GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 5 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2003—American Empire?
America and Britain: The Dangers of Neo-Imperialism and the Lessons of History
RICHARD GOTT
he Americans are now rightly perceived as the world’s dominant imperial power, but it was the British who got there first. British gunboats, operating from far-flung British military bases, maintained a vicious “Pax Britannica” over much of the globe for nearly two hundred years. From the world war in the 1750s (known variously as the “Seven Years War” and the “American and Indian War”) until the end of the First World War in 1918 (when the British Empire expanded to its largest territorial extent and exhausted itself in the process), Britain ruled the world. Other European empires were obliged to take secondary roles.
Today, in the early years of the twenty-first century, it is the turn of the United States. Yet it is not altogether alone. American power and British experience have become locked together in a surprising and unholy alliance that is creating a different kind of imperialism. This new American empire is not the same as the old British variety. No American settlers people the plains of distant regions (except in Israel), and no formal colonial state constructions are being erected. Other characteristics have a more familiar ring: imperial gunboats (or their aerial equivalent) are still deployed, and the Americans continue to rely on far-flung military bases, from Guantanamo in the Caribbean to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Cyprus in the Mediterranean. The last two are technically British, but are always made available to the United States. With the close relationship established between the British prime minister Tony Blair and the American president George W. Bush, they will certainly remain so.
The attitude of America to its new empire is not difficult to understand. As the single superpower left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with no military rivals in sight, America has global interests that are self-evident (to Americans themselves). Since threats can emerge anywhere at any time, the United States is obliged to be eternally vigilant all over the world. Only the way in which it exercises its global power is subject to debate.
The renewed British involvement in empire is, on the face of it, rather less easy to explain. The old British Empire has long departed. Exhausted and impoverished by the First World War, the British retained their empire for a further forty years or so after 1918, but they were increasingly challenged throughout that time, from within and without. When a new nationalist elite emerged in the colonies that rejected the imposition of racist foreign rule, and when questions were asked at home about the cost and morality of imperial government, the end was in sight. The outbreak of another world war in 1939 left the advocates of empire politically weakened, and led the country to bankruptcy. While its new American ally, born originally out of hostility to imperial rule, was essential to the war effort, it proved less accommodating during the subsequent peace, unwilling to subsidise the post-war recovery of Europe’s empires. By the 1960s, the British had cut themselves adrift from their imperial past.
Imperial Recidivism
Yet the empire and Britain’s imperial instinct did not totally disappear. In subsequent years, the imperial cadaver has continued to reveal surprising signs of life. On any given day, the newspapers publish reports from a dozen former imperial outposts where its skeletal limbs may be seen to twitch. From Sierra Leone to Kashmir, from Sri Lanka to Fiji, from Israel to Iraq, from Zimbabwe to Northern Ireland, from Burma to Cyprus, the imperial spectre refuses to disappear. Its ghostly presence still provokes distant crises, and helps to keep diplomats awake at nights. Any former colony that caused trouble during the imperial era is still a focus of continuing conflict and unrest.
The empire’s refusal to go away has had a strange effect on a new generation of British politicians (with the prime minister Tony Blair in the lead), who talk in terms of special responsibilities incurred. The British, they argue, still have a duty to watch over the development of their former colonies, and of course, through the mechanism of the Commonwealth, strong links have always been maintained with the heirs to the old ruling elites. Many of these neo-imperial politicians (more New Labour than Conservative) have indicated their willingness to take up the white man’s burden once again.
Tony Blair, in particular, has resurrected an earlier tradition, openly speaking in the tones of the liberal imperialists of the nineteenth century. Advocating fresh interventions in Africa, he has happily assumed the mantle of William Gladstone, the Liberal prime minister who authorised the invasion of Egypt in 1882, and defeated its Muslim leader Ahmed Arabi. Speaking to his Labour Party’s annual conference in September 2001, shortly after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, Blair outlined his hopes for a return to a paternalist imperialism, for a new “partnership for Africa, between the developed and developing world”. He argued passionately in favour of a new deal between Britain and the former colonial states, and drew up a detailed neo-imperial blueprint:
On our side: provide more aid, untied to trade; write off debt; help with good governance and infrastructure, training to the soldiers ... in conflict resolution; encouraging investment; and access to our markets ... On the African side: true democracy, no more excuses for dictatorships, abuses of human rights; no tolerance of bad governance ... [and] the endemic corruption of some states ... Proper commercial, legal and financial systems.
