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After the imperial turn
Thinking with and through the nation
By Antoinette M. Burton Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3142-X
Chapter One
SUSAN D. PENNYBACKER Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire?
The elections of 1983 and 1987 pointed to yet another important social development: the growth of the immigrant population of peoples from Asia and the West Indies.... People of Asian and West Indian descent now make up a large part of the shopkeeping and public transportation work force in such cities [London, Leicester, Wolverhampton, and Bradford], with one result being that local shops stay open longer because the Asians are willing to work long and hard. Asian doctors have been essential to the National Health Service, since many homegrown British doctors prefer private practice.... It is clear, therefore, that the British Nationality Act of 1981 and its predecessors of the 1960s and 70s did not succeed in keeping Asians and West Indians from immigrating into Britain and that England, which for many hundreds of years had absorbed Celtic people from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, is no longer exclusively white. -Thomas William Heyck, The Peoples of the British Isles
Divisions were capable of being bridged in the light of a prevailing attachment to places, traditions and myths. The more ceremonial aspects, such as the enthusiasm for the Crown, masked a more fundamental kind of commitment, to which West Indian andother newer immigrant citizens could also respond.... The truth was, perhaps, that Britain in the years from 1914 to 1987 had not changed all that fundamentally. -Kenneth Morgan, "The Twentieth Century"
The story cannot simply be told as one of decline. Though the laurels of international leadership passed to others during the twentieth century, Britain still had its moments of glory, not all of them illusory; and Britons nourished hopes, not all of them misguided. ... [Decline of empire] could be represented, in a flattering but not wholly false light, as an enlightened transition to the creation of a multicultural Commonwealth. -Peter Clarke, The Penguin History of Britain
The old American-centered specifications of black life as abjection, though tied to the immiseration of so many people, are incompatible with the new currency of black culture as commodity and cipher of vitality, fitness and health in a weightless global market that relies more than ever on blacks to supply some of its most alluring software. ... Britain has been judged to be a relatively successful multicultural society. -Paul Gilroy, "The Sugar You Stir"
No longer are lands outside the British isles the only theaters of racial and imperial conquest. In a reversal of fortune, the center of past empire has become a contested site for those who govern the history industry. How is Britain now captured; how is it understood in the work of the practitioners of our times? The quotations above suggest some notable directions. Thomas Heyck has written what is probably the most successful, "progressive" textbook presently used in the teaching of British history in American colleges and universities. Kenneth Morgan and Peter Clarke, both holders of prestigious chairs in Britain, have contributed two best-selling volumes to the Anglo-American canon of new, popular British histories. Paul Gilroy is a leading social theorist whose work on "race" has a wide academic following and whose voice is now highly influential among a multiracial, transatlantic intelligentsia. For different if frequently overlapping audiences, the few statements cited above mark out lines within which both "nation" and "empire" receive restorative treatment.
This essay asks a series of questions: How is the "nation" of Britain being construed within a popular interpretive literature? How do conflicting interpretations nevertheless reflect the omnipresence of the United States as the "negative example" of race relations and of a flawed "multiculturalism"? How do these issues, one of interpretation and one of political and demographic influence, affect the teaching of the subject still most often presented in its gut as "modern British history," fashionable packaging notwithstanding? Further, do new canons that include Hanif Kureishi, Michael Ondaatje, and Mary Prince transcend a past drill? Do new interrogations of old favorites like Austen, Roberts, and Orwell also assist American students and their overlords in negotiating that seductive pedagogic dance step, the "imperial turn"? How is the pursuit of modern British history faring in the "new era of globalization"? Are the cures working, the complaints subsiding, the patient rejuvenating?
The most explicitly racial narrative of English history is not that of empire per se but of slavery and antislavery. This story has altered considerably over time, and though William Wilberforce's triumph takes pride of place, the "economic" role of slavery has been increasingly emphasized in general works of history, even if slaves are afforded little agency. Before Heyck's work, R. K. Webb's Modern England was regarded as the textbook of choice in the United States. It explained:
Hence the importance of the west coast of Africa. There English merchants found buyers for printed cotton cloth from India and for English metal goods and gin; in return they got ivory and gold that could be sent to the Far East in exchange for cottons, silks, spices and tea, and they procured slaves for the West Indies and the southern colonies of North America, a trade on which much of the prosperity of Bristol, and to a lesser extent Liverpool, was based.
