What Ruling the World Did to the British
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2011
Copyright © Jeremy Paxman, 2011
BBC logo copyright © BBC, 1996
The moral right of the author has been asserted
By arrangement with the BBC: the BBC and the BBC logo are trademarks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence
Jacket design: Superfantastic
Jacket images © Kimball Stock
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
The chapter epigraph on page 270 is taken from The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell, published by W&N Fiction, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, London. Reproduced with permission
ISBN: 978-0-67-091960-4
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
By the same author
Friends in High Places
Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life (editor)
The English
The Political Animal
On Royalty
The Victorians
For Elizabeth, Jessie, Jack and Vita, for whom the imperial project meant long periods of either mental or physical separation. Independence is at hand
‘It seems such a shame when the English claim the Earth That they give rise to such hilarity and mirth’
Noël Coward, ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, 1931
‘You’re a Brit, aren’t you?’ It was an accusation. His face was twisted, angry and only about six inches away from mine. His breath was beery. I was backed against a wall outside a drinking club in west Belfast, and two of his friends stood on either side – there was no chance of running for it. This is how it begins, I thought, starting to panic. It ends with a beating in a lock-up garage or the back of a pub somewhere. Or worse.
It didn’t, of course. Within less than a minute an older man had said something and the three youths laid off, sauntering away without a word: next time it really might be an undercover British soldier. I knew what a ‘Brit’ was, all right. But I had never been called one until I arrived in Northern Ireland to cover the war there in the 1970s. Belfast was a dark place – and not just because its street lights had been knocked out in the many battle-zones across the city. It was a conflict murky with injustice, bigotry, exploitation, long memories and short fuses. The terminology reflected what you thought the violence was. The British preferred to call the everyday bombings, gunfights, murders, military funerals and armoured cars on the streets ‘the Troubles’. It might look like a war, but it wasn’t. To the IRA, the violence was definitely part of a war to force the British out of the last corner of their Irish colony. The ‘loyalist’ settler community, almost exclusively the descendants of Scots and others who had been brought to Ireland to make the place safe for England, fought for the right to remain British, despite not living in Britain. The epithet ‘Brits’ referred to the apparatus of imperialism, specifically the army, and by extension all of us who came to Ireland from England, Wales or Scotland, although it was really the English who were hated. I did not much like the term.
I had arrived in Ireland woefully ill-equipped to understand what was happening there. Anti-colonial wars belonged to another time in history. This is even more the case for many British people now: the average age in Britain is forty, which means that apart from a vague awareness of the war to reconquer the Falkland Islands or the ceremonial handing back of Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, most citizens have little sense of Britain as an imperial power.
Anyone who has grown up or grown old in Britain since the Second World War has done so in an atmosphere of irresistible decline, to the point where now Britain’s imperial history is no more than the faint smell of mothballs in a long-unopened wardrobe. Its evidence is all around us, but who cares? It is the empty fourth plinth at the north-west corner of Trafalgar Square that interests us, not the three that are occupied by a king and a couple of imperial generals. Ask us what those generals did and we’re lost. Even the most exotic empire-builders have sunk from our minds. Charles Gordon is a good example. His unhinged mission to Khartoum and subsequent beheading raised him to saint-like status in Victorian Britain. A statue, showing the great martyr befezzed and cross-legged on a camel was placed in the middle of the traffic at the main crossroads in Khartoum, to remind the Sudanese who was boss. At independence in 1956 they took it down and sent it back to England, where it was re-erected at the school in Woking founded at Queen Victoria’s behest as a memorial to the general. It stands there, grey and unexpected, to this day. They used to tell the story of a small boy taken after church each Sunday to admire the national hero. After several weeks’ veneration, the child asked, ‘Daddy, who is the man on Gordon’s back?’ But even the jokes have passed into history now.
And yet the sense of being British is clearly very different to being, say, Swedish or Mexican. No one would have a Mexican up against a wall in Ireland because of his nationality. Ever since the moment when I realized that there were people who saw me differently because of my country’s history, I have wondered what that history has done to us as a nation. We think we know what the British Empire did to the world. But what did it do to us?
For the most part, we look back on our imperial history simply as the actions of men and women we cannot identify with, the product of motives we do not really understand. It is emotionally easier and politically more convenient to inquire no further. But it is not particularly helpful. If we accept – as any thoughtful Indian does – that the British Empire had a shaping influence on India, then where is the common sense in claiming that the same history has not had at least as important a role in Britain? Can we seriously pretend that a project which dominated the way that Britain regarded the world for so many hundreds of years has had no lasting influence on the colonizers, too? Without understanding how we looked at the rest of the world, we cannot really understand ourselves. It is nearly fifty years since the then US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, minted the only remark for which he is remembered in Britain, that ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.’ The remark has since become tediously familiar, but the fact that the observation remains true all these years later reflects the continuing significance of the imperial experience. ‘Finding a role’ has (along with not going bankrupt) been the main task of every British government for the last sixty years. In a strange way, the one place which has yet properly to decolonize itself is Britain.
