For anyone who is interested in Britain's imperial past, 1997 was the most important year for historical reflection since the bicentennial of the American Declaration of Independence in 1976. It marked the centenary of Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee, when imperial consciousness (although not imperial dominion) was probably at its zenith, and when the British displayed their empire to themselves in London in an uncharacteristic fit of imperial presence of mind. But it also witnessed the 50th anniversary of the end of the British Raj in India. This was an intrinsically momentous event, as the keystone of the imperial arch, the land of Robert Clive and Lord Curzon, of Kipling and Lutyens, was given away; and a no less momentous portent, because in the aftermath of Indian independence, the maintenance of much of the rest of the British empire in Africa and Asia was rendered both unnecessary and impossible.
But 1997 was not only retrospectively resonant in the British imperial story: it was also part of it. Indeed, it saw the end of that story, as British dominion was terminated in the last great colony, Hong Kong, and as the decommissioned royal yacht Britannia sailed away, over the waves the British navy had long since ceased to rule, into what was the final, irreversible imperial sunset. That these three events-the diamond jubilee, Indian independence and the Hong Kong handover-should have been separated by two 50-year intervals is an extraordinary calendrical coincidence. And to move from the zenith of empire to the beginning of the end of empire in the space of one half century, and then to move from the beginning of the end of empire to the end of the end of the empire within the span of another, is not only an accident of chronology. It reminds us how short-lived this heyday of Britain's imperial history was and how rapidly that empire declined and fell.
because i was born in 1950, my life coincides almost exactly with this second 50-year period. From one perspective, this means that I never knew the empire when its far-flung existence really did seem to many to be a permanent, indissoluble part of the providential order of things, and when the ultimate responsibility for the government of more than one quarter of the world's land surface and population actually did reside in London. But from another point of view, it means that I belong to the last generation of Britons for whom the empire was something like a real presence in their formative years and imaginative life. What sort of a presence was it? Some of the most influential recent writing has been concerned with telling us what it was like to grow up in the colonies and dependencies of this empire as the sun went down, and in the years after it had set. But what did it mean to me as I lived out what there was of my imperial childhood, not in the empire, but in Britain itself ?
Such imperial childhood as I had was not because I came from what would then have been termed "an imperial family." My parents and their forebears had no personal or professional connection with the empire and, with one exception (of which more soon), they had never visited any part of it, and they had no first-hand experience of it. Nor-being born and brought up in Birmingham-did I come from an imperial city in the way that would have been true had I been born and brought up in Glasgow or Belfast or Liverpool or London: great, outward-looking, maritime communities, with their shipyards and warehouses, their docks and harbours and beckoning horizons. To be sure, Birmingham had claimed as its own the two pre-eminent imperialist politicians of their time: Joseph Chamberlain and Leopold Amery, both of whom were MPs for the city, and both long-serving colonial secretaries in Conservative governments. But Chamberlain had died in 1914, three years before my parents had been born, and Amery was a spent force in politics by 1945.
Not surprisingly, then, the first imperial moment which made any impact on me had nothing specific to do with Birmingham and, in a way, nothing specific to do with empire. But the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 was a sort of imperial moment, none the less. I was too young to remember the day, and my parents did not then own a television on which I might have watched the proceedings. But my childhood was certainly suffused by what seemed to be its warm afterglow. I remember playing with cardboard cutouts of horses and golden coaches. I know my sister's first doll was named Queenie after the queen of Tonga, one of the overseas celebrities of the coronation; and I later learned that Mount Everest had been conquered by a British expedition on the very day Elizabeth II had been crowned, a Henty-like adventure story that was retold throughout the 1950s.
Because I was in these ways a coronation child, I think I acquired the impression that there was a greater Britain, somewhere beyond Birmingham and beyond the seas, which had sent its representatives to London to join the queen in Westminster Abbey, and that this was how things always had been and always would be. This unfocused idea of empire gradually became more concrete as I absorbed my father's recollections of his time in India. This was the one first-hand piece of imperial experience to which my family could lay claim, and it meant that for me, as for hundreds of thousands of Britons between 1757 and 1947, the British empire primarily meant the Indian empire. My father served there in the Royal Engineers between 1942 and 1945, and this was the greatest adventure of his life. It was nearly his last adventure, because he caught malaria, and had he not been near Calcutta, where he got the best medical care, he would have died.
