The Empire of Good Intentions A History of Britain by Simon Schama


The Empire of Good Intentions

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BUGLE CALL

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January 1901 - the dawn of the British Empire's fourth century.

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Few of its servants or rulers imagined it would be its last.

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Queen Victoria was barely cold in her coffin

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when her Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, envisioned a fitting memorial in Calcutta

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to the Queen Empress who reigned over a fifth of the globe.

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A learned enthusiast of Indian architecture,

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Curzon's mind naturally turned to the most beautiful memorial in the world - the Taj Mahal.

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Not least because HE had been responsible for making it beautiful again -

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cleared out the bazaar in front of it, restored its water gardens.

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Now he would build the British Taj, faced with the same white marble hewn from the Makrana quarries.

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But the Victoria memorial would not be a poem in stone

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so much as a proclamation in domes and columns

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that the British Raj was the Rome of the modern age.

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But was this a time to be spending a royal fortune when millions of peasants were starving?

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When the foundation stone was laid,

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a year after Curzon left India amidst violence and chaos,

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at least 16 million Indians had perished

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in the most terrible succession of famines Asia had known for centuries.

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What had happened?

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The men and women who'd sat at their desks, played out their chukkas and danced in the club

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were not monsters of hard-hearted indifference. They had, many of them, only the very best of intentions.

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They had a vision that their Empire was the best the world had ever seen because it was built on virtue.

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Its power was to be measured, not in Gatling guns,

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but in an unselfish dedication to eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease.

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We would take cultures crippled by those maladies and stand them on their own two feet.

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In the fullness of time, so the theory went,

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the millions would become civilised enough to govern themselves

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and we would leave them, the children of our liberal dream, grateful, devoted, peaceful

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and - this was the bonus for the modern world - free.

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It didn't exactly work out like that, did it?

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So what went wrong?

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On February 4th 1834, the young MP for Leeds made a farewell speech to his electors.

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Thomas Babington Macaulay, Clever Tom, boy wonder at Cambridge,

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juvenile lead of the Whigs in the Commons, ace reviewer and historian in the making,

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had decided that, as nice as all this was, he needed a fortune.

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India, he'd been told, was where you got it, fast.

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And just to show he wasn't a greedy Tom, while he was at it, he'd do good to the natives.

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He might be leaving industrial Britain,

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but he was confident he'd find its products as well as its benevolent spirit alive and well in Calcutta.

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May your manufactures flourish, may your trade be extended, may your riches increase.

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May the works of your skill and the signs of your prosperity meet me in the furthest regions of the East,

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give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry and the spirit of my constituency.

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Macaulay's breezy optimism

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that cotton cloth and constitutionalism were what Britain had to offer the world

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was the authentic voice of the liberal Empire,

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equally sure of itself whether it was preaching and teaching at India, Ireland or darkest England,

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where the natives also toiled in filth, ignorance and disease,

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and equally in need of a hefty dose of Victorian vim and vigour.

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Asia, they thought, was especially inert,

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and the great principle of liberalism, according to its founders, was, above all, movement.

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Macaulay had been brought up a strict Christian, but his real church was the church of progress -

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steam engines, free newspapers, and parliamentary government.

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The historian in him looked at the rise and fall of civilisations

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and was jubilant that this was Britain's time for imperial greatness.

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We would share our blessings, moral and material.

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We would take ancient societies, miserable with poverty and tyranny, and teach them self-reliance.

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And when we'd done the job, we'd pack up and go home.

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The great principle of the British Empire would be self-liquidation.

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It would be like a parent, full of bittersweet emotion as its children were sent off into the world,

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tied to the home no longer by power but by grateful affection.

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Never had Britain had such an abundance of clever, zealous young men

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itching to liberate Asia from the grip of superstition and disease.

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And in the Governor General of India, Lord William Bentinck, they'd found an ardent patron.

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Even the most dedicated pilgrims in search of the relics of the Raj

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are not going to make a beeline for this statue.

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In fact, I don't suppose anybody in this park knows who Lord William Bentinck really was.

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You have to look at the figures in the frieze here to see why he rates a commemoration.

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Bentinck was the first of the authentic do-gooder Governors General,

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and the kind of person he wanted to do good to was this woman in distress in the middle of the sculpture group.

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She's a young widow about to join her husband in a joint cremation, the traditional Hindu practice of suttee.

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Unlike an older generation of British in India,

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the likes of Macaulay and Bentinck knew next to nothing of this kind of tradition,

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nor would it have made any difference if they had. What they knew was an abomination when they saw it.

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Never mind that there were only 500 cremations a year -

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the campaign to abolish suttee was the campaign of their dreams, and they went about it with a will.

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Volumes were written by missionaries, committees deliberated in Parliament, a law was passed,

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and inspectors were dispatched to intercept widows en route to the funeral pyre.

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The 1830s were a crossroads in the young life of the liberal Empire.

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Did the welfare of our native subjects oblige us to impose the values of the West on the East?

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Or should we be rebuilding and reinvigorating Asian culture and society?

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Charles Trevelyan, another high-minded young reformer, who was courting Macaulay's sister,

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was in no doubt at all which road to take. The more British India could become, the better.

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For Macaulay and Trevelyan, the country would be turned into one vast school room.

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Teaching, for them, was not just a job. Western education was the instrument

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by which India was going to be transformed from a world of bullock carts and beggars

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into the progressive Victorian dynamic world of the telegraph and the locomotive.