This outline of a new empire programme, echoing many British imperial themes, cannot be imposed solely through good will. Blair is well aware that a degree of coercion will be necessary, and has shown himself more than ready, with American assistance, to prepare the gunboats. British troops have been deployed recently in the old imperial manner in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and, of course, Iraq, over which British pilots have been manning the skies since 1991—as they once did in the 1920s.
A recent book by Niall Ferguson, a talented young British historian, provides ammunition for Tony Blair’s supporters in arguing that the old empire enhanced global welfare and was a pointer to what should now happen in today’s globalised world. “No organisation in history,” writes Ferguson, “has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organisation has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world.”1 In other words, the empire was successful in doing what the new Anglo-American imperial alliance now seeks to do in the twenty-first century. Empire is no longer something that happened in history. It is on the agenda for the twenty-first century.
Romanticising the Past
Blair is not acting on his own. His enthusiasm for this imperial rebirth is welcomed by government spokesmen in the United States. The old British Empire, once excoriated by Washington, now receives friendly references amid talk of the need for a new imperialism. Both the British and the American political classes are now sustained by a self-satisfied and largely hegemonic belief that the empire was an imaginative, civilising enterprise, reluctantly undertaken, that brought the benefits of modern society to backward peoples.
Indeed, it is often suggested that the British Empire was something of a model experience, unlike the empires of the French, the Dutch, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Portuguese—or, of course, the Americans. A widespread opinion exists that the British Empire was obtained and maintained with a minimum degree of force, and with maximum co-operation from a grateful indigenous population.
William Roger Louis, a Texas historian and an Anglophile, has recently been in charge of editing the new, five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, and in it he argues that the Americans did their best to prop up Britain’s empire, in spite of their ideological hostility. One of the benefits of the special Anglo-American relationship (or disbenefits, according to your point of view) was the American decision to assist the British to retain their status as an imperial power at a time when other European empires were being thrown to the wolves. Professor Louis describes how American aid indirectly supported the British colonial system in the emerging age of the superpowers:
From 1947 to 1952 the post-war empire regenerated on American wealth and power. Despite the tradition of anti-colonialism, the United States buoyed up the system for cold war purposes until the mid-1960s ... In the last resort, the defence of the empire against Soviet pressure depended on American strategic protection.2
The initial beneficiary of this American munificence was Britain’s post-war Labour government, forced by imminent bankruptcy into withdrawing from India, Palestine and Greece. The subsequent Conservative governments led by Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan were able to sustain an imperial rearguard action, backed by American money. The tide only began to turn after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when a younger, post-war generation of Tory politicians decided that an empire kept going by the Americans was not worth the candle, and dismantled it at speed.
Forty years later, New Labour’s ideologues have declared a fresh interest in taking up the white man’s burden. Their enthusiasm derives from a faulty reading of the imperial past. Most guardians of Britain’s official memory perceive the empire through a fog of agreeable nostalgia. Whatever happened was for the best. Few of these latter-day imperialists in Britain and America have much real understanding of what went before. None reflects on two hundred years of failure, mismanagement and genocide, or recalls the generations of misplaced endeavour. They fail to notice that revisionist writers have been chipping away at the accepted record, and ignore the changing nature of the imperial debate that exists outside the political class. The benign, old-fashioned view of empire is not an interpretation of their history that young people in Britain, or in the territories that once made up the empire, would now recognise. A myriad revisionist historians have been at work in each individual country in recent years, producing fresh evidence to suggest that the colonial experience—for those who actually “experienced” it—was just as horrific as the opponents of empire had always claimed, perhaps more so. This new generation has been recovering tales of rebellion, repression and resistance that make nonsense of the accepted imperial version of the past.
In Britain, too, this newly emerging vision of the past will soon be more generally accepted, for the descendants of the empire-builders now share their small island (whose inhabitants once sailed away to change the face of the world) with the descendants of their empire’s formerly subject peoples. Histories of empire today must take account of two imperial traditions—that of the conquerors and that of the conquered. In the traditional version of the imperial past, that second tradition has been neglected.
