The british empire
Dr. Bruce Westrate, History grabs that would make Julius Caesar blush. It wasn’t for nothing that Gandhi suggested the reason the sun never set over the British Empire was that “God didn’t trust them in the dark.” Colonialism, critics allege, intensified and exported class distinctions and racism while warfare became the stock-in-trade of Proconsuls and Viceroys. All the while, an indifferent bureaucracy remained aloof, even obstructive, in the face of recurrent, devastating famine. Not to be outdone, anthropologists pile-on, recounting horrible atrocities committed in Australia, Tasmania, India, and Kenya. Economists lament the British fetish for free trade which made acute shortages, along with the Potato Famine in Ireland, much, much worse than they otherwise would have been. Most hyperbolic of all, postmodern intellectuals chime in, as did one Cambridge scholar recently, concluding that “The British were the Nazis of their time.” Now, in my best “Law and Order” Sam Waterston mode, I will stipulate to many of these crimes, indulgences and missteps, along with many more which I could mention. However, that does not mean that I concur with the final judgment. Multiculturalism is a specious philosophy which is derivative of the post-modern critiques of writers like Michael Foucoult, Edward Said and Jacque Derrida, and posits the absolute relativity of cross-cultural knowledge. Under this view, it is objectively impossible for those in one culture to assess another because “all is translation,” colored by the biases and preconceptions inherent in one’s own cultural prism. Consequently, under this worldview, all cultures are morally equivalent, and so impervious to judgment simply because they are incomprehensible to outsiders, whose conclusions are hopelessly clouded by ignorance and the prejudice which stems from it. As with many intellectual fads, there is just enough truth in the multicultural message to be dangerous, for it strikes at the very guts of history: disciplined scholarship in the pursuit of truth. If there is no truth, then there may be no legitimate pursuit. Conclusions cannot be arrived at and so judgments cannot be made. The very reason we study history, that is to chart our progress as human beings and learn from our mistakes, no longer exists. If all truth is relative and nothing is inherently “right,” then nothing is inherently “wrong.” So “History,” at least in the Western
ST. MARK'S SCHOOL OF TE X AS
sense of the term, simply stops. It is tantamount to flatearthers and astrologers demanding repeal of the scientific method, along with the guarantee of equal time. Students, thereby, are deprived, as the late Alan Bloom pointed out in The Closing of the American Mind, “of the impulse of Odysseus, who, according to Dante, traveled the world to see the virtues and vices of men.” So what better petrie dish within which to test this philosophy, I thought, than the British Empire, the crucible of cultures? History is a dynamic, not a static, proposition. And the greatest advantage which hindsight affords us, of course, is perspective, but only the kind buttressed by objective knowledge. And I strive for my students to be more reliant on that, than on vague, political taglines or felicitous buzzwords which, however pleasing to the ear, are so nebulous and imprecise as to mean everything…and so nothing. If empires, at the end of the day, are to be judged as having shed blood, then the British Empire was, without a doubt, guilty. But then so was every other empire in the history of man, as they all are the products of conquest and exploitation. And since antiquity, empires (not nationstates) have been the most popular models by which men have chosen to rule themselves…and others. Yet a fair reading of the evidence, as may be found in the case of India, would find British conquest, owing largely to its swiftness and efficiency, to have been far less bloody than those which had gone on before. And must not we also, in the interest of balance, concede that the relative absence of native discontent during two centuries of British rule (the famous Pax Britannica) in some measure affects the calculus, as India was spared the timeless cycle of conquest and plunder that had long been its lot? Alternatively, consider British eradication of the slave trade, in which incidentally they were hardly the only participants. Might not the British people be credited for the lives saved by the extension of their rule over land and sea as much as they are condemned for their participation in that awful commerce? It was the Royal Navy, after all, that suppressed a trans-Atlantic trade which had consumed perhaps 10 million souls. Moreover, it has (continued on next page)
9