Some years back, I bought the Penguin paperback The Venetian Empire - first published in 1980 - and thoroughly enjoyed reading the account of six centuries of a successful republican city state; whose empire consisted of islands, isolated fortresses and trading routes. An early run-out for the first stages of the British Empire? Now, I have tackled Morris' first volume of the trilogy on the Rise and Decline of the British Empire. It is a huge canvas but, by having chapters concentrating 'patch-like' on particular issues in particular areas, Morris covers much ground coherently and knowledgably.
Morris (I hesitate to use 'he' or 'she', as in 1973 his outward persona was still James, rather than the later Jan) has the gift of words and what could have been a tedious account is replete with compelling images of personalities and places. In the years prior to writing the book, Morris visited many of the places described and this adds to its authority and pace of narrative. One moment the mindset of the Transvaal Boers is discussed; then Thuggee in the sub continent; then Lord Durham laying down the law in Canada; then the appalling story of the Famine in Ireland. The book continues with the Indian Mutiny; the search for the source of the Nile; the Jamaican Rebellion; the Ashanti Wars; Parnell in Ireland; and 'the martyr of Empire' - Charles George Gordon. Along the way, Morris delivers some memorable sentences (truths?): It was only to be expected that the improving instinct would presently father the interfering impulse, as the evangelical power of Britain pursued new fields of action; ...Force was ever the fuel of empires...and inevitably Victoria's was very soon at war; ...the conviction of Empire was increasingly reinforced by a sense of duty, and became heavily veneered with religiosity; ...the British army was the striking force of the imperial mission...and it is said that there were only two years during Victoria's reign when the British Army was not somewhere fighting a skirmish;...yet there were forebodings. To many the Empire seemed too diffuse an organism, set against taut new Powers like Germany or the United States, and throughout the 1870s and 1880s there were repeated attempts to give it logic. By the penultimate chapter, Scramble for Africa, Morris is arguing that the idea of Empire was becoming vulgarized, like some fastidious sport cheapened by arrivistes...Africa and the New Imperialism tainted this conception...the Africa scramble was a chronicle of squalor - chiefs gulled, tribes dispossessed, vast inheritances signed away with a thumb-print or a shaky cross...avarice was the most obvious motive.
The chapter that shocked me most was No. 23 - The End of the Tasmanians: The obliteration of a subject race. There really can be no defence of this major blot on the Empire's story. Morris starts the chapter: Empire was Race. For an illustration of this truth at its cruellest and most poignant, let us see what happened to the aboriginal people of Tasmania, when they fell beneath the aegis of Victoria's Empire. Morris describes the Tasmanians as a seemingly insubstantial people. Polygamous by custom, they were affectionate by disposition, and merry, singing in a sweet Doric harmony, and dancing strenuous, hilarious and frequently lascivious animal dances. When the British settled in Tasmania the natives were defined as enemies, treated more and more as predators or vermin. Sometimes they were hunted just for fun, on foot or on horseback. They were flushed out and some 200 were sent to nearby Flinders Island, there to rot away...they wasted, declined to have babies, and grew thinner, and more morose, and more hopelessly melancholic. Eventually, 12 men, 22 women, 10 youngsters were taken to a disused penal settlement twenty-five miles from Hobart. By 1855 only 16 were alive. The last male Tasmanian was an alcoholic whaling seaman, 'King Billy' Lanney, who died of chronic diarrhoea in the Dog & Partridge. His skull was later dug up for the Royal Society of Tasmania's collection. The full page photograph of Truganini, the last Tasmanian (who died in 1876), is sobering. Her body was also dug up and her skeleton, strung upon wires and upright in a box, became for many years the most popular exhibit in the Tasmanian Museum.
It is in this Chapter that Morris quotes the famous resolutions passed by a New England assembly of Britons. (1) The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. Voted. (2) The Lord has given the earth or any part of it to his chosen People. Voted. (3) We are his chosen people. Voted.
Morris succeeds is putting flesh on the names of those who carved out and ran the Empire - many of whom have striking monuments in London. Lord Auckland, Charles Buller. Lord Chelmsford, Bishop Colenso, George Colley, Edward Eyre, Sir Bartle Frere, Charles Goldie. Gordon of Khartoum, Henry Havelock, Sir Henry and John Lawrence, Frederick Lugard, Charles Napier, Sir James Outram, Cecil Rhodes, Sir George Simpson, Henry Stanley and "All" Sir Garnet Wolseley. A brilliant cast in an uneven Play.
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Interestingly, The Spectator has just reviewed a biography of Morris (the jaunty travel writer and pioneer of modern gender transition): Jan Morris: Life from Both Sides. The Trilogy, Pax Britannica, is rightly praised but, inevitably, the review deals at some length with her 'transition', the event which defined her life. I have no comment to make on this aspect, but am glad she wrote the trilogy when she did, before she became more avowedly republican and Welsh nationalist.
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