The tulwars and assegais were out for Niall Ferguson in last Monday’s Start the Week. They were deftly wielded by four critics of the British empire and the result was a spirited exchange. It was another skirmish in that old war of words as to whether the empire was a good or a bad thing.
Ferguson thinks on balance that it was good, and I agree. Our antagonists do not. At times they seem intoxicated with their own moral outrage, and they express it stridently. Caroline Elkins’s account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during the 1950s has the provocative title of Britain’s Gulag: the Brutal End of Empire in Kenya.
Mike Davis’s version of 19th-century famines in India goes a step further along the path of moral remonstrance by calling his book Late Victorian Holocausts. These authors’ acolytes swell the indignant clamour. In The Independent, Johann Hari alleged that during the famines of 1876-78 and 1895-97 the rulers of British India adopted a “conscious policy of mass starvation”, which places two obscure Victorian viceroys on a par of wickedness with “Stalin and Mao”.
This is twaddle. The rulers of India were humane men and, although hampered by inadequate administrative machinery and limited resources, they made a determined effort to feed the hungry. In 1897 more than 33m Indians were being sustained by the government, which had allocated £4.3m (about £200m in today’s money) to relief operations. By this date, the railway network (a British innovation) was sufficiently advanced to distribute rice and grain to regions of dearth. There was no “holocaust”: between 1871-1901 India’s population increased by 30m.
As for the Mau Mau campaign, Elkins’s figures of 300,000 interned and a further 50,000 killed are contentious. David Anderson’s Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire calculates that 150,000 were imprisoned, between 12,000 and 20,000 insurgents killed in action and just over 1,000 executed for sedition and murder.
Of course contrary statistics cannot hide the fact that British forces and Kenyan auxiliaries behaved savagely at times. A temporarily paralysed government was stunned by the uprising and exaggerated the capacity of the rebels. This does not exonerate acts of brutality, but it should prevent them being portrayed as on the same moral level as the planned, sustained and secret policies of mass extermination that were practised over decades in Stalin’s gulags. Even to hint at parity is grotesque.
Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire was always an open society. Enoch Powell slated the government for the deaths of Mau Mau detainees in Hola camp in 1959. His reproof was a reminder of what T E Lawrence had observed in 1920, when Britain was suppressing an insurrection in Iraq. In a democratic nation, the public expected the empire to be decently run for the benefit of and with the consent of all its subjects.
What happened in every part of the empire was reported in the press and debated in parliament. Much of the evidence of the torture of prisoners in Kenya was aired in the Commons. Proconsuls and generals were called to public account. They also had their own codes of humanity: in 1919 Lord Chelmsford refused to employ poison gas against North-West Frontier tribesmen on the grounds that it would be a gross denial of Britain’s “civilising” mission.
This mission had a powerful hold over the public imagination throughout the last hundred years of the Empire's existence. British society was intolerant of injustice, cherished individual freedom and believed that the world was moving onwards and upwards. It is easy to jeer at this optimism, easier still to sneer at Britain’s wish to remake the world in its own image. Enemies of the empire do both and simultaneously speculate as to what might have happened had the British never appeared.
Alternative histories of India and Africa abound and tend towards fantasies about peaceful evolution and economic self-sufficiency.
This is historical self-indulgence; nations can never be permanently quarantined. From the earliest recorded history there has been an impulse for peoples to explore, trade and acquire territory for prestige and power. It was always a competitive business. If the British had not exploited the internal divisions within India, the Russians would have tried.
Empires of one sort or another have been a constant of history. They grow, wither and leave their legacies. I believe that on balance the British empire was a force for good and should be a source of national pride. It provided an interlude of stability in which countries divided by race and religion could develop and, in the case of India, discover a national identity.
Alongside railways, schools, universities, hospitals and sanitation projects, the empire introduced political and social ideas dear to the British. These included extending civil rights to women, a free press and, most important of all, a culture of popular consent and reasoned debate. English spread as the language of learning, law and commerce.
After 1945 a combination of domestic exhaustion, American pressure and local nationalisms, which we had neither the will nor the wherewithal to resist, led to the retreat from empire. Unlike the French, Portuguese, Russian and Yugoslav disengagements, the process was largely good-natured and involved little bloodshed.
The turmoil and casualties in Kenya were small beer compared with those in Algeria, Angola, Chechnya and the Balkans.
Most amazing of all (if one regards the empire as a bloodthirsty tyranny), millions of its former subjects have chosen to settle in Britain. Equally striking is the tendency of domestic critics of regimes, such as Robert Mugabe’s in Zimbabwe, to invoke British moral and political standards rather than those of pre-colonial days.
All this is ignored by the empire’s modern detractors. Their drift is clear. Words such as “gulag” and “holocausts” and crass comparisons with the murderous despotisms of the 20th century are deployed to portray the empire as a callous, depraved institution. This travesty is gaining converts. A young man recently interviewed about the St George’s flag associated the Union Jack with imperial “atrocities”.
Why is such poppycock believed? One answer is the tendency of some writers and documentary makers to poke about behind the wainscot of history in the hope of finding something nasty that can then be sensationalised. The process is selective and distorting. An empire that lasted 300 years is judged solely on the misconduct or errors of a handful of its servants. The crimes of one vicious intelligence officer in Kenya obliterate all the patient and benevolent labour of hundreds of district commissioners throughout Africa.
Such insidious reasoning is at the heart of Elkins’s book. Like other American academics, she is an heir of the war of independence and schooled to believe that all empires are intrinsically evil, corrupting and integral to the “old Europe” of current American demonology.
The reputation of the British empire can withstand the defamation of holier-than-thou American academics and the carping of African and Asian historians focused on its imperfections: nonetheless, we ought to ensure that the school curriculum provides a calm, balanced history of the empire. Among other things, it has transformed Britain into a multicultural nation and helped to create the thriving democracies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia and Singapore.
Lawrence James is author of The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
