Ghosts of Empire [Hardcover]

The sun, it was said, never set on the British Empire. From Hong Kong to the Falklands, from Canada to Australia, Nigeria to India, The Union Jack reigned Supreme throughout much of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, and in some places, both before and after.

Yet by Elizabeth II's coronation, Britain has lost the Crown Jewel of its Empire, India. The early years of her reign saw the dismantling of the Empire. Today, the remanenets of Empire is the Commonwealth of Nations, a paper coalition of little effect, of which the Queen is even more of a figurehead than she is in Great Britain.

But British Historian and politician Kwai Kwarteng (unlike their US counterparts, British politicians seem to genuinely contribute to scholarship; the current Foreign Minister, William Hague, is an author of several distinguished biographies, including an excellent study of William Pitt the Younger) argues that Britain has legacies throughout the world, and Imperial mark so to speak, which shapes the destinies of the former colonies still.

Kwarteng offers an enlightening and well written account of Britain's engagement in sixe regions throughout the world. Early on he explains that he won't dicuss the colonies in which large amounts of Europeans settled in a foreign land, because such an adventure is unlikely to repeat itself today. Still,one wonders why the idisyncratic choices in subject matter (in Africa, Sudan and Nigeria but not Zimbabwe, in the Middle East, not Palestine but only Iraq, in the far east, Burma and Hong Kong; Kashmere but not India generally; For a book aiming for current relevance, Afghanistan in surprisingly absent, as is South Africa).

Most of the stories are colorful and enlightening, but they don't amount to a "bigger picture", as far as I can see. It is fascinating to learn that Britain literally sold Kashmere to a wealthy Hindu dynasty, and equally so to be told that the Burmanese rebels against the British rule in the 1930s actually believed that holy tatoos would protect them against bullets and swords; But how do these facts (and many, many others) connect? What's the relationship between the empire's advantures in various tropical countries? There is quite obviously an undercurrent of contemporary left wing political thought (Iraq war is bad!) here, but the relationship is never explicitly argued for.

The official theme is that the British Empire was administered by eccentric individualist officers, with little or no central strategic planning. Thus Lord Randolf Churchill (Winston's father), more-or-less single handedly decided that the British were to annex and directly rule over Burma. One governor of Hong Kong tried to promote democracy while his predecessors and successors didn't. Similarly, British policy towards the Sudan vacciliated between a "Southern Policy", which aimed to strengthen the southern regions of Sudan, populated by mostly black pagans, as a bulwurk against the Arabic Muslim north, and its opposite "One Sudan" agenda. This policy changed when one official was replaced by another. But countries change policies all the time; I'm unconvinced that had the British centralized decisions more, London would've been able to direct matters in far away areas any more efficiently.

Nor it is obvious the the individual decisions were as idiosyncratic as Kwartung depicts them: in several cases, noticeably Hong Kong, it is quite apparent that the policy agenda served well entrenched institutional and political interests, and that neither pro nor anti-change officials were able to do much to change it.

Although Kwarteng says he has "not written one of those books that purport to show thhat the empire was a good thing or a bad thing", Ghosts of Empire rather clearly comes down on the latter direction; Kwartung is far too subtle a thinker to a monocasual account of the travails of the world, yet it is hard to avoid the impression that in every region he studies, the consequences of Empire are mostly negative.

But that may be a matter of focus - the British crusade against the Slave trade, for example, is frequently mentioned in the African chapters but is never the focus of the narrative. There's probably too much history, of too many places, and far too much uncertainty for any judgement of the worth of empire to be anything other than an idiosyncratic view.

"Ghosts of Empire" is well written and enlightening. It illuminates times and places in 19th and 20th century history of which I was mostly ignorant. And if its focus is individualistic and personalized rather than systematic and analytic, that actually reenforces, in a way, the book's central themes.

To Americans the British Empire conjures up cartoon-like images of 19th Century upper-class Englishmen tramping through the steaming jungles of Asia and Africa, shouting to native porters in an Oxford accent to bring up the silver for afternoon tea. It's difficult to remember that as late as 1940 the British Empire wasn't a cartoon at all, but a formidable global empire ranked superior to the United States in deployable "boots on the ground" military power and global economic influence.

The British did not recognize their loss of world hegemony until the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 when the world's other powers, including the USA and Canada, blocked their bid to retake the Suez Canal that had been nationalized by their former colony of Egypt. The British Empire is thus a recently deceased empire. During the three hundred years between the mid-1600s and the mid-1900s it was the most powerful political entity on the planet.

The legacy of the British Empire is as complex as its power. The British profited from the labor of dark-skinned peoples, but they also took the lead in abolishing slavery in their Empire, outlawing it decades before the American Civil War. They seized territories in Africa and Asia but worked with the United States to make sure that none of the Western Hemisphere republics would ever be recolonized by any European power, including them. Their empire is said by some, including this author, to have been anti-democratic, and yet they left a legacy of democracy in countries of unimaginable demographic diversity like India.

