Notes

We have been researching our ever more Moby Dick like essay on James F. Stephen, which is the reason we could be seen, Thursday, in a down town coffee house reading the seemingly dry as toast political history of Great Britain, The British Revolution, 1880-1939, by Tory historian Robert Rhodes James. The book, published some time in the 70s, turns out to be quite unexpectedly readable. It is rather depressing that Rhodes, who from his author picture is the typical dried up prune of a nerdy Tory, has such ease as a writer -- it implies a whole background acquaintance with English prose that just isn't there anymore. It has disappeared in our lifetime. The environmental disaster of extinction has gotten prolonged and constant exposure in the news for the last thirty years; but the cultural disaster of the extinction of a prose capable of subtly incorporating the whole range of English literature, the repertoire, in its easy narrative of facts, is not exposed at all in the press. In fact, the press is one of the toxins that has killed this particular talent off. It is all quite startling. It is like a whole generation of piano players losing their knowledge of scales.

Anyway, James provides a number of really good quotes from Victorian and Edwardian worthies. Here's Lord Roseberry, briefly prime minister after Gladstone and a key architect of the latter phase of British imperial expansion, describing Northcote, Disraeli's successor, for a brief time, as the head of the Conservatives:

"Where he failed was in manner. His voice, his diction, his delivery, were all inadequate. With real ability, great knowledge, genial kindness, and a sympathetic nature -- all the qualities, indeed, which evoke regard and esteem -- he had not the spice of the devil which is necessary to rouse an Opposition to zeal and elation.... When Northcote warmed there was, or seemed to be, a note of apology in his voice..."

Isn't this a perfect description of Daschle? And, cutting out the sentence that begins "with real ability," isn't this Lieberman? Indeed, it is the spice of the devil that is missing from the entire Democratic leadership.



Celebrators of the imperial process

Niall Ferguson, the Tory answer to � well, to whom? To Ferdinand Braudel? Anyway, Niall Ferguson is the news in Britain this Sunday. He has a BBC series on Empire, and a book, named Empire, too, to go along with it. Now, we find Ferguson a fascinating figure. We disagree with his cases - for instance, his case against Keynes book, the Consequences of the Peace - but we think his willingness to adventure counter-factually through the conventional wisdom of historians is bracing. The Times is all about Ferguson this week. Sunday, the Times published a number of reviews of the book and the series. Andrew Roberts, who compares Ferguson, rather nonsensically, to Errol Flynn, states Ferguson's case like this:

"AS THE subtitle of this book suggests, Niall Ferguson makes big claims for the British Empire. Not only did these small rainy offshore islands turn the world capitalist, he argues, but they also made huge tracts of it speak English, play team sports and adopt our land-tenure system and common law. Moreover, what he calls "Anglobalizsation" was a Good Thing, and was achieved with far less blood being shed than would have been done by our Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian or - God forbid- German competitors."

The benignity of Empire is the theme of the season. We think it is a deeply pernicious and misleading theme. Another review of the book, this time by FELIPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO, strikes a discordant note - in fact, seems to be about another book entirely:


"In Niall Ferguson�s view, one of his well-selected pictures seems fairly to sum up the British Empire: a German caricature of 1904, in which Britons cheerfully torture a black man. A capitalist forces whisky down the victim�s throat, while the rack, manipulated by a soldier, extrudes gold from his rectum. Nearby, a churchman sermonises myopically. The empire, Ferguson explains in his book written to accompany the Channel 4 series which started last Thursday, originated in piracy, unrolled in slavery, practised outrages and atrocities and struggled to �play the role of world policeman with a straight face�. The �civilising mission� was a sham: empire induced savagery in its servants. The British came to India, for example, as predatory conquistadors � barbaric exploiters of a society more prosperous and, by many standards, more impressive than their own.

All this candour is surprising after an introduction that promises a robust defence of the morality of empire. Eventually, the author wrenches his rabbit from the hat. The British Empire may have been bad in some respects; but for the world of the late 19th century and much of the 20th, the alternatives were worse: German or Russian or Japanese hegemony. The balance of investment and exploitation favoured the exploiters only a little. By espousing free trade and repudiating slavery the British enriched the world and enhanced humanity. Their legacy includes liberal capitalism, parliamentary democracy, and �finally, there is the English language itself�.

As a case for the defence, it is disappointingly predictable: the vaunted legacy surely owes more, in any case, to America�s empire than to Britain�s."

Well, which version of Ferguson's version of Empire is right? And what kind of justification is it that, in the event, the Brits were better than the Spanish or the Germans?

It seems to us that the question is being posed in such a manner as to skew the issue. The question of the British effect on India is not a matter of whether the Portugese would have been better for India, but whether the Moghuls would have. Also, there is a problem with the penchant for historical battles, and turning points, etc. The turning point in India, to use the great British colony once again, was not decided at the end of the seven years war. It was decided every year after the seven years war. It was decided, with bloodshed and mythology, at the end of the Sepoy mutiny, in 1859. Whether India, like Russia, could have governed itself, imported technology, created a framework within which to palliate the great famines of the latter half of the 19th century is something we will never know. But it definitely loads the dice to make this question turn on the alternative between the Brits and the Germans, or the Japanese, or the French.

The European edition of Time magazine casts a surprisingly skeptical eye on Ferguson's empire nostalgia. This graf seems to make the case, although with an example that seems, really, to trivialize the record, disparate as it is, concentrated in thousands of separate records, of atrocity:


"But Ferguson's Empire balance sheets show some creative accounting. Though he dutifully frowns on the horrors of slavery or, say, the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, in 1898 (in which 10,000 Muslims were annihilated in five hours by Lord Kitchener's Maxim guns), few such moments make it into the debit column. "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish," Ferguson writes. "It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity." There might have been, he admits, but he clearly doubts it."

Finally, this is Peter Conrad weighing in in the Guardian on one of Ferguson's nuttier claims:

"Ferguson presents the loss of Empire as an act of supreme altruism, 'authentically noble'. Britain bankrupted itself in a war against alternative Empires - German, Japanese, Italian - whose treatment of their subject populations was manifestly less humane. 'Did not that sacrifice,' he asks, 'alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?' I am not sure that he establishes the moral superiority of the home team. Of course, Christianity put a hypocritical, cozening gloss on imperial venality by claiming that the Empire had a redemptive, civilising mission.But despite this piety, British colonies depended on slavery; no wonder the nabobs were offended when the Japanese, after the fall of Singapore, enslaved British soldiers and put them to work building a railway through the jungle. Hitler admired the Empire and offered to let the British keep it if they smiled on his own imperial ambitions in eastern Europe."