Imperial nostalgia: How the British conquered themselves

By Peter Mitchell

A strong emotional attachment to the memory of empire runs deep in British culture. In recent years, that memory has become a battleground in a long-drawn ideological war, inflecting debates on race, class, gender, culture, the UK’s future and its place in the world. This provocative and passionate book surveys the scene of the imperial memory wars in contemporary Britain, exploring how the myths that structure our views of empire came to be, and how they inform the present. Taking in such diverse subjects as Rory Stewart and inter-war adventure fiction, man’s facial hair and Kipling, the Alt-right and the Red Wall, Imperial Nostalgia asks how our relationship with our national past has gone wrong, and how it might be improved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526146199

Book preview

Imperial nostalgia

Imperial

nostalgia

How the British conquered themselves

Peter Mitchell

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Peter Mitchell 2021

The right of Peter Mitchell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6131 4 hardback

ISBN 978 1 5261 4620 5 paperback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: opuscule / Alamy Stock Photo

Typeset By Newgen Publishing UK

For my teachers

Non Omnis Moriar [I shall not wholly die]

Horace, Ode 3.30; written above the

doorway of Cecil Rhodes House, Oxford

Sploosh

‘Edward Colston’ (John Cassidy, 1895, bronze casting)

Contents

Introduction

1Associative magic: nostalgic time and the revolt against mourning

2Inventing the tradition: how nostalgia made an empire

3Sovereign bodies: Britain’s imperial present

4‘The best and most perfect virtue’: empire, race and free speech in the battle for the university

5The adventures of the Imperial Wonder Boy: Rory Stewart and the fantasy of innocence

6‘Degraded underfoot perverse creatures’: empire and the languages of class

Conclusion: escaping the empire

Acknowledgements

List of figures

Further reading

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

In 2016, I was employed on an academic project studying the British empire. This project was based around one ambitious idea, which was to try to understand how the British empire worked on a day-to-day basis and on a global scale: as we put it, ‘everywhere and all at once’. Approaching the empire as what geographers call an assemblage – in this case a vast and intricate structure of steamships, jails, territory, grammar books, memoranda, people, ideology, hydrocarbons, laws, food, files and violence – we hoped to come out with some idea of how, across the nineteenth century, the interlinked parts of the global imperial state held together, or didn’t.¹ In practical research terms, this meant settling on a few short snapshots of time across the nineteenth century, locating the records of what passed in and out of the agencies of colonial government during those short timescales, and reading every single last one of them.

It was hard work, mostly tedious and occasionally thrilling. Either way, I wasn’t very good at it; and, outside the archive doors, certain developments were making it very hard to concentrate. It wasn’t just the obvious events of that humid, miserable early summer – in which it was always getting hotter but never seemed to get properly light – but also the sense behind them of a strange and long-brewing crisis that was assuming everything, piece by piece, into its widening gyre. I knew that this crisis had, somehow, a lot to do with the papers I was ploughing through; that this improbable global tissue of steamships, memoranda, jails etcetera had not only shaped the world I inhabited in a multitude of ways, but was exerting a specific pressure on the present.

One particular morning, only days before the Brexit referendum, I sat down in an unusually good mood. It was Bloomsday, the day on which aficionados of James Joyce’s Ulysses celebrate that novel’s cosmopolitan universalism, its mistrust of the codes of nation, empire and masculinity, and its generous, if merciless, examination of kind, common, troubled, despairing, persistent humanity. I ordered up a volume of papers I’d been working through from about the middle of the 1857 Indian uprising, and began to take notes. Then the news began to happen, in hourly increments. The first item of the morning was English football fans taunting migrant children on the streets of Lille; the second the unveiling of Nigel Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster, with its photograph of a column of refugees moving inexorably towards the camera. By lunchtime, Jo Cox MP had been murdered by a white supremacist. I looked down at the documents I was supposed to be studying: troop requisitions and tables of payments to P&O for their transport, interdepartmental bickering, breakdowns of the speed of telegraph communication from Suez via Trieste or Marseilles, all the peripheral logistics of a colonial war; and I felt that some violence coded in these documents had somehow found its way back out into the world and begun to wreak havoc again.

