Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  That was to become a view unheard. Edward Heath often told how, in Willy Brandt’s Third World Commission, the representatives of Afro-Asia demanded that the rich nations of the North should compensate them for colonial rule. As a former British prime minister Heath replied he had spent much of his public life decolonising, so it had nothing to do with him or his contemporaries. The debate went on all day – interrupted, to be sure, by a good lunch – and by evening North and South accepted they could not agree and moved to other business. But they had tacitly agreed about one thing, and without noticing it: that colonialism was an act of despoliation to enrich the whites at the expense of the rest. At least no one troubled to deny it.

  There are difficulties in all that which, till recently, were seldom mentioned.

  The claim that the British empire was racially motivated was always unsubstantiated and, one might add, false. You were either given bad evidence or told that none was needed: you do not conquer the globe, it was felt, unless you think yourself racially superior.

  Some of the evidence can be briskly dismissed.

  Rule, Britannia, rule the waves:

  Britons never will be slaves

  is how James Thomson ended his masque Alfred in 1740. Britain had become a nation some thirty years earlier, when the crowns of England and Scotland were united, and King Alfred was supposed to have founded the navy nearly a thousand years earlier. Thomson, a Scottish poet working in London, is not making a point about empire but about defeating the French at sea and frustrating any renewed attempt by the Bourbon monarchy to restore the Stuarts, and the masque ends with a call for more ships:

  They rule the balanced world who rule the main.

  It was not a programme for empire. Nor was Rudyard Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the Law’ in his ‘Recessional’ of 1897. The lesser breeds were Germans, notably the German emperor Wilhelm II – Queen Victoria’s grandson and the last of the Kaisers – who was making boastful speeches. The poem is not about blacks or browns, and since Germans are not usually thought of as a race distinct from the British the remark is not racist. Three years later, in Kim, Kipling wrote a novel about his profound love of India, where he was born and had always wanted to live out his days.

  No official document has been produced to show that European colonial annexation was impelled by racism. Some colonial officials and their wives believed that white was best; so did many a settler, and the settler-mentality of Kenya and Rhodesia is notorious. But then you can think all that without being in a colony, as in old Shanghai or in many a big city in Europe or America today where people worry about their neighbours. Racism is commonplace in human affairs, and you do not have to colonise to think one skin-colour better than another. In India it was felt long before Europeans came, as the north was subjugated in the Middle Ages by waves of pale Islamic conquerors from the Middle East.

  Racists, what is more, like the South African governments that created and maintained apartheid, can be fiercely anti-colonial. So was Ian Smith, who in 1965 illegally declared Rhodesia independent – only the second such act in British imperial history. (The first was in 1776). True, whites had begun to enter the southern tip of Africa as settlers in the seventeenth century. But then so had the blacks, who began to arrive at much the same time as the Dutch. Only the Dutch and the British are thought of as settlers there, however – presumably because they are white.

  Black slavery, again, was not the creation of European colonialism, since Arabs had been slaving in black Africa since the seventh century, and in the early modern period the powerful states of West Africa enslaved the fellow blacks they sold on to the Portuguese, the French and the British. British slave emancipation occurred as early as 1833, thirty years before the United States, the work of a colonial power known as the British parliament; France followed in 1848, more narrowly anticipating Lincoln. But an independent Brazil kept slavery till 1888, so colonialism may have hastened emancipation. It is a conclusion to ponder.

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  Superiority is far wider than race, and you can easily feel superior to another people without being racist at all. The British did not think of themselves as a race in the present understanding of the term, for good reason, so it is hard to see how they could qualify. They could still feel superior. ‘Free-born Englishmen’ was a common boast in the eighteenth century when, vastly outnumbered, they out-fought France and Spain around the globe. It meant that since the Glorious Revolution of 1689 they did not suffer despots, like the French, or an Inquisition like the Spanish. That is a sense of superiority, to be sure, but it has nothing to do with race. Whoever thought the French were racially distinct? In the nineteenth century the French exported their civilisation as well as roads and railways and encouraged Arabs to read Racine: it was called a civilising mission. But it was not a racial mission, since you can read Racine whatever the colour of your skin; and if the European powers had failed to spread their civilisation the charge against them would have been far graver and far better deserved.

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  The French were not in North Africa, however, or the British in India and elsewhere, to teach literature.

  So why were they there? It may be more interesting to ask that question than to answer it, and to ask it is to realise that there is no single answer. Colonialism was not homogenous, and tribes and nations have been moving about the globe since history began. Why limit the question to the whites? Anti-colonialists like the late Edward Said of New York plainly enjoy feeling indignant, but they are highly selective in choosing their targets. Does the Arab conquest of North Africa count, or Arab slaving in east Africa? Were Soviet bases in eastern Europe colonialist, or Soviet bases in Vietnam? Does the Chinese occupation of Tibet count? And when will a government in Khartoum stop killing the blacks of Sudan?