It is most obvious in international affairs, where the imperial habit remains a very hard one to break. When a British prime minister puffs out his chest and declares he ‘will not tolerate’ some African or Middle Eastern despot, he speaks not as a creature of a twenty-first-century political party in a dilapidated democracy but as the latest reincarnation of Castlereagh or Palmerston – somehow, British foreign policy has never shaken off a certain nineteenth-century swagger, and the implied suggestion that if anything happens to a British citizen, a Royal Navy gunboat will be dispatched to menace the impertinent perpetrators. It is not entirely their fault that British politicians bluster in this fashion – the frayed old frock coat comes with the job. The merest glance at regimental battle honours in the British army discloses a roll-call of colonial wars, from Abyssinia to Zululand, by way of everywhere from Canada to New Zealand. This long history of fighting in faraway places of which we know next to nothing has left the British army positively eager to be deployed across the world. When, for example, the Grenadier Guards were sent to Afghanistan in 2007, they arrived sporting battle honours from the Crimean War, the Opium Wars, a campaign against Islamist forces in Sudan in the 1890s, another to subdue the Boers in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, and a ‘temporary’ British intervention in Egypt which began in 1882 and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. Once you’ve got that sort of pedigree you’re keen to measure yourself against it. And perhaps, at another level, this history of involvement overseas also helps to explain why it is that British charities play such a disproportionately large role in international development and disaster relief.
When Edward Gibbon said, ‘I have no way of judging of the future but by the past,’ he acknowledged the determining influence that history has on the present. Can we, for example, understand the European Union without recognizing the French fear of the Germans and the Germans’ fear of themselves? And in the United Kingdom it has proved very hard – if indeed anyone has really tried – to discard all that stuff about how Britannia rules the waves. It is the imperial heritage which gives the Foreign Office the supercilious vanity that it somehow understands the developing world better than countries which have not had the sola-topi experience. Despite being the biggest and most prosperous country in Europe, Germany does not command a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, because it lost the Second World War. Britain may have emerged from that conflict battered and broke, but it still possessed sufficient imperial presence to become one of the Permanent Five. And, had the United States not once been part of the British Empire, the much fetishized ‘special relationship’ would never have become such an obsession in the minds of British governments.
It goes much further. It was their empire which convinced the British that they were somehow special. Yet the disappearance of their empire has failed to persuade them that they are not so very different from much of the rest of Europe. Is it any wonder that Britain’s relations with the continent are so tortured and its commitment to the ‘ever closer union’ sounds so hollow, when its relations with the rest of the world are managed by an institution housed in a great neo-classical building whose very design was intended to impress upon foreigners the unique splendour of British rule? The interior walls are covered in murals portraying ‘Pax Britannica’ as the reincarnation of the Roman Empire. (In the 1960s there were plans to pull the whole place down and replace it with something of glass, concrete and steel as a sign of Britain’s new role in the world. The money ran out before the demolition contractors could move in, which was a rather better demonstration of the country’s new status.) These heavy public buildings designed to make a statement about the solidity of British purpose can be found everywhere from Dundee to Dunedin: schools, parliaments, stock exchanges, police stations, railway termini, all executed in neo-classical or neo-Gothic style, regardless of whether or not either was appropriate for local conditions. Like the Foreign Office, they stand there still, slightly shabby on the outside, traceried with electric wires and plastered with plastic notices within, reminders of a vain and vanished glory, recalling the desert ruins of Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’ (‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’). In the one-time colonies these buildings speak of the past. In Britain they are where the business of the present is transacted, and to suggest that we have somehow developed an ability to ignore the influence of our physical surroundings is to ask us to believe a great deal. As Winston Churchill remarked, ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ We tiptoe into the future down marbled corridors ringing to the clip of Victorian heels.
