Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [36]
The commercial impulse which drove traders to seek new markets and to enforce their demand to trade at the point of a gun if necessary was as powerful as ever. But the moral fervour which infused the campaign to abolish the slave trade bestowed another sense of purpose on British imperialism. The country had demonstrated its willingness to fight the good fight at home, and now it would do the same in the rest of the world. The campaign against slavery would last well into the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the great public support for David Livingstone’s mission to root out Arab slave traders in Africa demonstrated. The moral conundrum of empire – how could we deny others the freedom we demanded for ourselves? – now had an answer. It might seem paradoxical to associate colonizers with freedom, but in this case the two were deeply connected. Before long, the British were apostles for a new gospel in which Christianity and commerce were said to be natural bedfellows.
Chapter Four
‘I stand astonished at my own moderation’
Robert Clive, 1773
On the map, the second edition of the empire – the phase which the world considers ‘the’ British Empire – was a very different thing from what had gone before. In the middle of the seventeenth century the empire, such as it was, lay at the fringes of the Atlantic. Two hundred years later, it was scattered across the world, and the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, could boast that ‘a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong’. The Atlantic empire did not become a worldwide empire according to some great plan but by the opportunism of businessmen, the ambition of adventurers, the self-confidence of the military, a gathering sense of national purpose and a series of accidents. The place where this development of imperial purpose was most observable was in the grandest of all the imperial possessions, India.
Here, in the bustle of its massive population, the complexity of its cultures, the overwhelming nature of its heat, dust and smells, the strangeness of its holy men, was a world as different from a damp, ordered north Atlantic island as could be imagined. ‘There is so much of everything!’ was the authentically awestruck exclamation of one Englishwoman when she disembarked in Bombay.
I had never seen so many people; a mixture of brown faces, and dirty white garments and spotless uniforms, and helmets, mixed up with oxen, mangy dogs, crows, and beggars, and driving through narrow streets between tall colour-washed houses, with vivid trees jammed between them, jingling victorias and bullock carts round you, and parrots shooting across the road over your head, black crows squawking. People. People. People. And your frock stuck to your shoulders.
Preventing other powers getting their hands on this bustling, unfathomable land determined the decisions of governments in the grandest buildings in London and cost the blood of young men in the sands of Afghanistan. It necessitated the raising of regiments, the acquisition of other colonies and the deployment of navies. In the heyday of imperial India men of unimaginable wealth with brown skins and Oxford drawls were manipulated by white-skinned functionaries on official salaries. The men who administered India considered themselves an elite and the most elite of all was the viceroy, who represented the