Webb also wrote of "the one great legislative monument of the [Fox] ministry, the abolition of the slave trade ... the first installment of a long campaign against slavery led by the Clapham Sect; Wilberforce had moved the bill." But the Jamaican uprising of 1865, which led to the court-martial of Governor Eyre, found Webb more willing to judge character. He identified the anti-Eyre campaign in England as "a magnet for radical, progressive, and humanitarian sentiment":
The pro-Eyre forces were no mere cluster of reactionaries, although Kingsley had long shown his distaste for blacks, and Carlyle was by this time far gone in an unattractive, racist hatred of the world he had been unable to hector into his own image.... Eyre attracted as defenders many men who disliked what was happening around them; they were neither evil nor inhumane, but they believed sincerely that men of whatever breed should be kept in their places and ruled firmly-through natural deference where possible, by force if necessary.
Heyck's discussion of slavery is more perfunctory, with white Englishmen occupying center stage in the context of economic imperative:
By 1700, the white population (overwhelmingly British) stood at a quarter of a million in the thirteen colonies; by 1750, it had grown to almost a million, and there were 250,000 African slaves as well.... The growth of slavery in the West Indies (and the simultaneous importation of slaves into some North American colonies) constituted a very important and new feature of life for some Britons.
The passage from slavery to freedom is typically succeeded in historical narratives by the onset of the foreign policy of the mid- to late Victorian era. In Morgan's Oxford History of Britain, the late H. C. G. Matthew wrote of what Morgan termed "imperialist neuroses" at the fin de siecle, forebodings linked to the misgivings that surrounded the Boer War. Further, Morgan proclaimed the "forcible wrenching of Britain out of its place in the sun," insisting upon its enduring legacy: "Britain in many ways has been the cockpit of mankind." The dissenters, from the Levelers to Orwell, remained "deeply committed to an almost religious sense of the civilized essence of their country and its people, their history and destiny." The doubts revealed character-even the dissidents' exalted love of country. As empire faded, its aftermath became in some sense a reinvigorated subject, sustained precisely by the absence of what had ceased to be.
The indebtedness of twentieth-century histories to A. J. P. Taylor's English History, 1914-45 is still visible. Though few American students would know his name, his candor remains unrivaled:
This book is about thirty years in the history of the English people, and others come in only if they made a stir in English politics or aroused English interest in other ways. Thus, I discuss the impact of events in India on English politics and do not attempt to narrate India's political history. Similarly, I have passed over developments in Africa which were significant for Africa, but not, at that time, for England.
Taylor was fearless of the charge of exclusion, precise in his purpose, and confident in its rationale. Compare that assuredness with the tentative openings of both Morgan's panoramic Oxford History of Britain and Clarke's more discursive and ruminative Hope and Glory. Morgan begins by paying a kind of backhanded homage to Lord Trevelyan's masterpiece, his History of England:
Secure in itself, a vibrant, outward-looking island has proceeded to colonize and civilize the world. None of Trevelyan's themes can be dismissed. Equally, none can be accepted uncritically in the more tormented, doubt-ridden age of the late twentieth century, with its well-founded suspicion of racial and national stereotypes. The problem of trying to come to grips with the essential reality of British experience remains as pressing and as fascinating as ever.
Clarke hesitates to affirm his subject, though he will soon find a way out of the bind, which he ascribes chiefly to others: "The main reason ... why British history is no longer in thrall to triumphalist accounts is surely not just because of methodological enlightenment: it is because at the end of the twentieth century British historians lack confidence that there is much to celebrate."
Whence the uncertainty, and how is it manifest in the imaginary journey from Blitz to Blair? It lies in part in the awkward pursuit of racial narrative, conjoined with the quest to salvage English national character. Taylor had provided an unsubtle, straightforward verdict on World War II and its aftermath: "Future historians may see the war as a last struggle for the European balance of power or for the maintenance of Empire. This was not how it appeared for those who lived through it. The British people had set out to destroy Hitler and National Socialism." They had been through both wars, start to finish:
Yet they remained a peaceful and civilized people, tolerant, patient, and generous. Traditional values lost much of their force. Other values took their place. Imperial greatness was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined; the condition of the people improved.... 'British' here means, perhaps for the last time, the peoples of the Dominions and of the Empire as well as of the United Kingdom.
