Churchill and Empire, by Lawrence James – a review

A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of the day, when everything that really mattered had already been handled, and being subject to a series of trivial dismissals, outbursts of comic rage, and with little effort made to understand what might be an appropriate way to govern these immense territories. I am sorry to place a limit on anyone’s admiration for Churchill, but there it is.

It is important for historians to make an effort to understand individuals by the standards of their own day, and not ours. There is a dismal school that finds it rewarding to debate whether Napoleon was homophobic or not, but for the most part we have to try to understand where a figure’s standards of judgment and thought stood in relation to the spectrum of opinion of his own day. Churchill’s attitudes to the empire, and in particular to the races that the empire ruled, performed an interesting trajectory while not actually changing very much at all in the course of a long life.

Churchill, as a young officer and journalist in Sudan and South Africa, and subsequently as the Liberal under-secretary for the colonies from 1905, actually had some bien-pensant aspects. In an office where it was perfectly all right to talk of Jan Smuts as having ‘all the cunning of his race and calling’ or refer to a freedom fighter as ‘the Mad Mullah’, Churchill’s attitudes were relatively sound. Though he believed in ‘the gulf which separates the African negro from the immemorial civilizations of India and China’, he also stood up for the importance of treating Africans well, promising during the Transvaal crisis that ‘British influence will continue to be a kindly and benignant influence over subject races’.