Old, unhappy, far off things

Sixty-five years ago this month the Daily Express published a particularly horrific picture on its front page.  Under the heading Hanged Britons: Picture that will shock the world, it showed two British sergeants, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who had been murdered by Irgun paramilitaries in the Mandate of Palestine.  The sergeants had been kidnapped and killed in reprisal for the execution of three members of the Jewish underground organisation in what was becoming an increasingly ugly guerrilla war. 

There had been other terrorist incidents in the course of the conflict, but what became known as “the sergeant’s affair” was different.  The sheer ugliness of the event – the bodies were also bobby trapped – brought the conflict home to the people of Britain, causing the most widespread anti-Semitic rioting the country had ever seen, notwithstanding the fact that the killings had been condemned by British Jewish leaders.

By the end of the August holiday weekend there had been serious anti-Jewish rioting in Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, with more minor disturbances in Bristol, Hull, Warrington and London.  Although there were no fatalities a number of people were beaten up and property destroyed, including a wooden synagogue in West Derby.  In Eccles, John Regan, himself a former sergeant, harangued a crowd of some seven hundred people, saying “Hitler was right.  Exterminate every Jew – every man, woman and child.  What are you afraid of?  There’s only a handful of police.”

Serious stuff, but in the end it all proved to be so much hot air, not just Regan’s incitement, for which he was charged and fined, but the whole violent wave.  Even obvious fascist politicians like Jeffrey Hamm, formerly of the British Union of Fascists and now in charge of the League of Ex-Servicemen, could not make any lasting political capital out of the incident.  The Express, which had triggered the violence with its sensational front page lead, backed off in shock, calling for calm and describing the attacks on innocent shopkeepers as a national disgrace.

That short hot summer has left almost no memory.  It’s a pity, really, because as history the whole episode is really quite intriguing.  Although superficially caused by an event far from these shores, it revealed much more about problems and difficulties far closer to home: the problems of austerity Britain. 

George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, published two years after the sergeants’ incident, is supposedly about a dystopian future.  In actual fact it was much more about a dystopian present, as people reading it at the time would have recognised.  The drab London he depicts in the novel was not some imaginative construct but a living reality.  Like so many other British cities, it had not fully recovered from the war.  Vacant lots and bomb sites were everywhere.  With a housing shortage came a serious problem of homelessness. 

The war, and its financial legacy, also had had a profound effect on the economy. Some foodstuffs, like butter, meat were still rationed. Confectionary had come off ration in 1949, but distribution had to be brought back under state control because demand was simply too great. Shortages meant that people took to producing their own food in back gardens and allotments. Income tax was at an extraordinarily high level, more than twice what it is today. Bureaucratic red tape was a major feature of everyday life, also brilliantly reflected in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the 'social comedies' being produced by Ealing Studios, movies like Whisky Galore and Passport to Pimlico.

The war had been won; the peace was clearly being lost.  Food shortages and serious unemployment were compounded by a fuel shortage in the bitter winter of 1946-47, when coal was rationed in a coal-rich country.  Unhappy and bewildered, people looked for scapegoats, turning to the greatest scapegoats of all – the Jews.  Rationing created a vigorous black market which, by common perception, was controlled by the Jews. It’s not that surprising that so many ordinary people were taken in by this, especially as Ernest Bevan, foreign minister in the Labour government of the day, made anti-Semitic remarks, including one to the effect that the Jews of Europe were “pushing to the front of the queue.”

Cities like Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, where the rioting was worse, also happened to be the places most affected by unemployment and general deprivation.  What began there as anti-Jewish riots soon turned into a looting free for all.  But the whole thing passed just as quickly as it had emerged.  The hooliganism had been based on personal frustration not on any deep rooted anti-Jewish hostility.  It was too soon after the Holocaust, details of which were still being revealed, for anti-Semitism to become a credible cause.  1947, as Lionel Trilling said in an article on the subject (New Statesman, 28 May), was the end of a chapter, not the beginning. 

The following year the state of Israel was formed and the sergeants’ affair, and the riots, forgotten.  It left one painful and unnoticed irony: Clifford Martin was Jewish.  

A Tale Told by an Idiot

David Cameron, our Prime Minister, wanders the world with a look of bewilderment on his face, understanding nothing, changing his message to suit his audience. A mendacious Tony Blair was bad but a stupid one is so much worse. Yes, that’s what we have in this fatuous ‘heir to Blair.’ There he is, ever so 'umble like Uriah Heep, apologising and wringing his hands over past ‘errors’; apologising for the British Empire.

It’s all part of the Blairite legacy, the politics of apology, the politics of hypocrisy. Blair took it to a fine degree; yes, he was sorry over distant things, things that happened long before he was born, like the Irish Potato Famine or slavery, while sanctimoniously and self-righteously justifying his role in the death of thousands in Iraq. Cameron is shaping up, attempting to walk in those shoes, offering an apology over the partition of Kashmir, an issue over which he has not the first clue, while bombarding Libya.

The trouble with Cameron, and please forgive the crudity of the expression – a reflection of my mood – is simply this: he does not know his arse from his elbow. He understands nothing of our history, more or less telling people, telling foreigners, what he thinks will please them most, even if it means talking this country down, even if it means forgetting the very real achievements of the past.

He read PPE – Philosophy, Politics and Economics – at Oxford, a course which, as Peter Oborne wrote recently, is notorious for skimming the surface of understanding and historical knowledge. But one would think he would be better advised. This is a man who believed that Britain was a ‘junior partner’ to America in 1940, or so he told Obama, when America wasn’t even in the war. This is a man who, as I wrote recently, considers Palmerston to be one of his influences (Cameron plays Palmerston, plays Blair) clearly with no understanding at all just exactly what Palmerston represented.

Last November he visited China wearing a red poppy. Now in Britain that is a mark of respect, a token of remembrance for the dead of two world wars and all conflicts since. But in China the poppy is a symbol of something quite different – it’s a symbol of humiliation, a symbol of the Opium Wars, when the country was obliged to accept importation of a drug that was ruining the lives of so many of its citizens. It’s not the poppy of Flanders the Chinese remember; it’s the poppy of Bengal, the poppy of Palmerston. Only the most ignorant individual, ignorant of history, could fail to appreciate that. Ignorant and appallingly ill-advised by the Foreign Office, Cameron had to be asked to take it off.

The past, as L P Hartley wrote in the opening of The Go-Between, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But we should try to understand just exactly how they are done; we should try to have the message translated. Yes, bad things happened, yes, the legacy of Empire is not spotless, evidenced by the Opium Wars, but there was so much good also, so much that is being lost by Cameron’s muddled message.

In recent debate I argued in relation to the India that the British impact was generally positive. Amongst other things this huge country was united for the first time in its history; that it acquired a consciousness of nationhood for the first time. It was the British who ended abuses like suttee and thuggism; it was the British who created an integrated transport system. Above all it was the British who in English gave the people of India their first common language, something that has enabled the country to make an impact on the world economy in the present day. Cameron does no favours in holding out the anti-imperial crutch, the very thing that the likes of Robert Mugabe leant on most heavily as he ruined Zimbabwe.

We need a grown up leader for a grown up world, a leader who will stand up for Britain, a leader who understands our past, a leader who does not wander the world like an absurd penitent, sackcloth here, ashes there, gaffs everywhere. I tried to resist the impression for so long that Cameron was playing at politics, resist the impression that he is a weak, shallow and insincere man, a man not fit for high office. I can do so no longer. He is pathetic, a risible figure, an idiot telling a tale that signifies nothing, nothing beyond his own incapacity and lack of understanding.

Tory Diaspora

The American War of Independence conjures up so many heroic images and so many myths, anything from Paul Revere’s Ride to the winter at Valley Forge; from the gallant Minute Men to the ferocious ‘Hessians’, the mercenary army of a ‘tyrant’ king.

Have you ever considered what happened to the losers, those who fought on the ‘wrong side’? I’m not thinking here of those dreaded Hessians! No, the people I have in mind were the colonists who remained loyal to the crown, loosely grouped by the Patriots as ‘Tories’.

Their story is told in Liberty’s Exiles: the Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire by Maja Jasanoff. The book contains some intriguing snippets of information on the social and demographic composition of those who supported the crown in the struggle. They were not all conservative by any means, not all the upper echelons of colonial society.

There were the slaves, some 20,000 of them, who agreed to fight for the British in return for freedom. These included some two dozen men who had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, the leading author of the Declaration of Independence, and one Henry Washington, once the property of…well; I don’t think I really need to tell you, do I?

