"Jolly good article! ... one need only to view the former colonies today to see their sorry plight after independence"

Ahem.

Are you, perhaps, referring to former colonies Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, currently numbers 1 through 4 in The Heritage Foundation's ranking of the world's freest economies?

The United Kingdom, by the way, ranks 16th and falling, below other former colonies Canada, Mauritius, and, yes, even below the United States.

"The world is a worse place today for the passing of that Empire."

... and such of its warm customs as sod o my in the Public Schools.

[Warning - very long] Mr. Crocker, you are a very amusing writer and I loved The Old Limey. But your collection of strawmen and false dichotomies does nothing to justify empire building or make us want to romanticize the Raj. You have inadvertently done one thing for which traditional conservatives owe you some gratitude: pointed out that neocon adventurism has nothing in common with classical conservatism in the democratic tradition but instead is comparable to the worst excesses of 19th century empire building that the USA of the time wisely refrained from, until progressives TR and WW jumped us into the middle of frays that were none of our affair.

“The British Empire certainly did not go in for “nation-building” in the “let’s export the democratic welfare state” sense. The British believed they governed well, and did well for the people they governed, but they always had to ensure that the sum of benefits minus costs was in the black.”

I think this is the heart of your misunderstanding. The British were indeed successful imperialists in that they had a traditional empire and ran it along traditional businesslike lines. This was nothing new. Alexander and Genghis Khan had done as much. The Spanish and French and Germans of Queen Victoria’s day ran their empires in the same principles. If what we really admire is an empire that was run profitably, we could do no better than to follow the brutal but quite remunerative example of Belgium’s King Leopold. Recall that the British of their day were not quite as admiring of the similar profitable way in which the Spanish and Portuguese empires were run as you are of the equally profitable British one! It is always easier to see the other fellow’s humanitarian excesses.