And then there are Britain’s constitutional arrangements, not least the country’s continued possession of a monarchy. The anthropologist Arthur Hocart spent years attempting to understand the origins of kingship and concluded that all he could say with certainty was that when history began, there were gods and there were monarchs: the earliest-known religion was a belief in the divinity of kings. No rational person has believed that nonsense for centuries. But the fact that Britain is still ruled by a representative of this prehistoric institution is in large part the consequence of empire. Giving Victoria the bombastic title of empress in 1876 had been an empty, cost-free gesture by that great regal flatterer Benjamin Disraeli. But the monarchical tone of empire was useful in co-opting the support of other kings, from Bangalore to Zululand, enabling a form of colonization in which the new subject state might claim hardly to notice that it had been emasculated. One Basuto king is said to have told Victoria, ‘My country is your blanket, O Queen, and my people the lice upon it.’ Across the world, cities, provinces, lakes, mountains, gardens, parks, highways, stations, puddings and flowers were named after Victoria, and many of her people assumed that the Great White Queen was an integral part of the empire’s success. She was not: she just got lucky. Her sons and grandsons, with their imperial tours, durbars, colonial statues, tributes and tiger-hunting were lucky, too. By the same token, you could say that Queen Elizabeth II was unlucky. Her role has been to preside over the disappearance of empire, as the number of British possessions has shrunk to a few curious dots in the seas and oceans of the world. But just as lands were claimed in the name of a British queen, so their independence required a royal witness, with Elizabeth or one of her family on hand to watch as the British flag was lowered and the flag of the new state raised. Look at any photograph of Commonwealth leaders since the early 1950s and the one face you can almost guarantee to find there is that of Elizabeth II, and it is largely due to her that the institution, such as it is, survives at all: like the empire, it smells of monarchy. Elizabeth may never have enjoyed her great-great-grandmother’s title of empress of India, but the fact that other nations have taken her seriously has encouraged the British to do likewise.
And the empire did more than consolidate the position of the monarchy. It did much to make the political identity of Britain, too. Of the many elements which came together to create a ‘British’ identity – Henry VIII’s break with Rome, say, or the adoption of a Scottish king when Elizabeth I died childless – the importance of England’s growing basket of overseas possessions cannot be exaggerated. In the seventeenth century, as they watched the English begin to pile up overseas possessions, Scots had dreamed of a colony or so of their own and attempted to establish a settlement in Panama. They reckoned without the difficult terrain, the pestilential climate and the perfidious English. The scheme collapsed in 1700, and with it ambitions for a Scottish empire. Henceforth, the Scots would become some of the most effective builders of the joint enterprise of a British empire. In the first fifty years after the 1707 Act of Union, 30,000 Scots settled in America. Others would pour into Canada, Australia and New Zealand. By 1776 there were 220 Scots employed at the highest level of the administrations in Madras and Bengal: Sir Walter Scott would come to describe India as ‘the corn chest for Scotland’. Explorers like Mungo Park cut through jungles. David Livingstone left Lanarkshire to become the most famous missionary in history. Scottish traders like William Jardine and James Matheson built a trading network across the Far East. One-third of colonial governors between 1850 and 1939 are said to have been Scots.
The army became the most visible means by which the distinctive characteristics of the subjugated Welsh, Scots and Irish were channelled into the British identity. By the early nineteenth century both Ireland and Scotland were sending disproportionately large numbers of soldiers to fight Britain’s colonial wars. Irish formations like the 18th Regiment of Foot saw combat in North America, Egypt, China and South Africa, the Connaught Rangers in South America, India and in both wars against the Boers. The 1st Battalion of the 24th Foot, which became the South Wales Borderers, lost 540 of its men at Isandlwana in the Zulu Wars. The Royal Welch Fusiliers, who had battled American revolutionaries at Bunker Hill, Yorktown and Lexington, remained inordinately proud of the archaic spelling of their name: Robert Graves, who served with them in the First World War, thought that it recalled the Wales of Henry Tudor and Owen Glendower. A similar integration of separateness happened in Scotland, where ordinary Scots were prohibited from wearing the tartan after the suppression of the 1745 rebellion, with the exception of the nation’s regiments in the British army, all of which adopted them. The ‘thin red line tipped with steel’ that the Times correspondent William Russell saw repulsing Russian cavalry at Balaclava in 1854 was made up of kilted Highlanders of the 93rd Regiment. A genuinely new British political identity had been forged by the empire. Is it any wonder that, with the empire gone, increasing numbers ask what is the point of the Union?
