April 15, 2007
Andrew Roberts III Posted by Alexander Burns at 04:55 PM EST I enjoyed reading Fred Smoler’s response to The New Republic’s article on Andrew Roberts. His point about Hari’s personal attack on Roberts’s family origins is particularly well taken. I’m not sure “what sort of person abuses anyone for metaphorically stinking of the frying oil,” but I’m certain it’s not a person I’d like to spend much time with. Mr. Smoler takes issue with a few comments in my previous post on the subject and suggests that Johann Hari is not necessarily the reliable critic I take him to be. I’m not as acquainted with Hari’s work as Mr. Smoler apparently is, so I’ll defer to his experience. I’m not entirely comfortable, though, with the suggestion that Hari, a former Iraq war supporter, is “trying to cleanse himself of charges of initial thought crimes by burnishing his anti-imperialist credentials.” If Hari’s aim was to exonerate himself in the eyes of liberals, he’d have been rather foolish to take to the pages of The New Republic, the nominal editor of which, Martin Peretz, is about as reviled on the left as Dick Cheney. As Mr. Smoler correctly guesses, I have joined him in the practice of writing about Andrew Roberts without fully reading his latest work. I have glanced at A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, but I have not read it in its entirety. To be perfectly honest, I’m not particularly eager to do so. Hari’s review might be rather mean-spirited, but, as I previously wrote, that doesn’t mean its criticisms can be dismissed out of hand. For example, a “recurring theme in Roberts’s work,” according to Hari, is “that nationalist sentiments can be successfully crushed with massive violence.” With the example of the Amritsar massacre in hand, Hari argues that this is a very simpleminded view of the way violence works, highlighting how “Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru—men who had been constitutionalists with some residual loyalty to the Empire—abandoned their position following Amritsar, reasoning that, if the British were going to gun down women and children, there was no point in taking the reformist route.” This is a persuasive argument that there’s a certain degree of myopia in Roberts’s approach to history. Not having read Roberts’s book, I won’t say that it’s worthless. But having read Hari’s review, with its bits of compelling criticism, like this one, I think I’ll spend my reading hours elsewhere, perhaps on works that deal with empire in a more intellectually challenging way. Fred Smoler writes that “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.” I’d agree with this statement, but I’d also say, and I imagine Mr. Smoler would agree, that such comparisons are not always the most instructive ways of getting at truth. Yes, one might say, the Communist government under Castro seems bad, but consider the alternatives of Stalinist Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and present-day North Korea. True, but it seems that one might be missing a more nuanced point. I’m not tripping over myself to jump on board with Caroline Elkins, but I generally prefer works of history that are challenging, subtle, and humble in their scholarly approach. For that, I guess I’ll have to eschew both Andrew Roberts and Johann Hari.
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