If we were to have an empire at all, probably it would strike most Americans, traditional conservatives and the rest, that this would be the least bad way to do it. Which is one reason most of us don’t want to be imperialists; we don’t want to have to be rapacious foreign masters. But we have never nationalized one drop of oil, one grain of gold dust, or one diamond chip from our various military endeavors which are nevertheless described by our detractors as imperialist and colonialist. And realistically we’re never going to. On the contrary; when we invade somewhere, instead of taking billions out, we put billions back in to rebuild the place far better than it was before. So our “empire” doesn’t really have the same point that Victoria’s immensely lucrative one did, and we can’t set hers up as example. Neither world opinion today not American opinion ever would condone our running the Iraq invasion at a handsome profit. So what is the point of your comparison?
“The British Empire set a beneficial example in another sense too. It was tolerant. On issues that truly mattered — an independent judiciary, limited government, abolishing slavery and widow-burning — they enforced British standards of fair play, ordered liberty, and decency. But they were also quite content to let Arabs be Arabs, Masai be Masai, and so on. They did not politicize society or, another way of putting it, nationalize it. They ruled with the lightest of authority, often through local elites, and had a famous affection for the “warrior races” (which they were keen to defeat and then bring on their side).”
A half-truth at best. This was not a consistent or universal policy, and the British were very much in the habit of picking winners and losers. And typically they did just what all invading forces did, what the French and other empires did – picked the second most powerful group and put them in charge. That ensured loyalty from their functionaries, who had no desire to see their imperial masters retreat and leave the Sikhs to be suddenly vastly outnumbered and outgunned by the Hindus whom the Sikhs had been pushing around only thanks to British backing.
Yes, the Empire was famously – infamously, some say – tolerant of the Arabs in particular. But the legion of fawning Arabists in the F.O. were not nearly so tolerant of the Jews. And although you may think you have preemptively disarmed criticism on the Irish front with your sneering references to bog-trotters and such, only the most dishonest of commentators could claims with a straight face that there and elsewhere the British did not politicize or nationalize society. Or that they ruled through local elites.
Such was not the case in Australia or New Zealand, either, where the British ruled directly after smashing the local leadership, and whose languages, religions, and customs the British quite brutally suppressed. The Maori for example was a warrior race whom British military men may have quite admired, as you say. But that didn’t mean a British Governor General was going to be caught dead calling on some village chieftan wearing a grass skirt. That sort of thing might be a necessary compromise when outnumbered 500-1 by a powerful Indian potentate, but not in New Zealand and elsewhere.
So what you really mean is, when the British encountered a strongly armed Indian prince or Arab sheikh, they would allow him to swear fealty to the Queen and would rule through him. But where the locals were unorganized or outnumbered enough to be run roughshod over completely, as in Oz, that was the preferred method.
Really in fact most of your examples of “tolerance” and not remaking local customs can only apply to the Muslim world, where British romantic after romantic fell under the spell of the mysterious east. “Orientalism” as it was known was all the rage for generations, and it captured the fancies of Burton, Lawrence, and too many others to count. But such lavish affection for the customs of the locals did not carry over to the aborigines, the Maori, the Celts, or the native Americans in Canada, Guyana, British Honduras, etc.
“And between the British Empire and its enemies among the Bolsheviks, the National Socialists, the scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls, and fanatics, I know which side any true conservative should plant his colors.”
The classic false choice.
You’re not doing the cause of imperialism any good by arguing dishonestly and borderline incoherently like this. Most conservatives, probably especially what you call paleocons, are quite Anglophilic. You’re really barking up the wrong tree here. We’re quite appreciative of historical Britain in the general sense, allowing for the vast difference in worldviews between 1850 and today. But you are instead focusing on the details, details founded on the slave trade and continued into the outright theft of the Raj, and there we cannot follow you. We (I) believe that the British Empire was one of the least bad empires that thrived in the 1500-1950 period. By far the least bad in most respects, although the black legend that has falsely grown up around Spain has unfairly demonized that nation, which was far more enlightened for instance in its dealing with native Americans than were the British.
Nevertheless most of us are glad we are an offshoot of the British Empire. Glad we speak English. Glad we can lay second-generation claim to the legacy of Locke, Burke, and other democratic visionaries. Glad and grateful for Thomas Paine and our own English-American founders. We wouldn’t change a thing about the past.
But that doesn’t mean we’re not also glad to have left the Empire just when we did (before the British monarch officially became an Empress of course; but Britain was an empire de facto long before Victoria was handed India). We can admire the EFFICIENCIES of past regimes, whether it’s Caesar, the Khan, Bismarck, Victoria, and even our own FDR admin, without wanting to adopt their goals or believing we can or should apply their goals and practices to today’s world.
I believe it was Hayek who said that in America, conservatives are the liberals because conservatism won. The enlightened liberal project succeeded here long ago; while it was still (is still some places) just a theoretical proposition in Britain and the rest of Europe. Therefore conservatives here are trying to conserve the legacy of a successful democratic rebellion, not the legacy of a conquering regal empire. The classic Imperial Tory is not a role model that an American conservative of any stripe can aspire to emulate. Both may be called “conservatives,” just as a Greek and an Israeli may each be called Orthodox, but the word means very different things in the two different contexts. We’re not trying to preserve the fiction of the divine right of kings, or the notion of the citizen as subject, literally subject to his lord’s whim. We fought two wars to get away from those ideas. So no, conservatives we are, but Tories we can never be.

The fact that a thug like Robert Mugabe still has to go through the motions of having Presidential elections, or having the Supreme Court ratify his decisions says that the British planted deeply the roots of Republican Gov't and rule of law wherever they ruled, and even the likes of Mugabe can't ignore those traditions.

"But we have never nationalized one drop of oil, one grain of gold dust, or one diamond chip from our various military endeavors which are nevertheless described by our detractors as imperialist and colonialist. And realistically we’re never going to. On the contrary; when we invade somewhere, instead of taking billions out, we put billions back in to rebuild the place far better than it was before."

America existed before 1945. It did plenty of old school imperialism. Like Britain, it annexed some territories and controlled others through varying degrees of informality, local client rulers and business interests. Only the scale and timespan were smaller. And I might add that expansion to the Pacific was also a process of imperialism and colonization, involving military conquest of some lands, treaty cessions of others, war, bloodshed, and colonial settlement. The US was just lucky in facing no serious competitors for that territory from fairly early in the republic's life, and in VASTLY outnumbering the native population. That's how you end up with annexed territory integral to your country rather than territories seeking independence.

