THE BRITISH EMPIRE
How far was the empire on which the sun never set Good Thing'? Max Beloff offers a
provocative assessment of the motivation and achievements of British Imperialism in the
light of a major new study to be undertaken.
I would like to begin by referring to the famous passage in the autobiography of Edward
Gibbon:
It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing among the ruins of the
Capitol, while the bare-foot-ed friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that
the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind. But my original
plans were circumscribed to the decay of the city rather than of the empire.
I do not know whether similar musings were responsible for the decision to embark upon
a new Oxford History of the British Empire which is to deal not only with its decline and
fall, but with the entire four centuries between the first and second Elizabeth. In any case,
the particular problems that will confront the editors and authors in their task are very
different from the challenges that faced Gibbon.
Gibbon himself was by modern lights an amateur - he wrote the whole book. The Oxford
history is to have a general editor and editors of each volume, with individual authors for
each chapter. It is indeed an apt illustration of the adage that the advance of scholarship -
computers, databases, instant communication and the rest - simply means knowing more
and more about less and less.
Of course there are perfectly good reasons for this use of many authors, for seeing
historical writing as subject to the laws of industrial production fox seeing Adam Smith
rather than Gibbon as the herald of the future.
One explanation for the reliance upon collective endeavour is that the materials for the
British Empire, even in its earliest stages, are so much more abundant than for the Roman
Empire. The coming of the age of printing made a permanent difference to the record of
events, and British archives and most of those preserved overseas are continuous in their
coverage and enormous in their range and bulk.
What Gibbon had at his disposal were the accounts of a few ancient writers which happen
to have survived in manuscript form, and the evidence of the Roman monuments still
extant in his time. No doubt the labors of the archaeologists and the consequent ability to
make use of inscriptions and other data has increased our understanding of the Roman
Empire in its early centuries, but still the gaps in our knowledge remain enormous. We
have only to compare what we know of Roman Britain with what we know of the British
Raj in India. Consider Agricola, and the guesses that have to be made to fill in the
narrative of his admiring son-in-law Tacitus, with the way in which we can follow the
daily doings of Lord Curzon through his official and private papers.
Gibbon was writing more than three centuries after the fall of Constantinople brought the
Eastern Empire to its fatal conclusion. After such a long time, a measure of detachment
was possible. Can we have such detachment writing about a structure which the older
ones among us knew in our own lifetimes as a going concern, and which was indeed a
going concern when the Cambridge History of the British Empire was launched in 19297
Is it possible to avoid taking sides in the controversies to which the post-imperial era has
given birth?
In the year of my birth in the consulate of Herbert Henry Asquith, before the First World
War broke upon us, the British Empire, loved or reviled, was as much part of the order of
things as the moon or the stars. Atlases with much of the world's surface colored red were
the staples of my consciousness of a wider world. I was eight years old before the British
Empire reached its maximum extent. How then envisage its disappearance? Wider, still
and wider, shall thy bounds be set. Why not?
Of course, it was possible for someone like the late Sir Nicholas Mansergh, my senior by
some three years, to accustom himself to the disappearance of the British Empire by
stressing the continuity of British Empire into British Commonwealth and of British
Commonwealth into Commonwealth.
For younger historians coming of age in the years of the final transition from the end of the
Second World War to the 1960s, an optimistic perspective was not difficult to find. The
sins of the Empire, now freely admitted, were redeemed by its legacy of democratic
institutions and liberal ideals. A Commonwealth of equal nations freely cooperating for
the common good seemed an appropriate organization for the contemporary world and, the
history of the British Empire could be studied to see how this glorious consummation had
been achieved.
The euphoria was short-lived. The fields in which cooperation at the Commonwealth
level proved most significant were few in number, excluding both defence and commerce.
