In Growing, published in 1961, Leonard reflected on his experience as a colonial official and his ultimate disenchantment with the imperial project. Starting as a 24-year old cadet, he describes himself as a “very innocent, unconscious imperialist” (Growing, 25) who came to enjoy his position of authority and “the flattery of being the great man and father of his people” (Growing, 158). His extraordinary diligence earned both praise from his superiors and occasional communal hostility. He tried to be both strict and fair, an enforcer of regulations, perhaps in the manner of a public-school prefect, a model familiar to the St Paul’s graduate in dealings with subordinates. Ambitious for success, he prided himself on his efficiency and relentless work ethic. While tolerating the formulaic sociability of the tiny British community—tennis, bridge, and gin—Leonard was contemptuous of his feckless compatriots in this colonial backwater. To alleviate his loneliness, he immersed himself in the duties of his job, riding on horseback to distant parts to hear complaints and resolve disputes. In time he “fell in love with the country, the people, and the way of life” (Growing, 180), so alien to the elite British culture that he had forsaken in 1904. His fascination with Ceylon increased along with his administrative responsibilities, especially after he became Assistant Government Agent in Hambantota, exerting authority over 100,000 people: “the more remote that life was from my own, the more absorbed I became in it and the more I enjoyed it” (Growing, 225). An exemplar of empire, he was genuinely dedicated to the welfare of those he governed, his eagerness for professional advancement notwithstanding.
To believe that by 1911 Leonard had become convinced that the people of Ceylon ought to be allowed to govern themselves strains credulity,1 although he conceded that “the Europeanizing of non-Europeans is a mistake” (Growing, 157). He had come to realize that villagers regarded him as “part of a white man’s machine which they did not understand,”2 but never doubted that his rule was benevolent and that the Sinhalese and Tamils still required the expertise that colonial administrators could furnish. Local headmen were notoriously corrupt, and representative institutions were non-existent. While somewhat disillusioned with the imperial mission, he clung to the paternalist values of British progressives: advanced European nations had a moral duty to monitor the development of inferior races through sound governance. When asserting that he “disapproved of imperialism and felt sure its days were already numbered” (Growing, 248), he was writing with the hindsight of half a century of anti-imperial propaganda, including his own contributions. Leonard’s altered perspective developed gradually in London, not in Ceylon, stemming more from research into exploitation in Africa than from first-hand knowledge. As Peter Wilson has observed: “It was not the raw experience that led to his radicalization, but rather the radicalization that led him to reconstruct his experience of the previous decade.”3 Aside from occasional outpourings of frustration to Strachey, there is scant evidence of dissatisfaction with imperial hegemony while he was in Ceylon. What motivated his request for leave and eventual resignation from the colonial service was a disheartening isolation and homesickness, aftereffects of bouts of malaria,4 typhoid fever, and eczema, and the hope, at the age of 31, of married life.
Ceylon intruded on his life in London unexpectedly in 1915, after riots broke out in Kandy and Colombo. Denouncing the outbreak as seditious, British officials imposed martial law, condemning scores of participants to death. In contrast, Leonard saw it as another manifestation of internecine conflict endemic in Ceylon. When the Sinhalese sent a deputation to England to oppose government measures and demand an impartial inquiry, they appealed to him to mobilize activity on their behalf. His attempts to initiate parliamentary action through Philip Morrell and Ramsay MacDonald in 1917 proved futile. The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society sent a delegation to the Colonial Office in January 1918, including Leonard, who interceded on behalf of the Sinhalese, but its plea was rejected. In November he submitted a note to the Advisory Committee on International Questions (ACIntQ), urging the government “to give the same measure of responsible government to Ceylon as it gives to India.” The Sinhalese were the equals of the peoples of India in education and political capacity. To concede measures of self-government to India but not to Ceylon would be “grotesque and impossible.”5 The denial of these claims helped to foster his anti-imperial inclinations, which grew apace during the years in which he wrote about empire.
In 1916 Leonard was enjoying the notoriety achieved after the publication of International Government, acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Sidney Webb approached him about undertaking a parallel study, this time on the movements of international trade, about which Leonard’s knowledge was meager. After imposing several stipulations, he signed a contract with the Fabian Society in February 1917 but soon found the subject overwhelming. In October, with Webb’s encouragement, he shifted the scope to imperial trade and exploitation with a focus on Africa. Here again he had leapt into a project with insufficient preparation. It required intensive research, facilitated by the assistance of Virginia and Alix Sargant-Florence, who copied out statistics and consular reports borrowed from the London School of Economics library. Little had been written on the subject, aside from the polemical critiques of Hobson and Brailsford,6 and published material was not always easy to come by. When he appealed to his Fabian sponsors for advice, Webb told him: “We have none of us practical knowledge. As to methods and scope we must leave it to you.”7 Leonard had to educate himself, delving into company balance sheets, trade figures, and annual reports, with few signposts to guide him. How to evaluate disparate sources from several imperial powers proved a monumental undertaking that occupied him for almost a year and a half, but he managed to complete the manuscript by February 1919, writing his daily complement of 500 words. Virginia noted in March that Webb “finds his book a most remarkable piece of work” and expected it to be published in June.8 Empire and Commerce in Africa ultimately appeared in January 1920, George Allen & Unwin again serving as his publisher in association with the newly formed Labour Research Department.
