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“Ornamentalism” and “Orientalism”: Two Sides of the Same Cultural Coin? An

Investigation of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire

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 “Ornamentalism” and “Orientalism”: Two Sides of the Same Cultural Coin?
An Investigation of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire

David P. Long
School of Theology and Religious Studies
The Catholic University of America

I. Introducing the Topic

In “Her Majesty’s Servants,” one of the short stories included in the Jungle Book
collection, Indian-born British author Rudyard Kipling wrote of a British soldier on duty in
Rawal Pindi, India who will be participating in a military parade for the Viceroy of India. Also
present at this parade will be the Amir of Afghanistan, “a wild king of a very wild country” who
brought with him “savage men and savage horses from somewhere at the back of Central Asia.” 1
The night before the parade, the soldier overhears a conversation between the British animals
and their Afghani counterparts on what the parade will include how protocol works and what
these savage animals should expect from British efficiency.
The next day, after the soldier watched the parade from a post close to the Viceroy and
Amir, he overheard the following conversation.

[The] old grizzled, long-haired Central Asian chief, who had come down with the
Amir, [was] asking questions of a native officer. “Now,” said he, “in what manner
was this wonderful thing done?” And the officer answered, “An order was given,
and they obeyed.” “But are the beasts as wise as the men?” said the chief.

“Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his
sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the
captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier
commanding three regiments, and the brigadier the general, who obeys the
Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress. Thus it is done.”

“Would it were so in Afghanistan!” said the chief, “for there we obey only our
own wills.”

“And for that reason,” said the native officer, twirling his mustache, “your Amir
whom you do not obey must come here and take orders from our Viceroy.”

1
Rudyard Kipling, “Her Majesty’s Servants,” The Jungle Book, available online at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/236/236-h/236-h.htm#link2H_4_0013.
 2

Through this fable, Kipling presented the moral example of the British Empire: efficient,
dispassionate, and organized; against the wild and savage native populations, animal and human
alike. David Cannadine, author of the book Ornamentalism, is familiar with this imagery. As the
Dodge Professor of History at Princeton University, and having served previously on the
faculties of Cambridge, Columbia and the University of London, Cannadine’s “academic
interests range widely across the economic, social, political and cultural history of modern
Britain and its empire, capitalism, collecting and philanthropy in nineteenth and twentieth
century America, and the history of history.” 2 His work includes serving as general editor for the
Penguin History of Britain since 1989 and the Penguin History of Europe since 1991. He has
also published fourteen books, most especially Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their
Empire (2002), which serves as the focus of this presentation.
Ornamentalism is an internal review of an internal conversation, and Cannadine’s focus
therefore remains invariably British. Few references are made to parallel imperial projects, such
as those undertaken by the French, Dutch or Belgian nations. This is a book written by a British
imperial historian, about the British imperial consciousness, and in many of its references, to a
predominantly British audience. In his project, Cannadine emphasizes the metropolitan British
perception of the colonial British Empire, and argues that class, rank and status were more
important than race. With this argument, Cannadine wrote Ornamentalism as a direct critique
of Edward Said's Orientalism, which argues the existence of prejudiced outsider interpretations
of the East shaped by the attitudes of European imperialism in the 18th and 19th centuries.
With this brief introduction, the paper is proposed as follows: the first section will serve
as a systematic introduction of Ornamentalism, including what Cannadine sees as the main
lessons to be learned from the British ornamental project. The second section will elaborate on
the strengths of Cannadine’s argument, using outside sources who viewed imperial developments
in class, society and culture in the same light. Following the elaboration of strengths, this paper
will discuss the significant weaknesses in the ornamentalist program, including how
Ornamentalism ignores important cultural factors in favor of a limited social hierarchical model.
Finally, the conclusion of this paper will offer a theoretical solution to the “Ornamental”-

2
A more detailed biography of [Sir] David Cannadine, knighted by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the New Year’s
Honours 2009, can be found on his faculty website at Princeton University, available online at
http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=dcannadi.
 3

“Oriental” dichotomy that both Cannadine and Said believed existed in cultural and imperial
studies.
II. Ornamentalism and the British Imagination
In presenting Ornamentalism, Cannadine attempts to describe the British imperial system
of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries in opposition to the “democratization” he witnessed in
the formation of the post-World War II British Commonwealth. Even though he described
himself as “in every sense a child of the welfare state,” 3 Cannadine also grew up in “the warm
after-glow of what for years was simply called ‘the Coronation’” 4 of Queen Elizabeth II in June
1953. This event allowed Cannadine to “acquire the vague impression that there was a greater
Britain, somewhere beyond Birmingham and beyond the seas, that had sent its representatives to
London to join the queen in Westminster Abbey, and that this was how things had always been
and always would be.” (183-184)
Listening to his father’s stories of years spent in the British Army in India, flipping
through his scrapbook of pictures, and looking at the souvenirs of empire his father brought back
to Birmingham, helped shape Cannadine’s world outlook. When combined with his primary
school education, filled with textbooks lauding British civil engineering improvements in
colonial cities and voyages of British explorers to the farthest reaches of the world, all the while
sitting in a classroom dominated by a map where British imperial possessions were colored in
red, it seemed “Empire” was alive and well in Cannadine’s post-Coronation youth. Cannadine
found further guidance in the book The British Empire, which sat on his parents’ bookshelves,
and in which he read,

The British Empire is only three hundred years old, but it has already outrun all
the records of history. The Roman Empire never reached one seventh, the Arab,
Mongolian, Spanish and Chinese Empires never more than one third, even the
Empire of the Tsars did not account to much more than one half of the British
Empire, which covers a quarter of the land of the globe. It is three times greater
than Europe, twice as great as South America, a hundred times greater than the
United Kingdom.

3
Interview with David Cannadine for the “Making History” Project, conducted by The Institute of Historical
Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London. The interview took place on July 24, 2008 and is
available at http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/interviews/Cannadine_David.html.
4
David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), 183. Further references to Ornamentalism in this section will be included as in-text parenthetical citations.
 4

“What,” the authors went on to inquire, with not a trace of irony or self-doubt, “is
the secret of Britain’s greatness?”5

For Cannadine, the answer was in the combination of race, class, social constructs and
superiority, which started to take shape in the British metropole of the 18th century, and was
exported to other lands as the program of colonization.

