The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (W W Norton & Company; 1998)

EMPIRE AND AFTER^427

often resented the traders as crass and rude, greedy and importunate.
Too bad. Businessmen were only too ready to go "outside channels"
and appeal direcdy to London or Paris, where money counted.
Besides, officials had their own care for promotions and enrichment.
Empire drew such types, men who did not want to spend their lives as
magistrate in some bucolic home county, men of pride and power and,
if we are to believe the reports, men sometimes drawn by the sexual
ambiguities and freedoms of an interracial, anomic world. These were
not healthful climes, and many an official died early; they drank like
fish, and alcohol is a poison. But vigorous, mettlesome men think
themselves immortal. Meanwhile they spoke of "duty" and "improve­
ment"—a "call" to higher things.^6
Higher things included conquest, "dominion over palm and pine."
The sages in the Colonial Office might try to leash agents abroad, but
it took months for instructions to arrive, plenty of time for the fait ac­
compli. "Peccavi [I have sinned]," wrote Sir Charles Napier to his su­
periors in London—a one-word pun to soften his disobedience in
taking Sindh in 1842 in the face of explicit orders to the contrary. So
over the centuries, bit by bit and bite by bite, the British, for example,
found themselves picking up large and small pieces of territory: the
whole of India, much of Burma, Canada all the way to the Pacific,
Australia and New Zealand, plus watering holes and refueling stations,
strategic power points, refuges along the major trade routes and on the
periphery of great markets (thus Gibraltar, Malta, St. Helena,
Capetown, Bombay, Singapore, Hong Kong, Aden). Such places paid
their cost and made a string of pearls around the globe. Some of them
were prizes of imperial ambition; others, of mercantile interest. But at
bottom, all of them were the reward of superior power. *

In the old days, students of world (or European) history learned of

"Old" and "New" empires. The old were the territories taken from

build. ..." At the end of two years of this, this toady was peremptorily fired. In mit­
igation, Sir George was acting in the best English courtly tradition. Cf. William Pitt's
effusive gushings to King George III—Cook, The Long Fuse, p. 111.

• Frontiers were the lines of encounter of stronger and weaker, hence loci of testing
  and conflict. The Earl of Carnarvon spoke in 1878 of "the difficulties of frontier":
  "The same provocations, real or supposed... the same temptation of those on the spot
  to acquire territory" were a universal characteristic of empire—Hyam, Britain's Im­
  perial Century, p. 283. On imperialism as an expression of disparity of power, see
  Landes, "Some Thoughts on the Nature of Economic Imperialism" and "An Equi­
  librium Model of Imperialism."