Table of Contents
Praise
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I - RULE BRITANNIA
Chapter 1 - THE ENDURING EMPIRE
Chapter 2 - MR. POTTER’S EMPIRE
Part II - NORTH AMERICA
Chapter 3 - CALLING THE NEW WORLD INTO EXISTENCE TO REDRESS THE BALANCE OF THE OLD
An Empire of Liberty
Plunder and Plantations
We Want You for the New World
“Setting the World on Fire”
Imperial Summit: Wolfe at Quebec
An Empire of Their Own
An Imperial Family Quarrel
The Politics of Prudence
The Empire Strikes Back
Chapter 4 - SIR FRANCIS DRAKE (1540–1596)
Francis Drake: Preacher’s Kid Turned Pirate
Raider of the Spanish Main
The Terror of All the Seas
Armada!
Chapter 5 - SIR HENRY MORGAN (1635–1684)
“More Used to the Pike Than the Book”
Vice Admiral of Buccaneers
The Governor’s Deputy
Chapter 6 - CHARLES CORNWALLIS, 1ST MARQUESS CORNWALLIS (1738–1805)
The Reluctant General
Yorktown
A Passage to India
Part III - IRELAND AND JOHN BULL’S OTHER EUROPEAN ISLANDS
Chapter 7 - THE SHAMROCK AND THE ROCK
The Arrival of the English
Going Native
Ireland: England’s Tijuana
War, War, and More War
Good Time Charlie and the Siege of Derry
Reform and Famine
Independence: Gladstone and Parnell; Lloyd George and De Valera
The Gunman’s Republic
Irish Peace at Last
Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, and the Ionian Islands
Chapter 8 - SIR WALTER RALEIGH (1554–1618)
Virginia’s Founder
In Search of El Dorado
Chapter Nine - ARTHUR WELLESLEY, THE 1ST DUKE OF WELLINGTON (1769–1852)
Napoleon’s Nemesis
Pillar of State
Chapter 10 - SIR CHARLES NAPIER (1782–1855)
Peccavi
Part IV - INDIA
Chapter 11 - THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
Avenging the Black Hole of Calcutta
An Evolving Empire
The Great Indian Mutiny
Kim’s Commission
Gandhi versus Churchill
Chapter 12 - ROBERT CLIVE, 1ST BARON CLIVE (1725–1774)
From Clerk to Hero
The Prize of Plassey
Ennobled but Not Respected
Chapter 13 - GEORGE CURZON, 1ST MARQUESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON (1859–1925)
The Great Viceroy
Curzon’s Age of Lead
Chapter 14 - LOUIS MOUNTBATTEN, 1ST EARL MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA (1900–1979)
Young Mountbatten
Labour’s Viceroy
Part V - AFRICA
Chapter 15 - THE DARK CONTINENT
Ashanti
Lord Lugard and “Indirect Rule”
Cry, the Beloved Country
The Boer War
The Wind of Change
Chapter 16 - GENERAL CHARLES GEORGE GORDON (1833–1885)
The Ever Victorious Army
Gordon of Khartoum
Chapter 17 - HERBERT KITCHENER, 1ST EARL KITCHENER (1850–1916)
Secret Agent in the Sudan
Omdurman
Battling the Boers
Kitchener: The Great Recruiting Poster
Chapter 18 - IAN DOUGLAS SMITH (1919–2007)
UDI
Après Smith le Déluge
Part VI - MIDDLE AND NEAR EAST
Chapter 19 - THE LOVE OF DESOLATE PLACES
Passport to Suez
Denouement at Suez
The Kingdom of Iraq
The Power behind the Peacock Throne
Between Two Ancient Peoples: Arabia and Palestine
Adventures in Aden
Chapter 20 - SIR RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON (1821–1890)
Soldier and Spy
The Great Adventure
Cannibals and a Knighthood
Chapter 21 - T. E. LAWRENCE (1888–1935)
Revolt in the Desert
Lawrence of Arabia
Maker of the Middle East
Chapter 22 - LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR JOHN BAGOT GLUBB (1897–1986)
Glubb of Mesopotamia
The End of Glubb Pasha
Part VII - AUSTRALIA AND THE FAR EAST
Chapter 23 - AUSSIE RULES
Imperial Australia
Australia at War
The Kiwi Connection
Hong Kong
An Empire of Capitalists, Rajahs, and Planters
Chapter 24 - SIR THOMAS STAMFORD RAFFLES (1781–1826) and SIR JAMES BROOKE (1803–1868)
The White Rajah
Chapter 25 - FIELD MARSHAL SIR THOMAS BLAMEY (1884–1951)
Australia Will Be There
MacArthur’s General
Chapter 26 - FIELD MARSHAL SIR GERALD TEMPLER (1898–1979)
Setting Europe Ablaze—and Sacking Konrad Adenauer
The Tiger of Malaya
Part VIII - RECESSIONAL
Chapter 27 - WINSTON CHURCHILL’S LAMENT
NOTES
INDEX
Other Politically Incorrect Guides You Might Enjoy
Also by H. W. Crocker III . . .