The Harold Macmillan of the 'wind of change' was the same Harold Macmillan who tried
to bring Britain into the European Communities; and when his agent for that purpose, Sir
Edward Heath, became prime minister in the next decade, he both brought Britain into
'Europe' as the saying went, and sacrificed important Commonwealth interests in the
process. Indeed such a sacrifice was a precondition of Britain's acceptance, and pressures
to end whatever symbolic relics of the Commonwealth relationship still survive is a
constant preoccupation of the Brussels institutions to which British sovereignty has been
surrendered. If we have no abiding interest in the Commonwealth, why care about the
history of the Empire?
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the study of the history of the British
Empire has taken on yet a new guise: the study of the individual countries which once
formed part of it. But, by treating that episode as merely an interruption in their own
national story, the centre, its institutions and its doctrines lose their attraction as subjects
of study; all the weight is on the periphery.
If the newly emancipated former colonial territories were seen to be fulfilling the
expectations of their peoples, whether in material terms or in respect of human rights, then
the imperial past would be seen as at best a neutral delaying factor in their development
and at worst as wholly negative. Imperial history becomes anti-imperial history.
But things are not like that. Over much of what was the Empire, in most of Africa and in
parts of Asia and some of the Caribbean islands, governments maintaining themselves by
force, biased in favor of particular segments of the population and pursuing economic
policies best described as socialism mitigated by corruption, have failed to protect their
citizens in the most basic ways, such as in law and order, access to foodstuffs and primary
healthcare. Does anyone maintain that Burma or the Sudan are better off now than when
they were part of the British Empire?
There is of course a paradox here. We are told much about the importance of new aspects
of historical study - women's history, the history of minorities, or social history in all its
aspects, yet when it comes to post-imperial history, all this is thrown out of the window.
All that matters is the political: that black or brown or yellow men should now rule where
once white men had lorded it over them. What happens to the people at large is seen as of
secondary importance.
Does not this have very consider-" able consequences for how the Oxford History of the
British Empire should be written? Instead of stock terms of abuse ('imperialism',
'colonialism') should we not search out the positive factors both in what was attempted
and in what was done?
Once again the difficulty is that it may not be possible without the lapse of time to be
confident that this perspective is correct. From the time of Augustus to the end of the
Roman Empire in the West it is true that we number a mere four centuries. The Holy
Roman Empire, claiming some authority over much of Europe, endured for nearly a
millennium, and could at least, in theory, claim part of the Western Empire's inheritance:
when Gibbon wrote there was still a Holy Roman Emperor, a fact which cannot be
altogether overlooked when we seek to find a vantage point from which to approach our
problem of perspective.
Perhaps we should see the Commonwealth as some sort of equivalent. Even so we can
regard the history of the British Empire as dealing with something with a clear beginning
and a clear end. Just as Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century could talk of the
deceased Roman Empire, could our authors think of themselves as writing the history of
the 'deceased British Empire'? Was the deceased murdered or was death due to natural
causes?
When did the deceased know that his time was up? It is often taken for granted that at any
rate the second British Empire was created at a time of massive self-confidence. What
then do we make of Macaulay writing in 1840 of a time when 'some traveller from New
Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London
Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Paul's'. It is clear that Macaulay, thought of as the
embodiment of bourgeois triumphal-ism, could contemplate a future in which London's
power in the world would have vanished and the city itself have been reduced to a vast
solitude.
It was possible at one point to think of the United States stepping in to add its strength to
Britain's and to join in upholding what were seen by some as similar values. It was, after
all, to the Americans that Kipling, the first exponent of the fear of impel decline, made his
exhortation to take up the white man's burden. While I understand that it has been
suggested that President Franklin Roosevelt was party to a conspiracy to replace the
British Empire with an American one, the real problem for the world has been the
opposite one - America' s refusal to take up the white man's burden.
For although the United States has itself for almost a century 'been involved in ruling
territories and in projecting its power to distant parts of the globe, it has never seen itself
as an adjunct or inheritor of the Empire to which its original components once belonged.
On the contrary, its interventions have on the whole been marked by hostility towards the
Empire and subsequent to the Empire's demise, to the Commonwealth.
