hierarchical and highly structured in its social organization. Mere snobbery formed an important part of this organization, as many of the tribal leaders and local potentates, like Yoruba chiefs in 1930s Nigeria, vied for audiences with the King in London, or lobbied extensively, like Sir Robert Ho Tung in Hong Kong, for differing ranks of knighthood. To the likes of Sir Robert Ho Tung there was a world
of difference between being a mere knight bachelor and being a KBE or the even more exalted KCMG.
Despite hierarchy and class being central to the British Empire, we cannot be blind to the fact that the British Empire did bring justice and order to often anarchic parts of the world. To say that the empire was undemocratic is not to say that its effects were wholly negative. It is common for people involved in history and politics to see institutions, with the best intentions, as wholly good or wholly bad. Such institutions as slavery, or ideas such as fascism, can be put into these simple categories with some justification. Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.
Others, while recognizing the hierarchical nature of the British Empire, have said that conditions in the empire merely matched conditions in Britain itself. This is not strictly true. While Britain was a country famously obsessed by class, after 1918 there existed mass democracy, and certainly, by the 1930s, democracy existed in Britain on the same basis as it does today, except for the lowering of the voting age in 1967. If one were to look at the British prime ministers of the 1920s and 1930s, the discrepancy between heads of government in Britain and colonial governors in places like Sudan and Hong Kong becomes obvious. David Lloyd George, the son of a Baptist schoolteacher from Wales, could become prime minister in 1916. It is inconceivable that a man of his background, without a university education or a military career, could have become governor of Nigeria, for example. The same could be said of Ramsay MacDonald, the
illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid, who became the Labour Partyâs first prime minister in 1924. Without a public school education, and without a university degree, it is very unlikely that anyone like Ramsay MacDonald could have got anywhere in the colonial empire. The British Empire was undoubtedly more snobbish, more hierarchical and more deferential than the mother country. It is wrong to argue, as some have done, that British administrators were merely projecting the class distinctions of Britainâs society on to the colonial empire. Britain was changing at a much faster rate than the empire, and recruits to the Imperial Civil Service towards the end of the empire, in the 1950s, were only too conscious of this.
In the colonies themselves, distinct rules of precedence applied which bore no relation to status in the mother country. If these distinctions were derived from Britain, they took on a totally independent life in the colonies which, by the early twentieth century, had a completely different scale of values and preoccupations. This realization forms part of Kitty Faneâs
of difference between being a mere knight bachelor and being a KBE or the even more exalted KCMG.
Despite hierarchy and class being central to the British Empire, we cannot be blind to the fact that the British Empire did bring justice and order to often anarchic parts of the world. To say that the empire was undemocratic is not to say that its effects were wholly negative. It is common for people involved in history and politics to see institutions, with the best intentions, as wholly good or wholly bad. Such institutions as slavery, or ideas such as fascism, can be put into these simple categories with some justification. Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.
Others, while recognizing the hierarchical nature of the British Empire, have said that conditions in the empire merely matched conditions in Britain itself. This is not strictly true. While Britain was a country famously obsessed by class, after 1918 there existed mass democracy, and certainly, by the 1930s, democracy existed in Britain on the same basis as it does today, except for the lowering of the voting age in 1967. If one were to look at the British prime ministers of the 1920s and 1930s, the discrepancy between heads of government in Britain and colonial governors in places like Sudan and Hong Kong becomes obvious. David Lloyd George, the son of a Baptist schoolteacher from Wales, could become prime minister in 1916. It is inconceivable that a man of his background, without a university education or a military career, could have become governor of Nigeria, for example. The same could be said of Ramsay MacDonald, the
illegitimate son of a Scottish housemaid, who became the Labour Partyâs first prime minister in 1924. Without a public school education, and without a university degree, it is very unlikely that anyone like Ramsay MacDonald could have got anywhere in the colonial empire. The British Empire was undoubtedly more snobbish, more hierarchical and more deferential than the mother country. It is wrong to argue, as some have done, that British administrators were merely projecting the class distinctions of Britainâs society on to the colonial empire. Britain was changing at a much faster rate than the empire, and recruits to the Imperial Civil Service towards the end of the empire, in the 1950s, were only too conscious of this.
In the colonies themselves, distinct rules of precedence applied which bore no relation to status in the mother country. If these distinctions were derived from Britain, they took on a totally independent life in the colonies which, by the early twentieth century, had a completely different scale of values and preoccupations. This realization forms part of Kitty Faneâs
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