Pax Britannica (21 page)

There is the ring of omniscience to such a list, written in such a script, in such a huge thick-leaved register of Empire. By and large only Britons from Britain were considered suitable for the senior imperial posts. There were exceptions: Australians administered New Guinea, New Zealanders the Cook Islands, a few Indians had succeeded in entering the higher ranks of the Indian Civil Service and a few Sinhalese shared in the Government of Ceylon. In the West African colonies there were some African senior officials, but they were soon to be replaced. This was a burden for white men, and candidates for the senior branch of the Colonial Service had to  be ‘of pure European descent’.

The law was different. To administer the imperial justice the British had to enlist the help of their subjects. In several parts of the Empire natives were acting not only as barristers but as magistrates and judges, too. The British could scarcely resent their participation, though nobody annoyed them more than a really litigious native lawyer, because the legal system of the Empire was so immensely involved, so interwoven with customary law and the codes of previous authorities, that often the local lawyer was the only person who really understood it.

The Common Law of England did not necessarily obtain throughout the Queen’s Dominions. The principle was that an Englishman took with him ‘as much of law and liberty as the nature of things would bear’. Acts of Parliament after the foundation of a colony only applied there if they expressly said so, and if a colony had its own laws before the British arrived, they remained in force until they were specifically superseded. A myriad different codes supplemented, modified or replaced the Common Law in different parts of the Empire, inherited from previous rulers or evolved as safety and common sense demanded. Even in the white self-governing colonies, those mirrors of England, the law was often locally modified: the Australians had changed the marriage law, and the New Zealanders had repealed the Statute of Uses, one of the most important statutes in English conveyancing.

In general the British respected indigenous laws, where they made sense, and seemed just: within their own islands, after all, they allowed a quaint degree of legal latitude to the Scots. British imperial scholars were the first to clarify and define the Islamic and Hindu laws of India—a memorial in Calcutta Cathedral proudly portrayed Sir William Jones, the great oriental jurist, with the tablets of the law in his hands, and Muslim and Brahmin sages respectful at his feet. Customary law was generally honoured, unless it was especially horrible, and even slavery, though legally abolished in the British possessions more than sixty years before, was not flatly forbidden everywhere: in countries actually annexed it was seldom
tolerated, but in Protectorates only its legal status was abolished— it was not an offence for a native to keep slaves, but slaves’ children were born free, and a slave could always claim his freedom.
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The advent of English law did not much affect the more advanced branches of native civil law in India, which were essentially religious, and the baffling procedures of West Africa, with all their rituals of fetish and oblation, were mostly left undisturbed, if only because few Britons could master them.

All this made for a dizzy variety of legislation. British India had its own superb Penal Code, drawn up by Macaulay. Stephen once described it as ‘the criminal law of England freed from all technicalities and superfluities, and systematically arranged’: anyone who wanted to understand the criminal law of India had only to read the Penal Code ‘with a common use of memory and attention’. The French Canadians kept their archaic version of French law, as it had been before the Revolution, while Mauritius and the Seychelles had the Napoleonic Code. Sicilian law applied in Malta, Roman Dutch in Ceylon and Cape Colony, Ottoman in Cyprus. Traces of Spanish law still applied in Trinidad, and faint remnants of the old Brehon law in Ireland. In Sarawak, a British Protectorate, the White Rajah very often made the law up as he went along: generally with liberal intent, in an island where, for example, if an unmarried pregnant girl refused to reveal her lover’s name, she was traditionally left to starve in the forest. In Jersey the
clameur
de
haro,
an ancient appeal to the Crown, could still be raised by a really determined litigant, and lawyers still went for their training to the University of Caen in Normandy.

Sometimes the law, whatever its nature, applied equally to rulers and ruled, English or native. Sometimes the imperialist found himself subject to special rules of his own, set apart from the laws of the country he ruled. In theory there was a special court in England to deal with offences committed by Englishmen in India. It was established in 1784, and consisted of three judges, four peers and six members of Parliament. It was a conscious copy of the tribunal of
Roman senators which, in the second century
B
.
C
., had been established to try offences committed by Roman officials against provincials: but it had never been summoned.