Imagine the scramble at the end of the war in Indochina in the 1970s, as those who had sided with the Americans in Vietnam and Cambodia tried to get out by whatever means possible. Imagine a similar scramble in 1783 with the loyalist cause lost. Uncertain of their future in the new United States, some 60,000 people made for the borders, some to Canada, some to the Bahamas, some to Britain, some to the West Indies, some even going as far as India and Australia. The oddest of all is those who sought refuge in Sierra Leone in Africa, there setting up a Utopian community in one of the most unpromising environments on earth.

There were also the Indians, the native allies of the British. Here special mention should be made of Thayendanegea, also known as Colonel Joseph Brant, chief of the Mohawks, who had fought for the crown both in the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War) and the War of Independence. He came to London, creating a sensation at a costume ball by appearing in full Mohawk dress, his face covered in scarlet war paint. Doubtless seeing an Indian for the first time in his life, an Ottoman diplomat, probably oiled with drink, got it into his head that Brant’s painted face was really a mask. He took him by the nose and made efforts to pull it off, whereupon the mortified Mohawk took out his tomahawk and swung at the head of the offender. Exit Turk pursued by an Indian!

Although some black Loyalists also ended up in London, where they were reduced to beggary, far more took refuge in Jamaica, not at all welcome by a slave-owning society. The presence of these men, the yeast of liberty, paradoxically made the condition of the island’s large slave population even worse than it was before, just to ensure that the idea of freedom was contained.

Jasanoff gives some idea of what conditions were like by drawing on the diary of one Thomas Thistlewood, a plantation overseer. Runaways had their heads cut off and stuck on poles as a warning to the others. Those guilty of minor offences had their cheeks sliced and their ears cut off. Of one slave caught eating sugar cane Thistlewood notes “I had him flogged and pickled, and then made Hector shit in his mouth.”

Some of the impoverished blacks who ended up in London were aided by an organisation called the Committee for the Black Poor, who mounted what must count as the first ‘back to Africa’ movement in history. Ships were chartered to carry some two hundred people to Sierra Leone, where they landed and set up home in 1787 on land bought from the local Temme tribe, anticipating later developments in Liberia by some decades.

The whole thing, the story of the white and black diaspora from the United States across the globe, to every corner of what was soon to emerge as the second British Empire, is quite fascinating. It was the first great refugee crisis in British history, the story of whole groups of people as well as unique individuals. It’s the story of Elizabeth Johnston, a young mother from Georgia who spent thirty years looking for a new home, a pilgrimage that took her from Britain, to Jamaica and to Canada. It’s the story of any number of others like her, white, black or red.

There is another important aspect to this story. The émigrés played an important part in the building of the second British Empire, that’s certainly true; but they did something even more important – they helped determine its evolution and its character, at least in the Anglo-Saxon parts. Though they had remained loyal during the American Revolution, they carried into exile many of the democratic ideals of the Thirteen Colonies. Having enjoyed a high degree of liberty in their old homes they did not readily adapt to distant and paternalist rule. The British authorities themselves, learning from the American experience, and anxious to avoid further uprisings, were later to hand out responsible government to Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

What happened to Joseph Brant, you may wonder? Well, after failing to catch and scalp his Turk he managed to set up home with his people under British protection in Ontario, a particular group of ‘Tories’ who were to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that would almost certainly have been denied them in the land of the free.

This is an important book on a neglected subject. Exhaustively researched, it is virtually guaranteed to be the standard text in this area for some time to come. I only have one minor quibble over the author’s unfortunate tendency to slip at points into a slightly infelicitous use of jargon, which is why I am giving it four stars rather than five.

Penniless thoughts

Just imagine living in Britain in the late sixth century AD. I use the word Britain here in a purely geographical sense because, politically speaking, there was no Britain. Still, you are a cultured person, one of the few who can read and write, an ever diminishing talent in this Dark Age; you have an idea of Britain. For you it is a Dark Age; for you the light went out over a century before, when the last Roman legion left the province of Britannia for ever.

You live in a twilight world, pushed ever further to the west by Germanic invaders from across the North Sea. These are the people who will create a new land; these are the Angles, the people who will, in time, create Angle-Land, but you don’t know that; you are looking to the past, to vanished greatness, to Rome. Come on, be honest; you are a Tory, are you not? You have to be to see anything positive in empire; at least you have to be according to the New Statesman, a repository of the stalest left-wing ideas, as well as a refuge for jolly bad writers!

