Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire [Hardcover]

David Cannadine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2001 | ISBN-10: 0195146603 | ISBN-13: 978-0195146608

With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and upon which the sun never set loosened its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its origins, nature, purpose, and effect on the world it ruled--is far from settled.
In this incisive new work, already being hailed as a landmark, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective--through the eyes of those who created and ruled it--and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire. Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the British were motivated not by race but by class. The British wanted to domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they ruled according to an idealized image of their own class hierarchies. In reestablishing the connections between British society and colonial society, Cannadine shows that Imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more nor less than they loathed the great majority of Englishmen and were far more willing to work with maharajahs, kings, and chiefs of whatever race than with "sordid" white settlers. Revolted by the triumph of democracy in Britain itself, the Empire's rulers embraced a feudal vision of the colonies which successfully endured until the 1950s.
Written with verve, clarity, and wit--and characterized throughout by highly original thinking--Ornamentalism will fundamentally alter the way we view the British Empire.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Imperialism, Cannadine argues, was a vehicle that enabled the British to replicate and export their own "hierarchical social structure" to their colonies. This need was especially pressing as industrialism changed the social order in their own country. In some undeveloped nations, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the Britons could start to build this stratified society from scratch. In other regions, such as India, Africa, and the Far East, they simply worked to preserve the already established order, such as the "caste-based indigenous Indian society" and the rule of the "Malayan sultans and African Kings." Cannadine stresses that the British system was not about race but about class and status. The British viewed most of their own people as far beneath these foreign chiefs, sultans, and pashas. Inevitably, though, the dominions became increasingly unimpressed by the pomp, ceremony, and British authority, and as nationalism grew stronger, all vestiges of British rule came under attack. Often repetitive and slow, this book reads like a university thesis, but the arguments and ideas are insightful. Appropriate for academic or large public libraries with British collections. Isabel Coates, Brampton, Ontario
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

This revisionist look at the British Empire argues that it was primarily based not on a conviction of racial superiority but, rather, on a vast and complex social hierarchy, in which rank trumped color. Britain exported its élites—sending aristocrats, Gothic architecture, and pheasant as far afield as Australia—to create a simulacrum of Victorian society abroad, and also bolstered the status of indigenous rulers: Indian maharajas, Middle Eastern emirs, and West African chiefs. Cannadine is excellent on the uses of pageantry and on the kitschy extremes it had reached by the nineteen-twenties. He is convincing, too, in his assessment of how imperial grandeur was used to distract Britons from social upheavals at home. But although he tries to soft-pedal the racism of the Empire, he cannot disguise the prejudices of the colonists, and sometimes the anecdotes he cites to illustrate a non-racist world view seem to prove the opposite.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195146603
• ISBN-13: 978-0195146608
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #539,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Empire where class trumps race, September 28, 2001

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Boon L. Kwan "Bernard" (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Hardcover)

David Cannadine, a self declared "Child of Empire" has what can only be described as an obsession with the British Aristocracy. Unlike some of his other works such as "Decline and fall oft the British Aristocracy" where he allows bittersweet emotions such as nostalgia to be evoked at the passing of an era, or the undisguised glee of an outsider indulging in schadenfreude in "Aspects of Aristocracy: grandeur or decline" this book presents a much more balanced analysis.

His thesis is that there was a complex interplay of class and race in the Empire, but in most cases class trumps race.

The defining example from the book is an exerpt from the "Raj quartet" where the british aristo identifies more clearly with his Indian counterpart who went to public school than to the uncouth white police constable. However the police constable viewed himself as superior to the Indian because of his race.

Its thesis accords well with my experience in public school at Winchester College in England where I felt accepted as a peer despite being Asian. But my same peers were openly disdainful of poor uneducated Pakistani and Bangledeshi immigrants. (They welcomed the educated Indians much more easily)

Perhaps these sentiments were what prevented mass support for Oswald Mosley and Fascism in the 1930s despite prevalent anti-semitism. It has been argued by John Lucas that Nazism as an ideology failed because Hitler had made his elite too small. The British extended their elites to the sultans, nawabs, emirs and kings all over the Empire and used them to bind the Empire together.

