|
Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2014 1:37:43 GMT
The question of whether, say, India or Nigeria are “better off” because of British imperialism contains an inherent contradiction: before colonialism there were no states called India or Nigeria. But to prove the horrors of imperial rule — or to dispute the historians who recommend that the United States self-consciously adopt Britain’s former “burden” — one has only to examine the catastrophic choices of British colonialists that continue to influence events today. GHOSTS OF EMPIRE Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World By Kwasi Kwarteng Illustrated. 466 pp. PublicAffairs. $29.99. “Our only justification for 200 years of power was unification,” says a character in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, reflecting on the ugliness of partitioning the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. “But we’ve divided one composite nation into two and everyone at home goes round saying what a swell the new viceroy is for getting it sorted out so quickly.” While it is true that colonial policy was often formulated in London, it is equally true that Britain could become the greatest power on earth only by delegating power — either to Britons who served as imperial representatives or to local forces intent on doing the empire’s bidding. But Kwasi Kwarteng, in this fine book, argues that the empire granted far too much authority to the wrong people. “Accidents and decisions made on a personal, almost whimsical, level have had a massive impact on international politics,” Kwarteng writes. “Ghosts of Empire” explores six cases where this impact was felt: Iraq, Nigeria, Sudan, Hong Kong, Kashmir and Burma. This is a list without many success stories, and Kwarteng, who is a Conservative member of Parliament with Ghanaian parents and who claims to want to transcend “sterile” debates about the empire, ends up making a damning case. “The British Empire is a bizarre model to follow for fostering stability in today’s world,” he says. “Indeed, much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policy making.” Kwarteng’s examples all provide him with common themes. Although the kingdom of Iraq, which arose from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, was under an imperial mandate only until 1932, the British retained significant control until the late 1950s. Yet by repeatedly putting its faith in unpopular rulers who could be depended upon to ensure a steady supply of oil, London inadvertently set off several nationalist explosions. A string of army coups, starting in 1958, eventually led to Saddam Hussein. Kwarteng convincingly argues that the trust placed in the pro-Western Hashemite rulers was largely a function of the snobbery and arrogance of the people who actually administered the empire. One sees the same arrogance in London’s treatment of Africa. Britons in Nigeria had an innate distrust of educated “natives” and decided to grant resources and autonomy to more traditional tribal chieftains, who were intent on pursuing local, not national, interests. Britain’s decision to join the Islamic north of the country with non-Muslim settlements in the south fed tribal conflicts and insurgencies that have lasted to this day. In Sudan, meanwhile, British authorities ruled the north and south separately, ultimately to calamitous effect. Southern Sudan has recently become a separate country after decades of bloodshed, and the last 10 years have seen unconscionable war and genocide in the Darfur region, which was mindlessly tacked on to Sudan during World War I. Kwarteng quotes Rudyard Kipling, who, with astonishing condescension, wrote that the Sudanese “will honestly believe that they themselves created . . . the easy life which they were bought at so heavy a price.” Here as elsewhere, Kwarteng is critical but not patronizing, allowing the reader to grasp the motivations of the British while simultaneously seeing the shortcomings of their decisions. Hong Kong, with its successful economy and relatively free society, is the one example in this well-written book that does not quite fit Kwarteng’s pattern. He ably conveys the unwillingness of British administrators to allow a functioning representative government. But it is still worth pointing out that the partial autonomy China has granted Hong Kong — largely because of the territory’s history as a British possession — compares favorably with the liberties allowed on the mainland. Kwarteng is extremely effective at showing the problems with British policy, but his discussion of Kashmir reveals the limitations of his analysis. Yes, British rule in this beautiful state (which, despite its largely Muslim population, became part of majority-Hindu India after partition) was shortsighted. And yes, by ensuring Hindu domination in the century leading up to partition, British civil servants exacerbated the region’s problems. But Kashmir became an incredibly dangerous and volatile place only because of the much larger decision to partition India into two countries. If that fateful decision had not been made, the myopia of officials in Kashmir would have been localized. Similarly, in Iraq, the selfishness and greed of British civil servants must be set alongside the disturbing lack of knowledge about Sunnis and Shiites that was exhibited by officials in London (like Winston Churchill, then the secretary of state for the colonies), who insisted on British control in the first place. Big decisions can also have big consequences. Kwarteng does not spend much time on religion, even though the British “legacy of individualism” that he highlights no doubt had something to do with the country’s Protestant character. Delegating authority probably contributed to British military successes in wars against more hierarchical Catholic powers like Spain and