If International Government established Leonard’s reputation as a proponent of the League of Nations, the voluminous Empire and Commerce in Africa transformed him into Labour’s pre-eminent critic of empire. As Hobson had done, he contended that the motive behind imperialism was primarily economic: both authors regarded imperialism as a conspiracy of international financiers seeking profit in Africa and elsewhere and pressuring governments into acquiring territory. However, unlike Hobson, Leonard supplied a mass of empirical data to underpin his argument, making his book an essential source for the incipient anti-colonial movement in Britain. Hobson had visited Africa before writing his seminal Imperialism: A Study (1902) as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian, covering the South African war. Leonard never went to Africa, but his credentials as an analyst of empire were burnished by his years as a colonial official. No other figure in the interwar Labour Party, aside from Sydney Olivier, sometime Governor of Jamaica, had as much first-hand experience of a British colony. From his vantage point as secretary of the ACIntQ, he was instrumental in formulating policy, his position enhanced further when a separate Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions (ACImpQ) was established in 1924 with Leonard serving as its secretary as well. He had suggested to Webb as early as 1918 that a separate committee to address colonial questions might be appropriate, but it was not until Labour gained office for the first time that the need for expertise on imperial affairs became apparent. Thereafter most of his political activity centered on efforts to institute reforms and guide subject peoples to self-government. He was ahead of most of the party leaders, as well as the trade-union movement, in advocating independence for India, Ceylon, Egypt, and Ireland after the First World War. Virtually every party document on the empire issued from the 1920s to the 1940s bore his imprint. If he did not actually draft them, as he did with several key manifestos, he was responsible for piloting them through the committee and ensuring that they reached the party executive. The composition of the ACImpQ shifted over time, but for more than two decades his commitment was unflagging, and he endured the bi-weekly meetings without complaint.
Leonard’s treatment of Africa was selective, most likely determined by available material. As he had done in International Government, he provided a laborious historical narrative of the partition of Africa by competing European powers after 1880. Germany, France, and Britain had taken what they wanted, incorporating territories within their empires. It was, he claimed, “the policy of grab.” This might be rationalized by imperialists on the grounds that “for the good of the world the ‘uncivilized’ must be placed openly and completely in the power and under the government of the ‘civilized’” (Empire, 54–5). He concentrated particularly on the European encroachment in Abyssinia and the British annexation of Uganda. Analyzing the conquest of Algeria, Tripoli, and the Congo enabled him also to include the expansion of France, Italy, and Belgium, but his examples stressed similarity rather than national differences. In his general indictment he found Britain less culpable: “as regards murder, robbery, savagery, and dishonesty in Africa, our record is better than that of any other State of Europe” (Empire, 256). His assessment of tropical Africa discounted strategic or idealistic motives and exaggerated official reluctance to annex more territory. He did concede that in Egypt, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco economic motives merged with considerations of strategy and balance of power. Misled by propaganda generated by company directors and colonial secretaries, European governments imagined that acquiring undeveloped land in Africa would provide economic advantage over their rivals. By 1900 almost all of Africa, much of it virtually inaccessible, had been incorporated into European empires. For Leonard, a consistent advocate of better conditions for subject peoples, the scramble for Africa was nothing less than a crime against humanity:
European civilization, through the machinery of State and trade, has carried some considerable benefits into Africa; but the autocratic dominion of European over African has been accompanied by such horrible cruelty, exploitation, and injustice, that it is difficult not to believe that the balance of good in the world would have been and would be infinitely greater, if the European and his State had never entered Africa. (Empire, 259)
Even so, while he decried the impact of European conquest, he did not believe that jettisoning ill-gotten territorial gains was the answer. Since Africa was inhabited mainly by “non-adult races,” the native population needed protection from “the cruel exploitation of irresponsible white men.” Oversight by European governments was preferable to the excesses of landowners and financiers, except perhaps in the Belgian Congo. “No change for the better would be brought about by the European State withdrawing its control. Economic imperialism has itself created conditions in which that control must inevitably continue” (Empire, 357–8). Imperial powers should make amends in the twentieth century for reprehensible conduct in the nineteenth. The case studies of annexed African territories, laden with historical detail about colonial adventurers and statesmen, were less compelling than Leonard’s efforts to prove that the economic benefits of imperialism were largely illusory. He doubted whether the possession of an African empire had added either to the power or to the wealth of any European nation. Further, the use of military force in Africa in support of economic interests had hampered international relations, the consequences of which became apparent in 1914. The lesson to be drawn was that, “so long as policy is dominated by this hostility and competition of economic imperialism, and the power of the State is controlled and directed by the profit-making desires, there can be internationally no stability or security, no real harmony or co-operation” (Empire, 321).
He employed statistical evidence to show that British East Africa was of negligible value to British industry, either as a source of raw materials or as a market for manufactures. Some Englishmen—financiers or planters—had made or lost fortunes, but trade and industry reaped little profit. The poverty of African natives curtailed their demand for British manufactures, while the infrastructure required to extract minerals was lacking. The totality of its East Africa holdings supplied a mere 1 percent of British imports and consumed only 1 percent of British exports (Empire, 331–4). French North African colonies were scarcely more lucrative: Algeria and Tunis together took 11 percent of French exports (Empire, 329). Germany and the United Kingdom were far more important for French commerce than the whole of its African empire. “Nothing could show more clearly,” he declared, “that the economic beliefs behind economic imperialism are dreams and delusions” (Empire, 330). Nor was it possible for any imperial state to reserve colonial products for its own industries: capitalists sold wherever they found buyers. European powers exported more to and imported more from each other than from their colonies, negating the justification for seizing African lands in order to supply raw materials and markets for manufactured goods.