This book provides an interesting contrast to America where race is so much more important. Black and white interracial marriages are quite commonplace in Britain. In my opinion it better to recognize nobility in another person and disdain the baseness in another person regardless of the colour of their skin.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable Scholarship, March 27, 2003

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Charles J. Marr (Cambridge Springs, Pa USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Hardcover)

Let's keep it short. The title is more than a cute pun. Old Boney once said, no doubt in fine French, that a man would do things for a piece of yellow ribbon that he would not do for all the gold in the world. This scholarly, but not too much so, study is about British uses not of glory but pomp: the deliberate distribution of honors neatly packaged by class; indeed, neatly packaged by the rank of various colonial states somewhat in the pattern of elborate dinner seatings of the middle ages. "I say is Fijii above or below the salt?" In an age of "postcolonial/subaltern/otherness" studies this is a readable guide to events and behaviors of our British cousins that those of us on this side of the pond sometimes find rather mysterious. It is a good addition to the personal library of anyone doing serious literary/social analysis.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An unbiased look at how class was the engine for Empire., December 19, 2003

By 

Daniel J. Hamlow (Narita, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (Paperback)

This volume serves as an extension of Cannadine's earlier book Class In Britain. In Ornamentalism, Cannadine takes a different approach in looking at the driving force of the British Empire. It was driven not by race, but class, a traditional-hierarchical one, with the Empire being "the vehicle for the extension of British social structures, and the setting for the projection of British social perceptions, to the ends of the world and back again." This in turn means that "it was about antiquity and anachronism, tradition and honour, order and subordination, about glory and chivalry,... processions and ceremony, plumed hats and ermine robes... about thrones and crowns... dominion and hierarchy, ostentation and ornamentalism." It was thus also concerned in the constructions of affinities rather than otherness, as one of the ways to civilize the places they had taken over.

Indeed, social ranking was the result of the Enlightenment's way of looking at people, races, and colour, a concept that transcended the three dynamics. And the British were far more welcoming than the racist Germans. An example was the invitation to England of King Kalakaua of Hawaii, who took precedence before the crown prince of Germany, the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who took offence at his being ranked lower.

A lot of focus is given to the nobles of other countries, as the image formed by these well-dressed personages created a dignified image of order and authority. These sultans, pashas, shahs, etc. were the apex to their own people, but formed a lateral relationship to the British dukes, princes, and marquesses. They were also important in keeping order after uprisings such as the Sepoy mutiny of 1857. India with its castes was the perfect example. Rudyard Kipling himself observed the fixed order of obedience, pack animals obeying their drivers, drivers their sergeants, sergeants to their lieutenants, lieutenants to their captains, all the way up to generals obeying their viceroy.

The monarch itself symbolized the semi-divine aspect of the empire/territory/kingdom. For Queen Victoria, the number of places named after her, the buildings, statues, stamps, honours, correspondence envelopes, were all manifestations of the omnipresence of empire and thus of class. This is where Edward Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance" marches came in, in honour of the queen's Diamond Jubilee (sixtieth anniversary celebration) in 1897. Critics saw them as "glittering gaudy toys."

Also, the creation of honours to promote the imperial hierarchical vision is discussed, such as the Order of the Garter, Order of St. Michael, all these medals, which became a status symbol, leading to officials proudly displaying their array of orders like a peacock, "the accoutrements of hierarchical display and imperial ostentation."

And thus did imperialism and classism, seen as one interconnected world, lead to ornamentalism, defined as "hierarchy made visible, immanent, and actual. Small wonder that was the way the ordinary British citizen related to the world. Abroad, "they saw what they were conditioned, what they wanted, and what they expected to see."

In the end, it was nationalism, attacks from the urban, intellectual, and middle classes, technology, and the perception that hierarchy was unchanging that brought down the empire.

Cannadine doesn't take the neo-conservative, imperial apologist position, nor does he take the post-colonial and post-modern perspective in writing this book. Rather, he neither defends nor criticizes it, but tells the facts plain and simple, using the "entire interactive system" approach and giving a wider perspective of what the Empire looked like. He succeeds in breaking new ground, away from the ancient master narratives, by addressing the issue of class and hierarchy.