On 31 March 1904, a small army of some 1,200 men, accompanied by 10,000 bearers and 20,000 animals – mules, bullocks, buffaloes, ponies, yaks and camels – were making their way through the snowy, windswept terrain of southern Tibet. The military members of the expedition included Gurkha infantry, some Sikh pioneers, and British gunners of the Norfolk Regiment, who brought with them the comparatively newfangled machine gun invented by Sir Hiram Maxim and adopted into the British army in 1889.1
The Maxim gun was sighted to 2,500 yards, and could fire about 450 rounds per minute. It was trundled along on a wheeled carriage.2 In Tibet, in 1904, they had never seen a wheeled carriage, let alone a machine gun.3
The expedition as a whole was led by a short mustachioed figure called Colonel Francis Younghusband, of the King’s Dragoon Guards. The troops were commanded by Brigadier-General James Macdonald of the Royal Engineers. Their aim was to reach Lhasa, the monkish capital of that mountainous land. There, it was believed, they would find evidence of Russian weapon-emplacements, Russian spies and possibly even a Russian governor. It was to counteract this danger to the British Empire in India that Younghusband’s expeditionary force had set out, upon the instruction of the viceroy, to establish a British presence in the Tibetan mountains. A hundred miles inwards and upwards, they approached a hamlet called Guru.
They had climbed to a height of 15,000 feet and were making their way down a track between an escarpment and a dry salt lake. On the gravel flats through which they went, the Tibetans had barred their progress by constructing a rough stone rampart. A group of Tibetan horsemen rode out to meet the invaders. Colonel Younghusband told the Tibetans that they had fifteen minutes to clear the road. They failed to do so. Everyone waited. Younghusband gave orders that no one should fire unless fired upon. In complete silence, the infantry advanced towards the barricade. On high ground to the east of this spot, the Norfolk Regiment had dragged up the Maxim guns and placed them strategically to look down on the thousands of Tibetans who milled about beneath them.
The aim of the Gurkhas and the Sikhs was simple: to climb the escarpment and to manhandle the few Tibetan troops who were armed with antiquated muskets, matchlocks and swords. Having disarmed the enemy, they would then dismantle the roadblock and Younghusband would make his progress to Gyangtse, and then to Lhasa. Unfortunately, the Tibetan commander rode into the confused crowd, a Sikh attempted to grab his bridle, and he loosed off a pistol shot. The Tibetan commander shot an Indian soldier through the jaw – not fatally.
Colonel Younghusband had never seen a war at close quarters. He was as much an explorer as he was a soldier, and he watched with horror as the Maxim guns, on the orders of Brigadier-General Macdonald, began their rapid mechanical chatter. Tseten Wangchuk, one of the Tibetans in the valley, recalled: ‘While we were waiting at the wall during the discussions, a hail of bullets came down on us from the surrounding hills. We had no time to draw our swords. I lay down beside a dead body and pretended I had been killed. The sound of firing continued for the length of time it would take six successive cups of hot tea to cool.’4
The next morning, in a confidential memo to the viceroy of India, General Macdonald gave an account of what happened. His men had used 50 shrapnel shells, 1,400 machine-gun rounds, and 14,351 rounds of rifle ammunition. Their casualties were: six lightly wounded, six badly wounded, none killed. Some 628 Tibetans were killed in that very short space of time, with, as he reckoned, some 222 wounded.5
Macdonald was a clumsy man, not a sadist. Neither the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, who had authorized the expedition, nor Younghusband himself were by nature men of blood. On 4 April, Curzon wrote to Younghusband covering sixteen sides of paper.
I know that you will have been rather miserable over the recent encounter, just as sickened and distressed as I was. For carnage is a horrible thing, even when justified by every law of necessity – and with the bulk of the poor wretches who were shot down we had no sort of quarrel. At the same time in so far as I know the facts – in the main from newspaper correspondents, I do not feel that there is ground to blame anybody except the Lhasa general and his men.
In fact, when the killing-field was cleared, only three Russian rifles were found among the Tibetan dead and wounded.
