Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

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  One thing at least is now clear. The imperial powers were not impoverished by decolonisation. When the United States gave up its base at Subic Bay in the Philippines in 1992 it was replaced by an export zone, which may be the Filipino idea of a good deal, though the likeliest beneficiary was the American taxpayer. Britain and France are richer today without empires than they ever were with them, by a lot, and when the Left in colonial times talked darkly about exploitation they missed the point. If exploitation means impoverishment, then it may have worked the other way around, and the gap between North and South is wider today than it ever was in the imperial age. It is not exploitation a backward economy has to fear but neglect, and it is the colonial powers that failed to exploit their overseas territories, like the Portuguese in Africa, that have a charge to answer. The declining economies of some African states in the last thirty years through civil war, corruption and a consequent lack of investment illustrate what hardly anyone now doubts – that the foreign investor bent on profit is not a curse but a blessing. That change of heart is widely reflected in a change of rhetoric. Little is heard nowadays about neo-colonialism or coca-colonisation, and the surge of interest in the free market in Africa and South Asia shows that a lesson has been learnt. China bids to become the greatest economy on earth. In the 1980s India began to privatise and open its markets, at much the same time as Mao’s successors opened up China with their enterprise zones. Socialists had learnt, by experience, that socialism does not work.

  Though I never shot an elephant, like Orwell, I can recount a less dramatic incident. When I was first in India, in the early 1960s, an official in New Delhi told me that the government of India no longer believed foreign investment threatened national independence. Quite the contrary. It is the big nationalised combines like the state car industry, he said, that are hard to discipline. The state can easily become more powerful than government, and whereas the managers of foreign firms obey at the drop of a hat and even, he went on with a smile, try to anticipate what government wants, state monopolies tend to be uncontrolled and a world of their own. In other words, nationalisation can reduce the power of central government, privatisation can increase it; and foreign capital, above all, can increase it enormously. That was the considerable discovery made by the Indian Congress Party which, in the heady days of Nehru’s leadership, had long believed the opposite. A big state, they learned, can lead to weak government.

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  Orwell’s larger point was that a colonial power, far from being in control, mostly has to do what the natives expect.

  An elephant, he tells in his 1936 sketch, had gone mad and killed a Burmese coolie; so though it was far from mad by the time he found it quietly munching grass on the edge of town, he felt obliged to shoot it to satisfy a watching crowd. A working elephant is a valuable property, as he knew. Nonetheless he had to do something. ‘I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind’. Many rulers since will recognise the dilemma, like Ronald Reagan when, with tragic consequences, he sent troops to Lebanon, or George Bush (senior) when he sent them into Somalia. There is always an elephant somewhere waiting to be shot, and the world expects you to act even when you know, or suspect, there is nothing useful you can do.

  Such ugly dilemmas marked the imperial policies of Britain and France through the nineteenth century and long into the twentieth. One had to do something, for example, or appear to do something, when General Gordon was attacked in Khartoum in 1885; or when there was an Arab revolt in Algeria in the 1950s; or when confronted in Indochina by the Vietcong, or in Kenya by Mau Mau. Sovereignty does not free your hands. In fact it constrains the imperial power. Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia were not United States territories and never had been, which gave Washington a certain freedom of action – a freedom to ignore a crisis which, in the event, it chose not to use. France, by contrast, had no such choice in Algeria. If a French government had abandoned Algerian sovereignty at the first Arab uprising it would have started a civil war in France as well as in Algeria. There was an elephant that had to be shot, even if it was not worth shooting.

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  There are myths about the imperial era which, though perhaps weaker than they once were, still need to be examined.

