IMPERIAL ECHOES
By the same author:
The Tradition of Smollett
British Political and Social History
British Trade Union History
You Should See Me in Pyjamas
JRR Tolkien: The Shores of Middle-earth
(with Elizabeth Holland)
The Changing World of Charles Dickens
JRR Tolkien: This Far Land
True Characters: Real People in Fiction
(with Alan Bold)
Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds
Who was Really Who in Fiction
(with Alan Bold)
The War Poets 19141918
Screening the Novel
(with Keith Selby and Chris Wensley)
Literature and Imperialism
The Author, the Book and the Reader
Echoes of War
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by
LEO COOPER
190 Shaftesbury Avenue, London WC2H 8JL
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
47 Church Street,
Barnsley, South Yorkshire S70 2AS
Text Robert Giddings 1996
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 085052 394 X
The right of Robert Giddings to be identified as author of this
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission
from the publishers.
Typeset in 1/13 pt Linotype Sabon by
Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.
Printed in Great Britain by Redwood Books, Trowbridge, Wilts
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO:
ARTHUR WESLEY GIDDINGS
2nd Lieutenant, 125 Siege Battery,
Royal Garrison Artillery 191619
ARTHUR JOHN GIDDINGS
Bandsman, 3rd Carabiniers,
Prince of Waless Dragoon Guards 194753
REGINALD JAMES GIDDINGS
Sapper, Royal Engineers 194749
The Author would like to thank the Librarian and Library staff of Bournemouth University, especially the Inter-Library Loan Department, not only for their splendid help in locating texts, even when only sparse bibliographical details were available, but also for their massive support through the location and provision of numerous volumes and quantities of source material when I was researching this book. Also the Librarian and staff at the London Library, without whom no book of this sort would really be possible.
My thanks are also due to the curators and staffs of the fine Museums of several British County Regiments. Their materials and displays were a great source of inspiration. Leo Cooper, my publisher, and Georgina Harris, his assistant, provided constant encouragement and were endlessly resourceful over the tracking down of maps and illustrations. In Bryan Watkins, I could not have had a better editor. His military experience compensated for my amateur enthusiasm and his editorial skill helped the material into shape.
RG
to speak a word of that just commendation which our nation do indeed deserve they have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad, and searchers of the remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerless government of her most excellent Majesty, her subjects through the special assistance and blessing of God, in searching the most opposite corners and quarters of the world in compassing the vast globe of the earth more than once, have excelled all nations and people of the earth. For, which of the kings of this land before her Majesty, had their banners ever seen in the Caspian Sea? which of them hath ever dealt with the Emperor of Persia who ever saw an English leger in the stately porch of the Grand Signor at Constantinople? who ever found English consuls at and agents at Tripolis, in Syria, at Aleppo, at Babylon, at Balsara, and which is more, who ever heard of Englishmen at Goa before now?
Richard Hakluyt: Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics and Discoveries of the English Nation 1589.
*
The British overseas empire really begins with these ventures by brave, reckless, buccaneering Elizabethan seafarers which Hakluyt so proudly chronicles. The thrust for empire came not so much from the desire of English monarchs for overseas conquest, but from the zeal of trading and commercial interests initiated by such companies as the East India Company, the Levant Company or the Virginia Company. Once the foundations of settlement were made in Virginia in 1606, London was full of talk about serious colonization. By 1642 the West Indies and Bermuda had absorbed some 40,000 colonists.
Colonial trade was increased by each war the British fought overseas, with the Spanish, Dutch and French in the West Indies, North America, Latin America, the Far East, India, Africa and the Middle East. Certain aspects of the economy thrived in war iron and other metals, leather trades, shipbuilding, woollens, chemicals. The end of each war seemed to bring Britain more overseas territory in which her merchants and empire builders could extend imperial power. The defeat of the Dutch a nation more conscious of their maritime power than the Spanish in a series of wars in the 17th Century gave Britain dominion over the East Indies and on the Hudson River. This allowed British influence to extend in America, pushing the French out. The Treaty of Utrecht, which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713 provided Britain with key naval bases in Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, Acadia, Gibraltar and Minorca. During the 18th Century there were only twenty-three years of peace. The Peace of Paris in 1763 left the British masters in India and North America.
But the 19th Century, and for us in these islands, more particularly the late Victorian period, was the Age of Empire. The century begins with a few border, frontier and tribal conflicts in the Indian sub-continent which made Arthur Wellesley a household name. As the century unfolded, each passing year brought forth a seemingly unending series of small wars, fought mainly against resisting or rebelling native tribal armies, mostly in India, Africa and the East. By the turn of the 19th and 20th Century Britains Empire stands at its zenith. Between 1875 and the beginning of the Great War in 1914, Britain increased its territories by over four million square miles. The word imperialism only comes into general political discourse at this time. It does not appear in the works of Karl Marx (who died in 1883). John Atkinson Hobson, the economist and publicist, wrote in Imperialism (1902) that the word was on everyones lips and used to denote the most powerful movement in the current politics of the western world.
As Empire grew, the world shrank. As E J Hobsbawm argues, the great period of European imperialism created a single global economy:
progressively reaching into the most remote corners of the world, an increasingly dense web of economic transactions, communications and movements of goods, money and people, linking the developed countries with each other and with the undeveloped world Without this there was no particular reason why European states should have taken more than the most fleeting interest in the affairs of, say, the Congo basin. (The Age of Empire 1987 p. 62)
European civilization now required this overseas world the exotic for its continuance, development and survival. Western civilization and its technologies needed raw materials oil, rubber, tin, non-ferrous metals, sugar, tea, coffee, cocoa, nitrates, timber, fruit, meat, vegetables. Awareness of the exotic, the far away, of places with strange names inhabited by curious different people begin to feature in European literature in the Middle Ages. Its survival is a testimony to its popularity, and far-fetched or untruthful as much of it may be, its existence certainly points to the great fascination European readers had for these faraway places. To take but one example, the
