Pax Britannica
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A vassal could qualify for respect, if not for power or promotion, if he possessed certain specific qualities the British admired. East was East and West was West, and never the twain would meet—
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the
ends of the earth!
There were certain subject peoples who habitually showed these qualities to advantage, and were always favourites of their rulers. In particular the streak of romantic chivalry in the British, fortified perhaps by the immense popularity of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King‚ induced them to cherish a brave enemy. They admired the magnificent Zulus of Natal, who had fought with such lordly skill in the wars of the 1870s, and the chivalrous Maori of New Zealand—‘Keep your heads down, Sikkitifif’, came a voice across the battlefield to the 65th Regiment, during one engagement with those stalwart enemies, ‘we’re going to fire!’1 They respected the manlier Indian tribes of Canada, and liked the strapping Sudanese, whose killing of General Gordon had been despicable indeed, but whose soldierly gifts surely showed that a Christian education would redeem them.2 They had an overwhelming affection for the tough little mountain peoples of the Himalaya, and the fighting tribesmen of the Punjab—those swaggering Sikhs in turbans and whiskers, those irrepressible Pathans and Afridis of the North-West Frontier, rogues always worth the fighting, whose Nelsonic dash and quixotic generosity were all the British liked to imagine in themselves.
The British recognized the strength of the Chinese. Even in Australia, Baron von Hübner reported, the Chinese were admitted to be ‘the best gardeners, the best agricultural labourers, the best workmen of every sort, the best cooks and the most honest and law-abiding people’. Kipling was astonished, when he first visited Singapore, at the extent to which the Chinese ran the colony—yet ‘England is by the uninformed supposed to own the island’. The British worked well with the Parsees of Bombay, Zoroastrians of great business acumen who seemed to think more or less in the European manner, and were the first natives of India to play cricket: Parsees had even built ships for the Royal Navy, and so impregnable was their social eminence in Bombay that the British themselves found it hard to buy houses on the Ridge at Malabar Hill, where the Parsee patricians lived. The Burghers of Ceylon, half-caste Dutch left behind by a previous Empire, were liked for their solid, unassuming good sense. In South Africa and Canada the British much respected the German, Slav and Scandinavian communities which had also settled there under the Flag: the only numerous marriages between Britons and subjects of other races were those with the Swedes and Ukrainians of western Canada.
Of course they also cultivated useful allies. In India they were generally friendly with the princely caste, if only because its members were grand, rich, powerful and often educated in England. They were sometimes overawed, indeed, by the horsy opulence of the Rajahs, who carried Englishness to unapproachable extremes: but they generally preferred Muslim to Hindu princes, because the Muslim creed offered a code of conduct that seemed not so very far from their own ideal of Godly cleanliness and courage. Feudatories of this kind were often buttered up with high-sounding imperial decorations, Grand Crosses of the Star of India, Victorian Orders or Orders of St Michael and St George, and were honoured guests at governors’ tables, polo matches and jubilee processions. In the field the anglophile subject was often an irritation: in England he was always fêted, and the most popular visitor to London that summer, one of the very few whose faces were generally recognized, was Wilfrid Laurier, the conciliatory French Canadian Prime Minister of Canada.
Clearly the British responded most warmly to what they would think of as Nordic qualities. In several parts of the Empire they also worked closely with Jews. In South Africa Jewish capitalists and speculators were eager allies of the British in their bid for the Transvaal goldfields, and in India one of the most celebrated of Anglo-Indian families sprang from the Persian-Jewish clan of the Sassoons, great men in Bombay: in the very heart of the Poona cantonment, just down the road from the club and the Anglican church, stood the high pinnacled tomb of David Sassoon, its sarcophagus elaborately carved by Samuel of Sydney Street, Mile End Road, with the crest of the Sassoons at its feet, and the Poona synagogue respectfully outside the window. The Jews of other countries remained Jews, observed the Jewish Chronicle apropos of the Jubilee celebrations. The Jews of the British Empire became true Englishmen.