France, but the darker side of this aspect of Protestant individualism is visible throughout Kwarteng’s book. This is not to say that the Spanish or French empires were any less brutal than the British Empire — on balance they were probably more savage — but for the sake of his argument Kwarteng should have dwelt longer on how their religious beliefs influenced Britain’s imperialists. In Simon Raven’s novel “Sound the Retreat,” a colonel in the British Army is having a conversation with an Indian friend on the eve of independence. After being informed that Indians “wish to order their own affairs,” the officer turns sour: “It’s your fault. You will insist on the British leaving.” To which his Indian interlocutor responds, “Partly because we do not like being spoken to in that tone of voice.” The British Empire would never have been what it was if its servants did not believe that they were part of a mission civilisatrice, something larger than themselves. But as George Orwell detailed in his fiction and essays about Burma, one of Kwarteng’s case studies, you cannot really rule over people for too long without losing a bit of your own humanity, no matter what your original mission. It is no wonder that the men tasked with administering the British Empire were too often loftily arrogant and too often inclined to take the tone that Raven identifies. Kwarteng’s book does not condescend toward its subjects, even if they were much too condescending toward the people they viewed as their own subjects.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Apr 18, 2014 13:25:42 GMT
Churchill and Empire: Portrait of an Imperialist Lawrence James Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp.464, £25, ISBN: 9780297869146 A fraught subject, this, and one which makes it difficult to sustain undiluted admiration for Churchill. Lawrence James is the doyen of empire historians, and has traced the great man’s engagement with the enormous fact of the British empire. What emerges is a sense of the individual nations being dealt with at the end of the day, when everything that really mattered had already been handled, and being subject to a series of trivial dismissals, outbursts of comic rage, and with little effort made to understand what might be an appropriate way to govern these immense territories. I am sorry to place a limit on anyone’s admiration for Churchill, but there it is. It is important for historians to make an effort to understand individuals by the standards of their own day, and not ours. There is a dismal school that finds it rewarding to debate whether Napoleon was homophobic or not, but for the most part we have to try to understand where a figure’s standards of judgment and thought stood in relation to the spectrum of opinion of his own day. Churchill’s attitudes to the empire, and in particular to the races that the empire ruled, performed an interesting trajectory while not actually changing very much at all in the course of a long life. Churchill, as a young officer and journalist in Sudan and South Africa, and subsequently as the Liberal under-secretary for the colonies from 1905, actually had some bien-pensant aspects. In an office where it was perfectly all right to talk of Jan Smuts as having ‘all the cunning of his race and calling’ or refer to a freedom fighter as ‘the Mad Mullah’, Churchill’s attitudes were relatively sound. Though he believed in ‘the gulf which separates the African negro from the immemorial civilizations of India and China’, he also stood up for the importance of treating Africans well, promising during the Transvaal crisis that ‘British influence will continue to be a kindly and benignant influence over subject races’. If this now sounds extraordinarily quaint, it is important to remember that Churchill, at this point, was within the main body of British political thought about race and empire. Compared with people like Prince Heinrich of Prussia, who airily said that Britain and Germany were natural allies because ‘the other large European nations are not white men’, Churchill was quite a generous thinker. There is no question, however, that as Churchill’s career progressed, his thinking and his way of talking about these subjects stayed in an embarrassingly late-Victorian mode. Leo Amery observed that ‘the key to Winston is to realise that he is Mid-Victorian, steeped in the politics of his father’s period, and unable ever to get the modern point of view’. On questions of race, his way of talking would have been considered extreme even by many thoughtful Victorians, as an eye-opening paragraph of James’s demonstrates. A Kenyan delegation was ‘a vulgar class of coolies’; Arabs could be ‘as trustworthy as a King Cobra’ and ‘worthless’; black men could be ‘blackamoors’ and even ‘niggers’, a term which was never acceptable in Indian or African imperial circles; the Chinese were ‘chinks’ and ‘pigtails’, and so on. To say, of India, that ‘highly educated Hindus’ were planning to take it ‘into the deepest depths of Oriental tyranny and despotism’, shows how little Churchill had tried to understand even Nehru and Gandhi. ‘I hate the Indians,’ he observed in the 1940s. ‘They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.’ This attitude may very well have sharpened the hostility of the generation of Indian leaders, such as Bose, and strengthened the hand of individual factions in negotiation. Gandhi called some of the offers he was being given ‘a post-dated cheque on a bank which is obviously going bust’. The whole thing was made very much more straightforward by having to deal with a Prime Minister who, in 1941, was still talking about ‘Indian soldiers from all parts of Hindustan’. Interestingly, the former colonies still maintain a great deal of interest and enthusiasm for Churchill. My own husband Zaved, who is a Bengali born in 1970, reports that his grandfather, a lawyer of exactly the grand argumentative Calcutta type Churchill had most difficulty with, gave his favourite grandson the nickname ‘Churchill’ — on the amused grounds that my husband cried excessively as a small child. The notion of Churchill as a lachrymose complainant is an unusual one, glimpsed by a remote, intelligent observer. But what were they supposed to think of him? The most serious blot on Churchill’s imperial record, I think, is the Bengal famine of 1943-4. As Max Hastings describes in his All Hell Let Loose, the loss of Burma was followed by a series of floods and cyclones, wrecking the 1942 harvest. The suffering was immense. In his exceptional 2011 memoir, The World in Our Time, Tapan Raychaudhuri describes the Bengalis’ plight. These people began to beg, very ineffectually at first. They asked for food and nothing else because cash was useless in a market where prices went up several points every day. Soon they realized that nobody had food to spare. The begging for rice, bhat, stopped. The hitherto unheard of plea, ‘give us some gruel’ (phyan dao go) — the water one throws out when cooking rice — was now heard on every street in the city. The half-dead soon began to join the ranks of the dead. An incomparably harrowing series of drawings from the famine by the great Bengali painter Zainul Abedin are among the masterpieces of Indian art. For Churchill at the time, the Indians ‘must learn to look after themselves as we have done… there is no reason why all parts of the British empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done’. Still more disgracefully, he said in a jocular way that ‘the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks’. Lawrence James, though generally very fair-minded, comes close to excusing this by saying that ‘shortening the war would and did reduce suffering everywhere… famine relief in Bengal was never given high priority’. Three million people, perhaps more, died of starvation. I don’t believe that if three million Welshmen died, the same criteria would have been used by Churchill to avert his eyes. James has addressed this difficult and disappointing subject with tact and eloquence. The attention Churchill paid to the empire was, for so much of the time, fairly incidental, and much of the book has to be a discussion of foreign policy questions which had implications for the empire. He very sensibly avoids laying blame on the empire as a whole, remarking that ‘the quantification of one bad deed against a good one achieves nothing’, and that anyone can balance the Amritsar massacre against the establishment of a medical school at Agra. Still, you have to ask how well Churchill did in this area, and despite an unusual degree of first-hand experience of Africa and India, his record, in this scrupulously fair telling, is disappointing.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on May 1, 2014 4:44:08 GMT
Fredrik Logevall, Author and Professor of International Studies and History at Cornell University, presented "Embers of War: Why Were We in Vietnam?" on Wednesday, February 27. The lecture examined Vietnam in the post-1945 era, and explored the factors that put the US on its collision course with history. The lecture was sponsored by The Schemel Forum. 7 May 1954 is a day that helped to alter the course of American history. It was on this day that French troops, under siege for two months by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh forces, were roundly defeated, signaling the end of France’s efforts to re-exert control over its former Southeast Asian colony. American involvement, however, was to begin to ramp up and continue for the next 21 years. Fredrik Logevall’s ‘Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam’, is a fascinating examination of the decades leading up to American escalation and direct troop involvement in 1965. Logevall does an excellent job in his historical analysis, not suggesting any one factor existing as the primary determinant of the eventual outcome in Vietnam, but rather surmising that the story is a product of ‘alternative political choices, major and minor, considered and taken, reconsidered and altered, in Paris and Saigon, in Washington and Beijing, and in the Vietminh’s headquarters in the jungles of Tonkin. It’s a reminder to us that to decision makers of the past, the future was merely a set of possibilities’. It is these choices, driven as they were by political and cultural factors both inside and outside Vietnam itself, that show the repetition of flawed and mistaken strategy by the French and then the Americans, to understand the driving forces behind the Vietnamese experience in any way. This was further distorted by the balancing act of appeasing the European colonial powers, France and Great Britain, Roosevelt’s desire to aid development and future independence, and the shifting geopolitical map and spheres of influence that arose after Second World War. Roosevelt spoke passionately about his dislike for European colonialism and imperialism, often suggesting that American involvement in the war was partly the responsibility of the Europeans. ‘There has never been, there isn’t now and there never will be, any race of people on earth fit to serve as masters over their fellow men … We believe that any nationality, no matter how small, has the inherent right to nationhood’. Early in the war, Roosevelt would press the issue of his anti-colonial sentiment, only to be rebuffed for fear of creating a chasm in the alliance. By the time that Truman assumed the presidency after Roosevelt’s death, the landscape had changed. Logevall points out that Ho Chi Minh had allied himself with the Americans during the war against Japan, but the increasing pressure from several sides rendered a continuation virtually impossible. The Vietminh were not just a nationalist party, but