ПАТУВАЊЕТО КАКО
ИМПЕРИЈАЛНА СТРАТЕГИЈА
Џорџ Натаниел Курзон оди на Исток 1887-1894
4.
Travel as Imperial Strategy:
LORD CURZON AND BRITAIN
The power that
designedly fosters its own weakness, ultimately perishes of the atrophy thus
engendered
Lords Cromer, Milner and Curzon
might have been active in a different theatres of the British empire but the
very fact of their collective designation as Britain ’s imperial Edwardian
proconsuls suggests commonalities. Like Cromer, Milner started off as a Liberal
with concern for social issues, but coming of a later generation, he merged
these into the new radical imperialism of the final decades of the ninetieth century.
We have seen how England in Egypt and
Modern Egypt share a common discourse; Milner’s book, helping to popularize
British imperialism in that country, paved the way for Cromer’s summative
statement of the case. Neither of these texts can be said to function within
the specific genre of travel literature. (However, the three volumes in Blunt’s
anti-imperialist ‘Secret history’ series – English
occupation of Egypt, India under
Ripon, and Gordon at Khartoum –
are constructed around an English gentleman’s diary entries, many of them
records of personal travel.) If, like Milner’s Curzon’s early writings promote
empire as a project of ‘romance’, they do so within an individualized
experience specifically enhanced by the travel frame. With Curzon, travel becomes
central to exposition of the imperialist message. And just as imperialist
literature on Egypt coheres
around the achievement and ideas of Cromers, a cognate literature on Persia , the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan
arose around the boundaries and strategic assumptions proposed by Curzon in Russia in Central Asia (1889) and Persia and Persian Question (1892). This
body of writing was enlarged by the pens of acolytes who came from the
generation nurtured in the new imperialism. They include figures like Percy Cox
and A. T. Wilson. Cox partly owed his promotion to Curzon, and Wilson in turned
owed his to Cox. Both men engaged in travel, but like their master’s, this was
travel for a purpose: mapping out the terrain in which Britain ’s
imperial interests interfaced with the perceived threats of competitors.
Reference will also be made to political journalism of the early 1900s, which
took as its point of departure Curzon’s portrayal of the decrepit Persian State
and the ‘weak’ and ‘cowardly’ ‘Persian character’.
This chapter therefore, has the
purpose of articulating a ‘Curzonian’ school of imperialist travel writing, and
linking it with the wider discourse of Orientalism. Here Edward Said’s analysis
remains a great value, and an attempt will be made to apply it to the context
of Curzon’s travel writings. Indeed, Curzon advances statements that amount
almost to a transparent stereotype of Orientalism. He accomplished this by
proposing a travel theory of his own in which he divided the purposes of his
travel into two. The motivation for the first was political, and entailed
surveying the scope of British interests in the East. The second predicated
personal enjoyment of the eastern scene – a category later comprehended by Said
in the term aesthetic Orientalism.
Alongside contemporaries Balfour and Cromer, Curzon certainly seems to fit
within the bloc of imperial patronage that sought to inscribe the East within
the construct of western knowledge/power which Said termed Orientalism. As
enunciations of an aesthetic of travel, or codifications of imperial
administration, it might be argued that Curzon’s writings rarely digress from
Foucault’s equation of knowledge and power. Curzon’s emphasis is on a
unchanging but unstable Orient, which could be considered exactly what Said had
in mind when he defined Orientalism as ‘a static system of “synchronic
essentialism”’. Curzon and Cromer thought the stagnation of eastern polities
like Egypt and Persia was
such, as to warrant European governance and control. Both were Islamic nations,
and Islam contributed to their decay and general hopelessness. Cromer, Curzon
and their allies and supporters, also established the code of the childish,
irrational oriental, incapable of governing himself and therefore apt subject
for European tutelage, which was essential if the eastern society was to
progress. Of course, it was distinctly preferable for such governance to be
British.
However, while Curzon’s travel
writings readily yield themselves to Orientalist analysis, his own individual
qualities also emerge within his aesthetic Orientalism, in particular a
romantic a romantic historicism and sense of occasion which fed into the
imperialistic aesthetic he developed during his period as Viceroy of India. There
still remains the need to problematise the confidence of imperial mastery in
Curzon’s Orientalism. This can be done by supplying the interior anxieties it
seeks to cover by its political/racial logocentrism, particularly as these
anxieties relate to the imperial rivalries of the ninetieth century. These
operate within the political climate of late European imperialism in the East.
