Ghosts of Empire (63 page)

Individualism was a guiding principle of the British Empire. This is shown by the career of Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Withdrawn and aloof, repressed and driven, Kitchener was an idiosyncratic loner who became a hero of empire. His administrative talents were uneven, and he was clearly bored by the routine of day-to-day government, but his image, the drooping moustache and clear blue, wide-set eyes, was compelling, while his autocratic manner gave people assurance in uncertain times. The cry for Lord Kitchener to be given high office at the outbreak of the war in
1914 was deafening and prompted Asquith, the Prime Minister, to appoint him secretary for war, a decision which Asquith often regretted.

The British Empire allowed individuals, the civil servants and imperial administrators who worked within it, a wide degree of freedom; the man on the spot was often, quite literally, the master of all he surveyed. A Kitchener in the Sudan, or a Lugard in Nigeria, for example, could rule like a benign dictator with very little supervision from Whitehall. Even as late as the 1950s, when he was in office in Hong Kong, Sir Alexander Grantham described the power and authority of the governor in terms usually reserved for the Almighty.

In the Classical Greek sense, the British Empire was an aristocratic empire, and it openly celebrated ‘rule by the best people'. There was a meritocratic element to imperial government; selection for the imperial service followed rigorous exams or interviews, designed to select those believed to be the best. Yet that selection was confined to a very narrow range of schools and universities; the products from a magic circle of public schools–the fifteen schools George Orwell remembered from his prep-school days–enjoyed the lion's share of the best imperial postings. This process produced a class of colonial administrators drawn overwhelmingly from the upper-middle, professional classes, and yet there was a broad range within this class, as Orwell himself knew. In the Sudan, the sons of peers might serve as district commissioners; in Hong Kong the sons of impoverished clergymen or schoolmasters could be cadets; the imperial class did have some wide variations within it, even though, compared to the rest of the country, the pool from which it was drawn outwardly seems shallow.

This was only natural, in the thinking of the time. Such people were born leaders. They were the ‘best of our race' and represented the ‘highest athletic and mental culture' of the British people, as Lord Cromer said of the Sudan Political Service. These administrators would rule over native populations like Plato's guardians–whom, given the Classical education many of the civil servants had received, they consciously imitated. In this sense of natural rulers, or rule of the best, whether those ‘best' men came from the British Isles or from the colonies, an aristocratic principle ran right through the empire. Coupled with the idea of rule by the best there
is also the implication, in many of the letters written by colonial governors, that the empire was seen as something of a school of virtue, where character, discipline and willpower would be trained to prevail. The colonies were regarded as providing a suitable arena for the display of talent for the best of the imperial breed. Like any aristocratic oligarchy, imperial administrators believed theirs to be a high calling, requiring self-discipline and ability.

In its individualism, its elitism and its snobbery, in the audacity of its self-belief, the British Empire was not the precursor of the world of the early twenty-first century. Its values and the mental universe of its administrators, educated as many of them were in the languages and culture of ancient Greece and Rome, could not be further removed from the largely Americanized world we now inhabit. The British Empire, in its scale and ethos, was completely unlike any system of government that the world has known. It is highly unlikely that such an enterprise will be undertaken by any nation, no matter how powerful, ever again. The phenomenon of British imperial rule must be understood in its own terms.

1
Mead, Walter Russell,
Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World
, New York, 2001, p. xvi.

2
Ferguson, Niall,
Colossus
, London, 2005, p. 24.

3
Cannadine, David,
Ornamentalism
, London, 2001, p. 4.

4
Ibid., p. xx.

5
Cromer, Earl of,
Political and Literary Essays
, London 1913, first series, “The Government of Subject Races,” from
Edinburgh Review
, January 1908, p. 17.

