It was advertised as “a place where boys could be boys”, with its acres of park, valley and woodland, into which boys could disappear and beat each other with sticks and fenceposts and marinated conkers. Our sacred texts were the Dangerous Book for Boys, Cherub, Our Island Story and anything by Kipling. Girls, alien creatures of ill-repute, were absent, as were high academic standards. Instead, we were free to play sport and musical instruments, and to work on our “Character” — to become stable, self-assured Englishmen of the last century, who could stand firm in the flux of the present one.

I was not the first of my family to board there. In fact, I was “Adair minimus”, the fourth of my brothers (minor, major, and maximus) to attend the school. Each had returned, quieter, for their first exeat, insisting that it was such fun. And it sort-of was. It could not be avoided, so we had to make do. This was, after all, England’s annual trick of renewal, the ritual by which the country had sustained itself for nearly 200 years. To maintain an empire, the Carthaginians had sacrificed their children; the English merely spent vast sums of money on packing theirs off to board. This had once been considered “progress”.

Suggested Reading

Can public schools be redeemed?

By Matt Rowland-Hill

And yet progress has now left the prep school behind. By the time I arrived, in 2010, these institutions had been confused into taking one of two paths: rapid modernization or entrenchment. Mine chose the latter, and that made little sense: the world for which they hoped to raise us was long-since dead, and the ritual had become a hollow repetition. Eight-year-old children were being weaned not, as once, to rule the waves and administer an empire, but to lament their ill-fortune in therapy rooms and broadsheet supplements, or else to exert their wits in the lower rungs of the insurance market. Once upon a time, these old boys would have been public-minded; now they were just “posh” and their only certainty was that the rest of the country really cared how this made them feel.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the character of Earl Spencer, who has spent the past fortnight busily “ragging” the King. His life maps effortlessly onto the decline of the prep school, and the upper and upper-middle classes more generally: a transition from steely coldness to self-centered loquaciousness. Over his last two books, Spencer has done more to dismantle the vestigial myths of hidebound English “society” than the Labour Party could ever dream of. In his memoirs A Very Private School (2024) and last week’s Swan Song: Diana, My Sister, he has moved beyond the stoic and illusive stability of prep-school England into everything that is its antithesis, a confessional, tabloid desperation that Philip Roth might have deemed a very English berserk. Neither the prep school nor the Royal Family will ever quite return to their former innocence: these books, which he insists are not attacks but memoirs, have undermined the very structures that enabled 19 generations of his family to reside at Althorp.

Prep-school England is now dead. There are only 163 eight-year-old boarders in Britain, down from 468 in the year I started. This means a bygone elite will not reproduce itself. And yet, should these schools and their attendant way-of-life die, something will undoubtedly be lost because, however obsolete and exclusive they seemed, they did their best to promote an ethos we lack today: “Character” over results, the individual over the statistic, and the sort of self-restraint that could prevent these tabloid squabbles between the houses of Spencer and Windsor.

Mine was the county school, which meant that everyone in the county sent their children there, and that all the county’s fine class distinctions — between middle, upper-middle, and upper class — were quietly endorsed. There was a rifle range and a clay-pigeon shoot, and boys were permitted to skip lessons and ride to hounds at the hunt’s annual meet in the school parking lot. Then, the boys who rode would be served honey-mustard sausages and cups of Bovril by those who didn’t.

Our lives, our characters, felt old there — enchanted. The wars felt nearer than the local town, and the school register was haunted by the same surnames that appeared on our war memorial. It was a world without irony, much like the Boys’ Own universe described by George Orwell, in which “Everything is safe, solid, and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever and ever,” even if, really, it was already doomed. Each year, we re-enacted the Second World War and played a game called German Spotlight. The boys had to get from one end of the school site to another without being spotted by the SS officers, whose roles had been assumed by the teachers. I could never evade the Nazis for long, and would trudge back to the school building, where a film was showing for the re-imprisoned boys. “1940, Somewhere in England,” the credits read, and I would think of those boys still out there, sticking it to the boche in the frost-bitten grounds.

The school was founded in the late 19th century by a “monocled and fanatical Jacobite”. He designed it as a modern school, complete with concrete playground, Eton Fives courts, and a gaudy arts-and-crafts chapel. He chose the site for its “healthy aspect”, in the hope that this might prevent his charges from snuffing it too readily — a common problem in the earliest prep schools. This happened half-a-century after Thomas Arnold purportedly invented the prep school, back in 1837, when he decreed that he would not accept under-12s at his school — believing them to be unsafe among the older boys, many of whom were bullies, or pederasts, or both. And yet more than Arnold, it was the age that necessitated them: the rapid expansion of an empire that required officers and administrators — and somewhere to deposit their children — as well as a newly enriched caste of industrialists whose rougher edges needed a shine. In practice, that meant imparting “Character”: an Arnoldian idea that incorporated moral imperviousness, muscular Christianity, and an odd streak of anti-intellectualism. As Jan Morris wrote, Arnold had “implanted concepts of privileged service [in his students] that led logically to the idea of a new Rome”. His boys would become “Christian Gentlemen” — moral, not empathic, but with enough sense of duty and cold detachment to rule the natives in Gujarat or the Gambia.

This doctrine outlasted the century. Orwell, author of the best prep-school memoir, Such, Such Were the Joys, attended St Cyprian’s in the 1910s where he was thrashed for wetting his bed by the headmaster. In hindsight, Orwell thought, to enlist a child at prep school delivered them from the family to the nation, and so created foot soldiers — like Orwell himself — who, at only 19, could assume responsibility for some 200,000 Burmese subjects.

In Orwell’s day, there was a cruel logic to this. By John le Carré’s time, some 30 years later, there wasn’t. In his fallen Britain, there was a clear original sin: “the maiming of the privileged young.” They were thrashed, bullied, and buggered into eligibility for that Philoctetean caste of mandarins who presided impotently over national decline — their survivors’ coldness inflicted, now, upon British subjects instead of colonial ones. Thus, le Carré held the schools accountable for “the traumas, deformations, and truncations of character that explain the British Establishment from the appalling Doctor Arnold to the Thatcher Matronocracy”. Le Carré’s words blurbed Nick Duffell’s The Making of Them, a polemic that popularized the concept of “boarding-school survivors”. The BBC documentary followed several children in their first weeks at Maidwell Hall in the early Nineties, the very school where Charles Spencer was abused. It presents a collage of interviews with new-boys, middle-aged “survivors”, and parents — one of whom dismisses the idea of speaking to his eight-year-old on the telephone since “[children] can’t express themselves very well”. Often, what was most difficult for “survivors” to come to terms with was how parents who had suffered in their own time could inflict the same suffering on their own children. Not Charles Spencer — who desperately tries to excuse his parents. In A Very Private School, Spencer documents the scholastic North Korea that was Maidwell, where he was bullied, beaten, and sexually abused. His book weakened the prep-school ritual’s spell, to the extent that Maidwell itself closed down in the summer of 2025.

Britain stopped thrashing its privileged children soon after it lost Hong Kong. Corporal punishment was abolished in private schools in 1998, some 12 years after the ECHR had triumphed over le vice Anglais in the state system. Unsurprisingly, an hour-long detention proved no match for the slipper and cane. And as their disciplinarian Victoriana morphed into twee gentility, so too did the boys the schools produced. If, once, it had been necessary to drill them into inhuman stoicism, all they really needed now was a psychiatrist’s phone number and a recommendation for the MCC, and then it was off to an interminable lunch in Leadenhall Market or to oversee the decline of their familial estate. For all that these schools continued to market a timeless, Boys’ Own fantasy, these days they could only sell connections and access — a means for an impotent elite to reproduce itself. If they couldn’t build “Character”, they could, at least, make you posh.

This was clear enough in the boys at my school, much as my headmaster tried to drill us with old-fashioned, Anglican ideals. Bald and bespectacled, his was a doctrine of self-assurance and deference, which encouraged us to be polite, civic-minded, and Christian, as well as to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions. And yet in daily chapel, his sermons confused the word of God with news of how the First XV had performed in their away match at Terrington. It couldn’t have been further from the “hellfire and masturbation” that Cyril Connolly remembered from his time at school. Perhaps that’s because it was markedly less sexual in my time, save for the wanking epidemic that briefly spread among the third form. Sex had fled the chapel, and now belonged in the PSHE classroom. It fell upon a science teacher to inform us how sex and its attendant organs worked. Modern parents, after all, weren’t paying to have their children terrified of sex.

More from this author

Foot-and-mouth was the start of the trouble

By Cosmo Adair

And that’s what mattered. “It’s difficult to realize that a school is primarily a commercial venture,” Orwell wrote — and so all schools will do as the market dictates. Our headmaster had believed in the school and its vision, but the market increasingly didn’t. Modern psychology and the new British values made sure of this. Power moved from the headmaster to the parent, and boarding became flexible. Those who still boarded often went home on the weekends. The Fives courts were converted into classrooms and after the headmaster retired, the school became co-educational.

Their death could be blamed on Labour’s VAT policy, but, really, it was inevitable. Most old boys have, now, enacted their own little berserk — therapized out of their former class allegiances. And, besides, the only people interested in an old-fashioned education these days seem to be the Chinese and the Rees-Moggs. Most of Britain now regards these schools as they do the Catholic Church: as safe houses for perverts. Those that remain will be (mostly) southern, and will focus on “excellence”, not Character, and so will foster a new kind of snobbishness — the untethered, Spencerian sort, whose cruelty is its destructive self-concern. The much derided Arnoldian doctrine will, perhaps one day, be missed. It could have blossomed in a modern institution, cut loose from cosseted datedness and cruelty.

And what became of us, trapped between the old world and the new? The world in which we were raised bore no resemblance to the one we entered. The traditions were dead and the rituals meaningless. Civic-mindedness is of little benefit in a City career, where stoicism proves an inconvenient stopper on the second bottle of claret. Some could still lead vanished, institutional lives, but would find themselves to be hollow men clutching onto romantic visions of lost grandeur, or else expensive and out-of-date ideals. Character could take us so far, but that alone didn’t seem of much use in a world of chaos and smartphones and Snapchat and hardcore porn. “How I did loathe that preparatory school,” wrote the 19th-century author Herman Merivale, “preparatory, thank heaven, for a life that was not to be.”

The same Winston Churchill, always longing for a fight, and in love with Dreadnoughts, was probably involved in the crazy decision to send two giant battleships, HMS Barham and HMS Ramillies, to the same estuary during the General Strike of 1926. Again, they never actually did anything. Merseysiders are, I would guess, quite proud at having been taken so seriously, though there is no evidence that the tactic made any difference. One has to wonder what would have happened if their ships’ companies had been ordered to open fire on Liverpool. I guess it would have gone badly for whoever gave the order. The famous Kronstadt sailors, who helped out in Lenin and Trotsky’s Petrograd putsch of 1917, may have been fooled by the Bolsheviks at the start. But they rebelled against them in 1921 when they found out what Lenin was really like. And it was to Trotsky’s lasting shame and disgrace that he massacred them that March.

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organization, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honor and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend.”

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listening for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealized as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

This reputation was kept alive just a little longer by two films. The first, The Cruel Sea, is one of the best movies ever made and shows, among other things, how the spirit of the Navy, stretching back through centuries, embraces and takes hold of ordinary men and turns them into something very nearly heroic. The other, In Which We Serve, features a speech by Celia Johnson, playing a naval wife, and explains the privations of this role. It can reliably reduce me to tears, and not just because of the way she says “sloop”, so upper-middle-class that nobody could get away with it nowadays. During one scene, at a 1939 Christmas dinner, she is wearing a small brooch, in a shape worn by my mother and known to her as the “Crown of Neptune”.

Few will ever notice this, but the little shiny badge betokened membership of a secret society. It was a sign to other such navy wives of a great unknown sisterhood, familiar with the grim features of married quarters and rented lodgings in glum seaports or remote colonial stations, the endless disruption of life by emergencies and distant postings, the miserable pay, and the infuriating tussle with their great permanent love rivals: their husbands’ ships. In Which We Serve also features the glorious Navy Prayer, one of the Church of England’s “Forms of Prayer to Be Used At Sea”, written when the Navy was recognized as an indispensable part of the nation. It is a plea for a safe return from danger, and opens with the words, “O Eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea, who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…”

And this is one of the beauties of the Navy which once endeared it to so many. For it was beautiful. Great warships, which we no longer possess, are beautiful, as such engines of destruction should probably not be. The boxy, enclosed modern vessels of today’s piddling navies lack this magic, as do the two giant car parks we call aircraft carriers. But in the early Sixties, I couldn’t get from my home in the village of Alverstoke to Portsmouth without crossing the harbor by ferry, under the immense 15-inch guns of the last British battleship, HMS Vanguard. There is something uplifting and thrilling about great guns, and the swooping lines of the ship itself, 814 feet long, that expressed power as few other works of man can do. It made our hearts swell a bit, to know we possessed such an instrument. And many hearts, including my own, have shriveled, as that lovely fleet has melted away.

Of course, all this is also wrapped in England’s deep love of the sea. One sign of this can be found in Arthur Ransome’s books about children sailing in the Lake District. It is now impossible to imagine the hold these stories had on hundreds of thousands of English childhoods, lived far from the shore. Michael Frayn, who grew up in the Surrey suburbs, has confessed that he read them over and over again, and tried to write one of his own. Eventually, the children in the series escape from their lake and actually go to sea, in reality and in fantasy. Towards the end of Peter Duck, one of the strangest of these remarkable novels, the children sing their way up the Channel to the words of the sea shanty “Spanish Ladies”, a favorite of my naval father, marking the ancient landmarks known to homecoming Englishmen since the time of Grenville and Hawkins:

And the First land we made, it is called the Dodman,
Next Rame Head off Plymouth, Start, Portland and Wight;
And we sailed by Beachy, 
By Fairlight and Dungeness,
Until we brought to by the South Foreland Light. 

Those who still savor the “inshore waters” part of the Shipping Forecast, as I do, were probably brought up in a maritime Britain, where there was still a bit of salt in everything and the sea was a friend and fortification, not, as it seems now, a door left wide open. Modern Britain is now so turned away from the sea that it brings to mind a passage in C.S.Lewis’s Prince Caspian, one of the Narnia books. The new rulers of Narnia fear the sea and what might come over it, and have deliberately allowed thick woods to grow along the coast. Lewis, who also grew up in more naval days, though he lived far from the sea, understood, like any British person of his time, that the ocean is a source of power and inspiration and a great highway to the world and all that is in it. But only if you have a Navy.

In this, as in so much else, the Senior Common Room revolutionary was entirely wrong. But not, the far less influential Walker Connor. The American political scientist had predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of resurgent nationalism in his 1984 book The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy. Indeed, Connor observed, rather than leading societies away from the backwardness of tribalism toward the promised land, in reality state socialism relied upon the strength of national feeling for the implementation and survival of its project, to the extent that the Soviet Union was forced to create the very structures, the semi-autonomous republics, which would end up consuming it.

Time would prove Connor correct, and the post-national fantasies of Hobsbawm disastrously wrong. Yet while any PPE graduate has at least a cursory familiarity with Hobsbawm’s writing on nationalism, the only recent Westminster allusion to Connor’s writing appears to be an AI hallucination. At our own time of epochal political change and ideological ferment, perhaps analogous to the collapse of Soviet communism, it may therefore be worth reassessing Connor’s central contribution to political science, now that it too has entered the Westminster lexicon: that of ethnonationalism.

More from this author

Benedict Anderson: humane nationalist

By Aris Roussinos

There is surely very little that can unite Reformers and Starmerites at the podium in shared expressions of pained distaste, other than the concept of ethnonationalism. Even the populist Right, at least in interminable online debates, is torn between rival concepts of civic and ethnic nationalism, in which the latter is seen as a dangerous and novel radicalization of the former. Alluding to Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain, Farage recently declared that, “Unless we are able to provide a proper democratic antidote” to anxieties over mass immigration, “then I fear that we will see a rise of a really worrying, dangerous form of extreme right ethno-nationalism”. The Home Secretary, for her part, has warned that British “patriotism is turning into something smaller, something like ethnonationalism,” a term Labour MPs nevertheless struggle to define. The Left-wing IPPR thinktank similarly warns that “large parts of the political right are increasingly, often explicitly, ethnonationalist”, including, it claims, 71% of Reform supporters. Reform’s Zia Yusuf, meanwhile, rather improbably accuses Rachel Reeves of being an ethnonationalist. Without being clear precisely what it means, Westminster has awoken to the existence of ethnonationalism, as a political force and as a threat to its current order.

But what is ethnonationalism, other than, as the above Westminster voices, claim, patriotism’s evil twin? In his 1994 book Ethnonationalism: the Quest for Understanding, a collection of essays spanning 30 years of careful deliberation, Connor coined the term to dispel what he termed the “terminological chaos” of writing on the subject. For Connor, all nationalism was at heart ethnonationalism, deriving from essentially emotional loyalties to the nation, itself a fundamentally ethnic category. As he puts it, “nation connotes a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related. Nationalism connotes identification with and loyalty to one’s nation as just defined. It does not refer to loyalty to one’s country.”

Most of the world, Connor asserts, “is subdivided into a series of perceived homelands to which, in each case, the indigenous ethno-national group is convinced it has a profound and exclusive proprietary claim.” For as he asks, “Who but the Scots could have plenary claim to residence within Scotland, who but Germans to Deutschland, Kurds to Kurdistan (literally “Land of the Kurds”), or Nagas to Nagaland?” This is, for Connor, simply a historical and social fact: it does not mean that members of other groups can or should not reside among them, or even be absorbed by them; but it does mean that the dominant ethnic group will always see its own group interests as paramount in its own titular homeland, and that this belief will almost always, eventually, come to shape that country’s politics, particularly if the self-assurance of continued ownership comes to be challenged.

The problem, Connor perceived, was that this basic, observable reality had become confused by the popular and lazy academic use of “nationalism” to describe the transference of such emotions, for which “poets are far better guides for penetrating… than are social scientists” to the state, a self-identification he preferred to describe as “patriotism”. Nationalism and ethnonationalism are, to Connor, exactly the same thing, with ethnonationalism his preferred term to underline this relationship; patriotism, in contrast, is limited to loyalty towards the state, which may or may not be founded on ethnic lines. Where multinational states, like Britain, have survived into the age of nationalism, they find themselves increasingly threatened from below, as with Scottish and Welsh nationalism: and in a no-longer hypothetical tussle between British patriotism and Scottish nationalism, Connor places his historical chips on the latter’s eventual victory. Rather than a benign alternative to ethnonationalism, the Westminster-approved concept of “civic nationalism” is, according to this interpretation, something between a misnomer and a category error, an attempt to harness the power of nationalism in the service of state patriotism, just as was tried and failed by the Soviet Union.

Connor’s aim was descriptive, rather than normative. “He has been relatively silent on whether constitutional engineering or astute statecraft can ever successfully manage nationalism,”  his intellectual disciple, the Irish political scientist Brendan O’Leary observes. “He has ‘quested’ for understanding, not sought to put the world to right.” Connor did not intend to advocate for ethnic nationalism as a mode of politics, merely to accurately portray the world around him. In this, he expressed frustration at the errors of academics and policymakers who, through a “tendency to perceive trends deemed desirable as actually occurring”, relegated to an atavistic past a phenomenon he believed was only growing in power.

For in his own way, Connor was just as much a modernist as Hobsbawm or Gellner. The antiquity or otherwise of nations was of no interest to him: he understood that the perception of ethnic kinship is a social fact rather than a biological one, in which “the myth of a common and exclusive descent can overcome a battery of contrary fact”. His argument was that the age of nationalism, which dawned with modernity, was a historical watershed setting us apart from all that came before. Before modernity, nations could die or meld into each other or assume new identities: after the age of nationalism, the tendency is for nations to be set into permanent, immovable forms, and for sub-state groups which had not acquired national identities to adopt them, inspired by the contact with other peoples brought about by modernity, increased mobility and the reaction to centralizing state power.

Rather than at its tail-end then, we are only part way through the age of nationalism. Yet through wish-fulfillment rather than a descriptive approach to objective reality, Connor observed, the Second World War’s “immediate afterglow lulled scholars into believing that Europeans had left nationalism behind”, while specious comparisons with the United States created the illusion of a parallel European melting pot, an analogy that nevertheless still trickles down from academia, through thinktanks and journalists directly to policymakers. Muddled thinking thus creates bad policy, leaving the powderkeg dysfunction of modern British politics as the result.

To show the speciousness of the analogy with America, Connor approaches the problem from multiple angles. First, America’s immigrant, assimilationist society is built upon the extirpation of its native inhabitants, as “the American policy of conquest eliminated the indigenous people as cultural competitors”. Few analogies exist in Europe, and where they do they are rarely lauded, especially by the natives themselves. Secondly, he notes, the United States was, historically, explicitly understood as an Anglo-Saxon ethnic polity, in appeals to blood descent, and the bonds deriving, as striking as anything from 19th-century European Romantic nationalism. The descendants of African slaves, Connor emphasizes, though their ancestors had been brought against their will into America from its very beginning, had no say in the formation of this political identity, into which they were only lately, and partly assimilated once it had already crystallized. For those who actively forged this new world political identity, Connor reminds us: “Paeans to the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon strain said to be inherited by the true Americans were plentiful well into the twentieth century”.

Finally, Connor observes, “the pattern of early settlement created a dominant, almost exclusive Anglo-Saxon culture; upon this firmly entrenched cultural base, representatives of other cultures, on their own, were periodically added in relatively small numbers. As a result, ethnic problems in the United States have not been primarily characterized by minorities resisting assimilation, but rather by the unwillingness of the dominant group to permit assimilation at the tempo desired by the minorities.” The American model of assimilation then was, until very recently, one in which immigrants were essentially compelled to adopt a fictive Anglo-Saxon political identity, that of the staatsvolk or dominant, leading ethnic group to whom the state belonged. A modern-day example can be seen in the Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, of pure Italian descent, declaring his total self-identification with this legal and political tradition such that when he first visited England, he “felt at home”. Yet by the Nineties, Connor observed, Americans who had previously toned down their Old World ethnic identities began to reassert them, with Connor suggesting that the upsurge in ethnic self-identification, along with what he termed “black nationalism”, “a nationalism in the most correct sense of the word”, might come to challenge the American model. Even in the United States, the ideal form of the immigrant state, the melting pot may not be the final outcome.

That the belated introduction of the term “ethnonationalism” in Westminster discourse derives from the growth of anti-immigration sentiment is hardly surprising. The IPPR paper on ethnonationalism begins with what it calls “the alarming turn on the right towards policies of mass deportation”, an object of genuine surprise to its authors. They would have done well to reflect on the observation made in Walker’s little-read 1986 essay, The Impacts of Homelands on Diasporas, that “history is liberally sprinkled with cases in which diasporas have appeared relatively secure only to be faced with an unexpected outbreak of xenophobia and nativism”.

In this essay, Connor expands on the distinction between America’s unique case and that of the rest of the world, divided up into ethnic homelands. A homeland need not be an ancient state, but can be created, as in the case of Quebec, wherever new settlement is geographically concentrated: we may, here, think of European parallels in the process of becoming. The United States could only become an immigrant society because its prior native peoples were removed from the equation: in Africa, Asia, and Europe, this was not the case, with the result that the threat of expulsion always hangs over incoming peoples, however long-settled they may be, or secure they may feel.

“In such an environment, diasporas are viewed at best as outsiders, strangers within the gates,” Connor observes. “They may be tolerated, even treated most equitably, and individual members of the diaspora may achieve highest office. Their stay may be multigenerational, but they remain outsiders in the eyes of the indigenes, who reserve the inalienable right to assert their primary and exclusive proprietary claim to the homeland, should they so desire.”

Citing the example of the East African Asians, ejected after the end of British rule, Connor notes that the “benign tolerance toward the Asian migrant community did not long survive the British withdrawal from East Africa. The tolerance shown by the colonial authorities does not require explanation, since their homeland was not involved” — but as soon as the homeland peoples of the region obtained the opportunity, their long-suppressed resentments were translated into political reality. Such, Connor suggests, is the nature of human societies, however much we might wish it were otherwise.

That Westminster figures can use Connor’s terminology without engaging with his work should not, perhaps, surprise us. Writing in a 2003 festschrift for Connor, his student and colleague, the Italian sociologist Daniele Conversi, observes that British academics were uniquely blinded, through their intellectual and moral biases and aspirations, from describing objective reality. As he remarks, “A cavalier tradition of superciliousness has percolated through most post-war studies of nationalism in Western, particularly British, academia.,” partly a reaction to the horrors of  the Second World War, but “often derived from several overlapping traditions: part of mainstream Liberal thought… or of the competing Marxist viewpoint, as in the case of Eric Hobsbawm”.

The result, it is implied, is that the top-down assimilatory state-building projects suggested by thinktanks like the IPPR are as doomed to failure as those of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia. By failing to take ethnonationalism seriously, by misapprehending its meaning, and by relegating it to a distant, shameful past, they have created a political project in direct opposition to the most powerful political force in modern history, one that brought down each of the great European empires in turn. It is remarkable that the British state can have unlearned this clearly apparent truth, for as Connor observes of Britain’s imperial collapse, “the basic cause of the disintegration of empire was the refusal of people to accept political rule by those deemed aliens.”

More from this author

How Gorton beat Denton

By Aris Roussinos

But there is another characteristically Connorian observation that British policymakers may be wise to dwell on: on the legitimacy of the state. “The literature has assumed that legitimacy is necessary for a modern state to function,” Connor remarks. Where the state is reduced to coercion to survive, it is generally held, then it has proved its illegitimacy in the eyes of its people: where it is not compelled to rely on coercion, it can be assumed to be considered legitimate. Instead, Connor observes, all the state requires to survive is passivity, in which a “mélange of fear, habit, inertia, apoliticalness, political and cultural isolation, disorganization” staves off immediate collapse, without inspiring loyalty or affection. “Only passivity, not legitimacy, is essential to the everyday, humdrum functioning of a society,” he notes. “But if the state requires more than passivity, if it hopes to invoke the symbols of the state as a means of gaining positive cooperation and sacrifice, legitimacy will be sorely missed.” Beneath its unruffled surface, the Soviet empire was, Connor perceived, fatally wounded by a widespread, popular withdrawal of consent: all it took was an unexpected crisis to elicit collapse.

To stave off this outcome, O’Leary, developing Connor’s thought towards the policymaking ends his teacher spurned, proposes that “a stable democratic majoritarian federation… must have a Staatsvolk, a national or ethnic people, who are demographically and electorally dominant — though not necessarily an absolute majority of the population — and who must be the co-founders of the federation”. Such is the largely unspoken settlement that assures ethnic Russian loyalty to their multi-ethnic state, that of the Han to China or the Fars to Iran: without this predominance, they are likely to withdraw their consent from the state, and bring the whole thing crashing down around them. As Connor warns, “We know from the comparative study of nationalism that when the two loyalties are perceived as being in irreconcilable conflict — that is to say, when people feel they must choose between them — nationalism customarily proves the more potent.”

Such a rebalancing is, more or less, what Katie Lam suggested in advocating the termination of Boriswave visas for the purpose of “cultural coherence”,  a policy and phrasing directly quoted, with horror, by the IPPR. This backlash is hardly surprising: such a policy may well be successful, as O’Leary shows, in staving off political instability, but it is also “inconsistent with liberal cosmopolitan and radical multiculturalists’ hopes”. Like those before them, who believed the Soviet Union had resolved the national question, perhaps our own ideologues would rather be swept away by historical forces than give up their cherished illusions.

To the Indian migrant of recent vintage — such as myself — the curry house was always something of a culture shock. No such institution quite exists in India: no laminated menus promising “Madras (Hot)” as a fixed rung on the Scoville scale; no vindaloo calibrated for stag nights; no chicken tikka masala swimming in its sunset-colored gravy. That last dish, famously christened Britain’s “national dish” by the Labour Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in 2001, at the soggy zenith of the Blairite multicultural rapture, was less a testament to British cultural absorption than to a proclivity for unadventurous adaptation.

