Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Historians now call America Britain’s ‘first empire’, to distinguish it from the second – in Asia, Africa and the Pacific – where settlement policies were very different. While there was always a military presence in the second empire, outright conquest was never a desirable (or achievable) aim.

⁶ As epitomised by the very name of the East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, which became dominant features of this phase of empire, the watchword was trade, protected trade. The colonies of the East comprised in the main what the Portuguese called feitorias

, factories, self-governing independent enclaves, as often as not acquired by treaty, the intention being to make them international entrepôts for both European and Asian merchants. Necessarily fortified, they nevertheless had no real military strength – in India, for instance, they could never have posed a threat to the Mughal forces. Nine hundred British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers managed to govern upwards of 250 million Indians. (How they did it is a question for a separate book.)

⁷

But the imperial presence did grow, aided by the retreat of the Muslims, and in time commerce triumphed, the East India companies growing in strength and influence. In India the company eventually emerged as the effective ruler of large parts of the country but even then, according to Anthony Pagden, India was always different from America and from later colonies in Africa. ‘India, and Asia generally,’ he says, ‘was always a place of passage, not of settlement . . . No sense of being a distinct people ever emerged among the Europeans in India. There was never a Creole population or very much of the interracial breeding which transformed the population of many of the former Spanish American colonies into truly multi-ethnic communities.’⁸

Even so, there were risks inherent when two very different cultures rubbed up against each other. We saw in Chapter 29 how the activities of the Bengal Asiatic Society helped to kick-start the Oriental renaissance, when Sir William Jones drew attention to the deep similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and when Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, attracted Hindu scholars to Calcutta to research the Hindu scriptures (he was himself fluent in Persian and Hindi). But in 1788, three years after his term as governor-general had ended, Hastings was impeached by Parliament in London, accused of having ‘squirreled away’ an enormous personal fortune, filched partly from the East India Company itself and partly from the rulers of Benares and Avadh. Though Hastings was eventually acquitted, seven long years after the impeachment began, his trial ‘was a great theatrical event’, largely stage-managed by Edmund Burke, and the former governor-general never really recovered. Burke was convinced that the East India Company had betrayed its aims, which, as well as trading, were ‘to spread civilisation and enlightenment in the empire’. Instead, he said, the company under Hastings’ leadership had become tyrannical and corrupt, ‘subjugating Indians and betraying the very benevolence it was ordered to propagate’. (Later historians have concluded differently, that the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became.⁹) The way Burke spoke, Hastings had betrayed a high ideal of empire, the benevolent spread of Western civilisation, an attitude echoed in Napoleon. This was perhaps disingenuous of Burke (and of Napoleon). What Hastings’ impeachment really showed was a priggishness in the imperial mind: whatever high-flown aims they arrogated to themselves, they were not so different as they thought from the more naturally aggressive colonialists of the first empire. Niall Ferguson lists nine ideas on which the ‘second’ British empire was based, which they wished to disseminate most. These were: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team games, the limited or ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty.¹⁰

Then there was the contentious issue of slavery. Empires had always involved slavery of one kind or another. We can never forget that both Athens and Rome had slaves. At the same time, to be a slave in ancient Greece or Rome did not necessarily involve degradation. Unlucky slaves were sent into the army or the mines; lucky ones might serve as a tutor to children.