Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Ferguson Niall

Author:Ferguson, Niall [Ferguson, Niall]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241958513
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-10-24T16:00:00+00:00

TORY-ENTALISM

For many British officials in India, toiling for years on end in a far-flung land, the thought of ‘home’ – not simulated in Simla, but the real thing, to which a man might one day retire – provided consolation in the heat of the plains. As the Victorian era drew to a close, however, the expatriates’ memories of home became increasingly at odds with the reality. Theirs was a nostalgic, romantic vision of an unchanging rural England, of squires and parsons, thatched cottages and forelock-tugging villagers. It was an essentially Tory vision of a traditional, hierarchical society, ruled by landed aristocrats in a spirit of benign paternalism. The fact that Britain was now an industrial giant – where as early as 1870 most people lived in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants – was somehow forgotten.

A similar process happened in the other direction, however, as people in Britain imagined India. ‘What should they know of England, who only England know?’ Kipling once asked, a reproach to his countrymen who ruled a global Empire without setting foot outside the British Isles. He might have put the question to Queen Victoria herself. She was delighted when Parliament bestowed on her the title of Empress of India (at her own suggestion) in 1877. But she never actually went near the place. What Victoria preferred was for India to come to her. By the 1880s her favourite servant was an Indian named Abdul Karim, also known as the ‘Munshi’, or teacher. He came with her to Osborne in 1887, the personification of the India the Queen liked to imagine: courteous, deferential, obedient, faithful. Not long after that, the Queen-Empress added a new wing to Osborne House, the centrepiece of which was the spectacular Durbar Room. The work was overseen by Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard’s father, and was clearly inspired by the ornately carved interiors of Mughal palaces: indeed, parts of it look like a white version of Delhi’s Red Fort. The Durbar Room offers another distinctly backward-looking vision, giving no hint of the new India of railways, coalmines and cotton mills the British were bringing into being. In this, it was typical of the way the British liked to see India in the 1890s. It was a fantasy.

Then, in 1898, the Marquess of Salisbury’s Conservative government appointed a Viceroy whose whole career in India was an attempt to turn that fantasy into a reality.

To many of his contemporaries, George Nathaniel Curzon was a most insufferable person. Born into an aristocratic Derbyshire family who liked to trace their line back to the Norman Conquest, he had risen like an arrow through Eton, Oxford, the House of Commons and the India Office. In truth, there was nothing effortless about his famous superiority.* Entrusted as a child to a deranged governess, he was periodically forced to parade through the village wearing a large conical cap bearing the words ‘liar’, ‘sneak’ and ‘coward’. (‘I suppose’, he later mused, ‘no children wellborn and well-placed ever cried so much or so justly.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.