For better or worse, that Britain is on its way out. Where once Brick Lane’s neon promised a Soviet sameness, today’s openings — typically regional, not national; a touch evangelical about provenance — suggest a city that prefers its cuisines less translated. If the old curry house served up a hospitable fiction, the new arrivals dish out the real thing.

And yet, just as London acquires a taste for the truly local, one of its grandest culinary generalities approaches its centenary. This week, if fate and the facilities managers permit, the Michelin-starred Veeraswamy will turn 100. For a century now, the establishment has served mulligatawny beneath low chandeliers, its monogrammed silver and formal service staging a certain vision of Anglo-Indian continuity above Regent Street.

Mulligatawny itself — from the Tamil milagu tanni, or “pepper water” — began as a thin broth before being refashioned into one of the statelier soups of the Raj. In trendier circles in 1780s London, it was thickened with stock and meat, standardized with curry powder, and promoted to a fashionable first course. Thereafter, tins accompanied Victorian expeditions, and, on one occasion, an overgenerous cook left David Livingstone’s party incapacitated for “several days in severe suffering”. In a later age, it surfaced in Seinfeld as Kramer’s tepid libation of choice: “Yeah, it’s an Indian soup. Simmered to perfection by one of the great soup artisans in the modern era.”

Mulligatawny remains the signature dish at Veeraswamy, theatrically poured at the table from a silver tureen. Other offerings, too, flit with similar ease between the Subcontinent and the Home Counties. A “Calcutta” beetroot croquette, for instance, appears with a Stilton sauce and Bhutanese chili — the Raj rendered as canapé.

The mains, too, are curiously gentle. The spices arrive almost meekly, as though still mindful of interwar digestion. One imagines the ghost of a Twenties diner, moustache bristling, brow beading nervously at the prospect of chili. By modern standards, the seasoning is restrained to the point of bashfulness; yet there is a quiet pleasure in that restraint.

Suggested Reading

Confessions of a failed restaurateur

By Richard Crampton-Platt

Such easy-going culinary federalism has long been the restaurant’s métier. But now, the institution faces a singularly modern demise. The Crown Estate, which owns the building, intends to refurbish Victory House — that splendid slab of Twenties Imperialist Baroque — to bring its offices up to contemporary standards. The plans involve altering the ground-floor entrance: a minor architectural adjustment, perhaps, but unfortunately the very corridor through which diners ascend to the restaurant upstairs. Once the lease expires, there will be no practical way for Veeraswamy to remain where it’s been for nearly a century.

The result has been a curious spectacle of culinary petitioning. More than 20,000 people have appealed to Charles Windsor to intervene and preserve this slice of Anglo-India. The Crown Estate, meanwhile, speaks in the antiseptic idiom of modern property management, explaining that the redevelopment is required to “bring the building up to modern standards”, and free up office space to secure long-term value. Free-market fundamentalism, in royal livery, has come at last for the chutney trays.

Founded in 1926, Veeraswamy was the brainchild of Edward Palmer, the great-grandson of an East India Company general and a Mughal princess, a lineage so operatic it sounds like something conjured up by E. M. Forster. The restaurant opened in Piccadilly Circus and has remained there ever since, stoically serving through the Blitz and Brexit. It has some claim to being Britain’s first upscale Indian restaurant: not the first curry house, since lascar sailors had been feeding Londoners since the 19th century, but the first to present Subcontinental fare with silverware and ceremony.

Palmer’s ambition was pedagogical. The early menu was designed to introduce Britons to Indian cooking: in a form tempered for insular palates. Royal, diplomatic, and political patronage duly followed. A Danish prince, legend has it, even helped inaugurate the great British ritual of “pints and curry” by arranging for his preferred lager, Carlsberg, to be shipped over for his visits.

The original Veeraswamy menu, as the food writer Sejal Sukhadwala notes, became the template for what would later solidify into the standard curry-house repertoire: kormas, biryanis, rogan joshes. It also came to structure expectations: poppadoms first, vindaloo for the brave, korma for the timid. The British curry, then, owes something of its grammar to this glitzy setting — aristocratic beginnings for what would become a thoroughly plebeian pleasure. There is some irony there. Curry, that workers’ favorite, once dismissed as little more than “blotting paper” food — useful chiefly for soaking up heroic quantities of beer — was in fact born in one of London’s grandest dining rooms.

The story has come full circle. When the journalist Mihir Bose first arrived in Britain in the Sixties, Indian food was regarded with something approaching suspicion. Factory colleagues in Leicester warned him not to bring his “funny-smelling” cooking into the workplace. Curry would later enjoy a quite different sort of ascendancy, becoming a firmly hoi-polloi favorite, with no pretensions to haute cuisine. Now, half a century on, it has drifted loose from its working-class associations once more. A clutch of Indian restaurants hold Michelin stars, while nothing announces bourgeois takeaway quite like Dishoom. In his memoir, Bose recalls a young fitness trainer confessing to sudden late-night cravings for curry — and refusing to believe there had ever been a time when Brits recoiled from it.

What’s more, “going for an Indian” no longer means going for a curry. If Veeraswamy once educated Londoners about Indian food, today the capital scarcely requires instruction. The city’s culinary map runs from Punjabi grills in Southall to Keralan cafés in East Ham, from Gujarati thali houses in Wembley to tasting menus in Mayfair that treat asafoetida with the reverence once reserved for truffles. The children and grandchildren of postwar migrants have moved the cuisine on. Paradoxically, post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain is more cosmopolitan, more culinarily curious, than imperial Britain ever was.

When I visited on a Thursday evening, Veeraswamy was oddly heaving. The lift kept disgorging diners in twos and fours, many of them casting the same slightly conspiratorial glance around the room. Variations of the same question drifted between tables: was this to be our last meal here? At the entrance a genial usher, splendid in durbar-kitsch regalia, greeted arrivals with the air of a man presiding over a minor pageant.

To step inside Veeraswamy today is to wander into a minor museum of late-imperial camp. The place has the air of a colonial cousin of Wiltons. One senses the regulars have been coming for decades, perhaps generations. Lights hang low over white tablecloths tended with mortuary diligence; chintz and polished silver conspire to evoke not India so much as a certain idea of India once issued by an Edwardian pen. This is not the India of Bombay or Delhi but the India of The Far Pavilions, which is to say it feels unmistakably British — certainly, a relic of Britain that has largely slipped from view.

My waiter, who combined clubland bonhomie with flashes of dramatic flourish, told me business had rarely been brisker. The threat of closure has evidently sharpened appetites. People want, as he put it with a shrug, “their last mulligatawny”. There is also a final opportunity to sample the house cocktail, dating from the restaurant’s founding and simply called the 1926: an arrestingly verdant concoction, floral and faintly medicinal, like something a Raj apparatchik might once have taken to steady the nerves when the natives began entertaining ideas above their station.

There is, of course, no accounting for taste. Veeraswamy will not be to everyone’s liking. Yet establishments are not preserved because they are fashionable but because they carry institutional memory. The spectacle of campaigners beseeching the King to save their curry house, no doubt, has about it the air of an Evelyn Waugh plot twist: empire’s aftertaste petitioning empire’s heir. But one can smile at the absurdity and still feel the pathos.

If it closes, London will not starve. There are fiercer curries and cleverer chefs across the city. But a world will have vanished. It says something about the state of Britain today that empire — or at least its culinary afterlife — could survive decolonization, yet may not survive the unsentimental logic of property and profit. Neoliberalism, after a fashion, has defeated imperialism.

The barometer stands for Britain’s seafaring heyday, at which time most vessels would have carried one. Even for a bureaucrat such as my forebear, documenting the fruits of that seaborne trade in the Customs House in Harwich, this object would have been richly symbolic of the peculiar mix of risk-taking and scientific pedantry that characterised our island’s maritime tradition.

The Powell, meanwhile, captures a blizzard of contradictory feelings, from a Britain that had only very recently lost the empire this seafaring tradition founded. It is a confusion due, in part, to the way the loss happened: partly through overstretch and decadence; but with the death-blow dealt by one of Britain’s former colonies: America.

In turn, this close kinship allowed the impression to flourish of this being less a parricide than a passing of the baton. Together, so the hope went, the Anglophone “West” would leave imperialism as such behind, and foster a peaceful, prosperous world for all mankind. But will this comforting fantasy still hold, if 21st-century America abandons this neutrality and turns imperialist herself?

This seems to be where we are, all of a sudden: with the de facto global hegemony that America long exercised obliquely, through a web of purportedly neutral international rules and obligations, giving way to a more naked spirit of expansionism. This isn’t just about the spirit of “endless frontier federalism” extolled in Heritage Foundation director Kevin Roberts’ manifesto for the New Right, or Elon Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars. It appears to have earthly territorial implications too: recently, President-elect Donald Trump has refused to rule out using American economic or even military force to expand US territory into areas of perceived geopolitical interest. Potential targets reportedly include Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

Suggested reading

Is Elon the new Enoch?

By Tom McTague

Trump’s apparent willingness to comprehensively jettison America’s longstanding role as “world policeman”, in favour of active participation in great-power competition, has caused shockwaves around the world, with the Financial Times recently warning that he “risks turning America into a rogue state”. But leaving aside the question of whether “rogue states” are even conceptually possible, without a “global policeman” enforcing the rules, the prospect of America engaging openly in great-power competition raises deep-seated cultural and political questions for Britain in particular.

Beyond our seafaring history, my dad’s heirloom barometer might more romantically be said to stand for a peculiarly Anglo combination of home-loving and wanderlust, which together provide a common cultural stem for both Brits and Americans. It’s surely true that those historic Englishmen who left to settle the New World possessed these qualities in different proportion to those who roved but — like Bilbo Baggins — always assumed they’d return to the Shire eventually. Even so, whether Australian, Canadian, Brits or Americans, Anglo diaspora peoples tend to recognise this restless, roving streak in our national character.

By contrast, my dad’s Powell anthology captures crucial developments in the specific post-war political history of Britain, as distinct from those of the wider Anglo diaspora. In particular, Powell was excoriating on the self-soothing behaviour characteristic of Britain’s ruling class since the sun set on the empire: a bundle of delusions enabled in practice by the fantasy of diaspora “Anglosphere” continuity.

For when it came, the blow of Britain’s dethroning as Top Nation, by our own former colony, was softened by this sense of kinship. As the historian Nigel Ashton notes, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously analogised the handover in classical terms, telling his colleague Richard Crossman while the war was still ongoing that the British “are the Greeks in this American empire” and should run the Allied Forces Headquarters “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”.

This quality of extended-family connection mixed with rivalry is vividly depicted in the literature of the immediate post-war period, such as John le Carré’s classic spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Against an early-Seventies backdrop of chilly air, clipped sentences, and penny-pinching, the novel’s British secret service agents refer to their American associates as “the Cousins”. It’s an ambivalent term, often used with mingled resentment and disdain: “Why tell the Cousins everything?”.

More from this author

Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress

By Mary Harrington

Nor was this wholly unwarranted. For while Macmillan may have been — initially at least — optimistic about Britain enjoying an influential post-imperial position, as favoured flunkeys to the new hegemon, others, including Powell, were more cold-eyed about the dynamic. As noted by James Barr in his history of British and American rivalry in the post-war Middle East, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden reminisced that, in the late Forties, Powell warned him that “in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans”. Eden admitted that it was only much later that he understood what Powell had already grasped: that cousins can be competitors as well as kin.

Nor was this Powell’s only moment of foresight. By the time the anthology I found on my dad’s shelves was published in 1969, he was already persona non grata, following a backlash to his notorious 1968 speech on Commonwealth immigration. But what strikes in Freedom and Reality is less Powell’s views on migration than his clear-eyed and prescient assessment of British ruling-class inability to adapt psychologically to the country’s shrunken reach and standing.

For more than a century, Powell points out, the British had been used to “Britain” also meaning India, and had thus, as he puts it, “got into the habit of thinking in what are sometimes called ‘global terms’”. In Powell’s view, having lost that real-world geographic reach, Britain should have refocused on Western Europe. But instead, unable to relinquish their habitual global perspective, the British elite conjured two ideas from the rubble of empire and war: firstly, the “Commonwealth”, and secondly the “special relationship” in which we were to be Greece to America’s Rome, in the joint pursuit of universal peace.

As Powell saw it, this represented a colossal self-delusion, in which “the vanishing last vestiges […] of Britain’s once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets, whereby […] in partnership with the United States we keep the peace of the world”. To him, this was a confection whose lack of basis in logic or reality was only outstripped by fantasies about the Commonwealth, an organisation he saw as riddled with contradiction and whose demands often ran counter to British national interest.

The half-century since Powell’s heyday doesn’t seem to have cured British elites of such fond dreams. Rather, it has compounded them by adding a third: the pan-European post-imperial project of mutual colonisation usually referred to as the EU. (Powell opposed this as well, also presciently, on the grounds that it would harm Parliamentary sovereignty.) And though Brexit went some way, for better or worse, to reversing Britain’s entanglement in that project, we still possess the same Hyacinth Bucket-like fixation with “Britain’s standing” on “the world stage”.

Nor have we shed the slavish commitment to showing “leadership” by outdoing even America in pursuit of US foreign policy priorities. Meanwhile, not even increasingly strident demands for “reparations” from supposed friends and allies in the “Commonwealth” seem capable of shifting the entrenched British ruling-class conviction that this entity is in some fundamental way a good and necessary thing for our country.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Aris Roussinos

But one of the crucial pillars on which Britain’s post-war, post-imperial cope rested was always American geopolitical neutrality. The idea was that we needn’t mourn the empire, which was bad anyway, because Anglophone cultural and economic leadership would persist — it would just shift its capital, wealth, and geopolitical interests several thousand miles west. But it would still be “the West”, still the English-speaking world, and still, however tenuously, the same cousinly spirit.

But the idea that Britain is a “leader” alongside America in keeping global peace relies on America both doing the defence legwork, and also making at least a nominal effort to look neutral. Where does that leave Britain, then, if the former is on the chopping-block and the latter risks being jettisoned for a new Arctic “Great Game”? In the genuinely post-liberal geopolitics this would produce, Britain is unlikely to be able to go on sitting in the current three-way intersection between Europe, the “Commonwealth”, and the Cousins.

This juggling act surely only lasted as long as it did because America’s self-appointed “global policeman” role prevented any of this trifecta’s more delusional implications from biting too deeply. But swap out global-policeman America for expansionist America and things quickly get messy. Should Trump actually annex Canada, for example, a Commonwealth state of which King Charles remains (however nominally) head of state, how should Britain respond? Similarly, should he make moves on the currently self-governing Danish territory of Greenland, should Britain come down on the side of our European neighbours, or the “Cousins”?

At least some in Britain clearly feel closer kinship with English-speakers across the pond than our neighbours across the Channel. There have, for example, been recent calls both in Britain and the US for a much more special relationship; even for Britain’s annexation by the Cousins. Especially for those younger, more tech-optimistic “Right-wing Progressive” Brits with portable careers and an eye on the Elon Musk phenomenon, absorption by the USA would likely read more as a formality than a significant change — and in any case as a more advantageous proposition than cosying up to a stagnant and censorship-happy EU.

In terms both of Europe’s resurgent Right-wing ethnopolitics and Britain’s specific history, it would in fact make perfect Right-wing sense. Having sailed our barometers around the world, leaving diaspora communities worldwide, it follows logically that a putative ethnopolitics of Englishness would look beyond as well as within the British Isles, toward that diaspora as well. (Whether such a diaspora would want anything to do with modern Britain is, of course, a separate question.)

For those still committed to European-style social democracy, meanwhile, our immediate neighbours might seem more ideologically congenial than the New World, not to mention more geographically relevant. And Britain’s now-considerable Commonwealth-heritage population, meanwhile, has far fewer direct historic links to the USA. For such groups, “Cousins” is unlikely to conjure a picture of mid-century WASPs.

It is too early to tell which way Britain will jump, though Starmer’s reverse ferret this week on the Chagos handover may be a sign of things to come. But we are leaving the inshore waters of the long 20th century — and, as the seafarers used to say, the glass is falling. For, to extend Macmillan’s classical analogy, the Cousins seem on a trajectory from republic to empire. And if this is so, Britain’s long era of self-delusion will soon be at an end, and with it the deferral of hard choices. What matters more to us: our legacy of empire, our near abroad, or our historic diaspora? I’m not sure I want to find out. But Britain has no prospect of charting a new course until we are willing to face these questions.

Although the spectre of tariffs rather than free trade has initiated the current flap in Canadian-American relations, the ghosts of 1911 are not far away. At first, Donald Trump suggested that Canadians could avoid his planned heavy import tariffs by tightening their border security, but he quickly proposed a better alternative: Canada should become America’s 51st state.

Canadians have now turned a joke into a crisis. In December, Chrystia Freeland resigned as Finance Minister, alleging that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was spending  on vote-winning gimmicks when he need to keep his “fiscal powder” dry for a trade war with Trump. And on the resonant date of January 6, Trudeau’s own resignation followed.

The alarm over Trump’s musings has lacked historical perspective. The journalist Andrew Coyne called him “utterly insane”, writing almost tearfully about how “the basic assumption of Canadian history, that we would always have a stable, democratic ally to our south, is over”. Yet as Laurier’s fate illustrates, this is just wrong. Canadians have always worried about the American threat to the autonomy and even sovereignty of their nation. Until recently, its politicians saw the States not as a friendly big brother but an unruly giant with a scary hunger for resources. These fears provoked debates that were always and sometimes usefully introspective: about what Canada is and how it might need to change.

Some Canadians demanded “annexation” before their nation even existed. In 1849, leading merchants in Montreal, then the capital of the province of Canada, formed an Annexation Association. They argued that Britain’s North American colonies could never put on population or become prosperous until they could crack the tariff walls protecting the huge American market. And the only viable way to do that, they said, was to request political union with the United States.

After Montreal’s Parliament buildings were burnt down by rioters, British officials soothed these discontents by negotiating a trade agreement, but annexation would return in the aftermath of the American Civil War — this time as a menace rather than a promise. American statesmen threatened to annex the North American territories in compensation for British support for the defeated South. Although this did not come to fruition, the prospect of invasion lingered for decades afterwards.

Fear of the United States was therefore a vital spur to nation-building. John A. Macdonald, the Tory and Anglophile Prime Minister of the province of Canada, championed its confederation with other colonies in 1867 to strengthen them all against the States. The new Dominion of Canada bought the vast western territories of the Hudson Bay Company, and turned them into provinces. Macdonald planned a Canadian Pacific Railway to link Vancouver and Montreal, encouraging goods and people to flow from east to west rather than north to south. And although Canada still struggled to attract immigrants and bled people to the States, Macdonald won a final electoral victory in 1891 by denouncing the Liberals’ response to these problems — a US trade agreement, no less — as tantamount to treason.

Canada might have been much more populous and prosperous in 1911 than at Confederation, but Laurier’s proposals revived neuralgia about American intentions. President Taft wrote to his predecessor Theodore Roosevelt — a sentimental annexationist — that they would turn Canada into an “adjunct to the United States”. The leaking of his letter provoked outrage. Trumpish gaffes, not least the House Speaker’s remarks about wanting to see Stars and Stripes at the North Pole, reminded Canadians of their moral objections to becoming Americans. Kipling snapped that if Canada wanted to harmonise its economy with the United States, then it would also have to dramatically up its murder rate — a quip that retains its sting in the age of mass shootings.

Laurier’s defeat in 1911 made freer trade with America toxic for decades. During the Second World War, Prime Minister Mackenzie King drew Canada into an unprecedented degree of military and industrial cooperation with the United States. Yet his youthful memories of Laurier’s rout held him back from a comprehensive free trade agreement. After all, FDR once confided in him that he wouldn’t mind owning Canada. Not until 1988 did a Canadian Prime Minister sign a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.

The differences between 1911 and now underline Canada’s current predicament. It was already evident in Laurier’s time that Canada could not count on Britain to overawe the United States. In 1903, the British even sided with the Americans in dismissing Canada’s efforts to lay claim to vital waterways in Alaska. Yet the Conservatives could still draw an emotive contrast between two futures: American annexation or security and prosperity within the British Empire. The Second World War destroyed that contrast by transferring ultimate responsibility for protecting Canada’s territorial sovereignty from the States, where it has remained. It vanished altogether by the Sixties, along with the Empire. Trudeau loyalists jokingly invoke the year 1812 — when British forces burned down the White House — but it is they who need the history lesson. Justin’s father Pierre Elliott Trudeau tried to find a third option to Americanisation or insecure isolation by drumming up trade with Europe and Japan, but his efforts did not amount to much. When Trudeau’s successor Brian Mulroney inked his Free Trade Agreement in 1988 with Ronald Reagan, he tied Canada to a continentalist strategy, which assumed an identity of outlook with the United States.

More from this author

The allure of American mysticism

By Michael Ledger-Lomas

Because annexation has always been a partisan topic, it suits many Canadians to present Trump’s threats as a damning judgment on Trudeau, which a speedy change of personnel could fix. Freeland, who aspires to replace him, has hinted as much. Her resignation letter coincided with the launch of her biography, which presents her as a steely realist who can deal as handily with Trump as with the Kremlin. Canadians to Freeland’s Right are much freer with their contempt. David Frum, a Canadian speechwriter for George Bush who has reinvented himself as a Never Trumper centrist, argues that Trudeau’s performative angst about Canada’s colonial record was a fatal declaration of weakness: Trump shares with “ultra-progressives” the “same project of Canadian annihilation”.

Yet Pierre Poilievre, whose Conservatives are set to win the looming federal election, will find it no easier to exorcise fears of annexation. John Diefenbaker in the early Sixties was the last Conservative Prime Minister to engage in rousing displays of anti-American nationalism. The Conservatives have since become the voice of Western Canada’s fossil fuel industry, whose customer is the United States. Stephen Harper, the last Conservative to hold office before Trudeau, pressed “ethical” Canadian oil on the Americans while echoing their foreign policy. His protégé Poilievre has been stumped for ideas in this crisis, beyond reminding Americans of their consumption of Canadian fossil fuels — which Trump resents as a form of subsidy — and talking of building up the military, which all parties have agreed to run down for decades.

Perhaps though the events of 1911 should though remind Canadians not to panic: about American demagogues or themselves. Laurier’s biographer Oscar Skelton cattily observed that if Kipling could sell thousands of poetry books to Americans, then a Saskatchewan farmer ought to be able to sell them “a beef”. He celebrated “humbler and more unconscious diplomats”: the scores of Canadians and Americans already quietly doing business with each other. Then and since, political rhetoric has obscured but never changed the geographic logic for the inexorable convergence of the Canadian and American economies. Even Laurier’s opponents in 1911 did not rely on fear alone as an argument. The joy of being or remaining British was that it made for dynamic but orderly social and economic progress. They made the point by speaking on platforms decorated with maps of Canada’s impressive railway network. For all Kipling’s talk of “soul”, the moral of 1911 was the need to keep strengthening state capacity and to remove internal barriers to trade. The same may be true today.

Insecurity, then, drove Hastings into devising the “system of conciliation”, essentially a vanity project that entailed winning over the déclassé intellectual elites of India to the Company cause. And so, surrounded by a coven of Hindu and Muslim clerics and thinkers, he was able to reinvent the Company man as a patron of the native intelligentsia. The upstart merchant-mercenary of yesterday was now the enlightened scholar-statesman of the new dispensation. As it was, the overwilling Hindu and Muslim pundits cynically, and perhaps understandably, treated the whole exercise as a power grab, letting on to the Company’s pen-pushers that they were the repositories of India’s unchanging laws. Their spurious claims about the existence of a fairly coherent body of “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” were taken at face value and willed into being.

With a few minor tweaks, it’s a system that still exists in India today. Under its original terms, the state abdicated responsibility on matters relating to inheritance, marriage, and divorce, ceding control over “personal law” to hastily appointed ultraconservative religious authorities. The upshot for Indian Muslims was a legal regime of shariatic derivation in which unilateral divorce without alimony was a male prerogative. The inheritance law was of a piece with this vision: sons were entitled to twice the share passed to daughters. This was just as well for the “orientalists” of the East India Company, enamoured of “authentic” native custom, even if no such thing existed. It likewise suited its more hard-nosed businessmen, anxious to rule on the cheap. Public law — land contracts, taxes — was kept in British hands, while pesky personal law was offloaded to priests.

Over the past quarter-millennium, no universalising countervailing influence has been able to breach this identitarian consensus. Indeed, only two serious stabs have been made by rationalists to undermine religious authority, the first of which was the zestful Utilitarian attack of the early 19th century on a range of religious customs. The second was the largely passive revolution of 1947, when the baton passed from an English to Indian elite, committed notionally to secularism. But Hindu and Muslim personal law remained on the books.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hastings is to blame for Modi, or that a direct line can be drawn from 1772 to 1992, when Hindu fanatics sparked nationwide riots after tearing down Babur’s Mosque, a pivotal episode in the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rare though it was, precolonial India was no stranger to confessional violence between Hindus and Muslims, not least over matters of cow worship and slaughter. Yet the fact remains that Indians, in the main, clung to their primary identification as members of this and that sect and subcaste. It took British legal reform and Hindu and Muslim religious revivalism in the 18th century to convince a great many to start thinking of themselves above all as Hindus and Muslims.

More from this author

The thuggish tactics of Narendra Modi

By Pratinav Anil

Devolution added a further fillip to fanaticism. As the franchise expanded from the 1860s on, and first councils and then provinces fell into Indian hands, religion offered a crude shorthand for political difference. Hindus and Muslims milked votes through their respective positions on cows, and increasingly the stakes went beyond bovine blood, also encompassing human flesh. Here was the unholy alliance between votes and violence that would have crippling consequences for the country after independence. And the arrival of the new intellectual current of nationalism only compounded this confessional problem. Deciding to mine the rich vein of national identity, the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, established in 1885, propounded an anticolonialism which amounted to a sentimental tribute to Hindu gods. It unsurprisingly found itself at loggerheads with the Muslim League, founded in 1906, which successfully lobbied for a Muslim quota in the services and in parliament, essentially an electoral extrapolation of the Hastings principle. If still far from a foregone conclusion, the road to Partition was now clear.

By the time the cantankerous and identity-obsessed Mohandas Gandhi seized control of the Congress in 1920, it was, in a sense, already too late for course correction. Rather favourably disposed to Muslims unlike many a rabidly prejudiced Congressman, Gandhi nevertheless inaugurated a political style that precluded any semblance of common ground between Hindus and Muslims. “My Hindus” could strike deals with, even befriend, “you Muslims”, but any alliance between the two faiths could only ever be skin-deep. The chasm between Hindu and Muslim was far too existential to warrant any meaningful connection with a member of the opposite team. More dismayingly, Gandhi’s handpicked henchmen didn’t so much as even pay lip service to the official ideology of secularism. By 1937, a mere 2.2% of the party membership was Muslim; at the time, one in four Indians swore by Islam. When the bulk of the provinces fell to the Congress that year, the trial run at independence revealed what a farcically one-sided affair the party was. Cow slaughter bans were introduced. In schools, idolatry was forced down the throats of hapless Muslims. Not long after, in 1940, Jinnah’s Muslim League would demand a separate homeland for Muslims.

So it was that when the Brits Brexited the subcontinent seven years later, the transfer of power was accompanied by a carve-up: a largely Hindu India achieved independence sandwiched by two pools of Pakistan snipped from its sides.

Since independence, Indians have struggled to make one nation out of two communities. Already in the early Fifties, a purge of Muslims had left the higher echelons of the civil service entirely devoid of minorities. More recently, the Hindu nationalist BJP — in power since 2014 — has given carte blanche to Hindu militias to break up interfaith marriages and bulldoze Muslim homes. Its new citizenship law is designed to disenfranchise millions of Muslims in the borderlands. In cities such as Ahmedabad, laws have been passed preventing Muslims from buying and renting property in Hindu areas.

Detached observers will rightly point out such enormities are par for the course in young democracies, where the demos falls hostage to the ethnos. Indeed, the Indian dilemma is far from unique. As in the former colony, so in the metropole. Postwar Britain, too, was after a fashion a new nation, having just emerged out of the British Empire. It is no accident that the rise of English nationalism in the mid-century was roughly coeval with the rise of Hindu nationalism. As the historian Olivette Otele has recently reminded us in African Europeans, race mattered rather little in Europe in the age of empire; prejudice turned instead on religion.

