For an Englishman abroad, it's good to read that the empire wasn't all bad
I never thought that Tuscany was the sort of place I would like. I had been to Florence, but somehow Tuscany invoked images of middle-aged men in straw hats and pink shirts. When I got there, deep in Chiantishire, I loved it. I even bought a sort of panama. Anyway, by the pool, I started on Niall Ferguson's Empire. Essentially, Ferguson's argument is that empire was, in its own way, globalisation.
The beneficial exports of British imperialism, he argues, were the rule of law, the English language, incorruptible administration and free trade. The abolition of slavery, the implantation of Christianity and the spread of technology and communications were other by-products. Ferguson suggests that, in the end, the British sacrificed their empire in order to stop the Nazi Reich. Britain was bled dry (the huge debt to America will not be repaid until 2006), and the empire that had once ruled a quarter of the world was moribund.
As someone brought up in South Africa, I have always been alive to the idea that the empire was not just a form of exploitation. With it came a whole bundle of other activities, including schools - of the sort I attended - idealism of a kind that has largely died out and a sense of manifest destiny. There were both liberal and repressive strands to empire. For example, in South Africa, after the Boer war, the Africans were completely sold out, but Solomon Plaatje, a founder of the ANC, was an Anglophile and spent years in England, with some help from Labour grandees, trying to achieve the repeal of the Natives' Land Act 1913, the precursor of apartheid.
The other thing that people like my father subscribed to was the belief that the English gentleman was a very advanced form of evolution, unlike a Kurtz in the Congo. Then I read in an Italian guidebook an approving reference to the first postwar settlers in Tuscany, who were apparently English aristocrats, artists and writers, followed by the riff-raff from Germany and Holland. And just yesterday, in Amos Oz's new book, confirmation: his parents rated anything English tops in terms of culture and civilisation.
Wearing my panama, I tried to do something to keep alive the old stereotype.
Justin Cartwright's new novel, The Promise of Happiness, is published by Bloomsbury
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