Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [119]
The mettle that a race can show
Is proved with shot and steel,
And now we know what nations know
And feel what nations feel.
The impression of big-boned country boys consigned to their fate by toffee-nosed English generals is one that turned out to be especially well suited to the developing sense of Australian nationhood: was it not to escape that sort of class prejudice that their ancestors had left the old country? It is a very partial version of the truth (the British suffered many more casualties in the operation). But it was enough. The empire that emerged from the war was a much less top-down association. It was soon time to send for the now septuagenarian Arthur Balfour, who chaired a committee which agreed that the white Dominions of the empire could in future be as independent as they chose.
At the end of the war, the whole conceptual framework of empire looked shaky. Empire had become an official project and the awful loss of life had done nothing at all to enhance belief in the wisdom of government. (The great celebrant of empire, Rudyard Kipling, had lost his own son at the battle of Loos in September 1915: just turned eighteen when he was last seen staggering through the mud, half his face hanging off.) The emerging force in British politics, the Labour party, was more interested in improving living conditions at home than in the country’s possessions abroad. And internationally, US President Woodrow Wilson’s elaboration of the fourteen points on which the peace settlement would be based had included a specific promise that all colonial claims would be settled on an ‘absolutely impartial’ basis in which the needs of the colonized would have just as much weight as those of the imperial power.
Increasingly, the language of British imperialism changed. Talk was no longer of some national destiny but of a duty of ‘trusteeship’, a responsibility owed by Britain to its colonies. If carried through effectively, this approach had the potential, as one distinguished historian put it, ‘to convert the anti-imperialists of one generation into the imperialists of the next’. The bible of this approach was a book with the very dull title of The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, written by the former Governor General of Nigeria, Frederick Lugard.* A short, slightly haggard man with an enormous forehead, Lugard laid out a guiding principle that, instead of governing directly, Britain should rule its territories with and through local chiefs, promoting the interests of both indigenous people and colonial power. For a while, this new gloss on imperialism disarmed the growing number of sceptics, until they pointed out the chasm between theory and reality, and asked whether it might not be a better idea simply to concentrate upon helping local societies to develop, and giving them their freedom as soon as possible. But this was not a campaign which enjoyed mass popular support – just as the imperial movement began to succumb to indifference and self-absorption, so did anti-imperialism. As one British left-winger wryly pointed out, if you wanted to empty a political meeting hall, you talked of Indian independence.
Promises of custodianship were no longer going to be enough for nationalists anywhere, and it was in India that the most pressing question arose, with a growing feeling that the subcontinent’s great contribution to the war effort deserved proper recognition by the Mother Country. It had been striking that some of the most nationalistically minded Indians had been among the fiercest advocates of military service. They had realized there could be political dividends to come, even if the British hadn’t quite grasped the point. ‘I venture to say that the war has put the clock of time fifty years forward,’ said the