Preface
Viscountess Viola Vorpel
Smugness is an odd little word with a disproportionately large shadow. In the older dictionaries—those that smell agreeably of dust and calfskin—it appears as something almost virtuous: smooth, trim, neat, properly turned out. It belongs to the realm of polished boots and brushed cuffs, of surfaces made correct. Yet listen carefully and one hears, faintly behind it, the whisper of another word: smuggler. The one who moves stolen goods under cover of respectability, laundering theft into commerce with a steady hand and an innocent face. That, too, has been the business of empire.
For those of us who came of age in the 1920s, in drawing rooms and dormitories where the maps still showed the world pink at the edges, smugness was the ambient temperature of British life. It warmed the tea and cooled the conscience. The Empire, we were told, had brought order, law, railways, railings, respectable hats, and English verbs to the furthest ends of the earth; in return, the world had obligingly supplied rubber, tea, tin, labour, and the occasional rebellion to keep the newspapers brisk. It was, by the time of our youth, not so much an argument as a habit. Empire was simply the weather—alternately bracing and oppressive, but always presumed.
This book is written from within that weather, but at an angle to its barometer. It takes as its subject the British Empire as seen not from the desks of proconsuls or the benches of Parliament, but from the particular vantage points of those who were expected to decorate its surfaces rather than direct its course: women and men who loved contrary to regulation. Between them, they furnished the imperial story with its colour, its conversation, its domestic labour, its gossip, its silences, and its inward dissent. They are often present in the archive as bystanders and footnotes—wives on verandas, sisters sending parcels, clerks who never married, friends who shared houses for decades—but rarely as narrators in their own right.
To attend to their vantage is to see empire as a system of smuggling. Not only of goods—though cotton, sugar, opium and gold were indeed moved across oceans in ways that would have troubled any plain-speaking moralist—but of meanings. The grand phrases of the age—civilisation, protection, improvement—served as the velvet wrapping around more brutal transactions. Land was taken and named “secured”; labour was coerced and called “recruited.” Violence was reissued as necessity, and necessity as benevolence. Words themselves functioned as customs officers, stamping stolen property with the seal of legitimacy.
Nowhere was this more glaring, and more carefully polished, than in the story of opium. In the polite version, taught in the clubs and the better schools, Britain fought for the principle of free trade and the opening of China to commerce and light. In the less polished record, the East India Company cultivated opium in Bengal, forced its sale into Chinese markets in defiance of Chinese law, and when Chinese officials attempted to stem the tide, dispatched gunboats in the name of treaty rights. The dealer condemned the addict; Parliament congratulated itself on its principles. The moral contortions involved would have been comic had they not been soaked so thoroughly in human suffering.
These contortions required a supporting theatre of character. Asia, and the wider “East,” were cast as lands of weakness and excess—of “Oriental vice”—against which Britain’s own indulgences appeared, by contrast, sober and corrective. The word “civilised” did more work in those years than any battalion. It allowed gunfire to appear as education, taxation as tutelage, and the imposition of alien codes as the simple spreading of light. The smugness lay not only in the acts themselves but in the composure with which they were described: theft, narrated in the grammar of stewardship; domination, recited as service.
Women and queer men moved inside this theatre as both participants and witnesses. Women organised the social life of stations, read to the children of officials, arranged the flowers before imperial portraits, edited the letters home. They saw, at close range, the disjunction between the rhetoric of mission and the reality of boredom, bad temper, and bureaucratic blundering on which the imperial day so often turned. Many of them learned early that if one wished to endure, one listened more to the servants’ accounts of weather and wages than to the Governor’s speech on destiny.
Gay men, for their part, lived at a double remove. They were beneficiaries of hierarchy—white, male, educated—yet also suspects under the same legal and moral codes that claimed to be civilising the world. Their friendships and attachments developed in the interstices: in the mess, the office, the shared bungalow, the voyage out and home again. To read their letters, when one can find them, is to see imperial smugness from a strange vantage: both inside the club and perpetually on its threshold. It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the sharpest, quietest observers of Empire’s manners and absurdities were men whose own desires had to be smuggled beneath a surface of correctness.
This book is not an indictment in the oratorical manner, nor a defence in the nostalgic vein, but an anatomy of tone. It is concerned with the gloss that allowed so much to pass unquestioned: the way a quartet on the verandah could coexist, perfectly naturally, with famine in the same province; the way a missionary’s earnestness could share the page with a shipping report tallying human cargo as “coolie labour”; the way a law criminalising love between men could be exported abroad under the heading of “improvement.” It asks, in effect, how a society came to feel right while doing so much wrong—how it achieved that peculiar state in which conscience is not silenced so much as gently muffled, like the ticking of a clock under heavy curtains.
To write from the 1920s is to stand at a hinge. The War has shaken the certainties of our parents; new movements stir in India, in Egypt, in Ireland; women have stepped, unevenly and controversially, into the realm of the vote. The Empire is still officially a source of pride. It is also increasingly a source of unease, a subject for jokes in some circles and for anger in others. The polished surface has begun to show scratches. What this book proposes is that we attend not only to the grand cracks—the mutinies, the wars, the legislative acts—but also to the hairline fractures visible in private rooms: the diary that does not quite agree with the Times, the letter that undercuts the official report, the drawing-room conversation that goes suddenly, tellingly silent.
Smugness, as the etymologists remind us, is not the opposite of guilt. It is guilt in its evening clothes, smoothed and brushed and reassured by its own reflection. To read the Empire through the eyes of its women and its queer sons is to watch that toilette in progress. It is to see how theft learns to call itself tidiness, how exclusion dresses as propriety, how an entire world-system acquires, and then believes in, its own good manners.
This is not, perhaps, a comforting vantage. But it is, the writer hopes, a clarifying one. For if there is any lesson to be drawn—not as moral, but as observation—it is that what we most need to understand about empire is not only what it did, but how it learned to do it with such excellent poise.
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