  The European empires arose out of the Reformation and began as an effect of a long religious war, mainly between Britain and France, or France and Spain together. That war lasted intermittently from the Armada of 1588 to Waterloo, which is more than two centuries; but only historians seem to remember it, and it is now widely assumed that Europe collectively conquered the world. It is now largely forgotten, too, that Asia had earlier conquered Europe, starting in the seventh century, when Arabs (and later Turks) conquered Spain, Portugal, much of France and Italy and the whole of the Balkans. An age haunted by the spectre of Osama bin Laden may be about to relive the ages of religious conflict, and it might be instructive to recall that religious wars are not new and that the West has been known to lose them.

  Europeans first went to Afro-Asia to trade, not to annex, and in India they fought each other with armies largely recruited on the spot. There is little evidence they thought of Asians as racially inferior. The East looked more ancient and ceremonious than Europe, more opulent in its treasures. Wordsworth called it the gorgeous east. The Chinese court was more elaborate than anything Europeans had dreamed of; and when Samuel Johnson remarked casually in his life of Jonathan Swift that Swift washed himself with oriental scrupulosity, he no doubt implied that Europeans in comparison were a smelly lot.

  The European colonies, in any case, had little in common. The North American colonies were sometimes founded by religious refugees like the Pilgrim Fathers; or planted, like Virginia; or seized from European rivals. In the nineteenth century, when the United States expanded by conquering half of Mexico and settling the lands of nomadic tribes, New York was dubbed the Empire State to mark its proud imperial role: ‘Westward the course of empire.’ So Americans were once proud of that role: kin in sin. Quebec was seized by the British in 1759 as part of a Two Hundred Years War against France where each side was bent on destroying an age-old enemy – an issue finally settled at Waterloo in 1815. Trade had something to do with it, religion a good deal; race nothing at all.

  The entire inhabited globe, with a few modest exceptions like Madeira and Bermuda, is now occupied by conquerors and the
ir descendants, along with the immigrants who followed. It is hard to be sure when colonialism shades into conquest, but one might try. A Canadian once remarked that the Quebec Act of 1774, when the British parliament guaranteed the religion of Quebec and its French civil code, was the first conquest in a new style – a herald of the colonial era. Conquerors do not usually guarantee the rights and religion of a conquered people, and to that extent European colonialism was conquest at its most humane. The Quebec Act was deeply resented by the New England colonies, on Protestant grounds, and contributed to the outbreak of the revolutionary wars in the following year.

  After 1830 the French guaranteed the Arab way of life in North Africa and banned missionaries. A millennium earlier, by contrast, the Arabs had conquered North Africa and forced the native Berbers to become Muslims; many still survive as a racially distinct people, driven from their lands in the ensuing centuries. It does not count as a colonial fate, apparently, and you will not hear it mentioned in debates about colonialism in the UN General Assembly. History belongs to the conquerors, and as far as governments are concerned North Africa is Arab.

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  By now colonialism is widely thought to have been exploitative. That implies an enforced system of buying cheap and selling dear, whether goods, labour or natural resources. But many colonies, like Gibraltar or the British sovereign bases in Cyprus, never made a profit or expected to; like Okinawa, their value was strategic. So colonialism was not always about making money, and exploitation cannot be its essence.

  Trade is not a zero-sum game, in any case, and if Europe grew richer in the nineteenth century it does not follow that Afro-Asia grew poorer. Whether Afro-Asia is richer or poorer for its colonial experience is a question only an ignoramus would dare to pose or to answer. But one thing is clear: the poor often flocked into colonies, as black miners flocked into the gold digs of South Africa to send wages back to their tribal lands. Ethiopia, never a European colony except for a few years under Italian Fascism, remains one of the poorest countries in Africa; and one of the richest Caribbean islands is Curaçao, which is still Dutch. The Indonesian record does not suggest that decolonising brings mass prosperity.

  Independent Singapore is prosperous, but like Hong Kong it derives its wealth from a colonial past: the British found them empty places harbouring fishermen and left them great international financial centres. Their wealth is very unevenly distributed and enriches others besides themselves. But that could be said of places that are not colonies, as the Japanese have been proving for years on Wall Street.

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  So why does colonialism have a bad name?

  It is bad when it is white, and in all likelihood because it is white. The sin lies in the kin – it is wicked to be white. That is a resentment to be understood. A generation or two after the end of empire the world’s wealth is still predominantly white, apart from Japan and an emerging China, and the Leninist view that colonies propped up a dying capitalist system has been quietly abandoned.

  In the event European colonialism was often brief and provisional. South Africa became independent in 1910, a mere eight years after the defeat of the Boers, and with a largely Boer electorate. That does not sound like the act of a rapacious colonial power. In India the imperial spirit was so cautious that annexation did not begin for a century and more, in the 1790s, and where it existed it lasted for little more than a century; at independence a third of the subcontinent was still without British sovereignty, and complex deals had to be made with local rulers over partition – a problem still unresolved in Kashmir. So the British could be reluctant to annex and eager to depart. In 1946-7 Louis Mountbatten went to India as the last Viceroy with instructions to force Indian leaders to accept an early date for independence: an act so precipitate, Indian leaders felt, that in later years he could not revisit part of the subcontinent for fear of rioting. A year later the British refused to administer Palestine.