  One is that imperialism – or colonialism, to give it the name that largely replaced it in Third World rhetoric in the 1960s – was a single phenomenon to be dismissed by a single moral judgement, usually negative. That was never so. The Grab for Africa, it is true, was impelled by the power of fashion, and Bismarck, that wily cynic, is said to have believed in German territories abroad for no better reason than that France and Britain had them already. By the turn of the century colonies were admittedly something of a status-symbol among the European powers, not excluding Russia, which was expanding eastwards towards the Pacific and southwards towards India. But there is no sense to be made of colonial history as a single event based on a single cause, like a quest for status or markets. Gibraltar has been a British colony since 1704 because the Protestant powers of the north, Britain and the Netherlands, resented a French Bourbon becoming King of Spain and upsetting a European balance of power. That has little to do with status or markets, and nothing to do with where we are now. Gibraltar, like the Falkland Islands, is a colony because its inhabitants wish it. The British sovereign bases in Cyprus are there to help keep the peace in the Middle East, and they never had anything to do with making money. In fact bases cost money. India, it is true, was under British sovereignty –at least about two thirds of it was, down to 1947 – because of a search for markets. But it was principally the French whom the British defeated there in the mid-eighteenth century, not the Indians, and Australia was annexed in 1788 as a repository for convicts, while Malta only became a British colony in 1800 because the Maltese invited the Royal Navy to get rid of the French. So colonies can be loss-making as well as profit-making, and some of the biggest profits can be made without annexation, as with the British (and later the US) economic penetration of South America in the nineteenth century. Those who once believed that empires were the last phase of capitalism – that they were all about making money – are now thinking again; and when you read that the British left India in 1947, you should recall that the number of British living there rose after independence and that trade increased.

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  Another misapprehension is that imperialism involved racial and cultural contempt.

  Accounts of racism often insist that though no British imperial claims to racial superiority can be found, some such sense of superiority must have been felt. How else, and why else, would one quarter of the inhabited globe have been occupied? It is less often noticed that the largest acts of territorial conquest in the nineteenth century – the Russians in Asia and the Americans in North America – are not now usually thought of as imperial acts at all. Empire, in any case, can inspire admiration and leave a trail of affection. The ancient Romans never got over their sense of cultural inferiority to the Greeks they had conquered, and Britain and India today are bound by the deepest of cultural ties. An American I once met in India was amazed and faintly disgusted by the pervasive anglophilia he found there, and an American lady I took to see Tom Stoppard’s play Indian Ink in London told me that the play, though excellent, would not easily transfer to Broadway, since it is all about the profound cultural admiration of the British for India and of Indians for Britain. True, it is a very lopsided affection. Britain is full of Indian restaurants, and I do not know of any English restaurants in India. On the other hand Indians often perform Shakespeare, whereas the British seldom, if ever, perform Sir Rabindranath Tagore. There are reasons for all this that scarcely need to be enlarged.

  And then there is the Tom-and-Jerry factor: when you see a mouse fighting a cat, you naturally side with the mouse. But life is not like that, or at least not reliably like that. Sometimes the big guy is right and the little g
uy is wrong. Some of America’s difficulties with Castro in Cuba were caused or intensified by Tom and Jerry. It is easy if you watch the struggle from a distance to suppose the United States is bullying a small neighbour. The same misunderstanding dogged the ill-fated Anglo-French expedition to Egypt in October 1956, which was opposed not only by Washington and Moscow but, more interestingly, by General Franco, who perhaps felt some sympathy for his fellow-dictator President Nasser. In fact the French prime minister, a socialist called Guy Mollet, and Anthony Eden, the British prime minister, believed as men who had been young in the 1930s that the momentous mistake of appeasing dictators must not be repeated. There is abundant evidence that, rightly or wrongly, they were sincere in that belief. But what the world saw, or thought it saw, was two big powers attacking a little one.

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  So was Orwell right? He shot an elephant in Burma, as he explains, simply in order to avoid looking a fool. Perhaps that sums up some graver decisions, like Lyndon Johnson’s to send ground troops to Vietnam or Eden’s to go into Suez. It is not necessarily a silly motive, and Orwell does not suggest it is. Governments have to keep faith, at least some of the time, and they have to try to look as if they are not easily bullied. But empire raises larger issues.

