Regaining a Big Vision for Britain: The Archbishop of York's Lecture to The Smith Institute

11 comments on “Regaining a Big Vision for Britain: The Archbishop of York's Lecture to The Smith Institute”

1. Catholic Mom says:

   January 16, 2009 at 10:18 pm

   Ummm…he thinks the British Empire was a “noble vision for the future” ?? Yeah, I’ve noticed a decline in German self-esteem too since they no longer have that “Deuschland uber alles” thing to strive for. And what is Russia now that they no longer have their Young Pioneers with their neat little neckerchiefs and their eyes fixed firmly upon the horizon? There’s definitely nothing like militarism and international domination to give you a reason for living. Or wait….maybe there IS something else???? But what could that be???

2. William S says:

   January 16, 2009 at 11:18 pm

   The Archbishop was not romanticising miltaristic imperialism.

   But he was saying (and don’t forget he grew up in a country which experienced British rule) that the Empire made British people outward-looking. That could be bad and there were episodes of imperial hisory which we can’t be proud of.

   But it could be good. Service in the Empire made early 20thC Britain one of the most internationally-experienced countries in the world. And I use the word ‘service’ advisedly. When I was a teenager, the Vicar of our little village church had been a district commissioner in the Sudan in the 1930’s, where among other things he freed a tribe from slavery. They named themselves ‘the Sons of Arkell’ after him. That was not untypical of the Empire in its later stages. It was seen as a trust given to Britain to try to improve the lives of the people of the Empire.

   And pretty well every village would have had someone in it who had lived and worked in some exotic place. It made society more outward-looking than it would otherwise have been, and despite greater travel we have in some respects lost that connectedness.

   There are evil Empires, but Star Wars notwithstanding, not all empires are entirely evil.

3. Katherine says:

   January 16, 2009 at 11:46 pm

   Let me join William S in putting in a good word for the British Empire. And I’m an American! I spent two years recently in India. Indians who patriotically celebrate their country’s independence from British rule nonetheless acknowledge their debt to the Brits. They have a railroad system which was British-built and until the recent road-building spurt was the only thing tying the country physically together. Creaky and unwieldy as it is in India, they have a parliamentary government in a multi-cultural country, unique in their part of the world. And they have, increasingly, a unifying language, English. Arrogant the Brits may have been, but they did not leave their imperial subjects naked as so many other empires have done.

4. azusa says:

   January 17, 2009 at 12:04 am

   Africa was, on the whole, more peaceful and healthier under British rule than much of it has been since. Only Tanganyika (Tanzania) seems to have avoided civil war or strife, and they’re as poor as church mice.
   NOT an argument for imperialism, just an appeal to let facts rather than ideology color one’s outlook.

5. Mike Bertaut says:

   January 17, 2009 at 4:12 am

   You would be hard-pressed, once you drill beyond political rhetoric, to find a single country that was formerly part of the British Empire that would have found it’s way to first-world status if it had missed out on, if nothing else, being exposed to the British Civil Service System. That’s my two cents on the Empire comments.

   I am curious, however, when I read of the great Social Experiment that Britain has engaged in since the tragedies of WW2: Is there no permanently ensconced welfare-sucking underclass in Britain as we have here in America? Even though most of our more robust Social Programs are only 40 years old, we still have 3rd and 4th generation families within which no one has held a job or sought employment or finished school, period. Whole generations of families for whom survival=federal government support.

   By example, 48% of pre-Katrina New Orleans was on public assistance. This goes a long way to explaining why their immediate response to disaster was to go to a big public place and wait for the government to come by. Does not England have this problem, with it’s much more refined blanket of social programs?

   I’m just curious….mrb

6. Catholic Mom says:

   January 17, 2009 at 6:22 am

   Ah, yes. The wonderful civilizing British empire. Not even counting how they civilized the Irish, just think of some of the great work they did in Africa and India. Not content merely to help fellow whites such as the Boers (google “Boer + concentration camp”) let’s just look at how they improved the lives of non-whites. The following was written by a British author, reprinted in “The Hindu.”