But he survived to bring back his memories-and more than his memories. While in India he compiled a scrapbook with a vivid black and green cover, full of pictures of what seemed to me this exotic, far-off land: of the Gateway of India in Bombay, the Taj Mahal at Agra and the Kanchenjunga Mountains. He sent home rugs, tablecloths, and small pieces of furniture: fabrics and artifacts of empire which were an everyday part of my young life. And he talked endlessly about India: the journey out, via Cape Town, on the Franconia; the torrential rains at Cherrapunji; mongooses and snakes and scorpions; travelling on trains where tea was made with boiling water from the engine; the voyage back, through the Suez Canal and the stormy passage in the Bay of Biscay, when he was obliged to eat tripe. He admired Lord Wavell as a wise and patient viceroy, and thought Mountbatten, by comparison, a glib and self-serving adventurer. His last memory was bitter: leaving India to the jeers of those whom he believed owed their freedom to the British, but who now wanted freedom from the British. He regretted independence and partition, feared that India would subsequently go communist, and was delighted that it did not.
I did not learn from my father's stories that military force was an important element in the maintenance of empire, perhaps because he himself had so disliked the petty regimentation of army life. But I can say that India meant more to me than it would have done if he had not gone there: it was not only a place on the map; it became a place in my mind. In one guise, Everest was the peak which had been climbed, at the coronation, by the imperial duo of Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing. In another, it was part of the Himalayan range my father had seen for himself. In the same way, Jawaharlal Nehru and Ayub Khan seemed as much a real presence in my early life as Harold Macmillan or Hugh Gaitskell.
In 1961, the queen paid a state visit to India, complete with elephant processions and tiger shoots, (very different in tone from her 1997 tour). At my primary school we made a map to trace her progress. The school also possessed a large world map which depicted the empire as it was in its zenith between the two world wars. Here was an extraordinary vista of earthly dominion for a Birmingham boy to behold. It provided a geographical context for the India my father talked about, and also Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, the old dominions which were then much closer in sentiment and in substance to Britain. The British press reported events there as though they were domestic news. And Lords Slim and Cobham, latter-day proconsuls had local links. Slim was a self-made Birmingham boy, my father's "boss" in India, and governor-general of Australia from 1953 to 1960. Cobham was an aristocrat, and owned a country house nearby at Hagley, which was opened to the public while he was away as governor-general of New Zealand from 1957 to 1962.
This seemed to bring empire close to home. It came home in other ways, too. The gifts my father had sent back from India gave me some notion that one of the purposes of empire was to produce goods which were exported to Britain: lamb and butter from New Zealand, tea from India, chocolate from Nigeria, coffee from Kenya, and apples from South Africa. And I played with toys which were identified as "empire made"-often a euphemism for "made in Hong Kong." There were imperial ambiguities here of which I gradually became aware. New Zealand lamb and butter were considered inferior to English provisions; "empire made" goods were low-quality plastic found only in Woolworths; and, when South Africa left the Commonwealth in 1961, my mother stopped buying its produce.
There was a second physical sense of empire, more powerful for me than chocolate or apples. As a schoolboy, I was captivated by the marvels of civil engineering, and many of these man-made wonders were located in the empire. There was the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Aswan Dam on the Nile and the Kariba Dam, which was just being built on the Zambezi. There was the St Lawrence Seaway. There were the P&O liners which plied to the Antipodes, including the newly-built Canberra. There were the imperial bridges-over Sydney Harbour, across the Zambezi at Victoria Falls and across the St Lawrence at Quebec-the dimensions of which I learned by heart. And there were the great imperial trains: the Spirit of Progress in Australia, the Blue Train in South Africa and the Canadian Pacific transcontinentals. In Birmingham city centre there was a Canadian Pacific office and in the window were displayed models of its ships and trains. I dreamed of travelling on them.
This was my private, childhood sense of empire: experiences I absorbed and elaborated in Birmingham during the 1950s and early 1960s. Obviously it was a superficial and limited picture. It was also a comforting one: as I envisaged it, the empire seemed good and friendly and big and strong, and I took for granted that it was right that Britain had it. But this was also a picture which became harder to reconcile with what was happening to the empire in the real, grown-up world outside my imagination. After the coronation, the next imperial episode I remember was the Suez crisis of 1956. I was too young to appreciate the bitter passions it provoked. But I do remember that my father was emphatically on the side of Eden against Nasser; that one of the greatest marvels of imperial engineering had first been nationalised and then been damaged; and that Britain had been defeated and the idea of imperialism discredited. A mere three years on, the coronation and the euphoric feelings to which it had given rise had been turned upside down.
