A.L. Morton’s ‘A People’s History of England’ I

I posted a comment at Laban Tall's yesterday which included a quotation that I think would benefit from some context. I did not want to intrude too much on someone else's blog, so I decided to become a blogger myself - of sorts - and post extended passages from A.L. Morton's classic 'A People's History of England'. These passages relate certain episodes from Britain's imperial past which I believe might be instructive for all opponents of today's Empire.

LT posted a link to a book of 'patriotic' verse extolling the virtues of empire, but to me, patriotism and empire are in opposition. Patriotism is a love of the local, particular, and traditional, while empire turns away from these to seek satisfaction in the exotic, distant, and new, and tends inevitably to destroy the local and particular attachments of both imperialist and colonised peoples.

A Victorian Bishop is quoted from the foreword to the book:

To consolidate the Empire, and to animate it as a whole with noble ideas, is one of the greatest needs and duties of the present day; and an empire, like an admiral, lives not by bread alone, but by its sentiments, its ambitions, its ideals.

LT, perhaps rightly, wrote that many Bishops of 2008 would call the Victorian a 'fascist'. But I wanted to comment on the inherent tension between empire and patriotism, I wrote:

Substitute 'international community' for empire and you'd be hard-pressed to find a Bishop who doesn't swoon with relief at being offered the soft alternative. The Bishops pretend not to see that the 'international community' pursues the same ends as empire, and readily resorts to hard-empire military invasions when frustrated.

Empire and patriotism are, almost by definition, polar opposites, but like the Victorians we are being trained not to see this. A.L. Morton in 'A People's History of England' wrote:

It is entirely characteristic that it was just as the Tory Party ceased to be really representative of the landowners that it adopted a pretentiously self conscious 'Merrie England' propaganda patter. The peculiar task of Disraeli was to reconcile the English aristocracy to their position of junior partner in the firm of Imperialism Unlimited.

Topical substitutions for key words in that passage, and parallels with today's Empire, are various and obvious.

Here is the quotation from Morton in context:

It was during the government of Gladstone that attention was forced upon Ireland by the Fenians. Nothing could be more revealing than Gladstone’s famous exclamation when he was called on to take office in 1968, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ Here ‘pacify’ is the operative word. For all sections of the ruling class, Ireland was a conquered province to be governed in their interests, peacefully if possible, but by violence when necessary. It was within the limits set by this conception that the whole struggle between Liberals and Tories over the Irish question was waged during the late nineteenth century. Their differences were purely tactical and it was among the working class alone that the belief that Ireland was a nation with the right to determine its own destiny found any support.

One outstanding event of the period, and the one which marks decisively the turn into a new age, must receive more detailed consideration in a later chapter.* This was the purchase by the British government in 1875, on the initiative of Disraeli and with the assistance of the Rothschilds, of the shares in the Suez canal held by the Khedive of Egypt. It is important both for its place in the development of the British Empire and for the close co-operation it reveals between the Tory government and the powerful international financial oligarchy.

New figures appear on the scene, Goschens, Cassels and the like, to balance the already established Barings and Rothschilds, and they exercise an increasing influence upon British policy and turn it into a new direction. As they grew in power, and as the influence of banking over industry extended, the Liberal party became more and more a party of the middle class and its authority diminished while the rise of the Labour party on the other side ate away its mass basis among the workers. It is entirely characteristic that it was just as the Tory Party ceased to be really representative of the landowners that it adopted a pretentiously self conscious 'Merrie England' propaganda patter. The peculiar task of Disraeli was to reconcile the English aristocracy to their position of junior partner in the firm of Imperialism Unlimited.

It was indeed a pressing necessity for the British bourgeoisie to learn new ways, for in the late 1870s a deep economic and social crisis was upon them, not to be overcome so lightly as the periodic crises of the bounding years of dominant Liberalism.

* Morton's account of the British Empire in Egypt forms Part II of this posting.

Earlier in Chapter I, Morton had written of Disraeli:

The revolt against Peel was led by a young and almost unknown Jewish politician, Benjamin Disraeli, and it was Disraeli who re-created the Tory party at the beginning of the age of imperialism, no longer primarily as a party of the landowners but as the party of the new power of finance capital.