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English would be a way to bring Indians, divided by so many faiths and languages, together,

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and it would help bridge the culture gap between Europe and the subcontinent.

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To those who said, "You're destroying their own culture,"

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Trevelyan replied that Hinduism was:

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Identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities

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that it gives way at once to the light of European science.

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Well, here we are, on the veranda. Late afternoon, the perfect Imperial time of day.

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This is the time when words like veranda and bungalow enter the British vocabulary,

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and they would make you think that the world that the sahibs built for themselves

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was a marriage between an Indian and a British lifestyle.

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A bungalow, after all, was a one-storey Indian dwelling. But it wasn't really like that at all.

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What the British had done with the bungalow was make a life for themselves

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that was as much as possible like the life of a country gentleman in Buckinghamshire or Lancashire.

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So instead of the bustle of an Indian courtyard, with animals inside it, washing and cooking going on,

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we have the rose garden, the well-kept hedges,

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the strictly disciplined gardeners.

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Tucked safely away behind the walls of bungalows and barracks,

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and flattered by a new class of English-speaking merchants,

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the sahibs imagined they knew everything about this new Westernised India,

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which would be, as Macaulay liked to put it, "An ally, not a subject."

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So when Macaulay and Trevelyan went home at the end of the 1830s to government jobs in London,

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they were confident that they had sown the seeds of a modern, liberal India.

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Everything was now in place

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to ensure as much of the world as possible would be governed by the one mechanism capable of doing so -

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the British Empire of free trade. And educated, anglicised India would be a key player.

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There was just one iron law - let the market do its job.

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If people clinging to backward ways went under in the name of the new economic order, well, so be it.

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But while the modernisers were all looking East to see the payoff of their great experiment,

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the first great shock to the complacency of their views came from the opposite direction - the West.

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Somewhere alarmingly closer to home - from Ireland.

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Many of those who looked back on the disaster thought they should have seen it coming all along,

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seen that Ireland was India with rain.

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A population explosion from over two to over eight million in a century.

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Too many bodies clinging to unworkable little plots,

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too small to make a profit in the Imperial marketplace.

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Of course, just like India, there were islands of modernity in the great ocean of poverty.

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Rich Ireland was the East and the North, around Dublin and Belfast,

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facing the immense engine of industrial Britain and supplying it with butter, meat, linen and oatmeal.

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But the West was where Ireland's agony was felt.

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Tiny scraps of land with a cabin and a pig

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and only potatoes to grow to make the difference between survival and starvation.

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By the 1840s, Irish men and women, especially in the poorer counties of the West,

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were eating between 10lbs and 15lbs of potatoes a day, sometimes washed down with a little buttermilk.

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Then in 1845 the angel of death struck, in the shape of the fungus phytophthora infestans.

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Spores grew on the underside of leaves.

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The Irish wind blew them to their neighbours, and the Irish rain made sure the crop rotted.

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The infestation was so sudden and so unprecedented,

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it was impossible at first to take in the magnitude of the disaster.

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In August 1846, Father Theobald Matthew saw the damage for himself.

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On the 27th of last month, I passed from Cork to Dublin.

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This doomed plant bloomed in all the luxuriance of an abundant harvest.

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Returning on the 3rd of the following month,

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I beheld with sorrow one wide waste of putrefying vegetation.

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In many places the wretched people were seated on the fences of their decaying gardens,

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wringing their hands and wailing bitterly at the destruction that had left them foodless.

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And while this was happening, oats, one of rich Ireland's prime exports, were being shipped out.

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The man executing Government policy at the Treasury was Charles Trevelyan.

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Someone who could see a catastrophe around the corner

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wrote to Trevelyan, begging him to stop the export of oats.

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I know there is a great and serious objection to any interference with these exports,

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yet it is a most serious evil.

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Trevelyan wrote back:

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We beg of you not to countenance in any way the idea of prohibiting exportation.

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The discouragement and feeling of insecurity to the trade

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would prevent its doing even any immediate good.

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If the peasants of Western Ireland weren't able to grow potatoes,

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perhaps by labouring on public works they could earn money to buy food.

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This is one of those relief projects, a road in the Burren in County Clare which goes absolutely nowhere.

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But it didn't matter. Even these futile jobs got closed down.

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So too did the soup kitchens which the Government briefly provided,

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following the example of the Quakers and others.

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Now there was only one place to go - the workhouse - even if you had typhus or dysenteric fever.

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Workhouses like this one at Portumna in Galway were filled to overflowing.

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Workhouses had always been deliberately designed to be as much like prisons as possible

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to deter anyone who had the slightest chance of a job.

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But as the famine developed, the situation here got much, much worse,

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the sick and the healthy placed side by side. You'd had to be off your head to want to cross the threshold.

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But when the alternative was starvation, multitudes were banging at the doors begging to be let in.

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After June 1847, to get any sort of relief you had to prove you were at the very bottom of the heap,

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with no more than a quarter of an acre to call your own.

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Of course, renting, say, one acre of bog or heath didn't exactly make you middle class.

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Hundreds of thousands of peasants, of course, were clinging to their cabins and patches of land

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on which they hoped to be able one day to grow potatoes again. Now they were faced with a terrible choice -

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either turn in that extra land to the landlords to get poor relief, or stay put and starve.

