Migration rates Decade ending
(per 1,000 population) 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910
Britain 58 52 50 70 44 65
Ireland — — 66 142 89 70
Austria-Hungary — — 3 11 16 48
France 1 1 2 3 1 1
Germany — — 15 29 10 5
Italy — — 11 34 50 108
Spain — — — 36 44 57
The impulse towards mass migration is easy enough to understand: a better life, plentiful land, new horizons. But why was Britain so very different? What made the outflow so great? Or rather, given that Italian emigration would eventually outdo the British, what made it come about so early?
There are four principal answers. One, British wages were the highest in Europe and transport costs the lowest. Quite simply, if people wanted to leave, Brits were among the first to afford the trip. Second, during the critical phase of the early nineteenth century Brits were in the paradoxical position of being both wealthy enough to leave and poor enough to want to, the offer of free land in the USA still a significant enough factor to encourage the trip. Third, the British population boom came earlier and faster than it did elsewhere. As population cohorts reached their twenties, with farmland not freely available and industrial jobs hardly attractive, there was an inevitable tendency for that population surplus to head down to the nearest port and set sail for someplace new.
The fourth reason, however, would prove the most important. Emigration breeds emigration. If no one in your village has ever made the long voyage to New York, only the pluckiest, most intrepid sorts are likely to do so. But if your Uncle Joe and your Auntie Edna and your Cousin Flo and that ginger bloke called Ted who once kissed your sister are all already in the USA, then the move will seem far less daunting. We Brits never felt alone. That’s why, during the decisive phase of mass migration, it was Brits, not Continental Europeans, who peopled the new worlds.
All this matters. Assumptions of inevitability have a habit of smuggling themselves into historical thought without anyone ever quite noticing. It’s easy, for instance, to assume that because the Mayflower contained a bunch of English speakers, with recognizably English political, religious and cultural attitudes, then the modern United States was bound to end up retaining (in modified form) that outlook. The idea’s nonsense, of course. If, in the decades and centuries following the Mayflower, the French had emigrated en masse (or the Germans in Massen or the Italians in blocco) and the Brits had stayed at home, the world today would be a vastly different place. America would be utterly different in terms of politics, economy, science, culture and cuisine. Even its language might well have shifted, those early English-speaking Puritans becoming no more than a historical curiosity.
This parallel universe, of a French-speaking America peopled by French-speaking migrants, would be utterly different from the one we actually inhabit. The ‘Special Relationship’ could have tied America and France, with Britain watching jealously from the sidelines. There might be an anglophone secessionist minority in Canada; 400 million French speakers in India; a burgeoning swell of French speakers in China; and here at home, societies clamouring to protect the English language. This parallel universe might well be disconcerting, yet it wouldn’t be all downside. After all, in such a world, we’d surely, finally, be able to thrash the Aussies at cricket.
SOLDIERS AND SLAVES
If you poke around on an internet video service such as YouTube, you’ll be able to find video clips of the Japanese Parliament, or Diet, in action. At first glance, those videos are nothing so special: a whole load of blokes in suits, in a modernish assembly building, talking interminably in a language that few of us understand. Except that the blokes in question are clearly Asian not European, the clips might easily have been shot in Luxembourg or Slovenia or Denmark; or, for that matter, in Cardiff, Belfast or Edinburgh.
Yet familiarity ought not to blind us to the tremendous oddness of this sight. Here is the Prime Minister of Japan, addressing the Japanese Parliament, and he’s wearing British national costume. The modern grey business suit, after all, is as traditionally Japanese as is jellied eel or pie and mash. The sight of an oriental prime minister in a suit should startle us every bit as much as if (God forbid) Gordon Brown were to come to the dispatch box wearing a silk kimono. The oddness, however, does not stop at a certain form of attire. The Japanese obtained their parliamentary constitution from the post-war American occupiers, whose own political thinking had its roots all the way back in the constitutional arrangements of the first Anglo-Saxon kings of England. That Japanese Parliament is bound by the rule of law, a concept whose practical origin can be traced back to the signing of Magna Carta by the banks of the River Thames. In short, Japan—a country that lies half a world away from Britain and for most of the past few centuries did much to prohibit contact with Europeans of any stripe—bears a British imprint, not merely in the superficials (those boring grey suits), but in the deepest elements of its political culture too.
