Imperialism and Colonialism

Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton

Alan Macfarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Imperialism and Colonialism: Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton is a collection of interviews that are being published as a book for the first time. These interviews have been conducted by one of England's leading social anthropologists and historians, Professor Alan Macfarlane. Filmed over a period of several years, the three conversations in this volume are part of the series Creative Lives and Works. These transcriptions form a part of a larger set of interviews that cut across various disciplines, from the social sciences and the sciences to the performing and visual arts. The current volume is on three foremost imperial and global historians. Colonialism is intrinsically linked to its imperial past. Christopher Bayly, Richard Rathbone and Richard Drayton, come alive through these conversations in this book. They offer a refreshing perspective to the actions of the colonizer and the colonized, often deriding the actions of the former. Bayly talks at great length about his Indian experience, Rathbone talks about the tempered indifference of the larger academic community towards African history and its oral tradition and Drayton engages his readers with anecdotes and interesting insights into Creole culture. The book will be of enormous value not just to those interested in the subject of History, Culture Studies, Ethnography and Comparative Studies and Literature but also to the uninitiated because of the lucidity which conversations bring to even otherwise opaque discussions..

Please note: This title is co-published with Social Science Press, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

PART One

Christopher Alan Bayly. Photograph courtesy Alan Macfarlane.

Christopher Alan Bayly

Sir Christopher Alan Bayly, FBA, FRSL (1945-2015) was a British historian specialising in British Imperial, Indian and global history. From 1992 to 2013, he was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge.

In 2007, he succeeded Sir John Baker as President of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Bayly also became the Director of Cambridge’s Centre of South Asian Studies. He was co-editor of The New Cambridge History of India and sat on the editorial board of various academic journals. He also served on the inaugural Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009.

In 1990, Bayly was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). In 2004 he was awarded the Wolfson History Oeuvre Prize for his many contributions to the discipline. In the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours, it was announced that he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor ‘for services to History’. Upon being informed of the knighthood, he stated: ‘I regard this not only as a great personal honour but, as an historian of India, as recognition of the growing importance of the history of the non-western world’.

In 2016, Bayly became the first person to be posthumously awarded the Toynbee Prize for global history.

Some of his publications include: The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880-1920 (1975), Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (1983), Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (1988) and Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830 (1989).¹

I

Christopher Bayly (CB): I am Chris, by the way! I was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, in 1945. I grew up there, travelling out sometimes to the Kent countryside, and sometimes south to Sussex. I didn’t leave there until I went to university.

AM: Gosh, that is a long time in one place! We will come back to that. You’re a historian. Some historians curiously totally seem disinterested in their ancestors. I have interviewed some, expecting them to be really interested, but most of them know something about their grandparents and as far back as that. Can you tell me something about your grandparents?

CB: I had two very different styles of grandparents, and other relatives of that sort. One group were basically Londoners, cockneys. My grandfather fought in the First World War and that was one of the interests that started me in history. He wasn’t in the Western Front, but was actually in the Egyptian Campaign with Allenby,² moving up into Palestine, up into Turkey, and was eventually shot by an Ottoman plane, I think in 1917. He spent a long time in hospital in Egypt, where he in effect, was actually educated because he came from a pretty poor background. But his stories were absolutely fascinating and I grew up listening to the difference between Indian soldiers on the Eastern Front and how the Australians were always out of control, and that sort of thing. Most things you would hear from everybody but it was very interesting at the age of seven or eight to hear about all this.

On the other side of the family, my grandfather was an evangelical Christian who had been a boxer. They had also started in London but had come down to Tunbridge Wells during the Depression. This is my father’s side. The important thing about that part of the family was that although my grandfather was very religious, for some reason he decided to get rid of my father as early as he could. He effectively indentured my father into the Merchant Navy at about the age of 15, which was very early in those days and which had something to do with the financial crisis of that period. This meant that my father also had an extremely wide-ranging career. He was in the Merchant Navy until 1953. He did the Atlantic run, and on one occasion he went up on the Soviet side, which was of course extremely dangerous, but luckily most of what he was doing was across the Atlantic.

Before that he had been to the East. He brought copra from India to Britain, and took goods to Britain and brough mechanical machinery across the Atlantic to the United States, then all the way back across the Pacific. It was a very interesting introduction into world history and geography. In 1953, he retired from the Merchant Navy and became a geography teacher in Tunbridge Wells. I had both geography and a very early introduction into colonial and world history through my father. Going back further is rather difficult. There were stories about members of the family who were illegitimate, some of aristocratic illegitimacy, other stories about how they were very poor. I haven’t really been able to make much sense of it. There are Baylys spelt my way in Northern Ireland as well as East Kent, and I never really understood if there was a connection between them. But about three weeks ago somebody wrote to me and said there was a connection, that somebody from Northern Ireland, a kind of aristocrat, went to Sandwich in Kent and developed housing and estates there. This would have been in the mid-19th century, so it is possible that there was a connection between these two different types of Bayly. But my earlier family background is more or less unknown to me.

AM: Coming now to the next generation, to your parents. Our parents sometimes have an influence on us. Tell me something about how they may have,, you have talked about your father, but you haven’t talked about your mother. What were their characters?

CB: My father was very committed to teaching but I think he was always a little sad that he had given up his career in the Merchant Navy. He became the next in line to a Captain so had a good career and probably could have gone on and made a lot more money. But he did have a very strong sense of commitment, a kind of patriotic commitment of that period. They both did. My mother worked in the countryside during the war and used to talk about how the bombs flew over when she was planting vegetables.

My father said he had left the sea because he felt he ought to help develop the country again after the Second World War and the destruction of London, in particular. He came back and became a teacher, but I think he was always rather sad about that and felt that he should have carried on with the much more exciting career. Nevertheless, he was a geography teacher and he taught in what was then a secondary modern school which was at the lower end of the food chain of schools in those days.

I seem to remember that the students couldn’t be classed as bad or backward. I met quite a lot of them when I was growing up, particularly from the ages of seven to 10, and they always seemed to be able to talk to me about things even though about that stage I was about to go to a grammar school. It was interesting to see another part of the education system when I was growing up. My father was very demanding in the sense that he always expected one to take academic work very seriously from an early age. He was very good at making me write, and I think that was the most important thing he did for me. I had to write long sentences and paragraphs and he was quite rigorous about it. He failed miserably in regard to mathematics which I was never any good at, and I am not quite sure why that was. It is interesting that my brother, in fact, was a very good mathematician and went on to do medicine at Oxford, and became a doctor, has now retired from that profession and now teaches in a university. He is an osteoporosis specialist. I don’t think it was a genetic fault, but for some reason I just didn’t get on with mathematics and science at all.

Early on, partly under the influence of my father, I had become interested in archaeology. In those days my father used to take us out to archaeological digs. I remember going to High Rocks, an area of sandstone cliffs about 20 miles from Tunbridge Wells, where Mr Money used to do digs on a Neolithic site. My father was the one who used to dig the trenches, he was the labourer while I was scraping away! And I found quite a lot of interesting things. My greatest find was a Neolithic flint axe head which was a rather nice piece, and now I think in the Tunbridge Wells Museum. At the same time, we used to travel south down to Sussex and look at the older villages there and the Norman castles, so from an early age, I was interested in earlier history and that was where the bug bit me.

AM: And your mother?

CB: My mother was a disciplinarian. She always kept a beady eye on our work. She was not particularly well-educated in a formal sense but she was highly intelligent. She had been to the girls’ grammar school in Tunbridge Wells though probably left at the age of 16. My impression is that one actually acquired more education by the age of 16 then than kids do now by the age of 18. She wrote extremely well and was always interested in what I wrote and always used to criticize it. I think one of the things my mother did for me was to develop more of a kind of imaginative streak in me. She was very keen that I painted, did artistic representations and that sort of thing. When I was writing my early history of Neolithic people, I would do little sketches of the Neolithic people chipping away at their flints. Although a hopeless mathematician, I was not bad at art and I probably could have gone on to an artistic education if that had been appropriate. But by the age of 14 one had to choose what to do. I am still doubtful whether it is a good thing to push kids on to do only three or four subjects at A Level or whether it is better to let them do a much wider Baccalaureate system. I had a Baccalaureate at home even though I had to limit myself when doing academic work.