‘I dare say,’ Lord Curzon continued, ‘the soldiers may have been slow to seize the provocation given: and the appetite for slaughter, once aroused, is not easily slaked.’6
In spite of Younghusband’s disquiet at the killings, the expedition continued, now divided into two, with Macdonald leading one party, Younghusband the other. On 8 April a further 200 Tibetans were killed at Kala Tso, defending their position with ancient matchlocks.7 By 11 April the British had reached Gyangtse, and on 3 August they eventually got to Lhasa, the ‘forbidden city’ on the ‘roof of the world’. They were not the first Europeans to do so. Jesuit missionaries had arrived there in 1625 and kept a presence there for a century.8 What was new was the underlying political rationale for a British presence in this all but impenetrable place. Lord Curzon, antiquarian, linguist and historian, blanched at the prospect of British soldiers, at his behest, galumphing through historic sites. Writing to Younghusband from England from Walmer Castle, his official residence as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, Curzon urged:
When you come to Lhasa or while you are there, please be very careful to stop any pillaging of the temples or Monasteries. Any other country would strip them bare. But let us set an example as at Peking. Of course enormously important discoveries may be made in respect of manuscripts. But let there be no burning or wanton destruction.9
Neither Curzon nor Younghusband had any doubts, however, not merely that the British had every right to be invading Tibet, but that they had a duty to do so. Younghusband wrote: ‘I hope His Majesty’s Government will never lose sight of the central fact that British interest in Lhasa is positive, legitimate and inevitable, and that Russian interest is factitious, ulterior, and pursued with unfriendly designs.’10
One Russian, a Siberian named Buriat Dorjieff, was active in Tibet, and was seen by British intelligence as a grave danger to British interests. He was a Buddhist convert, and his conversations with the Dalai Lama were of a largely spiritual character, but Lord Curzon and Younghusband had persuaded themselves that Dorjieff had ‘taught the Tibetans to rely as trustingly on Russian support as Dr Leyds induced President Kruger’ – of the South African Republic, the instigator of Boer resistance to British domination in South Africa, and so the key figure in promoting the Boer War – ‘to rely upon the Germans’.11
Even when the British had entered Lhasa and found no evidence for their intelligence reports, no Russian presence, no plans for the Russian Tsar to convert to Tibetan Buddhism (which was one of the rumours), they could still persuade themselves that their very arrival was a blessing. ‘The Tibetans’, Younghusband believed, ‘are not a people fit to be left to themselves between two great Empires … They are nothing but slaves in the power of the selfish and ignorant monks … To force ourselves into personal contact with the leading Lhasa men means no oppression of a harmless people: it means rather the emancipation of a people most willing to be friendly with us, who are held in bondage now by a cruel, self-seeking oligarchy of monks.’12 The Communist Chinese offered similar justification for their invasion of Tibet in October 1950.
When they eventually arrived in Lhasa, Younghusband gave orders for full-dress uniform to be worn as he marched his troops through the muddy streets. He was delighted by the warm Tibetan welcome. A Tibetan eyewitness recorded: ‘When the British officers marched to the Tsuglakhang [Jokhang] and other places, the inhabitants of Lhasa were displeased. They shouted and chanted to bring down rain, and made clapping gestures to repulse them. In the foreigners’ custom these were seen as signs of welcome, so they took off their hats and said thank you.’13
By September, the British had withdrawn from Tibet. The secretary of state for war, Lord Lansdowne – Curzon’s predecessor as viceroy of India – rather delighted in a diplomatic coup in which he received Russian reassurance that Russia would not occupy Tibet. The Younghusband expedition had divided opinion in Britain, and not just among cabinet colleagues and bigwigs who disliked Curzon.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘that little black demon of a Kipling’ as Henry James called him,14 the poet of the Empire, was one of the very many English in the pages which follow to have married an American. (Henry James was best man, on 18 January 1892, when Kipling married Carrie Balestier at All Souls’, Langham Place, in London with only five other people present – Edmund Gosse, his wife and son, the publisher William Heinemann and the clergyman who performed the ceremony.)15 It was in 1899 that Kipling paid his final visit to the United States and apostrophized them upon their taking possession of the Philippine Islands.
Take up the White Man’s burden –
The savage wars of peace –
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hope to nought.16
Kipling’s perspective of Empire was shaped by his childhood in India. His parents were artists and designers, he was a journalist. They were observers of those he most admired, the engineers, the administrators, the builders and soldiers. With his intuitive artistic antennae, Kipling, ardent British imperialist as he was, could sense, at the very acme of success for the Raj, that America was one day to supersede Britain as the world’s policeman, emperor and banker.
