The British Empire's Lessons for Our Own
By Jeremy Hildreth
14 June 2005
The Wall Street Journal
BRITISH EMPIRE AND COMMONWEALTH MUSEUM
Bristol, England
Bristol, England -- `I like America," sputtered the drunken Welshman a\little too close to my face. "But your foreign policy stinks. You justwant to police the whole world!"
He was pressed next to me in the vestibule of an overcrowded London-bound train, and his timing was extraordinary.
"Funny you should say that," I replied, "because I've just come from the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Seems you guys had a pretty good turn at that `world's policeman' beat once upon a time.Think we Yanks can do any better?" That quieted him right down.
The irony, though, on full display at this comprehensive museum, is that long before the British were policemen they were adventurers and pirates. One of the poorest nations in Europe at the time, the British launched their global ambitions in the 1500s with what the museum
terms "exploration and plunder." This evolved into textile, spice and slave trading (and some North American settlements like Jamestown, Va.), and resolved into a full-blown territorial empire following victory in the Napoleonic wars in 1815. Although Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901 marked the Empire's glory days, its maximum geographic
span came in the 1920s, when fully one-quarter of the world's population fell under its rule.
Roughly twice the size of Spain's empire, thrice that of France's and five times larger than the Roman Empire, the British Empire remains the greatest such agglomeration the world has ever known. The Brits had their shortcomings and foibles -- slavery, brutality, a tendency to call adult servants "boy," etc -- but in the Anglophone hegemony department, they're a tough act to follow.
The museum, which has many photographs and artifacts (few of which are memorable in themselves), covers its subject in the manner of a well-written textbook with poster-sized pages. You'll do a lot of reading here, but what a story. Displays and panels show how using
administrators and settlers backed by small armies and a fearsome navy, the British built whole nations one after the next. Wherever they went, they created governments, judicial systems, schools, hospitals, charities, telegraphs and railways (37,000 miles of track in India alone). Their collective efforts brought the English language, relative prosperity, a Western cultural orientation toward rights and liberty, and at least a modicum of law and order to large
swaths of the globe.
Yet in recent times it's been more fashionable to harp on the consequences of empire than to extol them. The museum itself had to fight through a miasma of anti-Empire sentiment in the decade-long run-up to its opening in 2002. Explains Katherine Hann, head of education and interpretation at the museum, "It was simply deemed
politically incorrect to support an exhibition on the empire," and funding was hard to come by. In the end, having failed to secure the <pound sterling>18 million they needed from public sources, the museum's trustees turned to individuals and foundations for financing, and the museum continues to operate without subsidy from either
national or local government.
For all the anxiety modern-day Brits may have about imperialism, their predecessors were less troubled. Not unlike Americans today, no matter how out of line British foreign actions were at times, the Brits' confidence in the essential goodness of their mission was rarely rattled. The museum portrays this as a culturally rooted belief inculcated from an early age. "British children were taught that serving the empire was a noble duty," says one placard. "Picture books and comic books were full of imperial heroes, and they collected sets of cigarette cards and stamps that showed the empire as a big, happy
family."
The naivete of this view was unsustainable, and to use a British _expression_, eventually things went "pear-shaped." Although World War I saw the enlargement of the empire to include Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Tanganyika (Tanzania), the immense cost of the war pushed Britain's focus onto matters domestic.
Proof of Britain's inability to attend to its vast realm came in World War II, when the empire lost all of its Far Eastern holdings except India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to the Japanese, badly damaging its prestige (and prestige, wrote George Orwell in "Burmese Days," was "the breath of [colonial] life"). Thereafter, the museum tells us, "[the white colonies like] Australia and New Zealand turned to the
U.S. as a more reliable ally. In Asia, people accepted Britain's return only grudgingly. Their political confidence had increased and they demanded immediate steps toward independence."
There was another dynamic in play, too. Strikingly, writes British scholar Niall Ferguson in "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World," even when "the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British
society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain's imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire something of a self-liquidating character." So, to
its credit, and unlike, say, France, Britain did not fight to keep its colonies. Instead, it freed them on the best terms it could get. India was the first to go in 1947, Hong Kong the last in 1997.
Thus, unusually, Britain lost its empire but kept friends. It now exerts its venerable influence in the world through institutions like the Commonwealth, whose 54 former colonial members support each other and meet regularly to play imperial sports like cricket and rugby, and the British Council, a vital organ of soft power that promotes British culture and language abroad, and for which the U.S. regrettably has no counterpart. Britain also balances a strong military with deft international diplomacy, particularly a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council and the "special relationship" with the U.S.
Glaringly, one imperial legacy the museum does not discuss is the "receivership" of the empire by the U.S., which has been almost literal in places like the Middle East and figurative elsewhere. For the museum to weigh in here might have been daring but also instructive, for as Mr. Ferguson, whose book championing an American
"liberal empire" was for sale at the museum shop, says: "Whatever they choose to call their position in the world -- hegemony, primacy, predominance or leadership -- Americans should recognize the functional resemblance between Anglophone power present and past and
should try to do a better rather than a worse job of policing an unruly world than their British predecessors."
America can also learn from the British Empire about changing with the times. The museum explains that "post-war babies [in the formerEmpire] grew up without the old reverence for Britain," which reducedBritish authority. Similarly today, for a dozen reasons -- many of them utterly beyond our control -- people around the world are growing
up without the love of, admiration for, or reliance upon America that their forebears had.
Whether it's South Americans boycotting U.S. merchandise, Asian countries sidling up to China, central banks raising their proportion of euro-denominated reserves, or Welshmen making inebriated banter on trains, we are flush with signs that the world wants a different
relationship with America than the one it's had.
Accordingly, even as America continues to take up the white man's burden (to use Kipling's poetic exhortation, explicitly addressed to the U.S. in 1899), sometimes with force, it behooves us to emulate our former masters by coming, in time, to rely more on soft power than on
economic or military coercion. Furthermore, this should be seen not as a surrender to multilateralist claptrap but as a rational reaction to an altered state of affairs.
The lesson seems to be that while might may sometimes be right, we, like the British before us, ultimately will need other ways to sustain our eminence and influence. And if we can do that, then any future Museum of American Leadership will reflect as well on us as this museum of empire does on Britain.
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