Colin Robertson’s review of Matthew Lange’s recent book, Lineages of Despotism and Development, takes issue with the rather reasonable view that the illiberal character of every imperial adventure is always unwelcome to those who are colonized. In response, he evokes the grandeur and nobility of sentiment that adorned the British imperial project at its apex. Yet one cannot help suspecting that where Lange sees the reality, Robertson serves up romance. He falls prey to the easy trifecta of self-serving arguments employed by defenders of the British Empire—it was preferable to its vampire empire competitors, it left behind some worthy institutions and, finally, it saved the Natives from themselves (witness the bloodshed when Britain finally left).
Robertson reflects “it sometimes seems that more ink than blood has been spilled by both [the British Empire’s] defenders and antagonists.” Sadly, this was not the case. The long and grisly catalogue from slave trade to aborigine slaughter, opium wars, murderous collective reprisal massacres from the Sudan, Malaysia and Amritsar, to the Bengal famine of 1770, all tell a much different story of empire than that of the penny post. Rather, one comes to view a state of affairs littered with avarice, cruelty and incompetence only to be justified with the rhetoric of a humanizing and humanitarian ideal. History shows that where freedom and empire are in tension, those who would conquer display a preference for the latter. Robertson approvingly quotes Orwell, but misses a more instructive passage where Orwell notes that “empire is a despotism—benevolent, no doubt, but still a despotism with theft as its final object.”
Isn’t this debate oh-so-1990s—aren’t we all post-colonial now? The consequences of understanding empire and our role in it are real, particularly as former colonies that were at the business end of empire start to play larger global roles and flirt with their own imperial projects (China in Africa). English Canada is still recovering from our own post-colonial hangover, not sure what to be proud of and what to disassociate from. Our response to our own part in imperial history will inform our global relationships in the coming decades. The glories of dominion status and the glamour of association with such a grand global project as empire rightly started to fade in the trenches of World War One and have been thoroughly supplanted by the emergence of modern, post-Pearsonian Canada. In practice, we’ve fashioned a very 21st-century post-imperial idea of self that, if well told, travels well in the rest of the world. But, as Robertson shows, nostalgia, even amongst keen observers, fades slowly and is deeply wrapped up in our family and institutional memories. Robertson, and the rest of us, would do well to recall Edward Gibbon: “The history of empires is the history of human misery.”
