[PEN-L:33669] the British empire as entertainment

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxxx>]

A very Tory kind of history

Niall Ferguson's feel-good television series on the British empire is a
blinkered and sentimental romp

Hywel Williams
Thursday January 9, 2003
The Guardian

It was British, it was benign, and it was very, very big. In remembering
it we have nothing to lose but our shame, so let's move on from guilt
history to smug history. Morality - a tale for idiots - can't be
measured but land mass can. Just look at the length and breadth of it
all from the mouth of the Thames to the Bay of Bengal: 25% of the
world's land surface containing some 444 million people. Never had so
many been ruled by so few. And if that isn't gratifying enough, think of
the money. British coffers once contained almost half of all
foreign-owned assets. God bless the national debt and the Bank of
England which made it all happen.

Niall Ferguson's feel-good history of the British empire hits our
screens tonight with a glossy look and a cynical splash. Feckless
Spanish imperialists who couldn't exploit their assets disappear over
the horizon. French governments with bad debts lose the battle for world
power. Our missionary historian strides from the court where once the
Mughal emperor ruled (until receiving "an offer he couldn't refuse") to
New England settlements (where Protestants bred "like rabbits"). Late
17th-century swashbuckler and the late 20th-century loadsamoney combine
to inform his views.

At least there's no liberal cant involved in the exercise. Ferguson is
as determinist as any vulgar Marxist and sees the profit motive as a
ruggedly wholesome British truth. This is the history of appetite and of
consumption, of goodfella imperialist gangsters on the make. Greed for
sugar in the West Indies, like later greed for textiles in India, was
good. Our drugs - sugar and tobacco - were uppers. And greed meant
looking good too - since vanity's demand for clothes to flatter was so
happily elastic.

A 2003 Ferguson looks back to 80s Thatcher and shows how thoughts
imbibed early carry on fermenting. That self-conscious glee in low
motivation carries with it the whiff of an era. For all its hectically
contemporary global tones this is nostalgic programming. Part of its 80s
reference is the sneering at a gutless establishment. For Ferguson the
cause of the American rebellion's success was that there was no fire in
the Westminster belly: Britain's government could not be persuaded to
fight on and win. If only Yorktown had been the Falklands.

Still, there's a consolation in the loss. At least our successors as a
global power started life as transatlantic Brits. The atlanticism of the
series gives a direct feel to it all - at a time when we prepare to go
to war as wholly owned American subsidiaries. When Tony Blair claims the
best of empire as a part of Britain's past which can inspire the present
(as he did in his speech to our assembled ambassadors on Tuesday) he
enters Ferguson's territory. This series is apologetics with a
policy-link.

The problem with Ferguson's materialism is that it is both too limiting
and too ambitious as an idea. If trade and economics are the final truth
about empire, why were all those wars necessary to make it happen? For
the single explanation of everything turns easily into something which
can't explain the particular. And even Ferguson can't escape the
sentimentalism which afflicts all pro-imperialists as the maps of red
turn into a nostalgic haze.

He likes the imagined frankness of Britain's 18th-century empire, a time
when the officers of the East India Company married native women, and he
imputes cross-cultural fertility to the period. "Sleazy orientalism"
gets the thumbs up - and 19th-century improving administrators the
thumbs down. But what was constant was the sense of hierarchy maintained
in parallel, if occasionally contiguous, universes. The British liked
India because of the caste system - if the Indians couldn't be white, at
least they were blessed with a relative of class.

In taking the politics out of imperialism, Ferguson makes the whole
enterprise of defence too easy for himself. It took political struggle
and ideology to both make the empire and to dismantle it. Neither was an
inevitable process. There's a lack of imaginative understanding here for
those to whom it all happened.

This is history which is quite shamelessly for the British themselves.
It's populist stuff designed to make all of us feel part of the imperial
elite. Toiling masses experience unexplained plagues and disease
offstage in Ferguson's history. But famine in British Bengal was a
political event - a natural disaster exacerbated by incompetent
imperialism. In dismissing the political experiments of 17th-century New
England Puritans in self-government and debate, he misses the democratic
point which buried the British empire.

It broke up, he says, because other empires came along - nastier ones
which bankrupted the virtuous polity. But of the true story of
nationalist rebellion, no viewer will get a whiff. Nationalism
radicalised by uniting the politics of the masses with that of the
intelligentsia. It motivated as economics never could or did. But for
Ferguson, nationalism is just for Brits while empires are for Americans.
To be consistent he should tell us, in his determinist way, that Britain
follows American policy because Britain's economy follows the American
way. But that's too hard a truth for a very Tory kind of British
patriot.

· Empire: Why Britain? begins on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm.
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