What is the legacy of imperialism in terms of ideas? The answer is complex and cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic development of former colonies in the modern world. For many years, following the Second World War, when decolonisation accelerated, imperialism carried much negative baggage: it was a byword for racism, economic exploitation, cultural arrogance on the part of the colonisers at the expense of the ‘other’, the colonised. A large part of the post-modern movement had as its aim the rehabilitation of former colonised cultures. The Indian Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has held professorships at Harvard and at Cambridge, reported that India has had far fewer famines since the British left.
Recently, however, a more textured picture has emerged. ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies . . . India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself . . . the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements [what Lawrence James calls the “unseen empire of money”] and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a network of global communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ Niall Ferguson has shown that, in 1913, at the height of empire, 63 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1996 only 28 per cent did. In 1913 some 25 per cent of the world stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20 per cent or less of US per capita GDP; by 1997 that had fallen to 5 per cent. In 1955, near the end of the colonial period, Zambia had a GDP that was a seventh that of Great Britain; in 2003, after some forty years of independence, it was a twenty-eighth. A recent survey of forty-nine countries showed that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French civil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors’. The vast majority of the common-law counties were once under British rule. The American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset showed that countries which were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving ‘enduring democratization’ after independence than those ruled by other countries. On the other hand, the effects of colonisation were more negative where the imperialists took over countries that were already urbanised, with their own sophisticated civilisations (India, China), where the colonisers were more interested in plunder than in building new institutions. Ferguson thinks this may well explain the ‘great divergence’ by which these latter two countries were reduced from being leading civilisations – perhaps as late as the sixteenth century – to relative poverty.
Imperialism, therefore, wasn’t just conquest. It was a form of international government, of globalisation, and it did not only benefit the ruling powers. The colonialists comprised not just Cecil Rhodes, but Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones.89
The extent to which Orientalism developed as an aspect of imperialism has been the subject of much debate at the end of the twentieth century and on into the present one. The argument which has had most attention is that developed by the Palestinian critic and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, the late Edward Said. In two books, Said argued first that many nineteenth-century works of art depicted an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and simplification. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Snake Charmer (1870), for example, shows a young boy, naked except for the snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. Said’s argument was that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practiced in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. He showed for example, that the Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In this way, he said, the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an ‘imaginative demonology’ of the ‘mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational.90
Said took his argument further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). It was in the ‘great cultural archive,’ as Said put it, that the ‘intellectual and aesthetics in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority . . . your sense of power scarcely imagined that those “natives” who appeared either subservient or sullenly cooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge . . .’91 At some basic level, Said insisted, ‘imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others . . . For citizens of nineteenth-century Britain and France, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention. British India and French North Africa alone played inestimable roles in the imagination, economy, political life and social fabric of British and French society and, if we mention names like Delacroix, Edmund Burke, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling, Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, or Conrad, we shall be mapping a tiny corner of a far vaster reality than even their immense collective talents cover.’ It was Said’s contention that one of the principal purposes of ‘the great European realistic novel’ was to sustain a society’s consent in overseas expansion.92
Said focuses on the period around 1878, when ‘the scramble for Africa’ was beginning, and when, he says, the realistic novel form became pre-eminent. ‘By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.’93 All the major English novelists of the mid-nineteenth century accepted a globalised world-view, he said, and indeed could not ignore the vast overseas reach of British power.94 Said lists those books which, he argues, fit his theme: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Disraeli’s Tancred, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. The empire, he says, is everywhere a crucial setting. In many cases, Said says, ‘the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally visible presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied or given density . . .’95