Imperialism

Hélène von Bismarck twice quotes (in an officiously corrected version) Robert Burns’s lines: ‘O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us!’ She is congratulating herself on assuming this role in writing a book about Britain as a German. There is no doubt that out of a mixture of self-regard, curiosity about other people’s points of view and the occasional outburst of ribald mockery, the British have long enjoyed accounts of themselves by visitors. Whether these narratives possess any accuracy or unusual perception is another question, but there seems no doubt that a British audience exists even for ones of the utmost mediocrity and banality.

Slavery was – and importantly continues to be – a moral abomination. Its existence in the 21st century is a disgrace. Whole communities such as the Uighurs are subject to forced labour; two years ago it was estimated that 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China. And slavery is a problem much closer to home. Immigrants in the West are also at risk. A student of mine, an Indian national, enquired about the possibility of working at a Brick Lane curry house. He was told that they would ‘employ’ him, but that he would have to surrender his passport and sleep in a locked room on the premises.

This is a brave and learned book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the history of Africa; who has taken sides in the recent quarrel about ‘Rhodes Must Fall’, in Oxford or other parts of the world; or who wants to entrench themselves in contrary positions in our apparent ‘culture wars’. It is the biography of a vicar’s son, born in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in 1853, who went as a teenager to Africa to join his elder brother who’d bought a plot of land in Natal. One day, walking past a stream by the side of a field, he noticed some pebbles gleaming especially brightly. They were diamonds. By the time Cecil Rhodes enrolled as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford, aged 20, he had an annual income of £23,000 – the equivalent of about £1.

Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people. He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time.

‘Walking by the banks of the Chao Praya on a breezy evening after a day of intense heat,’ writes Sunil Amrith at the start of his melancholic new book, ‘I struggled to connect the scene before me.’ While the river that flows through Bangkok looked idyllic, ‘crowded with noisy pleasure boats festooned with lights’, Amrith was struck by the realisation that half of the city ‘could be underwater by the end of this century’. This thought was the latest stage in a process that he says has taken him time to work out: ‘I can no longer separate the crisis of life on Earth from our concerns with justice and human freedom that inspired me to become a historian in the first place.

It is hard to imagine any Victorian man living a fuller life in a flimsier body than Robert Louis Stevenson – and he certainly wouldn’t have managed it without the support of his partner and wife of several decades, Fanny Van de Grift. Born in Edinburgh on 13 November 1850, Louis suffered from countless childhood illnesses that limited his activity to reading books, writing stories and staging ‘pasteboard theatre’ productions with his nanny, or else travelling to health spas in Marseille, Genoa and Naples. He strongly resisted his father’s efforts to enlist him in his own career as a lighthouse designer, and at Edinburgh University the only thing he excelled at was truancy.

Were trains to blame for the travel writing boom of the 1980s? When Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar was published in 1975, it sold 1.5 million copies and launched a publishing phenomenon. At first, long-distance train journeys conjured all the romance of the golden age of travel: leather luggage, first-class compartments and the billowing steam from an antique engine. But with each new imitator, the format became increasingly stale, and now train trips suggest the cushioned charm of Michael Portillo’s never-ending BBC series. Nevertheless, as Clare Hammond shows in On the Shadow Tracks, rail journeys can still take the traveller deep inside a country.

Monarchy was as characteristic of the 19th century as nationalism and revolution. The Almanach de Gotha was a better guide to power than the Communist Manifesto. Constitutional monarchy, in particular, was considered the panacea of the age. On the first morning of her reign, Queen Victoria announced: ‘I have promised to respect and love the constitution of my native country.’ The Times declared her ‘steeped in the spirit of the constitution’. Gladstone said: ‘All the principles of the constitution have been observed by the Queen... in a manner more perfect than has ever been known.’ In reality, as Anne Somerset’s magnificent, disturbing and innovative history of Queen Victoria and her prime ministers shows, this was untrue.

In 1960, Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo tell us, Lucian Freud went to the Goya Museum in Castres in search of a particular painting. He wanted to create portraits that were character studies and ‘not mere likenesses’, and Goya’s collective portrait ‘La Real Compañía de Filipinas’,a study in human nullity that represented ‘absolutely nothing’, was just what he was looking for. Fernández-Armesto explains: The work belongs in the tradition of what might be called Spanish ‘anti-portraiture’, from Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ to Goya’s own devastatingly candid royal family group, ‘Familia de Carlos IV’, moral as well as physical delineations of regal vacuity.

It happened by accident. In 1829 the naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was trying to hatch a moth pupa. He placed it in a sealed glass container, along with some soil and dried leaves, and set it aside. Sometime later he was surprised to find that a fern and some grass had taken root in the soil, despite having no water. As Sathnam Sanghera writes in Empireworld, the discovery ‘revolutionised the logistics of international plant transportation’. Suddenly there was a means of securely transporting seeds and seedlings across vast distances. Empireworld is a sequel to Sanghera’s wildly successful Empireland. Where the latter examined the legacies of empire in Britain, this book seeks to apply that template to the world.

Tribal rivalries have existed from humanity’s beginning and have fuelled the creation of every prestigious monument ever built. By the Age of Science we were building not pyramids but ironclads and submarines fighting for ascendancy at sea, expanding our empires in spite of an ever-growing movement for colonial independence. The Spanish-American war of 1898 added the United States to the list of great nations believing it to be their destiny, even duty, to bring their kind of progress to the world. Many understood that achieving overwhelming technological power as a nation guaranteed that no antagonist would dare attack. Limited by agreements made after the first world war, Britain no longer ruled the waves.

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the 1st century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s ‘sense of resentment and frustration had festered’, writes Tom Holland. ‘Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt as something raw’, Domitian moved away with a wife whom his family disliked, ‘doomed forever to be a supernumerary’, paranoid, attracting gossip, avoiding any company in which ‘innocent mention of baldness’ might be viewed as ‘mockery of his own receding hairline’. In most judgments by posterity this Prince Harry of the early empire fulfilled all this lack of early promise. Big brother Titus became emperor only briefly.