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July 27,
2003
The Previous Superpower
By Fareed Zakaria
"A HISTORY OF BRITAIN, The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000." By Simon Schama. Illustrated. 576 pp. New York: Miramax Books/Hyperion. $40.
In 1896 a young Winston Churchill arrived in Bangalore, India, as a junior officer of the Fourth Queen's Own Hussars, searching -- as ever -- for action, excitement and glory. He was a staunch believer in the British Empire. He gloried in its power but believed that it was different from all past empires, blessed with a historic civilizing mission. Britain was the bastion of liberty, destined to spread its values through backward lands. The empire's purpose, he wrote, was to ''give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to plant the seeds of commerce and learning.'' ''What more beautiful idea,'' he asked, ''can inspire human effort?''
And yet, Simon Schama writes, in the third and final volume of his ''History of Britain,'' ''There was an awful lot of hanging around in the club, pending the accomplishment of these great goals.'' Churchill details the utterly lavish life of British officers in India, waited on hand and foot by a retinue of servants: ''There was nothing they would not do. Their world became bound by the commonplace articles of your wardrobe . . . no toil was too hard, no hours were too long. . . . Princes could live no better than we.'' For most of the officers in Bangalore -- indeed for most generals and viceroys -- the empire's purpose had much more to do with the preservation of their power, and British power more generally, than the improvement of India. This tension between Britain's power and its ideals surfaces repeatedly in Schama's engaging book, which is subtitled ''The Fate of Empire.'' This is a history lesson that should interest Americans today as we contemplate our own lofty ideals and immense power.
Schama, university professor at Columbia University, opens with the warning that ''readers in search of an exhaustive account of the careers of Sir Robert Peel or Reginald Maudling should put this book down right now.'' This is not a comprehensive history with a straightforward narrative, touching on all the major events of modern British history. Partly this is the result of the pull of television. The book is a companion volume to Schama's widely broadcast television series and is structured as a collection of episodes (told through individuals) that span the years 1776 to 2000. Schama is unashamedly idiosyncratic, pointing out that his book is a history of Britain, not the history of Britain. Still, it might seem odd that this volume barely mentions the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Crimean War or the Boer War. And it is sometimes too breezy in structure and tone, assuming readers will know the basic facts about, say, the repeal of the Corn Laws. But while one might quibble with the lack of emphasis on this figure or that event -- I, for one, did want more on Peel, one of Britain's most important prime ministers -- on the whole Schama pulls it off. He writes wonderfully, in an easygoing yet elegant manner, with an eye for the telling aesthetic detail, and throughout brimming with intelligence and passion. In addition, most of the biographical essays do end up serving to highlight, in one way or another, his central theme -- the push and pull between Britain's liberal hopes and its imperial realities.
The first hundred pages of the book are taken up with the intellectual and cultural atmosphere surrounding the French Revolution (at the time seen as a far more important event than its American counterpart). The question on every European's mind was, Is violent revolution the way of the future? Schama tells the story through romantic philosophers like Jean Jacques Rousseau, poets like William Wordsworth and political writers like Tom Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Cobbett. The latter group, Britain's radicals and liberals, forced incremental but persistent reform and thus staved off revolution. By the end of the 1830's, Britain had passed an emancipation act for Catholics, abolished slavery in its colonies, vastly expanded the number eligible to vote and embraced free trade.
Things hadn't gone as all the radicals had wanted. Having seen industrialization as the enemy, many would have been shocked to discover that it was industrialization that broke down Britain's oligarchies and hierarchies. ''Like Rousseau, Wordsworth believed that the British countryside ought to be the antidote to, not the accomplice of, modernity,'' Schama writes. ''But the opposites had somehow got together, got inside each other; country people wanting town things; town people yearning for a piece of the countryside. And they got it. The most industrial society in the world was also the most attached to its village memories.''
Schama uses the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace in London to open his account of Victorian Britain. Meant to showcase the wonders of British industry, for many in Britain the exhibition meant a great deal more. Prince Albert, Victoria's consort, had explained that it heralded the dawn of a happy world of growers, makers and shoppers. Commerce would triumph over war, and expositions like the Great Exhibition would be the preferred alternative to military parades. Though skimping on the economics, Schama paints a fair enough picture of Victorian Britain -- and a fascinating portrait of its royal couple, Victoria and Albert -- with its inexorable economic dynamism, political reform, worries about cultural decay and horrific social conditions. He reminds us that at the height of mid-Victorian equipoise, life expectancy for mechanics and laborers was 17 years.
