There is something especially distressing in Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron’s posturing, often inspired by the more benighted sections of the tabloid press. I am thinking particularly of his recently-floated proposal to re-launch the British Empire Medal. This was, I am told by an authority on the subject, begun in 1917 but fell into abeyance in 1992. It was, I am told by an authority on such matters, a poor man’s version of various medals devoted to the British Empire (Commander - CBE, Order – OBE and Member – MBE).
Those of us who have long been saying that naming medals after the Empire is archaic and irrelevant, a sign of delusional atavism, can only despair of this country ever escaping its past. Could gongs not, perhaps, be for ‘British Excellence,’ which at least has the merit of existing? Cameron, one feels, has about as much sensitivity to history as Tony Blair.
Not that, apparently, the British Empire is quite dead yet. There are still many in this country still passionately debating its faults and its merits. The number of door-stopping books on the subject at the moment witnesses the enthusiasm for this particular polemic. Indeed, there has been a much-commented debate in the London Review of Books, started by a long article by one of empire’s children, Pankaj Mishra, called ‘Watch This Man’.
The man in question is Professor Niall Ferguson (author of Civilisation: the West and the Rest, who has, in a number of books, managed to wrap sympathy for the European empires in a cloak of objectivity. He articulates this position, says Mishra, by “scoffing” at “those who can still work themselves into a state of high moral indignation over the misdeeds of the European empires”. Cleverly, Ferguson deplores one or two “misdeeds” as “exceptions to the general rule of imperial benevolence.” He has protested vehemently at charges of racism, but appears aligned with those hankering for a distorted pro-empire view in the British school curriculum, presented as “our island story”. It is half-way to the alarmingly simplistic view of the historian David Starkey that “most of Britain is a mono-culture” and large parts of the country are “unmitigatingly white.”
This row is likely to continue, but it shows how much imperial nostalgia is still around. One therefore welcomes books such as xxxx by Richard Gott, which demonstrates clearly how the British Empire was conceived in what Mishra calls “structural violence.” Jeremy Paxman, the grand old man of BBC-TV’s ‘Newsnight’ programme, has joined the fray with a book called What the Empire did to the British, which is the precursor of a TV series next year. If over-rapidly written and often tiresomely superficial, at least his title poses an interesting question. The British were affected by their imperial pretensions and assimilations in all sorts of ways.
It is soothing to turn to a more detached view of empire by another child of empire, Kwasi Kwarteng, a British Tory MP of Ghanaian heritage. He, too, has written a book on the subject called Ghosts of Empire (published this year by Bloomsbury), but he insists that it is “not one of those books that purport to show that the empire was a good thing or a bad thing.” Rather, he is concerned to show some of the unfinished business that the British left in key areas of the planet that are current geo-political pressure points such as Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria. His sub-title is ‘Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World”, and he is particularly keen to show how the actions of individual ‘imperialists’ often helped create some conspicuous messes.
One of his major themes (0ne might almost say obsessions) is the way the class and racial attitudes of colonial officials was an important and often decisive influence. which is why he goes into detail on the educational background of figures such as Curzon, Milner and Lugard. These details, indeed, give the book its particular compelling interest, as they really help in understanding those who otherwise would be remote figures in history books.
The role of British players in Iraq, in particular (such as the extraordinarily dominant figure Gertrude Bell) go a long way towards explaining how Iraq eventually went the way it did, but Nigerians will be particularly interested in the two chapters on their country – one on the colonial period (think Lugard here), the other post-independence. They may also wonder why he chose to write of Nigeria rather than his own Ghana, where a constructive colonial outsider like Governor Guggisberg did much to help make the Gold Coast the modern nation-state of Ghana.
In some ways Kwarteng’s book is a more devastating critique of the shortcomings of empire than other works recounting its brutal origins. His approach, describing some of the more pretentious and ludicrous masters of empire, makes it a deeply fascinating study to read and enjoy.