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It was no choice at all.

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The hungry converted themselves into the officially landless just to get something to eat,

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travelling miles to the widely dispersed workhouses, leaving their plots behind.

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It was just the opportunity Irish landlords had been waiting for.

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Tenants who tried to stay were forcibly evicted, their roofs smashed in to make sure they didn't return.

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Now the landlords could stock their acres with sheep and cattle.

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So much more profitable than peasants and pigs.

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At the height of the famine, there were too many babies dying either at birth or in early infancy

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for the priests to be able to baptise them all.

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Denied consecrated ground, their fathers carried them to a little piece of no-man's-land,

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like this, on the very rim of the island, on the Atlantic shore,

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and put up a rough stone marker to mark their short, sad life.

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For two million Irish men and women

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for whom it was just too exhausting to go on fighting the uphill battle against hunger,

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opportunist landlords and the stony heartlessness of the Government,

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there was one more place to trudge to - the ports,

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which would carry them away to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand

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and - they hoped to God - a better chance, a better life.

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It would be many generations

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before Ireland's population would recover to the numbers before the potato blight struck.

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And in the memory bank of the Irish diaspora, in Boston, New York or Sydney,

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the great emptying of Western Ireland was above all a British - make that an English - plot,

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little short of genocide.

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It certainly wasn't that. Many of the cruelties were acts Irishmen inflicted on each other,

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just as the Highland clearances had been horrors committed by Scots against other Scots.

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But Trevelyan and men like him DID subscribe to the blessing-in-disguise theory,

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in which, as in India, the road to modernity in overcrowded, unproductive rural economies

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would always be paved with the ruin of villages.

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This is how a contemporary English newspaper summarised it:

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The truth is that these evictions are not merely a legal, but a natural process.

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And however much we may deplore the misery from which they spring,

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we cannot compel the Irish proprietors to continue in their miserable holdings

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the wretched swarms of people who pay no rent

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and who prevent improvement of property as long as they remain on it.

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For many Irish on both sides of the Atlantic, Trevelyan was to blame.

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John Mitchell, a journalist and the most eloquently bitter of the Anglophobes wrote:

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I saw Trevelyan's claw in the vitals of those children -

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his red tape would draw them to death.

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The price of this religious devotion to the Victorian bible of free trade was a million dead,

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another two million uprooted as emigrants, more than a third of the total population of Ireland.

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It was perhaps the greatest peacetime calamity in all of 19th-century European history,

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and it happened not just on the doorstep of the richest country in the world, but inside our own house.

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Ireland, after all, had been part of the kingdom since 1801,

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and this, nationalists would say for generations afterwards, was the bitter fruit of the union.

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Knighted in 1848 for his sterling work on Irish relief,

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Sir Charles Trevelyan was oblivious to all this hatred.

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No blots on HIS conscience.

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"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course,"

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his memorial window would proclaim in the church near his family's estate in Northumberland.

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By the spring of 1857,

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Trevelyan was in no doubt that Victorian Britain was, in the best sense imaginable, the new Rome,

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the Rome before corruption and despotism set in. A light to the nations.

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And thanks to Trevelyan's reforms, run by a new kind of civil service - entry by exam, not by connections.

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Now government, the dream machine of Trevelyan and Macaulay,

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needed a space that would properly proclaim its moral and political grandeur.

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Not a rabbit warren of inky-fingered scribes, but a palace of the high-minded and the hard-working.

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And here it is. The new Foreign Office, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott.

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Swaggering enough to take its place alongside the Topkapi in Istanbul,

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Versailles or the Doge's Palace in Venice as an indisputable house of power.

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And it was a machine whose every part interlocked with majestic economy and precision.

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Our great banks told native money men what Britain needed,

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THEY told their cultivators, and lo, raw cotton and indigo dye arrived.

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We shipped back to them the manufactures produced in the workshop of the world,

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locomotives taking our textiles and heavy metal to the towns of India and China and Latin America.

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The globe was shrinking. And through the modern marvel of the electric telegraph,

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this was the first empire that could boast it was run on high-speed information,

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a worldwide web of intelligence - commercial, political, military.

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So how was it, then, with all this,

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we managed NOT to hear the ominous rumble of an earthquake in the making right in the heart of India?

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Perhaps because we were so besotted with our shiny new toys

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we weren't looking or listening in the right place,

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weren't eavesdropping in the bazaar and the mosque, listening to the imams and the soothsayers.

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If we had been listening,

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we'd have heard in the towns angry complaints about missionaries pushing Bibles in native languages,

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and in the countryside protests about who controlled the land and the taxes you had to pay for it.

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Mutiny, the word by which WE know the terrible slaughters of 1857,

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seems to speak of rank ingratitude for all the good Britain was supposed to have brought India.

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But if you look at it from the Indian point of view, the picture changes.

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Both British and Indians got very worked up about loyalty and honour.

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But what they meant by those very highly-charged words were two completely different sets of values,

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values which were at war with each other in 1857, before a single shot had been fired.

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The Indians, whether Hindus or Muslims, peasants or townsmen,

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lived in a world governed by ceremony, shame, respect and passion.

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The Victorians prized moral and material self-improvement, and above all, tight emotional discipline.

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Typical, then,

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that in their eagerness to issue their Indian recruits, or sepoys, the new, improved Enfield rifle,

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the Army neglected to ensure that the cartridge grease was made of neither pig nor cow fat -

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an oversight bound to offend both Muslims and Hindus.

