April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 11:50 AM EST Alex Burns posted on Andrew Roberts, whose new book has yet again been nastily attacked, this time in The New Republic, by Johann Hari, in “a disturbing article.” The article is admittedly disturbing, for it characterizes Roberts as “a man with links to white supremacism, whose book is not a history but an ahistorical catalogue of apologies and justifications for mass murder that even blames the victims of concentration camps for their own deaths.” “Links” is a very vague word, made less persuasive when we eventually learn, from Hari’s own review, that the concentration camps Roberts apologizes for were, rather oddly, the ones used to suppress white supremacists, so I’ll continue to reserve judgment. I again stress that I have not read the book under attack, and I assume Alex Burns has not read it either, only because he does not claim that he has, and there is an irresistible temptation to note that one has read a book under discussion when another party to the conversation acknowledges that he has not. There is nothing wrong with a blogger discussing reviews of a book he has not read—I began this discussion by doing so myself—but it is not always easy to assess such a review’s accuracy. What are some possible clues about the likely worth of Hari’s review? Alex Burns calls Hari’s tone, and Jacob Weisberg’s earlier tone, “fairly derisive.” I would use stronger language, and did: I think the reviews are contemptibly spiteful and consistently venomous. Venomousness is sometimes appropriate, spite less frequently so, but neither quality inspires confidence about judiciousness and fair-mindedness. I have read and sometimes admired Hari in The Independent; he has interestingly complicated politics, but he does occasionally suffer from a passion for the intoxicating pleasures of violent indignation. I’d also speculate that as a former supporter of the Iraq War, not a popular position with Independent readers (or too many other citizens of the Republic of Anglo-American Letters), Hari may be trying to cleanse himself of charges of initial thought crimes by burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials. His use of what he considers authorities does not always inspire confidence. For example, Hari writes that Andrew Roberts has “an agenda that the distinguished Harvard historian Caroline Elkins describes as ‘incredibly dangerous and frightening.’” This distinguished Harvard historian has written a prizewinning but much-contested book, Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya. If you know a little about Stalin’s gulag, and a little about the history of Kenya, this title speaks volumes. A comparison might be a hypothetical book called Attica: America’s Auschwitz. Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, reviewed Elkins’s book with great reservations in The Guardian (“Elkins remains rigidly one dimensional in her understanding”), which Guardian aficionados may consider rather like Al Qaeda expressing uneasiness about a want of balance in an anti-Zionist tract. Elkins estimated that the British killed several hundreds of thousands of people while suppressing the Mau Mau; Histories of the Hanged, a celebrated book published around the same time, by David Anderson, estimated that the British executed 1,090. A letter published in The New York Review of Books detailed Elkins’s alleged shortcomings, and another letter by the same writer on the same subject to The London Review of Books made similar points, some of which were generously conceded by the author whose review is being corrected. I note that scholars who write letters to the NYRB and the LRB are rarely if ever Colonel Blimp clones. I’ve read another savage review of Elkins by an African historian, who sounded as if knew what he was talking about, as well as various encomia by people who sounded as if they didn’t. So it is possible that the British published and unpublished statistics on the Mau Mau are infinitely less reliable than Stalin’s published and unpublished statistics on the Ukraine, and if so, Elkins is the most important scholar of our time. But maybe not. Similarly, Hari writes that “Mike Davis of the University of California, Irvine, author of Late Victorian Holocausts, says bluntly: “This is tantamount to Holocaust-denial. His arguments about the Boer concentration camps are similar to the arguments of the Nazi apologists about those camps.” This seems vastly unlikely, not least because the camps were not themselves too similar, and Mike Davis’s title, as well as his argument, should arouse the same uneasiness Elkins’s title does. Are the crimes of the later British Empire usefully compared to the most notorious crimes of Hitler’s empire, or of Stalin’s? As we used to say in the old New Left, to ask this question is to answer it (unless historical fantasies can be