History is version. I remembered this as I read through three books: Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, Peter Conradi's Who Lost Russia, and Robert Tombs's The English and Their History. The first two made me realise that, when it comes to the Russian Revolution and Russia in general, Western scholars are not merely divided, they are confused. Figes's treatment of the event is probably the most widely read in the post-Soviet era, but even he gets certain facts muddled up. (Case in point: did the Soviet delegation to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty really compel a random peasant to come with them for the negotiations, as he points out?) As for Conradi's account, it is typical of the anti-Putin diatribes that scholars have been writing for years. The National Review puts it best: "The West misread Russia in the 1990s." Well, so did Conradi, the Review, and every other scholar.
Both Figes and Conradi tackle a particular period. Robert Tombs, on the other hand, tackles an entire civilisation. England being England, the "largest nation in Europe to lack a state of its own" (David Frum), there are enough and more historical realities and anecdotes that should make up a multifarious account of that civilisation. The role of the country in the slave trade, the colonialist enterprise, and the subjugation of its own people (particularly the Irish) would fill up any history book.
And yet, beautifully written though his treatment is, Tombs avoids these hard facts and conjures an alternative history in which the governments wanted to do away with slavery, ameliorate the evils of imperialism, and spread the spirit of charity among its less privileged citizens and brethren. History is version? You bet!
Is The English and Their History, as detractors may suggest, a "patriotic history of England"? Or is it, as David Frum suggests, a "systematic refutation of the most familiar lines of indictment"? Frum argues that it is no polemic, "not even an anti-polemic", which means that the objective is not to propagate a view, no matter how orthodox or unconventional. In three areas, however, Tombs becomes a revisionist: the slave trade, the state of the proletariat during the Industrial Revolution, and the response of the British government to the Irish Famine.
Tombs, when setting the record straight on these three events, refutes the orthodox accounts and their writers: the Abolitionists, the Marxists, the Irish Nationalists. From 1815 to 1850, the heyday of Dickensian England, for instance, the English experience was, for the likes of William Morris, William Blake, Arnold Toynbee, and Friedrich Engels, one of drudgery and unbearable poverty. In contrast to them, Tombs observes that drudgery and poverty in the slums of London, Liverpool, and Manchester was borne, not out of the Industrial Revolution, but of rapid, unplanned urbanisation. He takes on Engels's conventionally accepted work on The Working Class of England and writes against its pessimism, arguing that "an 1860s survey found 95 per cent of houses in Hull and 72 per cent in Manchester to be 'comfortable'."
These are assertions, and their sources hold water in roughly the same way that most of Figes's sources in A People's Tragedy do: that is to say, they reflect the particular, peculiar views of certain historians. That 1860s survey, for instance, was taken from Michael Mason's The Making of Victorian Sexuality, which refutes the view that Victorian England was a haven of prudery and hypocrisy; in Masons's eyes, at least, it was "in reality a code intelligently embraced by wealthy and poor alike as part of a humane and progressive vision of society's future."
I find that description hard to swallow, given that much of Sri Lanka's laws relating to marriage and divorce stem from Victorian morals. The Penal Code's hostility towards homosexuality, for instance, is at odds with the flowering of gay rights in 19th century Germany. To be sure, the German legal system also forbade relations between males (especially after the German Empire was unified in 1871), but German doctors, in stark contrast to their British counterparts, pioneered research which concluded that homosexuality "should not be viewed as a psychic depravity or sickness."
In Sri Lanka, of course, homosexuality remains a depravity and sickness. The Penal Code was enacted in 1883. Sections 365 and 365A criminalises relations between the same gender, with a term of imprisonment of two years. It is hard to conclude that these reflected the ethos of the civilisation on which it was imposed, given that a) the Code was a watered down version of its Indian equivalent, enacted almost a quarter century before, and b) it was a legal expression of a way of thinking that succeeded a period of capitalist accumulation in the country of its origin.
It was during Victorian England that vast strides were made in urban planning (a "stupendous effort in bricks and mortar", as Tombs puts it). It was an attempt at unifying different classes after the clashes between the bourgeoisie and proletariat that had characterised the period from 1815 to 1850. Whether or not the attempt worked, there's no denying that during this pivotal era, prosperity met with prudery, and the two joined hands. The result was a body of law which has never since been equalled in its universality and sexual hypocrisy. India, more populous than us, managed to move away from it. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, remains bonded to it.
Tombs's book is both an alternative and a watered down account of history. Personally, I believe it is relevant even to Sri Lankan historians, because it paints a picture of colonialism and exploitation which is at once deceptively self-evident and distorted. On the slave trade, for instance, Tombs argues that there was a sustained campaign led against it by the British state, which culminated with the enactment of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834. A closer examination of this piece of legislation, its historical antecedents, and its ramifications for a world in which the balance of power had shifted to the other side of the Atlantic are called for, I rather think.
The British state, which passed the Abolition Act in the 19th century, competed fiercely with the French and the Portuguese over the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Slavery was not born in England, nor was it a Western creation: as Tombs points out, between 1530 and 1640, more than one million European civilians were kidnapped and sold by Arab raiders in the Middle East. But the difference with the British slave trade, and indeed the European slave trade in general, was that it was systematic, brutal, and carefully planned out. It was an institution, not a practice.
Tombs's argument is that to view the Atlantic slave trade purely in terms of British involvement would be unfair, given that it was a joint effort between European buyers and African sellers. This is no different to the assertion that the British didn't conquer countries like ours, rather we let them conquer us, because the rulers we had were too cruel. Yes, collaboration does presuppose collusion, and the fact is that the slave trade was the result of an agreement between the exploiter and the exploited. Still.
To the writer's credit, he minces no words in depicting the horrors of slavery. But the end of it, oppressive as the institution of slavery was (the campaign against it became "the most important humanitarian campaign in English history") did not spell out the end of exploitation. On the contrary, its end was the result of two distinct yet related realities: the fear of the British ruling class of Africans becoming their competitors, and the shift to colonialism in Asia. It is significant to note here that the Abolition Act excluded from its ambit the "Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", which included India and Sri Lanka. The British may have been magnanimous, but they were hardly saints.
The truth was that the slave trade was indispensible to the accumulation of capital in Western civilisation. No matter how well intentioned the Abolitionists were, no matter how effective their campaigns may have been, there was a range of factors which had a say in the enactment of the Abolition Act, among them the emergence of America as the centre of Western power. It wouldn't be until 40 years later when the United States passed its own Abolition Act in the form of the 13th Amendment, but then, even with the advent of the Civil War, which according to certain romantic historians "freed" the slaves, slavery was never completely abolished: it was changed and it continued in the form of segregation, right until the Civil Rights Movement.
So what do we gain from these assertions, Tombs's and mine? The awful truth: that the history of the struggle against imperialism has almost always been underscored by considerations of realpolitik. The British may have been underrated in their love of humanity. But saints they were not.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, October 21 2018
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