As for the general effects of imperial policy in Africa, these, in Leonard’s judgment, “have been almost wholly evil.” In bitter competition before 1914, European states ruthlessly appropriated lands to which they had no justifiable claim. “By fraud or by force the native chiefs and rulers were swindled or robbed of their dominions” (Empire, 352–3). Unless the principles of the League Covenant were applied to Africa, especially the concept of trusteeship, the “black non-adult races will remain subject to the autocratic government of alien white men” (Empire, 356). In a first intimation of ideas he was to develop in later writings, Leonard envisaged imperial government of African colonies yielding to international control, perhaps by means of a mandate system, making imperial powers accountable to the league for their administration of colonies. For Europe to become a force for good, a social revolution was necessary to replace “the ideal of profit-making and buying cheap and selling dear” (Empire, 361) with a goal of serving the Africans, reserving land for the natives, and providing education to enable them ultimately to govern themselves. Although Leonard continued to reiterate stereotypes about racial inferiority in Africa—using terms such as backward, primitive, and non-adult—he could embrace anti-imperialism while still promoting enlightened administration by colonial officials. In describing the varieties of subject peoples, he compared “highly civilized Chinese or Indians” with “African savages who have never risen above a primitive tribal organization of society.”9 Racial inferiority was not innate among African natives; rather it was the social consequence of economic exploitation and ignorance. His targets were the white oppressors, not the disinterested experts who sought to address their needs. The ultimate aim was the welfare of colonial subjects, but for the foreseeable future this required imperial administrators to control the process, gradually introducing as much self-government as each territory was prepared to receive. In truth, this was a forward-looking colonial policy rather than an anti-imperialist one. Injecting a moral purpose justified continued imperial control, and if European powers declined to assume the burden, then international authorities must supplant them. Since the league was not yet capable of internationalizing Africa, transferring trusteeship over the non-adult races to mandatory states might prove a feasible alternative. The trouble was that “the Western world has no belief in or desire for trusteeship. Europe will continue to pursue its own economic interests, and not the interests of the natives in Africa” (Empire, 366). Even though subsequent critics refuted his perspective, Empire and Commerce was hailed as a landmark in the historiography of imperialism.
Later in 1920 Leonard managed to condense his findings in a brief volume in a series of international handbooks, edited by Dickinson, under the title Economic Imperialism. It allowed him to extend his analysis to Asia but also to modify his mono-causal explanation for imperialism. Economic beliefs and desires “supplied the original motive power which set in motion the power of the State” (Economic Imperialism, 34). If the initial impulse came from financiers and joint-stock companies, he now conceded that moral, sentimental, and strategic factors, while not fundamental, helped to generate popular support for retaining empire. Here we find the first hints of his later preoccupation with “communal psychology.” In the competition for commercial advantage, China too was subjected to exploitation, but mainly through railway or mining concessions. In contrast to Africa, China resisted Western encroachment in a desperate clash of civilizations that produced economic chaos and political anarchy. Looking to the future, he warned that neither Africans nor Asians would submit indefinitely to European despotism, their hostility destined to increase with the passing years (Economic Imperialism, 103). Once again, he hoped the League might help subject peoples adapt to the modern world. China and other Asian countries were already capable of governing themselves, provided they received guidance and technical assistance from the West.
In principle, the idea of consigning former German and Ottoman colonies to the trusteeship of the victorious powers seemed like a propitious change, as long as they were not simply subjected to British or French tyranny. Leonard’s view of mandates oscillated between suspicion that they were a sham, concealing exploitation by the mandatory nations, and hope for their potential to dismantle European empires. The subject recurred often in his books and articles, most notably, in a pamphlet, Mandates and Empire, issued by the League of Nations Union in the autumn of 1920. In it he seized upon the prospect of Article 22 of the covenant transforming the relations between European states and those parts of Asia and Africa subject to colonial rule by requiring these territories be administered solely for the well-being and development of the native population. After years when African subjects were sacrificed to the greed of white settlers and exploiting companies, here was an opportunity to ensure that the mandatory power govern in a way that would protect native interests. He urged the League to emulate British policy in West Africa by guaranteeing native rights in land and prohibiting its alienation to Europeans. In addition, forced labor should be prohibited, along with any tax that compelled natives to work for Europeans. To enable these people to “stand alone as free people,” it was essential to widen gradually the sphere of responsible and democratic government. The provisions of the article denied the mandatory power sovereignty over the land, but this could be ensured only if the League exercised supervision and held the mandatory accountable. “The League cannot shuffle off responsibility on to the Mandatory, for it is the League which has accepted the sacred trust of civilization” (Mandates, 14). His prescription for native education stressed primary and technical schools, so that native communities could make the most effective use of their land, but he did not foresee industrial development. Although the mandate system was applied only to holdings of defeated powers, Leonard looked beyond these limitations. If the system fulfilled its intended purpose, then it was “essential that it should be extended to all subject peoples” (Mandates, 17).