also Communist. This political reality placed the United States squarely in a conundrum. Logevall argues that we could have continued support of Ho Chi Minh, facilitating independence, but also creating a communist state in Southeast Asia. Additionally, this support of Ho and refusing French requests for military aid to combat the Vietminh ran the risk of losing French support in confronting the Soviet threat throughout Europe. This placed the administration in a very awkward position of trying to honor alliances while balancing the stated desires, at least publicly under Roosevelt, of fostering independence and supporting self-determination. The United States needed to weigh the various options available, and decide what it deemed the least damaging. In retrospect, the American path only aided the French in prolonging what turned out to be the inevitable; indeed, the French vastly underestimated the strength and resolve of the Vietminh, and their uncanny ability to adapt to circumstances in the field. The French seemed to view the reclamation of what they considered their ‘crown jewel’ in Southeast Asia as a foregone conclusion, when in fact they failed to not only grasp their own severe shortcomings and future reliance on the United States financially, where regional sentiment would ultimately lie in the struggle, but how determined Ho and the Vietminh were to resist. Embers of War: The Fall of An Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam Fredrik Logevall New York, NY, Random House, 2012, ISBN: 9780375504426; 864pp.; Price: £25.00 Conventional wisdom now reflects the assumption that the sheer passion for nationalism and demands for self-determination were keys to Ho’s ultimate victory over the French, and the subsequent stalemate with the American war machine. Logevall might have examined this more closely in an effort to examine Ho’s motivations, because they were not merely nationalist in nature. Upon ascension to power in the North, Ho ordered large-scale political assassinations of non-communists and massive land reforms in the wake of the Geneva Accords, further consolidating power in the North. A greater understanding of these factors would generate debate as to what Ho’s true motivations were, and might dispel a bit of the mythology of Ho’s nationalism. In a very real sense, the conflict was both ‘nationalist’ as well as ‘political-ideological’. Ho Chi Minh was in fact a very dedicated Communist. Assuming that political ideology played a distant secondary role in this conflict is shortsighted. Attempts to dismiss that aspect of the conflict only complicate attempts at analysis. Through Logevall’s detailed research, readers are able to get a true sense of how diplomacy and politics played a huge role in American decision making during these years. Understanding that there was serious debate within the administration as to what role the United States should play is a very important aspect to how decisions were made, and the ramifications of those decisions. Equally important, Logevall describes the dichotomy within Eisenhower’s decision making. Although Eisenhower did not publicly support sending American troops into the field, he very readily embraced the ‘domino theory’, which would come to dominate American Cold War foreign policy decisions for the next several decades. Much like Korea and other emerging ‘hot spots’ throughout the world, Eisenhower was committed to not letting the South fall into Ho’s hands, and felt the best course of action was to prop up Diem’s regime as a way of doing so. As was so often the case during Vietnam, the United States failed to truly understand Ho’s resolve. None of this is to say that Ho did not face large problems of his own. His land reforms, which he ultimately abandoned, were a source of contention, as they were unpopular. One of Ho’s biggest hurdles was that he wanted to consolidate power, but simultaneously wanted to appear as a nationalist, which would appeal to the Vietnamese people. Ultimately, the Vietminh were able to adapt, at least publicly, and the United States was either unwilling or incapable of doing so. It was a clear indication that the United States had learned very little from the French experience there, in what Logevall describes as ‘self-delusion’. The idea being that despite substantial evidence to the contrary, American decision makers convinced themselves that the American experience and the French experience were not the same, and had no correlation to one another. Ultimately, Logevall contends that the attitude of the United States was that it could be successful where the French failed, but the greatest flaw in that assessment was to ignore not only the Vietminh resistance, but also failure to accurately gauge the attitudes and interests of the South Vietnamese people. They were being used as pawns in a political chess match, where entire governments were being built and propped up by what they saw as another colonial power. In many ways, the Diem regime was worse for the South Vietnamese than the Vietminh. Despite the fact that Diem was stridently anticommunist, he was also not a nationalist. His ruling interest lay in maintaining a class structure that would allow for continued control over the peasants and farmers that made up much of the nation. The realization never occurred to the American decision makers that they were yet another foreign power exerting imperial control on the Vietnamese people, and sentiment would ultimately begin to shift to Ho Chi Minh and the Vietminh, further complicating an already muddled and disjointed American approach. To simply expect to win based on military might and deep pocketbooks, the Americans arrogantly miscalculated, ignoring the very real political component of the conflict, and choosing to ignore history. Additionally, the broadening of the Cold War, and