Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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It is a striking feature of the current debate on American global power that the opponents of an ‘imperial’ American foreign policy can be found on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In his later years, the novelist Gore Vidal has become an outspoken critic of the American ‘imperial system’, which, he claims, ‘has wrecked our society – $5 trillion of debt, no proper public education, no health care – and done the rest of the world incomparable harm’. In a similar vein, Chalmers Johnson argues that America is ‘trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making’ and warns that ‘the innocent of the twenty-first century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades’ – implying that terrorist attacks like those of 11 September 2001 are an understandable reaction to American aggression, a view that has been echoed by the New Zealand born political economist Robert Hunter Wade.
What is surprising to European eyes is that the fulminations of the anti-imperialist left should be matched – with almost perfect symmetry – on the isolationist right. In his book
A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America
, Pat Buchanan issued the solemn warning: ‘Our country is today travelling the same path that was trod by the British Empire – to the same fate ... If America is not to end the coming century the way the British ... ended this one, we must learn the lessons history has taught us’. For Buchanan, as for Vidal, overseas adventures subvert the ethos of the original, pure-of-heart republic in order to further the interests of sinister special interests. The remedy is to cease ‘running around on these moral crusades’ and bring American troops back home.
By comparison, only a minority of commentators in the United States view the British imperial example as one worthy of emulation. Thomas Donnelly of the Project for the New American Century explicitly models his proposed twenty-first century pax americana on the pax britannica of Queen Victoria’s reign. Max Boot of the
Wall Street Journal
has argued that America should be providing anarchic countries like Afghanistan with ‘the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets’. In Boot’s words: ‘The chaotic post – Cold War environment resembles that of the post-Napoleonic world, with the United States thrust willy-nilly into Britain’s old role as globocop’. Similar parallels have been drawn by Robert Kaplan, who sees the British campaign in the Sudan in 1898 as the precursor of recent American exercises in ‘asymmetrical warfare’. Even Joseph Nye – no proponent of the unilateral flexing of American muscle – believes ‘the US can learn a ... useful lesson from the period when Britain held primacy among the global powers’.
The question that remains unresolved in this debate is whether the United States today is more powerful than the British Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out, Britain was never as militarily dominant then as the United States is today: ‘Even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies – right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy’. On the other, American power today remains in large measure informal or ‘soft’ – exercised through economic and cultural agencies rather than colonial structures. Anarcho-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that such informal empire is just as powerful as the formal imperialism of occupying armies and administrators. In their view – and it is a view widely shared by the multifarious critics of ‘globalization’ – multinational (but mainly American) corporations, aided and abetted by apparently supranational (but mainly American) public institutions like the International Monetary Fund – exercise just as much power as the soldiers and civil servants who enforced the pax britannica. Yet there clearly is a difference between influencing a nominally sovereign state, whether through economic pressure or cultural penetration, and actually ruling a colony. The United States in 2003 formally controls a far smaller area of the world than the United Kingdom did in 1903. Its weapons have a longer range, but not its writ.
Moreover, there are challenges to American power today that Britain did not have to contend with a hundred years ago. In Joseph Nye’s image of a three-dimensional chessboard, American power is greatest on the top ‘board’ of traditional military power; more circumscribed on the middle board of economic power; and relatively weak on the bottom board of ‘transnational relations that cross borders outside government control’, where the players range from ‘bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme [to] terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations at the other’. As we shall see, the British Empire also had to contend with over-mighty bankers and terrorists, but the technological possibilities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries favoured the imperialists over the individual troublemaker. Only in his wildest dreams could the Mahdi, the leader of the Sudanese dervishes, have devastated the City of London the way Osama bin Laden devastated Lower Manhattan.
The parallels between today’s empire and yesterday’s can never be exact, of course. But it is clear that today’s debate about American global power can only be enriched by a proper understanding of how the last great Anglophone empire functioned.
