I often feel like I’m not cut out
to be a good historian. I’m not very good at instantly zeroing in on the pith
of an argument and picking it to pieces. It usually takes me awhile to figure
out what’s going on, both what’s being said and what’s being implied beneath
the surface. It usually takes me a lot longer to figure out what my own
position might be. And, perhaps most alarming of all, my position might not
necessarily be to one side or the other of what’s being said. Horror of horrors
– I often find myself to be a middle-roader, coasting down the middle-lane,
smiling at all those passing by on one side and all those shooting past on the
other. This is what occurs to me most often when I’m sitting in academic
seminars; the realisation of my own intellectual inadequacy, i.e. – the fact
that I have no brain.
Critical thought is difficult. It
doesn’t come naturally to me. I have to work at it. And even then I’m still not
sure of what I actually think. I tend to see the good in all things and maybe unconsciously
I disregard the stuff that doesn’t directly chime with me. Rather than engaging
with the negatives, I always seem to choose to focus on the positives and try
to run with those instead. And that’s usually when I get walloped by someone sidling
up beside me with a big argument I simply seem to have failed to notice. My
academic outlook and performance often feels like the Monty Python fish slapping dance
sketch.
 |
| Monty Python - Fish Slapping Dance Sketch |
I’ve been thinking a lot about this
recently. Over the Easter weekend I read David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Allen Lane /
Penguin, 2001). This book had been on the edge of my radar for some time. A
book of possible relevance to my PhD. I was vaguely aware it had caused a bit
of an academic ripple when it was first published, not least because I’d come
across a number of articles written ‘in reply’ to it not long after it was
published in a special edition of the Journal
of Colonialism and Colonial History (Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 2002). An
aspect of my PhD examines personal perspectives of empire and imperialism – how
individual people fitted into the web-like matrix of connections that spanned
and linked the networked colonial machine, and thereby how those individuals
meshed together as the components which ultimately drove the inexorable giant
engine of empire. How their interactions drew each of them together into a
greater whole, how their individual actions (simply in pursuit of making a
living, making ends meet in a colonial world) combined – almost inadvertently
perhaps – to form this oddly indefinable and intangible fact of reality which,
for want of a better term, many have described as the broader ‘imperial
project.’
I’m still very much trying to
grapple with how any historian can confidently come up with his or her grand
theory of empire. My route to my current PhD is oddly circuitous. I began as an
amateur archaeologist, going on to become a student of anthropology (with as
much archaeology as I could cram in). Hence I was used to the idea of the
bigger picture, the broader canvas and the grand sweep of time, seemingly being
pieced together from the minutiae of pot sherds and burn marks left in the
ground. For instance: “This piece of
Samian ware tells us all we need to know about how the Romans went about
occupying and then ruling Britain via indigenous proxies or client kings.”
… Does it? Blimey, that’s amazing! – Likewise anthropology: “We can conjecture a lot about the origins
of culture through a theoretical model based upon the socio-linguistic norms
hidden in the meta-myths of traditional societies, such as those found in the
tribes of the Amazon rainforests.” … Really? Blimey, that’s amazing!
It took me a while to figure out
that this is all conjecture. The art
(and the artifice) is not necessarily in the argument but in the arguing.
Convincing others that your interpretation of the evidence is the correct one.
Scepticism is the foundation of all academic debate. Not taking anything at
face value all the while that what’s being presented is often being presented
as the incontrovertible truth. I first learnt this lesson physically one summer
whilst working as a member of an archaeological dig (I won’t say where). There
were two trenches dug not too far apart beside a small stream in a highly
acidic soil. One trench – Trench A – seemed to be filled with an assortment of
“later” material – medieval walls and a well with some nicely preserved organic
finds. The other trench – Trench B (the one I spent some two or three weeks
digging in) – was a barren boringscape
of differing soil colours and wrist-grating alluvial gravel deposits. It was like
trowelling through semi-solid concrete that stuck to your hand shovel like congealed
porridge, and all for no reward. But it did teach me about the subtle
gradations of soil features, which on later digs helped me to spot near
imperceptible changes and disturbances in different soil lenses and deposits.