Historians since Michelet have written about the moment at which the dead material of the archive comes alive with the shapes of those whose lives are recorded there. This is usually presented as a quasi-miraculous moment: the dead have been made to speak, their voices recovered and their suffering borne witness to. Fewer have written about the sense that, as a scientist might say, their specimens have escaped from the lab. This probably has to do with embarrassment, since historians are supposed to know better than to be surprised. The violence of the past is ongoing in the present; not only structurally, in that it is built into the foundations of the society in which we live, but in more subtle, more constitutive ways: in the words we use, the images we attach to things, the ways we imagine ourselves and each other.

Plenty of people have always known this. Half a decade on from 2016, the idea that you could be shocked to find the violence of the colonial past carrying through into the present seems quaint – or simply a reflection of an immense obliviousness. I knew about this stuff intellectually. That it should be a shock to feel it at an almost physical level simply testifies, in this case, to this particular historian’s whiteness and maleness, his affluence and safety, his sheer comfort in his well-padded chair in the reverent hush of the British Library. More broadly, it testifies to a certain default way of thinking about the past, one reinforced by the decorousness of archives and museums, by the evocative covers of history books and the aristocratic reconstructions of TV programmes about the Tudors. This way of thinking says that the past is past: it is inert material, catalogued, domesticated, commodified. It is reducible to a set of gestures and styles, a Renaissance fair or a vintage flea market which we can perambulate at leisure, picking and choosing what we want to keep.

Even to me, employed as I was then (however briefly) in researching its history, and paid to know about it, the British empire had never quite escaped the category of something comfortably exterior to my own life and experience. It was something faintly embarrassing and a bit camp: a succession of images from Kipling or Camp Coffee Extract labels, a Christmas showing of Zulu seen through an overfed haze; politically repugnant, to be sure, but not something of real and visceral immediacy. But reading the record of the empire during the summer of 2016 – and, for that matter, ever since – felt like going to a Sealed Knot battle re-enactment and suddenly noticing that the blood was real.

I was wrong, of course: the blood has always been real, just not for everybody. To think otherwise reflects only an immense privilege, bought at the expense of others who have never had the luxury of considering history as something separate from themselves. It seems probable that the common liberal conviction that everything was just fine until 2016 simply reflects the fact that, for many people with access to cultural capital, that year’s events constituted their first proper sense of immersion in history as an ongoing and destructive process: the first time that they had had to face the possibility of having real skin in the game.

Either way, that surprise is long gone. The toppling of Edward Colston’s statue into the Avon in June 2020 marked the most dramatic recent point at which the problem of imperial memory moved from the ambient to the declarative, from a thing which inflected our rolling national crisis to the conduit of its most violent energies. (Again, I was at my desk, this time writing this book; and as it occurred to me that if I simply walked along to my local war memorial and said what I thought about the empire I stood a reasonable chance of getting punched in the face, I realised that I was going to have to do some significant redrafting.)

What followed was clarifying. Within a day of Colston’s toppling, the right-wing journalist Melanie Phillips had set the tone of what would follow from the government and the press, writing in the Times that the Black Lives Matters (BLM) demonstrations had been ‘a form of insurrection against western society and its institutions … the result of decades of appeasing those determined to bring down western culture’.² For years, the convergence of imperial nostalgism and the further reaches of right-wing sentiment had been occurring piecemeal, quietly, by suggestion and inference, with each utterance a testing of what was possible or permissible to say, a pushing of the boundaries of acceptable political discourse; and now here it was in black and white. Imperial iconography had long been the cultural terrain of conservative fears of cultural and racial dilution, shading those fears’ more paranoiac edge into the discourse of replacement theory – the narrative in which a decadent liberal elite is conspiring to bring down white civilisation through demographic change and cultural warfare. Phillips and other prominent commentators on the right had been trafficking in this theory for years, and Phillips herself appears quoted with approval in the manifesto of the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik. Now, after Colston, statues – and the imperial nostalgias of which they were a conveniently visible sign – were to be understood as standing in for a whole civilisation. And, well, here we are.

This book is about Britain’s relationship to its imperial past in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It starts from the observation that we live in the ruins of empire, haunted by its violences and humiliations, traumatised as a society by the things we have done and had done to us in its name, and in thrall to its fantasies of cruelty, subjugation and supremacy. Empire – having had it and having lost it – is the constant background noise to our culture, an underlying neurosis which, even as I have been writing this, has begun to erupt in ever clearer, more frightening and more cathartic forms. The memory and experience of empire is built into the deep structure of how we engage with race, class and gender; it pervades our culture, from prestige TV to the textures of everyday consumer existence; it is built into our constitutional arrangements, just as its legacy structures the arrangements of global capitalism by which we remain one of the world’s richest countries at the expense of its poorest; and it is the contested ground on which we play out some of our most violent and estranging conflicts.