Thereafter, my life seemed to coincide with a succession of anti-imperial or de-imperialising episodes. By the late 1950s and early 1960s imperialism had become a dirty word-in the Congo, in Indonesia, in Algeria. All around the globe, "the end of European primacy" was being proclaimed. I had a vague idea, which my father didn't share, that people wanted "freedom" and "independence." Part of me thought that if colonial people wanted "freedom" or "independence" they ought to have it. Another part of me found it all very sad-for me, not for them.
I began to notice that there was a pattern to this end of empire. It went as follows. At some point between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, there would be "trouble" in a colony: the communist insurgence in Malaya, Mau Mau in Kenya, guerrilla warfare in Cyprus. Thereupon a state of emergency was declared by the British governor, and the nationalist leaders were put in prison. Sometime later, they were released and then one of them became the colony's first prime minister, with whom the British then began negotiations for a speedy advance to independence. At the agreed date, a ceremonial handover took place attended by a member of the royal family-though never by the queen herself. The Sudan, Ghana and Nigeria; Sierra Leone, Malaya and British Guiana; Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika; Malta, Cyprus and Singapore; Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland: one by one, they went their own way.
I vividly remember the broadcast of Harold Macmillan's "wind of change" speech from South Africa in February 1960. But not everyone liked these winds of change. British settlers in the White Highlands in Kenya felt they were being abandoned by their "kith and kin" in Britain, and television programmes reported their plight and rage. And in 1961, South Africa was forced to leave the Commonwealth as a result of objections from among the new member nations to its racist policy of apartheid.
By this time, "the Commonwealth" had long since superseded "the empire" in official terminology, and it carried with it a new historical narrative which revised the old imperial story of trusteeship, the white man's burden, dominion over palm and pine. According to this account, which was in full flower by the mid-1960s, the British had always intended to prepare their colonies for independence. This path was pioneered by the dominions, which by the inter-war years were effectively self-governing although they still recognised the British monarch as their head of state. Then, in 1947, India, Pakistan and Burma all became independent republics. With the exception of Burma, they too joined the Commonwealth, and recognised the British monarch as the head of this new, post-imperial community. Finally came the third phase, with the independence of most of the remaining colonies in Asia and Africa. They in turn joined the club, most of them as republics.
This was a reassuring story, which sought to present the end of the British empire as the whole point of the British empire-by calling it the Commonwealth. Like many others, I was not entirely convinced by this. The empire had been about power. The Commonwealth was about sentiment-an alumni association of a university which seemed to be rapidly going under. In the mid-1950s, the Commonwealth had still been primarily British and white; ten years later it was overwhelmingly multiracial. And as Britain's influence lessened, the unity and coherence of the Commonwealth were correspondingly attenuated. For there was not only the fierce disagreement about South Africa. As Macmillan sought to turn Britain away from its imperial past and towards a European future by applying for membership of the common market, both Australia and New Zealand felt that the mother country was turning her back on them. For much of this time India and Pakistan were also at loggerheads, and the "Kashmir problem" remained unresolved (as it still is). There was a terrible civil war in Nigeria, and many of the newly independent African nations soon became one-party states. I told myself that none of this compared with the dreadful things going on in Indonesia, Indo-China, Algeria or the Congo: but they did suggest that "the Commonwealth" was less of a success than was often implied.
There were plenty of right-wing Conservatives who disapproved of what Macmillan was doing, and who disapproved even more of colonial secretary, Iain Macleod, whom they accused of pushing the colonies into independence with unjustified speed. Although part of me was saddened by this ending of empire, and by the recognition that my school map was now out of date, I was also clear that I was on Macleod's side.
There was one part of empire which went neither quickly nor quietly. The white settlers of Southern Rhodesia, led by Ian Smith, were appalled by the prospect of black rule and declared independence from Britain in November 1965. They were determined that Britain should not sell them out (as they felt had been the case with the settlers in Kenya), and they were convinced that they had to go it alone. The matter dragged on through the 1970s. But soon after Mrs Thatcher came to power, a settlement was reached and Southern Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, with majority rule. By then, all that was left of my British empire were a few islands in the Atlantic and the Pacific, plus Gibraltar, the Falklands and Hong Kong-together with test match cricket, the Order of the British Empire (the last use of this phrase in official parlance) and the BBC World Service (which began as the Empire of the Air).