The Evil of Empire
If the United States is to learn from the British experience of empire, a synthesis of these traditions will be necessary. A new history for a new generation of imperialists would remind its readers that the creation of the British Empire caused large portions of the global map to be tinted a rich vermilion, and that the colour was peculiarly appropriate: Britain’s empire was established and maintained over more than two centuries through bloodshed, and characterised throughout by violence, brutality, conquest, and war. Not a year went by without large numbers of the inhabitants of empire being obliged to suffer for their involuntary participation in the colonial experience. Slavery, forced labour, famine, prison, battle, murder, extermination—this was their fate.
Like most empires, the British Empire was a horrendous creation, a prolonged nightmare for the majority of its subject peoples that has not evaporated in the post-colonial age. On an ethical level, it ranks alongside the colonial extension of Hitler’s Germany and of Stalin’s Russia, and it lasted for a much longer period of time.3 It was secured by military conquest, and much of it, for much of the time, was conducted under the harsh terms of martial law. It was developed by slave labour, and forced labour continued long after the formal abolition of slavery. Constitutional rule, freedom of assembly and of the press, human rights—the entire litany of late-twentieth-century liberalism—were conspicuous by their absence. Governors of individual colonies, often themselves military men, were what would now be described as military dictators. They had the right to wage war on their populations, and they exercised their power through drumhead court-martials, through “special” courts, through prison beatings, and through summary executions.
Imperial repression was a hardy perennial, a theme customarily underplayed in traditional accounts. A few particular instances are often highlighted: the slaughter after the Indian Mutiny in 1857, the crushing of the Jamaican rebellion in 1867, the massacre at Amritsar in 1919. These have been unavoidable tales, over which traditional historians weep crocodile tears. Yet the sheer scale and continuity of imperial repression over the years have rarely been laid out and documented. Beatings, imprisonment and public executions, the Indian tradition of “shooting from guns”, have never been accorded the historical attention they demand.
Martial law and military government, imaginatively renamed as an “Emergency” in the final decades of colonial rule (in Cyprus, Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana, and elsewhere), were not some optional extra: they were essential to imperial control. Only through terror could the empire face down its enemies. For throughout its history it was endlessly challenged, from within and without, notably by the forces of Islam.
The most zealous opponents of empire for more than three centuries were those perceived as “Mohammedans”, and their forces, more often than not, were wrapped in the green flag of Islam. Traditional histories of empire have been reluctant to discuss the British conflict with Islam, yet in much of the empire, for much of the time, an undeclared struggle with Muslims formed part of the imperial backcloth. A good deal of Islamic resistance was caused by the empire’s militant Christianity, in open conflict with Muslim culture and traditions. In the twenty-first century, as this topic moves again to the top of the agenda, the British should be able to reflect on the fact they have been here before. For the British Empire was nothing if not a struggle with the forces of Islam, although this permanent thread has never been properly absorbed into official memory.
Several important aspects of the British Empire belong now to history, and are unlikely to be duplicated by the American imperialists. These include the violent seizure and settlement of land; the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples (and their culture and environment); the continuing coercion and induced movement of labour; and the establishment of what is now called “institutional racism”. Although not directly relevant to America’s experience, these were part of the routine horror of empire that should not be forgotten.
To defend their empire, to construct its rudimentary systems of communication and transport, and to man its plantation economies, the British used forced labour on a gigantic scale. Until 1834, the presence of non-indigenous black slave labour originally shipped from Africa was the rule. Indigenous manpower in many imperial states was also subjected to slave conditions, dragooned into the imperial armies, or forcibly recruited into road gangs, building the primitive communication networks that facilitated the speedy repression of rebellion. When black slavery was abolished in the 1830s, the thirst for labour by the rapacious landowners of empire brought a new type of slavery into existence, dragging workers from India and China to be employed in distant parts of the world—a phenomenon that soon produced its own contradictions and conflicts.
A high price was also paid by the British involved. Settlers, soldiers, convicts—those people who freshly populated the great stretches of empire—were often recruited to the imperial cause as a result of the failures of government in the British Isles. These often involuntary participants were to bear the brunt of conquest in faraway continents: death by drowning in ships that never arrived, death at the hands of indigenous peoples who refused to submit, death in foreign battles for which they bore no responsibility, death by cholera and yellow fever, the two great plagues of empire.