the expectation by much of Western Europe that the United States would shoulder much of the financial and military burden in deterring Soviet aggression there, probably contributed to a lack of specific planning and strategy as it pertained to the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. Using prior strategy of conventional war as their guide, decision makers mistakenly developed plans and strategies that would not apply in Vietnam. By the time that Johnson committed to ground troops and direct confrontation in 1965, Ho’s forces were battle-tested and American troops were in no way prepared for the opposition that they would face for the next decade. Logevall has written a fascinating book, perhaps the definitive work on this aspect of the greater Vietnam issue. Most do not understand the importance of the events that led to direct American involvement, and this is a very accessible, well-researched work that captures how and why decisions were made during and after the French disaster. This was a very crucial time period, where much of the American strategy was developed, and it reveals the wrong assumptions, self-delusion, and miscalculations that were an enormous part of the American experience there. These are important pieces to more full understanding American involvement, and ultimately, American failure.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on May 8, 2014 21:55:12 GMT
The following eyewitness account of the struggle between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Sir Winston Churchill, during negotiations for the Atlantic Charter at the naval base of Argentia in Newfoundland in March 1941, is taken from the book As He Saw It, by Elliott Roosevelt (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946). Elliott Roosevelt, FDR’s son, was his aide at all but one of the Big Three conferences during World War II. A continuous theme throughout the book, is the clash between the two leaders on the issue of Britain’s colonies, as FDR fought for his vision of a postwar world without empire. The following are two short excerpts. It must be remembered that at this time Churchill was the war leader, Father only the president of a state which had indicated its sympathies in a tangible fashion. Thus, Churchill still arrogated the conversational lead, still dominated the after-dinner hours. But the difference was beginning to be felt. And it was evidenced first, sharply, over Empire. Father started it. “Of course,” he remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.” He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow. “No artificial barriers,” Father pursued. “As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition.” His eye wandered innocently around the room. Churchill shifted in his armchair. “The British Empire trade agreements” he began heavily, “are—” Father broke in. “Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It’s because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are.” Churchill’s neck reddened and he crouched forward. “Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Dominions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England’s ministers.” “You see,” said Father slowly, “it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me. “I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can’t be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now—” “Who’s talking eighteenth-century methods?” “Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation — by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community.” Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. Hopkins was grinning. Commander Thompson, Churchill’s aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic. “You mentioned India,” he growled. “Yes. I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy.” “What about the Philippines?” “I’m glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they've gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down. . . .” “There can be no tampering with the Empire’s economic agreements.” “They’re artificial. . .” “They’re the foundation of our greatness.” “The peace,” said Father firmly, “cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. Will anyone suggest that Germany’s attempt to dominate trade in central Europe was not a major contributing factor to war?” It was an argument that could have no resolution between these two men. . . . The conversation resumed the following evening: Gradually, very gradually, and very quietly, the mantle of leadership was slipping from British shoulders to American. We saw it when, late in the evening, there came one flash of the argument that had held us hushed the night before. In a sense, it was to be the valedictory of Churchill’s outspoken Toryism, as far as Father was concerned. Churchill had got up to walk about the room. Talking, gesticulating, at length he paused in front of Father, was silent for a moment, looking at him, and then brandished a stubby forefinger under Father’s nose. “Mr. President,” he cried, “I believe you are trying to do away with the British Empire. Every idea you entertain about the structure of the postwar world demonstrates it. But in spite of that” — and his forefinger waved — “in spite of that, we know that you constitute our only hope. And” — his voice sank dramatically— “you know that we know it. You know that we know that without America, the Empire won’t stand.” Churchill admitted, in that moment, that he knew the peace could only be won according to precepts which the United States of America would lay down. And in saying what he did, he was acknowledging that British colonial policy would be a dead duck, and British attempts to dominate world trade would be a dead duck, and British ambitions to play off the U.S.S.R. against the U.S.A. would be a dead duck. Or would have been, if Father had lived.