Copyright Page
Praise for
The Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the British Empire
“As someone who grew up in India, I often hear people ask, ‘What have the British done for us?’ Until I read this book, I didn’t have the full answer. And here is Crocker’s answer: ‘Apart from roads, railways, ports, schools, a parliamentary system of government, rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, and the English language . . . nothing!’”
—Dinesh D’Souza, President of the King’s College and bestselling author of The Roots of Obama’s Rage
“The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire™ offers a cautionary tale for Americans who don’t believe the sun could ever set on our great land. Even the nations collapse when a people no longer believes in itself or its mission. Harry Crocker’s book is a jolly good read for Anglophiles and history buffs in general.”
—Brett M. Decker, Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Times and former Governor of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club
“H. W. Crocker’s Politically Incorrect Guide™ to the British Empire is a vivid, wide-ranging and persuasive defence of an empire that spread freedom, democracy and the rule of law to all the corners of the earth. As Crocker shows, the British people supported the Empire because they believed in the superiority of their civilisation. This belief was neither false nor hypocritical, and Crocker adroitly assembles the proof that the Empire was both a liberating force in a dangerous world, and a testimony to those old virtues—grit, leadership and the stiff upper lip—which were taught to British children of my generation, and which are being air-brushed from history by the cult of political correctness. This brave and persuasive book deserves to be read in all courses of school history: it tells an inspiring story in an inspiring way.”
—Professor Roger Scruton, philosopher, founding editor of The Salisbury Review, and author of more than two dozen books, including Art and Imagination and A Politica
l Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism
For Fiona, Regis, Rafferty, Garnet, Auberon, and Trajan
“The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment, and all the parlour pinks and eager, ill-informed intellectuals cannot convince me to the contrary.”
—Noël Coward, diary entry, 3 February 1957
Part I
RULE BRITANNIA
Chapter 1
THE ENDURING EMPIRE
The British Empire still exists, thank goodness, with its outposts in the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar, the British Antarctic Territory, Pitcairn Island, and a peppering of other British Overseas Territories (including Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, and St. Helena) and Crown Dependencies (closer to home, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). Together they ensure that the sun still does not set on the British Empire. At its height, though, Britain’s empire was the largest ever, covering a quarter of the globe—or half of it, if you count Britain’s control of the seas—and governing a quarter of the world’s population.
The empire was incontestably a good thing. The fact that it is controversial to say so is why this book had to be written. In the groves of academe, colonialism and imperialism are dirty words, the fons et origo of Western expansion with all its alleged sins of racism, capitalism, and ignorant, judgmental, hypocritical Christian moralism. But if the Left hates imperialism, so do many so-called paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians who blame the British Empire for dragging the United States into two unnecessary—in their minds—World Wars.
Still, most Americans are sympathetic to Britain. They think of her as our oldest and most reliable ally, even if they might be ambivalent at best about the British Empire, or harbor a knee-jerk disapproval of it: “Isn’t the empire what we fought against in 1776?” In fact, no. “Aren’t Americans anti-imperialists by birth?” John Adams didn’t think so when he foresaw in 1755, with prescience and pleasure, the transfer “of the great seat of empire to America.”1 Thomas Jefferson didn’t think so when he referred to America as an “empire of liberty”2 or urged the annexation of Canada. And President James K. Polk didn’t think so when he proudly claimed, after the Mexican War, to have “added to the United States an immense empire.”3 For Irish-Americans, of course, the ancient animosity against England, inherited from the old sod and lovingly nurtured, makes them dubious, or worse,4 about the British Empire—though, as we’ll see, much of this animosity is based on Shamrock-shaded myths.
To hate the British Empire is to hate ourselves, for the United States would not exist if not for the British Empire. It was that Empire that created the North American colonies, giving them their charters, their people, their language, their culture, their governments, and their ideas of liberty. The inherited “rights of Englishmen” going back at least to the Magna Carta of 1215, were planted on American soil by English people in an overt act of profit-making imperialism. Moreover, the American War of Independence was not a war against the idea of empire. It was a war guided by men like Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, who wanted an American Empire of their own—and who were in fact partly motivated by the British Empire not being imperialist enough.
After the War of Independence, Britain’s trade with the United States surpassed what its trade had been with the Thirteen Colonies. Even with the interruption of the War of 1812, Britain was not only a trading partner, it was a tremendous source of new Americans. From the end of that war (1815) through the presidency of Zachary Taylor (1850), roughly 80 percent of British emigrants came to the United States;5 we can presume they saw America as a second Britain, but one with more opportunity. Despite occasional diplomatic kerfuffles, there was an ineluctable bond between Britain and the United States, a bond that encompassed everything from the influence British literature had over American writers to the quietly conducted power politics of the Royal Navy helping enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In 1899, when Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem about picking up the white man’s burden, his purpose was not to urge his fellow Britons to greater sacrifices but to congratulate the United States for accepting an imperial mission in the Philippines, joining Britain not as a global rival but as a partner in extending the blessings of Christian civilization.
