The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (2 page)

Still, most Americans are sympathetic to Britain. They think of her as our oldest and most reliable ally, even if they might be ambivalent at best about the British Empire, or harbor a knee-jerk disapproval of it: “Isn't the
empire what we fought against in 1776?” In fact, no. “Aren't Americans anti-imperialists by birth?” John Adams didn't think so when he foresaw in 1755, with prescience and pleasure, the transfer “of the great seat of empire to America.”
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Thomas Jefferson didn't think so when he referred to America as an “empire of liberty”
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or urged the annexation of Canada. And President James K. Polk didn't think so when he proudly claimed, after the Mexican War, to have “added to the United States an immense empire.”
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For Irish-Americans, of course, the ancient animosity against England, inherited from the old sod and lovingly nurtured, makes them dubious, or worse,
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about the British Empire—though, as we'll see, much of this animosity is based on Shamrock-shaded myths.

To hate the British Empire is to hate ourselves, for the United States would not exist if not for the British Empire. It was that Empire that created the North American colonies, giving them their charters, their people, their language, their culture, their governments, and their ideas of liberty. The inherited “rights of Englishmen” going back at least to the Magna Carta of 1215, were planted on American soil by English people in an overt act of profit-making imperialism. Moreover, the American War of Independence was not a war against the idea of empire. It was a war guided by men like Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, who wanted an American Empire of their own—and who were in fact partly motivated by the British Empire not being imperialist enough.

After the War of Independence, Britain's trade with the United States surpassed what its trade had been with the Thirteen Colonies. Even with the interruption of the War of 1812, Britain was not only a trading partner, it was a tremendous source of new Americans. From the end of that war (1815) through the presidency of Zachary Taylor (1850), roughly 80 percent of British emigrants came to the United States;
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we can presume they saw America as a second Britain, but one with more opportunity. Despite occasional diplomatic kerfuffles, there was an ineluctable bond between Britain
and the United States, a bond that encompassed everything from the influence British literature had over American writers to the quietly conducted power politics of the Royal Navy helping enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In 1899, when Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem about picking up the white man's burden, his purpose was not to urge his fellow Britons to greater sacrifices but to congratulate the United States for accepting an imperial mission in the Philippines, joining Britain not as a global rival but as a partner in extending the blessings of Christian civilization.

At the time, Theodore Roosevelt thought Kipling's poem was bad verse but good politics. Today, at least in English literature courses, if it is taught at all it is merely another exhibit in a long litany of Western condescension to, and exploitation of, native peoples. But Kipling frames the white man's burden rather differently. It means binding your best men to serve another people, to take up what he says will be a thankless task, yet one that a mature and Christian people must do—to banish famine and sickness, to provide peace and order, to build roads and ports, to seek the profit of another rather than oneself.

Kipling knew the British Empire as well as any man—and he saw it clear-eyed, with all the blood and sacrifice and repression, of self and others, it entailed. He was a patriot for his own country, but India was his country too, the country where he was born and where his imagination was ignited. The British Empire of the twenty-first-century academic lecture hall, however, is something utterly different. The idea that the British Empire was a white man's burden is treated with scorn, contempt, and ridicule. The Empire was not a responsibility borne by self-sacrificing Britons—on the contrary, the Empire was a vehicle of rapacious, self-serving capitalists responsible for racism, slavery, and oppression on a global scale. But which was it really?

True, the British Empire was responsible for a portion of the slave trade. But it was also responsible for ending it. Indeed, the British Empire's war
against slavery was actually a major factor driving imperial expansion, as the Royal Navy patrolled the coasts of Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the East Indies, and sent troops inland, especially in Africa, to put slavers out of business. British taxpayers also paid off the former slave owners in the British West Indies—spending twenty million pounds (about 37 percent of the British government's revenues in 1831)
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—to ensure that slaves were liberated or made apprentices.

True, the British Empire was animated by the belief that a public school-educated Englishman was capable of governing any number of native peoples. But the Empire also relied to an extraordinary extent on the cooperation of the native peoples; their governing structures were often left largely intact; their aristocracies were generally treated as legitimate elites; and it was the native peoples themselves who provided many or most of the foot soldiers who enforced the imperial Pax Britannica.

True, the British conquered other peoples, drew lines on maps, and declared large portions of the globe part of the Empire. But it is also true that in doing so the British introduced their ideas about the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government, not to mention their games of cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis, and golf; their literature; their ideas about what constituted fair play; and—to use an imperial word, a Hindi word—their ideas of what was
pukka
and what was not.