And the empire changed not merely the political sentiments of the United Kingdom, but the very genetic make-up of its citizens. Since history began, Britain has been a nation of immigrants, whether Romans, Scandinavians, Irish, French, Jews, Italians or Dutch. But the empire drew migrants from across the planet. The world’s oldest Chinatown is in Liverpool. Hundreds of thousands of Irish poured into English and Scottish cities in the middle years of the nineteenth century. By the end of the century there were about 50,000 Germans and perhaps 150,000 Russian Jews in the country. Immigrant families built banks such as Rothschilds, Barings and Warburgs, gave us high-street retailers like Marks and Spencer, Moss Bros, Burtons and Top Shop, and supermarkets like Tesco. The first British Indian MP was elected in 1892. In the second half of the twentieth century, vast numbers of migrants from one-time colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and the Indian subcontinent landed in Britain and changed the look and feel of many cities. These communities produced writers and artists who invigorated the native arts, sportsmen and women who raised standards of performance, and cooks who did the national cuisine a big favour.
The traffic in the other direction had been enormous, too. The distinctive character of the British Empire – unlike its Russian or Austro-Hungarian counterparts – was its immense geographical spread, from tiny atolls to entire continents. This was partly because its perpetrators lived on an island: it is striking that the age of imperialism begins only after Queen Mary had lost Calais, the last English possession in France, in 1558. Thereafter, the European concern of most British governments was merely to see that no individual power became strong enough to menace British possessions overseas. That the English had seawater in their veins tended to make overseas adventures more attractive than they might have seemed: when you are surrounded by sea, any journey anywhere involves travelling by water – the difference between visiting Norway and visiting New Zealand is merely one of degree.
There is no completely reliable estimate of how many people left Britain for a new life overseas during the years of empire, but most of them never returned, and by 1900 a majority of English-speakers were living outside Europe. The British diaspora created a network of family connections stretching from a grey, damp island in the North Atlantic to dusty sheep stations in Australia, rough-and-ready mining towns in Africa and snowy wildernesses in Canada. So while at any one time the imperial life was being lived only by a minority of the population, the colonial experience was familiar to many more. The awareness of ‘abroad’ lives on in the fact that more than three-quarters of the British population hold passports. In the United States – great immigrant nation that it is – the figure is less than a third.
When the British went to live in the lands they conquered they were confronted immediately with the question of what it was that made them distinct from the people among whom they lived. The number who asked the difficult question ‘What’s so special about us?’ must have been small. Indeed, when you read the popular literature of the period its most offensive characteristic is the assumption of racial superiority over ‘brutes’ and ‘savages’. As Cecil Rhodes put it, ‘We are the finest race in the world and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’ As the empire matured, a peculiar illogicality seized the British: we rule more of the world than any other nation, therefore we must be superior to any other nation. In fact, of course, it was technological advance and entrepreneurial flair which gave birth to the empire. But a belief in some moral pre-eminence offered reassurance to the anxious imperialist. For the majority of empire officials – district officers and magistrates, policemen, teachers, farmers and engineers – the role was perhaps justification itself. Yet it was a role in an alien land, and the customs and conventions of Hove or Huddersfield were absent. So the daily business of living in a British community – even a community of one or two, out in the bush – required the invention of a set of norms, of things which were done at certain times of the day, and things which were definitely not done at any time. These communities were obliged to define what being British meant. In the bungalows and clubs, the sundowners on the verandah and the suet puddings at the dinner table, they were acting out a version of what life was like at home. But it was a not-quite-perfect representation.
Creating and running this enormous enterprise required a certain type of individual, which gave Britain its idiosyncratic public-school system, designed to produce not intellectuals but ‘sound chaps’ – capable, dependable, resourceful. They were to be oblivious to discomfort and able to inspire respect, for through them was the reality of the British Empire to be made clear. Parents understood the job of the school. In Tom Brown’s School Days, Squire Brown knew what he wanted from the education his son was to receive at Rugby. ‘What is he sent to school for?’ he asks. ‘If only he’ll turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, and a gentleman, and a Christian, that’s all I want.’ Add in a firm handshake and an ability to play cricket and you have the makings of a district officer. That such a key part of the British educational system was for generations geared not to mental achievement but to something else – ‘pluck’ is perhaps the best word for it – seems at odds with the fact that Britain has nearly twice as many Nobel Laureates as France, five times the total of Italy, Russia or Japan. But these men and women of intellectual pre-eminence are a memorial not to the famous Victorian public schools, created expressly with the empire in mind, but to the country’s grammar schools and to the huge intellectual contribution made by refugees and migrants. Let Yorke Harberton, the hero of G. A. Henty’s With Roberts to Pretoria, stand for all of the products of the imperial educational system:
a typical public-school boy – straight and clean-limbed, free from all awkwardness, bright in expression, and possessed of a large amount of self-possession, or, as he himself would have called it, ‘cheek’ … a little particular about the set of his Eton jacket and trousers and the appearance of his boots; as hard as nails and almost tireless; a good specimen of the class by which Britain has been built up, her colonies formed and her battle-fields won …
Not all Henty’s heroes came from such privileged backgrounds, for at most the public schools could educate only about 20,000 boys a year. But one of the lessons Henty and other imperial authors tried to teach was that the empire gave opportunities for anyone who had the guts to seize them with both hands. By the 1950s, total sales of Henty’s novels were reckoned at about 25 million and they had become an important means of passing on the values of imperial education to anyone who could read.