From Hegel to Marx, and from Engels to Said, it has been commonplace to
suggest that Britons saw their society (and by extension, that of what became their
settler dominions) as dynamic, individualistic, egalitarian, modernizing – and thus
superior. By comparison with such a positive and progressive metropolitan
perception, this argument continues, Britons saw society in their “tropical” and
“oriental” colonies as enervated, hierarchical, corporatist, backward, and thus
inferior. But among its many flaws, this appealingly simplistic (and highly
influential) contrast is based on a mistaken premise, in that it fundamentally
misunderstands most Britons’ perceptions of their domestic social world when
their nation was at its zenith as an imperial power. (4)

In fact, argues Cannadine, Britons “generally conceived of themselves as belonging to an

unequal society characterized by a seamless web of layered gradations, which were hallowed by
time and precedent, which were sanctioned by tradition and religion, and which extended in a
great chain of being from the monarch at the top to the humblest subject at the bottom.” (4) By
thinking of themselves in this light, Britons were in line with the motivations of other imperial
powers in the post-Enlightenment world, who “saw themselves as the lords of all the world and
thus of humankind. They placed themselves at the top of the scale of civilization and
achievement; they ranked all other races in descending order beneath them, according to their
relative merits (and demerits).” (5)
Here, Cannadine makes a clear distinction between his notions of supremacy and those
raised by other historians of imperialism and colonization, including the aforementioned Edward
Said, whose work Orientalism remains the largely-unnamed antithesis of the ornamentalist
project. Said viewed the discourse between the West and the “Oriental” Arab culture as a power
imbalance between the stronger (West) and the weaker (Arab), and between the dispassionate
Orientalist scholars, be they French, British or German, and the passionate, sensual and

5
H. Johnston and L.H. Guest (eds.), The Outline of the World Today, Volume II: The British Empire (London: 1924)
as quoted in Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 192.
 5

untrustworthy Arab subject. It was a racial gulf between the two sides of the Oriental discourse,
and the imbalance became translated as racial misrepresentation.
Cannadine believes the Said position overvalued the role of racial difference. Instead, the
British Imperial discourse was not dominated as much by race, which Cannadine acknowledged
as existing at the national level, but instead focused on class and social status at the individual
level. “[A]s the British contemplated the unprecedented numbers massed together in their new
industrial cities, they tended to compare these great towns at home with the ‘dark continents’
overseas, and thus equate the workers in factories with coloured peoples abroad.” (5) In fact,
“one additional reason why ‘natives’ in the empire were regarded as collectively inferior was that
they were seen as the overseas equivalent of the ‘undeserving poor’ in Britain.” (6) It was a
social definition, and not racial distinction, which guided the actions of the British Empire.
This social defining existed from the earliest days of the empire-building project, and the
English discovered this reality as soon as they discovered new lands and new peoples. For
instance, when the English established colonies in Virginia, Massachusetts, and Canada, they
encountered a Native American society that “closely resembled their own: a carefully graded
hierarchy of status, extending in a seamless web from chiefs and princes at the top to less worthy
figures at the bottom.” (6) Therefore, “when the English initially contemplated native
Americans, they saw them as social equals rather than as social inferiors, and when they came to
apply their conventionally hierarchical tools of observation, their prime grid of analysis was
individual status rather than collective race.” (8) This is not to say, however, that this
conventional observation was accurate, for,

Even in the heyday of empire these hierarchical structures and constructs,

impulses and images, imaginings and ideologies, based on status rather than race,
were never wholly pervasive or persuasive. And they were often founded on
serious misunderstandings (sometimes deliberate, sometimes inadvertent) of
imperial society, whether in the metropolis or the periphery. But they were the
conventional wisdom of the official mind of the metropolis, and of their
collaborators on the peripheries, and of many people in Britain and the empire
who also envisaged this “vast interconnected world” in traditional, Burkeian
terms. (10)

In explaining the conventional hierarchical viewpoint, Cannadine references the British

Whig Parliamentarian Edmund Burke (1729-1797), whose traditional terms can best be
illustrated in his dealings with the Hastings Affair. Warren Hastings had served as the Governor
 6

General of Bengal from 1774 until 1785, and was called before Parliament in 1787 on charges of
official misconduct, mismanagement and corruption. Between 1788 and 1795, hearings were
held intermittently, in which Burke served as the prosecutor against the policies of both Hastings
and the British East India Company.
At the beginning of the hearings, Burke developed a set of moral expectations and
imperial duties, and in his four-day presentation of charges, Burke contended that Hastings and
the East India Company had both destroyed traditional Indian society and failed to replace these
traditions with new customs. Burke's indictment described the former governor as the “captain-
general of iniquity, …ravenous vulture devouring the carcases of the dead” with a heart
“gangrened to the core.” 6 Despite Burke’s best efforts, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, but
Burke had been successful in establishing the public perception that the British Empire ought to
be a moral undertaking.
Not all constituent parts of the emerging British Empire agreed with the social
perceptions that Burke had aroused in the Hastings Trial. For instance, after the successful
American Revolution, “In the newly formed United States, these anti-hierarchical impulses won
out, and the country was launched on a non-British, non-imperial trajectory of republican
constitutionalism and egalitarian social perceptions.” (15) This shocking defeat marked a change
in perspective, and “thereafter, the British vowed that this should never happen again in their
empire, which meant that elsewhere in their colonies hierarchy was nurtured and supported, and
social revolution thwarted.” (15)
Ironically, Burke had likewise been shocked by the British military response to the
American Revolution, and by celebrations in Britain after the defeat of the Americans at the
Battles of Brooklyn Heights (1776) and the Philadelphia Campaign (1777), which led to the
military occupations of New York City and Philadelphia, respectively.

As to the good people of England, they seem to partake every day more and more
of the Character of that administration which they have been induced to tolerate. I
am satisfied, that within a few years there has been a great Change in the National
Character. We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery people, which
we have been formerly. 7

6
Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781–1998 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 35.
7
F. P. Lock, Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 394.
 7

Later, after the American victory at Yorktown (1781) and the Peace of Paris in 1783 that
confirmed British independence, Burke responded, “I do not know how to wish success to those
whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish
success to injustice, oppression and absurdity.” 8
The Dominions of Canada, Ireland, and the Cape Colony in South Africa became the first
examples of this Burkeian emphasis on social hierarchy and tradition, and were governed
through the suppression of local movements, the instituting of viceroy governments, and the
building of government structures resembling the “home country.” However, these dominions,
along with those in Australia and New Zealand, had an inherent advantage in creating social
hierarchies parallel to those in Britain, in that these countries had less native resistance. The
removal of Native Americans from their Canadian homelands, the dispossession of Aboriginal
lands in Australia, the unequal 1840 Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, and the expulsion of
the Xhosa and Zulu from the Cape Colony allowed colonial governments to recreate the British
social order on terra nullius. Therefore, “underpinning all these mid-century settler regimes, with
their traditional, transoceanic loyalties and their ‘imported social hierarchies’ was the view…that
a mature settler society was necessarily a graded, layered society.” (30) These settlers brought
Britain with them, meaning it was unnecessary to find “the similar” because they already had
“the same.” By the end of the nineteenth century, “From Melbourne to Toronto, Sydney to Cape
Town, gentleman’s clubs, grand hotels, railway stations, public schools, new universities,
provincial legislatures, and Anglican cathedrals proliferated.” (34)
The place where a parallel social hierarchy was most successful was on the Indian
subcontinent, where “One of the predominant themes during the first phase of conquest was that
caste-based indigenous Indian society was ordered, traditional and layered hierarchically, and
should be nurtured and appreciated in the same way that the similar society in Britain was.” (16)
By the 19th century, a traveler from London who arrived on the shores of India found,

