Benefits of Empire

As a young boy I collected stamps, a hobby I shared with my paternal grandmother. Every Saturday we would delve into a black trunk full of stamps—a legacy of my grandfather, who had died in 1944, while my father was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Among my favourites was the two cent Canadian “XMAS 1898,” featuring a map of the world with the British possessions inked in red. The stamp’s inscription (“We hold a vaster empire than has been”) was drawn from Sir Lewis Morris’s “Song of Empire,” an ode written for Queen Victoria’s 1887 Silver Jubilee. The map, a Mercator projection that made the empire look even bigger, was based on a design by Sir George Parkin, then principal of Upper Canada College (and maternal great-grandfather to Michael Ignatieff).

The stamp is testimony to one of the advantages of empire: the imperial penny post, an official measure that allowed sending letter mail within the wider empire for just one British penny, or two Canadian cents. Proposed at the 1898 London Postal Conference by Canadian postmaster general William Mulock, it caught the imagination of British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain. Chamberlain saw it as another means of cementing imperial ties at a time when writing letters was as popular, at least among the elite, as today’s e-mail. Mulock triumphantly sent the first letter bearing Parkin’s map on Christmas Day 1898 to his British counterpart, the Duke of Norfolk.

This penny post was, arguably, yet another example of the kind of positive imperial initiative that gave meaning to one of our enduring colonial legacies, our constitutional mantle of peace, order and good government. It is the broader colonial legacy that McGill sociologist Matthew Lange examines in Lineages of Despotism and Development: British Colonialism and State Power.

Lange recognizes that British rule took various forms during its roughly 500-year history, from John Cabot’s 1497 claim of Newfoundland for Henry VII to the 1997 lowering of the Union Jack in Hong Kong before Prince Charles and Governor Christopher Patten. Parkin’s originally exaggerated map proved prescient. At its early 20th-century zenith, when the sun literally did not set on it, the British empire was seven times bigger than Rome’s, covering a quarter of the earth’s landmass.

During the 19th-century “Age of Empire,” Britain settled Australia, New Zealand and the other Oceanic islands, and effectively governed much of southeast Asia and the Canadian northwest with the absorption of the lands once managed by its great trading enterprises—the East India and Hudson’s Bay companies. The race into Africa continued during the latter part of the century. Disraeli acquired the shares giving Britain control of the French-built Suez Canal in 1875. To secure it, Egypt was occupied in 1882. The canal helped inspire Cecil Rhodes’s vision of British rail eventually moving people and products from the Cape to Cairo. The empire would reach its geographical limits with the acquisition of mandates, mostly former German colonies, during and after the First World War. All subsequently proved a headache.

Divestment with mutual privileges began with an ever-evolving status of self-rule for the Dominion of Canada in 1867, extending to the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 and the Dominion (now Realm) of New Zealand in 1907. The south of Ireland—Eire—and many of the mandates, accumulated in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles, were shed during the inter-war period. The end of the Second World War also marked a rapidly accelerating end of empire. Money and morale had run out with “hope and glory” and the empire could not endure. The Suez debacle in 1956 marked the effective end of Pax Britannica, and with the transfer of Hong Kong back to China in 1997, there remain but a tiny handful of red dots on the map. Withdrawal was usually messy and often bloody. In the years after the Union Jack had come down, post-colonial states were marked by racial and tribal strife, coups, military dictatorships and partition.

Lange’s book is based on two years of fieldwork that took him around the world doing substantive research on institutional developments in 15 former colonies, from Barbados and Nigeria to India, and a statistical analysis that includes data from 24 others. All of this aims to test the developmental impact of British rule in former colonies.

Lange focuses on comparing the post-colonial results of two contrasting administrative styles adopted in the British Empire, depending on the time and place: direct and indirect rule. Admitting that the distinction is contested and sometimes confused, he builds on the work of others—including Frederick Lugard, Michael Hechter, Michael Doyle and Michael Fisher—to come up with his definitions. Indirect rule for Lange is based on “collaborative relations between a dominant colonial center and several regionally based indigenous institutions,” while direct rule is “the construction of a complete system of colonial domination in which both local and central institutions are well integrated and governed by the same authority and organizational principles.”

Simultaneously, he emphasizes that the two styles of colonial government captured by this distinction are basically contrasting ends of a single spectrum. By Lange’s definition the “white dominions” were the more extreme case of direct rule. While British control of northern Nigeria through local chieftains would be an extreme case of indirect rule, he treats the administrations of India and the Straits colonies as representing a hybrid combination of classically colonial and indigenous institutions.

The most successful of Lange’s in-depth case studies is Mauritius, which was captured by Britain from France in 1810 and gained independence in 1968. He argues that British implementation of relatively intense direct rule changed the societal relationship between what were essentially a small francophone ruling elite and the majority Creole and Indian plantation workers, a combination of those descended from slaves and those imported as indentured servants. This non-francophone majority was then able to form relatively free villages of peasants throughout the island and develop what Lange calls associational ties, which helped drive the country’s later developmental success. For Lange, “state bureaucratization, infrastructural power, and inclusiveness” have been critical in explaining Mauritian progress: today, the island is a relatively prosperous upmarket tourist destination, among the best-governed of African states.

