"Pax Britannica"

With Roy McMillan's excellent narration, Jan Morris's prose truly sparkles. Too bad the version available to me is abridged.

• Jingo imperialism was intoxicating fodder for the newly enfranchised working classes, and the Conservative-Unionist Government was dominated by imperialists of complementary styles: Lord Salisbury the Prime Minister, stroking the surface of affairs with his patrician and scholarly hand; Joseph Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary, an expansionist of the new kind, impulsive and insatiable, who had even gone so far as to install electric light in the Colonial Office. It all went with an almost frantic gusto, like universal craze.
• Gladstone the Little Englander had expressed a popular view, when he called the triumphs of Empire ‘false phantoms of glory’. The Bill which, in 1876, created Victoria Empress of India, had aroused furious opposition. Disraeli, its progenitor,1 loved addressing her as ‘Your Imperial Majesty’, but Gladstone called it ‘theatrical bombast and folly’, and The Times thought it ‘tawdry’. In those days the word ‘Empire’ still referred, in liberal British minds, to the dominions of foreign tyrants, and the idea of a British Empress seemed a monstrous negation of principles. Twenty years had passed, Gladstone was dying
• An inventor had to take out thirty-five separate patents if he wished to protect his device throughout the Queen’s possessions. The Roman Empire in its prime comprised perhaps 120 million people in an area of 2½ million square miles: the British Empire, now that it had reached ‘the limits set by nature’, comprised some 372 million people in 11 million square miles—ninety-one times the area of Great Britain. Throughout this immense dominion, this quarter of the globe, the British enjoyed rights of suzerainty,
• The acquisition of it all had been a jerky process. Absence of mind it never was, but it had happened so obscurely that to the ordinary Briton the rise of the Empire must have seemed more like some organic movement than the conscious result of national policies. There seemed no deliberation to it.
• by 1609 the first imperial settlers, a company of castaways, had been washed up on Bermuda—to inspire the first imperial work of art, The Tempest.
• Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha were occupied as garrison islands, to prevent a rescue of Napoleon when he was imprisoned upon St Helena (when Napoleon died and the troops were withdrawn three men, with a woman and two children, decided to stay on Tristan—their descendants formed its population still, and their settlement, officially Georgetown, was always known as Garrison). Cyprus was taken over from the Turks under a convention engaging Britain to help the Sultan defend his Asiatic possessions against Russia. Australia was glumly colonized when the loss of the American colonies deprived the British of a convict dumping-ground.
• THE Roman Empire was self-contained. The Spanish Empire was concentrated. The Russian Empire was continental. The British Empire was broadcast across the earth, and communications were the first concern of its late Victorian rulers. The electric telegraph and the steamship had transformed the Pax Britannica.
• So much a part of Empire was their passage that the common abbreviation for the best combination of cabins on the India run (Port Outward, Starboard Home) had already gone into the language: Posh.
• But there was £65 million of French capital in the Canal Company, compared with only £31 million British, and there were twenty-two French directors against ten British. They constantly squabbled about transit fees, the British always wanting them lower, the French higher. Worse still, the Canal was too small for British imperial requirements: large battleships could only go through by dismounting their heavy guns into lighters, and coaling at the far end of the canal. Suez was like an exposed nerve in the anatomy of the Empire.
• Long before a road or a railway crossed the Outback, the Overland Telegraph was erected—2,000 miles of line, with 36,000 telegraph poles. Seven or eight men lived in each station, with 20 or 30 horses, a few cows and a flock of sheep. All around was wilderness, and the stations were protected by brick walls with loopholes, in case of aboriginal attack. At Barrow Creek, in 1874, two cable men were speared to death by Warramunga tribesmen,1 and the aborigines were constantly stealing insulators to use as axe-heads, and wire for multi-pronged spears.
• At night especially the Alice cable station must have seemed a properly epic outpost. Then the wind rustled off the desert through the eucalyptus thicket, armies of frogs croaked in the fringes of the pool, the air was heavy with dust and gum-smell, and the horses stood silent beneath the pepper trees. Oil lamps shone through the windows of the huts, and sometimes a sudden chatter of the Morse machine miraculously linked the Alice, for a moment or two, with Calcutta, Malta and the imperial capital on the other side of the world.
