The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A "staggering 90% of the world's nations" have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.
If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.
In fact, that latter claim is not quite true. To begin with, the very posture of lighthearted satire implies a certain perspective on events that most people might find questionable. Imagine a gentle farce on the Rwandan genocide, and you see how incongruous it is. Moreover, when the author claims that there is much in Britain's imperial past to be proud of, and some aspects that would make one less proud, this is an explicit moral stance. It just happens to be a stance of, at best, moral ambivalence. Such just is the evasive register of empire nostalgia and apologia these days.
In the previous decade, as New Labour's "Britishness" project proceeded in fits and starts, there was an earnest attempt by various figures, from Gordon Brown to Niall Ferguson, to reclaim the empire from its opponents. This was essential. National pedagogy always proceeds along two temporal axes. On the one hand, the nation is always coming into being but not yet fully itself, hence the need for it to be educated about itself. On the other, it has always already existed, is eternal, and its people are linked with one another in a linear fashion through history, hence the need for the nation's past to be vindicated.
For that reason, the invariant tone of the national revival and the empire peddling that came with it, was "yes, there is much to regret, but overall we should be proud of Britain's past and awed by its imperial accomplishments". This is unsurprisingly the underlying thrust of the coverage yielded by this book, and the tone of its publicity.
Even so, the research certainly has some pedagogical value. For one thing, it shows the scope of empire's activities to extend well beyond the formal boundaries of the colonial sphere. It takes into account the activities of pirates and privateers acting on behalf of the crown just as much as invading armies. This does not just disclose the sheer scale of the enterprise of empire, shocking as it may be. It indicates that there may be much more to empires than the establishment of formal colonies, and that the time of empire may sprawl well beyond its previously delimited boundaries. Indeed, as the historian Julian Go has shown, there are far greater similarities between the modalities of British imperial control and governance and those of the US than have previously been recognised.
The shortcomings of this approach are nonetheless clear. First of all, it is ahistorical in that it treats as eternal what is contingent. Many of the listed invasions pre-date Britain's existence as a state. This is important because the beginnings of modern empire can be traced to the formation of British statehood out of the conquest of Ireland, and union with Scotland. The invasions of Gaul not only preceded this juncture but were actually conducted by the Roman occupiers of what was then an island of disunited tribal fiefdoms. The author may as well say that India invaded Burma in 1824 just because the British troops who conducted the invasion were mustered in India.
Just as importantly, while the study of invasions gives us an insight into a cross-section of empire's scope, it is in one respect quite narrow and misleading. Invasions are an important punctuation in the development of an imperialist strategy, an initial means by which political or economic control is asserted, but they are not the point of the exercise. It is difficult, simply by looking at invasions, to understand how they are related in a wider ensemble of practices of imperialist power.
For instance, Britain did not have to repeatedly re-stage the invasion of India in order to establish tiers of lasting control. And these can be just as deadly as invasions, if not more so: from the Great Famine to the Amritsar Massacre, to mention but a couple of nodal points in British colonial rule. Millions more perished between invasions than during them, as the result of the normal functioning of imperial control.
But a story of that kind is not conducive to the easy conviviality of imperialist revival. It is less a story of adventure and intrigue, such as this latest book promises to be, than one of the banality of evil. It is routinised, institutional cruelty. And that just isn't a good larf.