In a recent article in' the Times Literary Supplement, provocatively entitled 'Empire
preserved', Professor Roger Louis, the editor of the Oxford History, and Professor Ronald
Robinson argue that an exception must be made for the period immediately after the
Second World War. At that time, they argue, the Americans gave priority to their anti-
communism over their anti-imperialism to the extent of taking measures which gave the
British Empire a new lease of life. It is true that American financial assistance enable
post-war Britain to cope with the crisis in the sterling area and to continue with a certain
amount of expenditure on maintaining its position in various parts of the world. It is also
correct that after 1947 the Americans accepted some of the preferential arrangements
within the Commonwealth's economic structures, and that Marshall Aid made it possible
for Britain to maintain some commitments overseas that might otherwise have had to go.
But neither those facts nor the replacement of British by American power in holding the
line against the Soviet threat in the Middle East and South and SouthEastern Asia amounts
to a sudden conversion to the inherent propriety of imperial rule. Suez, and its handling by
John Foster Dulles and Eisenhower, is the litmus test of American attitudes to empire.
It is true that American funding made possible a new spurt in the development of parts of
the Empire, notably in Africa. But to say 'the postwar system was regenerated on
American wealth and power, and that measured against this reinforcement the loss of
India in the imperial Great Game seems almost minor', suggests a very curious
perspective indeed.
What Louis and Robinson mean by Empire is not empire at all. I have been classed as a
'Gibbonian' in the sense of presuming that the Empire fell because of 'infirmity in the
metropole and insurgency in the provinces', and in believing, therefore, that empire ends
when component parts of it achieve political independence. But that of course is true. An
empire whose central authority cannot command its resources is no empire. The claim that
this connection between independence and imperial decline is an illusion because the 'old
Dominions' achieved virtual independence while Britain was still at the height of its
power, overlooks two vital pieces of evidence to the contrary. No sooner had the degree
of independence reached been appreciated, than" efforts were begun to contrive some
form of imperial federation. If the sovereignty of the UK parliament was not acceptable,
what about an Imperial Parliament? And if independence did not mean the end of empire
for the countries concerned, why did we talk in the inter-war years and later, of 'the
British Empire and Commonwealth'?
The main thrust of the United States in the post-war years was to use its influence in
European affairs to bring about a European federal system into which the British had to be
pressured. The Empire had gone or was going; now the Commonwealth was to be
sacrificed as well.
As Gibbon finally laid down his pen in 1787, he attributed Rome's fall to the 'triumph of
barbarism and religion'. I am inclined to think that barbarism and religion may provide a
useful clue to the fate of the British Empire. I would not mean by either what Gibbon had
in mind. By barbarism I mean the reaction against the notions of an impersonal law,
faithfully administered, and the recourse of all citizens in favor of ties of race and tribe
and caste. By religion I have in mind modern creeds that, while not involving belief in the
deity, are held with equal intensity by believers. The chief of these is democracy: the idea
that legitimacy can only be conferred by the ballot box and once conferred is absolute.
Whether in the metropolis or on the periphery, democracy and empire go ill together. Or
at least that is a belief that the authors of the Oxford History must somehow and
somewhere be prepared to examine.
All empires have had territorial limits and the British Empire was no 'exception. Beyond
the frontiers to which direct rule extended there could be either rival empires with whom
conflict was in the nature of things, endemic as between Rome and the Persians, or Britain
and Russia, or Britain and France; or there could be areas of confused allegiance and
conflicting authorities as was true of the area beyond the Rhine and Danube where Rome
was concerned, in the Balkans for Byzantium, in the Caucasus and central Asia for the
Russians. In the case of the modern maritime empires there has been at times what is
called informal empire, where an area has been penetrated by trade and investment but not
seen as calling for the imposition of direct rule. What, in the British case, will the authors
make of Latin America?
In the Roman case, the Euro-Asian volkerwanderung of the period meant that not only
were barbarian authorities within their own lands brought into client relationships, but
through the encouragement of resettlement within the empire's borders, important changes
in the character of the populations over which the emperors ruled took place on a large
scale. And with the infiltration of individuals from even further afield and the movement
of soldiers and civilians between the near eastern and African provinces and the western
provinces of the Empire, vast cultural changes were set to work notably in religion The
Victorian Church at Simla has its parallel in the Temple of Mithras in the City of London
and in the mosques that have replaced synagogues that had replaced the churches of
London's East End.