His views about the relative political maturity of mandated African and Asian territories differed sharply: in Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia national independence should be conceded at once, not vitiated by artificial boundaries devised to satiate the greed of Britain and France. The peoples of the Middle East must administer their own territory, looking to Europe merely for guidance. Should pre-war methods of despotic control persist, he anticipated “perpetual trouble,” ending “in a blaze which will tax all our military resources to extinguish.” It was essential for the League to revoke the mandates if the powers violated their terms. Without strict adherence to Article 22, “the whole mandatory system is nothing but a worthless scrap of paper.”10
In Downhill All the Way Leonard tends to conflate both advisory committees, even though the ACImpQ emerged six years later than the international one. Its significance was that “it enabled me, as secretary, to try to get the party and its leaders to understand the complications and urgency of what was happening in remote places and among strange peoples about whom they were profoundly and complacently ignorant” (Downhill, 223).
As the author of a pioneering study on Africa with extensive colonial experience, he was regarded as an expert but equally as an invaluable facilitator of policy discussions and reports. The two committees gathered information that was then disseminated in as many as 200 memoranda per year. The title of secretary belied his dominance on the ACImpQ, and in his collaborations with others, such as C. R. Buxton or Norman Leys, he generally assumed the dominant role. In a New Statesman letter, written months before his death, he discounted the impact of such writers as Hobson and Morel on interwar African policy. Instead it was “worked out in detail” by the Labour Party ACImpQ. From the outset its approach was “politically anti-imperialist,” insisting that “the gross neglect of African colonies must be ended.”11 Leonard’s reputation within the movement was based not only on his scholarly and polemical writings but on his involvement in party deliberations. His continuous activity turned him into one of the principal architects of Labour’s foreign and imperial policies. In contrast, not only to Fabian imperialists, but also to prevailing popular attitudes, he sought to dismantle the empire, although only at a pace dictated by the readiness of the colonial peoples. Little wonder that Beatrice Webb, who admired Leonard, described him as “an anti-imperialist fanatic but otherwise a moderate in Labour politics.”12
The first detailed Labour manifesto on Africa, drafted by Leonard and Buxton, was approved by the ACImpQ, adopted by the executive and party conference, and published as The Empire in Africa: Labour’s Policy in 1920. A slightly revised version by Leonard and Leys was issued in 1926 as Labour and the Empire: Africa, portions of which reappeared in the Reports and Proceedings of the Labour and Socialist International Congress in 1928. After surveying the extent of the African crown colonies, whose administration was “absolutely autocratic,” the pamphlet compared British East Africa, where land and people were exploited for the benefit of the white capitalist, with West Africa, where native land rights were preserved and native economic interests fostered. These contrary models of colonial rule indicated the way forward: “Labour’s policy, if based on Labour principles, must be the abolition of economic exploitation and the education of the native so that he may take his place as a free man both in the economic and political system imposed upon Africa” (Empire in Africa, 3). Much of what followed echoed Leonard’s conclusions in Empire and Commerce in Africa.
Confining natives to reserves and subjecting them to forced labor and exorbitant taxes, increasingly prevalent in the East African colonies, such as Kenya and Uganda, “does not aim at the creation of a self-respecting race of African producers secure in their possession of the land, but at the evolution of a race of servile labourers in European employ divorced from their land” (Empire in Africa, 4). It was creating a discontented, landless proletariat, threatening British occupation with eventual insurrection. He was no less outspoken in criticizing government policy, which, under pressure from the settlers, was complicit in exploiting indigenous people. If left in possession of their own land, natives were capable of working it more effectively than the European landowner, as cultivation of cash crops in West Africa confirmed. Labour’s policy stipulated that land must be treated as the property of the native community, rejecting European expropriation. Slavery and all forms of compulsory labor must be prohibited. British authorities should also enforce the elimination of any color bar, opening all occupations without regard to race. In addition, native local government should be encouraged, but, until a genuinely representative system developed, tribal self-government must suffice. The goal was native participation in legislative councils and the gradual transfer of authority to these bodies. In line with Leonard’s expressed views, the principle of trusteeship under the League of Nations should be extended to all tropical Africa. Finally, the colonial government had a duty to make primary education accessible to all school-age children, supplemented by technical colleges and teacher training schemes. The plan also provided for an African university with a curriculum substantive enough to be recognized by professional authorities in Europe and America. The aim should be to train not more African lawyers but rather scientific agriculturalists, doctors, and health officers.
When Leonard, as spokesman for the ACImpQ, responded to a questionnaire on subject peoples in January 1926, he called for immediate self-government in Iraq, Ceylon, and also in Palestine, although only in accord with the provisions of the mandate and the Balfour Declaration. Turning to African colonies, he contended that African natives were not yet capable of governing themselves: “The immediate grant of self-government would be disastrous.…No measure of ‘responsible government’ can at present be granted and it should never be granted unless and until it is certain that the Government will be responsible to and controlled by the African inhabitants.”13 Meanwhile legislative and executive power must remain in the hands of the Colonial Office. Such pronouncements were not so much “politically anti-imperialist,” as Leonard argued in his 1969 New Statesman letter, but rather expressions of benevolent paternalism, keeping Africans under British tutelage until imperial authorities deemed them ready to take control of their own affairs. It also implied that the consent of the subjects was less vital than the opinions of well-intentioned experts, who knew what was best for the natives. The ACImpQ was slow to abandon the idea that self-government was something best doled out in gradual stages rather than conceded all at once. Nor was it merely self-government that would be dictated from London: economic and social programs should also continue to be managed by British officials. This attitude toward Africa began to alter only when emerging nationalism awakened critics of imperialism to new realities.
