BOOKS: Jan Morris, The "Pax Britannica" Trilogy

Jan Morris: Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress. London: Faber and Faber, 1998 (first ed.: 1973). 0571194664. 554 pp.

Jan Morris: Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire. London: Faber and Faber, 1998 (first ed.: 1968). 0571194672. 543 pp.

Jan Morris: Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat. London: Faber and Faber, 1998 (first ed.: 1978). 0571194680. 572 pp.

I have read one other book about the history of the British Empire before — The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James — but that was a long time ago, so I figured it wouldn't be a bad idea to finally get around to reading Morris's three books about the British Empire as well. After all, these had been waiting on my shelf for a long time as well (about 15 years).

I vaguely remembered that the British Empire went through what is sometimes described as two distinct phases. In this view, the “first” British Empire got started somewhere in the Elizabethan age, most of its colonies were in North America, and it declined into insignificance when the United States managed to win their independence. The “second” British Empire emerged during the reign of Queen Victoria, then went into a decline and disappeared in the period of decolonization in the middle of the 20th century.

This second one, frankly, seems a lot more interesting and fascinating; it's the one that we usually hear about and that is the source of most of the associations that come to mind when we think of the British Empire or encounter it in popular culture. And it is this second one that is the subject of Morris's trilogy (or “triptych” as she likes to call it in the prefaces to the individual volumes).

Morris puts the zenith of this empire in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. This is when the Empire was at the peak of its power and its self-confidence (or you might say its arrogance), if not yet quite at the peak of its territorial extent. The central volume of the trilogy, Pax Britannica, is an overview of the Empire in its various aspects as it stood about 1897. That volume is what Morris wrote first, in 1968 (back when she was still a he — James Morris). Heaven's Command covers the growth of its empire from the coronation of Queen Victoria to 1897, and Farewell the Trumpets covers its decline from 1897 to the 1970s, when this last volume was written. (The edition I read is a 1998 reprint, for which Morris contributed a short new introduction that naturally mentions the handover of Hong Kong the year before, but the rest of the book doesn't seem to have been changed from the original edition.)

I enjoyed this trilogy a great deal. It isn't exactly a conventional work of history, and obviously hasn't been written by an academic historian, but I mean that as a plus and not a minus. It's wonderful that someone writes books like this, because the historians themselves certainly can't and won't do it. Morris has a great way with words and is always able to paint a vivid picture of what a particular milieu, in a given time and place, must have been like; she has clearly read a great amount of material, but has also done research of a sort that reminded me more of a journalist's than a historian's — interviewing people, working with letters and diaries, and the like. This is of course mostly applicable to the last volume, which covers a period that was comparatively recent at the time it was being written. After describing some particular episode of imperial history, she invariably appends a footnote telling you what happened next: how the general or administrator that you just read about fared in his retirement, how the dusty imperial outpost in the middle of nowhere is a bustling metropolis now, etc. Morris seems to have visited nearly every place she writes about, and invariably tells us briefly what it looked like in the 1970s when she worked on these books. In the latter parts of volume 3 we even get the occasional anecdote from the days when Morris himself was a minor colonial official of some sort in the waning decades of the British Empire, mostly in the Middle East.

Another good thing about this trilogy is its breadth of coverage. Far from being only about warfare and politics, there are also a good number of chapters about how the empire intersected with various other spheres of human activity, from science and technology to religion and the arts. The Empire covered an enormous variety of very diverse territories and affected every sphere of human life and activity, and Morris manages to cover it all.

I also liked her overall attitude towards the British Empire and imperialism as such. This is one of those politically sensitive topics where people so often seem unable to express anything other than extreme opinions nowadays. They either condemn imperialism as evil incarnate, or praise it as doing the poor benighted natives a favour and running their affairs for their own good. Morris manages to strike a better and more balanced course. She doesn't hesitate to show that imperialism was indeed brutal and morally wrong, but she also points out that often enough, the British empire-builders did put in an honest effort to administer the territories under their control well, that they mostly had pretty decent intentions from the perspective of their own moral framework, and that in many instances these territories were in fact governed better under the Empire than under whatever local ruler they had had before (and, in some instances, than under whatever local dictator ended up running them after independence).