Forgive me; I’m having a spot of fun here at the expense of the tiresome Laurie Penny, who gives us “pop culture and radical politics with a feminist twist”, at least that’s what the New Statesman says she gives us. Earlier this year she wrote an article berating the terrible Tories for, in her words, wanting children to be proud of Britain’s imperial past. That’s a terrible thing, don’t you agree, just like my hypothetical ancient Briton’s nostalgia for the order and security of Rome?

The occasion for Penny’s penniless thoughts was the decision by Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, to invite Niall Ferguson, a ‘right-wing colonial historian’ (he must be; Penny says so), to help revise the school history curriculum to – horror of horrors – say something positive about the British Empire. Do you know anything of Fergusson? You should do if you read The Independent, the most boring newspaper on this planet, where Johann Hari, in his capacity as the “young bloodhound of the liberal left” (Penny again) exposed him as the “court historian for the American hard right.” In other words he’s a decent historian and a jolly good writer!

Gove’s sins get worse. He’s decided it’s time – please sit down if you are of a nervous disposition – to celebrate Britain’s achievements, including the achievements of empire. Not only has Ferguson been invited to offer a contribution so, too, has Andrew Roberts, another right-wing monster, who has “dined with South African white supremacists, defended the Amritsar Massacre and suggested that the Boers murdered in British concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity.” I expect he likes to drown puppies for a spot of relaxation.

I’m a Tory but I’m no apologist for empire. More than that, in some ways I think that we might have been better off without it, better off without its heavy legacy, better off without the expense. But it happened and in so many ways it’s a good thing that it happened. The United States of America is the greatest legacy of the British Empire, the power house of the English-speaking world, created by English constitutional principles. And then there is modern India which, though some may like to deny this, owes its political existence and its present prosperity to the fact that it also forms part of that same English-speaking world.

I so tired of the Pennies of this world, tired of small intellectual change. It’s just so typical of the left, this perpetual negativity. Bad things happened, bad things happened in the course of British expansion across the globe, just as they happened in the course of Roman expansion across the ancient world, but so many positive things emerged, so much that contributed to the advance of civilization. It’s a story worth knowing and a story worth repeating. Not so, says Penny, it’s all about ‘social control.’ What a pity she wasn’t around to offer her fatuous opinions to my ancient Briton.

Sympathy for the Boer

The Second Boer War elicited a lot of sympathy for the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, the two beleaguered republics, and a lot of hostility to Britain across the world. Opposition began at home. The Irish Nationalists were vociferous opponents, which comes, I suppose, as no great surprise. Michael Davitt, the founder of the Irish National Land League, resigned his parliamentary seat at Westminster in protest. He subsequently tried to interest the European powers in the fate of the Boers, writing an apologia, condemning the British for arming “African savages” against two “Christian states”. Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein, used the occasion of the war in an attempt to focus hostility towards continuing British rule in Ireland.

Kier Hardie, leader of the British Labour Party, absolved the Boers of all blame for the war-and ignored their treatment of black Africans-because they were a "virtuous, republican and pastoral people, with all of the fine qualities that pertain to that way of life." J. A. Hobson, John Burns and Edward Carpenter, left-wing and radical, all combined to describe the war as the work of “Cosmopolitan-Jewish manipulators” living in Cape Colony.

Beyond British shores, Theodore Roosevelt, then governor of New York, and himself no stranger to the attractions of imperialism, expressed some sympathy for the Boers, with whom he shared a Dutch ancestry, though he believed that their downfall was part of an Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny, just as was the downfall of the Spanish Empire in 1898. His distant cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, took a quite different view, presiding over the Harvard Committee for Boer Relief. Sun Yat-Sen, Chinese revolutionary and political leader, was encouraged by the example of Boer resistance, seeing it as a blow against all forms of imperialism.

