What they could do; and what they did
“Ghosts of Empire” is the maiden work of Kwasi Kwarteng, who is an historian by training having earned his doctorate from Cambridge and a politician by profession — a rare combination indeed in our part of the world. The study of making and unmaking of the British Empire has been a popular subject among all hues of writers; Kwarteng’s work is different because it studies colonialism from the perspective of the colonial administrators, who ruled in the colonies subjugated by British imperialism. Keeping in view the vastness of the subject, he has restricted his enquiry to the case studies of colonial Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria and Hong Kong.
Through the words and deeds of the characters that played significant roles in the colonies, the author has tried to explain the ‘guiding philosophy’ behind the process of the British empire-making. Through the words of Benjamin Disraeli in the House of Lords in the heyday of the imperial conquests in 1878, we are told that this British statesman wanted the subjugated and the yet-to-be-enslaved people of the East to know that the British Empire was as an epitome of liberty, truth and justice. These were not the only ideals of colonial governance; they kept changing with changing times and often conflicted depending upon the statesmen that interpreted them. For example, to the old-fashioned economic liberals such as Winston Churchill, the guiding economic principle of the empire was free trade but for Joseph Chamberlain it was economic protectionism whereby goods from colonies were preferred through light taxation in comparison to the goods that were imported from Britain’s imperial rivals such as Germany and the US. Moreover, the author perceptively points out that the words such as democracy and liberal economics were noticeably absent from Disraeli’s speech. This was because the empire was neither liberal nor democratic rather it “openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of chosen elite, drawn from a tiny proportion of the population in Britain.” This raises the question as to what constituted this elitism.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, an important change had occurred as it did not matter to which family one belonged to as Dr Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell wrote: “Now in England being of an old family was of no consequence”
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, an important change had occurred as it did not matter to which family one belonged to as Dr Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell wrote: “Now in England being of an old family was of no consequence.” So what was of consequence for one to rise and shine in imperial Britain? The answer lay in being educated at the right schools and universities with Eton and Harrow at the top of about fifteen elite schools and Oxford and Cambridge topping the list of the universities. Those who aspired flourishing careers as colonial administrators were expected to master classics, languages, cultures and histories while the study of technical subjects was considered below prestige which can be understood from a comment about the Professor of Engineering at Oxford who was belittled by his colleagues as the “Professor of Jam-Making.” As the base of this elitism was meritocracy and not family lineage, therefore, sons (surprisingly not daughters) of even anonymous middle class families could climb the social ladder as is evident from the case of Ramsay Macdonald who went on to become the Labour Party’s first prime minister despite being the illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid.
Though the educational background made the colonial administrators a class in themselves, they were a bewildering mix of evangelical Christians, atheists, conservatives, liberals and even radicals — all committed to the service of the empire.
It is generally believed that the imperial policies for the colonies were conceived, planned and controlled by the policy makers at White Hall in London; the author has demolished this thesis by arguing that the ways and means of executing these policies remained very much at the discretion of the “man on the spot,” who pursued whatever action he deemed fit, thus the blame of “chronic instability” in the empire has been put on these “powerful individuals,” who, in the opinion of the author “directed imperial policy with little supervision from White Hall.” Such was the power of these “powerful individuals” that with the proverbial sweep of hand, they could reverse the policies pursued for decades. For example, after the war of 1857, the British government in principle discarded the policy of annexations thus allowing the princely rulers of India to retain their princely states but Lord Randolph Churchill went against this imperial policy by abolishing the monarchy in Burma. Though not written by the author of this book, it is common knowledge that the original Partition Plan of the Indian subcontinent devised by Viceroy Lord Mountbatten and sent for the approval of the British parliament through his chief of staff Lord Ismay was changed by him when the Congress President Jawaharlal Nehru threatened to reject it in a confidential whisky-after-dinner meeting with Mountbatten at Simla causing great embarrassment for Ismay as well as the British government, but such was the power of the man on the spot that the revised plan acceptable to Nehru and not shared with any other Indian leader or political party was passed by the “mother of parliaments” as the Indian Independence Act of 1947 in just ten minutes. India and Burma were not the only examples. Major policy reversals were also brought about by the “men on the spot” such as Kitchener in Sudan, Lugard in Nigeria and Alexander Grantham in Hong Kong.
It is generally believed that the imperial policies for the colonies were conceived, planned and controlled by the policy makers at White Hall in London; the author has demolished this thesis by arguing that the ways and means of executing these policies remained very much at the discretion of the “man on the spot”
While monarchy was done away in Burma, it remained the chosen instrument to perpetuate British imperialism in Iraq and Egypt unlike the French who were more inclined towards setting up republican governments in their colonial possessions. No wonder when the French deposed Faisal as the King of Syria in 1920, it was the British who made him the King of Iraq. On one hand the imperialists in London were dependent on their “men on the spot” to further the imperialist cause; these “men on the spot” were in turn dependent on the native maharajas, sultans and nawabs to effectively implement the imperial agenda in the subjugated territories. Almost a third of the Indian subcontinent was controlled through these princely props while the rest was managed by the collaborating native elite nurtured in modern education and western traditions.
Kwarteng’s re-reading of the history is that all the good and the bad that happened in these six British colonies was the work of the “men on the spot” and the imperialist policy makers in White Hall and colonial office could not be blamed because they were totally helpless being far away from the actual theatres of colonial operations. Where the messy situations turned into ‘ghosts’ that still haunt the world such as the still unresolved dispute of Kashmir state, the author has put the onus of failure on the native elite, which in this case was the Maharaja of Kashmir, giving a clean chit to Viceroy Mountbatten and his masters in London.