Hemmed in: on the representation of imperial defeat

The ruined cabin

Towards the end of the first volume of Democracy in America, there is a pivotal chapter in which Alexis de Tocqueville summarises those causes, both circumstantial and intentional, which, in his view, will work towards the long-term viability of the fledgling democratic republic. The mood of the chapter is appropriately expansive, even optimistic. Yet this optimism does not prevent Tocqueville from interrupting his account with a somewhat melancholy anecdote. ‘Sometimes’, he begins, ‘man advances so quickly that the wilderness closes in again behind him.’ ⁶ From this crepuscular beginning, he goes on to describe those ‘abandoned houses in the forest, ruined cabins in the remotest solitude’, which are stumbled across in the midst of what he has already portrayed as ‘an empty continent, a deserted land waiting for inhabitants’. ⁷ In particular, Tocqueville recalls arriving at the banks of a lake in ‘one of the still-wild districts remaining in New York State’, ⁸ surrounded by forests and with an island rising from the water, where ‘nothing on the lake shore suggested the presence of man’. With the use of ‘an Indian canoe’ drawn up on the sand, Tocqueville reaches this island, which he describes as ‘one of those delightful New World solitudes that almost makes civilized man regret the savage life’. ⁹ Yet the solitude is not quite as it appears because Tocqueville begins to make out, after all, the ‘traces of man’: logs cut for building, but now sprouting again; a hedge returning to its natural state; the blackened stones of an abandoned hearth; and the debris of a fallen chimney. As he leaves, Tocqueville tells us: ‘I kept saying sadly: “What! Ruins so soon!”.’ ¹⁰

For Tocqueville, of course, the frontier cabin was an apt symbol of what he took to be the inner ambivalence of democratic society. An apt symbol, on the one hand, of the animation, the ambition and the rugged self-reliance that he so admired among Americans and which, he believed, might counter the peculiar social dangers of democratic life: servility and compliance before the majority and before the state. An apt symbol, on the other hand, of the spiritual isolation of democratic citizens, of a self-interestedness capable of fraying away the spaces of orderly domesticity and neighbourly restraint. This much ambivalence is deliberate in Tocqueville’s carefully staged recollection, therefore, reflecting his uncertainty about the likely trajectory of a society founded on the promise of equality.

There are also, however, other less deliberate ambivalences here. In the chapter that follows this, Tocqueville will write about the effects of European colonisation on Native American populations. Three centuries earlier, in A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Las Casas had drawn a deliberately dignifying comparison in claiming that ‘the common people [of the Americas] are no tougher than princes or than any other Europeans born with a silver spoon in their mouths and who spend their lives shielded from the rigours of the outside world’. ¹¹ For Tocqueville, from his side of the revolutionary period in Europe, the same analogy takes on a more intimate meaning: the Native Americans, he suggests, share not just something of the noble habitus – characterised, in his account, by a respect for personal qualities, a proud disdain of industry, a glorying in combat and the chase – but they share also in the fate of the European aristocracy before the advance of democratic society. Tocqueville, it should be said, is careful to qualify his analogy, describing the nobility of the Native American as ‘pretended’ ¹² rather than real. Nevertheless, his sadness at their treatment (pushed to ‘the extreme edge of freedom’ ¹³ ) and his anger at the hypocrisy implicit in this treatment (‘It is impossible to destroy men with more respect to the laws of humanity’ ¹⁴ ) are clearly intended to suggest a certain degree of sympathy, in the proper sense of the word.

Yet, despite this suspicion of historical kinship, the solitude of Tocqueville’s derelict cabin in the woods stands in a long tradition of the representation and self-representation of North American colonisation, a tradition reaching back at least as far as the captivity narratives of the early settlers and their deliberate framing and deployment by the Puritan historians of that colonisation. It stands, that is to say, in a tradition in which the present and future success of European imperialism is called forth through a paradoxical image of its apparent defeat. It was in this way, in a famous sermon, that Cotton Mather responded to the crises faced by the New England settlers at the end of the seventeenth century, including the fact that ‘Bloody, Popish and Pagan Enemies, [have] made very dreadful Impressions upon us, and Captived and Butchered multitudes of our Beloved Neighbours’. ¹⁵ Mather enjoins his congregation to interpret such events as ‘hopeful symptoms’; that is to say, as evidence of a trial visited upon the colonies by God so as to prepare the spiritual ground for their future redemption. Thus it is that he ‘improves’ (i.e. exposits upon) the testimonies of Hannah Dustan and Hannah Swarton, which are recorded at the end of his sermon. Those who had seen their homesteads and livelihoods destroyed by that ‘Barbarous Adversary once and again let loose to Wolve it upon us’, ¹⁶ who had been captured, but who had subsequently effected their escape, become the exemplary characters in a greater providential narrative, which he entitles, appropriately, Humiliations Follow’d with Deliverances.

Tocqueville’s history, of course, assumes a secular rather than a religious frame, and yet his anecdote is positioned within his account so that it too tells a story of coming deliverance. The remnants of the cabin which he stumbles across are presented not as evidence of past failure, but precisely as a guarantee of white America’s coming success, a guarantee of that future imperial expansion that he visualises in the last chapter of the book, already encroaching on Texas and destined, in his view, to dominate much of the world. Like Volney before him, what Tocqueville unearths is not so much a ruin as a blueprint, the floor-plan of a future already out there amid the wilderness, merely awaiting those who will take occupation of it. ¹⁷ It was, of course, precisely the absence of such a plan for the future that doomed the Native American in his view: throughout Democracy in America, he argues, in accordance with an established colonial application of the legal principle of res nullius, that indigenous peoples occupied, but did not possess, the land, ‘that they were there, in some sense, only waiting’; ¹⁸ only waiting, that is to say, for the fate that was about to engulf them.

