Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (46 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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And what of the other side in this great imperial game? If the British were, as Chamberlain and Milner believed, the master race, with a God-given right to rule the world, it seemed to follow logically that those they fought against were their natural-born inferiors. Was this not the conclusion drawn by Science itself – increasingly regarded as the ultimate authority in such matters?
In 1863 Dr James Hunt had dismayed his audience at a meeting in Newcastle of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by asserting that the ‘Negro’ was a separate species of human being, half way between the ape and ‘European man’. In Hunt’s view the ‘Negro’ became ‘more humanized when in his natural subordination to the European’, but he regretfully concluded that ‘European civilization [was] not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character’. According to one eyewitness, the African traveller Winwood Reade, Hunt’s lecture went down badly, eliciting hisses from some members of the audience. Yet within a generation such views had become the conventional wisdom. Influenced by, but distorting beyond recognition, the work of Darwin, nineteenth-century pseudo-scientists divided humanity into ‘races’ on the basis of external physical features, ranking them according to inherited differences not just in physique but also in character. Anglo-Saxons were self-evidently at the top, Africans at the bottom. The work of George Combe, author of
A System of Phrenology
(1825), was typical in two respects: the derogatory way in which it portrayed racial differences and the fraudulent way in which it sought to explain them:
When we regard the different quarters of the globe [wrote Combe], we are struck with the extreme dissimilarity in the attainments of the varieties of men who inhabit them ... The history of Africa, so far as Africa can be said to have a history ... exhibit[s] one unbroken scene of moral and intellectual desolation ... ‘The negro, easily excitable, is in the highest degree susceptible to all the passions ... To the negro, remove only pain and hunger, and it is naturally a state of enjoyment. As soon as his toils are suspended for a moment, he sings, he seizes a fiddle, he dances’.
 
The explanation for this backwardness, according to Combe, was the peculiar shape of ‘the skull of the negro’: ‘The organs of Veneration, Wonder and Hope ... are considerable in size. The greatest deficiencies lie in Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, Ideality and Reflection’. Such ideas were influential. The idea of an ineradicable ‘race instinct’ became a staple of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century writing – as in Cornelia Sorabji’s tale of the educated Indian lady doctor who willingly (and fatally) submits to the ordeal by fire during a pagan rite; or the account by Lady Mary Anne Barker of how her Zulu nanny reverted to savagery when she returned home to her village; or W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Pool’, in which a hapless Aberdonian businessman tries in vain to Westernize his half-Samoan bride.
Phrenology was only one of a number of bogus disciplines tending to legitimize the assumptions about racial difference that had long been current among white colonists. Even more insidious, because intellectually more rigorous, was the scientific snake-oil known as ‘eugenics’. It was the mathematician Francis Galton who, in his book
Hereditary Genius
(1869), pioneered the ideas that a ‘man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance’; that ‘out of two varieties of any race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life’; and that on a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, a ‘Negro’ is two grades below an Englishman.
80
Galton sought to validate his theories by using composite photography to distinguish criminal and other degenerate types. However, a more systematic development was undertaken by Karl Pearson, another Cambridge-trained mathematician, who in 1911 became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London. A brilliant mathematician, Pearson became convinced that his statistical techniques (which he called ‘biometry’) could be used to demonstrate the danger posed to the Empire by racial degeneration. The problem was that improved welfare provision and health care at home were interfering with the natural selection process, allowing genetically inferior individuals to survive – and ‘propagate their unfitness’. ‘The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind’, he argued in
Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage
(1912). ‘As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage’.
There was, however, one alternative to state intervention in reproductive choices: war. For Pearson, as for many other Social Darwinists, life was struggle, and war was more than just a game – it was a form of natural selection. As he put it, ‘National progress depends on racial fitness and the supreme test of this fitness was war. When wars cease mankind will no longer progress for there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock’.
Needless to say, this made pacifism a particularly wicked creed. But fortunately, with an ever-expanding empire, there was no shortage of jolly little wars to be waged against racially inferior opponents. It was gratifying to think that in massacring them with their Maxim guns, the British were contributing to the progress of mankind.
One final oddity needs to be noted. If Social Darwinists worried that the racially inferior underclass was reproducing itself too rapidly, they said rather less about the procreative efforts of those men who were deemed to be at the top of the evolutionary scale. In the absence of survivors from ancient Athens, the pick of the human species was self-evidently to be found in the British officer class, which combined excellence of pedigree with regular exposure to the martial form of natural selection. The fiction of the period is crowded with the type: Leo Vincey in Henry Rider Haggard’s
She
, handsome, brave and not excessively bright, who ‘at twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the youthful Apollo’; or Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
, with his ‘strange, twinkling, reckless eyes – eyes of a cold light blue, the colour of a glacier lake’, to say nothing of
the strongly-curved nose, the hollow, worn cheeks, the dark, ruddy hair, thin at the top, the crisp, virile moustaches, the small, aggressive tuft upon his projecting chin ... [He] was the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert, open-air lover of dogs and of horses. His skin was of a rich flower-pot red from sun and wind. His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging, which gave those naturally cold eyes an almost ferocious aspect, an impression which was increased by his strong and furrowed brow. In figure he was spare, but very strongly built – indeed, he had often proved that there were few men in England capable of such sustained exertions.
 