Morris is able to look at the Empire and the imperialists with a certain amount of sympathetic nostalgia while being aware that this sort of thing shouldn't be driven too far, and I think she succeeds admirably at this. After all, one doesn't need to condemn the Empire and everything about it in order to demonstrate that it's morally wrong. You just need to not subscribe to a utilitarian moral framework, and most people don't anyway. Then it's obvious that a nation should get to run its own affairs even if it doesn't do as good a job (for some definition of doing a good job) than some hypothetical foreign imperialists would. I got the impression that many Britons themselves were coming round to this point of view by the time decolonization was starting in earnest in the 1960s or so. Morris quotes a memorable statement by Gandhi on this subject: referring to British claims that India would plunge into chaos if the Britons leave, he said “Give us chaos!” (FtT, p. 470.)

The only real downside of these books is the lack of endnotes. We learn nothing about the sources that Morris used for the book, except for the occasional passing mention in the main part of the text. I think it's a great pity. Sure, some of her sources aren't accessible to the general public — e.g. interviews and letters — or they may be hard to reach, e.g. old newspapers; but some at least are surely books that shouldn't be too hard to find. Endnotes in a book can often be a great source of ideas for what to read next, and I was sad to see that there is nothing of that sort here, not even a bibliography.

Another minor downside is that the whole thing turned out to be a bit longer than perhaps ideally I would have liked. Each of these three volumes has a bit over 500 pages, and by the end I had to push myself a bit to keep reading a couple of chapters a day and get over with the whole thing. But anyway, this should by no means be taken as a serious complaint — it's always better that a book is too long rather than too short, and when taken in moderate doses these three books were very pleasant reading indeed.

Heaven's Command

Morris points out somewhere that the British Empire — if you define it as England having some sort of overseas possessions — actually goes back all the way to the Norman conquest, as the (Norman) kings of England then controlled some bits of French territory. These were later lost, but England kept control of the Channel Islands, soon gained control of parts of Ireland, and so on. Nevertheless, her trilogy begins pretty much with the accession of Queen Victoria. The few territories left of the “first” Empire did not strike the British as terribly important and there was little immediate interest in acquiring more (p. 24).

Some of the initial impetus for expansion came from seemingly humanitarian motives: the suppression of the slave trade got the British Navy into the habit of acting as a worldwide naval policeman, and the idea of ‘evangelical imperialism’ emerged (p. 39). In India, this encouraged them to suppress the thugs (p. 77). In South Africa, it was the British suppression of slavery that triggered some of the first great migrations of the Boers (p. 54).

Commercial motives for imperialism soon followed, often in the form of chartered companies with some quasi-governmental functions. Some of the old ones were still going strong (e.g. the Hudson's Bay Company, which seemed to consist mostly of suitably dour Scots; p. 116), and some new ones were founded later, mostly in Africa (p. 522).

During this early period, expanding the Empire was “largely a matter of impulse” (p. 175) rather than due to the government following a big plan: it often depended on local opportunities or initiatives, gaining one territory to protect another, etc.

In India, there were some interesting differences between this new 19th-century empire and the old 18th-century one. The old imperialists often regarded e.g. native Indian princes as their social equals, and did not hesitate to imitate some aspects of their culture, but in the 19th century a much more condescending attitude prevailed (pp. 75, 249). Partly the gap between Britons and natives also increased once British women started coming to India in larger numbers (PB, p. 135).