And here, of course, Tocqueville’s recollection, like Mather’s use of the Hannah Dustan story, works to further effect. The image of the abandoned cabin paints the triumph of empire in colours belonging to defeat, representing it in terms of vulnerability, isolation, even weakness. A little later on, he will return to such imagery, describing again the ‘wretched … isolated dwellings’ encountered in those borderlands where ‘organized society and wilderness meet’. ¹⁹ Approaching these ‘poor huts’ towards evening, he says, one ‘sees the hearth fire flicker through the chinks in the walls, and at night, when the wind rises … the roof of boughs shake to and fro in the midst of the great forest trees’. ²⁰ This is empire imagined as a flickering light in the darkness, imperilled on all sides, but sustained and assured for the future by the fact that it carries within itself the implements of civilisation: ‘Bible, ax, and newspapers’. ²¹ Clearly, such an image draws its power from, and perpetuates, the deception that what was ‘out there’ was indeed an undifferentiated, threatening wilderness. In that respect, of course, the representation of the frontier of imperial expansion as if it were a last line of defence allows Tocqueville to talk sympathetically about the fate of the Native Americans one moment, only to merge them with the inhuman wilds the next. Hence, he can reach his island with the use of an ‘Indian canoe’ and still say that nothing around him suggested the presence of human beings until he came across the traces of past European settlement, a settlement whose ruination merely proves that this is land that still awaits its master.

The dead ruling the living

It was Joseph Schumpeter who noted that the surprising and distinctive feature of modern imperialism, as opposed to Roman or early Islamic versions, for example, is that it must continuously be represented as an essentially ‘defensive’ endeavour. Whereas, he says, ‘in the distant past, imperialism had needed no disguise whatever, and in the absolute autocracies only a very transparent one … today it is carefully hidden from public view’. ²² For Schumpeter, this was the case, in part, because imperialism was to be understood as an essentially ‘objectless disposition’, ²³ so that, although it may be said to articulate, in various times and places, with particular social and economic interests, imperialism is properly understood as constituting an end rather than a means: ‘Such expansion is in a sense its own “object”, and the truth is that it has no adequate object beyond itself.’ For Schumpeter, therefore, pretexts of this sort become necessary in the modern era, as they were not in earlier historical periods, because ‘capitalism is by its nature anti-imperialist’. ²⁴ In saying this, he is referring to the familiar claim that unencumbered free trade would act against the formation of insular, mercantilist interests and, thus, against belligerent nationalism. He is also referring, however, to a change, inaugurated by capitalism, in how we see the world. It becomes increasingly difficult, in his view, to conceive of any objectless action in the context of capitalist modernity: ‘the instinct that is only instinct, that has lost its purpose, languishes relatively quickly in the capitalist world’; ²⁵ languishes, but is never quite disposed of, precisely because the class to whom such a view of historical action belongs has itself not been quite disposed of. Imperialism continues, for Schumpeter, not because it has an affinity with the ‘inner logic of capitalism’, ²⁶ but precisely because that inner logic has never been allowed to conclusively play itself out. What emerges instead at the start of the twentieth century is a capitalism ‘patterned’, as he puts it, not only in its ‘economy … but also its mind’ ²⁷ by the world of the pre-capitalist elites. The degree to which modern empires are presented as a defensive endeavour is thus doubly eloquent, itself speaking out of a deeper historical defeat: the self-proclaimed triumph of the bourgeois era conceals an inner colonisation by the forces of autocracy, which it claims to have consigned to the past.

We are, to put it in the most generous way possible, still awaiting the historical evidence that would justify Schumpeter’s view that capitalism, in the long run, will prove inherently anti-imperialist, and, in many respects (see, for example, his prediction that America was ‘likely to exhibit the weakest imperialist trend’ ²⁸ ), hindsight leaves his analysis looking very wide of the mark. Nevertheless, he was, it seems to me, on to something in arguing that the ideology of defensive empire, the repeated self-representation of the European empires in and through the imagery of defeat, might be understood as a symptom of the historical compromise between the bourgeoisie and an older elite. Tocqueville’s anecdote, after all, demonstrates a not insignificant reversal. He had begun his study by imagining democratic society ‘settling down complacently among the ruins of the old building’ ²⁹ of the aristocratic world. Yet, out on the New World frontier, it is Tocqueville, an aristocrat of a sort, who settles down amid a ruin of democratic society and who reads that ruin as a proof of its coming triumph. The same Tocqueville who argued later, in the peremptory phrase that opens the second of two reports that he wrote for the chamber of deputies recording the discussions of a committee established to review French colonial policy: ‘Algeria must be colonized.’ ³⁰ And, if such a policy, as he had insisted in an earlier article from 1841, meant submission to the ‘unfortunate necessities’ of Marshal Bugeaud’s razzias – the need to ‘burn harvests … empty silos … seize unarmed men, women and children’ ³¹ – it was a policy that justified itself, not on account of the economic interests entailed in it, but because the imperial frontier was, for France as it was for the American settlers in his view, the line at which a particular conception of freedom was to be defined and defended. Tocqueville repeatedly implies in his writing, as he does here, that it takes the mind of the noble to properly grasp the seemingly modern concept of ‘freedom’, to cherish freedom not for the usual bourgeois, utilitarian reasons, but for the sake of its ‘own intrinsic glamour’. ³² One gets a sense, within the various dispatches and discussions that Tocqueville produced in regard to the French colonisation of North Africa, just how far, in this respect, the project of European imperialism was indeed ‘patterned’ by the mind of the pre-capitalist elites. While his analyses, which played a not insignificant part in shaping French policy-making in this period, do recognise the private interests at stake in Algeria, his conception of the imperial project itself remains essentially ‘objectless’. The vulnerable outposts of French imperialism appear as spaces in which things intrinsically glamorous are to be won or lost: glory, renown and freedom from the constraints of a bureaucratic state. ³³

