Don't lock the coffin, Dr Louis
Jan Morris
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, VOLUMES I-V editor-in-chief William Roger Louis OUP, £30 each, except Volume Vat £35
The passion has faded, the pride is dis- persed, and here come the undertakers, all in black, to lower the coffin lid on a terrific national adventure, the British empire.
Terrific? Most people nowadays would choose a different adjective for that splurg- ing of red across the map. 'Terrific' is alto- gether too celebratory for our times, and only a few old retrogrades like me are stirred by the imperial images — you know, grey warships on the tropic horizon, tur- baned half-feral Englishmen of the fron- tiers, steam-trains pounding across the Indian plains, boys fresh from school hand- ing down judgments of life and death, all that sort of thing. For me the empire is something dazzling in the memory and the imagination; for another generation it is an ancestral disgrace; and for the 125-odd edi- tors and writers of The Oxford History of the British Empire, now complete in five splen- did volumes, it is a specimen for a monu- mental post-mortem.
All this is quite right. It is right for me, being of a certain age and romantic dispo- sition, to shed a tear over that which once was great. It is right for the public of another generation to view the former claims of history with distrust. It is certainly right for a definitive work of scholarship to explore the whole vast enterprise, dispassionately presided over by an impar- tial foreigner (Dr William Roger Louis of the University of Texas). And now that nearly all the facts are available to scholars, and every argument has been rehearsed, it is proper to be burying that once flamboyant cadaver with decent academic ceremony.
But excuse me, Dr Louis, before you close the satin-lined lid with your soft gloved fingers, let's take one last look at the poor departed, shall we? It makes a lovely corpse, you must admit. It's laid out lovely. You can see it was a good-looker when it was young, and of course it suf- fered a lot in its later years, dropped a lot of the flab. You'd hardly know it was that old fart from the Boer war, would you? Poor soul, things were never so good for it after that, and I've got to confess we rather lost interest in the family — but there, like I always say, there's nothing like adversity for improving the chaaseter. There we are then. Thank you, Doctor, you can shut the lid now, let's all have a nice cup of tea and talk it over.
The empire was no Adonis, and was never quite transmuted into myth. Kipling briefly sparked its exotic legend, Elgar orchestrated it before his disillusionment, Lady Butler made heroic pictures of it and the Boys' Own Paper revelled in its derring-do. Just when it reached a populist climax, though, at the end of Victoria's century, everything conspired to deflate it. World wars, economic troubles, the glitter- ing rise of Hollywood, socialism, jazz and the decline of the class system — all these meant that the British empire never matched the American West as the stuff of 20th-century legend or family entertain- ment. It never quite caught on with the great British public, and, as the years went by and the illicit thrill of conquest paled into earnest good intentions, it became a bit of a bore for one and all.
Now, of course, hardly anybody dares say anything good about it. The nation has been brainwashed by successive genera- tions of prigs and ideologues (starting, I suspect, with the wartime zealots of the Army Education Corps). Could anything be much more politically incorrect than 'imperialism'? Britain is awash with lottery money, but none of it has gone to the British Empire and Commonwealth Muse- um at Bristol, the one big attempt to explain and interpret the empire for the public at large. In an extraordinary act of wilful denial, almost the entire British peo- ple has expunged from its mind the stag- gering fact that for better or for worse our own great-grandfathers were directly responsible for the government of a quar- ter of the entire world's population — and were convinced that it was an honourable national duty.
One might think that as the very idea of empire disintegrates in ignominy it would fire the creative urges, the instinct to recapture and make permanent those lost convictions and experiences. But few have really tried, on any intellectual level. In lit- erature there was Paul Scott's Raj Quartet (1966-75); in cinema Zulu (1964) and The Man Who Would Be King (1975) — oh, and Cany On Up the Khyber; in art nothing, unless you count war memorials; in music scarcely a note since Mandalay. The BBC did make one half-hearted television effort to resurrect some of the imperial excite- ment, but the series predictably flopped.
For now the empire is not a matter for wonder, only for shame. Hardly an English child, I swear it, feels a flicker of pride or even interest today in the colossal imperial risks and achievements; in Scotland (home of half the empire's engineers) and Wales (where the heroes of Rorke's Drift came from), patriots prefer to forget that their nations were ever on the ruling side of empire; it seldom occurs to the tabloids that when the forces and aid groups of UNO or 'the West' go in to settle a squab- ble, impose a peace or clear up the rubble, they are only doing, mutatis mutandis, what the Pax Britannica did not so long ago.
It is not, of course, the duty of a great work of scholarship to encourage myth, and few of the contributors to the Oxford history could do it if they wanted to. They are academics all, and it is their business to record and analyse the truth, not to make poetry out of it. Not many of them are old enough to remember for themselves the imperial frisson, and they are rightly con- cerned, in any case, to place the empire in its wider global context, all patriotisms apart. So far as I can see they are scrupu- lously fair in their assessments, but you will never smell the joss-stick or the gunsmoke in their pages, or hear a chunking paddle on the Irrawaddy.
Nor should you. These are not cosmeti cians at a funeral parlour, these are more like attendants at a state interment. They come from many universities and several countries (although oddly enough in all five volumes only two contributors are from the greatest of the former subject states, India, and only one admits to having actually served the old empire — Glen Balfour- Paul, formerly of the Sudan Civil Service). As a whole, they are a great deal more readable than their solidly Anglocentric predecessors of The Cambridge History of the British Empire (nine volumes, 1929-59), but nobody could call them Homeric, or even Gibbonian.
No offence, Dr Louis. I know, I know, they are not meant to be. It is a shame, though, that by now the empire has been so thoroughly demonised that even by trickle- down effect your honest and decent labours are unlikely to shift its popular image — very few of us would want one nation to rule forcibly over another (cer- tainly not a Welsh nationalist like me!). The empire is dead and gone, and a good thing too. But as your immense work makes plain, often between its lines, there was much good to the old body — nobility as well as squalor, kindness beside greed, bullying but sacrifice too. In your own words, 'a sense of ethical responsibility. ... remains, in retrospect, one of the principal characteristics of the British colonial era'. In its way the British empire was a mirror of all our merits, our failings and our changing values, among rulers and subjects alike, and it is a tragedy that in the public mind all that is acknowledged is the evil of it.
For, as I am sure you will agree, to com- memorate is not necessarily to approve, to admire is not always to agree, and what is bad can all too often be beautiful. Like it or loathe it, the British empire was a truly amazing expression of a people's vigour, boldness and imaginative power; perhaps it may yet find its grand, artistic expression, beyond the rules of academe, and inspire, if not our children, at least our children's children with its astonishments.
So don't lock the coffin, Dr Louis.
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