Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

33

The Uses and Abuses of Nationalism and Imperialism

In 1648, more than 150 years after the discovery of the Indies, and of America, the Treaty of Westphalia was finally concluded. This brought to an end the Thirty Years War, when Protestant and Catholic nations had fought themselves to a standstill over how to interpret God’s intentions. They agreed that, from now on, each state would be left free to pursue its own inclination. So much blood had been shed, for ideas that could never be settled one way or the other, that a ‘toleration of exhaustion’ seemed the only way forward.¹ However, it was impossible to avoid the fact that there were several uncomfortable consequences which followed from this new state of affairs. For one, the papacy was sidelined; Spain and Portugal lost power, and the centre of gravity of Europe moved north, to France, England and the newly independent United Netherlands.² But by now it had become clear that the globe was bigger, more varied and more recalcitrant than the first explorers had anticipated and this brought about a change in sensitivity in the northern nations, whose very existence had been confirmed by the outcome of the Thirty Years War. Instead of the outright conquest of other peoples, which had brought Spain such vilification for its treatment of the American ‘Indians’, the northern nations were more interested in trade and commerce. (Only around a quarter of the Spanish and Portuguese migrants to pre-independence Latin America were women, whereas British settlers in North America were encouraged to bring their wives and children. As a result, far fewer British migrants took sexual partners from the indigenous population.) This change in feeling, between the early ‘Catholic’ attitude and the later ‘Protestant’ one, had a great deal to do with the fact that new mercantile classes were replacing the traditional military and landowning aristocracies as the main political force. There was thus an intellectual and moral basis in this development: commerce was believed to be a civilising and humanising force, for both parties. ‘Commerce was not simply the exchange of goods, it involved contact and tolerance.’³

Crucial here were the Protestant countries, Britain and Holland. Each had a strong tradition of trading and, as countries which had achieved religious tolerance at some cost, they had no wish to inflict the same sin on the populations they found in distant lands. If they could, they would rescue these ‘primitives’ from paganism, as a subsidiary aim of trading, but they would not use force.⁴

If anything, Britain was now more important in this regard than Holland. Britain had her American colonies and, after the Seven Years War with France, she had emerged as the most powerful of the maritime nations. But the seven-year campaign had driven her into massive debt and it was her attempt to make good her financial losses, through taxation of the American colonies, combined with the government’s flat refusal to allow these colonies any direct representation in Parliament, that finally brought on the War of Independence (though the levels of taxation in the American colonies were quite low compared with those in Britain).⁵ This was not a foregone conclusion but, at the same time, for many people, in Britain and elsewhere, it was only too clear that colonisation could never work in the long run. Experience was to show that either the colonies became dependent, and then a drain, on the metropolitan countries or, once they showed signs of becoming economically self-sufficient, they wanted to go their own way. One of Adam Smith’s most pertinent predictions was that free Americans would prove better trading partners than as colonised subjects. Niall Ferguson says that there is good reason to believe that by 1770 New Englanders were ‘about the wealthiest people in the world’.

Historians now call America Britain’s ‘first empire’, to distinguish it from the second – in Asia, Africa and the Pacific – where settlement policies were very different. While there was always a military presence in the second empire, outright conquest was never a desirable (or achievable) aim.⁶ As epitomised by the very name of the East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, which became dominant features of this phase of empire, the watchword was trade, protected trade. The colonies of the East comprised in the main what the Portuguese called feitorias, factories, self-governing independent enclaves, as often as not acquired by treaty, the intention being to make them international entrepôts for both European and Asian merchants. Necessarily fortified, they nevertheless had no real military strength – in India, for instance, they could never have posed a threat to the Mughal forces. Nine hundred British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers managed to govern upwards of 250 million Indians. (How they did it is a question for a separate book.)⁷

But the imperial presence did grow, aided by the retreat of the Muslims, and in time commerce triumphed, the East India companies growing in strength and influence. In India the company eventually emerged as the effective ruler of large parts of the country but even then, according to Anthony Pagden, India was always different from America and from later colonies in Africa. ‘India, and Asia generally,’ he says, ‘was always a place of passage, not of settlement . . . No sense of being a distinct people ever emerged among the Europeans in India. There was never a Creole population or very much of the interracial breeding which transformed the population of many of the former Spanish American colonies into truly multi-ethnic communities.’⁸

Even so, there were risks inherent when two very different cultures rubbed up against each other. We saw in Chapter 29 how the activities of the Bengal Asiatic Society helped to kick-start the Oriental renaissance, when Sir William Jones drew attention to the deep similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, and when Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, attracted Hindu scholars to Calcutta to research the Hindu scriptures (he was himself fluent in Persian and Hindi). But in 1788, three years after his term as governor-general had ended, Hastings was impeached by Parliament in London, accused of having ‘squirreled away’ an enormous personal fortune, filched partly from the East India Company itself and partly from the rulers of Benares and Avadh. Though Hastings was eventually acquitted, seven long years after the impeachment began, his trial ‘was a great theatrical event’, largely stage-managed by Edmund Burke, and the former governor-general never really recovered. Burke was convinced that the East India Company had betrayed its aims, which, as well as trading, were ‘to spread civilisation and enlightenment in the empire’. Instead, he said, the company under Hastings’ leadership had become tyrannical and corrupt, ‘subjugating Indians and betraying the very benevolence it was ordered to propagate’. (Later historians have concluded differently, that the more Hastings studied Indian culture, the more respectful he became.⁹) The way Burke spoke, Hastings had betrayed a high ideal of empire, the benevolent spread of Western civilisation, an attitude echoed in Napoleon. This was perhaps disingenuous of Burke (and of Napoleon). What Hastings’ impeachment really showed was a priggishness in the imperial mind: whatever high-flown aims they arrogated to themselves, they were not so different as they thought from the more naturally aggressive colonialists of the first empire. Niall Ferguson lists nine ideas on which the ‘second’ British empire was based, which they wished to disseminate most. These were: the English language, English forms of land tenure, Scottish and English banking, the common law, Protestantism, team games, the limited or ‘night watchman’ state, representative assemblies, and the idea of liberty.¹⁰

Then there was the contentious issue of slavery. Empires had always involved slavery of one kind or another. We can never forget that both Athens and Rome had slaves. At the same time, to be a slave in ancient Greece or Rome did not necessarily involve degradation. Unlucky slaves were sent into the army or the mines; lucky ones might serve as a tutor to children.

Modern slavery was not like that: the very idea of the slave trade was itself degrading and horrendous. ‘It began on the morning of 8 August 1444 when the first cargo of 235 Africans, taken from what is now Senegal, was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos. A rudimentary slave market was improvised on the docks and the confused and cowed Africans, reeling from weeks confined in the insalubrious holds of the tiny ships on which they had come, were herded into groups by age, sex and the state of their health.’¹¹ No trading was allowed until Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ had been notified and arrived at the quayside. As sponsor of the voyage, he was entitled to a fifth of the booty, in this case forty-six humans. This is how the traffic in ‘black gold’ (as slaves became known) began.

While it was new to Europe, a slave trade had existed in Africa for hundreds of years. What changed now was the size of the demand. The European slave trade was driven by a new form of commercial enterprise – the sugar plantation. And Europe’s taste for sugar turned out to be such that, between 1492 and 1820, according to Anthony Pagden, ‘five or six times as many Africans went to America as did white Europeans’. This statistic, however well-known, still has the power to shock. It shaped the Americas and provided the United States with, arguably, its most intractable problem. One deep reason for this abiding American dilemma arose from the fact that modern slavery involved a new understanding of the relationship between master and slave.¹² Neither Aristotle nor Cicero was ever comfortable with the idea of slavery. On occasion they tried to argue that slaves were a different ‘type’ of person, but they knew that was unconvincing when in many cases slaves had merely been on the losing side in a war. The main monotheisms took much the same view. Both the Old Testament and the Qurʾan authorise the taking of slaves, but only after a ‘just war’.¹³ The early Christians did not look favourably on the enslaving of other Christians but did not extend the same charity to non-Christians. In the early years of the trade, there were some attempts by Catholic clerics and jurists to claim that the wars deep inside Africa were ‘just’ but few took their arguments seriously and an advance of sorts was made in 1686 when the Holy Office condemned the slave trade. But, significantly, it did not condemn slavery itself.¹⁴

The Vatican’s view reflected what was for a time the general opinion – that the slave trade was more offensive than slavery itself – but protests continued to snowball and drew attention to the fact that, underneath it all, there was a paradox. It was held by many that Negroes were ‘an inferior type of people, little better than animals’, and as if to confirm this they were often given the names of pets – Fido, Jumper and so on. Yet this attitude was flatly contradicted by the fact that masters often required their slaves to undertake tasks that demanded a full mental equipment.¹⁵ No less dangerous was the possibility that female slaves would be found sexually attractive by their masters, producing mixed-blood offspring and a new type of social problem. So the new relationship was fraught with inconsistencies and tensions.

