Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (14 page)

Imperialism is, by definition, unpleasant for its victims. Even a supporter such as Niall Ferguson acknowledges that it is “the extension of one’s civilization, usually by military force, to rule over other peoples.”
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Regimes created by imperialists are never polities ruled with the consent of the governed. Evelyn Baring (later known as Lord Cromer), who was the British consul general and de facto overlord of Egypt from 1883 to 1907—officially he was merely an “adviser” to the formally ruling khedive—once commented, “We need not always enquire too closely what these people ... think is in their own interests.... It is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience, ... we conscientiously think is best for the subject race.”
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Lord Salisbury, Britain’s conservative prime minister at the start of the twentieth century, put it more succinctly: “If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.”
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Apologists for imperialism like Ferguson never consult the victims of the allegedly beneficent conquerors. As the American historian Kevin Baker points out, “The idea of Rome or the British empire as liberal institutions of any sort would have come as a surprise to, say, the Gauls or the Carthaginians, or the Jews of Masada; or, respectively, the Zulus or the
Boers or the North American Indians or the Maoris of New Zealand.”
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Eric Foner, the historian of American race relations, similarly reminds us that “the benevolence of benevolent imperialism lies in the eye of the beholder.”
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What can be said, however, is that the British were exceptionally susceptible to believing in the “goodness” of their empire and, in this, the United States has indeed proved a worthy imperial successor. In his analysis of Jane Austens 1814 novel
Mansfield Park,
which depicted a wealthy English family whose comforts derived from a sugar plantation in Antigua built on slave labor, Edward Said observed, “European culture often, if not always, characterized itself in such a way as simultaneously to validate its own preferences while also advocating those preferences in conjunction with distant imperial rule.”
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Actual, on-the-ground imperialists, as distinct from their political supporters and cheerleaders back home, know that they are hated; that is one of the reasons they traditionally detested imperial liberals, socialists, do-gooders, and other social critics remote from the killing fields, who criticized their methods or advocated the “reform” of some particular imperial project or other. Whether the imperial power is itself a democracy or a dictatorship makes a difference in the lives of the conquered, but only because that tends to determine how far the dominant country is willing to go in carrying out “administrative massacres,” to use Arendt’s potent term, when perpetuating its rule in the face of resistance.
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A split between those who support imperialism and those who enforce it is characteristic of all imperialist republics. Both groups, however, normally share extensive rationales for their inherent superiority over “subject races” and the reasons why they should dominate and impose their “civilization” on others.

Those who supply such rationales of domination belong to what I call the “Jeane Kirkpatrick school of analysis.” As Reagan’s U.N. ambassador, Kirkpatrick once said, “Americans need to face the truth about themselves, no matter how pleasant it is.”
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Historians like Ferguson are of this persuasion, which particularly flourished in the first years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in Anglo-American countries. That Britons and Americans have proven so comfortable with the idea of forcing thousands of people to be free by slaughtering them—with Maxim machine guns in the nineteenth century, with “precision-guided munitions” today—seems to reflect a deeply felt need as well as a striking inability to imagine the
lives and viewpoints of others. While this, too, is typical of any imperial power, it has perhaps been heightened in the cases of Great Britain and the United States by the fact that neither has ever been defeated and occupied by a foreign military power.

On the other hand, even defeat in war did not cause the Japanese to give up their legends of racial, economic, and cultural superiority. Although the Japanese after World War II “embraced defeat,” in the historian John Dower’s memorable phrase, they never gave up their nationalist and racist convictions that in slaughtering over twenty million Chinese and enslaving the Koreans they were actually engaged in liberating East Asians from the grip of Western imperialism.
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All empires, it seems, require myths of divine right, racial preeminence, manifest destiny, or a “civilizing mission” to cover their often barbarous behavior in other people’s countries. As Foner points out, sixteenth-century Spaniards claimed to be “freeing” members of the Aztec, Mayan, and Incan civilizations from backwardness and superstition via Christian conversion, while Britons in the late nineteenth century liked to think that in massacring Africans they were actually helping to suppress the slave trade.
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There is, in fact, nothing new about such self-enhancing American military campaign names as “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” “Infinite Justice” (as Centcom called the 2001 U.S. attack on Afghanistan until Muslim scholars and clerics objected that only God can dispense infinite justice), and “Just Cause” (Bush senior’s vicious 1989 assault on Panama).
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Such efforts reflect both justifications for imperialism and strategies for avoiding responsibility for its inevitable catastrophes. The first recourse in justification has long been racism—or at least a sense of superiority—in all of its forms, including the belief that victory over the “natives” (including their mass deaths due to diseases the imperialists introduce) is evidence that God or the gods have divinely sanctioned foreign conquest. As the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr taught, “The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values is the source of all religious fanaticism.”
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Then there has been the long list of what writer Sven Lindqvist, in his book
“Exterminate All the Brutes”]
which is a gloss on Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,
usefully terms pseudo-scientific “ideologies of extermination”: eugenics, perversions of Darwinism, natural selection, survival of the fittest, Malthusian demography, and more.
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Racist defenses of imperialism have often been linked to the argument that the imperialists have bestowed some unquestioned benefits, often economic, on their conquered peoples even as they pauperize or enslave them. Examples from the last two centuries include the benefits of “free trade,” globalization, the rule of (foreign) law, investor protection, “liberation” from other imperial powers or homegrown dictators, or “democracy.” In supporting Bush’s attack on Iraq, the Harvard historian Charles S. Maier notes approvingly, “Empires function by virtue of the prestige they radiate as well as by might, and indeed collapse if they rely on force alone. Artistic styles, the language of the rulers, and consumer preferences flow outward along with power and investment capital—sometimes diffused consciously by cultural diplomacy and student exchanges, sometimes just by popular tastes for the intriguing products of the metropole, whether Coca-Cola or Big Macs. As supporters of the imperial power rightly maintain, empires provide public goods that masses of people outside their borders really want to enjoy, including an end to endemic warfare and murderous ethnic or religious conflicts.”
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Finally, in retrospect, there has been simple amnesia: the systematic omission of subjects that are impossible to square with the idea of “liberal imperialism.” For example, both Ferguson and the
Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire
skip lightly over the fact that the empire operated the world’s largest and most successful drug cartel. During the nineteenth century, Britain fought two wars of choice with China to force it to import opium. The opium grown in India and shipped to China first by the British East India Company and after 1857 by the government of India, helped Britain finance much of its military and colonial budgets in South and Southeast Asia. The Australian scholar Carl A. Trocki concludes that, given the huge profits from the sale of opium, “without the drug, there probably would have been no British empire.”
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Other intellectual strategies have been concocted to avoid facing the reality of imperialist depredations. For example, the philosopher John Locke came up with the brilliant idea that the land in North America British colonists were stealing from the indigenous people was actually terra nullius, or “nobody’s land.” But let me expand briefly on just two of the rationalizations for imperialism: racism and economic benefits bestowed.