British conduct during the war, especially the setting up of concentration camps, was the source of much international hostility, though most remained blind to Boer atrocities against black people. Close on 3000 volunteers served with the Boer Republics, which included a Scandinavian Corps, almost wiped out at the Battle of Magersfontein. In the various Boer commandos it was possible to find Germans, Russians, Italians, Irish, French and Americans. The Germans included Count Harra von Zeppelin, at the one extreme, to Fritz Brall, the anarchist, at the other. In the Hollander Corps was to be found Cornelius van Gogh, brother of Vincent, the painter, and Theo the art dealer, who committed suicide after being captured by the British. The Russian Corp, mostly ambulance drivers and scouts, numbered among them Prince Bagration of Tiflis, a Cossack hetman, and Alexander Guchkov, later to serve for a time as Minister of War in the Russian Provisional Government, established after the Revolution of February 1917. The French included Prince Louis d'Orleans et Braganze, cousin of the Orleanist pretender. He was joined by Count de Villebois-Mareuil, one of the founders of Action Francaise.

Naturally enough, the Boers attracted a lot of support in the Netherlands, their ancestral home, with Queen Wilhelmina going so far as to send a warship to bring Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal, to Europe, where he was well-received, both in Paris and the Hague. Streets were named after him in the Netherlands and Belgium, and a statue erected in his honour in Dresden. German approval of the exiled president was to continue for some time, and the Nazi film industry was later to pay its own tribute in Ohm Krüger, made in 1940. Widespread as it was, pro-Boer sentiment caused no government to bring pressure on the British, and had no affect whatsoever on the outcome of the war.

A Man and a Brother

We are not long past the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. The important question, one that I’m not sure has been fully considered, is why opinion swung so decisively against a practice that had long been part of the national economy. The answer is simple: slavery had been tolerable, like so many other abuses over time, for as long as it was invisible. By the late eighteenth century this was no longer the case.

Slavery and the slave trade were activities both remote from British shores and thus removed from popular consciousness. This changed after the conclusion in 1763 of the Seven Years' War, when ever increasing numbers of enslaved men and women began to appear in London, brought by their owners.

The immediacy was shocking enough, but it also raised questions about the validity of the institution in a country where there was no slave law. It lead directly to Somerset v Steuart in 1772, when Granville Sharp argued before Lord Mansfield at the Court of King's Bench that slaveholding in England was a violation of the Common Law. To ship slave law into the country would, as Sharp put it, make England "as base, wicked, and tyrannical as our colonies." Mansfield, in finding for the plaintiff, effectively curtailed the liberties of the slave owners. Though evading the more general question about the legality of slavery as such, he had, in effect, encouraged the view that the practice was "repugnant to English laws", as one slaveholder expressed it.

There was an acute irony at work here; for the Mansfield decision defined Britain as a 'land of liberty', not long before the slave-owning American colonies began to object to being subordinated to the 'tyranny' of Parliament. "Why", Samuel Johnson asked, "do we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?" In the ideological debates between the two sides, slavery became a political issue in a way that it had never been in the past, with the Americans insisting that if there were slaves in the colonies it was because British traders had put them there. Practically speaking, of course, it was all posturing, and neither side took any meaningful steps to address the issues raised; but it still drew attention to slavery as a moral problem; that slavery was a vice and that opposition to slavery was a virtue.

Before the American Revolution, the British Empire was little more than a commercial opportunity; afterwards it started the process of rebirth as a kind of moral mission, where rule should be exercised, as Edmund Burke put it, "for the benefit of the governed as well as the governors." Evangelicals within the Church of England pressed for the proper pastoral care of slaves within the Empire, just as officers returning from the war urged the government to give support and assistance to the escaped American slaves who had fought with the British Army.

It was now that the Quakers, who had always disliked slavery, but had not challenged the existence of the institution, began to press for abolition. Buoyed up by the conviction that the British people now considered slavery as a national embarrassment, they moved forward, gathering support and momentum along the way. By the early 1790s the consumption of West Indian Sugar, the chief product of slavery, was plummeting, showing that abolition had indeed become the cause of the nation. All that was needed was someone to direct opinion; all that was needed was William Wilberforce.

In Praise of Empire

The British Empire was a force for good in the world. There, I’ve said it! I’m not the first, though, to swim against the tide on this question. Those who wish an effective counter to all of the past negativity could do no better than have a look through Naill Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World.

Yes, we did make the modern world, not through a self-conscious and ugly imperialism that characterised the French colonial enterprise; no, but simply in the pursuit of trading opportunities, the life blood of a mercantile island nation. In the wake of the traders and the buccaneers our people(stress here on the possessive pronoun!) travelled across the earth, building up the great English-speaking nations; building what was to become the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as a host of smaller nations within this great backbone of liberty and democracy.

