3 THE CIVILIZATION GAME

In February 1901, a month after the start of a new century, Samuel Clemens took a moment to reflect on the last. He was perhaps the most qualified man to do so. Clemens, aka Mark Twain, had seen more of the Victorian world than anyone, traveling across the United States in the days before the transcontinental railroad and around the world (twice) in his old age.

But most of all, through his endless perambulations and interactions with a good part of the globe, Twain had seen more of that elusive animal called civilization than any of his peers. By 1901 he had seen too much. With his usual caustic wit, he told his fellow Americans: “Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked—but not enough, in my judgement, to make any considerable risk advisable.” The imagery was biblical—Matthew 4:16. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” It was a favorite quotation among missionaries and empire builders. Rudyard Kipling invoked it in his famous exhortation of the “White Man’s Burden”:

Take up the White Man’s Burden,

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better

The hate of those ye guard—

The cry of those ye humor

(Ah slowly) to the light:

“Why brought ye us from bondage.

“Our loved Egyptian night?”

Twain was unimpressed. He had seen how the English ruled their empire with a combination of condescension and brutality. He quoted a recent dispatch from a private in the Boer War: “We tore up the hill and into the intrenchments, and the Boers saw we had them; so they dropped their guns and went down on their knees and put up their hands clasped, and begged for mercy.

They look doubtful, but in reality they are not. There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us…but each detail was for the best…. This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice, cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing. It knows what it is about. Give yourself no uneasiness; it is all right.[2]

How had things gone so disastrously wrong? How had the concept of natural rights, which seemed in 1800 to herald a new Age of Enlightenment, become so warped by 1900 as to be an instrument of oppression? Twain, though an eyewitness to the result, had not been present at the start. The Victorian era was the watershed moment when social reform and imperialism buried natural law beneath an avalanche of dubious new “rights” and supplanted it on the global stage with the amorphous concept of civilization. The consequences remain with us to this day.

By 1794, translations of the Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man had circulated throughout Latin America, inflaming insurrectos like Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin.

A similar transformation had taken place in England and on the Continent. The Prussian Allgemeines Landrecht (General Law of the Land) stated in its preface that “the general rights of the individual rest upon his natural freedom to pursue and promote his own welfare, without injury to the rights of others.”[4] The Napoleonic Code, established in 1804, declared that “the exercise of civil rights is independent of the quality of citizen, which is only acquired and preserved conformably to the constitutional law.”[5] As with Blackstone, it divided the laws into categories conforming to natural rights of life, liberty, and property and proceeded to spell out the civil law in each with exhaustive detail. Unlike revolutionary declarations, however, there was no invocation to that “universal and unchanging law, the source of all positive laws, none other than natural reason.” The code was a much more workmanlike document. “The laws,” it began bluntly, “are executory throughout the whole French territory, by virtue of the promulgation made thereof by the first consul.”

In these early years of the nineteenth century, even revolutionary language continued to be couched in familiar terms of natural right. The Chartist movement, which flamed briefly in England in the late 1830s, sought a new constitution for the British people modeled in part on the American example. “The universal political right of every human being,” it maintained, “is superior and stands apart from all customs, forms, or ancient usage; a fundamental right not in the power of man to confer, nor justly to deprive him of.”[6] In an 1837 petition, Chartists called for, among other things, universal suffrage and equal representation in parliament.

That would soon change. Observing the revolutions that peppered the Continent between 1820 and 1848, German economist Karl Marx drew some conclusions. Even revolutionaries, he declared, were immersed in “a cult of law, a cult of the State.”[7] They argued for radical change using the same ossified lexicon as their oppressors. Natural rights, Marx concluded, were nothing but a bourgeois construct designed to maintain its control over humanity through the promulgation of false goals for the masses. “Freedom” was defined in political rather than social terms, but real freedom, according to Marx, began with self-sufficiency. What good did it do a man to have the right to vote if he was denied the ability to feed his family, or himself?

Marx’s contemporary, Friedrich Engels, agreed. Universality was a myth—and a convenient one, as it kept the working class falsely content with their lot. Rights, he maintained, “varied so much from nation to nation and from age to age that they have been in direct contradiction to each other.”[8] Morality was a construct as well, emerging from a particular class at a particular moment in history. Contrary to religious teachings or Enlightenment philosophy, Engels declared, “all moral theories are the product, in the last analysis, of the economic stage which society has reached at that particular epoch. And as society has hitherto moved into class antagonisms, morality was always a class morality.”[9]

Events favored this new relativism. The disparities between rich and poor in the West had always been great, but not so great that a universal language of rights was incompatible. There had been a merchant class and a planter class, and lesser cognates of each. As such, a townsman and a farmer might have different lives, but they understood one another.