The British way of doing things has been disseminated by a number of different means. One notable way has been emulation. During the eighteenth century, European countries noticed that the Brits somehow managed to operate their criminal justice system without either torturing the accused or bringing about the collapse of civilization. Consequently, the realization began to dawn that perhaps torture was not quite as needful as had long been thought. Equally, when British sailors started kicking footballs around on the beaches of Genoa or Rio de Janeiro, their games were interesting enough to be widely adopted.
A second means of transmission has been migration. The United States has English as its national language, because, early on, Brits were readier to emigrate there than anyone else. For the same reason, British political and legal concepts were more influential than French or Spanish ones in building the country which would become the twentieth century’s most successful and influential superpower. As with the United States, so too with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and (to a lesser extent) elsewhere too.
The third mode of transmission, however, has been just as potent, and morally far more uncomfortable. The British Empire spread British ways by means of the carronade and the cutlass, the musket and Maxim gun. Territory was acquired by force or the threat of force. Once acquired, it was held the same way. By the standards of empires, the British model was relatively gentle, relatively non-exploitative and relatively tolerant. Yet empires are unlovely things, and even a relatively good version of the breed remains brutal, exploitative and aggressive. Even a fairly short list of British imperial excesses would have to take in the enslavement of Africans, the genocide meted out to Native Americans, the displacement of Australian Aboriginals, the imperial campaigns of ‘reprisals’, the concentration camps of the Boer War, the rebels blown apart on the cannon’s mouth following the Indian Mutiny, the massacres at Amritsar or Omdurman, the famines exacerbated by colonial rule, the bloodshed and inadequate government that often followed independence. The British Empire was morally implicated in all these things, and countless more such things besides. The ill-effects of colonial rule linger on today, not just in the poor countries of ex-colonial Africa, but in the in the most prosperous parts of the former empire too. Think of the unhappy situation of Aboriginals in Australia, or of Native Americans in the United States. Better still, think of the long and violent colonial legacy in Ireland, whose troubles may only now be drawing to their unlamented close.
It is conventional now—‘politically correct’, if you will—to be anti-empire. I think that such conventional wisdom represents the only morally tenable position to hold. Anyone today wanting to argue the case in favour of empire will inevitably find themselves having to defend those things that it gave rise to and was built on: the enslavement, the genocide, the displacement and the rest. Yet to take a moral stance shouldn’t blind one to some of the other legacies of the British Empire.
Take, for instance, the not so minor issue of democracy. Bri
tish lip-service to liberty might have produced its share of belly-laughs, but the colonial system brought with it common law notions of the rule of law, habeas corpus, jury trial, and the rest. Democracy was held up as a goal—one that seemed to recede forever out of reach, but a goal nonetheless. In the white colonies of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, democratic self-determination was achieved with remarkable smoothness. Elsewhere, colonial rule and representative government were deemed simply incompatible, yet it remains a striking fact that virtually every larger country to have emerged from colonial rule as a continuously functioning democracy is a former British colony, India being the wonderful, pre-eminent example of the type.
Indeed, even the briefest consideration of twentieth-century history underlines the importance of the British democratic tradition. Depending a little on how you count, the only countries to have gone through the twentieth century as stable democracies are as follows: Australia, Britain, Canada, Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States. Of these nine countries, six are English-speaking. The other three—Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland—were not among the heavyweights of world affairs. Had it not been for the British imperial legacy, including, most importantly, the United States, the most prevalent model of government in the world today would most likely be taken from the versions offered by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. As it is, the world, is in large part free and getting freer. In 1973, Freedom House, an American NGO, reckoned that just 29.7% of the world’s countries were free, compared with 45.9% unfree. Today, those statistics have reversed: 46.9% of the world’s nations are free, and just 23.2% unfree. (In both cases, there’s an intermediate group of partly free nations too.) These free nations enjoy not simply representative government, but all the trimmings too: a free press, the rule of law, due process in criminal trials, and the rest.