The fate of many of the products of these schools is captured in one of Rudyard Kipling’s most resonant poems about empire, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ (‘A great and glorious thing it is / To learn, for seven years or so, / The Lord knows what of that and this …’). It describes what happens when a young public-school subaltern is sent to the North-West Frontier.
A scrimmage in a Border Station
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!
The walls of churches across Britain are plastered with memorials to young men who died in inconsequential ambushes like this, or were carried off by fever in some obscure location the churchgoers at home could not place on a map of the world. The memorials to these imperialists created a sense that there really were corners of foreign fields that were forever England. The deaths of grander figures created a distinctive empire iconography, as familiar in its way as stained-glass representations of the Passion of Christ. Tableaux depicting the last moments of General Wolfe during the battle for Quebec, surrounded by his grieving officers and native Indian guide, of the mortally wounded Horatio Nelson lying in the bowels of HMS Victory, or of General Gordon serene on the steps of the palace in Khartoum, about to be speared to death, became familiar to countless numbers of citizens. The streets of our cities are peopled with statues and monuments to these generals, admirals and explorers who died to ensure that Britannia’s bounds were set wider still and wider.
But the most vibrant legacy of empire evident every day is not its now deeply unfashionable poetry, music or paintings but the sports which were either invented or codified to keep its young men fit and occupied and somehow to pass on to the colonized, through cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis or golf, some of the imperial values. These sports were also supposed to inculcate personal courage and collective loyalty in the builders of empire. The supreme imperial game was cricket – as an 1868 guide to outdoor sport put it, ‘We even think that square-leg to a hard hitter is no bad training for coolness at the cannon’s mouth.’ The belief is best expressed in Henry Newbolt’s extraordinary poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (The Torch of Life), an account of a close-run battle in 1885 Sudan, which he saw through the prism of his days as a scholarship boy at Clifton College:
There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play, and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
The sand of the desert is sodden red –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed its banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks –
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’
It is absurd, of course – British victories against tribal peoples were so often the triumph of guns against spears. But it is the authentic language of empire. At the battle of the Alma in the Crimean War, Sir John Astley of the Scots Guards watched as a Russian cannonball cut through his company. He recalled in his memoirs that he had shouted to one of his men ‘who was our best wicket-keeper’ to catch it. The man replied, ‘No sir! It had a bit too much pace on. I thought you was long stop, so I left it for you.’ The cricket analogy was ever present. During the siege of Ladysmith in 1899 – two years after Newbolt had composed his famous lines – one Old Etonian wrote to his parents: ‘I think we “played the game” in keeping the Boers busy with us here.’
A couple of generations have now grown up ridiculing that sort of attitude. Everyone knows that war is not a game, and no one is much interested in the idioms which made it possible for our ancestors to deal with danger and death. It has been a long time since the age and beliefs of empire seemed an attractive subject for creativity. From E. M. Forster and J. G. Farrell to Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith, the stuff of fiction is the end of empire and its aftermath. In 1960, you might have gone to the cinema to see Kenneth More playing a polished British army captain smuggling a six-year-old Hindu prince out of danger in North West Frontier. By 1970 you were more likely to be watching Carry On up the Khyber, with Sid James as the military governor, Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond, and Charles Hawtrey as the scandalously underpanted Private Widdle in the 3rd Foot and Mouth Regiment. In fiction, the hero of the hour was now Tom Brown’s tormentor, the cad Harry Flashman. By the turn of the millennium, there was hardly an imperial hero who had not had a few buckets of mud thrown at him. The great explorers of Africa, such as Richard Burton, were racists. Captain Scott had condemned his men to icy deaths in Antarctica by vainglorious bungling. The sexuality of the hero of Khartoum, General Gordon, was suspect. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, was cracked. The tone of movies had changed, too. David Lean’s portrayal of a troubled egotist in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) was much less about grand imperial designs than about a romantic, misunderstood loner. The new heroes were the men and women who fought against the British brutes – the Mahatma in Gandhi (1982), the medieval Scottish rebel William Wallace in Braveheart (1995) or the modern Irish revolutionary in Michael Collins (1996).
