Empire builders
Keith Windschuttle
American Outlook
VI, 3, Summer 2003

As recently as two years ago, any author making a forthright defense of European imperialism would have found it hard to get his book published and almost impossible to attract a favorable review in the press. The historical record of imperialism was regarded in right-thinking circles everywhere as a topic to be censured.

Almost overnight, however, what was once a dirty word has been accepted back into the realm of acceptable political debate. Partly as a consequence of the shock of September 11 and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, but partly also as the result of a long period of historical revision about the economic consequences of the European expansion that began five centuries ago, the whole story is being re-assessed. Moreover, several authors have emerged to advocate a new imperial role for the United States itself.

The most scholarly of these is historian Niall Ferguson whose new book Empire is also the basis of a television series of the same name produced by Channel Four in London. [1] The book is a complete history of the British Empire, from its sixteenth century origins in the islands of the Caribbean and the wastelands of Virginia and New England, to its peak in the early twentieth century when it ruled one quarter of the world's landmass and people, and to its demise over the subsequent fifty years when two world wars undermined Britain's economic ability and political will to remain an imperial power. Ferguson has produced a tour de force, a compelling work, which, thanks to the very intelligent structure of its narrative, is an exceptionally good read, indeed the best introduction to this vast subject to be found. The most provocative aspect of the book, however, is not its history but the political lessons the author draws for the present.

Ferguson argues that the United States today has much to learn from the centuries of British experience. He says that, as the world's only remaining superpower, America has itself already taken on a de facto imperial role very much like the one Britain once played. However, because the American political tradition has been largely anti-colonialist, Ferguson claims the US is an empire that dare not speak its name. "It is an empire in denial."

Ferguson's aim is to demonstrate that Britain's imperial record is not merely nothing to be ashamed of, but was a positive force that "made the modern world". The history of the empire was characterized by the global spread of trade and wealth, technological and cultural modernization, and the growth of liberalism and democracy. Many of these benefits were conferred not just on those places directly ruled by the British. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage them in countries outside its formal domain but under its economic influence through the "imperialism of free trade".

This assessment will not, of course, be welcomed by many of the radical nationalists and aging Marxists in the formerly colonized countries who initially used the argument of imperial exploitation as the basis for their demand for independence and who have employed it ever since as a convenient excuse for their own failure to thrive in the post-colonial world. They and their Western academic supporters have claimed that all aspects of imperial rule, even including scholarly attempts by Europeans to research and appreciate the indigenous cultures, were ultimately aimed at maximizing the surplus value that could be extracted from the subject peoples.

Ferguson's book disarms much of this criticism by agreeing with it up to a point. In the eighteenth century, he acknowledges, the British were as zealous in acquiring and exploiting slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp out slavery. Until well into the twentieth century in India and Africa, Britain practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that most people today would consider abhorrent. Moreover, when imperial authority was challenged -- in India in 1857 and 1919, in Jamaica in 1831 and 1865, in South Africa in 1899 -- the British response was brutal. When famine struck -- in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s -- Ferguson says the response was negligent, "in some measure positively culpable". At the height of imperial power around 1900, Tory grandees like the Indian Viceroy, George Nathaniel Curzon, displayed an aristocratic hubris unknown since Rome.

In fact, the one major mistake Ferguson has made on an empirical matter derives from conceding too much to the empire's critics. He says that, in early nineteenth century Australia, the Aborigines of Tasmania were hunted down, confined and ultimately exterminated: "an event which truly merits the now overused term 'genocide' ". However, his source is the book by the Australian expatriate art critic Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, a lurid history that was a best seller internationally but whose scholarship has been largely discredited at home. The concept of Tasmanian "genocide" is now rejected even by prominent left-wing Australian historians who otherwise still try to portray black and white relations down under in their worst possible light. The colonial governments wanted to civilize and modernize the Aborigines, not exterminate them. Their intentions were not to foster violence towards the Aborigines but to prevent it.

Ferguson believes the real debate over the Empire should be less over the morality of individual events and personalities and more about the major changes it brought and the differences it made to the lives of most people it affected. From this perspective, his principal opponents are not the nationalist and Marxist left but those classical liberals, from Adam Smith onwards, who always argued that imperialism was bad for both the British and the world economy. They believed that because imperialism distorted market forces -- using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in favor of the metropolis -- it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy. From the classical liberal perspective, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that was important, rather than coercive imperial rule. In support of this case, Ferguson notes, one recent historian has claimed that if Britain had got rid of its empire in the 1840s, it could have reaped a "decolonization dividend" of a 25 per cent tax cut.

Ferguson is himself a liberal economic historian but he takes issue with the anti-imperialism of the classical economists. While they preferred to focus their attention on flows of commodities, capital and labor, they said less about flows of knowledge, culture and institutions. For the transition to modernity to occur, he argues, legal, financial and administrative institutions such as the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems and incorrupt bureaucracies were essential. Institutions of this kind were the cultural products of Western Europe, especially Britain itself. The only way for the world to gain their benefits was for Europe's most powerful military and economic nation to impose them on the countries it made part of its empire.

Imperialism encouraged investors to put their money in developing economies, places that would otherwise have been sites of great risk. The extension of empire into the less developed world had the effect of reducing this risk by imposing, directly or indirectly, some form of British rule. In practice, money invested in a de jure colony such as India, or a colony in all but name such as Egypt, was a great deal more secure than money invested in a de facto colony such as Argentina.

