12. IMPERIALISM AND CIVILIZATION
The last argument in favour of imperialism is that it brought that vague but portentous entity, “civilization”. European imperialism, writes John Darwin, “provoked, and drew strength from, a fiercer assertion than ever before of Europe’s cultural mission to be the whole world’s engine of material progress and also its source of religious and philosophical truth. Europeans were uniquely progressive, it was variously claimed, because of their physical, social or religious evolution. This was the charter of their ‘race supremacy’. Last but not least, Greater Europe’s expansion into Afro-Asian lands too remote or resistant in earlier times seemed a tribute to its scientific and technological primacy. The ‘knowledge gap’ between Europeans and (most) others looked wider, not narrower, at the end of the century. Parts of Europe were entering the second industrial revolution of electricity and chemicals before the non-Western world had exploited coal and steam.”168
In 1897 many of the crowned heads of Europe assembled in London to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne. The Diamond Jubilee celebrations, bringing together representatives of every nation of the empire, marked the zenith not only of the British empire, the largest in extent to that date in world history, but the acme of the idea of empire in general, of empire as the bearer of great civilization.
The great poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), wrote a poem for the occasion, Recessional (referring to the procession of clergy out of church after a service), which was published in The Times the next day:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire;
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget – lest we forget…
Coming from the “jingoistic” poet par excellence, this call to humility was unexpected. The British Empire, he warned, could go the same way as those ancient empires of Nineveh and Tyre if it succumbed to pride…
His words struck a chord in the heart of the people. “The novelist Walter Besant wrote, ‘The people, bewildered with pride, were ready to shout they knew not what – to go they knew not whither. And then the poet spoke, and his words rang true. I know of no poem in history so opportune, that so went to all our hearts – that did its work and delivered its message with so much force.’…”169
Pride in being the citizen of a great empire was fostered by governments in order to restrain discontent in the lower classes. As Eric Hobsbawm writes, “Ever since the great imperialist Cecil Rhodes observed in 1895 that if one wanted to avoid civil war one must become imperialist, most observers have been aware of so-called ‘social imperialism’, i.e. of the attempt to use imperial expansion to diminish discontent by economic improvements or social reform or in other ways. There is no doubt at all that politicians were perfectly aware of the potential benefits of imperialism. In some cases – notably Germany – the rise of imperialism has been explained primarily in terms of ‘the primacy of domestic politics’…
“… Imperialism encouraged the masses, and especially the potentially discontented, to identify themselves with the imperial state and nation, and thus unconsciously to endow the social and political system represented by that state with justification and legitimacy. And in an era of mass politics… even old systems required new legitimacy. Here again, contemporaries were quite clear about this. The British coronation ceremony of 1902, carefully restyled, was praised because it was designed to express ‘the recognition, by a free democracy, of a hereditary crown, as a symbol of the world-wide dominion of their race’ (my emphasis). In short, empire made good ideological content.”170
Paradoxically, therefore, the economic motivation of imperialism had beneficial social, political and cultural side-effects, in that the colonies provided the emotional sop of “glory” to the discontented masses, which in turn had the effect of giving a belated boost to the now distinctly “old-fashioned” ideas of empire, dominion and hierarchy. Of course, the power of some of these European monarchs and emperors was at least partially subject to parliaments and so, as Hobsbawm says, symbolical. Nevertheless, there is power in symbols, especially if the symbols are persons who seem to justify themselves by continuing in power for long periods (Queen Victoria reigned for 64 years, and Franz Joseph had ruled Austria since 1848)…
And so the combination of the welfare state plus the “glory” of belonging to a powerful nation-state-empire helped to keep the revolution at bay for perhaps another generation. Indeed, the last decades before 1914 can be seen as a kind of “Indian summer” of the monarchical principle, when most European states, in spite of their democratic principles, were headed by monarchs, mostly German and mostly related in one way or another to Queen Victoria, the matriarch of Europe.
This may be seen as a cultural plus of imperialism. And yet the service that imperialism rendered in keeping alive the hierarchical principle in the imperial nation must be set against the disservice it did by encouraging racism – not only on a popular level, but at the level of so-called “science”. For the late nineteenth century was an age, on the one hand, of empire, and on the other of popular democracy, which on the face of it were incompatible concepts. And so a new justification of empire was needed, a justification that would justify the imperial people as well as the imperial dynasty - and that justification was provided by racism. As Dominic Lieven writes, “An autocrat or even an aristocracy could rule over ethnically different peoples citing the same justifications of divine appointment, prescription or superior culture that they used to legitimise their governing of peoples of their own ethnicity. But a sovereign democratic nation could only justify its rule over other peoples in the long run by doctrines of innate racial superiority.”171
“To some,” writes Diana Preston, “Darwinism seemed to legitimize distinctions between races and between individuals, and to justify the existence of social hierarchies and of rich and poor – indeed, of pecking orders of all sorts. Looking back over the nineteenth century, the well-known British journalist William Thomas Stead, later to go down with the Titanic, wrote: ‘The doctrine of evolution… may be regarded as the master dogma of the century. Its subtle influence is to be felt in every department of life. It has profoundly modified our conceptions of creation, and it is every day influencing more and more our ideas of morality. Men are asking, Why hesitate in consigning to a lethal chamber all idiots, lunatics and hopeless incurables? And in the larger field of national politics, why should we show any mercy to the weak? Might becomes right… Wars of extermination seem to receive the approbation of nature.’
