British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn't, by Bernard Porter, IB Tauris & Co, £20
Heroic Failure and the British, by Stephanie Barczewski, Yale University Press, £20
By far the most striking work in Tate Britain’s compelling recent exhibition, Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, was Elizabeth Butler’s depiction of an exhausted, slumped British Army surgeon being slowly carried back to base after the catastrophic 1842 retreat from Kabul. The First Anglo-Afghan War was one of the great catastrophes of British imperial adventurism and Butler’s The Remnants of an Army (1872) captures perfectly the expedition’s mixture of futility, incompetence and arrogance. It is a picture that speaks purposefully to Bernard Porter and Stephanie Barczewski’s new accounts of the representation of heroic failure and the lingering impact of imperialism on British culture. Yet its theme, imagery and place at the Tate serve only to contradict much of what is argued in each of these ultimately unsatisfying books.
This is not a bad time to be exploring the legacies and meanings of British colonialism, as we seem to be embarking on a renewed bout of Empire-angst. Even as imperial scholars are stressing more and more the plural, hybrid and diverse nature of the British Empire—a historical event that encompassed racist brutality in Jamaica together with an Anglo-Saxon “kith and kin” white commonwealth; the treaty ports of China together with the plantations of Ulster; the industrial capitalism of Bombay together with the “civilising mission” of David Livingstone—the contemporary public debate is still tediously divided along good versus evil matrices.
In Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum is in the middle of a programme called “Adjustment of Colonial Terminology”—which entails renaming hundreds of artworks to rid them of archaic, orientalist, offensive or racist nomenclature. Pictures with titles that include the words “Indian,” “Mohammedan,” or even “dwarf” are being systematically retitled by the curators. Meanwhile, at Oxford University, “Rhodes rage” has made its way from the campuses of Cape Town and KwaZulu-Natal to Oriel College with demands for the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue on account of his colonial crimes. Leading the “Rhodes Must Fall” charge in Oxford has been the South African student and, ahem, Rhodes scholar Ntokozo Qwabe—who has also made the case for banning the French Tricolore from universities after the Paris attacks, “in the same way that the presence of a Nazi flag would have to be fought against.” Finally, there was more than a whiff of the colonial mindset in the publication of Oliver Letwin’s notorious 1985 memo, as he extemporised on the “bad moral attitudes” prevalent among inner-city black Britons whose entrepreneurial ambitions could stretch only to “discos and drugs.”
For Porter, the willingness of commentators to place all these controversies within an exclusively colonial paradigm speaks to the intellectual short-comings of so much imperial discourse. Ever since the publication of his controversial history, The Absent-Minded Imperialists, Porter has been doggedly downplaying the domestic impact of empire. With scholarly skill and polemical verve, he has long argued that other identities and discourses (class, gender, faith, liberalism) overshadowed the imperial turn. Arguing that British history 1850-1950 was predominantly framed by the British Empire constitutes a mistaken misreading of the past.
This new work endorses that approach, but has a different feel. It is the text of a historian of a certain age, drawing together the threads of a successful professorial career. Like a retiring ambassador’s final telegram, it is full of brio and confidence, refreshingly free of academic-ese or footnotitis, but also a bit thin on argument and evidence. In essence, it is a superb long-form essay for undergraduates coming fresh to the imperial battlefield—and Porter wants to capture them for his own platoon before anyone else twists their minds.
His thesis remains that the bulk of the British population was unconcerned with empire. The small minority that was engaged in the imperial project can be divided between the “liberal,” who drove the expansion of empire for profit, and the “feudal,” who sought to control it for the colonial people’s good. The liberals were the middle classes; the feudal, the upper classes. But the inherent contradiction in the form was that “from its very origins the British Empire had been built on a misunderstanding: that imperial power, formal or informal, could be exerted cheaply, so as not to hamper enterprise, and liberally, so as not to offend against most Britons’ most fundamental values.” In short, the British Empire was often expensive and frequently illiberal—and, hence, attracted limited support.
If Porter’s previous works had entailed an extensive conversation with the Victorian historian John Robert Seeley (who famously described the British as having “conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind”), the defining figure in this book is John A Hobson, the Edwardian economist. It was Hobson who understood imperialism, in a conceit that Vladimir Lenin would lift, as a higher form of capitalism.
