Fall of the British Empire is instructive

By LLEWELLYN KING
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON -- I grew up in southern Rhodesia -- now Zimbabwe -- in the remains of the day of the British Empire. Now as talk of American empire ricochets around Washington, even as we are aghast at the excesses in the Abu Ghraib prison, I wonder if anyone has any idea of what made the British Empire work.
Britain controlled first and foremost the technology. Firearms belonged to the British and they were kept in British hands. Later came the telegraph and the railroads: technologies that opened up the land but were the exclusive province of the European conquerors.
But there was more to it than that. The British believed in building on what they found, not in dismantling indigenous institutions. They hung chains of office around the necks of tribal chiefs and enhanced their status rather than diminishing it.
More important was the philosophy of empire. At its core, it believed in the superiority of its own race and institutions. But it was moderated by a belief, deeply held, that with empire went responsibility to indigenous people.
To control its excesses, it evolved a language of empire, of colonization, which promoted nobility in action and words. Officers who failed, or committed abuses, were expected to "fall on their swords." By the 19th century, it no longer meant suicide, but it did mean resignation and disgrace.
The phrase "noblesse oblige" permeated government thought and action, and established protections and dignities for the subjugated peoples. Their "kith and kin" were to be respected and handed out justice equal to that meted out to the colonizers. At all times, one was to be a lady or a gentleman.
Some of the British implementation in Africa was positively socialist. Domestic servants, in addition to their meager wages, by law had to be fed -- and generously fed. A domestic servant had to be given stewing beef twice a week and 15 pounds of maize meal (cornmeal) once a week. Of course, this was much more than any individual could eat, and it provided for many hungry mouths among the unemployed.
Mission schools
Likewise, medicine, though limited in its availability to large urban hospitals, was free to Africans. Schooling, also limited, was free, too. In addition to government schools, there were dozens of Christian mission schools that augmented the public effort. It was not universal health care and it was not universal education. But it was a reflection of the settlers' sense of moral responsibility.
In Southern Rhodesia, police were few and far between, until the outbreak of the war of independence in the 1970s. Until then, the police were proud that no prisoner had lost his or her life in custody -- a record just slightly better than that in Great Britain itself.
On the upside, these settlers operated their outpost of empire with wisdom and generosity. On the downside, they seized for themselves the riches of the country, taking some of the best land, and imposed a system of dominance by a small white minority over a much larger indigenous population. There was racial segregation and denial of political rights. It was benign but futile.
Britain's colonial experience was uneven. Some countries were conquered. Others, such as northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi), sought the protection of the British Crown and became protectorates. Still, other parts of Africa, of less interest to Britain, were said to be held under the queen's suzerainty -- a loose arrangement to keep out other colonial powers and to protect trade.
'Winds of change'
By the 1960s, whatever the nomenclature of empire, the empire was collapsing. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan acknowledged this when he spoke of "winds of change."
One by one, the colonies, protectorates and other entities began life as independent countries. Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanganyika, Zambia, Zanzibar, in Africa alone, said farewell to the empire. India had departed in 1948, followed in due course by Burma, Malaysia, Singapore and Sri Lanka.
Oddly, the imperial experience was probably happiest in Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon. The only execution ever carried out, I was told by a Sri Lankan historian, was of an Englishman by the English for crimes against the regime.
There was good and there was evil in the empire. But it could not have been brought about without the fundamental respect for human rights that it embodied -- before human rights was so titled.
The British learned to administer empire, and they often learned it at a high cost, from the Muslim rebellion in India in 1857 all the way to the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya around 100 years later. It is worth remembering that two of the most ignominious failures of the British Empire were in the Middle East, when it simply abandoned its responsibilities.
The first was the withdrawal from Palestine in 1948. The second was 16 years earlier, when the mighty empire threw up its hands and pulled out of a place called Iraq.
To talk of empire today is to talk nonsense; and if one is to try it, the conqueror must be conditioned for the burden of the undertaking.
X Llewellyn King is chairman and CEO of the King Publishing Co., publisher of White House Weekly and Energy Daily, in Washington, D.C. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.