Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism [Paperback]

Ronald Robinson (Author), John Gallagher (Author), Alice Denny (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1978 | ISBN-10: 0333310063 | ISBN-13: 978-0333310069 | Edition: 2nd

'...penetrating and profoundly provocative book.' - Asa Briggs

Product Details

• Paperback: 545 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 2nd edition (June 1978)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0333310063
• ISBN-13: 978-0333310069
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The History of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, 2003, February 9, 2008

By 

Joseph Ryan (Islamabad, Pakistan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (Paperback)

A description of the U.S. invasion of Iraq might start with 9/11, Bush's Administration, the 1991 war, or Iraq's invasion of Iran. The history of the invasion, however, is not a description of the invasion itself but of what happened before. Robinson, Gallagher, and Denny provide that history.

"Africa and the Victorians" describes the UK's responses to fear of erosion of the British Empire. In the mid-1800s, British leaders assumed that modernization of the world economy would naturally strengthen the empire. Events of the late 1800s didn't work out that way. Rather, political developments outside Europe took a nationalist turn. In addition, the expanding world roles of Russia, Germany, and the U.S. threatened to cost the UK its global preponderance, unless the UK could count on all its traditional assets, especially India.

India was securely in British control internally, but the routes of British access to India ran through the Mediterranean, Egypt and, after 1869, the Suez Canal, or alternatively around South Africa. Nationalist politics in both Egypt and South Africa seemed, to British imperialist eyes, to make both routes less secure. In addition, both Germany and Russia were chipping away at Turkey and thus approaching the Suez Canal.

Thus, in 1882 Britain sent its armies to take over Egypt and safeguard the Canal. Many in London wanted to do this on the cheap by quickly withdrawing and then ruling through Egyptian elites, but the old India hands had their way and the UK undertook direct rule and military occupation.

Although it technically falls in Asia and thus outside the book's African focus, the story continued a few years later on the other side of Suez, with the fall of Turkey and Britain's annexation of the lands that lay on Russia's path to the Canal. Both in South Africa and Suez, Britain entrusted territorial defense to colonists -- Britons in the Cape Colony and Israelis east of Suez.

British troops stayed in Egypt until 1954, at which point the Egyptian politics of 1882 replayed themselves almost exactly. Britain and Israel, along with France, invaded again in 1956 to reoccupy the Canal, but by then the shift in world power already feared in the late 1880s had come to pass, and the invaders were ordered out of Egypt by the U.S. and the USSR. By that time, the U.S. had assumed the UK's role as guarantor of Turkey, Israel, and Suez.

The invasion of 2003 repeats this pattern in terms of taking a supposed overseas interest, perceiving an indirect threat to it, invading to overthrow a nationalist government, and then staying supposedly to develop the country but more practically because the invader looks down on the local political alternatives. The U.S. invaders don't seem shy about potentially repeating Britain's experience of a 72-year-long military presence.

Access to India was, of course, no longer an issue even in 1956, but once started these things take on lives of their own.

In their last pages, Robinson, Gallagher, and Denny make this observation: "Fundamentally, the official calculations of policy behind imperial expansion in Africa were inspired by a hardening of arteries and a hardening of hearts. Over and over again, they show an obsession with security, a fixation on safeguarding the routes to the East. What stands out in that policy is its pessimism. It reflects a traumatic reaction from the hopes of mid-century; a resignation to a bleaker present; a defeatist gloss on the old texts of expansion." This also describes U.S. policy toward the world as of 2003, compared to the Marshall Plan days fifty years earlier.

Note that this book has apparently been published under two subtitles: "The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent" (U.S.) and "The Official Mind of Imperialism" (UK).