Did the end of the British Empire make the death of the Union inevitable?
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Version 0 of 1. The organiser had written to say that when I landed at Copenhagen she would be there to receive me at the airport with a sign saying, “Life Writing After Empire”. And so she was, just beyond the baggage hall and among holders of other signs – “Crowne Plaza” and “Mr Jonas Olsen” – none of which had the opacity of “Life Writing After Empire”. It could have been the name of a student rock band, but was instead the title of one of those scholarly conferences that go by the name of “workshop” – as though the participants bang and scrape with hammers and chisels all day long, when, in fact, unnecessarily complicated talk and laptops are the order of the day, with breaks for questions, coffee and cake. Writers such as Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge have sometimes satirised this kind of event. A part of me feared that the next two days would be filled by nouns such as “trope” and “discourse” – and infecting them all like an academic mildew, the adjective “postcolonial”. As it turned out, nobody else had much time for that last word either – it was generally agreed to be tainted by overuse and imprecision, hence the alternative “after empire”. As for “life writing”, that meant biography and autobiography, memoirs and correspondence. Seventeen of us had been invited to take part and some had come a long way – one historian from Harvard and others from Singapore and Sydney – though most were from the University of Copenhagen, which has developed a specialism in the study of the British Empire. An odd sort of specialism, you might think, in a country of 5.6 million people whose modern reputation is founded on box sets, butter and bacon, until you are reminded that Denmark too once had an empire that, while not as extensive as the British, was just about as far-flung: from Greenland’s icy mountains to trading stations in Africa and India, and islands in the Caribbean. From our bus, we could see the Danish flag that had flown over all of them as a mark of ownership now fluttering from the gardens and rooftops of the little houses that dotted the countryside: square standards or long streamers that coiled and uncoiled in the breeze and added splashes of red to a landscape of green pasture and low trees hung with white blossom. The Danes were “almost excessively fond of their flag”, said a professor on the bus, adding that they believed it to be the first national flag in the world – a flag that represented a country rather than a knight or a monarch – and had been first recorded as such in the 14th century. After we reached our seaside hotel, we went for a walk along the top of the cliffs, more soil than stone, to see the stone that marked the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s favourite view – across the Skagerrak to Sweden. One of us translated the inscription: “What is truth other than living for an idea?” And then we returned to hear the Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff talk about her work on a new biographical study of Joseph Conrad. She said that Conrad’s decision to join the British merchant navy hadn’t just been an accident; as the world’s then largest fleet, and still expanding, it was always hungry for new officers and crew, and happy to recruit any nationality, including Polish. Conrad, I knew, had been a friend of the Glasgow mariner David Bone, commodore of the Anchor Line, and as Jasanoff spoke I had a memory of ships with black funnels – Anchor Line ships – that even in the mid-1960s still took passengers from the heart of Glasgow to Karachi and Bombay, and could be seen berthed at quaysides that were only a thousand yards from the university. In the context of the conference, that was a pertinent memory, because what some of us were in Denmark to consider is the now almost-conventional wisdom about British identity: that it rose and fell with the empire, and with the empire’s going the United Kingdom will almost inevitably break up. Stuart Ward, professor of global and imperial history at Copenhagen University, reminded us of this theory’s several advocates, from Tom Nairn, writing presciently in 1977, to Linda Colley in her book Britons, published in 1992. David Marquand took the idea to the extreme when he announced in 1995 that shorn of empire, Britain had “no meaning” and it was therefore impossible “for Britain as such to be post-imperial”. In a what-goes-up-must-come-down way, it looks a plausible argument. The logic is, as Ward said, that if you can demonstrate that the empire forged an idea of Britain, then Britain’s vanishing two centuries later “is merely a question of the laws of physics – remove the load-bearing pillar, and the structure falls”. But Ward wasn’t so sure: there were too many unexamined assumptions. Britishness had survived the empire for several decades, and if it was now dying, we needed to look to the present as well as the past for the reasons why. The present at that moment last Sunday lay across the North Sea. My phone bleeped – a text from my wife: “New line from Boris, Ajock-alypse now!” Here was evidence (a Jock or a Paddy or a Taffy might argue) that imperial attitudes were destroying British identity rather than supporting it. Few historians seem to have written that oddity into their prognosis, though it wouldn’t be the first time that metropolitan carelessness has encouraged the separatist instinct. A paper on imperial memoirs by another professor, Charles Lock, quoted a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s account of his time in Britain, Our Old Home, which wondered how George III and his government had contrived to lose American loyalty. “It has required nothing less,” Hawthorne wrote, “than the boorishness, the stolidity, the self-sufficiency, the contemptuous jealousy, the half-sagacity, invariably blind of one eye and often distorted of the other, that characterise this strange people, to compel us to be a great nation in our own right, instead of continuing virtually, if not in name, a province of their small island. What pains did they take to shake us off, and have ever since taken to keep us wide apart from them!” Boris Johnson as the George III of the Scottish question? Perhaps not, but the Tory leadership and the Tory campaign have deepened the division between Scotland and England as no other party has done, including the SNP. On the way back to the airport I looked again at the wooden houses flying their national flags – as simple in design as a saltire – and remembered that Borgen is Nicola Sturgeon’s favourite TV show, and that many nationalists think of Denmark (and its Scandinavian neighbours) as the model for the kind of country Scotland should be. Even after the election, this still seems an unlikely prospect: for a start, Denmark doesn’t share the social problems Scotland has inherited from its role in the industrial revolution. But as the inscription on Kierkegaard’s monument says, “What is truth other than living for an idea?” |