Unfinished Empire

“‘Empire’ is a grand word,” write John Darwin at the beginning of his Unfinished Empire. On the ground, the reality of empire is “a mass of individuals, a network of lobbies, a mountain of hopes: for careers, fortunes, religious salvation or just physical safety. Empires were not made by faceless committees making grand calculations, nor by the ‘irresistible’ pressures of economics or ideology. They had to be made by men (and women) whose actions were shaped by motives and morals no less confused and demanding than those that govern us now.”

And empires were the product not only of grand strategy and dashing heroism. They are the product of mundane efforts by common people: “Building an empire was not just an act of will or an imaginative impulse, though both were essential. It required a long chain of mundane activities to bring it about: the reconnoitring of ‘targets’; the founding of bridgeheads; the raising of money; the recruiting of sailors, soldiers, emigrants and adventurers; the rallying of allies (not least at court or in government); the writing of rules (not least about property in ‘newfound’ lands); the regulation of trade as well as of moral behaviour in exotic locations; the framing of governments.”

Given all this, Darwin observes sardonically, “It is not hard to see how much could go wrong.”

The British empire in particular was the product of many hands with many motives: “Far from being the mere handiwork of kings and conquistadors, it was largely a private-enterprise empire: the creation of merchants, investors, migrants and missionaries, among many others.” The players weren’t all Brits either. One of the main concerns of British imperial authorities was to negotiate the “ terms on which indigenous peoples and their leaders would become the allies, the clients or the subjects of empire. . . . empire was ‘made’ as much if not more by the local auxiliaries that ‘empire-builders’ recruited as by the imperialists themselves. The result was an empire of hybrid components, conflicting traditions, and unsettled boundaries between races and peoples: a source of constant unease as well as extraordinary energy.”

As Darwin’s title has it, the British empire was never finished, no matter how neatly patterned the maps may have looked: “As late as 1914 (sometimes imagined as the ‘high noon’ of empire), the signs of this were everywhere: in the derelict state of some of Britain’s oldest possessions; in the exiguous strands of settlement that made up Canada and Australia; in the skeletal administration of tropical Africa, soon to be even more skeletal in the 1930s depression; in the chronic uncertainty over what kind of Raj would secure British control and appease Indian unrest; in the constant avowals that there would be no further imperial expansion, and the no less constant advances, a pattern that continued even after 1945; in the fuming and fretting of imperialists at home that public opinion was not imperial-minded enough. . . . Edwardian imperialists believed that far from constructing a durable edifice that needed only periodic attention, the Victorian makers of empire had bequeathed their successors little more than a building site and a set of hopelessly defective plans.”

There was no single planner, no single plan, no single vision of what the empire was on about: “Colonizing (with British migrants), civilizing (with British officials), converting (with British missionaries) and commerce (preferably without migrants, officials or missionaries) coexisted in uneasy and often quarrelsome partnership as the ‘objects’ of empire.”

The British empire was “by necessity a series of compromises,” always adjusting and adapting to local circumstances that were not under British control, not to mention international pressures that had their own complex set of priorities and energies.