From these stark inequalities came a new understanding of rights. “Property is theft!” Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared in 1840.[11] Rights bound humanity together, he wrote, but property by its very nature created divisions. In a state constructed on Enlightenment principles of law, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau once argued, the individual should exist in as much liberty as in a state of nature. Each person within the state enjoyed the same liberty and security as any other, but the right to own property was not the same as the right to property itself. No one had any natural rights to property, only the same theoretical right to acquire it. Yet, as Proudhon argued, right and ability were not synonymous: the working classes often had no ability to purchase land, even if they had the “right” to do so. Conversely, Marx and Engels charged, the natural right of property had become an economic weapon wielded by the ruling classes against the proletariat.

Numerous legal texts from Grotius to Blackstone spoke of citizens’ “enjoyment” of their natural rights. But according to Marx and Engels, the rights to life, liberty, and security required a foundation of economic and social security in order to be enjoyed. From this basic premise came an ultimate division between that which the state may not deny the individual (natural, or “negative,” rights) and that which the state has the obligation to provide (social, or “positive” rights). Now Pandora’s box was opened. If the state had certain positive obligations toward its citizens, what were they? Not all answers emerged from the Marxist handbook. In an age of reform, starch-shirted Victorian crusaders argued passionately for the “right” of the working class to an education, to public libraries and universities, to parks and museums and other temples of the spirit. The horrendous conditions of the slums sparked calls for the right to clean water, natural light, and fireproof buildings. And, of course, working conditions in the factories brought forth an entirely new language of rights: wage minimums, workday hours, child labor, safe conditions, and so on.

Not all (nor even most) of these cries for reform came from socialists. Victorians saw the charitable state as an extension of the charitable home: just as each person sought the good for themselves and their family, Christian duty required that they seek it for the community as well. Public buildings became temples dedicated to this new reformist zeal, from libraries modeled on the Parthenon to firehouses with garish neo-Gothic battlements. This was the architecture of ennoblement: each building symbolized the higher purpose behind its function. Railway stations were quite literally cathedrals to progress. Even prisons, hospitals, and insane asylums were transformed into palaces of rehabilitation. Thus the definition of “rights” gained almost limitless elasticity: a right was anything that, if enjoyed by all, served the public good.

New rights encouraged new claimants. Unmoored from natural law, this new generation argued that each individual within a society could advance certain rights subjective to their station. Hence the factory worker enjoyed certain rights as a worker, which would be neither needed nor sought by an aristocrat. In that year of revolutions, 1848, another revolt was taking shape that would ultimately eclipse them all. At the Seneca Falls Convention, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton offered a devastating summary of how their rights as women had been trampled by men for millennia. It was all the more fascinating for its joint advocacy of traditional rights under natural law and new positive ones:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her…. He has compelled her to submit to law, in the formation of which she had no voice. He has withheld for her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners…. He closes against her all the avenues of wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself…. He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.[13]

The nineteenth-century extension of rights was not merely in response to Marx or Engels; social advocates like Thomas John Barnardo and Florence Nightingale did not speak through a mouthpiece of Marxism. Advocacy was broader and more diverse than any political or economic theory could encompass. But it is certainly true that socialism and communism emerged from the same overarching societal impulse that dominated the age: reform. Reform could mean all things to all people. For Chartists in England and their contemporaries in the Dorr War in Rhode Island, it meant extending suffrage; for Stanton and Cady, it meant egalitarianism between the sexes; for the myriad Christian and secular organizations throughout America, Britain, and the Continent, it meant anything from temperance to postal laws to clean hospital beds.

Yet for much of the century, on the international scene, reform meant slavery. As discussed in the previous chapter, slavery had long been a sore point for legal theorists, as it appeared to violate not just one but every natural right. Grotius abandoned his customary cool logic to make the utterly spurious claim that Africans chose to be slaves. A highly selective understanding seemed to reinforce this view: the Spanish and Portuguese, arriving in West Africa in the early 1600s, discovered a common practice among tribes of enslaving those captured in battle. This had been common in the West also, when Rome paraded her captives through the streets of the Forum, but such unpleasant realities were best forgotten. One of the crowning ironies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was that both slavery and the theory of natural rights flourished in perfect juxtaposition.[14]

Aside from Quakers and other splinter sects, the first significant voice of dissent came from none other than William Blackstone. In the first edition of his Commentaries, published in 1765, Blackstone declared that “a slave or a negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws and with regard to all natural rights becomes eo instanti a freeman.”[15] This was charming but untrue. No such understanding existed in England, where slaves—especially in major cities like London—were commonplace. Moreover, Blackstone draws an odd distinction between English soil and English law: even if such persons were freed once they reached England, what about all those territories under English jurisdiction? These included Barbados, Jamaica, Virginia, and the Carolinas, all of whose economies depended upon slave labor.