The gap between Britain's rhetoric and its reality is most marked in its experience as an imperial power. Schama tells this story using only two examples among Britain's vast possessions, but they are the central ones -- Ireland and India. The mid-Victorians saw in India a laboratory for all their ideas of improvement. Thomas Babington Macaulay, the most eloquent exponent of liberal imperialism, explained in a speech in parliament that as Britain charted the beginning of its rule in India, it should accept, even celebrate, its eventual end. ''To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition,'' Macaulay said, ''to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own.'' And many of the Britons -- almost all Scots, Irish, or Welsh -- who ran India approached their tasks filled with Enlightenment ideas about science, free trade and constitutional government. The Victorian liberals were patronizing about India but they passionately wanted to bring progress to its people.
But the empire was not only -- or even largely -- about civilizing. It was also about accumulating economic advantage and maintaining power. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857 this motive became paramount, and men like Macaulay lost out to a tougher and more cynical bunch. The rhetoric of free trade persisted, but the reality was that tariffs were constantly manipulated to favor British imports and disadvantage Indian products. Often it was more than tariffs. In Orissa, the government banned the production of salt altogether, which was the chief livelihood of most of its people. Not surprisingly, in the famine of 1866, a quarter of the state's population died. Equal justice under the law was the motto, but Indian judges could not hear cases involving Europeans. Schama writes later in the book about George Orwell's fury during his posting in British Burma: ''It was the gap between the self-righteousness of the governing-class ideals -- Christianity, cricket and civilizing the natives -- and the reality of coercion that most offended him.''
Perhaps even more surprising, given the prejudices of the time, was the attitude taken toward Ireland, a European country. London had been content to let the tiny Anglo-Irish oligarchy run Ireland in the worst feudal manner. British liberals like William Gladstone flirted with ideas of land reform and local autonomy, but they always withered against the brute realities of maintaining power. Indeed, Schama describes in a harrowing section how the British saw benefits in Ireland's famines of 1846 and 1850 -- in which one million people, nearly 15 percent of the population -- died. Many thoughtful Britons seriously explained that this would reduce the problem of overpopulation (about which the Victorians were obsessed since Thomas Malthus). The Times of London opined that Providence had supplied a ''check of nature'' and that society is ''reconstructed in disaster.'' In retrospect, the obvious solution to Britain and Ireland's tragic association was autonomy (Home Rule). But the British (particularly British conservatives) always feared they would look weak; and in staying strong, they encouraged Irish extremism, terror and separatism. Both in Ireland and India the gradualist, constitutional paths to self-government that Macaulay envisioned never took place. Instead what emerged was a raw contest of power, and eventually Britain, waning on the world stage, accommodated itself to reality and let go.
The final section of the book is a brilliant, essayistic look at modern Britain through the lives of two men, Winston Churchill and George Orwell. Schama does more with these two well-worn lives than one could have imagined. In particular, he uses Orwell to tell the story of Britain's fall from superpower and its resurrection as a less glorious but vibrant and modern nation. In these last chapters one can see clearly that this is not an angry account of Britain but a realistic one. In seeing his country warts and all, Schama is able to paint an affectionate and human picture of a country to which he is still deeply attached. In Orwell's ''Golden Country,'' he concludes, ''nature, love, freedom and history are all raveled up together. Some before him called such a place of hopes and blessings 'Jerusalem.' And some of us obstinately think we can still call it Britain.''
The reality that Schama does not dwell on, however, is Britain's complex legacy. A vast majority of third-world democracies today are former British colonies. Despite the undeniable cruelties and hypocrisies of British imperialism, it brought organization, institutions and Enlightenment ideas to some of its colonies. (Not all; Orwell was right about Burma.) In the end, Britain's failure was that it could never keep faith in its liberal ideals, succumbing instead to the petty arrogance of race and national might. America is a different country, of course -- less fascinated by empire -- but in one important respect it faces the same paradox as Britain. No matter how compelling America's ideals, they still come wrapped in American power. People abroad may love the former but they are inevitably suspicious of the latter. And if America falters in its application of its ideals, people around the world will believe that they are simply a smoke screen for its power. Call it the fate of empire.
Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, is the author of ''The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.''