It would be nice if this were only our problem, but it isn’t. The world is getting hotter and we’re running out of both space and time: there’s nowhere to escape to and no more room for prevarication. Almost everywhere, in the face of this fatal entangledness, societies are turning inward – to the nation, to the sovereign state, and especially to its power to exclude and punish. It is easy to imagine the millions or billions of deaths that climate change will cause this century as deaths caused by drowning, natural disaster, scarcity or disease, but most of them will be caused by conflict, by poverty and by borders. Those lethal borders are built and sustained not only by guards and fences and checkpoints, but by ideological structures which determine who qualifies and who does not, based on the convenient, and necessarily ever more closely policed, fictions of race, nationality and belonging.

These fictions always take a local form. Poland and Hungary have based their emergent nationalist authoritarianisms on memories of domination, rebel nineteenth-century nationalisms, blood-and-soil peasant identity, Catholicism, antisemitism and antiziganism. Russia has based its own brand on Great Russian chauvinism, Third-Rome Orthodox Christianity and an opposition to decadent liberal mores. America’s inward turn has mobilised the familiar languages of frontier mythology and embattled white supremacy, along with opportunistic misogyny and hysterical free-market fundamentalism. In all these examples, the salient features are more or less the same: a preoccupation with sovereignty and borders, and with the purity (ethnic, linguistic, cultural) of the national community; a violent defence of masculinity and the nuclear family against the inroads of the female, the trans and the queer; and above all a furious and aggrieved exceptionalism, a sense that it is high time that this community (this male, national, white, Christian or at least not non-Christian community) was restored to its pre-eminent place in the natural order of things. In Britain, that natural order of things is imperial.

To undo this knot – to attempt to disarticulate the complex problem of imperial history from the violent fantasies of the likes of Phillips and the opportunistic culture-war manoeuvres of the political and media establishment – is difficult work, and will necessarily involve care, compromise, grinding educational and political work, and as much good faith as anyone can muster. To begin with, it might help to historicise the structures of feeling surrounding our relationship to our imperial past, and to tease apart the deeper imaginaries of empire – the intricate dream-works of images, meanings and associations by which we relate to that past and make that past a living part of our present. As a culture, we in the UK have never made the empire a taboo enthusiasm. Quite the reverse: through our engagement with it, we have been able to indulge a rich and varied range of nostalgias and animosities. It’s a field on which we inscribe our most acrid anxieties and through which we project, often, the worst versions of our communal selves. But because it is still so live and so open, it is still possible to see ways forward to a better historical accounting. Because the empire is speakable, we can find better, less destructive ways to speak of it.

In the first two chapters of this book I step back and examine what we mean when we talk about ‘empire’ and ‘nostalgia’. In Chapter 1, I interrogate nostalgia itself, exploring the centrality of mourning and loss to the nostalgic imagination, and precisely how those emotional complexes can be directed into reactionary politics. In Chapter 2, I historicise nostalgia within the empire, giving (I hope) a pocket guide to the cultural preoccupations of late nineteenth-century high imperialism – and more specifically how it, too, was based around mourning, elegy and a sense of unrecapturable time. If the conflicts and cultural neuroses of the present are structured in part around a nostalgic yearning for empire, these two chapters try to historicise that yearning and trace its surprising persistence through time.