The policy statements contained pledges that could be implemented if a Labour government came to power, a dubious prospect in 1920. The ACImpQ continued to press for a commitment to future self-government in the colonial empire, but even when the executive adopted recommendations, they had few opportunities to carry them out before 1945. Nor did Labour pursue a forward policy when in office in 1924 or 1929–31. As prime minister, MacDonald had bigger fish to fry, and when, in 1929, Leonard and Buxton approached Sidney Webb (Lord Passfield), the Colonial Secretary, to complain that in Kenya expenditure on education and roads discriminated against Africans, taxed disproportionately for minimal returns, Webb, progressive on social policy but a conservative defender of the empire, denied their appeal for budgetary revision. Leonard followed up with a letter to his erstwhile patron, stressing the need for a Labour government to demonstrate by its actions that trusteeship was a reality. Reiterating claims made during his deputation, he insisted that “the incidence of taxation is grossly unfair to the native” and “the Government of Kenya has displayed deplorable weakness in many respects where the settlers have pressed their interests against those of the natives.”14 He was reluctant to accept that a Labour Colonial Secretary would simply refuse to implement principles stated in the party platform. But it was all to no avail. Such failures caused Leonard later to question whether the immense amount of work undertaken by the advisory committees served a genuine purpose. He could console himself with the belief that they did occasionally have some impact:
We spread through the Labour Party, and to some extent beyond it, some knowledge of the relations between the imperialist powers and the subject peoples of Asia and Africa and even some realization of the urgent need for revolutionary reform so that there would be a rapid and orderly transition from imperialist rule to self-government.
(Downhill, 238)
Most of Leonard’s early writings on imperialism were commissioned works, emanating from either the Fabian Society, the League of Nations Union, or the ACImpQ. In 1928 he published his most speculative treatment of the subject, Imperialism and Civilization, under the Hogarth imprint. Much of it recapitulates the discursive themes of his two earlier books, but it also anticipates the type of cultural criticism contained in After the Deluge (1931, 1939). In contrast to exhaustive studies, like Empire and Commerce in Africa, he was now able to write without constraint, accountable to no one but himself for its contents. Looking back through history, he observed that it was not until industrialization that Europe became “a belligerent, crusading, conquering, exploiting, proselytizing civilization” (Imperialism, 9). Asia and Africa were powerless to resist “ruthless world-conquest” on a scale previously “unknown in human history” (Imperialism, 11). But by the twentieth century imperial domination unleashed a world revolt against Europe as semi-independent states, especially in Asia, sought to escape from Western control. Imperialism, as it existed before 1914, was no longer possible. It was the collision of incompatible civilizations, rather than racial conflict, which inspired nationalist outbreaks in India, China, and the Islamic world, a belated reaction to imperial exploitation. Racial and religious conflict, he argued, emerged only once the clash of civilizations began, merely “a channel into which the waters of revolt against imperialism have run” (Imperialism, 27). Imperialism brought with it the seeds of its own destruction, when it imposed Western civilization on alien cultures. In India it was the British-educated elites who resorted to political agitation, developed in Europe, against their overlords. Writing in 1928, he expressed the view that “the revolt against Europe had already reached the stage at which it cannot be successfully resisted” (Imperialism, 70).
The situation in colonial Africa was different, since its more primitive inhabitants were able neither to withstand the European incursion, nor to assimilate its civilization. Yet, despite the unscrupulous methods of the conquerors, the absorption of African territory into European empires was “desirable” as a way to “protect the inhabitants from the merciless massacre and exploitation by private adventurers” (Imperialism, 76–7). Unless European settlers were restrained, the African, “a child in the hands of any European,” would become the economic slave of the white capitalist (Imperialism, 82). Yet, even in Africa, where the white minority held sway, the revolt against foreign control would inevitably be repeated, its outbreak becoming “far more terrible than that of Asia” (Imperialism, 92). He was prescient in targeting East Africa as the site for future nationalist unrest, which exploded in the 1950s and 1960s. As Noel Annan observed, Harold Macmillan’s notorious “winds of change” speech in 1960 echoed what had been Leonard’s clarion call since the 1920s.15
In the book’s most provocative chapter, “The Inverse of Imperialism,” he probed the impact of Asians and Africans in countries primarily inhabited by white men. This offered an opportunity to look at the Negro16 population in America and the immigration of Asians into the United States, Kenya, South Africa, and Australia, where their presence and economic competitiveness had aroused hostility. He cited the fierce antagonism of whites in America to the upward mobility of emancipated blacks who challenged their economic and political supremacy. While denying the ultimate viability of segregation, he held out little hope for assimilation, since hostile sentiment seemed unlikely to change. He claimed, without evidence, that racial conflicts were subordinate to political and economic ones, but that, once racist sentiments surfaced, they came to dominate the situation: “The presence of a large, homogeneous, unassimilated population belonging to one race and civilization in a State where the majority of the population belongs to another race and civilization creates a very difficult and dangerous situation” (Imperialism, 105).
