Will there be Americans playing such a role in Baghdad in 2043? It seems, to put it mildly, improbable.
Gertrude Bell was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with a first-class degree. She learned to speak Arabic during an archaeological visit to Jerusalem in 1899 and, like T. E. Lawrence, became involved in British
military intelligence. In 1917 she was appointed oriental secretary to the British civil commissioner in Baghdad. It was a posting she relished. “I don’t care to be in London much,” she wrote. “I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It’s the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me.”
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Dotted all over the British Empire were thousands of “Orientalists” like Gertrude Bell, simultaneously enamored of the exotic “Other” and yet dominant over it. Her account of Faisal I’s coronation in 1921 perfectly illustrates their mode of operation: “Faisal looked very dignified but much strung up—it was an agitating moment. He looked along the front row and caught my eye and I gave him a tiny salute. Then Saiyid Husain stood up and read [the British commissioner’s] proclamation in which he announced that Faisal had been elected king by 96% of the people in Mesopotamia, long live the King! with that we stood up and saluted him, the national flag was broken on the flagstaff by his side and the band played God Save the King—they have no national anthem yet.”
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To a woman like Gertrude Bell, being there, in order discreetly to supervise this carefully choreographed regime change, was evidently very good fun. She had absolutely no desire for an “exit strategy” that would have sent her back to England.
Admittedly, most Britons who moved abroad preferred to migrate to the temperate regions of a select few colonies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa—that soon became semiautonomous Dominions. Between 1900 and 1914 around 2.6 million Britons left the United Kingdom for imperial destinations (by 1957 the total had reached nearly 6 million); three-quarters of them went to Canada or the Antipodes.
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Nevertheless, a significant number went to the much less hospitable climes of Asia and Africa. There were around 168,000 Britons in India in 1931.
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The official Colonial Service in Africa was staffed by more than 7,500 expatriates.
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The British went abroad in multiple roles: not only as soldiers and administrators but also as businessmen, engineers, missionaries and doctors. Like America’s informal empire today, Britain’s empire had its nongovernmental character; there were Victorian multinational corporations and Victorian “nongovernmental organizations.” But the key point is that whichever role the British played, they generally stayed—until retirement or, as countless colonial cemeteries testify, death. The substantial expatri
ate communities they established were crucial to the operation of the British Empire. These were the indispensable “men on the spot” who learned the local languages, perhaps adopted some local customs—though not to the fatal extent of “going native”—and acted as the intermediaries between a remote imperial authority and the indigenous elites upon whose willing collaboration the empire depended.
Of crucial importance in this regard was the role of the Indian Civil Service, which became a magnet for the very best products of the university system. The proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in the Indian Civil Service was remarkably high, rising steadily after the 1880s to over 70 percent. Two-thirds of ICS men who served in the 1930s had been educated in England’s exclusive public schools; three-quarters had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. All but one of the eight provincial governors in India in 1938 were Oxonians.
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John Maynard Keynes, who by the 1920s had become quite disparaging about the empire, experienced one of the few reverses of his dazzling Cambridge career when he came in second rather than first in the ICS examination.
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Oxbridge products also staffed the less exalted Colonial Service, which administered the British colonies in Africa and other parts of Asia. Of the 927 recruits to the Colonial Service between 1927 and 1929, nearly half had been to Oxford or Cambridge.
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There were also significant numbers of Oxbridge graduates in the other governmental and private-sector agencies that operated in the colonies.
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The key question is why so many products of Britain’s top universities were willing to spend their entire working lives so far from the land of their birth, running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries. Consider the typical example of Evan Machonochie, an Oxford graduate who passed the ICS exam, set off for Bengal in 1887 and spent the next forty years in India.
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One clue lies in his Celtic surname. The Scots were heavily over-represented not just in the colonies of white settlement but also in the commercial and professional elites of cities like Calcutta and Hong Kong and Cape Town. The Irish too played a disproportionate role in enforcing British rule, supplying a huge proportion of the officers and men of the British army. Not for nothing is Kipling’s representative Indian Army NCO named Mulvaney. This was because Scotland (especially the north) and Ireland (especially the south) were significantly poorer than England. For young men growing up on the rainy, barren fringes of the United
Kingdom, the empire offered opportunities. The potential benefits of emigration seemed to outweigh the undoubted risks of the tropics. Like the “porridge traps” that Hong Kong banks were supposed to set in order to recruit their predominantly Scottish clerks, Balliol College functioned as a channel through which ambitious young Scots could pass from “North Britain” via Oxford to the empire.
Yet economics alone cannot explain what motivated a man like Machonochie or, indeed, a female Oxonian like Gertrude Bell. The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere belief that spreading “commerce, Christianity and civilization” was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.
The contrast with Americans today could scarcely be more stark. To put it bluntly, one of the most serious difficulties the United States currently faces is its chronic manpower deficit. There are simply not enough Americans out there to make nation building work.
At the time of writing, the shortage of military personnel in Iraq was acknowledged by nearly every informed observer outside the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Of the army’s thirty-three front-line brigades, sixteen were in Iraq in September 2003; by the end of the year, active duty force levels had been increased by 33,000, and 165,000 members of the National Guard and Reserve had been called up, a substantial number of whom went to Iraq. Even with the support of other countries, however, a total U.S. presence of around 120,000 was not sufficient to impose order on the country.
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The crisis was such that the administration was forced to swallow its pride and seek foreign reinforcements—even from the very countries that had opposed the war at the outset.