AM: When your father and various people did roam around and was in the army, your most famous fieldwork on the Raj and things like this, Burma, you are not part of this Raj sent home from India as I am? You haven’t got imperial antecedents as you know until you check it further?

CB: No. Despite working on the Raj, I do not have any ‘imperial’ antecedents, what I do have is subaltern imperial antecedents in the proper sense of the term. Subaltern now means peasantry or labourers in the towns in revolt against colonialism and the domination of capital. However, before about 1970, subaltern meant the middle level of officers, both in the army and navy, and also in the administration. To that extent I was more in the subaltern class of imperialists. As I said, my grandfather was a non-commissioned officer in the First World War, my father in the Merchant Navy but never reached captain. It is very interesting that when we used to talk about his feelings about the East, perhaps when I was nine or 10, he used to talk about the people he had encountered in India, particularly their uppity and high-class manners. These were people who were not much more than subalterns themselves, but he didn’t notice a difference in the way that he and his crew reacted to the Indians in India and the way he felt the higher level British in India reacted, even people who had been influenced by this ideology. So, there was a sense that he was the next level down and didn’t altogether approve of the Empire.

Although they were both very patriotic, my parents were never particularly imperialist and didn’t take a strong racial view. One reason for that was that in the early days – in the 1950s – they used to take exchange students from France and take them around the Kent and Sussex countryside. At least two of them were Africans and they seemed to get on very well with them. There was a man from French West Africa, a lovely chap, huge and tall. This was when my brother was really quite small, and I remember we used to push him about in a pram. My mother was there with this very tall African, and all the people in Tunbridge Wells who saw them would come and look into the pram to see what colour the baby was! My parents did not seem to have a racial view but they were very worried about Communism, I remember that. This wasn’t surprising in those days as we had air-raid warnings and had to go down into shelters.

AM: This was during the war?

CB: No this was after the war because I was born in 1945. This would be the Cold War.³

AM: Did they go on till then?

CB: When everybody was worried about nuclear attacks and the outbreak of the Cold War, there were a lot of training things if there was an air-raid siren at school we would have to do this that and the other. I remember one of the schoolteachers in about 1954 saying that we must all stand as one of the great men of history had died. This was 1954. This was Stalin.⁴ This was pretty extraordinary and tells you something about the deep divide in this country at that time about the nature of Communism. Within a few years, by 1956, Khrushchev⁵ had denounced Stalin and everybody was a bit quieter after that, but the Russians were there, either as a threat or as the people who had saved us during the war and that was a very important thing that we were brought up on. I also remember 1962, going on a bit further and I have actually put that in the introduction of my new book. When I was in bed, my father always used to bring in tea in his dressing-gown, and I remember that day when I got up very fast, he came into the room with the tea and said: ‘I don’t think we would be alive in the evening’. This was right at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.⁶

AM: That was in the winter of 1962. He was nearly right!

CB: He was indeed!

AM: That’s lovely. Perhaps we can go on to your schools. You went to grammar school at the age of 11, was it? Was it a good school?

CB: Yes, that’s right I went to grammar school at 11-plus. It was a very good school. Most of the teachers were Oxbridge graduates who couldn’t get jobs anywhere else. They had come into the profession during the Depression and then they had gone to war, so they all had very wide experience. Some had been in the Navy. One who was particularly influential was an English teacher who had fought through Italy and used to talk about the Battle of Monte Cassino,⁷ so I was very interested when I finally went to Italy at 17 to go and look at Monte Cassino. The school was very good, partly because it wasn’t a rote teach...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Note on Transcription
• Introduction
• Empires and the Role of Anthropology
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Appendix 1: Biographical information Compiled by Radha Béteille
• Appendix 2: Historical information Compiled by Radha Béteille