To avoid replicating the American problem, he warned against unrestricted Japanese immigration to Australia or California. If the world were to prevent racial conflicts, it must avoid “these alien, unassimilated enclaves.” He reserved his strongest condemnation, however, for South Africa, which was re-creating the American situation on “a colossal scale and in a form which must lead to appalling disaster” (Imperialism, 106–7). Once again, he looked to the League to extend genuine trusteeship to subject peoples, providing disinterested administrative and economic assistance. It was the only way to avoid strife, but it also required Asia—and somewhat later Africa—to learn the secrets of “stable government, honest administration, and sound finance” (Imperialism, 123). One might recognize this as a Fabian approach to the legacy of imperialism, but perhaps only a Fabian could find a glimmer of hope in the prospect. Imperialism and Civilization was less an anti-imperialist diatribe than a prophetic analysis of dangers that beset the increasingly unstable international scene. His sweeping judgments, often skirting the edge of unwitting racism, were uttered in a spirit of racial harmony. In the 1920s he envisaged a multiracial commonwealth without any notion of how to achieve it.
Labour adopted an updated policy for the colonial empire, which Leonard drafted, at the Hastings party conference in 1933. Its most notable feature was a new emphasis on socialization and self-government: “a continued effort should be made to develop the Empire into a real Commonwealth of self-governing and Socialist peoples” (Colonial Empire, 5). Nowhere in the empire had there been serious efforts on behalf of the native peoples, but this was the goal to which the party now committed itself. Labour promised to grant responsible government in Asia and Africa, provided that the franchise was given to native inhabitants on the same terms as European minorities. In the meantime, traditional village and tribal institutions would be preserved, with cooperative societies employed to train local leaders to become more democratic and efficient. Lest this appear to accelerate the process too hastily, the statement added: “In the more primitive communities of Africa and the Pacific, the British Government must still for many years be responsible for the difficult task of seeing that the economic life of the territory is adjusted to the economic life of the outside world without damage to the interests of the Native inhabitants” (Colonial Empire, 7). Obstacles to their advancement could be overcome by education “designed to assist even the more primitive type of Native to become a free citizen capable of efficient participation in and control of his industry and his Government” (Colonial Empire, 13).
Although he wrote less about it, Leonard was equally committed to promoting self-government in India. The ACImpQ included several ex-Indian civil servants, like Sir John Maynard, who took the lead in producing memoranda, twenty-three between 1924 and 1931. The concessions that had been offered were so grudging and incomplete that Indian nationalists could only conclude that “the alien rulers would release their hold on the subject people only if forced to do so by bloody violence” (Downhill, 226). Leonard joined a gathering of prominent Labour figures to meet Gandhi in December 1931 after the London Round Table Conference and enjoyed a memorable private conversation with Nehru in February 1936. Even though the party supported taking immediate steps to establish Dominion status, its leaders had no opportunity to realize the promise until after the war.
In November 1938 Leonard’s memorandum on projected reforms to the Ceylon constitution for the ACImpQ advocated “an appreciable measure of responsible government” as the keystone of Labour policy for the island. In order to safeguard the Tamil minority from Sinhalese domination, he urged a federal solution on the Swiss model as a way to enable distinct communities to coexist peaceably in a democratic state.17 He was the first person to propose a federal arrangement as a way to mitigate communal conflict in Ceylon, a solution that resurfaced fifty years later in the Indo-Sri Lanka accord of 1987. By making a number of concessions to Tamil demands, the accord temporarily brought an end to insurgent resistance, but it was not until 2009 that government forces finally defeated the diehard struggle of the Tamil Tigers.
The question of assimilation, a recurrent theme in Imperialism and Civilization, permeated Leonard’s fragmentary writings about Palestine. In 1926 he had endorsed Palestinian self-government while acknowledging the Balfour Declaration as a stumbling block. During the interwar period the British mandatory authority dithered as to whether to implement the pledge to transform Palestine into a Jewish national homeland or admit the impossibility of complying with the provisions of both the mandate and the Balfour Declaration, a dilemma exacerbated by pro-Arab officials in the Palestinian administration. Despite efforts by historian Lewis Namier and by Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization, to convert Leonard to Zionism in the 1920s, he remained adamantly resistant. In his view, intermarriage and assimilation in Western Europe and America raised doubts about whether Jews would even continue as a distinct community, although he cited Nazi anti-Semitism as a factor militating against total integration. It was unfortunate that Palestine was the disputed territory, given the “indigenous nationalism everywhere in the Near East.”18 Just as he opposed Japanese migration to Australia or Indians to East Africa, he initially perceived Jews as an unassimilable element in the Arab world. Despite his Jewish heritage, he insisted that “the savage xenophobia of human beings is so great that the introduction of a large racial, economic, religious, or cultured minority always leads to hatred, violence, and political and social disaster” (Journey, 185). In 1941 it fell to Leonard to draft an ACImpQ report on Palestine whose aim was to make it possible for Jews and Arabs “to cooperate peacefully in a self-governing Palestine.” Its key principle was to preserve territorial integrity and reject proposals for partition. The memorandum tried to grapple with the issue of Jewish immigration, advising some limitation in order to prevent Arabs from being reduced to a minority. While unrestricted immigration was unfeasible, it would be possible to admit more Jews without jeopardizing the Arab position. Within specified limits, “Jews should be allowed and encouraged to enter and develop the country.”19 By 1942 he held out some hope that a binational state might be created in Palestine, capable of providing for both a Jewish national home and its inclusion in a federation of Middle Eastern states.20 Even after the war had ended, he was reconciled neither to