Ghosts of Empire (2 page)

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 realised that very few schools in Britain enjoyed such a pleasant setting. And yet the story of the school since independence in 1957 reflected the turbulent, unsettled 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 of the traces of the old order. The school had been transformed, but many vestiges of the empire could still be seen; the house system, favoured in British boarding schools, and the honours boards in the dining room were still all there. The empire in a certain sense still existed, although it now clung on only in a twilit afterlife that conveyed but an eerie echo of its original character.

This book tries to describe some of that afterlife through an account of an aspect of a country's experience before independence and afterward. The
character of the British Empire is portrayed through the forgotten officials and governors, without whom the empire would not have survived a few weeks. I have not tried to write one of those endless number of books that tries to show whether the empire was a good or a bad thing. Instead, I have tried to transcend what I believe to be a rather sterile debate as to its merits and demerits. I have simply tried to enter into the mentality, as best as I could, of the empire's rulers, to describe their thoughts and the character of their ideals and values. I argue that individual officials wielded immense power and it was this unrestrained power that ultimately led to instability, disorder and chaos.

Officials, as I hope to show, often developed one line of policy, only for their successors to overturn that policy and pursue a completely different approach. This was the source of chronic instability in many parts of the empire. In many ways, the British Empire was too individualistic, and the vagaries of democratic politics meant that a consistent line was seldom adopted. This type of individualism I have called ‘anarchic individualism', in that there was often nothing to stop the ‘man on the spot', as he was called by the Colonial Office civil servants, from pursuing the course of action he thought best. It is often forgotten how important the idea of individualism was to Victorian Britons. As Lord Cromer, who administered Egypt as the British Consul-General under the nominal government of the Khedive, or later King, of Egypt, observed, ‘Our habits of thought, our past history, and our national character all, therefore, point in the direction of allowing individualism as wide a scope as possible in the work of national expansion'.
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From Nigeria, where Lord Lugard dominated the scene, to Hong Kong, where Sir Alexander Grantham successfully ended any move to more democratic institutions in the 1950s, powerful individuals directed imperial policy with little supervision from London. Such a system was ultimately ‘anarchic' and self-defeating, since in Nigeria, Sudan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, policies developed over years were simply put aside as a new governor took his place.

Such 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 individuals together was a very similar educational background, which leads inevitably to the idea of class.

The empire was extremely hierarchical. In each colony, there were highly detailed tables of precedent that showed exactly where everyone stood in the pecking order. These tables sometimes revealed whether the superintendent of the Botanical and Forestry Department took precedence over the director of the Royal Observatory, but this hierarchy was not really the type we associate with feudal society. What tends to be overlooked in discussions about class in Britain is the extent to which class was often merely a synonym for money and education. In a feudal society, class is associated with the idea of family and breeding, yet even 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'.
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This is a vital point that 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 regard, there was a clearly defined pecking order, with Eton and, to a lesser degree, Harrow at the top of the scale, and perhaps about fifteen other schools that were regarded as being acceptable. Education at this sort of school would very often be followed by a stint at either Oxford or Cambridge University.

Once admitted to a ‘decent' public school, and after obtaining a 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. Once the right educational background had been established, the system was quite meritocratic. The ultimate imperial civil servant was Alfred Milner, who was born in Germany in 1854, the son of a medical student and 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, even though he died before he could be officially installed. Milner owed his success initially to his prowess in Oxford's examination halls. He had won the top classical
scholarship to Balliol 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 the county of Middlesex, in 1885. Thereafter he sought power as an administrator.

