Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2 page)

Churchill’s conversation with Blundell is a good starting point for consideration of his lifelong involvement with the British Empire, and the general attitudes to it from which his specific policies flowed. In order to do this we need to contend with his reputation – or reputations – on imperial issues. The popular image of him, which draws in particular on his opposition to Indian independence in the 1930s and 1940s, is of a last-ditcher for whom the integrity of the Empire was paramount. Yet many of his contemporaries had viewed him differently. As a youthful minister at the Colonial Office in the Edwardian period, political antagonists had described him as a Little Englander and a danger to the Empire. (‘Little Englandism’, which today carries connotations of anti-European xenophobia, at the time implied opposition to imperial expansion and to foreign entanglements in general; it was often used as a term of abuse.) As late as 1920, even the wild-eyed socialist MP James Maxton would claim disapprovingly that ‘the British Empire was approaching complete disintegration’ and that ‘it was not going too far to say that Mr Churchill had played a primary party in bringing about that state of affairs’.
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Such critics, it should be noted, were not alleging that Churchill was actively hostile to the Empire, more that it was not safe in his hands or that he was comparatively indifferent to it. By the time of Churchill’s final term in office, this view was still maintained by a tenacious few. In 1953 the Conservative politician Earl Winterton wrote to Leo Amery, one of Churchill’s former wartime colleagues, to congratulate him on the first volume of his memoirs. He told him: ‘I am particularly pleased that you have, whilst paying a tribute to Winston’s great patriotism, stated, which is indubitably the case, that he has never been an imperialist in the sense that you and I are; we suffered from this point of view during the war, whilst we were in opposition after the war and are still suffering from it to-day.’
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Although similar opinions can be found in the historical literature, such contemporary opinions of Churchill need to be treated with some caution.
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Those who accused him of not caring enough about the Empire often meant, underneath, that he did not happen to share their particular view of it. Nor is the conventional image completely misleading. Although during his post-1931 wilderness years Churchill publicly disclaimed the diehard label, it is clear that he came to revel in it. During the war, the topic of India frequently triggered such extreme reactions in him that he sometimes appeared not quite sane.
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Nevertheless, this man who could be so disdainful of non-white peoples – ‘I hate people with slit eyes & pig-tails’ – also had another side to him.
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In 1906, when criticizing the ‘chronic bloodshed’ caused by British punitive raids in West Africa, it was he who sarcastically wrote: ‘the whole enterprise is liable to be misrepresented by persons unacquainted with Imperial terminology as the murdering of natives and stealing of their lands’.
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As his talk with Blundell shows, this concern for the welfare of subject peoples stayed with him until the end of his career. In 1921, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, he stated that within the British Empire ‘there should be no barrier of race, colour or creed which should prevent any man from reaching any station if he is fitted for it’. Yet he immediately qualified this by adding that ‘such a principle has to be very carefully and gradually applied because intense local feelings are excited’, which was in effect a way of saying that its implementation should be delayed indefinitely.
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As one Indian politician put it the following year, when noting Churchill’s seemingly inconsistent position on the controversial question of Asians in East Africa, it was ‘a case, and a very strange case indeed’, of the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
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Therefore, in order to understand the origins and impact of Churchill’s imperialism, we do not need to overthrow the conventional picture so much as to understand how it arose. We also need to see why, during the second half of his career, it came to crowd out the story in which he appeared as a conciliator and even as a Radical. In order to do these things, we need a firm grasp of the world in which he grew up and began to make his career at the end of the nineteenth century. The British Empire at that time was in a phase of rapid expansion, driven by multiple forces, from private trading and missionary activity to international great-power rivalries. At the time of Churchill’s birth, in 1874, it was about to embark on its most triumphant phase. In 1877, amid great controversy, Queen Victoria was crowned ‘Empress of India’, in a symbolic adornment of the longstanding British control of the subcontinent. During the 1880s, Britain took part in the ‘scramble for Africa’, a race between European powers for colonies, acquiring Bechuanaland, Nigeria, Somaliland, Zululand, Kenya, Rhodesia and (in 1890) Zanzibar. This was by no means the end point of the growth of the Empire; there were further acquisitions at the end of World War I and, if enemy colonies conquered during World War II are taken into account, it reached its maximum territorial extent only in 1945.
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At its zenith, around 500 million people, or about a quarter of the world’s population, were British subjects.

The very speed of the expansion, and the multiplicity of motives behind it, helped ensure a great diversity in methods of rule. Terminology shifted throughout the period of Churchill’s lifetime – for example ‘Commonwealth’ gradually replaced ‘Empire’, to his considerable chagrin – but for the period of his political maturity certain broad generalizations are possible. Loosely speaking, the ‘dominions’ were those territories such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada which had achieved a substantial (and progressively increasing) level of political autonomy.
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During the interwar years they gained the formal right to secede from the Empire if they wished. The ‘colonies’, by contrast, were overseas possessions where the Crown retained proprietorship. They might nonetheless be ‘self-governing’, which meant that the white settler elites had considerable control over local affairs. There were also other forms of governance, including the League of Nations ‘mandates’ granted to Britain after World War I, as for example in Palestine. India, anomalously, was neither a dominion nor a colony, British rule there being to a substantial extent based on cooperation with loyal Indian princes.
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Such distinctions were probably lost on the majority of the British population at the time.
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This, however, does not necessarily constitute proof that the masses were indifferent to the Empire. Churchill, for one, believed that the imperial zeitgeist of his schoolboy years had left ‘a permanent imprint upon the national mind’.
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As Churchill’s headmaster at Harrow school put it in 1895:

if the Elizabethan era marks the beginning, it is not less true that the Victorian era marks the consummation of the British Empire. The seventeenth century may be said to be the age of individual explorers, the eighteenth of commercial companies, the nineteenth of the State. [. . .] It is not the expansion of Empire, it is the spirit of Empire, which is the characteristic of the reign of Queen Victoria.
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This new spirit may have been largely restricted to elites; but then, Churchill was one of the elite.

