Pax Britannica (16 page)

1
The first Afro-Asian peer was Sir Satyendra Sinha, who became Lord Sinha of Raipur in 1919.

2
Rosebery, though Gladstone’s Foreign Secretary, and Liberal Prime Minister himself in 1894–5, was the most eloquent of imperialists, and probably invented the phrase ‘Commonwealth of Nations’, in its British imperial sense. His views gradually estranged him from his party, and he died in 1929 a political independent, imperialist to the end and a famous stylist.

1
This splendid fellow (1697–1775), who probably began his military career in the ranks, was unknown until he arrived in India at the age of 50. He made his name in the wars against the French, and is honoured by a spirited effigy in Westminster Abbey—and by this picture, which still hangs in the Fort St George Museum in Madras.

1
Charles Brooke (1829–1917) was the second white rajah: his uncle James, an East India Company servant, had gone to Sarawak on an official mission in 1839, had put down a rebellion and been made ruler of Sarawak by its suzerain, the Sultan of Brunei. Charles, under whose rule Sarawak became a British protectorate, was succeeded by his son Charles Vyner Brooke, until in 1946 the country was annexed by the British Crown.

2
There were corners of the Empire where these happy-go-lucky philosophies were never adopted. One was the Caribbean island of Grand Cayman, which was settled by the black descendants of slaves and the white descendants of buccaneers and castaways. Even in such circumstances an all-white
élite
arose, and to this day the Bowdens, Ebanks, Edens and Merrens of Grand Cayman can claim absolute European descent.

1
Striking the servants, in an off-hand way, died hard in the Empire. In 1946, during my first week in Egypt, I boarded the Cairo train at Port Said with an English colonel of particular gentleness of manner and sweetness of disposition. As we walked along the corridor to find a seat we found our way blocked by an Egyptian, offering refreshments to people inside a compartment. Without a pause, apparently without a second thought, the colonel kicked him, quite hard and effectively, out of our way. I was new to the imperial scenes, and I have never forgotten this astonishing change in my companion’s character, nor the absolute blank indifference with which the Egyptian accepted the kick, and moved.

1
It was in 1857, the
Oxford
Dictionary
says, that the word was first applied to dark-skinned people other than Negroes, but perhaps the Mutiny was the reason. Certainly it was in 1858 that the Queen recorded in her journal her abhorrence of the usage.

1
It was only in the colonies of southern Africa that a substantial British working class settled among a coloured majority: as they were the most obviously vulnerable of the imperialists, so in the end they proved the most intractable.

1
Some survive, notably along Old Court House Street, where one or two jewellers and gunsmiths, with diamond rings in dusty showcases, and the gleam of gunracks among tiger-masks and horned heads, piquantly evoke imperial extravagances of long ago. Spence’s Hotel, too, a favourite of the Victorians, thrives in air-conditioned modernity: it is claimed to be the oldest hotel in Asia, founded in 1830, and its telegraphic address is ‘Homeliness’. All over India and Pakistan establishments still announce themselves in fading letters to be By Appointment to the Viceroy and Vicereine, and no imperial legacy lives on more strongly in the subcontinent than the tradition of the English boarding-house. Many of the smaller houses still bear the names of their old proprietors. Mrs Davis of Rawalpindi left her boarding-house to one of her male servants, but such was the commercial value of her name and sex that he adopted the professional pseudonym of
Miss
Davis, and prospered for many years.

1
Nor was Ripon’s attitude forgotten. When, in 1915, his statue was erected in Calcutta, it was financed entirely by Indian subscription—no European subscribed.

1
Above the harbour of Tauranga, in the North Island of New Zealand, are buried the British dead of the battle of Gate Pa, one of the early engagements of the Maori wars. Among them there lies a Maori chieftain, Rawiri Puhiraki, whose epitaph says of him that he gave drink to the enemy wounded, protected the unarmed and respected the dead. ‘The seeds of better feeling thus sown on the battlefields have since borne ample fruit.’

2
In 1898, when he had completed the conquest of the Sudan, Kitchener tried to provide it by raising funds for Gordon College, Khartoum. He soon got bored with the project, but Kipling celebrated it with an invocation to the Sudanese themselves:

The college survived nevertheless, and renamed Khartoum University is today the chief centre of higher education in the Sudan. 

1
Grey (1812–98), who went on to be both Governor and Prime Minister of New Zealand, was not so successful with white settlers—Matthew Arnold’s brother Tom, then living in New Zealand, noted that there was ‘something less manly about him than I expected’. In life he constantly antagonized them, and in death he bequeathed them a fateful phrase of his own invention: ‘One Man One Vote’.

2
But she was unable to prevent, in the following year, the barbaric destruction of the tomb of the Mahdi, whose bones were thrown into the Nile, and whose skull Kitchener proposed to send to the Royal College of Surgeons to be exhibited with Napoleon’s intestines. The Queen thought this medieval—after all, the Mahdi
‘was
a man of a
certain
importance’—and in the end the skull was secretly buried by night at Wadi Halfa.

1
Among the other loot was the gold crown of the Emperor Theodore. It remained in England until the Emperor Haile Selassie was exiled there in 1936, when King George V gave it back to him.

2
Though Indians claim the British later used the Ajanta statuary for target practice.

1
At Como this infatuated servant of the Raj thought he saw a headquarters revenue official (
Sadr
Kanungo
),
with his clerks, bringing the land ownership records to be inspected; at Avignon the spectre of an Indian watchman, holding his incident notebook, grinned cheerfully at him on the railway station; at Monaco he ordered ten days in the lock-up (
das
roz
tak
hawalat
) for the prosecuted gamblers. ‘Maxim’s new machine’ was presumably the steam-driven flying machine which, in 1894, Hiram Maxim persuaded to rise a few inches from the ground at Bexley in Kent. Maxim (1840–1916), a British-naturalized American, was an imperial figure himself, for his machine-gun was the standard automatic weapon of the British Army: he was knighted in 1901.

1
And when Kipling spoke of those ‘lesser breeds’, if we are to believe George Orwell, it was not the coloured peoples that he meant. The phrase, Orwell thought, ‘refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are “without the Law” in the sense of being lawless’. Certainly in the context of the verse, from the poem
Recessional,
it is hard to see how Kipling could have had powerless subject peoples in mind: