Free Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng

Conclusion
    When Benjamin Disraeli, by then Earl of Beaconsfield, wound up the debate on the Congress of Berlin in the House of Lords on 18 July 1878, he made his final appeal to ‘the consciousness that in the Eastern nations there is confidence in this country, and that, while they know we can enforce our policy, at the same time they know that our Empire is an Empire of liberty, of truth, and of justice’. 1
    It is revealing that Disraeli said nothing about democracy or liberal economics. Subsequent generations of politicians, historians and campaigners have made the British Empire in their own image, promoting it as a vehicle for whatever cause they happened to espouse. One example of different people appropriating the empire for their own purposes occurs in the field of economic theory. For old-fashioned economic liberals like Winston Churchill, the British Empire was an empire of free trade; for Joseph Chamberlain, on the other hand, the empire was perfect for protectionism, known as ‘imperial preference’, in that goods from the British colonies were ‘preferred’, more lightly taxed, in comparison with goods from Britain’s industrial competitors, such as Germany and the United States. The empire has been invoked to support a multitude of causes.
    Perhaps the key to understanding the British Empire is the idea of natural hierarchy. Class and status were absolutely integral to the empire, and notions of class were important in forming alliances with local elites, the chiefs, the petty kings and maharajas who crowded the colonial empire. The dominance of ideas of class and status made it easy for the British to establish local chiefs as hereditary rulers. In Kashmir, a Hindu family were established as rulers over an overwhelmingly Muslim kingdom. The Dogras ruled Kashmir for a hundred years, and the effects of their rule are
still felt today. In Iraq, a new monarchy was established in 1921 under the Hashemite family, who had no historic links to the country. Once again, notions of royalty and status prompted policy without regard to local opinion. The French in Syria were more pragmatic; they established not a monarchy but a series of states which would form the Republic of Syria in 1930. Monarchy was a particularly British instrument of policy. The British established a monarchy in Jordan and supported the monarchy in Egypt. The French by contrast, under the Third Republic, were less enthusiastic about that form of government, and they had actually deposed Faisal, Iraq’s future king, as King of Syria in 1920. It was the British who compensated Faisal by making him King of Iraq, and yet the events of the summer of 1958, only thirty-seven years after Faisal I’s coronation, revealed the imprudence of the British policy. The unpopular monarchy was overthrown in Iraq and led to the establishment of governments in that country which were successively nationalist regimes that often ranged themselves against Western interests.
    The so-called natural leaders, the maharajas, the sultans and nawabs, even the local chiefs, were flattered and cultivated. Individual rulers were set up in the Middle East, in India and in Africa. The irony of this generally pro-monarchical policy was that it was not consistent. A centuries-old monarchy in Burma was torn down by an abrupt change of policy, while monarchies were set up in Kashmir and Iraq which had no real tradition of independent monarchy. Behind monarchy lay ideas of class, which made aristocracies and natural leaders a favourite theme of Colonial Office civil servants, governors and chief secretaries. Natural leaders were explicitly an integral part of Lord Lugard’s policy of indirect rule, a policy which prevailed in large parts of the Indian subcontinent, where a third of the Indian Empire was formed by the princely states.
    Of course, in this context, any notion of democracy was far from anyone’s mind. The British Empire was