  Why be there at all? Nobody loves you for it, you are expected and even required to perform foolish and expensive acts, and you are blamed when things go wrong. The fashion for disengagement shows that Orwell’s point has been taken. Overseas responsibilities, colonial or not, can weaken you at home and threaten your prestige abroad. In an age of Internet and intercontinental ballistic missiles it would be misleading to call the new mood isolationist. A global economy leaves no room for isolation, and NATO is right to feel threatened whenever there is a war. But it may still be natural to prefer to sit at home and press buttons than to go.

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  There is another aspect to Orwell’s paradox about the impotence of imperialism which he does not even hint at and which, even today, is seldom heard. I mean the depletion of a trained and creative workforce. The Indian Civil Service, in its heyday in the early years of the twentieth century, creamed off some of the finest intelligences of the British nation, year after year, to serve their working lives in a disagreeable climate in return for the limited advantages of tenured employment, an abundance of domestic servants and eventual pension-rights. France, being close to North Africa, sent out officials by the thousand to administer Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. It is hard to be confident about cause and effect here, but I suspect that France and Britain were culturally duller countries between the two world wars than they have since become. London was not then the theatre capital of the world or its financial capital, as it has become, and its novelists were less widely known in the world than they are today, while in the 1930s Paris faded as a cultural centre. An imperial responsibility can probably help to make you dull, and if you send forth the best you breed, as Kipling once recommended, you are left with whatever is left.

  There is another aspect of decolonisation that is seldom if ever mentioned. London and Paris nowadays import intellectuals. Tom Stoppard, who was born in Central Europe, was schooled in India, Doris Lessing was brought up in central Africa, and it is common at London literary parties, especially late in the evening, to discover that almost everyone was born abroad. Paris is flooded with artists and writers from eastern Europe as well as Africa, and its intellectual life often seems to be full of Romanians and Slavs. It would be brave to claim that France and Britain are more interesting, in their creative life, for being ex-colonial states, but it may be so, and nobody doubts they are richer.

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  So perhaps Orwell was righter than he knew. At all events his dead elephant will stay dead. America will not return to Liberia, or Belgium to the Congo, or Britain to Nigeria, or France to Algeria, or Italy to Somalia, or France to Syria. There is, as the saying goes, no percentage in it, and the local elites who loot their peoples in the intervals between civil wars are probably, on a long view, safe. In a deathless image Orwell described how his elephant, which had suddenly looked thousands of years old at the first shot, climbed slowly to his knees with the second and stood weakly upright, with sagging legs and a drooping head. At the third shot, which killed him, he trumpeted for the first and only time. That is unlikely to be an invention. It sounds much like the colonial empires we once knew. But the elephant of empire will not in our times rise or trumpet again. The audience has gone home and there are better uses for the gun. The West will send medics and aid and as few troops as it dares. It will watch and trade and wait.

  17. The Sudden Death of Imperial Guilt

  One might begin, like a well-heeled traveller, in that luxurious Manhattan hotel the Waldorf Astoria.

  In December 1900, in the last weeks of Queen Victoria’s reign, a twenty-six year-old journalist, Winston Churchill, just elected to parliament, lectured there on the Boer War. It was still raging, and he was introduced by an ageing author called Mark Twain, who disapproved of it. Mindful that the young war-hero had an American mother, Twain joked elaborately about the Anglo-American tradition. ‘We have always been kin,’ he told his New York audience, ‘kin in blood, in religion, in representative government, in ideals.’ But the Spanish-American war of 1898, to his deep disapproval, had made the United States an imperial power in the Philippines and in the Caribbean. ‘Now we are kin in sin,’ he went on gravely. ‘The harmony is complete, the blend is perfect – like Mr Churchill himself, whom I now have the honour to present.’

  Less than half a century later the jocular prophecy of an Anglo-American empire was fulfilled, and it is only now beginning to unravel. But how sinful was, or is, the Anglo-American empire? Suddenly there is a new school of historians inviting the world in a new millennium to think kindly of the Churchillian dream. In 1998 The Oxford History of the British Empire began to appear, edited (and partly written) by William Roger Louis of Austin, Texas. Not one to mince words, he opens with the startling remark that the empire was marked by a ‘deep sense of ethical responsibility’. That is likely to surprise a lot of people, and not only in Texas.