But then one day someone in our trench hit an undoubtable treasure – a jet finger
ring with a Chi-Rho symbol. Late Roman, early Christian – far older than
anything that had so far come out of Trench A. Trench B team was exultant.
After weeks of being belittled by our chums in Trench A, now they were the ones
who were sulking. The excavation director, who we thought had near enough
forgotten we existed, appeared like a shot. Trowel out, a couple of deft flicks
– then, standing back for a couple of contemplative wheezes on his cigarette,
he selected a nearby undergraduate on their first summer dig assignment. “Look here,” the dig director said,
before bending forward and then, with the point of his trowel, he scored a long
six foot by two-ish foot oblong in the mud. “You
see that? The very slight difference in soil colour inside and out? The
alignment, East-West? That’s an early Christian grave, that is. Nothing organic
left because of the soil acidity. Bottom it out for me. It’s probably only very
shallow.”
The undergrad and the rest of us
stared and stared, trying to make out the difference in colour. It seemed
brilliant and baffling in equal measure. Debate raged amongst the diggers of
Trench B for days afterwards. Some were adamant they could see it, others that
it was all made up. The ring wasn’t a grave good. Yes, it was. No, it wasn’t. Our
area supervisor thought it had simply been washed into the area as part of an
alluvial deposit from the nearby stream. As you can expect, I never fully made
my mind up – I could see the virtue and the plausibility of both arguments.
What mattered most was who argued the case most ably. The dig director won of
course, because he was the director, with greater experience, greater aptitude,
a sharper eye, etc., etc. The site supervisor – whilst more experienced than
the hapless undergrad who’d been selected to hollow out the shallow trough of
‘a grave’ – was still only a novice himself, still earning his archaeological
spurs; ‘twas ever thus, perhaps.
But essentially this is the game of academia. It’s a
knock-about match of tennis in many respects. A learned and academic sage (namely
Dr Indiana Jones) once noted that history and “archaeology is the search for fact not truth (If it’s truth you’re
after, … [the] philosophy class is right down the hall).” But interpretation is the keystone upon
which academic careers and reputations are built. The span of the arch can be wide in
terms of quantity and quality of evidence, but the keystone of your argument is
what essentially holds it together. Find a fact that knocks the keystone out
and it all comes crashing down. But is that necessarily a bad thing? – Perhaps
not if it manages to advance or alter the focus of debate?
Anthropology taught me the value
and the power of conjecture and speculation. It used to frustrate me immensely
that there was a seemingly huge gaping void in terms of evidence – how can you
formulate a theory of the origins of culture when so much remains speculative
and unknowable? Biological anthropology can suppose when a particular hominid
may have evolved a voice box capable of producing speech and ergo language, but is relative growth of
brain size enough to claim that such an evolutionary leap as the ability equates to the actuality of language occurring, and ipso facto that communication equates to
the establishment of culture? – Chimps communicate, but is that culture? – What is culture?
I thought I’d find myself on surer
ground when I embarked upon my MA in modern world history. After all, archives
comprise written records which can furnish and inform the past more directly
and in ways which fossilised hominid larynxes and roughly grave-shaped soil
stains can’t quite fully muster, right? – Not always. Archives can be unreliable,
especially if they are created to a premeditated agenda. Say, an imperialist
agenda, perhaps. There’s seemingly no escaping politics, every argument has its
angle … And that’s why I find grand historiographical theories so intriguing.