Racist views remained strong, right up to and beyond the time slavery was finally abolished. William Wilberforce was just one of the abolitionists who could not dispel his belief that European Christian culture was a civilising force. At one point he confessed that the emancipation of the slaves ‘might actually be less important than that the reign of light and truth and happiness might be brought among them through Christianity and British laws, institutions and customs’. But Wilberforce did join the sponsors of an experimental colony, Sierra Leone, founded in 1787 to ‘introduce civilisation among the natives and to cultivate the soil by means of free labour’. Sierra Leone flourished and its capital, Freetown, became one of the bases for the new Royal Navy anti-slaving squadron.¹⁶ In the event, it was Denmark which, in 1792, became the first European nation to outlaw the slave trade. Britain took action to end the trade in 1805 and slaving had become a hanging offence by 1824. But elsewhere it went on for another half-century – the last landing was made in Cuba in 1870.¹⁷

The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, had created one set of European states. The Congress of Vienna, called in 1815, to decide the shape of Europe in the wake of Napoleon’s fall, created another. Attitudes were very different then from now. For the British Foreign Minister Lord Castlereagh, one of the architects of the new Europe, Italy was no more than a ‘geographical concept’, and its unification as one state ‘unthinkable’.¹⁸ A German at the congress had much the same view about his own country. ‘The unification of all the German tribes in a single, undivided state,’ he said, was no more than a dream that had ‘been refuted by a thousand years of experience and ultimately cast aside . . . It is incapable of realisation by any operation of human ingenuity, nor can it be enforced by the bloodiest of revolutions; it is an aim pursued only by madmen.’ He concluded that if the idea of national unity gained the upper hand in Europe, ‘then a wasteland of bloody ruins will be the only legacy that awaits our descendants’.¹⁹

The main aim of the Congress of Vienna was to prevent there ever again being a revolution in Europe, and to that end the assembled diplomats and politicians set about recreating much the same landscape as had existed immediately after 1648. ‘Spain and Portugal were restored under the former ruling families, Holland was enlarged by the former Austrian Netherlands, later to become Belgium, Switzerland was reconstituted, Sweden stayed united with Norway, and since the Pentarchy, the club of five major European powers, was unthinkable without France, the latter was left intact with its 1792 border.’²⁰ But this carefully balanced European system depended on central Europe remaining fragmented, diffuse and powerless.²¹ Many of the Europeans at the Vienna Congress were very disturbed by the so-called ‘Germanophiles’, who were determined to unify Germany and turn her into a nation-state. As the French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord wrote to Louis XVIII from Vienna: ‘They are attempting to overturn an order that offends their pride and to replace all the governments of the country by a single authority. Allied with them are people from the universities, youngsters who have been primed with their theories, and all those who ascribe to German particularism all the sufferings that have been inflicted on the country in the course of the wars that have been fought there. The unity of the German fatherland is their slogan, their faith and their religion, they are ardent to the point of fanaticism . . . Who can calculate the consequences, if the masses in Germany were to combine into a single whole and turn aggressive? Who can say where a movement of that kind might stop?’²²

At that point, in other words, the principle of nationality was acknowledged, as Hagen Schulze has pointed out, only where it was linked to the legitimate rule of a monarch: in Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Sweden – north and western Europe. The German-speaking lands, and Italy, were left out. This helps explain why nationalism, cultural nationalism, began as a German idea. The political fragmentation of the region was actually the logical outcome of the European order. One only has to look at the map to see why. ‘From the Baltic to the Tyrrhenian Sea, it was Central Europe that kept the great powers apart, kept them at a distance and prevented head-on collisions.’²³ No one wanted an undue concentration of power in central Europe, for if anyone should take control, they could easily become ‘mistress of the entire continent’.²⁴ For many, the minuscule Italian and German states guaranteed freedom. Although Italy and Germany were in a similar situation, in this regard, much of Italy was occupied by a foreign power (Austria in the north, the Bourbons in the south), and this too explains why modern nationalism began in Germany. In fact, the unification of Germany, and of Italy, were two of the seminal political events of the nineteenth century which – together with the Civil War in America – did so much to bring about the great industrial rivalry in the last decades of the 1800s, fashioning our modern world, but which also led eventually to the First World War, setting the stage for the calamitous twentieth century. How prescient Talleyrand was.²⁵

The first person to identify what we may call ‘cultural nationalism’ was Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), though the great German historian Friedrich Meinecke said that Friedrich Karl von Moser had first found signs of a ‘national spirit’ in 1765 ‘in those parts of Germany where 20 principalities could be seen during a day’s journey’. The stage had been set, as we saw in Chapter 24, with the emergence (not just in Germany) of a self-conscious ‘public’ in the late seventeenth century. ‘Nature,’ Herder said, ‘has separated nations not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but most particularly by languages, inclinations and characters, that the work of subjugating despotism might be rendered more difficult, that all the four quarters of the globe might not be crammed into the belly of a wooden horse.’²⁶ For Herder the Volk was irreducible, incompatible with the idea of empire, which he said went against the grain of the ‘natural plurality’ of the world’s peoples.²⁷ The Germans wanted unification, a nation-state, and this had to be ‘cultivated’ because they had for too long been the theatre of war for the European powers, where ‘today’s ruler might turn out to be tomorrow’s enemy’.²⁸ In place of the ‘jumbled patchwork’ of states that had occupied central Europe for centuries, the nineteenth century saw two massive powers come into being. The nature of this change cannot be overestimated.

The other European nations responded to these German and Italian sentiments with what Hagen Schulze has called ‘patriotic regeneration’.²⁹ This was especially true in France, for example, where the entire education system was placed in the service of the nationalist cause. The teaching of history and national politics was to be the cause of national regeneration after revolution and repeated defeat. The most obvious – one might say the most lurid – example of this was G. Bruno’s Le Tour de la France par deux enfants: devoir et patrie. This was the story of a fourteen-year-old boy, André Valden, and his brother Julien, aged seven. The story is set in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War after the two boys have been orphaned and stranded in their home-town of Phalsburg, which has been annexed by Germany. They escape and journey throughout France in the course of their adventures, ultimately finding a new home in the country, which, thanks to those adventures, they now see in all its glory. Appearing first in 1877, the book went through twenty reprints in the next thirty years. Another example of the fervent nationalism of the times is that while Jules Ferry (1832–1893) was education secretary, every classroom was required to display a map of France with Alsace and Lorraine shown surrounded by black mourning crepe. Jules Michelet (1798–1874) wrote about France as the ‘pontificate of modern civilisation’, meaning that it was the pioneer of the modern enlightened state: ‘the French idea of civilisation had thus become the very core of a national religion.’ (The Marseillaise was adopted as the national anthem in 1879.)³⁰

England responded too, but in a different way. The colonial expansion of the British empire achieved unprecedented dimensions between 1880 and the First World War, as this table makes clear:

Colonial dependencies (in thousands of square kilometres)

Here are some contemporary comments, quoted at length, to show not only their tenor but how widespread they were. ‘Imperialism has become the very latest and the highest embodiment of our democratic nationalism. It is a conscious expression of our race’ (the Duke of Westminster). ‘The British are the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’ (Joseph Chamberlain.) On seeing the port of Sydney, Charles Darwin wrote ‘My first feeling was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’ ‘I claim that we are the leading race in the world, and the more of the world we populate, the better it will be for mankind . . . Since [God] has obviously made the English-speaking race the chosen instrument by which He means to produce a state and society based on justice, freedom and peace, then it is bound to be in keeping with His will if I do everything in my power to provide that race with as much scope and power as possible. I think that, if there is a God, then He would like to see me do one thing, that is, to colour as much of the map of Africa British red as possible’ (Cecil Rhodes).³²

The downside to this outbreak of nationalism, which looks inevitable with the benefit of hindsight, was yet more racism. Anti-Semitism was especially virulent in France and Germany. This partly had to do with the envy of Britain³³: the French and German empires were so small, compared with the British, that the view formed, as Paul Déroulède, founder of the League of Patriots in France, put it, ‘We cannot hope to achieve anything abroad before we have cured our domestic ills.’³⁴ And there was no doubt who was internal enemy number one – the Jews. In 1886 Edouard Drumont published La France juive, a ‘concoction’ of Jewish life and customs, which, though crude and clumsy, became an instant best-seller. It turned out to be the prelude to a wave of anti-Semitism in that country, culminating in the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish officer was falsely accused of being a German spy. In Germany, the so-called Kulturkampf, the ‘cultural battle’, though it was waged over the supervision of schools and the appointment of parish priests, was really about the attempt by the Protestant state to make Catholic politicians conform to Prussian policy. In amongst this intolerance, the role of Jews was inevitably discussed.

Nationalism reached its ultimate form at the turn of the century in Maurice Barrés’ trilogy, Le roman de l’énergie nationale (1897–1903). Barrés’ idea was that the cult of the ego was the main cause of the corruption of civilisation. ‘The nation ranked above the ego and had therefore to be regarded as the supreme priority in a man’s life. The individual had no choice but to submit to the function assigned to him by the nation, “the sacred law of his lineage”, and to “hearken to the voices of the soil and the dead”.’³⁵ As Hagen Schulze has rightly pointed out, nationalism, the idea of a nation, which at the turn of the nineteenth century had been seen as a form of utopia, as a natural political and cultural entity, had become by the turn of the twentieth century a polemical factor in domestic politics. ‘It no longer stood above the parties uniting society, but itself turned into a party and divided society.’ The consequences were to be catastrophic.

Once again, we should be careful of exaggeration. Nationalism was catastrophic in many ways, but it also had its positive side. This was nowhere more evident than in regard to the great flowering of German intellectual life in the nineteenth century which, whether or not it was caused by unification of the country, and by the great feeling of nationalism that accompanied the unification, certainly occurred at exactly the same time.

