Free Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng Page B

frustration in Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil , and it informs her observation that ‘it is rather funny when you think of all the people who used to come to our house at home [in South Kensington] that here [in Hong Kong] we should be treated like dirt’. 2 Hong Kong, as Fane saw, had its own rules of hierarchy and precedence. It is important to remember that, at a time of increasing democracy and Labour governments in Britain, the colonial empire, especially in places like Hong Kong, remained much the same. Hong Kong would be governed in the same autocratic way for 150 years. In the Sudan, public schoolboys still dominated the administration in a way that often surprised civil servants in London.
    The power exercised by district commissioners in places like the Sudan, where young men in their mid-twenties would rule a land the size of Wales, as judges, lawgivers and policemen rolled into one, was immense. The arrogance of provincial governors in Sudan was legendary. This aspect of empire shows the extent to which there was a predisposition to strong individuals, leaders who, by sheer force of character, could impose their will on circumstances. The late Victorian hero-worship of Lord Kitchener is a conspicuous example of this tendency.

    This individualism was, I have noted, anarchic, in that there was very often no policy coherence or strategic direction behind the imperial government as experienced in individual colonies. Often strong-minded officials and governors would, by a metaphoric sweep of the hand, reverse the policy of decades, thereby creating more confusion and instability. Such reversals occurred in Burma, in Sudan and in Hong Kong. In Burma, the policy which the British government had pursued in India, since the Mutiny of 1857, was reversed by Lord Randolph Churchill, who was committed to the outright annexation of the country. This step was not only contrary to the policy followed since 1857, but had been opposed by the Earl of Mayo when he was viceroy of India in the early 1870s, and had been viewed suspiciously by the Marquess of Ripon, viceroy in the 1880s. Even as late as the 1940s, officials were not convinced that Lord Randolph had done the right thing when he abolished the Burmese monarchy. In Sudan, the ‘Southern Policy’ of Harold MacMichael was reversed in the late 1940s. That policy has been seen by the Sudanese in the north as the cause of many of the problems which their country has confronted in the half-century since independence, years which have been dominated by civil war. In Hong Kong, Sir Mark Young’s sincere plans for greater democracy were reversed by his successor, Sir Alexander Grantham, and this suspended any progress towards democracy in Hong Kong for thirty years. As it happened, democracy, even by the late 1980s, had never been seriously practised in Hong Kong. This lack of any democratic progress in the colony, over the three decades immediately after the Second World War, made Chris Patten’s aggressive stance in the 1990s bewildering not only to the Chinese government in Beijing, but to British diplomats in China and in Whitehall.
    Individualism was a guiding principle of the British Empire. This is shown by the career of Herbert Horatio Kitchener. Withdrawn and aloof, repressed and driven, Kitchener was an idiosyncratic loner who became a hero of empire. His administrative talents were uneven, and he was clearly bored by the routine of day-to-day government, but his image, the drooping moustache and clear blue, wide-set eyes, was compelling, while his autocratic manner gave people assurance in uncertain times. The cry for Lord Kitchener to be given high office at the outbreak of the war in
1914 was deafening and prompted Asquith, the Prime Minister, to appoint him secretary for war, a decision which Asquith often regretted.
    The British Empire allowed individuals, the civil servants and imperial administrators who worked within it, a wide