This essay considers the way in which instances of defeat have been discussed, represented and put to use in the context of the history of modern imperialism. It argues that the response to moments of defeat has often been crucial in justifying the further expansion of imperial control, as well as in mobilising popular sympathy in support of imperial action. What is appealed to, in such representations, is often not an idea of strategic or economic interest as such, but a less easily defined or contested idea of honour or valour. The long historical roots of this idea reveal, apart from anything else, just how far empire was the context for a rapprochement between a newer and an older elite.
de MontaigneMichel, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (London, Penguin, 1991[1580]), p. 236.
2.
Ibid., p. 238.
3.
SchivelbuschWolfgang, The Culture of Defeat: on national trauma, mourning and recovery (London, Granta, 2001).
4.
Ibid., p. 2.
5.
BraudelFernand, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century, Vol. 1: the structures of everyday life (London, Fontana, 1979), p. 93.
6.
de TocquevilleAlexis, Democracy in America (New York, Harper Perennial, 1966[1835/1840]), p. 283.
7.
Ibid., p. 280.
8.
Ibid., p. 283.
9.
Ibid., p. 284.
10.
Ibid.
11.
de Las CasasBartolomé, A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London, Penguin, 1992[1542]), p. 10.
12.
Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 319.
13.
Ibid., p. 318.
14.
Ibid., p. 339.
15.
MatherCotton, Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances (Boston, 1697), p. 12.
16.
Ibid., p. 33.
17.
18.
19.
Ibid., p. 303.
20.
Ibid.
21.
Ibid.
22.
SchumpeterJoseph, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York, Augustus M. Kelley, 1951[1919]), p. 93.
23.
Ibid., p. 7.
24.
Ibid., p. 96.
25.
Ibid., pp. 89–90.
26.
Ibid., p. 128.
27.
Ibid., p. 125.
28.
Ibid., p. 95.
29.
Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 16.
30.
de TocquevilleAlexis, Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 174.
31.
Ibid., p. 70.
32.
de TocquevilleAlexis, The Old Régime and the French Revolution (New York, Anchor Books, 1983[1856]), p. 169.
33.
Repeatedly, in Democracy in America, Tocqueville presents himself as a kind of ethnographer of democratic life, his strangeness defined not by his nationality, but by his nobility. It is as an aristocrat that he thus bemoans the loss of ‘freedom’ in the democratic world: ‘those same men who from time to time have upset a throne and trampled kings beneath their feet bend without resistance to the slightest wishes of some clerk’ (Democracy, op. cit., p. 688), and the same voice bemoans those who have allowed a pettifogging bureaucracy to entrammel the colonial project, so that everything in Algeria is decided ‘according to the whim of some clerk’ (Writings on Empire, op. cit., p. 105).
34.
CainP. J.HopkinsA. G., British Imperialism: innovation and expansion, 1688–1914 (London, Longman, 1993); Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: crisis and deconstruction, 1914–1990 (London, Longman, 1993).
35.
Schumpeter, op. cit., p. 130.
36.
VeblenThorstein, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, Viking Press, 1939[1915]); J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: a study (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1965[1905]).
37.
In particular, Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the present crisis’, New Left Review (I/23, 1964), pp. 26–53; and Anderson, ‘The figures of descent’, New Left Review (I/161, 1987), pp. 20–77, collected later, with other material, in English Questions (London, Verso, 1992). See also the response by E. P. Thompson, ‘The peculiarities of the English’, in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, Merlin Press, 1978).
38.
Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism: innovation and expansion, op. cit., p. 68.
39.
Anderson, ‘Origins’, op. cit., p. 34; compare Thompson (op. cit., p. 54): ‘one of the best passages in Anderson’s Origins is that in which he discusses the blood transfusion which the imperialist climax, after 1880, gave to this [aristocratic] influence’.
40.
‘In an imperial system, the iconography of power is necessarily aristocratic: it is a pure presence’ (Anderson, ‘Origins’, op. cit., p. 41). See, among many other possible references, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992); J. A. Mangan, The Games Ethic and Imperialism: aspects of the diffusion of an ideal (London, Frank Cass, 1998); Victor Kiernan, Imperialism and its Contradictions (London, Routledge, 1995), Chapters 1 and 2; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: the expositions universelles, great exhibitions and world’s fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988), Chapter 5.
41.
Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), Max Havelaar (London, Penguin, 1987[1860]).
42.
Anderson, ‘Origins’, op. cit., p. 34.
43.
RobinsonRonaldGallagherJohn, ‘The imperialism of free trade’, Economic History Review (Vol. 6, no. 1, 1953), pp. 1–15.
44.
RobinsonRonald, ‘Non-European foundations of European imperialism: sketch for a theory of collaboration’, in OwenRogerSutcliffeBob, eds, Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London, Longman, 1972).
45.
KiernanVictor, The Lords of Humankind: European attitudes towards the outside world in the imperial age (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 216.
46.
MarxKarlEngelsFredrick, On Colonialism (Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1959), p. 88.
47.
HobsonJ. A., The Psychology of Jingoism (London, E. Grant Richards, 1901), p. 67; compare Hobson, Imperialism, op. cit., p. 47.
48.
SeeleyJ. R., The Expansion of England (London, Macmillan, 1883), pp. 262; 270; 303.
49.
Ibid., p. 9.
50.
Ibid., p. 3.
51.
SummerfieldPenny, ‘Patriotism and empire: music-hall entertainment, 1870–1914’, in MacKenzieJohn, ed., Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1986).
52.
Hobson, Psychology of Jingoism, op. cit., p. 28.