A large and complex country – an entire subcontinent populated by teeming

millions embracing two powerful and competing religions. There were territories
directly administered by the British, which were ruled from Calcutta (and later
from New Delhi), and there were between five and six hundred autonomous
princely states, which constituted roughly one third of the subcontinent.” (41)

8
Ibid., 399.
 8

However, despite the complexity of the system, Cannadine believes the London tourist would
have felt comfortable in the Indian colonies, since the British colonial leaders fashioned an
image of India as similar to England, and the Indian countryside resembled those of Devon,
Somerset, or Wiltshire. “It was atop this layered, Burkeian, agrarian image of Indian society that
the British constructed a system of government that was simultaneously direct and indirect,
authoritarian and collaborationist, but that always took for granted the reinforcement and
preservation of tradition and hierarchy.” (43)
For Cannadine, the Indian social hierarchy reflected life in the colony in the same way
social status, protocol and class structures in Britain dominated interaction. For instance, just as
class and status regulated relationships in the Regular Army, with an general staff populated by
the sons of British nobility commanding garrisons of British middle class officers and lower
class sergeants, corporals and privates, the Indian colonial army began to reflect that construct.
Furthermore,

What was true in the military was no less true of civilians. They were in a parallel
chain that tied together the village, to the governor of the province, and finally to
the viceroy of all India. Throughout the Raj, protocol was strictly governed by the
‘warrant of precedence,’ which in 1881 consisted of seventy-seven ranks, and
which gave essential advice as to whether the government astronomer in Madras
was of higher standing that the superintendent of the Royal Botanical Gardens in
Calcutta. Everywhere in British India, social rank depended on official position.
(43)

What was true of military and civilian life also proved true for the Indian leadership,
especially in those places where the British ruled indirectly through native princes. The British
colonial government created in both the vice-regal system and the re-introduction of the Durbar a
system of pageantry that emphasized the social laddering of the colony. The Durbar, a Persian
term meaning “Court of the Shah,” was the formal meeting where the Shah held all state
discussions. The Muslim Mughal Empire transformed the Persian court of their origins into an
Indian privy council where ceremony blended with affairs of state. When the British Empire
extended its dominion through India, the Durbar “articulated the traditional social order and
legitimated the position of the queen-empress at the head of it. But it was also an improvised,
pseudo-medieval spectacular of rank and inequality, which indicated that the British were
developing in India ‘a more closely defined honorific hierarchy’ and increasingly projecting an
 9

image of their South Asian empire as a ‘feudal order.’” (46) At the first Durbar in 1877, local
princes were seen as the “native aristocracy of the country…whose sympathy and cordial
allegiance was regarded as no inconsiderable gesture for the stability of the Indian Empire.” (46)
By 1903, these same princes were “no longer merely architectural adornments of the imperial
edifice, but were regarded by the viceroy as pillars to help to sustain the main roof.” (48) Finally,
in planning the 1911 Delhi Durbar, the only durbar the British Monarch attended, “the viceregal
correspondence which passed between Calcutta and London…might suppose that the British Raj
depended less on justice and good administration than on precedence, honours and minute
distinctions of dress.” (51)

The British Durbar was a theater of colonial discourse meant to symbolize a

united India under British dominion. Each and every person was given their
assigned place, with the viceroy at the pinnacle of authority and all others ranked
in respect to him, including princes, landowners, civil and military servants, and
the Indian people, who were categorized by caste, religion, and community. In
effect…the British Crown established a new social order on the subcontinent with
itself at the center. This order both consolidated and differentiated all subjects,
Indian and British. 9

Since India seemingly provided the perfect example of honor and social hierarchy, the
British attempted to recreate the Indian system in its growing colonial possessions, often with
mixed results.

The colonial empire never rivaled the dizzy, caparisoned splendours of the Raj,
since Malayan sultans, Nigerian emirs and African kings rarely ruled over
societies that were as venerable, as settled, as ornamental or as rich as the
grandest princely states seemed to be. But traditional India remained the model,
which meant that this new empire of indirect rule depended on the cooperation
and support of kings who were presumed to be at the apex of a clearly defined
hierarchical society. (64)

The same was true in the Empire’s Arab holdings in Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Transjordan
and Iraq, gained during the decades of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse from the 19th century to
the end of the First World War. Here, the presentation of British power reflected a model of
conservative stability, where the Empire could reassure local princes, sheiks, and rulers that their

9
Donald P. Kaczvinsky, “Memlik's House and Mountolive's Uniform: Orientalism, Ornamentalism, and The
Alexandria Quartet,” Contemporary Literature 48:1 (Spring 2007), 101-102.
 10

authority would be maintained under the watchful eye of the British colonial representative. In
many ways, this presentation of social hierarchy and political power resembled that made by
Said in Orientalism, although Cannadine would undoubtedly disagree with that assessment.
Cannadine quotes the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, immortalized in film as
“Lawrence of Arabia,” who understood that “Ancient and artificial societies like this of the
Sherifs and feudal chieftains of Arabia found a sense of honourable security when dealing with
us in such proof that the highest place in our state was not a prize for merit or ambition.” (75)
This artificiality in constructing power and social relationships would become the British method
of ruling Arab nations, but would eventually lead to the system’s collapse after World War II.

The British Middle East was organized on the basis of…creating kings, resulting
in regimes that stressed solid magnificence and ordered dignity. There were
proclamations and coronations for the new kings, and durbars at which big sheiks
and nobles, magnates of the wilderness and great chiefs of the desert pledged
allegiance and paid homage, and the countryside, the cabinets and the legislatures
of these new royal dominions were dominated by the sheikly landowners. (77)

The result was a large new imperial dominion based on a romantic, admiring,
escapist view of Arab social structure, which closely resembled Rudolph
Valentino’s celebration of the Bedouin characteristics of “nobility, dignity,
manliness, gracefulness and virility” in his film The Sheikh (1921). (78)

In the end, with its successes and failures aside, Cannadine presents his reader a unified
vision guiding the British Empire as a social construct that moved the hierarchy of the British
Isles to the colonies, dominions and mandates. The relationships in England between classes,
which proved successful in creating an empire, could be recreated in the colonial classes and
prove successful in ruling an empire. As Cannadine explained, “The British Empire was a royal
empire, presided over and unified by a sovereign of global amplitude and semi-divine fullness,
and suffused with the symbols and signifiers of kingship, which reinforced, legitimated, unified
and completed the empire as a realm bound together by order, hierarchy, tradition and
subordination.” (102)