   In reading reports of the trial of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, you are struck by two things. The first, of course, is the anachronistic brutality of the country’s laws. Mr. Pamuk, like scores of other writers and journalists, is being prosecuted for “denigrating Turkishness,” which means that he dared to mention the Armenian genocide in the First World War and the killing of the Kurds in the past decade. The second is its staggering, blithering stupidity. If there is one course of action that could be calculated to turn these massacres into live issues, it is the trial of the country’s foremost novelist for mentioning them.

   As it prepares for accession, the Turkish Government will discover that the other members of the European Union have found a more effective means of suppression. Without legal coercion, without the use of baying mobs to drive writers from their homes, we have developed an almost infinite capacity to forget our own atrocities.

   Atrocities? Which atrocities? When a Turkish writer uses that word, everyone in Turkey knows what he is talking about, even if they deny it vehemently. But most British people will stare at you blankly. So let me give you two examples, both of which are as well documented as the Armenian genocide.

   The Indian famine

   In his book Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, Mike Davis tells the story of famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million Indians. These people were, he demonstrates, murdered by British state policy. When an El Nino drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan plateau in 1876 there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent its export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 320,000 tonnes of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible way.” The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited “at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices.” The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of Buchenwald. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94 per cent.

   As millions died, the imperial government launched “a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought.” The money, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived, was used by Lord Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government’s export policies, such as Stalin’s in Ukraine, manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud, and the Punjab, which had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25 million died.

   Three recent books — Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins, Histories of the Hanged by David Anderson, and Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis — show how white settlers and British troops suppressed the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya in the 1950s. Thrown off their best land and deprived of political rights, the Kikuyu started to organise — some of them violently — against colonial rule. The British responded by driving up to 320,000 of them into concentration camps. Most of the remainder — more than a million — were held in “enclosed villages.” Prisoners were questioned with the help of “slicing off ears, boring holes in eardrums, flogging until death, pouring paraffin over suspects who were then set alight, and burning eardrums with lit cigarettes.” The soldiers were told they could shoot anyone they liked “provided they were black.” Ms. Elkins’ evidence suggests that more than 100,000 Kikuyu were either killed or died of disease and starvation in the camps. David Anderson documents the hanging of 1,090 suspected rebels: far more than the French executed in Algeria. Thousands more were summarily executed by soldiers, who claimed they had “failed to halt” when challenged.

   These are just two examples of at least 20 such atrocities overseen and organised by the British Government or British colonial settlers. Some of them might trigger a vague, brainstem memory in a few thousand readers, but most people would have no idea what I am talking about. The British journalist Max Hastings laments Britons’ “relative lack of interest” in Stalin and Mao’s crimes. But at least we are aware that they happened.

   In one British newspaper we can read the historian Andrew Roberts arguing that for “the vast majority of its half-millennium-long history, the British empire was an exemplary force for good … the British gave up their empire largely without bloodshed, after having tried to educate their successor governments in the ways of democracy and representative institutions” (presumably by locking up their future leaders). In another, he insists that “the British empire delivered astonishing growth rates, at least in those places fortunate enough to be coloured pink on the globe.” (Compare this to Mike Davis’ central finding, that “there was no increase in India’s per capita income from 1757 to 1947,” or to Prasannan Parthasarathi’s demonstration that “South Indian labourers had higher earnings than their British counterparts in the 18th century and lived lives of greater financial security.”) Elsewhere, John Keegan asserts that “the empire became in its last years highly benevolent and moralistic.” The Victorians “set out to bring civilisation and good government to their colonies and to leave when they were no longer welcome. In almost every country, once coloured red on the map, they stuck to their resolve.”