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In fact, it was not the issue of the offending cartridges which was the problem.

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Vegetable grease was quickly substituted. What was most offensive

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was the increasingly arrogant response of the British to matters which they regarded as trivial.

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They were about to find out just what was trivial to an Indian and what wasn't.

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For generations, the province of Awadh in N India had supplied the British Army with its best sepoys,

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in return for which they got to go back home

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and swagger about in the gardens of Lucknow, its principal city.

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Then in 1856, their special status disappeared when Awadh was annexed.

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And why? Because the new Trevelyanite civil service decided that the province was badly administered.

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The sepoys joined a long queue of people - tax collectors, local judges, palace courtesans -

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all bitter that a perfectly workable regime had been demolished by the British in the name of officiousness.

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Lucknow, once one of the most easy-going places for Europeans and Indians to mix -

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at cockfights, for instance - had become a segregated city.

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The tight-laced British huddled together in their military cantonment

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and in buildings scattered through the 37 acres of the Residency,

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complete with churches, clubs and banquet hall.

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They were about to pay the price for this distance. Their over-reliance on the new information technology

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had fatally separated them from the word on the street.

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The sahibs, of course, said they'd built this cordon sanitaire for the memsahibs,

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who'd come out to India in record numbers.

0:28:420:28:45

Have to keep the ladies away from the dirt, disease and frightful morals of the natives, don't you know?

0:28:450:28:53

But the memsahibs at Lucknow were about to get a taste of the real India with a vengeance.

0:28:530:28:59

Take Katherine Bartram, for example. 23 years old, just married to an Army surgeon,

0:28:590:29:07

living in a hill station 80 miles away from Lucknow.

0:29:070:29:11

There with her new baby, Kate lived the usual bungalow life, waited on hand and foot by servants.

0:29:110:29:18

In early June 1857, Kate and her husband Robert would have heard the incredible news

0:29:200:29:27

that sepoys had marched to Delhi and persuaded the old king, the last of the Mughals, Bahadur Shah,

0:29:270:29:33

to issue proclamations calling on the faithful to rise against the Feringhis, the detestable foreigners.

0:29:330:29:41

European Delhi burned,

0:29:410:29:44

its desperate survivors retreating up this hill to the ridge at the northeast end of the city.

0:29:440:29:50

What started as a mutiny of soldiers

0:29:500:29:53

built like wildfire into an immense rebellion of peasants and townspeople,

0:29:530:30:00

right through the mid-Ganges Valley, the prosperous heart of India.

0:30:000:30:06

Lucknow would not escape the flames.

0:30:060:30:08

Rumour fed disobedience, even up at the Bartram bungalow.

0:30:080:30:13

With brutal speed, the world that Kate must have thought would never change,

0:30:130:30:18

that daily routine of sweepers, punka wallahs, grooms, cooks, gardeners,

0:30:180:30:23

now began to crumble under her slippered feet.

0:30:230:30:28

All our servants have deserted us, and now our trials have begun in earnest,

0:30:280:30:33

for from morning till night we can get no food cooked and we have not the means of doing it for ourselves.

0:30:330:30:40

How we are to manage, I cannot tell.

0:30:400:30:43

For many nights we have not dared to close our eyes.

0:30:440:30:48

I keep a sword under the pillow, and dear R has his pistol ready to start up at the slightest sound.

0:30:480:30:56

Their isolation marked them as sitting ducks.

0:30:560:31:00

Their only chance lay in somehow getting through to the stronghold at Lucknow.

0:31:000:31:05

When Robert was called to his regiment,

0:31:050:31:09

Kate made her way by elephant through hostile country to the domes and minarets of Awadh's golden city.

0:31:090:31:17

8,000 sepoys were preparing to encircle the Residency.

0:31:170:31:22

Within the grounds were barely 800 British soldiers, just 700 loyal Indian troops

0:31:220:31:29

and 50 pupils from La Martiniere, Lucknow's model Western school,

0:31:290:31:35

who were also ready to do their bit.

0:31:350:31:38

Soon after Kate arrived, the siege began.

0:31:430:31:47

When a breakout failed, it was obvious that the British wives would be needed to nurse and cook.

0:31:470:31:54

The torrid heat was broken only by torrential rain.

0:31:540:31:59

Above them, bullocks and horses wandered about, mad with thirst.

0:31:590:32:03

Details had to be sent out to bury the rotting carcasses.

0:32:030:32:08

As it got hotter, the Residency turned into a stagnant pool of sickness.

0:32:080:32:14

Kate Bartram gagged at the overflowing latrines.

0:32:140:32:19

Food became dire, covered with thick swarms of flies.

0:32:250:32:29

There was still champagne, but now it was an anaesthetic used only for the badly wounded -

0:32:290:32:36

one bottle drunk at a gulp before an amputation.

0:32:360:32:41

Kate Bartram watched babies and mothers die, as cholera and dysentery took their toll.

0:32:420:32:49

She saw people go mad. The Victorian mask was slipping.

0:32:500:32:56

After nearly five months, a relief force managed to break through and evacuated the women and children.

0:33:000:33:08

But still the siege wore on.

0:33:100:33:13

It wouldn't be lifted until 1858, the following spring.

0:33:130:33:18

By then, the great Indian rebellion had been crushed.