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On the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta a grand and curious monument stood, across the road from the equestrian statue of Lord Napier, and within sight of Fort William’s glowering redoubts. It was an oblong pavilion of Ionic columns, a little thicket of pillars above a jetty, severely classical in origin, but given an oriental flourish by its shaded profusion of columns. Behind it the ships steamed up and down the river, and passengers arriving at Calcutta sometimes disembarked at its landing-stage, to take a gharry into the city. In a capital notable for its monuments to generals, proconsuls, engineers and great administrators, many people assumed this memorial, too, to honour some man of imperial steel. In fact Prinsep’s Ghat commemorated the young Anglo-Indian who, in the 1830s, first translated the rock edicts of Asoka: James Prinsep, who died in his forty-first year after twenty-two years in the Indian service.
It would be unfair to end a chapter about British racial attitudes with the implication that all was arrogance or condescension. Even in that glaring noon of Empire, much generosity and respect still gave nobility to the Pax Britannica. We have been speaking of the general: the particular was often far more attractive. The Liberal party was out of power, but the liberal instinct was still alive, and the higher motives of the imperialists were not all humbug. The Colonial Office in London consistently stood for fair play towards the subject races, often against bitter criticism from white men on the spot. The Indian Civil Service still recruited men of compassionate integrity—there were even a few multi-racial clubs in India. The liberal intelligentsia fought every overbearing gesture with honourable zeal, and there were still men of all political parties, undazzled by the flash of the New Imperialism, who thought of the Empire as a trust—support for settlers in distant lands, protection for innocent primitives, a guarantee of honest government.
Countless individual acts of kindness had entered the legends of Empire. In Australia aborigines still remembered how Sir George Grey, when Governor of South Australia, had been recognized by an old woman of the Bibbulmum tribe as the spirit of her dead son, and had gently and smilingly allowed her to embrace him crooning the words, ‘Boonoo, Boonoo! Bala ngan-ya Kooling!’—‘It is true, it is true, he is my son!’1 In the Punjab a sect called the Nikalsaini actually worshipped the memory of John Nicholson, ‘the Lion of the Punjab’, one of the great men of the North-West Frontier before the Mutiny. If few such reputations were being established at our particular moment of the imperial history, at least there lay beneath the cant and gasconade older and gentler traditions of Empire. Queen Victoria herself was their living symbol, and stood recognizably in the line of Wilberforce and Livingstone, maternally caring for the coloured peoples. She detested the Boers, because they were so cruel to black Africans. She thought it unfair that in the casualty lists of frontier wars British soldiers were named, but seldom natives. She very much wished the Zulus could be allies rather than enemies—not only were they honest, merry and brave, but they did not smoke. She often felt for the Queen’s coloured enemies as much as she did for the Queen’s white men. She kept an eagle eye on Kitchener’s armies that year, as they fought their revengeful way up the Nile,2 and when she was once told that the fierce Afridis were again about to attack her soldiers on the North-West Frontier of India, her first response was to wonder why: ‘I fear that the poor people are suffering from the necessity of supplying horses and ponies and cattle to us … which comes heavily upon them after their famine and plague.’
