Empires of the Mind Page 2

  Ambitions and fantasies about empire in the global and metropolitan spheres had an important impact on a third sphere too: Europe. After two world wars, which have sometimes been seen as European civil wars, moves were made to construct a European Common Market and a European Union. Not all European countries were equally enamoured of the idea. The driving forces of the European project were West Germany and France, which were variously recovering from defeat, foreign occupation and division. Britain, which had not been defeated, occupied or divided, took a very different view of Europe. It imagined that it had ‘stood alone’ against Hitler after the fall of France in 1940, relying on the solidarity of its Empire and Commonwealth before being rescued by the United States (little or nothing was said about Soviet Russia). It was reluctant to join a Europe that endangered both its ties with the Commonwealth and its ‘special relationship’ with the United States. Britain was therefore absent from the first phase of European construction. In the 1960s, when it changed its mind, it was told twice by France that it could not join because it was too caught up with its Commonwealth and the United States. France, by contrast, saw the European project as a way of building Europe as an acceptable version of the Napoleonic Empire, the core of which had been the Low Countries, western Germany and northern Italy. It kept Britain out as it had under Napoleon’s Continental System, while having no compunction about holding onto its own Françafrique.

  When Britain finally did join the European Community in 1973, the success felt like a defeat. It had swapped a world empire for membership of a European empire that was controlled by France and then, after reunification in 1990, by Germany. One felt like a bad rerun of the Napoleonic Wars, the other like a repeat of the Second World War that this time ended in defeat. France too was concerned about the hegemony of Germany but decided that the best way to manage her was to tie her in to an ever more federal Europe. Used to telling colonial subordinates what to do, and sending in the gunboats if they did not comply, Britain had little experience of negotiating with equals. Neither did she like the idea of an ever more federal Europe and set her sights on retaining or recovering as much sovereignty as possible. In the new century, as wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria drove new waves of refugees towards Europe, the European Union’s single market and doctrine of the free movement of people stirred up in Britain a toxic brew of hostility to European federalism and panic about new waves of foreign immigration.

  Increasingly, it became clear that British and French imperial power was more illusion than reality. These old countries no longer wielded serious influence over the rest of the globe. For a long time the United States had been the hegemonic power, Russia returned to the international fray after imploding in the 1990s and formerly colonised or semi-colonised powers such as India or China now became global players. Besides, neither Britain nor France had the means to sustain adequate armed forces. This did not prevent them from reinventing empire one more time. Indeed, the more empire appeared to have declined and fallen, and the more national identity was threatened, the more a fantasy of empire was conjured up as the answer to all ills. It provided the model for projecting power onto the world stage and for imposing control on immigrant populations, whether they were seeking entry into the metropolis or were already there. In Britain’s case it offered an alternative to European partnership, now dubbed vassalage, in a global dimension which was variously called ‘global Britain’, ‘Empire 2.0’ or ‘the Anglosphere’, a version of the Commonwealth that included the Dominions and the United States but silently excluded the Caribbean ‘Windrush generation’ and African members of the Commonwealth. France, meanwhile, while denouncing colonialism as a ‘crime against humanity’, retained Françafrique and mobilised French-speaking countries of Francophonie as a response to the Commonwealth.

  Intractable questions of empire were for a long time squeezed out of public consciousness. This was partly because of the anguish of the loss of empire for the imperialists and the pain it involved for the colonised. Myths were spun about the orderly ‘transfer of power’ from the imperial capital to national elites. Documents relating to the brutality of decolonisation were hidden or destroyed. Whereas empire at its height had been celebrated by pageantry and stories of the civilising mission, neo-colonialist operations against freedom fighters were often carried on under the radar, and murder covered up. During the Falklands War reporting restrictions were in place and the public message was that this was a miniature rerun of the Second World War.

  As empire passed away, moreover, it was reimagined nostalgically as a world in which everything and everyone was in his or her place, according to their class or rank or gender, and of course according to their race. In Britain, the Indian Raj was the main subject of this fantasy. In 1974, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Plain Tales from the Raj, written by Charles Allen, who was born to officials of the Raj in 1940, moved back to England with his family in 1947 but rediscovered India doing Voluntary Service Overseas in 1966–7. Autobiography of a Princess in 1975 and Heat and Dust in 1983 were among the elegiac films recovering the lost world of the Raj by Bombay-born producer Ismail Merchant and American director James Ivory from screenplays or novels by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In France the cult of empire affected the general population less but ‘nostalgérie’ was powerfully nurtured by French settlers who had been forced to leave Algeria in 1962. Alexandre Arcady’s 1979 Le Coup de Sirocco dealt with their plight, while a group of former settlers rebuilt their ideal Algerian community in the provençal village of Carnoux, near Marseille. Their narrative was that French Algeria was a great deal better than the ‘gâchis’ or mess into which that country had fallen after their departure.4