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This can be seen as a direct consequence of the sustained contraction in the size of the American armed forces since the early 1970s (when the total number of active service personnel peaked at 3 million, compared with under 1.4 million today). True, the United States in 2002 had around the same number of service personnel overseas as the United Kingdom did back in 1881, just over a quarter of a million in each case.
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But there the resemblance ends. In those days, less than a third of Britain’s total armed forces were stationed in the United
Kingdom itself. By contrast, more than four-fifths—82 percent—of Americans on active military duty are based in the United States.
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Even the B-2 stealth bombers that pounded Serbia into quitting Kosovo in 1999 were flying out of Knob Noster, Missouri. It is also striking that when American service personnel are posted abroad they generally do not stay for very long. The introduction of yearlong tours of duty in Iraq marks a break with the system of minimal overseas stints introduced thirty years ago after Vietnam.
Twelve months, to be sure, are longer than the average duration of a foreign trip by a Wall Street investment banker, which can be measured in days, but it is scarcely long enough to acquire much local knowledge. In any case, it is worth remembering that more than half of America’s seventy-three major overseas bases are in Western Europe, and no fewer than twenty-five of them in Germany, near towns like Heidelberg and Kaiserslautern, where living standards are higher than in some American states.
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Unlike the British, who built barracks in hostile territories precisely in order to subjugate them, the Americans today locate a quarter of their overseas troops in what is one of the most prosperous and arguably one of the most pacifist countries in the world. (Significantly, when the Pentagon detects serious local hostility to one of its overseas outposts, as in the case of Subic Bay in the Philippines, the base is hastily shut down.)
The problem of manpower is not purely military, however. Unlike the United Kingdom a century ago, the United States is an
im
porter of people, with a net immigration rate of 3 per 1,000 and a total foreign-born population of 32 million (nearly 1 in 9 U.S. residents).
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Moreover, when Americans do opt to reside abroad, they tend to stick to the developed world. There are an estimated 3.8 million Americans currently resident abroad. That sounds like a great many, but it is just one eighth of the number of foreign-born residents of the United States. And of the expatriate Americans, more than three-quarters live in the two next-door countries (1 million in Mexico, 687,000 in Canada) or in Europe (just over 1 million). Of the 290,000 who live in the Middle East, nearly two-thirds are to be found in Israel. A mere 37,500 live in Africa.
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This, in other words, is an empire without settlers, or rather the settlers come
to
the metropolis rather than leave it for distant lands. How far it is possible to exert power outside a country’s borders by drawing foreigners inside those
borders is debatable, to say the least. It can be argued that luring foreign elites to study at America’s universities is a kind of indirect rule, in the sense that it involves a form of collaboration and cooptation, not to say acculturation, of indigenous elites. Much, however, depends on how long these foreign students stay in the United States. Since quite a large proportion of them never return to their native lands, it is not clear how much influence is in fact thereby exerted.
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A further important contrast with the British experience is that the products of America’s elite educational institutions seem especially reluctant to go overseas, other than on flying visits and holidays. The Americans who serve the longest tours of duty are the volunteer soldiers, a substantial proportion of whom are African-Americans (12.7 percent of the U.S. population, 28.9 percent of Army enlisted personnel).
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Hence Timothy Garton Ash’s pun on Kipling when he visited Kosovo after the 1999 war: here (as in Vietnam) “the white man’s burden” was visibly being borne by a disproportionate number of black men.
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It is of course just possible that the African-Americans will turn out to be the Celts of the American empire, driven to overseas adventure by comparatively poor opportunities at home, just as the Irish and the Scots were in the nineteenth century. Indeed, if the occupation of Iraq is to be continued for any length of time, it can hardly fail to create career opportunities for the growing number of African-American officers in the army. The Central Command’s most effective press spokesman during the war, General Vincent K. Brooks, exemplifies the type.
The British, however, were always wary about giving the military too much power in their imperial administration. Parliamentarians at Westminster had read enough Roman history to want to keep generals subordinate to civilian governors. The “brass hats” were there to inflict the Victorian equivalent of “shock and awe” whenever the natives grew restive; otherwise, colonial government was a matter for Oxbridge-educated mandarins. It would be interesting to know, by way of comparison, how many members of Harvard’s or Yale’s class of 2004 are seriously considering careers in the postwar administration of Iraq. The number is likely to be small. In 1998–99 there were 43,683 undergraduate course registrations at Yale, of which just 335 (less than 1 percent) were for courses in Near Eastern languages and civilization. There was just one, lone undergraduate majoring in the subject (compared with 17 doing film studies).
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After graduation too
the members of America’s academic elite generally subscribe to the Wizard of Oz principle: “There’s no place like home.” According to a 1998 survey, there are currently 134,798 registered Yale alumni. Of these, little more than 5 percent live outside the United States. Scarcely any, just over 50, live in Arab countries.
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At Oxford and Cambridge a hundred years ago ambitious students dreamed of passing the ICS exam and embarking on careers as imperial proconsuls. Today the elite products of the Ivy League set their sights on law school or business school; their dream is by definition an American dream. This, then, is not only an empire without settlers, but also an empire without administrators. Though he himself was an experienced diplomat whose past postings ranged from Afghanistan to Malawi, L. Paul Bremer and his staff were manifestly short of Middle Eastern expertise. It is a sobering statistic that just 3 of his initial team of officials were fluent in Arabic.
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