She was an outspo
ken admirer of Indian art, too—some might say ostentatious, for she had one room at Osborne fitted out entirely as a Durbar Room, with murals by Rudyard Kipling’s father. Despite the disregard for Asian and African cultures which was ingrained in the nature of British imperialism, there were always individuals to cherish the conquered civilizations: Prinsep’s Ghat was paid for by public subscription among the British of Calcutta. It was not a fault of the British to destroy alien cultures for the sake of mere uniformity. Their innate respect for tradition, bred by so many centuries of continuity at home, obliged them to tolerate most native ways, unless—like human sacrifice, suttee, or infanticide—such ways offended the conscience even of the humanist. Throughout the British presence overseas there had been scholars and artists eagerly devoted to the laws, the religions, the art, the folk-lore of the east. Once, when Lord Napier invaded Ethiopia with an avenging army in 1867, the British deliberately tried to emulate Napoleon, attaching savants of several specialities to their armies, and producing the most thorough studies till then of the Abyssinian civilization—at least 500 precious manuscripts were taken home to England.1 The Ajanta Caves, those prodigies of Buddhist art, were first appreciated in modern times by British soldiers of the Indian Army,2 and it was the British Archaeological Department of Ceylon which rescued from the jungle the stupendous temples of Anuradhapura. The officers’ mess of Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, perched on a high ridge at Mardan, near the Afghan frontier, was decorated with a remarkable series of Graeco-Buddhist sculptures, reminders of Alexander’s conquests in those regions: they had been found during the digging of the Swat Canal, and were lovingly preserved by the soldiery.
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For it was not viciousness, nor even simply conceit, that fostered the general aloofness of the British. It was partly a sense of ordained separateness, partly the natural reserve of islanders, and partly no doubt the awkwardness people feel when they do not understand a foreign caper, or more especially do not speak a foreign language. Many a British official, his life spent in the imperial territories, learnt to love his charges with a passionate sincerity—even Tommy Atkins, Alfred Milner wrote from Cairo in 1893, regarded the Sudanese ‘with half-amused, half-admiring and inoffensively patronizing affection’. Sometimes the sympathy was so complete that the imperialist genuinely thought himself a son of the country, like those many colonial administrators who could never bear to leave, but settled upon their retirement in cottages called Mon Repos or Journey’s End, in fragrant alcoves of Darjeeling or beside the Pyramids road. ‘Ah India, my country, my country!’ Kipling had cried, in the middle of a travel essay, and there were many Britons to whom the whole vast panoply of Empire really was a community, multi-coloured, inconceivably dispersed, yet still a brotherhood of sorts, in which it was a man’s job to encourage the backward, comfort the neglected and honour the Queen. A faint irony sometimes salted these high-minded attitudes, as the Briton considered how extraordinarily obtuse some of his brothers were, but in such men it was not contemptuous, only wry. This is how a balladeer calling himself Brer Rabbit, writing in The Pioneer of Allahabad that year, described a leave in Europe:
I hied me north to Como where the lake is azure blue,
Where you loaf about on steamers quite content with naught to do.
But upon the mountainside I saw a Sadr Kanungo
With patwaris and the Khasras all for me to ‘janch karo’.
Then I took a train for Avignon, but gazing from the car
I perceived upon the platform my old friend the chaukidar.
The ‘brave gendarme’ had vanished, the ‘gorait’ was in his place,
With his ‘waradat ka notbuk’ and a grin upon his face.
Next I flew across to Monaco in Maxim’s new machine—
After all these misadventures for a gamble I felt keen
But a sub-inspector met me with a smile upon his face—
He’d ‘chalaned’ 2,000 gamblers, and I’d got to try the case!
I said ‘Das roz tak Hawalat’ and off to Naples fled
(That I had not jurisdiction never came into my head)
But in ‘Napoli’ that’s ‘bella’ but can beat Cologne for smells
A Vaccinator asked me to inspect his cleaned out wells.1
In Ceylon they even had Natives playing cricket for the colony, and in 1894 Alan Raffel took 14 for 97 against the visiting M.C.C. Arrogance) indeed!
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Steevens’s unspeakable conceit might speak for the New Imperialism, as it spoke for the Daily Mail: ‘This sort of creature has to be ruled, for his good and our own.’ An older conception of Empire, and one likely to prove more resilient in the end, had been expressed seventy years before, by Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and still had its adherents throughout the Pax Britannica: ‘Let it still be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light; let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolate, but as the gale of spring reviving the slumbering seeds of mind and calling them to life from the winter of ignorance and oppression. If the time shall come when her empire shall have passed away, these monuments will endure when her triumphs shall have become an empty name.’1
1 The first Afro-Asian peer was Sir Satyendra Sinha, who became Lord Sinha of Raipur in 1919.
2 Rosebery, though Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary, and Liberal Prime Minister himself in 1894–5, was the most eloquent of imperialists, and probably invented the phrase ‘Commonwealth of Nations’, in its British imperial sense. His views gradually estranged him from his party, and he died in 1929 a political independent, imperialist to the end and a famous stylist.