Two things might be said immediately about such an account of imperialism. The first is that it is, of course, far more publicly serviceable, as well as more difficult to contest, than any alternative that might be fashioned from a frank admission of economic motives. Schumpeter is, thus, half right. As the influential recent work of Cain and Hopkins ³⁴ has suggested, where Schumpeter sees atavism in modern imperialism (‘the dead ruling the living’, as he puts it ³⁵ ), there may well have been a much more comfortable and increasingly close accommodation between factions of the metropolitan bourgeoisie and an older, landed elite. In Cain and Hopkins’ account, the focus of which is the British empire (and which draws, to some extent, on the insights of earlier theorists such as Thorstein Veblen and J. A. Hobson, ³⁶ as well as owing an obvious debt to theses famously advanced by Perry Anderson ³⁷ ), this alliance took shape geographically around the city of London and coalesced economically over time as finance capital, with shared interests emerging in banking and investment services, the provision of credit and insurance and in the other sectors of the economy dealing with the facilitation of trade and communications. ‘[I]mperialism becomes one of the methods by which [a pre-capitalist] elite can prosper and continually renew itself’, they suggest. ³⁸ One can accept this much of their argument without having to adjudicate over the earlier debate between Anderson and Thompson about the completion or incompletion of a bourgeois revolution in Britain.

A rare point of agreement between the protagonists in that dispute was a recognition of the degree to which the empire provided an ongoing scene for aristocratic performance and a context from which the aristocracy continued to shape, in deleterious ways, the ‘interior space’ of the nation. ³⁹ As Anderson argued, and as is well recognised now, the overseas empires helped to provide a warmed-up half-life for the symbolic and aesthetic practices of the European nobility. ⁴⁰ It is similarly recognised that forms of indirect rule, established in places such as India, Northern Nigeria or some of the Pacific islands, helped to shore up local feudal arrangements, as they also did in the Java so vividly described by the embittered Dutch colonial administrator Eduard Dekker (Multatuli). ⁴¹ Something like the converse is also true, however; the social vision of the pre-capitalist elite proved more than practicable in representing empire as the essentially disinterested defence of threatened freedoms, as opposed to the entirely interested extension of forms of un-freedom over others. The public imagining of empire was significantly shaped by an aristocratic ideology that valorised prestige, disavowed crude commercialism and served to portray the material interests of conquest as moral ones, its objective processes as the outcome of ‘objectless’ passions. Schumpeter draws attention to this ideological shaping not only by analysing its historical conditions of possibility, but also by the extent to which he perpetuates it. If he mistook, as Anderson put it, an effect for a cause, the effect is nonetheless historically telling. ⁴²

The second point to make is that the representation of empire through the imagery of glorious defeat or embattled defence creates an imperative. As with all ideologies, the question to be asked here is not just of how things are seen, but of the conditions for action that such vision establishes. In this sense, the ‘pretexts’ of modern imperialism that Schumpeter refers to should not be understood as merely excuses or deceptions, but as a series of accounts that insist, above all, on their ‘pre-ness’; they point not just to what is, but to what must now come to be by virtue of what is. Empire is forever rising from its own ashes, just as Tocqueville’s ruined cabin becomes the paradoxical guarantor of the success of American colonisation. Even a cursory glance through the history of the high period of British imperialism makes clear how often and how effectively this imperative resonated. Almost uniformly in that context, expansive military expeditions were represented as having been called forth by some instance of defeat or threat against British outposts, interests or ‘men on the ground’. The fact that commercial agents, missionaries and explorers so often wandered beyond the bounds of the formally recognised empire meant that instances of local ‘defeat’ or valorous defensive actions were never in short supply, as did the fact that Europeans almost always formed a tiny, highly visible minority within the bounds of established empire. This is not to suggest, as have Robinson and Gallagher in their famous thesis, ⁴³ that imperial expansion tended to work back to front, that it was effectively driven by events that took place at its turbulent peripheries. Cain and Hopkins’ account reasserts (convincingly, in my opinion) the degree to which powerful metropolitan interests were effective in shaping imperial decision-making according to their own concerns, even if events were necessarily also shaped by the contingencies of local relationships and by the varied responses of those affected. ⁴⁴ The point, in any case, is that the contexts of empire meant that there was never any shortage of grist to the ideological mill that I have described. There are, of course, the famous examples: the killings of British residents that marked the start of revolt in India in 1857; the murder of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885, which gave, as Victor Kiernan puts it, a ‘generation of Englishmen an emotional symbol of civilization stabbed by savagery’; ⁴⁵ the defeat of the British forces at Isandlwana in 1879, which marked the start of the Anglo-Zulu wars. But the same articulation is evident in a whole series of less celebrated instances in which small local losses, killings or perceived threats led to punitive expeditions, conquests and the extension, or attempted extension, of new forms of imperial control. British involvement in Malaysia began in this way, with the Perak war (1875), which was portrayed as a response to the killing of a British administrator as, inter alia, was the Anglo-Satsuma war in 1863 and the sacking of Benin in 1897. Honorific, as opposed to military, defeats could be positioned in similar fashion; the Second Opium war with China, famously, broke into open hostilities after the Chinese authorities insisted on searching the Sparrow, a British trading vessel.

