Return of the imperial apologist

Deepak Lal is a clever man. After all, it seems he quit the IAS when he still could.

He is also a fellow columnist in this newspaper, and that too makes him quite special. The third string in his bow is the professorship at Stanford University.

But he suffers from a problem that often afflicts the intellectually gifted. Their erudition can overwhelm their judgment and the seamlessness of their knowledge can subdue their common sense.

This book is as good an example as any of that.

It takes a lot of courage to say that empires were good things. However, intellectual courage, as we know, can come from two sources.

One source is a flawless marshalling of facts, and arguments that are based on unassailable logic. The other is the exact opposite of these. The two types of courage should not be confused with each other.

Lal has marshalled his facts well. That much has to be conceded.

But has he marshalled them in their entirety? That incompleteness makes his logic a good deal less than impregnable. It is also this book's Achilles' heel.

Another thing: this book could have been written by a lawyer. Lawyers present some of the facts to argue towards a pre-determined conclusion, whereas the academic method is to work through all the facts so that they lead to the only possible logical conclusion.

Also, some books are also written not to provoke argument, but irritation. A book in praise of the caste system, for example, would fall in that category.

To generally sensible folk, such books present a dilemma that is similar to the one presented by those who break wind loudly in public. The polite ones don't know how to react, and the rude ones snigger.

Lal has also not bothered to define an empire. He relies on someone else's definition. So he says, "Empires, for our purposes, can be defined as 'multi-ethnic' conglomerates held together by transnational organisational and cultural ties".

But this overlooks an essential aspect of empire: the use of force by those who BOT them, so to speak. It is arguable that empires succeed not for the reasons Lal gives""unified administration, better communications, the introduction of a lingua franca, etc.""but because they use force, indeed quite a lot of it.

So, in fact, what Lal thinks are the reasons are actually the consequences of the use of force by the Imperial power. These are, doubtless, good consequences. But they are not the only consequences.

The process of B in the BOT above can be very destructive. O does yield the benefits Lal mentions. But the T can be very destructive, too. So, are the gains from O enough to outweigh the losses from B and T?

I could and do argue that the current Indian and Chinese arrangements are, really speaking, empires in all but name. After all, when a central authority rules over a billion people whose diversity is great as that of the Roman or the British empire, you can't pretend that it is not an empire.

Certainly India is. Its Constitution is an Imperial one, as is the modus operandi of the Executive""primarily predatory.

Or is it that an empire is an empire only if it has a certain minimum size in terms of square kilometres? And, following from that, is it enough to have the square kilometres but not the population? Or should an empire have both?

A fuller discussion would have been very useful, if only in illuminating the contradictions of empire. Lal omits to do that.

Then there is the bibliography.

Why does Lal think that a book on empires, even if it is to praise them, should not contain any reference to, say, Dadabhai Naoroji, William Digby, and Penderel Moon, to name just three critics of the economics of the British empire in India?

Or G Balachandran's work on the Bank of England's exchange rate policies between the sterling and the rupee during 1900 and 1918 and how this was designed not only to prevent capital from flowing into India but to flow out as well?

Or Rudrangshu Mukherji's treatise on how the British used force after 1857 in Kanpur to keep the Empire intact? The bib contains 48 references to himself, though.

But never mind. Let us end on a happy note with an excellent joke that Lal cracks very early on in the book: "The two major effects of empire have been that they preserved the peace and promoted prosperity in the territories they encompassed".

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In Praise of Empires

Deepak Lal
Palgrave Macmillan
Pages: Not stated,
Pages: 270