regions, and the entire global trading community to build a world that trades in freedom and therefore grows in prosperity.” This kind of rhetoric gives democracy a bad name.
Some who deplore the British Empire’s racism and the fraudulent economic benefits it offered its imperial subjects are nonetheless willing to applaud its gentlemanly endgame, arguing that the way the empire dismantled itself after World War II was “authentically noble” and redeemed all that went before. Ferguson takes up this theme, too. “In the end, the British sacrificed her empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the empire’s other sins?”94 Much of this is Anglo- American claptrap, but at its core there is a theoretical distinction that is important. First, a look at the argument.
P. J. Marshall asserts categorically: “The British entered into partnerships with their nationalists and extricated themselves from empire with grace and goodwill.. . . The unwillingness of the British government after 1945 to be dragged into colonial wars is irrefutable, even if it is not easy to explain.”95 This idea, a staple of Anglophile romanticism, is simply untrue. When he was writing in 1996, Marshall was surely aware of the Malayan Emergency, a bloody colonial war to retain British possession of its main rubber-producing southeast Asian colonies that lasted from approximately 1948 to 1960. It was the British equivalent of the anti-French and anti-American wars that went on in nearby Indochina. Although the British claimed victory over the insurgents, much like the French did in Algeria, the long and deadly conflict led to independence for Britain’s colonies and the emergence of the two successor states of Malaysia and Singapore.
The so-called Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya from 1952 to 1960—in the immediate wake of the global war against fascism—was one of the most vicious colonial wars Britain ever fought. No one knows precisely what “Mau Mau” means or even what language it comes from, but it was the Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, some 1.5 million strong, who led the rebellion for freedom from British oppression. Kenya’s white settler population was different from similar groups in other colonies. A great many came from Britain’s upper classes, and they assumed privileges in their new East African enclave that had long since been abolished in their homeland. Caroline Elkins, an American historian who has reconstructed the revolt against these expatriates, writes, “Kenya’s big men quickly established a leisurely life-style aspired to by all Europeans in the colony. On their estates or farms or in European neighborhoods in Nairobi, every white settler in the colony was a lord to some extent, particularly in relationship to the African population.... [T]hese privileged men and women lived an absolutely hedonistic life-style, filled with sex, drugs, and dance, followed by more of the same.”96
When the Kenyans rebelled against ruthless land seizures by the settlers and their adamant refusal to share power in any way, the British retaliated—in the name of civilization—by detaining, torturing, and executing huge numbers of Africans. They imprisoned in concentration camps nearly the entire Kikuyu population, whom the British contended were not freedom fighters but savages of the lowest order. This colonial war may have slipped the mind of the editor of the
“On the dreadful balance sheet of atrocities,” Elkins explains,”... the murders perpetrated by Mau Mau adherents were quite small in number when compared to those committed by the forces of British colonial rule. Officially, fewer than one hundred Europeans, including settlers, were killed and some eighteen hundred loyalists [pro-British Kikuyu] died at the hands of Mau Mau. In contrast, the British reported that more than eleven thousand Mau Mau were killed in action, though the empirical and demographic evidence I unearthed calls into serious question the validity of this figure. I now believe there was in late colonial Kenya a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead.”97 This was anything but an extrication from empire “with grace and goodwill.”
Without doubt Niall Ferguson also knows about the way the British crushed the Mau Mau, since he and his family lived in Nairobi in the late 1960s, but he makes no mention of the rebellion in either of his books on the British Empire. Instead, he writes, “We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili—and our sense of unshakable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango.”98 The British seem to have no qualms about distorting the historical record in order to prettify their imperialism. Jan Christian Smuts, the Boer general who later defected to the British side and served twice in the early twentieth century as prime minister of the Union of South Africa, the British colony’s successor state, called British indifference to their violations of international law during the Boer War “very characteristic of the nation which always plays the role of chosen judge over the actions and behavior of all other nations.”99
There are still other post-1945 colonial wars that contradict any claim of an honorable British abdication of empire, for example, the joint Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in November 1956 in retaliation for Gamal Abdel Nasser’s act of nationalizing the Suez Canal. Nothing came of it because the United States refused to join this exercise in gunboat diplomacy. Nonetheless, the incident revealed that some eighteen years after the British occupation of Egypt had supposedly ended, Britain still had eighty thousand troops based in the canal zone and did not want to leave.100 And then there is the British military’s 2003 return to what
There are other problems with the thesis that the British Empire revealed its human greatness at its twilight. The bungled partition of India into India and Pakistan caused between two hundred thousand and a half million deaths and laid the foundation for the three wars to follow between the two countries and the ongoing conflict in Kashmir.102 Raychaudhuri explains, “The British perception that Hindus and Muslims were two mutually antagonistic monoliths, a notion not rooted in facts, became an important basis for allocating power and resources. Hindu-Muslim rivalry and the eventual partition of India was the end result, and the British policy makers, when they did not actually add fuel to the conflict, were quite happy to take advantage of it.”103 In the partition, Lord Mount-batten, the last viceroy, openly sided with the Hindu-dominated Congress Party against the Muslim League.104
An empire such as Britain’s that remains a democracy at home and a tyranny abroad always faces tensions between its people in the field and the home office. The on-the-spot imperialists usually exercise unmitigated power over their subordinated peoples whereas political leaders at home are responsible to parliaments and can be held accountable through elections. Writing about British imperialism, Hannah Arendt noted that “on the whole [it] was a failure because of the dichotomy between the nation-state’s legal principles and the methods needed to oppress other people permanently. This failure was neither necessary nor due to ignorance or incompetence. British imperialists knew very well that ‘administrative massacres’ could keep India in bondage, but they also knew that public opinion at home would not stand for such measures. Imperialism could have been a success if the nation- state had been willing to pay the price, to commit suicide and transform itself into a tyranny. It is one of the glories of Europe, and especially of Great Britain, that she preferred to liquidate the empire.”105
Even though I believe Arendt overstates the achievements of Britain, her point is the main one I have tried to
