'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Empire then and now

Posted by Helena Cobban at January 19, 2007 10:43 PM

The British historian Elizabeth Monroe must have been born in about the same year as my father-- 1910.  I have Monroe's1981 book Britain's Moment in the Middle East, 1914-1971 here in front of me, and in the bio note it says , "After serving on the staffs of the League of Nations and Chatham House, she obtained a Rockefeller Travelling Fellowship in 1937 for study in the Mediterranean area." (After that, she headed the British government's Middle East Information Division during World War 2; then she was ME correspondent for the Economist for 15 years before settling down at St. Antony's College, Oxford, to write history.)

My father, James (JM) Cobban, gained his degree from Cambridge in Classics in, I think, 1933.  Then in 1935 he published his first book, Senate & Provinces, 78 -49 B.C.; Some aspects of the foreign policy and provincial relations of the senate during the closing years of the Roman Republic.  

I have that in front of me, too, along with another volume that I inherited from my dad's estate after he died eight years ago.  It's a volume by Percy Sands, who had been my dad's Headmaster at the Yorkshire Dales "public" (i.e. private) school where he spent nine of his most formative years. Many decades later JM would tell me that Sands had been his most important role model as he grew up. And as I look at Sands' book today I see that on his book's title page-- as on my father's-- it notes that this piece of work in ancient history won Cambridge's  "Thirlwall Prize" for history.

Percy Sands' book was published in 1908.  Its title was The Client Princes of the Roman Empire. under the Republic

Why am I telling you all this?  Well, mainly to demonstrate that the kinds of quandary George Bush faces in the Middle East are not new... Not new at all!  Indeed, many whole sections of Sands' book The Client Princes could be applied almost exactly to situations in the US empire today.  (Remember, too, that a number of the "provinces" and the "client princes" written about in his book, as in my father's book, were in what we now think of as the Near, or Middle, East.)

One example of the similarities then and now:  Sands' Appendix B cites both Latin and Greek sources to provide evidence of more than a dozen instances in which various client kings (read "Ahmad Chalabi", etc) had bribed men of presumed influence within imperial Rome...

And then, in his final chapter Sands segués effortlessly from his consideration of client-center political relationships within ancient imperial Rome to client-center political relationships within the then-contemporary British Empire.

In his Section 90, for example, he writes:

Perhaps it was also a sense of justice which led the English to intervene on behalf of a chief against rebellious subjects, and to uphold an authority which it has once recognized, though here again, if the chief's oppression is at the root of the outbreak, he may be called upon to temporarily surrender much of his preprogative to a British officer.  The Roman senate on the contrary seems not to have disliked such disturbances, as they tended to weaken the country and place it more at Rome's mercy.  With the same motive the [Roman] senate divided kingdoms when occasion offered, whereas the British Government has intervened at times to prevent the disintegration of a client state...

I guess another thing that is worth noting here is the influence that a British style of classical-based education had on successive generations of the young men who grew up in its orbit.  Here in my present home in the US, when people talk about the roots in antiquity of "Western civilization" they tend to get into a lot of fairly abstract discussion about Ancient Greece, and the roots of democracy.  I don't, to be frank, remember British people of my father's generation ever talking much about anything as airy-fairy as "Western civilization", at all.  But when they were out there, doing-- or analyzing the doings of-- Empire, the classical-era model that they had most in mind was Rome, not Greece.  The Rome, that is, laws, of sound public administration, and fine achievements in engineering, more than the Greece of ontological discussions (and of warring city states, and naked athletes cavorting in their hippodromes.)

My father, in his last chapter there, "Roman rule in practice" gave several examples of the kinds of restraints on Roman imperial power that brought stability and even a degree of prosperity to many of the non-Romans within the far-flung Roman Empire.  For example, he wrote (p.204) "In Sicily, it was expressly ordained that in suits between a Roman and a Sicilian the judge should be of the same nationality as the defendant."

The Palestinians or Iraqis of today should be as lucky!

(I want to note that I am not defending the tone or content of everything that my father wrote in the book, a few portions of which I find very offensive.  But then, I am reading it today with a post-colonial sensibility.  He was writing it as a 24-year-old born and raised in the bosom of the British Empire.  For me, going and back and reading Senate & Provinces has been an interesting experience.  I confess I never read it before this week.)

