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| ISBN-13: | 9780520962866 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2016 |
| Series: | Berkeley Series in British Studies , #10 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire
By Daniel I. O'Neill
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96286-6
CHAPTER 1
Burke and Empire in Context
EDMUND BURKE WAS BORN INTO a world increasingly governed by empires and imperial rivalry. To understand Burke's conception of empire, we must begin with the definition of the term itself and what it had come to mean for the British in the eighteenth century. The English word empire is derived from the Latin imperium, whose literal meaning is "supreme power or command." Initially, imperium referred to the authority of a magistrate to act in the name of Rome and its citizens. Over time, therefore, the term became closely allied with sovereignty, originally understood as the power to apply Rome's laws. In the beginning there was a distinct division between the domestic and external realms subject to this power. However, eventually imperium (and hence empire) came to connote unlimited authority over both spheres. The "Roman Empire" thus came to be understood as a single extended territorial unit encompassing different political and cultural communities under one sovereign power, and our modern understanding of empire has inherited this broader meaning.
The terms colony (and colonialism, etc.) derive from another Latin word, colonus, meaning "farmer." Here, the etymology appropriately reminds us that colonial practices are best understood as one subset of imperial practices, involving the large-scale transfer of settler populations from the metropole to peripheral territories, where the new arrivals "planted" themselves permanently in the soil while maintaining political allegiance to their home country.
From this perspective we can see that eighteenth-century Britain was both imperial, as in the case of India (which had no large-scale British settler population), and colonial, as in the case of North America and (to a lesser extent) the West Indies. Ireland was a more difficult case to define in these terms. Unlike all of the other nodal points of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, it was technically a "kingdom by conquest," but one with a large and well-established colonial population by the eighteenth century.
As it unfolded during the 1700s, the concept of empire underwent a transformation based on the practices and interests of British policy makers. The earlier notion of imperium as sovereignty or military rule (including rule over a large geographically contiguous area) expanded to cover a wider range of interwoven phenomena. The eighteenth-century British Empire included territories marked by conquest and overseas colonization, but also those linked by new networks of commerce, often coexisting in overlapping and complex fashion. Additionally, regardless of any discrete terminological division, the British actually engaged in acts of conquest not only in the "kingdom" of Ireland but also against the Native Americans in the "colonial" context and on the Indian subcontinent in the more old-fashioned and narrowly "imperial" one. In order to understand Burke's overarching logic of empire, therefore, we must first come to grips with the multilayered, deeply entwined, and evolving meanings of the term British Empire in the eighteenth century, which provided the necessary context in which his particular conception of empire developed.
THE IDEOLOGY OF BRITISH EMPIRE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
David Armitage has shown convincingly that Britain's dominant conception of its empire in the eighteenth century was defined by the terms "Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free." This regnant self-understanding was an "ideology" — or a specific, systematic, and contestable political interpretation — of a geographical entity that started to develop from the mid-sixteenth century. By the 1730s it included the kingdoms of England and Scotland along with Wales (collectively known as "Great Britain" after the 1707 Act of Union), as well as the "third kingdom" of Ireland. This portion of the "Atlantic Archipelago," to use J.G.A. Pocock's term, was centered at London and situated along an "Anglo-Celtic frontier" that was increasingly dominated by English culture, political norms, institutions, and language throughout the period. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century the settler colonies of North America and the islands of the Caribbean had also been firmly added to this archipelago, an entity whose inhabitants for the first time began to describe themselves as members of a unified "British Empire," understood as a Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free community. Let us consider each of its four component themes briefly in turn.
We shall start with freedom, or "liberty," since it has been observed that the fundamental question for the British in the eighteenth century was how to reconcile imperium and libertas, or how to create a unified empire based on liberty. But what was meant by liberty? Even though it was not universally applied even in the metropole, the British trumpeted the protection of a number of "negative" freedoms pertaining to the individual. These included the protection of life, freedom of personal movement, freedom from arbitrary arrest, and the protection of private property. The most important source of these liberties was the common law, but institutionally their defense also required the right to trial by jury and not to be taxed or subject to laws without "consent." By the eighteenth century there was also a well-established belief, supposedly traceable back to the quasi-mythical "ancient constitution" but really emerging in the seventeenth century, that political liberty could be preserved only through a mixed constitution of the one (king), the few (House of Lords), and the many (House of Commons). Such a constitution created both a balance and a separation of powers in the form of a representative government, the so-called king in Parliament. This arrangement, which greatly augmented parliamentary power, grew out of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and was largely gospel in the metropole by the mid-eighteenth century.