• The girls messed ten to a table under the supervision of the eldest emigrant, known as ‘the captain’, and after breakfast each morning their cabins were inspected for tidiness by the chief matron. On deck they were separated by a double hand-rail from the rest of the passengers, and they were strictly forbidden to speak across it... Thus, refrigerated in purity, these perishable cargoes were shipped to the bounds of Empire, where lusty colonials presently defrosted them to perpetuate the breed.
• The traffic was officially controlled. The Colonial Office arranged the movement of Indians to the Caribbean sugar colonies, and British Guiana, Natal, Mauritius and Fiji all had their immigration agents in Calcutta. There were terrible abuses nevertheless. The Indians were so naïve, the employers so worldly, that unfair exploitation was inevitable. Recruiters were often paid by head of labour, which encouraged them to be unscrupulous, and planters sometimes treated their indentured labourers virtually as private property.
• The most ubiquitous of these transplantations was the Australian gum-tree—the eucalyptus, which first left Australia in 1854, but which by the 1890s had been scattered across the world. It was supposed to prevent malaria; some thought the smell of its leaves did it, others the drainage of marshy soils by its roots. The British took it everywhere, and especially to India, where they planted it along thousands of miles of roads, around a hundred cantonments, in countless bungalow gardens, until it seemed to have been part of the landscape always, and the grey shine of its leaves appeared only to be a coating of immemorial Indian dust. Another great success was the rubber plant. This the British imported from Brazil to India, and they were the first to make a regular crop of it,
• At one end of the Queen’s scale stood the British themselves, casting their shadows across the world. At the other end were the aborigines of the Australian Outback, ravaged by white men’s sicknesses, demoralized by white men’s examples, a people so debased and disinherited by the Pax Britannica that they seemed almost ready to dissolve into the dream-time that was their conception of the afterlife, where the unborn babies danced in the spirits of rocks and springs, or were supervised upon the shores of eternity by that homely governess, the turtle.
• Of course Salisbury had its social pretensions... Since then many white women had arrived, and the town had acquired a streaky veneer of decorum.
• In Canada armies of prospectors were labouring over the passes to the new goldfields of the Yukon—a journey so frightful that often, when at last they reached the diggings of Bonanza Creek, they turned in relief and went home again.
• As the frenzied miners dug away to the very edges of their holdings, so the roadways collapsed, the pit grew deeper, and the only way to extract the diamond ore was by rope pulleys, from the diggings themselves to the lip of the hole. Soon every miner had his own ropeway, and the whole vast mess of the Big Hole was covered in a mesh of ropes, gently shimmering in the hot wind like an enormous spider’s web, or swaying with the weight of innumerable buckets—at the top of each thread a barrow or a truck, at the bottom, far down in the chasm, a sweating imperialist.
• The joke that ‘niggers began at Calais’ was not entirely a joke. Cloudy conceptions of Race and Heritage coloured the outlook of the British the moment they crossed the Straits of Dover, and, coupled with the confidence bred by the period of splendid isolation, made the average Briton feel a different being even from his contemporaries across the Channel
• But all over the Empire there were private boys’ schools in the English manner, generally Anglican of atmosphere, with blazers and rugby caps, first elevens and prefects, corporal punishment and even fagging—the whole oddly twisted or foreshortened, so that with their pallid expatriate masters, their fragile natives or husky young white colonials, they were like English public schools seen in a distorting mirror... when a new headmaster turned up at Trinity College, Kandy, in Ceylon, he found 100 boys waiting to be caned as an opening duty.
• The British recognized the strength of the Chinese. Even in Australia, Baron von Hübner reported, the Chinese were admitted to be ‘the best gardeners, the best agricultural labourers, the best workmen of every sort, the best cooks and the most honest and law-abiding people’. Kipling was astonished, when he first visited Singapore, at the extent to which the Chinese ran the colony—yet ‘England is by the uninformed supposed to own the island’. The British worked well with the Parsees of Bombay, Zoroastrians of great business acumen who seemed to think more or less in the European manner, and were the first natives of India to play cricket: Parsees had even built ships for the Royal Navy, and so impregnable was their social eminence in Bombay that the British themselves found it hard to buy houses on the Ridge at Malabar Hill, where the Parsee patricians lived. The Burghers of Ceylon, half-caste Dutch left behind by a previous Empire, were liked for their solid, unassuming good sense.