Sigmund Freud, Max Planck, Ernst Mach, Hermann Helmholtz, Marx, Weber, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Strindberg, von Hofmannsthal, Rudolf Clausius, Wilhelm Röntgen, Eduard von Hartmann, . . . all these were German or German-speaking. It sometimes escapes our attention that the period between 1848 and 1933, overlapping the turn of the century, when this book comes to a close, was the high point of the German genius. ‘The twentieth century was supposed to have been the German century.’ These words were written in 1991 by the American historian Norman Cantor. They are echoes of those by Raymond Aron, the French philosopher, talking to the German historian Fritz Stern, when they were in Berlin to visit an exhibition commemorating the centenary of the births of the physicists Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. All were born in 1878–79 and this moved Aron to remark: ‘It could have been Germany’s century.’³⁶ What Cantor and Aron meant was that, left to themselves, Germany’s thinkers, artists, writers, philosophers and scientists, who were the best in the world between 1848 and 1933, would have taken the freshly-unified country to new and undreamed-of heights, were in fact in the process of doing so when the disaster that went by the name of Adolf Hitler came along.

Anyone who doubts this claim – that the period 1848–1933 was the German century – need only consult the list of names which follows. One could start almost anywhere, so complete was this dominance, but let’s begin with music: Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Anton Bruckner, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Fritz Kreisler, Arthur Honegger, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Franz Lehár, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic. Medicine and psychology were not far behind – in addition to Freud, think of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Wundt, Hermann Rorschach, Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Reich, Karen Horney, Melanie Klein, Ernst Kretschmer, Géza Roheim, Jacob Breuer, Richard Krafft-Ebing, Paul Ehrlich, Robert Koch, Wagner von Jauregg, August von Wassermann, Gregor Mendel, Erich Tschermak, Paul Corremans. In painting there was Max Liebermann, Paul Klee, Max Pechstein, Max Klinger, Gustav Klimt, Franz Marc, Lovis Corinth, Hans Arp, Georg Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Slevogt, Max Ernst, Leon Feininger, Max Beckmann, Alex Jawlensky; Wassily Kandinsky was of Russian birth but it was in Munich that he achieved the single most important breakthrough in modern art – abstraction. In philosophy, in addition to Nietzsche, there was Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, Ernst Cassirer, Ernst Haeckel, Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, Ferdinand Tönnies, Martin Buber, Theodore Herzl, Karl Liebknecht, Moritz Schlick.

In scholarship and history there was Julius Meier-Graefe, Leopold von Ranke, Theodor Mommsen, Ludwig Pastor, Wilhelm Bode and Jacob Burckhardt. In literature, in addition to Hugo von Hofmannsthal there was Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig, Gerhard Hauptmann, Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, Walter Hasenclever, Franz Werfel, Franz Wedekind, Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan George, Berthold Brecht, Karl Kraus, Wilhelm Dilthey, Max Brod, Franz Kafka, Arnold Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Carl Zuckmayer. In sociology and economics, there was Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter and Karl Popper. In archaeology and biblical studies, in addition to D. F. Strauss there was Heinrich Schliemann, Ernst Curtius, Peter Horchhammer, Georg Grotefend, Karl Richard Lepsius, Bruno Meissner. Finally (though this could just as easily have come first) in science, mathematics and engineering there were: Ernst Mach, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger, Heinrich Hertz, Rudolf Diesel, Hermann von Helmholtz, Wilhelm Röntgen, Karl von Linde, Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Emil Fischer, Fritz Haber, Herman Geiger, Heinz Junkers, George Cantor, Richard Courant, Arthur Sommerfeld, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, Wolfgang Pauli, David Hilbert, Walther Heisenberg, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Alfred Wegener, not to mention the following engineering firms of one kind or another: AEG, Bosch, Benz, Siemens, Hoechst, Krupp, Mercedes, Daimler, Leica, Thyssen.

This still does not do full justice to the German genius. The year 1900, the close of our time-frame, saw the deaths of Nietzsche, Ruskin and Oscar Wilde but it saw three ideas introduced to the world which, it may be said without exaggeration, formed the intellectual backbone of the twentieth century, certainly so far as the sciences were concerned. These ideas were the unconscious, the gene and the quantum. Each of these was of Germanic origin.

In explaining the great and rapid triumph of German ideas, in the period 1848–1933, we need to examine three factors, each special to Germany and German thinking but also to the theme of this chapter. First, we need to understand German ideas about culture, what it was, what it consisted of and what its place was in the life of the nation. For example, in English, ‘culture’ does not normally distinguish sharply between the spiritual and the technological areas of life but, in German, Kultur came to stand for intellectual, spiritual or artistic areas of creative activity but not the social, political, economic or technical-scientific life. As a result, whereas in English the words ‘culture’ and ‘civilisation’ are complementary aspects of the same thing, in German that is not the case. In the nineteenth century, Kultur denoted manifestations of spiritual creativity – the arts, religion, philosophy; in contrast, Zivilisation referred to social, political and technical organisation and, most important, these were deemed to be of a lower order. Nietzsche made much of this, and it is a vital distinction, without which a full understanding of German thought in the nineteenth century is impossible.

There was thus in Germany what C. P. Snow would have called a ‘two cultures’ mentality, and with a vengeance. One of the effects of this was to highlight and deepen the divide between the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. Several of the sciences, by their very nature, formed a natural alliance with engineering, commerce and industry. But, at the same time, and despite their enormous successes, the sciences were looked down upon by artists. Whereas in a country like England, or America, the sciences and the arts were, to a much greater extent, seen as two sides of the same coin, jointly forming the intellectual elite, this was much less true in nineteenth-century Germany. A good example of this is Max Planck, the physicist who (in 1900) discovered the quantum, the idea that all energy comes in very small packets, or quanta. Planck came from a very religious, somewhat academic family, and was himself an excellent pianist. Despite the fact that his discovery of the quantum rates as one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time, in Planck’s own family the humanities were considered a superior form of knowledge to science.³⁷ His cousin, the historian Max Lenz, would jokingly pun that scientists (Naturforscher) were in reality foresters (Naturförster) – or, as we would say, hicks.¹⁹

The work of Ernst Mach reinforces this point. Mach (1838–1916) was one of the most impressive and ardent reductionists, with many discoveries to his credit, including the importance of the semicircular canals in the inner ear for bodily equilibrium, and that bodies travelling at more than the speed of sound create two shock waves, one at the front and the other at the rear, as a result of the vacuum their high speed creates (this is why we speak of a ‘Mach number’ on Concorde, or used to). But Mach was implacably opposed to metaphysics of any kind and denounced what he called ‘misapplied concepts’, like God, nature and soul. He regarded Freud’s concept of the ‘ego’ as a ‘useless hypothesis’. He felt that even the concept of the ‘self’ was ‘irretrievable’, that all knowledge could be reduced to sensation and that the task of science was to describe sense data in the simplest and most neutral manner possible. Mach was widely read in his day: both Lenin and his disciples, and the Vienna Circle, were adherents. Mach firmly believed that science had the answers, and that such subjects as philosophy and psychoanalysis were largely useless.³⁸

This profound division – between the sciences on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other – had serious consequences. One that is particularly relevant here was that the intuition of artists was given more respect, accorded a far higher status, in Germany than anywhere else at the time. This was reflected in a second division, over and above that between the arts and the sciences, between Kultur and Zivilisation. This was the opposition between Geist and Macht, the realm of intellectual or spiritual endeavour and the realm of power and political control. It is important to say that the relationship between Geist and Macht, whether culture or the state should take precedence, was never satisfactorily resolved in Germany. The consequences were momentous, as a brief excursion into political/social history will show.

In 1848, Germany’s attempt at a bourgeois revolution failed and with it the struggle of the German professional and commercial classes for political and social equality with the ancien regime. In other words, Germany failed to make the socio-political advances that England, Holland, France and North America had achieved, in some cases generations before. German liberalism, or would-be liberalism, was based on middle-class demands for ‘free trade and a constitutional framework to protect their economic and social space in society’. When this attempt at constitutional change failed, to be followed in 1871 by the establishment of the Reich, led by Prussia, a most unusual set of circumstances came into being. In a real sense, and as Gordon Craig has pointed out, the people of Germany had played no part in the creation of the Reich. ‘The new state was a “gift” to the nation on which the recipient had not been consulted.’³⁹ Its constitution had not been earned; it was simply a contract among the princes of the existing German states, who in fact retained their crowns until 1918. To our modern way of thinking, this had some extraordinary consequences. For example, one result was that ‘the Reich had a Parliament without power, political parties without access to governmental responsibility, and elections whose outcome did not determine the composition of the government’. In addition to the Reichstag, there was the Bundesrat, not an elected body at all but a committee of state governments, which shared power with Parliament, but neither of whom could depose the Chancellor. Moreover, the internal arrangements of the individual states were not affected by the events of 1871. The franchise for the Prussian Parliament, for example (and Prussia made up three-fifths of the population), depended on the taxes one paid, meaning that the top 5 per cent of tax-payers had one-third of the votes, the same proportion as the bottom 85 per cent.⁴⁰ Nor did the Chancellor rule with the aid of a cabinet: the imperial departments, which expanded their influence as time went on, were run by subordinate state secretaries. This was quite unlike – and much more backward than – anything that existed among Germany’s competitors in the West (though this ‘belatedness’ or otherwise of Germany is the subject of lively academic controversy right now). Matters of state remained in the hands of the landed aristocracy, although Germany had become an industrial power. This power was increasingly concentrated in fewer hands for, with urbanisation, the growth of commerce and the expansion of industry, the patchwork of old German states became less and less powerful and the empire more of a reality. The state thus became progressively more authoritarian as it took on a greater role in regulating economic and social issues. In short, as more and more people joined in Germany’s industrial, scientific and intellectual successes, the more it was run by a small coterie of traditional figures – landed aristocrats and military leaders, at the head of which was the emperor himself. This essential dislocation was fundamental to ‘German-ness’ in the run-up to the First World War. It was one of the greatest anachronisms of history.⁴¹

This great dislocation had two effects that concern us. One, the middle class, excluded politically and yet eager to achieve some measure of equality, fell back on education and Kultur as key areas where success could be achieved – equality with the aristocracy, and superiority in comparison with foreigners in a competitive, nationalistic world. ‘High culture’ was thus always more important in imperial Germany than elsewhere and this is one reason why it flourished so well in the 1871–1933 period. But this gave culture a certain tone – freedom, equality or personal distinctiveness tended to be located in the ‘inner sanctum’ of the individual, whereas society was portrayed as an ‘arbitrary, external and frequently hostile world’. The second effect, which overlapped with the first, was a retreat into nationalism, but a class-based nationalism which turned against the newly created industrial working class (and the stirrings of socialism), Jews and non-German minorities. ‘Nationalism was seen as moral progress, with utopian possibilities.’⁴² One effect of this second factor was the idealisation of earlier ages, before the industrial working class existed, in particular the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stood for an integrated daily life – a ‘golden age’ – in pre-industrial times. Against the background of a developing mass society, the educated middle class looked to culture as a stable set of values that uplifted their lives, set them apart from the ‘rabble’ (Freud’s word) and, in particular, enhanced their nationalist orientation. The Volk, a semi-mystical, nostalgic ideal of how ordinary Germans had once been – a contented, talented, a-political, ‘pure’ people – took hold.