Closely allied to the principle of liberty in the British conception of empire was that of commerce. The British depicted their empire as built on Enlightenment principles: it eschewed the conquest, subjugation, or destruction of indigenous peoples for the purpose of extracting their resources (much unlike their imperial competitors France and — especially — Spain). Instead, the basis of the British Empire was said to be trade, or commercium, in the widest sense of the term, one that encompassed the exchange of ideas as well as material goods. According to Scottish Enlightenment thinkers in particular, commerce was held to require freedom rather than force, and commercial interactions were understood by the British as having a profoundly humanizing and civilizing effect on all those who engaged in them. Commerce, it was believed, could in fact culminate in the alleviation and perhaps even the elimination of international conflict. Within this framework, Britain saw its North American and West Indian colonies as built on the backs of intrepid colonial entrepreneurs enacting their liberty on unbroken ground and aiming, simultaneously, at material gain and spreading the civilizing fruits of what Montesquieu, a great lover of things British, praised as "sweet commerce."
This view of the New World points in turn to the importance of the doctrine of res nullius or terra nullius ("empty things" or "empty lands"), which formed the philosophical backbone of the British Empire across the Atlantic until the end of the eighteenth century. According to this theory, the British did not see themselves as the conquerors of indigenous peoples at all, unlike the French and Spanish. There were two dimensions to this claim. The first was straightforward: for a time, many of the lands in North America seemed literally empty, devoid of inhabitants and therefore available for anyone willing to exercise individual liberty to make their own private property. However, this argument could extend only so far, because the British quickly encountered Native Americans, both in small settlements and wandering nomadically through large territories that they had previously assumed were vacant.
This is where the second dimension of the res nullius claim proved essential. According to John Locke and others, the lands of the New World remained empty, notwithstanding the existence of large numbers of Native Americans on them, because most of their inhabitants did not to do what the colonists' very Protestant God had instructed, which was to enclose common lands, till and improve them, and plant themselves as well as their crops in residence on them. In the Second Treatise, the Calvinist Locke memorably insisted that while God gave the earth to men in common, he did not want it to stay that way. Rather, he gave it to the industrious and rational and commanded them to mix their labor with it, subdue it, cultivate it, enrich it, and divide it up into discrete individual tracts of private property. The Native Americans' failure to do this could only mean that they were irrational, incapable of understanding God's law, and therefore less than fully equal human beings, or, alternatively, that they were willfully disobeying God's commands. Either way, the British saw themselves as justified in settling on the land, because the indigenous peoples did not really own it anyway. In some instances, of course, the British did "freely" trade for or purchase the land from settled Native American tribes (who wondered at the strange beings who believed anyone could own the earth), thus "planting" themselves on the land without violently extirpating its previous inhabitants, at least in the short run.
At the same time, earlier arguments drawn from feudal conquest and the obligation to spread Christianity and transform the "heathen" subjects newly under Britain's control also persisted as forms of justification for expanding empire in North America. These arguments went back to Sir Edward Coke's famous decision inCalvin's Case (1608), an argument that crystallized the views embedded in royal charters such as the one establishing the Virginia Company (1606), requiring Christian princes to convert all Amerindian heathens in a sort of religious crusade. For Coke, conversion remained the ultimate goal, one that was the logical extension of the absolute power that conquest legitimized. Failing their willing conversion, Coke argued, permanent war was justified over indigenous imperial subjects. This justification for westward expansion in America surfaced strongly in some quarters after 1763, with the vast new territorial acquisitions made during the Seven Years' War.