Loftily above it all, the supreme fount of imperial justice, sat the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. As the Crown was to the administration of the Empire, the Judicial Committee was to the law. It was the supreme court of appeal for the entire British Empire, outside the United Kingdom. The origin of this eminence was curious. When William of Normandy conquered England his subjects of Normandy and the Channel Islands retained, to differentiate them from the conquered Saxons, particular legal access to the King’s person, by way of his Privy Council. Normandy was presently lost, but the Channel Islands kept this ancient privilege, and it was later extended to all the overseas dominions. (Citizens of the United Kingdom had the right of appeal to the House of Lords: in practice the two courts had become virtually identical.)

Oddly enough, in an Empire devoted to pomp and pageantry, the Judicial Committee flaunted few of the trappings of English law. Its members, half a dozen eminent jurists, met in modest upstairs chambers in Downing Street—John Buchan thought the premises ‘shabby—the majesty of the imperial law seemed poorly recognized’.
1
They wore no robes or wigs, only plain dark suits, and sat at a semicircular table, the barrister addressing them standing at a lectern in the middle. It was only a committee, not officially a court of law. Its duty was to give advice to the sovereign, so that no dissenting judgements were delivered—it would have been improper to offer the Queen conflicting advice—and no verdict was pronounced: the judges merely declared that in their opinion the
appeal should be dismissed or upheld, ‘and they will humbly so advise Her Majesty’. Sometimes a judge from Canada, South Africa or Australia attended a hearing: but there was nothing very imperial to the circumstances of the Judicial Committee, and visitors to its meetings were often disappointed.

Yet this was, in the range of its powers and jurisdiction, the most powerful court of the modern world. It might only offer its humble advice to the Sovereign, but the advice was invariably accepted. A quarter of the inhabitants of the earth were ultimately at its mercy, and when the Kols hill tribe in India were once involved in a dispute with the Government about forest rights, their elders were surprised sacrificing a kid to propitiate a distant but omnipotent deity. ‘We know nothing of him, but that he is a good god, and that his name is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.’ Nothing was more properly romantic, in the complex structure of the Pax Britannica, than the existence of this tremendous tribunal, perhaps the one imperial institution that smacked authentically of the Caesars. The laws of half a dozen conquered civilizations were laid before it, and its members must interpret them all both by their own values, and by the values of the imperial British. They might have to declare an opinion, against which there was no further appeal, upon the legal meaning of the Koran, or the Hindu Manu, or a clause of the Napoleonic Code modified by Canadian practice, or even the law of the Kingdom of Kandy, that last stronghold of the Ceylonese monarchs, hidden away in the forested interior of the island. Once an English lawyer had pleaded before them, on behalf of orthodox Hinduism, against the abolition of suttee, the burning of widows alive: more than once the Committee had dealt with cases in which property had been entailed in the person of a temple idol.

Some of the greatest British jurists had presided over the Judicial Committee, and its roll of members included many of the ringing honorifics of the realm—the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Chief Baron, the Lord Chief Justice, the Master of the Rolls, the Vice-Chancellor of England and all the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary. Among them in 1897 were Lord Halsbury, whose
Laws
of
England
was the standard digest of English law, and Lord Macnaghten, the
most eloquent jurist of his day.
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There was no sniffing at such a body, at a moment when the prestige of English law, by whose standards all else was ultimately to be judged, stood at its highest. When a Chinese lawyer argued his case from Hong Kong, or a Jamaican litigant appealed to the fair play of the Crown, when an East African Muslim pleaded the legal significance of the Meditations, or the Kols hillmen slit the throat of another kid—as the members of the Committee looked out from their table across their quarter of the world, it must sometimes have seemed that the dream of a universal civilization was half-way to fulfilment.