0:33:200:33:24

Calcutta had remained intact at one side of the country and the Punjab at the other.

0:33:240:33:30

Troops from both converged on the centre, and then it was only a matter of time.

0:33:300:33:35

But then came retribution, swift and terrible.

0:33:390:33:44

Sepoys blown apart by cannon, flogged to death, mutilated.

0:33:440:33:49

Prints illustrating what British men and women had suffered fed the calls for revenge.

0:33:510:33:59

Since the public expected to see a charnel house, photographers who came to Lucknow obliged them,

0:33:590:34:06

dressing their photos with the disinterred bones of mutineers.

0:34:060:34:11

Things would never be the same. As a sop to Indian pride,

0:34:150:34:20

the East India Company had pretended to govern alongside a symbolic Mughal presence, the King of Delhi.

0:34:200:34:28

For a brief moment during the rebellion, he had become an emperor again.

0:34:290:34:35

But now he was a wanted fugitive.

0:34:350:34:38

The British caught up with the pathetic, blind old man at Humayun's tomb in Delhi.

0:34:380:34:44

As a captive, he became a figure of ridicule.

0:34:440:34:48

The East India Company and the rule of the Mughals were put to rest at the same time.

0:34:500:34:56

The catastrophe of the mutiny threw into crisis all the old ideas about how the Empire should be run.

0:34:570:35:05

What shape it would take in the future divided opinion,

0:35:050:35:09

and those divisions were personified by the Punch and Judy of politics

0:35:090:35:14

in the second half of Victoria's century - Disraeli and Gladstone.

0:35:140:35:18

They'd slug it out for decades,

0:35:180:35:22

their views on Imperial power as conflicting as their personal and political styles.

0:35:220:35:28

The man who gave the British a real appetite for empire was, of course, Benjamin Disraeli.

0:35:280:35:35

His whole career, from taking on and tearing down the venerated leader of the Tory Party, Sir Robert Peel,

0:35:350:35:43

to taking the reins of that party,

0:35:430:35:45

was one long virtuoso exercise in improbability.

0:35:450:35:50

And the most improbable feat of all was to make the exotic, starting with himself -

0:35:500:35:56

domestic, national, patriotic.

0:35:560:35:59

When Macaulay had made his maiden speech, arguing for the admission of Jews to parliament,

0:35:590:36:06

it's unlikely he could ever have imagined that one would lead the Tories in the next generation.

0:36:060:36:12

Dizzy was in fact a baptised Jew, a romantic novelist who compensated for his lack of aristocratic pedigree

0:36:120:36:19

or commercial fortune, by being the attack dog of a party not famous for verbal brilliance in the House.

0:36:190:36:27

He took one look at how politics was conducted in mid-Victorian Britain and saw that something was missing.

0:36:270:36:34

That something was what he called imagination.

0:36:340:36:38

Now, what does a politician do with imagination? Well, in the hands of a mere showman, not a lot.

0:36:380:36:45

But behind the parliamentary performer, the wag in the cherry-red waistcoats and the glossy curls,

0:36:450:36:52

was a political tactician of pure genius,

0:36:520:36:55

someone who could take imagination and turn it into power.

0:36:550:37:01

Disraeli's appeal was being NOT Gladstone, not being the high-minded, morally driven do-gooder.

0:37:020:37:10

When Queen Victoria complained she hated being addressed like a public meeting by Gladstone,

0:37:100:37:16

she voiced the irritation of millions of her subjects.

0:37:160:37:20

How the two of them spent their hours tells you everything.

0:37:240:37:29

Gladstone, when he allowed himself time off from the dispatch boxes,

0:37:290:37:33

unbuttoning his cuffs and chopping down trees at Hawarden, his estate in Flintshire.

0:37:330:37:39

Disraeli, on working days at Hewenden, his house near High Wycombe,

0:37:390:37:44

strolled the terrace amidst his peacocks,

0:37:440:37:48

and then perused the odd document or two between daydreams in the study, where,

0:37:480:37:54

"I like to watch the sunbeams on the bindings of the books."

0:37:540:37:59

Like the master psychologist he was,

0:38:000:38:03

Disraeli had cottoned on to the insight, so obvious to us, but rather shocking to the Victorians,

0:38:030:38:10

that in the dawning age of mass politics, not everyone wanted to be political.

0:38:100:38:16

That rather than struggle relentlessly to BE good,

0:38:160:38:20

many people would be happier to have good done for them.

0:38:200:38:24

The new voter might actually prefer physical betterment

0:38:240:38:29

over the moral regeneration the Liberals were always going on about,

0:38:290:38:33

might want the kind of things that Disraeli's Government would give them - better food, cleaner water,

0:38:330:38:40

and the gaudy oompah of empire over the pious cant of liberty.

0:38:400:38:47

In Disraeli's vision for post-mutiny India, the Queen would rule as Empress,

0:38:470:38:54

and Britain would swerve sharply away from Macaulay's wishful thinking

0:38:540:38:59

that the best thing for Indians would be to turn them into brown Englishmen.

0:38:590:39:05

Let them instead be Indians, and be delivered to the tender care of fathers -

0:39:060:39:13

the viceroys and their teams of prefects, the district commissioners, magistrates and collectors,

0:39:130:39:19

who in return for their children being good boys and girls would promise to deliver peace,

0:39:190:39:24

good health and a bowl of rice.

