An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

39. THE BRITISH EMPIRE

The British Empire presents us with a puzzling paradox: how could a country whose ideology was liberalism, and which had fought, and would continue to fight, under the banner of freedom from tyranny for all peoples, then set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen, enslaving hundreds of millions of peoples to itself?

Of course, there are many very different kinds and qualities of empire. The principal argument of this series of books is that one kind in particular – the Orthodox Christian Empire, based on the symphony of powers between the Orthodox Autocrat and the Orthodox Church – is in fact the best form of government yet devised for the attainment of the supreme end of man: the salvation of his immortal soul. The British Empire was not of this type, although it also claimed to be bringing salvation in Christ to heathen peoples.
But could it be argued that the British Empire, as the first exemplar of what Simon Schama calls “the empire of good intentions”, did more good than evil?
Niall Ferguson summarizes his case for the British Empire as follows: “For much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the ‘imperialism of free trade’. Prima facie, there therefore seems a plausible case that empire enhanced global welfare – in other words, was a Good Thing.
“Many charges can of course be leveled against the British Empire; they will not be dropped in what follows. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was ‘not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind’; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that ‘the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen’; nor, as General Smuts claimed, that it was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history’. The Empire was never so altruistic. In the eighteenth century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged – in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 – the British response was brutal. When famine struck (in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s) their response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable. Even when they took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.
“Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world. To characterize all this as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ risks underselling the scale – and modernity – of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the ‘ornamental’ (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkable non-venal administrations.”⁶⁵
Of course, this begs the question whether “the free movement of goods, capital and labour” is such an indubitable good. In England for generations it was an indubitable evil, in that it plunged the vast majority of the population – the rural as well as the urban poor – into terrible, soul-destroying poverty, while increasing the pride, cruelty and hypocrisy of the governing class to a proverbial degree (“Victorian hypocrisy” is still a byword). Nor does the fact that liberal England gradually, very gradually corrected these ills – significantly, by abandoning the strict theory of Free Trade and the non-interference of government through the enactment of various social reforms and the beginning of the Welfare State – alter this judgement, unless we are to believe, with the Jesuits, that “the end justifies the means”, and that the cruelty of Victorian England is justified by the relatively more just and humane England of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
If “the free movement of goods, capital and labour” was such a disaster for the British themselves as weighed on the scale of that utilitarian principle of Jeremy Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, it is difficult to see how it could have been a boon for anyone else. Thus the destruction of the indigenous Indian textile industry by competition with the factories of Northern England doomed millions of Indian peasants to even greater poverty. And if the British administration was indeed less venal than the Mughal one that it replaced, this was a relatively small benefit to place in the scale against the five million dead in the Bengal famine of 1873-74 and the famines that periodically recurred thereafter. But if it is argued that such suffering was justified in that it was a necessary stage “on the path to modernity” and the modern, democratic India, then we are back with the Jesuit principle again and the idea that the sufferings of one generation, undertaken unwillingly and imposed for less than altruistic motives, can compensate for the relatively greater prosperity of another, much later one.
Ferguson continues: “Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows and migration could have been ‘naturally occurring’ in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to expunge.
“When the British governed a country – even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles – there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the most important of these would run:

1. 
   The English language
   
2. 
   English forms of land tenure
   
3. 
   Scottish and English banking
   
4. 
   The Common Law
   
5. 
   Protestantism
   
6. 
   Team Sports
   
7. 
   The limited or ‘night watchman’ state
   
8. 
   Representative assemblies
   
9. 
   The idea of liberty
   

“The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire, the thing that sets it apart from its continental rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals: some were very far from it. But what is striking about the history of the Empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain’s imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.”⁶⁶

This is a fair point, but a highly paradoxical one. For it presupposes that the “liberal Empire” of Britain could only introduce the benefits of liberalism by illiberal means - coercion, and that these benefits were perceived not immediately, but only after several generations had passed, when the formerly uncivilised tribes had matured to the extent of being capable of parliamentary self-government. This was because, as Ferguson admits, the spreading of liberalism was not the real motivation for the creation of the Empire, but rather commercial gain from the import of sugar, spices, cotton, etc., and the export of manufactures, financial services, etc. When that commercial gain was threatened for one reason or another, the British response was to send in the gunboats or the redcoats, and annex the territory in question before introducing those western institutions – property rights, contractual law – that would guarantee a stable, long-term trading relationship. And so “the rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth.”⁶⁷
And when the end of the Empire came, after the Second World War, it came not so much as result of the British at length deciding that the natives were now mature enough to govern themselves, nor even because the natives’ demand for self-government acquired an unstoppable momentum, but simply because the Empire was now broke and could no longer afford its colonies…⁶⁸