Blackstone’s edict was finally given form in a 1772 case, Somerset v. Stewart. On the question of whether a slave was presumed free upon arriving in Britain, Lord Mansfield declared he must be: no law establishing the legality of slavery had ever existed in the country, and in the absence of law one must look to those rights and freedoms that did exist. These spelled out quite clearly the natural rights of all persons—black or white—within England. Mansfield was careful to draw a distinction between the isles and the colonies, where such positive law legitimizing slavery had been enacted by colonial assemblies. Nevertheless, the Somerset case had the effect of a warning knell. Slavery was “so odious” and contrary to natural law, wrote Mansfield, that it could only persist until right-thinking legislators disposed of it.[16]

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, this legal reform became a crusade. A faction of Parliament, led by the charismatic William Wilberforce, campaigned to extend Mansfield’s ban to the whole of the British slave trade. Their efforts bore fruit with the passage of the Slave Act of 1807, which declared the trade an offense to natural law and the law of nations. But that was only the beginning. It soon became clear that banning British merchants merely encouraged other nations to carry slaves—a fear that had been articulated forcefully by opponents of the bill in Parliament. Hence after 1807 Britain turned her efforts to enforcing a general ban throughout the world.[17] This sweeping policy must be understood in context. From the French Revolution of 1789 to the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at Waterloo in 1815, the whole of Europe and much of the globe was convulsed by war. Britain’s slave-trade ban was only as effective as its ability to compel other nations to follow suit, which was limited. Denmark freed its slaves in 1794, but few others joined it. France, which had abolished slavery under the revolutionary government that same year, reestablished it under Napoleon in 1803. Also in 1794, the United States Congress set a deadline for the ban of the slave trade by American vessels (though not slavery itself) by 1808. In 1806 President Jefferson, a slave owner himself, urged the Congress to hurry things along: “I congratulate you, fellow-citizens, on the approach of the period at which you may interpose your authority constitutionally, to withdraw the citizens of the United States from all further participation in those violations of human rights which have been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa.”[18] Jefferson’s invocation of “human rights” is fascinating but vague: is it the natural rights of the Africans that are being violated, or is it the deleterious effect on the souls of the slave trader that has him concerned?

Britain’s ban on the trade continued to reverberate. An 1823 case before the Supreme Court, In re Antelope, argued the claim that the slave trade was an offense to the law of nations, no different than piracy, and thus illegal even in states which had not officially abolished it. Claimants raised the example of pirates who as hostis humani generi (enemies of the human race) were subject to universal jurisdiction—in effect, international criminals. So too, they maintained, were slavers. The Marshall court reluctantly disagreed. While it concurred that the trade was abhorrent to natural law, that understanding had not become so universal as to elevate it to the law of nations. It left open the possibility for such an understanding in the future, however.[19]

By the 1820s the abolitionist campaign altered focus. How could Britain abolish slavery within its borders and its fleet, yet allow it in colonies under British law? This was a delicate matter, as reformers soon discovered. Attempts to enforce the trade ban encountered fierce local resistance in the Caribbean, where planters in Trinidad and Barbados openly bartered with smugglers as colonial governors looked the other way. Parliament passed strengthening legislation in 1811 and 1815 imposing criminal fines for purchasing contraband slaves, but this had little effect. In the 1820s the Colonial Office adopted a different tack, encouraging gradual emancipation by drafting a model law and circulating it through the colonies. Except for tiny Nevis, every British colony ignored the bill or openly rejected it.[20]

Such intransigence hardened the government’s resolve. When the Whigs returned to power under Charles Grey in 1830, they did so under a banner of reform. The Reform Act of 1832, hailed as the most sweeping reordering of government since the Glorious Revolution, extended the franchise and abolished the so-called “rotten boroughs” that had allowed privileged families to elect themselves unopposed to Parliament. In 1834, Grey channeled this same spirit of reform toward the colonies. Frustrated by colonial foot-dragging, Parliament finally declared the abolition of slavery throughout the empire on August 1, 1834. As historian G. M. Trevelyan grandly phrased it, “All slaves under the British flag were to become free. On the last night of slavery, the negroes in our West Indian islands went up to the hill-tops to watch the sun rise, bringing them freedom as its first rays struck the waters.”[21]