0:39:240:39:27

For Disraeli and the Tories, the goal was more empire, not less.

0:39:290:39:35

Now what India needed was an extravaganza to celebrate her new dominion.

0:39:380:39:45

And who better to organise one than the noble, though irredeemably bad, poet, the Earl of Lytton?

0:39:450:39:52

Lytton's India would be a new-old India,

0:39:540:39:58

a combination of tigers and peddlers, holy men and native princes, bejewelled, feudal and loyal.

0:39:580:40:06

The Queen Empress promising to protect "the ancient usages and customs of India."

0:40:070:40:14

The bond would be sealed at a Durbah, a great assembly,

0:40:170:40:20

camped on the most sacred site of the Raj - Delhi Ridge,

0:40:200:40:25

where the British had precariously held out during the mutiny,

0:40:250:40:29

and which, along with Lucknow, had become a place of pilgrimage in the 20 years since.

0:40:290:40:35

Spectacle would wipe out the memory of slaughter.

0:40:350:40:39

On New Year's Day 1877, thousands watched Lytton step onto a dais,

0:40:420:40:47

its banners designed by Rudyard Kipling's father,

0:40:470:40:52

and receive on behalf of the Empress the homage of 300 Indian noblemen,

0:40:520:40:57

the Nizams and the Gaikwas and the Maharajahs.

0:40:570:41:01

The show had to be sufficiently over the top if it was to impress them with the invincibility of the Raj.

0:41:010:41:08

As Lytton put it:

0:41:080:41:10

The further East you go, the greater becomes the importance of a bit of bunting.

0:41:100:41:15

The banquet, the most expensive in British history, went on for a week.

0:41:170:41:23

During that week, thousands of the Queen Empress's subjects in Madras and Mysore starved to death.

0:41:230:41:29

No reason, Lytton thought, to let it spoil the party.

0:41:290:41:34

The monsoon had failed in south India.

0:41:370:41:40

Lytton's council knew the situation might get desperate.

0:41:400:41:44

But though they were supposed to be the new kind of benevolent ruler, they stuck to the old rules.

0:41:440:41:52

Once again, there would be no interference in the grain markets.

0:41:520:41:56

One again, famine relief works were overwhelmed,

0:41:560:42:00

prompting Lytton's enforcer, Sir Richard Temple, playing the part Trevelyan had played in Ireland,

0:42:000:42:06

to introduce the distance test,

0:42:060:42:09

which insisted that starving applicants travel at least ten miles to dormitory camps

0:42:090:42:15

in order to sign on for hard labour.

0:42:150:42:18

The task of saving life, irrespective of cost, is one which it is beyond our power to undertake.

0:42:180:42:27

The embarrassment of debt and weight of taxation would soon be more fatal than the famine itself.

0:42:270:42:34

What made the scale of suffering so obscene

0:42:390:42:42

was that it happened during a time of grain surplus in other parts of India.

0:42:420:42:48

But so devoted to the market was the Government,

0:42:480:42:52

that it refused to liberate those supplies for fear it would artificially bring down prices.

0:42:520:42:58

So common sense, not to mention common humanity,

0:42:580:43:01

were sacrificed to the fetish of the market, and millions were abandoned to perish.

0:43:010:43:08

Five million died in 1877, of starvation and cholera.

0:43:080:43:14

Horrified missionaries would use relatively portable cameras

0:43:140:43:18

to record sights that otherwise no-one in Britain might believe.

0:43:180:43:23

They saw peasants drop dead in front of troops guarding stockpiles of rice and grain.

0:43:230:43:30

Florence Nightingale, moved to indignation by reports of the famine, called it,

0:43:300:43:36

"a hideous record of human suffering and destruction the world has never seen before."

0:43:360:43:43

For William Gladstone, the lessons of India and Ireland were very clear.

0:43:430:43:49

Disraeli's glitzy paternalism was not the answer.

0:43:490:43:53

For Gladstone, it was morally inexcusable.

0:43:530:43:57

But liberalism needed to be something more than the old mantra of liberty, free trade and righteousness.

0:43:570:44:04

It needed to nail its colours to the mast of political justice.

0:44:040:44:09

For surely it was the sense of being robbed of that justice which drove men to fury and violence.

0:44:090:44:16

So Gladstone's new testament would be the idea that government,

0:44:160:44:22

even self-government within the Empire, or Home Rule, should be the instrument of justice.

0:44:220:44:28

William Ewart Gladstone was a politician whose career had always been shaped by religious revelation

0:44:300:44:37

and for whom the Bible was not just a sacred text, but a guide to politics.

0:44:370:44:42

Once the truth had been revealed to Gladstone, he felt obliged, like the carriers of the first gospels,

0:44:420:44:49

to preach to the unbelievers, to bring others to the light.

0:44:490:44:54

And did he preach it!

0:44:560:44:59

The great railway campaign in the North, Lancashire, Scotland,

0:44:590:45:03

where, with the wind in his hair and fire in his belly,

0:45:030:45:07

the locomotive-driven prophet, appearing before the immense flock, rained down hellfire

0:45:070:45:13

on the immorality and indifference of Disraeli's Government to human suffering.

0:45:130:45:18

Gladstone swept to victory in 1880, but he knew he had no time to celebrate.

0:45:220:45:29

He had to grasp the nettle.

0:45:290:45:31

Ireland is at your doors. Providence has placed it there.