The experience of black Britons in the 20th century confirms this. In their brilliant sociology of the British elite since Victorian times, Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman recall an interview with a black British woman who contrasted her experience of Oxbridge in the Seventies (“Don’t come to my room while my parents are here. They don’t like coloureds,” she was told) with that of her parents in Thirties Oxbridge (they “absolutely loved it, so I had a slightly rose-tinted view of the whole thing. So I walked into the kind of prejudice that my mother never met. She was met by a lot of curiosity, but not overt racism”.)

Their strikingly different experiences point to a broader phenomenon. As a rule, modern empires have handled diversity better than nation states. In the latter, parochialism has all too often trumped cosmopolitanism; and prejudice, toleration. So it shouldn’t surprise us that the experience of a black Briton in the Thirties, when Britain was still an empire with at least a smidgen of commitment to ethnic plurality, was altogether different from that of her daughter in the Seventies, when Britain was in the throes of a rabidly intolerant postimperial nationalism. It is the reason why, despite being a Brexiteer, I maintain a theoretical sympathy to supranational projects, even the one that has gone horribly wrong next-door. For it can hardly be denied that Britain’s return to cosmopolitanism, in great part of Europhilic stamp, took the edge off English nationalism.

If Hindu nationalism has succeeded where English nationalism has failed, it is because identity politics has won out in India. Segregation in all its declensions — legal (the long shadow cast by Hastings and the orientalists); electoral (the marriage of votes and violence); social (Modi’s war on miscegenation and mixed neighbourhoods) — has been placed on a pedestal. Contrariwise, in England, a steady universalisation of laws has resulted in the dismantling of the pillars of minority oppression — Catholic emancipation in 1829; decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967; abolition of blasphemy laws in 2008 — all the while steering clear of the kind of identitarian quotas and carve-outs, exemptions and exceptions, that have gained ever greater currency in India. It is no accident that, beyond the crenellated confines of the ivory tower, so few Brits set any store by racial or religious identity politics today. Compare Tommy Robinson’s itsy-bitsy fan base with that of Enoch Powell’s in his prime. Small wonder the far-Right’s brat summer proved to be such a damp squib.

Our own century’s William Dalrymple is an anachronism down to his name (incidentally, the conservative writer Anthony Daniels took on the pseudonym “Theodore Dalrymple” because he felt it sounded like that of a “gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world”). Once William Dalrymple might have been governor of the Punjab; now he hosts a podcast. The only comparable figure in contemporary Britain is that other prize stallion of the Goalhanger stable, Rory Stewart — with whom Dalrymple in fact lodged in Kabul in the late 2000s, when he was writing Return of a King.

Even Dalrymple’s outspoken criticism of Israel, which recently got him into genteel Twitter fisticuffs with his friend Simon Sebag Montefiore, has a smack of the old school about it: one can situate him comfortably within a Toryish tradition that disdains the Balfour Declaration as a betrayal of our Arab friends and a cause of national dishonour. In a similar vein, he has done more than most Israel-critics to highlight the plight of the Arab Christians swept up in the conflict, for whom he has agitated since he wrote From the Holy Mountain in 1997.

That book, retracing John Moschus’s steps, completed a trilogy of travelogues that started with In Xanadu, where he followed the path of Marco Polo. Dalrymple’s account of his Silk Roads adventures, written when he was only 22, was praised far and wide by all the greats in the game, including his hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Then came City of Djinns, a colourful telling of life in Delhi. Eunuchs and dervishes feature prominently. “Delhi ladies very good,” says his driver at one point, “having breasts like mangoes.”

It is a cliché for the travel writer to find more of himself, and of his home country, the farther he ventures afield; but what seems to have most startled Dalrymple in City of Djinns was the absence of Britain and Britishness in India, which had somehow “managed to shed its colonial baggage”. The only traces of home were to be found among the depressed Anglo-Indians: they too are presented as an anachronism, and Dalrymple writes about them with warmth and fellow-feeling. “The dish I like is that Kentucky Fried Chicken,” says one, Joe Fowler, regarding a recent visit to the motherland: “A very popular dish over there, a delightful dish.” His tone becomes gradually more mournful: “It was born and bred in us that the British Empire would last for ever. They promised us that they would stay.”

In his travel books, Dalrymple himself is the main character, but his move to history as his preferred genre has occasioned a retreat. Already he was blurring political commentary and historical anecdote with tales of his own derring-do: the first chapter of The Age of Kali, for example, tells us a lot both about the origins of the Left-wing movement of Lalu Prasad Yadav, and the author’s efforts to flag him down for an interview (which eventually occurred when they happened to end up on the same flight). Dalrymple declared his intention to retreat from the fore in the introduction of his 2009 book Nine Lives. When he wrote In Xanadu, “travel writing tended to highlight the narrator”; now he prefers to stay “firmly in the shadows”.

Dalrymple’s acclaimed series on the East India Company pursues themes already present in The Age of Kali and City of Djinns. In the latter, he decried the savagery and rapacity of the Company, empire, and — especially — of the British response to the Mutiny of 1857, in which were manifested “all the most horrible characteristics of the English character — philistinism, narrow-mindedness, bigotry, vengefulness”. The date 1857 hangs over much of his writing. It marked the starting-point for what he has called “the world of Kipling”, characterised by “decree from London, complete racial segregation, and the Brits behaving according to stereotype”. It is a shift that Dalrymple bitterly laments.

More from this author

The Empireland delusion

By Samuel Rubinstein

But Dalrymple’s interpretation of history has always been more sophisticated than bog-standard empire-bashing. In White Mughals, he illustrates and underscores the extent to which a genuine love of, and respect for, India coexisted alongside avarice and exploitation within the East India Company. On one early episode of his podcast Empire, co-hosted with Anita Anand, he goes out to bat for the great bogeyman of Company Rule, Warren Hastings. Far from prosecuting Hastings in the manner of Edmund Burke, Dalrymple finds something redeeming in him: his learning, his curiosity, his enthusiasm for Indian letters and manners. All this stands in contrast with Robert Clive, the real villain of the piece, whom Dalrymple takes as representing the less urbane, more cynical dimension of British imperialism — the dimension which ultimately, on his telling, came to dominate the stage.

Dalrymple has now moved back in time with his latest book, The Golden Road. Here he tells the grand and gripping story of how India shaped the ancient and medieval world. “Why”, he asks in the introduction, “is the extraordinary diffusion” of Indian influence “not better and more widely known?” “Some might argue that this is a legacy of colonialism,” he answers. This construction anticipates a “but”, but none comes: in any case, Dalrymple, as his appreciation of Hastings makes clear, knows better than anyone that British attitudes to India were always a good deal more complex than regarding it as an “ignorant backwater”.

In The Golden Road, he gives the impression of self-consciously hamming up his Indophilia, perhaps for comic effect. Early on he cites, with a wink, Sanjeev Bhaskar’s Goodness Gracious Me sketch: “Christianity? Indian! Leonardo da Vinci? Indian! Royal family? Indian!” Then, as we progress through his narrative, more and more things turn out to be Indian in origin. The university? Indian! The wealth of the Roman Empire? Indian! Our numbers — and with them “a revolution in commerce, leading ironically to the creation of trading companies that would pioneer the domination of Europe over Asia in the centuries to come”? Indian!

It may therefore be that the old travel writer hasn’t completely disappeared from his own narrative, and that he’s playing a character that is in some ways an imperial throwback. It is as though he goes into overdrive to undo 1857: this may be said to be his overarching mission, if he has one. In a recent interview, he bristled at being described, in jest, as the “last of the White Mughals”, but perhaps this can be meant as a compliment. White Mughals, Indophiles, and William Dalrymples have been a perennial presence in Britain’s intellectual culture, and we are better for it.

In the centuries that have followed, not a single monarch has been assassinated, and only one Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, has suffered such a grim fate. And he was killed not by political rivals, but by a merchant with a grievance. Before 1688, though, deposed kings and other politically inconvenient royals often faced a darker end than the exiled James II. Royals including two Edwards, Henry VI, and Mary, Queen of Scots, either died mysteriously in captivity or were executed publicly.

This is not especially surprising. In a monarchy proper, as opposed to the constitutional kind, political legitimacy rests not in the system so much as in the person of the monarch: a king only becomes meaningfully a king when enough powerful people perceive him as having that special extra something that elevates him to royalty. And a pretender is someone else competing to be seen in this light — either by the same cadre of the powerful or by a rival cadre. In this situation, the only sure-fire way to eliminate the risk posed by a pretender is to eliminate the pretender.

Whatever name Vladimir Putin gives his system of government, its operations in practice make more sense in monarchical than liberal democratic terms. Take, for example, the death in prison of Alexei Navalny last Friday. While of course reprehensible from a democratic perspective, his death was wholly predictable from a monarchical one. For Navalny was, in effect, a pretender to the Russian throne, with considerable public and international support behind his protests against Putin’s regime. Thus, much as with Henry VI in 1471, the only way to eliminate the threat he posed was to eliminate him.

Writing against the French Revolution, the Savoyard reactionary Joseph de Maistre argued, in 1794, that the government of a people is not something that can be composed in the abstract; rather, it emerges from the distinct history, culture, and disposition of the people as a whole. With this in mind, we might suggest that, notwithstanding superficial changes of regime, from the Romanovs through Stalin to Putin, Russia has never really abandoned rule by tsar and aristocracy.

More from this author

King Charles and the twilight of the Boomers

By Mary Harrington

This is more difficult to grasp from the vantage-point of the anglophone West, though. For here we’ve grown accustomed to thinking of the Anglo-Saxon model as the only sane and decent way of doing politics. First formalised in the 1701 Act of Settlement — then, across the Atlantic, stripped of its vestigial monarchy 75 years later by the Declaration of Independence — this model views politics as properly a contest of ideas rather than individuals, conducted in a political space that at least aspires to neutrality. Political rivalries, in this order, are to be contained via a matrix of shared norms — one that, importantly, includes a convention of not imprisoning, persecuting, or bumping off one’s rivals.

But this modus operandi has arguably only come to seem so self-evident and eternal by virtue of the outsize role played first by the British Empire, and subsequently by the American one, in shaping the modern West. Both these regimes share a common intellectual and religious legacy and, initially at least, some considerable common demographics. But today the Old and New Worlds are diverging increasingly sharply — including in political outlook. Notably, in today’s England, even supposedly insurgent Right-wing parties colour dutifully inside the conventional political lines. By contrast, the Anglosphere nation now most openly debating direct autocratic rule is the Land of the Free.

There, after Biden’s victory, Trump was mockingly linked to James II. More recently, though, jibes about an impotent king in exile has morphed into mounting anxiety about a Caesar-in-waiting. Those on the Right have made their contribution, not least via mischievous memes comparing the profile of Trump’s son Barron with surviving images of rulers from classical antiquity. And Trump himself has done little to assuage those who fear he aspires to Caesarism, declaring recently that he would not govern as a dictator on election “except on day one”.

In response, Republican Never Trumper, Liz Cheney, has warned of “a sort of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States”. Is this really happening, though? In a political attention economy that incentivises hyperbole, it’s hard to say. But if it is, the surest evidence in favour of an American tilt towards autocracy comes not directly from Trump, or even from neoreactionary writers or online shitposters. Rather, it lurks in the political class, in the tiers just below Presidential incumbents or hopefuls — and especially in the weaponisation of American institutions as tools of political persecution.

This is, increasingly, a bipartisan strategy. On the day Navalny died, a court in New York City ordered Donald Trump to pay a $354 million fine in a civil fraud trial, one of a plethora of ongoing efforts to impeach or otherwise hamper Trump via the courts. Trump now claims himself subjected to a Putinesque campaign of persecution, calling the ruling “a form of Navalny” and declaring: “If I weren’t running [for president] none of this stuff would ever happen.”

Two days before the Trump fraud ruling, meanwhile, a parallel Republican mobilisation of the formally neutral institutions of justice produced a special counsel report, which found Biden had “wilfully retained and disclosed classified materials”. When the special counsel nonetheless declined to prosecute on the basis of these findings, this was interpreted as further evidence of partisan abuse of neutral institutions, and denounced by Republican House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik as a sign of the “unAmerican, two-tier justice system that exists in Joe Biden’s America”. The outrage only grew louder the following day, when a key witness in the Trumpist attempt to impeach Joe Biden was charged by the FBI with fabricating allegations about the President and his son taking bribes.

More from this author

Burning Man is a capitalist lie

By Mary Harrington

To be clear: I am not taking a stance here on the truth or justice of any of these allegations or campaigns. Nor, unlike Trump, am I drawing an equivalence between efforts by Republicans and Democrats to wield American state machinery against their political rivals, and the tendency of Vladimir Putin’s enemies to die in plane accidents or (like several English medieval royals) mysteriously in prison. Nonetheless, it should be clear that a new consensus is solidifying among the American political class: one that departs increasingly dramatically from its British constitutional forebear.

In this emerging order no one expects to persuade their opponents. This is perhaps understandable: polarisation is now so acute in the Land of the Free that almost two-thirds of young Americans would reject a prospective partner based on incompatible politics. There is no point contesting ideas, if people’s loyalties are tribal. But if this is so, how do you win? The answer appears to be: by capturing institutions, then going after the other tribe’s leader. There is no such thing as neutral regulatory, governance or administrative infrastructure in this existential struggle against political opponents.

A similar institutional trench warfare is also being fought today in Poland. Since the deposition of the conservative PiS party, a coalition led by former EU President Donald Tusk has taken over and fired key personnel from the state broadcaster, is legislating to pack the judiciary, and is also reportedly preparing to prosecute key PiS officials. Supporters see these actions as an “iron broom” sweeping out anti-democratic distortions. Opponents, though, view Tusk’s efforts themselves as the assault on democracy.

But perhaps again this makes sense from de Maistre’s perspective. Poland’s tradition of liberal democracy is so short as to be practically non-existent. The country enjoyed four years as a fully independent democratic state, from 1922 to 1926, and then another 13 between the end of the Cold War and before EU accession in 2004. Otherwise, the lands and peoples known as Poland have been ruled with vacillating boundaries by an assortment of monarchs, strongman rulers with largely cosmetic parliaments, and Eastern or Western empires.

Thus the face-off between Tusk and PiS represents, if anything, a reversion to the Polish norm, following a brief outlier effort at doing politics on something like the Anglo-Saxon model. And seen across the globe and through time, this is also more generally true: Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy is the outlier, and assorted forms of autocracy and empire are the historic and cross-cultural norm. So perhaps we should greet the competing claims of institutional capture now emanating from America’s rival factions with a measure of fatalism, even if these suggest that American political-class support for the legacy Anglo system is fading.

And again, perhaps, from de Maistre’s perspective this development makes sense. For while its founding political order drew heavily from England both in sensibility and in core assumptions, it is less obvious why modern America should continue in this vein. A “propositional nation” from inception, over time the Land of the Free has become, by design, ineluctably less Anglo in demographic terms. And seen thus, it is perhaps unsurprising to note how many American culture war issues, from statues to “whiteness”, cash out as disputes over how (or whether) to value the nation’s Anglo cultural legacy.

More from this author

Gen Z's radical race politics

By Mary Harrington

Following the same de Maistrean logic, it’s to be expected that as the demographic composition of a nation changes, so too will that nation’s emergent — as opposed to written — constitution. It is not unthinkable that one casualty of this change might be the once-unshakeable baseline of public support for a style of procedural politics strongly associated with America’s early Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers.

What will emerge in its place? Will a rapidly-diversifying 21st-century America find itself, by virtue of its changing composition, more inclined towards more autocratic governance? Certainly, albeit in a less violent fashion than Russia, an order seems to be emerging in which victory requires more than just defeating opposition parties: it necessitates the annihilation of rival pretenders. And in turn implies the replacement of a politics of ideas, by one of divinely marked persons. Should this order consolidate itself, it will, whatever the window-dressing, be a monarchical regime.

At present, the keenest supporters of American diversity are generally also those loudest in expressing anxieties about a putative Trumpian Caesar. It will be ironic in the extreme if it does turn out that the real bulwark against autocracy was America’s now rapidly dissolving Anglo heritage.

If the test of “nuance” is being criticised from all sides, then Sanghera’s books pass with flying colours. Critics on the Right panned his 2021 book Empireland for invoking “the Britain-loathing New York Times” and “that prodigious bore Fintan O’Toole”. On the Left, in a somewhat warmer review, Stanford’s Prof. Priya Satia admonished Sanghera for drawing upon works which have apparently been “debunked”, such as Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy (1973-8). Only on the shelves of Waterstones Dad are his books safe — but that remains a considerable and influential constituency, one that uses the genre of popular history to form its political worldview. So if that’s who’s reading him, what will they take away from these books? What does the Sanghera project amount to?

The breadth of his reading is part of the sell. A whopping 39% of Empireworld is notes and bibliography. And Sanghera is at pains to convince his readers that he is an honest broker, presenting himself as a blank slate, an autodidact, who having read as much as possible with an open mind has arrived at his own conclusions. He wrote Empireland not principally to edify his readers, but to “plug large gaps” in his own knowledge. Unlike the “culture warriors”, he comes with no axes to grind; he poses as a latter-day Leopold von Ranke, bravely telling the hard truths about British history “as it actually was”.

This rhetorical strategy has its advantages, but can make his books read like pell-mell compilations of quotations from various authors. Sometimes in Empireworld this works to launder ideas that strain credulity, such as the British Empire being responsible for last year’s floods in Pakistan, or the trauma of slavery in the Americas “epigenetically” disposing its modern-day descendants to workaholism and “the downplaying of achievements in public”. Other times, he ends up endorsing ideas which I doubt he sincerely holds. Notoriously, in Empireland he called for Britons to accept that “ultimately, multiculturalism is, in the words of the Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, just ‘colonizin’… in reverse’”. Aside from sounding awfully like a shot fired in the “culture wars”, I suspect that this would do more harm than good for race relations in Britain; and given that Sanghera does not approve of “colonizin’” but does approve of “multiculturalism”, he most likely shares this view.

But the main shortcoming of Sanghera’s books is that they tell us much more about their author’s own psychology, itself a product of an epistemic ferment of which the “culture wars” are part, than “how imperialism has shaped modern Britain” or “how British imperialism has shaped the globe”. The world around him is a Rorschach test, and he only ever sees one thing. These books have a picaresque flavour: we follow our maverick hero on his adventures as he entertains us with his party-trick, his unrivalled mastery at the game of “spot the colonial inheritance”.

Suggested reading

What Harry Flashman teaches us about empire

By Aris Roussinos

At the beginning of Empireworld, we join him on his journey from New Delhi back to London, “noting down every imperial legacy we happen across”. The sniffer dogs at the airport remind him that the “international trade in cocaine was influenced, indirectly, by British imperial politics”. Encountering some other passengers drinking at the airport bar, he thinks about how “British imperialists spread drunkenness across the planet”. No respite is to be found on his 10-hour flight. That the actors on the TV screen are skinny is a legacy of “imperial attitudes”. And watching Ralph Fiennes “do a half-decent job of making Lord Voldemort appear forbidding” makes him think about the Hollywood trope of the “British baddie” (it’s odd to make this point about a franchise where all the characters are British), a trope which — “let’s face it” — is also down to empire.

All this retreads ground already covered in Empireland, which opens with a suggestion for how empire education could be integrated into P.E. lessons: “Playing football? The perfect opportunity to tell students that ‘kop’, the colloquial name for rising single-tier terraces at football grounds, originally comes from Spion Kop” (a battle in the Second Boer War). It can feel a bit like reading the diary of an undercover Martian, whose only knowledge about our world comes from Zulu, a Kipling anthology, and the British Empire’s Wikipedia page. There is of course nothing wrong with having historical obsessions and lively imaginations. “Have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself, had their hobby-horses?”, as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy once asked. But, as Shandy continues, a hobby-horse is to be indulged in only “so long as a man rides [it] peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him”.

Sanghera wants us all to get atop his horse. When he plays his game of “spot the colonial inheritance”, he treats it as a terrible failing when others do not participate. Thus the “legacy of empire” must be taught more at school and university — at the expense of John Milton or the Ten Commandments if necessary. In the second chapter of Empireworld, we pace around Kew Gardens, our narrator lost in thought about the relationship between empire and botany. He is jolted by the “painfully polite”, “twee” atmosphere in the Kew Gardens café: how are we to tally this, he asks, “with the racism of influential botanists”? It is unclear what exactly Sanghera wants: perhaps every family enjoying a day out at Kew should be made to reflect on the supposedly bloody history of their surroundings. In fact he comes close to supporting such a regime elsewhere in the book. One of his interlocutors recommends that “every European tourist to Jamaica be lectured on the history before being allowed to collect their bags”, and Sanghera’s only reservation (I suppose a valid one) is that this would “fuel the culture war over colonialism in the West”. Again, Sanghera is placed at a remove from that culture war, though I doubt this idea would please Jamaica’s tourism industry, either.

More from this author

Gen Z has an Israel problem

By Samuel Rubinstein

Why must we play this game with him? Sanghera offers a different answer in Empireworld to the one given in Empireland. Empireland was essentially making a moral argument: we should think and talk and teach more about the empire because it’s the right thing to do. In Empireworld, however, morality takes a back seat. We now find ourselves in the hard-edged world of geopolitics and multipolarity and soft power.

Some portents of this did surface towards the end of Empireland. Among the unsettling instances of “imperialism” that Sanghera finds in Boris Johnson’s rhetorical repertoire are references to London being “the greatest city on earth”, Britain having the “best universities”, and Britain being “the leading military player in western Europe”. A less imperially afflicted mind would recognise these for the banal platitudes they are. Even Borat boasts that Kazakhstan is the “number one exporter of potassium”. But what Sanghera dislikes about this “world-beating” bluster is that, by being so apparently tactless about the imperial past, it somehow diminishes Britain’s standing on the world stage. This argument, which becomes the central thesis of Empireworld, is never properly explained.

Britain, on Sanghera’s account, is now too puny a nation to get away with not constantly drawing out the imperial connotations of everything it says and does. We have no choice but to play the game of “spot the colonial inheritance”. India, after all, is a “burgeoning superpower that will shape our future in all sorts of ways”, and apparently would like for us to play along. To make matters worse, the “conversation” about reparations is swiftly “leaving us behind”: “we will look increasingly irrelevant and ignorant if we continue not to engage”. Presumably an “engagement” consisting of a sharp and simple “no” is not quite what Sanghera is after. One has to wonder how many pounds we shall have to cough up if we wish to maintain our “relevance” in the world.

Suggested reading

When will we forget the Second World War?

By Nicholas Harris

This emphasis on how Britain “looks” animates every page of Empireworld. It mars, for example, an otherwise intriguing discussion of the imperial roots of Britain’s third sector, and the British enthusiasm for animal charities in particular. The first wildlife conservation charities were set up, perversely, by big game hunters; British imperialists were “pioneers in extinction”. This, Sanghera says, is an “important thing to acknowledge within our national obsession for animal conservation and protection” — for “if we forget it, we risk looking cynical and hypocritical as we go about lecturing the planet”. When the King and the Prince of Wales bleat on about saving the rhinos, they are “seemingly oblivious to the fact that their ancestors were at the forefront of destroying some of these species in the first place”. Perhaps, however, they are not “oblivious” to this fact at all, and simply do not think it relevant that (to use one of Sanghera’s examples) Edward VIII once shot a tiger.

For all these flaws, there is a worthwhile book buried deep in Empireworld, one which could have “provided nuance” to a heated and often ugly debate. Every now and then, Sanghera says the sort of thing that ought to feature more prominently in discussions of imperial history: that empire was “unplanned” and “nebulous”; that it had “areas of grey, where seemingly opposite things could be true at once”; that it was “messy” and “full of contradictions”; that it “instilled chaos and spread democracy”. Near the end of the book we get some much-needed self-reflection: for all his inveighing against the hoary old balance-sheet question of whether the empire was “good or bad”, he confesses that he had himself “participated in a micro form of balance-sheet thinking myself”. No prizes for guessing which side he tended to come down on.

Alas, this tease of the sort of book that Empireworld might have been is forever snatched away from us in the conclusion. On the final page, returning to his fixation on “optics”, Sanghera recites a litany of all the things Britain “cannot” do until it somehow faces up to its imperial past. “We cannot lecture nations about homophobia without accepting that we determinedly enforced homophobia upon large parts of the world.” “We cannot negotiate climate change treaties without acknowledging that we were pioneers in inflicting man-made climate change upon the planet.” One might quite reasonably say in response that yes, we can, and yes, we should. In any case, this screed on the sins of empire rather gives the game away. For no “nuance” is here to be found: only a rousing battle-cry in the “culture war”.

Start the story at a different moment in time — 1948, say, when the grandparents of today’s Gazans were living in the area, now southern Israel, where Hamas terrorists committed their atrocities — and the crystalline certainties of the scenario above take on a different light.

But there are more than two options. We could begin our story much earlier than 1948, perhaps when the name Gaza was recorded for the first time: during the reign of the mighty, empire-building Thutmose III, 1,479–1,425 BC. By this time, Gaza had already been under the rule of the Pharaohs for several decades. The long view quickly reveals that contest is a constant in Gaza’s history. Wars surge up at intervals in great, seismic eruptions, before the territory settles into an equilibrium which in turn is shattered by another external invader.

Much of this turbulence can be attributed to Gaza’s strategic location. Hemmed in between the Mediterranean and the Sinai and Negev deserts, this coastal oasis has long been a desirable waypoint on the trade routes that criss-crossed the arid region. Both the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, in the 1st century BC, and the Arab geographer Al Muqaddasi in the 10th century AD, commented on its beauty and enviable location. Critically, as the last point before a desert crossing, it was also an essential stopping place for conquerors looking either east from Egypt or west from the Levant. All roads of conquest ran through Gaza.

Enter stage left, from the 12th century BC, among the most historically compelling of Gaza’s many occupiers: the pagan Philistines of Philistia, etymological forefathers of the Muslim Palestinians of Palestine. And here, as the Philistines came to blows with the Jewish tribes of the interior over access to the coast, arose the earliest signs of the conflict that continues 32 centuries later between the Palestinians and Israelis.

Suggested reading

Israel is trapped by Western guilt

By Tom McTague

This was the Gaza of the Bible, in which the Israelite warrior Samson was chosen by the Old Testament God to rescue Israel from the Philistines. Tricked by Delilah into revealing the secret of his strength, Samson was eventually undone, his eyes gouged out before he was imprisoned in Gaza and put to work turning a massive millstone around and around in an endless ordeal. But he had the bitter last laugh, as he pulled down the Philistine temple on himself and his persecutors, killing everyone.

This apocalyptic vision of going round and round in circles before wreaking death and mutually assured destruction endures as the defining narrative of Israel and Gaza. Old Testament smiting becomes 21st-century Israeli airstrikes and Palestinian rockets, the violence circular and never-ending.

Gaza has been completely destroyed and emptied of its inhabitants before. Alexander the Great besieged the city in 332 BC. When it refused to surrender, his forces stormed its defences, put its men to the sword, and sold its children into slavery. The Hasmonean siege in 96 BC was another orgy of slaughter and destruction, this time launched by the Jewish king Alexander Jannaeus, ruler of Judaea, to seize Gaza from the Greeks. After these explosions of violence, the transfer of Gaza to Roman rule in 63 BC was comparatively peaceful, but after Rome officially switched to Christianity in 380, and the Bishop Porphyrius became bishop of Gaza in 395, he led a mob to loot and sack a city which had remained traditionally hostile to the followers of Christ. The city’s pagan gods and temples were destroyed in a fundamentalist frenzy. Last Thursday, 17 centuries later, St Porphyrius got his comeuppance when an Israeli airstrike shattered the church, the oldest in Gaza, that bore his name.