• An older conception of Empire, and one likely to prove more resilient in the end, had been expressed seventy years before, by Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, and still had its adherents throughout the Pax Britannica: ‘Let it still be the boast of Britain to write her name in characters of light; let her not be remembered as the tempest whose course was desolate, but as the gale of spring reviving the slumbering seeds of mind and calling them to life from the winter of ignorance and oppression.
• the island of St Lucia: Like many another island fortress it had endured an uncertain history, and had been passed from France to Britain, Britain to France, fourteen times in all, as the one Power or the other gained supremacy in the West Indies.
• All this invited ‘cramming’, and many private tutors specialized in bringing a young man up to the mark for the Indian Civil. If, against heavy odds, he succeeded, he then spent a year’s probation at an English or Scottish university, and a second examination followed. This time he must take compulsory papers in Indian penal code and procedures, the principal language of one of the Indian areas, and the Indian Evidence and Contract Acts: he must take a paper in either the code of civil procedure or Hindu and Mohammedan Law, plus a choice of papers in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and the history of British India. He was also tested in horsemanship, including ‘the ability to perform journeys on horseback’: if he failed this, he could go to India anyway, but he would get no rise in salary until he passed his equestrian tests out there,
• Steeped in the traditions of the team spirit, slightly glazed perhaps by the intoxications of the High Anglican revival, aglow still with the privileged pleasures, strawberries and Alpine reading parties of the English universities at their happiest, the young imperialist
• Yet this was, in the range of its powers and jurisdiction, the most powerful court of the modern world. It might only offer its humble advice to the Sovereign, but the advice was invariably accepted. A quarter of the inhabitants of the earth were ultimately at its mercy, and when the Kols hill tribe in India were once involved in a dispute with the Government about forest rights, their elders were surprised sacrificing a kid to propitiate a distant but omnipotent deity. ‘We know nothing of him, but that he is a good god, and that his name is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.’
• Not the law as such, but the rule of law, was the one convincingly unifying factor in imperial affairs. The British subject, whether he be Kaffir, Maori or French Canadian, automatically acquired those private civil rights which the English had evolved for themselves since the time of Magna Carta.
• Ascension was eight hundred miles from the next British territory, St Helena, and not particularly on the way to anywhere else. In deciding how best to administer the place, the British accordingly took a practical if unorthodox step: they declared it to be a ship. It was borne on the books of the Admiral Superintendent, Gibraltar.
• Here are a few less spectacular anomalies of Empire. Gibraltar, Malta, Bermuda, Guernsey and Jersey all had military governors, appointed by the War Office. Cyprus was governed by a High Commissioner, because it was ostensibly still part of the Turkish Empire: there were Mudirs and Mukhtars in its administration, the Turkish Majlis still had a say in taxation, and Cypriots were liable to conscription in the Turkish Army unless they paid a poll tax. The New Hebrides were governed as a condominium by an Anglo-French naval commission. Tristan da Cunha was more or less run by the chaplain of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Sarawak, though a British Protectorate, was still ruled by the White Rajah. British Guiana had a legislature called a Court of Policy, inherited from the Dutch, and in Gibraltar the only local authority of any kind was the sanitary commission. Guernsey and Jersey had their own Etats, 15th century assemblies of Norman origin.
• he has a waxed moustache like a drill sergeant’s, his eyes are fiercely gleaming, and his mouth is set in a sardonic, slightly contemptuous smile, such as might shrivel an African chieftain to insignificance, or in another incarnation wither an importunate customer in the cab queue at the Savoy.
• And finally a great lady of Empire, Mrs Daisy Bates...  if the strength of the White Rajah lay in his facial expression, the power of Daisy Bates was in her posture: high up there on her rickety buggy, with aboriginals for company and camels to tow her, she sits superbly, flamboyantly erect, as if to show that a good British upbringing, with sensible corsetry, could fortify a woman against hell itself.
• Sir Henry Stanley, deliverer of Livingstone: A life of staggering adventure followed: war, on both sides of the American Civil War, in the Indian campaigns of the West, in the United States Navy; journalism, with Napier in Abyssinia, in Spain during the 1869 rising, in search of Livingstone for the New York Herald;
• Jameson was as odd a doctor as ever took the oath... He charmed half England when, at the commission of inquiry into the Jameson Raid, he observed with touching candour: ‘I know perfectly well that as I have not succeeded the natural thing has happened: but I also know that if I had succeeded I should have been forgiven.’
