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Revisiting the Empire
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10557 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
5,735 Words |
| Author
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Lincoln Allison
Lincoln Allison is senior lecturer of politics at the
University of Warwich in England. He is author of A Journey
Quite Different: Collected Walks, Manchester University Press
(1988). |
Those of us born after World War II in Britain couldn't give a fig for the British Empire. Only in a minority of cases was our disdain inspired by any moral principle. It was just that the thing was out of date and irrelevant to our lives, its image of baggy shorts and dumb devotion to duty in unattractive contrast to the new British we were growing up in. increasingly, Britain was an exciting place culturally; the sterility associated with the stiff upper lip was being replaced by a sharp and lively cynicism that expressed itself in the new "permissive society" through satire, drama, television, and rock music that were among the world's best.
The smart set had taken this view since 1918. At a time when the "mightiest empire the world had ever known" was at its statistical peak, holding "dominion over palm and pine"--meaning a quarter of the world's surface and a third of its population--it was fashionable to regard the whole thing as a bit of a bore. Not wicked or misguided, but much worse: tedious. Underlying the boredom was the certain knowledge that it was all a bit of a sham, that the kind of power that Britain had over most of its empire was limited and fragile and much diminished by the expenditure of financial and political credits in World War I.
Britain now was a debtor nation. The automatic loyalty of the empire in war, which had proved reliable in 1914, was specifically disavowed when a resumption of hostilities against Turkey seemed likely in the Chanak incident of 1922. In any case, as the satirical historians Sellars and Yeatman put it in 1926, American now was "top nation" and history had ended. (It often does!)
DISDAIN FOR THE EMPIRE
Even at the height of empire, the British had proved remarkably unimperial. H.G. Wells remarked that nineteen out of twenty Englishmen knew even less about the British Empire than they did about the Italian Renaissance. A survey at the end of World War II confirmed his hunch: Only a minority of British people could explain the difference between a dominion and a colony, a concept crucial to such structure as the empire possessed; very few indeed had any substantial knowledge of what the empire contained (and 3 percent thought the United States was part of it). So our contempt for matters imperial in the postwar period did not merely follow the fashionable interwar view; it was in line with the traditional English attitude, which combined disdain for foreigners with the curious habit of acquiring foreign territories.
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