There is little point in piling up examples in this respect. Karl Marx, watching the overtures to the Anglo-Persian war in 1856, noted how wearily familiar the pattern had already become, how each successive extension of British power began with the accusation of ‘some nebulous outrage’, so that imperial history perennially recreates ‘the fable of the wolf and the lamb’. ⁴⁶ Some years later, reflecting no less wearily on the pretexts for the Boer war, J. A. Hobson considered this process at greater length, arguing that imperialism, at least so far as its domestic public reception was concerned, required a ‘cancelment of all sane, normal grasp of the laws of moral causation … a shortening of vision’. ⁴⁷ A key part of this perceptual foreshortening was the way in which the forces of empire came to be read only as the surrounded frontier stockade, the besieged residency at Lucknow or the ambushed Shangani patrol; only, in other words, as a series of decontextualised instances in which what was at stake was the ‘objectless’ defence of freedom as such, that which has to be defended simply by virtue of what it is, for the sake of its ‘intrinsic glamour’, and in the face of which all questions of economic interest must appear misplaced or vulgar. It is precisely in this sense that J. R. Seeley, for example, looking back over the history of English imperialism in India in 1883, could confidently proclaim that the major wars of the English in India were defensive wars, concluding that: ‘the assertion … that the Empire is the mere result of a reckless pursuit of trade, proves to be as untrue as the other assertion sometimes made, that it is the result of a reckless spirit of military aggression’. The expansion of British rule in India, rather, is to be reckoned on the altogether more elevated ‘high grounds of statesmanship’ and is to be understood as a process driven by a disinterested and moral decision-making: ‘Aggrandisement might present itself in the light of a simple duty, when it seemed that by extending our Empire the reign of robbery and murder might be brought to an end in a moment and that of law commence.’ ⁴⁸

The passion of the spectator

It was Hobson’s particular insight that modern imperialism articulated in disturbing ways with the emerging world of consumer society: ‘jingoism’, he wrote, ‘is the passion of the spectator’ ⁴⁹ and, therefore, of that wider, anonymous community created by the mass-mediated spectacle. There is more than a little condescension in Hobson’s account of such crowds, to be sure, and he tends to deny the possibility of critical thinking or sceptical detachment in relation to the popular arts, seeing the music hall, for example, as a ‘serviceable engine for generating military passion’. ⁵⁰ As Penny Summerfield has shown, ⁵¹ the meanings and the spaces of the music hall (and of popular creativity more generally) were rather more contested, even in the era of high imperialism, than Hobson allows. Nevertheless, The Psychology of Jingoism is important, it seems to me, precisely because it does not settle for the idea that the public are merely duped by the impresarios of imperialist spectacle. Hobson’s concern, rather, was with the way in which the ‘spectators’ of empire came to be emotionally self-invested in what they consumed. When he notes, for example, that the public accepts claims about ‘“a just and necessary war for the furtherance of liberty and the protection of the British empire” for which it has precisely the same sort of evidence as for the belief that Colman’s is the best mustard, or Branson’s extract of coffee is perfection’, ⁵² the question he is raising is the question of the felt-ness of empire, its appeal to a semblance of moral choice, of taking sides, which, as Theodor Adorno would later suggest, is equally a part of the appeal made by advertisers in the selling of mustard or coffee.

In this respect, the continual recapitulation of the story of empire as imperilled or surrounded is obviously significant. The fears of the settler frontier, expressed, for example, in Mary Rowlandson’s best-selling True History, were sharpened by a sense of genuine demographic insecurity – ‘hem’d in with the merciless and cruel Heathen’ ⁵³ – just as the narratives of Barbary captives described by Linda Colley ⁵⁴ spoke to a sense of genuine vulnerability in an era prior to the establishment of British naval and economic hegemony. Yet these terrors of nascent empire refused to be exorcised, even as that empire came to occupy a position of more or less secure global dominance. To some extent, of course, this was because they corresponded to the later colonial administrator’s paranoia over the threat of resistance; Susan Bayly points out that nineteenth-century British officials in Asia felt themselves increasingly ‘surrounded by dangerous frontiers’, ⁵⁵ by millenarian and revivalist movements whose spread and content were unpredictable and by mysterious outbursts of rebellion, rumoured and actual. Fearful of a ‘native’ who refused to remain compliantly in place, colonial officials came to seek ontological stability in the concept of ‘race’ and geographical stability through various applications and adaptations of those vagrancy laws first developed at home to control the movements of the Tudor poor. ⁵⁶ Yet, despite such remedies, the ‘native’ continued to prove a slippery object, and the imperial mind continued to be visited by a recurrence of Rowlandson’s nightmare: ‘It is odd how the African, and more particularly the Hausa, tends to avoid being in front of you when speaking or being spoken to’, wrote the then assistant district officer, Walter Crocker, in his diary of a tour of Northern Nigeria in 1934. ‘Thus Messengers or servants, instead of placing themselves in your line of vision, sit or stand at the side or even as far back as they can get so that without turning your head to an uneasy degree you cannot see them.’ ⁵⁷

It was precisely the ‘uneasy’ private fears of colonial officials on the ground – fears of encirclement, imminent threat, defeat – which provided a characteristic tone for a tradition of metropolitan representation of empire which gained in visibility during the high-water mark of Victorian imperialism, as the British empire became an explicitly public project. In the live recreations of glorious defeats from the southern African wars, ⁵⁸ in the music hall imaginings of the death of Gordon or Captain Wilson, ⁵⁹ in Henry Newbolt’s poetic use of the battle of Abu Klea, or William McGonagall’s of Maiwand, ⁶⁰ British individuals abroad were imagined in such a way as to be effectively ‘de-empired’, stripped of imperium. This was not the only palette from which imperial self-representation was drawn, of course; there was always bombast and vainglory aplenty. Nevertheless, it is notable just how often, especially at its height, the British empire was represented to a domestic public as the absence or defeat of itself.