Men like this certainly did exist. Yet a remarkably high proportion of them made only the most half-hearted, if any, contribution to the reproduction of the race they exemplified – for the simple reason that they were homosexuals.
A distinction must be drawn carefully here between men whose upbringing and life in almost exclusively male institutions inclined them towards a culture of homoeroticism and condemned them to have difficulties with girls; and those who were practising pederasts. In the former category probably belonged Rhodes, Baden-Powell and Kitchener (of whom more below). In the latter category certainly belonged Hector Macdonald.
Like Rhodes’s relationship with his private secretary Neville Pickering, Baden-Powell’s intense attachment to Kenneth ‘The Boy’ McLaren (a fellow officer in the 13th Hussars) was almost certainly not physically consummated. The same almost certainly goes for Kitchener’s friendship with his aide Oswald Fitzgerald, his constant companion for nine years. Each of these men, so masculine in public, could be extraordinarily effeminate in private. Kitchener, for example, shared with his sister Millie a love of fine fabrics, flower arrangements and fine porcelain, and would take time off during campaigns in the desert to correspond with her about interior decoration. But this, in conjunction with a shred of malicious saloon-bar gossip, hardly suffices to label him ‘gay’. All three exhibited far clearer symptoms of well-nigh superhuman repression – a phenomenon seemingly incomprehensible to the early twenty-first century mind, but an indispensable element of Victorian over-achievement. Kitchener’s nanny, doubtless no great Freudian, spotted it early in her charge: ‘I am afraid Herbert will suffer a great deal from repression’, she remarked after he concealed an injury from his mother. Ned Cecil also hit the mark when he observed that Kitchener ‘loathed any form of moral or mental undressing’.
Macdonald was a quite different case. The son of a Ross-shire crofter, he was unusual in that he rose all the way through the ranks, having begun his career as a private in the Gordon Highlanders and ending it a major-general with a knighthood. Distinguished from the outset by his often reckless bravery, Macdonald’s private life was reckless in a different way. Though he married and fathered a child, he did so secretly and saw his wife no more than four times after their wedding; when overseas, however, he was notoriously prone to homosexual adventures and was finally caught
in flagrante
with four boys in a Ceylonese railway compartment. As late Victorian Britain grew ever more prudish – and laws against sodomy were ever more stringently enforced – the Empire offered homosexuals like ‘Fighting Mac’ boundless erotic opportunities. Kenneth Searight was another: before leaving England at the age of twenty-six he had known only three sexual partners, but once in India he found a very wide scope, detailing his numerous sexual exploits there in verse.
Overkill
 
What happened in the Sudan on 2 September 1898 was the zenith of late Victorian imperialism, the apogee of the generation that regarded world domination as a racial prerogative. The Battle of Omdurman pitted an army of desert tribesmen against the full military might of the biggest empire in world history – for, unlike the earlier and privately funded wars waged in southern and western Africa, this was official. In a single battle, at least 10,000 enemies of the Empire were annihilated, despite a huge numerical advantage on their side. As in Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’, the sand of the desert was ‘sodden red’. Omdurman was the acme of imperial overkill.
Once again, the British were drawn to extend their imperial reach by a combination of strategic and economic calculation. The advance into the Sudan was partly a reaction to the ambitions of other imperial powers, in particular the French, who had their eyes on the upper waters of the Nile. It also appealed to the City bankers like the Rothschilds, who by now had substantial investments in neighbouring Egypt. But this was not the way the British public saw it. For the readers of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which took up the subject with gusto, the subjugation of the Sudan was a matter of revenge, pure and simple.
Since the early 1880s the Sudan had been the scene of a full-blown religious revolution. A charismatic holy man claiming to be the Mahdi (the ‘Expected Guide’, last in succession of the twelve great imams) had mustered a vast army of dervishes, their heads shaven, their bodies clad in the simple
jibbeh
, all ready to fight for his strict Wahabbist brand of Islam. Drawing his support from the desert tribes, the Mahdi openly challenged the power of British-occupied Egypt. In 1883 his forces even had the temerity to wipe out, to the last man, a 10,000-strong Egyptian army led by Colonel William Hicks, a retired British officer. After an indignant press campaign led by W.T. Stead, it was decided to send General Charles George Gordon, who had spent six years in Khartoum as the Egyptian Khedive’s Governor of ‘Equatoria’ during the 1870s. Although a decorated veteran of the Crimean War and the commander of the Chinese army that had crushed the Taiping rebellion in 1863 – 4, Gordon was always regarded by the British political establishment as half mad, and with some reason.
81
Ascetic to the point of being masochistic, devout to the point of being fanatical, Gordon saw himself as God’s instrument, as he explained to his beloved sister:
To each is allotted a distinct work, to each a destined goal; to some the seat at the right-hand or left of the Saviour ... It is difficult to the flesh to accept ‘Ye are dead, ye have naught to do with the world’. How difficult for any one to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures, its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is! That is to know the resurrection.
 
‘I died long ago’, he told her on another occasion; ‘I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll’. Charged with evacuating the Egyptian troops stationed in Khartoum, he set off alone, resolved to do the very opposite and hold the city. He arrived on 18 February 1884, by now determined to ‘smash up the Mahdi’, only to be surrounded, besieged and – nearly a year after his arrival – hacked to pieces.
While marooned in Khartoum, Gordon had confided to his diary his growing suspicion that the government in London had left him in the lurch. He imagined the Foreign Secretary, Lord Granville, complaining as the siege dragged on:
Why, HE said distinctly he could only hold out six months, and that was in March (counts the months). August! Why he ought to have given in! What is to be done? They’ll be howling for an expedition ... It is no laughing matter; that abominable Mahdi! Why on earth does he not guard his roads better? What IS to be done? ... What that Mahdi is about I cannot make out. Why does he not put all his guns on the river and stop the route? Eh what? ‘We will have to go to Khartoum!’ Why, it will cost millions, what a wretched business!
 

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