These various factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding so much of German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, and which helps explain both the (predominantly German) discovery of the unconscious and why Germany became so dominant in this area. The word in German is Innerlichkeit.⁴³ Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inwards, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it, was a derogation of their calling and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one. For example, and as Gordon Craig tells us, before 1914 it was only on rare occasions that German artists were interested, let alone stirred, by political and social events and issues. Not even the events of 1870–1871 succeeded in shaking this indifference. ‘The victory over France and the unification of Germany inspired no great work of literature or music or painting.’⁴⁴ Authors and painters did not really find their own day ‘poetic enough’ to challenge their talents. ‘As the infrastructure of the new Reich was being laid, German artists were writing about times infinitely remote or filling their canvases with nereids and centaurs and Greek columns.’ Even the great Wagner was composing musical drama that had only the remotest connection with the world in which he lived (Siegfried, 1876; Parsifal, 1882).⁴⁵

There were of course exceptions. In the 1880s, for example, there was a movement in the arts known as Naturalism, inspired in part by the novels of Émile Zola in France, the aim being to describe the social ills and injustices caused by industrialism. But in comparison with the literature of other European countries, the German Naturalist movement was half-hearted in its attempt to make radical criticism and the Naturalists never turned their attention to the political dangers that were inherent in the imperial system. ‘Indeed,’ writes Gordon Craig, in his history of imperial Germany, ‘as those dangers became more palpable, with the beginnings under Wilhelm II of a frenetic imperialism, accompanied by an aggressive armaments programme, the great majority of the country’s novelists and poets averted their eyes and retreated into that Innerlichkeit which was always their haven when the real world became too perplexing for them.’⁴⁶ There were no German equivalents of Zola, Shaw, Conrad, Gide, Gorky or even Henry James. Among the major (German) names of the day – Stefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal – hard, harsh reality was subordinated to feeling and the attempt to fix on paper fleeting impressions, momentary moods, vague perceptions. Hofmannsthal’s concept of Das Gleitende, the ‘slip-sliding’ nature of the times, where nothing could be pinned down, nothing stayed the same, where ambiguity and paradox ruled, is discussed in Chapter 36. Gustav Klimt did exactly the same thing in paint, and his example is instructive.

Born in Baumgarten, near Vienna, in 1862, Klimt was the son of a goldsmith. He made his name decorating the new buildings of the Ringstrasse with vast murals. These were produced with his brother Ernst but on the latter’s death in 1892 Gustav withdrew for five years, during which time he appears to have studied the works of James McNeill Whistler, Aubrey Beardsley and Edvard Munch. He did not reappear until 1897, when he emerged with a completely new style. This new style, bold and intricate at the same time, had three defining characteristics: the elaborate use of gold leaf (using a technique he had learned from his father), the application of small flecks of iridescent colour, hard like idl, and a languid eroticism applied in particular to women. Klimt’s paintings were not quite Freudian: his women were not neurotic, far from it. The women’s emancipation movement in Germany had been far more concerned than elsewhere with inner emancipation, and Klimt’s figures reflected this.⁴⁷ They were calm, placid, above all lubricious, but they were still ‘the instinctual life frozen into art’, as Hofmannsthal said. In drawing attention to women’s sensuality, Klimt was subverting the familiar way of thinking every bit as much as Freud was. Here were women capable of the very perversions reported in Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book Psychopathia Sexualis, which made them tantalising and shocking at the same time. Klimt’s new style immediately divided Vienna but it also brought about his commission from the university.

Three large panels were asked for: ‘Philosophy’, ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’. All three provoked a furore but the rows over ‘Medicine’ and ‘Jurisprudence’ merely repeated the fuss over ‘Philosophy’. For this first picture the commission stipulated as a theme ‘The triumph of light over darkness’. What Klimt actually produced was an opaque, ‘deliquescent tangle’ of bodies that appear to drift past the onlooker, a kaleidoscopic jumble of forms that run into each other, and all surrounded by a void. The professors of philosophy were outraged. Klimt was vilified as presenting ‘unclear ideas through unclear forms’. Philosophy was supposed to be a rational affair; it ‘sought the truth via the exact sciences’. Klimt’s vision was anything but that, and as a result it wasn’t wanted: eighty professors collaborated in a petition that demanded Klimt’s picture never be shown at the university. The painter responded by returning his fee and never presenting the remaining commissions.⁴⁸ The significance of the fight is that in these paintings Klimt was attempting a major statement. How can rationalism succeed, he is asking, when the irrational, the instinctive, the unconscious, is such a dominant part of life? Is reason really the way forward? Instinct is an older, more powerful force. It may be more atavistic, more primitive, and a dark force at times, but where is the profit in denying it?⁴⁹

The concept of Innerlichkeit was one thing in the hands of Freud, say, or Mann, Schnitzler or Klimt – it was original, energising, challenging. But there was another side, typified by the likes of Paul Lagarde and Julius Langbehn. Neither of these is as well-known now as Freud, Klimt, Mann and the others, but at the time they were equally famous. And they were famous for being viciously anti-modern, for seeing all about them, amid the fantastic and brilliant innovations, nothing but decay. Lagarde, a biblical historian (one of the areas where German scholarship led the world), hated modernity as much as he loved the past. He believed in human greatness and in the will: reason, he said, was of secondary importance. He believed that nations have a soul and he believed in Deutschtum, Germanism: he thought the country embodied a unique race of German heroes with a unique will. Lagarde was also one of those calling for a new religion, an idea that, much later, appealed to Alfred Rosenberg, Göring and Hitler himself. Lagarde attacked Protestantism for its lack of ritual and mystery, and for the fact that it was little more than secularism. In advocating a new religion, he said he wanted to see ‘a fusion of the old doctrines of the Gospel with the National Characteristics of the Germans’. Above all, Lagarde sought the resurgence of the German people. To begin with he adopted ‘inner emigration’: people should find salvation within themselves; but then advocated Germany taking over all non-German countries of the Austrian empire. This was because the Germans were superior and all others, especially Jews, were inferior.⁵⁰

In 1890 Julius Langbehn published Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Teacher). In this book, Langbehn’s aim was to denounce intellectualism and science. Art, not science or religion, was the higher good, he said, the true source of knowledge and virtue. In science, the old German virtues were lost: simplicity, subjectivity, individuality. Rembrandt als Erzieher was a ‘shrill cry against the hothouse intellectualism of modern Germany’ which Langbehn thought would stifle the creative life; it was a cry for the irrational energies of the people or tribe, the Volk-geist, buried for so long under layers of Zivilisation. Rembrandt, the ‘perfect German and incomparable artist’, was pictured as the antithesis of modern culture and as the model for Germany’s ‘third Reformation’, yet another turning-in.⁵¹ One theme dominated the entire book: German culture was being destroyed by science and intellectualism and could be regenerated only through the resurgence of art, reflecting the inner qualities of a great people, and the rise to power of heroic, artistic individuals in a new society. After 1871 Germany had lost her artistic style and her great individuals, and for Langbehn Berlin above all symbolised the evil in German culture. The poison of commerce and materialism (‘Manchesterism’ or, sometimes, Amerikanisierung) was corroding the ancient inner spirit of the Prussian garrison town. Art should ennoble, Langbehn said, so that naturalism, realism, anything which exposed the kind of iniquities that a Zola or a Mann drew attention to, was anathema.⁵²

In other words, it can be argued – it has been argued – that nineteenth-century Germany produced a special kind of artist, and a special kind of art, inward-looking and backward-looking, and that the German fascination and obsession with Kultur had let Zivilisation run riot. Among other things, this formed the deep background to the emergence of scientific racism.

Modern (scientific) racism stems from three factors. One, the Enlightenment view that the human condition was essentially a biological state (as opposed to a theological state); two, the wider contact between different races brought about by imperial conquest; and three, the application and misapplication of Darwinian thinking to the various cultures around the world.

