A health warning: those who worked in or for the empire may find their blood pressure rising when
categorised by ‘trimmed moustaches and clipped foreskins, their addiction to
games and to work, their low-brow ideas and high-minded attitudes, their curious blend
of honesty and hypocrisy, their preoccupation with protocol and prestige, their racial
prejudices and the extent to which they lived in symbiosis with their charges’. At times,
too, they will feel that Brendon, Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, must have
googled ‘empire+disaster-i-nastiness’. In following the loss of empire from the defeat at
Yorktown to the handing back of Hong Kong, with never an incident we would prefer
forgotten missed, rather than its triumphs and glories, Brendon is emphasising what
undermined empire. Our human and geographic base was small and remote from our overseas possessions. We were always over-extended and ‘no vindication can eradicate
the instinctive hostility to alien control’. Our very nature was against us. We valued
liberty too much to be comfortable imperialists. Not that Brendon allows us to bask in
our role as stewards; he is, however, not as dismissive of it as many historians, seeing
trusteeship as paternalism tinged with hypocrisy.
He tells an exciting story and he tells it well with delightful turns of phrase: Cornwallis
‘embracing duty’; the flat bottomed Nemesis attracting ‘more barnacles than the Colonial
Office’; the ‘Nile’s transcontinental incontinence’; ‘the Snider at odds with the bible’; and
so on page after page. Brendon also quotes many of us extensively, if selectively and not
always wisely. On page 538, for example, he cites Harold Smith’s "Squalid End to Empire"
as authority for saying that Sir James Robertson, last Governor-General of Nigeria, ‘freely
employed dirty tricks’ and ‘election rigging’, a statement that most Nigerians as well as
British would have found laughable at the time and totally ignores the well-briefed
academic authorities on the period, notably John Mackintosh and K W J Post. Brendon
should have relied on these and Martin Lynn’s account in the Nigeria volume of the British
Documents at the End of Empire series. But he wanted the bad news.
Nonetheless it is salutary to be reminded of disasters, which are part of the story of
empire but which most of us find impossible to associate with our empire - Irish famine,
opium wars, the genocide of Tasmanian aborigines. When set alongside the sad events
within our experience - Indian partition, the Palestinian mandate, the Malayan
emergency, Aden, Cyprus, Hola camp, it is easy to understand why empire gets a bad
press. But the fact remains that for several centuries the British Empire was hugely
significant thanks to what Jan Morris, in a review of Brendon’s book, called ‘the
everyday diligence and efficiency of British Empire-builders down the generations’ and
‘the diurnal slog of a thousand nameless functionaries simply doing their best in what
they thought was an honourable cause.’
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