0:45:310:45:37

Law and legislature have made a compact between you, and you must face these obligations.

0:45:370:45:44

Even if he'd wanted to look the other way, political reality would have made it impossible.

0:45:450:45:52

Ireland now boasted a block of 59 MPs,

0:45:520:45:55

who had no intention of allowing London to neglect Irish affairs.

0:45:550:46:00

And at their vanguard was Charles Stuart Parnell,

0:46:050:46:10

whose fate would be tied to Gladstone's as he inched towards Home Rule.

0:46:100:46:17

A Protestant landowner from County Wicklow and an MP,

0:46:170:46:21

Parnell was the most unlikely incarnation of Irish anger, hopes and dreams.

0:46:210:46:27

At this distance, without the sound of his voice or the feeling of his presence,

0:46:270:46:34

it's hard to recapture what made this patrician so charismatic a leader.

0:46:340:46:40

Perhaps it was just because he went so much against the grain,

0:46:400:46:44

did things a gentleman was not supposed to do.

0:46:440:46:47

A landlord who burned for the sufferings of the landless,

0:46:470:46:52

and who could play the parliamentary game like a Friday-night fiddler.

0:46:520:46:56

But Parnell was such a god in the pub and at the race track,

0:46:560:47:00

and a god who all too obviously was made of flesh and blood.

0:47:000:47:04

Parnell's power to sway the Liberals and Gladstone came because he was riding two political horses -

0:47:040:47:11

the well-behaved mare of the ballot box,

0:47:110:47:16

and the fiery stallion of countryside violence.

0:47:160:47:20

This had been triggered by a collapse in demand for Irish cattle and butter.

0:47:200:47:26

Small farmers found themselves struggling to pay their rents. Large numbers faced eviction.

0:47:260:47:32

They fought back with ferocity - cattle-maiming, arson, murder.

0:47:320:47:36

Parnell, as President of the National Land League,

0:47:380:47:42

was the mouthpiece for airing the grievances of the rural population.

0:47:420:47:46

In 1881, in an effort to pre-empt more violence, Gladstone pushed through a Land Act

0:47:460:47:53

which theoretically gave the Government the right to intervene in landlord-tenant relations.

0:47:530:48:00

Suspicions, though, had a way of overcoming trust.

0:48:050:48:10

On the Irish side, it was thought that without the threat of violence, boycotts, strikes, hits on landlords,

0:48:100:48:17

the British would never get really serious about land reform.

0:48:170:48:21

And on the British side, Gladstone was told by the hard-liners in his Government to get tough on militants.

0:48:210:48:28

As the apparent figurehead of the militants, Parnell was thrown into Kilmainam Jail.

0:48:280:48:35

But Gladstone soon realised it was a futile gesture and that dialogue was the only way forward.

0:48:360:48:42

Then, just when it seemed as if progress might be possible,

0:48:440:48:50

on May 6th 1882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his under-secretary Thomas Burke,

0:48:500:48:55

were attacked and stabbed repeatedly while walking in Dublin's Phoenix Park.

0:48:550:49:02

Gladstone took it personally.

0:49:050:49:07

Frederick Cavendish was not just the chief secretary for Ireland, he was also, for Gladstone, family -

0:49:070:49:13

his wife Catherine's nephew.

0:49:130:49:16

Parnell was horrified, offered Gladstone his resignation,

0:49:180:49:24

and assumed that the Phoenix Park murders had all but killed off any serious chance of collaboration.

0:49:240:49:30

But Gladstone did exactly what the hard men of both sides did not expect him to do.

0:49:300:49:36

He rejected the resignation and began a correspondence with Parnell which made their relationship much closer.

0:49:360:49:44

Parnell's importance to Gladstone was that he alone could translate the fury of Irish grievances

0:49:440:49:51

into something politically constructive.

0:49:510:49:55

Gladstone's importance to Parnell

0:49:550:49:57

was that he was the first British politician to take seriously the nationalist dream of Home Rule.

0:49:570:50:03

By the mid-1880s, Gladstone became more adamant that by embracing the cause of Home Rule

0:50:030:50:10

he was doing God's work in Ireland.

0:50:100:50:13

He was indeed in another world, combing his library at Hawarden for Irish history.

0:50:130:50:21

Yet for all the prayers and the penance,

0:50:210:50:24

he was only being realistic when he told the House of Commons this was:

0:50:240:50:28

One of the golden moments of our history.

0:50:280:50:33

One of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return.

0:50:330:50:40

The speech lasted three-and-a-half hours -

0:50:400:50:43

as if Gladstone could overcome the adverse arithmetic of the lobby by sheer force of oratory.

0:50:430:50:50

Now, with all the tragic hindsight we have of the miseries that would ensue on his failure,

0:50:500:50:55

nothing rings more powerfully true than his moving appeal to ditch history and memory

0:50:550:51:01

for the sake of the future. Ireland was asking, he said:

0:51:010:51:06

For what I call a blessed oblivion of the past.

0:51:060:51:11

She asks also a boon for the future,

0:51:110:51:13

and that boon will be born to us in respect of honour,

0:51:130:51:18

no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity and peace.

0:51:180:51:25

Such, sir, is her prayer.

0:51:250:51:28

Think, I beseech you, think well, think wisely,

0:51:280:51:33

think not for the moment, but for the years to come before you reject this bill.