Not the law as such, but the rule of law, was the one convincingly unifying factor in imperial affairs. The British subject, whether he be Kaffir, Maori or French Canadian, automatically acquired those private civil rights which the English had evolved for themselves since the time of Magna Carta. It took the Romans many generations to extend civil rights throughout the Roman Empire, because it was done in stages: the British granted such rights the moment they annexed a territory. One day a tribesman might be absolutely subject to the fickle despotism of his hereditary chieftain, with no personal liberties whatever: the next day he had a constitutional right to take a suit before Lord Halsbury, or stand for the Imperial Parliament. Most people, in most parts of the British Empire, would probably have agreed that on the whole, and certainly by the standards of its predecessors, it offered its subjects justice. Wherever the British went, as they threw down railway lines and erected Anglican churches, so they set up courts : and though the magistrate might only be an anxious youth a year or two down from the university, or a beery old veteran soaked for a quarter of a century in sun and the lesser vices, still the hearing was likely to be fair and the
judgement impartial. To many of the Queen’s native subjects this was the first advantage of the Pax—more important than prosperity, efficient government, even better health. Asked in 1896 to name the first benefit of British rule in Egypt, a Cairo newspaper editor replied that now a peasant could not only bring a lawsuit against a pasha, but actually win it.

Simple benevolence was not a general trait of the British imperial system, but its fairness was generally recognized. As Emerson once wrote, ‘the English sway of their colonies has no roots of kindness in it. They govern by their arts and ability: they are more just than kind.’ If an imperial idealist had to choose a text of Empire, he might have done worse than select the original instructions of the East India Company to its judges in the east. In those days the state of the law in India was fearfully muddled, a welter of religious and customary law only thinly reinforced by English practice, but the Company’s justices knew how to behave. When there were no positive or acceptable rules to follow, they were told, they must consult two simple principles: ‘Equity or Good Conscience’.
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T
WO celebrated monuments stood near the lake in Kandy, the sweet mountain capital of the last Ceylonese kings, toppled off their thrones only thirty years before. One was the Temple of the Tooth, a confectionery structure of white marble, in whose moat guardian crocodiles loitered, and in whose inner shrine a large discoloured chunk of ivory was claimed to be a tooth from the mouth of the Lord Buddha. The other was the audience chamber of the Kandyan kings, an unpretentious but beloved structure, built with the skills of Portuguese captives in the seventeenth century, and so a monument to the lost power of the kingdom. Around these two buildings the life of the little city fragrantly revolved, the monkish litany echoing across the lake at dawn, the aromatic shambles of the bazaar, the fireflies wavering haphazard in the shrubberies as the sun went down: but immediately beside them, overshadowing the one and not in the least abashed by the other, the British built the headquarters of their administration in central Ceylon—a vaguely Palladian, four-square, sensible office block, deposited there with uncompromising firmness, as if to say that no memory of vanished kings, no relic layered in gilt and sandalwood, could logically resist the power of the Raj.

One feels among the writings of the New Imperialists a hunger for this sort of absolutism, as they tried to reduce the complexities of the Empire to some comprehensible order. But there was no true order to the thing. It had no real logic to it, no very definable purpose, no formula. It was, as Richard Ford wrote of Spain, a kingdom of exceptions. Even in Kandy the nature of British rule was not so clear-cut as the juxtaposition of those three buildings seemed to imply, for down the road there was a fourth, a wooden kiosk beside the lake, which was the headquarters of the village headmen—Ceylonese of substance and inherited dignity who had been
absorbed into the British system of government, and were almost as important under Queen Victoria as they had been under King Wikrama Raja Sinha. Very peculiar, Disraeli had thought this Empire. What was true of one colony was seldom true of another: and there were, in 1897, forty-three separate governments within the British Empire, displaying every degree of independence and subjugation, and all manner of idiosyncrasy.

At one end were the great self-governing colonies, virtually nations in their own right. Their emancipation had come easily, because until a decade or two before the British had been chiefly anxious to reduce their imperial burdens, relied upon Free Trade for their continuing prosperity, and were very willing to release colonists who were only British anyway. The last thing London wanted was another Boston tea party. There were eleven of these semi-nations: Canada, the six Australian colonies, New Zealand, Cape Colony, Natal and Newfoundland. None of them was absolutely independent. Their foreign policies were still decreed by the Imperial Government, whose diplomats represented them in foreign capitals, and they still depended upon Great Britain for their security at sea. But they were not obliged to go to war for London, and they had their own local defence forces, their own agents in England, and their own tariffs, sometimes directed against imports from the United Kingdom. These outstations of Greater Britain had two-chamber Parliaments, faithfully reproducing the rituals of Westminster, and they appointed all their own public officers, except only the Queen’s representative (though even in the choice of Governors they had their say, generally suggesting noblemen of limitless pedigree and resource).

