The Grand Inquest of the World: British Imperialism and Europe

This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

The praeter-colonial mind tries to make sense of a post-colonial world where also the colonial and the pre-colonial coexist and compete as rationales in our everyday lives. Where to begin a journey of discovery whereby the praeter-colonial mind can start to fully exercise its faculties and critical capabilities? A place embodying one of the most recent and successful imperial experiments in history, where the exploits of colonialism are celebrated as well as its dividends jealously preserved, sounds like the proper setting to begin this quest. We must begin at the British Museum, located in the heart of London.

It is immediately upon entering the magnificent neo-classic palace that serves as the Museum’s humble abode that we are introduced to a treasure from ancient times: the Rosetta Stone. I remember reading about it in my history books at school back in Chile. The very stone used by French archeologist Jean-François Champollion to decode the secrets of one of the most beguiling civilizations in history by using Greek as a vehicle between past and present. I never thought I would get the chance to see with my own eyes an artifact from ancient Egypt, unless I could somehow manage to go back in time. It turns out that museums are the next best thing to time-travel.

The Rosetta Stone is among the proudest possessions of the British Museum, which boasts an impressive Antiquity wing spanning from ancient Egypt to Greece and Rome, in addition to all the other collections covering pretty much every period in history and every corner of the earth – complete with a Moai or stone statue from Easter Island, a place that for some reason is under Chile’s jurisdiction as we shall see in Chapter Three dedicated to the ‘Global South’. In other words, the British Museum is replete with things that should not be there.

The Rosetta Stone is certainly not supposed to be there. I am not saying this to echo the all too familiar argument that the British Museum should return all its artifacts to the countries from where the British Empire looted them. This is something that has been formulated so many times that it has become a punchline, most exquisitely brought to us by comedian James Acaster, who imagines the Brits replying to the peoples asking for their property back: ‘Sorry, you can’t have it back. We are still looking at it!’.

What I mean when I say that the Rosetta Stone should not be in the British Museum is not that it belongs in Egypt, although it probably does. What I mean is that it may as well have ended up in Paris, the capital of yet another European empire, as it was ‘discovered’ by French troops occupying Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century. It was only after the British took over that part of the world that the Stone was finally sent to London, where it has sat comfortably since 1801 (The British Museum 2017).

It takes a lot of self-confidence to believe that an ancient treasure might be better preserved in your own country rather than in the place where it comes from. It takes even more to be convinced that, of all the available options, your country is the best possible destination. This is an aspect of British imperialism that I believe is not talked about enough. Sure, many Brits, same as many other Europeans, believe they are better than the rest of the world. But we can spot variations even among Europeans themselves, the smaller the difference the bigger the wedge it drives between relatives – what psychologists refer to as the ‘narcissism of minor differences’, like when you militantly resist the way they do things at your cousin’s house just because they are slightly different from what you grew up with (‘They make hot cocoa with water instead of milk – the horror!’).

In this chapter I would like to reflect on how the British have embraced this narcissism of minor differences and taken it to the next level, as they have styled themselves as the keepers of their European brethren while practicing their own brand of colonialism. Inspired by this sense of relative superiority, they have pushed the idea that every other European colonial enterprise has been irredeemably flawed for a variety of reasons including the Black Legend of the Spanish Conquista, the protean terror of French absolutism turned revolution, the viciousness of the Dutch descendants known as the Boers, the sheer cruelty of the Belgians, the recalcitrant warmongering of the Germanic Reich(s), and the rampant tyranny of the Soviet experiment. The first huddle we will explore, then, corresponds to all those English-speaking nations that are a result of this particular iteration of European imperialism. The fact that we are able to critically approach it whilst using the language it bequeathed to us as a vehicle of said critique is a fascinating aspect of the praeter-colonial mind, insofar as we are trying to make sense of a post-colonial present by drawing on the tools of a colonial legacy.

A Soul-searching Nation

British exceptionalism is nothing new. The last time the entire world heard about it was not that long ago, when the UK decided to opt-out of the European Union in 2016 under the banner of ‘Brexit’. That a country would voluntarily decide to leave an organization that so many other nations are fighting to join – some of them, like Ukraine, even having to pay with blood for their audacity – lays bare the unbridled sense of superiority of its people. It’s like a rich family deciding to pull their kids out of one of the best schools in the county because they believe they can do better with just a private tutor, while scores of other families are still on the waiting list hoping for an opening next semester.

Brits have very little tolerance for external advice or control, and they try to keep foreign interference with their own affairs to a minimum – a courtesy the self-styled ‘Global Britain’ has not extended to the rest of the world, certainly. Sure, they finally managed to break free from the ‘shackles’ of the EU; but they still have to suffer European oversight in matters of human rights, as they remain part of the Council of Europe and its judicial organ, the European Court of Human Rights sitting in Strasbourg.