Writing about the British Empire, historian Simon Schama has written:
The irony that an empire so noisily advertised as an empire of free Britons should depend on the most brutal coercion of enslaved Africans is not just an academic paradox. It was the condition of the empire’s success, its original sin…By the end of the eighteenth century…instead of an empire of farmers and traders the British Empire was overwhelmingly an empire of soldiers and slaves. The Americans who had taken the professions of liberty most seriously had flung them back in the teeth of Britain and gone their own way.
He’s right. Brutality in all its forms was a necessary part of the imperial project, its original sin. Yet Schama is also right to call attention to the paradox of Empire, the contradiction embedded at its heart: those professions of liberty which, ludicrous as they often looked, nevertheless bore fruit. The world we live in today is increasingly free, increasingly democratic. That this is the case owes much to a liberty built on coercion, a dream of freedom given life by soldiers and slaves.
LIFESTYLE
THE BRITISH WAY OF DEATH
In one of his travel books, Evelyn Waugh speaks of meeting a ‘very elegant Greek who wore an Old Etonian tie and exhibited an extensive acquaintance with the more accessible members of the English peerage’. According to Waugh, this anglophile Greek told him of a recent incident, in which one of the main ferries crossing the Bosporus had run aground on some rocks hidden by morning mist. The captain and chief officer had taken the only available lifeboat and made off in it themselves.
Left to themselves the passengers, who were a motley race of Turks, Jews and Armenians fell into a state of mad panic. The only helpful course would have been to sit absolutely firm and hope for rescue. Instead they trotted moaning from side to side, swaying the ship to and fro and shaking it off the rocks on which it was impaled.
So far this is all run-of-the-mill Waugh: a less than wholly reliable anecdote, spiced up with disparaging remarks about foreigners—particularly those presumptuous enough to affect the wearing of that most sacred of English icons, an Old Etonian tie. But Waugh is still working up to his climax:
My informant [the Greek] sat frozen with terror…in expectation of almost immediate capsize. He was here met by a stout little man, strutting calmly along the deck with a pipe in his mouth and his hands plunged into the pockets of his ulster. They observed each other with mutual esteem as the frenzied workmen jostled and shouted round them.
‘I perceive, sir,’ said the man with the pipe, ‘that you, too, are an Englishman.’
‘No,’ answered the Greek, ‘only a damned foreigner.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said the Englishman, and walked over to the side of the ship to drown alone.
Did any such event ever happen? Was Waugh ever told this story in anything like the form in which he relates it? Quite possibly not. And even as told, the tale doesn’t quite hang together. While Waugh is acerbic about the workers who ‘trotted moaning from side to side’, surely his Englishman’s calm ‘strutting’ would have had exactly the same effect on the balance of the ship?
All this, however, is beside the point. In Waugh’s world, an Englishman was expected to be calm, even imperturbable, in the face of his impending death. It is no coincidence that Waugh’s Englishman is depicted as a stout, small, ulster-wearing pipe-smoker. Each of these attributes is designed to convey not an aristocrat or man of breeding, but the ordinary Englishman, a man of the phlegmatic middle classes, a John Bull type, solid in build, practical in dress, calm in temperament. Place such a man in a life-threatening situation, and this most ordinary of Englishmen would come out superior to even the showiest of well-born foreigners. (It’s perhaps worth noting that when Waugh spoke of the ‘English’, he would have included any Scot, Welshman or Irishman who had the proper understanding of the important things in life: the flight of a cricket ball, the fall of a trouser leg, the correct use of a finger bowl, the right way to patronize a foreigner.)
