Ghosts of Empire (62 page)

Patten continued to be defiant. Like any democratic politician, he courted the popularity of the masses and used his skill as a publicist to good effect. He was portrayed in the media as the champion of the little man's rights against the big bully, China. Yet, as Cradock pointed out, Patten would be leaving Hong Kong in a royal yacht within five years, while the people of Hong Kong would have to live with the consequences of his schoolboy politics. In 1995, by redefining the ‘functional constituencies', Patten more or less extended the vote in Hong Kong to a full democratic franchise. His friends argued that he had brought democracy to Hong Kong; his detractors thought it was a pointless and futile gesture. In terms of what actually happened, the detractors were proved right. The Legislative Council which was elected under Patten's governorship was dissolved upon the handover of Hong Kong to China and replaced by a Provisional Legislative Council until elections were held under the old pre-Patten rules in 1998. Patten left Hong Kong as a popular figure; he was energetic and charismatic and had, in his wife and three young attractive daughters, a photogenic family which would be the envy of any Western democratic politician, but, in terms of a legacy, it is difficult to see what he achieved.

On 15 June 2005, Donald Tsang handed in his nomination form for the post of chief executive of Hong Kong; the form bore the signatures of 674 members of the 800-strong Election Committee. Hong Kong after June 1997 was designated a Special Administrative Region, under the ‘one country, two systems' concept enshrined in the Joint Declaration of 1984. Tsang's almost unanimous election revealed the emptiness of the ‘one country, two systems' slogan. As Hong Kong resumed its status as a benevolent dictatorship, and as China moved towards capitalism with increasing alacrity, it was difficult to see how different the systems actually were. More relevantly to the history of the British Empire, it was difficult to see how different Donald Tsang himself was from the British governors who had preceded him as autocrats of Hong Kong. Tsang was Chinese, whereas
the British were all white European men, but, in his manners and style, he was virtually indistinguishable from them. A devout and disciplined Roman Catholic, he had joined the Hong Kong Civil Service in 1967 and had served under British rule for thirty years, during which time he became the first ethnic Chinese to serve as financial secretary of the colony. His outlook was similar to that of John Cowperthwaite, whom he praised as the architect of the ‘colony's prosperity as an international business centre'. Tsang always wore bow ties, and sent his two sons to English boarding schools.
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He was pleased to receive a knighthood in recognition of his services to the British Crown, and he was not embarrassed to use Government House as his residence despite its Southern plantation style. Hong Kong in the first decade of the twenty-first century had simply continued its life as a colony, with Beijing as its master in the place of London. The ‘new cadres', one observer noted, ‘coming down from [China's capital] are reminiscent of the early British administrators in the 1800s, with their own language, their own clubs, and their own condescending attitudes towards their new subjects'.
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Hong Kong's history goes to the heart of the nature of the British Empire. Its reversion to China under a regime of ‘benign authoritarianism', the term Chris Patten used to describe British rule, shows a remarkable continuity. Hierarchy, deference, government by elite administrators, united by education in the same institutions, in largely the same subjects, were all features of British imperial rule which were also characteristic of officials in imperial China. The story of Hong Kong also confirms the enormous power wielded by colonial governors. If Sir Mark Young had been succeeded by administrators who shared his vision, the history of Hong Kong might well have been very different. Lastly, Hong Kong showed, in many ways, how changes in Britain were not reflected by changes in the wider empire. Patten was a child of the liberal 1960s and blindly believed a version of his country's history that presented the British Empire as an enlightened liberal force, spreading democracy and freedom to the furthest shores of the earth. Margaret Thatcher had grown up through the Second World War, listening to, and believing, Churchill's late Victorian rhetoric that invoked Shakespeare's ‘sceptred isle' imagery; she genuinely shared the Whiggish notion that British history, with its
Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution, was the story of the development of ‘freedom' and liberal democratic ideas of government. So far as this idea was true for Britain, it did not apply to any real extent to the administration of the British Empire, which was always a wholly different political organization from Britain itself. The British Empire had nothing to do with liberal democracy, and, particularly in Hong Kong, was administered along lines much closer to the ideals of Confucius than to the vivid, impassioned rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill, or even Shakespeare.