  Lack of interest in empire was also explained by the fact that until the 1970s histories of empire were written by academics who were outside the mainstream of national history-writing, yet national histories dealt rarely with empire. In France, the history of Algeria was the monopoly of two men, Charles-André Julien, whose family had emigrated to Algeria in 1906, and his pupil Charles-Robert Ageron, who taught there between 1947 and 1957. The two volumes of their history of Algeria, divided chronologically at 1870, were published in 1964 and 1979.5 Neither Algeria nor any other French colonies had a place in the first part of Pierre Nora’s compendium on French collective memory, Les Lieux de Mémoire, published in 1984–92, apart from one essay by Ageron on the colonial exhibition of 1931.6

  In 1944 Caribbean historian Eric Williams, who experienced racism in 1930s Oxford, demonstrated that the British industrial revolution and consequent world power had been founded on the slave plantations. By contrast leading British economic historian Peter Mathias, while stressing the importance of a ‘commercial revolution’ kick-starting the industrial revolution, had only two references to the slave trade and none to plantations in his 1969 First Industrial Nation.7 Cambridge historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, who had both served in the Empire during the war, published Africa and the Victorians in 1967, as a contribution not to the history of Africa so much as to ‘the general theory of imperialism’. Moreover their study bought into a myth that explained empire-building by virtue of the fact that ‘the Victorians regarded themselves as the leaders of civilisation, as pioneers of industry and progress’.8

  The most dismissive judgement on the irrelevance of African history was nevertheless made by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford. Lecturing on the BBC in 1963 he declared:

  Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness, like the history of pre-European, pre-Columbian America. And darkness is not a subject for history […] History, I believe, is essentially a form of movement, and purposive movement too. It is not a mere phantasmagoria of changing shapes and costumes, of battles and conquests […] the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.9

  In recent years, however, thi
ngs have changed dramatically. The story of empire has much more grip on public consciousness and is indeed a subject of passionate public debate. A number of reasons may be suggested. First, since 9/11, the War on Terror launched by the United States and Great Britain against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Iraq was seen by many as a New Imperialism. It provoked a spate of books and articles about empire, whether that empire was British or American, and how positive an influence it was in the world.10 Second, the threat of global Islamism manifest in terrorist attacks in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Europe and the waves of largely Muslim refugees driven out by the war sharpened debates about national identity. Multicultural options were cast aside in favour of monocultural ones, talking up the importance of ‘British values’ and French republican secularism. This in turn triggered debate about who was British or French, and the ambivalent place of people from the former colonies in metropolitan society.11 Third, the debate on the European Union questioned the ability of countries within the EU to defend their borders against immigration and their sovereignty against growing federalism. This stimulated new thinking about empire and what versions of it might offer salvation in a crisis-ridden world.

  Writing about empire has also changed dramatically over the last thirty years. The emergence of global history has decentred British and European historians and made historians of empire mainstream. Chris Bayly demonstrated that global history was not simply ‘world’ or ‘extra-European’ history but interconnected history. He made connections, for example, between the Taiping rebellion in China, the Indian revolt of 1857, the European revolutions of 1848 and the American Civil War.12 Global history created the challenge of studying colonial and metropolitan history through the same lens. This methodological agenda was reset in 1997 by American historians Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler in their seminal article, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’.13 This has subsequently been taken up by historians such Catherine Hall, who urged ‘challenging the binary’ between metropole and empire, Bill Schwarz, who explored ‘connections between the imperial past and metropolitan present’, and Todd Shepard, who advised researchers to ‘treat metropole and colony as part of the same analytic field’.14

  In a related development, colonial history has been subverted by postcolonial history. Instead of writing the history of empire and the colonies outwards from the imperial metropolis, privileging the perspectives of the imperialists, postcolonial history is written from non-European, non-Western perspectives and privileges the experiences of those who have been at the receiving end of colonialism, down to the present day. A breakthrough in this field was the 1988 article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ by Columbia Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This dismissed the colonialist conceit that the abolition of sati was ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ and demonstrated that sati-suicide was espoused by women fighting for Indian independence.15 A seminal collection The Empire Writes Back (1989) challenged the way the English canon had marginalised non-Western literatures in English, which must be explored and made part of the canon.16 Postcolonial approaches were championed by historians such as Joya Chatterji, who wrote about the partition of India and the migrations and diaspora it provoked from the perspective of the Indian populations themselves.17 David Anderson and Caroline Elkins exposed the atrocities committed by the British in their colonies, notably Kenya.18 Elkins’ book was attacked by Andrew Roberts as a ‘blood libel against the British people’, but as Richard Drayton, Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King’s College London, pointed out, ‘An imperial history that does not think and speak for those on the underside of global processes will be inaccurate, if not delusional, about the reality of empire, and complicit with future forms of tyranny, inequality and structural violence.’19