The British also in a very real sense helped to create modern India, giving it a political unity it never before possessed in its history; giving it a rail transport system which still functions today; giving it a common language which has managed to unite such a diverse and polyglot nation, allowing it to make an impact on the modern world.

Even in leaving Empire there was often a magnanimity and greatness. There is no better contrast here than with how the British dealt with the communist insurgency in Malaya, while nurturing moves towards independence, and how the French dealt with that in Indochina. And just imagine what would have happened if the French had predominated in North America and, more particularly, what would have happened if they had not been kicked them out of India. Our exit from India was far from tidy but how much worse it would have been going by the French example, the example of Vietnam and Algeria.

The British Empire was also a huge exporter of capital, building roads, railways and industries all over the earth, to great benefit to local economies, as indeed was the introduction of a system of education. Administrators sent out from England were generally scrupulously fair, bringing government and order to places that often had neither the one nor the other.

The system of English common law was another of our exports, still used and valued across much of the world, as indeed was the parliamentary system of government and the economic model of free-trade capitalism.

Paradoxically the British, true to their rather diffident nature, did not value the Empire during its heyday, a point I made in a recent post. I’m not asking for a retrospective attachment to that which is dead and gone, just a better understanding of how important the Empire was and, for all its faults, how benevolent, greater even than Rome at its apogee.

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath pass’d away a glory from the earth

Losing America

A new archive of letters was discovered recently which illustrate how much personal responsibility George III bears for the loss of the American colonies. What they show in particular is the communication gap, with a king and an administration hopelessly out of touch with events in America; a king whose optimism contrasts sharply with the pessimism of the commanders on the ground.

The collection, which goes on sale at Sotheby’s in New York in a series of auctions beginning in April, indicate that the commanders began to despair of victory almost as soon as the conflict began in 1775. A letter by General John Burgoyne, written in Boston on 25 June, 1775, is the earliest assessment of how bad things were. The British position is described as

…a crisis that my little reading in history cannot parallel…such a pittance of troops as Great Britain and Ireland can supply will only serve to protract the war, to incur fruitless expense and to insure disappointment.

It was not just the pittance of troops that was a problem; it was also the kind of troops that the crown possessed. In the previous wars with the French for the control o the Continent the British had relied on the support of colonial militias, who knew the country and could make the most effective use of the terrain; skirmishers, who knew how to use hit and run tactics and fighting skills learned from the natives. On occasions these highly mobile forces were to prove superior to conventional armies, tied to roads and dependent on supply columns, as Burgoyne was to find to his own cost at Saratoga.

The collection also includes a copy of George III’s proclamation of August 1775 calling for the “suppression of rebellion and sedition”, one of only twenty in existence. Other correspondence from London emphasises just how absurdly sanguine the authorities were, continually hoping that the rebels would see their error and sue for pardon. The problem is quite clear: king and cabinet obviously saw events in America as an old-fashioned rebellion, much like that of the Scottish Jacobites earlier in the century. It was nothing of the kind: it was a revolution.

Thoughts of Empire

On reading Kipling I used to wonder to what extent, if at all, the overseas Empire impacted on the consciousness of British people at the time. The simple answer is far less than is imagined; far less than those in the school of Edward Said would have us believe. Indeed, for the best part of the nineteenth century it hardly impacted at all. The patriotic concept of Empire was a relatively late creation, really only emerging when a sense of crisis set in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

In high culture it hardly features at all, and no major novel of the day has an imperial theme. In architecture the 'Imperial style', if such an expression can even be used, effectively disappears after the time of George IV, as Britain adopted the same Greco-Roman fashion preferred throughout the western world, non-imperial societies included. Even in boys' fiction the subject of Empire is almost completely avoided before the advent of G. A. Henty. R. M. Ballantyne's 1858 novel Coral Island is 'exotic', rather than imperial, as indeed are the works of Rider Haggard. The stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling were a relatively late addition to the literary canon, and his enthusiasm for Empire is in large measure explained by the fact that he was born in India. The general indifference in Britain itself was a source of frustration to some, including the historian J. R. Seeley, who complained that the Empire seemed to have been acquired "in a fit of absent-mindedness."

Native British lack of enthusiasm for the project of Empire is, in large measure, explained by the educational system of the day, which placed no importance whatsoever on international affairs and contemporary politics. In 1902, when a Member of Parliament asked a class of school leavers who among them had heard of the Indian Mutiny, only one boy raised his hand.