Emancipation in the empire and Britain’s efforts to curtail the slave trade around the globe were a milestone in the history of natural law. For the first time, a nation had advanced the proposition that natural rights were enforceable the world over and undertook to do exactly that. Moreover, the sweeping abolition of slavery in the colonies represented a stern moral lesson: some behavior, no matter how deeply ingrained in local society or beneficial to local economies (or even, indeed, to the British economy) was simply beyond the pale of the law. This should have been an unalloyed triumph, an extension of the same principles that animated the legal and political revolutions of the last century. Yet the precedent held another meaning. Once reform had been introduced to the empire through the abolition of slavery, it cleared a broad path; “reform” was a suitably elastic term for almost any social, political, economic, religious, or cultural interference.

The implications were not lost on William Wilberforce. The same man who ended the British slave trade turned his attention to India in 1813. Decrying the “moral pollution” of Hindu and Moslem society, he declared in a breathless rush: “Must we not…endeavor to raise these wretched beings out of their present miserable condition, and above all, to communicate to them those blessed truths which would not only improve their understandings and elevate their minds, but would, in ten thousand ways, promote their temporal wellbeing and point out to them a sure path to everlasting happiness?”[22] That was a tall order even for an empire. Fortunately for Wilberforce, his brother-in-law, James Stephen, had recently been appointed undersecretary and chief counselor to the Colonial Office. Described by one historian as “an unbending busybody” in whom “pedantry and priggishness were more than balanced by a sense of moral obligation toward alien races under the British flag,” Stephen soon gained the nickname Mr. Mother Country.[23] Championing Edmund Burke’s principle that Britain should adopt a policy of benevolent trusteeship toward her colonies, Stephen and his colleagues in the Colonial Office went further. They resolved to raise the banner of reform in every British territory, until the whole of the empire was legally, culturally, and morally indistinguishable from Britain herself.

This secular crusade mirrored an ecclesiastic one of even longer heritage. “Behold!” cried Reverend Samuel Marsden, wading ashore in New Zealand in 1814 and encountering a group of bemused Maoris, “I bring you glad tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!” Long before the British government (or any government, for that matter) became concerned with the manners and souls of their imperial subjects, Protestant missionaries had already staked their claim. This reformist zeal traced itself as far back as the Puritan colony of Massachusetts: its colonial seal featured a Native American with a ribbon of speech pouring from his mouth and encircling him like ectoplasm: “Come Over And Help Us.”[24] Nor was the English case singular. A papal edict of 1492 gave unlimited title of any conquered lands to Spain and Portugal, provided they convert the indigenous populations to Catholicism. The Protestants were simply following the same path.

While such efforts had been underway for centuries, Christian proselytizing in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries emerged from the same rich soil of reform as abolitionism. In less than a decade during the 1790s, London alone produced the Baptist Missionary Society, London Missionary Society, Church Missionary Society, and British and Foreign Bible Society. These societies were often far in advance of the British government in what they saw as the protection of native peoples. In 1837, for example, the Colonial Office proposed the New Zealand Association, which provided for the establishment of an inspector of natives and pledged that 10 percent of all lands would be set aside as native reserves. Not good enough, the Church Missionary Society answered. If the government could only “let the Mission have its free and unrestricted course for half a century or more…the great political and moral problem will be solved—of a people passing from a barbarous to a civilized state.”[25]

It is worth considering for a moment what that transmutation actually entailed. Theoretically, any aboriginal that embraced Christianity was “civilized,” but they could not do so unless they could read the Bible for themselves. Nor could they participate in the greater community until they learned its language, manners, and dress. The Age of Reform in the colonies thus welded preexisting Christian norms of morality and cultural practice with a more generalized and secular “civilization” that included recognition and adoption of natural rights. The result—with railway lines and other modern mechanical marvels thrown in—was a holistic vision of reform extending to every aspect of aboriginal life.

