The Absent-Minded Imperialists This page intentionally left blank The Absent-Minded Imperialists Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain BERNARD PORTER 1 3 GreatClarendonStreet,Oxfordox26dp OxfordUniversityPressisadepartmentoftheUniversityofOxford. ItfurtherstheUniversity’sobjectiveofexcellenceinresearch,scholarship, andeducationbypublishingworldwidein OxfordNewYork Auckland Bangkok BuenosAires CapeTown Chennai DaresSalaam Delhi HongKong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata KualaLumpur Madrid Melbourne MexicoCity Mumbai Nairobi Sa˜oPaulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto OxfordisaregisteredtrademarkofOxfordUniversityPress intheUKandincertainothercountries PublishedintheUnitedStates byOxfordUniversityPressInc.,NewYork (cid:1)BernardPorter2004 Themoralrightsoftheauthorhavebeenasserted DatabaserightOxfordUniversityPress(maker) Firstpublished2004 Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced, storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmitted,inanyformorbyanymeans, withoutthepriorpermissioninwritingofOxfordUniversityPress, orasexpresslypermittedbylaw,orundertermsagreedwiththeappropriate reprographicsrightsorganization.Enquiriesconcerningreproduction outsidethescopeoftheaboveshouldbesenttotheRightsDepartment, OxfordUniversityPress,attheaddressabove Youmustnotcirculatethisbookinanyotherbindingorcover andyoumustimposethissameconditiononanyacquirer BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData Dataavailable LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData Dataavailable ISBN0-19-820854-5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 TypesetbyKolamInformationServicesPvt.Ltd,Pondicherry,India PrintedinGreatBritainonacid-freepaperby BiddlesLtd, King’sLynn,Norfolk Till min ¨alskade Kajsa This page intentionally left blank Preface Looking back, the empire seems an awfully big part of British history. Yet thisisonlyrecentlycomingtobeacknowledgedinBritainitself.Foreigners of course have known it for years. That is scarcely surprising. It was as an empire that Britain mainly presented herself to them. Some of them were W caughtupinit:asitsvictimsorbene ciaries,accordingtocircumstancesor one’spoliticalviews;asitssubjects,anyway.Othersusedtocompetewithit. Americansencountereditbothways.Thismustgofartoexplainwhyitwas herempirethatmostlyimpressedthese‘others’aboutBritain,andstilltends to impress them in historical retrospect. Britons themselves on the other hand have usually downplayed it, comparatively. This is not just a recent phenomenon,acaseperhapsof‘denial’bornofpost-imperialguiltorregret. The empire has always seemed to mean less to most British than to its admirers and critics abroad. It hardly features at all in any obvious way in British literature and art. It was usually neglected in English schools. (We shall be seeing the evidence for this later.) Why was this? Does it really X re ect the reality of the empire’s impact back home? Were those native historians who used to leave it out of their accounts of Britain’s modern W development entirely, or at least to marginalize it, justi ed in so doing, at any rate from the point of view of Britain’s domestic history; or were they missing a trickhere? Just what wasthe relationship between her experience as an imperial power—there can be no doubting that, of course—and her more inner being? In what ways can she be said to have been an imperial society, as well as an imperial nation? This is the subject of this book. It has been written as a contribution to the current debate on Britain’s imperial culture in the nineteenth and 1800 1940 earlytwentiethcenturies(c. – ),whichinrecentyearshastendedto give rather greater emphasis to the imperial factor in her domestic history X thanolder-fashionedBritishhistoriansusedto.Anumberofin uenceshave contributed tothis, someofthem political (the Vietnam war, forexample, which extended the meaning of the word ‘imperialism’ for many), but two W important books in particular. The rst was John MacKenzie’s Propaganda 1984 and Empire ( ), which showed the extent to which Britons were urged to preface 1880 become empire-minded from the s onwards; the second was the late 1993 Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism ( ), which revealed actual imperial 1880 traits not only in the obvious post- literary canon (Kipling, Conrad), but also in earlier authors (Austen, Charlotte Bronte¨,Dickens), where they W hadhardlybeennoticedatallbefore.