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By Root 1211 0

other races were getting out of hand. When riots broke out in Alexandria in the summer of 1882, killing several dozen Europeans, the Liberal Charles Dilke – a man who believed in the British as a sort of benevolent master race – noted in his diary that ‘Our side in the Commons is very jingo about Egypt. They badly want to kill somebody. They don’t know who.’ That leitmotif of so much late nineteenth-century imperial policy – a desperation to protect India – was another element, just as it had been the reason for Disraeli’s decision to buy shares in the new Suez Canal in the first place. Businessmen who believed their money was at risk roared on demands for military action. The jingoism Dilke had observed in parliament was shared by much of public opinion and was whipped up by the press, which presented Charles Gordon as a sort of Messiah. Succumbing to that pressure put the Sudan mission in the hands of a zealot, who, like many empire-builders, presented the task he had been given as a moral mission. That was Gordon’s particular madness, but the slow speed of communications meant that the success or failure of the imperial project was forever in the hands of individuals in distant lands, and the government of the home country just had to live with the consequences. On top of all of that was the need to make sure that the British kept other colonists out.

Chapter Ten

‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

Henry Newbolt, ‘Vitaï Lampada’, 1892

What was to be done with a place like Sudan? Like everywhere else, once the conquest was finished there came the problem of administration. If you had any faith in the empire, this was a task which might stretch for centuries. And the bigger the empire became, the greater the number of people required to make it function. When the acquisition of territories was a by-product of free enterprise, it could be left to Jack the Lads of one variety or another. Better still, it could be done indirectly, through treaties with local chiefs and kings, who retained the dignities of power in exchange for surrendering the reality or paying a ransom. This was how it worked in much of India, where hundreds of rajahs and nawabs, maharajahs, nizams, walis and badshahs* were accorded the courtesies of apparent sovereignty – replete with artillery salutes – but whose strings were pulled by British residents or agents. A similar system was adopted once Africa had been colonized, a ‘dual mandate’, in which local chiefs continued to rule their tribes while the British ran the army, organized taxes, managed the colony’s foreign relations and plundered its natural resources. These arrangements had the obvious advantage for the British of requiring fewer officials while affording maximum profit and it is at least arguable that had some similar concessions been made in North America, then perhaps Britain might have hung on to its colonies there a little longer and said goodbye to them with more grace.

By the late nineteenth century the possession, retention and running of an empire was Britain’s main international preoccupation, and it required a dedicated corps of individuals as its officers. At the grandest end of things – being the queen-empress’s personification in India, for example – the representatives of the Crown were expected to be imposing figures. Lord Curzon, Viceroy at the turn of the century, had been haunted since his Oxford days by a verse beginning:

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon.

I am a most superior person,

which made him the right sort of chap for the job, and Viscount Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, was a genuine member of the British royal family. All were supplied with the robes and carriages, decorations and retainers, to give them an appropriately viceregal appearance. But the vast majority of officials were mere executives, untroubled by questions of how long one country might exercise authority over another, or indeed why it had been acquired in the first place. Their job was to make it function. The job could have a particular charm for younger siblings of