Where Oriental stasis was judged beneficial to Britain ’s
imperial interests (that is, when characteristic of an area over which Britain exercised control) re-iteration of
Muslim weakness both justified and supported her imperial provenance (Egypt ). But if
such weakness was deemed to jeopardize Britain ’s
imperial interests, as evidenced in area over which British power could not be
exercised or maintained (Persia ),
it became a subject of anxiety. Imperialists strategies for British involvement
in Islamic affairs therefore differed according to the degree of control,
direct or indirect, Britain
might be able to apply.
CURZON AND THE EAST
George Nathaniel Curzon came from
a long line of Curzons who, in his own words, went ‘straight back to Norman who
came over with the Conqueror’. Unlike most of his ancestors, who were ‘content
to remain in possession of the same [Derbyshire] estate since twelfth century’,
George Curzon was marked out for great things, amply fulfilling his prep school
headmaster’s prophesy that he would ‘certainly be distinguished man in the best
sense of term’. An outstanding career in Eton was followed by five years at Balliol College ,
Oxford , the
‘kindergarten for aspiring politicians and diplomats’, attended by future Prime
Minister H.H. Asquith, Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, and Alfred, later Lord
Milner. The future Viceroy of India began his travels in the East as a young
graduate, smarting from the humiliation of gaining only second class degree. In
1883 he set out for the Eastern Mediterranean with the aim of researching the
Byzantine Emperor Justinian, the subject of one of Oxford ’s hardest essays prizes. En route from
Naples to Athens ,
he sat on his bunk writing his essay, in between paroxysms of sea sickness.
Curzon left his party of Oxford friends in Greece , going on to Egypt ,
where he cruised the Nile, had an affair with exotic Englishwoman, but
resolutely refused to enjoy the seductiveness of Cairo . From there, he proceeded to Palestine and Syria , where he ‘spent most of the
time comparing the sites […] with the events associated with them in the Bible’
– much to the detriment of the former. This was to set a pattern for his
subsequent travels in Persia
and Central Asia (though not in India )
where he continually came across ruins on or near sites celebrated for their
former glories. Despite such disappointment, Curzon’s travels for a purpose had
yielded a result: on his way home via Turkey
and the Balkans, he read a copy of the The
Times, announcing that his essay on Justinian, dispatched some weeks
earlier, had won the Oxford
prize. This vindication of the journey and by the text (for Curzon always read
everything written on the target area by other authors ancient and modern, and
then endeavoured to supersede them himself) was to set a precedent for his
later books on Central Asia and Persia.
Between 1887 and 1894, Curzon
made five journeys to the East, including two that took him around the world.
His political aspirations were the main motive, the aim being to establish
himself as the foremost expert on Asian affairs in so far as they impinged upon
the British empire . But he also found the East
captivating in a manner that served to accentuate his Orientalism. In 1886,
Curzon crossed the Atlantic, traversed eastern Canada ,
the Mid-West, and sailed from San Francisco to Japan , returning via Hong
Kong , Singapore
and Ceylon .
Calcutta , seat of an empire not far short of the
entire size of Europe , furnished the climatic
for his pride in British governance over the East.
His aesthetic pleasure was no
less fulfilled by the Taj Mahal. In 1888 Curzon journeyed across Central Asia
on the newly completed Trans Caspian Railway, from Uzun Ada on the Caspian, to
Merv, Askabad, Bukhara and Samarkand, an then on horseback to Tashkent. The
following year found him on the same railroad, this time crossing the Persian
frontier into Khorassan, travelling from Meshed
to Teheran, by post horse (the only means of transport through a terrain devoid
of roads), south to Bushire, and down the Persian Gulf .
His second round the world trip, in 1892, gave Curzon the opportunity to
observe China , Japan , and Korea . In 1894, he made his last
journey to East – to the Pamir in Afghanistan – prior to his
appointment as Viceroy of India (1899). His later career on the Conservative
front bench and in government (his last years spent as Foreign Secretary)
precluded extensive travel outside Europe .
Curzon’s journeys a recorded in
three works, each of which consist not only of travel writing, but copious
historical research and political analysis on the East. Russia in Central Asia and Persia
and the Persian Question, are both framed by a concern with Russia’s
spreading power in the region, and the putative threat this posed to British
India, while Problems of the Far East
(1896) concentrates on Britain’s providential role in that area of the globe.