Of course, Waugh was a snob, a bigot and a propagandist. To use his anecdotes as a means of assessing the British temperament would be as nonsensical as using Pravda, say, to assess the Soviet economy under Leonid Brezhnev. Better perhaps to use known historical incidents to prove the case. At the Battle of Waterloo, the dashing cavalry commander Henry Paget (later Lord Anglesey) had his leg hit by a cannonball. Paget is said to have exclaimed, ‘By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg,’ to which the Duke of Wellington replied, ‘By God, sir, so you have.’ Yet it’s hard to build much of a case from scraps such as these. For one thing, this exchange may well have been polished in the telling. For another, the words as reported could as easily be the product of shock as of raw physical courage. For a third, every nation likes to burnish the martial lustre of its heroes and it would be impossible to find any nation on earth that didn’t have comparable tales to tell.
All the same, Waugh was on to something real. Take, for instance, an incident that took place towards the end of the Russian Civil War in 1920. Admiral Kolchak, the leader of the anti-Bolshevik forces, had been captured and was to be executed along with Pepeliaev, a political ally.
The lip of the escarpment was illuminated by the headlamps of the lorry that had brought the firing squad; its members were drawn up on either side of the bonnet, so as not to obscure the headlamps.
In the still, freezing night…the prison commandant led Kolchak into the funnel of yellow light. Pepeliaev had to be dragged. Both men were handcuffed.
Kolchak was offered, but refused, a bandage for his eyes…A priest was there. Both prisoners said their prayers aloud. Then they were placed, side by side, on the spot where many men, and some women, had looked for the last time on the stars. Pepeliaev’s eyes were shut, his face livid. Kolchak was entirely master of himself: ‘like an Englishman’—the analogy oddly recurs in an official Soviet account of the execution.
The order was given, the soldiers fired raggedly, both men fell…The corpses were kicked or prodded over the edge of the escarpment, down the short piste of frozen snow discoloured by the transit of their predecessors, into the water and under the ice.*
This is
an extraordinary tale. Not that Kolchak was master of himself when he died, but that his executioners should report it in the way they did: ‘like an Englishman’. Kolchak’s executioners were Bolsheviks—communists—opposed to pretty much everything that Britain stood for. The execution took place in Irkutsk, east Siberia, one of the remotest places on earth. None of the executioners could have had more than the haziest understanding of what Britain and Britons were actually like. Yet there it is: ‘like an Englishman’, a shorthand compliment for courage in the face of death. Nor was the comparison a one-off. Some backwoods partisans, on inspecting the quietly dignified officer in jail just a few weeks earlier, had made the exact same comment.
This courage, this stiff-upper-lippishness, remains part of the English mystique. (More English now than Irish, Welsh or Scots.) If you drop the words ‘comme un anglais’ into Google today, you’ll come across phrases like ‘froid comme un anglais’, ‘flegmatique comme un anglais’, ‘arrogant comme un anglais’, ‘digne comme un anglais’. All these epithets, positive and negative, gesture at the same basic temperament—cold and arrogant on the one hand, phlegmatic and dignified on the other.
Yet these days these stereotypes are more false than not. If you doubt it, just think of Big Brother eviction ceremonies, the week of Princess Diana’s death, the Britain of Elton John and Posh and Becks, the efforts of politicians to be touchier and feelier than thou. Surely if one were looking for dignity and emotional restraint, one would be more likely to look anywhere else in northern Europe than our own fair islands. And there’s a point to all this. It’s all too easy to generalize too widely from the past. There certainly was a time when Waugh’s depiction of the phlegmatic Englishman carried more than a grain of truth—say, from 1800 to 1950, to give it some approximate dates. Before and after that time, the Brits were notable more for their rowdy gaiety than their restraint; more notable for their roaring, boastful courage than its quieter, more attractive cousin. In short, while history may certainly reveal some national characteristics that endure, many others—even those that were once considered to define the national identity itself—come, have their heyday and go again, leaving not a trace.
This Little Britain Page 23