   There is one, rightly sacred Holocaust in European history. All the others can be denied, ignored, or belittled. As Mark Curtis points out, the dominant system of thought in Britain “promotes one key concept that underpins everything else — the idea of Britain’s basic benevolence … Criticism of foreign policies is certainly possible, and normal, but within narrow limits which show `exceptions’ to, or `mistakes’ in, promoting the rule of basic benevolence.” This idea, I fear, is the true “sense of British cultural identity” whose alleged loss Max Hastings laments today. No judge or censor is required to enforce it. The men who own the papers simply commission the stories they want to read.

   In Ireland, the British also used a famine to help ethnically cleanse the countryside. At the time of the famine, Ireland was a net exporter of cheap beef and grain — being used to feed British workers fueling the Industrial Revolution in Victorian England. These were the required payments of the sharecroppers. (Basically Irish folks farming Irish land now held by English landlords.) The Irish who grew the beef and grain subsided on potatoes. When that crop failed, the English continued to insist on their payments, leaving the Irish to starve. However, having annexed Ireland some 30 years previously, they were now in the awkward position of having to take some responsibility for conditions there. “Relief” was offered only to those who had no land holdings. This meant that a starving family who owned an acre of land had to cede the land to get relief. “Outdoor” relief consisted of make-work jobs breaking rocks for un-needed roads in the coldest winter. Those who didn’t show up didn’t get food. “Indoor” relief was administered through workhouses in which families were separated — men in one place, women in another, children in another. Workhouses were disease factories. Mortality in many places exceeded 50%. The one “free” thing the British offered was transportation out of Ireland. By the end of the famine, half the population was dead or had immigrated. The Irish population has never recovered to its pre-famine level. From a Malthusian perspective, which many Victorians took with respect to the Irish, this was a feature, not a bug. Yet the Irish remain strangely ungrateful, even to this very day.

7. Katherine says:

   January 17, 2009 at 1:31 pm

   The above commenters, including me, did not maintain that the British never erred in their colonial enterprises. They were not always benevolent, but neither were they always deliberately evil. They did leave behind structures which assisted the previous holdings in Africa and South Asia in entering the modern world. Catholic Mom, you view the British, apparently, throughout the hundreds of years of imperialism as no better than the thirteenth-century Mongols. This is just as warped as the idea that the British were always benevolent and with no self-interest.

8. azusa says:

   January 17, 2009 at 4:18 pm

   Catholic Mom, try to look at the world with both eyes. My father was an Irish Catholic & I’m fairly familiar with the Irish Catholic-Nationalist take on things. You would never guess from some of them that a large minority of Irish was and is Protestant – a product of the turmoil of the 17th century when Ulster was ‘planted’ and Ireland was subsequently divided into Catholic Jacobites and Protestant Orangemen, in a war that threatened the goverrnment of England and Scotland as well. The Jacobites lost and were punished (in the style of those days) for backing the wrong side, and the divsions into an English speaking Protestant Ascendancy and an Irish speaking Catholic ‘serving class’ were deepened. But the history didn’t begin then. Ireland, indeed, was under Anglo-Norman hegemony since the 11th century. Your black and white view of ‘the English’ and ‘the Irish’ (not to mention responses to the Famine) is a gross over-simplification of an ancient and very complex relationship. For one thing, the Irish have always been a very important part of the British army and fought most of Britain’s ‘imperialist’ wars.

9. William S says:

   January 17, 2009 at 4:54 pm

   catholic Mom, I can’t help thinking of Stevie Smith’s poem ‘TheCelts’, which begins
   [blockquote] I think of the Celts as rather a whining lady
   Who was beautiful once but is not so much now
   She is not very loving, but there is one thing she loves
   It is her grievance which she hugs and takes out walking.[/blockquote]

10. William S says:

    January 17, 2009 at 7:56 pm

    Ooops I realise I pressed Submit when I meant to press preview . . .

    Stevie Smith talking particularly about the Irish (I’d love to quote the whole poem but I don’t know where copyright stands on that).

