CHURCHILL AND EMPIRE
A Portrait of an Imperialist
Lawrence James
Pegasus Books;
452 pages; $28.95
"To paraphrase Winston Churchill," Ronald Reagan said in his first Inaugural Address, "I did not take the oath I've just taken with the intention of presiding over the dissolution of the world's strongest economy."
In November 1942, Churchill had said that "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Why would the president of a republic born out of rebellion against that empire want to allude to those words, especially since, at the time Churchill spoke them, the American administration and people had been united in their resolve that, whatever else they were fighting for, it was not to preserve the British Empire?
Born when imperialism was at its zenith, Churchill lived to see the end of empire, notably his own country's, and the part he played in this epic story is fascinating. Lawrence James, the author of several books of British history, says that Churchill and Empire deals with "a subject that has been overlooked or discreetly sidelined in Churchillian literature", a puzzling claim. Churchill's imperialism was one of the most salient facts about him, much discussed in his lifetime, and endlessly dissected since by historians, most recently by Richard Toye in his excellent Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made. Is there something new to say?
Before he was elected to Parliament in 1900, aged 25, Churchill had fought in or witnessed no fewer than four savage imperial conflicts. He was a soldier and journalist before he became a politician, and although he maintained that "the consciousness of dominion over subject races must alone increase the self-respect of every Englishman", he candidly described the realities of imperial war.
In 1898 he took part in one of the last cavalry charges, at Omdurman in Sudan, less battle than massacre. He exultantly killed several men fighting for the jihadist leader, the Mahdi, but he also recorded that "all Dervishes who did not immediately surrender were shot or bayoneted". As a colonial office minister from 1905 to 1908, Churchill visited Kenya and thought that its backward peoples (including the forebears of the present American president) needed to be taught the discipline of hard work. But he was also dismayed by reports in South Africa of the "disgusting butchery of the natives". In other words, as we should really have grasped by now, Winston Churchill was all his life a bundle of contradictions, radical or reactionary by turns, brutal and chivalrous.
Three years after World War I, in which his career was nearly ended by the Gallipoli debacle, he became colonial secretary, at a critical moment in the story of "what is called, somewhat oddly, the Middle East", as he put it in 1940. In his memoir My Early Life, he said that he had been brought up as a Tory, and, thus, pro-Turkish, and it had been a cardinal British principle to preserve the Ottoman Empire lest it should collapse and the vacuum be filled by Russia.
When it did collapse as a result of the war, the vacuum was filled instead by the British themselves. Churchill cobbled together a completely artificial state, "Iraq", while partitioning the territory to the west into "Transjordan" and "Palestine". Although his own sympathies were with the Zionist settlers, he soon realised what a thankless burden this Palestine was, and toyed with the idea of handing it over to the United States.
In 1929 Churchill insisted that the British had rescued India "from ages of barbarism, tyranny and internecine war", and he spent the next several years in futile opposition to the India Bill, which granted modest self-government. Mr James is surely wrong to say that Churchill accepted final defeat over the Bill "with good grace": that was not how most people saw it then.
And it was India that would be the greatest stain on Churchill's record at its otherwise splendid climax. As prime minister from 1940 to 1945 he obstinately thwarted any attempt to move toward a settlement with Gandhi and the Congress nationalists. Worse still was the awful Bengal famine of 1943. Like the Irish famine 100 years before, it was not caused by the London government, but in both cases official indifference and inaction gravely aggravated the horror, and destroyed any moral authority the British claimed to rule those suffering peoples.
Underlying Churchill's refusal to alleviate the famine was sheer racial contempt. "Starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks," he said. In the postwar years he railed against the Labour government for granting India its independence, although he then sullenly recognised that the game was up for imperialism.
If Mr James' book reveals not much that is unfamiliar, it is readable and generally reliable, despite a few slips. Churchill's friend and colleague Lord Moyne, assassinated by Zionist extremists in 1944, was not a viscount; and the dinner in London for Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, in June 1937 was at the house of Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Liberal leader, not that of the Labour leader Clement Attlee, as Mr James says.
We are left with two great paradoxes. The man who heroically defied the vilest racial tyranny in history was himself not only an intransigent imperialist but a racist, by the standards of his own age, as well as ours. And although Churchill said he would not preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, he did just that, or at least hastened its demise.
"Although he didn't like to do so, Mr Churchill ended the stage of the British Empire," Zhou Enlai perceptively observed to Henry Kissinger in 1969. He may not have intended to, "but objectively he ended the British Empire". Did Churchill in his heart know that?
©2014 The New York Times News Service
