Once there was an empire that governed roughly a quarter of the world’s population, covered about the same proportion of the Earth’s land surface, and dominated nearly all its oceans. The British empire was the biggest empire ever, bar none. How an archipelago of rainy islands off the northwest coast of Europe came to rule the world is one of the fundamental questions not just of British but of world history.
Why should Americans care about the history of the British empire? There are two reasons. The first is that the United States was a product of that empire -- and not just in the negative sense that it was founded in the first successful revolt against British imperial rule. America today still bears the indelible stamp of the colonial era, when, for the better part of two centuries, the majority of white settlers on the Eastern Seaboard were from the British Isles. Second, and perhaps more important, the British empire is the most commonly cited precedent for the global power currently wielded by the United States. America is the heir to the empire in both senses: offspring in the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is, Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited? I do not believe that question can be answered without an understanding of how the British empire rose and fell; and of what it did, not just for Britain but for the world as a whole.
Was the British empire a good or bad thing? It is nowadays quite conventional to think that, on balance, it was a bad thing. One obvious reason for the empire’s fall into disrepute was its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself. This is no longer a question for historical judgment alone; it has become a political, and potentially a legal, issue. The questions recently posed by an eminent historian on BBC television may be said to encapsulate the current conventional wisdom. “How,” he asked, “did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world? ... How did an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?’' How, despite their “good intentions,” did the British sacrifice “common humanity” to “the fetish of the market”?
Despite a certain patronizing fondness for postcolonial England, most Americans need little persuading that the British empire was a bad thing. The Declaration of Independence itemizes “a long train of abuses and usurpations” by the British imperial government, “pursuing invariably the same Object,” namely “a design to reduce [the American colonists] under absolute Despotism” and to establish “an absolute Tyranny over these States.” A few clear-sighted Americans -- notably Alexander Hamilton -- saw from an early stage that the United States would necessarily become an empire in its own right; the challenge, in his eyes, was to ensure that it was a “republican empire,” one that did not sacrifice liberty at home for the sake of power abroad. Even Hamilton’s critics were covert imperialists: Jefferson’s expanding frontier implied colonization at the expense of Native Americans. Yet the anti-imperialist strain in American political rhetoric proved -- and continues to prove -- very resistant to treatment.
It is a striking feature of the current debate on American global power that the opponents of an “imperial” American foreign policy can be found on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. In his later years, the novelist Gore Vidal has become an outspoken critic of the American “imperial system,” which, he claims, “has wrecked our society -- $5-trillion of debt, no proper public education, no health care -- and done the rest of the world incomparable harm.” In a similar vein, Chalmers Johnson argues that America is “trapped within the structures of an empire of its own making” and warns that “the innocent of the 21st century are going to harvest unexpected blowback disasters from the imperialist escapades of recent decades” -- implying that terrorist attacks like those of September 11, 2001, are an understandable reaction to American aggression.
What is surprising to European eyes is that the fulminations of the anti-imperialist left should be matched -- with almost perfect symmetry -- on the isolationist right. In his book A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America, Pat Buchanan issued the solemn warning: “Our country is today traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire -- to the same fate. ... If America is not to end the coming century the way the British ... ended this one, we must learn the lessons history has taught us.” For Buchanan, as for Vidal, overseas adventures subvert the ethos of the original, pure-of-heart republic in order to further the interests of sinister special interests. The remedy is to cease “running around on these moral crusades” and bring American troops back home.
The question that remains unresolved in this debate is whether the United States today is more powerful than the British empire of the mid-19th century. On one hand, as Paul Kennedy has pointed out, Britain was never as militarily dominant then as the United States is today. On the other, American power today remains in large measure informal or “soft” -- exercised through economic and cultural agencies rather than colonial structures. Anarcho-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri insist that such informal empire is just as powerful as the formal imperialism of occupying armies and administrators. In their view -- and it is a view widely shared by the multifarious critics of “globalization” -- multinational (but mainly American) corporations, aided and abetted by apparently supranational (but mainly American) public institutions like the International Monetary Fund, exercise just as much power as the soldiers and civil servants who enforced the pax britannica. Yet there clearly is a difference between influencing a nominally sovereign state, whether through economic pressure or cultural penetration, and actually ruling a colony. The United States in 2003 formally controls a far smaller area of the world than the United Kingdom did in 1903. Its weapons have a longer range, but not its writ.
