I must confess that before I read this book the date September 29th, 1923 had no special significance for me. Yet it was the day when Britain, having got possession of the Palestine Mandate, became the largest empire in the world. The first World War had destroyed other European empires, but the British Empire had grown in size, covering nearly 14 million square miles, 150 times the size of Great Britain, a quarter of the world’s land area with 460 million people, a fifth of the world’s population, acknowledging George V as King Emperor. Britons could proudly claim that the sun never set on the British Empire.
But the reality was the sun rose on an empire where Britain’s former colony the United States was now the most powerful economic force, Britain owed the US £900 million, and its own hold over its far-flung colonies was so frayed that little more than two decades later it would crumble to dust.
Matthew Parker has had the brilliant idea of starting each chapter by narrating what happened on Saturday September 29th, 1923. This ranges from plump, balding William Makenzie King, prime minister of Canada, arriving in Liverpool to attend the Imperial Conference to “safeguard the permanence of the empire”, to a telegram from the colonial office to the governor of Kenya regarding a well-connected white settler beating one of his workers to death for riding a mare. Such killings by whites of their black servants were not uncommon. The settler had been given a prison sentence of two years and the East African Standard deplored the murder but added, “we do not believe that it is possible for the Native to be properly trained without corporal punishment”.
Parker then pulls back in each chapter to tell the story of British rule in a particular colony. Based on extensive research we hear the views of both the coloniser and colonised and in the process he proves that the oft-repeated claim that this was a benevolent empire run where all subjects of the monarch were treated equally is historical rubbish. So, although West Indian troops fought in the first World War they were excluded from participating in the victory parade in London in July 1919.
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George V’s own son, the Prince of Wales, reflected the hypocrisy. After the war he was sent on endless tours of the empire as the King thought the throne was the “pivot” of empire. From Barbados he wrote to his mistress Freda, “I didn’t take much to the coloured population, who are revolting”. In Australia, meeting a group of about 100 Aboriginals, he wrote, “They are the most revolting form of living creatures I’ve ever seen! They are the lowest known form of human beings & are the nearest thing to monkeys I’ve ever seen”. From New Zealand he wrote, “inane Maoris danced & made weird noises” and was “revolted” when women kissed his hand. But in his 1951 ghostwritten autobiography, he concealed his true feelings, describing the Maoris as “what was most novel to me in New Zealand”.
Even administrators who did not believe in the empire were terribly conflicted. In 1914 Arthur Grimble applied to join the colonial office to work in the Pacific Islands as they were “romantically remote”. He was contemptuous of the idea that “the Almighty was Anglo-Saxon” and felt it was “presumptuous to speak of our right to own an empire”. But administering the Gilbert Islands he opposed the teaching of English to the “natives”, arguing that education in English would “produce no appreciable effect whatever upon the collective dirtiness, inertia, improvidence, and domestic unenlightenment of the people”.
Even George Orwell, who served in the police force in Burma, had a love-hate relationship with the empire. He thought the British Raj was “an unbreakable tyranny” but confessed “the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts”. While admitting that the British ruled Burma in a despotic fashion he emphasised that, “The English have constructed roads and canals – in their own interest, sure enough, but the Burmese have profited from them – they have built hospitals, opened schools, and maintained national order and security”. In his famous essay Shooting an Elephant, written in 1936, seen as the Bible of anti-imperialism, he wrote that it is “a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it”. Sentiments that would be music to those who today argue the empire should be honoured.
[ Legacy of Violence: A History of the British EmpireOpens in new window ]
Parker convincingly proves how deluded such a view is and, without ever assuming the role of anti-imperialist preacher, lets the words and deeds of the imperialists themselves reveal how far from glorious the real world of the British Empire was.
