Victoria's Broken Promise: Class, Race, and Empire, 1858-1947
In the 1850s, Great Britain was at the height of her powers. Britain was the first nation to dismantle the old corruption. It was the first to replace networks with systems — meritocratic selection for the civil service, the postal service, the railways, the steamships, the market-based credit system centered on the Bill on London. The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851 showcased her unchallenged leadership in industry — based on cotton, steam, iron and coal. The world’s trade and finance was organized from the Square Mile. The Crown could raise more money than the rest of the sovereigns of Europe combined. She had the command of the seas and held ‘the five keys that locked up the world’ [Admiral Fisher]. British steamships ruled the waves — the two power standard would not be necessary until much later. The French had given up competing in 1815. The American Civil War and the founding of the Second American Republic in 1865 that would mark the beginnings of the near-unipolar world with the century of American growth was still in the future. As was German unification, which would obtain in 1871. After the violent midcentury passage and the onset of ‘the global condition’ [Gyer and Bright], other, bigger powers would rise up and put Britain in her place. But for now, she reigned supreme.
The East India Company, a central component of the old structures of global power that emerged with English jealously about Dutch primacy around 1600, had essentially taken over the Indian subcontinent. The Company emerged as a first among equals in a crowded field of scavengers on the carcass of the empire of ‘the Great Mogul’ in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the process of reform of the old, corrupt structures of power, the Company had been stripped of its monopoly on Indian trade in 1833 and the corruption of the Naboobs — without exception on the payroll of the Baniyas — was censored and curtailed. The mutiny in 1857 was the last straw. Despite the consensus on free-trade, the Company was nationalized. India was to be ruled directly from Westminster. Victoria’s proclamation promised the natives of India a secular and colorblind empire:
In as much as power can be taken at face value, Victoria’s proclamation was in earnest. In practice, the Raj was based on a class alliance between upper class Britons and upper class Indians, who together expected the deference of the lower classes across the color line. The global color line would not fall until a half-century later. Before that could happen, high racialism would have to gain a grip on people’s minds. Intellectual developments happening at the same time, in the late-1850s, would later drive the rise of high racialism in the 1890s. The two events that bracket this innovation are the publication of Darwin’s Origins of Species in 1859 and Lyell’s Antiquity of Man in 1863. But the idea of the antiquity of man ‘burst upon the scientific world with an irresistible force’ in 1859, once people knew that Lyell had changed his mind about whether mankind was dramatically older than six thousand years and whether men had actually walked the earth with extinct mammals — as some radical geologists had been suggesting for decades.
The antiquity of man implied the antiquity of the races of man and the debate in pre-professional anthropology settled in favor of polygenism/multiregionalism. In 1859-1987, it was thought that ‘the continental races of man’ had been separated for a million years or more. The victory of the Out-of-Africa hypothesis would prove the recency of ‘the races’ — with the time-depth of population separation bounded above by sixty thousand years. This would set the stage for the hegemony of Boasian antiracism in the 1990s. The Boasians rise to power began with the antisystemic turn in 1968, but the ideas go back to Boas and his advisees at Columbia Anthropology in the early-20th century. But I am getting ahead of the story.
The Second Industrial Revolution, 1870-1970, polarized the world that has been weakly depolarizing since. High racialism was the idea that the evident polarization of the world was explained by the hierarchy of the races. Put bluntly, the motor of history was the race struggle and some races were stronger than others. Specifically, the white races were stronger than the colored races, and within the races of Europe, the northern and western races were stronger than the eastern or the southern. By the 1890s, these ideas which reduced world order to phylogeny laid the foundations of high racialism as an elite ideology. International competition was refracted through the high racialist frame. The revolution in German and American foreign policies obtained in 1897-1898. But high racialism was global in reach. The color line fell on every inhabited continent and the global structures of power were reconfigured.
In the Raj, the alliance of the Anglo-Indian elites broke down with the imposition of the global color line. The ‘revolt against the West’ was a countermovement to high racialism. The Indian elites immediately began organizing a national political movement. At first, the demands were for control of specific questions of governance and policy. But as Victoria’s promise of a colorblind empire was abandoned with the intensification of racial apartheid, class relations that held the Raj together collapsed. Indian elites simply could not digest submitting to lower class Britons. This then generated the independence movement and the end of the Raj. Gandhi became an agitator in South Africa because he could not bear the equation implied by the global color line: Putting the Hindoo with the Bantu together in the same taxon was too much — even the scientific anthropologists agreed that Caste Indians were Indo-European!
Victoria’s promise of a secular empire was also broken in a bid to control the forces unleashed by Indian modernization and elite political awakening. Bengal was partitioned along confessional lines in 1905. This set the template for the policy of playing the Muslim and Hindu elites against each other in Indian politics that set the stage for the catastrophe of the partition of India. Even as the elites set about getting rid of the British, with Ambedkar and his Dalit question contained, they fought over the keys to the bungalows along confessional lines.
High racialism drove high imperialism. European self-congratulation was at its peak at the turn of the century. After the struggle against Germany, the British Empire was extended and a new racial-technological ideology of empire took hold. The Anglo-Saxon was to rule through technological prowess. The fiscal problem of controlling an enlarged empire was to be solved by technological superiority. The restive populations of British Mandate were to be subjected to ‘air control’ — in the era of poor bombing accuracy, this meant area bombing for ‘moral effect’. These ideologies and mental structures of imperial power were tied at the hip to high racialism. It is what justified the colonial structures of power which began to be increasingly challenged by the educated class in the colonies.
The colonial structures of power were only partially dismantled by decolonization. British firms continued to control many sectors of the Indian economy for decades. Even today, these old structures of power associated with class and empire have conserved. At Delhi’s newly-modernized airport, a recorded female voice in an inexplicably posh British accent straight from the public schools of Guilford makes public safety announcements.
It is astonishing to realize the sheer provincialism of the official BBC “received pronunciation.” It is native to the upper classes of maybe half of the Home Counties — spoken at home by less than 5 percent of the English population. But it is used to signal the status of the speaker to billions of people in over a hundred countries, well beyond the limits of the former British Empire. One can understand how it could've been so at, say, midcentury. But how can it have survived and perhaps even strengthened its stranglehold some 74 years after the British yielded India and 65 years after the Suez humiliation? Why has the New England upper class accent not displaced it? One hears of similar long-running hegemonies of the Parisian elite accent in the Francophone world and the northern Berlin-Hamburg accent in Germany. But those are provincial compared to English's monopoly as the lingua franca of the world, and that of the southern upper class accent within it.
We know how London got a third life as a center of Metropolitan finance with the eurodollar and British offshore banking secrecy spiderweb from Gary Burn and Nicholas Shaxson. But the hegemony of the Guildford public school accent alerts us to more subtle structures of power, reproduced almost entirely by those below, that have a considerably longer life.