6
Quoted in Judd, Gerrit Parmele,
Members of Parliament 1734–1832
, Chicago, 1972, p. 36.

7
Dictionary of National Biography (DNB)
.

8
Orwell, George,
Essays
, London, 2000, p. 425.

9
Cannadine,
Ornamentalism
, p. xix.

10
Ferguson, Niall,
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
, London, 2003, p. xxii.

1
Yergin, Daniel,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
, New York, 1991, 2nd edn 1992, p. 183; Delaisi, Francis,
Oil: Its Influence on Politics
, trans. C. Leonard Leese, London, 1922, p. 86.

2
For Curzon, see Gilmour, David,
Curzon
, London, 1994; Nicolson, Harold,
Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925. A Study in Post-War Diplomacy
, London, 1934, p. 49.

3
TNA, CAB 21/119.

4
Ibid.

5
Stivers, William,
Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order 1918–1930
, London, 1982, p. 47.

6
Lawrence, T. E., letter to
The Times
, 22 July 1920.

7
Leslie, Shane,
Mark Sykes: His Life and Letters
, London, 1923, pp. 13, 17.

8
Ibid., pp. 163, 94.

9
Ibid., p. 62.

10
Ibid., pp. 147, 151.

11
Fromkin, David,
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
, New York, 1989, p. 375; Hewins, Ralph,
Mr Five Per Cent: The Biography of Calouste Gulbenkian
, London, 1957, p. 128.

12
Monroe, Elizabeth,
Britain's Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956
, London, 1963, p. 60; Kent, Marian,
Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil 1900–1920
, London, 1976, p. 146.

13
Marlowe, J.,
Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson
, London, 1967, pp. 35, 36.

14
TNA, CAB 21/119.

15
TNA, CAB 21/61.

16
Ireland, Philip Willard,
Iraq: A Study in Political Development
, New York, 1937, p. 451.

17
Quoted in Mejcher, Helmut,
Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928
, London, 1976, p. 49.

18
TNA, CAB 24/4.

19
House of Lords debate 20 February 1919, quoted in Wilson, A. T.,
Mesopotamia 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties. A Personal and Historical Record
, London, 1931, p. 163.

20
Bell, Gertrude,
Letters of Gertrude Bell
, selected and edited by Gladys Bell, London, 1987, pp. 468, 400.

21
Philby, H. St J.,
Arabian Days
, London, 1948, p. 131.

22
MECA, Bowman papers.

23
Storrs, Sir Ronald,
Great Britain in the Near and Middle East
, Cust Foundation Lecture, University College, Nottingham, 1932.

24
MECA, Bell papers, box 1, letter to Lord Allenby, 13 August 1920.

25
Philby,
Arabian Days
, pp. 173–4.

26
Bell,
Letters
, p. 460, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 1 November 1920.

27
MECA, Bowman papers, diary entry, Basra, 24 August 1918.

28
Abdullah, Thabit A. J.,
Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos
, London, 2006, p. 13.

29
Bell,
Letters
, p. 393.

30
Luizard, Pierre-Jean,
La Formation de l'Irak contemporain
, Paris, 1991, pp. 373, 380 (translations are my own).

31
Quoted in Stivers,
Supremacy and Oil
, p. 35.

32
Haldane, Sir Aylmer,
The Insurrection in Mesopotamia 1920
, Edinburgh, 1922, pp. 30, 314.

33
MECA, Bowman papers.

34
Simon, Reeva Spector, and Tejirian, Eleanor H. (eds),
The Creation of Iraq 1914–1921
, New York, 2004, p. 29.

35
Wilson,
Mesopotamia
, p. 253.

36
Luizard,
La Formation de l'Irak
, pp. 374, 422.

37
Bell,
Letters
, p. 404.

38
Quoted in Ireland,
Iraq
, p. 243.

39
Luizard,
La Formation de l'Irak
, p. 402.

40
Marr, Phebe,
The Modern History of Iraq
, 2nd edn, Boulder, Colorado, 2004, p. 23.

41
Simon, Reeva Spector,
Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny
, New York, 1986, rev. edn 2004, p. 46.

42
The Times
, 7 August 1920, quoted in Bennett, G. H.,
British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period 1919–1924
, London, 1995, pp. 106, 107–9.

