French cartoon from 1898: China is being carved up by (left to right) Queen Victoria, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicolas II, the French Marianne, and the Meiji Emperor of Japan as, behind them, a Qing official protests in vain
The relationship between Islam and the west, the rise of tiger economies in Asia, and the modern-day role of the United States as world leader can all be illuminated by reference to the history of empire. Yet modern accounts of empire—or the British empire, at least—often focus too narrowly on whether it was a force for good or evil. Two major books last year proved the stubborn endurance of this ideological pursuit. Whereas Richard Gott’s Resistance, Repression and Revolt described the British empire as an exercise in brutal repression and violence, Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and the Rest presented western imperialism as a somewhat benign force, promoting democracy, medicine and liberal economics.
What unites these approaches is that they are derived from political theories with origins in the west: the ideologies of Marxism, Whiggism, and neoconservatism. But two new books attempt to free themselves from these constraints. In Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, John Darwin, an Oxford academic and the author of After Tamerlane, which won the Wolfson Prize in 2007, attempts to place Britain’s global commercial and colonising enterprise in a wider context, beyond the skewering effect of modern ideologies. Pankaj Mishra’s From the Ruins of Empire gives voice to the intellectual, articulate response of the people who were themselves subjected to imperial rule.
Darwin’s Unfinished Empire focuses almost exclusively on Britain’s actions and interests. Darwin’s scope could not be wider, encompassing the political integration of the British Isles; the colonisation of America and the south Pacific; and the various forms of imperial rule in India and Africa, right through the 19th century to the end of empire in the 1940s and 50s. Darwin takes the “long view” of the history of the British empire—with chapters such as “Imagining Empire,” “Defending Empire,” and “Ending Empire”—in an attempt to explain the factors behind Britain’s global expansion, as well as the origins of the “geopolitical order” of the “new world” that exists today.
But such generality brings with it problems. One of the difficulties of writing about the British empire is the immense range of experiences involved. Imperial histories oscillate between surveys, like Darwin’s book, and a more detailed focus on particular times and places, such as James Barr’s 2011 book Line in the Sand, which looks at the partition in the Middle East between France and Britain that emerged after the first world war. In attempting to capture the story of the empire, Darwin incorporates military campaigns, trade, religion and decolonisation. Yet an account such as Barr’s sheds far more light on the chaotic processes—the material interests and political machinations—by which imperial rule and influence emerged in a given region at a given time.
Darwin’s broad-brush approach fails to enter into the mindset of imperialists. To mention Garnet Wolseley as the “model of Victorian professionalism” is informative, but no other context is provided for this important military figure’s character. Coming from a relatively impecunious family, Wolseley was beset by monetary worries. He shared an evangelical belief in God’s will, which perhaps stemmed from his Irish Protestantism. This faith also led Wolseley to identify wholly with England: “To see England great is my highest aspiration, and that I might have a leading part in contributing to the attainment of that greatness, is my only real ambition,” he wrote to his wife in 1882. The granular portraits of imperialists offered by Darwin fail to capture such significant details. It is vital in imperial history to attempt to understand the cultural values of those who, like Wolseley, drove expansion and maintained rule on the ground. As David Cannadine, the British historian now based at Princeton University, has said, the task is to recover the “world view and social presumptions of those who dominated and ruled the empire.”
The intellectual culture and character of people like George Goldie, often described as the founder of modern Nigeria; Cecil Rhodes, the “diamond king” of the Cape Colony; and John Nicholson, who recaptured Delhi after the so-called Indian mutiny of 1857 and who was a popular Victorian hero, were very different from the characters we find in modern Whitehall or in British academia. Acknowledging that General Charles Gordon genuinely believed the Garden of Eden was situated in the Seychelles is likely to lead to more insight than the smooth generalities modern historians construct about the reasons for British imperial expansion.
It is also important to understand the attitude of the British public during the time of imperialism. Despite outbursts of popular sentiment on occasions like the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, it is easy to exaggerate the hold of empire on the public imagination. The late-Victorian accountant commuting on the newly opened Metropolitan line from Pinner to Moorgate (the Pinner branch was opened in 1885) would have had very little consciousness of the everyday business of maintaining a global empire. As George Orwell wrote in his essay on Rudyard Kipling (the poet of the imperial Raj, who was born in Bombay and was described by Orwell as “the prophet of imperialism”): “The mass of the people in the 1890s were anti-militaristic, bored by the empire, and only unconsciously patriotic.” Orwell, the sensitive journalist, describes the Britain of his childhood more acutely than many modern historians, including John Darwin.