By then, the British thoroughbred had become a rattle-ribbed old nag. The country had been exhausted and impoverished by two world wars, had withdrawn from its colonies and was demonstrably unsure quite where its future lay. The United States, the new global policeman, professed itself an enemy of imperialism and, in first undermining British attempts to manage the Palestine issue, and then seeing off the duplicity behind the plot to seize the Suez Canal in 1956, delivered mortal blows to the country’s self-confidence. Colonies seemed to belong to another time in history.
And it had all passed so quickly. The fate of the crumbling Ottoman Empire worried European politicians for the best part of a century: the British Empire’s illness was speedy and fatal and carried it off in a few decades. The British came out of both world wars on the winning side, and so never had the need to reimagine themselves as anything other than what they had once been, nor the need to think much about the legacy of their actions. All that was required was a readiness to accept themselves much as they had been beforehand, but in a diminished state. How much better it might have been to have had the chance to devise another destiny.
‘To plunder, to slaughter, to steal – these things they misname empire’
Tacitus, c. AD 98
There is not much to Port Royal these days, just a scrabble of streets, a couple of bare-shelved stores and an open sewer running down to the sea. It is certainly not royal, and – apart from the odd fishing boat pulled up on the black beach – not much of a port either. Half a dozen barefoot boys play cricket in the dirt, their wickets a plastic beer case and an up-ended table with two legs missing. There is a policeman, but nothing for him to do, for nothing much happens in Port Royal. A young man pushes a trolley through the rutted streets, a bowl of goat stew kept warm on some glowing charcoal. He has ambitions, he says: one day he plans to have his travelling restaurant mounted on full-sized bicycle wheels. Apart from a betting shack where improbable numbers of dollars are staked on unlikely outcomes, the poverty-stricken fishing village of today bears little relation to what went before. For once this collection of dilapidated buildings at the south-eastern tip of Jamaica was one of the most notorious places on earth. A couple of earthquakes, a terrible fire and numerous hurricanes – each said to be God’s judgement on the loose morals of earlier residents – have removed most traces of its time as ‘the wickedest city in the world’.
‘This town is the Sodom of the New World,’ wrote a seventeenth-century clergyman who made the mistake of visiting the newly established English colony, ‘and since the majority of its population consists of pirates, cutthroats, whores and some of the vilest persons in the whole of the world, I felt my permanence there was of no use and I could better preach the Word of God elsewhere among a better sort of folk.’ He departed on the same ship that had brought him, leaving the place to its vagabonds, escaped jailbirds and prostitutes such as the notorious ‘No Conscience Nan’, ‘Salt-Beef Peg’ and ‘Buttock-de-Clink Jenny’. The place floated on a sea of rum – by 1661 the town had stirred itself to acquire a council, which, in the month of June alone, issued over forty new licences for drinking dens. (There was no need of visiting clergy because the rum they served was so strong it was known as ‘Kill Devil’.) A governor of Jamaica drily observed that ‘The Spaniards wondered much at the sickness of our people, until they knew of the strength of their drinks, but then they wondered more that they were not all dead.’ Port Royal made the wild towns which grew up around nineteenth-century gold strikes seem like quiet country villages, for one simple reason. It was built not on digging gold out of the ground but on stealing it. This tropical Klondike flourished on maritime gangsterism. Jamaica lay ‘in the Spaniard’s bowels and in the heart of his trade’.
The parasitic process went like this. The Spanish robbed the Aztec and Inca empires of Central and South America, and then transported the precious metals under armed guard to the Caribbean coast, where they were loaded on to ships to be carried back to Spain. The thugs of Port Royal simply put to sea, mugged the Spanish and then scuttled back to Jamaica as fast as possible. The British were not the first into this uncertain but often immensely profitable business, for French pirates had begun falling upon Spanish convoys soon after they started to sail for Europe from the Americas. But the British were the most ruthless, and Sir Francis Drake’s prayer ‘I know many means to do her Majesty good service and to make us rich, for we must have gold before we see England,’ can stand as a mission-statement for all of them. When Drake finally reached home – after plundering a mule train on the Panamanian isthmus loaded with gold and silver in 1573 – not only was he rich but he soon became an English national hero. There was something about the man’s freebooting spirit that chimed with the mood of a sixteenth-century England, a nation beginning to feel that being an island gave both security and opportunity: when you have no troublesome land borders (the Welsh had been ‘pacified’ and the Scots were increasingly more envious than dangerous), all foreigners are exotic and it is easy to feel indifferent about what your citizens do to them. For anyone willing to face the risks involved, piracy was free enterprise, red in tooth and claw, open to anyone and offering the prospect of great wealth.