One of the early propagators of biological racism was Jules Virey, a French doctor who addressed the Parisian Académie de Médecine in 1841 on ‘the biological causes of civilisation’. Virey divided the world’s peoples into two. There were the whites, ‘who had achieved a more or less perfect stage of civilisation’, and the blacks (the Africans, Asians and American Indians), who were condemned to a ‘constantly imperfect civilisation’. Virey was deeply pessimistic that the ‘blacks’ would ever achieve ‘full civilisation’, pointing out that, like white people, domesticated animals, such as cows, have white flesh, whereas wild animals – deer, say – have dark flesh. This didn’t square with science even then (it had been known since the sixteenth century that, under the skin, all human flesh is the same colour) but for Virey this ‘basic’ difference accounted for all sorts of consequences. For example, he said that ‘just as the wild animal was prey to the human, so the black human was the natural prey of the white human’.⁵³ In other words, slavery – far from being cruel – was consistent with nature.⁵⁴

One new element in the equation was the development in the nineteenth century of racist thinking within Europe. A familiar name here is Arthur de Gobineau who, in On the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–1855: i.e., before Darwin and natural selection but after the Vestiges of Creation), claimed that the German and French aristocracy (and remember that he was a self-appointed aristocrat) ‘retained the original characteristics of the Aryans’, the original race of mankind. Everyone else, in contrast, was some sort of mongrel.⁵⁵ This idea never caught on but more successful was the alleged difference between the hard-working, pious – even joyless – northern Protestants, and ‘the languid, potentially passive and potentially despotic Latins’ of the Catholic south. Not surprisingly perhaps, many northerners could be found (Sir Charles Dilke was one) who became convinced that the northern ‘races’, the Anglo-Saxons, Russians and Chinese, would lead the way in the future. The rest would form the ‘dying nations’ of the world.⁵⁶

This reasoning was taken to its limits by another Frenchman, Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936). Lapouge, who studied ancient skulls, believed that races were species in the process of formation, that racial differences were ‘innate and ineradicable’ and any idea that they could integrate was contrary to the laws of biology.⁵⁷ For Lapouge, Europe was populated by three racial groups, Homo Europaeus – tall, pale-skinned and long-skulled (dolichocephalous), Homo Alpinus – smaller and darker with brachycephalous (short) heads, and the Mediterranean type – long-headed again but darker and shorter even than Alpinus.⁵⁸ Lapouge regarded democracy as a disaster and believed that the brachycephalous types were taking over the world. He thought the proportion of dolichocephalous individuals was declining in Europe, due to emigration to the United States, and suggested that alcohol be provided free of charge in the hope that the worst types might kill off each other in their excesses. He wasn’t joking.⁵⁹

After publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species it did not take long for his ideas about biology to be extended to the operation of human societies. Darwinism first caught on in the United States of America. (Darwin was made an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society in 1869, ten years before his own university, Cambridge, conferred on him an honorary degree.⁶⁰) American social scientists William Graham Sumner and Thorsten Veblen of Yale, Lester Ward of Brown, John Dewey at the University of Chicago, William James, John Fiske and others at Harvard, debated politics, war and the layering of human communities into different classes against the background of a Darwinian ‘struggle for survival’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ Sumner believed that Darwin’s new way of looking at mankind had provided the ultimate explanation – and rationalisation – for the world as it was. It explained laissez-faire economics, the free, unfettered competition popular among businessmen. Others believed that it explained the prevailing imperial structure of the world in which the ‘fit’ white races were placed ‘naturally’ above the ‘degenerate’ races of other colours.^{61 20}

Fiske and Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1899, flatly contradicted Sumner’s belief that the well-to-do could be equated with the biologically fittest. Veblen in fact turned such reasoning on its head, arguing that the type of characters ‘selected for dominance’ in the business world were little more than barbarians, a‘throw-back’ to a more primitive form of society.⁶²

In the German-speaking countries, a veritable galaxy of scientists and pseudo-scientists, philosophers and pseudo-philosophers, intellectuals and would-be intellectuals, competed to outdo each other in the struggle for public attention. Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist and geographer, argued that all living organisms competed in a Kampf um Raum, a struggle for space, in which the winners expelled the losers. This struggle extended to humans, and the successful races had to extend their living space, Lebensraum, if they were to avoid decline.⁶³ Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), a zoologist from the University of Jena, took to social Darwinism as if it were second nature. He referred to ‘struggle’ as ‘a watchword of the day’.⁶⁴ However, Haeckel was a passionate advocate of the principle of the inheritance of acquired characteristics and, unlike Spencer, he favoured a strong state. It was this, allied to his bellicose racism and anti-Semitism, that led people to see him as a proto-Nazi.⁶⁵ For Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927), the renegade son of a British admiral, who went to Germany and married Wagner’s daughter, racial struggle was ‘fundamental to a “scientific” understanding of history and culture’.⁶⁶ Chamberlain portrayed the history of the West ‘as an incessant conflict between the spiritual and culture-creating Aryans and the mercenary and materialistic Jews’ (his first wife had been half-Jewish).⁶⁷ For Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples were the last remnants of the Aryans, but they had become enfeebled through interbreeding with other races.

Max Nordau (1849–1923), born in Budapest, was like Durkheim the son of a rabbi. His best-known book was the two-volume Entartung (Degeneration) which, despite being six hundred pages long, became an international best-seller. Nordau became convinced there was ‘a severe mental epidemic; a sort of black death of degeneracy and hysteria’, which was affecting Europe, sapping its vitality, and was manifest in a whole range of symptoms, ‘squint eyes, imperfect ears, stunted growth . . . pessimism, apathy, impulsiveness, emotionalism, mysticism, and a complete absence of any sense of right and wrong’.⁶⁸ Everywhere he looked there was decline.⁶⁹ The impressionist painters were the result, he said, of a degenerate physiology, nystagmus, a trembling of the eyeball, causing them to paint in the fuzzy, indistinct way that they did. In the writings of Baudelaire, Wilde and Nietzsche, Nordau found ‘overwheening egomania’, while Zola had ‘an obsession with filth’. Nordau believed that degeneracy was caused by industrialised society – literally the wear-and-tear exerted on leaders by railways, steamships, telephones and factories. When Freud visited Nordau he found him ‘unbearably vain’ with a complete lack of a sense of humour.⁷⁰ In Austria, more than anywhere else in Europe, social Darwinism did not stop at theory. Two political leaders, Georg von Schönerer and Karl Lueger, fashioned political platforms that stressed the twin aims of, first, power to the peasants (because they had remained ‘uncontaminated’ by contact with the corrupt cities) and, second, a virulent anti-Semitism, in which Jews were characterised as the very embodiment of degeneracy. It was this miasma of ideas that greeted the young Adolf Hitler when he first arrived in Vienna in 1907 to attend art school.

France, in contrast, was relatively slow to catch on to Darwinism, but when she did she had her own passionate social Darwinist. In her Origines de l’homme et des sociétés, Clémence Auguste Royer took a strong social Darwinist line, regarding ‘Aryans’ as superior to other races and warfare between them as inevitable in the interests of progress.⁷¹ In Russia, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) released Mutual Aid in 1902, where he took a different line, arguing that although competition was undoubtedly a fact of life, so too was co-operation, which was so prevalent in the animal kingdom as to constitute a natural law. Like Veblen, he presented an alternative model to the Spencerians in which violence was condemned as abnormal. Social Darwinism was, not unnaturally, compared with Marxism and not only in the minds of Russian intellectuals.⁷²

Not dissimilar arguments were heard across the Atlantic in the southern states of the USA. Darwinism prescribed a common origin for all races and therefore could have been used as an argument against slavery, as it was by Chester Loring Brace.⁷³ But others argued the opposite. Joseph le Conte (1823–1901), like Lapouge or Ratzel, was an educated man, not a red neck but a trained geologist. When his book The Race Problem in the South appeared in 1892, he was the highly-esteemed president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His argument was brutally Darwinian.⁷⁴ He said that when two races came into contact one was bound to dominate the other.

The most immediate political impact of social Darwinism was the Eugenics movement, which became established with the new century. All of the above writers played a role in this, but the most direct progenitor, the real father, was Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1822–1911). In an article published in 1904 (in the American Journal of Sociology), he argued that the essence of eugenics was that ‘inferiority’ and ‘superiority’ could be objectively described and measured.⁷⁵

Racism, or at the very least uncompromising ethnocentrism, shaped everything. Richard King, an authority on ancient Indian philosophy, says it was Orientalists who, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘effectively created’ the religions of Hinduism and Buddhism.⁷⁶ What he means is that though complex systems of belief had evolved in the East over many centuries, the peoples who lived there did not have the concept of religion ‘as a monolithic entity which involved a set of coherent beliefs, doctrines and liturgical practices’. He says that the very idea of religion, as an organised belief system, using sacred texts, and with a dedicated clerisy, was a European notion, stemming from the Christians of the third century after they had redefined the Latin word religio. To begin with, that had meant a ‘re-reading’ of the traditional practices of their ancestors, but the early Christians – then under threat from the Romans – had redefined the word so that for them it meant ‘a banding together, in which a “bond of piety” would unite all true believers’.⁷⁷ It was in this way, says King, that religion came to mean a system that emphasised ‘theistic belief, exclusivity and a fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendental world of the divine . . . By the time of the Enlightenment, it was taken for granted that all cultures were understandable in this way.’⁷⁸

In fact, says King, the term ‘Hindoo’ was originally Persian, a version of the Sanskrit sindhu, meaning the Indus river. In other words, the Persians employed the word to single out the tribes inhabiting that region – it did not then have a religious meaning.⁷⁹ When the British arrived in India, he says, they first described the local inhabitants ‘as either heathens, the children of the devil, Gentoos (from the Portuguese gentio = gentile) or Banians (after the merchant population of Northern India)’. But the early colonialists could just not conceive of a people without a religion as they understood the term, and it was they who attached to this complex system of beliefs the phrase ‘the religion of the Gentoos’.⁸⁰ Towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Gentoo’ was changed to ‘Hindoo’ and then, in 1816, according to King, Rammohan Roy, an Indian intellectual, employed the word ‘Hinduism’ for the first time.⁸¹

And it was much the same with Buddhism. ‘It was by no means certain,’ says King, ‘that the Tibetans, Sinhalese and the Chinese conceived of themselves as Buddhists before they were so labelled by Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.’⁸² In this case, the crucial figure was Eugène Burnouf, whose Introduction à l’histoire de Bouddhisme indien effectively created the religion as we recognise it today. Published in 1844, Burnouf’s book was based on 147 Sanskrit manuscripts brought back from Nepal in 1824 by Brian Hodgson (see here).

