Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power Read Free Page A

sporting clashes – best of all the rugby tours by the ‘British Lions’ to Australia, New Zealand and (until they were regrettably interrupted) South Africa. 1 At home we ate ‘Empire biscuits’. At school we did ‘Empire shooting’.

Cases Against
     
    Admittedly, by the time I reached my teens, the idea of a world ruled by chaps with red coats, stiff upper lips and pith helmets had become something of a joke, the raw material for Carry On Up the Khyber, It Ain’t ’Alf ’Ot Mum and Monty Python’s Flying Circus . Perhaps the archetypal line in the genre is in the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life , when a bloodspattered ‘Tommy’, fatally wounded in a battle with the Zulus, exclaims ecstatically: ‘I mean, I killed fifteen of those buggers, sir. Now, at home, they’d hang me! Here, they’ll give me a fucking medal, sir!’
    When I got to Oxford in 1982 the Empire was no longer even funny. In those days the Oxford Union still debated solemn motions like ‘This House Regrets Colonization’. Young and foolish, I rashly opposed this motion and in doing so prematurely ended my career as a student politician. I suppose that was the moment the penny dropped: clearly not everyone shared my confidently rosy view of Britain’s imperial past. Indeed, some of my contemporaries appeared quite scandalized that I should be prepared to defend it. As I began to study the subject in earnest, I came to realize that I and my family had been woefully misinformed: the costs of the British Empire had, in fact, substantially outweighed its benefits. The Empire had, after all, been one of history’s Bad Things.
    There is no need here to recapitulate in any detail the arguments against imperialism. They can be summarized, I think, under two headings: those that stress the negative consequences for the colonized; and those that stress the negative consequences for the colonizers. In the former category belong both the nationalists and the Marxists, from the Mughal historian Gholam Hossein Khan, author of the Seir Mutaqherin (1789), to the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of Orientalism (1978), by way of Lenin and a thousand others in between. In the latter camp belong the liberals, from Adam Smith onwards, who have maintained for almost as many years that the British Empire was, even from Britain’s point of view, ‘a waste of money’.
    The central nationalist/Marxist assumption is, of course, that imperialism was economically exploitative: every facet of colonial rule, including even the apparently sincere efforts of Europeans to study and understand indigenous cultures, was at root designed to maximize the surplus value that could be extracted from the subject peoples. The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces – using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favour of the metropolis – it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either. In this view, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that mattered, not the coercive integration of imperialism. Thus, investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies, while the cost of defending the Empire was a burden on taxpayers, who might otherwise have spent their money on the products of a modern consumer goods sector. One historian, writing in the new Oxford History of the British Empire , has gone so far as to speculate that if Britain had got rid of the Empire in the mid-1840s, she could have reaped a ‘decolonization dividend’ in the form of a 25 per cent tax cut. The money taxpayers would have saved as a result of this could have been spent on electricity, cars and consumer durables, thus encouraging industrial modernization at home.
    Nearly a century ago, the likes of J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse were arguing along very similar lines; they in