Zionism nor to “the self-righteous sadism of both sides and of their supporters, masquerading in the hypocritical cloak of misery, patriotism, or impartiality.” His seeming even-handedness prevented him from identifying any “peculiar nobility and righteousness” in the determination of the Jew in Palestine “to make life hell for everyone because everyone has made life a hell for him.”21 This was written shortly after the bombing of the King David Hotel killed more than ninety people, hardening British opinion against Jewish militancy. In view of earlier negative remarks about Palestine, his response to the creation of Israel marked a decided change in outlook. In 1949 he wrote that “our true interests are in a peaceful and prosperous Palestine and therefore in a peaceful and prosperous Israel.” Reversing its “disastrous policy of encouraging the Arab League to liquidate the Jews,” the British government should prove by its actions that “we desire friendship and cooperation with the new State.”22 After the Suez conflict in 1956, he extolled the Israelis’ “determination to defend themselves. If efficiency, toughness, enthusiasm can save a people, Israel will survive.” For a stable peace to be achieved in the Middle East, international action was required. To allow a “lawless attack upon Israel” would be “to endanger the future peace of the whole world.”23
In 1940 the ACIntQ suspended operations until 1944, since Labour, junior partner in the coalition government, did not encourage the critical perspective that it had offered for more than two decades. After the Fabian Society and the New Fabian Research Bureau reunited in 1939, Leonard served on the Fabian Executive, helping to establish its Colonial Bureau. He transferred his foreign-policy initiatives to the International Bureau of the Fabian Research Department, becoming its chair from 1943 to 1953. The ACImpQ continued to function during the war under the auspices of the party’s International Department, and Leonard dutifully attended its meetings as well as those of several Fabian groups, even after bombing of his Bloomsbury house in 1940 virtually marooned him in Rodmell. Eventually he acquired a London flat to avoid the protracted commutes from Sussex to Westminster under wartime conditions. He was the principal author of two major wartime reports on the future of the empire.24 In view of the 1945 Labour victory and the appointment of Arthur Creech-Jones, chair of the Labour Party Reconstruction Committee and an ACImpQ stalwart, as Colonial Secretary in 1945, these documents were key markers in charting the direction of postwar imperial goals.
Much of their contents recapitulated manifestos of the 1920s, suggesting that Leonard’s anti-imperialism had evolved to only a limited extent. Nearly all the colonies outside Africa were deemed “ripe for self-government,” but most Africans were “not yet able to stand by themselves.” European states needed to retain administrative control in trust for the native inhabitants, training them “in every possible way so that they may be able in the shortest possible time to govern themselves.” Indirect rule must not be used as an excuse for reinforcing autocratic tribal rulers or denying access to education. Grants should be withheld from any colonial territory that refused to eliminate discriminatory practices in employment. The application of a color bar was “a negation of the idea of colonial administration as a trust in the interests of the native inhabitants.” The reports called for economic planning coordinated by the Colonial Office, encouraging production by Africans, but also “imposing planned agriculture and production upon the inhabitants.” The economic basis would remain agriculture; industry ought to be discouraged unless it benefited the native population. Exploitation of mineral wealth should be under state ownership and control rather than “private profit-making enterprise.” The primary obligation of British administration must be educational, requiring substantially increased expenditure, to enable Africans to manage their own affairs. To develop the economic potential of African colonies and to improve living standards, large outlays of capital and loans were essential either from the metropole or from an international fund for development. These reports embodied a comprehensive scheme of political, social, and economic advancement, socialist in its focus on state planning, paternalistic in its reliance on supervision by officials and experts. They did not envisage African autonomy or even vernacular education. Instead, imperial authority would make restitution to their subjects for decades of neglect, doing for them what they could not yet do for themselves. The intention was to improve conditions, apply local revenue and government funding to the welfare of native inhabitants, and expand educational opportunity.
In August 1943 Leonard broadcast on the BBC Home Service on the responsibilities of colonial empire. He described extreme contrasts within the British Empire, ranging from Ceylon, whose people were “just as capable of managing their own affairs as we are,” to Africa, where “millions of people are living in the most primitive conditions, uneducated and illiterate.” If the empire was ever to become a Commonwealth of Free Peoples, then the “advanced” peoples should be given full self-government immediately after the war. He criticized those on the “extreme left” who wanted to grant self-government to Africans as a way for the British to clear out of Africa. In his opinion this would be “disastrous for the Africans,” likely to fall victim to profiteers. Instead colonial administrations should go “all out to devolve self-government” and provide “an enormous extension of elementary and secondary education.” Native authorities needed to become “gradually democratized.” In a strongly worded riposte, Elspeth Huxley, who had grown up in the white minority community in Kenya, chided Leonard for his outdated perspective. Criticizing him for referring to Africans as an undifferentiated, backward mass, she questioned whether the British record on education and self-government was as disgraceful as he claimed. Further, she doubted whether democracy would be appropriate where one tribe refused to be represented by another, a prospect that Leonard failed to anticipate.25 He was prone to perceive colonial peoples as subsisting at different stages of development but equally capable of evolving to where they could manage their own affairs democratically. This led him to disregard traditional customs, tribal animosities, and social structure in Africa, despite available anthropological research. His years in Ceylon had helped him interpret similar factors in Asian cultures, but his lack of first-hand experience in Africa proved to be an abiding deficiency. In that sense The Village in the Jungle was a work of greater insight than Empire and Commerce in Africa.