Kipling’s version of the imperial role was entirely shared by Curzon the viceroy, who said in a speech delivered at Bombay: ‘Since this country first laid its spell upon me, I have always regarded it as the land not only of romance, but of obligation. India to me is “Duty” written in five letters instead of four. All the servants of Government, European or native, are also the servants of duty. The Viceroy himself is the slave of duty as well as its captain.’17
George Nathaniel Curzon had become the viceroy of India, aged only thirty-nine. In Washington, on 22 April 1895, he had married the beautiful Mary Leiter, the daughter of Levi Z. Leiter, who had made a fortune, partly out of his partnership in the Chicago store, Field, Leiter and Co., partly by successful real estate investments. (He did very well out of the great Chicago fire of 1871.) The family, German Swiss in origin, Mennonite, subsequently Lutheran, in religion, sprang from Pennsylvania, but after old Levi made his money they moved to the American capital. Young Mary captivated the president’s wife, Mrs Cleveland, as she subsequently captivated British aristocratic society in the London season and at country house parties.18
Curzon, heir to his father the Reverend Lord Scarsdale’s Derbyshire estate at Kedleston, was a person of flair and brilliance, but he had an income of merely £1,500 per annum. Though it may very well be true that he did nothing so crude as to marry for money, the Leiter fortune helped to establish him at a palatial London address, Carlton House Terrace, and there is no doubt at all that such an improvement in circumstances made it possible for him to live as a viceroy should. Upon their marriage, Mary and her descendants were offered immediately the annual income from $700,000 (£140,000) worth of bonds, which totalled $33,500 (£6,700), while on her father’s death her marriage settlement would receive a further million dollars. In the event of Mary predeceasing him (an event to occur when she was aged only thirty-six), Curzon was to be allowed as much of the £6,700 as he desired.19
It certainly enabled them to keep up a princely style. And they were able, when the old queen died and was succeeded by her son Edward VII, whom Mary had befriended during her own version of ‘The Siege of London’, to represent their monarch at the splendid celebrations held in India, at the Delhi Durbar. On 12 January 1903 she wrote back to old Levi in Washington:
From the day we entered Delhi on elephants to the day we left it in a state procession, one pageant was grander than another and the State Ball in the palace of Akbar was a thing to dream of – The Duke of Connaught and the Grand Duke of Hesse who had both been to the Coronation in Russia said that nothing there could compare with the positively bewildering beauty of the scene – Halls of alabaster inlaid with precious stones dazzling in the glow of electric light, Indian chiefs covered with jewels – officers in full dress – women in jewels, and as a background the jewelled throne of the old Empress of Delhi towering in lofty beauty as a setting to British rule. People were perfectly speechless with admiration and there were no words to describe the beauty of it. I think that Mamma and Daisy [the youngest sister] enjoyed everything. I had them blessedly looked after, and they had the best places.20
Mary Curzon saw the superb pageantry of the Delhi Durbar as the outward and visible sign of an extraordinary political phenomenon, namely British rule in India. The subcontinent’s 1,802,629 square miles were equal in size to Europe minus Russia. Its population of nearly 300 million (294,361,056 in 1900) was administered by a Civil Service of fewer than 1,000 people, almost all of whom were British. The Indian army of 150,000 troops was the mightiest in the East, and India also bore the cost of a further 75,000 British army men garrisoned in situ.21 By an elaborate system of tariffs and controls, India was self-supporting, but it was also used to shore up the British economy, for example in its obligation to import cheap Lancashire-made cottons.
The daughter of the Chicago department-store millionaire Levi Leiter was, like the teeming millions of the Indian subcontinent, helping to bankroll an extraordinarily successful political oligarchy. Later generations came to believe that elitism and privilege were bad because they were based on inequity, because by allowing a family such as the Curzons a large estate in Derbyshire, and encouraging them to be the ruling class, you were depriving others, no less able perhaps but less fortunate, of the chance to share some of their wealth, or to exercise political power. Why should power be exercised by the few on behalf of the many?