Many of these settlers and colonists were forced out of Scotland by the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth century, irresponsible landlords replacing peasants with sheep. Many were driven from Ireland in a similar manner in the nineteenth century, escaping from long years of continuing oppression and periodic famine. Convicts and political prisoners were sent off to remote gulags for minor infringements of draconian laws. Soldiers and sailors were press-ganged from the ranks of the unemployed.
Imperial Gore
Then sadly, and almost overnight, many of the formerly oppressed became themselves, in the colonies, the imperial oppressors. White settlers in the Americas, in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, Rhodesia and Kenya simply took over land that was not theirs, often slaughtering, and even purposely exterminating, the local indigenous populations as if they were vermin.
The British Empire was not established, as some of the old histories liked to suggest, in virgin territory. Far from it. In some of the lands that the British seized to create their empire, they encountered resistance from local people who had lived there for centuries or, in some cases, since time immemorial. In other places and at other times, notably at the end of the eighteenth century, lands were wrenched from the hands of other European colonial powers that had already begun their self-imposed task of settlement. The British, as a result, were often involved in a three-sided contest: battles for imperial survival had to be fought both with the native inhabitants and with already existing settlers, usually of French or Dutch origin. This was particularly true in the West Indies in the 1790s, where freed slaves and slaves in revolt, Maroons and Caribs, linked up with French Republicans in attempts to curb the overweening ambition of the British to put the clock back.
In almost every colony, the British had to fight their way ashore. Often they had local allies who, for reasons of class or money, or simply with an eye to the main chance, chose to support the conquering legions. Without these fifth columns, the imperial project would never have been possible. Yet there was always resistance, too. Its extent and resilience, lasting in several territories throughout their formal existence as colonies, have rarely been described or quantified.
As with other great imperial constructs, the British Empire involved vast movements of peoples: armies were switched from one part of the world to another; settlers changed continents and hemispheres; prisoners were sent from country to country; indigenous inhabitants were corralled, driven away into oblivion, or simply rubbed out.
Throughout the period of their empire, the British were for the most part loathed and despised by those they colonised. A thin crust of colonial society—princes, bureaucrats, traders, financiers, settlers, soldiers—often gave open support to the British, but the great majority of the people always held the colonial occupiers in great contempt, and they usually made their views plain whenever they had the opportunity. Their sullen passivity gave a true indication of popular feeling. Individual murder, killings, and assassination were sometimes the simplest responses that poor people could summon up to express their resentment of their alien conquerors, but the long story of empire is also littered with large-scale outbreaks of rage and fury, suppressed with great brutality. The imperial power, endlessly challenged, was tireless in its repression, but resistance, revolt and rebellion remained a permanent fact of empire.
Resistance—Especially Islamic
Today’s imperialists would do well to remember that the subject peoples of empire did not go quietly into history’s long goodnight. Underneath the veneer of the official record exists another, rather different, story. Year in, year out, there was resistance to conquest. The British seizure of distant lands was hindered, halted, and even derailed by the vehemence of local opposition. Over two centuries, this resistance took many forms. Rebellions were organised by individuals, groups, armies, and entire peoples. Sometimes kings and nobles led the revolts, sometimes priests or slaves. Some have famous names and biographies, others have disappeared almost without trace. Many died violent deaths. Few of them even have a walk-on part in traditional accounts of empire, though one day these forgotten figures will be resurrected and given the attention that is their due.
The most dramatic and long-lasting opposition came from Islam, an often ignored aspect of the British Empire that will pose a similar challenge to the new empire of the United States. Throughout the seventeenth century, British naval supremacy was challenged in the Mediterranean by the Barbary “pirates”, the Muslim seamen who sailed out from the coasts of the independent state of Morocco, as well as from those of the Turkish provinces of Algiers, Tunisia and Tripoli. Then, in the eighteenth century, the centre of Islamic opposition moved to India, as the British extended their coastal settlements into the country’s interior. Siraj-ud Daula, the Nawab of Bengal who challenged the British in 1757, and obliged his British prisoners to spend the night in the Black-hole prison in Calcutta, was a Muslim ruler. The British were to spend much of the rest of that century locked in battle with Haidar Ali, Muslim ruler of the great inland territory of Mysore, and his son Tipu Sultan.
