The British Empire produced some great books. Both sides of the debate over the empire’s moral worth should be able to agree on that at least.
Empire was a major subject the nineteenth century’s great essayists and historians. Macaulay’s History of England is underpinned by the assumption that the history of England was ‘emphatically the history of progress’. The Whig school of history, embodied by G.M. Trevelyan, entrenched Macaulay’s ideas. Britain’s destiny was to bring progress to less fortunate people, which was reflected by the Victorian imperial policy of ‘civilising’ the globe. J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur describes that noble, presumptuous and often catastrophic aim in a richly satirical setting: poetry reading continues at Krishnapur despite mutiny, siege and cholera.
Farrell’s Empire Trilogy is part of a tradition of imperial fiction (a tradition now dominated by works from formerly subjugated peoples). Kipling is the most renowned of imperial writers, supported by the jingoistic derring-do of Rider Haggard and A.E.W. Mason. All three saw their books filmed in the 1930s, particularly by the Kordas — whose technicolour production of Mason’s The Four Feathers was a smash box office hit in 1939. Bernard Porter, the esteemed historian of empire, has argued convincingly that the British Empire was an ‘elite project’ which left the British cold in their urban squalor. But the popular success of these writers and ensuing film adaptations suggest that the masses weren’t wholly indifferent to a map that was painted pink.
But, certainly, the empire came to be viewed with open ambivalence the longer it persisted, which contributed to its disintegration. There is a clear sense of this in Paul Scott’s towering Raj Quartet, which was brilliantly adapted for television by Granada in the early ‘80s (above). Scott characterises a divided and personally conflicted class of sahibs. There are aspiring careerists who see the empire as a route to social advancement. There are romantics who believe that Britain is still a civilising force in India, the ‘mother and father’ of the people. There are the exhausted old hands who recognise that their ‘India is finished’. There are racists who believe that India must be ruled by a mix of ‘fear and contempt’. There are opportunists who see an easy million here and there. There are the guilty, those who will ‘stay on’ to amend for the sins of their fathers. And there are a handful of Indians and British who made the mistake of trying to assimilate into the other’s culture, who tried and failed to ‘cross the river’ as Scott puts it.
The Raj Quartet captures the moral complexity of empire — the difficulty of coming down on one side of a vexatious issue. It shows how the modern world was forged by Britain’s rapid capitulation, and what happened to those who did or did not capitulate. Jeremy Paxman’s latest TV series invites you to consider what the empire did to the British, look no further than Paul Scott for an answer. It left them diminished and demoralised. And above all, it left them loathed — not absolutely, but mostly. Scott’s bleak version has lessened with time. Who would have thought that a British monarch would visit Ireland as successfully as the Queen did last year?
I’ve only mentioned a handful of empire books here. What’s your favourite?
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