But that is as far as they will go. They will not take advice from anyone, not from other Europeans, and certainly not from outside of Europe. It was undoubtedly a moment of great hilarity when in 2008 Sri Lanka, a former British colony, suggested in a UN report that the UK ‘consider holding a referendum on the desirability or otherwise of a written constitution, preferably republican, which includes a bill of rights’ (UN Human Rights Council 2008). This cheeky proposition by one of its former colonies was met with deafening silence in subsequent reports filed by the British government.

No, it is usually Brits telling the rest of the world what to do, for which they have effectively weaponized one of their most salient political traditions: commissions of inquiry (Sanghera 2024, 197). Indeed, according to a report prepared by the House of Commons titled Government by Inquiry: ‘The tradition of the public inquiry has become a pivotal part of public life in Britain, and a major instrument of accountability’ (House of Commons 2005, 7). Accordingly, the main organ commissioning such investigations, Parliament, has ever been perceived as ‘the grand inquest of the nation’ (Ibid, 10). But since many of these inquiries had a scope greater than the nation itself as they were also concerned with what was going on in the colonies, we may dub the British Empire ‘the grand inquest of the world’.

Indeed, commissions of inquiry were effectively used by the British Empire to gather information about its colonial possessions in places like Ireland, South Africa, Mauritius, Ceylon, and the West Indies (Laidlaw 2012; Johnson 1978). The main objective of these probes was to gather information in order to promote accountability, good governance and reform in faraway places where public scrutiny was not always possible. In addition, fears of ‘imperial contagion’ were a constant concern in British politics (Laidlaw 2012, 756) in the sense that what was done in the colonies could just as easily be done in the metropolis – a thesis fully unpacked by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism when thinking about European imperialism as a precursor to the Holocaust (Arendt 1962).

The British legacy of government by inquiry can further be seen today in places like America and Oceania, where some remarkable exercises in soul- searching and self-reflection have been conducted in the context of the hapless ‘Global War on Terror’. The 2014 US Senate report on the use of torture by CIA agents (US Senate 2014), and the 2020 Brereton report on war crimes committed by Australian special forces in Afghanistan (Australian Defence Force 2020) are two remarkable examples of this longstanding tradition.

That Is Not Done

Commissions of inquiry were used by the British Empire not only as a way of gathering information and promoting reform within its own jurisdiction. They were also used to tell other powers what to do with the populations located in their respective overseas territories. One of the few examples of an overall positive humanitarian intervention, that is, the use of military force to stop massive rights violations, took place in 1860 in the province of Syria then under Ottoman control. Shocked by the violence perpetrated against local Christian populations in Mount Lebanon and Damascus, France and the UK sent troops, with the Ottoman Empire’s consent, to restore peace and order. In the aftermath, and true to form in the British imperial tradition, a commission of inquiry was set up to determine responsibilities for the violence (Rodogno 2011, 181–182).

Perhaps one of the best examples of a commission of inquiry established by the British Empire to oversee the situation in the territories under control of another European power was the investigation leading up to what became known as the Casement Report (Louis 1964). Published in 1904 by Roger Casement, the report contained an account of widespread acts of violence and brutality committed by Belgian and other European agents against native populations in what was known then as the Congo Free State, that is, the part of Congo colonized by King Leopold II of Belgium as his own private property.

The report, in which Casement vocally preached ‘the gospel of Congo reform’ (Ibid, 120), caused such an impact in European society at the time that it is said to have precipitated the end of the Congo Free State as a royal possession when it was turned into an official Belgian colony in 1908 – a modest slice of the African gâteau that the Belgians would hold on to for a further 52 years.

This and other accounts of the heinous acts of violence and outrageous abuses committed in the Belgian Congo inspired some of the most insightful works of fiction written about imperialism: An Outpost of Progress in 1897 (Conrad 2002a) and Heart of Darkness in 1899 (Conrad 2002b), both authored by Joseph Conrad, a Polish-British writer born in Ukraine.

Conrad’s own position about imperialism remained ambiguous and nuanced, his praeter-colonial mind being able to accommodate both earnest praise for the advancement of ‘light’ and progress as well as sober condemnation of the horrendous assaults on humanity he witnessed. In his own words:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea (Ibid, 107).

Another remarkable European individual caught in the middle of the imperialist fever, whose exploits were immortalized by the late Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa in his 2010 novel El sueño del celta (The Dream of the Celt) (Vargas Llosa 2010), is no other than the author of the Congo report: Roger Casement. If anyone epitomizes the spirit of the praeter-colonial mind at the turn of the twentieth century it is undoubtedly Casement.