The Brits were said to jealously guard their empire, and yet they refrained from instigating hopeless bullheaded wars against aspiring native peoples in their last remaining colonies the 1950s and 1960s like the French did in Algeria and Indochina. The Brits were said by some to be racist, and yet they welcome the dark-skinned peoples of their empire into their homeland with open arms.

To Americans the Brits have been like an eccentric but benign uncle. When they recognized our independence in 1783 they had the foresight to understand that their foes in the future would most likely be rivals in Continental Europe, not the United States. Except for the 1812 War they accommodated our rising ambitions in the world, an effort that saved their country and our common cause of democracy and human rights in the 20th Century World Wars and the Cold War. Canadians, and I suspect Aussies and Kiwis, view the British Empire like a beloved old mother who no longer plays a role in the lives of her children who have grown up to live in their own houses.

So what about the REAL colonies of the British Empire --- the ones in Africa, the Middle East, India, Asia, and the Caribbean? What do the dark-skinned people of these colonies who hewed the wood and drew the water for their White masters, who sometimes fought for the Empire and sometimes rebelled against it, perceive to be the legacy of the British Empire?

This book discusses the British Empire from these people's perspectives. But it does have limitations in its presentation:

1. It's more like a collection of term papers than a book. It SHOULD be titled: "An essay on the British administration of Iraq, Hong Kong, and a few other countries most people can't locate on a map." To be fair, the author tells us up front that it is an "unusual book about the British Empire" perhaps acknowledging that it is a collection of snippets, or micro-views of the British Empire rather than a higher-level view of the whole. Sometimes the microcosm approach works well in illuminating the larger picture, but in this case the microcosms don't illuminate anything larger than themselves.

2. Lack of objectivity. It starts off a bit on the heavy side by trying to link the modern-day American Republican Party's "neo-conservatives" to the 19th Century British Imperialists. When politics is mixed with history one has to suspect that the author is trying to mask a political rant as an objective history book. The author also characterizes the British Empire as being "anti-democratic." How, then, does he explain that India, with a fantastically diverse population of over a billion people, is the world's largest democracy? I don't know that every Third World country in the British Commonwealth is a true democracy, but many are.

3. Poor organization. The starting point for this book should have been a dramatic event like the Suez crisis of 1956 which broke the back of the British Empire. This would have succinctly encapsulated the positives and negatives of what the Empire was all about from the perspective of the Third World colonies. Instead we get droning recounts about the British Empire in 19Th and early 20th Century Iraq, Nigeria, Kashmir Burma, Sudan, and Hong Kong. The multi-chapter essays on Iraq and Hong Kong were modestly interesting to me, the rest not at all.

4. Turgid writing. The writing is long-winded in mundane details and all-too-brief in telling the IMPORTANT stories of the British Empire in these regions, stories such as the Suez Crisis; the liberation of the Indian subcontinent and its partition between India and Pakistan; the return of the Jews to British Palestine; the World War II battles in Burma when the British and the natives fought together to defeat the Japanese.

5. Lack of perspective on the colonial peoples. The author portrays the British as being cartoonist old fogeys. What about their subjects? We know that many of subject peoples of the British Empire in Asia, India, and Africa were loyal to the Empire, while others fiercely opposed it. Where are their stories? There ARE mundane stories about minor characters, but where is the major story line? This book is about the British Empire in the Indian subcontinent, but it mentions Gandhi only a few times, and only then tangentially.

6. The conclusion is a let-down. It is the summing up of the details of British administration polices rather than any big picture conclusion about the actual impact of the British Empire on its subject peoples. What, if anything, did the Brits do to improve the lot of the peoples they governed in their Third World colonies or to prepare them for ultimate independence? One suspects they must have done SOMETHING positive, otherwise most of these former colonies wouldn't still be associated under the British Commonwealth. It would also have been interesting to compare the peaceful dissolution of the British Empire in the 1950s with the violent dissolution of the French Empire.

Sad to say, but this book takes one of the most interesting empires in human history and makes it look small. It's like looking at an elephant through the wrong end of a telescope and imagining you are seeing an ant.

This book may be of interest to persons who are studying the history of the British colonial administration of Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Nigeria, Sudan, and Hong Kong. It may be of interest to academics who are researching history from an anti-imperialist view, or to those who seek data that will help them make comparisons between modern-day American "Neocons" in Iraq and British Imperialists in the 1920s.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: BOOKSHELF, Reviewed By Andrew Roberts, FEBRUARY 10, 2012.

Now That The Sun Has Set

Can America learn from the demise of the British Empire, avoiding the paternalism and self-doubt that led to disastrous decline?.