The unfamiliar institutions of imperial Britain must be seen in the context of a time in which government spending accounted for around 5 to 10 per cent of GDP. (Today the figure is nearly 50 per cent.) The foreign office under Lord Palmerston in the 1830s contained precisely 45 people. In India, as Darwin reminds us, 250m people were governed by an administrative class of fewer than 1000; in Sudan, a district commissioner, barely 25 years old, would administer an area the size of Wales with perhaps 100,000 inhabitants.
The attempt to find a single reason that might explain the chaotic process by which such forms of governance came about is doomed to fail. British imperialism had a peculiar and inconsistent character. As JR Seeley, the 19th-century historian, put it: “The British empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind.” Individual initiative, eccentricity, and chaotic forms of leadership played a much bigger role in the imperial story than the more general concepts of racism, gender relations, and free trade. Darwin’s Unfinished Empire does address some of this eccentricity, but it is perhaps too broad in its approach to show how contingency and sheer chance shaped the course of events in the widely different political contexts of the vast British empire.
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Refreshingly, though, Darwin’s eclectic approach is not ideologically committed, and this allows him to build an authoritative account of the multiple empires that have been conjured up by historians and political writers. He discusses the Whig empire of Victorian intellectuals such as Thomas Macaulay and John Stuart Mill, who essentially saw Britain’s role as a progressive force in world history. As Macaulay, in his fulsome rhetoric, proclaimed in a speech in the House of Commons in 1833, the East India Company’s rule “commenced a great, a stupendous process—the reconstruction of a decomposed society” wrecked by “all the evils of despotism and the evils of anarchy.” Mill, in a similar vein, said in On Liberty (1859) that “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement.” It is not difficult to see how this was used to justify British rule in Asia and, later, in Africa.
Yet from the empire’s inception, there was also its critique. In the 18th century, this was largely Tory, memorably expressed by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift was a high-Anglican Tory who railed against Walpole’s Whigs: the merchants, shop keepers and grand financiers, the “monied interest” who benefited from overseas trade and aggressively supported war with France. In his cool and impassive style, Swift recounts how imperial forces “see a harmless people, and entertained with kindness: they give the country a new name: they take formal possession of it for a king… they murder two or three dozen natives… return home, and get their pardon. Here commences new dominion, acquired with a title by divine right.”
In recent years the case for the virtues of imperialism was revived by neoconservative thinkers. Niall Ferguson led this charge, with books such as Colossus and Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (it is appropriate, perhaps, that the latter was published in 2003, the very year in which the “coalition of the willing,” led by the US, toppled Saddam Hussein). Neoconservatives pined for a new global empire and looked back with fondness to the British empire as a model for global governance. The neoconservative view is, in many ways, simply a revival of the old Whig empire trumpeted by Macaulay and Mill; yet it is simplistic and naive in its cheerleading for global power, mistakenly viewing the US empire as a successor of the British empire when its avowed beliefs and means of exerting global influence are so different.
Yet none of these visions of empire tells the whole story. The Whigs and the neoconservatives are right to stress the role of the rule of law in imperial government, although their understanding of the motivations and culture is flawed. Marxists are justified in looking at the economic basis, but to explain it exclusively in those terms is grossly misleading. While an economic motive is obviously behind the East India Company’s involvement in India, such motives are less easy to discern in the administrations of Nigeria, Sudan, and even the Gold Coast in the early-20th century, where imperial expansion was driven in no small part by the sense of adventure, an ill-defined yearning for significance, and an equally nebulous sense of national pride. The eccentric characters often attracted to imperial service are surprisingly unmaterialistic, taken as a group. General Gordon was famously bored by money and saw, like many others, the imperial mission as grander than a mere commercial raid. Ultimately, these ideologically driven histories, because they fail to pay close enough attention to the people involved in the imperial struggle, provide a skewed account of empire and its legacy.