I’ve taken a very long route to get
back to my initial starting point – reading David Cannadine’s Ornamentalism – because that’s what the
process of doing a PhD is all about. Thinking through why we think what we
think, and moreso perhaps, why we don’t always see what we think until we’ve tried to write our way out of it or through it. I knew the book had caused a
stir. I could see Cannadine was controversially pitting his theory of ‘ornamentalism’
– that the British Empire was essentially all about the British obsession with extending
hierarchies of class and status, rather than the more predominant and far
reaching theory of Edward Said’s ‘orientalism’ – that empire was all about codifying
racial hierarchies, the scientific project of racializing and exoticising ‘the
other’ as essentially fitting into a formal structure, an ‘us
and them’ situation of the dominant and the subordinate. Instead Cannadine
posits that extending social equivalence voids Said’s racial contentions – the
fact that the British could bestow the same honours on Lord Curzon, as Viceroy
of India, and the Begum of Bhopal, as exemplified in the paired photographs of
them both wearing the same robes and insignia of a knight grand commander of
the Order of the Star of India (c.1900 and c.1890 respectively, figs. 19 and
20). Cannadine thereby claims it is time to “reorient orientalism” (p. 125) by
acknowledging that “the British exported
and projected vernacular sociological visions from the metropolis to the
periphery, and they imported and analogized them from the empire back to
Britain, thereby constructing comforting and familiar resemblance and
equivalencies and affinities.” (p. 122) He does so by solely focussing on
all the pomp and flummery of empire’s elite, especially as it was extended to
the nobility of the subject peoples, stating that class was of greater
equivalence than race. But reading this line of thought, without wholly disagreeing
with it, it seems to show its own narrowness of focus – particularly by the example
he gives of its limitations, e.g. - the fact that the Chief of Basutoland was
refused his request to visit Rome en
route back to his homeland from London for fear that the pomp and
circumstance of the Pope would upstage and thereby undermine the pomp and
circumstance he’d witnessed in Britain (p. 113). Clearly not all sovereigns are
equal, which goes as much for George V as it did for the Chief of Basutoland –
hence the smoke and mirrors of maintaining prestige and appearance needing to
pre-empt the chance of unfavourable misinterpretation.
 |
| Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, c.1900 |
I read this book thinking
imperialism isn’t so much about the merits of ornamentalism over orientalism, but
rather as something running concurrent to it. Ornamentalism (as many of the
contributors to that special edition of the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History justly demonstrate)
only really applies to the top brass of the Empire elite. As a social history
the book’s claim “to put the history of
Britain back into the history of empire, and the history of empire back into
the history of Britain” (p. xx), rings rather hollow – what about all the other echelons of society? Ornamentalism is, if
anything, just an aspect of empire. As a book it is eminently readable and it is
furnished throughout with apposite and pithy points of evidence. I couldn’t
disagree with it wholly as I could see the virtues within its thesis, such that
I can see it informing a view of empire rather than embodying a definitive
picture of empire. As Cannadine himself states, empire means “different things to different people in
different places” (p. 182). He attaches as an appendix a telling chapter,
written earlier than the book, which locates himself in relation to his subject
as ‘a child of empire.’ Whether you read this first or at the end it will shape
or re-shape your view of the book because it reinforces my point that all
arguments are about personal perspectives and how you manage to (or don’t
manage to) persuade people of your own particular conjectures.
 |
| The Begum of Bhopal, c.1890 |
This is all very pertinent still
today. Even though Cannadine’s book is now nearly 20 years old, the variously
contested debates about the legacy of empire is something which is still very
much a ‘live topic.’ Think of the recent wrangles over the various ‘Rhodes Must
Fall’ campaigns, and the imperial nostalgia which seems to be a large part of
the current push towards Brexit. I recently attended a one-day symposium at the
British Museum titled: Exhibiting the
Experience of Empire. Listening to the wide range of speakers, one of whom
even sung a large part of her presentation, I was struck by how emotive the
topic of empire can be, even still today. Ornamentalism
contends that empire is a done and dusted topic, no longer really live – which,
in and of itself, has been posited as an argument for shutting down argument (see again the Journal
of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring, 2002). But the
mixed reactions to recent attempts to draw together definitive pictures of this
topic – for example, think of the recent exhibition Artist & Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past at Tate Britain
(see here) – show that this topic is very much alive and fighting to be
reckoned with, and reconciled in some, as yet unfound, way.