43
MECA, Bell papers, letter dated 23 March 1921.

44
For Churchill remark, see Simon,
Iraq between the Two World Wars
, p. 1; Kedourie, Elie,
England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire
, London, 1987, p. 88.

45
Lawrence, T. E.,
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence
, selected and edited by Malcolm Brown, London, 1988, p. 384, letter to Sir Gilbert Clayton, 9 October 1928.

46
Ibid., pp. 349–50, letter to Mrs Charlotte Shaw, 18 October 1927.

47
Bell,
Letters
, p. 468.

48
Ibid., p. 500.

49
Main, Ernest,
Iraq from Mandate to Independence
, London, 1935, p. 44.

50
Howell, Georgina,
Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell
, London, 2006, pp. 447–8.

51
Bell,
Letters
, p. 536, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 30 January 1923.

52
Lawrence,
Letters
, p. 353, letter to Sir Hugh Bell, 4 November 1927.

1
Mejcher, Helmut,
Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928
, London, 1976, Preface.

2
Ibid., p. 136.

3
Kent, Marian,
Moghuls and Mandarins: Oil, Imperialism and the Middle East in British Foreign Policy 1900–1940
, London, 1993, p. 1.

4
Earle, Edward Meade, ‘The Turkish Petroleum Company: A Study in Oleaginous Diplomacy',
Political Science Quarterly
, vol. 39, no. 2, June 1924, pp. 265–79, at pp. 272–3.

5
McMurray, Jonathan S.,
Distant Ties: Germany, the Ottoman Empire and the Construction of the Baghdad Railway
, London, 2001, p. 134, n. 5.

6
McBeth, B. S.,
British Oil Policy 1919–1939
, London, 1985, p. 7.

7
Nicolson, Harold,
Curzon: The Last Phase 1919–1925. A Study in Post-War Diplomacy
, London, 1934, p. 330.

8
Hewins, Ralph,
Mr Five Per Cent: The Biography of Calouste Gulbenkian
, London, 1957, pp. 129, 77.

9
Gulbenkian, Nubar,
Pantaraxia
, London, 1965, p. 38.

10
Ibid., p. 38.

11
Ibid., p. 229.

12
Bennett, G. H.,
British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period 1919–1924
, London, 1995, p. 115.

13
Delaisi, Francis,
Oil: Its influence on Politics
, trans. C. Leonard Leese, London, 1922, pp. 15–17.

14
McBeth,
British Oil Policy
, p. 34.

15
Stivers, William,
Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey and the Anglo-American World Order 1918–1930
, London, 1982, p. 59.

16
Monroe, Elizabeth,
Britain's Moment in the Middle East 1914–1956
, London, 1963, p. 66.

17
Meade, ‘The Turkish Petroleum Company', p. 274.

18
Delaisi,
Oil
, pp. 42–3.

19
Quoted in Mejcher,
Imperial Quest
, p. 106.

20
New York Times
, 18 November 1920, quoted in Fischer, Louis,
Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum
, London, 1926, p. 219.

21
Ibid., p. 220.

22
Ibid., pp. 220–1.

23
McBeth,
British Oil Policy
, p. 59.

24
Quoted in Shwadran, B.,
The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers
, New York, 1955, 3rd edn, 1973, p. 219.

25
TNA, CAB 24/125.

26
TNA, CAB 24/134, quoted in Bennett,
British Foreign Policy
, p. 116.

27
Ibid., p. 136; TNA, CO 730/29/60539.

28
TNA, CAB 21/119, letter of Edwin Montagu to Viscount Harcourt, 23 December 1918.

29
Stivers,
Supremacy and Oil
, pp. 30, 110; TNA, CAB 23/43.

30
TNA, ADM 116/2692, letters to Shuckburgh, 19 November, 4 December and 8 December 1928.