Header overlay

Dominion over Palm and Pine

In 1914 the great Arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, calculated that the Russian Empire had been expanding for over four centuries at an average daily rate of 55 square miles or more than 20,000 square miles a year. I used to think this an absurd statistic, the sort of mistake made by people who can’t remember how many noughts make a million. Then it dawned on me that, compared with the expansion of a rival empire, the advance had been rather slow.

At its zenith the British Empire extended over more than 12 million square miles, of which Great Britain itself formed less than one per cent. In the course of the nineteenth century, when most of its expansion took place, the average annual rate of growth was about 100,000 square miles, while the increase for every twenty-four hours was a staggering 270 square miles, or an area the size of Hyde Park every five minutes. Late Victorian historians proudly calculated that the Empire was four and a half times larger and more populated than the Roman dominions under the Emperor Trajan.

Britain’s empire was spread over six continents, seven seas and three centuries, during which the focus shifted from the Atlantic to Asia and finally to Africa. One might have expected such diversity to have deterred writers from trying to sum it up or paint its portrait. It didn’t. Diversity was clearly not a problem for Marxists who, in Lenin’s words, regarded imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ and believed colonialism’s essential purpose to be the plunder of the non-Western world. Nor has it troubled post-colonial historians today who take it for granted that colonial rule is always evil and colonialist motives are invariably bad. Some more independent-minded historians have from time to time written single-volume ‘Rise and Fall’ chronicles which are, perhaps inevitably, over-simplified and under-researched. But only one writer has revelled in the diversity of the imperial experience and has dared to depict it on a massive panoramic canvas. And that writer, James Morris, is not in fact an historian but a journalist and travel-writer of genius.

In the first volume of his imperial trilogy, Pax Britannica, Morris focused on a single year, 1897, the year of

Subscribe or sign in to read the full article

The full version of this article is only available to subscribers to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly. To continue reading, please sign in or take out a subscription to the quarterly magazine for yourself or as a gift for a fellow booklover. Both gift givers and gift recipients receive access to the full online archive of articles along with many other benefits, such as preferential prices for all books and goods in our online shop and offers from a number of like-minded organizations. Find out more on our subscriptions page.

Subscribe now or

In 1914 the great Arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, calculated that the Russian Empire had been expanding for over four centuries at an average daily rate of 55 square miles or more than 20,000 square miles a year. I used to think this an absurd statistic, the sort of mistake made by people who can’t remember how many noughts make a million. Then it dawned on me that, compared with the expansion of a rival empire, the advance had been rather slow.