Chapters 3 and 4 return to the immediate present, tracing the salience of imperial nostalgia as a structure of feeling in the most bruising contemporary political conflicts over identity, race, gender and nation. Chapter 3 covers the events of 2020, a year in which imperial memory became perhaps the most furiously-contested battleground in British public politics. From the street violence that followed the BLM protests of the late spring of that year to the governmental attacks on antiracism as a political force that closed it, I try to give an account – necessarily reactive and provisional, since this book was written during the events themselves – of how the memory of empire has become folded into our most anxious preoccupations with bodily, cultural, racial and national sovereignty. Touching on the ‘statue wars’ that followed Colston’s toppling, the campaign against the National Trust for investigating its properties’ ties to colonialism and slavery, and the drastically troubled discourse surrounding national sovereignty, borders and immigration, I investigate a few landmark months in a long and rolling crisis, and try to contextualise the cultural conflict around ‘wokeness’ as part of an ongoing, transnational effort to reconfigure state and society along ethnonationalist and incipiently authoritarian lines. Chapter 4 goes deeper into the issue of higher education, where so much of the current conflict about empire has played out. Using the public career of the Oxford professor Nigel Biggar as a case study, it examines how the reactionary politics of the past few years has brought together imperial history, the moral panic over ‘free speech’ and assaults on higher education itself to attempt to reshape the cultural terrain, and situates this within the longer history of empire and the university – in this case Oxford, and its special place in the national psyche.

In Chapters 5 and 6, I consider how some of the basic source codes of British life and identity – class, gender, political affiliation and regional identity – are shot through with imperial ways of seeing, thinking and feeling. Chapter 5 attempts a partial anatomy of how imperial masculinities inform the codes and behaviour of the British ruling class: focusing on the eccentric figure of Rory Stewart, the Conservative writer and politician, it traces the archetype of the ‘imperial wonder boy’ from Victorian celebrity adventurers like Burton and Speke, through Lawrence of Arabia, the spy fictions of John Buchan and the self-mythologising of figures such as Patrick Leigh Fermor, to the air of innocence and aristocratic exceptionality that distinguishes the upper reaches of the British state. Chapter 6 turns a similar gaze outwards, to survey how people of other classes, and the terrain of the English regions and the UK’s constituent nations, are still conceptualised through imperial eyes; and how the construction of an autochthonous, naturally reactionary ‘white working class’, so central to the consolidation of the new reactionary politics, relies in complicated and often contradictory ways upon inherited imperial scripts.

Finally, I turn back to the central problem of imperial nostalgia in the UK today: what is really at stake in our ongoing litigation of the past, our refusal to come to terms with our national history, and the fantasies of innocence to which we are attached; and, albeit tentatively, I try to outline some of the ways in which we might escape from it.

Chapter 1

Associative magic: nostalgic time and the revolt against mourning

Kipling vs. Angelou

In the summer of 2018, during a programme of renovation at the University of Manchester’s student union building, a wall was decorated with a mural of the Rudyard Kipling poem ‘If …’. Whoever okayed the poem’s inclusion clearly thought of it as an unchallenging inspirational text: it has been voted among the nation’s favourite in various polls since the 1990s. The leaders of the student union thought otherwise. After consultation, they painted over ‘If …’ and superimposed the words of Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’, a hymn of Black and anticolonial resurgence. Rather than erase Kipling’s poem entirely, they had left its lines visible beneath the Angelou: the gesture was elegantly dialogic, historically sensitive, even gentle. The university administration was sympathetic, and the administrators of the union’s premises apologised for having failed to consult student opinion. Smiling group pictures were taken.

There was an immediate reaction from the press: ‘The PC brigade see no irony in imposing their own standards on Rudyard Kipling’ (The Times); ‘Why Rudyard Kipling’s classic poem is rightly revered’ (The Daily Mail). The Mail article named students involved, particularly ‘one Sara Khan, a self-styled queer Muslim woman who currently rejoices in the job title of liberation and access officer … Yesterday, critics accused Ms Khan of liberal fascism’. The same article bore as one of its introductory bullet points the sentence ‘Victorian writer’s 300-word celebration of hard work is offensive to minorities’. The Spectator suggested that the students were dupes, acting unwittingly on behalf of ‘adults’ with far more shady agendas. The poem itself was printed alongside several of these pieces, along with recuperations of Kipling – arguing, for example, that

[y]‌es, Kipling shared the view of almost all Englishmen of his day: the Indians were not ready for self-government, and would not be for a long time … In assessing his work by modern, ‘PC’ standards, the students are guilty of precisely the same offence they attribute to Kipling – imposing the values of one culture on to another … divorcing Kipling from his context would also miss the point. He was, undoubtedly, a

Reviews for Imperial nostalgia

[Annette de Grandis · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As someone with what I thought was a reasonable understanding of the subject, I approached this book with interest and it exceeded my expectations - it was profoundly illuminating and highly readable—a rare combination.