By ANDREW ROBERTS

Overall, was the British Empire a good or a bad thing? Taken in the round over its half-millennium history--between John Cabot landing in Newfoundland in 1497 and the hand-over of Hong Kong in 1997--did the British Empire contribute or detract from the sum of human happiness? The standing of the empire is the most contentious historiographical battleground in British public discourse, and Kwasi Kwarteng has tossed a grenade into the struggle with "Ghosts of Empire." He describes the book as "a post-racial account of empire, insofar as it does not regard the fact that the administrators were white, while the subject people were from other races, as the key determinant in understanding empire. There is clearly more to understanding the British Empire than racial politics, important though that was."

Mr. Kwarteng is a black writer of Ghanaian origin who might have been expected to adopt the classic left-wing analysis of the British Empire as an exploitative, racist kleptocracy. Instead, he has written a far subtler and more nuanced critique. He is also an Old Etonian, a Cambridge University history Ph.D., and a Conservative member of Parliament. He almost glories in his own elitism; it's hard not to warm to someone who expresses his grateful love to his parents in the dedication to his book, using Latin.

The Marxist characterization of the imperialist elite as a bunch of asset-strippers does not wash with Mr. Kwarteng, who rightly portrays them as among the most idealistic group of administrators in the history of mankind. They presided over the spread of responsible governance and the application of the rule of law--often in places that had little conception of those ideas, much less experience of them.

The execution, Mr. Kwarteng concedes, was imperfect. He notes that the British did not believe in the self-determination of peoples (which imperial power genuinely can?) and enforced policies that privileged British commerce over foreign, and often went for short-term solutions, especially when Westminster was in need of financial retrenchment. Yet the results, he says, were on the whole for the good, especially when one considers that the alternative for native peoples was often not independence but rather being part of the infinitely worse-run French, German, Spanish, Portuguese or--God forbid--Belgian empires.

Yet Mr. Kwarteng is not the apologist that his opponents have tried to make out. He resolutely holds the British imperialists to account for the mess they made when relinquishing power over places like Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria. (He might have added the Palestine Mandate, but five post-British hot spots seem quite enough to cover.) He also writes about Hong Kong, but there the leave-taking did not lead to bloodshed; indeed, Hong Kong is still prosperous, and anyhow there was no real alternative to honoring the 1898 agreement to hand the territory back to China. By contrast, the British often had plenty of alternatives to the routes they took elsewhere, yet all too often plumped for partition, hasty exits and unjustified self-congratulation.

Mr. Kwarteng is an engaging writer, and his pen portraits of British imperialists are subtle and scholarly. He presents well-known figures--Lord Kitchener, General Gordon, Lawrence of Arabia--and obscure ones, such as Lord Lugard of Nigeria, Sir Henry Dobbs of Iraq and Sir Anthony Grantham of Hong Kong. Lugard, we're told, "was a believer in deeds and, like so many of the most ardent imperialists, mistrusted cerebral indulgences." Yet he wrote a good deal about empire and coined the term "dual mandate" to describe British policy. One part of the mandate, Mr. Kwarteng says, "was to make money, the second part was to develop the colonies for the benefit of the indigenous peoples themselves."

What emerges, in "Ghosts of Empire," is a picture of well-meaning classicists from Oxford and Cambridge who in their 20s and early 30s went out to rule over vast areas of the globe with minimal training and much muscular Christianity and common sense, as well as a desire to do their best for the people in their care. All too often such men were flung into complex tribal, religious and political quagmires. As Mr. Kwarteng shows, goodwill simply wasn't enough.

In his introduction to the American edition, Mr. Kwarteng states that "no nation faced such similar problems to modern America as Britain at the height of its imperial glory." He argues that, as the world's pre-eminent superpower, Britain was for decades the financial and commercial center of the world and deliberately took on responsibility for the world order. Its Pax Britannica was thus almost a precursor to today's Pax Americana. His message is that America should learn the lesson of the demise of the British Empire and avoid the paternalism and opportunism that in Britain's case led to disastrous decline.

This seems like a good alternative path for America to follow, but is it? In his recent State of the Union speech, President Obama said: "Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn't know what they're talking about." It was hardly a Churchillian rejoinder, but then it was a very demotic speech, and he is wrong. By almost any criteria, the America's influence in the world has indeed waned since the Eisenhower administration, but it still has a good head start on the British Empire, which was antidemocratic, protectionist, slow to innovate and largely ruled over by the sportsmen of its only two great universities. America, by contrast, is--when it is true to itself--a proselytizing democracy, free-market and innovational, which has more than a dozen of the world's top 20 universities.

Where the British Empire does indeed hold a message for modern America is in the area of self-belief. Many of the British Empire's worst legacies stemmed from a collapse in confidence among the British elite in the values and principles that had made Britain the largest empire in the history of mankind. Anyone who thinks that just such a spasm of self-doubt among America's elite isn't a problem in modern America doesn't know what he is talking about.

Mr. Roberts's "The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War" is published by HarperCollins and is available on Amazon.com.

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