It is also important to realise that British schools, unlike those in the United States, placed almost no value on the importance of patriotism. Indeed, the British political elite tended to view any enthusiasm of this kind with a high degree of suspicion, because of its association, via the French Revolution, with republicanism and democracy. British people belonged to specific social classes, and classes had duties, not rights. The upper classes were taught to rule, at both home and abroad; the lower classes were taught to obey; and the middle-classes were taught how to create wealth. Empire was merely a distraction. In 1893, Lord Kimberly, himself former Colonial Secretary, when asked if children should not be given some lessons in imperial patriotism, said that they would be better off "given practical lessons in the geography of their own localities rather than being shown maps [of the Empire] they are not well versed in, and which do not convey much to their minds."

One also has to consider the nature of the British Empire itself to understand why it played so small part in the consciousness of the nation. The 'Imperial Red' maps-which did not start to appear until the 1880s-are actually quite deceptive, suggesting something centralised and unified, like the ancient Roman or the modern Russian Empires. The British Empire, in contrast, was possibly the most decentralised in history, in that a good part was administered by local elites, which meant that it could be maintained at the minimum of cost, and with the minimum of personnel. In other words, no national effort was required to sustain it. The small class of Imperial Civil Servants was proud of their exclusivity: it was their Empire, not 'the peoples'.

These attitudes began to change somewhat by the beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the Second Boer War and after, when the Empire came under threat from rival powers and home-grown nationalism. It was only at this time that the imperial propaganda movement got underway. But apart from brief bursts of enthusiasm, the general response remained muted. In 1911 an executive of the Victoria League remarked of a lecture given at the Workers Educational Association that the "audience gave the impression of suspicion, of hostility to the subject and of considerable indifference to the conditions prevailing in the colonies."

Yes, the Empire was there, yes it had important economic and political consequences; but the deeper sense it was like an iceberg-virtually invisible until the very last moment.

Fighting for the Falklands

It's an historical oddity that the Falkland Islands, remote, wind-swept, with little strategic importance and no mineral wealth, have taken England to the threshold-and over the threshold-of war some five times; with Spain, with France and with Argentina. In fact it was the 1770 'crisis in a tea cup' that begins the whole sequence.

English sailors first caught sight of the Falklands in the late sixteenth century. In the following century the government was to make a half-hearted claim, though under the Treaty of Tordesillas they fell within the Spanish orbit. It was only in 1748, with the report of Admiral Lord Anson, that London began to give the matter its serious attention, sounding out the Spanish on the question of sovereignty. This only had the effect of drawing up the battle lines, though the matter was put to one side for the time being. An uncertain equilibrium might have remained but for the unexpected intervention of a third party-France.

After the conclusion of the Seven Years War, the French, attempting to improve their position in the South Atlantic, landed in the Falklands, establishing a base at St. Louis, now Port Stanley. At the same time, the one unbeknown to the other, the British made their own landing at Port Egmont in the west. Responding to Spanish objections, the French handed over Port Louis, now renamed as Port Soledad, though neither party was as yet aware of the proximity of the English, until a chance sighting of some ships in December 1769. And now we have a little overture to what was to come just over two hundred years later.

In June 1770 the Spanish governor of Buenos Aires sent five frigates to Port Egmont, landing some 1600 marines. The small British force present promptly surrendered. When Parliament assembled in November, the MPs, outraged by this insult to national honour, demanded action from the government. The Spanish attempted to strengthen their position by winning the support of France, invoking the Pacte de Famille between the two Bourbon crowns. For a time it looked as if all three countries were about to go to war, especially as the Duc de Choiseul, the French minister or war and foreign affairs, was in a militant mood. But Louis XV took fright, telling Charles III that "My minister wishes for war, but I do not." Choiseul was dismissed from office, and without French support the Spanish were obliged to seek a compromise with the British.

In January 1771 the British were allowed to restore the base at Port Egmont, although the whole question of sovereignty was simply sidestepped, a source of future trouble. The best verdict on the little fracas was passed by Samuel Johnson in his pamphlet Thoughts on the late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Island, looking at the British problem in holding such remote islands against a hostile mainland, "...a colony that could never become independent, for it could never be able to maintain itself." And so it remains today.