Empire’s role to guide such men in the ways of honesty, industry, and sobriety.

  The Missionary with Only One Convert

  Among the soldiers and explorers and Randlords of Britain’s African empire, perhaps the most famous imperialist of all was a Protestant medical missionary, Dr. David Livingstone (1813–73). As a missionary in Central Africa, Livingstone cured the sick; tried (and failed) to interest the natives in a non-polygamous religion (he made only one partial convert); and became an ardent African explorer—believing this was his true calling, and one not unrelated to preaching the gospel. As a Scotsman, he had also absorbed the teachings of Adam Smith and believed in the holy trinity of Christianity, commerce, and civilization: commerce required navigable rivers, increased trade with Britain might displace the slave trade, and as more of Africa became explored more missionary stations could be established. His life was certainly adventurous—he was once mauled by a lion, frequently tread where no white man had been before, and was famously lost and presumed dead in darkest Africa, until found by Henry Morton Stanley: “Doctor Livingstone, I presume.” He died, his body ravaged by African diseases, while searching for the source of the Nile. His African attendants cut out his heart, so that it could be buried in African soil, before transporting the body back to Britain.