Tea at Trianon: How Liberals Made the British Empire

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 4, 2021

How Liberals Made the British Empire

From UnHerd:

As the recent outpouring of commentary demanding that the United States prolong its 20-year military intervention in Afghanistan for the continuance of liberal humanitarian ends reminds us, the Mrs Jellybys, endlessly demanding that something should be done, are still very much with us. In the conquest of much of Africa, liberal humanitarianism and imperialism strode hand in hand into the forested interior: an accurate understanding of how this happened is more timely than ever.

The process of Britain’s growing political entanglement with the African continent took place in three very different stages. In the first, a product of the early modern period, British traders enmeshing themselves in the new, globalising capitalist economy discovered that rich profits could be made buying slaves from African coastal rulers and transporting them to the New World as forced agricultural labourers, paying for them with the products of the new factories. It would be more accurate, then, to characterise the Atlantic slave trade as a product of capitalism or even of globalisation than of either colonialism or imperialism, yet our newly-woke global corporations seem curiously loath to make this connection.

It was the second phase, the idealistic and humanitarian imperialism of the abolitionists, that set the stage over the course of the mid-19^th century for the acquisitive, high imperialism of the Scramble for Africa. This story, for both Britain and Africa, curiously enough begins with the American Revolution, when British forces offered liberty to any enslaved African-Americans who were able to escape their rebellious masters. When Britain lost the war, the freed slaves were evacuated north to Nova Scotia as refugees, where the question of what to do with them troubled British policymakers. The abolitionist lobby, led by Granville Sharp, William Wilberforce and prominent members of the evangelical Clapham Sect, devised the plan of transferring freed African-Americans and Jamaican Maroons to the British outpost of Sierra Leone, where they would form the nucleus of a civilising mission to convert the natives away from their slave-trading ways, and towards the light of capitalist free trade and Christianity.

By 1791, the Sierra Leone Company, run by liberal humanitarians including Wilberforce, had taken over governance of the nascent colony, initiating a process described by the historian Bronwen Everill as one where abolitionists had adopted a worldview “defined by this loose coalition of ideas: the ‘civilization’ of Africa via an end to the slave trade, adoption of standards of western life, material culture, and institutions; Africa’s conversion to Christianity; and the introduction of ‘legitimate’ commerce to simultaneously replace the slave trade, enrich the colonies and the metropoles, and inspire ‘civilized’ consumption.” (Read more.)