Did ‘The British Empire’ Ever Actually Exist?

One hesitates to be too critical of something someone says casually. But, unlike the Guardian reporting of what the Pope said last week, its reporting of what David Olusoga says seems to come with approval — and this makes it worthy of criticism.

Olusoga is a successful historian. You have probably seen his books in Waterstones, both in the adult and children sections. He said, at the Hay Festival:

There’s one country left in the British empire that needs to liberate itself and have its independence day from its own history, and that’s Britain.

This gets 10 out of 10 for wit. It was probably even more effective on stage than it is on the page. We only have to be critical of what he says afterwards:

It’s like we’ve had a party and everyone else left and we haven’t noticed. It infects our view of ourselves; it complicates and confuses our view of the rest of the world; it stops us from fully understanding how the rest of the world relates to us.

Let’s consider the logic here. The British are dealing with the world in a sort of three o’clock in the morning toxic haze while everyone has gone home to drink soda water and hock, or whatever is their version of a pick-me-up. Britain is the lad still dancing with some stale beer in his hand, not fully understanding why everyone else has bid their leave.

Finally:

It’s just silly to have national honours named after an empire that doesn’t exist. It’s like having it named after Narnia.

There’s that wit again. But Olusoga is playing a trick. Watch out for wit. Wit is a very effective means by which balls and cups can be manipulated. Why is it, for instance, that every magician engages in repartee? It distracts the audience.

Here, in rebutting Olusoga, we have to be pedantic. Pedantry is underrated. It asks us to think twice, which is always a good thing, and it also involves appeals to authority, which, though it may end in sclerosis, may also prevent us from simply appealing to the authority of our own wit.

‘Empire’ is am ambiguous term.

It originally meant, when it was the Latin word imperium, ‘the right to command’. In the Roman republic an imperator was a successful commander, one who had won a battle and returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph.

By degrees the word imperium shifted in meaning.

It came to mean the territory ruled by the Romans.

When Rome became a concealed monarchy under Augustus the word imperator was one of the words reserved for the use of the ruler: so having been a republican word it now became a monarchical word.

For centuries imperium always referred to Rome.

What was Rome? It was a continental empire.

Rome, of course, split in various ways: and so there were at least three, and possibly eventually four inheritors of the imperial style. First, there was Byzantium, the original Rome which had been Christianised and transplanted by Constantine to the east. Then, there was the Papacy, which remained in Rome and not only inherited the red shoes but also fused old imperial ideology with Petrine imperatives. Third, there was the Holy Roman Empire, which was a creation of the Pope, but which went its own way, not only coming into conflict with the Papacy but uneasily existing alongside Byzantium: since now were two Roman empires, one Greek in the east and one German in the west. Fourth, there was Roman Law, which had been codified by Justinian out of old codes in Constantinople, and which formed the basis of the revived learning of the universities in the Middle Ages.

Excuse that last paragraph, but I said I would have to be pedantic.

Anyhow, what happened afterwards was the great revolution: this was the liberation of the concept of empire from anything to do with Rome. This happened, in steps, and by degrees, in Europe: as European states emerged, and as European vernacular languages emerged within those states, and the word imperium was put to use in non-Roman or post-Roman contexts. It was, in a word, deromanised.

Consider Henry VIII, who provoked the Reformation in England. In the 1530s, one of his Acts stated, “England is an Empire”. What he and his ministers meant by that was that just as the Roman Emperors had ruled Rome, so the English Kings ruled England — with unlimited sovereignty. England was, therefore, an empire: which meant it would no longer bow or scrape before, say, the Holy Roman Emperor, or the Pope. This was one of those little moments we consider important in the rise of the modern state: the modern state being, exactly, an entity which is not under some feudal obligation to any other entity.

Think about this. England itself, or, later, Britain, was an empire. It ruled itself completely. This was the only strictly constitutional meaning of the word ‘empire’ in English before the 19th century. Though, let it be said clearly, the word ‘empire’ was not used very often then or later.

As time went on, and we took on India, the American colonies, South Africa, Australia etc. the English began to worry — especially after the loss of the American colonies. (How many of you know that Benjamin Franklin tried to persuade the English that the colonies should be part of a ‘British Empire’? He was, actually, the first theorist of such a thing. The English, remarkably, did not want to theorise such a thing.) They began to worry — about what on earth this mystifying set of territories meant. Occasionally the word ‘empire’ was used as part of the explanation.

But the word ‘empire’, even in the 19th century, remained ambiguous.

It could mean, as Henry VIII had meant it, the sovereign state, i.e., eventually the United Kingdom.

It could mean ‘the other bits’, i.e., the possessions held or ruled by the United Kingdom and which, therefore, did not rule themselves fully or yet or at all: India, Australia, Canada etc.

It could mean ‘the whole damned thing’, i.e., and capitals are needed here, THE BRITISH EMPIRE as a unified constitutional and civilisational order.

That last one, which seems to be what Olusoga and others have in mind when they are expressing resentment about it, only ever existed in the hopes and dreams of a few late-19th century visionaries, like J.R. Seeley and Cecil Rhodes. The British Empire as a systematic unity simply did not exist. It never existed.

The words ‘the British empire’ are a sort of simplification, which might have been inspiring for schoolboys like Churchill and exciting for academics like Olusoga who want to chastise anyone who has ever come close to the schoolboy idea, but it is simply nothing real. It is a simplification, and it is a grotesque one, whether one is in favour of it or one is opposed to it.

I should also say, finally, that the last thing that happened — in the 19th century — was that for the first time in history we began to criticise empire (the whole thing, I mean, not just bits of it). We became conscious of empire, saw that there was an imperial style of politics, we called it ‘imperialism’ (a word which had a great future thanks to Lenin and others), and we argued it back and forth. We have been arguing about empire since the 1840s and about imperialism since the 1870s. No one ever seems to notice this. All the arguments we hear nowadays would have been old news to anyone living through the Boer War.

What is the point? Well, at one level Olusoga can say whatever he wants. But at another level, he is just Churchill with colours reversed. And at yet another level he is simply wrong.

If we agree with Henry VIII and say: “Let’s simplify and say that the British Empire — or English Empire — is whatever the British — or English — rule”, then there is no inconsistency in having a medal inscribed Order of the British Empire.

One could say, and Olusoga might say, that the United Kingdom does not rule itself. It is ruled by fashion, by cult, by ‘science’ [Laughter] and by a myriad of open conspiracies, but, even if we admit this, we could still say, “Well, Olusoga, would you rather indulge the hope that the British rule themselves, and exult in your little medal, or would you rather have a certificate from the Gates-Schwab-Fink-Xi Global School of Skills saying that you have adequately recognised that you do not rule yourself?”

In sum, the advantage of the word ‘empire’ is that it asks us a question about who is ruling whom. If one stops asking that question, one is inevitably going to be ruled by someone else.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.