  In France, where colonial history in the academy remained fairly traditional, postcolonial history was developed outside the academy by historians who set up a research group called ACHAC (Colonisation, Immigration, Postcolonialism). Founded in 1989 and headed by Pascal Blanchard, it explored ways in which colonised Africans were represented in colonialist iconography.20 In 2005 it popularised the concept of the ‘colonial fracture’ whereby contemporary attitudes and memories are seen to be divided by the experience of colonialism. While the so-called Français de souche identify with the colonisers, having one set of attitudes and memories, the children of the colonised now living in France have quite another.21 One of the contributors, Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon in 1957 when the French were brutally imposing their neo-colonial rule, and the author of Postcolony, pointed out that the French were still a long way off adopting postcolonial approaches:

  Why does France persist in not thinking in a critical way about the postcolonial, about its presence in the world and the presence of the world in its bosom, before, during and after the colonial Empire? […] As in the colonial period the model of integration is that of assimilation, agreeing to a rule of indifferentiation which refuses to allow a special status to groups on the basis that they belong to different communities. Postcolonial studies come up against a political, cultural and intellectual narcissism of which one could say that what is unthought derives from a racialising ethnonationalism.22

  In the last thirty years, equally, there has also been a great deal of writing about the legacies and memories of empire. Writing in the aftermath of the Iraq War, Derek Gregory argued that ‘many of us (I include myself) continue to think and act in ways that are dyed in the colours of colonial power’.23 Paul Gilroy pointed out at the same time that Britain seemed less confident and more troubled by its colonial past, while immigrants served as ‘the unwilling bearers of the imperial and colonial past’.24 John Darwin highlighted a viewpoint according to which ‘Britain was constituted by empire’, its brutalities and inequalities traceable back to its imperial past.25 Historians have examined how the legacies of empire are found in the former imperial or colonising country and include institutions, social structures, imaginations and mindsets.26 On the French side, Benjamin Stora has devoted a lifetime to exploring ways in which the memory of the Algerian War was first suppressed and then burst into public consciousness around 2000, and how it structures the attitudes of both former settlers and the former colonists.27 Non-French historians have contributed significantly to an ongoing debate about France’s complicated relationship with its colonial past.28

  The return of empire to public consciousness has not been easy. Indeed, as historians have demonstrated, the memory of empire is divided by the conflicts of empire themselves. Memory wars around empire have raged in France and in Britain. They do not, however, remain simply as memory. They structure public debate and politics in its widest sense.

  In France, a law of 2005 required the nation to honour those who had died fighting to preserve the French Empire in North Africa and schools to teach the benefits of that colonial mission. The law, however, provoked sharp criticism and the formation of a group called Les Indigènes de la République (the Natives of the Republic) who denounced the reproduction of colonial hierarchies and injustices in contemporary French society.29 In Britain there was much public commemoration in 2007 of the bicentenary of the abolition of slave trade act as an act of national humanitarianism. Researchers led by Catherine Hall have nevertheless pointed out that much of the wealth of the British ruling class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was drawn from profits of the West Indian slave plantations and that those compensated when slavery was abolished in British colonies after 1833 were not the slaves but the slave owners.30 Debates were generated about Britain’s slave-owning past, especially in cities like Bristol and Oxford, much of whose wealth derived from the slave trade and plantations.

  In 2015 a campaign was mounted in South Africa for the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town to be removed. Although he had been a builder of empire and a philanthropist of education, he was increasingly seen as a colonial adventurer and racist defender of white supremacy. The s
tatue in Cape Town was taken down and a similar campaign was mounted in Oxford in 2016 to remove a statue erected above the High Street by Oriel College, where Rhodes had studied.31 While students marched and held meetings, arguments were made by the college, university and press that ‘history can’t be rewritten’.32 Rhodes was a man of his time and that was that. The counter-argument was that Rhodes was criticised even by his contemporaries and that the framework of analysis was now postcolonial. Just as statues of Napoleon, Stalin and Saddam Hussein came down when regimes changed, so the statue of Rhodes might be removed when those who had suffered the depredations of empire and their heirs gained a voice to demand the symbolic righting of wrongs.

  This study began with the 2013 Wiles Lectures at Queen’s University Belfast on ‘Remembering and Repetition in France: Defeat, Colonialism and Resistance since 1940’.33 These addressed two questions. First, how it was that those who liberated France from her colonial base in Algeria in 1944 were back ten years later, torturing suspected rebels who were trying to drive out the French in the Algerian War of 1954–62. How could so little have been learned from thinking about liberation and so many mistakes made? And second, how far were France’s current troubles with its immigrant population, many of whom were of North African and Muslim origin, in some ways a replaying of the Algerian War? The lectures were given after the riots in France’s banlieues in 2005 but before the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks in 2015, which confirmed the urgency of tracing links between France’s behaviour as a neo-colonial power in Syria and the jihadist attacks in Paris.