At the time, Theodore Roosevelt thought Kipling’s poem was bad verse but good politics. Today, at least in English literature courses, if it is taught at all it is merely another exhibit in a long litany of Western condescension to, and exploitation of, native peoples. But Kipling frames the white man’s burden rather differently. It means binding your best men to serve another people, to take up what he says will be a thankless task, yet one that a mature and Christian people must do—to banish famine and sickness, to provide peace and order, to build roads and ports, to seek the profit of another rather than oneself.
Kipling knew the British Empire as well as any man—and he saw it clear-eyed, with all the blood and sacrifice and repression, of self and others, it entailed. He was a patriot for his own country, but India was his country too, the country where he was born and where his imagination was ignited. The British Empire of the twenty-first-century academic lecture hall, however, is something utterly different. The idea that the British Empire was a white man’s burden is treated with scorn, contempt, and ridicule. The Empire was not a responsibility borne by self-sacrificing Britons—on the contrary, the Empire was a vehicle of rapacious, self-serving capitalists responsible for racism, slavery, and oppression on a global scale. But which was it really?
True, the British Empire was responsible for a portion of the slave trade. But it was also responsible for ending it. Indeed, the British Empire’s war against slavery was actually a major factor driving imperial expansion, as the Royal Navy patrolled the coasts of Africa, the Persian Gulf, and the East Indies, and sent troops inland, especially in Africa, to put slavers out of business. British taxpayers also paid off the former slave owners in the British West Indies—spending twenty million pounds (about 37 percent of the British government’s revenues in 1831)6—to ensure that slaves were liberated or made apprentices.
True, the British Empire was animated by the belief that a public school-educated Englishman was capable of governing any number of native peoples. But the Empire also relied to an extraordinary extent on the cooperation of the native peoples; their governing structures were often left largely intact; their aristocracies were generally treated as legitimate elites; and it was the native peoples themselves who provided many or most of the foot soldiers who enforced the imperial Pax Britannica.
True, the British conquered other peoples, drew lines on maps, and declared large portions of the globe part of the Empire. But it is also true that in doing so the British introduced their ideas about the rule of law, liberty, and parliamentary self-government, not to mention their games of cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis, and golf; their literature; their ideas about what constituted fair play; and—to use an imperial word, a Hindi word—their ideas of what was pukka and what was not.
No Plan but Profits, Progress, and Pole-Axing the French
“We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.”
Sir John Robert Seeley, The Expansion of England: Two Courses of Lectures (Macmillan & Co., 1891), p. 8
The British Empire was driven in large part by commercial interests, but these were joined by other interests as well. There were missionary and military interests, of course, but there was also the sheer adventurous, or prideful, desire to paint the map red, something that caught the imagination of many an empire-builder, from the colossal capitalist Cecil Rhodes to the founder of Singapore, Stamford Raffles. If profit was a motive, it is also true that it was the British themselves who often created the infrastructure (the roads, the ports, the railways), developed the products (rubber, tobacco, gold), and provided the markets that brought these far-flung areas into the world economy to a far greater extent than they had been
before.
And if we are to talk about oppression on a global scale it might be well to remember which country sacrificed a generation to preserve liberal ideals against the militarism and aggression of the kaiser’s Germany; which country stood alone against Hitler after the fall of France in 1940; and which country, though riven by Bolshie labor unions and Cambridge spies and traitors, was the most stalwart European opponent of Bolshevism and Communism. As the British historian Christopher Dawson wrote in 1932, the Bolsheviks regarded the British Empire, “not without reason as the chief element of cohesion in the divided ranks of their enemies.”7
In World War I and World War II, and to a certain degree in the Cold War, when one speaks of Britain one speaks of the Empire. In both World Wars, Britain was joined by the self-governing dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; units came from every nation within the Empire; and the all-volunteer Indian Army served on battlefronts in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East—the Indians providing more than three million men all told. When the Cold War turned hot, Britons, Canadians, South Africans, and ANZACs (Australians and New Zealanders) fought in Korea; Rhodesians, Fijians, and ANZACs served with the British in Malaya; and the ANZACs were in Vietnam.
When Britain could no longer maintain the Pax Britannica, it became the Pax Americana. The transition was sometimes less successful than it should have been because of American ambivalence about empire. In World War II the Americans were often suspicious of Britain’s postwar imperial designs, and President Franklin Roosevelt was obsessed with getting the British out of Hong Kong and India (he compared the Indians to the North American colonists of 1776). Rather than empire, Roosevelt believed in a sort of liberal idealism and internationalism, much of it channeled through his plan for a United Nations—an alternative institution and vision, and one that has proven far more prone to bureaucracy, corruption, officiousness, and incompetence than the British Empire.