Kwasi Kwarteng - Ghosts of Empire: Britains Legacies in the Modern World

GHOSTS OF

EMPIRE

Britains Legacies in

the Modern World

Kwasi Kwarteng

Liber dicatur hic parentibus meis

amore grati filii piissimo

Contents

The British Empire remains one of the most popular themes in history. We all know, or think we know, about its character. We have a hazy image of officers in pith helmets, pukka sahibs and turbaned and bejewelled maharajas; we have a sense of the grandeur and splendour of the empire, but it remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, very remote. The workings of the empire itself are even more obscure, as is the long roll of colonial governors and officials who administered it.

In this book, I have tried to show what the British Empire was really like, from the point of view of the rulers, the administrators who made it possible. As one historian has said, the task is to recover the world-view and social presuppositions of those who dominated and ruled the empire. This does not mean that the victims and critics were unimportant, but it does mean that any understanding of the empire should start with trying to capture the mentality of those who bore responsibility for an imperium which was the largest the world has seen.

Ghosts of Empire takes an unusual approach, in the way it examines aspects of Britains legacy in parts of the world which are diverse in terms of geography and culture. The countries or territories which form the subjects of this book are, in many ways, still influenced by their connection with Britain. Many of them, like Iraq and Kashmir, have been prominent in the international press for some years; others, like Nigeria and Sudan, have been less widely written about, but all of them, in my view, reveal certain similar characteristics of British rule.

The choice of Hong Kong was the easiest, since the departure of the British from the territory in 1997, watched by millions of people on television, has been understood to symbolize the formal end of the British Empire. More relevantly, to readers in the twenty-first century, Hong Kongs destiny is now bound up with that of China, the most rapidly emerging superpower of the new century. Iraqs history as a dependent territory of empire was strictly a twentieth-century affair. Handed over to Britain in 1920, after the First World War, Iraq remained under formal British rule for only twelve years. Yet, for the next twenty-five years, it was ruled by a monarchy which affected British manners and style.

In Kashmir, a Hindu family were established as rulers over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years, and the effects of their rule are still felt today. Monarchy was a particularly British instrument of policy, and the experiences of both Iraq and Kashmir illustrate its limitations. Burma, which, like Kashmir, formed part of the jurisdiction of the Secretary of State for India, was treated in a completely different way. In Burma, an ancient monarchy was toppled and replaced by direct British rule. The contrasting treatment of Kashmir and Burma reveals the many inconsistencies of imperial policy. On the continent of Africa, within the boundaries of both Nigeria and Sudan, there existed ethnic and racial animosities which were only exacerbated by imperial rule. These animosities have haunted the post-imperial destinies of both countries.

The British Empire has always been with me. My parents were born in what was then called the Gold Coast in the 1940s and had experienced the empire at first hand. My father entered secondary school in January 1956, less than fifteen months before the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in March 1957. This school was designed on traditional Anglican lines, and, although it had been founded only in 1910, it imitated older English establishments. The headmaster was an Englishman, of a type familiar in the colonies, a product of Winchester, Englands oldest boarding, or public, school, and Cambridge University.

I visited the school, Adisadel College, in 2001 for the first time. I was struck by the grace and tranquillity of its environment, as the school stands high on a hill in Cape Coast, Ghanas oldest town, which had been colonized by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. I realized that very few schools in Britain enjoyed such a pleasant setting. And yet the story of the school since independence in 1956 reflected the turbulent, unsettled history of the country since that time. In 1960 there had been 600 boys at the school; there were now over 2,000 and yet the facilities and infrastructure had remained the same. The shortage of money had not really changed the ethos of the place. Even though the school tried to shake off its imperial past, and had done this successfully by abolishing, for example, the teaching of Ancient Greek in 1963, there were still many traces of the old order. The school had been transformed, but vestiges of the empire could still be seen, not least in the house system, favoured in British boarding schools, and the honours boards in the dining room. The empire in a certain sense still existed, although it now clung on only in a twilit afterlife that carried an eerie echo of its original character.

This book attempts to describe some of that afterlife, by giving an account of a countrys experience before independence and afterwards. The character of the empire is portrayed through the forgotten officials and governors, without whom it would not have survived more than a few weeks. I have not written one of those books that purport to show that the empire was a good thing or a bad thing. I have tried to transcend what I believe to be a rather sterile debate on its merits and demerits. I have simply sought to enter, as best as I could, into the mentality of the empires rulers, to describe their thoughts and their ideals and values. I argue that individual officials wielded immense power, and it was this that ultimately led to disorder and even chaos.

Officials, as I hope to show, often developed one line of policy, only for their successors to overturn it and pursue a completely different approach. This was a source of chronic instability in many parts of the empire. In many ways, the British were too individualistic, and the vagaries of democratic politics meant that a consistent line was seldom adopted. I have called this anarchic individualism, in that there was often nothing to stop the man on the spot, as he was called by the Colonial Office officials, from pursuing the course of action he thought best. From Nigeria, where Lord Lugard dominated the scene, to Hong Kong, where Sir Alexander Grantham successfully ended any move towards more democratic institutions in the 1950s, powerful individuals directed imperial policy with little supervision from Whitehall. Such a system was ultimately anarchic and self-defeating, as policies developed over years in Nigeria, Sudan, Hong Kong and elsewhere were simply put aside when a new governor took his place.

These reversals of policy show that the empire was an intensely pragmatic affair. Apart from a common educational background and a sense of shared style, individual governors and officials had a wide range of interests and beliefs. Some were motivated by a strong evangelical Christianity, others were outright atheists; some governors were highly conservative, while others were more liberal, even radical. What bound these people together was a very similar educational background, which leads inevitably to the notion of class.

Class was central to the British Empire. As one historian has argued, Britons in the imperial age saw themselves as belonging to an unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations... hallowed by time and precedent.