Younghusband and Imperialism [review of Patrick French, <i>Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer</i>]
1995; Volume: 15; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.15173/russell.v15i1.1874
ISSN1913-8032
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics
ResumoReviews 89 YOUNGHUSBAND AND IMPERIALISM RICHARD A. REMPEL History / McMaster University Hamilton, ON L8s 4L9, CANADA Patrick French. Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial Adventurer. London: Flamingo, An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 1995· Pp. xxii, 44°·£20.00 (paperback £7·99)· F ifty years ago British imperial rule over one quarter of the world was still regarded popularly as a worthy, often noble, mission in many parts of the Commonwealth, not least in much of Canada. The pathfinders of Empiremen such as David Livingstone, Richard Burton and Francis Younghusband-and the proconsuls-Lord Curzon, Lord Milner and Lord Cromer-were viewed with respect and even veneration in many corners of the "white" Dominions, for all that controversy often surrounded some of their imperial policies. The twenty-fourth of May each year was a major celebration for children in the British imperium, for, after all, it was Queen Victoria's birthday. The exploits of these and other imperialists were celebrated in songs sung at school and in churches, in much of the Englishspeaking press and in the tales of adventure written by John Buchan, G. A. Henty and Rudyard Kipling. As recently as the early 1950S in Canada, Kip- 90 Reviews ling's Kim was still a set book in the Grade ix English syllabus and Henry Newbolt's "Vitai Lampada" a required poem- ;" The Gatling's jammed and the Colonel's dead ... And England's far, and Honour a name, But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks, "Playup! play up! and play the game!" At the scholarly level, many standard texts, however critical of aspects of imperialism, tended to stress British policies of benevolent "trusteeship" and the manner in which colonies grew into their inheritance of parliamentary government and the rule of law. There were, of course, searing attacks, such as Eric Williams' Marxist study, Capitalism andSlavery (I944). But what of the Empire and its vot;uies now? Scattered and reviled, only a few may now be found-and then generally only on the far Right of the British Conservative Party. T1?-e anti-imperialists are now in the ascendantespecially those who can plausibly claim to have been victims ofwhat scholars·and laymen alike now tend to view as the predatory, racist, male chauvinist and brutally tyrannical British imperial rule. Learned journals and the movies, often most searchingly represented by British scholars, are laden with analyses of sexually repressed architects of imperial policy, of misogynistically driven explorers, ofrapacious administrators and hegemonically motivated authors of elementary school readers. In the light of such broadsides, how could so many in the Commonwealth have adhered to the earlier, shallow, misguided view of imperial values! British imperial values, in popular culture, seem only for the satirical appetites of Monty Python. Of course, even in the heyday of the Empire, it had its vociferous and often trenchant critics-the South Africans who remembered the Boer War concentration camps, the Catholic Irish bowed but by no means broken by centuries of English misrule, Indian Nationalist leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru and writers, notably]. A. Hobson, Leonard Woolf and Bertrand Russell-although the latter's anti-imperialism has never been deeply scrutinized and, I would argue, his writings contain many more examples of an imperial cast ofmind than generally recognized. In Patrick French's Younghusband we find a mature balance between the uncritical, all-too-naive reverence for British imperialism of 50 to IOO years ago, and the often numbingly dismissive anti-imperial scholarship so fashionable currently. Certainly Younghusband's psychic abrasions and precarious personal relationships are examined in detaiL There are the references to Younghusband's unsatisfactory relationship to a cold, indifferent mother; speculation abounds as to whether he had an incestuous association with his older sister Emmie; the author describes Younghusband's emotional immaturReviews 91 ity that blighted his engagement to a seemingly compatible woman; his subsequent , apparently sexually arid marriage to a bigoted and rigid wife is then explored; and his liberated affair in old age is dealt with at great lengthindeed , it takes up almost as many pages as his stunningly heroic trek in 1887 from Peking, .across the Gobi desert and through the nearly impassable Mustagh Pass by Ki and...
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