  Five years later, as the Iraq War broke out, Niall Ferguson, an Oxford Scot at Harvard with happy memories of a Kenyan childhood, wrote a bestseller called Empire and subtitled How Britain Made the Modern World. The book has been called an imperial panegyric. That may be an exaggeration, but Ferguson does not sound remorseful about an historic epic that ended in his lifetime. Worse people, you are left to think, might have made the modern world, and then where should we be? Mankind, on balance, was lucky.

  All that is highly subversive. When I first lived in the United States, which was in the 1950s, empire was universally seen, by Left and Right, as a rapacious system based on assumptions of racial superiority and backed by brute force. Now, in contrast, it is said European colonialism was an effect of religious wars provoked by the Reformation – Protestant against Catholic – with racial consciousness an effect rather than a cause. It was not racism that provoked empire, and Europe expanded not out of a sense of superiority but because of its own disunity. That makes the imperial age look amazing. Europe grew through its own dynamic instability. Divide-and-rule is a well-known principle. Europe, by contrast, ruled because it was divided, and its empires were competitively acquired and competitively administered.

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  Disturbing as that is, there is still a more disturbing point to be made, and one still largely neglected.

  Racism was not right-wing. For a century or so, from the 1840s, Marxists and other socialists publicly demanded racial extermination and were unique in that demand. So the Left could not easily condemn empire on anti-racist grounds and did not. They often praised it, and to that limited extent the new school of imperial historians unknowingly echoes the Victorian Left. Marx and Engels often spoke as Germans of the inherent rights of civilisation over barbarism, hailing the German conquest of Easte
rn Europe, and in a letter of April 1899 Jack London, the Californian socialist, announced that ‘the lesser breeds cannot endure’ and that the whites alone were worth preserving: ‘I cannot but hail as unavoidable the Black and the Brown going down before the White.’ Three years later, in Anticipations, H.G. Wells called for an all-white world-wide socialist utopia and the extinction of the dark races; and in August 1913, in the New Statesman, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, both leading figures in the Fabian Society, declared there could be no early self-government for non-whites in the British empire ‘even as regards strictly local affairs’, and ‘in some cases never’. In 1929 a Social Democrat government in Denmark became the first to pass a sterilisation act, four years before the National Socialists took power in Germany, and other Scandinavian governments followed with eugenic laws that targeted ethnic groups like gypsies as well as psychopaths. These laws were not fully repealed till the 1970s.

  So socialists had no occasion to accuse others of racism. They were proud to believe in it themselves; and for some, like the Webbs, empire meant white supremacy for ever and ever. But then there were no socialist governments before the first world war, and the great European empires were made by others. Did anyone else believe in white superiority?

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  It is now widely believed that white-is-right was once a wide-spread view except among socialists, and decolonisation was conducted in the shadow of that assumption. In 1956 Jean-Paul Sartre, at a peace-in-Algeria rally, insisted that all colonialism had been white on non-white, though Arabs by then had been slaving in Africa for over a thousand years. Colonialism, said Sartre in a speech collected in Colonialism and Neocolonialism (2001), was ‘a system that was put in place around the middle of the nineteenth century, began to bear fruit around 1900, declined after the first world war and then finally turned against the colonisers’. That shows how much he knew about it, as a Soviet admirer, or wished to know. But his assumptions had long since invaded literary studies, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) is commonly studied as an indictment of Europeans in Africa, though in a letter to his publisher in December 1898 Conrad insisted that his novel about the Belgian Congo was not gloomy: it was about how criminal it is to be inefficient ‘when tackling the civilising work in Africa’. Conrad, who was naturalised British and a patriot, believed the Belgians were doing it badly in the Congo and should be shown how to do it better.