In both cases, and this is crucial, says King, the current manifestations of these religions were seen as ‘degenerate’ versions of a classic original, and in great need of reform. This ‘mystification’ achieved three purposes. One, in viewing the East as ‘degenerate and backward,’ imperialism was justified. Two, insofar as the East was ancient, the West was by comparison ‘modern’ and progressive. Three, the ancient religions of the East satisfied Europe’s nostalgia for origins, very prevalent at the time. Friedrich Schlegel had voiced what many thought when he wrote ‘Everything, yes, everything without exception has its origins in India.’⁸³

Warren Hastings, whom we have already encountered, was appointed governor-general of Bengal in 1772. He was firmly of the view that British power in India, if it were to flourish, needed the agreement and support of the Indians themselves. The inherent implausibility of such an approach seems not to have detained or deterred anyone. Instead, he began a series of initiatives on the educational front designed to curry favour with a certain class of Indian. First, he proposed a professorship in Persian at Oxford. Drawing a blank there, his next move, with William Jones and others, was to found the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which was discussed in Chapter 29. More practical still was Hastings’ provision for officials of the East India Company to be taught Persian, which was the language of the Mughal court, and for Hindu pandits to be brought to Calcutta to teach these same men Sanskrit and at the same time translate ancient scriptures. One effect of this was to produce several generations of British officials who were familiar with the local languages and sympathetic to Hindu and Muslim culture. Here are some lines from Hastings’ preface to the translation he commissioned of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Every instance which brings [the Indians’] real character home to observation will impress us with a more generous sense of feeling for their natural rights, and teach us to estimate them by the measure of our own. But such instances can only be obtained by their writings; and these will survive, when the British dominion of India shall have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance.’⁸⁴

Hastings’ achievements were built on in 1800 when Marquess Wellesley, the new governor-general, created the College of Fort William, which later became known as the ‘university of the East’. Here, language tuition was expanded and, in addition to Persian and Sanskrit, Arabic and six Indian local languages were offered, together with Hindu, Muslim and Indian law, science and mathematics. Wellesley also saw to it that Western teaching techniques were introduced, in particular written examinations and public disputation. ‘For many years the ceremony at which the disputations were conducted was seen as the principal social event of the year.’ The college was an ambitious undertaking, at least in the early days. It had its own printing press which published textbooks, translations of Indian classics, studies of Indian history, culture and law, and a library was begun where a collection of rare manuscripts was formed.⁸⁵

This enlightened policy didn’t last. The first setback came when the ‘court’ of the East India Company proposed that the college, or at least that part of it which taught European subjects, be transferred to England. And then, in the wake of the massacre of British subjects at Vellore (in south-east India), policy was changed decisively and a decision was taken that British power in the subcontinent could be sustained only if there were a mass conversion of Hindus.⁸⁶ This was such a fundamental change that it was never going to occur without a fight. In a celebrated pamphlet, entitled Vindications of the Hindoos, by a Bengal Officer, Colonel ‘Hindoo’ Stewart argued that any attempt at mass conversion was doomed to failure, one reason being that the Hindu religion was ‘in many respects superior . . . The numerous Hindu gods represented merely “types” of virtue, while the theory of the transmigration of souls was preferable to the Christian notion of heaven and hell.’⁸⁷

It did no good. After the renewal by Parliament of the charter of the East India Company in 1813, a bishopric of Calcutta was established, the College of Fort William was dismantled and its collection of books and manuscripts dispersed. In January 1854 it was officially dissolved.⁸⁸ The Asiatic Society of Bengal was left to run down. The fate of the college, and the society, served as a barometer of wider changes. The Orientalist policies pursued by the British in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had at the least helped produce a major extension of Western knowledge about the East. The new attitude, the attempts at mass conversions, merely helped polarise India, into coloniser and colonised.

What is the legacy of imperialism in terms of ideas? The answer is complex and cannot be divorced from the social, political and economic development of former colonies in the modern world. For many years, following the Second World War, when decolonisation accelerated, imperialism carried much negative baggage: it was a byword for racism, economic exploitation, cultural arrogance on the part of the colonisers at the expense of the ‘other’, the colonised. A large part of the post-modern movement had as its aim the rehabilitation of former colonised cultures. The Indian Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has held professorships at Harvard and at Cambridge, reported that India has had far fewer famines since the British left.

Recently, however, a more textured picture has emerged. ‘Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies . . . India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British models. Finally, there is the English language itself . . . the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements [what Lawrence James calls the “unseen empire of money”] and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a network of global communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.’ Niall Ferguson has shown that, in 1913, at the height of empire, 63 per cent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1996 only 28 per cent did. In 1913 some 25 per cent of the world stock of capital was invested in countries with per capita incomes of 20 per cent or less of US per capita GDP; by 1997 that had fallen to 5 per cent. In 1955, near the end of the colonial period, Zambia had a GDP that was a seventh that of Great Britain; in 2003, after some forty years of independence, it was a twenty-eighth. A recent survey of forty-nine countries showed that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French civil-law countries the weakest, legal protections of investors’. The vast majority of the common-law counties were once under British rule. The American political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset showed that countries which were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving ‘enduring democratization’ after independence than those ruled by other countries. On the other hand, the effects of colonisation were more negative where the imperialists took over countries that were already urbanised, with their own sophisticated civilisations (India, China), where the colonisers were more interested in plunder than in building new institutions. Ferguson thinks this may well explain the ‘great divergence’ by which these latter two countries were reduced from being leading civilisations – perhaps as late as the sixteenth century – to relative poverty.

Imperialism, therefore, wasn’t just conquest. It was a form of international government, of globalisation, and it did not only benefit the ruling powers. The colonialists comprised not just Cecil Rhodes, but Warren Hastings and Sir William Jones.⁸⁹

The extent to which Orientalism developed as an aspect of imperialism has been the subject of much debate at the end of the twentieth century and on into the present one. The argument which has had most attention is that developed by the Palestinian critic and professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, the late Edward Said. In two books, Said argued first that many nineteenth-century works of art depicted an imaginary Orient, a stereotypical Orient full of caricature and simplification. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting Snake Charmer (1870), for example, shows a young boy, naked except for the snake wrapped around him, standing on a carpet and entertaining a group of men, dark-skinned Arabs festooned in rifles and swords, lounging against a wall of tiles decorated with arabesques and Arabic script. Said’s argument was that the intellectual history of Oriental studies, as practiced in the West, has been corrupted by political power, that the very notion of ‘the Orient’ as a single entity is absurd and belittling of a huge region that contains many cultures, many religions, many ethnic groupings. He showed for example, that the Frenchman Silvestre de Sacy, whose Chrestomathie arabe was published in 1806, was trying to put ‘Oriental studies’ on a par with Latin and Hellenistic studies, which helped produce the idea that the Orient was as homogeneous as classical Greece or Rome. In this way, he said, the world comes to be made up of two unequal halves, shaped by the unequal exchange rooted in political (imperial) power. There is, he says, an ‘imaginative demonology’ of the ‘mysterious Orient’ in which the ‘Orientals’ are invariably lazy, deceitful, and irrational.⁹⁰

Said took his argument further in Culture and Imperialism (1993). It was in the ‘great cultural archive,’ as Said put it, that the ‘intellectual and aesthetics in overseas dominion are made. If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority . . . your sense of power scarcely imagined that those “natives” who appeared either subservient or sullenly cooperative were ever going to be capable of finally making you give up India or Algeria. Or of saying anything that might perhaps contradict, challenge . . .’⁹¹ At some basic level, Said insisted, ‘imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others . . . For citizens of nineteenth-century Britain and France, empire was a major topic of unembarrassed cultural attention. British India and French North Africa alone played inestimable roles in the imagination, economy, political life and social fabric of British and French society and, if we mention names like Delacroix, Edmund Burke, Ruskin, Carlyle, James and John Stuart Mill, Kipling, Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, or Conrad, we shall be mapping a tiny corner of a far vaster reality than even their immense collective talents cover.’ It was Said’s contention that one of the principal purposes of ‘the great European realistic novel’ was to sustain a society’s consent in overseas expansion.⁹²

Said focuses on the period around 1878, when ‘the scramble for Africa’ was beginning, and when, he says, the realistic novel form became pre-eminent. ‘By the 1840s the English novel had achieved eminence as the aesthetic form and as a major intellectual voice, so to speak, in English society.’⁹³ All the major English novelists of the mid-nineteenth century accepted a globalised world-view, he said, and indeed could not ignore the vast overseas reach of British power.⁹⁴ Said lists those books which, he argues, fit his theme: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Disraeli’s Tancred, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. The empire, he says, is everywhere a crucial setting. In many cases, Said says, ‘the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth century as a codified, if only marginally visible presence in fiction, very much like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied or given density . . .’⁹⁵