(Saidwasnotthe rsttodothis,but X he has been the most in uential.) Both these books inspired ‘schools’ of followers,whothenfoundevenmoreimperialismembeddedinnineteenth- and early twentieth-century British culture and society, sometimes in the mostsurprisingplaces.Sofarsogood(inthemain).Butthisthengaverise insomequarterstotheideathatBritainwaspermeatedwithimperialismat every level, to the exclusion of almost every other ideology or ‘discourse’ (using that word in its broadest sense), whether contemporaries realized it or not. That contemporaries did not always realize it was a reason for pointing it up where it did not appear overtly: inserting imperial references W into television or lm adaptations of nineteenth-century classic novels, for example, and into documentaries about other aspects of Victorian life, on 1 thegroundsthatitwastherereally,evenifnotexplicitlystated. Inthisway, what before had been a ‘merely’ scholarly idea spread into more popular consciousness.Itmayhavebecomethereceivedwisdombynow;takingusa X long way on from the time when imperial perceptions and in uences were whitewashed out of domestic British history almost entirely. Thatwhitewashingwascertainlyreprehensible.Itwasalsofrustratingto historians like myself, who taught and wrote about imperial history, but were forced to do so in a kind of academic ghetto separately from the mainstream of ‘British history’, and were often misunderstood as a result. (For a start, we were widely assumed to be imperialists. The presumption was that you studied what you empathized with. Most social historians, afterall,weresocialists.)Thisobviouslygaveafalseviewofthemainstream. Tosomeoutsidersitseemedincomprehensible.AfavouriteangleonBritish history for many years was what was called the ‘Whig’ one: a narrative of ever-growing ‘freedom’ through time. How could that be squared with the suppression of many freedoms which is a logical corollary of ‘imperialism’ W ¼ V bymost de nitions (imperium ‘power’), andwas apretty blatant e ectof Britain’s empire-building from the seventeenth century onwards—the period of the growth of this ‘freedom’—both overseas and in Ireland? It W just did not t. You cannot judge a bully outside by the sweetness of his conductinhishome.(Thisisnottoimply,incidentally,thateitherofthose descriptions isnecessarilya fair one for Britain in this period.) Quite apart viii preface from that, the whole implication of her worldwide dominance had to be that more people were involved in Britain’s history than the ‘British’— usually restricted to metropolitan white men—alone. Jamaicans, Punjabis, Ghanaians, white Canadians, Australian aborigines, and all the countless other peoples who got caught up in the web of the British empire at one time or another, women as well as men, were and are as much a part of Britain’s storyasthepeoplewholivedororiginatedinBritainitself. When theempirewasliftedoutofitsghettoandreintegratedinthemainstreamby such as MacKenzie and Said, no one was more relieved and delighted than someofusoldimperialhistoryhands.Atlasttheempirewascominghome. Many of the contributions of the MacKenzie-ites and the Saidists 2 (‘Saidist’ is MacKenzie’s mischievous neologism) have hugely enriched our understanding, both of the nature of British imperialism and, on the other side of the equation, of Britain’s culture and society. It is fascinating andimportanttorealizetheextentofthetracestheformerleftonthelatter, in particular: between the lines of Jane Austen’s novels, for example, where onecouldeasilymissthemwithoutSaid’scleverguidance;inmorepopular literature and music in the second half of the nineteenth century; on perceptions and constructions of gender; through sport; in shows, zoos, X and museums...and so on. This is an in uence that was greatly neglected before. It is no longer. We have—I would guess—most of the materials available to us now to judge of the real impact and importance of the imperial factorin the domestic lifeofBritain in thisperiod, andvice versa. V That,however,hasnotyetbeendoneproperly.E ectshavebeendiscovered and described, but not evaluated. Sometimes—this book will argue—their value has been exaggerated. This is for a number of reasons. Semantic unclarityisone.Toomuchconcentrationonimperialfactorsisanother;ifyou are only working on one aspect of a culture or society, its importance can seem greater than it is. The presumption that they must have been over- W whelming is a third. This is the rst study to tackle this question without anyoftheseparticulardrawbacks.(Itmayhaveothers.)Itisasoberattempt toplacetheimperialfactorinBritishdomestichistoryinabroadercontext: W V to discover how great it was, what exactly it signi ed in di erent circum- X stances, and how it related to other in uences, overall. It also aspires to a more contemporary and practical purpose. Imperial- ism is not at an end. (This is being written in the immediate aftermath of 2003 the Iraq war of .) This book will try to show what kind of support an earlier version of British imperialism required and received from the ix