53.
See Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, ed., Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (London, Penguin, 1998).
54.
ColleyLinda, Captives: Britain, empire and the world, 1600–1850 (London, Pimlico, 2003), Part 1.
55.
BaylySusan, ‘The evolution of colonial cultures: nineteenth-century Asia’, in PorterAndrew, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. III (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 466.
56.
See, for example, Laurence M. Geary, ‘“The whole country was in motion”: mendicancy and vagrancy in pre-famine Ireland’, in Jacqueline Hill and Colm Lennon, eds, Luxury and Austerity (Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 1999); Jeremy Martens, ‘Polygamy, sexual danger and the creation of vagrancy legislation in colonial Natal’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Vol. 31, no. 3, 2003); William J. Chambliss, ‘A sociological analysis of the law of vagrancy’, Social Problems (Vol. 12, no. 1, 1964).
57.
CrockerWalter, Nigeria: a critique of British colonial administration (New York, Books for Libraries Press, 1971), p. 130. While there are problems, in my opinion, with the work of Homi Bhabha, both stylistic and intellectual, he deserves much credit for drawing attention to the strange paranoia that beset the imperial project in this respect; see Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, Routledge, 1994).
58.
‘Showbiz imperialism: the case of Peter Lobengula’, in MacKenzie, op. cit.; on the metropolitan representation of empire more generally, see MacKenzie, ‘Empire and metropolitan cultures’, in Porter, op. cit.; MacKenzie, ‘The popular culture of empire in Britain’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds, The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. IV (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999); Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (Harlow, Pearson Longman, 2006), Chapter 5.
59.
AttridgeSteve, Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Chapter 1; MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), Chapter 2.
60.
MacDonaldRobert H., The Language of Empire: myths and metaphors of popular imperialism (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1994), Chapter 3.
61.
Tocqueville, Writings on Empire, op. cit., p. 85.
62.
Baden-PowellRobert, Scouting for Boys: a handbook for instruction in good citizenship (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004[1908]); Rudyard Kipling, The Light that Failed (London, Penguin, 1995[1890]).
63.
Derounian-Stodola, op. cit., p. 103.
64.
See, for example, Sarah Britton, ‘“Come and see the empire by the all red route!” Anti-imperialism and exhibitions in interwar Europe’, History Workshop Journal (Vol. 69, 2010); Nicholas Owen, ‘Critics of empire’, in Brown and Louis, op. cit.
65.
UsherwoodPaulSpencer-SmithJenny, Lady Butler, Battle Artist, 1846–1933 (Gloucester, Sutton, 1987), pp. 76–7; see also John Springhall, ‘“Up guards and at them!” British imperialism and popular art, 1880–1914’, in MacKenzie, op. cit.
66.
Usherwood and Spencer-Smith, op. cit., p. 15. There is patriotism in this image, of course. In both Remnants of an Army and The Roll Call, a distant standard remains upright, a sign that there has been no surrender, no conclusive defeat; see also Matthew Lalumia, ‘Realism and anti-aristocratic sentiment in Victorian depictions of the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies (Vol. 27, no. 1, 1983), pp. 25–51.
67.
Thompson, op. cit., p. 67.
68.
The three-and-a-half novels in Farrell’s ‘empire’ series are Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, The Singapore Grip and, incomplete and posthumously published, The Hill Station. Troubles finds a wonderful objective correlate for the collapse of empire in the crumbling glamour of a grand hotel for ‘the quality’ on Ireland’s south-east coast. Farrell may or may not have come across Thompson’s description of the aristocracy in the late imperial period as being like ‘the staff at an elaborate and prestigious hotel, who could in no way influence the comings and goings of clientele … but who could arrange the ball and appoint a Master of Ceremonies’, but this describes the action of the novel remarkably well (Thompson, op. cit., p. 55).
69.
ArendtHannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London, Harvest/Harcourt, 1973), p. 73.
70.
Ibid., p. 137.
71.
Ibid., p. 150.
72.
Veblen, op. cit., p. 145.
73.
Arendt, op. cit., p. 188.
74.
Ibid., p. 190.
75.
Ibid., p. 192.
76.
Ibid., p. 299.
77.
Ibid., pp. 193, 192 and 196 respectively.
78.
‘Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations – to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike’, Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest (London, Penguin, 1977), pp. 85–6.
79.
PagdenAnthony, Peoples and Empires: Europeans and the rest of the world, from antiquity to the present (London, Phoenix, 2001), p. 12.
80.
See Jason Burke, The 9/11 Wars (London, Allen Lane, 2011), Chapter 4.
81.
MannMichael, ‘American empires: past and present’, Canadian Review of Sociology (Vol. 45, no. 1, 2008); although compare George Steinmetz, ‘Return to empire: the new US imperialism in comparative perspective’, Sociological Theory (Vol. 23, no. 4, 2005); David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London, Verso, 2003), Chapters 6 and 7.
82.
HardtMichaelNegriAntonio, Empire (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000).
83.
CoatneyLou, ‘Film reviews: Black Hawk Down’, American Historical Review (Vol. 107, no. 4, 2002), p. 1338.
84.
MillerFrankVarleyLynn, 300 (Milwaukee, OR, Dark Horse Books, 1999).
85.
Schivelbusch, op. cit., pp. 292 and 294.
86.
Burke, op. cit., p. 45.
87.
Colley, op. cit., esp. Chapter 1 and epilogue.
88.
Ottobah CugoanoQuobna, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (London, Penguin, 1999[1787]), pp. 69–70.