The British Empire was driven in large part by commercial interests, but these were joined by other interests as well. There were missionary and military interests, of course, but there was also the sheer adventurous, or prideful, desire to paint the map red, something that caught the imagination of many an empire-builder, from the colossal capitalist Cecil Rhodes to the founder of Singapore, Stamford Raffles. If profit was a motive, it is also true that it was the British themselves who often created the infrastructure (the roads, the ports, the railways), developed the products (rubber, tobacco, gold), and provided the markets that brought these far-flung areas into the world economy to a far greater extent than they had been before.

And if we are to talk about oppression on a global scale it might be well to remember which country sacrificed a generation to preserve liberal ideals against the militarism and aggression of the kaiser's Germany; which country stood alone against Hitler after the fall of France in 1940; and which country, though riven by Bolshie labor unions and Cambridge spies and traitors, was the most stalwart European opponent of Bolshevism and Communism. As the British historian Christopher Dawson wrote in 1932, the Bolsheviks regarded the British Empire, “not without reason as the chief element of cohesion in the divided ranks of their enemies.”
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In World War I and World War II, and to a certain degree in the Cold War, when one speaks of Britain one speaks of the Empire. In both World Wars, Britain was joined by the self-governing dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; units came from every nation within the Empire; and the all-volunteer Indian Army served on battlefronts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East—the Indians providing more than three million men all told. When the Cold War turned hot, Britons, Canadians, South Africans, and ANZACs (Australians and New Zealanders) fought in Korea; Rhodesians, Fijians, and ANZACs served with the British in Malaya; and the ANZACs were in Vietnam.

When Britain could no longer maintain the Pax Britannica, it became the Pax Americana. The transition was sometimes less successful than it should have been because of American ambivalence about empire. In World War II the Americans were often suspicious of Britain's postwar imperial designs, and President Franklin Roosevelt was obsessed with getting the British out of Hong Kong and India (he compared the Indians to the North American colonists of 1776). Rather than empire, Roosevelt believed in a sort of liberal idealism and internationalism, much of it channeled through his plan for a United Nations—an alternative institution and vision, and one that has proven far more prone to bureaucracy, corruption, officiousness, and incompetence than the British Empire.

Today, it is the British Empire rather than the United Nations that still provides the unacknowledged, unspoken standard by which most observers measure a country's success. If we say that Canada, Australia, and the United States are generally successful countries, we say so because they have followed the British model of liberty and free commerce. If we judge a country like Zimbabwe a failure we do so
not
because it is governed contrary to the majority of countries in the United Nations and
not
because it is governed contrary to African traditions but because it is governed contrary to British laws and traditions—even as it maintains a pretense of following them. Zimbabwean judges wear wigs and go through the motions of upholding the legal model inherited from Britain. Zimbabwe holds parliamentary elections even if the outcome is preordained and ensured by intimidation and violence. The very fact that the Zimbabwean government maintains a semblance of British institutions is testimony that the British legal and political model has legitimacy in public opinion.

There is another point to be made—and that is simply that the British Empire, for all its occasional missteps and outrages, was a global, Shakespearean stage on which Britons could take part in a glorious adventure, playing Hotspur to headhunters and Henry V to Hottentots. If that sounds
boyish, it is meant to, because the Empire was boyish; it trained boys to its tasks in schools of self-denial, cold dirty baths, bad food, long runs, stiff upper lips, the imperial languages of Greek and Latin, “playing the game,” and embracing the ideal of service. It was an advanced form of commercial, military, and political outdoor recreation for Boy Scouts (themselves a creation of the British Empire). Young men, straight out of school, could find themselves in distant lands acting as lawgivers to primitive tribes and dangerous brigands; they were men of conservative sentiments, liberal ideals, and boyish pluck. In the famous observation of George Santayana,

Alas that day is here, ushered in by United Nations bureaucrats, liberal internationalists, native kleptocrats, liberated Islamists, and Third World Communists and National Socialists, all of whom emerged as Europe's empires retreated. The retreat of the British Empire was not progress—either for Western Civilization or in many cases for the countries achieving independence. In the case of Africa, certainly, independence has meant a dramatic, chartable economic regression relative to the rest of the world—not to mention savage wars and famines that imperial powers could have prevented or contained. There have been some independence success stories—not just the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, but Singapore, Hong Kong, and, it appears, India, South Africa, and Malaysia, and perhaps a few other locales where the vision of Britain's empire-builders might yet be fulfilled. Many a Briton thought it his duty, in the words of the scholars Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duignan, “to carry civilization, humanity, peace, good government, and Christianity to the ends of the earth.”
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That duty still exists for those who want it, and perhaps it would repay our study to see how Britain's imperialists actually did it.