 |
| Exhibiting the Experience of Empire Symposium at the British Museum, 2018 |
Everyone is affected by this legacy
of empire to varying degrees. I remember being struck by the absurdity of the
pomp and ceremony surrounding the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. It seemed
oddly anachronistic. There was stuffy old Prince Charles, weeping. Tony Blair,
standing alongside, looking oddly awkward and distinctly out of place, not
least because he was the brand new Prime Minister of progressively modern New
Labour, poised to revolutionise the UK and catapult it into the 21st
century, at last. And then in came the goose-stepping soldiers of the People’s
Liberation Army. It was baffling and comical. Until then I’d thought empire was
dead and buried; alive only in the fading photographs and memories of our
grandparents and great grandparents, if they’d lived long enough and we’d been
lucky enough to have known them. But here it was, enacting a distinctly
mournful last hurrah. It all seemed very Monty Python-esque to me. Empire was
always a game of smoke and mirrors, pomp and prestige, artifice and
appearances. Similarly Ornamentalism
is exclusively preoccupied with appearances rather than actualities. Cannadine
mentions George Orwell in passing, but it’s not the George Orwell who felt
silly shooting an elephant in front of the natives, all for the sake of the
white man’s burden and the necessity of maintaining imperial prestige.
Empire is decidedly not dead and
buried. It pervades our present like a Dickensian spectre. Touching and
tainting, inspiring and unsettling the present in multifarious ways. The
nostalgia of past greatness waiting to be reclaimed by glorious Brexit,
enabling a return to some sort of global ‘free trading’ Britain. Strong and stable.
Ornamentalised by a return to blue passports. Orientalised by an unprecedented
and heavy-handed crackdown on “illegal” immigrants – here I’m thinking
specifically of the bureaucratic and Kafka-esque absurdity of Commonwealth
citizens who settled in the UK over half a century ago whilst only children and
having lived legitimate law abiding lives here all those years, who are now
being threatened with detention and extradition to “home” countries they have
never known let alone ever called or thought of as “home” (see here). Sadly we’re
back to John Bull and Johnny Foreigner again. The legacy of empire is
increasingly leeching into our present and poisoning these supposedly
‘post-colonial’ times.
As a student of imperial history,
attempting to grapple with the various ways in which empire needs to be read
and represented today, I’m frequently baffled by the bigger picture. It seems
the more I read upon the subject, the more my mind is like a large open duvet
cover inside a washing machine. Whatever the brand, whether I choose Daz or
Ariel – Niall Fergusson or Eric Hobsbawm – is only a part of it. As the topic
spins round my mind, all the books, articles, exhibitions, archives,
perspectives, prejudices, blind-spots, arguments and counter-arguments, as much
as my vapid indecisive, open-minded, sponginess of critical acumen – all of it
finds their way inside the open duvet cover, such that when the washing machine
stops spinning, I am left trying to untangle and make sense of a huge jumble of
things that have clumped together inside. It is a dank and heavy bundle of
laundry that needs to be sorted through. But, to my mind at least, that’s the essence
of doing a PhD. It takes time to work through it all, to work it all out, and
make my own mind up. Each piece needs to be flattened out and hung up to dry of
its own accord and in its own time. Yet, however neatly I manage to do so, I know
I will always find that there is still a sock missing at the end. And whether
or not someone else finds that sock before I do is what will always make all
the difference. But who knows, if I keep trying and don’t give up, maybe I
might make a decent historian yet.
Re-reading the above, I should
perhaps add that I’ve also had a cold all Easter weekend. The last hot toddy I
made was possibly a little stronger than I realised – but what the heck, I’m
still posting this piece regardless, duvet cover analogy and all – after all,
no one reads blogs anymore anyway, do they? – #phdchat
Happy Spring Holiday everyone!
~
Also on 'Waymarks'
