HISTORY: Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man's WorldBy Bill Schwarz Oxford University Press, 584pp. £35
EXHAUSTED AND IMPOVERISHED by the second World War, Britain lost the will to govern the biggest empire of all time. Without the support of Her Majesty’s Government, local rulers of the British colonies could not maintain control. As a British spymaster in a recent John le Carré novel put it, with painful aptness, “We are suffering, as an ex-great nation, from top-down corporate rot.” The centre could not hold; things fell apart.
Bill Schwarz, of Queen Mary, University of London, who has lectured on sociology, cultural studies, communications and English as well as history, seems to have assumed the role of academic undertaker. In the first instructive, melancholy volume of a projected three-volume imperial postmortem, he describes the decline of elite and populist morale that brought about decolonisation. The suddenness of the process shocked people who cared. In the hedonistic clamour of postimperial consumerism, a large number of the people of Britain couldn’t have cared less.
In the introduction, Schwarz outlines the prospectus for his monumental work. After The White Man's Worldhe will publish The Caribbean Comes to Englandand Postcolonial England?His didactic method is perfectly clear: as he goes along, he tells what he is going to tell; he tells it; he tells what he has told. With patient consideration, he treats readers as students. All of us who finish the course should be able to do quite well in the exam. Though he presents most of the historical data in a reasonably objective way, to earn top marks one will have to share his evident hostility to the policies of the New Right, a commitment I found easy to make.
“Enoch Powell – eccentric, heretical, often crazed – appears at the very beginning of the opening volume and at the end of the final one,” Schwarz writes. “The structure of my narrative works back historically from the moment of Powell in Birmingham in April 1968,” when Powell warned that black immigration to Britain would result in “rivers of blood”. Schwarz cites that incendiary speech “to demonstrate both the extent of popular mobilisation for Powell and the intensity of the political emotions of those who identified with him”.
British imperialists, like other western peoples, believed in white supremacy, at least until the middle of the 20th century, and some reactionaries clung on to the concept long afterwards. The British, sometimes, perhaps, altruistically, had imposed British law, British education, the moral rules of the Anglican church, British medicine, British systems of transport and communication, and British games on conquered nations. British civilisation, while said to be improving the lives of colonial natives, certainly made them better able to serve their masters (and mistresses) and to produce plenty of raw materials for burgeoning British industries. The irony was that the more effectively the whites raised the standards, abilities and usefulness of the allegedly inferior local population, the more ardently the latter aspired to equality and demanded national self-determination. Development raised doubt: was white really supreme?
Schwarz exhibits the breadth of his political and historiographical credentials, veering discreetly to the left of centre by quoting the eloquent black polemicist James Baldwin on the subject of skin pigmentation. "Baldwin," Schwarz writes, "was concerned with how whiteness operates in the psychic and emotional organisation of the inner life." Baldwin dismissed whiteness as a state of mind, a metaphor, a historical event, and seemed to nullify the works of all the imperial propagandists, such as Rudyard Kipling, John Buchan, Robert Baden-Powell, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Wallace, Winston Churchill and Lord Harmsworth's Daily Mail.
Even more traumatically than the earlier independence and partition of India, Egyptian nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956 signified the end of the empire. Alan Lennox-Boyd, later Lord Boyd, patron of the Monday Club, a right-wing pressure group of Conservative backbench members of parliament, predicted that “failure to stand up to Nasser would put Britain out of business”, Schwarz relates. He quotes Michael Foot’s “wonderfully irreverent portrait” of Lennox-Boyd as “a junior imp who never grew up, a Primrose League Peter Pan”. When, as a journalist, I visited Sir Anthony Eden in his office at 10 Downing Street early in the Suez crisis, the prime minister’s obvious anxiety already made it apparent that his cause was doomed, even before the US threat to subvert sterling forced a humiliating climbdown. It surely wasn’t Eden’s inflamed bile duct, as publicly announced, that soon brought about his resignation.
Schwarz deals thoroughly with the subsequent collapse of Britain’s African colonies, in spite of the attempts of Roy Welensky, Jan Smuts, Ian Smith and others to maintain the status quo and even to combine an enlarged Central African Federation with segregated South Africa. Meanwhile, members of the Monday Club conducted a Powellite campaign to halt black immigration and to begin repatriation, with no success whatsoever. As Britain became multiethnic, only the dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand remained white; to them, the aborigines and Maoris didn’t count. Schwarz does not offer what he calls “popular history amenable to the demands of television or to the zippy narrative of a page-turner”. Zippy he isn’t. But the beginning of his trilogy promises a major serious educational opus.
Patrick Skene Catling has published novels, and books for children
