Historians now call America Britain’s ‘first empire’, to distinguish it from the second – in Asia, Africa and the Pacific – where settlement policies were very different. While there was always a military presence in the second empire, outright conquest was never a desirable (or achievable) aim.6 As epitomised by the very name of the East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, which became dominant features of this phase of empire, the watchword was trade, protected trade. The colonies of the East comprised in the main what the Portuguese called feitorias, factories, self-governing independent enclaves, as often as not acquired by treaty, the intention being to make them international entrepôts for both European and Asian merchants. Necessarily fortified, they nevertheless had no real military strength – in India, for instance, they could never have posed a threat to the Mughal forces. Nine hundred British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers managed to govern upwards of 250 million Indians. (How they did it is a question for a separate book.)7
But the imperial presence did grow, aided by the retreat of the Muslims, and in time commerce triumphed, the East India companies growing in strength and influence. In India the company eventually emerged as the effective ruler of large parts of the country but even then, according to Anthony Pagden, India was always different from America and from later colonies in Africa. ‘India, and Asia generally,’ he says, ‘was always a place of passage, not of settlement . . . No sense of being a distinct people ever emerged among the Europeans in India. There was never a Creole population or very much of the interracial breeding which transformed the population of many of the former Spanish American colonies into truly multi-ethnic communities.’8
Even so, there were risks inherent when two very different cultures rubbed up against each other. We saw in Chapter 29 how the activities of the Bengal Asiatic Society helped to kick-start the Oriental renaissance, when Sir William Jones drew attention to the deep similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and when Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, attracted Hindu scholars to Calcutta to research the Hindu scriptures (he was himself fluent in Persian and Hindi). But in 1788, three years after his term as governor-general had ended, Hastings was impeached by Parliament in London, accused of having ‘squirreled away’ an enormous personal fortune, filched partly from the East India Company itself and partly from the rulers of Benares and Avadh. Though Hastings was eventually acquitted, seven long years after the impeachment began, his trial ‘was a great theatrical event’, largely stage-managed by Edmund Burke, and the former governor-general never really recovered. Burke was convinced that the East India Company had betrayed its aims, which, as well as trading, were ‘to spread civilisation and enlightenment in the empire’. Instead, he said, the company under Hastings’ leadership had become tyrannical and corrupt, ‘subjugating Indians and betraying the very benevolence it was ordered to propagate’. (Later historians have concluded differently, that the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became.9) The way Burke spoke, Hastings had betrayed a high ideal of empire, the benevolent spread of Western civilisation, an attitude echoed in Napoleon. This was perhaps disingenuous of Burke (and of Napoleon). What Hastings’ impeachment really showed was a priggishness in the imperial mind: whatever high-flown aims they arrogated to themselves, they were not so different as they thought from the more naturally aggressive colonialists of the first empire. Niall Ferguson lists nine ideas on which the ‘second’ British empire was based, which they wished to disseminate most. These were: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team games, the limited or ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty.10
Then there was the contentious issue of slavery. Empires had always involved slavery of one kind or another. We can never forget that both Athens and Rome had slaves. At the same time, to be a slave in ancient Greece or Rome did not necessarily involve degradation. Unlucky slaves were sent into the army or the mines; lucky ones might serve as a tutor to children.
Modern slavery was not like that: the very idea of the slave trade was itself degrading and horrendous. ‘It began on the morning of 8 August 1444 when the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos. A rudimentary slave market was improvised on the docks and the confused and cowed Africans, reeling from weeks confined in the insalubrious holds of the tiny ships on which they had come, were herded into groups by age, sex and the state of their health.’11 No trading was allowed until Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ had been notified and arrived at the quayside. As sponsor of the voyage, he was entitled to a fifth of the booty, in this case forty-six humans. This is how the traffic in ‘black gold’ (as slaves became known) began.
While it was new to Europe, a slave trade had existed in Africa for hundreds of years. What changed now was the size of the demand. The European slave trade was driven by a new form of commercial enterprise – the sugar plantation. And Europe’s taste for sugar turned out to be such that, between 1492 and 1820, according to Anthony Pagden, ‘five or six times as many Africans went to America as did white Europeans’. This statistic, however well-known, still has the power to shock. It shaped the Americas and provided the United States with, arguably, its most intractable problem. One deep reason for this abiding American dilemma arose from the fact that modern slavery involved a new understanding of the relationship between master and slave.12 Neither Aristotle nor Cicero was ever comfortable with the idea of slavery. On occasion they tried to argue that slaves were a different ‘type’ of person, but they knew that was unconvincing when in many cases slaves had merely been on the losing side in a war. The main monotheisms took much the same view. Both the Old Testament and the Qurʾan authorise the taking of slaves, but only after a ‘just war’.13 The early Christians did not look favourably on the enslaving of other Christians but did not extend the same charity to non-Christians. In the early years of the trade, there were some attempts by Catholic clerics and jurists to claim that the wars deep inside Africa were ‘just’ but few took their arguments seriously and an advance of sorts was made in 1686 when the Holy Office condemned the slave trade. But, significantly, it did not condemn slavery itself.14
The Vatican’s view reflected what was for a time the general opinion – that the slave trade was more offensive than slavery itself – but protests continued to snowball and drew attention to the fact that, underneath it all, there was a paradox. It was held by many that Negroes were ‘an inferior type of people, little better than animals’, and as if to confirm this they were often given the names of pets – Fido, Jumper and so on. Yet this attitude was flatly contradicted by the fact that masters often required their slaves to undertake tasks that demanded a full mental equipment.15 No less dangerous was the possibility that female slaves would be found sexually attractive by their masters, producing mixed-blood offspring and a new type of social problem. So the new relationship was fraught with inconsistencies and tensions.