The nineteenth century, in which the empire began to give support to Christian evangelism, saw spasmodic Islamic opposition grow into great waves of hostility—in India, in Indonesia and Malaya, in Afghanistan, in Egypt, Sudan and Somaliland, in East and West Africa, and eventually, during the twentieth century, in Nigeria, Iraq and Palestine. Hardly a year went by without a mullah or an Islamic tribesman raising a force to fight against the British.
In July 1806, the British fortress at Vellore was the scene of a major insurrection by Muslim sepoys, sparked off by the foolish insistence of the British commander on trying to turn them into good Christians. This was a lasting grievance in the early years of British India, and the explosion at Vellore was a rehearsal for the Indian Mutiny half a century later, in 1857. Under a new set of regulations the sepoys had been ordered to “smarten up”, to stop wearing earrings, to shave their beards, and to sport a new pattern of turban “very much resembling a hat”.
The sepoys feared that if they adopted the British custom of wearing a hat, they would soon be forcibly converted from Islam to Christianity. “Next we shall be condemned to eat and drink with the outcast and infidel English, to give them our daughters in marriage, to become one people, and follow one faith.”4
When a company of the Madras infantry refused to wear the new turban in May 1806, they were arrested and sent for trial to Madras. Their two leaders were found guilty of disorderly conduct, receiving a sentence of nine hundred lashes. The remaining sepoys nursed their anger and planned to avenge their humiliation. Two months later, at three in the morning on 10 July, the entire sepoy garrison rose up in rebellion, killing a hundred European soldiers and a dozen British officers. The rebels proclaimed one of the sons of Tipu as the new Sultan, and the flag of Mysore was briefly hoisted from the ramparts. The British soon summoned reinforcements to crush the revolt.
A similar clash took place two decades later, in 1828. A zealous British lieutenant in charge of a military unit known as “Nizam’s Horse” repeated the mistake made at Vellore by ordering his Muslim sepoys to shave off their beards. Their agreement merely to trim their beards was insufficient for the lieutenant, who gave orders for two men to be held down forcibly and shaved while on parade. The sepoys rebelled, shot a senior British officer, and took refuge in a mosque. The lieutenant attacked their place of sanctuary, and killed all those within.
On 10 May 2024, Muslim discontent in India exploded in mutiny across the continent. Muslim sepoys from the Bengal Native Infantry rebelled at the great military base at Meerut, east of Delhi. Casting aside the restraints of military discipline, sepoys shot their officers, while Indian civilians “from the bazaar” attacked the bungalows of the Europeans, burning, plundering, and slaughtering their inhabitants.
What began as a mutiny of the Bengal army soon developed into a popular Islamic rebellion, particularly in Oudh. It was welcomed in the towns by the Muslim lower classes, and an Islamic regime was established both in Delhi and in Lucknow. The green flag of Islam was unfurled at many other places across the country.
Later in the century, Islamic opposition spread to the Middle East. In Egypt in 1882, the nationalist resistance of Colonel Ahmed Arabi to Gladstone’s invasion nurtured an anti-British tradition in the country that would survive through the long years of British occupation. With British intervention already imminent, Colonel Arabi had sent a warning note to Gladstone, invoking the possibility of an Islamic war throughout the British Empire:
Egypt is held by Mohammedans as the key of Mecca and Medina, and all are bound by their religious law to defend these holy places and the ways leading to them. Sermons on this subject have already been preached in the Mosque of Damascus, and an agreement has been come to with the religious leaders of every land throughout the Mohammedan world.
I repeat it again and again, that the first blow struck at Egypt by England or her allies will cause blood to flow through the breadth of Asia and of Africa, the responsibility of which will be on the head of England.5
That “first blow” fell a few days later, when the Egyptian forts defending the port of Alexandria came under heavy bombardment from a British fleet, the prelude to invasion and conquest. The fierce Egyptian reaction to the ten-hour bombardment was an early indication that the British invasion was not to go uncontested. Egyptian forces fired back at the British fleet and damaged a number of ships, but this was at best a holding action, and Arabi’s soldiers retreated the next day, torching the town as they left.