• There was something almost unreal to the scale of Rhodes. He was nicknamed the Colossus, of course, and of all the New Imperialists he most looked the part. He had a Roman face, big, prominent of eye, rather sneering—just such a face as a police reconstruction might compose, if fed the details of one who was both a diamond millionaire and a kind of emperor.
• A little lower a smudge of smoke and shanties marked the location of the Indian bazaar, and the town spilled away down the hillside in diminishing solidity, petering out in huts and shacks, until only the road itself was left threading a way through the trees to the distant plains below. At first sight Simla
• Lord Rosebery once declared that British foreign policy was essentially an Indian policy, ‘mainly guided by considerations of what was best for our Indian Empire’... The military planners in Simla were perpetually obsessed with the safety of this immense dominion, so thinly ruled and guarded, and in particular with the menace they supposed to come from the Russians along their northern frontiers. <> Much of Victorian imperial history had depended upon the fear of Russian intentions.
• Commanding officers often established regimental brothels, to cope with it: in Burma the military authorities imported Japanese prostitutes, and most Indian garrison towns had brothels reserved for the white troops, inspected by military doctors for cleanliness and patrolled by military police, who did not hesitate to beat up any native seen approaching the girls.
• As for the women of Empire, Kipling badly damaged their reputation for purity with his stories of the goings-on in the Indian hill stations. The historical novelist Maud Diver undertook to restore it in a book called The Englishwoman in India, but even she had to allow that the British grass widow in the hills had many temptations to resist. The two most insidious dangers, Miss Diver thought, were military men on leave and amateur theatricals, but many memsahibs fell too for the exotic allure of the East.
• Much of the driving force of imperialism, as of Victorian progress in general, was the energy sparked by man’s struggle with his own environment, and to many of the imperialists the struggle was an end in itself. The notion of a perpetual striving was essential to the morality of the day. Darwin’s strictly biological ‘struggle for existence’ had been given metaphysical overtones by artists and philosophers from Carlyle to W. E. Henley
• A puritanical pleasure in hardship was often allied with a boyish delight in rip-roar, the two formidably combining to produce a breed of stoic adventurers, for whom the imperial mission was a larger embodiment of a personal challenge. These instincts were, of course, strongly reinforced by the training of the public schools,
• Innumerable imperial anecdotes deliberately mix up the comic and the very dangerous, a piquancy always relished by the British. We hear often of the Indian stationmaster’s telegram down the line: ‘TIGER ON PLATFORM STOP STAFF FRIGHTENED STOP PRAY ARRANGE’,
• Man-eating tigers had still to be tracked down, and when they built the Uganda Railway they not only had to cope with murderous lions but sometimes scooped the scorpions and ants in bucket-loads from their camp sites.
• In Rhodesia the classic scene was Allan Wilson’s last stand against the Matabele—There Was No Survivor. In Natal the eighty men of Rorke’s Drift held out for ever against their 4,000 Zulu attackers, immortalized in scarlet and gunsmoke by the brush of Lady Butler.
• The inescapable miseries of dysentery had a different wry nickname in each possession—Gippy Tummy, Poonaitis, Karachi trotters. Nervous disorders in India were called by the soldiers ‘the Doo-lally tap’, after a notorious transit camp at Deolalie, near Bombay
• It was a paradox of Empire that the British, the most pragmatic of peoples, should have best expressed themselves architecturally in planned townscapes—in groups rather than individual buildings, skylines rather than façades. This was partly because sites were generally virgin, and partly because soldiers so often laid out settlements, and partly because in their overseas possessions the British allowed themselves to be more formal and methodical than they often were at home.
• of all expressions of the imperial taste, the gardens were the most satisfactory. The English predilection for the paradise garden, nature unobtrusively coaxed into order, was richly encouraged in the tropics, where the imperial gardeners found plants readier than anything at home to intertwine and luxuriate in the profusion they preferred. This was a ruling race with green fingers.
• Only one memorable painter responded absolutely to the heroic theme: Lady Butler, wife of an Anglo-Irish general and sister of Alice Meynell the poet. Elizabeth Butler, née Thompson... She was easily the Army’s favourite artist, because she always got the uniforms right, and the great public loved her work because it so faithfully expressed the British mystique of splendour in misfortune.
• Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne were all unfitted to the splendours of the age, Austin thought, because they were either feminine or lyrical—two un-imperial attributes. <> Yet the third of our writers, a short-sighted journalist of fey and sentimental inclinations, was himself as potent an imperial force as any battle fleet or India Council. Rudyard Kipling, 32 in 1897, was already at the height of his fame.