Moreover, there are challenges to American power today that Britain did not have to contend with a hundred years ago. In Joseph Nye’s image of a three-dimensional chessboard, American power is greatest on the top “board’’ of traditional military power; more circumscribed on the middle board of economic power; and relatively weak on the bottom board of “transnational relations that cross borders outside government control,” where the players range from “bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme [to] terrorists transferring weapons or hackers disrupting Internet operations at the other.” The British empire also had to contend with over-mighty bankers and terrorists, but the technological possibilities of the 19th and early 20th centuries favored the imperialists over the individual troublemaker. Only in his wildest dreams could the Mahdi, the leader of the Sudanese dervishes, have devastated the City of London the way Osama bin Laden devastated Lower Manhattan.
Let me now declare an interest. Thanks to the British empire, I have relatives scattered all over the world -- in Alberta, Ontario, Philadelphia, and Perth, Australia. Because of the empire, my paternal grandfather, John, spent his early 20s selling hardware and hooch (White Horse whiskey) in Ecuador -- not a colony, of course, but part of Britain’s “informal” economic imperium in Latin America. Thanks to the empire, my other grandfather, Tom Hamilton, spent nearly three years as an RAF officer fighting the Japanese in India and Burma. His letters home, lovingly preserved by my grandmother, are a wonderfully observant and eloquent account of the Raj in wartime, shot through with that skeptical liberalism which was the core of his philosophy. Thanks to the empire, my Uncle Ian Ferguson’s first job after he qualified as an architect was with the Calcutta firm of McIntosh Burn, a subsidiary of the Gillanders managing agency. Ian had started his working life in the Royal Navy; he spent the rest of his life abroad, first in Africa, then in the Gulf states. To me he seemed the very essence of the expatriate adventurer: sun-darkened, hard-drinking, and fiercely cynical -- the only adult who always, from my earliest childhood, addressed me as a fellow-adult, profanities, black humor, and all.
His brother -- my father -- also had his moment of wanderlust. In 1966, having completed his medical studies in Glasgow, he defied the advice of friends and relatives by taking his wife and two infant children to Kenya, where he worked for nearly two years teaching and practicing medicine in Nairobi. Thus, thanks to the British Empire, my earliest childhood memories are of colonial Africa; for although Kenya had been independent for three years, scarcely anything had changed since the days of White Mischief. We had our bungalow, our maid, our smattering of Swahili -- and our sense of unshakeable security. It was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains, and the taste of ripe mango. I suspect my mother was never happier. And although we finally came home -- back to the gray skies and the winter slush of Glasgow -- our house was always filled with Kenyan memorabilia.
So to say that I grew up in the empire’s shadow would be to conjure up too tenebrous an image. To the Scots, the empire stood for bright sunlight. Little may have been left of it on the map by the 1970s, but my family was so completely imbued with the imperial ethos that its importance went unquestioned. Indeed, the legacy of the empire was so ubiquitous and omnipresent that we regarded it as part of the normal human condition. Holidays in Canada did nothing to alter this impression.
Admittedly, by the time I reached my teens, the idea of a world ruled by chaps with red coats, stiff upper lips, and pith helmets had become something of a joke. When I got to Oxford in 1982, the empire was no longer even funny. In those days the Oxford Union still debated solemn motions like “This House Regrets Colonization.” Young and foolish, I rashly opposed this motion and in doing so prematurely ended my career as a student politician. I suppose that was the moment the penny dropped: Clearly not everyone shared my confidently rosy view of Britain’s imperial past. Indeed, some of my contemporaries appeared quite scandalized that I should be prepared to defend it. As I began to study the subject in earnest, I came to realize that I and my family had been woefully misinformed: The costs of the British empire had, in fact, substantially outweighed its benefits. The empire had, after all, been one of history’s Bad Things.
There is no need here to recapitulate in any detail the arguments against imperialism. They can be summarized, I think, under two headings: those that stress the negative consequences for the colonized; and those that stress the negative consequences for the colonizers. In the former category belong both the nationalists and the Marxists, from the Mughal historian Gholam Hossein Khan, author of the Seir Mutaqherin (1789), to the Palestinian academic Edward Said, author of Orientalism (1978), by way of Lenin and a thousand others in between. In the latter camp belong the liberals, from Adam Smith onward, who have maintained for almost as many years that the British empire was, even from Britain’s point of view, “a waste of money.”