Pankaj Mishra’s new book, From the Ruins of Empire, does not make the same mistake. The subtitle of the book, “The revolt against the west and the remaking of Asia,” announces its bold theme. Mishra’s focus is on the role that various Asian intellectuals from India, China, and the Middle East played in rejecting western imperialism.
“The revolt against the west” is obviously more extensive than just a revolt against the British empire; this book is instead based around “the most intelligent and sensitive people in the east,” and their responses to “the extraordinary sequence of events and movements—the Indian Mutiny, Anglo-Afghan Wars, Ottoman modernisation, Turkish and Arab nationalism, the Russo-Japanese War, the Chinese Revolution, the First World War, the Paris Peace Conference, Japanese militarism, decolonisation, postcolonial nationalism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism—that together decided the present shape of Asia.”
Mishra’s argument is that current accounts of western imperialism fail to understand how the modern world was formed, because they focus on the rulers and not the ruled. While the exploits of Cecil Rhodes and General Gordon are familiar to people with a passing interest in the history of the British empire, Asian intellectuals such as Phan Boi Chau and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani are less well known. Yet it was the ideas of these thinkers that shaped the revolt against western imperialism in Asia.
British historians often incorporate accounts of the 19th-century Opium wars into their narratives, but very few of them engage with the legacy of Li Hong Xhang, an eminent statesman of the late-Qing empire. Yet for Mishra, the “revolt against the west” was a phenomenon with origins in Beijing, Tokyo, and Shanghai as well as in the more familiar centres of western imperial power, such as Cairo, Delhi, and Calcutta. This shift in focus makes empire, and the wider nature of east–west relations, particularly relevant in the 21st century, when the relative economic decline of the west is set against the backdrop of emerging economies such as China, India, and even Turkey, whose GDPs have grown at rates of over 6 per cent a year in the last 15 years.
Yet Mishra avoids unhelpful generalities by focusing on two protagonists: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an Islamic activist who travelled widely throughout the Middle East in the 19th century; and Liang Qichao, a Chinese journalist and philosopher during the late Qing dynasty. Mishra presents them as examples of how Asian thinkers responded to empire: by returning to intellectual traditions in order to provide alternatives to the western politics and culture to which they were subjected; and by seeking to modernise Asian societies in order to overthrow imperial powers.
Through biographies of figures such as al-Afghani—revered today as an “intellectual godfather of the Islamic revolution”—Mishra attempts to show how the reactions of eastern intellectuals to western power continue to influence modern politics and ideology. He recounts with enthusiasm how “left-wing secularists as well as Islamists, pan-Arabists and pan-Islamists in Muslim countries as disparate as Egypt, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Malaysia regard al-Afghani as a pathbreaking anti-imperialist leader and thinker.”
Al-Afghani was particularly concerned with the extent to which western countries had extended their power through science and education, while the east, as he saw it, had declined. He loathed the British, ridiculing the idea that they were in India for the good of the Indians. To al-Afghani, the British terrorised and exploited all Indians, and sent the spoils back home.
Al-Afghani formulated a theory that was a progenitor of modern Islamism. He believed that all Muslims, wherever they lived, would have to catch up with the west. He decried the ignorance he believed was fostered in madrassas and the resulting subjugation of Islam by a scientifically-minded west. In a speech in 1870 he exhorted his fellow Muslims to “arise from the sleep of neglect.” The same year, he reiterated that the subjugation of Asian peoples had “happened from lack of vigilance, laziness, working too little and stupidity” before asking: “Are we not going to take an example from the civilised nations?”
One forgets just how mobile some intellectuals in the late 19th century were. Al-Afghani travelled to Moscow where he agitated against British influence in central Asia, particularly in Afghanistan and Kashmir. He was familiar with London, from where he denounced the corrupt Persian regime in Tehran.
Mishra traces their travels and influence across the continent, living up to the book’s mission of describing the east’s “revolt against the west and the remaking of Asia.” Ultimately, he breaks new ground in his focus on responses to empire from articulate people whose origins lay outside Britain.
Mishra is no fan of the British empire and its history in Asia; his prose is often polemical, and his account lacks the detached objectivity of Darwin’s general history. Yet From the Ruins of Empire benefits from his sensitivity to the people and times of which he writes. By writing from outside traditional western ideology, and by affording his sources the detail and attention they require, Mishra has provided a bold, fresh, and much appreciated perspective on the history of empire.