The British monarch was King of Kings in the empire, just as he was Lord of
Lords in Britain. There might be only one sovereign above him; but there were
plenty of them below, those agencies and beneficiaries of indirect rule who, once
placed and ranked according to their standing and degree, acknowledged the
supreme authority of the queen-empress or king-emperor. (111-112)
 11

For Cannadine, this was not an elitist notion, for “the social structure was generally
believed to be layered, individualistic, traditional, hierarchical and providentially sanctioned; and
for all the advances towards a broader, more democratic electoral franchise, it was in practice a
nation emphatically not dedicated to the proposition that all men (let alone women) were created
equal.” (121) The British people, by their very nature, were organized into a social hierarchy
through which they interacted amongst themselves and later, with those they ruled as members
of their ever-increasing empire. “When…the British thought of the inhabitants of their empire (as
they usually thought about the inhabitants of their metropolis) in individual terms rather than in
collective categories, they were more likely to be concerned with rank than with race, and with
the appreciation of status similarities based on perceptions of affinity.” (123)

As a conservative, traditional, ordered phenomenon, the British Empire was not

exclusively about race or colour, but was also about class and status. This in turn
means that it was about antiquity and anachronism, tradition and honour, order
and subordination; about glory and chivalry, horses an elephants, knights and
peers, processions and ceremony, plumed hats and ermine robes; about chiefs and
emirs, sultans and nawabs, viceroys and proconsuls; about thrones and crowns,
dominion and hierarchy, ostentation and ornamentalism. (126)

III. The Strengths of the Cannadine Argument

When investigating the imperial/colonial model created in Ornamentalism, many readers
would search instinctively for the role of race in the British imperial mindset. However, as
Kenan Malik explains, the priority in the Victorian era was social and class status.

For Victorians, race was a description not so much of colour differences as of

social distinctions. The English lower classes were to 19th century eyes as racially
different as were Africans or Asians. A report in the Saturday Review about
working-class life observed: “The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of
whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours,
persons with whom we have no point of contact.” 10

When using the Cannadine model, should it be surprising that the Saturday Review used the
word “caste” to describe the poor? What is more surprising, Malik argues, is Cannadine’s

10
Kenan Malik, “Why the Victorians were colour blind,” New Statesman, May 7, 2001, available online at
http://www.newstatesman.com/node/140258.
 12

assertion that there could be an interaction between different social levels, whether in India,
Egypt or in London, for Malik believes no such interaction was possible in the Victorian era.

A separation of classes was important because each had to keep to his allotted
place on the social ladder. “The English poor man or child…is always expected to
remember the condition in which God has placed him, exactly as the negro is
expected to remember the skin that God has given him. The relation in both
instances is that of perpetual superior to perpetual inferior, of chief to dependant,
and no amount of kindness or goodness is suffered to alter this relation.” 11

In Malik’s opinion, Ornamentalism allows the reader to move past racial understandings
by looking at imperial society that, while just as deplorable as Said’s racial notions, nevertheless
offered a change of perspective.

British imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more or less than they loathed
the great majority of Englishmen. They were far more willing to work with
maharajahs, kings and chiefs of whatever colour than with white settlers, whom
they generally considered to be uneducated trash. Just as Jamaican peasants and
East End costermongers were viewed as equally inferior, so Indian princes and
West African tribal chiefs were often understood as the social equivalent of
English gentlemen. 12

A second area of strength in Cannadine’s ornamentalist presentation is the prevalence of

the “Honours System” throughout the empire. As Cannadine explains, “Honorific
inventiveness…meant that Britain’s titular hierarchy was exported to the far boundaries of
empire, and that at home and overseas it reached further down the social scale, and brought more
people together, than ever before.” 13 It was also something that could move past the Saidian
racial divide, as “Throughout the empire many people at many social levels – both light and dark
skinned – did genuinely ‘yearn’ for these baubles and elevations, and great attention was given to
deciding who should receive what precisely.” 14
Again, India provides the ultimate expression of this honors system, but as Steven
Patterson argues, it was the Indian middle class, not the elites in the aristocracy or military, that
transformed honor into an effective methodology. As Patterson elaborates,

11
Ibid.
12
Ibid.
13
Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 85-86.
14
Ibid., 98.
 13

The dominant ethos of British India was set by the middle classes, who claimed
that their professional training as disinterested civil servants made them the fittest
rulers of India. Yet, although the Raj was rife with strict protocols and hierarchies,
Anglo-Indian society still thought of itself as just and likely to be the best hope of
governing India, and although the aristocracy and the middle classes had very
different ideas about their mission in India, both groups, and even the lower
classes, still believed that they ruled India better than Indians could rule
themselves. 15

Here, the reader seems to encounter a blending of the notions of Cannadine’s social
“Ornamentalist” and Said’s dispassionate “Orientalist”, and for Patterson, the blending occurs in
a middle class who saw the caste system as “flawed by priestcraft, superstition and warped
notions of how to run the country.” 16 For the Anglo-Indian, 17 “admitting that some Indians and
Britons shared similar traits is a far cry from admitting that Indians could run India, something
that would appear ludicrous to a majority of Anglo-Indians, who did not believe that India could
be modernized without British help.” 18 In fact, honor allowed the Anglo-Indian to move beyond
social and racial distinctions, which Patterson believes were closer to Said’s definition than
Cannadine’s.

Understandably, many Britons sought to understand India in terms that were

familiar to them, especially in viewing India as feudal, but this analogy brought
the races no closer together, since the Indian present was the European past and
on the evolutionary scale, “the British were far ahead.” Britons represented
progress, enlightenment, and modernity, while Indians, with few exceptions,
represented chaos, superstition and backwardness, notwithstanding some Indian
princes who adopted English customs, and the “babu” who was mocked for his
intellectual pretensions and aping of British customs. 19

Therefore, Patterson wants to take the Cannadine argument even further than Cannadine
took it himself, by classifying the British imperial model as an honorable model. “Ideas about

15
Steven Patterson, “The Imperial Idea: Ideas of Honor in British India,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial
History 8:1 (2007), available online at
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxycu.wrlc.org/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v008/8.1patterson.html.
16
Ibid.
17
The Oxford English Dictionary (2012 edition) defines Anglo-Indian as “Of mixed British and Indian parentage, of
Indian descent but born or living in Britain, or (chiefly historical) of British descent or birth but living or having
lived long in India.” Likewise, the Indian Constitution defines Anglo-Indian as “A person whose father or any of
whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is domiciled within the
territory of India and is or was born within such territory of parents habitually resident therein and not established
there for temporary purposes only.”
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid.
 14

honor were central to imperial thought, both in the Raj and in the British Empire, and honor is
arguably the most important theoretical framework for understanding how the British conceived
of their rule in India.” 20 Through the importance of honor, the historian is able “to understand
how Anglo-Indians were able to trust some Indians implicitly even while conceiving of the
subcontinent as a place filled with intrigue verging on chaos.” 21 To be honorable in your dealings
with people above your social status, as well as below it, was not difficult, even though the term
“honor” was difficult to define.

