Ghosts of Empire

GHOSTS OF EMPIRE BRITAIN’S LEGACIES IN THE MODERN WORLD

KWASI KWARTENG

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Liber dicatur hic parentibus meis amore grati filii piissimo

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Introduction

The British Empire remains one of the most popular themes in history. We all know, or think we know, about its character. We have a hazy image of officers in pith helmets, pukka sahibs and turbaned and bejewelled maharajas; we have a sense of the grandeur and splendour of the empire, but it remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, very remote. The workings of the empire itself are even more obscure, as is the long roll of colonial governors and officials who administered it.

In this book, I have tried to show what the British Empire was really like, from the point of view of the rulers, the administrators who made it possible. As one historian has said, the task is to recover the ‘world-view and social presuppositions of those who dominated and ruled the empire’.1 This does not mean that the ‘victims and critics’ were unimportant, but it does mean that any understanding of the empire should start with trying to capture the mentality of those who bore responsibility for an imperium which was the largest the world has seen.

Ghosts of Empire takes an unusual approach, in the way it examines aspects of Britain’s legacy in parts of the world which are diverse in terms of geography and culture. The countries or territories which form the subjects of this book are, in many ways, still influenced by their connection with Britain. Many of them, like Iraq and Kashmir, have been prominent in the international press for some years; others, like Nigeria and Sudan, have been less widely written about, but all of them, in my view, reveal certain similar characteristics of British rule.

The choice of Hong Kong was the easiest, since the departure of the British from the territory in 1997, watched by millions of people on television, has been understood to symbolize the formal end of the British

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Empire. More relevantly, to readers in the twenty-first century, Hong Kong’s destiny is now bound up with that of China, the most rapidly emerging superpower of the new century. Iraq’s history as a dependent territory of empire was strictly a twentieth-century affair. Handed over to Britain in 1920, after the First World War, Iraq remained under formal British rule for only twelve years. Yet, for the next twenty-five years, it was ruled by a monarchy which affected British manners and style.

In Kashmir, a Hindu family were established as rulers over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years, and the effects of their rule are still felt today. Monarchy was a particularly British instrument of policy, and the experiences of both Iraq and Kashmir illustrate its limitations. Burma, which, like Kashmir, formed part of the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for India, was treated in a completely different way. In Burma, an ancient monarchy was toppled and replaced by direct British rule. The contrasting treatment of Kashmir and Burma reveals the many inconsistencies of imperial policy. On the continent of Africa, within the boundaries of both Nigeria and Sudan, there existed ethnic and racial animosities which were only exacerbated by imperial rule. These animosities have haunted the post-imperial destinies of both countries.

The British Empire has always been with me. My parents were born in what was then called the Gold Coast in the 1940s and had experienced the empire at first hand. My father entered secondary school in January 1956, less than fifteen months before the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in March 1957. This school was designed on traditional Anglican lines, and, although it had been founded only in 1910, it imitated older English establishments. The headmaster was an Englishman, of a type familiar in the colonies, a product of Winchester, England’s oldest boarding, or public, school, and Cambridge University.

I visited the school, Adisadel College, in 2001 for the first time. I was struck by the grace and tranquillity of its environment, as the school stands high on a hill in Cape Coast, Ghana’s oldest town, which had been colonized by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I realized that very few schools in Britain enjoyed such a pleasant setting. And yet the story of the school since independence in 1956 reflected the turbulent, unsettled

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history of the country since that time. In 1960 there had been 600 boys at the school; there were now over 2,000 and yet the facilities and infrastructure had remained the same. The shortage of money had not really changed the ethos of the place. Even though the school tried to shake off its imperial past, and had done this successfully by abolishing, for example, the teaching of Ancient Greek in 1963, there were still many traces of the old order. The school had been transformed, but vestiges of the empire could still be seen, not least in the house system, favoured in British boarding schools, and the honours boards in the dining room. The empire in a certain sense still existed, although it now clung on only in a twilit afterlife that carried an eerie echo of its original character.

This book attempts to describe some of that afterlife, by giving an account of a country’s experience before independence and afterwards.

The character of the empire is portrayed through the forgotten officials and governors, without whom it would not have survived more than a few weeks. I have not written one of those books that purport to show that the empire was a good thing or a bad thing. I have tried to transcend what I believe to be a rather sterile debate on its merits and demerits. I have simply sought to enter, as best as I could, into the mentality of the empire’s rulers, to describe their thoughts and their ideals and values. I argue that individual officials wielded immense power, and it was this that ultimately led to disorder and even chaos.