For a time, Byzantine prosperity succeeded the Pax Romana, before wars with the Persians brought renewed strife. While these two elderly leviathans slugged it out, in surged a new, nimble and faith-filled force. Muslim Arabs conquered Gaza in 637, only five years after the Prophet Mohammed’s death; a flurry of Levantine cities, including Damascus and Jerusalem, were taken during the same campaign. In time, Gaza became a significant intellectual and commercial centre — before an Arab civil war in 796 ruined it altogether. That Muslim-on-Muslim conflict was just one among many early harbingers of the deep intra-Arab tension and disunity — Arabs call it fitna — which would bedevil Middle Eastern politics from the 20th century. But after the devastation of the Crusader conquests, Saladin restored Muslim pride and prosperity to Gaza, ushering in a long period of Mamluk and then Ottoman rule, which persisted until 1917.

But so many of these earlier wars and conquests seem like here-today-gone-tomorrow disturbances when compared with the devastation of today. Ancient disputes have, in the past century or so, sharpened into arguably the world’s most tragically intractable and bloody conflict, in which victims are aggressors and aggressors victims.

Lustick chose 1948 to begin his summary of the current conflict, but one could equally start a few decades earlier, with the British seizure of Palestine from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. That moment ushered in a new iteration of a conflict that has arguably never ended. Energetically lobbied by the Zionist movement, which wanted a Jewish homeland, Britain made a fateful decision that year. London’s Balfour Declaration which — in the words of the writer Arthur Koestler “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”— promised “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land the Biblical God had promised to Israel. Mass Jewish immigration followed, accelerated by the rise of the Nazis: around 250,000 Jews came to Mandate Palestine between 1929 and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Hounded out of Palestine by the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang terrorists in 1947, the British were unable to deliver on the second principle of the declaration: that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Much — Palestinians would say everything — was then done by Israel to prejudice Palestinian rights. All-out conflict in 1948 led to triumph and statehood for Israel, and wholesale dispossession and disaster ­— the notorious nakba — for the Palestinians. Around 750,000 fled into exile or were expelled — mostly to the West Bank, controlled by Jordan, or Gaza, then in Egyptian hands. Prevented from either entering Egypt proper, which did not want to take in such enormous numbers, or returning to their homes in Israel, overnight they became stateless refugees.

In 1947, the UN’s partition plan, rejected by the Arabs, had proposed a Jewish state occupying 55% of the country. By 1949, Israel controlled 78% of Mandatory Palestine, leaving the Arabs occupying West Bank and Gaza, which together represented just 22% of the original territory.

More from this author

Happy birthday, Baghdad, wonder of the world

By Justin Marozzi

Our story of Gaza takes another tragic turn at this point. Following its victory in the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, Israel occupied Gaza, prefiguring a rise of Jewish settlements, illegal under international law, in the territory. Tensions escalated to the boiling point of the 1987 intifada, violent protests which killed more than 2,000 and which came to be emblematic — as Gaza itself has become — of Palestinian resistance. Further intifadas — killing more than 4,000 in the 2000s, and 273 in 2015–16 — surged out of the failure of the long-awaited 1993 Oslo accords to bring peace.

Meanwhile, into Gaza’s political arena stormed Hamas, making mincemeat of its secular rival Fatah. Hamas has no interest in politics or development. It clings to the dream of the destruction of Israel and has risen to power and prominence to become the face of Palestinian resistance in Gaza and beyond. As Ian Black writes in Enemies and Neighbours, a history of Israel and Palestine from 1917–2017, the Gaza Strip is “a permanent, festering — and often violent — reminder of the unresolved conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land”.

Bald statistics confirm the reality of its immiserated population. Of the 2.2 million Gazans, 68% are refugees. The poverty rate is 61%, unemployment over 46%. Over 73% of households receive humanitarian assistance, with more than 68% citing it as the main source of their income. This is what Palestinians mean when they talk about the daily violence of life under a blockade which has been in force since Hamas took power in 2007, leaving most Gazans shut in, their airspace and coastline controlled by Israel. There is no question of freedom or autonomy. This is fertile territory for resistance and hatred.

Suggested reading

Israel is no longer Britain's war

By Aris Roussinos

And when Gazans consider the future, it’s hard to discern a ray of hope. They can hardly look to the occupied West Bank for a model settlement. Abandoning the armed struggle, recognising Israel and accepting 22% of historic Palestine has brought the West Bank Palestinians little in the way of dividends. Its 87-year-old “leader”, Mahmoud Abbas, head of the corrupt, enfeebled and incompetent Palestinian Authority, is known derisively in some Israeli circles as the mayor of Ramallah. Meanwhile, the two-state solution is dead and the extremists in power on both sides are dancing on its grave.

“Peace between Israel and Palestine can assume neither meaning nor substance except in Gaza, which will be both the foundation and the keystone,” wrote Jean-Pierre Filiu, Professor of Middle East Studies at Paris’s Sciences Po in 2012. A decade later, Gaza finds itself once again a cauldron of conflict. Khaled, a Palestinian friend, messages me. He fears the worst for this refuge of refugees. “For me, the unbearable human suffering experienced by Gaza is made worse by the real threat of a repeat of the historical traumatic displacement of Palestinians that Gaza embodies.”

Today, as Gaza crumbles beneath the relentless barrage of strikes, braced for another deadly invasion, a new story will begin. One can only hope, in the words of the late Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni, writing about her beloved Beirut in 1986, that Gaza will survive: “Elle est mille fois morte, mille fois revécue.”

Even now, Corfu’s crumbling rotundas and bandstands, its British barracks, hospitals and palaces, are monuments to a vanished imperial culture, as lost and romantically stirring as that of Rome. Yet recent research born from this faded grandeur is more than just romantic marginalia: it offers a certain nuance currently absent from Britain’s own tiresomely propagandistic discourse on empire. As the Corfiot historian Maria Paschalidi notes, torn between strategic realpolitik and liberal idealism, “Britain suggested a variety of forms of government for the Ionians ranging from authoritarian… to representative… to responsible government.” Yet none worked, creating a “failed colonial experiment in Europe, highlighting the difficulties of governing white, Christian Europeans within a colonial framework”. But if things had worked out differently, Corfu might today be as British as Gibraltar. And the fact that it is not tells a micro-history of London’s always-ambivalent attitude to Empire.

Analysis of Britain’s lost Greek empire opens up new and productive pathways for interpreting the imperial past, keenly studied by a young generation of Greek historians even as it is ignored in the former colonial metropole. As the historian Evangelos Zarokostas observes, the half-century Ionian interlude took place at a formative time, “a period of transition between the collapse of old structures and the establishment of new ones”, in which “British officials were ambivalent about the place of the protectorate in the empire from its very beginning.” From the very start, Britain ruled the islands as a crown colony, but under the legal fiction they were an independent state under British protection. This ambiguous settlement would prove fatal to British rule, but it also provided a template for later British governance in Cyprus, Egypt, Mandate Palestine and Iraq. The islands were a laboratory for later imperial adventures, and would soon prove just as onerous a burden. In this sense, the bloody and still-unresolved conflicts of today’s Middle East were born on the verdant islands of the Ionian. Similarly, the failed Ionian experiment, abandoned just as Britain began to acquire hegemonic status, was to be Whitehall’s first experience of decolonisation — a first draft, in colourful mid-Victorian style, of Britain’s 20th-century decline. 

In 1815, when Britain won the Ionian Islands from a vanquished Napoleon, the world looked very different. The island chain off Greece’s western coast commanded the entrance to the Adriatic, and seemed to offer mastery of the Mediterranean. In the 20 years preceding the raising of the Union flag over Corfu’s medieval fortress, the islands had rudely entered modernity after 400 years as a sleepy colony of Venice, passing from French to Russian hands and back to France again in a wearying succession of sieges and conquests. Desperately poor, they presented London with a complex society to govern: centuries of Venetian rule had left a Greek-speaking peasantry living in feudal squalor, lorded over by an absentee class of Italian-speaking nobles. In the regional capital, Corfu Town, all classes spoke Italian of one form or another, including the many Jews, confined to their ghetto by the vigorous antisemitism of their neighbours. As European Christians for the most part, the islanders were an anomaly in Britain’s expanding empire. How, then, were they to be governed? 

The Treaty of Paris which granted them to Britain asserted that Whitehall’s rule was merely a benevolent guardianship of the first independent Greek state since the Middle Ages. The reality was rather different: fresh from negotiating Haiti’s handover to its new black rulers, the Ionian Islands’ first British Lord High Commissioner, Sir Thomas Maitland, or “King Tom”, ruled with a rod of iron. A Scottish nobleman, described by his new Ionian charges as “dirty” and “frequently drunk”, Maitland began his decade as “conquistador” by erecting imposing monuments to himself, and ensured that, whatever the constitution said, absolute power rested with his own person. Feared by the locals as a volatile and abusive autocrat, whose secret police penetrated every level of Ionian society, Maitland’s absolute rule established the basis for later British governance. An enlightened despot, and a devotee of Adam Smith’s latest, fashionable theories, Maitland encouraged trade and imposed a sense of British order to Corfu’s teeming, overcrowded streets. Finding the locals disinclined to work, Maitland imported Maltese labourers to build his imposing regency palace of St Michael and St George, in the process reviving Corfu’s dwindling Catholic community. Correctly assessing the local nobility as easily swayed by glittering baubles, Maitland invented a chivalric order to dazzle them, still awarded today, in the absence of Greeks to bribe, to British diplomats — by themselves.

More from this author

He was never really 'Phil the Greek'

By Aris Roussinos

For a while, in the early decades of the 19th century, British rule was accepted by Corfiot society, if not by the more rebellious inhabitants of the southward islands. As Aggelis notes, there were even “popular demands from many Ionians to be ‘modernised’ by the British”. So, with all the lost confidence of Victorian Britain, Corfu was duly gifted the Foucauldian novelties of a Panopticon prison in Benthamite style, and a high-walled lunatic asylum, still occupied today. New Macadamed roads, also still in use, linked the villages to the capital, and a sturdy aqueduct brought water to its population. The expansion of new law courts, coupled with stiff sentences for carrying knives — at the time the British arrived, the Ionians had the second-highest murder rate in Europe — transformed a previously violent society into the most pacific, if now litigious, in the region. Handsome villas, their sober Regency neoclassicism softened by pastel-coloured limewash, sprung up around the town and its prosperous new suburb of Garitsa to house the garrison’s officers and their wives in British comfort. They are still lived in today by Corfu’s upper-middle class professionals — indeed, Prince Philip was born in one, Mon Repos. Banks and stock exchanges, hotels and sewers, street lamps and bandstands transformed the medieval walled city into a Balkan simulacrum of Cheltenham.

The eccentric Lord Guilford — whose erratically-spelled name is still commemorated by Corfu’s central square — founded modern Greece’s first university on the island, after being dissuaded from situating it on a goat-haunted mountain peak on Ithaca. A network of “Lancastrian schools” provided public education, including the first ever schooling for girls; British sentries guarded the ghetto during Holy Week, ending the local custom of stoning Jews who dared venture outside. And amid all this reforming zeal, garrison life drifted along with a sleepy, romantic charm, where red-coated officers and their crinolined companions hunted scented paper in lieu of foxes, and enjoyed champagne and oyster picnics on the island’s beauty spots, surrounded by peasants toiling in the olive groves. For Mrs Gaskell, imagining the life of an officer’s wife, enjoying “music and dancing” in her “house with its trellised balcony,” the daily round was one long summer holiday. For the ordinary squaddies, happily acquiring “local connections with women” and “local habits” and serving in the only British posting where wine was the ration drink, the only hazards were drunkenly falling from the ramparts or being snatched by sharks while swimming. A soldier’s life here was distinctly less onerous than in the Empire’s more spartan outposts. 

But the holiday atmosphere would not last long. The outbreak of the Greek Revolution aroused nationalist passions which would ultimately make British rule untenable. The exiled Corfiot nobleman Ioannis Kapodistrias, Russia’s foreign minister and a fervent opponent of British rule, complaining that the islanders were treated “like indians”, became the new Greece’s first head of state, complaining that the islanders were treated “like Indians”, until he was assassinated by his volatile mainland charges. When a Turkish ship carrying Muslim refugees landed on Zakynthos, the passengers were murdered by the islanders, causing Maitland to impose martial law and disarm the Ionian population. Agrarian rebellions would rumble on in the southern islands, with British officials occasionally murdered, and reprisals exacted. The Ionians were the only British territory where the revolutionary fervour of 1848 was successful: the liberal Tory Lord High Commissioner Lord Seaton, fresh from his experience governing Upper Canada, widened democratic participation and permitted a free press, recasting the Ionians as a white dominion fit for Canadian-style responsible self-government. Indeed, under Seaton the Ionian islanders were granted greater democratic rights than the people of Britain itself. When, the following year, British troops put down a peasant uprising in Kefalonia, burning villages and hanging rebels to the applause of the local nobles, his reactionary successor Sir Henry Ward blamed Seaton’s naive idealism for the disturbances, proroguing the Ionian parliament and exiling journalists in an abrupt return to authoritarian rule.

This constant oscillation between Liberal and reactionary Tory proconsuls introduced tensions into Ionian governance that would soon make British rule untenable. The expansion of education, of the legal system and of employment in the British administration created a new Ionian bourgeoisie who rejected the pro-British sympathies of the islands’ aristocracy in favour of radical nationalism: a pattern that would be repeated in more exotic colonies. In stirring Italian prose (though the British had reintroduced Greek as the language of law and government for the first time since the 13th century, Italian remained the language of choice for the educated classes) nationalist radicals with names such as Dandolo, Padova and Lombardo demanded union with the Greek fatherland. Enraged by Ward’s repression of the Kefalonian rebellion, the moderate reformists, who had previously sought closer integration within the empire on more favourable terms of trade and access to imperial sinecures, ceded power to the radicals.

When the Crimean War broke out, and the islands became the supply base for Britain’s defence of the hated Ottoman Empire against the islanders’ Orthodox co-religionists, even the formerly-pliable clergy began to publicly pray for the Tsar’s health and success, while islanders celebrated Russian victories over their colonial overlords. The end was looming. Local government was deadlocked as the radicals frustrated British rule, but the heightened repression angered liberal sentiment in London. In the dying decade of British rule, as at the beginning, Whitehall’s sole concern with the islands became keeping them out of Russian hands. Nervously, London discussed gifting the islands to Austria, though feared the international response. A proposal was made by Ward’s successor, Sir John Young, a former MP for Cavan who consistently likened the increasingly unruly Ionians to the now equally troublesome Irish, proposed to annex Corfu while ceding the more volatile islands to Greece.

In a justificatory British correspondence, the placid Corfiots were now characterised as “half-Venetian and half-Albanian” and thus barely Greek at all. As Paschalidi notes, Young insisted that “Corfu was perfect for ‘British capital and enterprise’ and “would be ‘completely Anglicised’ in a few years.” Yet the initially convenient legal fiction of the Protectorate prevented Britain from either fully annexing Corfu or handing the problem to a friendly power. The publishing of Young’s stolen correspondence just as Gladstone arrived in Corfu to find some workable solution forced London to reassure wary European powers it had no intention of creating a Balkan Gibraltar. At a loss for how to rid itself of its now unwanted Greek dependency, the British government began to search for a way out. That way out was to be King Charles’ great-grandfather, Prince William of Denmark.

Suggested reading

How Britain became an American colony

By Dominic Sandbrook

In 1862, Greek revolutionaries overthrew their unpopular Bavarian king Otto, and the country voted for a successor. When the votes were tallied, the winner, with more than 95% of votes cast (still the greatest democratic mandate in Greek history) was Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria’s second son. Both Alfred and Victoria immediately declined the offer — the throne of an impoverished Balkan country in the throes of revolution was hardly a prize — but the Greeks refused to listen: Alfred-mania had entirely swept the country. The Greeks believed that choosing Alfred would guarantee British protection for their weak and unstable new state, with the still-unliberated Ottoman possessions of northern Greece thrown into the bargain. Struggling to convince them that the Alfred option was impossible, British officials feared the disappointed Greeks would choose a Russian king in a fit of pique, swinging the country into the orbit of London’s greatest rival. After much haggling, British officials settled on a safely pliable king for Greece, Prince William of Denmark — King Charles’ great-grandfather. But to seal the deal, London needed a handsome gift to woo the Greeks: and what better option than Corfu and the Ionians, no longer strategically valuable and now impossible to govern?

And so, on June 2, 1864, the last British troops marched out of Corfu’s Old Fortress and the Union flag was lowered for the last time. The final Lord High Commissioner, Sir Henry Storks, gave a tearful speech in Italian while island notables gathered round him, “embracing him and conferring upon him not infrequently those salutations which Englishmen generally reserve for the other sex”. The frosty atmosphere of Britain’s last decade of rule had evaporated with their looming departure, as soldiers marched along streets “strewn with flowers”, “fêted in the taverns with free beer”. Now it was over, Corfiots had already begun to feel a certain nostalgia for their brief episode of Britishness. “Sono bono genti [they are good people],” a British correspondent quoted an old man waving his straw hat at the departing ships, wiping tears from his eyes: “’Adesso siamo liberi!’ [Now we are free!], said a young man, as he lit a cigarette by way of inaugurating the new order of things.” The young man was not quite correct: in relinquishing Corfu, Britain won a far greater prize, a quasi-colonial dominance over Greece itself, which would remain an effective British protectorate until London was supplanted by Washington following World War Two. For this exact reason, once Britain finally agreed to cede the Ionians, Ionian radicals who had long demanded union futilely began to campaign against it, as the historian Eleni Calligas shows: after experiencing “the corruption, intrigue, and clientelism permeating Greek politics” they soon retired from public life altogether, entirely disillusioned.

British rule in the Ionians is often seen, in Britain, as a curious backwater in the long imperial record, but the romantic but ultimately failed Ionian experiment set the scene for later imperial trends. Oscillating between Liberal and Tory proconsuls, tensions in British internal politics introduced a wild incoherence to Ionian governance: Tory repression inflamed local passions; Liberal idealism created a native nationalist bourgeoisie who would make the islands ungovernable. But young British administrators who cut their teeth in the failed Ionian project would later move on to the equally ambiguous annexation of Egypt, which established a precedent for British mandate Iraq: British governance in the Ionian would shape later failures in the Middle East. Similarly oscillating between liberal idealism — tempered by the nationalist enthusiasms of a bourgeoisie British rule had created — and harsh oppression, Britain repeated the same cycle in the Middle East as it did in the Ionian, ending in bloodier and less romantic failure. In the end, British patronage of independent Greece ended as that of its rule in the Middle East did, a rule supplanted by America, now being supplanted in turn..

More from this author

What Harry Flashman teaches us about empire

By Aris Roussinos

Cycling through an incoherent policy mix of authoritarian repression and liberal idealism, benevolent modernisation and indirect rule through feudal elites, British rule in the Ionians ended in the empire’s first bitter taste of decolonisation, even as Britain stood on the brink of world hegemony. But far from the black-and-white moral certainties of today’s demagogic historiography, the Ionian islanders themselves always felt ambivalent about their status as semi-Britons, as often pleading for greater incorporation into the imperial fold and the right to send an MP to the Commons as demanding independence. 

London, too, always felt more ambivalence than cupidity for its Greek possessions, searching for the least painful way to relinquish them and finally doing so according to the unsentimental demands of realpolitik. Far from the Ionians’ union with Greece being the inevitable result of nationalist fervour, London chose the moment of decolonisation, just one of many potential outcomes, and did so with relief. “I wish them joy of the association,” Storks wrote bitterly, “Ionia will be the Ireland of Greece.” When the British left, they were mourned only by Corfu’s nobility, its Jews (whose “situation would be very pitiable, if the English did not take them under their protection”), and its women, who, Storks observed, were “universally opposed to the cessation of British protection”. But in the end, aside from the residual Anglophilia of Corfiot elites, the only living result of this brief and romantic Anglo-Hellenic synthesis is our own philhellene King, and a lingering Corfiot taste for cricket and ginger beer, the last ghostly echoes of Britain’s lost Greek empire.

The Black Adder, as it was originally titled, is 40 years old this week, first airing on 15 June 1983. After a shaky start, it would run for four series, though in its day it was never as popular as the other great historical comedy of the decade, ’Allo ’Allo. But its 24 episodes, spread across four time periods, have secured a cherished place in the British TV pantheon: second greatest sitcom ever, according to a 2004 BBC poll of the public; 16th greatest programme ever made, according to the British Film Institute in 2000.

At the time, it wasn’t considered to be as controversial as Gove suggests, overshadowed by far noisier arguments about Britain’s history. A few months before Blackadder was first broadcast, it had been suggested to Margaret Thatcher that what she believed in were essentially “Victorian values” — and she leapt at the phrase with great enthusiasm. When she was asked to identify which bits of the 19th century she particularly approved of, she ran through the standard list — thrift, charity, personal responsibility — and added “the British Empire that took both freedom and the rule of law to countries that would never have known it otherwise”.

Her words were carefully chosen at a time when the public interpretation of the Empire was a contentious issue. It was an era of TV dramas such as The Jewel in the Crown and The Far Pavilions, of films Heat and Dust, A Passage to India and, biggest of all, Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi. When it won eight Oscars in 1983, an editorial in the Daily Mirror celebrated the man who “took on the mighty British Empire at the peak of its power and defeated it”. It was, it said, a film that had been made by a “new Britain” that Thatcher didn’t understand, one in which Gandhi was a hero and which “matched the mood of the moment, especially among the young”. (Though Attenborough also claimed that, were he still alive, Gandhi would have voted for the SDP.)

The other reason Blackadder wasn’t seen as controversial was simply that it was a comedy. When the BBC broadcast Alan Bleasdale’s First World War drama The Monocled Mutineer in 1986, its treatment of an Army deserter was met with a barrage of complaints; it was “blatant Left-wing bias”, complained Tory MP Neil Hamilton. Blackadder Goes Forth — the series to which Gove was to take belated exception — attracted no such condemnation in 1989, despite its depiction of the conflict as a futile, idiotic exercise in slaughter. Comedies weren’t taken seriously.

But even as the Right was winning the economic battles in the mid-Eighties, some were beginning to worry that it was losing on the cultural front. John O’Sullivan, later an advisor and speechwriter for Thatcher, wrote of how popular culture had been “invaded” by moral equivalence, undermining the West’s authority in the Cold War. It still wasn’t comedy that concerned him — more the replacement of John Buchan by John Le Carré as the country’s favourite thriller writer — but he was sure that there was a concern here: “This invasion may be more significant than at first appears. Popular culture, after all, is one important way in which national myths and loyalties are transmitted.”

And those myths were important in shaping national identity. The counter-balance was to be found in education, in the teaching of history, where the focus should be on social cohesion and unity. And if the “national myths” that were taught turned out to be not exactly the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, then that could be dealt with later on. “We must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism,” O’Sullivan wrote.

Suggested reading

How the culture wars came for history

By Dominic Sandbrook

This chimed with the views of Thatcher’s education secretary and mentor, Keith Joseph, who called for schools to foster “through the teaching of history, a sense of pride in one’s country and its achievements”. This was not happening because, as the Daily Mail explained in a 1990 editorial, for 20 years, “Left-wing educationalists have been given a free rein to denigrate this country’s past, to scorn its achievements, to make children almost ashamed to be British”. It was a particularly British phenomenon, argued John Rae, ex-headmaster of Westminster School: every American or French child learned about their respective revolution, but the same was not true in Britain of the Glorious Revolution. There was too much Peace Studies, not enough Civil War. Joseph’s successor as education secretary, Kenneth Baker, was shocked to discover that more children could tell the difference between a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus than could distinguish Charles I and Oliver Cromwell.

It was Baker who supplied the supposed solution: the national curriculum, a centrally approved agenda that would specify what was to be taught in primary and secondary schools. At its core, said Baker, should be “the history of Britain, the record of its past and, in particular, its political, constitutional and cultural heritage”. Or, in the words of a delegate to the National Union of Teachers conference, “the purpose of the national curriculum is to sell the ideas of present-day capitalist society, market values, profit, the beauty and joys of the British Empire”. As John McGregor, the next Tory education secretary, pointed out wearily: “History is by far the most political subject.”

The national curriculum was introduced in 1989 and was intended to be a decisive moment in reversing the advances made by the Left. You may have noticed, however, that it didn’t prove to be the last word in the debate. A 2021 Daily Mail editorial was still using exactly the same language when denouncing “those who love to denigrate this country’s history”. On the other hand, Sathnam Sanghera told a literary festival this week: “No country is as far behind in talking honestly about Empire than Britain.”

Much of the dispute comes down to the issue of what history is for. Sometime historian and erstwhile Labour MP Tristram Hunt once complained that “history on television is in danger of telling comforting stories about ourselves to ourselves, rather than confronting the past”. He was probably right — but there remained the question of whether that’s such a bad thing. Maybe people prefer comfort to confrontation. There’s a huge public appetite for television drama covering a wide spectrum of British history, from Wolf Hall and The Tudors, through Victoria and Downton Abbey, to The Crown and Call the Midwife. It’s possible to enjoy, to be engaged and stimulated, even to learn without having to confront.

In any event, confronting the past doesn’t necessarily bring any clarity. When an opinion poll in January 2016 asked how people saw the British Empire, 44% said it was something to be proud of, 21% said something to be ashamed of. When the same question was asked in August 2020 — at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests — both figures had fallen significantly, with the largest group now the 40% (nearly doubled since 2016) who couldn’t say whether they were proud or ashamed.

Maybe there’s a parallel between O’Sullivan’s “we must learn loyalty before we learn scepticism” and how most of us understand, say, physics. I’m aware, in an abstract, ill-informed sort of way, that Newtonian mechanics don’t apply at a sub-atomic level or when approaching the speed of light, but it doesn’t really matter to me; I find Newton perfectly sufficient in my life. I “know” — because I’ve been told — that the atoms making up the table at which I’m sat are mostly empty space, but I can still work on the assumption that it’s a solid surface.

I don’t feel the need to confront my simplistic understanding of gravity; rather, the predictability of matter is comforting in its certainty, even if it’s not the whole picture. Likewise, national myths. There’s a point to them, a usefulness in a common identity. Social cohesion is manifestly a good thing, and so too is patriotism.

Suggested reading

The death of historical truth

By Jonathan Sumption

The stories that comprise that mythology change, of course (despite the slow-thinking likes of Otto English furiously tilting at windmills that were left derelict four decades ago). Michael Gove recognised that when he complained about the “myths which have grown up” around the First World War, and called for greater nuance in our understanding. He was right: the assumptions that underpinned Blackadder Goes Forth were crude and narrow. But that interpretation of the conflict — “a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite”, as Gove summarised it — is now part of the national mythology.

Even if it sometimes feels as though there’s been a 40-year stalemate in the culture war to end all war, myths evolve. And that process is influenced more by TV such as Blackadder than by the national curriculum. Which is one in the eye for Conservatives — or, as Edmund Blackadder called them, “fat Tory landowners who get made MPs when they reach a certain weight”.

There’s nothing new about this sort of arrangement. In its day, the British Empire controlled an even larger share of the planet’s wealth, and the Spanish Empire played a comparable role further back. Before then, there were other empires, though limits to transport technologies meant that their reach wasn’t as large. Nor, by the way, was any of this an invention of people with light-coloured skin. Mighty empires flourished in Asia and Africa when the peoples of Europe lived in thatched-roofed mud huts. Empires rise whenever a nation becomes powerful enough to dominate other nations and drain them of wealth. They’ve thrived as far back as records go and they’ll doubtless thrive for as long as human civilisations exist.

America’s empire came into being in the wake of the collapse of the British Empire, during the fratricidal European wars of the early 20th century. Throughout those bitter years, the role of global hegemon was up for grabs, and by 1930 or so it was pretty clear that Germany, the Soviet Union or the US would end up taking the prize. In the usual way, two contenders joined forces to squeeze out the third, and then the victors went at each other, carving out competing spheres of influence until one collapsed. When the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the US emerged as the last empire standing.

Francis Fukuyama insisted in a 1989 essay that having won the top slot, the US was destined to stay there forever. He was, of course, wrong, but then he was a Hegelian and couldn’t help it. (If a follower of Hegel tells you the sky is blue, go look.) The ascendancy of one empire guarantees that other aspirants for the same status will begin sharpening their knives. They’ll get to use them, too, because empires invariably wreck themselves: over time, the economic and social consequences of empire destroy the conditions that make empire possible. That can happen quickly or slowly, depending on the mechanism that each empire uses to extract wealth from its subject nations.