Honor, for Anglo-Indian society, was derived from a specific set of cultural norms
and social practices and as a cluster of ethical rules that was most readily found in
societies of small communities, by which judgments of behavior [were] ratified
by community consensus. Like many other ideals thought to be associated with a
particular race, honor was riddled with hierarchical and exclusionary terms that
were far from abstract and universal. Honor was thus an external social credential
in which the individual sought the approval of the group, and the smallness of
Anglo-Indian society aided in this regard, since honor could not be extended too
broadly. 22

Other authors believe that the Cannadine model of social structuring could be extended
beyond “metropolitan-colony” vertical lines to include horizontal “colony-colony” connections.
In his article “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Tony
Ballantine argues that imperial social formation theories “highlighted the interdependence and
mutually constitutive nature of metropolitan and colonial histories” but failed to “pay close
attention to the ‘horizontal’ connections that linked colonies directly together. Important flows of
capital, personnel and ideas between colonies energized colonial development and the function
of the larger imperial system.” 23 As Ballantine states, “Recognizing both the strong ‘vertical’
networks that welded Britain and its colonies together and the importance of ‘horizontal’
connections between colonies suggests that the web is a useful metaphor for conceiving of the
structure of the empire.” 24 Therefore, “Unraveling these webs of empire may provide one way of
revealing the trans-national workings of empire and may enable us to recover the centrality of

20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid.
23
Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the Webs of Empire: Aryanism from India to the Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism
and Colonial History 2:3 (2001), available online at
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxycu.wrlc.org/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v002/2.3ballantyne.htm
l.
24
Ibid.
 15

imperialism in the making of the ‘satanic geographies’ of violence and inequality that
characterize our contemporary globalized world.” 25
If Cannadine is correct and social hierarchy played a formative role in the imagining of
empire, the question of ornamentalism can be extended even further than the horizontal
connections between British possessions. Can ornamentalism, in fact, exist outside the British
system? Vera Tolz, the Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of
Manchester, believes that such an extension can be made. In her article “Orientalism,
Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia,” Tolz argues that the Orientalist
movements in 19th century Russian academia, with its focus on education, intellectualism and
elitism in local communities, helped build the imagery of a Russian nation-state. Through this
process, Tolz’s “Orientalist” actually began to resemble the Cannadine “Ornamentalist.”

In the 1870s, the Russian press began to publish articles developing the idea of a
“native homeland” (rodina), whose advocates were concerned about how to make
a pan-national loyalty, a feeling of common overarching identity, take root in
Russia despite its huge size and diversity. Being originally articulated most
vocally by intellectuals in Siberia and the provinces of European Russia in
relation to the Russian-speaking population rather than the minorities, the concept
was based on the assumption that in order to foster a sense of national loyalty to
the entire state-framed community one should first develop a thorough knowledge
of and love for the history and cultural tradition of one's place of birth and
permanent residence. One could relate to the entire Russian fatherland (otechestv)
only through a strong affiliation with one particular locality (“native homeland”),
it was argued. Local identities and their links with a pan-Russian identity should
be fostered by education, creation of local museums, and the involvement of the
public in collecting and spreading knowledge about their localities. 26

Tolz later makes the explicit link between these Oriental studies and the creation of an
ornamentalist, nationalist, culturally identifiable Russian homeland.

It has been shown, in relation to countries other than Russia, that European
Oriental studies had a significant impact on the formation of a modern national
consciousness among colonial peoples. They helped to create among colonial
subjects an intelligentsia, equipped with European nationalist ideas and ready to
articulate them on behalf of their local communities. The growth of nationalism
(eventually aimed against the empires) within colonial societies was accepted as

25
Ibid.
26
Vera Tolz, “Orientalism, Nationalism, and Ethnic Diversity in Late Imperial Russia,” The Historical Journal 48:1
(March 2005), 137.
 16

inevitable by some representatives of the European elites and feared and resisted
by others. 27

While the ultimate outcome, like in the British Empire, would be the destruction of its “colonial”
system, an ornamentalist project did take hold in Mother Russia.
With this extension of ornamentalism to the Russian Empire, is it also possible to find
places where the British recognized ornamentalism could not exist, and where the social
constructs of the nation were too exotic to allow a “British system” to flourish? Dennis Hidalgo
believes that the events of La Decena Trágica in Mexico provide such an example. La Decena
Trágica, translated in English as “The Ten Tragic Days,” took place in Mexico City during
the Mexican Revolution, specifically between 9 February and 19 February 1913. By the end of
the ten days, a successful coup d'état had led to the assassination of Mexican President Francisco
Madero and his vice president, José María Pino Suárez, along with the deaths of over 400
Mexicans and the wounding of another 1,000.
The British had been the first European country to recognize Mexican independence, yet
instead of rallying behind the legitimately elected Madero, the British ambassador demanded his
resignation. Under the ornamentalist model Madero, with his conservative background, his status
as a wealthy, upper-class politician, and his leadership of the resistance movement against the
dictator Porfirio Diaz, seemed the perfect “British” elite, but the British government withheld
support. Hidalgo rightly questions,

How did the British rationalize the discrepancy between their antidemocratic
influence in Mexico and their increasingly egalitarian rhetoric at home? If a free
society was supposed to benefit from free trade and the growth of capitalism and
vice versa, how could the commercial class and British government prefer a
different kind of political establishment in its informal subsidiaries (i.e.
Mexico)? 28

The answer Hidalgo discovers was that Madero did not share the same vision of
hierarchical society preferred by the British government, as expressed at the time by the British
press. “Like Britain’s official policy toward Mexico, the imperialistic discourse produced by the
British press to describe and explain the Mexican Revolution appeared to violate Britain’s own

27
Ibid.
28
Dennis R. Hidalgo, “The Evolution of History and the Informal Empire: La Decena Trágica in the British Press,”
Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 23:2 (Summer 2007), 321.
 17

often-claimed political values. The ideological discrepancy toward the Revolution is arguably
more at play in the press as it reported La Decena Trágica in Britain.” 29 Unfortunately for
Mexican politics, and for Madero specifically,

