EMPIRE

My wife posed this question at breakfast recently. What is the difference between Putin annexing the Crimea and invading Ukraine, and the British Empire, which also conquered vast tracts of land by force of arms? This set me a-pondering. These days, when ‘empire’ has become a dirty word and post-colonial guilt seems to have seeped into the very fabric of British society, it is very difficult to build a case to support, or even to excuse, the raison d’etre of the British Empire. Yet somehow, I instinctively feel that Putin and the British Empire builders of the 18th and 19th centuries are not quite one and the same thing. Many colonials, though not all, obviously, had benevolent ideals. Putin is motivated by no such philanthropic mission.

Some facts first. The dictionary definition of ‘empire’ is “an extensive group of states or countries ruled over by a single monarchy or oligarchy or sovereign state.” Our kings and queens were evolving into constitutional rather than absolute monarchs during the time of Empire. Britain was becoming ademocracy, unlike the Roman Empire, ruled by a Caesar, or the Russian Empire, ruled by a Czar, or the Macedonian Empire, ruled by Alexander the Great, or the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Sultan. There was no autocratic dictator in Britain, but it still ruled its empire as a sovereign state.

At its zenith, the British Empire was the largest in the history of the world, comprising one quarter of the globe. It was said that the sun never set on the Empire because in some part of it, the sun would always rise at any given moment of time. But how did this come about, that a small, insignificant island off the north-west coast of Europe became so powerful and so influential?

In a sense, it could be said that Britain gained its empire almost by accident. At no stage did one politician or a group of politicians sit round a table and think it would be a good idea to conquer the world. Britain is, and always has been, a trading nation and being an island, it required a large mercantile navy to import and export goods and materials overseas. The Royal Navy protected and policed these trading routes, which in turn needed ports situated along these seaways to function. Thus, bases were seized and maintained in Canada (Halifax), India (Bombay, Madras and Calcutta), Cape of Good Hope (Cape Town), Kingston (Jamaica), the Mediterranean (Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez Canal), Ceylon (Colombo), the Arabian Peninsula and the approaches to the Red Sea (Aden), the east coast of Africa (Nairobi) and of course Australia (Sydney) and New Zealand (Aukland and Wellington). A logical extension of protecting these strategic staging posts would be to subdue the land where they were situated. Hence Britain found itself in charge of huge expanses of territory around the world that it did not, initially anyway, set out to conquer. Trade was the basis of empire, not expansionism per se. Annexing territory as a means for world domination was not the original plan, though that might have later become a welcome by-product.

Britain did not have a standing army, so it was unable to maintain any viable military force in its possessions, distant and widespread. So how did she maintain control? The British Empire, believe it or not, was administered by a gigantic confidence trick. The natives were hoodwinked into believingthat they were buying into a vast and profitable enterprise – beneficial to all - by making them feel part of the grand family, with Queen Victoria or Empress of India – what a clever ruse that was by Disraeli – at its head. Furthermore, they were seduced into working the levers of Empire, albeit overseen by their British superintendents, thus cooperating in the grand enterprise. Look, you can be (almost) like us, was the tacit incentive. The Christian missionaries played their full and assertive part in ‘civilising’, thus pacifying, the natives.

Queen Victoria was also Empress of India

The slave trade was something else. Yet it must not be forgotten that Britain was the first country to abolish the slave trade in 1807, long before the height of Empire, and what’s more, put its money where its mouth was by designating a whole fleet of the Royal Navy to police the west coast of Africa and enforce the law.

This is no apology for the British Empire. Of course, it benefited the home country more than its dependencies, and various uprisings and rebellions were put down brutally and ruthlessly but, by and large, if the natives ‘behaved’, things were relatively peaceful. The British did their best to rule according to the law; I can think of worse empires to have lived in.

So, what have the Romans, I beg your pardon, the British ever done for us? Apart from, well, obviously…. Not all of Empire’s by-products were iniquitous. Trade was of course of primary importance both to the colonials and the colonists, encouraging economic growth. Common law was established and its rule upheld. A civil service was set up, property rights were fixed and a banking system installed. Railways were built, roads and transport hubs created, and civic buildingsraised. The British brought their sports (cricket, football, rugby, tennis, hockey, polo etc), which the natives enthusiastically embraced. And, most significantly, English was spread far and wide, allowing it to become the lingua franca of the Empire, indeed the whole world.

The harm that Empire left in its wake has been well documented and it is hard to deny the psychological impact of conquest on the colonists and their descendants. The British were accused of arrogance; indeed, it was generally accepted that a Briton had won the lottery of life, simply on account of his birthright. But the effects of this deep-rooted anger and resentfulness are difficult to quantify. More easily added to the ledger of damage and wrong is the treatment of the indigenous people in certain places, notably Australia, New Zealand and Africa, and the arbitrary drawing of national boundaries, with little or no respect for cultural and tribal differences, which had catastrophic consequences, repercussions of which are still being felt today.

But I feel that some balance is required here, some measured reflection. I am very interested in history. I have read a lot of it. It seems to me that the historian’s bounden duty is to ensure that his research is scrupulous and honest, his telling of the story fair and accurate and his deductions carefully weighed. It is not his job – anymore that it is any of ours – to foist present-day values and mores on his critical analysis of the past. The British Empire was of its time, just as the Norman Conquest or the Civil War or the Industrial Revolution were of theirs; that was then and for good or bad, or both, they are part of our history and should not be excoriated just because they sit uneasily with contemporary perspectives.

Listen to this, from Doris Lessing, the British novelist, who grew up in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and whose background was steeped in imperial supremacy, though she was by no means an enthusiast for Empire:

“When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all other empires. You know, when people talk of the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.”

Or this, from the historian Niall Ferguson:

“For better or worse, fair or foul, the world we know today is in large measure a product of Britain’s age of empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?”