Writing after Edward Said, it almost goes without saying that a common characteristic of such imaginings is a proposition of boundedness. The representation of imperial defeat continually zeroes in on an impossibly neat figure: the contours of the palisade, the infantry circle or, to return for a moment to my original example, Tocqueville’s speculative proposal for a ‘continuous barrier’ to be erected around Algiers and the surrounding massif, on the understanding that nomadic Arabs find it constitutionally disconcerting to attack clearly marked, domesticated space: ‘You find wretched houses everywhere that withstood actual sieges without being taken.’ ⁶¹ The impossible neatness of these images, moral as well as conceptual, comes into focus not despite, but because of, their very wretchedness. The threatened or reported destruction on which the genre of imperial defeat feeds has the effect of turning the muddy morality of empire into a simple choice about freedom or its absence. Jonathan Swift’s reimagining of the imperial moment as one in which a giant wakes up pinned down by miniscule natives made this satirically explicit from early on, drawing out the extent to which the self-image of European imperialism was often equivocal, involving a strange paradox of self-aggrandisement and sly humility, the security of power clothed with the moral authority of the victim or the victim-to-be.

At the same time, such images raise the national ‘us’ above the exigencies of birth or of an equally muddy collective history and into the safety of sheer, seeming fact, a facticity given to ‘us’ by virtue of our emplacement in a threatening, exterior world. Thus, for example, Baden-Powell begins his ‘handbook for instruction in good citizenship’ precisely by encouraging readers to imagine themselves living their domestic life in a continual state of siege, an unending Mafeking. Thus, conversely, Kipling’s blinded artist Dick Heldar, in The Light that Failed, searches out his ending very deliberately amid the military square of a war on the African frontier. ⁶² The end of Kipling’s novel and the start of Baden-Powell’s handbook both rely on the same consoling, simplifying assumption: we know who we are most clearly when we are encircled, when we are conveniently hemmed in.

One should recognise, by way of qualification, that the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ realised in such stories of defeat did not always or automatically fall between European and non-European. Such a distinction was, perhaps, latent from early on, but it was the emergence of nineteenth-century scientific racism that served to rigidify a colour-coded understanding of the relationships of empire. In earlier examples of such stories, encirclement and vulnerability are frequently defined in response to experiences of defeat in the context of inter-European imperial rivalry. In Jemima Howe’s narrative of her kidnapping at the hands of the Abenaki in 1755, for example (at least as this was recorded retrospectively by the pastor of her home town, Bunker Gay), Howe’s treatment serves to mark a distinction not merely between civilised white and savage non-white, but also between Protestant Anglophone and Catholic French. Although Howe is redeemed from her original captors by a French family, she comes to find herself hemmed in by a new, twofold threat; the unwanted sexual attention of the men of the household, on the one hand, and by the unwanted proselytising attention of religious representatives of French ‘superstition and bigotry’, on the other. ⁶³ Earlier, amid the resurgence of war between England and the Dutch in 1672, John Dryden had summoned up memories of the ‘massacre’ of Amboina in 1623, turning the story of English and Japanese East India Company employees, executed by the Dutch authorities on accusations of treason, into a bloody Restoration tragedy. In Dryden’s play, the English characters are represented as victims of their own powerlessness, not in relation to ‘the native’, who becomes here a co-victim and a conveniently receptive partner to English benevolence, but in relation to a rival imperial power. It is the Dutch villain of the piece who sneers at Towerson, the English hero: ‘you ha’ no Castles in Amboyna’. The effects, however, remain those that I have already described. Firstly, the experience of defeat becomes a kind of ritualised moment in which English identity is revealed all the more clearly, as ancillary interests are stripped away (‘we yet have English Hearts’, is Towerson’s response). Secondly, and relatedly, there is a disavowal of commercialism as the driving force of British overseas expansion (‘I wou’d [not] make Merchandise of Love’, he declares, in the same breath).

A second qualification is also necessary here. Said’s account of Orientalism, like Hobson’s account of Jingoism before it, can be criticised for making blanket assumptions about the response of a domestic audience to the tradition of representations which it describes. As recent research has shown, popular imperial spectacles met with audiences in the plural, rather than the singular, and with responses that were not simply uniform. ⁶⁴ Representations of imperial defeat were not received in a one-dimensional way. The relatively short-lived, but enormous popularity of Elizabeth Thompson’s (Lady Butler’s) war painting, for example, was due in large part to the intimacy that she brought to a genre formerly known for its panoramic canvases and serried ranks. The Remnants of an Army (1879) provides a stark example of her style, with its image of a single desperate man approaching the fort at Jellalabad after the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842. Although the timing of the painting allowed some sections of the British press to associate it with demands for revenge in the context of the Disraeli government’s renewed invasion of Afghanistan, ⁶⁵ what characterises the composition is the profound isolation of the main figure on his ruined horse. Although help is distantly at hand, the precariousness of the rider, with his desperate last-ditch grip on the saddle, makes this an image more pathetic than jingoistic. Above all, it is an image that makes it all but impossible for the viewer of the picture to imagine empire as itself, as the exercise of power or command. As has been recognised in this respect, the popularity of Thompson’s pictures was not the product of a uniform patriotism, ⁶⁶ but of the fact that there was something democratic about their pathos, at least so far as their European figures were concerned. Thus, she focuses repeatedly on the suffering of the ordinary soldier in the imperial army, such as those lined up in The Roll Call, of which a quarter of a million copies were sold within a few weeks of its public display at the Royal Academy in 1874. One might argue, in other words, that the representation of imperial defeat in this era was significant not least because it served to provide the basis for what Pierre Bourdieu has called a sense of ‘homology’ between the subject of the image and the everyday lives of the popular audience for such representations. If that audience was, to some degree, won to empire in the late Victorian period, it may well have been won less by a thunderous nationalism or the glamour of the imperial durbars than by a sympathetic response to the imagining of experiences with which, domestically, it was all too familiar: embattlement, struggle, a desperate hanging on. Although Thompson’s popularity dwindled in the 1880s, the more triumphal work of her male followers and rivals – Gibb, Fripp, Wollen – continued, tellingly, to return to the subject of last stands and thin red lines. An era of defeat for progressive popular politics was ushered in, E. P. Thompson suggested, on the night that the siege of Mafeking was raised, when dockers on the Victoria and Albert docks refused to unload any ships not decked out in celebration of the news. ⁶⁷ It is worth asking, in the face of this fact, whether there might not have been good reason why those who were besieged in their daily and working lives responded to such distant dramas with this misdirected solidarity.