“The British officers, though they made many friends in Kabul, made many secret enemies too, by their free and easy behaviour with the women — who, frustrated as they often were by their husbands' pederastic preferences, were dangerously ready to oblige.” (P. 101.) :)))

*

From the middle of the 19th century, the British imperialists, and an increasing proportion of the public, were beginning to show a certain increased self-confidence, aware of Britain's status as a global leader in industry and technology (pp. 195–6). This gradually rose to a belief in what Morris describes as “the sacramental nature of the British Empire [. . .] belief in its own infallibility” (p. 328). They proclaimed Victoria the Empress of India and celebrated this with a great durbar in Delhi (p. 331).

The Indian mutiny of 1857, which was eventually brutally suppressed by the British, also contributed to a new attitude towards the imperial possessions: the Empire was now “stern, efficient and improving [. . .] its principal duty the imposition of British standards” upon the subject peoples (p. 249). The Empire grew a little more aggressive about expanding, and a little rougher in dealing with the natives under its control — we see chapters about the sad fate of the Metis in Canada, and the still infinitely sadder one of the Tasmanian aborigines.

There is also the occasional funny episode, such as the 1859 “Pig War” with the Americans over a small island near Vancouver (p. 371).

Gradually, a sort of ideology of empire emerged, and imperialism became an increasingly important political topic, with people like Disraeli promoting the idea that Britain should deliberately strive to become “a great country, an imperial country” (p. 382). Imperialism also became increasingly popular with the public; “like many another nation at the summit of its power, Great Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century was an image of conceit, and brazenly equated glory with strength, wealth and size” (p. 389).

This was the “New Imperialism”, vulgar and mercenary (p. 520), “a craze of fin-de-siècle” (p. 517.) The most notable territorial development of this period was the Scramble for Africa, “which brought out the bully in most imperialists” (p. 526). Morris draws some awfully subtle distinctions, though I suppose she is on to something: imperialism “had often been brutal in the past, and often misguided, but it had seldom been mean. [. . .] Africa and the New Imperialism tainted this conception.” (P. 520.)

There was also an interesting new economic motive. From the 1870s, it was getting clear that Britain would not remain the leading economic power for long, as the USA and Germany were catching up. Thus some wanted to abandon the traditional British policy of free trade, and set up the empire as Britain's exclusive economic playground protected by tariffs (p. 390). And “the more fragile the British supremacy became in reality, the more emotional became the idea of Empire” (p. 490), all the way to its culmination at the Diamond Jubilee in 1897. How much of a benefit the Empire really was in monetary terms is doubtful (pp. 535–6), but it was present everywhere in British life (p. 537).

Pax Britannica

This volume is an overview of the British Empire in its various aspects — society and politics, technology and science, sport and tourism, arts and architecture, army and navy, etc. — as it was at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when the Empire was at the peak of its power — or at least it felt that way to the vast majority of the British public.* They were suffused with a new-found enthusiasm for an ebullient, aggressive sort of imperialism, a feeling that governing the rest of the world was not only their right but actually their duty (p. 26), as a “service to mankind” (Curzon's phrase, p. 122). Morris makes a very interesting point that underlying this “New Imperialism” was the same spirit of hectic energy that we often associate with the fin de siècle in the arts of that period; here it was applied to foreign policy instead (p. 22).

[*In reality, rivals such as the U.S. and Germany were already overtaking Britain in various areas of industry, trade, and technology (pp. 25, 362), and the fear of falling behind was part of the reason for the fervent pushiness of New Imperialism (p. 127). “At the heart of the Diamond Jubilee there lay a doubt, or an irony” (p. 517), as though the British were trying, not quite successfully, to convince themselves that their position would continue as it was.]

The British imperialists of the day had a tremendous sense of self-confidence, regarded the territories under their charge with a sort of paternalist authoritarianism (p. 46), and were often accustomed to having something of a privileged status even outside the Empire itself — the “reflected glow of Empire” (p. 38). They were “drunk with glory” after decades of easy victories against poorly armed enemies in the colonies (p. 118), and militarism was now popular (p. 404). Racial prejudice also got stronger than before (pp. 134–8). Historically, New Imperialism was something of an aberration: “Chauvinism was an old British trait, but this aggressive conceit was something new” (p. 116); and even in its heyday, many were repelled by its coarseness (p. 335). “Lording it for lording's sake was not the deeper British style.” (P. 517.)

