Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell Nathan K. Hensley (bio) Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire, by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell; pp. xii + 403. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, $95.00, $31.99 paper, $31.99 ebook. When scholars of Victorian England and its empire in the year 2023 read this book's title and see, on the cover, a pith-helmeted lieutenant raising the Union Jack over a crowd of white soldiers, they will be forgiven for experiencing a flash of concern. But despite activating the genre signals of the steamship-and-saber histories it superficially resembles, this volume is not a blustering yarn about imperial liberators. Neither is it straightforwardly critical toward that narrative, alas still persuasive to Tory nostalgists and Brexiteers today. Rather it is marked by a tonal restraint whose effect gathers force as the criminal evidence amassed here piles up over almost four hundred pages. Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire "is based," the authors explain, "on an appreciation of what it was to govern the most diverse and extensive empire that there has ever been" (2). Here "appreciation" pings like a tuning fork and resonates differently at the beginning of the book than it does at the end, after the dispossession, famine, kidnapping, and genocide have unfolded, in chapter after chapter, scene after scene, all through the direct statements of the architects themselves. Land wars, frontier lynchings, and military violence made the vision of these Great Men tangible. Accounts of such events share space here with details of state-run narcotics cartels and the regimes of coerced labor required to keep the plantations churning after the much-bragged-about abolition of slavery. These included Indian and Chinese indentureship, so-called apprenticeship in Africa, bondage of Tamil and Mauritian peasants, and the outright abduction of Pacific Islanders for the purposes of slave labor, among other flavors of conscription. Famines eradicated whole populations; [End Page 312] reservation systems marked ethnic groups for death while the policy of "amalgamation" promised what one under-secretary called "euthanasia for savage peoples" (198). Taken together, "the extent of the violence inflicted upon people of colour by the agents of British imperial governance" is, the authors write, "astonishing" (9). On the cover and title page, Ruling the World is described as a collaboratively written monograph by Alan Lester, Kate Boehme, and Peter Mitchell, but the acknowledgements are given in first person, from Lester's perspective, and thank Boehme and Mitchell for "lay[ing] its foundations" (xi). The book's contribution is to combine a biographically grounded focus on elite male actors with an attention to the lives and social orders crushed by their policies. The effect is to hold side by side the "liberal aspiration[s]" of some but not all imperialist apparatchiks with the catastrophic reordering that is the most enduring legacy of their labors in the present (338). Proper names of these agents flicker through the pages and accumulate to such a degree that a "Cast of Characters" is provided in an appendix. This pageant of masculine political agency constitutes an avowedly "old-fashioned" approach that places outsized faith in biographical explanation, affirms official policy as a privileged driver of historical change, and enables structural factors like gender to slip by without analysis (3). (Lisa Lowe's The Intimacies of Four Continents [2015] would have been a useful interlocutor.) Yet a focus on the deeds and life-plots of elite actors has some virtues. It enables the book easily to track, for example, relations among seemingly disparate zones of empire, as functionaries who tested their mettle killing Black peasants in Jamaica, for example (in the case of William Owen Lanyon), are promoted to oversee the complex territory of Griqualand West, in southern Africa, where in the face of a multiracial population Lanyon helped organize the "modernised, systematised, and bureacratised form of racial discrimination" that would become apartheid (317–18). A focus on individual agents also helps concretize relations among seemingly disparate narrative threads, as when...