The wondrous thing about civilization was that, having absorbed Christian values, it no longer depended on Christianity. Even a confirmed skeptic like John Stuart Mill found a utilitarian argument in favor of imperialism. “This mode of government,” he wrote in 1861, “is as legitimate as any other, if it is the one which in the existing state of civilization of the subject people, most facilitates their transition to a higher stage of improvement.”[26] In another article published the same year, he developed this secular civilizing philosophy yet further:

It is a step, as far as it goes, towards universal peace and generally friendly cooperation among nations…and in the case of the British possessions it has the advantage, specially valuable at the present time, of adding to the moral influence and weight in the councils of the world, of the Power which, of all in existence, best understands liberty.[27]

The logical gymnastics required for such a statement—that the nation that best understands liberty is best equipped for world domination—must be understood in the context of its time. In an age of railroads and steamships, telegraphs and stock exchanges, the developed world had little patience for the undeveloped. “The right of savages to the soil they occupy,” German socialist Eduard Bernstein wrote, was conditional on its use. If they did nothing with it, they derived no use from it, and therefore were not owners but squatters.[28] Bernstein may thus be credited for having provided, ex post facto, a justification for Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830. Another prominent socialist, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, lampooned the smug certainty of the colonizers with his customary caustic wit. The Englishman, he wrote,

is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the Gospel of Peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defense of Christianity…and takes the market as a reward from heaven.

Yet Shaw, too, endorsed colonization, so long as it was a force of “civilization.”[29]

Civilization, like its brother reform, had no ontological reality; it could mean all things to all people. Socialists saw well-organized states administering vast territories for the good of all; capitalists saw untapped markets; missionaries saw a holistic community of the saved, and so on. Inasmuch as the old, narrow timbers of natural law could still be found within this monumental edifice, they were best identified in the late-nineteenth-century concept of “liberal imperialism.” Liberalism, which in England represented the voice of social justice and equal protection under the law, had global potential. Recall Blackstone’s snarky comment that, although natural law existed everywhere in the world, England was the only nation that recognized the fact. The logical argument went thus: As Cicero once posited that only rational minds could discern natural law, thus it followed that only rational cultures could do so. A society hidebound by collective ignorance or superstition was as willfully blind to the law as a child. Just as the state bore the responsibility of educating every child, so too must the empire educate its unlettered multitudes. The first and best way was by example. “By bringing European gentlemen into direct and immediate contact with those of our new subjects who are yet unacquainted with our character,” an early colonial wrote from Delhi, “their minds would be conciliated and a groundwork laid for the introduction of our financial and judicial system.”[30]

It is easy to read smugness into such declarations and dismiss them accordingly. Yet however they might sound today, one cannot deny the fervency with which such views were held by the lawgivers or the determination they brought to the task. British officials tasked with bringing law to the hinterlands often found themselves confronting beliefs and practices more appalling than any early Christian missionary could have imagined. And, like St. Boniface among the Frisians, they soon learned that condemnation alone would not get them very far. When company representative John Campbell reached southern Orissa, he found the Kond peoples routinely kidnapping children from other villages, drugging them, and cutting them to pieces in religious rituals. Campbell’s response was a miracle of restraint. “The superstition of ages cannot be eradicated in a day,” he lectured his superiors. Rather than condemn, he sat amongst the Konds and shared with them that ancient Britons had once sacrificed humans also. “We were fools then and ignorant.” Then, adopting the tone and tenor of the Konds themselves, he made each of them take a handful of rice and earth and solemnly declare, “May the earth refuse its produce, rice choke me, water drown me, and tiger devour me and my children if ever I break the oath…to abstain from sacrifice of human beings.” It worked.[31] His example was soon followed by dozens of other administrators, and many egregious cultural practices, including ritualized murder and mutilation, began to decline. Even today it is hard to argue against the efforts of men like Campbell; such examples echo more recent debates over female genital mutilation, for example, and how far states may go in condemning or curbing it. That ethical problem did not exist for empire builders in the nineteenth century. “High-principled aristocrats from Britain’s political elite,” historian Lawrence James describes them. “They saw themselves not as India’s conquerors but as its emancipators.”[32]

Intertwined with yet distinct from Christian proselytizing, Liberal imperialism borrowed from enlightened rationalism and Victorian reform to present a vision of the world disenthralled from ancient superstition and barbarity, joined together by glittering bands of commerce and law. At the apogee of the empire this became a rallying cry: export Bibles and shirtwaists and railway lines and rights. A global empire meant not only that Britain had the ability to universalize natural rights but the obligation to do so. The Liberal politician Archibald Primrose, fifth Earl of Rosebery, expressed it thus: “We have to consider what countries must be developed by ourselves or by some other nation, and we have to remember that it is part of our heritage to take care that the world as far as it can be moulded by us, shall receive an English-speaking complexion, and not that of other nations.”[33] In 1900, as a new century loomed, Lord Rosebery looked with paternal pride upon the imperial achievements of the last. Chief among these, he argued, was the spread of English law:

How marvelous it all is. Built not by saints and angels, but the work of men’s hands cemented with men’s honest blood…not without taint and reproach incidental to all human work, but constructed on the whole with pure and splendid purpose. Human and yet not wholly human, for the most heedless and the most cynical must see the finger of the Divine.[34]