This was to be the deepest political question of the twentieth century: Lenin’s great question of Who, whom? Who has the power to do what to whom? Wherever the British held sway, or wherever they felt constrained to bring their influence, the question is going to arise. In national terms, it will lead to the question why the Indians, the Irish, the Africans, cannot throw off colonialism and govern themselves. In terms of class and personal politics, it will lead to individuals, in Britain and elsewhere, at length achieving political franchise, the vote, regardless of gender or class. In other parts of Europe political solutions, collectivist or corporatist, would be attempted which quickly became far more authoritarian, and certainly more murderous, than the apparently indefensible systems of empire and oligarchy which were in place at the beginning of the century – with much of the Balkans and the Middle East still under the increasingly shaky suzerainty of the Turkish sultans, and much of Africa and the Far East under the colonial rule of European powers – Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Britain.
Of these world empires, the British was the richest, and the most powerful. George Nathaniel Curzon saw India as the key factor in that power. His reason for the greatest diplomatic blunder of his career, authorizing Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet, was the simple fear that the Russian Empire would extend itself into Afghanistan, Tibet and India itself. The Russian Foreign Ministry in 1900 saw India as ‘representing Great Britain’s most vulnerable point’.22 Curzon was voicing the same idea, from an opposite point of view, when he said that: ‘As long as we rule in India, we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third-rate power.’23
Hindsight tells us that such a drop was bound to happen, that a small north European trading nation whose East India Company from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was commercially so successful in its dealings with maharajahs and merchants in the subcontinent could never for long sustain a pseudo-Roman empire based on military control. For one thing, that control could never be sustained, without frequent massacre, if the indigenous population chose to rebel against the governing power.
In the year that Queen Victoria died, 1901, the British Empire was in the midst of its greatest trial to date, namely the Boer War. That war ended in 1902 with a British victory of sorts, but there had been some terrible setbacks, military defeats and psychological humiliations. The other great powers in the world, and many of the smaller nations too, had enjoyed these humiliations very much indeed, rather as the enemies of the United States enjoyed the Vietnam war, or some of President George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern adventures. Two tiny anarchic states of Dutch Bible-bashing farmers had formed themselves into an amateur army which did not even possess uniforms. These Boers had seemed to many other people in the world, in their struggle against the British, to demonstrate what damage could be inflicted upon imperial power if a proud people had sufficient grit and faith. It took a British army of a quarter of a million men three years to defeat the Boers, and it cost not only £270 million, exclusive of postwar reconstruction,24 but also the British reputation for decency and fair play. General Kitchener’s concentration camps, in which women and children suffered and died, have never been forgotten in South Africa.
In 1894, Curzon had written a book called Problems of the Far East and dedicated it ‘to those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen’.25 After Kitchener’s genocidal murder and torture of Boer families, or Younghusband’s misguided expedition in Tibet, this belief, unshakeable in Curzon’s mind, was harder to maintain. Kipling, in one of his more awful poems, ‘The Lesson’, wanted to admit:
It was our fault, and our very great fault – and now we must turn it to use.
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get.
We have had an Imperial lesson. It may make us an Empire yet!26
The South African situation had demonstrated the weakness in the imperial idea, and the potential weakness of the Empire. One of the Indian orderlies, a member of the Indian Ambulance Corps, at the battle of Spion Kop in 1900 had been a young barrister, born in Porbandar, western India, trained as a lawyer at the Middle Temple in London, named Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He had gone to South Africa in 1893 to work on a single case, and he little by little found himself drawn into politics, defending the interests of Indians in Natal. The Boers had told the Indians: ‘You are the descendants of Ishmael and, therefore, from your very birth bound to slave for the descendants of Esau.’ Things did not much improve for Indians in South Africa when the British had won their war. Every Indian was a ‘coolie’. Indian schoolmasters were ‘coolie schoolmasters’. Gandhi was a ‘coolie barrister’. One of the British officials in the Transvaal said many years later to Gandhi that it was the virtues rather than the vices of the Indians which had aroused the jealousy of the Europeans and exposed them to political persecution. Gandhi stayed on in South Africa to fight for basic political rights for the Indian people of Natal and the Transvaal, but these years were to have the profoundest effect upon India.27
The power of Gandhi’s remarkable career stemmed from the fact that it could be seen as, and in some aspects actually was, apolitical. Gandhi’s interests were genuinely religious and spiritual. One of the greatest influences upon him was Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, a pacifist classic which argues for the anarchic idea of following the precepts of Jesus not to resist violence violently. Gandhi drew his inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita, from the Gospels, from Tolstoy and from Ruskin. It was on a railway journey from Johannesburg to Durban that he first read Ruskin’s Unto This Last. With money made as a barrister, Gandhi purchased a 100-acre estate near Durban where the ideals of Tolstoy and Ruskin, manual work and prayer, could be practised. At the same time he and his followers found themselves being arrested by the British authorities for defying such rules as those which forbade Indians to enter the Transvaal without permits. He developed the notion of satyagraha (Sanskrit: firmness in truth), a word which derives from sadagraha, firmness in good conduct – and which became the foundation stone of his policy of passive resistance.