On Ireland, I am no more sure what you mean than Crocker meant about politicizing and nationalizing society. All societies have politics. And nationalism does not develop as a matter of imperial policy, but organically and as a reaction to it. And what do you mean they didn't rule through local elites? There were always top level people from England, but who do you think the landholders were? In the long centuries of Catholic England's rule of the Lordship of Ireland, the elites of Ireland were a mix of the Normans, who invaded as freebooters not English agents, and the Gaelic lords who had long been there. With some Norse hangovers. The English actually invaded because the Anglo-Norman kings didn't want loose Normans setting up a rival power, as was already happening in Scotland. But those Normans were well established as locals, and the Gaels were nigh on aboriginal. And before long, and for centuries, the Crown's hand was again light on them. When in the 1500s religion and politics altered the dynamic, things got much worse in Ireland and the nature of its elite changed, but soon enough and right through to 1800, again a local elite ruled. And even after the Union of 1801, that elite retained power.

I might even add that the only way to really analogize Ireland for today's audience is to look at Pakistan. England is the settled, rich, populous Punjab. Ireland, source of slavers and pirates and perpetually warring chieftains raiding the shores of Roman and post-Roman Britain and contributing to its collapse, and then later playing host to Norse who raided the west coasts of England and Wales, and then later still being the dreaded possible staging ground for Spanish or French invasion, never successful but often planned and attempted, is wild Pashtunistan. The debatable borderlands of eternal war, unable and unwilling to unite against its settled and richer neighbour, unable and unwilling to unite either as its friend, able to prevent its use as a weapon against that friend, and therefore bound always to be ruled and suppressed by that neighbour until it offers an alternative. Ireland, for the record, once independent as a modern country, did fulfill that bargain covertly and overtly in WW2.

This sort of thing sucks if you live in the debatable lands, but that's geography for you. And its not as though dark age Ireland treated its British neighbours kindly, as I said.

As to your comments on Australia, canada etc. Yes, these are settler countries. The local elites were settler elites. These countries are the parts of the old empire that most closely match the US experience I mentioned above. Are you SERIOUSLY suggesting that it is a valid criticism of the empire, from an AMERICAN point of view, that the empire killed a lot of aboriginal peoples and stole their countries for colonists? REALLY?

I see also that you comment on "native Americans" in my own Canada. On the whole, their lives have ranged from OK to nasty in Canada, for reasons our fault as well as not. But we killed MANY fewer of them than you all did. And the rest of our sins are identical with your own.

And in present day New Zealand, the Maoris have more numbers and cultural significance for the modern society than Indians do in the US. Hell, they officially slap the name Aotearoa on official documents alongside New Zealand. am I going to see a US law with Lakota in it soon?

No British governor ever forewent his spiffy uniforms, but they wore native decorations more than any US official ever did, and participated in more of those cultures. They kept the white uniforms in India too, but governed that and smaller places with more preservation of local law and custom. Strictly, until 1858 they ruled India as agents of the Mughal emperor, and only replaced Persian with English as official legal language in 1820. They ruled over half the subcontinent through local kings, Muslim and Hindu. They meddled and advised them much less intrusively than your typical US bureaucrat pushed around Latin presidents or until recently Arab potentates. Even later, they took care to make their ruler the Mughals' heir as Emperor, and to hold Indianish ceremonies all over the place. The progressive introduction of Western political forms was part of decolonization, not conquest.

The slave trade, really? You mean the slave trade the English plugged into that others were also using to move slaves to America, that only Britain did anything to end eventually, and which built the future of America?

I actually agree on Spain. They ran a nasty empire on many fronts but much less racist about natives, at least upper class natives. They figured all peasants were equally scum. Not that some British didn't share that view.

AS to the theft of the Raj. The East India Company held land and forts in India lawfully from the Mughal. They gained political concessions from them over time as other players in Indian politics did. They waged war as those other players did. They were better at it and ended up with the most holdings. They eventuallly seized the chance of the Mutiny to supplant the Mughal entirely, in the traditional way. And never forget that the Mughal was originally a foreigner too, albeit from just nearby. Modern nationalist ideas have twisted Indians sense of their own history and weaknesses in that period to their contemporary rhetorical advantage.

