Culture and Imperialism.

In the beginning was the word. Imperialisme was coined 150 years ago, during the period of the July Monarchy in France, as a label for the attempts being made within the country to reclaim Napoleonic ideas and to reimpose the former imperial system. Passing into English as "imperialism," it was employed by British political writers in the 1850s and 1860s to describe the principles, imperial rather than republican, upon which Louis Napoleon sought to organize the government of France after he assumed the title of Emperor in 1852. The word had no connection at the time with what was later to be known as "the British Empire." Indeed, even so scathing a critic of Britain's acquisition of overseas territories as Richard Cobden never employed the word in his diatribes against imperial rule.

Only in the last quarter of the century did "imperialism" come into use to denote, usually with a degree of disapprobation, the process of imperial expansion. It was used by the Liberal leader William Gladstone in the aftermath of the Eastern Crisis of 1877-78 to condemn the conduct of the Tory prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, in moving the British fleet to the Dardanelles, dispatching Indian troops to Malta, and annexing Cyprus. Gladstone was not opposed to the existence of the British Empire but rather, as he explained at the time, to its extension by armed conquest and its maintenance by military force, a system he termed "imperialism." Four years later, of course, he occupied Egypt. The word was also used in British political circles by critics of the Second Afghan War (1878-79) and of the Zulu War, which took place at the same time. Once introduced into the sphere of African affairs, the word spread and flourished over the next twenty years during what came to be known as "the Scramble for Africa."

Since that day it has undergone countless changes of meaning in everyday usage, largely under the influence of Marxist-Leninist dogma. Not only has "imperialist" supplanted "imperial" as the adjective normally derived from "empire" but it has proceeded through a series of mutations, each more outlandish than its predecessor, until now it is no more than a husk of a word into which anyone may cram whatever tortured meaning he cares to. So it is with Edward W. Said, who in his new book subsumes under the heading "imperialism" virtually every contact Europe has had with the outside world since the eighteenth century. Not being an historian, he obviously feels himself absolved from any obligation to respect the imperatives of historical scholarship, and free to prosecute the Western world at will for the crimes he says it has committed against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Culture and Imperialism continues and broadens the attack Said launched a dozen or so years ago in Orientalism, which argued that the very study of the Middle East by Western scholars was an imperialist act, for it furthered the aims of imperial powers and contributed to Western perceptions of the Arabs as inferior and of Islamic culture as secondrate. Now he argues, more ambitiously, that not only did the West lay Africa and most of Asia under the imperialist yoke, but it also forced its culture, especially its literary culture, upon the African and Asian peoples, at the same time deriding or denigrating their indigenous cultures. However, as opposition to imperial rule grew, eventually finding expression in nationalist struggles for independence, a literature of resistance and liberation developed among the native intelligentsia and their sympathizers in the West, which ultimately neutralized the pernicious influence of imperialist literature and paved the way for the downfall of European dominion in Asia and Africa.

At least this is what I understand Said's thesis to be. His writing is so diffuse, obscure, and overwrought that it is difficult to make out what it is he is trying to say - even though he repeats himself ad infinitum throughout the book. Take, for instance, this passage, on British histories of India.

Whereas these official versions of history try to do this for identitarian authority (to use Adornian terms) - the caliphate, the state, the orthodox clerisy, the Establishment - the disenchantments, the disputatious and systematically skeptical investigations in the innovative work I have cited submit these composite, hybrid identities to a negative dialectic which dissolves them into variously constructed components. What matters a great deal more than the stable identity kept current in official discourse is the contestatory force of an interpretative method whose material is the disparate, but intertwined and interdependent, and above all overlapping streams of historical experience.

There are interminable acres of prose like this - muddled, inflated, impenetrable - which testify to nothing more than the author's awesome capacity for self-indulgence.

According to Said, the English novel was "immensely important" in the formation of imperial attitudes. "The novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other." A dubious proposition at best; but let it go. He chooses four novelists whose work for him embodies and promotes the ideas current in their day about the British Empire - Conrad, Kipling, Jane Austen, and Dickens. Conrad and Kipling one can understand, especially as they knew the East at first hand. But Austen and Dickens? It seems that by casually referring to Antigua in Mansfield Park Austen revealed that she had the empire in the back of her mind most of the time, that she was nevertheless indifferent to the condition of the subject peoples ("in Mansfield Park [she] sublimates the agonies of Caribbean existence to a mere half dozen passing references to Antigua"), and that she dodged facing up to her true responsibility to denounce imperialism and all its works.

Dickens in Great Expectations sent the convict Magwitch off to Australia, apparently a dreadful place unfit for decent Englishmen, which showed that Dickens knew a thing or two about what it felt like to be a despised colonial lad. Conrad, of course, as evidenced by the sentiments he expressed in Nostromo, Lord Jim, and Heart of Darkness, was a hopeless case, handicapped by "crucial limitations in vision," imbued with the "paternalistic arrogance of imperialism," and willfully blind to the existence of Africa's native culture. Kipling, surprisingly, is let off fairly lightly: although irredeemably tainted with the sin of imperialism, at least he knew India intimately and wrote about its people with sympathy.

To Said the mission civilisatrice of Britain and France in Asia and Africa was little more than a fraud. It conferred no benefits upon the native peoples but resulted only in "the murder, subversion and endless instability of |primitive' societies." The eminent social anthropologist Ernest Gellner, of Cambridge University, has already exposed at length in the Times Literary Supplement the errors, omissions, and fallacies of Said's arguments about the French Empire in North Africa. I shall confine myself, therefore, to Said's animadversions on the British Empire, which take up a good third of his book.