I remember how one verse of a Gujarati poem, which, as a child I learned at school, clung to me. In substance, it was this: If a man gives you a drink of water and you give him a drink in return, that is nothing. Real beauty consists in doing good against evil … Then came the Sermon on the Mount. It was the New Testament which really awakened me to the rightness and value of Passive Resistance. When I read the Sermon on the Mount, such passages as ‘Resist not him that is evil, but whoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also.’ … I was simply overjoyed and found my own opinion confirmed where I least expected it.28
The factors which were to undermine British imperial power were multiple and complex. Though more and more Britons, and Asians, came to doubt the Empire’s raison d’etre in the early decades of the twentieth century, there was only one nation in the world that could see it as a serious political or economic rival. This was the United States. Though Curzon feared the incursions of Russia in India, and though the Germans, French, Dutch and Belgians might regard the British as rivals for control of individual slices of African territory, the existence of a British Empire did not in itself cramp Russian, French, Dutch or Belgian style; it did not prevent them from being world dominators because it was never their ambition to be the supreme power over the rest of the world – what we now call the Third World. As Kipling half saw, in ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the crucial political development for the British was to be their relationship with the United States, and further, the crucial fact in British imperial history would be whether, post-1900, the Americans would choose to emulate Britain in carrying imperial responsibilities.
When history began to show that American ambitions were rather different from Kipling’s imaginings – that for some American statesmen and politicians at least, the expansion of their power seemed to depend on the diminution of the British – then the United States would be forced to make specific decisions, and take specific steps, to undermine and destroy British hegemony. But for a large, rich, patient nation like the United States of America, ready to bide its time, there were very many factors which could help their purposes. Sometimes it would be necessary to shake the branches, sometimes ripe fruit would simply fall of its own accord.
Gandhi’s strength in helping to undermine British power lay in the spiritual simplicity of his appeal. British justification for their Indian Empire, their belief that they were in India to ‘improve’ it, derived largely from a strange alliance between Utilitarian economists and evangelical missionaries. The extent to which practical economics, or Christian piety, predominated varied from decade to decade and from administrator to administrator, but both were evident. The extremist Christians in the early to mid-nineteenth century had dreamed of converting India, but Utilitarian common sense made it clear that Hindus, Jains, Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists were unlikely ever to become Anglican en masse, however clean British drains, however excellent British schools, however extensive British railway systems might turn out to be.
Although Curzon, to choose a colourful example, did not appear, as he and his wife rode into the Delhi Durbar on elephants in the full grandeur of his dress uniform, to be a man who believed that the meek would inherit the Earth, he was nominally a Christian, capable if confronted by the actual precepts of the Gospel of feeling shame. He believed that there was a providence in the British being given India to control. Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience in India, and the growth of the nationalist movement, belong to decades after Curzon’s resignation as viceroy, and return to England in 1905. (His wife Mary, her health seriously undermined by the Indian climate, died in 1906.)
Curzon’s resignation, angry and bitter, had come about after a dispute which ultimately arose from the Younghusband expedition. Lord Kitchener, hero or butcher, depending upon your viewpoint, of the Sudan and South Africa, condemned the system of dual control, whereby the Indian army possessed, in effect, two heads: the military member in the viceroy’s council and the commander-in-chief. Kitchener had been made commander-in-chief in India on Curzon’s recommendation, but the two fell out, and the viceroy remained in India only long enough to receive a royal visit, that of the Prince and Princess of Wales, on 9 November 1905.
Curzon’s achievements as an autocratic viceroy had been immense. Not only had he, from a position of deep knowledge, restored and preserved many works of art and architecture – notably the Taj Mahal – he had also given India the basic infrastructure and political institutions which would enable it to become a modern nation. Not only, in his last year in India, did investments in railways increase by 56 per cent, savings banks deposits by 43 per cent, and exports by 48 per cent. Not only had he, in the tradition of British administrators, defended India’s borders, provided her with access to the London money market, and modernized methods of irrigation and transport. He had developed India as a free-trade area the size of Europe, and continued the refinement of a civil service, the rule of law and the notion of individual freedom. All these things were acknowledged by Jawaharlal Nehru when he looked back on the British Raj of which Curzon was so proud and efficient an exemplar.
