Christopher Lee - Viceroys: The Creation of the British

VICEROYS

The Creation of the British

CHRISTOPHER LEE

CONSTABLE

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Constable

Copyright Christopher Lee, 2018

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-47212-473-9

Constable

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To Aggie
Vicereine who fed an elephant

CONTENTS

VICEROYS

There was never an empire like the British Empire, according to the senior history tutor at school, even while the Empire (always an upper-case E on the blackboard) was being dismantled. The Spanish under the Habsburgs and then under the Bourbons by the 1700s was the largest empire in the world. It was the Spanish and not the British Empire about which it was said that the sun never sets. It began in the early sixteenth century and started its decline in the nineteenth century, particularly after the Spanish American war of independence. The British Empire kept going.

The Spanish Empire spread from the Americas, north and south, Asia, the Pacific and the Caribbean. It returned its last colonies to their African people in 1976. The Catholic Monarchy was called the first European state. A dozen languages were spoken and understood and the second most understood language in the world, Spanish, survived. The other modern empires had none of the scope nor history of the British and the Spanish.

There were three common aspects of the British and Spaniards: first, when their empire building began both had long unbroken histories of monarchy. Athelstan was recognised as King of not just the English, but King of England in 926. Charles 1 in 1516 became the first Spanish monarch. They had a constant identity and did not slide through ever-moving borders under more powerful cultures and ambitions. Secondly, both nations had coastlines. Spain was part of the Iberian Peninsula and Britain was an island state; thus both were easier to defend compared with the inland European states. Most importantly, both had constant access to the way of the rest of the world, even the unknown the sea. You cannot have an empire unless you have a coastline. After the nineteenth century, did countries build empires in their own continents unless you count the Warsaw Pact? A landlocked nation cannot guarantee to reach its empire to supply it, bring back its spoils or defend it.

It was no coincidence that the most brilliant royal school of navigation that would make that access possible was the other Iberian monarch, Infante Dom Henrique, o Navegador, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. Henry was further south; therefore the rest of the world was closer. He knew for sure that Africa was there and it was bigger than others thought. He wanted to search for African gold and the legendary Prester John. Whatever his ambitions, Prince John created the lines and angles that made possible the great tracks that gave us the Age of Discovery. All that was needed were the means to follow them.

The British were slow to build the ships that had the distance and strength to follow rough waters; when they did a vessel was no more than the size of a small suburban back garden. Columbuss largest and most famous ship, the Santa Maria , was no more than fifty feet the typical size of a private yacht on a mooring at Cowes today. Drakes Golden Hind , in which he circumnavigated the globe, was barely one hundred feet. Once the ships were built and the basic navigation was good enough, the British followed the Dutch south then east into the Indian Ocean. They went in search of pepper and silk. They went to buy; they stayed to trade, then live. Thus the British Empire was conceived. It was a conception of opportunity, not of determination. The British went first to where the Dutch were, the East Indies, then to India where the Portuguese were, along with the silks that they could trade anywhere. They stayed because the Mughal needed them to protect himself from the Portuguese; the longer they stayed the more money they made and the more they needed the paraphernalia to protect their interests. Thus the uneasy commercial pregnancy produced an almost healthy birth. The British wanted to stay and to expand in India and they fought the Portuguese and particularly the French so to do. But this was the act of a small offshore island people attempting to create an empire, to become Novi Romani . The British in the Caribbean fought to defend their interests against, for example, late-eighteenth-century France. In India, there were battles that sent the French packing, but even then there was an understanding that when the two countries were at war, their trading entities in India should not be.

The coming about of the British Empire to outlive even the much admired Spanish possessions, the direction and influence it gave on British contemporary history and the sheer Kiplingesque theatre of it all have bewitched schoolchildren for generations

At the centrepiece of my personal curiosity has been the viceroys. I once taught that nineteenth-century India was what the British did with aristocrats who neither were not quite Whigs nor hunted south of the Thames. It was a feeble, spur-of-the-moment aside in contemporary history supervision because today the social distinction of hunting north but certainly not south of the Thames is no longer understood by those who hunt for an Upper Second. Here then one of the first distinctions when discussing the rights and wrongs of British colonial history. Never begin the debate from our own times. They were caretakers until a truly great but split nation was ready to go her own way and the British accepted that it did not want to be there, could not govern and had never really wanted to after the Sepoy Rebellion. Victoria liked India and learned Urdu and wrote in Hindustani to her Indian munshi, her clerk, Abdul Karim which said it all.