The Brismes Annual Lecture 2004: Biography and Empire: Lord Cromer (1841–1917) then and now

Abstract

I would like to use this opportunity to say something about imperial biography. What I say will be based on the process of writing my own biography of Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, the British pro-consul who spent 35 years of his career in India and Egypt, 1872-1907. It will also be based on thoughts provoked by the reception of the book this spring at a time of revived interest in Empire, particularly in one of its characteristic features: European military occupation of non-European countries. The book itself was largely completed in what now seems another world, that is the much more hopeful, post-Cold War era that existed before 11 September 2001, when economic relations, not military might, were supposed to underpin the new global order. This was an era which encouraged the exploration of the larger theme, not of empire per se, but of the nature of imperial power, both formal and informal, both hard and soft (to use Joseph Nye's terminology), in the exercise of which so it seemed to me Lord Cromer played a particularly interesting and exemplary role, not just in colonial government but also as a soldier, an international financier, a diplomat and an ideological exponent of the liberal economic notions of free trade, low taxes and small government, a bundle of roles characteristic of a system of hegemony brilliantly mapped out by my former colleague, Patrick O'Brien, in his introduction to the book he edited with Armand Clesse: Two Hegemonies: Britain 1846-1914 and the United States 1941-2001 (2002). My book was also written in the spirit of some ideas put forward by Edward Said in his 'Afterword' to the 25th anniversary edition of Orientalism published in 1994. Referring to the post-colonial project in general, he calls upon his readers to view the 'animosities and inequities' which characterised the imperial age, not as part of an eternal order but as an historical experience 'whose end, or at least partial abatement, may be at hand'., It is sad to have to observe how, just a decade later, these optimistic words may need some revision. But, as I hope to argue, they can still serve as a rough guide to