The Empire was connected by steamship lines (regrettably, Morris repeats the old “Port Outward, Starboard Home” factoid; p. 54), submarine cables, railroads, waves of emigration (and, as a result, a strong feeling of connection between the white colonies and Britain), and of course by trade connections (profit, Morris argues, was the main motive underlying the Empire; p. 99). But the importance of the Empire to trade was often exaggerated at the time, and Britain as well as its colonies traded a lot with areas outside the Empire (p. 451). Various kinds of infrastructure were also being built (“The British Empire was a development agency, distributing technical knowledge around the world”, p. 361).

Politically, the British Empire was something of a mess: a bunch of territories with different degrees of autonomy (some, like Canada, were almost independent, p. 386), different kinds of organization, governed by different institutions in different ways, often via an increasingly ponderous bureaucracy (p. 189). In some areas, local rulers and customary law were left largely in charge of things. “Legally there was no such thing as a British Empire. It had no constitutional meaning.” (P. 177.) “It was all bits and pieces. There was no System.” (P. 212.)

The British administration in India was involved in so many things that “in some ways India was almost a socialist country” (p. 269). This is probably something of an exaggeration but it's a pleasantly vivid simile :) India was Britain's most important colony, protecting it was one of the main goals of their foreign policy, and many other imperial territories were obtained primarily to protect their control of India or the trade routes leading to it (p. 276). Nevertheless imperialism had not had a great influence on British politics before the 1890s (p. 449).

There's an interesting chapter on British art and literature during this period (pp. 335–355), and perhaps unsurprisingly it seems that good artists and intellectuals tended not to be all that inspired by something as coarse and aggressive as the New Imperialism. Even Kipling, during the Jubilee year of 1897, published his Recessional, a poem whose sentiments ran exactly opposite to the prevailing mood of the time (“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday/ Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”, p. 347).

There were already some internal tensions in the Empire; the white dominions increasingly wanted to go their own way (pp. 482–3), and nationalism was beginning to emerge in the nonwhite colonies (pp. 487–9). Some dreamt of reforming the Empire into some sort of federation (p. 494), but of course that was unrealistic. The empire had no clear ideology (“The British had never been good at formulating abstractions”, p. 499), unless perhaps it was “the High Victorian concept of fair play” (p. 516).

The Queensland government ran an “official scheme for Female Emigrants”, who were kept under strict control while aboard ship: “Thus, refigerated in purity, these perishable cargoes were shipped to the bounds of Empire, where lusty colonials presently defrosted them to perpetuate the breed.” Ewww :)))) (P. 69.)

Farewell the Trumpets

This volume is about the decline of the British Empire, mostly in the 20th century. Even at its zenith, during the Diamond Jubilee year of 1897, there had been some feelings of unease about its future (p. 30). The Empire was “essentially irrational” and efforts to reform it in some more logical way were bound to fail as all its constituent parts just wanted more and more autonomy all the time (p. 60). This did not necessarily stop people from trying; e.g. Alfred Milner, a rare example of an “imperial technocrat”, suggested a sort of union of Britain and the white dominions (pp. 116–7).

Morris describes the Boer War of 1899–1902 as “the beginning of the end” (p. 65); a much messier and uglier war than the previous decades of easy victories against spear-chucking natives, and though the British eventually won, the atrocities to which they had had to resort “robbed the victory of any grandeur” (p. 89). And this was against an enemy whose total population was just 100,000 people; it showed how vulnerable the Empire was (p. 91), and resentful foreign powers as well as unhappy subject peoples took notice. The brash militarism of 1890s Britain largely came to an end (pp. 99, 125), and the existing ruling structures were considerably discredited (pp. 100–2).