What we are witnessing now is not only a period of rapid change in the physical and
demographic layout of the world, but one in which there is no certainty about where these
changes are leading. A storm- tossed raft is not the best place from which to make
accurate observations of the stars. I do not think that lack of material will prove an
obstacle to any of our authors. What they will find difficult, having no agreed common
philosophy, is to explain the past in terms which all their colleagues will find agreeable -
the mean between accepting at its face value what contemporaries said about their actions,
and judging them by standards with which they were unfamiliar.
We tend to think of the British Empire and the other European empires as somehow
artificial, based upon a transitory period of technological and hence military
preponderance. Now we see the former slipping away and the latter discounted as
unusable. Britain and the other countries of western Europe that once had empires - one
can have no certainty about Russia - are on the defensive. It is hard to remember that at
one time, not so long ago, the superiority of the West was taken for granted as part of the
natural order.
It was actually a Frenchman -Adolphe Thiers - who in 1851 declared that 'God's design
for civilization had given to the temperate zone the intelligence whereby the raw products
of the rest of the world could be brought to their perfection before being sent back to their
places of origin'. But something of the same confidence could equally have been found
among British mid-Victorians, - even free traders.
An understanding of the attitudes of empire-builders, as later on of those who with
seeming willingness relinquished Empire, is a precondition of writing their history. An
acceptance of the state of mind of Europeans - in this case of the English and later the
British -to bring other parts of the world under their rule is more important than the
insistence upon 'the profit motive that once exercised interpreters of imperialism. I say
English because' the impulse to conquer and give laws to the conquered was present right
from the start in the Anglo-Norman state we call England.
The most useful key concept for the would-be historians of the British Empire, as for
historians of other empires, is the familiar one of law and order. What united imperialists
was the belief that order in the sense of known laws actively enforced was good in itself,
and achieving this was far more significant for them than the hope of personal gain. There
were many easier ways of making money than acting as the overseas representative of the
Crown at any level from royal governor to local magistrate or district officer. Whether in
particular cases trade followed the flag or the flag followed trade is always a proper
subject for argument, the core of empire was not profit but governance.
The curious myth that the United Kingdom itself has no constitution rested upon the
recognition that the law-making powers of Parliament were not limited by any constraints
that Parliament could not itself remove. Sovereignty has of course now been put into
suspense by the limitations of Britain's legislative powers involved in membership of the
European Union. But while the British Empire was still in existence, and during the
period of its retreat, the sovereign Parliament of the United Kingdom busied itself almost
without intermission in providing for overseas territories written constitutions which did
include constraints upon what colonial legislatures could do, and which set out in some
cases rules for the conduct of public business which had been left to develop as
'conventions' in Britain itself. Since, therefore, such constitutions were, from the narrowly
legalistic point of view, Acts of the British Parliament, they could only be changed by
their amendment, and the growth of independence was marked out by the automatic
readiness of the British Parliament to give effect to requests from the territory in question
that this should be done. This constitutional and legal link between the United Kingdom
and the Empire Commonwealth should not be overlooked by historians to whom economic
and social ties may seem of more importance. 'Informal empire' is a contradiction in
terms.
The development of the Privy Council as the ultimate arbiter of constitutional arguments
was another pillar of the system which has been substantially reduced as Commonwealth
countries have removed the right of appeal. Nor does this constitutional aspect of the story
relate only to distant periods. One of the first legislative issues that came before the
House of Lords soon after my entry into that body, was the 'repatriation' of the Canadian
constitution. It was of course a largely symbolic gesture since, if Canadians had been able
to agree upon the changes they required, the Westminster Parliament would not have held
up their enactment. Now that the constitution has been 'repatriated', agreement seems as
remote as ever.