At its zenith the British Empire extended over more than 12 million square miles, of which Great Britain itself formed less than one per cent. In the course of the nineteenth century, when most of its expansion took place, the average annual rate of growth was about 100,000 square miles, while the increase for every twenty-four hours was a staggering 270 square miles, or an area the size of Hyde Park every five minutes. Late Victorian historians proudly calculated that the Empire was four and a half times larger and more populated than the Roman dominions under the Emperor Trajan. Britain’s empire was spread over six continents, seven seas and three centuries, during which the focus shifted from the Atlantic to Asia and finally to Africa. One might have expected such diversity to have deterred writers from trying to sum it up or paint its portrait. It didn’t. Diversity was clearly not a problem for Marxists who, in Lenin’s words, regarded imperialism as ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ and believed colonialism’s essential purpose to be the plunder of the non-Western world. Nor has it troubled post-colonial historians today who take it for granted that colonial rule is always evil and colonialist motives are invariably bad. Some more independent-minded historians have from time to time written single-volume ‘Rise and Fall’ chronicles which are, perhaps inevitably, over-simplified and under-researched. But only one writer has revelled in the diversity of the imperial experience and has dared to depict it on a massive panoramic canvas. And that writer, James Morris, is not in fact an historian but a journalist and travel-writer of genius. In the first volume of his imperial trilogy, Pax Britannica, Morris focused on a single year, 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the year later regarded as the apogee of the Empire, the year Kipling wrote his poem ‘Recessional’ warning the country of the frailty of its ‘dominion over palm and pine’. It was also the year, as Morris observes with his love of esoteric detail, in which the British imported more champagne than at any other time in their history.* After his vivid portrait of the state and structure of the Empire in 1897, the author went back to Victoria’s accession and in his second volume, Heaven’s Command, charted the imperial progress through the six intervening decades. The Morris technique is to flit from place to place – from the Nile to Jamaica, from the Zambezi to Tasmania – alighting here and there to sketch the features of a colony, the customs of its people, the behaviour of its administrators. He takes delight in the haphazardness of it all. In one representative passage he recounts how Ascension Island in the Atlantic was acquired to protect St Helena, where Napoleon was held captive at the time, but that after the French Emperor’s death it was transformed into an important coaling station while St Helena became an essential producer of watercress for the Royal Navy. The last volume of the trilogy, Farewell the Trumpets, takes the story from 1897 to the withdrawal from the last significant colonies (except Hong Kong) in the 1960s. Although the Empire reached its greatest extent between the two world wars (mainly by acquiring most of Germany’s territories in Africa), the imperial purpose had by then weakened, the sense of adventure had diminished, the idealistic impulse was almost gone. Few people now asked Winston Churchill’s rhetorical question of the 1890s: ‘What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more notable and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations?’ Britain and its possessions had become what Morris calls ‘an Empire in menopause’. Yet there were still great things to be done, especially on the fringes of British rule: the vast irrigation works in the Sudan, between the Blue and the White Niles above Khartoum; the pacification of the Hadramaut by a single British official, Harold Ingrams, who persuaded the sheikhs of the Aden hinterland to abandon their traditional tribal feuds. Even after the Second World War, after the great South Asian possessions – India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon – had been relinquished, there was a last spasm of colonial activity. The staff at the Colonial Office was tripled, thousands of young officials – far more than were ever needed in India – were recruited, and endless commissions were sent out to investigate such things as bilharzia in Dongola or the possibility of growing sugar-beet on Ascension Island. Not all of this energy was productive: as Morris records, there were a few ‘famous fiascos, like the Groundnut Scheme for Tanganyika which sold not a single groundnut, or the Egg Scheme for Gambia which exported not an egg’. The trilogy ignores neither the Empire’s brutalities nor its humiliations: we are given Governor Eyre’s repression in Jamaica (1865) and Brigadier Dyer’s massacre at Amritsar (1919), just as we have the military disasters of Afghanistan (1842), Kut el-Amara (1916) and Singapore (1942). But balance is invariably maintained. The British abroad, remarks Morris, were not always kind but they were usually just: they respected civil rights (on the whole), and the concept of Fair Play was their ‘finest ideology’, ‘the British approximation of the Sermon on the Mount’. Morris describes Elgar as the elegist of the Empire, but the description is at least as applicable to himself (as it is not to Kipling, who was its Jeremiah, raging against the demise he correctly foretold). The tone of the last volume is subtly different from its predecessors, more reflective, more elegiac and ‘tinged . . . with an affectionate melancholy’. It ends, appropriately, with a description of Churchill’s funeral in 1965, Big Ben silenced, farewell guns firing from the Tower of London, and the Thameside cranes dipped in a final salute.
The great drum-horse of the Household Cavalry, drums swathed in black crêpe, led the funeral procession solemnly through London to St Paul’s, while band after band across the capital played the Dead March from Saul, and the soldiers along the way bared their heads and reversed their arms.
