Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (24 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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In his search for the artery of civilization, Livingstone was indefatigable. Indeed, compared with those who struggled to keep pace with him, he seemed indestructible. Already the first white man to cross the Kalahari desert, the first white man to see Lake Ngami and the first white man to traverse the continent, in November 1855 he became the first to see what is perhaps the greatest of all the natural wonders of the world. East of Esheke, the smooth flow of the Zambezi is dramatically punctuated by a vast chasm. The locals knew the cascade as Mosioatunya, ‘the smoke that thunders’. Livingstone – already aware of the need to attract backing for his work back home – promptly renamed it the Victoria Falls ‘as proof of my loyalty’.
27
Reading Livingstone’s journals, it is impossible not to be struck by his passionate enthusiasm for the African landscape. ‘The whole scene was extremely beautiful’, he wrote of the Falls. ‘No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England’:
As it broke, wild pieces of water all rushing on in the same direction each gave off several rays of foam exactly as bits of steel when burned in oxygen give off rays of sparks. The snow white sheet seemed like myriads of small comets rushing on in one direction each of which gave off ... from its nucleus streams of foam.
 
These were ‘scenes so lovely they must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight’: they were quite simply ‘the most wonderful sight in Africa’. Such sentiments help explain Livingstone’s transition from missionary work to exploration. A loner, at times even a misanthrope, he plainly found it more fulfilling to trudge a thousand miles through the African interior for the sake of a sublime view than to preach a thousand sermons for the sake of a single convert. Nevertheless, the sheer beauty of the Victoria Falls only partly explains Livingstone’s excitement. For he always insisted that he was travelling with a purpose: to find a way to open up Africa to British commerce and civilization. And in the Zambezi itself he appeared to have found the key to fulfilling his grand design.
Beyond the Falls, Livingstone assumed, the river must be navigable to the sea some 900 miles away. That surely meant that it could be used to bring commerce to the African hinterland, allowing European civilization to flow up river in its wake. As tribal ‘superstitions’ dissolved under its influence, Christianity would at last take root. And as legitimate commerce spread inland it would undermine the slave trade by creating free employment for Africans. The Zambezi, in short, was – must be – God’s intended highway.
And right beside the Victoria Falls was precisely the kind of place where British settlers could establish themselves: the Batoka plateau, a landscape of ‘open undulating lawns covered with short herbage such as poets and natives call a pastoral country’, but where ‘wheat of superior quality and abundant yield’ also flourished, along with ‘other cereals and excellent roots in great variety’. It was here in the Zambian Highlands that Livingstone believed his countrymen – ideally, poor but hardy Scots like himself – would be able to establish a new British colony. Like so many explorers before and since, he believed he had found the Promised Land. But this was to be a cultural as much as an economic El Dorado. Once settled by white men, the Batoka Plateau would radiate civilizing waves, until the whole continent had been cleansed of superstition and slavery.
Mindful of the need to integrate his new colony into the imperial economy, Livingstone even had a staple crop in mind for Batoka. Cotton would be grown there, reducing the dependence of British textile mills (like the one where he had spent his childhood) on cotton grown by American slaves. It was a bold, messianic vision that linked together not only commerce, civilization and Christianity but also free trade and free labour.
In May 1856 Livingstone set off for England on a new mission. This time, however, the people he intended to convert were the British public and government: the good book he was peddling was his own:
Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa
. And this time conversion was instantaneous. He was showered with medals and honours. He was even granted a private audience with the Queen. As for the book, it was an immediate best-seller, selling 28,000 copies in the space of seven months. In
Household Words
, Dickens himself gave it an ecstatic review, candidly confessing that
the effect of it on me has been to lower my opinion of my own character in a most remarkable and most disastrous manner. I used to think I possessed the moral virtues of courage, patience, resolution and self control. Since I have read Doctor Livingstone’s volume, I have been driven to the humiliating conclusion that, in forming my own opinion of myself, I have been imposed upon by a false and counterfeit article. Guided by the test of the South African Traveller, I find that my much prized courage, patience resolution and self control turn out to be nothing but plated goods.
 
What especially impressed Dickens were
the author’s unflinching honesty in describing his difficulties and acknowledging his disappointments in the attempt to plant Christianity among the African savages; his sensible independence of all those mischievous sectarian influences which fetter so lamentably the exertions of so many good men; and his fearless recognition of the absolute necessity of associating every legitimate aid which this world’s wisdom can give with the work of preaching the Gospel to heathen listeners.
 