The efforts to find common ground with Mexicans, or honoring their social
hierarchy as much as in Britain’s fell short of Cannadine’s indications. Thus, the
news also revealed that strong British financial interests wanted immediate social
order in Mexico at any cost. Unfortunately, this wish bolstered the belief that
social and political development was evolutionary, and that Mexico was unready
for European-style democracy. In this way, the papers justified the British
antidemocratic influence in Mexico at a time when the opposite could have been
expected if Mexicans had been considered suitable—culturally and biologically at
the same level as white Europeans. Hence, the British journalistic response to La
Decena Trágica gave voice to a complex web of considerations influenced by
ideas and conditions of which economic concern for British financial interests in
Mexico and sameness of experiences were just part. 30

It would seem, therefore, that the ornamentalism project was never as unified or as
dominant as Cannadine would like to suggest. Could it be, perhaps, that ornamentalism was
simply decoration, an outward pomposity that hid an inner reality? Many cultural historians
would agree that such was the case.
IV. Weaknesses in an “Ornamentalist Outlook”
The question must be raised: were there other factors that undermine Ornamentalism?
Cannadine recognizes that there were limitations to the model he presents. For instance, he
understands that the British Empire in practice was never as hierarchical as the rulers or
collaborators theorized. Nations with less-developed economies never had the social layers and
gulfs between wealth and poverty that Britain experienced. There wer e inherent mistaken
perceptions and false analogies in India, especially regarding the caste system, and it seems the
hierarchical structure of Indian society was over-emphasized. In other areas of the empire,
natural hierarchical structures did not exist, and the British colonial administrators attempted to
re-create what was not present, for example in the “make-believe kingdoms” of the Arab world,
many of which disintegrated when the British withdrew after the Second World War. Finally, as

29
Ibid., 321-322.
30
Ibid., 325.
 18

Cannadine noted with some dismay, “Many Africans, South Asians, French Canadians, and
Afrikaners were simply not interested in British royalty.” 31
However, even with these caveats in mind, Cannadine and his presentation of social
hierarchy as the means of interaction between metropole and colony could not shake its critics.
Peter Marshall, for example, an author Cannadine quoted in Ornamentalism, questioned whether
the social elitism Cannadine referenced was as strong as he tried to present. Marshall explains,

Some existing hierarchies, such as caste in India, seemed to common British

understanding to put the wrong people on top. Imperial intervention, at least in
not preventing the racially determined apportionment of land, could underpin for
a time settler gentries in Southern Rhodesia or Kenya. Elsewhere outside South
Africa, white farming communities tended to displace indigenous inhabitants
rather than to conscript their labour, and then to create generally egalitarian
communities based on extensive rather than intensive cultivation of land. In fertile
and heavily populated parts of India, Southeast Asia or West Africa, elites who
were in control of the land before colonial rule could maintain their hold on it and
on the output of those who cultivated it. Paradoxically, the British, even in late
nineteenth-century India, were more inclined to intervene on the side the peasant
than of the landlord. 32

i. The Role of Religion in Imperialism

Jane Samson, professor of history at the University of Alberta, wonders where the
treatment of religion would enter into a discussion of ornamentalism, especially considering
Cannadine’s statement, “‘Chivalry and ceremony, monarchy and majesty, were the means by
which this vast world was brought together, interconnected, unified and sacralised.’ Sacralised?
Perhaps, at last, the importance of religious belief could be reconnected to the study of British
imperialism on both sides of the imperial frontier.” 33 Unfortunately, she found Cannadine’s
treatment of religion disappointing, as

Religion was mentioned on only two pages; evangelicalism on one. There are no
entries at all for missionaries. Having challenged his readers to delve into British
social history, this omission seems extraordinary, particularly when Cannadine
himself had made the “sacralisation” of empire of central importance to his

31
Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 145.
32
Peter Marshall, “Review of Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire,” Reviews in History Number 202,
available online at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/202.
33
Jane Samson, “Are you what you believe? Some thoughts on Ornamentalism and religion,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 3:1 (2002), available online at
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxycu.wrlc.org/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v003/3.1samson.html.
 19

argument. It became clear that he knows little about religion in modern Britain
and, moreover, could care less. The sole mention of evangelicalism dismisses it as
an obstruction to the great affinity-building projects of more enlightened
Britons. 34

In her critique, Samson references Cannadine’s inclusion of Tonga in the British imperial
system. Tonga, an archipelago kingdom of 176 islands in the South Pacific Ocean, is highlighted
in Cannadine’s recollections of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Specifically, he recalled
the crowd’s warm feelings towards the Tongan monarch.

Queen Salote of Tonga…still lives in many people's memories, wiping the rain
from her ample bosom, beaming to the crowds, and saying later that she refused
to ride in comfort while the new British Queen was enduring the inclement
weather in the traditional open coach. “Here again, across the varied races of
empire, there was convergence and equality,” writes Cannadine. Quite so. But
why was Salote the queen of Tonga? Again, as many Pacific historians have
found, Christianisation was bound up with the creation of a unified Tongan
monarchy.

The connections between the British and Tongan crowns that Cannadine admires
were first and foremost connections established through common Protestant faith
and the ambitions of a converted Tongan aristocrat and his missionary advisors.
Once again Cannadine misses significant opportunities through his neglect of the
history of religion. 35

Donald Kaczvinsky see a similar weakness in the Ornamentalist’s disregard for religion,
namely that religion served as part of the political motivation of empire, especially in places such
as Egypt, where religious identity could divide as quickly as race or social status. In Egypt, the
established British imperial policy unwittingly combined social status and religious identity,
which in turn created additional tensions, as illustrated in The Alexandria Quartet series of
novels by British author Lawrence Durrell.

The British did not so much teach the Moslems to hate the Copts as prop up a
monarchy - first the Sultan (later King) Fu'ad and then the effete King Farouk -
that had no support among the majority of people but with whom the British
identified, if nostalgically. The Copts were upset that they fared no better,
financially or politically, under British than they had under Turkish rule. After the
British left, the two factions, Copt and Muslim, had only a brief period of mutual

34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
 20

cooperation until the suppression of the Copts in the early years of the Nasser
regime.