Outposts of progress

The repertoire of imagery and narrative associated with imperial defeat continued to inflect the historiography of the European empires, even after those empires had formally disintegrated. Indeed, as the break-up of these began to play itself out, an aristocratic mood of decline and fall, which had always given colour to such representations, found itself acquiring a new authenticity; a mood well captured, after the event, in the three-and-a-half books of J. G. Farrell’s empire series. ⁶⁸ A particularly salutary example of the degree to which this way of envisaging empire continues to haunt attempts to grapple with its legacy is provided by Hannah Arendt; salutary because Arendt’s analysis of European imperialism and its relationship to totalitarianism is, in other respects, so profoundly insightful. Like Schumpeter, Arendt draws attention to the extent to which empire was the scene of a squalid compromise between the economic imperatives of the bourgeoisie and the ‘mind’ of the aristocrat. She argues, significantly, that modern theories of ‘race’, particularly as these were deployed and sharpened in the context of overseas dominion, were found to be persuasive not least because they were able to appeal to a still-resonant and essentially feudal notion of ‘differentiation by birth’. Doctrines of race gained an intellectual foothold, in part, because they ‘helped anybody feel himself an aristocrat’. ⁶⁹ Much more consistently than Schumpeter, however, Arendt recognises that modern imperialism has its objective roots in a contradiction between the demands of capitalism and the confines of the nation state. If imperialism is potentially ‘limitless’, in the sense that there is no necessary limit to the extension of imperial control, this is because it is driven from within by ‘the bourgeoisie’s empty desire to have money beget money as men beget men’, and, more particularly, by the dreams of the financier or the speculator that saw in the opportunities of empire a means of bypassing ‘the long way of investment in production’. ⁷⁰ On the one hand, therefore, Arendt draws out very clearly an alliance between gentleman and capitalist in the imperial context that is ideological insofar as the project of empire furnished the owners of ‘superfluous capital’ ⁷¹ with a semblance of social and historical purpose sufficient to shield them from the kind of resentment which, she argues, had overtaken the Jewish financiers of early modern states as they became associated with an unproductive wealth. On the other hand, this alliance was not merely ideological, but also profoundly ‘interested’, concerned, as it was, with allowing an alliance of ‘wasters’ (as Veblen called them ⁷² ) access to the shortcuts of imperial accumulation.

Yet, when she comes to trace the specific historical emergence of the ideological and administrative practices of totalitarianism within the imperial context, Arendt’s account shifts dramatically into the register of imperial defeat. She begins her pivotal chapter on race and bureaucracy by considering the history of imperialism in southern Africa, finding in the gold rushes that began there in the late nineteenth century an uncanny historical symbolism: ‘In its uselessness in industrial production [gold] bears an ironical resemblance to the superfluous money that financed the digging of gold and to the superfluous men who did the digging.’ ⁷³ Within a few pages, however, this quality of superfluity and social disconnection is no longer being attributed to the logic of a finance capital whose representatives descended on southern Africa, and is attributed instead to the physical and human landscape of Africa itself. The slippage begins by analogy: the ‘world of native savages was a perfect setting for men who had escaped the reality of civilization [because there they] faced human beings who, without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse’. ⁷⁴ But, by the time she comes to discuss the Boer occupation of the hinterland, Arendt is rehearsing an altogether typical story of vulnerable Europeans overwhelmed by an exterior wildness, by the fact of being surrounded by those who ‘behaved like a part of nature [and] had not created a human world, a human reality’. ⁷⁵ Nor is this judgement a passing aberration because her statement has to be read in the shadow of a wider argument in the study that any concept of rights must assume a life lived within a polity capable of defining and defending such rights for its members, so that it is ‘only savages’ ⁷⁶ who have nothing more than their humanity as a basis from which to claim just treatment. It is precisely an absence of political life in this sense which defines the black African in Arendt’s account and which, therefore, serves to exonerate the Boers, whose dominance is ‘as much imposed by their black slaves as assumed freely’, whose murders were ‘quite in keeping with the traditions of the tribes themselves’ and whose racism, thus, has ‘a touch of authenticity and, so to speak, of innocence’ ⁷⁷ about it. Thus, empire is again told as a tale of defeat: in Arendt’s case, a moral, if not actual, defeat which has its most obvious narrative precursors in the Conrad of Heart of Darkness and ‘An Outpost of Progress’. ⁷⁸ In Arendt’s version, the voortrek becomes the final proof of the Boer descent into ‘rootlessness’ and beyond the pale of European civic and political traditions. Such rootlessness ceases to be a characteristic of finance capital and its representatives searching the empire for opportunities to restage the ‘original sin’ of primitive accumulation. Instead, the origin of the sin is traced to Africa and to Africans themselves, so that, by an extraordinary upsetting of the ‘laws of moral causation’, it is the victims of European imperialism that are required to bear historical responsibility, not only for the crimes visited upon them (an argument that is familiar enough, as we have seen with Tocqueville), but also for the twentieth-century brutalities that emerged in the heart of Europe itself.