Yet Curzon was intensely reluctant to see any of the implications of his modernization. Though it was obvious that making India a modern free-trading nation would eventually lead it to require its own elected parliament, Curzon could retort:
Remember … that to these people, representative government and electoral institutions are nothing whatever … The good government that appeals to them is the government which protects them from the rapacious money-lender and landlord and all the other sharks in human disguise … I have a misgiving that this class will not fare much better under these changes than they do now … I am under the strong opinion that as government in India becomes more and more Parliamentary – as will be the inevitable result – so will it become less paternal and less beneficent to the poorer classes of the population.29
Certainly, the emergence of India as an independent and in economic terms liberal democracy only forty-two years after Curzon left the viceroyalty was not achieved without hundreds of thousands of deaths, the price paid by most peoples of the world in the twentieth century for political change and development. Gandhi, whose career and achievements will form an important part of our story, sounded an early warning note by asking rather simply whether the Christian gentlemen who had taken it upon themselves to administer his native land actually believed in the words of their Lord and Saviour when He had walked the Earth, or whether they preferred to be guided by Jeremy Bentham.
It was a difficult question to answer. One of the most touching of the items in the Younghusband Collection in the Library of the India Office in London is the tiny copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, which bears two inscriptions on its flyleaf. First, ‘F. E. Younghusband from his loving sister Emmie. “Endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ.”‘ There is then added in Francis Younghusband’s own hand: ‘This was carried with me through Manchuria, the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas and was returned to my dear old sister Emmie as a remembrance of me. F. E. Younghusband, June 14 1888.’ The two hymns which Younghusband has underscored heavily with pencil are Newman’s ‘Lead Kindly Light’ (number 266) and one which is less well known, number 264.
My God, my Father, while I stray
Far from my home on life’s rough way,
O teach me from my heart to say,
‘Thy Will be done’.
The dominant historical idea of the nineteenth century, popularized by Hegel, was determinism. Things must be as they are, history was moving in an ineluctable, inescapable progression. The Spirit of the Age cannot be gainsaid; nations and cultures have their day; once passed, the ascendancy is given to another. Hegel was a complicated thinker and he can be seen as the godfather of two quite contradictory movements, despotism, especially Prussian despotism, and freedom and liberalism. In his Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) he saw the established order of the Prussian state as the beginning of political stability and wisdom; but for rather similar reasons to Curzon’s later defence of British domination. Democracy would be wasted on primitive or underdeveloped peoples. At the same time, Hegel, a profoundly influential philosopher in Britain among the political classes, saw history as ‘none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. This strand of essentially liberal thinking would persuade you in a different direction. Rather than thinking that order was the essential ingredient in political salvation, you might think that freedom is most important; and in collective terms, this means you would support nationalistic aspirations against the big collective ideal of an empire.
This is the big question, politically and diplomatically, at the start of the twentieth century. The old Ottoman Empire, the ‘sick man of Europe’, is crumbling away, and the lands over which it presides – Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, as well as the Islamic Balkan peoples – all aspire to self-determination. Liberals of all nations tend to be selective in the extent to which they support nationalist endeavour. The British in Ireland are a case in point. Gladstone, the Liberal leader, took several decades of evolution from being the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories to being the Grand Old Man of British Liberalism, before he could support Irish Home Rule. In his youth he had supported ‘rebel’ Italians against the Bourbon or Austrian hegemony. It took a long time to see parallels between the desire of continentals for freedom and the Irish aspirations on his own doorstep. His championing of Irish Home Rule split the Liberal party and as we start the story, with the reign of King Edward VII, the matter is still unresolved.
On the whole, English liberals (of both the Unionist and Liberal parties) supported nationalism as an idea when it suited them, and not when it did not. British nationalism was obviously as commendable a virtue as Prussian nationalism was an international menace. The aspirations of the Serbs to expel the Austro-Hungarians, who had annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878, or of the Bosnian Muslims to be independent of the Ottoman Porte, were good things, whereas the desire of the Irish or the Indians to manage their own affairs was a nuisance, or plain crazy.