There were still a few efforts to expand the Empire and its influence here and there, however, e.g. around the Persian Gulf and in Tibet. Morris describes the British invasion of the latter (which involved a particularly disgusting massacre of Tibetans; p. 136) as “an anachronism” (p. 143): Younghusband and Curzon acted at their own initiative and largely against the wishes of the British government; and Britain no longer had the self-confidence to get away with doing that sort of thing (ibid.).

Now that the feeling of invulnerable strength was gone, Britain began to look for allies (France and Japan, p. 146) and reformed its army and navy (p. 155) to get them ready for war against other great powers and not just against natives in the colonies.

At the start of WW1, the Empire was still unified enough that King George V made a single declaration of war on behalf the whole empire (p. 432). Morris naturally focuses on those aspects of the war that affected the overseas parts of the Empire rather than the trenches of Flanders and the like. The British did a good deal of fighting in the Middle East, with considerable success (such as the taking of Jerusalem, p. 176). On the other hand, the Gallipoli campaign was a notorious failure (p. 194).

*

On paper, the Empire came out of the war as one of the victors, larger and stronger than ever (it took over a number of territories under the new mandate system, p. 208; and gained control over much of the Middle East through various vassal states, protectorates, and the like, p. 258); but war and its glories were thoroughly discredited, the spirit of idealism in which they had entered the war in 1914 was gone (p. 199), and the British public lost its zest for imperialism (pp. 209), despite various propaganda efforts to promote it (pp. 302–3, 313–14). Britain's old hegemony was gone too, though many didn't realize this at first (p. 205). The British Navy, which had once been stronger than any other two navies combined, now had to accept parity with the United States (p. 217). The dominions felt increasingly like independent nations, and e.g. refused to help Britain against Turkey in 1922 (p. 215).

There is a longish chapter about the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland, which was suppressed by the British with considerable brutality, but which led to a widespread sense that the Empire was, in a certain fundamental sense, unjust (p. 245). A few years after the war, Ireland became autonomous in any case. Anti-colonial movements also appeared or grew stronger elsewhere, e.g. in India: this was the period of the infamous Amritsar massacre (1919; p. 274) and of Gandhi's Salt March (1930; p. 290), and the British began to sense that their control over India “was foreseeably coming to an end” (p. 276). (An interesting indicator of that: it was getting hard to find Britons willing to enter the Indian Civil Service, as people figured that India would soon become independent and they would lose their jobs; p. 278.) The British mostly dragged their feet about changing anything in India, and many still thought it would be ages before India could be ready for independence (pp. 285–6, 296).

In the eyes of the British public, the Empire became to look somehow dated and a bit ridiculous, and increasingly irrelevant as their interest turned more to domestic social questions (pp. 304–5). The focus of the remaining imperialists shifted from India to other colonies, especially in Africa, and they grew slightly less disdainful of their subject peoples there (pp. 307–8). The dominions developed their own, non-British, national identities (p. 320), and the Empire was transformed into the British Commonwealth of Nations (p. 366), a nebulous entity whose members seem to have been connected by little more than a personal union (and shared history). In some of the African colonies, conflicts were beginning to emerge between the interests of the white settlers there and the London government's vague idea that the natives should, in the sufficiently distant future, eventually become able to run their own affairs (p. 382).

The growth of the Empire in the 19th century had been possible because Britain had been the first to industrialize in the age of steam (p. 27); but now other countries had caught up and overtaken it. Efforts to implement new technologies didn't always go well (p. 344); Morris tells the curious story of the attempt to establish a zeppelin route between London and Karachi, a costly multi-year project that ended with a crash on its first flight (p. 342). With airplanes, they did manage to establish an Empire Air Service, but it was inefficient and inconvenient (p. 357). They seemed to do better at at older technologies, such as railways, and did a lot of impressive work of irrigation engineering on the Nile (at the time, the British Empire controlled nearly the whole course of that river; p. 353).

