The Imperial Achievement: The Rise and Transformation of the British Empire.
by John Bowle.
Little, Brown. 484 pp. $15.00.
An Indian Summer.
by James Cameron.
McGraw-Hill. 224 pp. $7.95.
Who Killed the British Empire?
by George Woodcock.
Quadrangle. 356 pp. $10.00.
It seems to have occurred to a number of writers during the last decade that the dissolution of the British empire—and, by extension, its formation and career—still deserves discussion, explanation, or plain description. At the time, the empire was too large and obvious to be seen, too various and complex to be grasped. To me, growing up, the British empire was a large fact of every map I looked at, of school history courses, of political rhetoric and official occasions; but it was also, really, not a fact at all. None of “my” sources mentioned it: you do not gather from reading D. H. Lawrence, or George Eliot, or F. R. Leavis, that England owned an empire. And so nowadays I read about it with discovery and amazement in books like those under review.
Of the three, John Bowle’s book is the least interesting for its character. It stands by its contents, which are presented in orthodox chronological units, subdivided by continents, and with minimal overt ideology. It is stronger on the dominions than on the colonies, and on the imperial role of the Scots than on that of the Bantu, but it is above all a standard historical work. “The new sense of geopolitics,” Bowle writes, which shows us the physical and climatic facts behind commerce, settlement, and conquest, means that “political history written in terms of imperialist pride or post-colonial resentment is on its way out.” Well, we have heard that before—the end of ideology is like the perpetual-motion machine.
In fact, The Imperial Achievement is permeated throughout with a discreet and disguised imperialism, which manifests itself in various stylistic forms, most notably the aesthetic prose of romantic militarism: “As the monsoon mist lifted over the green plains of Bengal, the 39th Foot and the Sepoys broke up the Nawab’s Persian and Pathan guard. Under the English fire the elephants panicked. . . .” The general sense of history is simply conservative. Bowle dismisses the notion that there were two nations, the rich and the poor, in 19th-century England, and he blames the Labour government of 1945 for undermining England’s resilience and initiative with taxes and bureaucracy. The book’s bland “objectivity” turns out to be not quite so objective as it might have been.
_____________
Bowle’s academic sobriety is matched by James Cameron’s journalistic inebriation in An Indian Summer. Cameron is inquisitive and irreverent about everything, though about England his irreverence is bored, while about India it is angry, loving, alive. The drunkenness is ideological; his taste runs to paradoxes and confusions, incomprehensibilities and incompatibilities. Of course, it is hard not to see India in such terms, but just for that reason I would have welcomed more signs of resistance. Stylistically and ideologically, Cameron rather indulges himself, and is rather too insistently personal. But the book is full of striking information about, and impressions of, India; and the personality is not disagreeable or uninteresting.
Cameron is a star of British journalism and television, who has made TV programs about India, and who must expect his readers to be interested in him personally. Moreover, his personality is typical of the Englishmen who have molded middle-class British opinion over the last generation, and typical in its relation to the history of empire. Stylistically and ideologically, but also in class, education, and looks, Cameron reminds one very much of Malcolm Muggeridge—who is also very much interested in India, and has made TV programs about it. He also looks and sounds like Graham Greene, and like Trevor Howard playing a Graham Greene hero. Haggardly charming, harmlessly despairing, sophisticated, skeptical, rootless, this figure characterizes the world scene for English consciousness today, and it is a post-imperial figure. Cameron talks often of his grandfather, a Scots-Presbyterian minister of formidable learning and perfect Christian conviction. Such a man represents the empire-builders—Nyasa-land, now Malawi, was ruled even in this century by a theocracy of such Scots as missionaries—and represents everything Cameron is conscious of not himself being.
_____________
Neither this book nor Bowle’s is a book of ideas—that is, of concepts newly evolved to make sense out of historical problems personally felt. George Woodcock has written such a book in Who Killed the British Empire?, and it is a very interesting one. He has written such works before—his biographies of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Orwell, and his accounts of the Doukhobors and of anarchism. Woodcock always leaves the reader with some dissatisfactions or disagreements, but he has long been one of our most stimulating writers.
The major ideas here are those that organize the book. The first part describes the empire in terms of its great routes, listing the imperial ports and fortresses and coaling stations touched in sailing from London around the Cape of Good Hope to India; or via Suez to the same place; or to Canada and the Caribbean; and so on. This works very well, because it brings to light the character of the empire as a system of trade and communications, which was quite different from its character as conquered territory, and in many ways its more essential character.