In contrast, Sierra Leone, which became a protectorate in 1896, represents a hands-off approach: the British empowered the local elite—the tribal chiefs—to rule through “traditional means.” As Lange notes, the “paramount chiefs” were chosen “according to their abilities to command authority locally and their willingness to collaborate.” These divide-and-conquer tactics, especially after chronic fighting between chiefs, left the country segmented. And just prior to independence, in 1961, when the British sought to improve conditions through development assistance, the local chiefs used the funds as patronage, “offering grants and loans to kin, subchiefs and others as a means of maintaining their loyalty.” A contemporary British inquiry into this “chiefly despotism” concluded that “we have found … a degree of demoralization among the people in their customary institutions and in their approach to the statutory duties with which they have been entrusted which has shocked us. Dishonesty has become accepted as a normal ingredient of life to such an extent that no one has been concerned to fight it or even complain about it.” During the 1990s, civil war fuelled by blood diamonds killed tens of thousands and displaced a third of Sierra Leone’s population, leaving it at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index even in 2008.

On considering the overall impact of British decolonization world-wide, Lange concludes that independence reforms in directly ruled states reinforced, in most cases, the pre-existing structures, while those in indirectly ruled colonies mostly never produced the institutions required to achieve broad-based development. British colonialism, concludes Lange, left a “lasting impact on developmental processes,” although this varied from place to place, depending on the extent and duration of direct and indirect rule.

From time to time, Lange suffers from the academic complaint of slipping into the incomprehensible polysyllabic. Academics should be required to have their aunts, preferably of the P.G. Wodehouse variety, read their prose to keep them honest and readable. I am still trying to figure out his charts—such as “Nestled Strategies for Case Selection”—with their “dependent variable scores.” But he is capable of some clever phrasing, as illustrated in his conclusion that “direct rule was therefore both transformative and intensive, being the British colonial version of Hobbes’s Leviathan.”

Lange occasionally sweeps too broadly, as when, for example, he writes that “despite the relatively high levels of interaction between colonized and colonizer in directly ruled colonies, all systems of foreign domination are one-sided and exclusionary, characteristics that affect the inclusiveness of the colonial state and its active incorporation of local communities into national political institutions.”

While that may in some sense be the case, my own experience as Canadian consul in colonial Hong Kong, especially in the period after Tiananmen Square, suggested that the vast majority of Hong Kongers, if they had been permitted a vote, would have happily chosen to retain British rule. The vast majority, after all, had already voted with their feet when they left the Mainland and crossed into Hong Kong. Indeed, the fences in the northern territories, manned by the celebrated Gurkhas, were there to keep the flow at bay. That said, at least in the early years after Mao consolidated his hold, the British devised a kind of Darwinian safe touch policy, whereby if you made it to the island you were considered home free. Is it any wonder that Milton Friedman considered Hong Kong the epitome of free enterprise?

When one considers the developmental impact of institutions, it is also worth observing that adoption of either the Westminster model or its American derivative is clearly not enough to guarantee success. With some notable exceptions, including Hong Kong and Singapore, post-colonial states in Asia, Africa and Latin America have mostly failed to achieve the levels of growth or political stability associated with the United States or “old Dominions” such as Canada and Australia.

In a celebrated 1994 interview in Foreign Affairs, Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding leader, provided his own explanation for the state’s unusual success. He attributed it to “Confucian values” and lectured the West on its failures, arguing that “we use the family to push economic growth. We were fortunate we had this cultural backdrop: the belief in thrift, hard work, filial piety and loyalty and the extended family, and, most of all, the respect for scholarship and learning.”

Lee Kuan Yew is right—at least in his larger argument that culture does matter.

The late American political scientist Samuel Huntington had a similar view, arguing in favour of the centrality of culture in shaping institutions and, subsequently, political outcomes. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, Huntington asks: “Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.” Similarly, Francis Fukuyama points out that since successful governance is bound up with religious and cultural traditions, any political science that concerns itself only with formal institutional design is destined for failure.

In a survey of the immense literature about Britain’s empire, it sometimes seems that more ink than blood has been spilled by both its defenders and antagonists. And while Lange’s book is a useful addition to this ever-expanding library, it lacks the texture and colour of its outsized characters and far-away places.

When I was in Hong Kong, I met some of the later servants of empire. Like their predecessors, they were a special breed—willing to risk life and limb, learn the local languages and customs, all the while recognizing that in giving up the comforts of home they would forever be changed and would never be fully accepted in either their adopted home or their old country. George Orwell famously recounted his own adventures in “Shooting an Elephant,” but other fine accounts range from Austin Coates’s Myself a Mandarin: Memoirs of a Special Magistrate to Philip Mason’s The Men Who Ruled India. Ultimately, many of the figures described share the view conveyed in Churchill’s notes for an undelivered speech, almost a eulogy on empire, in which he argued that the “broad, shining, liberating and liberalizing tides of the Victorian era” had ended the “wicked and brazen” ways of old, so that “the exploitation of weaker and less well-armed peoples became odious, together with the idea of subject races.”

More generally, Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy remains the best overall account of the British empire, outdoing the spate of recent renditions (such as Piers Brendon’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire) for verve and passion. But George W. Bush and the neo-cons would profitably have read any of them at the outset of their administration, and as Barack Obama doubles down in Afghanistan, he also would do well to browse Morris’s chapter on the early British experience in that country. So would those who continue to believe that America has a providential mission to lead and fix a fallen world.

The debate on British empire continues. The passage of time has been kinder to it than most other imperial ventures. In part, as Lange acknowledges, this is because the former colonies, especially those that enjoyed longer direct rule and settlement—notably the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand—have prospered and continue to enjoy liberty and democracy as part of their legacy of empire.

Arguably, another legacy of empire has equally profound contemporary implications: Mulock’s idea of cheap, accessible international communication. A century later, English has become the lingua franca, and thanks to technology and the global reach of Microsoft and Google, communication through email—the contemporary penny post—has never been easier. And as we learned during Tiananmen Square with the fax, and more recently in Iran with Twitter, these tools have profound implications for globalization, development and democracy.