0:51:330:51:40

The prayer was not answered. In 1886, the bill went down to defeat.

0:51:440:51:50

So too did Gladstone and his party.

0:51:500:51:52

It would be six years before he'd be back in power for the last time,

0:51:520:51:57

with the chances of success even slimmer.

0:51:570:52:01

By that time, Parnell's reputation had been destroyed.

0:52:040:52:09

In 1890, the husband of Catherine O'Shea, his mistress,

0:52:090:52:14

had brought a divorce action based on Parnell's adultery with her.

0:52:140:52:19

A year later, deserted by his followers, disowned by the Catholic clergy, he died in her arms.

0:52:190:52:26

New liberalism was now high on the octane of Imperial conquest

0:52:280:52:33

or concern with social conditions at home.

0:52:330:52:36

Its politicians were just humouring Gladstone with another doomed reading in 1893 of the Home Rule Bill.

0:52:380:52:46

The Grand Old Man died five years later.

0:52:460:52:51

But he'd been right.

0:52:510:52:54

The chance of satisfying Irish self-government inside the United Kingdom would never be realised.

0:52:540:53:00

We're still living with the consequences of that defeat.

0:53:000:53:05

The failure of Home Rule was more than just the death rattle of Gladstone's project for Ireland.

0:53:070:53:14

It spelled the end of the whole Liberal dream of an English-speaking empire,

0:53:140:53:20

grounded on English justice and buoyed up by the great miracle of the Victorian industrial economy.

0:53:200:53:26

An empire whose pupil colonies would be educated and legislated into free self-government -

0:53:260:53:34

Macaulay's vision of half a century earlier.

0:53:340:53:38

The Empire, rolling from war to war, painting Africa as well as Asia red,

0:53:400:53:46

seemed to be in the hands of men like Lord Salisbury and Cecil Rhodes,

0:53:460:53:51

who made no bones about ruling by the sword, making it clear to Westernised natives

0:53:510:53:57

that if they thought they were going to have an equal share in law and legislation, they could think again.

0:53:570:54:04

It was no wonder, then,

0:54:040:54:06

that those who in an earlier generation would still have hoped to see the Liberal dream realised,

0:54:060:54:12

now turned their backs on it as a bankrupt fraud.

0:54:120:54:16

The Tories wouldn't give them prosperity, and the Liberals couldn't give justice and self-government.

0:54:160:54:23

It was time to fend for themselves.

0:54:230:54:26

In Britain, the working class finally had had enough of hand-me-downs

0:54:260:54:31

from the conscience-stricken middle-class liberals.

0:54:310:54:34

They created their own Labour Party.

0:54:340:54:37

In India, the writing was on the wall

0:54:440:54:47

when militant Hindu nationalists adopted a campaign and a word that had emerged in Ireland - the boycott.

0:54:470:54:55

For the entire premise of the Macaulay vision

0:54:570:55:01

had been that subject peoples would yearn to join the world of the British consumer,

0:55:010:55:07

and here they were saying no thanks to the travelling salesmen of the workshop of the world.

0:55:070:55:13

Self-sufficient handcrafts would challenge Imperial commerce.

0:55:130:55:16

That's why Gandhi put the spinning wheel at the centre of the Indian flag.

0:55:160:55:23

You wouldn't know this perhaps if you got a good seat at the last of the great Durbahs in 1911,

0:55:230:55:30

actually featuring a King Emperor, George V, present and in person,

0:55:300:55:34

held yet again on the dusty Delhi Ridge where the martyrs of the mutiny had held out.

0:55:340:55:40

Three years later, the Empire would ask its loyal subjects to line up for king and country.

0:55:460:55:53

Millions did - from Ireland and from India.

0:55:530:55:57

Out of the carnage of world war came a reborn Islamic militancy,

0:55:590:56:04

and a revolutionary Irish republicanism, eager to escape the clutches of Empire.

0:56:040:56:10

This is the Ozymandias of the Raj.

0:56:210:56:24

In 1947, when India became independent,

0:56:240:56:29

all New Delhi's statues of the King Emperors and viceroys and generals,

0:56:290:56:35

the great and the good and the not so good, were rounded up and taken here to the Empire's theme park -

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the Durbah field, where they were interned like so many forlorn hostages to that old joker - history.

0:56:420:56:49

Was that it, then?

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Were Macaulay and Gladstone and all the other high priests of the great Victorian mission

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kidding not just the natives, but themselves?

0:56:590:57:03

In the end, were they just window dressers of a regime that was really all about money and power,

0:57:030:57:09

and when both gave out, just cut their losses and slunk home?

0:57:090:57:14

Maybe. But before we write their ideals off completely,

0:57:140:57:18

we should take note of what rose from their defeat -

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cycles of religious hatred, sectarian wars and massacres, epidemics and destitution -

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not all of them, I think, exclusively our fault.

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But perhaps the last word on the British Empire hasn't been written after all -

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at least if that empire is thought of, not in terms of scarlet tunics and flashing sabres,

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but language, law and liberal democracy.

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So perhaps the marriage of East and West does have a future if we're prepared to fight for it,

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not just in Calcutta and Karachi, but also in Leicester, Oldham, Bradford and Burnley.

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Subtitles by Audrey Flynn and Graeme Dibble BBC Broadcast - 2002

0:58:280:58:33

E-mail us at [email protected]

0:58:330:58:38

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