|
|
|
Post by Admin on Sept 9, 2014 21:03:31 GMT
Empire of the Deep: The Rise and Fall of the British Navy Ben Wilson Weidenfeld, pp.692, £25, ISBN: 9780297864080 ‘I never before came across a man whom I could fancy being a Napoleon or a Nelson…His ascendancy over everybody is quite curious: the extent to which every officer and man feels the slightest praise or rebuke would have been before seeing him incomprehensible.’ Thus wrote the 22-year-old Charles Darwin of Robert Fitzroy, the 26-year-old captain of the Beagle, a good but not unusual example of captains during the Royal Navy’s zenith in the decades following Trafalgar. Part of the value of Ben Wilson’s excellent account is that he shows how exceptional those decades of nautical dominance were during the long run of Britain’s relations with the troubled seas around her coasts; also, how our present diminished state has brought us back full circle to our period of greatest naval weakness in the Middle Ages. During Saxon and Viking times the sea was the threat to these islands rather than its defence, as we later came to think. Invaders could appear without warning at almost any point on our long coastline, while the many estuaries and rivers were perfect inroads. Alfred the Great, most successful of Saxon kings in resisting Viking incursions, built a small fleet and is sometimes credited with being the father of the navy, but in fact the role of ships in his campaigns was very limited. It is more credible, Wilson argues, to consider him father of the idea of England. Naval paternity might more accurately be attributed to Henry VIII whose 54 ships with permanent logistical support and a network of coastal forts constituted a recognisably modern navy. Despite this, Britain remained nautically backward compared with other nations in terms of shipbuilding, seaborne exploration and the ability to project force far beyond these shores. For centuries, too, there were very blurred lines between royal service, trading, privateering and privacy. Outstanding individuals such as Hawkings, Drake and Raleigh were the high-achieving exceptions that created tradition — or belief in tradition, which amounted to the same thing. It was Admiral Anson’s reforms in the 18th century that created the conditions for subsequent naval supremacy. He took on endemic corruption, inefficiency, indiscipline and neglect, as well as a cultural antipathy that has something of a modern ring: ‘Verdicts for courts martial for cowardice or disobeying orders in the 1740s were undone by civilian courts and politicians,’ notes Wilson. The cultural changes wrought by Anson were most famously, or notoriously, exemplified by the shooting of Admiral Byng for having neglected to press home an attack against the French. As Voltaire observed, this harsh judgment served to ‘encourage the others’, with the result that for the next two centuries the Royal Navy was as feared for its aggression as it was respected for the fact that its captains took responsibility for failure (arguably, in fact, until 2007 when both traditions appear to have been forgotten in an afternoon, following the ignominious seizure of an RN vessel and crew in the Persian Gulf). Aggression was not, of course, in short supply at Trafalgar when Collingwood, locked yardarm to yardarm with his prey and eating an apple amidst fearsome cannonades, could exclaim, ‘What would Nelson give to be here!’ There are doubtless more accounts of Trafalgar than ships in the action but Wilson’s has the virtues of concision and clarity, while rightly emphasising the roles of training, gunnery, initiative and discipline. As Villeneueve, the talented French admiral conceded, ‘To any other nation the loss of Nelson would have been irreparable, but in the British fleet off Cadiz, every captain was a Nelson.’ Wilson also makes comparisons which illuminate the power and technological pre-eminence of warships in those days. Victory alone carried armaments equivalent to 67 per cent of Wellington’s artillery. It is said that anyone who studies Jutland — the hoped-for Trafalgar of the 20th century — emerges as a Beatty man or a Jellicoe man. Either you plump for the dash and boldness of the charismatic battle-cruiser commander, accepting his carelessness and lack of preparation as the other side of the coin, or you go for the rigour and method of the Grand Fleet commander, excusing his caution on the grounds that he was, as Churchill said, the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. Wilson is clearly a Jellicoe man, and it is hard to disagree; Beatty’s Nelsonic aggression was admirable but his neglect of Nelsonic planning, preparation and training should have seen him sacked rather than promoted. As Wilson says, ‘Both sides managed to lose the Battle of Jutland.’ The Royal Navy was not prominent in the 2012 Diamond Jubilee because there’s so little of it. Weaker now than for centuries (and about to get weaker still if the Lib Dems have their way with the nuclear deterrent), it could probably protect the Isle of Wight from occupation but would struggle with the rest of the country and certainly couldn’t be replaced from non-existent British shipyards. Even so, Wilson concludes that ‘Never has Britain been so strong at sea’ — not because we have the power to defend our interests but because, post-Cold War, there is no serious seaborne threat. For now. ‘The need for a navy will never go away,’ he reminds us. ‘History has not finished with us.’
|
|