Even as Britain’s political leaders placed themselves among the cherubim and seraphim, the architecture of empire served to reinforce these lofty aspirations. T. Robert Smith addressed the London Society of Arts in 1873 on the subject of public buildings in New Delhi. These, he insisted, must “be European both as a rallying point for ourselves, and as raising a distinctive symbol of our presence to be beheld with respect and even with admiration by the natives…. [Such buildings must] embody the idea of law and order which has been produced out of chaos by the British administration.”[35] Victoria Railway Station in Bombay, completed in the jubilee year 1887, was a product of this philosophy. Railways, like the law, combined pragmatic, symbolic, and societal purposes. Ostensibly they facilitated the movement of goods, people, and, if necessary, soldiers. Yet overlying this basic function was a high gloss of progressive morality: train tracks cleaved like gleaming scythes through ignorance, poverty, and paganism, enveloping every community they reached in the greater civilization. “Railways,” reformer Charles Trevelyan declared in 1854, “will be the great destroyer of caste, and the greatest missionary of all.”[36]

Accordingly, British architects in Bombay demolished an ancient shrine to the goddess Mumba Devi and replaced it with a giant steel temple encased by a riot of crenelated neo-Gothic fantasy. Whiskered effigies of the company directors beamed benevolently from the rafters on the tumult below. But from chaos, order: the crowd, for all its heterodox color and noise, moved by the predetermined, civilized rhythm of the railway clock at the heart of the station. Beneath the clock was a giant marble statue of Queen Victoria. It rested almost exactly on the spot of Mumba Devi’s ravished shrine.[37]

Something similar took place in the law, underscoring the vast gulf between theory and practice. The Charter Act of 1833, coming one year after the seminal Reform Bill of 1832 and described as “a watershed in the legal history of India,” attempted to ship and reassemble reform in the most far-flung reaches of the empire. The East India Company, which had maintained dictatorial control for almost two centuries, was reconstructed along much narrower lines, and the governor-general of Bengal—a minor functionary—became the infinitely more powerful governor-general of India. “Regulations,” a company term, were replaced by “laws.” All colonial government was to be centralized under imperial authority, with the same body of laws applicable throughout the Raj. Indian judges were to be appointed to determine the common law, exactly as in Britain herself. In sum, as one historian describes it, “the gate was thrown open for the liberal spirit of the British Parliament to travel through the [Colonial] Secretary to India.”[38]

The Charter Act was no mere reworking of company governance but a foundation for an entirely new legal relationship—to be placed alongside the Massachusetts Bay Company Charter of 1623 or even the “Great Charter” of 1215. The intent, M. P. Jain writes, was to create “a positive obligation on the government to provide for the protection of natives from insult and outrage in their persons, properties, religions and opinions”[39]—in other words, natural rights. Still, there were limitations. The charter theoretically abolished racial categorization, yet in 1853 the chairman of the Indian Law Commission noted resignedly that “during the last twenty years not a single native has been appointed to any office except such as were eligible before the statute.” In response, the Indian Civil Service Act of 1853 introduced competitive examinations that were judged blind. Additional acts passed that same year formally established new penal, civil, and criminal procedural codes, which had been commissioned by the 1833 charter but then allowed to fall into desuetude.

Parliamentary reform could only do so much, however. The ultimate responsibility for the laws lay with local administration, where racial prejudice and outright cruelty continued unabated. Indian resentment at decades of broken promises, double-dealing, and cultural annihilation culminated in the Mutiny of 1857, which saw thousands of Indian militiamen turn on their British commanders and attempt, futilely, to restore independence. The revolt was short and bloody, and its suppression left a legacy of disillusionment and bitterness on both sides. Parliament did what it could. A general amnesty was declared in November 1858. That same month, Queen Victoria intervened personally on behalf of her captive subjects. Rejecting an earlier draft of a proclamation reestablishing royal authority in the dominions, the Queen warned the Colonial Office that it must “[bear] in mind that it is a female sovereign who speaks to more than a hundred million of Eastern people, on assuming direct government over them after a bloody war, giving them pledges, which her future reign is to redeem.” She then made clear what those pledges entailed:

Such a document should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence and religious toleration, and point out the privileges which the Indians will receive in being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown, and the prosperity following in the train of civilization.[40]

The result of this extraordinary command was the Queen’s Proclamation of 1858, a singular document which functioned as a kind of Magna Carta for the Raj. In 1215, it was the barons that forced a reluctant King John to swear an oath upholding ancient rights and privileges; this time, the sovereign impressed such rights on her government and its officers. The provisions were startling, invoking both ancient natural law and modern (almost prescient) cultural awareness:

(g) We shall respect the rights, dignity and honour of our Native Princes as our own, and we desire that they as well as our own subjects, should enjoy that prosperity and that social advancement which can be secured by eternal peace and good government.

