Richard Meinertzhagen, brass knuckle apostle of British empire in Kenya, handled Koitalel, leader of an irregular native force, firmly. When they met under terms of truce, the African, holding a bunch of grass signalising peace, held out a hand and Meinertzhagen shot him. His troops then opened fire and killed 23 of Koitalel’s following. The story of Kenya is like that. Nasty.
The White Highlands were badly farmed by a gentry elite protected socialistically by subsidies. Marginalised Africans, liable to casual corporal punishment, were identified for field labour by the kipande, a metal tag worn round the neck. Now that isn’t the way I remember it as a nine year old reading Our Empire’s Story Told in Pictures. Robert Clive’s putsch against Siraj ud Dowla wasn’t told like that, either.
A central virtue of The Rule of Empires is that it lights up so many disgusting things. We get sequences of fraudulent, vicious or opportunist action: the Romans in Britain, the British in India, the Spanish in Peru, the Muslims in southern Spain, Napoleon’s French in Italy, the Nazis in France and the British in Kenya. The idea is to relate these excursions, show a large measure held in common and sustain the sub-title Why They Always Fall. However, buying its entire thesis is hard.
Do they have so much in common, these territorial conquests and holdings? They were all the products of violence, deceit and greed, undertaken for resources and/or territory. They produced much twisted law, patriotic pageant and hypocrisy. The cross was carried before Spanish theft and slaughter. Free commerce walked before the drum of John Company’s troops in India. William Pitt denounced “upon my soul” Robert Walpole’s unwillingness to make war on Spain on behalf of British ships, often slavers, engaged in illegal trade.
Such blind hypocrisy would turn into a central quality among Romans, British and, might one say it, Americans, a conviction that they were doing the natives a favour. Oddly, the only imperialist to acquit on this count is the one who briefly commanded from the outskirts of Moscow to Bordeaux. Adolf Hitler lied comfortably and well, but never took himself in.
Timothy H Parsons, Professor of African History at Washington University, St Louis, makes his own thoughtful concessions to difference. The Romans came as an army for a short term purpose, an imperial triumph back home to cement the authority of a new emperor, Claudius, and stayed for the limited profits to be extracted. The British came to Madras to trade and functioned for more than a hundred years as a commercial company (with an army).They seized political power, without its form, by one man’s private initiative, Robert Clive’s, only proclaiming empire a hundred years later. The Romans, however cruel when resisted, had no theory of race and handed out Roman citizenship readily, at any rate to the better placed. Caracalla in AD212 made it universal within the empire. The British did racial distinction like billy-oh.
Hitler’s rule in France, a five year business, was actually milder and more flexible for the French than most rule by conquest. As Parsons indicates, this was quite different from his unspeakable rule in the Ukraine, “inferior people” getting ferocious treatment with extinction in mind. Hitler, carrying the rage of 1910 Vienna, hated Slavs very little less than he did Jews. But there had been distant pre-echoes of Nazi extermination. Parsons could quote Cato on Carthage (delenda) and does quote Domitian on “no longer permitting a rebellious tribe to exist.”
What about the argument that empires always fail? The ones discussed here did. Rome disintegrated. The overreaching Nazis were destroyed. The Great Mosque of Cordoba is a cathedral, Gandhi, something of a British secular saint. But there are cases beyond this text, involving no failure of empire. The Norman Conquest was a success. The worst things befalling the Odos, Ranulfs, Alains and Fulkes who did well out of Hastings and the Harrowing of the North were to become the English ruling class, start speaking Middle English in the late 14th century and have children high and low – great nobles and nicely placed bastards. John Durbeyfield, Tess’ deluded father, is fiction, but in yearning to belong with the D’Urbervilles, he spoke for an anterior yearning common until yesterday.
The masters of Kiev Rus who, in the 10th century, began a takeover of lands to the east, still rule today, come tsar, party or oligarch, what is generally called Russia. The Israelis, responsible for – is it seven massacres? – and sponsors at Sabra and Shatila, of another, sit sweetly in place, still taking water and land, still moving Palestinians on – in Palestine. I’d call that empire. Incidentally, they early instituted the Norman practice of frankpledge, meeting every act of revolt by destroying the relevant village.
Parsons uses the example of failed empires to chastise George W Bush for trying to do in Iraq what he believes cannot be done successfully anywhere. He goes to some trouble to argue that the recent invasion, wrong though he believes it to be, was not precisely empire. The US government, soldiers, advisers and security firms were not meant to rule imperial territory. Finely judged, indeed they were not, but the verb is what weighs here. Try control.
A last point. Parsons has done serious work and written an intelligent and original book, worth respect and argument. But from what idleness, what spirit of abjection, has the Oxford University Press, its originating publisher, failed to put the American English text into English – Oxford, Cambridge or Warrington English? Pursued by the invader, the English hyphen retreats to the hills, leaving us with “preemption” and “reentered.” Then again, Parsons has a thing about the word “common” in place of “ordinary” so we get the “common Indian” and the “common French”. It jars. As for the East India Company, for all its iniquities, it was never the EIC. One feels slightly colonised.