Roger Casement was the poster child of the British fondness for commissions of inquiry. He was appointed by the UK government in 1903 to write his famous report on the Congo, as he happened to be the British consul in Boma at the time. After the success of this first inquiry, he was again commissioned by the Foreign Office to conduct an investigation on abuses committed against native workers collecting rubber for the UK-registered Peruvian Amazon Company. His two subsequent reports submitted in 1910– 1911 were as damning as the Congo one, the colonial exploitation in South America striking him as brutal and unchecked as the one he documented in Africa. As a result of his inquest endeavors for the British Crown, he was knighted and became known henceforth as Sir Roger Casement.

But that is not the whole story. Although he was a subject of the British Crown, Sir Roger was in fact an Irishman born in Dublin. Being exposed to the darkest side of European imperialism in Africa and South America did not leave him untouched or particularly amenable to the footprint of colonialism much closer to home. His critical spirit and inquisitive expertise eventually, perhaps inevitably, led him to turn the gaze inwards and unveil what was in front of his eyes: British imperialism was incompatible with a sovereign and independent Ireland.

Thus, Casement secretly became an activist for the republican cause and plotted with the Germans during World War I to arm the Irish rebels on the eve of the Easter Rising of 1916. Upon landing in Kerry inside a German submarine, he was captured and tried for treason against the British Crown. His defense famously riding on a comma from an obscure medieval statute (Anderson 2013), and despite pleads for mercy coming from the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw (but not Conrad, who never forgave him his treachery), Casement was eventually convicted and hanged as a traitor on the third day of August, 1916.

Thus passed one of the great praeter-colonial minds of the long nineteenth century – a very complicated individual caught in the middle of a very complicated age. In his mind the duties of benign imperialism coexisted with a powerful drive for human decency and an increasingly strong yearn for freedom. The very tools of empire put at Casement’s disposal to call out the depravity of other Europeans abroad led him to turn against the hypocrisy of his own masters and, ultimately, to his own demise.

Post-Imperial Hangover

Another remarkable praeter-colonial mind found in the British Isles today is Sathnam Sanghera, an English journalist author of the recent bestsellers Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain (Sanghera 2021), and Empireworld: How British Imperialism Has Shaped the Globe (Sanghera 2024). Born to Indian Punjabi parents in the Midlands, and Cambridge educated, Sanghera is the personification of the ‘British Dream’ so many immigrants pursue when they decide to move to the UK. But he is so much more than that.

Incredibly insightful and self-aware to a fault, Sanghera represents one of the finest examples of the praeter-colonial mindset that is the topic of this study. His relationship with empire is complicated, not unlike other British liberals before him. For example, George Orwell understood very well the injustices the British Empire was built upon but was nonetheless not ready to give it all up lest this may ‘reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes’ (Zakaria 2024, 140), A.K.A. pre-industrial, pre-imperial England.

Sanghera begins Empireland by proposing the creation of a new holiday in Britain: ‘Empire Awareness Day’, or as he also calls it, ‘Empire Day 2.0’ (in reference to the traditional Empire Day that existed between 1916 and 1958). By remembering such a day, British people could better understand the many ways the concept of empire shapes their lives today, including Sanghera’s (and so many others’) own immigrant background:

Empire explains why we have a diaspora of millions of Britons spread around the world. Empire explains the global pretensions of our Foreign and Defence secretaries. Empire explains the feeling that we are exceptional and can go it alone when it comes to everything from Brexit to dealing with global pandemics. Empire helped to establish the position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres, and also ensures that the interests of finance trump the interests of so many other groups in the twenty-first century. Empire explains how some of our richest families and institutions and cities became wealthy. Empire explains our particular brand of racism, it explains our distrust of cleverness, our propensity for jingoism. Let’s face it, imperialism is not something that can be erased with a few statues being torn down or a few institutions facing up to their dark pasts; it exists as a legacy in my very being and, more widely, explains nothing less than who we are as a nation (Sanghera 2021, 26).

He further develops the point in Empireworld, where he argues that the fashionable concept of ‘decolonization’, although important for restoring the self-respect and agency of the formerly colonized, can only ever be ‘tokenistic’, as ‘British imperialism is baked into our world and, frankly, it would be easier to take the ghee out of the masala omelettes I’ve become addicted to eating for breakfast in India’ (Sanghera 2024, 18).

Sanghera is further skeptical of approaching the legacies of British imperialism with a ‘balance sheet’ view whereby it is sustained that, on balance, after pondering its evils versus its contributions, British colonialism is qualified either as relatively good (for example, under the inquest of the world narrative developed in this chapter) or relatively bad (eliciting feelings of guilt or shame, when in actuality, he writes, history doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings) (Ibid, 145).

