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With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and "upon which the sun never set" finally lost its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its origins, nature, purpose, and effect on the world it ruled--is far from settled. In this incisive work, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective--through the eyes of those who created and ruled it--and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire. Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they ruled according to an idealized image of their own class hierarchies.
- Sales Rank: #854531 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Oxford University Press, USA
- Published on: 2002-12-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 5.38" h x .55" w x 8.06" l, .70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 288 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Library Journal
Imperialism, Cannadine argues, was a vehicle that enabled the British to replicate and export their own "hierarchical social structure" to their colonies. This need was especially pressing as industrialism changed the social order in their own country. In some undeveloped nations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Britons could start to build this stratified society from scratch. In other regions, such as India, Africa, and the Far East, they simply worked to preserve the already established order, such as the "caste-based indigenous Indian society" and the rule of the "Malayan sultans and African Kings." Cannadine stresses that the British system was not about race but about class and status. The British viewed most of their own people as far beneath these foreign chiefs, sultans, and pashas. Inevitably, though, the dominions became increasingly unimpressed by the pomp, ceremony, and British authority, and as nationalism grew stronger, all vestiges of British rule came under attack. Often repetitive and slow, this book reads like a university thesis, but the arguments and ideas are insightful. Appropriate for academic or large public libraries with British collections. Isabel Coates, Brampton, Ontario
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From The New Yorker
This revisionist look at the British Empire argues that it was primarily based not on a conviction of racial superiority but, rather, on a vast and complex social hierarchy, in which rank trumped color. Britain exported its �lites—sending aristocrats, Gothic architecture, and pheasant as far afield as Australia—to create a simulacrum of Victorian society abroad, and also bolstered the status of indigenous rulers: Indian maharajas, Middle Eastern emirs, and West African chiefs. Cannadine is excellent on the uses of pageantry and on the kitschy extremes it had reached by the nineteen-twenties. He is convincing, too, in his assessment of how imperial grandeur was used to distract Britons from social upheavals at home. But although he tries to soft-pedal the racism of the Empire, he cannot disguise the prejudices of the colonists, and sometimes the anecdotes he cites to illustrate a non-racist world view seem to prove the opposite.
Copyright � 2005 The New Yorker
Review
"A lively account....As entertaining in its anecdotes as it is thought-provoking."--Boston Globe
"Cannadine is excellent on the uses of pageantry and on the kitschy extremes it had reached by the nineteen-twenties."--New Yorker
"A thoughtful and spirited book....In the privacy of their small worlds, away from the postmodernists and the radical historians writing 'peripheral' history, there can be heard fond retrospects of the empire and its pageantry by ordinary, unfashionable men and women. Were these people to tell us what they recall of the empire's doings, I suspect that they would echo some of the truths of Cannadine's subtle and learned retrieval of that imperial history."--Fouad Ajami, The New York Times Book Review
"A study of British imperial attitudes that is light in size and tone but filled with weighty significance. In less than 200 pages of text, he has reopened the debate on the British Empire and has brought fresh insight into the ways that nations project their power around the globe."--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"This is a lovely book, full of insights and unfamiliar perspectives. Were the rulers of Victoria's Empire more snobbish or more racist? They hardly knew the difference, for the common people of their own nation were very little less mysterious or threatening to them than the dark sullen masses of India or Africa. At least this much can be said, though, and David Cannadine says it: The snobbery diluted and tempered the racism."--John Derbyshire, National Review
"Cannadine writes with insight, felicity and wit."--The Washington Post Book World
Most helpful customer reviews
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
An Empire where class trumps race
By Bernard Kwan
David Cannadine, a self declared "Child of Empire" has what can only be described as an obsession with the British Aristocracy. Unlike some of his other works such as "Decline and fall oft the British Aristocracy" where he allows bittersweet emotions such as nostalgia to be evoked at the passing of an era, or the undisguised glee of an outsider indulging in schadenfreude in "Aspects of Aristocracy: grandeur or decline" this book presents a much more balanced analysis.
His thesis is that there was a complex interplay of class and race in the Empire, but in most cases class trumps race.
The defining example from the book is an exerpt from the "Raj quartet" where the british aristo identifies more clearly with his Indian counterpart who went to public school than to the uncouth white police constable. However the police constable viewed himself as superior to the Indian because of his race.
Its thesis accords well with my experience in public school at Winchester College in England where I felt accepted as a peer despite being Asian. But my same peers were openly disdainful of poor uneducated Pakistani and Bangledeshi immigrants. (They welcomed the educated Indians much more easily)
Perhaps these sentiments were what prevented mass support for Oswald Mosley and Fascism in the 1930s despite prevalent anti-semitism. It has been argued by John Lucas that Nazism as an ideology failed because Hitler had made his elite too small. The British extended their elites to the sultans, nawabs, emirs and kings all over the Empire and used them to bind the Empire together.