  Empire was reluctant. In the late nineteenth century Hawaii offered itself to the British empire, which briefly annexed and promptly de-annexed it. So the British empire could be a hard club to join, harder to stay in. As a memento Hawaii took the Union Jack into its state flag. Fiji offered itself unsuccessfully several times before the Union Jack was raised there in 1874; and in 1963 Brunei refused to join an independent Malaysia. So the image of rapacious colonialists needs to be thoughtfully revised. There were always those who understood the dangers of over-extension.

  As the costs of independence mount in ex-colonies like Somalia and Zimbabwe, all that can mean disappointment and even anger. Failure is always easier to bear if it is somebody else’s fault, and the wickedness of the whites is a good line. But if the charge is racism, then the racism of the socialist tradition is not to be forgotten; and those who believe that Hitler cannot have been sincere in calling himself a socialist do not know much about the history of the idea.

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  The myth of colonial racism leads to easy self-excusing promoted by elites eager to succeed to office; and on my first visit to India, in the early 1960s, that was openly conceded in conversation. Anti-colonialism had furnished slogans designed to enlist world opinion, it was conceded, but it was beginning to date. ‘All that worked when we wanted the British to leave,’ the daughter of a Congress Party politician told me, ‘but now it’s time to admit that we are responsible.’ The advice was not always taken. When a Pakistani spokeswoman was asked after a military coup in Islamabad why democracy had proved so weak and corrupt, she replied vaguely: ‘I don’t know – perhaps it’s all those years of colonialism.’ The notion that Asians needed the British to learn how to take bribes can only raise a smile, and the BBC interviewer did not pursue the point; but there is still a lesson to be learned from the exchange. Those who obediently chant slogans about colonial exploitation should consider the game they are helping to play. Behind that glib self-excusing lies a steely determination by elites to rob those they rule, and they will go on robbing for at least as long as anyone believes it.

  Meanwhile there are achievements to remember, like the courage of the Quebec Act of 1774 or the peaceful passage of Rhodesia, two centuries later, by a colonial power, from anti-colonial white supremacy to black majority rule. What the Oxford history calls ‘a deep sense of ethical responsibility’ is a truth whose time has come. Wickedness is not the property of the whites, or of any one race. Sin is not kin. Perhaps it was the supremest racism of all to suppose it ever was.

  III The Heretics

  18. P.G. Wodehouse

  Heresy can mean doing obstinately what you do best, and doing it in the most improbable places. Jeeves, for example, was conceived and born in New York. At least P.G. Wodehouse was living there when he first thought of him.

  That may sound like an odd place to do it, but the fact is not in doubt. After two discontented years in a London bank and a little journalism, Wodehouse settled in Greenwich Village (off and on) in 1909. He had first visited America in 1904, drawn by its boxing tradition, but he soon came to believe he could write for it; and it was there in the autumn of 1914 that he met and married a young English widow called Ethel, whose daughter he adopted. War was breaking out in Europe, but his poor eyesight made him unfit for active duty, so he wrote on. There was to be another world war in his lifetime, as unexpected to him as the first, and after than he settled again in America, dying in 1975 on Long Island in his nineties. So New York was as much home to him as anywhere, though you sometimes wonder if anywhere was. He casually inhabited the whole world. Born in Guildford in 1881, his first infant years had been in Hong Kong, where his father was a magistrate, and his middle years, after New York and Hollywood, were spent in France. Like many Englishmen down the centuries he had the carefree talent of being mostly somewhere else and yet never losing sense of who he was.

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  It was in Greenwich Village that inspiration came. The first of the Jeeves stories, ‘Extricating you
ng Gussie,’ appeared in Saturday Evening Post in September 1915, where the manservant was given two lines, to be collected in The Man with Two Left Feet (1917); the story is largely set in New York, and all the Jeeves stories in My Man Jeeves (1919) are set there too. So the most famous manservant of modern literature started life as an expatriate – the creation, what is more, of an expatriate mind.

  Wodehouse spent much of his life pursuing ideas for serials, and he was to apologise one day, in the preface to the Jeeves Omnibus (1931), for the offhand way he had introduced the star of the best serial idea he ever had. In ‘Extricating young Gussie’ Jeeves’s two lines are wholly commonplace: ‘Mrs Gregson to see you, sir,’ and ‘Very good, sir, which suit will you wear?’ Such was his unobtrusive entry into immortality, and the idea of an impossibly perfect valet grew only slowly over the years. The second Jeeves collection, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923), was a loosely built novel of eighteen chapters that eventually made ten stories for the omnibus, which contained thirty-one, all revised. Progress was slow. Wodehouse was not a natural writer in his early years, if there is such a thing, and his seemingly effortless and ebullient style was an effect of long rumination and revision, missed chances, many trials and much error. Materials were used and re-used, conceptions took time to mature, and success with stories did not come till his forties.