The Captains and the Kings Depart

It is okay to admit to some nostalgia for the British Empire?

One of my students, a Pakistani, asked me recently how I felt about it. It was a difficult question. On the one hand, I was raised in Canada on my grandfather's old boys' books, published in the early years of the 20th century. They made the British Empire seem a glorious thing. On the other hand, I am ethnically Irish, and my grandmother never let me forget that the Irish were treated very badly by the English.

All that being so, however, perhaps it leaves me as fair a judge as we can find. And I do feel some nostalgia.

Is empire wrong? Not necessarily. It is wrong if you believe in the primacy, the essential rightness, of the nation state. But the nation state is, at its core, to be perfectly frank, racist. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were the ultimate nation states. Isn't a multi-national state morally better? Does it not better conform with the universal brotherhood of man?

By the same token, if the person heading your state is of a different ethniciy or race than you, is that a problem? Only if you are racist. Only if you have a problem with, say, President Barack Obama. Or Queen Elizabeth II, ethnically German. Or the Scottish Gordon Brown.

Certainly, empire was good for human prosperity and human progress. Expanded, open trade makes everyone richer. Open trade in ideas makes us all the wiser. As The Economist once pointed out, only in very recent years has China recovered the same portion of world trade it held in 1900. The notion of the white people “looting” the dark races was, for the most part, a myth, though there were some exceptions. The foreigners made their profits, but the local workmen got their pay, and the local merchants and entrepreneurs their prices and their contracted fees. The British kept the peace, dealt fairly ont he whole, and they left some very fine infrastructure, infrastructure that is often still relied upon, a half-century or more after the last foreigners left.

What of the shame of the local people, being treated as if they were wards? Fair enough; but the same argument ought to hold equally against foreign aid. Let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, then?

Of course, an empire is not a democracy. There is that criticism, surely?

Agreed; but I think it is also objectively fair to say that not all societies can handle a democracy. I recall the Saudi Ambassador to the US explaining this to Bill O'Reilly, on the latter's show, and being hooted down by the host. I knew he was right, but knew I would once have agreed with O'Reilly. I heard the same argument from a Vietnamese neutralist back during the US-Vietnam War, and doubted him.

But, having lived in various places around the world since, I now believe it—just, I might add, as Thomas Jefferson did. A democracy needs, first and foremost, a responsible ruling elite who are prepared to enter into a gentleman's agreement not to abuse power once they attain it, and to peacefully pass it on to someone else when the system requires it. That needs a huge amount of trust—trust, for example, that they are not themselves immediately going to be imprisoned or executed by their successors.

Without that, no democracy will last past the first fair elections; as history has repeatedly demonstrated. And, failing democracy, a disinterested, but essentially honest, foreign ruling authority may be the best remaining alternative.

In fact, an empire, acting as a court and police force of last resort, can be the ideal guarantor of democracy. It would have been best, perhaps, if the British Empire had worked harder in this direction. Nevertheless, it may have sown some seeds. And I suspect the fundamental insight was right, that the societies over which Britain held control were not ready for democracy for the most part.

India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, Ireland, Malta, and others emerged from the Empire as functioning democracies. Had the Empire lasted longer, perhaps more would have as well. It may not be coincidence that there seems to be a correlation between successful democracy post-Empire, and how long Britain held control over the territory. The oldest colonies have experienced the most successful transition.

That being so, the British Empire might, I think, in the end, have taken another course. A course that was actually proposed by many at the beginning of the 20th century. It might have slowly evolved into an international federation, like the EU, with nations becoming full partners in an Imperial Parliament once they had established their democratic traditions.

Perhaps it is for that lost opportunity that I feel most nostalgic. Had it come to pass, we surely would have avoided much human suffering: in the partition of India, in Idi Amin's Uganda, in apartheid South Africa, in Mugabe's Zimbabwe, in the Sri Lankan civil war, in the Yemeni civil war, in Saddam's Iraq, in the partition of Cyprus—even, perhaps, in the ongoing tragedy of Palestine.

It would be a very different world.

And wouldn't it, frankly, be a better world?