Racism has been the master imperialist rationale of modern times, one with which British imperialists are completely familiar. “Imperialism,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds, even if no race-thinking had ever existed in the civilized world.”
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But what, exactly, needed to be explained by racism? Initially, it was the growing dominance by small groups of well-armed, ruthless Europeans over societies in South and East Asia that in the eighteenth century were infinitely richer and more sophisticated than anything then known in Europe. As the historian Mike Davis observes, “When the sans culottes stormed the Bastille [in 1789], the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta [in China] and Bengal [in India], with Lingan (modern Guangdong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind.”
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In the early eighteenth century, India was a “vast and economically advanced subcontinent,” producing close to a quarter of total planetary output of everything, compared with Britain’s measly 3 percent.
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As the British set about looting their captured subcontinent this reality proved an inconvenient one. It became indispensable for them to be able to describe the conquered populations as inferior in every way: incapable of self-government, lacking in the ability to reason, hopelessly caught up in “static” Oriental beliefs, overly fecund, and, in short, not members of the “fittest” races. In other words, their subjugation was not only their own fault but inevitable.

Joseph Conrad’s closest friend and correspondent was the Scottish aristocrat and socialist R. B. Cunninghame Graham, who looked on his country’s imperialism with a jaundiced eye. It seems likely that Graham’s letters and published works inspired Conrad to write the most important book in English on imperialism—his 1899 novel
Heart of Darkness.
In 1897, in a story entitled “Bloody Niggers,” Graham summed up the English imperial view of the world in the following fashion: “Far back in history, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Egyptians lived and thought, but God was aiming all the time at something different and better. He let Greeks and Romans appear out of the darkness of barbarity to prepare the way for the race that from the start was chosen to rule over mankind—namely, the British race.”
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At its heart, British imperialist ideology revolved around the belief that history and human evolution—either divinely guided or as a result of
natural selection—had led inexorably to the British Empire of the nineteenth century. As a result, the British extermination of the Tasmanians (“living fossils”); the slaughter of at least ten thousand Sudanese in a single battle at Omdurman on September 2, 1898; General Reginald “Rex” Dyer’s use of Gurkha troops on April 13, 1919, at Amritsar to kill as many Punjabis as he could until his soldiers ran out of ammunition; the sanctioned use of explosive dumdum bullets (meant for big-game hunting) in colonial wars but prohibiting them in conflicts among “civilized” nations; and many similar events down to the sanguine, sadistic suppression of the Kikuyu people in Kenya in the 1950s were not morally indefensible crimes of imperialism but the workings of a preordained narrative of civilization.

What changed over time was the idea that a divine hand lay behind such work. As Lindqvist comments, “During the nineteenth century, religious explanations were replaced by biological ones. The exterminated peoples were colored, the exterminators white. It seemed obvious that some racial natural law was at work and that the extermination of non-Europeans was simply a stage in the natural development of the world. The fact that natives died proved that they belonged to a lower race. Let them die as the laws of progress demand.”
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On this, Ferguson concurs: “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.”
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In this scheme of things, welfare measures and ameliorative reforms of harsh colonial practices should not be allowed to interfere with natural selection since this would only allow inferiors to survive and “propagate their unfitness.”
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These ideas were much admired by Adolf Hitler in
Mein Kampf,
where he wrote approvingly of Britain’s “effective oppression of an inferior race,” the Indians.
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Racist attitudes spread throughout the British Empire and retained a tenacious hold on English thought well into the twentieth century. As P. J. Marshall, editor of the
Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire,
observes, “The roots of South African apartheid, the most inflexible of all systems of racial segregation, can clearly be found in the period when Britain still had ultimate responsibility. The British were never inclined to condone racially mixed marriages, which were common in some other
empires, and they rarely treated people of mixed race as in any way the equal of whites.”
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Niall Ferguson deserves credit for noting the sexual hysteria of the Victorians that contributed to these racist policies.
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That theme, for instance, infuses several of the great novels of Indian life— E. M. Forster’s
A Passage to India
(1924), Paul Scott’s
The Jewel in the Crown
(1966), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s
Heat and Dust
(1975), and Arundhati Roy’s
The God of Small Things
(1997). It is ironic, then, that Edwina, Lady Mountbatten, wife of the last British viceroy in India, had a passionate love affair with independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
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