    It is a wonderful reflection on the strange relationship between the two Islands. After pointing out how the English love the Celtic lady ‘oh they love her very much / Which is odd as she hates them more than anyone else’. Stevie Smith concludes:

    [blockquote] Oh the Celtic lady when she’s Irish is the one for me
    Oh she is so witty and wild, my word witty,
    And flashing and spiteful this Celtic lady we love
    [/blockquote]

    It’s the hugging one’s grievance and taking it out walking which is the danger Stevie Smith was warning about.

11. Catholic Mom says:

    January 18, 2009 at 2:15 am

    But the history didn’t begin then. Ireland, indeed, was under Anglo-Norman hegemony since the 11th century. Your black and white view of ‘the English’ and ‘the Irish’ (not to mention responses to the Famine) is a gross over-simplification of an ancient and very complex relationship. For one thing, the Irish have always been a very important part of the British army and fought most of Britain’s ‘imperialist’ wars.

    I never said that English/Irish relations began with the Ulster plantation. But what’s your point? That the English were benevolent before then? Yes, the Irish supplied the cannon fodder for most of England’s imperial ventures, for the simple reason that serving in the British army was one of the best jobs a landless, uneducated, Irish boy could get. (Bearing in mind that, until Catholic Emancipation, it was impossible for an Irish boy to GET an education.) Very often, after receiving devastating wounds, they were discharged without a pension or further care. As the song about the Irish soldier blinded in the Afghan wars says:

    So Irish boys, dear countrymen
    Remember what I say
    If you serve your country’s tyrants
    You’ll surely rue the day
    So if you are intending
    a-solidiering to go,
    remember poor blind Sheehan
    in the vale of Arklow.

    Please tell me what complexities re: the famine I’m missing out on. I’ve actually read quite a few technical books by historians analyzing details of imports/exports/population censuses/workhouse records/records of the British agencies charged with handling the famine, etc. For a very good statistical analysis, I recommend to you “This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine 1845-52” by Christine Kinealy.

    Catholic Mom, you view the British, apparently, throughout the hundreds of years of imperialism as no better than the thirteenth-century Mongols.

    I view the British empire as one of the great empires of history — one in which commerce did not FOLLOW the military, but preceeded it. The British were the first and most brilliant of the European countries (followed closely by the Dutch) to grasp the economic opportunities of colonialism — far beyond the “invade and pillage” mentality of the mongols. Rarely did they take their “eyes off the prize” or flinch from what the enterprise required. Were there benevolent Englishmen or situations in which the colonized benefited from colonization? Sure — there were benevolent slave holders and times when the conquored Native American benefitted from being conquored. But if you think slavery was a benevolent institution, or the driving of the Plains Indians from the plains (or the Cherokees from the East) did not function, effectively, as genocide, or that British imperialism was not rock-hard ruthless, then you don’t know history or you’re living in a made-for-TV dream world.

    I think of the Celts as rather a whining lady
    Who was beautiful once but is not so much now
    She is not very loving, but there is one thing she loves
    It is her grievance which she hugs and takes out walking.

    Having built for themselves a beautiful fantasy about their wonderful benevolent “white man’s burden” days, the Brits really hate it when the Irish deal out a few crisp irrefutable facts about their behavior in their own backyard. This, to them, is “whining.” Who was it who said “Irish history is something every Englishman should learn and every Irishman forget?”

    I remember a very nice English boy in graduate school who told me that recent research had discovered that there was actually nothing wrong with the potatoes during the famine — but they had a strange mold on them that the Irish believed would give them venereal disease, so they refused to eat them. You would have thought that when you were down to eating grass and watching your children die in front of you, you might want to risk it, but apparently it wasn’t enough to overcome their ignorant fears. And then, wouldn’t you just know it, they whined about it on top of everything else.

    Actually, I have no interest in discussing Irish (or anybody else’s) grievances against the British empire. I just can’t take the revisionist spin in silence.