But Taylor stopped in 1945. For those narrating the subsequent half century, the script changed drastically. Postwar immigration and its consequences had to be explained in order to confront national character. For Taylor, character appeared rock solid in the wake of the war, strengthened by the shared imperial experience, not stricken by it. Yet two decades later, Webb's rendering of the 1960s posited profound stresses on the national character:
The 1960's ... saw ... developments that, though they may have drawn on recessive traits in the nation's past, appeared as radical departures from settled and admired national traditions.... One of these new departures was the prominence assumed by racial tension and conflict.... Britain's prosperity served as a magnet to the poor and ambitious in colonies and former colonies.... The immigrants clustered in larger cities.... In 1958 there were race riots ... serious as portents if not in damage to lives or property.... One can perhaps understand public hostility when strange, alien people were intruded into a situation of economic uncertainty, especially in communities that have been by tradition tightly knit and inward-turning-though to say that is not to deny the self-evident racial cast of thinking and feeling that underlie this phenomenon, a century after the Governor Eyre controversy.
Heyck's more ostensibly liberal account of the century, fueled by its steady attention to the multiple histories of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales (hence Peoples of the British Isles), recorded new, seemingly unprecedented antagonisms:
Meanwhile, a new division was emerging in British society: race.... Labor was also idealistic about the Commonwealth: in 1948 the Labor government adopted the British Nationality Act, which allowed citizens of the Commonwealth to come to Britain with full rights of British citizenship. By 1951, the black population of Britain had doubled to 200,000, and in 1961 alone, 113,000 "colored" (including blacks, Indians and Pakistanis) immigrants arrived. The immigrants did not disperse evenly across the country but concentrated in a few urban areas.... Because the British were accustomed to a relatively homogeneous population, many of them did not readily accept the newcomers.
The British accounts of Morgan and Clarke also struggle to make sense of this era of disruption. Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech always appears. In Morgan's case, Welsh and Scots demands are contrasted favorably with those of the new arrivals, while nowhere are the interwar black and Asian communities acknowledged:
Less constitutional or placid were the demands of the black or brown minorities, over a million of whom had migrated to Britain from India, Pakistan, West Africa, and the West Indies since 1950. In addition to dilapidated housing and racial discrimination in employment and (sometimes) at the hands of the police, there was the added hazard of racial bigotry in older urban areas.
Clarke attributes racist attitudes in the 1950s and 1960s to the uniqueness of the encounters: "It was the visible presence of 'dark strangers,' concentrated in some English towns and cities, which gave immigration statistics a racial edge. The newcomers had their own distinctive habits and conventions, from cooking to religion; and, of course, their own distinctive skin color."
Thus, the convention of the recent literature on both sides of the Atlantic has been to acknowledge slavery and explain the mixed responses to it in terms of epistemological stances rather than approbations of repressive violence. Next follows the anxiety about empire fostered by the turn of the century, which still enjoyed, if rather more hesitatingly, the greatness of British imperial achievement. The era of the two wars culminated in a new perplexity prompted by a split response: if some knew of the need for racial harmony, many were simply bewildered by the foreignness of the invaders, curiously unused even to seeing them (seemingly even after years of colonial encounters, two wars in which they had participated, much travel by some to lands and territories peopled by "Others").
Still, proponents of national character were not perhaps wrong in exercising caution. Even Powell might be partially redeemed from the geopolitical vantage point of the 1990s, as Clarke admonishes: "Powell, however, had more of a point than his liberal critics allowed when he singled out the intractable difficulties in coming to terms with Islam.... Pakistani communities ... presented an almost impenetrable cliff-face to the conventions of their host country." Clarke reassuringly cites the fatwah issued against "profane" writer Salman Rushdie as a case in point. One is reminded of the Today Show interview with the mild-mannered Asian milkman in outer West London in the first days of l'affaire Rushdie. When asked if he supported the fatwah against Rushdie, the man enthusiastically replied that he knew not who Rushdie was, but he certainly did support the fatwah. In light of September 11, 2001, Clarke's cautionary note takes on new vernacular meaning. Americans need not have laughed too heartily in hands-across-the-sea solidarity; they still continue to perform the ultimate role as validators of the rationality of British character by serving as the negative example of a society gone awry-the model of undesirable and endemic racial violence.
(Continues...)
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