The mechanism the US used for this latter purpose was ingenious but even more short-term than most. In simple terms, the US imposed a series of arrangements on most other nations that guaranteed the lion’s share of international trade would use US dollars as the medium of exchange, and saw to it that an ever-expanding share of world economic activity required international trade. (That’s what all that gabble about “globalisation” meant in practice.) This allowed the US government to manufacture dollars out of thin air by way of gargantuan budget deficits, so that US interests could use those dollars to buy up vast amounts of the world’s wealth. Since the excess dollars got scooped up by overseas central banks and business firms, which needed them for their own foreign trade, inflation stayed under control while the wealthy classes in the US profited mightily.

The problem with this scheme is the same difficulty faced by all Ponzi schemes, which is that, sooner or later, you run out of suckers to draw in. This happened not long after the turn of the millennium, and along with other factors — notably the peaking of global conventional petroleum production — it led to the financial crisis of 2008-2010. Since 2010 the US has been lurching from one crisis to another. This is not accidental. The wealth pump that kept the US at the top of the global pyramid has been sputtering as a growing number of nations have found ways to keep a larger share of their own wealth by expanding their domestic markets and raising the kind of trade barriers the US used before 1945 to build its own economy. The one question left is how soon the pump will start to fail altogether.

When Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and its allies responded not with military force but with punitive economic sanctions, which were expected to cripple the Russian economy and force Russia to its knees. Apparently, nobody in Washington considered the possibility that other nations with an interest in undercutting the US empire might have something to say about that. Of course, that’s what happened. China, which has the largest economy on Earth in purchasing-power terms, extended a middle finger in the direction of Washington and upped its imports of Russian oil, gas, grain and other products. So did India, currently the third-largest economy on Earth in the same terms; as did more than 100 other countries.

Then there’s Iran, which most Americans are impressively stupid about. Iran is the 17th largest nation in the world, more than twice the size of Texas and even more richly stocked with oil and natural gas. It’s also a booming industrial power. It has a thriving automobile industry, for example, and builds and launches its own orbital satellites. It’s been dealing with severe US sanctions since not long after the Shah fell in 1978, so it’s a safe bet that the Iranian government and industrial sector know every imaginable trick for getting around those sanctions.

Right after the start of the Ukraine war, Russia and Iran suddenly started inking trade deals to Iran’s great benefit. Clearly, one part of the quid pro quo was that the Iranians passed on their hard-earned knowledge about how to dodge sanctions to an attentive audience of Russian officials. With a little help from China, India and most of the rest of humanity, the total failure of the sanctions followed in short order. Today, the sanctions are hurting the US and Europe, not Russia, but the US leadership has wedged itself into a position from which it can’t back down. This may go a long way towards explaining why the Russian campaign in Ukraine has been so leisurely. The Russians have no reason to hurry. They know that time is not on the side of the US.

For many decades now, the threat of being cut out of international trade by US sanctions was the big stick Washington used to threaten unruly nations that weren’t small enough for a US invasion or fragile enough for a CIA-backed regime-change operation. Over the last year, that big stick turned out to be made of balsa wood and snapped off in Joe Biden’s hand. As a result, all over the world, nations that thought they had no choice but to use dollars in their foreign trade are switching over to their own currencies, or to the currencies of rising powers. The US dollar’s day as the global medium of exchange is thus ending.

More from this author

We are the authors of our decline

By John Michael Greer

It’s been interesting to watch economic pundits reacting to this. As you might expect, quite a few of them simply deny that it’s happening — after all, economic statistics from previous years don’t show it yet, Some others have pointed out that no other currency is ready to take on the dollar’s role; this is true, but irrelevant. When the British pound lost a similar role in the early years of the Great Depression, no other currency was ready to take on its role either. It wasn’t until 1970 or so that the US dollar finished settling into place as the currency of global trade. In the interval, international trade lurched along awkwardly using whatever currencies or commodity swaps the trading partners could settle on: that is to say, the same situation that’s taking shape around us in the free-for-all of global trade that will define the post-dollar era.

One of the interesting consequences of the shift now under way is a reversion to the mean of global wealth distribution. Until the era of European global empire, the economic heart of the world was in east and south Asia. India and China were the richest countries on the planet, and a glittering necklace of other wealthy states from Iran to Japan filled in the picture. To this day, most of the human population is found in the same part of the world. The great age of European conquest temporarily diverted much of that wealth to Europe, impoverishing Asia in the process. That condition began to break down with the collapse of European colonial empires in the decade following the Second World War, but some of the same arrangements were propped up by the US thereafter. Now those are coming apart, and Asia is rising. By next year, four of the five largest economies on the planet in terms of purchasing power parity will be Asian. The fifth is the US, and it may not be in that list for much longer.

In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

Suggested reading

Post-Trumpism could save America

By Michael Lind

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

Suggested reading

The battle to control America's mind

By David Samuels

This is not going to be a fast process. The US dollar is losing its place as the universal medium of foreign trade, but it will still be used by some countries for years to come. The unravelling of the arrangements that direct unearned wealth to the US will go a little faster, but that will still take time. The collapse of the cubicle class and the gutting of the suburbs will unfold over decades. That’s the way changes of this kind play out.

As for what people can do in response this late in the game, I refer to a post I made on The Archdruid Report in 2012 titled “Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush”. In that post I pointed out that the unravelling of the American economy, and the broader project of industrial civilisation, was picking up speed around us, and those who wanted to get ready for it needed to start preparing soon by cutting their expenses, getting out of debt, and picking up the skills needed to produce goods and services for people rather than the corporate machine. I’m glad to say that some people did these things, but a great many others rolled their eyes, or made earnest resolutions to do something as soon as things were more convenient, which they never were.

Over the years that followed I repeated that warning and then moved on to other themes, since there really wasn’t much point to harping on about the approaching mess when the time to act had slipped away. Those who made preparations in time will weather the approaching mess as well as anyone can. Those who didn’t? The rush is here. I’m sorry to say that whatever you try, it’s likely that there’ll be plenty of other frantic people trying to do the same thing. You might still get lucky, but it’s going to be a hard row to hoe.

Mind you, I expect some people to take a different tack. In the months before a prediction of mine comes true, I reliably field a flurry of comments insisting that I’m too rigid and dogmatic in my views about the future, that I need to be more open-minded about alternative possibilities, that wonderful futures are still in reach, and so on. I got that in 2008 just before the real estate bubble started to go bust, as I’d predicted, and I also got it in 2010 just before the price of oil peaked and started to slide, as I’d also predicted, taking the peak oil movement with it. I’ve started to field the same sort of criticism once again.

We are dancing on the brink of a long slippery slope into an unwelcome new reality. I’d encourage readers in America and its close allies to brace themselves for a couple of decades of wrenching economic, social, and political turmoil. Those elsewhere will have an easier time of it, but it’s still going to be a wild ride before the rubble stops bouncing, and new social, economic, and political arrangements get patched together out of the wreckage.

That, after all, was the destiny of perhaps the most famous British astrologer of the 20th century: Mystic Meg, who died last week. Known as Meg Markova, but born Margaret Anne Lake, she became so identified with the power to predict the future that “Mystic Meg” passed into everyday language as a byword for prognostication.

It might be tempting to imagine that the modern age is so secular, scientific and disenchanted there is no modern-day role for a magician other than popular entertainer. How else to describe the “asparamancer”, who foretold the death of the second Queen Elizabeth last year in a pattern of falling asparagus spears?

But if you think there are no sorcerers left, you are looking in the wrong places. In fact, thanks at least partly to John Dee, it’s more accurate to say his inheritors now rule the world.

Whether or not you believe there’s anything paranormal “out there”, a great many studies affirm that most of the time when we notice patterns, we’re not conscious of doing so; what can feel like a “hunch” or “intuition” is really just our own powers of unconscious observation trying to get our attention. In this light, one way of understanding the many traditions of “reading” fortunes — whether in Tarot cards, the flight patterns of birds, tea leaves in a cup or the entrails of animals — is as a means of accessing some of these buried powers of pattern recognition, and allowing less conscious and sometimes more accurate observations to inform our conscious choices.

More from this author

Why Progress isn't feminist

By Mary Harrington

Dee himself used an obsidian mirror of Aztec origin, supported on wax discs inscribed with arcane symbols. He and the alchemist and medium Edward Kelley would gaze into its black, reflective surface, where they reported seeing visions of angels; these were reflected in numerous manuscripts, which form the basis of the Enochian system of magic. Their occult legacy has endured, from the 17th-century politician Elias Ashmole to the 20th-century British occultist and “father of modern Satanism” Aleister Crowley and beyond.

But this is hardly Dee’s only contribution. In the Elizabethan age, “natural science” and “occult science” were seen as intertwined — also seen in the mystical but proto-scientific study of alchemy. Dee epitomised this rich and strange Elizabethan brew of the material and magical, pursuing “thinges Supernaturall, æternall, & Diuine” alongside and often blended with mathematics, cartography and natural philosophy (and possibly also espionage, as the original “007”).

Dee stands alongside Francis Bacon as one of the founding figures of modern science — and the modern world in general. For two of his proposals helped lay the foundations for the age that followed: first, creating a national library accessible to anyone, and second, expanding Britain’s holdings into a “British Empire”, a term he’s credited with coining. While he didn’t live to see either come to full fruition, this vision of mass literacy and expansionary, extractive capitalism were key foundations of the Age of Enlightenment.

More from this author

The fairy-tale allure of conspiracies

By Mary Harrington

This was in full swing two centuries after Dee’s appointment as court magician. But as this world blossomed, in the process (as Dee envisaged) vastly enriching Britain’s wealth and power, so the “natural” aspect of the alchemical sciences came to dominate — even as the “occult” aspect lost status. Thus as Dee’s political vision was realised, his black “spirit mirror” remained in circulation — but as a curiosity, having passed through multiple hands into the collection of Augustan writer, art historian and Whig politician Horace Walpole.

Walpole was 56 in 1773, when Dee finally got his wish and the British Library was founded. That same year, too, Walpole denounced the immense inflows of wealth from the East India Company’s colonial depredations in India, deploring the “sink of Indian wealth” that he saw as turning Britain into a “gaming, robbing, wrangling, railing nation without principles, genius, character or allies”.

But did Dr Dee really “see” things in his black mirror? Was he a fraud, seeking only to befuddle the gullible? Was Mystic Meg only pretending to entertain the crowds?

It is true that in the flurry of affectionate recent articles commemorating the passing of Mystic Meg, there’s a conspicuous lack of efforts to tally up the hit-rate of her predictions on the National Lottery Show every week. But viewers loved her anyway: the theatrics, the crystal ball, the pendulum and the sometimes extraordinarily specific suggestions such that a woman named Pat or Cathy would win with a ticket bought at 6pm (which did not, in fact, happen).

More from this author

Humans will defeat the chatbots

By Mary Harrington

Nor have any of the other predictions made last year by “asparamancer” Jemima Packington come true. Boris Johnson hasn’t returned as PM; Princess Anne is not Duchess of Edinburgh; Prince William hasn’t been made Prince Regent. And the jury is still out on whether Ukraine will defeat Russia.

Even so, enough people found enough resonance to sustain Mystic Meg’s legend, such as the lorry driver who recently remembered gratefully sticking his ticket into the cab copy of the Yellow Pages on her advice, and then winning £15 million. And even if such stories have a touch of back-rationalisation about them, those who point to the patchy hit-rate of popular fortune-tellers to dismiss the power of pattern recognition as mumbo-jumbo don’t understand its real power.

The “libraries and colonialism” Age of Enlightenment in turn laid the foundations for the “digital libraries and post-colonialism” Age of Information we now inhabit. And in this world, you would only dress up your intuition (patchy or otherwise) with a breathy voice and the aesthetics of a Victorian medium if your preferred field was weekend telly and the tabloid press. What, though, if you were a figure more like John Dee — political éminence grise, global traveller, possibly spy? In that case, you’d want the kind of authority that gets you taken seriously by people with real power.

Suggested reading

The hypocrisy of Witch Lit

By Victoria Smith

Let’s say you wanted the modern equivalent of a royal charter today, for your powers of pattern recognition, and to offer those powers to guide the modern-day kings and princes in areas of unfathomable complexity, where decisions can make or break fortunes. You wouldn’t use hexagrams or chanting or the power of fear and the uncanny. Such a practice wouldn’t refer to angels, spirits or occult forces, either.

We live in the age that succeeded and built upon the one of science, exploration and British Empire that Dee inaugurated: that is, the American Empire. And in this era, someone who wanted the ear of those with real power would be far more likely to borrow the authority afforded by the exoteric side of Dee’s interests: the field now known just as “science”. Instead of sigils, it would use more mundane symbols to give substance to intuition. Users might call it “data-driven decision-making”.

And nor would such a person bother to learn abstruse tables of Enochian symbols or inscribe wax discs with elaborate symbols, if they wanted to use languages to shape reality. Other arcane languages are now routinely in use, coding the algorithmic trading engines that power the roiling back-and-forth of global finance, and the social media platforms that serve as giant, distorting scrying-mirrors for our collective souls.

Suggested reading

The philistine war on AI art

By Justin E. H. Smith

Should such an individual want to intervene more directly in these ebbs and flows of reality-shaping meaning, he might, for example, in the wake of a crucial tech-sector investment bank’s failure, take to Twitter and whip up investor panic or (according to some) try to incite bank runs so as to force a government bailout.

In other words, were John Dee alive today he wouldn’t be Mystic Meg. Her role was more akin to what I do: dabbling in pattern recognition, in service as much to entertainment as anything more solemn. Dee’s real inheritors, meanwhile, eschew overt “mystic” symbolism to hide in plain sight, in metropolitan skyscrapers and first-class business lounges. Nor do they stare at the images conjured on a blank piece of obsidian supported by a disc of wax inscribed with mysterious symbols. Instead they (and in fact most of us) spend much of our time staring at messages conjured on a blank surface powered by a tiny chip of silicone covered with mysterious symbols. Which is completely different.

Is this sorcery? Well, not exactly. I dare say the financiers, coders and economists conjuring in realms of pure meaning would (at least in public) vehemently reject the idea that they’re communing with anything beyond the exoteric world. Others, though, increasingly treat the voice behind the silicone mirror explicitly as an entity (or entities), with agency and unknown intentions.

Mystic Meg epitomised an age, and a culture, in which those with unusual powers of pattern recognition were more often than not perfectly happy not to be taken seriously. But in ways we’re only just beginning to grasp, this more innocent age is succeeded by a much more eerie one. And here, as in the age of Dr Dee, the natural and occult sciences are once again unnervingly intertwined.

After years of drifting apart, the United Kingdom suddenly felt united again. It couldn’t last, of course, and it hasn’t: a new UnHerd Britain poll reveals that while 55% of UK citizens agree that it’s a good thing Britain has a monarchy, in Scotland only 45% do.

Yet while the results are unlikely to put a smile on King Charles’s face, they are not, in the end, all that surprising. If anything, they represent a reversion to historic norms, following the fever dream of grief that broke out upon the Queen’s death. Previous surveys on Scottish attitudes to the monarchy have also shown that the Royal Family is not especially popular: shortly before the Platinum Jubilee, for instance, a poll found that fewer than half of Scots supported keeping the monarchy, while the Royals were similarly unloved four years before that. On a visit home last summer, I found that while Tesco had decked out even the frozen meat aisle with “happy and glorious” banners to mark the Queen’s jubilee, it was a lot harder to find signs of celebration in Scottish shops and institutions. The management of the purportedly “Royal” Botanic Garden in Edinburgh had tucked their jubilee sign away in a corner, while at the celebratory garden party in my hometown of Dunfermline, there were no royal souvenirs, not even a mug — although there was a cut out of John Forbes, a long-dead local worthy who founded the city of Pittsburgh.

It may be tempting to connect increasingly negative attitudes to the monarchy with the rise of nationalist sentiment since devolution. Prominent cultural figures, such as the author Alasdair Gray and the SNP politician Margo MacDonald, espoused republicanism. Nicola Sturgeon’s anointed disciple, Humza Yousaf, has vowed not only to break up the UK using “any means necessary”, but also declared on Monday that within five years of independence, he’d expect Scotland to find a new head of state. But republicanism isn’t merely an SNP talking point; Scotland’s bad relationship with monarchy goes back a long way, at least as far back as the Reformation, nearly five centuries ago.

More from this author

The secrets of Scotland's ancient capital

By Daniel Kalder

Calvinism, the national philosophy that came to dominate afterwards, is an innately levelling creed, with its cheerful teaching that God has already decided who is saved and who is damned and there is nothing you can do about it. Post-Reformation, the inhabitants of Dunfermline managed to forget where they buried no fewer than seven Scottish kings, including one of the greats, Robert the Bruce, who was only rediscovered by accident in the 19th century. In Scotland, the monarch was not the head of the church; the ministers elected their own leader. John Knox, who spearheaded the Reformation, neither admired nor feared monarchs and reduced Mary Queen of Scots to tears in front of her own court. George Buchanan, the tutor of Mary’s son James, was the author of The Law of Government Among the Scots, wherein he wrote that “the people have the right to confer royal authority upon whomever they wish”, and that they were free to overthrow — and kill — tyrants. Buchanan freely admitted to having “whipped the king’s arse” when the heir to the throne annoyed him.

Chafing against the ideas that his Calvinist tutor had tried to impose upon him, James threw off any restraints on his power as soon as he could, describing monarchy as “the supremest thing on earth” after he became king of England as well as Scotland. His son Charles I attempted to rule in the same way, but when in 1637 he tried to bring the Scottish church to heel by forcing it to accept the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the people did not meekly comply but rather rose up in anger, resulting in two wars of rebellion. Taking a leaf out of George Buchanan’s book, the Scots did not accept the King’s authority if it conflicted with the will of God (although they later agreed to fight for him when he agreed to support Presbyterianism).

But if the Scots were less than keen on monarchs, then the feeling seems to have been mutual. For a period of almost 200 years, following a brief appearance by Charles II in 1650, no king bothered to make the journey north of the border until George IV (described by Robert Burns as “a witless youth”) toured Scotland in 1822. This trip, in which the portly King appeared in a mini-kilt and pink tights, appears to have presaged a kind of thaw, and inadvertently laid the seeds of today’s heritage industry. Sir Walter Scott, at least, was very excited, and the pageant he organised cobbled together so many Scottish tropes that one resident of Edinburgh complained that he had “ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day”.

Suggested reading

Nicola Sturgeon is rewriting history

By Kathleen Stock

However, it was with the ascension of George’s granddaughter, Victoria, to the throne that Scotland really seems to have become integrated into the cult of monarchy. Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for his Queen in 1852 while Glasgow, today the most anti-monarchical place in the UK, was referred to as the Second City of the Empire, a title its inhabitants welcomed with pride. Indeed, the whole city was transformed into a monument to Empress Victoria; a statue of the Queen riding a horse (the first equestrian statue of a woman in the UK) stands close to the City Chambers (which she opened in 1888) to this day. This is easy enough to understand: in those days, Britain was winning at geopolitics, and the Scots wanted to be part of the winners’ club. While nationalists today may sometimes complain that Scotland is England’s last colony, the truth is that the Scots were enthusiastic colonisers themselves, proudly extending and administering the power of the British Empress across the globe.

Yet within a few decades of Victoria’s death, that sense of shared triumphalism vanished. My grandmother grew up in Clydebank in the heyday of the radical Red Clydesiders and remembered red flags flying at rallies in the Twenties and Thirties, while my father recalls attending a birthday party in a “communist chapel” in the early Fifties. He also remembers people booing Churchill when he appeared in cinema newsreels, and yet despite this radicalism, he has no memory of anyone booing the Queen. Indifference rather than hostility was the rule; she seemed “remote”.

Similarly, by the time I was growing up in Fife in the Eighties and Nineties, it was a given that the Royal Family were ludicrously posh and rich and out of touch, but we also accepted that that was kind of the point. Prince Charles may have liked to stride around Lochnagar in a kilt and paint landscapes of the Scottish wilderness, but this did not endear him to the masses; indeed, all that stuff about talking to plants inspired mocking impersonations at my school, and beyond. The Scottish comedian Craig Ferguson took his exceptionally cruel portrayal to the US, where it became a regular feature on his late-night chat show.

Suggested reading

The taming of the republicans

By Alwyn Turner

For all the talk of the Queen’s love of Scotland, which was emphasised after she died at Balmoral, it does seem that this profound emotional attachment was more than a wee bit correlated with that majestic estate. Although I do not doubt that the Queen was absolutely sincere when she spoke of her “deep and abiding affection for this wonderful country”, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that anybody who spends every summer in a castle surrounded by beautiful forests could reasonably be expected to love it. Indeed, I might never have emigrated to the US if Balmoral were my holiday home. By contrast, the Queen spent much less time at her official residence, the Palace of Holyrood House in Edinburgh.

Yet for all that, I do not recall meeting many vocal republicans until I went to university, and they were all English. The nationalists that I knew in the Nineties — and I knew somebody who ran (unsuccessfully) for the UK parliament — never talked about the Queen or her family. They weren’t fans, of course, but they didn’t care that they weren’t fans: the Royals were simply irrelevant. It is not until 2004 that the republican “Declaration of Calton Hill” — a spirited call for “an independent Scottish Republic built on the principles of liberty, equality, diversity and solidarity” — was issued, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to open the Scottish parliament. It attracted support from significant Scottish cultural figures such as Iain Banks, the poet Edwin Morgan, and Irvine Welsh. But it was organised by the Scottish Socialist Party, which currently has zero seats in the Scottish parliament. Ever since the days of Alex Salmond’s leadership, the official position of the SNP has been to retain the monarchy.

None of this is to say that I don’t think republicanism could become a serious force in Scottish politics. If Scotland were to become independent, then the lowest hanging fruit for nationalists to go after to maintain their sense of existential purpose would be the abolition of the monarchy, as Humza Yousaf’s sudden interest in republicanism makes clear. But until that day comes, the Royal Family simply will continue to be unpopular in Scotland, and poll after poll will reveal that they are unpopular, but it will not matter at all. Always “there” but never actually present, they will drift by on TV screens, occasionally turn up to open a building, and then go away again.

And Scottish apathy might, in the end, be for the better. Because although it is nice to think that we have an inherent aversion to authority, Scots were actually quite respectful towards Calvinist preachers for many centuries, and — as the willing submission to an extended lockdown revealed — the pursRed-lipped, finger-wagging, moralising style of leadership still has quite a constituency in the country. If not King Charles, then who? I’ll take my chances with the Royals, thank you.

A New Zealander, previously secure in his oceanic British identity, Pocock worked through the implications of the moment in his 1973 lecture, “British History: a Plea for a New Subject”, composed, he would later note, immediately “after the great divorce which occurred when you told us that you were now Europeans, which we, as New Zealanders, were not”. It was a conceptual reordering which meant “you cared as little for our past as for our future”.

Yet, Pocock observed, the implications for Britain were just as great as for the home archipelago’s imperial cast-offs. For after all: “if it has been psychologically possible for them to annihilate the idea of the Commonwealth…it is not altogether beyond the bounds of possibility that ‘United Kingdom’ and even ‘Britain’ may some day become similarly inconvenient and be annihilated, or annihilate themselves, in their turn.”

Without a grand overseas project with which to occupy itself, the centre itself, focused on Westminster, may not hold. Future historians may find themselves writing of “a ‘Unionist’ or even a ‘British’ period in the history of the peoples inhabiting the Atlantic Archipelago, and locating it between a date in the 13th, the 17th or the 19th centuries and a date in the 20th or the 21st.”

What evidence for this prediction can we find, a half-century later, in the collapsing British state of 2023? It is self-evident that the act of leaving the EU was an act of self-definition, a great inward turn to force the questions of what Britain is and what it should be back to the heart of national politics. Support for Brexit was closely aligned in the minds of its voters with a return to an economy of domestic industrial production, and to a drastic reduction in the historically unprecedented levels of inward migration to which the British political class had committed itself.

Yet the Brexit we got was another Brexit entirely: a vision of Britain as a global trading power entirely unmoored from the realities of its position, a product of the fact that our politicians, for all that effective governance of the UK remains beyond them, find our islands too small a stage for their talents. Johnson, Truss, and Sunak are each in their own ways exemplars of how the ideology of global Britain has made the British governing class incapable of running a small northwest European archipelago, prisoners of a delusion that Britain must always strive to be world-beating, even as it struggles to maintain parity with its closest neighbours.

For the Welsh political philosopher and former Labour MP David Marquand, writing in 1995 in a collection of essays engaging with Pocock’s grand conceptual reordering of our island story, such global pretensions were baked into Britishness from the start. As he observed, “for most of its history, the identity embodied by the British state was quintessentially global, oceanic, imperial and, by virtue of this, non- or at least extra-European”. The new British state’s justification was the consolidation of the various kingdoms of these islands in a grand imperial project, with the result being a vision of the British state and people which Marquand termed “whig imperialist”. And at its heart, he said, “lay the twin themes of globalism and constitutionalism. The British state was, by definition, a global state; and the British people, by definition, was a global people.”

More from this author

Can Europe survive the age of strongmen?

By Aris Roussinos

As Marquand observed, “the Whig imperialist vision of the British state helped to shape the mentality of the entire political class, left as well as right”. Whig imperialist Britain was Britain. “The British state was the child as well as the parent of empire. Its iconography, its operational codes, the instinctive reflexes of its rulers and managers were stamped through and through with the presuppositions of empire.” Even as the empire fell away, its ghosts still haunt Westminster, in inverted form, as a needy internationalism and an aesthetic distaste for the homely and familiar. Unlike our European neighbours, whose revolutions and wars of national independence helped clarify a secure sense of nationhood, Britain’s relentless focus on the periphery left a hollow void at the centre, at least for its rulers. As Marquand, now a convert to Welsh nationalism, observes, “shorn of empire, ‘Britain’ had no meaning”.

This interpretation does much to explain the strange pathologies of the 21^st-century Westminster class, and elucidates the strange mystery of why Britain, more or less uniquely in Europe, possesses a markedly anti-national commenting class (intelligentsia is not quite the right word), whose European pretensions, like the continental affectations of a Hyacinth Bucket, are simply those of the provincial petit bourgeois, repelled by the drab simplicities of home. It explains why Britain, for a European country, is uniquely at risk of self-dissolution by global economic forces, and why its governing class’s sense of national identity, as far as can be judged from its citizenship tests, is such thin gruel, entirely indistinguishable from vague internationalist norms of liberal tolerance. It explains the compulsion towards mass immigration, entirely inconsistent with the demands of British voters: for as the empire folded in on itself, sucking the empire’s global children in along with it like a collapsing star, it became easier to remake Britain in the image of the world than to shape the world in a way congenial to British desires.

Such an interpretation also explains the extraordinary ease with which Britain’s governing class has reduced the country to a powerless factotum of America’s global empire, and the degree to which such total self-abnegation of sovereignty is presented and experienced, not as a humiliation fetish but as the natural order of things, and the bedrock of Britain’s security. To maintain its global pretensions, the Westminster class has been forced into a posture of what Perry Anderson termed “hyper-subalternity to the US in an era when America had become the sole super-power”. It explains why our Right-wing populists are enamoured of globalised free markets even as they rail against “globalism”, why our state broadcaster functions as a vector of America’s new ideological fixations, and why our royals as well as our politicians look longingly at the better opportunities to be found in California. It explains, too, why our sole national institution, the NHS, sucks both staff and patients from around the world, finding its merely national mission too paltry for its dignity, and the humanitarian obligations of the British taxpayer too bountiful to be shared only among the British people.

Suggested reading

The revenge of the technocrats

By John Gray

For the British governing class, and its taste-making hangers on, Britain as a small European country is simply too small a stage to bother with. Yet instead of addressing these tensions, surely the underlying cause of the failures of British governance which drove Brexit in the first place, the result of Brexit has only been to heighten them: more immigration, the Indo-Pacific tilt, the endless attempt to summon a Global Britain into being in a post-imperial world. The contradictions between Britain’s world-leading pretensions and shabby material realities are now becoming too sharp for the state to effectively manage. If Brexit has foregrounded one essential fact of British politics it is that the problems facing the country are rooted in its governing class: a class which swooped together with organic solidarity after Brexit to prevent any democratic attempt to redirect its course, and frittered away the country’s economic sovereignty on dreams of global relevance.