Ferguson admits the long-term economic impact of imperialism remains difficult to quantify. No one has yet ventured to calculate what the benefit to the world economy as a whole may have been. "That it was a benefit and not a cost seems beyond dispute," he argues, "given the catastrophic consequences of the global descent into protectionism as Britain's imperial power waned in the 1930s".

When the British Empire was at its peak of influence, he points out, it was a much greater positive force for international investment, especially in poor countries, than any of today's institutions. In 1913 some 63 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1996 the proportion was only 28 per cent. In 1913, 25 per cent of the world stock of capital was invested in poor countries; by 1997 it was no more than 5 per cent.

Similarly, the consequences of the end of empire for a number of these poor countries have been stark. In 1955 per capita GDP in Britain was 7 times greater than Zambia. Today, per capita GDP in Britain is 28 times that of Zambia. In 1960, at independence, average income in Sierra Leone was around one seventh of that in Britain. Today, average income in Sierra Leone is one sixteenth of Britain. "It has been since independence that the gap between the colonizer and the ex-colony has become a gulf," Ferguson observes. "The same is true of nearly all former colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, with the notable exception of Botswana."

As well as the economic consequences of the British version of economic globalization, Ferguson also sees the legal and political structures of the Empire were real gains. Countries that were former British colonies, he demonstrates, had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratization after independence than those ruled by others. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million that has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony. While some have degenerated into tyranny and chaos or, like Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe, are on a downward trajectory to the same status, a study of 53 former British colonies in 1993 found just under half were still democracies. Ferguson attributes this to the way that British rule, particularly where it was indirect, encouraged the formation of collaborating elites. He also argues for the beneficial role of Protestant missionaries, who played a part in encouraging Western-style aspirations for political freedom in parts of Africa and the Caribbean.

The British notion of political freedom was probably the most important legacy because it set the Empire apart from its European rivals. Wherever the British were behaving despotically, Ferguson points out, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behavior from home. Indeed, he says the critical yardstick of liberty 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.

In short, what the British proved was that empire was a form of international government that could work - and not just for the benefit of the ruling power. It worked to globalize not just an economic but a legal and ultimately a political system too.

It is this conclusion that Ferguson believes the United States should heed today. In fact, he argues there is even more reason for America to now become the world's imperial power than Britain ever had. The United States is vastly wealthier relative to the rest of the world. In 1913 Britain's share of world output was 8 per cent; the equivalent figure for the US in 1998 was 22 per cent. Nor would the cost of expanding an American Empire be prohibitive, he argues. Present American military budgets are 14 times that of China and 22 times that of Russia. Britain never enjoyed such a lead over her imperial rivals.

Ferguson believes the United States already constitutes an informal imperial power. He predicts it will eventually shift to a formal empire, much as late Victorian Britain once did. "That is certainly what we should expect if history repeats itself," he argues.

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… Nor is it a coincidence that a map of the principal US military bases around the world looks remarkably like a map of Royal Navy coaling stations a hundred years ago.

He acknowledges there are significant differences between the two powers. Britain was a net exporter to its empire of both capital and labor while the United States today is a net importer of both. Whereas late Victorian British culture, corrupted by a jingoistic press, was seduced by the idea of empire, American culture since the 1790s, at both elite and popular levels, has preserved a strong anti-imperialist sentiment. Nonetheless, Ferguson argues that, whether it admits it or not, America has already taken up the global burden of the world's most powerful state. It has shouldered the responsibility not just for waging war against terrorism and rogue states but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy around the world. All that remains is to formally recognize the reality of its position.

In making this case, however, Ferguson has overlooked the most important force that transformed Britain from an overseas trader with a handful of minor colonies in the Americas into a major international player. As his own history makes very clear, that force was imperial rivalry. Starting with the Seven Years War of the 1750s, Britain and France embarked on the imperial equivalent of an arms race. Until then, the British presence in India had amounted to a small number of trading ports: Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. However, conflict with France and its Mughal allies escalated to the point where victory in the resulting wars meant Britain acquired the territory of both the French and the Mughals. By the nineteenth century, this process left most of the sub-continent in British hands. Eventually, to prevent its rival from gaining a strategic naval advantage, Britain felt compelled to establish a chain of naval stations around the globe, as well as colonies extending far into the Pacific Ocean. Similarly, the scramble for Africa had more to do with guaranteeing the sea route to India and curbing the emerging imperial ambitions of the Germans and Italians than with securing Rhodesian gold and diamond mines.

The United States today is in nothing like this position. Indeed, the fall of the USSR in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of international communism, put an end to the only plausible rival to America's international status. There is no other serious contender on any imaginable horizon. Indeed, America's current place in the world is historically unique. There has never been a world power so far ahead of its competitors in economic and military terms. It is not comparable to that of Britain at any time in the past -- nor to any of the ancient empires, for that matter. Only if another rival imperial force arose again, posing a threat similar to that of international communism, might Ferguson's argument for a more formal imperial role by America make sense. But without an imperative of this kind, it would have little reason to emulate the British Empire, and a long-standing cultural tradition to inhibit it from doing so.

Notes

1. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Basic Books, New York, 2003