The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain

498 Pages·2005·4.79 MB·English

by  Bernard Porter

The Absent-Minded
Imperialists
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The Absent-Minded
Imperialists
Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain
BERNARD PORTER

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Preface
Looking back, the empire seems an awfully big part of British history. Yet
thisisonlyrecentlycomingtobeacknowledgedinBritainitself.Foreigners
of course have known it for years. That is scarcely surprising. It was as an
empire that Britain mainly presented herself to them. Some of them were
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caughtupinit:asitsvictimsorbene ciaries,accordingtocircumstancesor
one’spoliticalviews;asitssubjects,anyway.Othersusedtocompetewithit.
Americansencountereditbothways.Thismustgofartoexplainwhyitwas
herempirethatmostlyimpressedthese‘others’aboutBritain,andstilltends
to impress them in historical retrospect. Britons themselves on the other
hand have usually downplayed it, comparatively. This is not just a recent
phenomenon,acaseperhapsof‘denial’bornofpost-imperialguiltorregret.
The empire has always seemed to mean less to most British than to its
admirers and critics abroad. It hardly features at all in any obvious way in
British literature and art. It was usually neglected in English schools. (We
shall be seeing the evidence for this later.) Why was this? Does it really
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re ect the reality of the empire’s impact back home? Were those native
historians who used to leave it out of their accounts of Britain’s modern
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development entirely, or at least to marginalize it, justi ed in so doing, at
any rate from the point of view of Britain’s domestic history; or were they
missing a trickhere? Just what wasthe relationship between her experience
as an imperial power—there can be no doubting that, of course—and her
more inner being? In what ways can she be said to have been an imperial

society, as well as an imperial nation?
This is the subject of this book. It has been written as a contribution
to the current debate on Britain’s imperial culture in the nineteenth and
1800 1940
earlytwentiethcenturies(c. – ),whichinrecentyearshastendedto
give rather greater emphasis to the imperial factor in her domestic history
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thanolder-fashionedBritishhistoriansusedto.Anumberofin uenceshave
contributed tothis, someofthem political (the Vietnam war, forexample,
which extended the meaning of the word ‘imperialism’ for many), but two
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important books in particular. The rst was John MacKenzie’s Propaganda
1984
and Empire ( ), which showed the extent to which Britons were urged to
preface
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become empire-minded from the s onwards; the second was the late
1993
Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism ( ), which revealed actual imperial
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traits not only in the obvious post- literary canon (Kipling, Conrad),
but also in earlier authors (Austen, Charlotte Bronte¨,Dickens), where they
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hadhardlybeennoticedatallbefore.(Saidwasnotthe rsttodothis,but
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he has been the most in uential.) Both these books inspired ‘schools’ of
followers,whothenfoundevenmoreimperialismembeddedinnineteenth-
and early twentieth-century British culture and society, sometimes in the
mostsurprisingplaces.Sofarsogood(inthemain).Butthisthengaverise
insomequarterstotheideathatBritainwaspermeatedwithimperialismat
every level, to the exclusion of almost every other ideology or ‘discourse’
(using that word in its broadest sense), whether contemporaries realized it
or not. That contemporaries did not always realize it was a reason for
pointing it up where it did not appear overtly: inserting imperial references
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into television or lm adaptations of nineteenth-century classic novels, for
example, and into documentaries about other aspects of Victorian life, on
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thegroundsthatitwastherereally,evenifnotexplicitlystated. Inthisway,
what before had been a ‘merely’ scholarly idea spread into more popular
consciousness.Itmayhavebecomethereceivedwisdombynow;takingusa
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long way on from the time when imperial perceptions and in uences were
whitewashed out of domestic British history almost entirely.
Thatwhitewashingwascertainlyreprehensible.Itwasalsofrustratingto
historians like myself, who taught and wrote about imperial history, but
were forced to do so in a kind of academic ghetto separately from the
mainstream of ‘British history’, and were often misunderstood as a result.
(For a start, we were widely assumed to be imperialists. The presumption
was that you studied what you empathized with. Most social historians,
afterall,weresocialists.)Thisobviouslygaveafalseviewofthemainstream.

Tosomeoutsidersitseemedincomprehensible.AfavouriteangleonBritish
history for many years was what was called the ‘Whig’ one: a narrative of
ever-growing ‘freedom’ through time. How could that be squared with the
suppression of many freedoms which is a logical corollary of ‘imperialism’
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bymost de nitions (imperium ‘power’), andwas apretty blatant e ectof
Britain’s empire-building from the seventeenth century onwards—the
period of the growth of this ‘freedom’—both overseas and in Ireland? It
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just did not t. You cannot judge a bully outside by the sweetness of his
conductinhishome.(Thisisnottoimply,incidentally,thateitherofthose
descriptions isnecessarilya fair one for Britain in this period.) Quite apart
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preface
from that, the whole implication of her worldwide dominance had to be
that more people were involved in Britain’s history than the ‘British’—
usually restricted to metropolitan white men—alone. Jamaicans, Punjabis,
Ghanaians, white Canadians, Australian aborigines, and all the countless
other peoples who got caught up in the web of the British empire at one
time or another, women as well as men, were and are as much a part of
Britain’s storyasthepeoplewholivedororiginatedinBritainitself. When
theempirewasliftedoutofitsghettoandreintegratedinthemainstreamby
such as MacKenzie and Said, no one was more relieved and delighted than
someofusoldimperialhistoryhands.Atlasttheempirewascominghome.
Many of the contributions of the MacKenzie-ites and the Saidists
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(‘Saidist’ is MacKenzie’s mischievous neologism) have hugely enriched
our understanding, both of the nature of British imperialism and, on the
other side of the equation, of Britain’s culture and society. It is fascinating
andimportanttorealizetheextentofthetracestheformerleftonthelatter,
in particular: between the lines of Jane Austen’s novels, for example, where
onecouldeasilymissthemwithoutSaid’scleverguidance;inmorepopular
literature and music in the second half of the nineteenth century; on
perceptions and constructions of gender; through sport; in shows, zoos,
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and museums...and so on. This is an in uence that was greatly neglected
before. It is no longer. We have—I would guess—most of the materials
available to us now to judge of the real impact and importance of the
imperial factorin the domestic lifeofBritain in thisperiod, andvice versa.
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That,however,hasnotyetbeendoneproperly.E ectshavebeendiscovered
and described, but not evaluated. Sometimes—this book will argue—their
value has been exaggerated. This is for a number of reasons. Semantic
unclarityisone.Toomuchconcentrationonimperialfactorsisanother;ifyou
are only working on one aspect of a culture or society, its importance can

seem greater than it is. The presumption that they must have been over-
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whelming is a third. This is the rst study to tackle this question without
anyoftheseparticulardrawbacks.(Itmayhaveothers.)Itisasoberattempt
toplacetheimperialfactorinBritishdomestichistoryinabroadercontext:
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to discover how great it was, what exactly it signi ed in di erent circum-
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stances, and how it related to other in uences, overall.
It also aspires to a more contemporary and practical purpose. Imperial-
ism is not at an end. (This is being written in the immediate aftermath of
2003
the Iraq war of .) This book will try to show what kind of support an
earlier version of British imperialism required and received from the
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