Narratives of vengeance

Anthony Pagden begins his recent historical survey of western imperialism by calling time on the existence of empires as such. They are, he says, ‘no more, at least in their traditional form’. ⁷⁹ It does appear clear that America’s contemporary military predominance could not easily, or at least durably, be translated into a formal territorial empire of any extent (although American power clearly relies on its ability to maintain a series of colonies in miniature, in the form of overseas bases and listening posts). It seems equally clear that most of the architects of the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were uninterested in the establishment of formal colonies, ⁸⁰ nor, for that matter, can America claim anything other than an increasingly equivocal economic hegemony. Yet, whether or not the current conjuncture marks the end of modern processes of empire building, as others aside from Pagden have argued, the only appropriate word for recent American foreign policy is ‘imperialist’, ⁸¹ and there remain significant continuities between that imperialism and the European forms that preceded it. Not the least of these continuities is the entirely familiar response to instances in which American interests or troops are attacked or defeated. In the representations and responses to such events, one can very often see replicated precisely the kind of dynamic that I have been describing in this essay.

I do not mean to suggest that there is only a straightforward historical repetition here. The frontier cabin with which I started, after all, is now a space interior to America rather than at its periphery. And, yet, it is noticeable that in popular novels and films, such cabins remain troubling, uneasy places and often find themselves besieged anew, no longer by Native Americans, but by whatever monstrous shapes popular culture can make out of historical bad conscience: the apparitions arising from ‘Indian’ graveyards (in a favourite set-up of Stephen King) or the voracious un-dead of the early schlock-horror movies of George A. Romero or Sam Rami. These hauntings of the political unconscious do bespeak a continuity with the past, and, in this regard, the proposition of a newly ‘decentred’ empire emerging at the end of the last century seems to me to overstate its case. If, as Hardt and Negri famously suggest, ⁸² we are witness to a new form of empire that assumes a world in which its enemies are everywhere and nowhere at once, hemmed in by foes who refuse to clearly reveal themselves, its nightmares are not really that far removed from those that troubled the sleep of British colonial officials in India or Africa, even if they take place on a different scale. Moreover, it is noticeable that, in American popular culture, as in Victorian British popular culture, imperial power is repeatedly imagined in or through the idea of its momentary defeat or failure. Witness the strange second life of the disaster movie, emerging at first in the context of the nuclear arms race, before descending into cliché and then parody by the late 1970s, only to be tellingly resuscitated within years of the end of the cold war and refurbished with computer-generated effects in order to unleash an ever-more cosmic series of adversaries against the great American metropolises.

More revealingly still, representations of imperial defeat in the American context are often superimposed explicitly onto earlier representations from the British imperial context or return to the same archetypes as did those earlier portrayals. Thus, in the former respect, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) imagines the disastrous American intervention in Mogadishu as a remix of Rourke’s Drift – or, at least, Rourke’s Drift as portrayed in Zulu. In Scott’s film, an entirely familiar horde of voiceless Africans shoot down an American helicopter and proceed to attack a beleaguered squad of American soldiers on the ground. The undifferentiated facelessness of the former throughout the film is contrasted with the unflinchingly realised recreation of injury and suffering among the latter: ‘U.S. forces blast away “skinnies” like the troops in Starship Troopers obliterating “bugs”, but more appear, endlessly’, wrote a reviewer in the American Historical Review, only to insist that ‘Black Hawk Down is not a “horde of savages”’ movie and conclude that it provided an ‘accurate, truthful understanding of what has happened’. ⁸³ In the latter respect, meanwhile, Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300 returns to the oldest of all the urtexts that have fed the representative tradition of western imperial defeat: the battle of Thermopylae. Miller’s very knowing rehearsal of the story celebrates, once again, the triumphant defeat of the forces that represent the ‘world’s one hope for reason and justice’, who defy, just long enough, the ‘howling barbarians, the armies of all Asia, pledged to … makes [sic] slaves of the only free men the world has ever known’. ⁸⁴ The original comic book series spawned a subsequent and hugely successful film adaptation of the same name, in which the ‘clash of civilisations’ symbolism was, if anything, heightened and to which was added a heavy dose of warmed-over orientalist cliché.

Such fictional imaginings of the national community find their echoes in the way in which the public spokespersons of American power themselves have responded to instances of threat or defeat. And here, of course, 9/11 and the events that followed it appear as the unavoidable contemporary example. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out, ‘September 11 contained something of the fall of Troy, the first of all defeats’, even though it occurred in a world in which the globalised dispersal of both populations and information meant that earlier traditions of national revanche no longer quite made sense. The crater left by the World Trade Center was, he says, ‘a vacuum crying out to be filled by an act of military revenge for which there is no addressee’. ⁸⁵ Schivelbusch’s comment is clearly intended to mark out 9/11 as a moment of profound change and, indeed, so it appears if it is placed in comparison with the European wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are his central concern. But placed alongside the kinds of imperial campaigns to which I have referred in this essay, it is clear that, for all that appears to have altered, much has remained the same. After all, almost none of those instances of imperial defeat discussed above came with a clear-cut or simply identifiable ‘addressee’ for revenge, certainly not one bearing a national identity. The response to those events was almost always, as Marx pointed out, cynical, disproportionate and excessive. Indeed, in many cases, those events were taken precisely as an opportunity to construct whichever ‘addressee’ was most expedient to imperial interests on the ground. Seen in that respect, the invasion of Iraq appears less like the befuddled response of a superpower, only able to think in outdated ‘national’ terms, and more like the latest in a long line of responses to imperial defeat in which the moral authority of victimhood is deployed to justify wilfully misdirected military action. The public rhetoric that supported such moves was carefully developed and refined. Jason Burke has described the way in which, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, through a series of speeches and press conferences, the response of government spokespersons to the attacks took shape around an increasingly explicit ‘narrative of righteous vengeance’. ⁸⁶ Just as with the public response in Britain to events before and during the Boer war or the hostilities in India in 1857, such a narrative served not only to legitimise subsequent military action, but was also used to draw a reassuringly clear-cut sense of self and a reassuringly clear-cut sense of purpose from the idea of defeat. The apotheosis of such an account came, perhaps, with George W. Bush’s second inaugural address:

Then there came a day of fire … We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came like a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel that same unity and pride whenever America acts for good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free.

