Empire Restored.(Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire)(Review)

Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine (Oxford, 264 pp., $25)

What on earth was the British Empire all about? It was a money racket, thought Orwell. No, it was an exercise in racial self-aggrandizement, said Edward Said. Part of a divine plan moving mankind toward unification, thought James Morris (who later, incidentally, became a woman, known as "Jan" Morris). The most popular idea among the people who actually ran the Empire-at any rate among the reflective minority of them-seems to have been that it was a selfless civilizing mission, bringing light to dark places: the sentiment implied in Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden."

All of the above, says David Cannadine, at least in some parts of the Empire, some of the time. His purpose is not to deny or overturn anyone else's pet theory, but to draw attention to an aspect of the Empire that, in his opinion, has been too little regarded. As much as anything, he argues, the Empire was about dressing up.

Well, that is to over-simplify somewhat. Cannadine is a respectable scholar, one of the fine cohort of British historians who have made their mark in the past 20 years: Simon Schama, Niall Ferguson, Roy Porter, Norman Stone, Linda Colley (to whom Cannadine is married). He taught at Columbia for ten years from 1988, an experience he credits with giving him the "cold eye" required to see the Empire plain: "You get the warm heart if you live here [i.e., in England], but you need to go to America to get the cold eye." Hmm. Be that as it may, the thrust of Cannadine's thesis is that, in his own words, "the British Empire was not primarily about race or color, but about class and status." Again: "We . . . need to recognize that there were other ways of seeing the Empire than in the oversimplified categories of black and white with which we are so preoccupied. It is time we reoriented orientalism."

That last is, of course, a shot aimed at Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, at the tremendous influence of that book, and at the, well, empire of academic studies it has generated, with spin-off colonies in Critical Race Theory, Feminist History, Queer Theory, and all the rest of the dreary catalog of "postmodernist" scholarly logrolling. Cannadine's title is another tweak of Professor Said's ear. Certainly, he agrees, race was a factor in the way the Empire was seen by those who ran it; but it was always liable to be trumped by class. The delicious anecdote that has caught everyone's eye appears in the book's prologue, and sets the mood for what follows. It takes place in the summer of 1881, when King Kalakaua of Hawaii, visiting England, was invited to a dinner party at which the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) was also to be present. The prince insisted that King Kalakaua should take precedence in the seating arrangements over the crown prince of Germany, who was his own brother-in-law and the future Kaiser. To back up his insistence, our Bertie offered the following flawless gem of imperial logic: "Either the brute is a king, or he's a common or garden nigger; and if the latter, what's he doing here?"

It is, of course, not news that the British have a thing about class. The copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern that has somehow survived from my own schooldays back in the mother country gives the third stanza of Mrs. Alexander's hymn "All Things Bright and Beautiful" as follows:

The rich man in his castle,