• In India the whole British-built irrigation system included some 40,000 miles of canals, irrigating nearly 20 million acres—much the greatest system of waterworks in history. The dam at Tansa, near Bombay, was claimed to be the largest piece of masonry erected in modern times: two miles long, 118 feet high, with a road along the top.
• Lord Napier took a complete railway with him when he sailed from Bombay to Ethiopia in 1868, and Kitchener was laying one as he went southward into the Sudan.2 In 1897 they were completing one in Newfoundland, starting one into the Yukon, half-way through one in Burma, thinking about one from Suakin to Berber, plotting one from Singapore through Siam to India, grumbling about not having one to Salisbury in Rhodesia, negotiating one from Hong Kong to Canton, surveying one up the Kabul River into Afghanistan, hard at work on one from the Kenya coast to the Great Lakes of Africa.
• the British passengers stalking down the platform in a miasma of privilege, pursued by coveys of servants and porters with bags, children, bedding, and possibly a goat to be tethered in the guard’s van, and provide fresh milk for the journey.1 All around was the theatrical confusion of India, which Empire had tamed: a frenzy of Indians, in dhotis, in saris, in swathed torn rags, in noseclips, ankle-bangles, turbans, baggy white shorts, scarlet uniforms, yellow priestly robes, topees, bush-jackets, loin-cloths;
• posing as philanthropists of one kind or another, and exquisitely skilled in techniques of robbery, fraud or extortion. Skagway was infested with Smith’s spies, stooges, tame lawyers and sham charities.
• The British were brassy with success. They seemed to win all their wars in the end, and they were acquiring an ear for trumpets.
• The Royal Navy was an intensely conservative body, wrinkled with quaint anomalies. The Board of Admiralty was a gilded relic of earlier centuries, meeting in its beautiful eighteenth-century chambers in Whitehall, and acting as patron to several church livings, including that of Alston with Garrigill and Humshaugh. The Navy list included eight ancient functionaries called Vice-Admirals of the Coast of Great Britain, and four Vice-Admirals of Ireland. All in all, there was a marvellously humorous fascination to this force. For its officers life was often one long working holiday, full of high spirits and good company
• Implanted in this melancholy setting were the Anglo-Irish, successors to settlers whose Englishness had been enforced as a matter of royal policy; under the fourteenth-century Statutes of Kilkenny they had been forbidden to intermarry with the Irish, to speak Gaelic or even to behave in Irish ways. This was the Protestant Ascendancy, an imperial ruling caste.
• Of all the cities the British had created across the waters, Dublin was the most beautiful. Its sense of space and flow was pure English, and its broad streets, decreed by the Dublin Wide Streets Commission in 1757, allowed the fresh air and sunlight off the sea to flood the city with an invigoration the most ascetic public school prefect would have applauded. Everybody felt the sparkle of the place, its tingle in the air, its mingled suggestions of wit and threat, like a bubbly drink laced with something lethal.
• David Clement Ruffelle Scott... was genuinely inspired. He built in ecstasy. He made the bricks out of the clay of ant-hills, and he laid the foundations before he had drawn a plan. The building grew as he went along, its shape decreed by two unusual principles. First, it was to have no front, back or sides—each face was to be of equal importance. Secondly, it was to avoid symmetry wherever possible—‘Symmetry,’ Scott thought, ‘means poverty of ideas.’ While he worked at his building Scott was also compiling a monumental Encyclopaedic Dictionary of the Mang’anja Language, and the two great projects proceeded side by side,
• In the colonies many sorts of social and political experiments had been tried, in advance of anything attempted in Europe. The very first true modern democracy was the Isle of Man, which gave the franchise to every man and woman in 1866: but New Zealand came a close second, even enfranchising Maori women by 1893.
• It was an instrument of universal order: its scattered bases had enabled the Royal Navy to keep the world at peace for the best part of a century, and its strong arm had established the rule of law in many once-turbulent places. It was an agency of material progress: everywhere its technicians laid down the foundations of industry, and paved the way for change. It was a mighty stimulant: it injected new ideas into comatose societies, it shook up stagnant cultures, it prodded peoples withdrawn from the world into indignant protest, it pulled half Asia out of the Middle Ages, half Africa momentarily out of barbarism. And like it or not, it kept Britain herself among the Great Powers for another half-century.