A ‘gigantic confidence trick’ — that is how Jeremy Paxman describes the British Empire. The first episode of the TV series which accompanies his book, Empire: What ruling the World Did to the British, aired last night.
Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’, based on the conceit that a handful of well-equipped soldiers and well-educated officials could provide stable government for the feckless potentates of India, Africa and the Middle East. Any challenge to British interests was ‘met with savage retaliation’, which invariably resulted in expansion.
The answer, then, to the problem of imperial security was deeper and further subjugation. (This was indiscriminate of race or creed. The Boer War and the concentration camps into which non-combatant Boers were interned is the most compelling riposte to those who say that British conquest was a racist endeavour.) Paxman is scathing of a lust for ‘power’ for its own sake. His disgust works better on screen than it does in print because he doesn’t need to say anything. He just looks.
But it wasn’t all blood and tears. There was sweat, too. The shaming episodes at Amritsar, Kubusie, Dublin and so forth were a small part of an elaborate ‘confidence trick’. Britain is naturally short of manpower, so these brutal outbursts had to be brief, although they were frequent. The Pax Britannica depended on the illusion of power sustained by pomp and circumstance, and the deluge of money created by industrial strength at home and maritime commerce abroad, all of which was protected by the mighty Royal Navy.
It is 50 years since the sun set on the British Empire, but we’re still trying to pull a fast one. Paxman insists that the ‘memory [of our imperial past] has never wholly faded’ and he suggests that the recent adventures in Libya and the Falklands are indicative of a design to keep little Britain at the top table. We were bluffers then, and we’re bluffers now.
Paxman is right, although his analysis relates to the British government rather than ‘the British’. If anything he does not go far enough. His book doesn’t fully explain that the empire became a trade racket during the late nineteenth century, as Britain struggled to maintain its economic hegemony in the face of first German and then American competition. The great debates about free trade and tariff reform, which tore apart Gladstone’s Liberals and continued to dominate British politics until 1939, are a symptom of that underlying fact.
The policy failed. Historians from A.J.P. Taylor to Judith Brown have argued, to varying degrees, that the British Empire collapsed because it ran out of money. Ruinously expensive (in every sense of the term) world wars hastened the process, but the root cause was that the workshop of the world had moved.
Economic decline remains the predominant feature in British politics, and a major foreign policy consideration. The attempt to revive the Commonwealth is, in truth, little more than a renewed effort to create a soft market for British goods. It’s of more interest — and importance — than our frolics in the Sahara.
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