Thus runs the most recent variation on an old American theme of ‘humiliations followed by deliverances’.

Conclusion

Ideologies cannot be merely fantasies. For an account of the world to have any social purchase, it has to articulate in some sense with how things really are; ideologies are bound to the truth they belie. I have suggested above that there may well have been particular reasons why the altogether un-imperious representations of empire that I have been describing appeared poignant or compelling to a working-class British public in the Victorian period, but that was a different issue, concerned with the way in which specific social experiences can shape the reception of cultural texts among specific audiences. My concluding point is a wider one about the general conditions under which a way of seeing the world can come to be believable or plausible. Linda Colley has argued that accounts of the British empire often resonated with a fearfulness about Britain’s geographical and demographical smallness, so that there was a continual oscillation in such accounts between hubris, on the one hand, and a sudden, vertiginous sense of vulnerability, on the other, a fact that explains the long public fascination with the narratives of captives. ⁸⁷ Colley’s bottom-up history of empire contains much that is revealing and original, but it also, in my opinion, mistakes effect for cause. Empire, after all, was about economics, something of which she makes little, if any, mention. It was about economic power, of course, at least in relative terms: the emergence of the European empires in the modern era, and of the British empire as the pre-eminent of these, cannot be understood outside of the history of the emergence of developed capitalist systems of production and exchange in those contexts. Of course, this is not the same as saying that every historical detail can be explained as a consequence of economics. Human lives are too messy for that, and economic interests can be both mediated through, and to some extent displaced by, all kinds of honorific and other demands. On the other hand, empire was also about economic weakness. Differences notwithstanding, this is the ambiguity that the classical Marxist accounts of empire pointed towards, the idea that modern imperialism was both a product of capitalism and a symptom of its crisis-bound existence. There are debates within debates in respect of such diagnoses, to be sure. As will be clear, I am reasonably convinced by the argument that a particular formation of capitalism within empire involved the dominance of financial and investment interests seeking, as Arendt put it, a shortcut past the long road of investment in production. The claim has a long history: ‘those who hold stock at home’, wrote Ottobah Cugoano in his jeremiad against slavery, ‘are a kind of idle drones, as a burden to the rest of the community’, before insisting that all such ‘useless business, has a tendency to slavery and oppression’. Cugoano goes on to work out this proto-theory of imperialism in some detail, describing further the link between useless business and overseas oppression and pointing out how those who have enriched themselves through ‘plunder … under pretences of war, wherein they were the first aggressors’, are able to:

send home their cash as fast as they can [and] at last when the wars subside, or other business calls them home, laden with the spoils of the East or elsewhere, they have then the grand part of their business to negotiate, in buying up bank stock, and lodging their plunder and ill-got wealth in the British or other funds. ⁸⁸

Gentlemanly capitalists, it is worth reiterating, were still capitalists. The recognition of the significance of these ‘idle drones’ in the shaping of modern empires does not displace a critique of capitalism that focuses on manufacturing or industrial production, both of which were unquestionably the source of significant imperial concerns in their own right. If empire was the context in which an essentially parasitic set of social interests was peculiarly visible, then it is in empire that a profound truth about capital as such is to be found; precisely that social ‘uselessness’ that Cugoano recognises and which finance capital only expresses to a peculiar degree. Such, after all, was the lesson with which Marx ended the first volume of Capital; the social forms and relations that characterised colonialism might help a metropolitan audience disabuse themselves all the more fully of certain ‘beautiful illusions’ about capital. Clearly, the representations of imperial defeat that I have discussed did work to an ideological effect, allowing a history of aggressive violence to be represented as a sequence of enforced defensive actions and creating the conditions in which an emotional identification with individual instances of European (or American) suffering in the service of empire might conceal the massacres that often preceded and proceeded these decontextualised events. Yet, in so doing, the narratives and imagery of imperial defeat let slip more than is intended. This is the case, not least, because such representations are required to portray the reality of continuous resistance to empire as a prerequisite of the stories they tell, an uncomfortable admission in its own right. Yet, this is a part of something more. Even as they make the economic logic of empire unspeakable, or at least harder to speak, such accounts make apparent how unspeakable that logic must be. This was Schumpeter’s real insight, that it was precisely the indefensibility of those economic interests at the heart of modern empire which created the imperative image of empire-as-defence. The representation of imperial defeat, in other words, reveals, despite itself, the fact that empire is already a symptom of capitalism’s self-destructiveness, of an economic process of accumulation that continually undermines the conditions of its own stability. Thus it is that the representations of imperial defeat glimpse a far greater vulnerability than they pretend. As one watches, for the third time in a season, San Francisco or New York being destroyed by the latest incarnation of monster or a vengeful weather event, it is just possible to make out the distant echo of Alexis de Tocqueville’s puzzled, out-of-sync exclamation on the New World frontier: ‘what, ruins so soon?’ And what gives the frisson to such images is the nagging, only partly stifled suspicion that the very existence of empire reveals an unwelcome truth about the economic order whose power it appears to demonstrate: its inner insufficiency and its persistent instability.