It need hardly be said that he hasn't a good word to say for the empire. Its sole purpose, it seems, was to oppress and exploit the peoples of Asia and Africa who were unfortunate enough to fall under Britain's malevolent sway. The only legacy it conferred was to make its former subjects, whether white, black, or brown, feel rejected and despised. How Said could come up with such a grotesque caricature, so much at odds with the historical evidence, defies understanding. The answer, in part at least, may lie in the sources he cites in his notes. These consist in the main of parti-pris works of Marxist or neo-Marxist provenance, among which revisionist studies of the New Left school predominate - the "innovative work" to which he refers in the passage quoted earlier. His exemplars include such authors as V. G. Kiernan, Noam Chomsky, and Ali Mazrui. His sacred texts are vituperative tracts such as Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. The standard authorities, such as the six-volume Cambridge History of the British Empire or the equally massive Cambridge History of India, are nowhere to be seen. Nor are any of the works of the great scholars of British imperial history. Very peculiar.

Said's big thought, which he proudly italicizes, is that "the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire." Not for him the old notion that much of the empire was acquired haphazardly, in a fit of absentmindedness, as it were. No, it was all part of a grand design, the intellectual foundations of empire being laid before the edifice was created. This, of course, is all nonsense. What Said is obviously unaware of is that the very word "empire," as applied to the overseas possessions of the Crown, did not come into use in Britain before the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time all these possessions, with the exception of the tropical African dependencies, the Boer republics, and a handful of Pacific islands, had already been acquired.

His lack of acquaintance with elementary facts about the empire shows up prominently in his section on British India, which he examines through the medium of Kipling's Kim. After beginning with the solecism of the "British East India Company" he goes on to speak of "British colonial officials" (India was never a colony administered by the Colonial Office but, eventually, an empire administered by the India Office), and to categorize India as "a territory dominated by Britain for three hundred years." In reality, it was not until the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which consolidated the hold of the English East India Company on Bengal, that one can properly speak of the beginnings of British rule in India. It was not until nearly a century later, with the conquest of Sind and the Punjab in the 1840s, that one could talk of British "domination" in India. From there to independence in 1947 was a hundred years.

Said seems to believe that the abolition of suttee and female slavery only came in the wake of the Indian nationalist movement. So much for the labors of Dalhousie as governor-general in the 1830s. Incidentally, Said is strangely silent about the centuriesold Arab slave trade from Africa, which was suppressed not by Arab nationalists but by intransigent "imperialists" like Palmerston.

The "Great Game" is defined by Said as "a sort of political economy of control over India," which would have raised a laugh beyond the Hindu Kush. Does he know when and how the term originated, or anything at all about the contest between Britain and Czarist Russia in Central Asia? Has he at least read Curzon? One doubts it. The great viceroy never appears in his book - although Christopher Hitchens, Alexander Cockburn, and Anthony Lewis all get favorable mention. Said further informs us that "after 1857 the East India Company was replaced by the much more formal Government of India." It was not. The Government of India had existed, in name and in fact, since 1834. It was the Crown, on the revocation of the Company's charter in 1858, that assumed through the India Office (the renamed Board of Control) direct responsibility for the governing of India, and sovereignty over those territories where the Company had been sovereign. Details, perhaps, but one tends to weary of an author whose pages are studded with historical inaccuracies of every kind, who has never read an imperial dispatch in the original, yet considers himself fully entitled to pontificate at will about the deplorable nature of British rule in India.

He is equally at sea with the rest of the empire. Until the eve of the Second World War, he tells us, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, like the tropical colonies, protectorates, and other dependencies, were governed directly from London. Evidently he knows nothing of the Balfour Declaration (of 1926 on Dominion status, not that of 1917 on Palestine) or of the Statute of Westminster of 1931 which accorded constitutional recognition to the independence of the Dominions. That's what comes of failing to read the right books on the subject. Another instance of this failure, one among many, occurs in the section of his book devoted to the literature of resistance to imperialism. He writes, basing himself on a book by an Arab nationalist, George Antonius, that "the Arabs, after liberating themselves from the Ottomans in 1917 and 1918, took British promises for Arab independence as the literal truth." If the Arabs "liberated themselves" from Ottoman rule, one wonders what the armies of the British Empire were doing in 1914-18 in places like Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq. As for the accusation of British bad faith toward the Arabs, Said is on shaky ground in relying upon Antonius's book, The Arab Awakening, which is a work of pure advocacy, written for the purpose of influencing British thinking on Palestine on the eve of the Second World War. Moreover, its shortcomings have been devastatingly exposed by a far greater scholar than Antonius, the late Elie Kedourie, in his classic study In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth. Said does not so much as mention this book, the existence of which he surely must, as a committed Palestinian nationalist, have been aware of.

The final fifty pages of his book are so embarrassing to read that it would be a kindness to draw a veil over them. He is outraged by the American air raid on Libya but not by the destruction of the Pan American airliner over Lockerbie or the French UTA airliner over Niger, the handiwork of Libyan terrorists. He deplores the war against Iraq, although he admits that Saddam Hussein was naughty to attack Kuwait. He concedes that the Middle East is in an appalling mess, the causes of which he quickly ascribes to the period of British and French domination, although he then goes on to lament that in those days, as compared with now, one could travel freely and in safety from Syria to Egypt. He holds the United States responsible for the Indonesian massacres in East Timor. He blames many of the troubles in the world on a demonic trio of "fundamentalists" - Ayatollah Khomeini, Pope John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher. And so on.

What emerges from these semi-coherent ramblings is Said's abiding hatred of everything the British Empire stood for and everything the United States stands for in the world today. A strange emotion for someone who was educated at Victoria College in Egypt, an institution founded by the British for the education of the scions of the Arab upper classes, and who has found a rewarding academic career in the United States, crowned by appointment to a chair at Columbia University. But that is his affair.