“Both Britons and Americans saw the Anglo-Saxon race as pre-eminent among the white races, which, in turn, rightly dominated the rest. One writer thought the Anglo-Saxons ‘in perfect accord with the characteristic conditions of modern life.’ The Anglo-Saxon focused on physical interests and material possession and consequently triumphed in world markets ‘because he has supreme gifts as an inventor of material things which appeal to the average man of democracy.’ His success in driving self-interest and ethical standards in double harness marked him out from others, but the writer believed the Anglo-Saxon to be ‘supremely unconscious of this duality in his nature’, concluding smugly that ‘there is a psychological difference between English-speaking men and others, which makes that which would be hypocrisy in others not hypocrisy in them. They are sentimentalists, and, as sentimentalists, not the best analysts of their motive and impulses.’”172
The British were particularly interested in such ideas, for on the one hand, theirs was the largest of the European empires, and on the other, they saw themselves as the standard-bearers of democracy, having “the mother of parliaments” and a tradition of resistance to tyranny since the time of Magna Carta. They concluded that it was the greater innate intelligence and superior character of the British that made them into the world’s most powerful nation, and gave them a right to rule the less genetically endowed nations of Africa and Asia. So the British never tried – in contrast to the French, who tried to make Algerians into Frenchmen – to make the black and brown peoples of their overseas colonies British: the perceived difference was simply too great. They even made a significant contribution to the rise of German racism in the person of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), an Englishman resident in Germany, who regarded the master race as being, not the Whites, but the Aryans to Teutons. “True history,” he wrote, “begins from the moment the German with mighty hand seizes the inheritance of antiquity.”173
As Ferguson writes: “If the British were, as Chamberlain and Milner believed, the master race, with a God-given right to rule the world, it seemed to follow logically that those they fought against were their natural-born inferiors. Was this not the conclusion drawn by Science itself – increasingly regarded as the ultimate authority in such matters?
“In 1863 Dr. James Hunt had dismayed his audience at a meeting in Newcastle of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by asserting that the ‘Negro’ was a separate species of human being, half way between the ape and ‘European man’. In Hunt’s view the ‘Negro’ became ‘more humanized when in his natural subordination to the European’, but he regretfully concluded that ‘European civilization [was] not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character’. According to one eyewitness, the African traveller Winwood Reader, Hunt’s lecture went down badly, eliciting hisses from some members of the audience. Yet within a generation such views had become the conventional wisdom. Influenced by, but distorting beyond recognition, the work of Darwin, nineteenth-century pseudo-scientists divided humanity into ‘races’ on the basis of external physical features, ranking them according to inherited differences not just in physique but also in character. Anglo-Saxons were self-evidently at the top, Africans at the bottom. The work of George Combe, author of A System of Phrenology (1825), was typical in two respects – the derogatory way in which it portrayed racial differences and the fraudulent way in which it sought to explain them: ’When we regard the different quarters of the globe [wrote Combe], we are struck with the extreme dissimilarity in the attainments of the varieties of men who inhabit them… The history of Africa, so far as Africa can be said to have a history… exhibit[s] one unbroken scene of moral and intellectual desolation… ‘The Negro, easily excitable, is in the highest degree susceptible to all the passions… To the Negro, remove only pain and hunger, and it is naturally in a state of enjoyment. As soon as his toils are suspended for a moment, he sings, seizes a fiddle, he dances.’ The explanation for this backwardness, according to Combe, was the peculiar shape of ‘the skull of the Negro’: ‘The organs of Veneration, Wonder and Hope… are considerable in size. The greatest deficiencies lie in Conscientiousness, Cautiousness, Ideality and Reflection.’ Such ideas were influential. The idea of an ineradicable ‘race instinct’ became a staple of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing…
“Phrenology was only one of a number of bogus disciplines tending to legitimise the assumptions about racial difference that had long been current among white colonists. Even more insidious, because intellectually more rigorous, was the scientific snake-oil known as ‘eugenics’. It was the mathematician Francis Galton who, in his book Hereditary Genius (1869), pioneered the ideas that a ‘man’s natural abilities are derived by inheritance’; that ‘out of two varieties of any race of animal who are equally endowed in other respects, the most intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life’; and that on a sixteen-point scale of racial intelligence, a ‘Negro’ is two grades below an Englishman. Galton sought to validate his theories by using composite photography to distinguish criminal and other degenerate types. However, a more systematic development was undertaken by Karl Pearson, another Cambridge-trained mathematician, who in 1911 became the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at University College London. A brilliant mathematician, Pearson became convinced that his statistical techniques (which he called ‘biometry’) could be used to demonstrate the danger posed to the Empire by racial degeneration. The problem was that improved welfare provision and health care at home were interfering with the natural selection process, allowing genetically inferior individuals to survive – and ‘propagate their unfitness’. ‘The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind,’ he argued in Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage (1912). ‘As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.’
“There was, however, one alternative to state intervention in reproductive choices: war. For Pearson, as for many other Social Darwinists, life was struggle, and war was more than just a game – it was a form of natural selection. As he put it, ‘National progress depends on racial fitness and the supreme test of this fitness was war. When wars cease mankind will no longer progress for there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock.’
“Needless to say, this made pacifism a particularly wicked creed. But fortunately, with an ever-expanding empire, there was no shortage of jolly little wars to be waged against racially inferior opponents. It was gratifying to think that in massacring them with their Maxim guns, the British were contributing to the progress of mankind.”174
Racist ideas based on the pseudo-sciences of Social Darwinism and physical anthropology appear to have been a contributory factor in other colonial empires: in the terrible exploitation of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold after 1886 and in the genocide of the Hereros by the Germans in 1904. “The proportion of the population estimated to have been killed in the Congo under Belgian rule may have been as high as a fifth. The estimated mortality rate in the Herero War was higher still… Colonial authorities were encouraged to treat subject peoples as ‘subhuman’.”175
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