Leonard pursued the themes of his talk in a 1945 essay on “The Political Advance of Backward Peoples” published in Fabian Colonial Essays. Once again, he claimed that “primitive or backward peoples” in their current state were incapable of coping with the political and economic problems that European civilization imposed, but he found no evidence to suggest any inherent racial incapacity. If the ultimate aim of colonial rule was democratic self-government of Africa by Africans, the primary duty of British authorities should be to train the native inhabitants so that they could administer their own countries as soon as possible. This could be accomplished only by educating the people: “universal education is a sine qua non of modern democracy.” Yet, even while promoting schools for Africans, he retained an Anglo-centric perspective. If Africans were going to manage their own affairs, they needed to be given knowledge of Western civilization and “higher education on western lines.” Training in democracy, necessarily gradual, need not be postponed until the population achieved the requisite educational standard. While native leaders would inevitably form the basis of local government, their institutions must become “fundamentally democratic in the western sense.”26 Leonard continued to doubt official commitment to preparing Africans for independence. As he lamented in 1959: “The sin and tragedy of our empire have been that we have never attempted to honor our promises and train brown and black subjects for self-government.”27 Elsewhere the outlook was more auspicious, and he applauded the concession of independence in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and Burma. Labour in power after 1945 had implemented the postcolonial policy that he had advocated for a generation. No other figure on the Left had been so consistent a proponent of gradually dismantling the British Empire, nor so prescient in recognizing that emergent colonial nationalism made the transfer of power inevitable, whether by peaceful or by violent means. Still, he was encouraged by the fact that “everywhere the model for the liberated nations is the industrialized civilization of western Europe.”28
Leonard’s inability to visit many of the places he wrote about may have been a handicap in understanding native peoples and their readiness to govern themselves. As long as Virginia was alive, he was reluctant to leave her for any period of time. In the interwar years they regularly vacationed in France and took occasional trips to Spain, Italy, and Germany, but these travels were undertaken when Virginia’s precarious health permitted. His political writings were based on information amassed at home, often the result of intensive reading, but never from actual observation, except when writing about Ceylon. After receiving a bequest in 1922 of several thousand pounds to promote socialism, Fabian leaders devised a plan to dispatch an investigator to Russia “to supplement documentary research into the Soviet system of government.” Beatrice Webb asked Leonard whether “there was the remotest chance of your being able to do it.”29 He was the obvious candidate, having written “two books successfully for the F.S. and endless unpaid work for the Labour Party and the Co-operative movement.” He had the advantage of familiarity with Russian language and literature. As Sidney told Fabian secretary Edward Pease: “This would be a big job, involving visiting Geneva and Moscow. Would you be disposed to spend out of the Atkinson Fund, say £250 for expenses and a fee of £250, the latter recoverable from royalties?”30 Of course Leonard had to reject the proposal and, in fact, never visited the Soviet Union, about which he was to comment profusely in the coming years.
In later years he traveled more widely, usually in the company of his companion, Trekkie Parsons. In April 1957 they went to Israel for ten days, a visit that caused him to repudiate his earlier anti-Zionist views. Although he arrived “with a comparatively open mind,” nothing prepared him for his delight in what he found. “I have never felt so exhilarated by the physical climate of a country and the mental climate of its inhabitants,” he later wrote. What astonished him most was “the immense energy, friendliness, and intelligence of these people” (Journey, 186–7). The sense of common danger reminded him of the atmosphere in London during the Blitz, since the small country was besieged by hostile Arab states. Three years later he returned to Ceylon, which he had been keen to revisit since it became independent. He was warmly welcomed by Sinhalese authorities and the local press, quickly reminding readers of Leonard’s support in 1916 after the British had cracked down on the riots. His public service was favorably recalled, and he was celebrated as the author of The Village in the Jungle. In honor of the visit, his official diaries were published, and he was escorted to the four regions of the island where he had worked as a colonial official. He admitted “to the discreditable enjoyment of being treated as a V.I.P. all over Ceylon” (Journey, 199). It was also gratifying to find ordinary people and officials going out of their way to praise the British administrators of Leonard’s day, even if their words contained more than a hint of flattery. He was pleased to see that the people of Ceylon now governed themselves at every level: “you feel both in the streets of towns and in villages a breeze of independence blowing through men’s minds, quickening their lives.”31 The most startling change, however, was the impact of the motorized bus. When Leonard had served in Ceylon, travel had been on foot, on horseback, and by ox cart. It often took him several days of laborious effort, penetrating the dense jungle, to reach more distant parts. But speed, while seeming to shorten distance, came at a price. As a civil servant he had gotten to know villagers by walking among them or stopping to hear their complaints, but this was less likely to transpire when officials could drive quickly from one place to another. Modernity had undermined that aspect of the relations between the governed and their rulers, and he lamented its loss. He found less poverty than he remembered, even though Ceylon remained predominately agricultural, with growth in rice and cotton production aided by large-scale irrigation.
By 1960 Leonard, 80 years old, was beginning to slow down. With the trip to Ceylon, almost fifty years after his resignation from the colonial service, his professional life had come full circle. After decades of anti-imperial activity, filled with books and articles, meetings and deputations, his own imperial past was vindicated. He had always been proud of his accomplishments in Ceylon, and now, instead of being maligned as an imperialist or dismissed as a relic of the past, he was hailed as a hero. How satisfying to discover that the affection he felt for his former subjects was reciprocated by their descendants a half century later.