Review: One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker

An extended version of my original review in The Spectator to mark the publication of One Fine Day in paperback

The British Empire, the East African Chronicle wrote in 1921, was a “wonderful conglomeration of races and creeds and nations”. It offered “the only solution to great problem of mankind – the problem of brotherhood. If the British Empire fails then all else fails.” Stirring words. Not those of some sentimental old Colonel Blimp back in London, however, but of the newspaper’s editor Manilal A Desai, a young lawyer who had moved to Nairobi in 1915 and quickly became a prominent figure in the large Indian community in Kenya.

But, as Matthew Parker observes in One Fine Day, his exhilarating and ambitious new account of the empire at the moment of its territorial zenith on 29 September 1923, Desai’s encomium came with a caveat. “Either the British Empire must admit the equality of its different people… irrespective of their colours of their skins and the place of their birth,” Desai continued, “or it must abandon its attempt to rule a mixture of people. There can be no half way.”

Parker’s narrative follows the rising sun westward from Ocean Island in the Pacific to Jamaica. The former, now known as Banaba, is one of the Gilbert Islands. It was a rich natural source of phosphates, a vital ingredient in fertilisers, which were needed to realise the agricultural potential of other parts of the empire, most notably Australia and New Zealand. But to access the phosphate, the island’s own fertile soil had to be destroyed. Imperial activity there, Parker writes, was “extraction colonialism at its most literal”. The Banabans felt so betrayed by Arthur Grimble, Resident Commissioner from 1923 to 1933, that they gave his name – ‘Kirimbi’ – to their dogs. They still do.

Desai’s words would prove prophetic. But the question he raised was a good one. Who was the empire for? Did it exist merely to fuel the engines of commerce, or did some higher purpose lie beneath? Many imperialists sincerely believed the latter. Trusteeship was, Parker writes, the ‘Big Idea’ of the moment: it was Britain’s role to nurture primitive peoples until such a time as they were ready to govern themselves. “The only salvation for the Malays,” wrote Sir Hugh Clifford, a long-time colonial official in Malaya, “lies in the increase of British influence, and in the consequent spread of modern ideas, progress and civilisation.” Even Leonard Woolf, described by Beatrice Webb as an “anti-imperialist fanatic”, thought it out of the question “to leave these non-adult races to manage their affairs”.

But as Parker notes, a man like Clifford embodied the contradictions in this strand of imperial thinking. Even as an advocate of British rule, he was quite capable of writing that: “The boot of the white man… stamps out much of what is best in the customs and characteristics of the native races… reducing all things to that dead level of conventionality that we call civilisation.” He himself was far from conventional; he may have been the inspiration for Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’.

On a later posting in West Africa, he refused to allow European corporate interests to take control of the lucrative cocoa trade, then largely in the hand of local family concerns. “A plantation system is not a society,” he wrote. “It is an economic agglomeration erected for the pursuit of profit.” But Clifford was an outlier, and an erratic one at that. Many among the educated elites in the empire were not slow to notice a hypocrisy underlying the apparent paternalism. “The dimensions of ‘the true interests of the natives at heart’,” wrote the Nigerian nationalist Herbert Macauley, “are algebraically equal to the length, breadth and depth of the whiteman’s pocket.”

Education, like medicine, was considered one of the grand bargains of imperialism, something given to mitigate the resource and wealth extraction. But many of the governing classes regarded it as a mistake. In Malaya, an official said, the Malays should be taught “the dignity of manual labour, so that they do not all become clerks”. Such a policy, he added, would avoid “the trouble which has arisen in India through over-education”.

General Sir Gordon Guggisberg, the Canadian governor of the Gold Coast, agreed. “The cry was all for education… They wanted university, schools, technical school,” he said. “The trouble was to stop these demands and keep things going at a sound, safe and easy rate.” There was a large class of semi-educated people, he added, who “knew just enough… to talk loudly about rights and other ridiculous things”.

The pace of change was simply too great, observed Arthur Grimble back on Ocean Island. “The native gentleman with his primitive yet perfectly clear cut standards of conduct” had been replaced by “the native snob; a being ashamed of his ancestry, ashamed of his history… ashamed of practically everything”. At an Imperial Conference in London in the autumn on 1923, some dominions were promised what was called “full recognition… as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth”. Elsewhere, imperial policy might have been a paraphrase of St Augustine: God, let me educate the natives, but not just yet.

As for Pax Britannica, its benefits were real. But were they enough? “It is true that the scourge of inter-tribal warfare and slave-raider’s invasion have ceased,” wrote the Kikuyu campaigner Parmenas Githendu Mockerie. But the number killed in the First World War “probably exceeded the number who were killed in the local warfare for a preceding century”.

Parker’s canvas is formidably vast, and inevitably he has had to be selective. He notes, for instance, the outrage felt in the Muslim community in India at the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the only great Islamic power in the world, after World War One; but he largely sidesteps the territories, including Palestine, that Britain gained through it.

But what vindicates Parker’s choices is the immediacy of his narrative. He has used a vast array of sources – official papers, newspapers, letters, diaries, and so on – to bring the tumult and turmoil beneath the imperial calm to vivid life. Fiction plays its part too, with the likes of Orwell, DH Lawrence and, in particular, EM Forster, used almost as a chorus to comment on contemporary events. While One Fine Day will surely be read primarily as an exemplary history of empire, it is also necessarily a history of political organisation and, perhaps, political consciousness too. Across the imperium, successful businessmen and educated elites – men like Desai and Mockerie and many others – were demanding their rightful place at the tables of power. The empire’s inability to accommodate them surely hastened its demise, and the sense one comes back to again and again here is not resentment or hatred. It’s betrayal. Betrayal of hope. Betrayal of possibility.

Many people have firm opinions about the British Empire. I don’t know if One Fine Day will change any minds. It’s not really trying to. But it surely cannot fail to open them to the messy, complex political and psychological realities of daily life under Pax Britannica for both the governed and the governing; to the immense and irreconcilable tensions between idealism, power and commerce; and to the great currents of ethnic, social and religious identity that so many imperialists failed to understand because they insisted on applying the small, poor frame of race.

The book’s subtitle is ‘Britain’s Empire on the Brink’, and it ends on a point, not of equipoise but of ossification and fracture. As Parker writes in his introduction, prior to the First World War imperialism had been the dominant mode of government for much of the world, and we can see autocratic, imperialist regimes – most notably Russia and China – once again on the rise today. Perhaps this anti-imperialist moment of ours will also pass. In which case One Fine Day may prove not merely compelling history but a troubling vision of our future too. If you are going to read one book about the British Empire then, make it this one.