The central nationalist/Marxist assumption is, of course, that imperialism was economically exploitative: every facet of colonial rule, including even the apparently sincere efforts of Europeans to study and understand indigenous cultures, was at root designed to maximize the surplus value that could be extracted from the subject peoples. The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces -- using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favor of the metropolis -- it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either. In this view, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that mattered, not the coercive integration of imperialism. Thus, investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies, while the cost of defending the empire was a burden on taxpayers, who might otherwise have spent their money on the products of a modern consumer goods sector.
The common factor in these arguments was and remains the assumption that the benefits of international exchange could have been and can be reaped without the costs of empire. To put it more concisely: Can you have globalization without gunboats?
It has become almost a commonplace that globalization today has much in common with the integration of the world economy in the decades before 1914. But what exactly does this overused word mean? Is it an economically determined phenomenon, in which the free exchange of commodities and manufactures tends “to unite mankind in the bonds of peace”? Or might free trade require a political framework within which to work?
The leftist opponents of globalization naturally regard it as no more than the latest manifestation of a damnably resilient international capitalism. By contrast, the modern consensus among liberal economists is that increasing economic openness raises living standards, even if there will always be some net losers as hitherto privileged or protected social groups are exposed to international competition.
But economists and economic historians alike prefer to focus their attention on flows of commodities, capital, and labor. They say less about flows of knowledge, culture, and institutions. They also tend to pay more attention to the ways government can facilitate globalization by various kinds of deregulation than to the ways it can actively promote and indeed impose it. There is growing recognition of the importance of legal, financial, and administrative institutions such as the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems, and incorrupt bureaucracies in encouraging cross-border capital flows. But how did the West European versions of such institutions spread as far and wide as they did?
In a few rare cases -- the most obvious being that of Japan -- there was a process of conscious, voluntary imitation. But more often than not, European institutions were imposed by main force, often literally at gunpoint. In theory, globalization may be possible in an international system of multilateral cooperation. But it may equally well be possible as a result of coercion if the dominant power in the world favors economic liberalism. Empire -- and specifically the British empire -- is the instance that springs to mind.
Today, the principal barriers to the optimal allocation of labor, capital, and goods in the world are, on one hand, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments, which together have condemned so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia to decades of impoverishment; and, on the other, the reluctance of the United States and its allies to practice as well as preach free trade, or to devote more than a trifling share of their vast resources to programs of economic aid. By contrast, for much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection, and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the “imperialism of free trade.” Prima facie, therefore, there seems a plausible case that the empire enhanced global welfare -- in other words, was a Good Thing.
Many charges can, of course, be leveled against the British empire. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was “not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind,” nor, as Lord Curzon did, that “the British empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen.” The empire was never so altruistic. In the 18th century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged -- in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 -- the British response was brutal. When famine struck -- in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s -- the response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable.
Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital, and labor than the British empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order, and governance around the world. To characterize all this as “gentlemanly capitalism” risks underselling the scale -- and modernity -- of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the “ornamental” (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkably nonvenal administrations.
The difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire. It is, however, instructive to try to imagine a world without the British empire. But while it is just about possible to imagine what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First World War, the imagination reels from the counterfactual of a world without the British empire.
As I traveled around that empire’s remains in the first half of 2002, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls -- which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but these vast metropoles remain cities founded and built by the British.
It is of course tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power; perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else, too. Maybe the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe too the great movements of population that transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.
Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows, and migration could have been “naturally occurring” in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to wipe away.
When the British governed a country -- even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles -- there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:
1. The English language 2. English forms of land tenure 3. Scottish and English banking 4. The Common Law 5. Protestantism 6. Team sports 7. The limited or “night watchman” state 8. Representative assemblies 9. The idea of liberty
The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the empire -- the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals -- far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain’s imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.
Would other empires have produced the same effects? It seems doubtful. In my travels I caught many glimpses of world empires that might have been: in dilapidated Chinsura, a vision of how all Asia might look if the Dutch empire had not declined and fallen; in whitewashed Pondicherry, which all India might resemble if the French had won the Seven Years’ War; in dusty Delhi, where the Mughal empire might have been restored if the India Mutiny had not been crushed in 1858; in Kanchanaburi, where the Japanese empire built its bridge on the River Kwai with British slave labor. Would New Amsterdam be the New York we know today if the Dutch had not surrendered it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonization? For better, for worse -- fair and foul -- the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of empire.