This endorsement, emphasizing as it did the ecumenical breadth of Livingstone’s appeal, could not have been better calculated to drum up support for his grand African design. ‘None of Doctor Livingstone’s many readers’, Dickens concluded, ‘more cordially wish him success in the noble work to which he has again devoted himself – no one will rejoice more sincerely in hearing of his safe and prosperous progress whenever tidings of him may reach England – than the writer of these few lines’. Even the London Missionary Society, which had been less than happy with Livingstone’s desertion of his official missionary duties, had to acknowledge in its 1858 annual report that
Missionary Travels
had ‘extended sympathy’ for the missionary movement. Faint praise, but praise just the same.
And yet, as the LMS report could not help but add, Livingstone’s success had almost at once been overshadowed by ‘awful, yet instructive events ... so unexpectedly ... permitted by the providence of God’. For in the very year that the book made its appearance, a storm broke on the other side of the world that would throw the whole strategy of Christianizing the Empire into question.
The Clash of Civilizations
 
For the missionaries, the interior of Africa was virgin territory. Indigenous cultures struck them as primitive; previous contact with Europeans had been minimal. In India, by contrast, the missionary movement faced an altogether more difficult challenge. Here was a manifestly more sophisticated civilization than Africa’s. Polytheistic and monotheistic systems of belief were both deeply entrenched. And Europeans had been living alongside Indians for more than a century and a half without challenging these other faiths.
Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the British in India had not the slightest notion of trying to Anglicize India, and certainly not to Christianize it. On the contrary, it was the British themselves who often took pleasure in being orientalized. Since the time of Warren Hastings, an overwhelmingly male population of merchants and soldiers had adapted to Indian customs and learned Indian languages; many also took Indian mistresses and wives. Thus, when Captain Robert Smith of the 44th (East Sussex) Regiment travelled around India between 1828 and 1832, he was unsurprised to encounter and admire a beautiful princess from Delhi whose sister was ‘... married although of the royal lineage to the son of an officer of rank in the [East India] Company’s service ... She had several children, two of whom I saw and ... they were in outward appearance little mahommedans, wearing turbans etc’. Smith himself found the lady in question’s features ‘of the highest order of beauty’. Something of an amateur artist, he was fond of sketching Indian women – and not out of purely anthropological interest. As he put it:
The mild expression, so characteristic of this race, the beauty and regularity of the features and the symmetrical form of the head are striking and convey a high idea of the intellectuality of the Asiatic race ... This classical elegance of form is not confined to the head alone, the bust is often of the finest proportions of ancient statuary and when seen through the thin veil of flowing muslin as the graceful Hindu female ascends from her morning ablution in the Ganges is a subject well worth the labour of the poet or artist.
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An Irishman, Smith was already married to a fellow countrywoman before he was posted to India. But men who came out in the East India Company’s service as bachelors frequently went further in their admiration of Asian womanhood. In one of his
Home Letters Written from India
(mainly dating from the 1830s) Samuel Snead Brown observed that ‘those who have lived with a native woman for any length of time never marry a European ... so amusingly playful, so anxious to oblige and please [are they], that a person after being accustomed to their society shrinks from the idea of encountering the whims or yielding to the fancies of an Englishwoman’.
This atmosphere of mutual tolerance and even admiration was the way the East India Company liked it, even if it practised religious toleration more out of pragmatism than principle. Although now more like a state than a business, its directors continued to regard trade as their paramount concern; and since by the 1830s and 1840s 40 per cent of the total value of Indian exports took the form of opium, there was not a great deal of room for highmindedness in the boardroom. The old India hands in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay had no interest whatsoever in challenging traditional Indian culture. On the contrary, they believed that any such challenge would destabilize Anglo-Indian relations; and that would be bad for business. As Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, put it drily in 1813: ‘If civilization is ever to become an article of trade between [Britain and India], I am convinced that this country will gain by the import cargo’. There was no point, in his view, in trying to ‘make Anglo-Saxons of the Hindoos’:
I have no faith in the modern doctrine of the improvement of the Hindus, or of any other people. When I read, as I sometimes do, of a measure by which a large province had been suddenly improved, or a race of semibarbarians civilized almost to Quakerism, I throw away the book.
 
That was why East India Company chaplains were explicitly banned from preaching to the Indians themselves. And that was why the company used its power to restrict the entry of missionaries into India, forcing those who wished to work there to base themselves in the small Danish enclave at Serampore. As Robert Dundas, the President of the Board of Control in India, explained to Lord Minto, the Governor-General, in 1808:
We are very far from being averse to the introduction of Christianity into India ... but nothing could be more unwise than any imprudent or injudicious attempt to induce it by means which should irritate and alarm their religious prejudices ... It is desirable that the knowledge of Christianity should be imparted to the native, but the means to be used for that end shall only be such as shall be free from any political danger or alarm ... Our paramount power imposes upon us the necessity to protect the native inhabitants in the free and undisturbed possession of their religious opinions.
 
In 1813, however, the company’s charter came up for renewal, and the Evangelicals seized their chance to end its control over missionary activity in India. The old orientalism was about to clash head-on with the new evangelicalism.
The men who wanted India open to British missionaries were the same men who had waged the campaign against the slave trade and launched the missionary movement in Africa: William Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay and the rest of the Clapham Sect, now reinforced by Charles Grant, a former East India Company director who had experienced a religious conversion after a thoroughly misspent youth in India. As an insider, Grant was crucial; he played a role in this campaign analogous to that of Newton, the ex-slaver, and Macaulay, the ex-plantation manager, in the campaigns against slavery. In his
Observations On the state of Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain
, Grant threw down the gauntlet to Munro and the other advocates of toleration:
Is it not necessary, to conclude that ... our Asiatic territories ... were given to us, not merely that we might draw an annual profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their inhabitants, long sunk in darkness, vice and misery, the light and the benign influences of Truth ...?
 

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