We are at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of history in which human beings massacred one another in numbers without historical parallel. The sheer number of deaths is actually impossible to comprehend or to absorb with the imagination, however often we might recite the actual numbers of those killed. Added to the prodigious numbers killed in war is that grisly and peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass slaughter of civilians: the Turkish killing of one million Christian Armenians in 1915, the incalculable numbers who died, first in the Russian Civil War, but also in the famines in the Ukraine, which Stalin used as a method of deliberate elimination; the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Nazi period.
In an important essay, Robert Skidelsky30 linked the growth of mass slaughter with the growth of those distinctive twentieth-century ideals, nationalism and democracy. ‘Hitler and Stalin were not democrats, but they killed for the sake of the people – to secure them a Thousand Year Reich or the communist millennium. Genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s started with the onset of democracy.’ Skidelsky argues that without some limit to the idea of democracy it easily slides into despotism. And if you ‘believe in “rule by the people” you have first to select the people’. In an Imperium, different racial and religious groups have to coexist in order to survive. Not so for the democratic nationalist, who actually asserts his ‘freedom’ by claiming the right to be a fully independent Hindu or Muslim, Indian or Pakistani. The inevitable concomitant is that the ‘alien’ in the nationalist’s midst will, by the democratic will of the majority, be expunged.
Skidelsky concludes his essay:
We have not yet overcome the idea that the world should be divided into national units, exercising their sovereign right of self-government. Yet they are not the only, or necessarily the highest, principles of political life. Empires at their best stood for multiracialism and religious tolerance. They also allowed a great deal of devolution in practice. They foundered in the 20th century because no way could be found of making their rule acceptable to their subject peoples.
Indian nationalists would legitimately resent Curzon’s lordly comment that ‘to these people representative government and electoral institutions are nothing whatever’. His was one of the loftiest and most patronizing of all the grand imperialist attitudes, but it could have been echoed, for example, in the life’s work and world view of Lord Cromer in Egypt, of the British in South Africa and Burma and Malaya. Cromer’s latest biographer tells of some young modern Egyptian students who made the pilgrimage all the way to North Norfolk to find Lord Cromer’s grave in order that they might spit upon it.31
We began this chapter with an account of Younghusband’s ill-starred invasion of Tibet, the killing of hundreds of Tibetans, and the thick-skinned insensitivity of the British imperialists’ attitude to the affair. But it would be unfair to leave the incident without setting it within a context of what came later. The massacre of 628 people in a mountain pass is a terrible thing, especially when the man who ultimately sanctioned the incident, the viceroy of India, can write: ‘there is no ground to blame anybody except the Lhasa general’. But fairness compels us to add that the moments when the British behaved with brutality in India, during the 1857–9 troubles, and in 1919 in Amritsar, are bloody interludes in a general story of containment and good order. The numbers slain are tiny compared with the numbers of those slaughtered by Indians and Pakistanis when they achieved their yearned-for independence. Likewise, it was in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Sultans that the Young Turks massacred the Armenians; the oppression of the Russian people by the Tsars would seem mild by comparison with the mass murders perpetrated by Lenin and Stalin. No Hohenzollern or Habsburg autocrat brought about killings on the scale of the populist Hitler.
Hegelian or predestinarían historians would see the end of the British Empire as doomed, foreordained to self-destruct. Certainly such incidents as the Younghusband fiasco did not strengthen the imperialist position. At the time of the disaster, there were many flag-waving jingoists who supposed that the Empire would go on for ever; and it is easy to see why. The Empire was still growing, reaching its maximum extent in 1921. But for many readers of H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (published 1911) there must have been more than a hint of prophecy in its summary:
The English rule in India is surely one of the most extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and does not know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens he remains … No one dare bring the average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, everyone who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were up to there … And beyond a phrase or so about ‘even-handed justice’ – and look at our sedition trials! – they told me nothing. Time after time I heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee or a virgin would be left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword than futility … The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves … In some manner we shall have to come out of India.32
It is a chilling passage in what is supposed to be a novel, published thirty-six years before Wells’s fellow socialists abruptly withdrew from India, on a ‘better fire and sword than futility’ ticket, leading to well over a million deaths during partition. The sort of dull district administrator so admired by Kipling saw rather more value than Wells did in preserving the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal. But for British imperialists, as for Bengali virgins, dangerous days lay ahead.