When Benjamin Disraeli, by then Earl of Beaconsfield, wound up the debate on the Congress of Berlin in the House of Lords on 18 July 1878, he made his final appeal to ‘the consciousness that in the Eastern nations there is confidence in this country, and that, while they know we can enforce our policy, at the same time they know that our Empire is an Empire of liberty, of truth, and of justice'.
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It is revealing that Disraeli said nothing about democracy or liberal economics. Subsequent generations of politicians, historians and campaigners have made the British Empire in their own image, promoting it as a vehicle for whatever cause they happened to espouse. One example of different people appropriating the empire for their own purposes occurs in the field of economic theory. For old-fashioned economic liberals like Winston Churchill, the British Empire was an empire of free trade; for Joseph Chamberlain, on the other hand, the empire was perfect for protectionism, known as ‘imperial preference', in that goods from the British colonies were ‘preferred', more lightly taxed, in comparison with goods from Britain's industrial competitors, such as Germany and the United States. The empire has been invoked to support a multitude of causes.

Perhaps the key to understanding the British Empire is the idea of natural hierarchy. Class and status were absolutely integral to the empire, and notions of class were important in forming alliances with local elites, the chiefs, the petty kings and maharajas who crowded the colonial empire. The dominance of ideas of class and status made it easy for the British to establish local chiefs as hereditary rulers. In Kashmir, a Hindu family were established as rulers over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years, and the effects of their rule are
still felt today. In Iraq, a new monarchy was established in 1921 under the Hashemite family, who had no historic links to the country. Once again, notions of royalty and status prompted policy without regard to local opinion. The French in Syria were more pragmatic; they established not a monarchy but a series of states which would form the Republic of Syria in 1930. Monarchy was a particularly British instrument of policy. The British established a monarchy in Jordan and supported the monarchy in Egypt. The French by contrast, under the Third Republic, were less enthusiastic about that form of government, and they had actually deposed Faisal, Iraq's future king, as King of Syria in 1920. It was the British who compensated Faisal by making him King of Iraq, and yet the events of the summer of 1958, only thirty-seven years after Faisal I's coronation, revealed the imprudence of the British policy. The unpopular monarchy was overthrown in Iraq and led to the establishment of governments in that country which were successively nationalist regimes that often ranged themselves against Western interests.

The so-called natural leaders, the maharajas, the sultans and nawabs, even the local chiefs, were flattered and cultivated. Individual rulers were set up in the Middle East, in India and in Africa. The irony of this generally pro-monarchical policy was that it was not consistent. A centuries-old monarchy in Burma was torn down by an abrupt change of policy, while monarchies were set up in Kashmir and Iraq which had no real tradition of independent monarchy. Behind monarchy lay ideas of class, which made aristocracies and natural leaders a favourite theme of Colonial Office civil servants, governors and chief secretaries. Natural leaders were explicitly an integral part of Lord Lugard's policy of indirect rule, a policy which prevailed in large parts of the Indian subcontinent, where a third of the Indian Empire was formed by the princely states.

Of course, in this context, any notion of democracy was far from anyone's mind. The British Empire was hierarchical and highly structured in its social organization. Mere snobbery formed an important part of this organization, as many of the tribal leaders and local potentates, like Yoruba chiefs in 1930s Nigeria, vied for audiences with the King in London, or lobbied extensively, like Sir Robert Ho Tung in Hong Kong, for differing ranks of knighthood. To the likes of Sir Robert Ho Tung there was a world
of difference between being a mere knight bachelor and being a KBE or the even more exalted KCMG.

Despite hierarchy and class being central to the British Empire, we cannot be blind to the fact that the British Empire did bring justice and order to often anarchic parts of the world. To say that the empire was undemocratic is not to say that its effects were wholly negative. It is common for people involved in history and politics to see institutions, with the best intentions, as wholly good or wholly bad. Such institutions as slavery, or ideas such as fascism, can be put into these simple categories with some justification. Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.

