Scuttling away from India in 1947, after plunging the jewel
in the crown into a catastrophic partition, "the British", the
novelist Paul Scott famously wrote, "came to the end of themselves as they
were". The legacy of British rule, and the manner of their departures –
civil wars and impoverished nation states locked expensively into antagonism,
whether in the Middle East, Africa or the Malay Peninsula – was clearer by the
time Scott completed his Raj Quartet in the early 1970s. No more, he believed,
could the British allow themselves any soothing illusions about the basis and
consequences of their power.
Scott had clearly not anticipated the collective need to
forget crimes and disasters. The Guardian reports that the British government
is paying compensation to the nearly 10,000 Kenyans detained and tortured
during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s. In what has been described by the
historian Caroline Elkins as Britain's own "Gulag", Africans
resisting white settlers were roasted alive in addition to being hanged to
death. Barack Obama's own grandfather had pins pushed into his fingers and his
testicles squeezed between metal rods.
The British colonial government destroyed the evidence of
its crimes. For a long time the Foreign and Commonwealth Office denied the
existence of files pertaining to the abuse of tens of thousands of detainees.
"It is an enduring feature of our democracy," the FCO now claims,
"that we are willing to learn from our history."
But what kind of history? Consider how Niall Ferguson, the
Conservative-led government's favourite historian, deals with the Kenyan
"emergency" in his book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World: by
suppressing it entirely in favour of a Kenyan idyll of "our bungalow, our
maid, our smattering of Swahili – and our sense of unshakeable security."
The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before.
But for Ferguson "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".
Clearly awed by this vision of the British empire, the
current minister for education asked Ferguson to advise on the history
syllabus. Schoolchildren may soon be informed that the British empire, as
Dominic Sandbrook wrote in the Daily Mail, "stands out as a beacon of
tolerance, decency and the rule of law".
Contrast this with the story of Albert Camus, who was
ostracised by his intellectual peers when a sentimental attachment to the
Algeria of his childhood turned him into a reluctant defender of French
imperialism. Humiliated at Dien Bien Phu, and trapped in a vicious
counter-insurgency in Algeria, the French couldn't really set themselves up as
a beacon of tolerance and decency. Other French thinkers, from Roland Barthes
to Michel Foucault, were already working to uncover the self-deceptions of
their imperial culture, and recording the provincialism disguised by their
mission civilisatrice. Visiting Japan in the late 1960s, Barthes warned that
"someday we must write the history of our own obscurity – manifest the
density of our narcissism".
Perhaps narcissism and despair about their creeping
obscurity, or just plain madness explains why in the early 21st century many
Britons, long after losing their empire, thought they had found a new role: as
boosters to their rich English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic.
Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by
western scholars and anticolonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and
often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a
benediction that, in Ferguson's words, "undeniably pioneered free trade,
free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour".
Andrew Roberts, a leading mid-Atlanticist, also made the British empire seem
like an American neocon wet dream in its alleged boosting of "free trade,
free mobility of capital … low domestic taxation and spending and 'gentlemanly'
capitalism".
Never mind that free trade, introduced to Asia through
gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that
"free" capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia
and Canada, that indentured rather than "free" labour replaced slavery,
and that laissez faire capitalism, which condemned millions to early death in
famines, was anything but gentlemanly.
These fairytales about how Britain made the modern world
weren't just aired at some furtive far-right conclave or hedge funders' retreat.
The BBC and the broadsheets took the lead in making them seem intellectually
respectable to a wide audience. Mainstream politicians as well as broadcasters
deferred to their belligerent illogic. Looking for a more authoritative
audience, the revanchists then crossed the Atlantic to provide intellectual
armature to Americans trying to remake the modern world through military force.
Of course, like Camus – who never gave any speaking parts to
Arabs when he deigned to include them in his novels set in Algeria – the new
bards of empire almost entirely suppressed Asian and African voices. The
omission didn't matter in a world where some crass psychologising about gay men
triggers an instant mea culpa (as it did with Ferguson's Keynes apology), but
no regret, let alone repentance, is deemed necessary for a counterfeit imperial
history and minatory visions of hectically breeding Muslims – both enlisted in
large-scale violence against voiceless peoples.
Such retro-style megalomania, however, cannot be sustained
in a world where, for better and for worse, cultural as well as economic power
is leaking away from the old Anglo-American establishment. An enlarged global
public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly
call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.
Furthermore, neo-imperialist assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have served to
highlight the actual legacy of British imperialism: tribal, ethnic and
religious conflicts that stifled new nation states at birth, or doomed them to
endless civil war punctuated by ruthless despotisms.
Defeat and humiliation have been compounded by the
revelation that those charged with bringing civilisation from the west to the
rest have indulged – yet again – in indiscriminate murder and torture. But then
as Randolph Bourne pointed out a century ago: "It is only liberal naivete
that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means
willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it."
This is as true for the Japanese, the self-appointed
sentinel of Asia and then its main despoiler during the second world war, as it
is for the British. Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or
maintained. The grandson of a Kenyan once tortured by the British knows this
too well as: having failed to close down Guantánamo, he resorts to random
executions through drone strikes.
The victims of such everyday violence have always seen
through its humanitarian disguises. They have long known western nations, as James
Baldwin wrote, to be "caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended
humanism". They know, too, how the colonialist habits of ideological
deceit trickle down and turn into the mendacities of postcolonial regimes, such
as in Zimbabwe and Syria, or of terrorists who kill and maim in the cause of
anti-imperialism.
Fantasies of moral superiority and exceptionalism are not
only a sign of intellectual vapidity and moral torpor, they are politically,
economically and diplomatically damaging. Japan's insistence on glossing over
its brutal invasions and occupations in the first half of the 20th century has
isolated it within Asia and kept toxic nationalisms on the boil all around it.
In contrast, Germany's clear-eyed reckoning and decisive break with its history
of violence has helped it become Europe's pre-eminent country.
Britain's extended imperial hangover can only elicit cold
indifference from the US, which is undergoing epochal demographic shifts,
isolation within Europe, and derision from its former Asian and African
subjects. The revelations of atrocities in Kenya are just the tip of an
emerging global history of violence, dispossession and resistance. They provide
a new opportunity for the British ruling class and intelligentsia to break with
threadbare imperial myths – to come to the end of themselves as they were, and
remake Britain for the modern world.
