The Lessons of Empire
The British Empire’s hostile breakup with India should have taught everyone two things: money cannot buy love, and power does not command respect.
1954
Queen Elizabeth II 1952-2022
© Sujayadhar, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nightfall at the Malviya Bridge over the Ganges at Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. This double-decker road and rail bridge was opened in 1887 as Dufferin bridge, and built by the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway (O&R Railway) under the direction of engineer (Frederick Thomas) Granville Walton (1840-1925). In asserting warily that “the British conferred great benefits on the peoples over which they ruled” Maugham had history on his side, though more bridges and fewer Government buildings would have been nice; but arguments of that kind rarely dispose subject peoples to feel more kindly. See John Bright on A Dream of Independence.
Introduction
In his Memoirs (1954) the Aga Khan Sir Sultan Mahomed Shah (1877-1957) regretted the breakdown of esteem between Englishmen and Indians in the early twentieth century. Novelist W. Somerset Maugham found in this a lesson for the emerging Power of the 1950s, the United States of America: a lesson not to make the same mistake the British Empire made.
abridged
IN the world of today the Americans occupy the position which the British so long, and for all their failings not ingloriously, held. Perhaps it would be to their advantage to profit by our example and avoid making the errors that have cost us so dear. The British wanted to be loved and were convinced that they were; the Americans want to be loved too, but are uneasily, distressingly, conscious that they are not.
They find it hard to understand. With their boundless generosity they have poured money into the countries which two disastrous wars have reduced to poverty, and it is natural that they should wish to see it spent as they think fit and not always as the recipients would like to spend it.