The main narrative line of Mansfield Park (1814), for example, is to follow the fortunes of Fanny Price, who leaves the family home near Portsmouth, at the age of ten, to live as a poor relation/companion at Mansfield Park, the country estate of the Bertram family. In due course, Fanny acquires the respect of the family, in particular the various sisters, and the love of the eldest son, whom she marries at the end of the book, becoming mistress of the house. Said, however, concentrates on a few almost incidental remarks of Austen’s, to the effect that Sir Thomas Bertram is away, abroad, overseeing his property in Antigua in the West Indies. The incidental nature of these references, Said says, betrays the fact that so much at the time was taken for granted. But the fact remains, ‘What sustains life materially is the Bertram estate in Antigua, which is not doing well.’⁹⁶ Austen sees clearly, he says, that to hold and rule Mansfield Park is to hold and rule an imperial estate in close, not to say inevitable association with it. ‘What assures the domestic tranquillity and attractive harmony of one is the productivity and regulated discipline of the other.’⁹⁷

It is this tranquillity and harmony that Fanny comes to adore so much. Just as she is herself an outsider brought inside Mansfield Park, a ‘transported commodity’ in effect, so too is the sugar which the Antigua estate produces and on which the serenity of Mansfield Park depends. Austen is therefore combining a social point – old blood needs new blood to rejuvenate it – with a political point: the empire may be invisible for most of the time, but it is economically all-important. Said’s underlying point is that Austen, for all her humanity and artistry, implicitly accepts slavery and the cruelty that went with it, and likewise accepted the complete subordination of colony to metropolis. He quotes John Stuart Mill on colonies in his Principles of Political Economy: ‘They are hardly to be looked upon as countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community . . . All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses . . . The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.’⁹⁸ It is Said’s case that Mansfield Park – rich, intellectually complex, a shining constituent of the canon – is as important for what it conceals as for what it reveals, and in that was typical of its time.

Both Kipling and Conrad represented the experience of empire as the main subject of their work, the former in Kim (1901), the latter in Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900) and Nostromo (1904). Said pictures Kim as an ‘overwhelmingly male’ novel, with two very attractive men at the centre. Kim himself remains a boy (he ages from thirteen to seventeen in the book) and the important background to the story, the ‘great game’ – politics, diplomacy, war – is, says Said, treated like a great prank. Edmund Wilson’s celebrated judgement of Kim had been that ‘We have been shown two entirely different worlds existing side by side, with neither really understanding the other . . . the parallel lines never meet . . . The fiction of Kipling, then, does not dramatise any fundamental conflict because Kipling would never face one.’⁹⁹ On the contrary, says Said, ‘The conflict between Kim’s colonial service and loyalty to his Indian companions is unresolved not because Kipling could not face it, but because for Kipling there was no conflict.’ (Italics in the original.) For Kipling, India’s best destiny was to be ruled by England.¹⁰⁰ Kipling respected all divisions in Indian society, was untroubled by them, and neither he nor his characters ever interfered with them. By the late nineteenth century there were, he says, sixty-one levels of status in India and the love–hate relationship between British and Indians ‘derived from the complex hierarchical attitudes present in both peoples’.¹⁰¹ ‘We must read the novel,’ Said concludes, ‘as the realisation of a great cumulative process, which in the closing years of the nineteenth century is reaching its last major moment before Indian independence: on the one hand, surveillance and control over India; on the other, love for and fascinated attention to its every detail . . . In reading Kim today we can watch a great artist in a sense blinded by his own insights about India . . . an India that he loved but could not properly have.’¹⁰²

Of all the people who shared in the scramble for empire, Joseph Conrad became known for turning his back on the dark continents of ‘overflowing riches’. After years as a sailor in different merchant navies, Conrad removed himself to the sedentary life of writing fiction. Conrad’s best-known books, Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (published in book form in 1902), Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907), draw on ideas from Darwin, Nietzsche and Nordau to explore the great fault-line between scientific, liberal and technical optimism in the twentieth century and pessimism about human nature. He is reported to have said to H. G. Wells on one occasion, ‘the difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!’¹⁰³

Christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he was born in 1857 in a part of Poland taken by the Russians in the 1793 partition of that often-dismembered country (his birthplace is now in the Ukraine). His father, Apollo, was an aristocrat without lands, for the family estates had been sequestered in 1839 following an anti-Russian rebellion. Orphaned before he was twelve, Conrad depended very much on the generosity of his maternal uncle Tadeusz, who provided an annual allowance and, on his death in 1894, left about £1,600 to his nephew (well over £100,000 now). This event coincided with the acceptance of Conrad’s first book, Almayer’s Folly (begun in 1889), and the adoption of the pen name Joseph Conrad. He was from then on a man of letters, turning his experiences and the tales he heard at sea into fiction.¹⁰⁴

Some time before Conrad’s uncle died, Józef stopped off in Brussels on the way to Poland, to be interviewed for a post with the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo – a fateful interview which led to his experiences between June and December 1890 in the Belgian Congo and, ten years on, to Heart of Darkness. In that decade, the Congo lurked in his mind, awaiting a trigger to be formulated in prose. That was provided by the shocking revelations of the ‘Benin massacres’ in 1897, as well as the accounts of Stanley’s expeditions in Africa. Benin: The City of Blood was published in London and New York in 1897, revealing to the Western civilised world a horror story of native African blood rites. After the Berlin Conference of 1884, Britain proclaimed a protectorate over the Niger river region. Following the slaughter of a British mission to Benin (now a city of Nigeria), which arrived during King Duboar’s celebrations of his ancestors with ritual sacrifices, a punitive expedition was dispatched to capture this city, long a centre of slavery. The account of Commander R. H. Bacon, intelligence officer of the expedition, in some of its details parallels events in Heart of Darkness. When Commander Bacon reached Benin he saw what, despite his vivid language, he says lay beyond description: ‘It is useless to continue describing the horrors of the place, everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live.’¹⁰⁵ Conrad avoids definition of what constituted ‘The horror. The horror’ – the famous last words in the book, spoken by Kurtz, the man Marlow, the hero, has come to save – opting instead for hints such as round balls on posts that Marlow thinks he sees through his field-glasses when approaching Kurtz’s compound. Bacon, for his part, describes ‘crucifixion trees’ surrounded by piles of skulls and bones, blood smeared everywhere, over bronze idols and ivory.

Conrad’s purpose, however, is not to elicit the typical response of the civilised world to reports of barbarism. In his account Commander Bacon had exemplified this attitude: ‘. . . they [the natives] cannot fail to see that peace and the good rule of the white man mean happiness, contentment and security’. Similar sentiments are expressed in the report which Kurtz composes for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Marlow describes this ‘beautiful piece of writing’, ‘vibrating with eloquence’. And yet, scrawled ‘at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: “Exterminate all the brutes!”.’¹⁰⁶

This savagery at the heart of civilised humans is also revealed in the behaviour of the white traders – ‘pilgrims’ as Marlow calls them. White travellers’ tales, like those of H. M. Stanley in ‘darkest Africa’, written from an unquestioned sense of the superiority of the European over the native, were available to Conrad. Heart of Darkness thrives upon the ironic reversals of civilisation and barbarity, of light and darkness. Here is a characteristic Stanley episode, recorded in his diary. Needing food, he told a group of natives that ‘I must have it or we would die. They must sell it for beads, red, blue or green, copper or brass wire or shells, or . . . I drew significant signs across the throat. It was enough, they understood at once.’¹⁰⁷ In Heart of Darkness, by contrast, Marlow is impressed by the extraordinary restraint of the starving cannibals accompanying the expedition, who have been paid in bits of brass wire, but have no food, their rotting hippo flesh – too nauseating a smell for European endurance – having been thrown overboard. He wonders why ‘they didn’t go for us – they were thirty to five – and have a good tuck-in for once’.¹⁰⁸ Kurtz is a symbolic figure, of course (‘All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz’), and the thrust of Conrad’s fierce satire emerges clearly through Marlow’s narrative. The imperial civilising mission amounts to a savage predation: ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of the human conscience’, as Conrad elsewhere described it.¹⁰⁹

At the time Heart of Darkness appeared there was – and there continues to be – a distaste for Conrad on the part of some readers. It is that very reaction which underlines his significance. This is perhaps best explained by Richard Curle, author of the first full-length study of Conrad, published in 1914.¹¹⁰ Curle could see that for many people there is a tenacious need to believe that the world, horrible as it might be, can be put right by human effort and the appropriate brand of liberal philosophy. Unlike the novels of his contemporaries, Wells and Galsworthy, Conrad derides this point of view as an illusion at best, and the pathway to desperate destruction at its worst.¹¹¹ Evidence shows that Conrad was sickened by his experience in Africa, both physically and psychologically, and was deeply alienated from the imperialist, racist exploiters of Africa and Africans at that time. Heart of Darkness played a part in ending Leopold’s tyrannical misrule in what was then the Belgian Congo.

Born in Poland, and despite the fact that Heart of Darkness is set in the Belgian Congo, Joseph Conrad wrote in English. A final achievement of Empire, which began in earnest with the American colonies but culminated in India and the ‘scramble’ for Africa, was the spread of the English language. Today, there are as many English-speakers in India as there are in England, and five times that number in North America. Across the world, one and a half billion people speak English. Yet for many years – for centuries – English was a minority tongue, which hung on only with great difficulty. Its subsequent triumph, as the world’s most useful language, is, as Melvyn Bragg has said, a remarkable adventure.