(h) We hold ourselves bound to the natives of our Indian territories by the same obligations of duty which bind us to all our other subjects.

(i) We disclaim alike the right and the desire to impose our religious convictions on any of our subjects. We will not interfere with the religious beliefs and modes of worship of our subjects….

(k) In framing and administering the law, due regard will be paid to the ancient rights, usages and customs of India.[41]

Had anyone but the queen advocated these reforms, they would instantly have been branded a heretic and possibly a traitor as well. The proclamation was a shocking refutation of civilization, in the received nineteenth-century understanding of the term. In contrast to Thomas Jones Barker’s famous painting The Secret of England’s Greatness, which depicted Victoria bestowing a Bible upon an amazed East African, here the sovereign in no uncertain terms rejected the missionary purpose that had long underlain Britain’s colonization scheme. In the same breath she also granted local autonomy, due process of law, and—incredibly—deference to custom. This was a natural-rights document in the purest sense, an anomaly among the volumes of imperial legislation. “Its only fault indeed,” historian Wilfrid Blunt remarked, “has been that it has never been carried out.”[42]

That fault was universal. In London, earnest reformers could see for themselves the fruits of their labors, but in India and the empire all legislation—altruistic or otherwise—ultimately came down to local enforcement. When Mohandas Gandhi left India in 1893 to take a position at a law firm in Durban, South Africa, his first court appearance came to a sudden end when the presiding judge demanded he remove his turban. On the train to Pretoria he was ejected from first class, despite purchasing a ticket. A year later he was organizing an Indian Congress in Natal, and in 1914 he returned to India to continue the struggle for civil rights.[43] While Gandhi might never actually have said that Western civilization “would be a good idea,” he certainly agreed with the sentiment.

The racism and class prejudice Gandhi observed was more systemic than the law itself. “The Hindu,” one governor-general observed in 1814, “appears a being nearly limited to animal functions, and even in them indifferent.”[44] The dapper colonial secretary of Victoria’s later reign, Joseph Chamberlain, agreed. “You cannot make omelets without breaking eggs,” he declared, “You cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition…without the use of force.”[45] Chamberlain’s triad is revealing: barbarism, loosely defined as to apply to almost any offensive cultural practice; slavery, in direct reference to the roots of imperial reform; and superstition, which his listeners understood to mean all “pagan” faiths. It was as neat and concise a rejection of the queen’s 1858 proclamation as could be found, yet by that time—1895—the question of cultural deference was largely moot.

Meanwhile, a counterrevolution had been quietly brewing in British political circles. Almost from its inception, Liberal imperialism was roundly critiqued by conservatives as idealistic and dangerous nonsense. Following Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution, they remained skeptical of holistic efforts to remake societies; better, they said, to let social institutions evolve organically—or, better still, remain unchanged. Inherently classist themselves, conservatives regarded India’s caste system as a mark of civilization rather than backwardness. Thus men like Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, became unlikely cultural relativists. India’s rich tapestry of cultures, beliefs, and practices enchanted rather than repulsed them, and as imperial overseers they favored a much more hands-off approach that encouraged profit over reform and gave greater legal authority to the nawabs. The Iron Duke famously opposed the India Bill of 1833, even its laudable intention of abolishing slavery throughout the empire. It was Britain’s duty, he proclaimed, to “uphold the ancient laws, customs and religions of the country,” even when doing so might be personally abhorrent.[46] This laissez-faire attitude was more reactionary than progressive; the duke also loathed that great engine of civilization, railways, as they “encouraged the lower classes to move about.” He was referring to the British lower classes.

Even those Englishmen who admitted, with Lord Rosebery, that their imperial model was “not without taint” still viewed it as a paragon compared with others. The German kaiser, arriving late in the game but with a show of force, unleashed the full might of the Deutsches Heer on a small tribe of West Africans that had resisted German expropriation of their land and cattle; 65,000 Herero people, or roughly three-fourths of the total population, were slaughtered between 1904 and 1907, an act which is often called the first genocide of the twentieth century. “The Kaiser went to playing the game without first mastering it,” Mark Twain derided.

