"Empire" by Niall Ferguson

Ferguson did not intend to write a general history of the empire; instead, his book offers a broad, globalist view of empire formation. In his telling, the story of how the British came to power is composed of a series of common ideas implemented across many lands. These innovations were in technology, the military, economics, politics and morality. Many of these changes, Ferguson says, are still with us today. We can thank the British for much of what makes Western life so nice.

One of the first of these ideas was the modern financial notion of easily available credit -- i.e., borrowing money cheaply. Strictly speaking, this wasn't a British idea; it was introduced to England by the Dutch. In 1688, the Dutch king William of Orange invaded England at the invitation of a handful of English aristocrats, and he brought with him finance-whiz businessmen who persuaded London to install a public-debt system in the nascent empire. One might not think the creation of a public debt would be particularly significant to the buildup of an empire, but one of Ferguson's talents is to show how small things can change the map of the world. As it does today, public debt allowed the government to pay for very expensive endeavors, such as wars. These wars -- particularly the Seven Years' War, in which the British drove the French from India -- gained the empire territory and power that, were it paying cash, it could never have afforded.

The British pursued many new approaches to imperialism that enabled them to quickly surpass other empires. Why were the British colonists in the Americas more successful at building stable colonies than the Spanish? Because, says Ferguson, they tended to send men and women (rather than just men, as the Spanish did) to the New World, allowing for communities in the colonies that resembled the ones in Europe. How did the empire manage to persuade Arabs to fight on the British side in World War I, stymieing German efforts to provoke an anti-British Arab jihad? Because they had men like T.E. Lawrence -- men "with the ability to penetrate non-European cultures" that was gained from the "centuries of Oriental engagement" that other empires lacked. How were the British able to gain so much of southern Africa so quickly? They'd invested in American-made Maxim guns, the world's first portable machine guns, huge death-machines that fired 500 rounds per minute and completely devastated native armies.

The British were not only skilled conquerors; they were also unrivaled at administering the lands they took over. One of the main questions raised by imperialism is a moral one: How can one people in good conscience rule over another? Ferguson makes the case in an oblique way; he suggests that one reason the British can be excused for colonization is that they were efficient governors. In India, for instance, fewer than 1,000 British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers, a force about twice the size of the New York Police Department, governed hundreds of millions of people. After early attempts to impose British culture on the colonies -- which ended with the Indian Mutiny of 1857 -- British colonial governors abandoned such efforts. This reluctance to enter into local affairs elides the moral problems of colonialism, Ferguson suggests; the British were so good at invisibly running their colonies, the natives might not have felt the psychological weight of being ruled from afar.

"How did the Victorians do it?" Ferguson asks, and he goes into great detail about the masterly plan the British devised to govern the colonies. First, the empire would send only its best men to deal with the natives, men who were "impartial, incorruptible, omniscient." Young college boys wanting to join the Indian Civil Service needed to pass a rigorous exam (sample question from the Mental Philosophy section of the test: "What Experimental Methods are applicable to the determination of the true antecedent in phenomena where there may be a plurality of causes?") and spent months learning native languages. But the British were also determined to turn over much of the governing power to indigenous leaders. A force of thousands of Indians saw to the day-to-day operation of the country. This pro-British Indian elite benefited greatly from British-style education. One of the most important legacies of British rule in India is the widespread dissemination of the English language there; it's this high English literacy rate that today makes India a hot location for American software firms.

British colonialism came with inevitable misfortunes and tragedies, one of which, of course, was racism. But Ferguson argues that white racism against the people of colonized lands was something that the empire tried valiantly to stop, if only because the empire knew that it could not rule over people who hated their rulers. Often, though, the progressive tendencies of the central government in London were frustrated by the businessmen who inhabited the colonized regions. Ferguson tells the story of the 1883 Ilbert bill, an effort by the London-appointed viceroy to allow Indian judges to try white defendants. The bill sparked an ugly outcry from whites in India. White men suggested that Indian magistrates would seek to punish white women for no reason other than the sexual thrill of it.

Ferguson does not excuse racism, and he points out that the feelings of whites toward the natives did lead, in some way, to the downfall of the empire. The white outcry over the Ilbert bill was the flashpoint for the Indian nationalist movement that would eventually force the British from India.

Aside from "the internationalization of the English language," among the gifts Ferguson says we ought to thank the British for are "the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization" in the world; "the Anglicization of North America and Australia"; the "enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity"; and the worldwide adoption and ultimate "survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s"; related to that, we should also credit Britain with promoting "the idea of liberty" -- an ironic benefit of imperialism.

Now, in order to be grateful for these things, one must decide whether it's good that we have them. Is it a good thing that English is an international language? The attitude of the Indian writer Arundhati Roy springs to mind. When her English-language novel "The God of Small Things" was published in 1997, Roy was praised -- somewhat patronizingly -- by a number of English-speaking critics for her facility with the language. The British historian Edward Chaney famously called the book "a tribute to the empire," and Roy, as she is wont to do when faced with any question over her stance on imperialism, lashed out, telling a London radio station that the only reason she spoke English was because she had been forced to. The empire had rolled over her native tongue.

You cannot be a cultural relativist and agree with Niall Ferguson. If, like Roy, you yearn for lost native languages, for the rituals the empire snuffed out because Englishmen believed them to be overly quaint or "savage," you'll have problems seeing the virtues of the British Empire. Ferguson clearly thinks that some things -- capitalism, for instance -- are inarguably beneficial to us all. But what he is really arguing is that the British were better for the world than other empires might have been. The Anglicization of North America and Australia, for example, wiped out much of their indigenous populations, and Ferguson recognizes that as a terrible cost of the empire. But he argues that many such costs would have had to be paid anyway: If the British hadn't taken North America, the Spanish might have, and they would have been far less successful with it. (Of course, one could argue that Spanish colonial rule was better for the natives; in Mexico and Central America Native American peoples and cultures are integrated into contemporary life.)

On the BBC recently, Ferguson was asked about Arundhati Roy's anger over having been forced to speak English, and whether India would have been better left alone. "The real question that I think we need to ask ourselves is, should they be ruled by bad empires or slightly better empires?" he said. "Because after all, India, when the British turned up, was already ruled by an empire -- the Mogul Empire. The Mogul Empire was an organization which existed to tax peasants in order to pay for the Moguls' consumption. I don't think there would have been many railways built if the Mogul Empire had remained in place, or had been restored in 1957 ... So I think it's completely fallacious to imagine that if the British hadn't been there, India would have been some kind of liberal democratic Indian nationalist government of the kind that it has today."

Next Page: Moral clarity strikes Britain

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