Its practitioners were a hugely varied bunch. In true pirate fashion, the origins of Edward Teach – ‘Blackbeard’ – are obscure. His end is not: in 1718 his severed head hung from the bowsprit of a ship sent from Carolina to tackle the menace of piracy. Another pirate, Stede Bonnet, was said to have been a gentleman plantation owner who took up robbery to escape his nagging wife. (Not that it was an entirely male world: two women pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were captured and escaped the gallows only when they revealed that they were pregnant, Anne Bonny ending her days as a respectable matriarch of eighty-four.) Howel Davis had been first mate on a slaving ship. Henry Mainwaring was the son of an MP and graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford: he was neither the first nor the last man to take up the trade after being employed by the Crown to suppress piracy, and he helped other ‘respectable’ citizens to embark on piratical careers by stage-managing bogus kidnappings, so that they could, if they chose, later return to normal life. William Kidd, hanged at execution dock in Wapping in 1701, was another who had decided that joining the pirates was a more lucrative career than the commission he had been given to hunt them down.
As the fates of some of these characters indicate, the British government was in two (or more) minds about those of its citizens who found the pickings of the Spanish Main – the Caribbean Sea alongside the mainland of Spanish America – irresistible. Medieval convention allowed those who had been robbed in foreign territory and been unable to get satisfaction in court to apply for permission to recoup any losses by force of arms. From this, it was only a small step to the invention of privateering, a system by which the Admiralty Court in London granted permission to private ships to attack the vessels of Britain’s enemies. In exchange for a licence to steal, the government demanded a share of the proceeds. The pith-helmeted, district-officered empire which was wound up in the twentieth century had its origins in the chaotic free enterprise of places like Port Royal. For while Jamaica may have been on the fringes of the known world, it was integral to the London Treasury and a central part of the strategy for war against Spain. This pattern of using freelances or proxies was one the British would employ time and again as they built their empire. Sometimes territories were conquered at the order of governments, but much of the time the flag was planted by licensed companies or some freebooting capitalist given a nod or a wink in London.
One of the most spectacular of these adventurers was Henry Morgan, a Welshman thought to have arrived in Jamaica in the 1650s. Morgan obtained a licence to fight the Spanish at sea, but – like many similar figures in the centuries to come – recognized that a faraway government would be almost powerless to stop him doing as he pleased, and would be likely, moreover, to thank him for it afterwards. In July 1668 he led a group of pirates in an audacious attack on the fortified town of Portobello in present-day Panama, where the Spanish unloaded the mule trains which had carried their treasure down to the coast for onward shipment by armed convoy to Europe. Military cunning and piratical enthusiasm overwhelmed Spanish unpreparedness: Morgan seized the town and in the following four weeks denuded it of spoils worth more than Jamaica’s agricultural exports for an entire year. He even forced the Spanish to pay him a ransom to leave Portobello. The individual pirate’s share of the plunder from Portobello was five or six times the annual wage of a seventeenth-century seaman. When news of the raid reached London, the Spanish Ambassador wrung his hands and moaned. The British gave their characteristic performance of sympathy, mild regret and practical indifference. What, they seemed to suggest, can we do? In truth, the British had discovered that contracting out the making of war – or money – was a policy which it was much easier to start than to finish.
When they would later come to justify their empire to the world (and to themselves), the political aspects of this robbery were presented as something rather more dignified. Early pirates talked of themselves as knights on some blue-water crusade against a corrupt, barbarous and lazy Spain. When someone had the impertinence to describe Henry Morgan in print as a buccaneer he sued the publishers for libel – and won. In 1664 the British had sent a new governor to Jamaica, bearing orders to improve relations with Spain and put a stop to privateering. Fortunately for Morgan, Sir Thomas Modyford’s political convictions were more than a match for the promiscuity of ‘No Conscience Nan’. He had brought with him hundreds of planters to whom he promised land on which they could grow sugar to feed the immense European appetite for the stuff. But clearing the dense jungle to create sugar plantations was a slow, laborious business – even when the work was done by slaves being imported from Africa. Within weeks of his arrival and his high-sounding proclamation to ban privateering, Modyford was writing home, explaining that he had changed his mind and would accomplish his mission step by step. In fact, the new Governor had decided there was simply too much money at stake in robbery. In 1667 he appointed Morgan admiral of the privateers and was already taking a cut of the proceeds himself.