1 This splendid fellow (1697–1775), who probably began his military career in the ranks, was unknown until he arrived in India at the age of 50. He made his name in the wars against the French, and is honoured by a spirited effigy in Westminster Abbey—and by this picture, which still hangs in the Fort St George Museum in Madras.
1 Charles Brooke (1829–1917) was the second white rajah: his uncle James, an East India Company servant, had gone to Sarawak on an official mission in 1839, had put down a rebellion and been made ruler of Sarawak by its suzerain, the Sultan of Brunei. Charles, under whose rule Sarawak became a British protectorate, was succeeded by his son Charles Vyner Brooke, until in 1946 the country was annexed by the British Crown.
2 There were corners of the Empire where these happy-go-lucky philosophies were never adopted. One was the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, which was settled by the black descendants of slaves and the white descendants of buccaneers and castaways. Even in such circumstances an all-white élite arose, and to this day the Bowdens, Ebanks, Edens and Merrens of Grand Cayman can claim absolute European descent.
1 Striking the servants, in an off-hand way, died hard in the Empire. In 1946, during my first week in Egypt, I boarded the Cairo train at Port Said with an English colonel of particular gentleness of manner and sweetness of disposition. As we walked along the corridor to find a seat we found our way blocked by an Egyptian, offering refreshments to people inside a compartment. Without a pause, apparently without a second thought, the colonel kicked him, quite hard and effectively, out of our way. I was new to the imperial scenes, and I have never forgotten this astonishing change in my companion’s character, nor the absolute blank indifference with which the Egyptian accepted the kick, and moved.
1 It was in 1857, the Oxford Dictionary says, that the word was first applied to dark-skinned people other than Negroes, but perhaps the Mutiny was the reason. Certainly it was in 1858 that the Queen recorded in her journal her abhorrence of the usage.
1 It was only in the colonies of southern Africa that a substantial British working class settled among a coloured majority: as they were the most obviously vulnerable of the imperialists, so in the end they proved the most intractable.
1 Some survive, notably along Old Court House Street, where one or two jewellers and gunsmiths, with diamond rings in dusty showcases, and the glea
m of gunracks among tiger-masks and horned heads, piquantly evoke imperial extravagances of long ago. Spence’s Hotel, too, a favourite of the Victorians, thrives in air-conditioned modernity: it is claimed to be the oldest hotel in Asia, founded in 1830, and its telegraphic address is ‘Homeliness’. All over India and Pakistan establishments still announce themselves in fading letters to be By Appointment to the Viceroy and Vicereine, and no imperial legacy lives on more strongly in the subcontinent than the tradition of the English boarding-house. Many of the smaller houses still bear the names of their old proprietors. Mrs Davis of Rawalpindi left her boarding-house to one of her male servants, but such was the commercial value of her name and sex that he adopted the professional pseudonym of Miss Davis, and prospered for many years.
1 Nor was Ripon’s attitude forgotten. When, in 1915, his statue was erected in Calcutta, it was financed entirely by Indian subscription—no European subscribed.
1 Above the harbour of Tauranga, in the North Island of New Zealand, are buried the British dead of the battle of Gate Pa, one of the early engagements of the Maori wars. Among them there lies a Maori chieftain, Rawiri Puhiraki, whose epitaph says of him that he gave drink to the enemy wounded, protected the unarmed and respected the dead. ‘The seeds of better feeling thus sown on the battlefields have since borne ample fruit.’