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2.83 AVERAGE
2.83 AVERAGE
medium-paced
The British Empire has never wanted for defenders. For centuries men in uniform spent their careers and even their lives to preserve its existence, while others confined their sacrifice to the expenditure of ink. H. W. Crocker III is in the latter category, and he undertakes his task at an inopportune time. Today the British “Empire” is a sad remnant of its former self, consisting of little more than some isolated leftovers that are maintained at considerable expense either out of nostalgia for past greatness or simply because nobody else wants them. When they do go, it will undoubtedly be with a whimper rather than a bang.
Yet so long as these isolated patches still fly the Union Jack, Crocker will continue to take heart. “The British Empire still exists, thank goodness,” he declares at the start of his paean to it, adding that it was “incontestably a good thing.” Sure, he admits, it was built through conquest of other people, it arbitrarily established boundaries to suit their interests, and it was responsible for a “portion” of the slave trade, but all of this in his view is a small price to pay for introducing to subjugated populations “their ideas about the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government,” as well as British sports and their concept of fair play. I’m sure he would have added warm beer to the list if he had a taste for it.
All of this, of course, is based on a host of assumptions, all of which go unaddressed. Foremost among them is that none of things would exist in the world if the British hadn’t introduced them, which would have come as quite a surprise to all those places in the world that enjoyed the rule of law, organized games, and ideas of fairness long before the British showed up on their lands to “introduce” them. And of course, introducing them was far from the goal of the empire in the first place, as Crocker reluctantly acknowledges before moving on quickly to the more fun parts of his tale. For someone who likes to bang on throughout the book about “Bolshies” and other right-wing boogeymen, he certainly doesn’t like to spend much effort defending the profit-seeking goals of the empire that merited their attacks on it.
The second assumption is that all of the British Empire’s wonderful contributions to the world could only have been introduced through conquest and subjugation. Crocker certainly had no shortage of opportunities to address this throughout the book, as the bulk of its pages are devoted to a “boys’ own” retelling of the conquest of empire, complete with entire chapters offering potted biographies of some of the most famous conquerors. It’s an approach that conveniently skips past any examination of the conquered, which evidently is necessary for Crocker to do to construct his claims for the “incontestable” goodness of the empire. After all, what do their lives matter when weighed against the introduction of tennis to the survivors?
And this gets to the biggest assumption of all in Crocker’s book, which is that British rule was incomparably superior to what preceded it, and that any positive aspects of independence was because of their legacy. This he argues through his region-by-region examination of the British Empire, which provides a curated selection of the highlights that support his arguments. Yet even in his presentation of his examples he excludes important details in order to make his case. Perhaps the best example of this is his chapter on America’s own period as an imperial possession, which he presents as largely a laissez-faire rule during its existence. Of course, it’s easy enough to declare that “there were no shackles on the Americans” if one ignores the effort by James II to introduce the Dominion of New England, an attempt to impose centralized administrative control that was only thwarted by the Glorious Revolution and William III’s focus on his wars with France. Exclusion of this episode is minor, though, compared to Crocker’s glossing over of the events leading to the American Revolution (or, as the British and Crocker prefer to call it, the American War of Independence), which he rushes through in a paragraph that only succeeds in conveying a sense that the author feels that the wrong side won.
Crocker’s belief in the ingratitude of imperial subjects is even greater when it comes to the Irish. As he presents it, the debt owed by the Irish to the English is vast, whereas the debt owed by the English to the Irish is negligible (with the author even pointedly reassigning any credit for Ireland’s contribution to medieval civilization to the Catholic Church). Tinted as it is by his use of rosiest of rose-colored glasses, Crocker’s portrait of Britain’s rule over the Emerald Isle is so discolored as to be unrecognizable. His celebration of the English for introducing “law and order” during the Middle Ages, as well as a parliament, leaves out that these were employed to extend English control at the expense of the Irish themselves. His summary of the Act of Union, which he presents as a failure due to the “charismatic” distractions of Daniel O’Connell, leaves out that his appeal was directly tied to the failure of the British to deliver on their promises of Catholic emancipation after the act’s passage. The “hazard” of the Irish potato famine leaves out that the tragedy was a consequence of the Irish peasantry’s British-imposed dependence on the crop. And so on. It is only thanks to such omissions that Crocker’s view of an ungrateful Ireland casting off British rule has any traction, and even he is forced to acknowledge without elaboration that by the end it was only maintained in the empire’s “second capital” by British soldiers patrolling in armored cars.
By this point perhaps the greatest flaw in Crocker’s argument is obvious, which is that among the greatest grievances of imperial subjects was that those concepts of “the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government” which he is so eager to credit the British Empire for spreading were in fact denied to them by the British throughout most of the empire’s existence. Here Crocker relies upon his reader’s ignorance of the details, such as the role the perceived loss of sovereignty played in motivating the American Revolution, or that the Irish parliament represented the Anglo-Irish minority rather than the Gaelic majority. This distortion only gets worse as he moves on to the Asian and African parts of the empire, as he ignores completely the British resistance to introducing rights and representative self-government whenever they feared it might become an impediment to their control. Claiming that “British policy was to lead India to becoming a self-governing dominion” omits that such a policy came only after a half-century of agitation by Indian activists and broken promises on the part of the British, and even then was hedged with provisions that allowed the British to rescind self-government whenever they decided it was necessary. And his description of British rule in Africa as a demonstration of “their usual facility for development, civilization, and self-rule” is an outright howler that requires complete ignorance of the structures of local governance imposed by the British in those colonies and the restriction of voting to white settlers to be believed.
It is this level of intellectual dishonesty that undermines Crocker’s effort to make a positive case for the British Empire. Only by providing the most superficial of overviews of British rule with cherry-picked examples to support his interpretation is it even remotely possible for him to make such a claim in the first place. And if the best defense that can be offered for events such as the use of torture by British security forces during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya that “some” of the accounts have been “hysterically exaggerated” while excusing the rest as being unauthorized, then the reader is well within their rights as to question the supposed incontestability of the empire as a “good thing.” If there is argument to be made that in the end the contributions of the British empire were more positive than negative, it certainly isn’t to be found in this lazy and misleading book.