The british empire
Dr. Bruce Westrate, History First of all, I beg your forgiveness, or at the least a chance to explain the unforgivably pretentious title of my senior elective: Multicultural Malaise, for there actually is one. The idea to weave a class around the British imperial legacy occurred to me during a National Endowment of the Humanities Seminar at UT in Austin entitled “Rediscovering the British Empire” in which I participated in the summer of 1996. I was struck by the timeliness of the subject, especially in light of recent dustups over the so-called “culture wars.” Imperial studies are making something of a comeback these days, after decades of Cold War neglect and disdain, often leaving that intriguing question on the table which I am asked most often: was the British Empire a good or bad thing? An important question, that. For within its saga are contained many of the most compelling choices of our time: war or peace, justice or tyranny, law or disorder, freedom or slavery, wealth or poverty, synthesis or heterogeneity. Yet, that question, like most historical queries, eludes the easy answer. All this emanating from a tiny island in the North Atlantic, and eventually bleeding crimson over one quarter of the globe officially, while controlling another quarter unofficially. At its height, one-third of the world’s population (570 million people) lived under its sway. How many of the world’s greatest cities are outgrowths of the imperial seed: Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore, Ottawa, Vancouver, Hong Kong, Sydney, Wellington, Melbourne, and Capetown. British engineers dammed the Nile, watered the Punjab, spanned the Zambezi and laced India and Africa, north to south, east to west, with railroads and telegraphs and the seven seas with undersea transmission cables. London became the world’s first financial cynosure. Her merchants and entrepreneurs introduced rubber to Malaya, tea to Sri Lanka, coffee to Kenya, tobacco and cotton to America, sugar to Jamaica and opium to Bengal. And Lloyd’s underwrote them all. Her physicians battled tropical disease and her bureaucrats, endemic famine, while her missionaries spread the gospel worldwide. All of this was, of course, facilitated and protected by the greatest navy the world had ever seen, the exploits of whose captains would become the stuff of legend: Drake, Hawkins, Graves, Hawkes, Jellicoe and Nelson. This was the empire of the three C’s: Christianity, Commerce and Civilization, The
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Empire of Good Intentions, the British Empire. In 1759, after he had ejected France from Canada for good, the great Prime Minister William Pitt was informed that his empire now exceeded in extent those of ancient Greece and Rome combined. The Great Commoner responded with typical lack of humility: “Speak to me not of Greece and Rome,” he replied haughtily, “those are the histories of little peoples.” Yet when the nineteenth-century historian J.R. Seeley answered the question of how it had come about, he could only respond that the Empire had been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” On its face, that is an unsatisfying explanation to me. Rather, I am struck by a sense of the Empire’s having “risen to its opportunities;” that far from being the culmination of some sublime altruistic vision, the Empire was a product of the government frequently finding itself rather stuck, perhaps as America currently seems, with its imperial role, usually out of some perceived strategic necessity or other. So although such opportunities were generally unpremeditated and often unbidden, the Empire would be the recipient, whether she wished it or no, of the dynamic movements sweeping over Georgian and Victorian Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Now many have noted, quite rightly, that there was a lot of humbug in this, and that the Empire had as much to do with pence as principles. Ravenous industrialists, after all, had blackened the English midlands and consigned a large section of the formerly rural population to a hybrid admixture of Dante and Dickens. Scottish highlanders emigrated out of desperation, having been largely dispossessed following the Battle of Culloden in 1746, while the Irish chafed under the yoke of delinquent landlords unaware of an even crueler fate which awaited them. The founders of British India such as Robert Clive were, to many, rapacious scoundrels, bearing as little resemblance to Christians as those they were supplanting. Elsewhere, British sea captains bore away the children of Africa to the horrors of Caribbean sugar mills, while other British mariners carried smallpox and mumps to the remotest recesses of the Pacific. And the present-day bill of particulars against the Empire, perforce, goes on: destruction of native culture, evisceration of basic human rights, outright land
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