If one looks at the history of the British Empire from the point of view of its governance, a
number of issues arise which transcend the history of the individual lands once part of it.
Perhaps the most striking feature, compared with other historical empires, is the deeply
civilian-character of its ruling institutions. It was acquired by the exercise of naval and
military power and where necessary maintained by it. But this ultimate dependence upon
military power did not mean that civilian rule did not prevail, whether it was the rule of
Westminster and its agents of or local Elites co-opted into the imperial machine. One
recollects the degree to which the location of power in the Roman Empire, either at the
centre or the periphery, was decided by the professional military, including some very
odd promotions to the imperial throne. We can see the full significance of this when
Queen Victoria was made Empress of India by an elderly man of letters, not by a
Praetorian Guard.
On the whole, the priority of the civil over the military was carried over into the Empire
successor states. Of its former territories only Pakistan, Nigeria, the Sudan and Myanmar
(Burma) have had intermittent periods of overt military rule. Other countries have
departed a long way from the Westminster model, but their tyrants have been, and are, of
the civilian variety.
Another common theme is that now generally classified under the heading of 'human
rights'. The most striking use of the ultimate sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament
was its abolition of slavery. Other forms of discrimination against nonwhite communities,
whether indigenous or immigrant, were largely left to local settler communities to whom it
was a continuing principle of imperial policy to transfer local power. In some sense the
problem was a permanent one, bridging the divide of the secession of the American
colonies. Treaties with Indian chiefs,ultimately swept aside in practice in what was to
become the United States, had their parallels in Canada and New Zealand. If the treaties
were made in the name of the imperial authority, the importance attached to them might be
greater. The Treaty of Waitangi is again a live issue in current New Zealand politics, and
the Inuits were among the principal objectors to the 'repatriation' of the Canadian
constitution.
In the case of colonies where people of another European stock vied with the British --
Canada and South Africa -- the issue was political rather than one of access to resources.
The vocabulary of such issues is a clue to the mentality of the period when the race
problem in South Africa meant the conflict between Boer and Briton.
In the Indian Empire and countries associated with it, where questions of settler influence
were of minor importance, the treaty-making power was an instrument for the extension of
imperial control with some limitation on the degree of imperial involvement and hence
expenditure.
In fixing the perspective for our history of the Empire, one must always remind oneself
that while there were innumerable differences between the lands which were part of the
imperial structure, the Parliament of the United Kingdom, the machinery of government in
Whitehall, was the same for all, at least after the dispossession of the East india
Company. The same members of Parliament had to make whatever decisions of policy
were required, and the great proconsular offices were occupied by the same set of men.
The same was true lower down the chain of authority. Of course there were divisions in
the machinery of recruitment -- the home civil service was one thing; the I.C.S. (Indian
Civil Service) another, the Colonial services a third. But the society that furnished them
was one. Even clearer is the case of the army which after the Napoleonic wars was
increasingly thought of and organised in terms of its role in imperial defence, in striking
contrast to the continental armies based upon conscription, and with their own land
frontiers or adjacent territories to which they laid claim and might one day wish to seize.
The problem of rights was thus largely an issue of constitutional arrangements, accepting
the reality of differentiated populations. For the rights of individuals within the system, the
availability of common law remedies was held to be sufficient. Bills of Rights on the
United States model did not feature in the Empire and were only taken up by
Commonwealth countries in the last stages of the Commonwealth's own disintegration.
It is more challenging to reflect on the role of federalism in the Empire's history. Neither
the first British Empire nor the second lent itself in the end to a federal solution to its
problems. But the idea of federalism as applied to particular territories was bound to
figure after the United States had shown it to be a viable form of government. So after the
Earl of Durham, as governor general of Canada, turned it down, federalism found its way
into that country with the British North America Act of 1867; and Australia became a
single Commonwealth in 1901 by adopting the same basic principle. A variant of the
formula was attempted in India and became the basis of India's own constitution after
independence. Malaysia may also be included in this category.