Of course no one would claim that the record of the British empire was unblemished. On the contrary it often failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation, and the “ethnic cleansing” of indigenous peoples. Yet the 19th-century empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements, and, with the abolition of slavery, free labor. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the 20th century, too, it more than justified its own existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.
What lessons can the United States today draw from the British experience of empire? The obvious one is that the most successful economy in the world -- as Britain was for most of the 18th and 19th centuries -- can do a very great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies. It is nothing short of astonishing that Great Britain was able to govern so much of the world without running up an especially large defense bill. To be precise, Britain’s defense expenditure averaged little more than 3 percent of net national product between 1870 and 1913, and it was lower for the rest of the 19th century. That was money well spent. No doubt it is true that, in theory, open international markets would have been preferable to imperialism; but in practice global free trade was not and is not naturally occurring. The British empire enforced it.
By comparison, the United States today is vastly wealthier relative to the rest of the world than Britain ever was. In 1913 Britain’s share of total world output was 8 percent; the equivalent figure for the United States in 1998 was 22 percent. Nor should anybody pretend that, at least in fiscal terms, the cost of expanding the American empire, even if it were to mean a great many small wars like the one in Afghanistan, would be prohibitive. In 2000 American defense spending stood at just under 3 percent of gross national product, compared with an average for the years 1948 to 1998 of 6.8 percent. Even after big cuts in military expenditure, the United States is still the world’s only superpower, with an unrivaled financial and military-technological capability. Its defense budget is 14 times that of China and 22 times that of Russia. Britain never enjoyed such a lead over her imperial rivals.
The hypothesis, in other words, is a step in the direction of political globalization, with the United States shifting from informal to formal empire much as late Victorian Britain once did. That is certainly what we should expect if history does indeed repeat itself. Like the United States today, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface. Its empire began as a network of coastal bases and informal spheres of influence, much like the post-1945 American “empire.” But real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism. That was how so much of the atlas came to be colored imperial red.
No one could deny the extent of the American informal empire -- the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies, and even of TV evangelists. Is this so very different from the early British empire of monopoly trading companies and missionaries? Nor is it any coincidence that a map showing the principal U.S. military bases around the world looks remarkably like a map of Royal Navy coaling stations a hundred years ago. Even recent American foreign policy recalls the gunboat diplomacy of the British empire in its Victorian heyday, when a little trouble on the periphery could be dealt with by a short, sharp “surgical strike.” The only difference is that today’s gunboats fly.
Yet in three respects the process of “Anglobalization” is fundamentally different today. On close inspection, America’s strengths may not be the strengths of a natural imperial hegemon. For one thing, British imperial power relied on the massive export of capital and people. But since 1972 the American economy has been a net importer of capital (to the tune of 15 percent of gross domestic product last year), and it remains the favored destination of immigrants from around the world, not a producer of would-be colonial emigrants. Britain in its heyday was able to draw on a culture of unabashed imperialism which dated back to the Elizabethan period, whereas the United States will always be a reluctant ruler of other peoples. Since Woodrow Wilson’s intervention to restore the elected government in Mexico in 1913, the American approach has too often been to fire some shells, march in, hold elections, and then get the hell out -- until the next crisis. Haiti is one recent example; Kosovo another. Afghanistan may yet prove to be the next.
The reality is that the United States has -- whether it admits it or not -- taken up some kind of global burden. It considers itself responsible not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states, but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. And just like the British empire before it, the American empire unfailingly acts in the name of liberty, even when its own self-interest is manifestly uppermost.
Yet the empire that rules the world today is both more and less than its British begetter. It has a much bigger economy, many more people, a much larger arsenal. But it is an empire that lacks the drive to export its capital, its people, and its culture to those backward regions that need them most urgently and that, if they are neglected, will breed the greatest threats to its security. It is an empire, in short, that dare not speak its name. It is an empire in denial.
The former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said that Britain had lost an empire but failed to find a role. Perhaps the reality is that the Americans have taken our old role without yet facing the fact that an empire comes with it. The technology of overseas rule may have changed -- the dreadnoughts may have given way to F-15s. But like it or not, and deny it who will, empire is as much a reality today as it was throughout the 300 years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world.
Niall Ferguson is a professor of financial history at New York University. This essay is excerpted from Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and Lessons for Global Power, to be published next month by Basic Books. Copyright © 2002 by Niall Ferguson.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 29, Page B7