Now for something serious, historical and (probably) boring. This is going over old ground for me.
History (like life) is complicated. I feel that it’s been one of my missions over the past fifty-odd years – if that doesn’t sound pretentious – to try to disentangle its complications, at least to the extent that my limited (and now declining) intellectual powers allow; in order to reach a more nuanced and complex understanding of past events. Other serious historians have generally taken notice. But I should also have liked my work to have percolated through to a more general audience, thus informing its views of present as well as of past politics. This however seems not to have happened.
The main problem with ‘popular’ history is that it tends to be over-simplistic. My particular beef in this regard – as you might expect from my academic specialism – has to do with the use of the word ‘imperialism’, or its derivatives, usually critically, in connexion with Britain’s – and several other countries’ – pasts. This may go back to the subject of my very first research, the journalist and ‘heretical’ economist John Atkinson Hobson, who discovered – or at least first analysed, albeit crudely – the economic ‘taproot’, as he called it, of the imperial expansion of his day (the turn of the twentieth century); so giving birth to the ‘Capitalist Theory of Imperialism’, which was subsequently taken over by Lenin, and then by most of the political Left. (See my Critics of Empire, 1968.)
Sure: the economic and specifically ‘capitalist’ roots of most modern imperialism are – it seems to me – indisputable. But they were not its only roots; and should not colour or dominate our retrospective view of what, again, was a very complex phenomenon. Other motives and causes – not always the same things – fed into it. Some were humanitarian, if often misguided. Early ones were libertarian – at least as regards ‘free trade’. A few were even essentially anti-capitalist, like the Royal Navy’s ‘West Africa Squadron’, operating from 1808 to the 1860s, and tasked to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at some expense to the British Exchequer, and of course to the slave-trading capitalists. ‘In the field’ British official colonial and Indian policy often worked against the interests of those capitalists who wished only to exploit Africa and Asia; earning the capitalists’ displeasure as a result. The problem here was that there weren’t enough colonial officials to tame them, with the personnel and power of the Colonial Office being very thinly spread, and indigenous resistance more effective than is sometimes credited. In other words, it could be said that there was not enough ‘imperialism’, in Africa especially.
Then again, at a personal level, not all professed imperialists were exploiters, racists and slave-drivers themselves. Colonial and Indian civil servants generally saw their mission as a paternalistic one, aiming to help and ‘raise’ what they regarded as ‘primitive’ peoples in the ‘scale of civilisation’, as they put it. In these instances they can’t be called ‘exploiters’, or even (literally) ‘racists’, because their assumption had to be that these ‘races’ could be ‘raised’. (Genuine racists, like Gobineau in France, were often anti-imperialist, because they believed racial inferiority was impermeable.) In my early books I coined the word ‘culturalist’ as a better alternative. But some of these people even preferred the ‘cultures’ of the people they were ‘ruling’. That was called ‘going native’, in the unpleasant colonialist argot of the time. But there was a significant number of them.
And ‘rule’ is another word that requires scare quotes, because there were many limitations to the authority that these men exercised over their ‘subjects’. Some of these were recognised; for example in the policy called ‘Indirect Rule’, which was the Colonial Office’s answer to the difficulties of administering (with its small numbers) the millions of people it had under its care in West Africa: ‘rule the native on native lines’, as it was described. It was not a particularly oppressive system; or not designed to be. Most of the oppression came at the hands of capitalists – plantation owners, mining companies, settlers (usually the worst) – who were out of the effective control of the imperial government. And most of the proselytism – another wrongdoing usually attributed to imperialism – was done by Christian missionary societies, which were similarly distrusted and opposed by the colonial authorities, on the grounds that they disrupted native communities. – And so on. I won’t go on; if you want more on this, you’ll have to read my British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t. (2016).
That book also analyses the conditions and circumstances that lay behind British imperialism in all its various guises and stages. It doesn’t skate over the atrocities that were a part of it, from slavery onwards – Omdurman, Amritsar, Indian famines, and all the rest of the horrendous catalogue; but it does seek to unravel its complexity (again), in order to prevent simplistic judgments of it. Indeed, I’d prefer that judgments weren’t made of British imperialism at all, any more than you would of the weather. Whenever in the past I offered a manuscript on imperialism to a publisher, I was asked whether it was pro- or anti-Empire. That seemed to be their only concern. In fact if you read any of my books you’ll find that I don’t come down on either ‘side’. Personally I’ve always been – or considered myself to be – an ‘anti-imperialist’; but mainly on the grounds that imperialism was misguided, rather than morally wrong; and prone to abuse, rather than intrinsically abusive. (This blog should certainly not be read as an apologia for it.) Imperialists made terrible mistakes, but sometimes for the best of reasons, or out of ignorance. (Tony Blair, with his backing of Bush’s Iraq War, was one of these.) Others were genuinely bad men: especially the capitalists (like Rhodes, probably), but also some of the officials, and military men. (The rogues do all appear to be men; but then women were not allowed into this sphere except very marginally.)
Then there are the historical ‘contexts’ of Britain’s imperial exploits to consider: economic, political and diplomatic. And also the fact that, by and large, her people at home were not particularly imperialistic themselves. (See my The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004.) And lastly, there is the fact that although Britain certainly did not originally invent imperialism, in any sense – the Cro-Magnons probably did that – she could be said to have invented anti-imperialism (Hobson again), which was an important factor behind even her imperial practice in the 20th century. Again, British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t, elaborates this point.
I realise that much of this will be difficult to credit by those brought up with simplistic views of the whole phenomenon; but all these factors, and others, make far more sense of this complex subject. At the very least, if modern Britons, for whatever reason, want to criticise, or even to laud, Britain’s past imperial record they should unpick and specify what kind – and agency – of imperialism they mean. Often they’ll find that what they object to – or admire – is not ‘imperialism’ per se; but, say, the capitalist, exploitative or missionary elements in it, distinct from other – kinder or more ‘progressive’ – ones.
Which bears on the general and more important point I want to make here: which is that popular and over-simplified versions of history – as of everything, probably – are one of the main obstacles to a useful understanding both of history, but also and more importantly, of the present day. I like to think that it’s people’s preference for simple answers, as well as for books that seem to bear out their prejudices, which accounts for the failure of my books – even the well-reviewed ones – to penetrate very deeply into what today is called the ‘contemporary discourse’; by contrast with – in my case – clearly pro- or anti-imperial ones. Or it may be, of course, that they’re not very good. I sometimes fear so.
‘We used to rule half the world’ was a slogan I recently heard yelled out at an anti-immigrant riot. – Well, no, actually. My books had clearly not got through to ‘Tommy Robinson’s’ kind.
There. History lesson over.
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