As Pocock observed, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which accelerated the consolidation of the British state in Westminster were the result of England’s governing class attempting to resolve their own political divisions through the incorporation of their neighbours in a greater, shared project. For “the English did not want such a war, but found that they had to fight it with each other; and they hated it so much that they imposed it on Scotland and Ireland in the attempt to resolve it. The imperial sovereignty they imposed on other nations was an effect of the imperial sovereignty they had imposed on themselves.”

Britain’s entry into the EC was itself, likewise, a failed attempt to recapture a greater stage on which Britain could play a global role, and foundered on the same tensions, the inward-looking domesticity of the British electorate rebelling against the outward-facing cosmopolitanism of its governing caste. Always the foil of other nations’ acts of self-definition — a process now continuing, with Scotland, even in the home islands — Britain never saw the need or found the occasion to do so for itself. In the collapse of Britain’s empire, then, the only anti-imperial project that failed was that of liberating Britain from its own rulers.

More from this author

It's time for Anglofuturism

By Aris Roussinos

But is it possible to liberate Britain from Westminster while maintaining the Union? The Union’s collapse would surely only leave us stuck with the same governing elite on a smaller and more claustrophobic scale, just as the cosmopolitan pretensions of the various Celtic nationalisms are, if anything, even more hysterical and absurd than those of the Union as a whole. Yet any attempt at a British Meiji restoration similarly falters on the unavoidable fact that the British governing class has very little interest in the governance of Britain itself — instead it recoils from it, as a distraction from the glittering possibilities of the wider world.

Such an elite makes a shaky foundation for a project of national renewal, yet without a total overhaul of Britain’s governing class, the remaining time in which to advance such a project is rapidly slipping away, before the nation dissolves itself with an affected smirk of enlightened tolerance. The revolt against Brussels then, was always just the opening salvo, on a continental front, of a far more difficult campaign: to become a prosperous European country, Britain must still liberate itself from the self-defeating foibles and global aspirations of the Westminster class.

At first, the book is promising. Its central conceit is inspired: suppose one were to take up from Thomas Hughes’s worthy Victorian classic of boarding school life, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a relatively minor character — a bully called Flashman — and imagine his life after he was expelled from Rugby. Suppose one were then, ingeniously, to place him in every major colonial (mis)adventure of the Victorian age, starting with the first Afghan War. Suppose one were to keep his original attributes (his cowardice, his intemperance, his spectacular selfishness) but combine them with some useful gifts (for riding, for picking up new languages). Would that not be a neat way to write a historical novel, mixing up the real characters with the invented, and presenting the whole story as the recently-discovered memoirs of a genuine Victorian military hero, reflecting in old age on his ill-spent life — lying, shirking, philandering?

But a couple of chapters in, the racial slurs are flowing like water; the copious sex is entirely consensual only, at a generous estimate, 60% of the time. The tone is that of a romp, the British Empire depicted as a setting in which defrocked public schoolboys might find themselves a little adventure. Reading the author’s words in his own voice does not help. His breezy defences of his hero’s racism, in an essay that appears in most recent editions of the books, are staggering in their complacency: “of course he is [racist]; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?” Aren’t these books seriously… problematic?

There is a case for seeing this hypothetical editor’s views as having a certain integrity. After all, they reflect a hard-won contemporary consensus about the wrongs of both racism and sexism. But they also reflect a trend authors will know well from their recent interactions with editors and agents: the view that to publish a book is to be willing to take responsibility for its contents, as if one had written it oneself. That means, effectively, that an editor’s ambivalence about the morals of a book or its characters are enough to justify not publishing it.

In their insistence on judging the value of a work of art principally in terms of its moral qualities, the publishers of today are heirs to a tradition of puritanism going back to Plato. But there has long been an anti-puritanical argument available too, the most notorious of them being the one articulated by Oscar Wilde: that to assess art in moral terms is to commit some sort of category mistake. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written, or badly written. That is all.” But that argument was never very persuasive by itself, and contains a large non sequitur. Why should that be “all”? Why can’t it be that part of what we’re saying in calling a book well-written is that it is morally exemplary? Surely it is those who call on us to leave our moral values at the door who have some explaining to do.

George MacDonald Fraser himself sometimes seemed to take Wilde’s view of the matter. He zealously repudiated, in his non-fiction, all attempts to defend his fiction as covertly anti-colonial, taking great pleasure in mocking critics who “hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism”. Was he “taking revenge on the 19 century on behalf of the 20th”? “Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy”? Were the books, as one religious journal was supposed to have claimed, “the work of a sensitive moralist” highly relevant to “the study of ethics”? No, he said, The Flashman Papers were to be taken “at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad”.

Is Fraser’s avowed amoralism the whole story? In one respect, the Flashman books are certainly amoral: they embody no systematic view that colonialism was wrong, illegitimate, unjust. (Nor, come to it, do they embody the view that it was right, legitimate and just.) As Fraser appears to see it in his fiction, empire was simply the default mode of political life in much of the world. This indeed was the case for much of human history. To be colonised was generally a misfortune for the colonised, but the individual coloniser was neither hero nor villain, just a self-interested actor acting on what he believed to be the necessities of his time and place.

Suggested reading

Was Kurt Vonnegut a nice man?

By Dorian Lynskey

We live in a world where we are constantly exercised by the problem of complicity. We wonder: am I complicit in climate change because I just put on the washing machine? In a sufficiently inclusive sense of the word “complicit”, of course I am: one of countless agents whose everyday actions add a tiny bit more carbon to the atmosphere. But outside an ethics seminar, what I’d tell you is that I was just doing my laundry because the clothes were beginning to stink.

Fraser was a deft enough writer to force his characters to confront the larger, what we today might call “structural” questions, in terms that belong to their own times, not to ours. At a pivotal moment in Flash for Freedom, Flashman is enslaved himself in America. Thrown into a cart with a charismatic slave called Cassy, he gets to hear her relish the irony of his position: “Well, now one of you knows what it feels like… Now you know what a filthy race you belong to.” Is there any hope of escape, he asks her desperately. None, she replies, “there isn’t any hope. Where can you run to, in this vile country? This land of freedom! With slave-catchers everywhere, and dogs, and whipping-houses, and laws that say I’m no better than a beast in a sty!” Flashman has the grace to be silent; what can he say?

The characters in the Flashman books, like most citizens of imperial powers in the 19th century, shared in this silence. Empire was the background to their world, much as capitalism is to ours. One needn’t have any kind of high moral view of its aims — spreading civilisation, for instance, or the true religion — to see in it the most reliable source of decent employment, and, if one didn’t die of cholera first, of adventure.

Here lies a major subject of contemporary discussion: how (if at all) we apportion responsibility for something called “structural injustice”, and whether it can be projected back into an age before anyone had recognised that there was such a thing. There are more and less demanding pictures available to us now of what the recognition of complicity demands from an individual. But any sane view of the matter has to allow for moral distinctions between the actions of different people within an unjust system. Not every bureaucrat in Thirties Germany was the moral equivalent of a concentration camp guard.

Suggested reading

University needs to hurt

By Arif Ahmed

Fraser was notoriously averse to acknowledging any such complexity in his non-fictional pronouncements. He said of his experience of the end of empire in India simply that it was “the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it”. His imagination had, after all, been stocked with the “stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s”. Reading the works of Walter Scott, among others, taught him that the history of empire was like all history, in being “one tremendous adventure story”. His own military experience in Burma gave him a real feel for the landscapes in which that history had taken place — India, China, Malaya, Australia, Benin, Madagascar — and his subsequent experience as a journalist gave him a “lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion”. That truthfulness he gave to his anti-hero, making one of Flashman’s few virtues his “shameless honesty as a memorialist”.

Aris Roussinos, writing in these pages earlier this year, suggested plausibly that “the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs”. The reason the Flashman stories could have been read as exposés of Victorian hypocrisy is not hard to find: their narrator frequently complains about it. The callous stupidity of leaders, both military and civilian, is Flashman’s great bugbear. He is in an especially good position to see both their callousness and their stupidity for what they were, because he does not have the high ideals — of the white man’s proverbial burden, for instance — that would encourage him to put a nobler complexion on them. He is a cad, but so in his view are the much-fêted men he is required to obey (Disraeli, Palmerston, Raglan of the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade); maybe it takes one to know one.

It is the avowed commitment to this sort of truthfulness that complicates the story Fraser wanted to tell about himself. The journal he mocked for treating his novels as the work of a serious moralist had in fact got it right, as long as we distinguish (to borrow a pair of terms from the American philosopher Stanley Cavell) between a “moralist” and a “moraliser”, between someone talking at us and someone talking to us. Like other unreliable narrators, Flashman’s words — to echo John Lanchester on the amoral, over-sexed (but gay) hero of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library — are “darkened by the pressure of another possible reading, a reading which has a deeper vision of life than the narrator’s”. In Flashman in the Great Game, set during what colonial sources used to call the Indian ‘mutiny’ of 1857, Flashman briefly sets down the final moments in the life of a British riding-master, who has just been struck down by Indian cavalrymen he once trained himself. The old man is neither indignant nor self-pitying. Flashman informs us that he

coughed blood, and his voice trailed away into a whisper. “They shaped well, though…didn’t they…shape well? My Bengalis…” He closed his eyes. “I thought they shaped…uncommon well…”

Suggested reading

Philip Larkin was a filthy genius

By Nicholas Harris

The so-called mutineers are heroes, skilled fighters in a cause they see as just; but so too are the men they had, until recently, obeyed without question, decent men who did their jobs honourably, failing only — like most people — to think hard enough about the system that made it all possible. It is possible to be wholly on the side of the “Bengali” rebels and still find these dying words both intelligible and moving. It would be a cruel principle of literary criticism, and a silly one, that insisted that our anti-colonial sympathies had not merely to supersede all our other sentiments but to dictate them. But some styles of modern criticism seeking out only what is “problematic” in old fiction appears committed to just such a principle.

There is more in the Flashman stories than even their author was willing, or able, to admit. One might say that they “tell the truth about empire”, but that is an unintelligent phrase if it means that there is one truth to tell about empire. Like other large historical phenomena — the spread or decline of Christianity, the Industrial Revolution, modernity — there are countless truths to tell about it. All we can try to do is to be truthful: to get the facts right, and to be honest about our reactions to them. The Flashman stories remind us, at a time when we seem to need these reminders, that a morally serious history need be neither simple nor humourless.

“All life is an experiment,” Emerson proclaimed. “The more experiments you make the better.” Is there a lesson there for Gareth Southgate? Or should the England boss stick with the tried and trusted, and resort to his usual back five against the bigger teams? Perhaps the only answer is to trust his own judgement. For “nothing,” Emerson also said, “can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

I’m pretty confident that nobody else has ever kicked off a preview of an England World Cup game with Ralph Waldo Emerson, but that’s just because we don’t often play the United States. There may have been a match in 2010, but it was so drab that I’ve long since forgotten it; and obviously World Cups before 1966 don’t count.

But as the hours tick down until tonight’s clash with the USA, Emerson’s legacy still looms large. For more than anybody else in his country’s history, it was the comically named Waldo who insisted that his countrymen emerge from the shadow of the Old World and create their own distinct identity, not simply as traitors and tax dodgers, but as unrepentantly non-British Americans.

The occasion was a speech to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society on 31 August 1837, entitled “The American Scholar”. And as Waldo told his listeners, it was time to throw off the shackles of the past. In future, Americans must take their cue from the natural wonders of their vast continent, not the dry, desiccated clichés they found in European libraries. The true American, Waldo said, should rely on himself: to stand tall, he must stand alone. “We will walk on our own feet,” he said grandly: “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” Some inspiring words there, perhaps, for the catchily named USMNT.

Throwing off the Old World has been an American preoccupation from the very beginning. The first pilgrims sailed west to escape what they saw as the sinful corruption of James I’s England, and you need only glance at the world’s worst newspaper to see that their descendants’ obsession with English wickedness is as fervent as ever. Even though more than two centuries have passed since the American colonists put financial self-interest above their duty to king and country, you can still detect traces of the old resentments.

You can see them in the frequent laments that Hollywood studios are employing too many British actors — even black British actors. You can see them in, say, the New York Times’s coverage of London’s restaurant scene (“Beyond Porridge and Boiled Mutton”). You can see it, too, in the same paper’s complaints that too many “Britishisms” are entering American English: “Crikey, Britishisms are everywhere. Call it Anglocreep. Call it annoying.” They’re calling us annoying? Seriously?

Even on the football pitch — sorry, “soccer field” — many Americans will tell you that this fixture matters more than any other. “For any American player, this matchup is unique,” the former US World Cup striker Eric Wynalda wrote a few days ago. “While playing Brazil and Argentina is how you measure yourself as a country, playing England always feels personal.” When he played England in 1993, there was, he recalled, “an element of jealousy. The England players were rich, they had a big league and great fan support. They were cocky as hell. We wanted to be them, but in our own way. I think that still exists.” As it happens, Wynalda and co. won that day. Still, it was only a friendly.

More from this author

Stop pretending Britain is America

By Dominic Sandbrook

Alas, in recent years, as even the most John Bullish have to admit, there haven’t been many cultural arenas in which we can feel smugly superior to our American cousins. Ever since the United States overtook Britain economically at the end of the 19th century — an inevitability given their geographical advantages, so that doesn’t really count as a win either — the boot has been firmly on the other foot. As early as 1914 the young T. S. Eliot, speaking in a debate at Merton College, Oxford, reminded his listeners “how much they owed to Amurrican culcher in the drayma (including the movies) in music, in the cocktail, and in the dance”. (These are Eliot’s own spellings. Again, they call us annoying?)

But it was in the decade after the First World War that the threat of Americanisation really loomed large. Britain was a country in shell shock: grey, weary, disillusioned and divided. The United States, on the other hand, was the land of ragtime and jazz, fizzing with excitement. “I am counting the days till I can get away and have decided from now on to live in America,” wrote P. G. Wodehouse in 1923. There was, he said, something “dead and depressing about London… all I want to do is to get back and hear the American language again.”

Wodehouse was bound for Hollywood, which was no accident. With a far bigger domestic market, an American film in the early Twenties typically made ten times more money than its British equivalent, which inevitably meant larger budgets. Even in 1925, some 95% of all film tickets sold in Britain were for American pictures.

More from this author

Britain needed the Falklands War

By Dominic Sandbrook

And when, two years later, Al Jolson’s film The Jazz Singer ushered in the age of the talkies, Fleet Street’s finest wailed in despair. The terrible truth, lamented the Daily Express, was that “the bulk of our picture-goers are Americanised to an extent that makes them regard a British film as a foreign film… They go to see American stars; they have been brought up on American publicity. They talk America, think America, and dream America. We have several million people, mostly women, who, to all intent and purpose, are temporary American citizens.”

In the decades that followed, the traffic flowed only one way. When the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941 — two years late, as true patriots will never tire of pointing out — it rapidly became the senior Allied partner. Sent to North Africa to liaise with General Eisenhower, the young Harold Macmillan predicted that his compatriots’ future lay in being “Greeks in this American empire”, and hoped they might be able to mastermind things from the shadows, “as the Greeks ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”. The Greeks in question were slaves, so this wasn’t a very enticing analogy. In any case, the Americans had no intention of allowing their former masters to “run” them. Britain would learn that lesson at Suez.

By the time Macmillan became prime minister in January 1957, Americanisation seemed unstoppable, epitomised by everything from Bill Haley and Elvis Presley to hamburgers and teenagers. When you read one contemporary list of outlandish Americanisms — “barbecued chickens rotating on their spits in the shop windows… parking meters… bowling alleys, glass-skyscrapers, flying saucers” — the surprising thing is that so many of them were American. Perhaps that tells its own story. “I must say,” muses Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, “it’s pretty dreary living in the American Age — unless you’re an American of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans.”

More from this author

Why the Tories love a clown show

By Dominic Sandbrook

Then came a genuine turning point. Before 7 February 1964, the date the Beatles landed in New York, only two other British acts, Acker Bilk and the Tornados, had held the Billboard number one spot, both with instrumentals. But with their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the picture changed.

In the next two years, British acts hogged the top spot for no fewer than 52 weeks, from Manfred Mann, Petula Clark and the Dave Clark Five to Herman’s Hermits, the Troggs and the Rolling Stones. The obvious irony is that they often played American music. But that didn’t make them any less British. “What made us first want to go to America and conquer it was being English,” the Who’s Pete Townshend said later. “We didn’t care a monkey’s about the American dream.”

For the next 40 years or so, the cultural relationship felt like a genuine joint enterprise. Sheer size meant the United States was always the bigger partner, but there were enough British Oscar winners, enough British number ones, to suggest that it wasn’t entirely one-way. At the height of the so-called Second British Invasion, between 1983 and 1986, British acts actually did even better than 20 years earlier, twice accounting for exactly half of all the places in the Top 40.

Even politically, British politicians could pretend, at least, that they stood as tall as their American contemporaries. Just read the hilarious transcript of Margaret Thatcher’s exchange with Ronald Reagan after British troops had landed on the Falkland Islands. Reagan suggests offering a ceasefire; she is having none of it. As the exchange goes on, Reagan’s contributions dwindle to “Margaret, I –” and ‘Yes, well —”, while hers get ever longer and more hectoring. True, he got his own back in Grenada a year later. But in Britain we’ve all forgotten about that, so again it doesn’t count.

Suggested Reading

The World Cup has never been beautiful

By Jonathan Wilson

Since then, however, there’s been a seismic technological shift, greater even than the rise of the cinema. And although we don’t really talk about Americanisation anymore, that’s surely because, since the rise of social media, we’ve become so Americanised that we no longer even notice it. Yet once you do start to notice it, you never stop. And yes, there’s a risk of sounding like the reincarnation of Lord Salisbury, but who cares?

So here we go. When did self-hating Britons start saying “mac ‘n’ cheese” instead of “macaroni cheese”? Why do 25-year-old publishers think “cliché” is an adjective? Why are there no medical systems on earth other than our beloved, sacred NHS and the cruel American private healthcare firms? Why does the BBC send 6,000 people to report on a senatorial election in Georgia but only two men and a dog to cover the federal elections in Germany?

Who decided that schoolchildren in Leamington Spa should care about Rosa Parks? Why did thousands of people take to the streets in Britain about the killing of a single black man in Minneapolis, when barely a handful bother to protest the sack of Mariupol or the incarceration of the Uyghurs? And why on earth, when a couple of half-crazed American academics announce that we must cancel the term Anglo-Saxon to describe Alfred the Great and Athelstan because it’s a racist “dog whistle” for “white, Western superiority”, do so many British historians fall limply into line?

Suggested Reading

Should England fans support Iran?

By David Patrikarakos

There’s only one answer to all this — and in an age that prizes victimhood above all else, what a richly satisfying answer it is. For it’s time we Britons recognised ourselves for what we are: a cruelly oppressed people, so brutalised by our imperial overlords that we don’t realise how badly we’ve been treated. Our idioms, our customs, even our cooking have been ruthlessly erased from history, our pies and puddings driven out by chicken wings and cheeseburgers, and we haven’t even noticed. And now they’re even coming for our ancestors, the Anglo-Saxons of sainted memory!

So what would Athelstan, the first king of all England, say? I think we all know the answer to that. He’d say: “Lads, it’s time to decolonise ourselves. Who cares what the Yanks think? But first things first: the World Cup. Let’s give them such a beating they never again claim that macaroni cheese is three words. Come on, England!”

And he would, of course, be right.

When we talk of folk tales, we are referring to the oral stories of common people. In the British Isles, a rich folkloric tradition emerged following waves of invasions by, among others, Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans. They are tales of dragonslayers, giants, and wizards, preserved in texts like Beowulf, Old English poetry and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. But over centuries, knowledge of them faded. Numerous reasons have been suggested for this, including the rise of Christianity, the Norman Conquest, Reformation, Interregnum, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, capitalism, globalisation or merely the passage of time.

Or perhaps Britain has erased its folk tales in an attempt to forget its past. Folk law is the ethnography of peoples, holding memories of traditions, beliefs, and values whose existence may have long vanished. In Britain there appears to be some modern discomfort with folktales, tied as they often are to particular landscapes, people and nations. After the Second World War, Germanic folklore, which the Nazis had overtly employed as a tool to bolster their notion of an Aryan nation, fell out of fashion. It may be that ongoing discussions around British Empire and colonialism, and the sense that folk tales are too easily linked to a nationalistic nostalgia, have made them taboo once again. Or perhaps in a post-Brexit world, anything that sniffs of specifically British or English myths aligns too closely with a perceived backwardness, insularity, or prejudice.

But it is their very sense of place and ties to particular landscapes and peoples that ensure their continued relevance. In the face of global “McDonaldsisation” that flattens the diversity of cultural traditions into a sanitised monoculture of big brands and business suits, folk tales radically resist homogeneity. As Unesco’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage points out, globalisation gives rise to “grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction” of heritage such as folklore. Folklore is a “mainspring of cultural diversity”, and its loss is tantamount to cultural destruction. A country ripped from its roots, with no sense of self, will fracture. It will leave people unmoored in an increasingly impersonal world. Brexit has been endlessly analysed as a reaction against globalisation by those angry at how their lives and cultural identities have been disregarded. Perhaps the vote was a desperate attempt to grasp something vital they felt was being lost. Folklore is one such vital anchor, connecting us with that past and each other.

Folk tales have refused to be banished entirely. Sporadic resurgences litter the 20th and 21st centuries, from the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Alan Garner, to the folk horror movement in films such as The Wickerman and Midsommar. Today a new generation of British writers is exploring the folk tradition: Neil Gaiman and A.S. Byatt have reimagined the Norse myths; Max Porter’s Lanny features an incarnation of a “Green Man” or woodwose; Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent revolves around superstitions of a legendary serpent; Zoe Gilbert’s Folk interweaves folk stories with the lives of the inhabitants of a remote island. All these centuries later, artists are discovering reasons to explore these ancient stories.

But why? Perhaps the first attraction of folk tales is that they are tales of wonder and magic. Folk tales, put simply, enchant. When the philosopher Max Weber spoke of the “disenchantment of the world”, he was talking of the dominance of scientific thinking, reason, and modernisation. Everything was, in theory, knowable. Superstition and other irrationalities would be banished. But folk tales, concerned as they are with the unexplainable, are the opposite of disenchantment. In Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starveacre the corpse of a hare can regrow muscle and skin and return from the dead. In Garner’s Booker-nominated Treacle Walker the arrival of a rag and bone man brings ancient rituals and second sight — an entire book, if you will, about rubbing at our dulled, disenchanted vision and revealing magic.

Suggested reading

Why are women becoming witches?

By Suzannah Lipscomb

However, magic is often dismissed as a subject for children — not literary fiction. With the exception of genres such as magic realism, stories of magic are often seen as slightly shameful or embarrassing, unlike, say, a solid realist novel about contemporary issues. Today, many of the motifs and settings of folklore can be glimpsed in children’s literature: Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Perhaps no one has done more to cement the folk or fairy-tale as an art form for children than Walt Disney. But rarely has literary fiction been permitted the same licence. When authors do dabble in folklore, the response is often bafflement or snobbery. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, set in an ancient Britain of monsters and dragons, was met with general bewilderment.

Yet there is clearly desire for these kinds of tales. “The fairy-story is really an adult genre, and one for which a starving audience exists,” as Tolkien put it. There is no better example than the continuing popularity of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, inspired by Old English and Norse literature, and more recently George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones series. These are not niche fantasy, children’s works, or guilty secrets, but mainstream, celebrated works of art. Perhaps those who scoff at magic and folk tales have “stopped short of true maturity”, which, according to WH Auden, consists of “a recovered sense of wonder”.

Suggested reading

The magic of Britain's rainforests

By Aris Roussinos

Fairy tales aren’t just about escapism, though. They can be political too. Many modern writers use folk tale characters and motifs to fight against a modernity that is destroying the planet and old ways of life. Now the forgotten figures of the past, the Green Man, giants and fairies, embodiments of the natural world, are resurrected and reimagined as defenders of the environment. In Jerusalem, Jez Butterworth’s state-of-the-nation play, a decaying olde England of druids and maypoles clings on even as the “civilising” modern world tries to sweep it away with clipboards and council edicts. That it has passed into near-legendary status since its premiere in 2009, with performances still selling out in 2022, is telling.

Clearly the old tales cannot be silenced. They cling on all these centuries later in new forms and new works as authors rediscover the rich traditions of this country. Perhaps one day, alongside Achilles and Hercules, Herne and Belinus and Wayland will take their rightful place in the pantheon of popular consciousness.

It was 2001. The writer and the monarch were standing in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, at an event to celebrate British publishing.

“Yes of course I remember,” the Queen said sharply.

“Well I was the person who brought the news back from Everest, so you got it on time.”

The Queen looked at Morris in silence. Before her stood a properly large lady — a 6ft 4” lady, with wispy white hair harassing a square head. A fascinating, but somewhat odd face. A correct Englishwoman’s voice, but sultry, with a male pitch. A laugh like a cat’s laugh, hissy and languid. And a lady. Were there ladies on Everest, in 1953?

Morris did not explain to the Queen that she had undergone gender reassignment surgery in the decades since the mountain was defeated. “How could I explain to her?” she later said. “Life is too short.”

How to explain Jan Morris? Who was she? What was she? Faced with a life like this, the Queen’s confusion is our own. Morris was a man, and then a woman. He had been a debonair foreign correspondent as the jet age dawned, who transformed into an apparently cheerful old dear wearing pearls in a damp corner of North Wales. He was a superb travel writer who yearned to compose novels, then wrote the Pax Britannica trilogy, the greatest — or at least the most entertaining — narrative history of the late 20th century instead.

She was a trickster who denied the existence of truth, then struggled to have her female identity accepted by her family, her profession, and her society. She wanted to be a raffish romancer, but was “happily married” for 70 years. She hymned British Imperialism, then became a Welsh Nationalist. She was described as an enigma, yet underwent the least enigmatic voluntary medical procedure possible. Her public persona was all bonhomie, but she lived alongside her own gravestone; it haunted the corner of her library for decades. Every time she said she had retired, she resurfaced scant months later with a new book — even after she died in 2020, there she was again, a little while later, with another one. There were 58 of them in the end. More than anything, she was a flirt, a tease. “My life is one long allegory,” Morris claimed. To which the reply, inevitably, is: for what?

Jan Morris was born James Morris in the Somerset seaside town of Clevedon in 1926. His father’s family was Welsh, his mother’s vaguely Norman — division was established as an early theme. The young boy wandered the hills overlooking the coast near his home, already isolated, already convinced “I had been born in the wrong body, and should really be a girl”, already yearning for the unobtainable. Then the miseries of school (Lancing College), where he was always in trouble, “beaten by prefects more than any other pupil” during the early months of the war. As the conflict wound down, Morris joined the 9th Lancers, serving in Venice, Trieste, and Cairo as an intelligence officer, undertaking what she called “squalid duties of repression and withdrawal”.

In 1953, Morris, at 27 the new foreign editor of The Times, became the official journalist on Edmund Hillary’s expedition to Everest. Breaking the news that Hillary had conquered the mountain made Morris’s career. He was a classic, frenzied overachiever. Celebrated books followed, such as Venice (1960), and the sex-change memoir, Conundrum (1974). These are the room temperature facts, diligently recorded by Paul Clements in his new biography, Jan Morris: Life from both sides. 

More from this author

The many deaths of Virginia Woolf

By Will Lloyd

You have to feel sorry for Clements. He was friendly with his subject, which is dangerous for a biographer. Morris destroyed her private papers, and lived, at times, as if existence itself was an inside joke. “Almost nothing in life is what it seems”, she wrote, and we would do well to apply this mantra to Morris’s own life. She claims she knew she was a woman when she was three or four years old — yet she pursued emphatically manly careers in the army and the press. She claimed an ambiguous sexuality — but when she met her wife, Elizabeth, Clements notes that “any questions about gender and sexuality were swept aside”. Five children, one of whom died, followed. The marriage was a perfect patriarchal model: Morris away obsessively working the globe; Elizabeth tending children, garden, accounts and house, alone. “Jan,” said her daughter Suki, “was a very complicated person, not in my view, the simple, lovely being that people see at all”. Nothing was what it seemed. All Clements will say is that she had a “contradictory nature”.