In 1945, my father was part of the British force that went into Germany. There, he helped to administer what turned out to be a relatively enlightened and restrained military occupation, in the course of which he was able to apply (I hope) some of what he had learned about good public administration from his study of the Romans...

And later still, Elizabeth Monroe would write about that whole period, 1914-1971, as having formed Britain's "moment" in the Middle East.  She approached the topic with the calmly dispassionate eye of a historian of empire, recognizing that throughout most of British history the major importance of the Middle East was as the location of the two "short routes" between Britain and India , and not for any intrinsic importance of its own.

Beyond this, Monroe had many important insights into the dynamics of the British engagement with the region   I am grateful to Bill the spouse, who's been reading Monroe fairly closely, and who signaled the following portions for me to look at:

* [Regarding Britain's occupation of Egypt in the 19th century:]  "Occupation, singlehanded, was the work of a moment...  But occupation had tremendous drawbacks.  It constituted, in Lord Salisbury's words, an 'intolerable hamper' on relations with France, Turkey, and Russia, and gave Germany gratuitous chances to play on these antagonisms.  Soon, everyone except Jingoes and land-grabbers wanted to get out...  Once in, it was difficult to get out, and soon two compelling motives for staying began to appear.  First, regeneration of the Khedive's government was not a matter of months or a year or two, as had been hoped... " (p.17)

*Egyptians saw partial independence as a "sham…since the independence they were given amounted to independence to do right, but not independence to do wrong, in situations in which the sole arbiter of right and wrong was Great Britain." (p.72)

*  (p.140: quoting from T.E. Lawrence in 1919-20:) "With percipience, Lawrence put his finger on the local milieu that was and is the key factor of successful dis-imperialism.

"In pursuing such courses [getting out of empire] we will find our best helpers not in our former most obedient subjects, but among those now most active in agitating against us, for it will be the intellectual leaders of the people who will serve the purpose, and these are not the philosophers nor the rich, but the demagogues and the politicians."

 "The alternative is to hold on to them with ever-lessening force, till the anarchy is too expensive, and we let go."

So I guess what I am trying to say here, too, is that I find all the attention that is given, within the US policy discourse on Iraq, to the mere military mechanics of of what's happening there to be highly insufficient.  US citizens and others who want to try to understand what's going on in Iraq today need to focus much more on the politics of imperial rule -- as it ever has been, from the days of the Roman hegemon right through to today.  And certainly, studying what happened politically during the lengthy periods of imperial rule the world has seen in the past-- in the Middle East and elsewhere-- seems much more useful than studying merely the mere tactics that were used during the last, fading days of certain imperial ventures.  In particular, the current vogue among US military people for studying the French "counter-insurgency" campaigns in Algeria or Vietnam seems particularly misguided:  In both those cases the French may have "won" two, or six, or two hundred military battles on the battlefield-- but at the end of the day, at the strategic-political level, they definitively lost both wars.

In particular, what we should all be studying much more is precisely that trick of "dis-imperialism" that T.E. Lawrence was writing about more than 85 years ago.  Of course, since he was writing that, the world has seen many, very rich examples of imperial retrenchment and wholesale dis-imperialism.  There are huge numbers of examples to look at, in which imperial powers that found themselves in a situation of drastic over-reach had to reassess their situation and find a "graceful" way to withdraw, and go home.  And they managed.  (And guess what?  The powers that dismantled their empires in the 20th century all survived as healthy nation-states back within their own borders, living off the fruits of past centuries of imperial rapine, while many of the formerly colonized nations were left pauperized, and still torn apart by the wounds their former masters had inflicted.  But that's a different part of the story...)

So: dis-imperialism.  Longtime JWN readers will be aware that I have a particular interest in the tricks of political-diplomatic legerdemain through which this was achieved in Namibia, in 1989.  I guess what I really need to do when I have the time is finish writing up the second blog post on that story that I've been mulling over for some time now.

But in the meantime, I've kind of enjoyed diving into the Monroe and into my dad's old books.