By the end of the century, the base hypocrisy of civilization was laid bare for all to see. Twain cannily described the difference between pretense and reality as between the cover and contents of a book. “Privately and confidentially,” he wrote, “[civilization] is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. That Actual Thing is, indeed, Civilization, but it is only for Export. Is there a difference between the two brands? In some of the details, yes.” What did the outside cover promise? “LOVE, JUSTICE, GENTLENESS, CHRISTIANITY, PROTECTION OF THE WEAK, LAW AND ORDER, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, HONORABLE DEALING, MERCY, EDUCATION, and so on.” Inside, however, was nothing but tyranny and toil. Why, he wrote with heavy irony, was the civilization business falling into such disrepute? “It is because our Mr. McKinley, and Mr. Chamberlain, and the Kaiser, and the Czar and the French have been exporting the Actual Thing with the outside cover left off.”

Mark Twain’s warning still resonates. The Victorians radically redefined understandings of rights, and we live in their shadow. At home, reform became Reform, as advocates for social justice and social welfare joined a growing chorus of political agitators demanding change. Some changes were incremental and benign, like Sunday holidays or safer working conditions. Others, advanced by Marx, Engels, and Proudhon, called for nothing less than a complete restructuring of society. Yet the cumulative effect was to drown natural rights in a deluge of new freedoms and privileges. Moreover, Marx’s critique of traditional rights as ersatz egalitarianism began to resonate. Ordinary people, even those un-persuaded by the lure of socialism, nevertheless began to see rights not as something shared but something unique to each. One enjoyed their rights as a laborer, for example—distinctions of station determined which rights each individual should possess. The result was a universal clamor for recognition composed of a numberless crowd of diverse claimants.

Such is the case today. In the United States, we possess those rights guaranteed by the Constitution, which are mostly natural rights. Yet we may also advance additional claims unique to our status as a disabled person, or a person of color, or a Christian, or an LGBTQ individual, and so on. Many of these claims are simply for equal treatment under the law, but not all. Consider, for example, the plethora of religious exemption cases now working their way through the courts. Does baking a cake violate someone’s rights “as a Christian”? Should adoption agencies be permitted to turn away LGBTQ applicants because of faith? The distinction here is that these individuals argue for more rights than others; special exceptions, not equality. Similarly, the nineteenth century introduced the idea of positive rights: standards of living the state is required to provide. Do we have a “right” to Social Security, welfare, health insurance, unemployment benefits? If some of these may still seem contentious, what about free education, fire departments, public transit, highways, or air traffic controllers? No one would seriously maintain that American citizens don’t deserve the right to an education, but upon what basis is that right advanced?

Just as reform revolutionized rights at home, civilization did so abroad. The greatest legacy of imperialism is a deep distrust and cynicism by the non-Western world for any attempt to critique or alter cultural practices. One can hardly blame them. The “blessings of civilization” were shoddy wares, as Twain pithily describes. The laudable goal of ending slavery was wedded to the equally laudable goal of spreading universal human rights. But from there things went astray: “civilization” came to mean everything from Bibles to railroads to corsets. Worse still, these “advances” were not shared with captive peoples but impressed on them. Victoria Railway Station (now called Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) was a metaphor in more ways than one: forcing natives to conform to the dictates of the railway clock; placing the white, Western railway executives as demigods above the horde; dominating the cityscape with its distinctly Gothic presence; and, most telling of all, obliterating the local goddess and replacing her with a new statue to venerate—the goddess of Progress, standing atop the station’s highest spire. So too did imperial law transform into something wholly different from the common law. Law was the principal conduit of civilization, the medium by which, as Chamberlain described it, old barbarisms and superstitions would be utterly erased. The core of legal universalism—that every human on earth is deserving of natural rights—came to be supplanted by a new concept: peoples could only enjoy their natural rights once they understood them. Understanding meant education, which meant conformity with Western norms.

In sum, the Victorians left us two tasks. First, we must distinguish negative and positive rights; more specifically, we need to draw distinctions between fundamental rights and other rights, liberties, and privileges. This does not mean abandoning the latter, at home or abroad. It does, however, mean establishing a core list of natural rights that we commit ourselves to defending regardless of circumstance. Second, and relatedly, we must find a way of articulating this language of rights that does not emerge from, or may be blamed on, imperialism. Rights have too often been a Trojan horse for interference and exploitation. When the United States articulates its vision of human rights in the next decade, it must pledge itself as Queen Victoria did to a basic recognition of cultural differences. And we need to “carry it out”: ultimately our actions will demonstrate fidelity more than any protestations of intent. At present the world does not trust the West, and the West has given them little reason to.

The blessings of civilization were a curse on the colonizers as well as the colonized, and the curse is still with us.