Morris began taking oestrogen pills in 1964, the first stage of an eight-year physical metamorphosis. She had been near-suicidal in the run up to this decision. And at the very moment her identity as a man was crumbling, her country was too. What did James Morris see when he looked around in 1964? He had been born at a time when Britain still decided world questions, and he had always approved of this. Now God was withdrawing His credit from the British. After Everest, Morris was a foreign correspondent for the Guardian. He filed from Cape Town and Bogota, from Cairo and Kabul, from Tel Aviv and Isfahan. He had followed Britain’s armies through the long, bleary rearguard action of imperialism. He had watched that “distasteful ignominy” at Suez. “We were living in a twilight time,” Morris wrote. “Old forces were dying and new energies emerging. Patterns that had seemed permanent were falling into chaos.”

Everywhere was retreat and evacuation. The Promethean spirit — “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life,” the spirit used to whisper — that executed Mughal princes without trial, that snaked railways underneath Rhodesian waterfalls, that doomed prisoners to silent wards on the frigid shores of the Tasman Sea, that Empire-building spirit, was gone. Things would never be the way they were again.

More from this author

England's other Saint George

By Will Lloyd

Bereaved of their worldly footholds — “the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more,” he wrote — the British were all alone. Morris’s entire generation was left like Atlas, but relieved of his globe. They would have to find new burdens to carry. It was not enough for him. He wanted more.

So, approaching middle-age, Morris hurled himself into two vast concurrent projects, two escape plans from the wreckage of Britain and his own masculinity. One concerned the past, and the Empire. One concerned the future, and his identity.

Though Clements never makes the connection explicit, it’s clear that James’s decision to become Jan was a peculiarly original response to the end of the British Empire. Read the Pax Britannica trilogy (1968-1978), the first of those projects, written as she transitioned. It is thunderously problematic. Morris described her response to Empire as “sensuous”. She cherished British cruelty in a way no one would dare do today. Empire was was a “flare”, a “blaze”, and an “ambition for its own sake”. As the 19th century turned, the British “yearned to break out of their sad and prosaic realities, and live more brilliant lives in Xanadu”. Other lands, from Ireland to India, were collateral, and Morris could live with that.

Suggested article

Why the Tavistock had to fall

By Kathleen Stock

Gender shadows these books. Clearly, it made Morris’s hairs stand on end to think about the sheer effrontery of men like Robert Clive, or Admiral “Jackie” Fisher or Winston Churchill. She remembered the gentlemen of the East India Company as “showy, amoral… Plundering, fighting and trading in a spirit of uncensorious give and take”. She loved the men of peak Empire even more. They had everything the men in her generation lacked: constancy, surety, a granite bedrock of Christian faith. Here she is on John Nicholson, an Anglo-Irish Army officer who flew through British India like a tempest. He was “a fable in his own lifetime… He was a fighter… He was a big man… He looked utterly sure.”

By the third volume of the trilogy, Farewell The Trumpets (1978), composed after Morris had her gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca, it was not merely the British Empire that was coming apart. It was British masculinity itself. Suez was the empire’s tomb, and a finale for the British male. Looking back at the troops sent to occupy Port Said in 1955, she saw them as “self-conscious”, their half-hearted war-making “somehow fraudulent”, suffused with a “sham virility”. Around them the Egyptian city stood “shattered and appalled… a bitter memorial to the last display of imperial machismo.” All the certainty had vanished. The sad-sack farrago at Suez raised more than geopolitical questions for Morris. If, after centuries of vigorous domination, British masculinity was impotent and no longer plausible, then why be a British man at all?

Well, how about a woman? This was the second project. In Conundrum, Morris elaborated on her notion of womanhood. It was not designed to please feminists. It was designed to be the opposite of the Victorian imperialists Morris so admired. “My own notion of the female principle was one of gentleness as against force, forgiveness rather than punishment, give more than take, helping more than leading.” In post-Imperial Britain, if Morris could not be a wolf, she would be a lamb. She would escape into her own romantic idea of femininity. To be a woman rather than a man, she argued, was simply a matter of “good taste”.

Published in 1974, Conundrum became, in Clements’ imaginative phrase, a “media circus”. Morris, the handsome writer, was the highest-profile person to change gender in British history. Her persona was savaged in print and on television. “She sounds not like a woman, but like a man’s idea of a woman,” wrote Rebecca West, “and curiously enough, the idea of a woman not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be.” Germaine Greer accused a “self-indulgent” Morris of lacking frankness about what her “new body looks like and how it works”. Nora Ephron laughed at her: Morris was “perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is… A girl”. A particularly brutal drubbing in the Times Literary Supplement left Morris writing to the editor. “Your cruel review of Conundrum has reduced me to tears.”

Suggested article

Why did my daughter become trans?

By Jo Brown

Every line of today’s battles over gender identity was scripted in the furore around Conundrum and Morris in the early Seventies. She appeared on a BBC talkshow and faced a 45-minute barrage of questions from an MP, a psychiatrist and a feminist. Morris was told that her book was “proselytising and immoral”. Her notion of womanhood was “ridiculous” and “limited”. Morris responded that it was “arrogant” to assume anyone could know what anyone else might feel like. The transexual experience was an “inner-music” and a quest towards a new reality. Gender, Morris told millions of TV viewers, “is the way people feel and the way they want other people to think about them — it is the spirit, the soul, and the innermost essence of what people feel they are.” Morris was saying that trans women are women. She may have been the first to do so in Britain. “I’m afraid you must take it or leave it”, she told the bewildered panel.

Overnight, Morris’s life was truly allegorical. Her life was a bridge between two worlds. The first was the old reality, where identity was confirmed in collective endeavours like the British Empire, inherited beliefs like Christianity and powerful institutions like the Armed Forces or Fleet Street. When she became a woman, Morris was clearing a path towards the second world we live in now. Identity is confirmed by the individual, through a series of deliberate choices rather than an inherited set of traditions, and based entirely on feelings. All she wanted, “was the liberty of us all to live as we wished to live, to love however we wanted to love”.

Morris suspected that she was a prophet. “Is mine only a transient phenomenon” she wondered, “between the dogmatism of the last century, when men were men and women were ladies, and the eclecticism of the next, when citizens will be free to live in the gender roles they prefer?” Asked about the pushback against the trans movement in 2017, an increasingly ancient Morris said our “moment is messy, but I think more and more people will move to my condition”. She believed it was possible that “everyone has the potential to have both genders in them”.

Jan Morris was an early adopter of an ideology that has swept across the Western world in the past 30 years. Conundrum has never been out of print. Morris’s belief — born from the collapse of empire, engineered to replace her imperial faith — that gender is ineffable and innate, are becoming commonplace in institutional settings. When Morris died, one of the leading tributes came from the chief executive of the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service.

Is this simply fashion? Is this ideology “cronyistic” as Helen Joyce, and other gender-critical writers have suggested? Some feminists argue that gender-identity ideology will be abandoned “when it is no longer in the ascendent”, the politicians and tech billionaires will junk the pronouns in their emails, biology will reassert itself, and women will no longer have penises.

Morris prefigured our present, but perhaps she represented the future too. Our great-grandparents believed that masturbation caused insanity. Our great-grandchildren may come to view the idea that only natal women can bear children with a mixture of condescension, alarm, and laughter. A quaint and horrible belief, like phrenology.

More from this author

A very British Hajj

By Will Lloyd

“The sexual attitudes of any given society”, Gore Vidal said, “are the result of political decisions.” He was right. Biological facts exist only up to a point. Power is more important. If power decides that fantasy and feeling take precedence over evolution and biology, then fantasy and feeling become fact. The distinction between the sexes can be socially engineered. The technology to make it so exists.

Whether such a shift will make people happier — which is surely the point of it — is difficult to answer. In her life as a woman, we can detect something quietly unwell about Morris. Nothing was as it seemed. She told interviewers how much she loved floral dresses and embraced a rather desperate frivolity. The hard-edges of James Morris were publicly sanded away. She would no longer take things that seriously — “far better in my opinion to regard the great world as a kind of show, a tragicomedy put on for my fascination”. Such an attitude of high unseriousness can only come from believing that there are no great causes left, that nothing really matters, so you may as well laugh. She  praised callowness. “Give me fizz, give me irresponsibility, and if I ever feel maturity creeping in, crack a bottle, put out more flags, and ring bells!”

It was a masquerade. “Many wondered,” writes Clements, “if there was an underlying melancholy behind this facade”. Seen as a whole, Morris’s entire life appears as a trick question, like the one she asked the Queen that day in Buckingham Palace. Could Britain get over the loss of Empire? And could a man be a woman? Morris was not the first, nor will she be the last, to discover that there are no simple answers to either question.

While most of us have spent the week praising the life and legacy of Queen Elizabeth II, she has been denounced by those who claim to speak on behalf of truth and justice. She wasn’t a benign monarch, these people say. She sponsored a system of racist division, and any black or brown person who mourns her death is a stooge of Empire and white supremacy. A House Negro. Self-hating. A coon.

It is indisputable that the British Empire committed many atrocities, and many of its advocates were motivated by racism. But the idea that Queen Elizabeth II’s international legacy can be reduced to colonial oppression and violence is a perverse distortion of history. When many West Indians moved to Britain in the Fifties and Sixties, their claim to a British identity and equal status with native white Britons was on the basis of being subjects of the Crown. Should they have rejected this? Is any black or brown person who accepts a knighthood a traitor to his race? Are all those nations where they are now flying flags at half-mast — from India to Nigeria to Jamaica to Ghana to Trinidad and many, many more — governed by self-hating coons? Every single one of them? Were all the postcolonial leaders who either decided to stay in the Commonwealth or join it motivated by profound self-loathing? This is not just an offensive argument: it’s patently absurd.

Rather than being a symbol of white supremacy, Queen Elizabeth II devoted much of her reign to fostering amicable relations with those countries which used to be a part of the British Empire. In April 1947, Princess Elizabeth spent the afternoon of her 21st birthday recording a filmed message to “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”. Elizabeth calmly outlined her dedication to the colonies and countries that linked through Britain like a daisy-chain across the world: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” It was a promise she would keep.

By the time of her coronation, in June 1953, the Commonwealth, which had emerged after decolonisation, only had eight countries. They wanted to rule themselves, but they didn’t want to completely sever their relationship with Britain. It would be tempting to describe the Commonwealth as Anglophone, a continuation of the countries Britain conquered and subjugated, and imposed their language and customs upon: the pink splash across old maps of the world. But this is a simplistic way of looking at this mosaic of nations.

The picture is a complex one. Canada is a majority English-speaking and minority French-speaking country; Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country and minority English-speaking country, colonised by the Germans before it was handed over to France. Both Canada and Cameroon are part of the Commonwealth. The official language of Mozambique is Portuguese — and when it joined the Commonwealth, in 1995, it became the first country to do so that was never a part of the British Empire. Togo and Gabon, two former French colonies, have joined the Commonwealth this year. They are the 55th and 56th members. It is a club that people want to join, not a union imposed by force.

Suggested reading

Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

If it’s not language, then what unites these nations? To a great extent, it was that quietly-spoken young woman, who, five years after giving that speech on her 21st birthday, became the Queen of Britain, and assumed the ceremonial position of managing the loss of an Empire. She didn’t bestride these newly independent countries like an aggrieved dictator. Nor was she a passive caretaker. She listened, and learned, and exercised her inquisitive mind. She was devoted to internationalism, and many nations warmed to those qualities. Elizabeth was the greatest diplomat of the 20th century.

Her diplomatic qualities were crucial in 1961. By that time, the Commonwealth had grown from eight to 12 members. That year, she would have to visit one small but profoundly consequential country in west Africa, and make sure it didn’t leave the club.

Ghana was the first black African country to gain independence, and it soon became the first African country to join the Commonwealth. The president was a charismatic firebrand called Kwame Nkrumah. He spent the Thirties studying sociology and economics in Pennsylvania, and selling fish on the streets of New York. After he moved to England, in 1945, he was often in Camden cafés chatting amiably with communists and anti-imperialists. When Nkrumah moved back to the Gold Coast, as Ghana was then known, and threatened the status quo by launching a mass strike, the governor-general Sir Charles Arden-Clarke described him as a “thoroughgoing communist”.

Suggested reading

Black kids should study Larkin

By Tomiwa Owolade

1961 was the white heat of the Cold War: five years after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising, and the year the Berlin Wall went up. Africa was decolonising, and many of these new nations were being courted by the Soviet Union. The Queen was scheduled to arrive in Ghana on 9 November 1961. The month before, Nkrumah had visited Moscow. Closer to Ghana, five days before her visit, a bomb exploded in the capital city of Accra which damaged a statue of Nkrumah.

The Queen was undaunted, telling Prime Minister Harold MacMillan: “I am not a film star. I am the head of the Commonwealth — and I am paid to face any risks that may be involved. Nor do I say this lightly. Do not forget that I have three children”.

The trip was a peach. She landed first in Accra and met several government ministers and dignitaries. These diplomatic endeavours were followed up by meetings with the chiefs and kings of Ghana. According to Nkrumah’s personal photographer, the Queen was genuinely interested in the people she met, asking incisive questions, for instance, about the cultural significance of native dress.

She was introduced to High Life music — a fusion of the native Akan musical rhythms and Jazz — and danced with Nkrumah. The revolutionary pan-Africanist leader, the chum of Nikita Khrushchev and Mao Zedong, danced happily with the Queen of Britain; the Commonwealth was a model of tolerance. (This, at a time when any black man who stared at a white woman for too long could be lynched in the United States.)

Suggested reading

How Camilla became Queen

By Will Lloyd

Ghana never left the Commonwealth. And by the Seventies, with revolutionary fervour ramping up across the developing world, the club had more than doubled its membership to nearly 30 nations.

If the legend of Elizabeth as the silent, passive doll Queen were true, the Commonwealth never would have worked. Her public inscrutability belied a deeply engaged person. Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, and the so-called Iron Lady of the Caribbean in the Eighties, said of the Queen that, “it’s obvious that she’s not just talking pieties. She’s interested, definitely interested, in what is happening in each of those countries”.

The Queen of the Commonwealth was not the mute Queen of postage stamps. She was articulate, she argued, she cajoled. The former Prime Minister of Fiji, Kamisese Mara, put it like this: “If you don’t know what you’re talking about she’ll soon let you know that you’re not quite fully versed in what you’re talking about because she’s so knowledgeable.”

Shridath Ramphal, the former Commonwealth Secretary-General, knew this Queen, a version largely hidden from the rest of us: “Every prime minister, every president, and I’ve been up against some pretty radical ones, militant ones, ones that you might think probably don’t care too much for this all monarchical thing.” Even they, according to Ramphal, placed maximum importance “on those 15-20 minutes when they can sit down with the Queen and talk about their countries, their problems, because she knows them very well”.

Her ability to approach internecine conflict with wisdom and knowledge was never on greater display than in her attitude to the nation where she was staying on her 21st birthday: South Africa. A year after that speech, South Africa started introducing a series of laws that prohibited marriage between people of different races; forced people of certain races to live in certain areas; and reinforced and expanded all pre-existing discriminatory practices in the country. These laws institutionalised the inferior status of black people. The word Apartheid entered the lexicon.

Suggested reading

The future of Anglicanism is African

By Tomiwa Owolade

In 1961, South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth. The Afrikaner government saw the Queen as a symbol of British imperialism, and they wanted to be free to pursue their racist policies without hindrance. In 1986, Commonwealth leaders all decided, with the consent of the Queen, to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Queen later developed a strong relationship with Nelson Mandela. He called her Elizabeth, and she called him Nelson. He was the only non-royal to call her by her first name. In 1994, four years after Mandela was released from prison, and in the year of its first ever democratic and multiracial election, South Africa rejoined the Commonwealth.

The Queen’s decades of service within the Commonwealth display a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the British empire and the postcolonial world. This is a story that is about more than conflict. To have the Commonwealth — that legacy of the Empire — embraced by leaders who also embraced Frantz Fanon and Karl Marx illustrates the complexities of the post-colonial relationship to Britain. These leaders detested white supremacy and brutal economic exploitation. But they also loved the Queen. Through the dignity of her character, she transcended hateful divisions.

Many of these post-colonial leaders, like Nkrumah, later degenerated into corrupt and authoritarian despots. Others, like Mandela, are universally acclaimed. But for most of them the Queen was a genuinely popular figure. A source of unity rather than oppression. An embodiment of the greatest virtues in a divided world: curiosity, compassion, grace and knowledge.

King Charles may not possess exactly the same qualities as his mother, but he is the custodian of a magnificent legacy. Despite the fact Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state last year, it is still a part of the Commonwealth. And I predict many more countries will want to join. And despite the bitterness of parochial diaspora activists, we have this to console ourselves with: our head of state, for 70 years, was a unifying figurehead across the world.

There was something different about Elizabeth II. Millions treated her with a hint of the divine right of kings, a woman who lived above interviews, who loomed over her own society mysteriously, with more in common with Franz Josef or the Romanovs than her own son.

This is the end of that story. The remaining royals of Europe are anachronisms, whether they are beloved or not; whether they are effective at their constitutional roles or not. This is the end of something which began on Christmas Day in 508, with the baptism of Clovis, which was the true start of sacral European Kingship. The story of a once Germanic warrior aristocracy that conquered and ruled Europe for over a thousand years, after the barbarian invasions that finished off the Roman Empire. Their demise from Paris to St Petersburg — as a sociology, as a political faith, as a simple fact — has been the story of modernity.

This end was first noted by the Bavarian nobleman Count Albrecht von Monteglas in 1917, when he decried that the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, with a thousand-year history, changed its name to the pedestrian Windsor “for a mere war,” the true age of European monarchy was over. The democratic age had arrived. That great flattening force seen so clearly by de Tocqueville in America, had come home to the old world meaning — not even a Hapsburg, let alone a Hohenzollern, even a Windsor — would serve without the implicit consent of the governed.

Queen Elizabeth’s death marks the latest step away from divinely ordained monarchy, towards something else. No longer sacred, the European monarch would rather be a pilot, or a country gentleman interested in urban planning. Another step along the path we have travelled since the laying of hands on His Majesty to cure disease was suspended after Queen Anne. It is no longer possible to suspend disbelief. The magic — or rather the mindset — was gone. There have been tears for the Queen this week, but can we imagine the same for Prince William decades from now? Looking at him, I can’t shake the feeling that he is just a West Londoner. Not a unicorn on his crest.

More from this author

The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

You don’t need tabulating political scientists to understand the British and their Queen. You need European psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung, Fromm. You need to understand the subliminal, the subconscious and the immense recesses of antiquity that haunt our psyches. It is here where monarchy draws its power. From the moment it was announced to her in Kenya, through her coronation as Queen of countries including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa, across a lifetime of the last post being sounded, over the by then mostly African Empire, that still existed when her reign began — she never stopped pretending. And for her, we never stopped pretending, either.

We pretended with her and for her — that the Commonwealth was real, that there was love and affection for her, or for us, in countries we’d conquered and lost, that we were still a great power. And if not an empire, then she ruled its heir. That her first minister was the equal of the men she received in what even the Kennedys realised was not splendour, but more a dowdy country hotel called Buckingham Palace. It could be beautiful, it could be felt, all this, but it wasn’t real. We all know a first principle of psychology is not to fantasise, but to accept who you really are.

As she aged, shrinking into her clothes, it became clear there wasn’t enough there, behind the insignia of government, to hold us up in the world.  The factories, the mines, the shipyards, the discoveries that powered the rule of Queen Victoria — we simply no longer had enough of them. The carpet has long been threadbare. The draught could now be felt in the house. This funeral is the last great pretence. The last funeral for a British world power. The world’s leaders will never gather like this in Westminster Abbey again. The crowds will not flock to London, let alone Edinburgh, like this again.

Suggested reading

The truth about Elizabeth's empire

By Remi Adekoya

This is third stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s Recessional. His great poem warning, amid the jingoism of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, that this empire too would go the way of Nineveh and Tyre. This is the moment — “that all our pomp of yesterday” — is buried with that tiny body. The trumpets and the ensigns remain, but as folklore, and hardly as anything more.

If Kipling were alive today, he might walk the Royal Mile, in Edinburgh, and see tourists, not mourners. He would stop outside Buckingham Palace and note the mawkishness of the Paddington Bears; the flowers wilting in their cellophane. None of this has the Christian certainty of Elizabeth’s Coronation, it has all the hallmarks the post-Anglican way we mourn now. How we festoon grief with lilies, postcards and teddies.

He wouldn’t be able to write — “God of our fathers, known of old, Lord of our far flung battle line” — even as a lament, or a prayer. The gap between his world, Churchill’s world, the Queen’s world, and our own is more than a matter of years. The threads that bound Church, Crown and Country into “Onwards Christian Soldiers” are gone. That was a Christian empire. There is only spectacle left.

Suggested reading

Who can rule Britain now?

By Mary Harrington

Elizabeth II was believable: because she believed. The last European monarch to believe her role was a divine calling. Today the old religion is not felt, even by the King, so uncomfortable — a scholar of Islam, a guest at al-Hazar, a patron of Jewish charities — at being Defender of the Faith. Charles could only bring himself to say, in his first address to the nation, that his faith was “rooted in the Church of England,” like he had long outgrown it. 

The King is not a stupid man. “Big Ears” of the tabloid press has spent his life knowing there is nothing sacred about him. That nobody reveres him. Every charity, every interview, has been proving Count Albrecht von Monteglas’s point. This is not what he called “the true Royal tradition” but an institution that knows it must constantly fight to keep its popularity afloat in the polls. A permanent referendum. Charles III could never rule like a true Hanoverian: his appetites or insanities, easily justified to the public as simply the divine order.

Suggested reading

The mythic power of King Charles III

By Aris Roussinos

The earliest known direct male ancestor of King Charles is Theodoric I of Wettin, a Germanic warlord, at the edge of the dark ages. His family tree includes Charlemagne, crowned Emperor in Rome. It includes Hugh Capet, who turned his dynasty from the Duke of the Franks, into the Kings of France. And, of course, Henry VIII, Charles I and Charles II. All the way through this story his ancestors have tried to weld what was sacred at the time to their crown.

Only with such a long view does it become obvious what Charles has spent a lifetime doing. By trying to be the King of, every craft, every field, every hedgerow — the voice of the planet — he is trying to channel that one thing we still all still treasure. Our ailing world. It is actually a question about us: whether he succeeds in making us believe. But whatever we come to feel for him or respect him — it will not be the hymn book reverence Kipling would recognise.

Wholly forgotten amid the Jubilee celebrations was the fact that, when the Queen acceded to the throne, she became sovereign not only of the UK, but also of a Muslim nation from which a million Britons like myself hail. The caption, for those who don’t read Urdu, translates as: “Elizabeth II, Queen of Pakistan 1952 – 1956.” It is the most remarkable detail in the chronicle of the Queen’s reign which began in February 1952, just as my father was born in a village in East Pakistan that through the strange meanderings of history was located in her dominions. My family’s fate has, ever since, been twinned with Her Majesty’s.

Of all the titles Elizabeth Windsor acquired on her father’s death, “Queen of Pakistan” would be the shortest-lived. The monarchy of Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s down-trodden Muslims, was quickly abolished. In time, so was the country itself, most of its population seceding to form a new country (Bangladesh). Although a rump state still claims the name Pakistan, the country of my parents’ birth no longer exists. Yet its sometime sovereign, Elizabeth II, miraculously lives on — the only remnant of the original Pakistani state as it existed before its collapse in civil war and genocide.

That national failure led to my parents’ emigration to the UK, and so my family fell once again under Her Majesty’s reign. They were “New Commonwealth immigrants”. But my father was truly a New Elizabethan, among the first subjects to be born under the new Queen — and born British, since the Nationality Act of 1948 established, with astonishing magnanimity, a common citizenship for the whole British Commonwealth. Three generations of my family have been born subjects of the same Queen, while a full five generations have lived under her reign, in the UK or the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan.

In all this time, the monarchy has been the dominant political fact in our lives. The labels on our passports — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK — have changed more than once; with the potential break-up of the United Kingdom they may do again. But while countries and their borders, governments and their ideologies, come and go, the one unfathomable fact that endures is the monarchy, whose legal subjects British-Asians have been ever since India was annexed more than a 150 years ago. And this legal relationship stretches back even further for those of Caribbean heritage, as far back as the 17th century.

No-one can claim the relationship began consensually. But whatever the iniquity of our initial subjection to this crown, it is that same crown that now guarantees our equality in this land. The Proclamation of 1858 that made my ancestors British granted them the exact same rights as all other subjects. It was Queen Victoria herself who had insisted on Indians “being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown”, words that would be recited by Indians at political gatherings. The principle was frequently ignored, but it was, as Gandhi put it, our Magna Carta, an assurance of equal treatment, decreed by the highest possible source, that still holds true today.

Monarchy, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. There’s something strangely celestial about that description, but he was onto something. As Shakespeare observed, “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king”. Elizabeth II is Dei Gratia Regina (“Queen by the grace of God”) and as even the imam of Cambridge mosque preached on Friday, “she is a servant of the Almighty Allah”. If, in our secular age, there can no longer be God-given rights, the monarchy’s pompous charade of divinity makes it the closest thing we have to an absolute — and that is what I’d like my rights to be.

Minorities don’t trust the “human bustle” — which is all we would have without a monarch. From history we learn that wherever a throne is eliminated, in due course so are ethnic minorities. Consider the multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa under the Habsburgs or of southeastern Europe under the Ottomans. A dozen languages were spoken in the imperial parliament in Vienna, while on any given day in an Istanbul cafe conversations could be heard in Turkish, Ladino, Greek, Armenian, French and Kurdish, at least. But since republican governments replaced these monarchies, the fate of every 20th-century cosmopolis on the continent has been one of merciless homogenisation through ethnic cleansing, population transfers or socio-economic strangulation.

Suggested reading

The Queen's secret history

By Mary Harrington

There’s a kneejerk association of monarchy with nationalism. But the two have mostly been pitted against each other since the imperial age in which European monarchies transformed into continent-spanning empires characterised, especially in the British case, by free trade and free movement. Nationalists opposed the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of these empires, eventually corralling their multiethnic populations into new nation-states, republics in the main, which now struggle to cope with a fraction of the ethnic diversity that their territories previously boasted under imperial rule.

Conservatives today won’t own up to a truth of which they should be proud: the original basis of our multicultural society was the imperialist, royalist ideology of High Toryism. This becomes clear from the debate around the Nationality Act of 1948 that enabled my father’s emigration. It was then the Conservatives who worried about Labour reforms destroying “our proud boast of the open door in this country to people from all the colonies”. The parliamentary statement by Lord Kilmuir, as Shadow Home Secretary, deserves quoting at length:

We deprecate any tendency to differentiate between different types of British subjects in the United Kingdom. We feel that when they come to the UK there ought to be an open door and reception for every type…We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone, from every part of the empire.

What united — and still unites — all these disparate people is the Queen, mere loyalty to whom makes us all British. Our oath of allegiance is to “Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors” — no more, no less. The symbolism of that is profound. It means my mother, a hijab-wearing Bengali Muslim woman who speaks little English can be unimpeachably British in a way she could not be unimpeachably French (even her clothing would not be deemed in keeping with “Republican values”). The simplicity of our oath is one of our constitution’s forgotten jewels, its tolerant spirit generally diffused throughout the state — a state that isn’t truly a nation-state since it claims four different “home nations”. Apart from Scotland, all have an underwhelming sense of nationality. As Daniel Defoe’s ditty scorning English nationalism went:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Dominic Sandbrook

By contrast, the nation-states born of decolonisation in the last century demand of its citizens fealty to a nation, that nation commonly being defined in ethnically exclusive terms. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the Roma minority that once had only to express loyalty to the emperor is under pressure to become Hungarian. These are societies at the mercy of ethnonationalism and xenophobia, lacking that impartial light of monarchy which, at its best, allows people of all races and religions to appeal to something beyond their differences from one another.