The author believes that this nuance-free balance sheet approach, so common in today’s culture wars, actually obscures what is an incredibly complicated and admittedly contradictory legacy that is ingrained in everything we do and everything we are today, and that engaging in a game of counterfactuals where we remove every imperial footprint from our world is simply unhelpful (Ibid, 282).

Another interesting point raised by Sanghera is what amounts to a rare and compelling exercise in historical humility, when he suggests that a reckoning with their imperial past would allow British people to be better prepared when the time comes for one or many of these formerly subjugated peoples to determine the former’s destiny:

There are other good reasons for Britons to understand this imperial history, and other imperial histories we’ve touched upon so far. When it comes to India, we need to appreciate its version of events because it’s a burgeoning superpower that will shape our future in all sorts of ways, and we can’t assume, as we’ve tended to, that they’re nostalgic for a time they’re actually trying to decolonize out of their system (Ibid, 145).

Ultimately, what Sanghera aims to achieve is to engage his countrymen and countrywomen so they, in turn, can join the ongoing dialogue about the legacies of imperialism that is already happening in the rest of the world, such that Brits can also assess and appreciate the highly complex reality of our present. ‘This dialogue would allow us to live in an infinitely more sophisticated, more interesting world’ (Ibid, 68) he concludes, adding that the ability to identify contradictory legacies and learning to live with them can actually be liberating. Because of what he writes, and because of what he is (how could we separate the two?), Sanghera is the archetypal prater-colonial mind of twenty-first century Britain.

We Need More British Museums

In the late 1990s Michael Ignatieff observed that there were some ‘Conradian continuities’ between the many humanitarian and military international engagements led by the West at the time and the classical interventionism of the age of empire (Ignatieff 1998, 93). He was referring to Joseph Conrad, an author we already mentioned here, whose name has become synonym with the awareness and denunciation of the excesses of colonialism.

Yet, as I also mentioned before, Conrad’s position on colonialism is at best nuanced, even praeter-colonial, as he believed in the possibility to redeem all the suffering with an idea, namely the notion that the light of civilization can make the darkness recede – unless, of course, the heart of darkness nests within all of us, a possibility he also seems to entertain when the narrator of Heart of Darkness, Marlow, experiences a sense of ‘remote kinship’ with the wild and passionate uproar coming from the men dwelling in the night of first ages (Conrad 2002b, 139; Maier-Katkin and Maier-Katkin 2004).

Conrad’s own praeter-colonial approach is best illustrated at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, when the narrator contemplates the Thames at dusk and suddenly declares that London, that beacon of civilization, the very heart of empire at the turn of the twentieth century, has also been ‘one of the dark places of the earth’ (Conrad 2002b, 105). By that he means that, a long time ago, when the first Roman triremes were making their way upstream over ‘a sea the colour of lead’ under ‘a sky the colour of smoke’, venturing into the unknown in this remote outpost of the Roman Empire, that part of the world was also deprived of all the things we consider a part of progress and civilization – law, order, commerce, industry, prosperity, and peace. In a word, the light, whose luminescence had to be carried to this ‘poor backwater’ (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012, 174) by the conquerors (Conrad 2002a, 9; Lindqvist 2018, 11–27). In that sense, the British Empire learned from the very best.

I thought of all these things as I walked through the streets of London, a place I once called home when I was a doctoral candidate. When I visited the British Museum for the first time, I suddenly found my post-colonial mind resenting this formerly dark place of the earth that believes it can now house ancient treasures and wonders from all over the world just because they were captured by force, not least an artifact, the Moai, that my own compatriots want back, even if the Brits are still looking at it.

But then I saw it: It was a Sunday morning, and families were out and about. They had taken their children to visit this admission-free museum so they could learn all about ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, China, India, America, and even a place as remote as Easter Island. As I saw kids observing all these wonders of history, absorbing every detail in their developing brains, I couldn’t help but think how rich their education was turning out to be, how many secrets of this world they could access and how much better versions of themselves they would grow up to be just by being exposed to such a treasure trove of human knowledge. And then it hit me, as my prejudiced post-colonial mind gave way to a more nuanced prater-colonial thought: We don’t need to get rid of the British Museum. What we need is more British Museums around the world, where kids of all places can access this kind of knowledge in their own towns. I imagine a worldwide network of museums sharing these artifacts so we can give every kid the opportunity to access a high-quality education. The practical details would need to be sorted out, of course, as many objects would not be able to be so easily transported back and forth. But they did transport them back in the day when conservation technology was not as advanced. We can do it again, more fairly this time, thus making sure children everywhere in the world can be amazed by the treasures of humankind, that their little praeter-colonial minds may grow strong and wise.

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