Others, while recognizing the hierarchical nature of the British Empire, have said that conditions in the empire merely matched conditions in Britain itself. This is not strictly true. While Britain was a country famously obsessed by class, after 1918 there existed mass democracy, and certainly, by the 1930s, democracy existed in Britain on the same basis as it does today, except for the lowering of the voting age in 1967. If one were to look at the British prime ministers of the 1920s and 1930s, the discrepancy between heads of government in Britain and colonial governors in places like Sudan and Hong Kong becomes obvious. David Lloyd George, the son of a Baptist schoolteacher from Wales, could become prime minister in 1916. It is inconceivable that a man of his background, without a university education or a military career, could have become governor of Nigeria, for example. The same could be said of Ramsay MacDonald, the
illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid, who became the Labour Party's first prime minister in 1924. Without a public school education, and without a university degree, it is very unlikely that anyone like Ramsay MacDonald could have got anywhere in the colonial empire. The British Empire was undoubtedly more snobbish, more hierarchical and more deferential than the mother country. It is wrong to argue, as some have done, that British administrators were merely projecting the class distinctions of Britain's society on to the colonial empire. Britain was changing at a much faster rate than the empire, and recruits to the Imperial Civil Service towards the end of the empire, in the 1950s, were only too conscious of this.

In the colonies themselves, distinct rules of precedence applied which bore no relation to status in the mother country. If these distinctions were derived from Britain, they took on a totally independent life in the colonies which, by the early twentieth century, had a completely different scale of values and preoccupations. This realization forms part of Kitty Fane's frustration in Somerset Maugham's
The Painted Veil
, and it informs her observation that ‘it is rather funny when you think of all the people who used to come to our house at home [in South Kensington] that here [in Hong Kong] we should be treated like dirt'.
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Hong Kong, as Fane saw, had its own rules of hierarchy and precedence. It is important to remember that, at a time of increasing democracy and Labour governments in Britain, the colonial empire, especially in places like Hong Kong, remained much the same. Hong Kong would be governed in the same autocratic way for 150 years. In the Sudan, public schoolboys still dominated the administration in a way that often surprised civil servants in London.

The power exercised by district commissioners in places like the Sudan, where young men in their mid-twenties would rule a land the size of Wales, as judges, lawgivers and policemen rolled into one, was immense. The arrogance of provincial governors in Sudan was legendary. This aspect of empire shows the extent to which there was a predisposition to strong individuals, leaders who, by sheer force of character, could impose their will on circumstances. The late Victorian hero-worship of Lord Kitchener is a conspicuous example of this tendency.

This individualism was, I have noted, anarchic, in that there was very often no policy coherence or strategic direction behind the imperial government as experienced in individual colonies. Often strong-minded officials and governors would, by a metaphoric sweep of the hand, reverse the policy of decades, thereby creating more confusion and instability. Such reversals occurred in Burma, in Sudan and in Hong Kong. In Burma, the policy which the British government had pursued in India, since the Mutiny of 1857, was reversed by Lord Randolph Churchill, who was committed to the outright annexation of the country. This step was not only contrary to the policy followed since 1857, but had been opposed by the Earl of Mayo when he was viceroy of India in the early 1870s, and had been viewed suspiciously by the Marquess of Ripon, viceroy in the 1880s. Even as late as the 1940s, officials were not convinced that Lord Randolph had done the right thing when he abolished the Burmese monarchy. In Sudan, the ‘Southern Policy' of Harold MacMichael was reversed in the late 1940s. That policy has been seen by the Sudanese in the north as the cause of many of the problems which their country has confronted in the half-century since independence, years which have been dominated by civil war. In Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young's sincere plans for greater democracy were reversed by his successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and this suspended any progress towards democracy in Hong Kong for thirty years. As it happened, democracy, even by the late 1980s, had never been seriously practised in Hong Kong. This lack of any democratic progress in the colony, over the three decades immediately after the Second World War, made Chris Patten's aggressive stance in the 1990s bewildering not only to the Chinese government in Beijing, but to British diplomats in China and in Whitehall.