produced to balance the scales). I shall not spend time here on Davis’s various shortcomings, and I am sure that along with interpretations and judgments I would not share, Andrew Roberts made some factual errors. When writing a book of broad range and sweep, such errors tend to be more rather than less common, and they can be very unfairly heaped up to create impressions of gross incompetence. To get a sense of how factual errors can be compiled into a misleading and odiously malicious attack on a book, I can think of no better example than the notoriously vicious Times Literary Supplement review of Orlando Figes’s splendid Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia; I cannot link to it, but any TLS subscriber and members of most universities can, and should. In Hari’s case, I am uneasy because he takes Davis and Elkins to be authorities worth quoting without caveat, and because I find various other claims in the review to be vastly improbable. (Does Amartya Sen really believe that there has been no substantial famine in the subcontinent since the British left? More than a million died in the 1974–1975 famine in Bangladesh, and I would be very surprised if a man who won a Nobel for his work on famine did not know this.) Did Roberts claim that internment worked in 1970s Northern Ireland, as Hari charges? A friend who has read the book tells me that he does not, instead stating, correctly, that internment worked in southern Ireland, in the 1920s, as a tactic De Valera used to crush the IRA. What evidence exists, in Hari’s review, of good faith, which would make me automatically credit his account over that of a friend of Roberts’? None, I fear, and some to the contrary. With peculiar vulgarity, pettiness, and mendacity, Hari writes that “one of the few things that can silence Roberts is a mention of his origins in the distinctly nonaristocratic merchant classes, with a father who owned a string of Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises. Much as he longs to be K&C (Kensington and Chelsea), to those he adores, he will always have the whiff of KFC.” This is false, indeed ridiculous, bad sociology, and remarkably unattractive. On the basis of what I have heard mutual friends and acquaintances state in passing, and from what I have looked up, Andrew Roberts, a Fellow of two Royal Societies, is a graduate of Cambridge, where he took a first at Caius; his father, an Oxford man who served as a lieutenant in the Royal Tank Regiment, was heir to a successful family firm now a century old, and Roberts currently resides at a much better address than the one Mr. Hari seems to imply he longs to live at. All of this suggests that Mr. Hari’s nasty and elephantine joke about KFC misses the point made by Lady Bracknell more than a century ago: Mr. Roberts did not rise from the ranks of the aristocracy, he was born to the purple of commerce. Lady Bracknell’s views aside, what sort of person abuses anyone for metaphorically stinking of the frying oil? Is Mr. Roberts a staggering revisionist about the British Empire? Given some current tastes for demonizing the empire, possibly so, but if staggering revisionism is a hanging offense, Elkins and Davis will swing from a much higher gallows. The issue should be whether the revisions are plausible and arrived at with modest competence and an initially open mind. Does Roberts sentimentalize the empire? Could be. Again, I haven’t read the book. The rulers of the British Empire committed many crimes, although rather fewer than did the men who ran most empires, and they also had astonishing achievements to their credit. Marx, of course, knew this. What passes for a left nowadays does not always seem to know this. It is a feeble defense of any regime to note that it is or was less vicious than either Hitler’s or Stalin’s rule, but it is a feeble mind that does not remember that the British Empire stamped out both the custom of burning widows alive and slavery, whereas Hitler, for example, revived both practices. Well, that is hyperbole; most of the widows Hitler burned had been gassed first. Still, if you compare the British empire to almost any of the others—to the Aztecs, the Romanovs, the Persian or Chinese empires (in both cases, up to the present day), the Belgians, and so on down the line, I think the Brits are flattered by the comparison. A large percentage of all the human beings who have ever lived have been born and died in empires, and if you drew a straw of average length and lived and died in an empire, an average life in the later British empire would not be the worst of possible fates. And if we reduce the question to that cruder and narrower comparison, the one in this case implied not by Roberts but by Elkins and Co., is it less mad to exult that Salisbury was better than Hitler and Stalin, or to pretend that he wasn’t?
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