Below them came the Crown Colonies, in almost every stage of development. Some had no legislature at all, but were ruled simply and squarely by the Governor and his officials: such were Gibraltar, for instance, and St Helena. Some, like Gambia or the Seychelles, had legislatures whose members were all officially nominated. Some, like Jamaica or Malta, had legislatures that included some elected
members. Barbados and Bermuda had fully elected Assemblies—relics of the self-governing constitutions, like those of the old British colonies in America, which they had enjoyed before the emancipation of the slaves. But in all the last word lay with the Governor, who could veto all legislation anyway: and in most the degree of public intervention could be manipulated easily enough by a switch of the franchise, reducing it as often as not to that airy upper-crust likely to be in sympathy with imperial ideas. (In Malta the franchise was limited to about one-eighteenth of the population—as the geographer Hereford George wrote, ‘so important a military station is necessarily governed, to a certain extent, in accordance with the needs of the Empire’).

Many imperial territories were officially Protectorates, and technically foreign countries still. Most of them were run, nevertheless, more or less as Crown Colonies, except that since their citizens were not British subjects they were conveniently unentitled to British legal rights—your Ashanti agitator could not cry habeas corpus, when the district officer decided to let him cool off in the lock-up for a day or two. In three territories—Rhodesia, North Borneo, Nigeria—chartered companies were paramount, as all-powerful agents of Empire: the charter of the Royal Niger Company, granted without any reference to Parliament in London, declared that the kings, chiefs and peoples of the Niger basin, ‘recognizing the virtues of the Company’, had ceded the whole of their territories to it, and that the British Government had authorized the company to govern them, and to acquire ‘by all lawful means’ other territories in the same region.

And magnificently separate as always was India, which was an Empire of its own—vast and unmanageable almost beyond conception, a third of it ruled by native princes under British suzerainty, the rest governed by the British themselves as an unwavering autocracy. ‘Whatever is done
for
the people,’ Bryce wrote of India, ‘nothing is done
by
the people’: British rule there, somebody else said, was ‘a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their leave and without their help’. In British India, more colossally than anywhere, the Crown was absolute.

Nothing was uniform. Consider the Government of Ceylon, which was thought to be the ultimate refinement of the Crown Colony-system. Ceylon was not the sort of possession that could reasonably expect self-government. Its native population was half Tamil from India, half indigenous Sinhalese, part Lowland part Kandyan, partly Buddhist partly Hindu, with Muslim and Christian minorities and a sizeable white community. Beneath the authority of the Governor was an officially nominated council intended to reflect at once this diversity of the Ceylonese and the grand fact of British domination. It comprised the commander of the imperial forces in the island; the Attorney-General; the principal Collector of Customs; two senior District Officers; the Director of Public Works; and representatives of the Tamils, the Sinhalese, the Muslims, the Kandyans, the Burghers, the Europeans and the merchant community. Eight Government Agents, one for each province, translated the decrees of Governor and Council into action: they and their senior assistants were nearly all British members of the Ceylon Civil Service, but below them the ancient hierarchy of headmen and village councils still held local authority. This was held to be a model administration. It gave the natives a share in the running of things, it respected indigenous tradition, it allowed every local faction a voice at Government House: but just as there was no mistaking which of those buildings in Kandy was of most immediate consequence, so there was no mistaking the fact that the British were absolute rulers of Ceylon.

