Read Online Pax Britannica by Jan Morris - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jan Morris
Tags: General, History, Europe, Political Science, Modern, Great Britain, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
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nations were more civilian than Victorian Britain—and they had not been engaged in a life-and-death struggle since the defeat of Napoleon. But a generation of easy victories had gone to their heads, and they were drunk with glory. Sometimes they yielded to surges of vindictive anger. Gladstone himself had ordered the bombardment of Alexandria, after the revolt of Arabi Pasha the nationalist in 1882, confounding those who forecast that he would only intervene with the Salvation Army. The boys at Eton unanimously voted that Arabi ought to be hanged for his patriotism, and Queen Victoria agreed with them.
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Dreams of private glory, too, forced the imperial play close up to the net, and helped to keep the pugnacity aboil. J. S. Mill oncecalled the British Empire ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes’, and certainly the native energy of the British needed outlets. 1 With 40 million people in their islands, a countryside tamed by railways and roads, and a newly educated generation reaching maturity, the more adventurous of the British felt cramped. They pined for more elemental environments, where climate, terrain, opportunity and the pitch of everyday life could all be more extreme. Most Britons emigrated, as we have seen, because they needed to, but many more were just in search of space, danger and responsibility and open air—and some, so sophisticated commentators suggest, were obeying a kind of sexual compulsion, a reaction to the celibate frustrations of the British public schools. Fame and fortune could be made out of imperial adventure. Punch once suggested a coat of arms for the reporter-explorer Henry Stanley, Livingstone’s putative rescuer, containing in one quarter ‘two dwarfs of the forest of perpetual night proper, journalistically exploited to the nines, with the motto Eminent Travellers Rescued While You Wait’.
For others the inducements were less immediately romantic. There were jobs to be found in the Empire less prosaic than their equivalents at home. The clerk could aspire to a merchant’s desk in Barbados or Singapore. The journalist could follow Kipling to the Pioneer at Allahabad, or write off on spec to the Toronto Globe ,the Melbourne Age or the Cape Times —all sound imperialist organs which welcomed able Englishmen. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, even the occasional artist, could pursue their professions less conventionally and often more profitably in colonial cities, while for working men, Lord Rosebery once assured the Trades Union Congress, the Empire provided ‘a variety of guarantees and opportunities … which can be offered by no other country in the world’. Standards of living were often much higher than at home. In the tropics especially servants were cheap and plentiful—even sergeants’ wives had maids and houseboys, while private soldiers in India invariably employed Indians to clean their buttons and boots.
To a really ambitious man the highest posts of Empire could bring most of the satisfactions of politics without the degradations of hustings or debate. Great splendours of position attended the successful imperial administrator. The chance of a truly regal status in life, such as a Colonial Governor enjoyed, with his own court and etiquette, his palace on the hill, a subject people at his feet and the Union Jack at his flagstaff—the mere possibility of such an elevation was enough to make a susceptible bureaucrat imperialist to the last gunboat. In the old days the Marquis Wellesley, though voted a grant of £ 20,000 for his services in India, died embittered because the Government refused to create him Duke of Hindustan. By the 1890s ambitions were less gorgeous, but were still compelling enough to create an interested lobby for the extension of Empire. Sir George Campbell, one of the most liberal of late Victorian imperialists, and himself a former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, thought the existence of a large and increasing class of
3
Dreams of private glory, too, forced the imperial play close up to the net, and helped to keep the pugnacity aboil. J. S. Mill oncecalled the British Empire ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes’, and certainly the native energy of the British needed outlets. 1 With 40 million people in their islands, a countryside tamed by railways and roads, and a newly educated generation reaching maturity, the more adventurous of the British felt cramped. They pined for more elemental environments, where climate, terrain, opportunity and the pitch of everyday life could all be more extreme. Most Britons emigrated, as we have seen, because they needed to, but many more were just in search of space, danger and responsibility and open air—and some, so sophisticated commentators suggest, were obeying a kind of sexual compulsion, a reaction to the celibate frustrations of the British public schools. Fame and fortune could be made out of imperial adventure. Punch once suggested a coat of arms for the reporter-explorer Henry Stanley, Livingstone’s putative rescuer, containing in one quarter ‘two dwarfs of the forest of perpetual night proper, journalistically exploited to the nines, with the motto Eminent Travellers Rescued While You Wait’.
For others the inducements were less immediately romantic. There were jobs to be found in the Empire less prosaic than their equivalents at home. The clerk could aspire to a merchant’s desk in Barbados or Singapore. The journalist could follow Kipling to the Pioneer at Allahabad, or write off on spec to the Toronto Globe ,the Melbourne Age or the Cape Times —all sound imperialist organs which welcomed able Englishmen. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, even the occasional artist, could pursue their professions less conventionally and often more profitably in colonial cities, while for working men, Lord Rosebery once assured the Trades Union Congress, the Empire provided ‘a variety of guarantees and opportunities … which can be offered by no other country in the world’. Standards of living were often much higher than at home. In the tropics especially servants were cheap and plentiful—even sergeants’ wives had maids and houseboys, while private soldiers in India invariably employed Indians to clean their buttons and boots.
To a really ambitious man the highest posts of Empire could bring most of the satisfactions of politics without the degradations of hustings or debate. Great splendours of position attended the successful imperial administrator. The chance of a truly regal status in life, such as a Colonial Governor enjoyed, with his own court and etiquette, his palace on the hill, a subject people at his feet and the Union Jack at his flagstaff—the mere possibility of such an elevation was enough to make a susceptible bureaucrat imperialist to the last gunboat. In the old days the Marquis Wellesley, though voted a grant of £ 20,000 for his services in India, died embittered because the Government refused to create him Duke of Hindustan. By the 1890s ambitions were less gorgeous, but were still compelling enough to create an interested lobby for the extension of Empire. Sir George Campbell, one of the most liberal of late Victorian imperialists, and himself a former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, thought the existence of a large and increasing class of
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