HistoryIn 1884, at the height of the public agitation for an expedition to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum, a pamphlet called A History of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire was published.
Purporting to be written in Auckland a century in the future, in 1984, it traced the decay of "what was once the cream of nations" back to Gladstone's pusillanimity. Its author, "Edwarda Gibbon", also listed other causes of British decline - including temperance, the Salvation Army, spiritualism, the abolition of flogging in the British army, and, interestingly, a change in the Gulf Stream which brought in a new ice age, turning the imperial capital into a haunt of polar bears.
Although it may appear odd for Piers Brendon to start his large-scale account of the "decline and fall" of the empire as early as 1781, he shows that the fear of decline, or even of imminent collapse, surfaced repeatedly throughout its life. That, and a frank admiration for the original Edward Gibbon's classic work, provides some justification for his title.
The year 1884 seemed, at the time, to herald the most dramatic expansion of the red parts of the world map [in the "scramble for Africa"]. The huge public pressure on Gladstone - a reluctant imperialist who had ordered Gordon to withdraw from the Sudan and saw his stand in Khartoum as insubordination - prefigured the upsurge of "Jingoism" that fuelled Briain's aggressive global posture around the turn of the century. (Gordon's death at the hands of the Mahdist jihadis unleashed a torrent of public grief pre-echoing that for Princess Diana.) Though the British did quit the Sudan for a time, they returned in spectacular style with Kitchener's victory at the battle of Omdurman in 1898. And in the meantime, they elaborated a system of control of neighbouring Egypt that perfectly illustrated the curious mechanics of the British empire.
Britain had sent a military force in 1882 essentially to protect its investments. Egypt had gone bankrupt: the (pre-IMF) answer was to send in a banker - Sir Evelyn Baring - to sort out its public finances. Baring (nicknamed "over-Baring" and later ennobled as the Earl of Cromer) came, saw - and stayed, for over 20 years, as the unofficial ruler of the country. He personified the British exercise of power.
As an administrative expert, he tirelessly proclaimed Britain's vital contribution to building Egypt's infrastructure to prepare it for responsible independence. (Brendon cites an estimate that Britain made no less than 66 official declarations of intent to quit Egypt over the four decades after 1882.) But he knew his mission would fail: it was impossible to make "a Western silk purse out of an Eastern sow's ear". The imperial presence was shot through with this sort of "Orientalism".
Cromer was not one of those given to seeing - as Florence Nightingale did - the epic ruins of Egyptian civilisation as a memento mori of imperial power (she wondered if Britain might "turn into Picts again as Egypt has turned into Arabs"). But he had a sharp insight into the essentially contradictory(or shipshod) nature of Anglo-Saxon ideals - "the ideal of good government, which connotes the continuance of his own supremacy, and the ideal of self-government, which connotes the abdication of his supreme position".
PIERS BRENDON DOES not directly endorse this explanation of the "decline and fall" he describes, and it is never quite clear whether he is analysing a process of decline, or simply painting an exotic panorama, adorned with a mass of character sketches (at which he is a dab hand). The exoticism is inescapable, of course, when the subject matter spans the globe from Hong Kong via Gallipoli to the Caribbean, and he gives it full rein. His anecdotal method can sometimes let him down, as when he offers little more than an Irish joke ("Enlist? Is ut me enlist? An' a war goin' on!") as an account of Irish participation in the first World War. And his levity of tone (certainly modelled on his hero Gibbon's, but less funny) sometimes seems inappropriate. Likewise, his evident amusement at the great labour leader Ernest Bevin's proletarian speech may not be shared by all his readers.
The final quietus of the British empire seems to have stimulated an increasing flow of large-scale histories of it. Ultimately Brendon's chronicle, for all its size, covers fairly familiar territory. He uses many unpublished sources, certainly, but even a hundred sets of private papers can do little more than add a splash of colour here and there (one example at random is the Singapore official who provoked a row with his neighbour by trying to build an air raid shelter during the Japanese advance on the great naval base).
Some major turning points emerge: the Irish independence struggle, the fall of Singapore, and perhaps above all the grisly post-war failures in India and Palestine. But how to explain the entire amazing saga? A page of summing-up at the end of so big a book seems to sell the whole thing a bit short. How much harm (or good) did the empire do? He delivers a few judgments at various stages, but they never amount to a systematic evaluation. For Brendon, "Britain's record in Africa was better than that of other states", and he seemingly endorses a governor of Nigeria's remark that "the great merit of British rule is that there is so little of it". Yet this minimalism could have baleful effects - as it definitely did in Egypt, and indeed in Iraq. The latter makes a surprisingly brief appearance. Maybe admirably, he has resisted the temptation to shape his book to fit current concerns. He neither justifies the empire nor condemns it: he is content to treat it as an extraordinary story, and he tells it well.
Charles Townshend is Professor of International History at Keele University. The paperback of his last book, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, was published by Penguin last year
Piers Brendon treats the history of the British empire as an extraordinary story The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781-1997 By Piers Brendon Jonathan Cape, 793pp. £25