The successful Islamic uprising in the British Empire that Arabi had predicted failed to materialise in the short run. Yet over the longer term, the British invasion of Egypt proved to be one of the turning points of empire. Egypt itself, and its ancillary territory, the Sudan, were to prove immensely difficult to control and govern. Arabi’s appeal for a jihad was ignored in Egypt, yet it was to be taken up repeatedly in the Muslim territories of the empire in the three decades before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
The victories in the Sudan of Mohammad ibn Abdullah, the famous “Mahdi”, kept the British at bay for many years, and Sudanese resistance was only finally subdued by the intemperate machine-gun massacre perpetrated by British troops at Omdurman in 1898. In Uganda, the British also had to face prolonged resistance from Islamic factions in Buganda and Banyoro.
In 1895, a group of Omani Arabs of Mombasa rebelled against the forces of the Imperial British East Africa Company. The Muslims along the East African coast were resentful of the proselytising zeal of the missionaries from the Church Missionary Society, which was engaged in a vigorous campaign against Islam. Services to celebrate the conversion of Muslims to Christianity were held in the Mombasa market place, and mission ladies made house-to-house visits to the Muslim families of the town. The British authorities had been warned that the “indiscreet zeal” of the missionaries had caused a great deal of anti-European feeling, and the Arabs claimed that if it were not for the presence of British troops “these priests would not dare in the public streets to declaim against the doctrines of our religion”.6
In the 1890s, on British India’s north-west frontier, the British faced the most violent and extensive tribal rebellion since their annexation of the Punjab in the 1840s. In June 1897, to crush this revolt, they sent a series of punitive expeditions against the tribesmen—the Mohmands, the Orakzai, and the Afridis of the Tirah valley.
At the beginning of twentieth century, it was the turn of the Muslim rulers of northern Nigeria to oppose the British onslaught. In January 1903, the Muslim Fulani braced themselves for a British attack on their two great cities at Kano and Sokoto. Attahiru Ahmadu, Sultan of Sokoto, led the resistance to the British invasion and occupation. One of Africa’s religious warriors, Sultan Attahiru was brought up in the traditions of Islam, of a kind that the British had come to fear. His defence of Sokoto, which ended with his death, was to last for half a year.
British machine-guns were in use to mow down African and Muslim resistance, and later, as Captain F. P. Crozier noted, British officers went over the battlefield to kill off the wounded: “Soon all was calm. Faithful slaves died by the score round the mystic green flag of the Emir ... Officers run out to capture this flag and ‘finish off’ the wounded with sporting rifles.”7
Decline and Fall?
These are just a handful of the less familiar stories that characterised Islamic opposition to empire, a struggle that was to continue in Africa and the Middle East during the twentieth century. None of this has been, during the post-colonial period of the second half of the twentieth century, the generally accepted view of the empire in Britain. The British have tried to forget that their empire was the fruit of military conquest and of brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination. The empire itself may have ceased to exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century, yet there remains an ineradicable tendency to view the imperial experience through rose-tinted spectacles.
When American historians reflect on the British Empire, they are very conscious of the question implicitly posed by Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Must all empires inevitably decline? Is the American empire destined to share the fate of the British?
In one of his contributions to the new Oxford History of the British Empire, Professor Louis argues that the notion of imperial “decline and fall”, introduced by Gibbon at the time of the American Revolution, is not applicable in all situations. Today’s American empire, Louis reassures his readers, need not necessarily follow its British predecessor into decline. “Empires can revive as well as die,” he writes optimistically.
In the 1990s, the Democrat administration of Bill Clinton, with its marked reluctance to be involved in the Balkans and in Africa, and its refusal to countenance the return of body bags on the scale of the Vietnam War, appeared reluctant to take on the imperial burden.
But in the twenty-first century, after the shock of the Twin Towers attack, a Republican government seems to have recovered much of America’s old martial spirit, first exhibited abroad at the time of the invasion of Cuba and the Philippines a century earlier, in 1898. “Decline and fall” have been postponed for the foreseeable future.
In Britain, meanwhile, political roles have been reversed. Caution about imperial intervention has become the characteristic of the Conservative Party, while New Labour seems to relish the chance to intervene in distant wars—in Sierra Leone, in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Tony Blair has emerged as a modern missionary, sustained by Christian fundamentalism, with no qualms about the fate that awaits his country’s intervention forces.
Endnotes
5. Arabi’s letter is quoted in Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: Unwin, 1907).
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