Officials, as I hope to show, often developed one line of policy, only for their successors to overturn it and pursue a completely different approach.

This was a source of chronic instability in many parts of the empire. In many ways, the British were too individualistic, and the vagaries of democratic politics meant that a consistent line was seldom adopted. I have called this ‘anarchic individualism’, in that there was often nothing to stop the ‘man on the spot’, as he was called by the Colonial Office officials, from pursuing the course of action he thought best. From Nigeria, where Lord Lugard dominated the scene, to Hong Kong, where Sir Alexander Grantham successfully ended any move towards more democratic institutions in the 1950s, powerful individuals directed imperial policy with little supervision from Whitehall. Such a system was ultimately anarchic and self-defeating, as policies developed over years in Nigeria, Sudan, Hong

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Kong and elsewhere were simply put aside when a new governor took his place.

These reversals of policy show that the empire was an intensely pragmatic affair. Apart from a common educational background and a sense of shared style, individual governors and officials had a wide range of interests and beliefs. Some were motivated by a strong evangelical Christianity, others were outright atheists; some governors were highly conservative, while others were more liberal, even radical. What bound these people together was a very similar educational background, which leads inevitably to the notion of class.

Class was central to the British Empire. As one historian has argued, Britons in the imperial age saw themselves as ‘belonging to an unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations . . . hallowed by time and precedent’.2 The empire was extremely hierarchical. In each colony, there were highly detailed tables of precedent, which showed exactly where everyone stood in the pecking order. These tables sometimes revealed whether the Superintendent of the Botanical and Forestry Department came before the Director of the Royal Observatory, but this hierarchy was not really the kind we associate with feudal society. What tends to be overlooked in discussions about class in Britain is the extent to which it was often merely a synonym for money and education. In a feudal society, class is associated with the idea of family and breeding, yet as early as 1775 Topham Beauclerk could tell James Boswell, Dr Johnson’s biographer, that ‘now in England being of an old family was of no consequence.

People did not inquire far back. If a man was rich and well educated, he was equally well received as the most ancient gentleman, though if inquiry were made, his extraction might be found to be very mean.’3 This is an important point which explains the prestige of the public schools. What your grandfather did for a living was, by the early nineteenth century, largely irrelevant. What really mattered was whether you had gone to the right schools and universities. In this respect, there was a clearly defined scale, with Eton and, to a lesser degree, Harrow at the top and perhaps about fifteen other schools which were regarded as acceptable.

Education at this sort of school would very often be followed by a stint at Oxford or Cambridge, where, towards the end of the nineteenth century,

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the class of degree awarded became important, with a first of course being more prized than a second or third. The subject studied was also significant, with Classics, the study of the languages and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, being the most popular as well as the most prestigious discipline. History was probably the next most sought after, but didn’t have quite the same status. Technical subjects were rarely studied by those who aspired to a career in the administration of colonies; the late nineteenth century was, after all, a time when the Professor of Engineering at Oxford was frequently dismissed by his colleagues as the ‘Professor of Jam-Making’.4 Once admitted to a ‘decent’ public school, and after obtaining a good degree at either Oxford or Cambridge, or perhaps after a stint in the army, the young man who wanted to make a career in the colonies could really go as far as luck and talent would take him. The system, once the right educational background had been established, was fairly meritocratic. The ultimate imperial civil servant was Alfred Milner, born in Germany in 1854, the son of a medical student who had married a widow twenty years his senior. Milner’s background was obscure, but by dint of talent and industry he ended up as a viscount and was elected chancellor of Oxford University, though he died before he could be officially installed. He owed his success initially to his prowess in the examination halls of Oxford University. He had won the top Classical scholarship to Balliol College in 1872 and had steadily picked up awards and prizes during his career there.

Armed with his double first, he dedicated himself to a ‘life of public usefulness’. His one brush with democratic politics failed, when he was unsuccessful as the Liberal candidate in Harrow, a suburb of London, in 1885. Thereafter he pursued power as an administrator.