This book provides an interesting contrast to America where race is so much more important. Black and white interracial marriages are quite commonplace in Britain. In my opinion it better to recognize nobility in another person and disdain the baseness in another person regardless of the colour of their skin.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Pomp, Circumstance and the Creation of the British Empire
By Chris Lipscombe
This is a much better book than I had originally expected. It is also a much easier read than I had anticipated. It's certainly not dry-as-dust narrative history. I had first read a review of the book in History Today which suggested that Ornamentalism by David Cannadine cast a new light on the importance of rank and ceremony in binding the British empire together across the globe, especially during its peak from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. This was enough to whet my appetite. That, and an interesting reminder in the title that Edward Said had already written in his book Orientalism about the fascination that the East (Near, Middle or Far, depending on the distance from London as the epicentre) had for British empire-builders, and a suggestion that the ideological traffic of empire was more than just a one-way street. Ornamentalism certainly delivers on its promise in painting a complex cultural picture of cultural and ideological interchange between ruling hierarchies throughout the British Empire. The author shows how this order was identifed and then explicitly sustained through mechanisms such as the British peerage system (think about all those thousands of OBEs). Cannadine also shows how order abroad confirmed and upheld order at home. This "Burkean" view of society bolstered (even upholstered) the fortunes of conservative British politicians from Disraeli to Churchill. As this world view dissolved through the twentieth century, so did British support for carefully constructed local elites overseas. In my own country, small conservative New Zealand, attachment to the Mother Country died hard. British titles were only abolished in New Zealand in 2000. Ornamentalism argues its own corner. It doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive history of the British Empire (go to the Cambridge History series for that). But it is an enjoyable read, and provided (at least for me) a different, richer way of thinking about empire. The book is also entertaining (some great anecdotes of the Raj in India); insightful (nice distinctions between the different experiences of the Dominions, the Colonies and the Mandates); idiosyncratic (the author provides a personal perspective of empire in an unexpected epilogue); and credible (check out the great notes/bibliography). If you are even vaguely interested in the British Empire, Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, or your own country belongs to that odd international club called the British Commonwealth,do yourself a favour and read this book. You'll enjoy it.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Brits on a spit -- and one in the eye for the occidentalists
By Harry Eagar
David Cannadine supposes that there might be more to the British Empire than simple racism. The reviews here at Amazon neatly prove his supposition to have been true. The critiques offered are all of the 'you did not pander to the antiracist ideology; you are an evil racist supremacist and you write badly, too' genre.
Well, Cannadine writes superbly, in the detached manner not of a 'child of the empire' but of an Englishman who wonders whether, indeed, he was one, and, if so, how much?
His argument apparently has taken his PC readers so much by surprise that they cannot comprehend it, but to someone, like myself, who lives in Hawaii, it is a commonplace. Hawaii was colonized by Americans, not Britons, but they behaved exactly the same -- despising, or at least keeping their distance from, the commoners; but happily intermarrying with the 'natural' aristocracy. Once Hawaii became a republic and the aristocracy was extinguished, they stopped intermarrying with them, as all natives were then 'common.'
This little story from the islands was written large in the British Empire. Cannadine does not pretend there was not a color line, but he notes -- and any Australian would say, 'Right, mate!' -- that the elite in the metropole despised the white colonists more than the black elites they chose to cosset and use in the policy of indirect rule.
Britain was becoming an urban and more democratic place, but the men who ran it were not, as Arno Mayer described (for Europe as a whole) as 'The Persistence of the Old Regime.'
The proconsuls of empire and the men who selected them in London were devoted to a rural, hierarchical, anticapitalist society; some explicitly yearned for 'feudalism.' Cannadine shows how they allied with rural and traditional hierarchs, or, in southwest Asia, invented them. They ignored or suppressed the modernizing, urban, educated -- and often, equally anticapitalist, though Cannadine does not point that part out -- rising classes in the Empire.
That one can speak of 'rising classes,' as even the Marxists do, proves that Cannadine is on to something when he speaks of the class-based, rather than race-based empire.
The contradiction brought down the empire in a short time, but, ironically, the inheritors were often more racist than the British and decidedly less progressive. Cannadine wrote this book in 2001 and includes a memoir, 'An Imperial Childhood?' (note, as other reviewers did not, the significant ?) in 1997, when Hong Kong was absorbed into a new, more savage empire. Now, five years on, it becomes less and less possible to deny that the former 'victims' were unable either to be governed or to govern themselves. Cannadine does not ruminate on this striking effect.
'Ornamentalism' is not meant, as some reviewers here suppose, to be a history. It is an extended essay on an aspect of empire that has been overlooked. But not the least of the book's many joys is the appended memoir, which, along with the clever title, skewers the turgid, lying, fake memoir of the sweetheart of the orientalists, Edward Said. There's no doubt that Cannadine was really a Birmingham boy, while Said was never a Palestinian.
Lastly, for an American reader, immune to the claims of aristocratic privilege, part of the joy of this book is the pictures of self-important men in funny hats.
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