The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (46 page)

Missing from that list of course is Hong Kong, an unlikely Chinese pearl of the British Empire, which was relinquished to mainland China in 1997. Hong Kong had been acquired after one of Britain's most gloriously high-minded little wars, the First Opium War (1839–42), fought to establish the important libertarian principle of free trade. As John Quincy Adams said: “Which has the righteous cause?. . . Britain has the righteous cause.” Opium, he pointed out was “a mere incident to the dispute; but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard the Tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution.... The cause of the war is the Kow-tow! the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of relation between lord and vassal.”
¹⁰
Of course in any battle over arrogance, Britain was sure to win, and did; in this case gaining among other prizes an unremarkable, rocky, and barely inhabited island
named Hong Kong. Britain would make it remarkable; British law and honest-dealing made it an entrepôt for enterprising immigrants.

The Arrow War (or Second Opium War, 1856–60) expanded Britain's holdings to include the Kowloon Peninsula, and they were expanded again with the so-called “New Territories” in 1898. Hong Kong was the British Gibraltar of the East, but far wealthier, as British tai-pans turned it into a hub of imperial trade. As James Morris noted, “Everywhere the symptoms of empire showed: the ships always steaming in from India, Australia or Britain itself, the Indian soldiers who often formed its garrison, the Sikh policemen and hotel doormen, the Australian jockeys who won all the races at Happy Valley, above all the British mesh of the place, the webs of money, style, and sovereignty which bound the colony so unmistakably to the imperial capital far away.”
¹¹

Even so, the population was overwhelmingly Chinese, the government undemocratic (on the paternal-authoritarian model), and the British, as Morris notes, “thought of the Chinese as foreigners in the colony, and themselves as true natives.”
¹²
While there was color prejudice, there was also an exhilarating air of freedom, which is why Chinese thronged to it. If they were not admitted to certain clubs or granted the democratic rights of Englishmen, they were utterly free to practice commerce, which they did with gusto.

Occupied by the Japanese during World War II, then a haven for refugees fleeing Communist China, Hong Kong was a beacon of freedom (without democracy) in the Far East. Its reigning genius in the 1960s was Sir John James Cowperthwaite, who as Hong Kong's financial secretary from 1961 to 1971 kept the island blissfully free of regulations and government intervention, preferring to keep taxes low and let people get on with their commercial affairs. When the British surrendered Hong Kong to mainland China, they handed the Communist Chinese a capitalist dynamo (and guarded it by what paper accords they could) that the People's Republic has so far refrained from dismantling.

Another capitalist powerhouse created by Britain was Singapore; founded as a British trading post by Stamford Raffles in 1819, it is now a global financial center and port, one of the busiest in the world. In addition, the British were in Borneo—where they planted a line of “white Rajahs” in the province of Sarawak—and Malaya. The East India Company had been active in Malaya since the late eighteenth century. As generally happened, the Company proved a dab hand at government and took responsibility for administering Malaya, until British colonial administrators—ruling sometimes directly, sometimes through local sultans—took over for them.

In Malaya, the British fought pirates, encouraged trade, and tried to keep the peace between the variegated peoples—whom they made even more diverse. British merchants arriving with the East India Company were followed by rubber planters, engineers to run the tin mines, businessmen, policemen, and administrators. Chinese traders came to the coast and then expanded vastly in numbers. Indians, specifically Tamils, were imported as laborers.

British expatriates loved Malaya for its tropical beauty, its gracious people, and its pleasantly ordered outdoor life. The British, of course, also kept the peace—and keeping the peace meant defeating a Communist insurgency in Malaya that lasted from 1948 to 1960, the British succeeding with tremendous courage and political and military skill, most especially under British General Sir Gerald Templer, whom Winston Churchill appointed High Commissioner of Malaya (1952–54). They succeeded again, defending Brunei, Borneo, and independent Malaysia from Indonesian aggression in a “confrontation” (or undeclared border war) that lasted from 1962 to 1966.

Britain did rather well by her Far Eastern colonies: from Singapore to New Zealand, from Australia to Hong Kong. In 1960, at celebrations marking the end of the Malayan Emergency—celebrations that included a victory parade with “everyone from Aborigines with blowpipes to men in armoured vehicles” while overhead “Canberra jets roared”—a pro-British American businessman, Norman Cleaveland, “looked at the placards of the Tunku [Tunku Abdul Rahman, first prime minister of Malaysia] smiling down from every corner, and turning to [British Field Marshal Sir Gerald] Templer said simply, in his direct American way, ‘Pity no one thought of putting up a photo of Churchill. This country owes him a hell of a lot.'”
¹³

“One of the greatest and best servants our Empire ever possessed. He was perhaps the first European who successfully brought modern humanitarian and scientific methods to bear on the improvement of the natives and their lot.”

“An equally remarkable man, ‘Rajah' Brooke of Sarawak, without official aid, won northern Borneo by sheer force of personality and by the best British methods of treating native races.”

 

 

S
tamford Raffles not only had a great name for a dashing empire-builder, he was the example
par excellence
of an enlightened, energetic, entrepreneurial English imperialist. In fact, Raffles, “the Father of Singapore,” was the model for the aspiring James Brooke who became the White Rajah of Sarawak, a title we would no doubt all long to hold.

Raffles was born on a ship bound for England from Jamaica, the very year that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. By the time he was fourteen his spendthrift father could no long afford Raffles' school fees, so he was sent to work as a clerk for the East India Company in its London headquarters of East India House. Whatever formal schooling he lacked he more than
compensated for by becoming a dedicated lifelong autodidact. His employers noted his industry, his keen intelligence, and his steady nature, and in 1805—the same year he married a striking and vivacious widow ten years his senior—he was sent to Penang (or Prince of Wales Island, as they called it) as an assistant to the governor. Typically, he taught himself Malay on the voyage to his new post.

Raffles, throughout his career in Southeast Asia, was flush with enthusiasm to learn everything he could about the peoples and the land he served: language, art, religion, history, botany, zoology—whatever there was to learn, Raffles wanted to learn it, even if his commercial duties meant he had to do so on his own time. During normal working hours, he pored over accounts and mastered all the commercial skills necessary to running a Company outpost—so much so that in 1807 he became chief secretary to the governor.