The two narratives I have unfolded are in many ways disconnected. The first is as an amalgam of paternal memories, my personal experiences, and my inner life of dreams and fantasies. It was a backward-looking and unchanging vision, oriented towards the empire as it had been in 1939, rather than as it was in 1959, let alone 1969. The second set of recollections tells a different story: the public, political events associated with the ending of empire, as they impinged on me at the time. This was a forward-looking, disruptive, uncertain and dynamic vision: not an imagined community existing comfortably inside my own head, but a real community dissolving uncomfortably in the world outside.
A third and final narrative of my imperial childhood is what I was reading about empire, and what it was telling me. When my father left his Birmingham primary school in 1926, he was given a book, edited by Harry Johnston and Hayden Guest, called The British Empire. When I came upon it, I was enthralled. Here is the fortissimo opening: "The British empire is only 300 years old, but it has already outrun all the records. The Roman empire never reached one seventh, the Arab, Mongolian, Spanish and Chinese empires never more than one third, even the empire of the Tsars did not account for more than one half of the British empire, which covers a quarter of the land of the globe. It is three times greater than Europe and twice as great as South America."
"What," the authors went on to inquire, (without a trace of irony or self-doubt), "is the secret of Britain's greatness?" In fact the book did not pretend to answer the question: it took this greatness for granted, and assumed it would be permanent, in ways no longer plausible by the time I read it. I think that I understood this: but for a time it made the book more appealing, not less. Beginning with Britain itself, it provided a tour of the whole inter-war imperial agglomeration: dominion by dominion, colony by colony, protectorate by protectorate-the empire at its greatest extent. Part history, part travelogue, part propaganda, it was an irresistible read, and for many years such knowledge as I had of the empire was derived from its self-congratulatory pages. The dominions and colonies were depicted as places which produced raw materials for the mother country, where good government thrived, where the benefits of British civilisation were widely available, and where, as a result, the people were happy and contented.
This view of empire was reinforced by the fiction I was beginning to read: Henty and Haggard, Conan Doyle and John Buchan, CS Forester and lan Fleming. These writers were spinning their yarns over a span of 80 years during which the world and the British empire had changed a great deal; and it is hard to imagine the stiff-upper-lip heroes of Henty or Buchan at ease in James Bond's more indulgent era. But all these authors took it for granted that Britain was a great imperial power, and they all seemed to be saying that the empire had only been won, and could only be maintained, by constant struggle and unceasing vigilance on its frontiers. This was hardly the same picture as that conveyed in the calmly confident pages of Johnston and Guest. I should like to report that I was troubled by this discrepancy, but I wasn't.
Imperial fact reappeared in more rigorous guise when I took my history O-level in the summer of 1966. The course at my school did not cover Britain or Europe, but the British empire and Commonwealth, from the loss of the American colonies to Indian independence. I was well taught by an inspired schoolmaster-so well, indeed, that the notebooks I compiled stood me in excellent stead when I returned to this subject in my final year at Cambridge. The textbook we read was by Sidney Reed Brett, who had been born in 1893, when Queen Victoria had another seven years to reign, and who had first published his History of the British Empire in 1941. In 1959 he produced a revised edition, A History of the British Empire and Commonwealth, and it was this that I used six years later. It had been written in the immediate aftermath of Suez, but before decolonisation had begun, or South Africa had left the Commonwealth, and its treatment reflected this. The history of the great dominions was a Whiggish progress from settlement, via union or federation, to responsible government; the history of India presented independence and partition as triumph. None of these nations had separate or autonomous histories outside the British imperial embrace.
This did not altogether square with the decolonising story unfolding before my eyes, and nor did the imperial history I studied at Cambridge between 1969 and 1972. In Part One of the History Tripos I took a paper entitled "The Expansion of Europe"; in Part Two, another paper on "The Commonwealth." As its title suggested, the first was concerned with the impulses to empire emanating from the European metropolis, rather than with extra-European responses to them: theories of imperialism from Hobson to Lenin, the partition of Africa, and so on. As for the Commonwealth paper, this represented little advance on my O-level syllabus. The basic story was the same, albeit treated with more sophistication, and, once again, decolonisation did not loom large. This was less surprising then than it may seem now. When I took this paper, the British empire had been gone for less than a decade, and historical scholarship and teaching had not yet absorbed the implications. Moreover, the dominant figures in the field-Nicholas Mansergh, Jack Gallagher, Eric Stokes and Ronald Robinson-had known the empire first hand: Mansergh had worked in the Dominions Office, Gallagher had driven tanks in North Africa, Robinson had been in the Colonial Office, and Stokes had taught in Singapore and Rhodesia.