*

There's an interesting contrast between the WW1 and WW2: in the former, Britain declared war on behalf of the whole Empire, but in the latter each dominion declared war separately (and there had been no formal alliance between them and Britain; p. 432). Hitler had (in)famously declared that he had no designs upon the British Empire (“[l]ike so many foreigners, he was seduced by history”, p. 432, and overestimated its strength), but Italian and Japanese war aims were certainly direct threats to the Empire (p. 433). Besides, the main allies of Britain — the USA and the Soviet Union — were unfavourable to the idea of empire as well (pp. 434, 463–7). It soon became clear that Britain could not defend the Empire by itself (as demonstrated e.g. by how easily Japan occupied British colonies in southeast Asia; p. 450).

The WW2 had been “a last glimpse of greatness for the British” (p. 459), and they were obviously not one of the remaining superpowers after the end of the war. The British people themselves had little interest in the Empire by then (pp. 462, 474). Nationalist movements grew in the various colonies (p. 470). In India it became clear that the British would have had to go full nazi on it if they had wanted to keep control over it, and instead they withdrew in an almost undignified haste (p. 489) while the country descended into violence: “thousands of people died unremarked in the streets of Amritsar, where the death of 400 had horrified the world twenty-five years before” (p. 490).

With India gone, many imperial territories now “had no point”, as their role had been mostly to safeguard British control of India (p. 495). The Commonwealth was reformed into an even vaguer and looser association (p. 500). Morris describes an interesting final burst of imperial energy: an ambitious programme of modernizing the various African colonies, with a multitude of agencies, investments into infrastructure and equipment, etc., but it all soon came to nothing (pp. 503–8). By then imperialism was discredited and the British had little interest in it (pp. 496, 511).

For some time after the WW2, the imperialists still believed in the power of British prestige (p. 473), but were disabused of this by such things as the debacle at Suez, when Britain had been unable to prevent the Egyptians from nationalizing the canal (p. 525). Decolonization proceeded in country after country, often following brief skirmishes (p. 516), though there were some few colonies that seemed to be in no hurry for independence. Morris ends this volume with Churchill's funeral in 1965, which can fittingly be seen as something of a funeral for the Empire itself (p. 556).

ToRead:

As I already mentioned earlier, this trilogy sadly lacks endnotes and a bibliography, but a number of interesting-sounding books are mentioned here and there anyway:

• George Aberigh-Mackay: Twenty-One Days in India (1881). The title provides a nice contrast with the more common ones along the lines of Forty-<something> Years in India (HC, p. 183).
• Lawrence Durrell: Prospero's Cell (1945). A book about Corfu, on which he lived for a number of years. (HC, p. 259.)
• Charles Dilke: Greater Britain (1869). This book “was an immense popular success, offering educated Britons a new vision of themselves as a benevolent master race” (PB, p. 37).
• Frank Richards: Old Soldier Sahib (1936). Recalls “the irrepressible randiness of the British soldier abroad in those days” (PB, p. 300).
• Dennis Kincaid: British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (1938). “[E]xceedingly entertaining” (PB, p. 300).
• John Galbraith: The Scotch (1964). A book about the Scots in Canada by the famous economist, “who was one of them”. One of these Scots told Morris that “the book was not generally popular in the community. ‘Not true?’ I surmised. ‘Too true’, was the reply.” (PB, p. 391.)
• Arnold White: Efficiency and Empire (1901). Showed how discredited the established ruling structures of Britain were in the wake of the Boer war (FtT, p. 100–1).
• Lord Edward Cecil: The Leisure of an Egyptian Official (1921). “[O]utrageous set-pieces of imperial farce” (FtT, p. 367).
• Ronald Storrs: Orientations (1937). “[T]he least imperial, most enjoyable and best selling of all imperial memoirs” (FtT, p. 395).
• Freddy Spencer-Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (1948). About his guerrilla activities in occupied Malaya during the WW2 (FtT, p. 458).