This writings are in several key respects characteristic of Orientalism as
delineated by Edward Said. The primary purpose of their publication was to
establish for their author an acknowledged expertise on his subject – Asia /the Orient – so furthering a political career that
would in turn be founded on a bedrock belief in British imperial dominance over
large areas of the East. Curzon’s mastery of his oriental subjects was intended
to facilitate his imminent participation in Britain ’s political sway over the
regions studied. The peoples of the East, with the exception of the Japanese,
towards whom he is at best ambivalent, are presented as unchanging,
picturesque, often corrupt, and general incapable of reforming themselves. This
backwardness is both the object of the traveler’s censure, and on occasion, the
source of his satisfaction. The ‘orientals’ having long forgotten their past,
this is left to western traveler and scholar to reconstruct. European
encroachment on and conquest over their lands is inevitable. The Turkomans of
Central Asia, recently so brutally conquered by Russians, make willing imperial
subjects, while the effete and cowardly Persians, steeped in the mire of
centuries of ‘oriental’ decay, represent a conundrum to British imperial
strategy given the importance of Persia within the ‘Great Game’.
If, in spite of his noble
ancestry, there seemed, as Harold Nicholson reflected, to be something of the
self-righteous high Victorian bourgeois in his attitude towards empire, it is
true that Curzon was himself conscious of a personal trait that lent itself to
‘middle-class’ efficiency. On his travels around the outposts of the British
empire, Curzon had expected first to find ‘good administration, good buildings
and wharves, order and decorum’, but he was infinitely gratified to discover
acquiescence in Britain ’s
providential rule. He attributed the success of the grandiose Durbar that he
directed in Calcutta
in 1903 ‘half in earnest, half in jest, [to] his “middle-class method”.’
Government House, the Viceroy’s residence in Calcutta , which he and his beautiful American
wife Mary (nee Leiter) were to grace between 1899-1905, was an Adam Smith
creation based on his family seat at Kedleston, Derbyshire.
Curzon’s career presaged great
promise, but a combination of personal flows and misfortunes perhaps denied his
gifts their full expression. Lacking personal tact, he was not always a good
manager of men; his pre-occupation with detail often led him to shoulder absurd
quantities of work that eventually broke his health. He attracted strong
loyalties, but his closest friends and colleagues had a habit of knifing him
into back. Curzon’s first brief spell in office was Salisbury’s second in the
Foreign Ministry in 1891, but his carefully accumulated experience of eastern
affairs won him the Indian viceroyalty at the relatively young age of forty.
Even his appointment was contested by those who saw liabilities in his advocacy
of a forward foreign policy in the East to counteract Russia . The
imperial historian Ronald Hyam, believes ‘politically his royalty was
disastrous’. Like Cromer, Curzon had no regard for the indigenous people other
that as an imperial subject race. He ‘spoke of Indians in terms normally
reserved for pet animals: at best they were “less than school-children”.’ The
period in India
cut the groove of his later political career. Erstwhile friends like the
Secretary of State for India ,
John Brodrick, turned enemy; and ambitious adversaries like Lord Kitchener
succeeded in bringing down the disingenuous Viceroy two years into his second
term. Curzon returned to England
to the political wilderness of the Liberal years under the highhanded Tory
leadership of another one time friend Arthur Balfour, and was passed over as
leader in 1911 when he latter resigned to be replaced by the Canadian Bonar
Law. With the fall of Asquith in 1916, Curzon – who was this time accused of
his own political maneuverings – should have been the natural choice for
Foreign Secretary, but the dilettante Balfour again stood in his way. The post
finally became his in 1919, and with the fall of Lloyd George in 1922, and the
death of Bonar Law a year later, the scene was set at last for Curzon to accede
to the highest office. But once again, personal enemies, in no less figure than
King George V, and un-adventitious circumstances – by now it seemed
anachronistic for a Prime Minister to lead a government from the Hose of Lords
– conspired to frustrate arguably the ablest man in politics. Curzon left the
Foreign Office after the Conservative defeat of December 1923, and died
prematurely sixteen months later. His legacy in India – beyond the renovation of
ancient monuments – was swept away by the growing indigenous opposition to
imperial rule.
…
(Geoffrey Nash, University of London
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