Beneficiaries
 
Let me now declare an interest. Thanks to the British Empire, I have relatives scattered all over the world – in Alberta, Ontario, Philadelphia and Perth, Australia. Because of the Empire, my paternal grandfather John spent his early twenties selling hardware and hooch (White Horse whisky) in Ecuador – not a colony, of course, but part of Britain’s ‘informal’ economic imperium in Latin America. I grew up marvelling at the two large oil paintings he brought back of the Andean landscape, which hung luminously on my grandmother’s living room wall; and the two Indian dolls, grim-faced and weighed down with firewood, incongruous beside the china figurines in her display cabinet. Thanks to the Empire, my other grandfather Tom Hamilton spent nearly three years as an RAF officer fighting the Japanese in India and Burma. His letters home, lovingly preserved by my grandmother, are a wonderfully observant and eloquent account of the Raj in wartime, shot through with that sceptical liberalism which was the core of his philosophy. I can still recall the joy of leafing through the photographs he took while stationed in India, and the thrill of hearing his stories about swooping kites and sweltering heat. Thanks to the Empire, my Uncle Ian Ferguson’s first job after he qualified as an architect was with the Calcutta firm of McIntosh Burn, a subsidiary of the Gillanders managing agency. Ian had started his working life in the Royal Navy; he spent the rest of his life abroad, first in Africa, then in the Gulf states. To me he seemed the very essence of the expatriate adventurer: sun-darkened, hard-drinking and fiercely cynical – the only adult who always, from my earliest childhood, addressed me as a fellow-adult, profanities, black humour and all.
His brother – my father – also had his moment of wanderlust. In 1966, having completed his medical studies in Glasgow, he defied the advice of friends and relatives by taking his wife and two infant children to Kenya, where he worked for nearly two years teaching and practising medicine in Nairobi. Thus, thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa; for although Kenya had been independent for three years, and the radio constantly played Jomo Kenyatta’s signature tune ‘Harambe, Harambe’ (‘Let’s all pull together’), scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief. We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango. I suspect my mother was never happier. And although we finally came home – back to the grey skies and the winter slush of Glasgow – our house was always filled with Kenyan memorabilia. There was the antelope skin on the sofa, the Masai warrior’s portrait on the wall, the crudely carved but exquisitely decorated footstool that my sister and I liked to perch on. Each of us had a zebra-skin drum, a gaudy basket from Mombasa, a wildebeest-hair flywhisk, a Kikuyu doll. We did not know it, but we grew up in a little post-colonial museum. I still have the carved wooden hippopotamus, warthog, elephant and lion which were once my most treasured possessions.
Still, we had come home – and we never went back. One who did not return to Scotland was my great-aunt Agnes Ferguson (‘Aggie’ to all who knew her). Born in 1888, the daughter of my great-grandfather James Ferguson, a garden labourer, and his first wife Mary, Aggie personified the transforming power of the imperial dream. In 1911, enticed by alluring pictures of the Canadian prairies, she and her new husband Ernest Brown decided to follow his brother’s example: to leave their home, their family and friends in Fife and head west. The lure was the offer of 160 acres of virgin real estate in Saskatchewan, free of charge. The only stipulation was that they had to build a dwelling there and cultivate the land. According to family legend, Aggie and Ernest were supposed to sail on the
Titanic
; by chance, only their luggage was on board when the ship went down. That was luck of a sort, but it meant that they had to start their new life from scratch. And if Aggie and Ernest thought they were getting away from the nasty Scottish winter, they were swiftly disillusioned. Glenrock was a windswept wilderness where temperatures could plunge far lower than in drizzly Fife. It was, as Ernest wrote to his sister-in-law Nellie, ‘sure terriabl [
sic
] cold’. The first shelter they were able to build for themselves was so primitive they called it a chicken shack. The nearest town – Moose Jaw – was ninety-five miles away. To begin with, their nearest neighbours were natives; friendly ones, luckily.
Yet the black-and-white photographs they sent back to their relatives every Christmas of themselves and ‘our prairie home’ tell a story of success and fulfillment: of hard-won happiness. As the mother of three healthy children, Aggie lost the pinched look she had worn as an emigrant bride. Ernest grew tanned and broad-shouldered working the prairie soil; shaved off his mustache; became handsome where once he had been hangdog. The chicken shack was supplanted by a clapboard farmhouse. Gradually, their sense of isolation diminished as more Scots settled in the area. It was reassuring to be able to celebrate Hogmanay with fellow countrymen so far from home, since ‘they don’t hold New Year out here very much just the Scotch folk’. Today their ten grandchildren live all over Canada, a country whose annual income per capita is not merely 10 per cent higher than Britain’s but second only to that of the United States. All thanks to the British Empire.
So to say that I grew up in the Empire’s shadow would be to conjure up too tenebrous an image. To the Scots, the Empire stood for bright sunlight. Little may have been left of it on the map by the 1970s, but my family was so completely imbued with the imperial ethos that its importance went unquestioned. Indeed, the legacy of the Empire was so ubiquitous and omnipresent that we regarded it as part of the normal human condition. Holidays in Canada did nothing to alter this impression. Nor did that systematic defamation of Catholic Ireland which in those days was such an integral part of life on the south side of the Clyde. I grew up still thinking complacently of Glasgow as the ‘Second City’ (of the Empire); reading quite uncritically the novels of H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan; relishing all the quintessentially imperial 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’.

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