On the whole, I am with you in your characterization of America's founding era, though "democratic rebellion" might carry it a bit far. And worth adding that the declared causes of that rebellion included taxation, the Quebec Act, and British Indian policy. I sympathize with the cause of representative institutions, but the colonies didn't want to defray the costs of an imperial war fought to defend them, to eliminate the French threat that loomed over the northern colonies from the beginning, which threat at times the colonists had complained got too little consideration in London. They also condemned the Quebec Act, for which the conquered French had agitated, as though the willingness of the British to rule French Canadians through forms of government familiar to them was any business of the American population. And the American colonists also condemned British Indian policy, chiefly because they assumed the Ohio lands ought to be opened up to colonization and exploitation by the colonies. And never mind the "savages" [to use Jefferson's term} living there. [Or further west, when the time came].

Strictly, the early empire with which Americans were familiar as part of it, was the more middle class and mercantile one, founded by settler and trader companies to make money, an American idea of empire run by banks and businessmen, not so much a "conquering regal empire". The stylized second empire epitomized in India was to a large extent a playground for aristocrats whose power was slowly fading at home, hence the uniforms and grandiosity. But it too was really built by businessmen, railway moguls, shipping moguls, and other types familiar to America of the same era. Cecil Rhodes could have been an American easily.

You have no idea how much I love and support the US and its leadership role, its people and to a limited degree its culture.

I usually only take an anti-American line when my own country Canada, is taking shots on this site [Americans are free not to to adopt any of the features of our society they dislike, I merely weary of having us characterized as "communist" or what have you, or any suggestion that our society is defective until it becomes more American], or when the empire of which Canada was once a proud part takes more hits than I consider its due, especially when certain conditions apply. Those conditions include Americans taking shots at the empire for things America has also done at great length, Americans pretending their country has committed no imperialism or aggression, or, with Jefferson, exaggerating the circumstances which are cited in the Declaration of Independence as though they are comparable to the way the term "despotism" was understood before or after 1776.

That's all I'm about when I get into one of those moods.

On slavery, I have no wish or qualification to argue with your reasonable points. It was obvious by 1865 that the South had not ultimately benefited from slavery, save for the wealth of a few. But slavery did open up all that land to agriculture, the form of wealth the region was chiefly pursuing from settlement until the civil war, and opening up a large chunk of a continent to wealth producing agriculture is most certainly a form of development. This is what I alluded to. More specifically, since the charge of fomenting the slave trade [for essentially the same reason and including the Caribbean sugar islands] was correctly levied against the British Empire in the earlier comment, I thought it worth pointing out the obvious, that slavery was prominent feature of America for a long time, was prominently supported and endorsed by the colonists of a whole region, at least those running those colonies, and persisted after independence because they considered it benefited them.

I merely did not are for the previous commenter implying that slavery was somehow more a British sin than anyone else's let alone more than an American one.

What would you call the United States' westward expansion at the hands of the Indians if not imperialism? I have no issue with it (in fact I think those that do are idiots not fit to live among civilized men), but the United States most definitely conquered and destroyed other cultures in the push to the Pacific.

Part of it was cultural timing.

The British Empire expanded at a time when we Brits considered it very important for a man to be morally good.

This was part of the Empire's success. Men who behaved dishonourably, whether to natives or to other Englishmen/Scots/Welshmen/Irishmen, faced immense social disgrace. The people of the Empire respected their administrators as men of great moral rectitude.

Bad behaviour was not glamorised by the culture of the time. Men did not aspire to be Jesse James, or John Dillinger, or Weather Underground, or gangster rappers. It was socially important for a man to be fair, honourable and virtuous.

This culture has largely collapsed in the West, except in Christian America. Few men care whether they are good...they care more that they are rich.

I think Nobel prize winner Liu Xiaobo had the same points in mind wishing that China had benefited from an additional 200 years of colonialism. He infuriated the Chicomms and western liberals alike.