Another section describes the empire as it was in 1930, a year when it was further extended than ever before or since (swollen by previously German colonies in Africa and Oceania, and by some Arab sheikhdoms) but when its dissolution was foretold by events like Gandhi’s Salt March, the surrender of Weihaiwei, and the Statute of Westminster. This idea also works well as a focusing device, a chronological map-center.
Another idea which pulls inchoate material into shape is Woodcock’s comparison and contrast of the roles played by Canada and India in the empire. Both entered it in the same decade, but the 19th-century period which saw Canada’s gradual emancipation to self-government saw India’s gradual subjection to English rule. Then in the 20th century India inherited the dominion idea worked out by Canada. Woodcock, himself a Canadian citizen, has interesting things to say about the development and character of Canadian culture, and about the way the possession of India both made necessary a whole series of other fortresses and dependencies to safeguard the route there, and also made possible the defense of those dependencies by means of the Indian army.
Two other ideas, which seem to me less satisfying, are reflected in the book’s title. No one, after all, killed the empire, and to repeat the question as a motif through the book gives an effect of archness—even though Woodcock has a serious answer to give. The other idea is the answer—that if anyone did kill the empire, it was the U.S. It is true that America always expressed disapproval of the British empire, and this may well have exerted influence, especially during England’s time of weakness in World War II, on its feelings about keeping India. Moreover, there is a lingering bitterness in English feelings toward America which such a theory would help explain. But Woodcock does not, to my sense, develop this hypothesis beyond a bold formula, and I am inclined to suppose that behind his theorizing lies only an emotional set against America and for the empire.
The appearance of some pro-empire sentiment in a man identified with anarchism offers surprising testimony to the power of the empire to move its citizens, even non-Englishmen, in retrospect. Or perhaps it was the non-Englishmen who were always the more imperialistically inclined. Canadians, certainly, have made a special contribution to the imperialist myth in this century, Lord Beaverbrook and his newspapers having been its main proponents in England. But Beaver-brook and his English allies were on the side of the men of power, and were hated by the men of sensibility, who had a power of their own. Woodcock is one of the first authors with roots in the “literary” values of England to turn his attention to this subject.
_____________
Imperialism was a militarist and philistine ideology, and there are many cases of its heroes being the villains of the literary world; for instance, Sir Edward Carson, the prosecutor of Oscar Wilde and the hero of the Ulster Volunteer movement of 1912, to keep Ireland in the empire; and F.E. Smith, the prosecutor of Roger Casement and the hero of the refusal to free India in 1930. Among men of power, in the ruling families, only rebels criticized such figures, while among men of letters their only friend and admirer was Kipling, the one literary figure to write about the empire without the heavy protective irony of a Conrad.
The 20th century has seen a different relation to literary values developing gradually among the ruling families; it is in many ways a reflex of their different relation to imperial power in this century. Typical are the Stracheys, a family which had sent half its sons to India from the days of Clive on; Woodcock says that they felt they belonged to India as thoroughly as any Moghul prince. In this century the most famous Stracheys have been Lytton, whose Eminent Victorians attacked the myth of the empire-makers (Gordon and Cromer and others), and John, who wrote the textbooks of Marxism for the 30’s, and became Minister in the government which freed India. Similar acts of rebellion occurred in all the families like the Stracheys in the 20th century, and lie behind seemingly unconnected cultural gestures. For instance, Claud Cockburn, the Communist journalist, was the son of a Vice-Consul in China; and Maurice Bowra, the mentor in aestheticism to Evelyn Waugh’s generation, was the son of an inspector in the Imperial Maritime Customs of China (a service staffed by Europeans, and over half by Englishmen). Such men were anti-imperialist at root, or, better, post-imperialist.
For within the “literary” half of England, one area was always completely averse to empire. The fiction of D.H. Lawrence and his 19th-century precursors, the criticism of F.R. Leavis, which in some sense derives from Lawrence, the fiction of Alan Sillitoe and Philip Callow, and the ideology of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart—all such figures and their work have an implicit Little England world-view about them, which distinguishes them from other literary intellectuals with left-wing sympathies. The Fabians, like Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, were pro-imperialist to the point of backing England against the Boers in 1901, while the writers of Blooms-bury were anti-imperialist to defy their fathers, in the style of a family quarrel and a generational rebellion. This is something very different from the class disapproval and aversion of interest in the writers I have just named. The loyalties of empire, positive and negative, to this day determine the dynamics of English culture much more than at first appears.
_____________