Mountolive may have forgotten that the Copts are Christian, but his ignorance is
not primarily based on racial prejudice. Mountolive admires Nessim and Leila
because he sees them as members of a traditional, aristocratic family that is
representative of the best of Egyptian culture-which he associates with Islam.
These aristocratic families would espouse values and cultural attitudes similar to
the best of traditional, aristocratic British culture – which Mountolive and most
Britons would associate with High Church Anglicanism. Coming from an
aristocratic family that sees itself as descended from the pharaohs, Nessim and the
other Hosnanis would have been thought, from a British perspective, to support
the monarchy. 36

It is clear that to ignore the religious character of the British Empire is to ignore British
history. The monarch, after all, serves as the Supreme Governor of the Church of England,
representing that “High Church Anglicanism” Mountolive espoused. Concurrently, the monarch
reigned as the formal protector of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, needed to relate to a
stridently Catholic population in Ireland, and conducted imperial business with Hindus in India,
Muslims in the Arab world, animist peoples in the African colonies, and even Dutch Reformed
in South Africa. British colonies were influenced by religious missionaries, and one need look no
further than the work of the London Missionary Society or the Baptist Missionary Society
founded by William Carey, who during his missions to India and South Asia translated the New
Testament into Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, and other local dialects. Furthermore, the British
Parliament in Westminster contained Anglican bishops sitting in the House of Lords as Lords
Spiritual, who were obligated to present matters of internal Anglican organization that the
Parliament could vote into law. The link between Church and Empire, therefore, was beyond
mere formalities, and played an integral role in what it meant to be British and imperial.
Cannadine, however, ignored this link and the effect such a link had on the colonial project.
ii. Racial Identities and Imperialism
Cannadine admits that racial definitions played an important part in the development of
the British Empire, but insists it was only one of “the varied – sometimes, even, contradictory –
ways in which the British understood, visualized and imagined their empire hierarchically.”37

36
Kaczvinsky, “Memlik's House and Mountolive's Uniform: Orientalism, Ornamentalism, and The Alexandria
Quartet,” 113.
37
Cannadine, Orientalism, 5.
 21

Racial definitions of superiority and inferiority remained at the macro level of the organization,
and because of this, racial biases took longer to root in imperial thinking.

By the end of the nineteenth century these notions of racial hierarchy, supremacy
and stereotyping had become more fully developed, and stridently hardened, as
exemplified in Cecil Rhodes’ remark that “the British are the finest race in the
world, and the more of the world they inhabit, the better it will be for mankind”,
or in Lord Cromer’s belief that the world was divided between those who were
British and those who were merely “subject races”. 38

Remember, however, that for Cannadine, the true reason for inferiority was social, as he
mentioned above: “One reason why ‘natives’ in the empire were regarded as collectively inferior
was that they were seen as the overseas equivalent of the ‘undeserving poor’ in Britain.” 39
Historians have reacted to the exclusion of racial prejudice as a significant factor in the
British imperial project by questioning the sources Cannadine used in his work. British journalist
and historian Richard Gott labeled Ornamentalism a “white wash,” in which Cannadine
portrayed the British Empire as a recreation of the Tory English countryside where “local
government since the 16th century had been controlled by those with high social prestige.” 40 As
Gott explains, the British Empire as Cannadine wished it to exist came to a dramatic end for a
different reason than the loss of ornament, pomp, or circumstance.

If you underplay the role of race in the imperial cocktail, you miss the reason for
the Empire's sudden collapse. The First World War over-extended the Empire; the
Second World War, which turned out, at its end, to have been a war against
racism, accelerated its downfall.

If the Germans are blamed for Hitler, should not the British be blamed for their
Empire? The imperial system may have been set up by the ruling class, as
Cannadine suggests, but a lot of lesser mortals rather enjoyed lording it over
people they regarded as their racial inferiors.

The difficulty about Cannadine's thesis (and his subtitle) is that it is already
known “how the British saw their Empire.” They saw it as pictured on a biscuit
tin, or as the label on a bottle, with the native orderly standing outside the

38
Ibid.
39
Ibid., 6.
40
Richard Gott, “White wash: How can a history of the British Empire underplay racism, asks Richard Gott:
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine,” The Guardian (London), Saturday
Review: Books (May 5, 2001). LexisNexis Academic. Web.
 22

campaign tent with a tray of Camp coffee essence, ever at the ready to serve the
expectant British officer.

We now know that the British Empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a
grand scale, involving military conquest and dictatorship, extermination and
genocide, martial law and “special courts,” slavery and forced labour, and, of
course, concentration camps and the transoceanic migration of peoples. Whatever
way we now look at Empire, this vision must remain dominant. 41

Perhaps not surprisingly, Cannadine anticipates these arguments referencing Hitler and
his genocidal practices, and saw in the pageantry of the British Empire a balance to the excesses
of the 20th century. The Empire thereby became a place of conservative, traditional values
resisting the loss of individual identity that the modern world offered. As Cannadine explains,

Viewed and evoked in this war, as a hierarchical construction, and as a

“traditional” enterprise, the British Empire must rank as one of modern history’s
most extraordinary creations, and it is only now that it is finally dead and gone
that we can begin to grasp – if we are so inclined – the full extent and varied
nature of its many extraordinarinesses.

…The splendid anachronisms of its pageantry was deliberately projected as a

powerful and reassuring antidote to the high-tech parades and search-light rallies
in Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Red Square and Hitler’s Nuremberg. 42

In Cannadine’s portrayal of empire, the citizen always knew his place because protocol
and social standing defined that place. The average British citizen may not be the same as the
Earl of Shrewsbury, but that citizen knew where he stood in relation to the Earl. For Cannadine,
it seems apparent that the Nuremberg rallies of Triumph of the Will or the May Day parades were
pomp without protocol, masses of people without distinctiveness, and rank and file without rank
and status. Britain meant better, and Britain did better by and for its imperial subjects.
iii. Was Ornamentalism Truly a Social Movement?
Richard Price, Professor and Chairperson of the Department of History at the University
of Maryland, College Park, believes Cannadine misrepresented the imperial identification of its
metropolitan citizens, and in the process made it an overly important as a social movement.

The empire as such did not figure much in their actual lives or work. They did not
actually know much about empire, nor, it seems, did many of them go to India.

41
Ibid.
42
Cannadine, Orientalism, 130.
 23

Empire was instead a useful site for them to authorize their own political
subjectivity. Thus regarded, empire was just like the needy working class for
middle-class feminists. It allowed them to marry their recognized domestic values
with their aspirations towards social and political public action. 43

To be a member of the British Empire, especially on the British Isles, allowed people to
discuss being imperial citizens but, as Price argues, it did nothing tangibly in the lives of the
citizens, either at home or abroad. Therefore, in presenting Ornamentalism as a sweeping social
movement, easily recognizable by anyone who would be looking for it as a unifying force, Price
believes Cannadine paints with too broad a brush.

The idea that the culture of empire can be reduced to one essential quality -
ornamentalism - grossly oversimplifies a very complicated process. Aside from
the easy dismissal of racial difference by Cannadine, there is the question of
gender, which a vast body of scholarship has placed at the center of how imperial
culture actually worked. Then there is the question of religion.

In the second place, ornamentalism works well to explain the mediation of

colonizer and colonized only in certain parts of princely India. Ornamentalism
was a useful element to the ideology of imperial rule, but it was an element that
was itself a historical construction, a partial answer to the problem of dealing with
indigenous hierarchies and aristocracies in places like India and Malaya. Once
one moved below the level of princes and nizams, how the British saw their
empire surely became a much more muddied, complicated, and very racial
business.