"Porter argues that 'After the end of empire, capitalism simply dismounted and bounded on, under the guise, now, of globalisation'"
Under the sway of imperial power, Victorian free trade was heading towards monopoly capitalism. And Porter is equally keen for us now to understand the triumph of modern global capital as the inevitable outcome of Empire. “Formal imperialism was a useful mount for international capitalism for a while,” he explains. But then, after the end of empire, capitalism “simply dismounted and bounded on, under the guise, now, of ‘globalisation.’” It is an argument that allows Porter to paint Tony Blair and George W Bush as the modern-day inheritors of the imperial mantle, as the dividing line between imperialism and capitalism—the Pentagon and Haliburton—becomes ever murkier. “In a way British imperialism morphed into the American version, with leadership usually going to the Americans; or else into more amorphous but still powerful forces largely out of the control of either, characterised as ‘multinational companies,’ or ‘international capitalism.’” And that, for Porter, is the real enemy.
On the domestic history of empire, Porter is adamant there was no imperial project pursued by the political class; no popular feeling driving imperialism; and the British Empire “was never quite as ‘imperial’ as it looked,” with its mix of passivity, accident and absent-mindedness. And while such scepticism does provide a useful antidote to the intellectual certainties of the imperial-academic complex, I am sceptical of the scholarship.
When Porter writes, for instance, of soldiers returning from imperial wars to indifference or ignominy, I think of the remarkable series of march-pasts the Boer War troops took part in. He suggests that English schools treated Empire Day, “only as a holiday, with very little patriotic content.” But that certainly was not the case in Liverpool, for example, where the Daily Post reported how “head teachers addressed the children upon the true significance of patriotism and imperialism,” and thousands of schoolchildren paraded through the playground in a colonial pageant. His suggestion that “representations of the Empire in the ‘fine’ arts are surprisingly sparse” is readily disproven by the Tate exhibition. And when Porter highlights a library of authors who were unaffected by empire, it was probably a mistake to include Arthur Conan Doyle. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive?” is Holmes’s opening line to Watson, a veteran of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, immediately pointing to an assumed colonial pre-history.
The physical, rather than literary, presence of empire in the Victorian public sphere is where Barczewski’s book begins. And her quest is to discover why the British were so drawn to commemorating the heroic failures of the age of expansion—the likes of Captain Robert Scott and General Charles Gordon, the Charge of the Light Brigade and David Livingstone. The answer, it seems, was to help provide a coping mechanism for the grubby realities of empire. For, “at the points where the Empire failed to live up to its ideals, it challenged not only the efficacy of colonial administration, but also national values and self-conceptions.” Celebrating epic failure offered a chance of putting a positive moral vision on the imperial project and confidently celebrating an ethical British identity. “As the British sought to create a vision of themselves as an imperial nation that could fulfil its idealised vision of itself as a benevolent and just ruler rather than a tyrannical conqueror, failure could be a very useful thing to highlight.”
It is fair to say that Porter would have some misgivings about the approach Barczewski pursues, with its implicit assumptions about a codified imperial project and tendency to marshal all the evidence under a colonial banner. But she provides good enough accounts of the life and cultural representation of various Victorian explorers and soldiers, a large number of whom ended up in statues dotted round Waterloo Place.
Barczewski ends her study with a vague suggestion that post-imperial Britain might be able to shed some of its fixation with heroic failure as the geo-political justifications have disappeared. But perhaps it would have been more interesting if she had wandered from Waterloo Place to Trafalgar Square to reflect on how the Fourth Plinth project has seen a masterful re-imagining of the British colonial legacy in the very heart of the Empire. Sculptures by the likes of the Anglo-Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare, have sought to challenge and re-interpret the history and meaning of Trafalgar in profoundly interesting ways. Indeed, so popular was Shonibare’s stunning Africanisation of HMS Victory, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, it was bought up for the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. The statues of Havelock, Napier and Nelson were not renamed or pulled down; instead, the story of empire was added to. For in the wise words of historian Linda Colley, “one of the reasons why we all need to stop approaching empire in simple ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing terms, and instead think intelligently and enquiringly about its many and intrinsic paradoxes, is that versions of the phenomenon are still with us.”
