11 April 2003


The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2003

The Sun Set on One,
But It Rises on Another

By JOHN O'SULLIVAN

If a Martian historian with Methuselah's life span devoted himself to observing from afar the broad patterns of human activity over the past millennium, he would see an explosion of energy in the British Isles from the 16th century onward. In particular, between the early 1600s and the 1950s more than 20 million people emigrated from Britain and settled in other lands. The British also developed dense patterns of trade with such faraway areas as India and Africa. Only a few of them emigrated to those countries, yet they reshaped them in line with their own practices.

From the standpoint of Mars, 1776 hardly registers. Eighty percent of British emigrants ended up in America, before and after independence. "Manifest Destiny" looks like a local instance of the emigration that was fueling Britain's imperialism. In any case, the same liberal principles -- free trade, the rule of law, representative institutions -- shaped both the U.S. and Britain's possessions.

Altogether this Anglo-American network of emigration, trade and rule amounted to the first global order. What might puzzle our Martian was why this order broke down in 1914 -- and why, when it reappeared in 1989, its center had moved from London to Washington.

Or has it? Niall Ferguson believes so. The neologism he coins to describe the British Empire is "Anglobalization." He concludes "Empire" (Basic Books, 392 pages, $35), his brilliant survey of its rise and fall, with an appeal to the U.S. to overcome its anti-imperialism and accept the responsibilities that the end of the Cold War has thrust upon it. So he must rescue British imperialism from the obloquy that descended upon it in the age of de-colonization.

Mr. Ferguson's main defense is an economic one. He notes that the British Empire, by establishing a world order based on free trade and free capital movement, assisted the development of poorer countries and raised living standards in its far-flung colonies. Imperial rule also spread institutions and practices favorable to good government, such as secure private property, personal liberty and impartial law. These often took root. Seymour Martin Lipset points to a marked correlation between being a former British colony and enjoying liberal democratic government today.

If this sounds dry, far from it. Though "Empire" is scrupulous scholarship, it is also a rattling good tale, with vivid accounts of the settlement of America, of the piracy waged against Spain by Britain's semi-official pirates, or "privateers," of David Livingstone's fearless wanderings in Africa and much else. Like the American frontier, the British Empire was an arena in which buccaneers, merchants, soldiers, bureaucrats and clergymen struggled for dominance.

Mr. Ferguson enjoys the irony that the idealistic NGOs of their day, such as the Church Missionary Society, caused more disruption than the practical-minded soldiers and money-grubbing merchants. To their credit, the idealists ended suttee and achieved the world-wide abolition of the slave trade, courtesy of the Royal Navy. But their Christian proselytizing was also partly responsible for the Indian Mutiny (1857) and its bloody suppression, after which the sun began to set on the empire even as it continued to expand into Africa and the Mideast. Americans avid to spread democracy abroad might conclude that remedying flagrant evils is a wiser course than remaking entire societies in one's own image of virtue.

Nor does Mr. Ferguson shrink from recounting the more straightforward atrocities in imperial history, such as the 1919 Amritsar massacre in the Punjab and the "genocide" of Tasmanians in Australia. He may even be insufficiently skeptical here. The Australian historian Keith Windshuttle has recently demonstrated that most allegations of Australian atrocities have little or no foundation in fact. Even if we take the harshest view of such events, however, Mr. Ferguson points out that they are isolated episodes in imperial history by comparison with the genocide and militarism central to the far more ruthless empires that challenged Britain in the 1940s.

And when that challenge came, its subject peoples rallied to the empire's defense. Gandhi's "Quit India" campaign of 1942 collapsed after a few weeks, but more than two million Indians served in the British forces, 250,000 of them outside India. Their loyalty signified something important: Most subjects of the king had never been better governed than by the young men of the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Office.

So when the balance sheet is added up, one wonders why someone as sympathetic to imperialism as Mr. Ferguson scorns Curzon's judgment that "the British empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has ever seen." Given the record of other human institutions, Curzon had a point.

It is a point that Americans are reluctant to grasp even when the empire is their own "informal" one -- and even when U.S. troops intervene to remove threats to international stability, as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The more forthright Mr. Ferguson believes that the U.S. should sustain networks of trade, aid, investment and defense that will mimic the British world order. Rogue states will be curbed, failed nations healed and brushfire wars smothered -- by aid and investment where possible, by arms where necessary.

It will, of course, be an imperialism that dare not speak its name. Some of the imperialists in progressive NGOs will even believe that they are anti-imperialist. And the logos under which they operate will be derived from the United Nations or the IMF rather than from the U.S. itself. But the underlying networks of cooperation that sustain this shy imperialism are likely to link the U.S. with such "Anglosphere" nations as Britain and Australia and perhaps, in due course, India and South Africa, which share the liberal world outlook.

Our Martian, observing current events from afar, might think that this was already happening.

Mr. O'Sullivan is editor in chief of United Press International.

Updated April 10, 2003