Other possessions were less tractable—Burma, for instance. Ceylon was a compact, fairly developed, accessible island on a familiar trade route, a genial and easy-going kind of colony. Burma was described by Sir George Scott, the principal British authority on the country, as ‘a sort of recess, a blind alley, a back reach’. Much of it was still wild and unmapped, and its people had never really accepted the values of the Raj, remaining remotely detached, seldom volunteering to serve the Flag, and never demeaning themselves with second-hand Western manners. Lower Burma the British
knew well enough; upper Burma contained large tracts of jungly tribal territory where successive British missions had been massacred or molested. Though it was governed as a province of British India, Burma was accordingly split into several different kinds of possession. On the one side a straightforward colonial administration governed the settled areas—commissioners, deputy commissioners, assistant commissioners, township officers down to village headmen. On the other side a queer congeries of arrangements was devised to keep the tribes quiet and happy. In the remote tribal territories British rule was rudimentary, and local power was left in the hands of chieftains—the Sawbwas, Myozas and Ngwe-kunhmus of the Shan States, the Duwas of the Kachins, the tribal paladins of the Chin peoples, the red Karens, the Bwè and the Mano. Some of these principalities were vast—Kengtung was as big as Belgium: some were the size of large private estates in England. All were allowed, in varying degrees, to look after their own affairs, the Raj only interfering when necessary to keep the peace or enforce justice.

Yet the whole was one province of Empire, from the ordered logic of the Rangoon municipality to the head-hunting country of the Wa, only once penetrated by Britons, where the villages of the Wild Wa were approached by avenues of human skulls, the Intermediate Wa, so Scott tells us, indulged only in ‘fits of head-hunting’, and the Tame Wa actually wore clothes. Indirect rule, the employment of existing authorities to do the governing for you, was not always popular among the New Imperialists. It clashed with their theme, and meant that people went on living in the old way, denied the full elevating benefits of white civilization. This was a very large Empire, though, its British cadre was small, it was growing constantly, and in many parts the British found it expedient to modify their civilizing mission and enlist the authority of a myriad chiefs, kings, emirs and paramount princes. In Africa they would try, more subtly than they ever did in Asia, to weld the ancient orders into the structure of Empire, exactly fitting each measure of responsibility into an imperial pattern, so that the pettiest pagan wizard could play his part in the grand design. But by these visionary means nobody was satisfied. The Empire lost part of its point, and the Africans found themselves stuck in a bog of tradition, from
which before long all the more intelligent ones did their best to escape.

Consider the island of Ascension, 7° 53’ S., 14° 18’ W., half-way between Africa and Brazil in the South Atlantic Ocean. Acquired by the British, 1815, as a garrison island. Area 38 square miles, length 7½ miles, breadth 6 miles, circumference 22 miles. Population 380, with 60 women and children, consisting of seamen and marines with their families, and Kroomen labourers from Liberia. No indigenous vertebrate land fauna. No industry. No known minerals. Half covered with lava.

Ascension was eight hundred miles from the next British territory, St Helena, and not particularly on the way to anywhere else. In deciding how best to administer the place, the British accordingly took a practical if unorthodox step: they declared it to be a ship. It was borne on the books of the Admiral Superintendent, Gibraltar. Darwin described it as ‘a huge ship kept in first-rate order’, when he visited the island on the
Beagle
in the 1830s; it was the only British possession under the control of the Admiralty (though the French Ministry of Marine had once governed most of the French Empire). Ascension had enjoyed a brief importance as a coaling station, before the opening of the Suez Canal. Now it was a naval sanatorium and a cable station on the South African line—its traditional function in a way, because for centuries mariners had left mail in bottles on this island, to be picked up by ships passing in the opposite direction, and there was a headland still known as the Letter Box.

A captain of the Royal Navy was normally in command, though sometimes it was a colonel of marines. He enforced and occasionally made the laws, punished offenders, presided over inquests, kept the registers and was president of nearly as many local societies as was Cecil Rhodes in Salisbury. The military garrison had long been withdrawn, but in 1897 there were still ten naval officers aboard Ascension, and everything about the island was nautical. The Commander lived in Admiralty Cottage, the light outside the police station
was an old ship’s lamp, every wall of St Mary’s Church was crammed with naval memorials. On the long track up Green Mountain, the parkland of the island, two sawn-off gigs acted as milestones—‘One Boat’ and ‘Two Boats’. The Navy had brought tons of earth and innumerable trees to soften that austere volcanic landscape: gums from Australia, yews from the Cape, castor-oil from the Caribbean, Scotch firs and Port Jackson willows. On the summit of the mountain they had made a dewpond, with frogs and goldfish in it, and a farm with roses, geraniums and English vegetables—it was a tradition that every officer posted to Ascension took with him some useful plant.