When people ask me what they should read about the Empire, I suggest they go to the five volumes of the Oxford History of the British Empire, where they will find a mass of recent research synthesized in scores of scholarly essays written by contemporary academic historians. But if they want to sense what the Empire was like, how it felt and smelt and looked, if they want to picture traders of the Hudson Bay Company with their beaver hats and sledges or Boer trekkers lumbering across the veld in their great ox-wagons – then I advise them to read James Morris. Richard Cobb, the great historian of the French Revolution, used to say that a good deal of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French history could be walked, seen and heard in cafés or buses or on park benches in Paris or Lyon. But many historians today, especially the post-colonialists, cannot share or indeed understand this view, because it implies that writing history is a cultural, creative and imaginative art as well as an academic discipline. Most of them write as if they have never sat in a Delhi rickshaw or a Calcutta café and have spent too much of their careers in a seminar room. No one could accuse James Morris of such things. He seems to have visited every segment of the globe that was once coloured pink on the schoolroom map, every port, every cemetery, every Government House from Mauritius to Belize. Attracted by ‘the aesthetic of empire’ – especially by ‘its feel, its look, its human passions’ – he consciously set out to convey ‘what it felt like’. In Pax Britannica the author imagined his book as ‘orchestrated by the young Elgar’, its pages ‘perfumed . . . with saddle-oil, joss-stick and railway steam’; its readers, he hoped, would close it with the feeling that they had ‘spent a few hours looking through a big sash window at a scene of immense variety and some splendour’. The writing here may be a little more purple than usual, but it accurately reveals both what Morris intended and what he achieved. Among the author’s qualities is a powerful sense of place, a talent for depicting ‘reef and tundra, desert and distant veld’. As with Kipling, you can feel you are beside him on the Grand Trunk Road, or among the mangroves and mosquitoes of a West African estuary, or else in Jamaica ‘in the tetchy and humid afternoon of a Caribbean October day’. But he evokes with equal skill the human ambience, the Anglo-Indian club so unfairly mocked by Forster, the temples of Kali the blood-goddess, the grave Boer preachers reading Ezekiel on their verandas in Pretoria. An enterprise like this had to include the great imperial dramas such as the useless valour of Gallipoli, the ignominious surrender of Singapore, the heroism of the naval convoys which kept Malta alive and British in 1942. So too did it need to have the military men, like Wolseley and Fisher, and the proconsuls, such as Curzon and Milner, the personalities of each conjured through colourful vignettes and a vivid use of chiaroscuro. Sir Edward Carson, who for better or worse kept Ulster British, is memorably described as ‘a Rhodes without an Africa’, ‘a heavyweight with a narrow imagination’. Yet Morris gives as much space to the lesser men of empire, to subalterns and district officers and holders of such lotus-eating posts as the Governor of Mauritius and the Lord High Commissioner in Corfu, who was known as il lordo alto by the Italianate Ionian gentry and whose salary in the 1830s was the same as that of the President of the United States. He is equally attracted to the more mechanical sections of his canvas, to the coaling stations and sea-cables and Imperial Airways’ flying boats, whose fates he has characteristically tracked down and listed:
One collided with an Italian submarine, one dived into Lake Habbaniyah, one sank in the Hooghly River, one was blown up by an exploding fuel barge at Southampton and one was permanently stuck in the mud in a lake at Tonk. Nevertheless they became a familiar and beloved part of life for thousands of Britons.
For me, one of the primary pleasures of the trilogy is the accumulation of recondite detail, often extended in asides or in a footnote. One of il lordo alto’s residences, we learn, later became the birthplace of Prince Philip and is now called Mon Repos. Captain Charles Boycott, Lord Erne’s hard-hearted land agent in County Mayo, not only gave his name to a new verb in English but enlarged the vocabulary of many other tongues as well, donating boykot to Turkish and boikittirovat to Basque. One of the best and most typical is the story of how, ‘when the [Anglican] Bishop of Gibraltar was received in audience by the Pope, the Pontiff remarked: “I gather I am within your Lordship’s diocese”’, followed by the explanatory footnote, ‘He was: it extended from Portugal to the Caspian. The Archdeacon of Bloemfontein told me this story.’ I imagine this memorable encounter predated the Anglican bishopric of Jerusalem. My abiding impression of the work is that one has been viewing a panorama painted by a pointillist. Morris has taken the sweep of Bishop Heber – ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains, from India’s coral strand’ – and filled it with the dreams, passions, foibles and performances of a quarter of the human race. He has evoked in all its diversity the imperial experience from New Zealand to New Brunswick. And he knew, as Kipling knew, that
the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.
*While writing the trilogy, Morris had a sex-change operation and became Jan but retained the masculine name for the imperial volumes.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 12 © David Gilmour 2006


About the contributor

David Gilmour likes to think he is the only person apart from Morris who has written books about India, Spain, Italy and the Middle East. But he is happy to be corrected.

Comments & Reviews

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.


Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.