How the Monarchy undermined the British Empire
Alexander Sinclair
Sentimental admirers of British Imperialism sometimes intermix their respect for the world’s most progressive institution with affection for the constitutional monarchy that nominally headed it. This is wrongheaded. Britain, to a much greater degree than other European states, pursued two separate models of imperialism; on the one hand, uncoordinated, profit-seeking conquests led by individuals like Rhodes or organisations like the East India Company; on the other, state-led governance under the watchful gaze of the monarch, typically justified by moral imperatives and/or plain conservatism.
India gives us a natural experiment in which the qualities of the two can be contrasted. Whilst some try to talk up the positive impacts of British rule on India, it remains undeniable that the most profitable British activity pre-Mutiny was direct wealth extraction, chiefly of bullion and jewels; Robert Clive became perhaps the wealthiest self-made man in Europe without trifling with the free market. This wealth transfer rewarded merit whilst providing capital for nascent British industry: pro-market activists who believe that wealth circulation is a universal good would do well to consider that a violation of property rights converted huge amounts of hoarded gold into fluid, highly productive capital.
Overseeing this activity were about a thousand ‘writers’, British men, mostly in their twenties and thirties, who could expect to return home with seven to eight figures in savings. The newfound ‘Public’ (viz. ‘democratic public sphere’) did not take kindly to the implicit assault on hereditary wealth and aristocratic control of Parliament, and soon Burke, Smith and others were rolling out the standard accusations of Unlawfulness and Unworkability. To Smith, the role of merchant was incompatible with the sovereign dignity required to install obedience without force; Burke, in criticising the insubordinate allocation of judicial authority to newly-employed writers, inadvertently wrote one of their greatest panegyrics:
Another circumstance which distinguishes the East India Company is the youth of the persons who are employed in the system of that service. The servants have almost universally been sent out to begin their progress and career in active occupation, and in the exercise of high authority, at that period of life which, in all other places, has been employed in the course of a rigid education. To put the matter in a few words,—they are transferred from slippery youth to perilous independence, from perilous independence to inordinate expectations, from inordinate expectations to boundless power. School-boys without tutors, minors without guardians, the world is let loose upon them with all its temptations, and they are let loose upon the world with all the powers that despotism involves.
This economic model, together with expansion and intensification of Company rule, was pursued up until the Mutiny. In the last decades before the defenestration of the EIC, the doctrine of lapse was aggressively pursued; steadily eliminating the corrupt, incompetent native monarchies. Burton’s first years in India give one a good picture of the whirlpool of excitement and immorality that prevailed in 1840s Bombay: it is like a little piece of the future dropped into the nineteenth century. He gives us the response to Cobden’s proto-libertarian broadsides against British rule:
He declared (as if he had been taken into supernatural confidence), that God and His visible Natural Laws have opposed insuperable obstacles to the success of such a scheme... All this was the regular Free-trade bosh, and the Great Bagsman would doubtless have been thunderstruck, had he heard the Homeric shouts of laughter with which his mean-spirited utterances were received by every white skin in British India. There was not a subaltern in the 18th Bombay N.I. who did not consider himself perfectly capable of governing a million Hindus... for every subaltern felt (if he could not put the feeling into words) that India had been won, despite England, by the energy and bravery of men like himself.
All of this ended with the advent of the Raj. The subaltern’s Indian mistress and platoon of servants went out; Victorian moralism had arrived; the new world order would be black-coated, austere, deferential, and sexually repressed.
British India would now bend the knee to Queen Victoria, where once it had wrestled with the “little Kings in Leadenhall Street”, and become obedient. Inevitably, a government devoted to the hereditary rights of monarchy set aside the destined aegis of conquest. Whereas the EIC had just taken Southern Burma and annexed the Punjab, twenty years would pass until the Raj stirred itself to a war in Afghanistan, in itself a joylessly conservative enterprise aimed at creating a ‘buffer state’ rather than at fun and profit.
This second Afghan War proved a costly débacle, as did the succeeding conflict in Burma. An immediate stop was put to the annexation of native states under British suzerainty; the last Governor-General, Dalhousie, had annexed an area larger than the Low Countries in eight years while eighty-nine years of the British Raj allowed a parade of premodern rulers to retain their authority into the era of the atom bomb. Before 1858 the local Rajah was a figure of fun; afterwards, the incompetence, oppression and needless cruelty were effaced and traditional rulers in India romanticised as a species of noble savage.
The reaction against the empirical racism of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries reached its peak around this time. Phrenology, in practice an egalitarian theory not unlike the unsubstantiated ‘multiple intelligences’ introduced by various woke windbags of the twentieth century, flourished in popular culture even as every one of its predictions was falsified; Lamarck introduced a bogus theory of inheritance whereby the natural hierarchies catalogued in the preceding could be overcome by sheer effort. The advent of exuberant Rhodesian expansionism and later Weisman’s genetics were experienced as a revolutionary outpouring of progress rather than a natural development of the status quo ante.
Starting from 1858, Guelph India began to install the machinery of Egalitarianism, replacing the rule of the writers with the sort of debating-society politics one can read about in Kipling; where natives* exempted from the rigourous selection process applied to British civil servants were paid large salaries to parody the worst aspects of European municipal politics in a system justified solely by democratic dogmas. In fact, the immediate consequence of Guelph rule in India was to turn an increasingly aggressive, expansionist power, which had just indulged in a successful war against China, into a conservative, utilitarian state; thereby defending the principle of hereditary privilege against a threat which had prompted concern amonst Britain’s moneyed classes ever since the Battle of Plassey.
That Monarchy and Egalitarianism should go hand in hand conflicts with the prejudices of a twentieth-century British intellectual culture, which in practice defended both against the inroads of progressive politics and science; but history and philosophy show that the two are natural allies. Monarchy is incapable of justifying itself on the meritocratic criteria that were the sole values of Company India; Vicky Guelph and her children would have failed at both the classical examinations that selected writers and the real-world, political-military competition in which their graduates excelled.
Resentment is not the sole prerogative of the poor. Neither is class warfare. The masses and the monarchies use the same doctrines and follow the same methods in extracting wealth. Within the Egalitarian system, every elected spiv and local Stakeholder is the image of the Big Boss, enjoying his meagre dole of power according to inherited right. That every citizen has a right to vote by simple virtue of being born is philosophically identical to the claims made by monarchs, and stands or falls by the same revolutions in the human mind.
What was the thwarted future of the colonial system? A. J. Hobson (himself an Orwellian reactionary who regarded the introduction of machinery into India as a retrograde step**) supposed the ultimate destiny of Western Imperialism to be the division of China; providing a labour pool which would obsolete the white proletariat and render the whole metropole from Lemberg to Los Angeles an image of the Home Counties, devoted to bureaucratic administration and artistic and scientific pursuits. Looking back at a twentieth century where Hobson’s moralistic bigotries prevailed, we may wonder what exactly about this intriguing vision rendered it an object of such dislike to elements of the British ruling class; but when we consider the importance of hereditary right to that class, the answer is not hard to find.
* देसी
** His lurid praise of Qing China as a country where “even capital sentences are executed by consent” is good for a laugh