Three years later came news that at long last the feuding between Britain and Spain was over. The Spanish had been plundering the New World since before the arrival of the British, but under the terms of the Treaty of Madrid they recognized Jamaica and other British possessions in the Caribbean. The pirates in Port Royal heard of the peace agreement when it was proclaimed with a drumbeat. But peace did not last long, and in August Modyford authorized Henry Morgan to put to sea, ‘to do and perform all manner of exploits, which may tend to the preservation and quiet of this island’, the sort of opaque instructions which in the centuries to come characterize so many imperial directions. Morgan’s reputation meant that he had no trouble assembling the biggest gang of privateers ever brought together in the West Indies, who promptly interpreted the promotion of quiet in Jamaica as attacking Panama City, a military operation so ambitious that the Spanish had assumed it to be impossible. Had it not been for the remarkable endurance of the attackers, who sailed upriver and then marched through almost impenetrable jungle without food for four days, the Spanish would have been right about Panama City’s security. But under Morgan’s leadership the attackers fell upon ‘the greatest mart for silver and gold in the whole world’. Although disappointed that the city was not holding more bullion, they still needed a train of 175 mules to carry their plunder down to the coast. Morgan arrived back in Port Royal in April 1671, to be greeted with the thanks of the colony and much business in the town’s grogshops.
But the privateers were about to fall victim to changing fashions. The sack of Panama had been a brilliant feat of arms. But the mercantile class preferred predictable yields. Slaving, for example, was an especially lucrative and largely predictable trade. A new governor, Sir Thomas Lynch, was dispatched to Jamaica carrying orders to end privateering and to arrest Modyford and send him to England. To placate the Spanish, who were furious when they heard what had happened to Panama City, the order was extended to include the arrest of Morgan as well. The two men were shipped to England and locked up in the Tower of London. But Morgan’s ‘disgrace’ did not last long. By 1674 he had been released and sent back to Jamaica, this time as lieutenant-governor. There, he set himself up in some style and invested in sugar production. More discreetly, he invested in the ships of other privateers, who for a while managed to go about their business under licences from the French. By 1682, under Morgan’s patronage, Port Royal had become the most fortified town in English America. When he died, six years later, he had amassed a fortune which included three plantations, assorted servants and 122 slaves.
By then the privateers’ days in the Caribbean were more or less done. Some travelled to North Africa, where they joined the Barbary pirates, whose raids the British did not suppress until the nineteenth century. A few struck out west, crossed the Panamanian isthmus, hijacked boats on the Pacific shore and set off on raids down the coast of South America. An archbishop of Quito remarked that had it not been for their absence of virtue, ‘the buccaneers’ daring in attack, their patience in enduring all sorts of toil and hardship, their perseverance despite the most terrible setbacks and their indomitable courage [might] arouse our admiration; we might call them heroes’. There spoke the vestiges of one empire to the harbingers of another. Wild, tough, enterprising, ruthless and often very much happier when away from the land they called home, the privateers had much in common with those who followed over the next few hundred years.
Sugar was the future. Experience of growing the crop in Barbados (the island had been captured by the British in 1627) had shown the phenomenal rewards to be had: at one point, in the middle of the seventeenth century, Barbadian sugar plantations promised speedy returns of up to 50 per cent on invested capital. And Europe’s appetite was apparently insatiable: in the next 150 years, British sugar consumption grew by 2,500 per cent. Sugar made tea, coffee and drinking chocolate palatable, sweetened the porridge of working people and made possible the puddings for which the country was acquiring an international reputation. The demand was more than strong enough to ride out the occasional hiccup in production caused by hurricanes, droughts or plagues of locusts.
By the time of his death in 1710 – during a punch-up among the colony’s politicians – Peter Beckford, for example, was reputed to own twenty estates, over a thousand slaves and £1,500,000 in further investments. He had arrived in Jamaica as a seaman, his son was Speaker of the Jamaican assembly, a grandson became lord mayor of London and an MP and a great-grandson the exquisitely sensitive collector and creator of the neo-Gothic mansion Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.
The planters were not immigrants – home was thousands of miles away. But their wealth allowed the so-called plantocracy to enjoy lives of cartoonish extravagance. As the appalled young wife of a newly arrived governor noted in her journal:
I don’t wonder now at the fever the people suffer from here – such eating and drinking I never saw! … I observed some of the party, today, eat of late breakfasts, as if they had never eaten before – a dish of tea, another of coffee, a bumper of claret, another large one of hock-negus; then Madeira, sangaree, hot and cold meat, stews and fries, hot and cold fish pickled and plain, peppers, ginger sweetmeats, acid fruit, sweet jellies – in short, it was all as astonishing as it was disgusting.