The observation that this background was important is hardly original. When Jawaharlal Nehru (who was to become the first Prime Minister of independent India) remarked during World War II that Churchill had ‘a Victorian mind’ it served as a convenient way of saying that he was a reactionary.
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Historians criticizing Churchill have often used similar shorthand.
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Churchill’s defenders also point to his Victorianism, but present it in a different way. For example his former private secretary John Colville, in a foreword to a new edition of
The River War
, Churchill’s 1899 work on Kitchener’s Sudan campaign, wrote the following.

Churchill’s imperialism, faithfully representing the feelings of his fellow-countrymen at this apogee of the British Empire, emerges clearly from this book: but it should be judged by the generally accepted standards prevailing at the end of the Victorian era and not by those in fashion today. [. . .] Churchill, for his part, was antagonised by Kitchener’s ruthless treatment of the defeated Dervishes, whose courage he respected.
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Similarly, one sympathetic historian, seeking to explain Churchill’s toleration of discrimination against black Africans, writes: ‘Churchill was a Victorian by upbringing [. . .] and most Britons of his generation regarded black Africans as backward and relatively uncivilized.’ But, he adds, ‘Churchill’s own outlook was more informed and relatively enlightened.’
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The defenders’ pleas for contextualization are, on the surface, highly plausible. However, they are also problematic. References to ‘generally accepted standards’, and to the views of ‘most Britons’, do less than full justice to the range of opinion in Victorian Britain to which Churchill was exposed. Furthermore, we are being asked to believe two contradictory things simultaneously. On the one hand, it is suggested, the seemingly unpleasant aspects of his racial thinking can be excused on the grounds that he could not have been expected to escape from the mentality prevailing during his youth. On the other hand, we are told, he
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escape it and is to be praised because he was actually unusually enlightened! We should not, in fact, use Churchill’s Victorian background as an historical ‘get out of jail free’ card for him any more than we should use it as a blanket label of condemnation. In order to understand its true importance, it is necessary to appreciate that his Victorian heritage accounted for many of the apparently ‘enlightened’ elements of Churchill’s thought as well as many of the ‘reactionary’ ones. At the same time, his attitudes in later life were not always a straightforward extension of the ones he held earlier. He himself said that he ‘had inclined more to the right as he got older’, but there were some changes in his views that cannot be easily located on a left-right spectrum.
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For example, although he showed much hostility to Islam in his early writings, this died away and was replaced during the interwar years with a near-fanatical hatred of Hinduism. In 1943 he remarked, ‘I’m pro-Moslem – the only quality of the Hindus is that there’s a lot of them and that is a vice’.
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This book aims at genuine explanation of these complex patterns, not tub-thumping or apologetics. Remarkable as it may seem, it is the first attempt to provide a comprehensive treatment of Churchill’s relationship with the Empire within a single volume.
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There have been some excellent short overviews, and numerous books dealing with particular countries, periods, themes and individuals, but no one has tackled the problem as a whole at volume length.
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The task is indeed a daunting one, and it is not possible within the scope of this book to give an exhaustive treatment of every single imperial issue with which Churchill was involved. It is, however, feasible to investigate the key features of the most important episodes and questions. Furthermore, there is significant new evidence that can be brought to bear on many of them. For example, the unpublished letters of Lady Lugard cast fresh light on the first controversial months of Churchill’s ministerial career, and the recently released Cabinet Secretaries’ notebooks (preserved for the post-1942 period) increase our understanding of his involvement in episodes such as the Mau Mau uprising.

The treasures of the archives should not, however, lead us to neglect published sources, not least the many forgotten reviews of Churchill’s early books. These help us reconstruct the ideological world in which Churchill was operating and improve our understanding of his arguments. They also remind us that, even if he himself viewed his youthful imperial adventures simply as a shortcut to a political career, they need to be considered more broadly.
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They were the means by which he established a reputation as the premier ‘public journalist of the Empire’.
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As such, he did not merely represent the Empire to the British people but affected the way it was seen throughout the world. Churchill became a global brand, inextricably mixed up with the image of the Empire, a process that began in the 1890s and reached its culmination during World War II. In one propaganda film shown in Africa, for example, the war was portrayed as a jungle fight between a snake, labelled ‘Hitler’, and its deadly enemy the mongoose, labelled ‘Churchill’.
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Not, of course, that the intended message always got through: in the 1960s one Zambian woman obtained a devoted religious following by playing an entirely worn-out record of one of Churchill’s wartime speeches on an ancient phonograph. She persuaded the crowds that the incomprehensible rumbling was ‘God’s voice anointing her his emissary and commanding absolute obeisance’.
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