AHistoryofBritain14.docx

1、AHistoryofBritain14A History of Britain 14. The Empire of Good Intentions (1 of 27)(TRUMPET PLAYS) January 1901 - the dawn of the British Empires fourth century.Few of its servants or rulers imagined it would be its last.Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin when her Viceroy of India, Lord Cu

2、rzon, envisioned a fitting memorial in Calcutta to the Queen Empress who reigned over a fifth of the globe.A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture, Curzons mind naturally turned to the most beautiful memorial in the world, the Taj Mahal.Not least because hed been responsible for making it beauti

3、ful again, cleared out the bazaar in front of it, restored its water gardens.Now he would build the British Taj, faced with the same white marble hewn from the Makrana quarries.But the Victoria memorial would not be a poem in stone so much as a proclamation in domes and columns that the British Raj

4、was the Rome of the modern age.But was this a time to be spending a royal fortune when millions of peasants were starving?When the foundation stone was laid, a year after Curzon left India, with its violence and chaos, at least 16 million Indians had perished in the most terrible succession of famin

5、es Asia had known for centuries.What had happened? The men and women who had sat at their desks, played out their chukkas and danced in the club were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference.They had, many of them, only the very best intentions.They had a vision that their empire was the best the w

6、orld had ever seen because it was built on virtue.Its power was to be measured not in Gatling guns, but in an unselfish dedication to eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease.We would take whole cultures crippled by those maladies and stand them on their own two feet.In the fullness of time, so th

7、e theory went, the millions would become civilised enough to govern themselves, and we would leave them, the children of our liberal dream, grateful, devoted, peaceful and, this was the bonus for the modern world, free.It didnt exactly work out like that, did it?So what went wrong?0n February 4th, 1

8、834, the young MP for Leeds made a farewell speech to his electors.Thomas Babington Macaulay, Clever Tom, boy wonder at Cambridge, juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons, ace reviewer and historian in the making, had decided that as nice as all this was, he needed a fortune.India, hed been told,

9、was where you got it, fast.Just to show that he wasnt a greedy Tom, while he was at it, hed do good to the natives.He might be leaving industrial Britain, but he was confident hed find its products, as well as its benevolent spirit, alive and well in Calcutta.May your manufactures flourish, may your

10、 trade be extended, may your riches increase.May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the east.Give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.Macaulays breezy optimism, that cotton cloth and c

11、onstitutionalism were what Britain had to offer the world, was the authentic voice of the liberal empire.Equally sure of itself, whether it was preaching and teaching, at India, Ireland or darkest England, where the natives also toiled in filth, ignorance and disease, and equally in need of a hefty

12、dose of Victorian vim and vigour.Asia, they thought, was especially inert, and the great principle of liberalism, according to its founders, was, above all, movement.Macaulay had been brought up a strict Christian, but his real church was the church of progress - steam engines, free newspapers, parl

13、iamentary government. The historian in him looked at the rise and fall of civilizations and was jubilant that this was Britains time for imperial greatness.We would share our blessings, moral and material.We would take ancient societies, miserable with poverty and tyranny, and teach them self-relian

14、ce.And when wed done the job, wed pack up and go home.So the great principle of the British Empire would be its own self-liquidation.It would be like a parent, full of bittersweet emotion as its children were sent off into the world, tied to the home no longer by power, but by grateful affection.Nev

15、er had Britain had such an abundance of clever, zealous young men, itching to liberate Asia from the grip of superstition and disease.In the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, theyd found an ardent patron.Even the most dedicated pilgrims in search of the relics of the Raj are not goin

16、g to make a beeline for this statue.I dont suppose anybody in this park knows who Lord William Bentinck really was.You have to look at the figures in the frieze here to see why hes commemorated. Bentinck was the first of the authentic do-gooder Governors General, and the kind of person he wanted to

17、do good to was this young woman in distress.Shes a young widow and shes about to join her husband in a joint cremation, the traditional Hindu practice of suttee.Unlike an older generation of British in India, the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition, nor woul

18、d it have made any difference if they had, but they knew an abomination when they saw it.Never mind that there were only 500 cremations a year, the campaign to abolish suttee was the campaign of their dreams, and they went about it with a will.Volumes were written by missionaries, committees deliber

19、ated in parliament, a law was passed and inspectors were despatched to intercept widows en route to the funeral pyre.The 1830s were a crossroads in the young life of the liberal empire.Did the welfare of our native subjects oblige us to impose the values of the west on the east, or should we be rebu

20、ilding and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?Charles Trevelyan, another high-minded young reformer, who was courting Macaulays sister, was in doubt which road to take.The more British India could become, the better.For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the country would be turned into one vast schoolro

21、om.Teaching for them was not just a job.Western education was the instrument by which India was going to be transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars into the progressive Victorian dynamic world of the telegraph and the locomotive. English would be a way to bring Indians, divided by so m

22、any faiths and languages, together.And it would help bridge the culture gap between Europe and the subcontinent.To those who said, Youre destroying their own culture, Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was.identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities that it gives way at once to

23、the light of European science.Here we are, on the veranda.Late afternoon, the perfect imperial time of day.This is the time when words like veranda and bungalow enter the British vocabulary.They would make you think that the world that the sahib built for themselves was a marriage between an Indian

24、and a British lifestyle.A bungalow, after all, was a one-storey Indian dwelling.But it wasnt really like that.The British had, with the bungalow, made a life for themselves that was as much as possible like the life of a country gentleman in Buckinghamshire, Hampshire or Lancashire.Instead of the bu

25、stle of an Indian courtyard, with animals inside it and washing and cooking going on, we have the rose garden, the well-kept hedges, the strictly-disciplined gardeners.Tucked safely away behind the walls of bungalows and barracks, and flattered by a new class of English-speaking merchants, the sahib

26、s imagined they knew everything about this new, westernised India which would be, as Macaulay liked to put it, an ally not a subject.So when Macaulay and Trevelyan went home at the end of the 1830s to government jobs in London, they were confident that they had sown the seeds of a modern, liberal In

27、dia. Everything was now in place to ensure as much of the world as possible would be governed by the one mechanism capable of doing so - the British Empire of free trade.An educated, Anglicised India would be a key player.There was just one iron law - let the market do its job.If people clinging to

28、backward ways went under in the name of the new economic order, well, so be it.But while the modernisers were all looking east to see the payoff of their great experiment, the first great shock to the complacency of their views came from the opposite direction, from the west.somewhere alarmingly clo

29、ser to home, from Ireland.Many of those who look back on the disaster thought they should have seen it coming, seen that Ireland was India with rain.A population explosion from over two to over eight million in a century.Too many bodies clinging to unworkable little plots, too small to make a profit

30、 in the imperial market place.0f course, just like India, there were islands of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.Rich Ireland was the east and the north, around Dublin and Belfast, facing the immense engine of industrial Britain, and supplying it with butter and meat, linen and oatmeal.But th

31、e west was where Irelands agony was felt.Tiny scraps of land with a cabin and a pig and only potatoes to grow to make the difference between survival and starvation.By the 1840s, Irish men and women, especially in the poorer counties of the west, were eating between ten and fifteen pounds of potatoe

32、s a day, sometimes washed down with a little buttermilk.Then, in 1845, the Angel of Death struck in the shape of the fungus phytopthora infestans.Spores grew on the underside of leaves, the Irish wind blew them to their neighbours and the Irish rain made sure the crop rotted.The infestation was so sudden and so unprecedented, it was impossible at first to take in the magnitude of the disaster.In August 1846, Father Theobald Matthew saw the damage for himself.On the 27th of last mo