Milner's career touches on another important point. It is mistaken 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 who sought to wield power without having to undergo the inconvenience of winning votes. Milner himself remained ‘profoundly distrustful of the enfranchised'.
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To argue that Milner and his colleagues were promoting democracy stretches the truth. The empire stood for order and the rule of law, but we must not pretend that its character was something other than what it was. The imperial administration was highly elitist, stratified and snobbish. It was the very opposite of the egalitarian, plural and liberal institution that some recent historians have portrayed. As George Orwell remembered about 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'.
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The people who ran the empire would have tacitly 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, the sons of university lecturers and civil servants. In fact, the majority of the administrators 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 sense of superiority was as much a manifestation of cultural superiority as purely social snobbery. An interesting feature of this sense of superiority was the extent to which native princes and rulers were made to fit into this 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 civil servants would spend time arranging for a Nigerian chief's stay in Claridge's, one of the most exclusive hotels in
London, in the 1930s. 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'.
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The British 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.
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Such a judgement gives too little attention to what the empire was really like, or to the ideas that motivated the people who actually administered it. Notions of democracy could not have been further from the minds of the imperial administrators themselves. Their heads were filled with ideas of class, loosely defined, with notions of intellectual superiority and paternalism. ‘Benign authoritarianism' would be a better description of the political philosophy that sustained the empire.

Ghosts of Empire
attempts to show how the ‘anarchic individualism' and paternalism that underpinned the British Empire led to messy outcomes. Transitions from British rule to independence were difficult, as the Pax Britannica imposed in the first place 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 often had very different ideas about government and administration. There is very little unifying ideology in the story of Britain's empire. It was grand and colourful but also highly opportunistic; it was dominated by individualism and pragmatic concerns. 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.

The speaker was self-assured and confident. With a lifetime of public service behind him, Lord Curzon was fully in command of his audience. The Inter-Allied Petroleum dinner, given on 21 November 1918 at Lancaster House in St James's, was a festive occasion. The Great War, which had cost over 900,000 British lives, had been over for ten days. It had been a close-run thing. For a considerable period during the war itself, Germany had looked invincible, with its great coal deposits and manpower. But oil had saved the day for the Allies. One of the most ‘astonishing things' Curzon had seen during the war in France and Flanders was the ‘tremendous army of motor lorries', all powered by oil. ‘Even before the War', he boomed, ‘oil was regarded as one of the most important national industries and assets.' It was clear that the ‘Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil'.
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Curzon was by now a seasoned imperial statesman. His career achievements had been celebrated, even from his Eton days, where he had been a competitive and successful student; he had finished his time there by becoming the captain of the Oppidans, the senior boy in the school who was not one of the seventy King's Scholars (King's Scholars were from less distinguished social backgrounds but were generally academically more able); as captain of the Oppidans, Curzon was the most academically distinguished of the affluent, fee-paying boys who formed the large majority of the school. At Oxford, Curzon's contemporaries had composed a famous ditty about him which referred to his ‘sleek' hair and the fact that he dined at the country seat of the Duke of Marlborough, Blenheim Palace, ‘once a week'. In many ways Curzon was an archetypal imperialist of his generation. Unlike many of his fellow aristocrats, he
was well travelled and curious about the world. In 1882, immediately after leaving Oxford, he had visited Constantinople, Palestine and Egypt. In 1885, still only twenty-six, he was in Tunis, and in 1887–8 he explored America, China and India. His energy, his curiosity and his ambition were boundless. More significantly, he was wholly committed to the imperial cause. In 1898, he became viceroy of India (that is, the British monarch's representative) at the age of thirty-nine. When Curzon was appointed foreign secretary in October 1919, he was regarded by Harold Nicolson, a Foreign Office official, as ‘the last of that unbroken line of Foreign Secretaries who had been born with the privileges of a territorial aristocracy and nurtured on the traditions of a governing class'. An important characteristic of this ‘unbroken line' was the narrowness of their education and the certainty with which they held their values. ‘Eton and Winchester, Christ Church and Balliol [elite colleges at Oxford University], Trinity and King's [equivalent colleges at Cambridge] had moulded these calm, confident and unassuming men.' They thought the same thing. ‘Upon the main principles of Imperial and Foreign Affairs they felt alike; they thought alike; they acted alike.'
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Not that anyone would accuse Lord Curzon of being ‘unassuming'. His manner, according to Nicolson who worked under him at the Foreign Office, ‘created the legend of a man, conceited, reactionary, unbending and aloof '. His imperialism ‘above everything' was based upon the doctrine of ‘responsibility', upon the conviction ‘that Great Britain had been entrusted with certain moral and practical obligations towards her subject races'.