Thus described, these men belonged to the last British generation among whom it was possible to believe that the empire had a future. To this extent, their views had something in common with Reed Brett and even Harry Johnston; and some of this must have rubbed off on me. In retrospect, this was the last flowering of British imperial history from the British point of view. Already the focus of scholarly interest was beginning to shift from the metropolis to those on the receiving end of empire. Robinson began to explore the "collaborating elites"; Stokes turned to agrarian society in India; and the way was open for histories of Africa and South Asia in which the British imperial presence was represented as an ephemeral episode of external intrusion, rather than as the defining framework of people's lives.
I became aware of these developments only after graduating from Cambridge in 1972, the point at which my imperial childhood (and adolescence) came to an end. To be sure, the Rhodesian settlement, the Falklands war, and the Hong Kong handover were still to come, as well as the overthrow of apartheid and the return of South Africa to the Commonwealth. But had I not gone on to study its history at school and university, the British empire would have ended for me, as it did for most Britons, with the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. His state funeral was the most magnificent public spectacle since the coronation, but it sent out a very different message, as the last rites of the great man were also a requiem for Britain as a great imperial power. I cannot remember by which of these endings I was more distressed. But the fact that I was so upset reinforces my claim that I belong to the last generation to whom the British empire meant something. If you were born in 1950, this was still-just-true; but if you were born in 1960, it was already too late.
This brings me to a final matter: immigration. By the late 1960s, Birmingham contained a large community of Africans, West Indians and South Asians, post-imperial immigrants who had settled in the least attractive parts of the city. I didn't live in a part of Birmingham where immigrants settled, although some of my relatives did; I recall only one dark-skinned pupil at my grammar school during my time there-and he was much younger than I was; and I once took part in an undergraduate demonstration at Cambridge against Enoch Powell, whose anti-immigrant speeches I thought outrageous. Beyond that, all I can recall now is that it seemed strange that the British had never minded having dark-skinned people living in their empire, yet they did not want them living in Britain.
How, then, do these childhood memories of empire strike me, from the perspective of the middle-aged historian I have since become? I seem to have had no military or strategic perception of empire, and no awareness of the people who lived in the empire, whatever the colour of their skin. This is a very domestic, metropolis-based story, and my recollections are devoid of the searing, wrenching episodes of independence and partition, massacre and murder, imperial resentment and post-imperial trauma, which are so vividly recounted in the writings of post-colonial contemporaries such as Salman Rushdie and Sara Suleri, in whose writings the empire looms much larger and more malevolent. The discrepancy between their account and mine is hardly surprising. In Britain, empire was often disregarded, or taken rather ignorantly for granted, or (just occasionally and no-less ignorantly) delighted in; and because for most people none of this was the result of first-hand experience, their sense of empire was more an internal state of mind than an external way of life.
All this leads me to wonder whether I should describe myself as having been drenched in "the imperial project," in the way that many post-colonial scholars argue was characteristic of the British throughout (and beyond?) the existence of empire itself. One answer is that I am not sure there was ever such a thing as "the imperial project": even at its apogee, the British empire was far too ramshackle. Another would be to say that there might have been "an imperial project" in the heyday of empire, but that it had long ceased to be pursued in any vigorous and recognisable way by the time my generation arrived upon the scene.
I belong to the last generation that hung, by its finger tips, to the coat-tails of empire. I was a child of empire, although empire was only a small and distant part of my childhood. I studied the history of the empire, although empire was only a small part of the history I studied. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that as I grew up, I realised that I had been a child of an empire that had been-a realisation that was prompted by the recognition that the empire in question was going, indeed had all but gone, even as it was being brought back from the dead in some of the history that I was studying. But to the extent that the British empire existed primarily inside my head rather than outside it, it did not do so in a particularly profound way, and if I hadn't learned more about empire at school and university, in ways which were, I suspect, atypical among my contemporaries, it would have meant even less to me than it did. So, paradoxical though it seems, the only people "drenched" in the British "imperial project" among my generation were not Britons, but the nationalist opponents of empire and its post-colonial commentators and critics.