The first inkling we have of English was when it arrived in the fifth century AD, spoken by Germanic warriors, who were invited to Britain as mercenaries to shore up the ruins of the recently-departed Roman empire.¹¹² The original inhabitants of the British Isles were Celts, who spoke Celtish, no doubt laced with a little Latin, thanks to the Romans. But the Germanic tribes – Saxons, Angles and Jutes – spoke a variety of dialects, mutually intelligible, and it was some time before the Angles won out. The present-day language of Friesland, by the North Sea in Holland, is judged to have the closest language to early English, where such words as trije (three), froast (frost), blau (blue), brea (bread) and sliepe (sleep) are still in use.¹¹³

Early English took on a few words from Latin/Celtic, such as ‘win’ (wine), ‘cetel’ (cattle) and ‘streat’ (street), but the great majority of English words today come from Old English – you, man, son, daughter, friend, house and so on. Also the northern words ‘owt’ (anything) and ‘nowt’ (nothing), from ‘awiht’ and ‘nawiht’.¹¹⁴ The ending ‘-ing’ in place names means ‘the people of . . .’ – Reading, Dorking, Hastings; the ending ‘-ham’ means farm, as in Birmingham, Fulham, Nottingham; ‘-ton’ means enclosure or village, as in Taunton, Luton, Wilton. The Germanic tribes brought with them the runic alphabet, known as the futhorc after the first letters of that alphabet. Runes were made up mainly of straight lines, so they could more easily be cut into stone or wood. The language had twenty-four letters, lacking j, q, v, x and z but including æ, Þ, ð and uu, later changed to w.¹¹⁵

‘Englisc’, as it was originally called, did not begin to grow until the Viking invasions, when endings such as ‘-by’ were added to places, to indicate farm or town: Corby, Derby, Rugby. The Danes made personal names by adding ‘-son’ to the name of the father: Johnson, Hudson, Watson. Other Old Norse words taken into Englisc at this time included ‘birth’, ‘cake,’ ‘leg’, ‘sister’, ‘smile’, ‘thrift’ and ‘trust’.¹¹⁶

The language came under most threat in the three hundred years following the battle of Hastings in 1066. When William the Conqueror was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day that year the service was carried out in English and Latin but he himself spoke French throughout. French became the language of the court, and of the courts, and of Parliament. But, while English survived, words from French were transferred. Mainly, they described the new social order: army (armée), throne (trone), duke (duc), govern (governer), but also cooking: pork (porc), sausages (saussiches), biscuit (bescoit), fry (frire) and vinegar (vyn egre).¹¹⁷ Old English didn’t simply die out: often it adapted. For example, the Old English ‘æppel’ was used to mean any kind of fruit, but after the French word fruit came in, the Old English retreated, to mean just one kind of fruit, the apple.¹¹⁸ Other French words that entered English at this time included chimney, chess, art, dance, music, boot, buckle, dozen, person, country, debt, cruel, calm and honest. The word ‘checkmate’ comes from the French eschec mat, which in turn comes from the Arabic Sh hmt, meaning ‘the king is dead’.¹¹⁹ These were the words that became Middle English.¹²⁰

Middle English began to replace French in England only at the end of the fourteenth century. England had been changed, as everywhere had been changed, by the Black Death, which had carried off many churchmen, Latin- and French-speakers. The Peasants’ Revolt also had a great deal to do with the resurgence of English, as the language of the protestors. When Richard II addressed Wat Tyler and his troops at Smithfield, Bragg says, he spoke in English. And Richard is the first recorded monarch using only English since the Conquest. In 1399, when Henry, Duke of Lancaster, crowned himself, after deposing Richard II, he too spoke in what the official history calls his ‘mother tongue’, English.¹²¹ ‘In the name of Fadir, Son, and Holy Ghost, I, Henry of Lancaster challenge this reyme of Yngland and the corone with all the members and the appurtenances, als I that am disendit be right lyne of the blode comying fro the gude lorde Kyng Henry Therde . . .’¹²² About a quarter of the words used by Chaucer are from the French, though often they have meanings now lost (‘lycour’ = moisture, ‘straunge’ = foreign, distant), but he used English with a confidence that showed a corner had been turned.¹²³

This confidence was reflected in the desire to translate the Bible into English. Although John Wycliffe is remembered as the man who first attempted this, Bragg says it was Nicholas Hereford, of Queen’s College, Oxford, who did most of the work. His scriptoria, organised in secrecy at Oxford, produced many manuscripts – at least 175 survive.¹²⁴

In the bigynnyng God made of nouyt heuene and erthe

Forsothe the erthe was idel and voide, and derknessis weren on the face of depthe; and the Spiryt of the Lord was borun on the watris.

And God seide, Liyt be maad, and liyt was maad.

Spelling was still haphazard. Church could be cherche, chirche, charge, cirche, while people could be pepull, pepille, poepul, or pupill. Order was first put in to this by the Master of Chancellery, shortened to Chancery. This entity was a cross between the Law Courts, the Tax Office and Whitehall, in effect an office that ran the country, and ‘Chancery English’ came to be regarded as the ‘official’, authorised version. Ich was replaced by I, sych and sich by suche, righte became right. Spelling became even more fixed after the invention of printing, which was also accompanied by the Great Vowel Shift, when a systematic change was made in the pronunciation of English. No one quite knows why this shift took place but the example Bragg gives shows that the sentence ‘I name my boat Pete’ would have been pronounced ‘Ee nahm mee bought Peht.’¹²⁵

All these were signs of increasing confidence, as was the great innovation of 1611, the King James version of the Bible, based on William Tyndale’s translation. Here we see modern English in the process of formation, its poetry as well as its form:

Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are they that morne: for they shalbe comforted.

Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.

Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes: for they shalbe filled.

In the Renaissance and the age of discovery, English began to burst with new words: bamboo (Malay), coffee and kiosk (Turkish), alcohol (Arabic), curry (Tamil). The rise of humanism, and an interest in the classics resurrected many Greek and Latin words (skeleton, glottis, larynx, thermometer, parasite, pneumonia). Their usage led to the so-called Inkhorn Controversy. An inkhorn was a horn pot which held ink for a quill and came to symbolise those who liked to coin new words, to show off their erudition in the classics. This blew itself out, but though we still use the words mentioned above, not all neologisms remained – for example, ‘fatigate’ (to make tired), ‘nidulate’ (to build a nest) and ‘expede’ (the opposite of impede).¹²⁶ Shakespeare was part of this renaissance and he was the first to use many words and phrases, whether he invented them or not. Whole books have been written on Shakespeare’s English but among the words and phrases we find fresh in his plays and poems may be included: obscene, barefaced, lacklustre, salad-days, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger. However, he too used words that didn’t fly: cadent, tortive, perisive, even honorificabilitudinatibus.¹²⁷

In America the new landscape and the new people inspired many fresh words or innovative coinages, from foothill, to bluff, to watershed, to moose, to stoop. Then there were squatter, raccoon (rahaugcum at one point), and skunk (segankw). Familiar words were put together to describe new things and experiences: bull-frog, rattlesnake, warpath. Traditional meanings changed in the New World: lumber meant rubbish in London but became cut timber in the United States. Noah Webster, a schoolteacher who wrote the best-selling American Spelling Book, which sold more copies than any other book in the New World save for the Bible, sparked that country’s obsession with pronunciation: today, whereas the British say cemet’ry and laborat’ry, Americans pronounce the whole word, cemetery and laboratory.¹²⁸ It was Webster who dropped the ‘u’ from colour and labour, the second ‘l’ from traveller. They were, he said, unnecessary. He changed theatre and centre to theater and center – that was clearer, as was check for cheque. Music and physic lost their final ‘k’.¹²⁹ The opening up of the frontier introduced more Indian words – maize, pecan, persimmon, toboggan, though tamarack and pemmican didn’t catch on so well. The poor travelled west on rafts which were steered with oars known as riffs – hence ‘riff-raff’. ‘Pass the buck’ and ‘the buck stops here’ came from card games played out west. The ‘buck’ was originally a knife with a buck-horn handle, which was passed to show who had the authority, who was dealing.¹³⁰ OK, or okay, allegedly the most-used word in the English language, has many alleged etymologies. The Choctaw Indians had a word Okeh, meaning ‘it is so’. In Boston it was said to be short for Orl Korrekt, and some Cockneys claim they too used Orl Korrec. Labourers working in Louisiana used to scrawl Au quai on bales of cotton that were ready to be transported downriver to the sea. But these derivations just scratch the surface and the issue is far from settled.¹³¹ ‘Jeans’ owe their existence to Mr Levi Strauss, who used a cloth called geane fustian, which had originally been manufactured in Genoa.

The Enlightenment and the industrial revolution naturally introduced yet more new words – reservoir, condenser, sodium (1807), Centigrade (1812), biology (1819), kleptomania (1830), palaeontology (1838), gynaecology and bacterium (both 1847), claustrophobia (1879). It has been estimated that between 1750 and 1900 half the world’s scientific papers were published in English.¹³² In India, at the height of the British empire, it was arguable as to which people had the linguistic power. For a start, the deep and distant background of much English, as an Indo-European language, was Sanskrit. But new words taken into English from Indian languages included bungalow, cheroot, thug, chintz, polo, jungle, lilac, pariah, khaki (which means ‘dust-coloured’) and pyjamas.¹³³ The English ridd Kolkata as Calcutta, though it has recently returned to the original.

But as English spread in the nineteenth century, with the British empire, to Australia, the West Indies, to Africa and many areas of the Middle East, it became what Arabic, Latin and French had once been, the common currency of international communication, a position it has held ever since. Gandhi felt enslaved by English, or said that he did, but the excellence and popularity of Indian novelists writing in English belies this sentiment. The triumph of English across the world may reflect earlier notions of nationalism and imperialism but it has gone well beyond them. English is the language not only of empire, but of science, capitalism, democracy – and the Internet.