These unstable political forces haven’t been totally absent even in our tolerant monarchy. In 1968, targeting East African Indians, the Labour government consciously restricted dark-skinned British passport-holders from entering the country, legislation which even the anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell considered, in some of its clauses, to be comparable to the Nuremberg Laws. Still, shortly afterwards, Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that made him the biggest name in UK politics.

Powell envisioned a renewed English nationalism, which arose from a disillusioned critique of imperialism not unlike those taking place in former colonies. He came to believe that the foreign adventure of empire — Powell was a veteran of the Indian Army — had suppressed English identity. Decolonisation was an occasion to rediscover it, as if it were an old oak in an abandoned garden. He railed against the “bogus mythical self-consoling invention of the British Commonwealth”, against the Queen’s new role as its Head, and of course against Commonwealth immigrants. The irony is that Powell could have made the same arguments as an Indian, say, and been regarded as a fairly standard postcolonial polemicist.

Queen Elizabeth deserves credit as probably Powell’s most successful adversary in those turbulent decades. She single-handedly preserved the old imperial High Toryism which Powell and later Tories had turned against, using her charm to launder out of it the darker stains of imperialism. Whereas for Powell, the nation-state was “the ultimate political reality”, for Elizabeth it was the British Empire in its new, egalitarian guise, the Commonwealth. In her famous broadcast on her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth pledged her life to serving “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.

Suggested reading

The importance of being British

By Nigel Biggar

Of course, the Queen never addressed him directly, but she was shadow-boxing against Powell’s English nationalism. Powell’s ravings grew more virulent. “It is truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land,” Powell would bellow. But all the while, Elizabeth would reaffirm her own commitment “to that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races”.

Eventually, Powell’s decorum yielded. In 1984, he attacked Queen Elizabeth — from a family of immigrants herself — using a phrase that would later be invoked, knowingly or otherwise, by Theresa May: “citizen of nowhere”. She was, Powell claimed, more concerned for “a vociferous minority of newcomers than for the great mass of her subjects…threatening the place of the Crown in the affections of the people” — a prediction that was utterly refuted by the jubilant Union Jack-waving of millions over the holiday.

Like most, at times I found myself chafing against the kitschier aspects of the spectacle. But then, when I saw the circle of saffron-robed sadhus from Gujarat at Neasden’s Hindu temple ignite a sacred flame in honour of the Queen, I remembered all over again what the lighting of all those beacons truly symbolised: a celebration by our motley, many-hued human bustle of the light that shines above it.

But the so-called “Holy Mowers” who maintain this beautiful spot are in something of a quandary about the very purpose of their existence: mowing. After all, this is “No Mow May” — a movement that began in 2019 in Britain and has taken off not just in this country but also in the US. It calls on mowers to give it a rest during the late spring as a way of allowing wildlife to be, well, a little more wild. Plants need pollinators and pollinators needs plants, so let the weeds return. Alas, its detractors think this creates an unholy mess, giving the dreaded green alkanet a free pass during this crucial growing month.

How we came to fall in love with the closely cut grass lawn is a long and fascinating story. Two years after my new church was opened in 1714, the landscape gardener Capability Brown was born. Known as England’s greatest gardener, Brown’s landscapes created the now familiar aesthetic of the English country house — Blenheim, Chatsworth, Burleigh — surrounded by clumps of trees, lakes, and vast swathes of cut lawn as far as they eye could see. Gone were the straight avenues of trees and geometric fountains; the new look was an imagined reconstruction of nature as God intended. Brown was not just copying nature; he was, some said, improving on it.

Styled as unaffected, the Brown look reflected the view that the English had of themselves: free and unmannered. In truth, it was just as mannered and even more expensive to produce than the more obviously artful and rectangular gardens that it replaced. And Marxists were right to point out that all the means of production, the way wealth was generated, was deliberately out of view. It was as though the aristocratic lifestyle could be built upon a few effortlessly grazing sheep. Later gardeners came to regard the Brown revolution as something of a cliché and a bit of a con.

But nonetheless, the idea that a little slice of paradise and individual freedom could be found in cut grass took hold in the most remarkable way. With the invention of the cylinder mower in the 1830s, the cut grass paradise was democratised. Even those moving from the country to the town could have a little patch of their very own Eden. Sport, too — golf, cricket, football — all required a mown surface. And as the British Empire spread its influence around the world, the lawn became a symbol of domestic success and tranquility.

More from this author

How the Church attacks its own

By Giles Fraser

In the US especially, the lawn represented the bourgeoise American Dream, the promise of domestic happiness available to all. It mattered not that the climate was unconducive. Millions of gallons of water were redirected to keeping this promise alive. Fertilisers were invented to keep the weeds down. Hours and hours of maintenance were required. As Yuval Noah Harari said of wheat: it’s not that we domesticated grass, but that grass domesticated us. But No Mow May is something of a fightback. The lawn is being cancelled — not green enough and too imperialistic.

And what all gardeners know, of course, is that the weeds will inherit the earth. This is especially true in Kew churchyard. Among all the fading gravestones, our constant mowing is only a temporary and ultimately futile act of resistance. It’s what we think we ought to be doing as responsible stewards of the natural world. As if the natural world relied upon us for its preservation.

Though perhaps it does. On the other side of the cricket pitch from the church is the Kew Gardens’ Herbarium, containing over seven million dried plants. Kew Gardens also houses the largest collection of living seed and plant diversity on earth: 2.4 billion seeds are carefully stored, frozen or dried — a priceless insurance policy for a future time of ecological crisis. I could not be more aware that it is now science, not religion, that is building Noah’s Ark.

More from this author

Why Bishops should be political

By Giles Fraser

At best, religions are a supporting act, taking our lead from others. The vision of some uniform, Capability Brown-inspired paradise has not helped us. We need different visions of how the natural world and the human aspiration for beauty and order might work together. And I suspect this will mean less carefully managed spaces and more appreciation of the serendipity of the wildflower meadow, with its bees and bugs and butterflies.

After all, a weed is simply a plant growing where it is not wanted. This has a parallel in Mary Douglas’s famous definition of dirt as matter out of place. Mud tramped in from the garden becomes dirt in the kitchen. For Douglas, this idea of everything having a rightful place implies the existence of a kind of social order that is premised upon a map of the world in which everything exists in relation to that map. Religion has generally been very influential in drawing these maps, as Douglas brilliantly explained.

Suggested reading

George Monbiot's farming fantasies

By John Lewis-Stempel

Some maps are more helpful than others, though. The Capability Brown map of the world was profoundly unhelpful and, unfortunately, deeply influential. It set up an impossible view of the natural world and invited us all to participate in its aesthetic and social pretence. It was always a kind of aristocratic deceit. And as a consequence we came to view the real natural world — green alkanet and all — as some sort of uninvited intrusion. Unnatural even. That’s the irony.

No Mow May freaks some people out. Their garden doesn’t look like it should. The dreaded weeds are re-appearing. But what is wrong here is not the weeds, but the way we have come to think about our gardens and our natural spaces. What we need is not fewer weeds but a new map of the natural world and our place within it. We can redesignate them as plants. Learn to make your peace with them. Because when you are six feet under, they will still be growing there above you.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

More from this author

The age of empire is back

By Aris Roussinos

And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

Suggested reading

In defence of defending empire

By Robert Tombs

And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

More from this author

Ernst Jünger: our prophet of anarchy

By Aris Roussinos

Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

Suggested reading

The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

Consider British GQ’s next cover star, the Ealing-born Bukayo Saka. The 20-year-old English footballer has had a redemptive story since he missed the losing penalty in the Euros 2020 final last summer; he has been the brightest star in a rejuvenated Arsenal team that has a good chance of getting into the top four in the Premier League.

Along with a snazzy photo shoot, Saka recorded a video for GQ in which he lists his ten most essential items. There is an iPad, a portable music speaker, some Twix chocolate bars, a football, a PlayStation, trainers, and moisturiser: all the things you’d expect any sporty young man to be proud of possessing.

But Saka also included something else — a Bible, gifted to him by his father. “Religion is a big part of my life,” Saka says in the video. “Obviously I’m a strong believer in God.” Of course, by religion Saka means Christianity. And the use of obviously is striking: why is it obvious he would be a strong believer in God as a young person born and bred in the capital city of a western European nation? Well, it is obvious to him because of his family. Saka comes from a Nigerian family. And for many black African communities in Britain, Christianity is everything.

So Saka, one of the standard-bearers of the England national football team — which substitutes for religion in the country at large — also embodies another fascinating nexus: the relationship between a black British identity and Christianity, a religion that was introduced to anglophone west Africa by the British.

There’s a concept called the pizza effect. The original pizza was once a basic dish found in different pockets of Italy: a flat bread spread with tomato sauce; no toppings. When immigrants from Sicily and southern Italy moved to America between the late 19th and early 20th century, they introduced pizza to Americans. And these Italian-Americans, on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and Chicago, gave this basic dish a renewed colour: it became a food of multiple toppings and textures. After the First World War, pizza was reintroduced to Italy. And it became pizza: not just a flat baked bread with some tomato sauce — but a national dish of magnificent variation.

The same is true of Christianity in Britain today.

More from this author

How Christianity kills itself

By Tomiwa Owolade

Christianity is collapsing throughout Britain. A British Social Attitudes Survey from 2018 concluded that this decline is “one of the most important trends in postwar history”. More than half of the British public now say they do not belong to any religion, compared to 31% in 1983. But there are parts of the country where the flame of the religion is still bright.

You have to go to London, especially the inner-city, to find England’s most vigorous forms of Christianity. It is largely West African immigrants who fill the pews of decaying churches from Peckham to Woolwich, who renovate new churches in Brixton and Lewisham, and who volunteer for Christian centres and charities up and down the capital. If you want a solid sense of the sacred, a connection to Britain’s ancient Christian past, you are more likely to find it while eating jollof rice in a big tent in Kennington than eating a Yorkshire pudding in a small room in Harrogate.

This is not a utopian vision of liberal multiculturalism. London is the most cosmopolitan city in Britain. We all know that. But it’s also the most religious and socially conservative city in the country. 62% of Londoners, for instance, identify as religious, compared with 53% of the rest of the country. 25% of Londoners attend a religious service at least once a month; only 10% of people outside London do. 24% of Londoners think sex before marriage is wrong, compared to 13% of the population. London is the most homophobic city in the country: 29% of people in London think homosexuality is wrong, while 23% outside London think this.

The city is not only diverse in markers of visual difference, such as skin colour and types of dress, but also in values. There is social libertinism and social conservatism and everything squeezed in-between. Many tend to focus on diversity in terms of surfaces, rather than diversity of values. The awkward tensions of the latter are tacitly accepted, like a squeaky-clean parent knowing his kids spent the night doing drugs in their bedroom but not mentioning it at breakfast the next morning. It’s a very British sort of relationship — traversing that thin border between tolerance and hypocrisy.

In the city 56% of Christians pray regularly. Only 32% outside of it do. London is more Christian today than it was during Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. According to David Goodhew, the director of ministerial practice at Cranmer Hall in Durham University, between 1979 and 2012 there was a 50% rise in the number of churches in the capital city. Many of them are built in boroughs of London with a large black population such as Southwark.

More from this author

In defence of wokeness

By Tomiwa Owolade

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann points out that secularisation is “almost entirely a white British phenomenon”. When the share of white British people decreases in an area, secularisation also slows down. The number of white British people who ticked no religion in the census rose from 15.4% in 2001 to 28% in 2011. By contrast, the number of black Africans who ticked no religion in that same time span rose only by a tiny amount: from 2.3% to 2.9%.

Given it’s black Africans who are driving the rise of Christianity in London, conservatives who want to renew Christianity in Britain would do best to stop relying on public pronouncements by Justin Welby and Pope Francis. Instead, they should lobby for an open-borders immigration policy for all the African countries Britain once colonised.

Many of these communities are Christians because of the British Empire. Christian missionaries may have been a part of colonialism, but their influence extended beyond the colonial government, establishing schools and discouraging practices hitherto common in pre-colonial Nigeria — human sacrifice, slavery, twin infanticide, and polygamy.

Christian missionary schools also provided the foundation for many forms of African nationalism. Pro-independence leaders, like Obafemi Awolowo and Nnamdi Azikiwe, were educated at schools established by missionaries. Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, an icon of revolutionary black African nationalism and the first leader of a black African country to gain independence from a European colonial power, was educated at a Catholic missionary school.

Meanwhile, Yoruba Christians have incorporated the God of the Old and New Testament into their own language. Whenever Yoruba people pray, for instance, they use the word Olódùmarè to refer to the God of the Bible, and this is the same name for the God of the native Yoruba religion.

Suggested article

Desmond Tutu's divine egotism

By Giles Fraser

It’s unsurprising, then, that many black Africans in Britain today emphasise the importance of Christianity to their identity. In general, black British people are more than twice as likely to say religion is very important to them. Most black British believers are Christian. Yet the centrality of Christianity to black British identity is hardly spoken about. Saka treasures his music record and his football. But on Instagram, his name is not Bukayo Saka but “God’s Child”.

Christianity can accommodate tension. It is both radical and conservative: it proclaims the downtrodden will inherit the earth and it praises life-long monogamy. It incorporates the puritanical fervour of Leviticus and the ravishing sensuality of the Song of Solomon. Its central figure is both a man who was abused and spat on and crucified, like a slave, but also a figure of transcendent divinity. What can be more beautifully Christian than the fact its future in the bosom of what was once the largest empire in the world is now being sustained by communities it once colonised?

Does Britain deserve obloquy for profiting so hugely from the Transatlantic slave trade, or credit for having abolished it? Statues of imperialists and slavers have been toppled and daubed and tossed into rivers. The Right, more rampant and paranoid than at any time since the war, denounces the ‘woke’ movement as a new and noxious threat to Western civilisation. Yet as far back as 1938, the great Lead Belly was already warning travellers to Alabama, “I advise everybody. Be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” But Belly’s warning was a long time ago.

Why has it all come alive again, and with such unappeased ferocity on both sides? The book that caught the zeitgeist in the midriff this year was Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland. It is never simplistic, always thoughtful, wry, and rueful as well as angry.

Sanghera comes from a family of Punjabi Sikhs and was brought up in Wolverhampton. He describes that upbringing in in his touching memoir The Boy with the Topknot. When he first went to school, he was unable to speak English, but he finished up at the great Wolverhampton Grammar School and then got a first in English at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He thus has the most intense imperial legacy, from Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech all the way back to the massacre of hundreds of Sikhs at Amritsar by the psychopathic temporary Brigadier Dyer.

In Empireland, he patiently explores that legacy: the loot in British museums (‘Loot’ is the Hindi word for the spoils of war, jocularly adopted by the British — a Pekingese dog found during the looting of the Summer Palace in Peking was christened Looty and sent home as a gift to Queen Victoria); the millions of post-war immigrants from the Commonwealth who have transformed England’s inner cities; above all, the abiding sense of the superiority and exceptionalism of the British race; and always in the background, the dark shadow of slavery, as abiding an embarrassment as it was profitable, best not spoken of in company — witness the silence of the Bertrams in Mansfield Park when their estates in Antigua come up in conversation.

Personally, Sanghera is grateful for everything that Britain has given him, and he acknowledges the formidable achievements of the British in India, up to and including the famous railways, one of the only vestiges of empire that ever make it on to TV, usually omitting the reality that the prime purpose in building them was to ferry troops quicker to suppress native disturbances and to carry British goods to the furthest corners of India at the cruel expense of native producers.

Sanghera refuses to tolerate the vainglorious, barely qualified praise of Empire from Right-wing historians and politicians, or their deliberate bleaching of our Island Story. Take David Starkey’s assertion, made in 2011, that “Britain is a white monoculture and schools should focus on our own history”. Sanghera’s deep-lying target is what he calls “imperial amnesia”, the pretence that the experience of the greatest empire ever known left no serious mark on the British psyche; a fifth of the world painted Peppa Pig pink, the English language the globe’s lingua franca — all this was a passing episode in our long history, which we shrugged off with a gracious smile.

Suggested reading

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

Outside the specialist literature, in the public sphere the whole experience has been muffled in a tactful silence as profound as the silence of the Bertrams. Now the argument has resurfaced with a vengeance — all the more toxic and unsettling for having been so long suppressed. At the many previous hauling downs of the Union Jack, would any royal personage have spoken as bluntly about the horrors of slavery as Prince Charles has just done on declaring Barbados a republic?

Nowhere can the extraordinary fluctuations in the British view of Empire be traced more vividly than in the rhetoric of Enoch Powell, Sanghera’s fellow-Wulfrunian whose shadow loomed so grimly over his childhood. Powell was devastated by the loss of India, but nevertheless wrote in his 1951 election address to the voters of Wolverhampton: “I BELIEVE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE. Without the empire, Britain would be like a head without a body.” But by the mid-1960s, he was claiming that the British Empire had been “a myth”, “a deception” and “an invention, all along”. That people had ever believed in it was “one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in political history”. He insisted that “England underwent no organic change as the mistress of a world empire”.

His response to Dean Acheson’s wounding taunt that “Great Britain has lost an empire but has not yet found a role” was to sign up wholeheartedly to Macmillan’s application to join the EEC: “It is as a European power… that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect… This is Britain’s world-wide role, no less than that of France or Germany.”

Powell’s recoil from this new enthusiasm was even more violent. By the time of the first referendum in 1975, he had become apocalyptic about the dangers of staying in the EU: “Belonging to the Common Market… spells living death, the abandonment of all prospect of national rebirth.”

You might think that such an erratic record would disqualify Powell from being taken seriously as a sage. Far from it. It is because he publicly charted his zigzags with such melodramatic passion that he attracted and still retains such undiminished veneration; witness the volume published in 2012 to celebrate what would have been his hundredth birthday with contributions from Roger Scruton, Simon Heffer, Andrew Roberts, Iain Duncan Smith et al. For his wanderings were their wanderings too, his disillusion their disillusion. He taught them to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Suggested reading

In defence of defending empire

By Robert Toombs

For Brexiteers, the suppression of imperial memory becomes almost as important for the future of the nation as the promotion of the project was in its heyday. Imperialist hankerings have to be explicitly denied. In This Sovereign Isle, one of the few attempts by a serious historian to justify Brexit, Robert Tombs, who in 1975 voted to stay in, argues that the Empire never did us much good: “Having an Empire had not been the source of Britain’s power and wealth… Empire had been in many ways a political, strategic and economic liability.” He insists that Brexit is in no sense a furtive effort to recreate it.

On the contrary, it is in fact a crucial trope in the Brexiteers argument that it was the European Union that was underpinned by “imperial nostalgia”. For historians like Toombs, and his fellow Cambridge historian Richard Tuck, the EU is indistinguishable — or very soon will be — from the great empires of the past. The idea of voluntarily sharing a range of powers with other nations is unimaginable to them. The simplest shared code of practice is seen as a vile infringement of sovereignty.

For Brexit Minister, David Frost, who is fast becoming the last hero of the cause, divergence is king. If as Lord Frost and Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator, have both admitted, the results so far seem less than satisfactory, that is because Brexit has not been properly tried, an argument familiar from old Communists disillusioned with an earlier god that failed.

This view of the nation sees Britain’s borders as an impermeable, indispensable protection of our national integrity. Up until the Fifties, Powell believed that “we must reduce or remove the barriers to free movement within the Empire of goods, of money, and above all, of human beings”. Now of course the free movement of human beings must be resisted without remorse: send them back, dump them on hulks in the Thames Estuary, send them to Albania, let them drown. Anything rather accept any obligation of humanity, let alone of empire.

Suggested reading

Not all the facts fit the anti-colonialist narrative

By Remi Adekoya

This was not how the dream of disentanglement was presented. Once ‘out of Europe’, we would be free, nimble, our bounds would be boundless. What was not said, perhaps not even thought, was that the Brexit dream brought with it harsher implications, of wilful exclusion of others, of hostile vigilance.

Only Nigel Farage and the ultras were prepared to deploy that harsher language, which was why they had to be kept out of sight not to frighten decent folk. With all their faults, the old empires — the Roman, the Ottoman, the British — had a certain openness, a sloppiness about ground rules. Which is partly why half the ministers in the present government are the descendants of recent immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution as well as poverty. Palmerston defended to the hilt the somewhat sleazy character of Don Pacifico, a Portuguese Jew, who happened to be a British citizen by virtue of being born in Gibraltar. These days Pacifico would be lucky to get past immigration control.

It is because Brexiteer rhetoric depends on peddling a sanitised version of the national past that we must redouble our efforts to recover every scrap of that past — the years of Empire, yes, but the years in the EEC/EU too — and not brush over any of the peculiar institutions that have adorned or polluted those pasts, including the most peculiar institution of all, the mass transportation and enslavement of millions of our fellow human beings. With all its attendant sillinesses and petty intolerance, this is a struggle that needs to be played out to the end, until we understand better exactly where we have come from and who we are. Better woke than dead to the world.

Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, first had a taste of such treatment in 2017, when he published a now famous, or notorious, article entitled, “The Case for Colonialism”. It was peer reviewed and published by a reputable scholarly journal. But then came the storm: a collective letter signed by hundreds of colleagues denounced him; editors of the journal resigned; terrified publishers pleaded with him to withdraw the article to protect them from possible violence; and abuse and death threats came flying his way.

What was his crime? To suggest, in careful and moderate terms (judge for yourselves — the piece is available here), that European empires did some good. And that some similar arrangement, through which advanced democracies might adopt some of the duties of government in failed states, might do some good today. Of course, one could object that not all European empires were benevolent or effective. One could equally suggest that few (or no) developed countries would be willing to shoulder the burdens of quasi-colonial government today. Many, even most, people might think Gilley’s ideas one-sided or unrealistic. So what? Debate — often heated — has for centuries been the way we have advanced knowledge and reached agreed position: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

But Gilley was not being offered debate. He was being threatened and silenced, labelled a heretic. Needless to say, this has become a familiar sight in Western academic life. Fortunately, he seems to have a secure tenured position; and admirably, he seems not to be easily intimidated. His new book, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire, takes the battle to a different level. “The Case for Colonialism” was a general survey: a birds-eye view of empire. A biography, of course, is the opposite: a worms-eye view from the grassroots.

More from this author

The first Englishman to change the world

By Robert Tombs

Burns, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was a distinguished man in his field, and a witty and dedicated public servant. But he was not a maker of high policy or an intellectual of wide influence. I had never heard of him; I expect few historians have. This, of course, is part of the attraction, if you want to show what governing the British Empire meant in everyday terms — not the view from Whitehall, but from an office in Nassau, a mud hut in Benin, or ultimately Christiansborg Castle in Accra. Burns started at the bottom of the colonial administration, as a 17-year-old junior revenue officer in St Kitts, and he ended as Governor of the Gold Coast. He was a true son of empire, born in the Caribbean, one of that rather small occupational class (his father was a local official), who for a few decades managed the largest empire in history on a shoestring.

Perhaps Gilley was drawn to Burns because he was “the last man” to make a principled defence of empire, as his career drew to an end at the United Nations. “It is the fashion today to decry colonialism,” Burns wrote in his memoirs, “but it has saved millions of people from worse evils … slavery and human sacrifice, corrupt judges and tyrannical chiefs, famine and disease.” Merely to say this is to break a contemporary taboo: “on balance, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” But Gilley clearly agrees.

He goes further in this lively, accessible, often amusing and frequently exciting story: he hammers home facts that outrage the “woke” consensus on colonialism. That many of its peoples wanted to be part of the empire. That they were proud to be colonial subjects. That opposition to colonial rule was rarer than the desire for more of it. That its peoples showed loyalty, even to the point of fighting for it. That officials like Burns were popular with the people they governed.

Suggested reading

How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

One small episode is intriguing in today’s context. As reforming governor of poverty-stricken British Honduras (now Belize) in the 1930s, Burns got the British Museum to return Mayan relics that had been recently discovered by a British doctor and sent to London. His plan was to set up a local museum to foster Mayan self-respect: “We see that the people have their bread but too often forget to let them have some butter with it”. The colonial government in Ceylon repatriated the royal regalia of the pre-colonial Kandy kingdom for similar reasons. But Burns never regarded the acquisition of these artefacts as theft. The Mayan ones, for instance, had been saved from oblivion.

Over the course of the period covered by Gilley’s book, and Burns’s career, the empire reached its apogee and its end. Two world wars and then the Cold War shattered its foundations. Burns became governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1941, surrounded by Vichy-controlled territory. The colonies proved, he wrote, “true loyal friends” at this time: had they wished “to push us into the sea there was little to prevent them.” Instead, they provided donations for Spitfires and volunteers for the army. Visiting Americans were astonished that Burns travelled the country without a bodyguard.

But Burns knew that the war meant the days of British rule were numbered. He was to face growing political opposition. Bizarrely, his worst problem stemmed from a case of ritual human sacrifice. The victim had been gruesomely slaughtered to mark the accession of a new chief. Important men were involved. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested the murderers, who were sentenced to death. Burns supported severity — he regarded human sacrifice, which still lingered on, as something he had a duty to suppress. But the case became politicised, opposition led by a nationalist lawyer, Joseph Danquah, who won support in Westminster against what was presented as excessive colonial harshness. Even Churchill denounced Burns.

More broadly, nationalist opposition, though limited in its popular support, acquired backing not only in Britain, but internationally. Burns foresaw all this. Indeed, he had long understood his task as being to prepare for independence, and had tried to reduce racial inequality. He forcefully promoted “Africanization”. But he believed that premature independence would endanger “the mass of the population”, especially if the Soviet Union (or indeed the Americans) weighed in.

Gilley begins his book with a poignant story that encapsulates the tragedy that ensued after the British released the reins in 1957. Burns’s erstwhile opponent, Danquah, who had seemed destined to rule Ghana, soon ended up in prison under the new dictator Kwame Nkrumah. The darling of Western progressives, feted by John F Kennedy and decorated by the Soviet Union, Nkrumah caused the economy of Ghana, hitherto Africa’s richest country, to collapse. Shortly before Danquah died of ill treatment in 1965, he wrote to Nkrumah from prison about justice and compassion, reminding him that:

“it was our people’s love of justice that compelled them to ask the British in 1843 to come back to Ghana … Now the British people have gone away … and already some people are asking … “Is this justice?”’ 

Suggested reading

America's African shame

By Ralph Leonard

This, then, is potentially a very controversial book — unless Gilley’s adversaries manage to have it written off as the work of a lone extremist, published by an obscure press and hence systematically ignored. There is an interesting story behind its publication — of at least one contract rescinded by a mainstream publisher after protests by their staff.

But why has the subject of empire become so explosive that a minority voice like Gilley’s must be silenced? If his general argument about empires were obviously false, it would be easy to refute. If his scholarship on Burns were faulty, the book could be effectively criticised. The orthodox view in academe today — that the empire was essentially repressive, exploitative, racist, violent, destructive, and so on — is backed up by numbers, research funding, and patronage. Even though its scholarship and intellectual bases are sometimes embarrassingly shoddy, it is in no danger of being overthrown.

Suggested reading

Why shouldn't the curriculum be 'Eurocentric'?

By Nigel Biggar

But this is clearly not the point. Anger is aroused by Gilley’s work not because what he says is false, but because much of it is evidently true. Scholarship aside, mere common sense suggests that a system as huge as the British Empire, which the Cambridge scholar Ronald Hyam describes as “a global mosaic of almost ungraspable complexity and staggering contrasts,” must have had some good effects. Perhaps those idealistic young people who volunteered for the colonial service, like Burns, were sometimes arrogant or naïve. But they often worked hard and selflessly to keep the peace, create economic development, provide medical treatment, build infrastructure and promote education. As Gilley’s book shows, they believed they were making the world a better place.

This is what cannot be admitted. It explodes the idea of the British empire as purely violent exploitation. It exposes the fragility of nationalist myths about struggles for freedom. Above all, it undermines the view that empire created a permanent legacy of racial oppression that still weighs on us today.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

More from this author

The demise of 'political blackness'

By Ralph Leonard

The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

Suggested article

The age of empire is back

By Aris Roussinos

Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

Suggested article

British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.