Milner’s career touches on another important point. It is a mistake to think that administrators were motivated by liberal ideas of democracy. In many cases they chose careers in the empire precisely because they were not democrats. They were elitists, men who could write Latin and Greek epigrams and had sought to wield power without having to go through the inconvenience of being elected. Milner himself remained ‘profoundly distrustful of the enfranchised’.5 To argue that he and his colleagues were promoting democracy stretches the truth. The empire stood for order and

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the rule of law, but we must not pretend that its character was something other than what it was. The imperial administration was highly stratified and snobbish. It was the very opposite of the egalitarian, plural and liberal institution that some historians have portrayed. As George Orwell remembered of his own education, ‘it was universally taken for granted . . . that unless you went to a “good” public school (and only about fifteen schools came under this heading) you were ruined for life’.6 The people who ran the empire would tacitly have agreed with this statement. Yet the narrow educational field did not preclude men of modest means, brought up in obscure families, from climbing the ladder. Among the administrators there were the sons of parsons, of university lecturers and of civil servants.

In fact the majority were from middling, anonymous families, without the pride of lineage associated with true aristocracies. It was at the public schools and, to a lesser degree, at the universities that the elite swagger and famously lofty sense of superiority were cultivated.

This was a manifestation as much of cultural superiority as of purely social snobbery. A first in Greats, the Oxford Classics course, and an education at Winchester ensured that a man would be held in the highest esteem. An interesting feature of this snobbery and sense of superiority was the extent to which native princes and rulers were made to fit the pattern. In the native societies the British administrator encountered, it was often class, money and education that counted more than race. This explains why Colonial Office officials in the 1930s would spend time arranging for a Nigerian chief ’s stay in Claridge’s, one of the most exclusive hotels in London. The hierarchical view of the world was exported to the colonies and, in many ways, the empire was a ‘vehicle for the extension of British social structures’.7 There were certainly notions of racial superiority, but these were mingled with often contradictory ideas about education and wealth. It was a confusing picture.

The empire was not simply a forerunner of the modern pluralist democracy, so valued in the West. It was something entirely different. It is simply misleading to describe the British Empire, as one historian has done, as the champion of ‘free-market liberalism’ and democracy.8 Such a judgement pays too little attention to what the empire was really like, or to the ideas that motivated the people who actually administered it. Notions of

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democracy could not have been further from the minds of the imperial administrators themselves. Their heads were filled with ideas of class, loosely defined, of intellectual superiority and of paternalism. ‘Benign authoritarianism’ would be a better description of the political philosophy that sustained the empire.

The focus of this book is on the colonial empire, not on the white dominions. This recognizes that much of the debate about the British Empire in the early years of the twenty-first century has really been about the role of the United States of America. Some historians and political scientists have suggested that the United States should follow Britain and try to impose its own ‘Pax Americana’ on the more anarchic parts of the world. The model the United States is being asked to follow is one of administration and military occupation. Even the most strident neoconservatives, the historians who say that ‘empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before’, have never suggested that millions of Americans should emigrate to places like Iraq on a permanent basis and establish their families there.9 Aggressive modern imperialists do believe that an empire can keep the world safe and better administered. I contend that the example of the British Empire shows the opposite; empires, through their lack of foresight and the wide discretion they give administrators, lead to instability and the development of chronic problems. In any case, the idea of creating an avowedly interventionist American empire now seems, especially after the defeat of the Republican candidate in the 2008 presidential election, as absurd as the notion of absolute monarchy seemed to Britons of the nineteenth century. It also misunderstands the nature of empire. Britain’s empire was not liberal in the sense of being a plural, democratic society. It openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn from a tiny proportion of the population in Britain. The British Empire was not merely undemocratic; it was anti-democratic. The United States, on the other hand, despite its difficult history, proclaims itself to be democratic, plural and liberal. Its avowed values could not be further removed from those of the British Empire.

As I hope to show in many of the examples of imperial history I outline in the following chapters, the anarchic individualism and paternalism

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which underpinned the British Empire led to messy outcomes. Transitions from British rule to independence were difficult, because the Pax Britannica was itself transient and without any firm foundation. The British Empire was nothing more than a series of improvisations conducted by men who shared a common culture, but who often had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in this imperial story. It was grand and colourful but it was highly opportunistic, dominated by individualism and pragmatism. The British Empire is a bizarre model to follow for fostering stability in today’s world. Indeed, much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policy-making.

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a note o n the A utho r Kwasi Kwarteng was born in London to Ghanaian parents. He has a PhD in History from Cambridge University and was recently elected as the Member of Parliament for Spelthorne in Surrey. Ghosts of Empire is his first book.

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First published in Great Britain 2011 Copyright Š Kwasi Kwarteng 2011 Map by ML Design Kwasi Kwarteng has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 36 Soho Square London w1d 3qy www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7475 9941 8 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc, Bungay, Suffolk

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