Failures are as illuminating as successes. The idea was canvassed for South Africa after
the Boer War, but rejected in favour of a more unitary frame of government. It is now
being revived under very different circumstances. In the period of retreat from Empire
after the Second World War, federation was tried and failed in both Central Africa and
the West Indies. Each failure emphasised the lesson that federalism only succeeds when
underpinned by a common sense of identity as well as common interests. It is a lesson that
continental Europeans have still to learn.
A final warning is that to concentrate on the builders of empire means assessing their own
social and intellectual background. That means being familiar with British domestic
history over the centuries, in which the nature of the imperial impulse and the mental
world within which it operated were subject to continuous change. It demands a gift for
understanding the limits of the possible, both in words and action, which may be difficult
for those brought up amid modern notions of political correctness. I think that this is
particularly a problem in a work that is to be the fruit of Anglo-American co-operation.
The self-evident truths of one people are not the necessary assumptions of the other.
In the end it all comes down to the very obvious point that a history, even one dignified
with the name of a great university, is only the sum of the personal preferences of its
authors. History is not there to be quarried out of archives, it is the residue of what has
passed through an individual mind. Whatever the role of editors in avoiding gaps and
preventing overlaps, it is the individual chapters we shall seek out and remember and
respond to. But what an adventure!
This article represents the substance of a lecture delivered in July 1995 to the annual
Anglo-American Conference of Historians (organised by the Institute of Historical
Research in London).
FOR FURTHER READING:
Until the new Oxford History of the British Empire appears the most comprehensive
current source is The Cambridge History of the British Empire (CUP, 8 vols. between
1929-59). Also useful are: Max Beloff Imperial Sunset, Volume One: Britain's Liberal
Empire, 18971921 (Macmillan, 1987, second edition); Max Beloff Imperial Sunset,
Volume Two: Dream of Commonwealth (Macmillan, 1989).
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Wider still and wider: this 1892 Punch cartoon of Cecil
Rhodes bestriding Africa from Cairo to the Cape, epitomizes the self confidence of
British imperialism at 'high noon'
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Court and consul: the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, with
his wife and an entourage of Indian princes c. 1900.
PHOTOS (COLOR): Jewels in the crown: A.E. Harris' depiction of Edward II receiving
a party of maharajahs and Empire dignitaries prior to his coronation; and (below) a 1931
poster from the Empire Marketing Board extolling the virtues of Imperial produce - part
of an extensive campaign mounted between the wars when the advocates of tariff reform
were keen to foster closer Imperial economic ties.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): For the sake of Auld Lang Syne? Her Majesty the Queen
with Commonwealth leaders at the 1961 Conference - at a time when its role as a
functioning successor of Empire was still being widely canvassed.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): (Right) New crowns for old: this 1876 Punch cartoon has
Disraeli as Aladdin, drawing Queen Victoria out of widow' s reclusion by offering her the
title of Empress of India - a kick- start for the cause of Imperial ideology.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): God the Englishman? The baptism of a Maori chief in
Otahe Church, New Zealand, 1853, after the Treaty of Waitangi had confirmed British
sovereignty.
PHOTOS (BLACK & WHITE): Trade following the flag? The cartoon opposite cocks a
snook (by today's standards offensively politically incorrect) at the benefits of British
commerce awaiting the Ashanti people after their occupation by the Crown in the 1890s.
Whatever the impact of finished goods from Britain on the Imperial territories and
colonies, that of raw products from them on the domestic market was profound - as in the
most ubiquitous commodity, tea, seen, (above) drying and being packed for Liptons in
Ceylon.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): British justice: this early 19th-century engraving of the
trial of an Arab man for murder before British authorities in Ceylon (with an Arab jury) is
early visual testament to the emphasis the advocates of empire placed on the
transplantation of British civil and judicial institutions and their universal applicability.
PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Barefoot bobbles on an African beat: Zulu police in
Durban.
~~~~~~~~
By Lord Beloff Lord Beloff is Emeritus Professor of Government and Public
Administration at the University of Oxford.
Morris, Jonathan, The British Empire.., Vol. 46, History Today, 02-01-1996, pp 13.