That both res nullius arguments and those derived from conquest were predicated on a specific religious understanding of God's intentions points to the third pillar of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, its Protestantism. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thinkers such as the two Richard Hakluyts (elder and younger), Sir Walter Raleigh, and Samuel Purchas defended the aggressive expansion of English power, especially in the New World, as a means of spreading the true faith and fending off the imperial advances of Catholic Spain. As Linda Colley has shown, Protestantism took on a still greater importance for the later expansion of the empire because it served as a bulwark against Catholic France, Great Britain's greatest enemy throughout the eighteenth century. The Protestant faith provided the necessary social glue to bind England, Scotland, and Wales together at home (if not Ireland, entirely) while also acting as a rallying point against French Catholicism and its closely associated political bane, monarchical absolutism. Protestantism was therefore key to the lengthy wars fought by the British against the French throughout the eighteenth century, wars that were about both imperial supremacy and domestic survival.
For most of the eighteenth century the self-proclaimed free, commercial, and Protestant empire created by the British could not be based on armies conquering territory, for reasons both geographical and demographical as much as ideological. Ideologically, of course, this would be an explicit denial of liberty. However, it was also wildly infeasible. The scale of discoveries in the New World made it clear that dominating all of the world's peoples and territories through force alone was impossible for any would-be imperial power, let alone an island with a relatively small population. However, while control of the land might elude the architects of empire, control of the seas was possible and could also serve as the chief conduit for commerce. First, however, the preexisting notion of maritime dominion, which implied imperium only over home waters, had to be replaced with the notion of mare liberum, or "free seas," a view of the oceanic waters that firmly solidified in the eighteenth century. The idea that nobody owned the seas opened the way for a "blue water" strategy guaranteed by the world's greatest naval power, which ensured that the ocean remained accessible to British interests at all times.
The notion that the British Empire was Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free was thus a means whereby the British distanced themselves ideologically from other imperial powers, like France and Spain. But of course, Britain's own conception of empire in the eighteenth century not only was "invariably self-serving" but also failed to capture the wide gulf between the ideal of empire as articulated in theory and its actual practice on the ground, as can be seen across all four of its definitional markers.
Even at the most basic level, assertions of Protestantism as definitional of British national and imperial identity willfully overlooked the case of Ireland, where four-fifths of the kingdom/colony were Catholic. And, of course, the "heathens" of the New World were not Protestants, which helps explain the continued appeal of feudal-conquest arguments in both locales. Similarly, the British could describe their empire as "free" in the eighteenth century even as they shipped and traded roughly half of all the slaves taken from Africa, or approximately 3.4 million people. In this way, the vaunted "empire of liberty" effectively closed its eyes to the evils of slavery.
Likewise, with respect to its exclusively "maritime" dimension, defenders of the "new imperial history" have noted that Native Americans were frequently at war with the British in North America during the eighteenth century and would no doubt have disputed any claim that Britain did not have a territorial empire before the 1760s, as would the millions of enslaved Africans and the Celts who had lost land, culture, and population since the 1600s through the expansion of British traders, colonists, and soldiers. Similarly, the beau idéal of "commerce" was in fact "clearly both rose-colored and self-serving, mystifying or obscuring the brutal, exploitive and violent processes of 'trade' and colonization (including the immensely profitable trade in slaves)." Finally, the fact that the British denied citizenship to indigenous peoples throughout large swaths of the New World, and even withheld "self-ownership" from the African slaves and their descendants who were brought to it, ensured that Britain's was in fact an "exclusionary empire" and had become so long before the addition of India to the imperial fold.
These interventions are extremely important because they remind us that there is a world of difference between eighteenth-century Britons' ideological depiction of their empire and empirical reality on the ground. At the same time, the self-conception remains crucial for my purposes here, because the ultimate aim of this book is to explicate Burke's logic of empire. Burke's was a view that emerged at the tail end of the official ideology, but it crucially distinguishes itself from this view of the British Empire in important ways through Burke's simultaneous deployment of Orientalist and Ornamentalist strategies. These strategies in fact enabled Burke to staunchly defend empire and imperialism even as the shape and scale of the empire itself radically transformed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Edmund Burke and the Conservative Logic of Empire by Daniel I. O'Neill. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,Introduction: Edmund Burke's Conservative Logic of Empire,
Chapter 1 • Burke and Empire in Context,
Chapter 2 • The New World,
Chapter 3 • India,
Chapter 4 • Ireland,
Conclusion: Ornamentalism, Orientalism, and the Legacy of Burke's Conservative Logic of Empire,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,