Empire cannot be treated as a hegemon, either at home or in the empire itself. It is

always true that the perspective from the center is going to be very different from
the perspective at the periphery of empire. Thus, from the frontier of empire, the
process of installing and building an imperial culture was a very untidy process. 44

Instead of questioning whether people understood what ornamentalism meant in their

individual lives as citizens of the British Empire, Andrew Sartori wonders whether
ornamentalism was already an outdated social construction by the time Cannadine believes it
flourished. Using the work Liberalism and Empire by the political scientist Uday Singh Mehta as
his starting point, Sartori argues that the British Empire of the end of the eighteenth and
beginning of the nineteenth century was already a contradictory creation. Quoting Mehta,

43
Richard Price, “One Big Thing: Britain, Its Empire, and Their Imperial Culture,” Journal of British Studies 4:3
(July 2006), 617.
44
Ibid., 624.
 24

“Britain was wrestl[ing] with one of the great paradoxes in the history of modern political
theory: a society that…was beginning to consider itself a democracy was at the same time
coming to govern an enormous empire without consent from or representation of its subject
populations.” 45 Furthermore, “it was Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism and a
virulent critic of democracy, who in the annals of modern political theory most consistently
expressed ‘a sustained and deep reluctance toward the empire.’” 46 Therefore, Sartori argues, the
British system was self-contradictory, where

Two mutually related factors conditioned the liberal encounter with the non-
Western world. First of all, there is “the fact and the awareness of the inequality
of power” that gives to liberal thought its confident, assertive expansiveness
(Mehta, 11–13). This first condition is itself tied to a second, more profound one -
a moral flaw residing at the very heart of liberal thought, constantly tempting it
with an “urge to dominate the world” that, even if it does not inevitably lead to
imperialistic practical consequences, is nevertheless internal to its discursive logic
(Mehta, 20). This deeper flaw is in fact the true villain of Mehta’s work, in
relation to which liberalism can stand only metonymically: namely, abstraction. 47

John MacKenzie, the pioneer of British cultural imperialism studies during his
professorial career at the University of Lancaster, notes that Cannadine relied predominantly on
aristocratic voices to support his argument, which slanted the discussion in favor of elitism. This
slant, in turn, biased the reader against a middle class who held different motivations for the
imperial project. As MacKenzie points out,

We have aristocratic comment, often seeking a sort of freemasonry of rank. We

have imperial administrators, usually in positions of upward mobility from the
resolutely bourgeois to the status of an imperial aristocracy. And we have writers,
often of a somewhat conservative tendency. There are few testimonies here from
businessmen or professionals. 48

45
Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999), 7.
46
Andrew Sartori, “The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission,” The Journal of Modern History 78:3 (September
2006), 624.
47
Ibid.
48
John MacKenzie, “Prejudice behind the pomp and baubles: Both rank and race dictated imperial order,” Times
Higher Education, July 27, 2001, available online at
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=164101&sectioncode=26.
 25

In this portrayal, the social pyramid, already tipped in favor of the upper classes, renders both the
middle and the base silent, and by doing so, Cannadine deprives his readers of a complete picture
of the cultural life of the British Empire.

If we think of those great hierarchies of British India - from the gubernatorial

through the “heaven-born” Indian civil servants to the technical services, the box
wallahs, the inferior ends of the military and lower-order professionals such as
teachers or missionaries - we hear very little from those echelons that constituted
the great base of the imperial pyramid. Were they as fascinated by rank as those
above, beyond noticing the endemic snobbism, well conveyed in Paul Scott's Raj
Quartet, that relegated them to much inferior status while expecting them to play
the key roles without which empire could not have functioned? 49

In fact, Cannadine ignores the motivation for many of the first English explorers, which
was for mercantile and trading purposes. The British Empire, MacKenzie argues, was an
economic empire, and as an economic empire, Ornamentalism was unimportant.

[E]ven if the imperial purple was snobbishly anti-capitalist, capitalism was still
the empire's raison d'être. And intriguingly, capitalists often stood outside the
ornamentalist spectacle. Capitalists, gentlemanly or otherwise, whether in the
metropolis or scattered around the empire, made it work, and no doubt wealth
comforted them in their relatively humble social status. 50

V. Conclusion: Is It Possible that “Orientalism” and “Ornamentalism” are

Two Sides of the Same Coin?
In describing the British Empire as “at least as much (perhaps more?) about the
replication of sameness and similarities originating from home as it was about the insistence on
difference and dissimilarities originating from overseas,” 51 Cannadine refutes the label of
otherness that historians wanted to give the imperial system. It should not be surprising that
Cannadine makes reference to Edward Said at this point, in what is the more significant of the
two references to Orientalism. “This in turn means that, pace Edward Said and his ‘Orientalist’
followers, the British Empire was not exclusively (or even preponderantly) concerned with the
creation of ‘otherness’ on the presumption that the imperial periphery was different from, and

49
Ibid.
50
Ibid.
51
Cannadine, Ornamentalism, xix.
 26

inferior to, the imperial metropolis.” 52 With this line, Cannadine dismisses Said as irrelevant to
Ornamentalism.
It is the opinion of this author, however, that Ornamentalism addressed the wrong book.
Instead of attempting to refute Orientalism (1979), one should look to Said’s later work Culture
and Imperialism (1994) for a discussion contrasting Cannadine’s position. In this book, Said
investigated the connection between the imperial movements of Western Europe, the cultural
attitudes that allowed imperialism to develop, and the cultures of the colonies that grew to resist
imperialism. His means of investigation: literature. In discussing the British Empire, Said looked
to authors ranging from Dickens, Kipling, Austen and Conrad, as well as the portrayal of the
imperial project in history books, perhaps even those on Cannadine’s Birmingham bookshelves.

One acute indication of how crucially the tensions, inequalities, and injustices of
the home or metropolitan society were refracted and elaborated in the imperial
culture is given by the conservative historian of empire D.K. Fieldhouse: “The
basis for imperial authority,” he says, “was the mental attitude of the colonist. His
acceptance of subordination – whether through a positive sense of common
interest with the parent state, or through inability to conceive of any alternative –
made empire durable.” 53

This mental attitude, Said continued, existed not in the social constructs that Cannadine
highlights, but in the literary creations Cannadine largely ignores.

As a reference, as a point of definition, as an easily assumed place of travel,

wealth, and service, the empire functions for much of the European nineteenth
century as a codified, if only marginally visible, presence in fiction, very much
like the servants in grand households and in novels, whose work is taken for
granted but scarcely ever more than named, rarely studied or given density. 54

Said suggested, therefore, that “We must…read the great canonical texts, and perhaps
also the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture, with an effort
to draw out, extend, give emphasis and voice to what is silent or marginally present or
ideologically represented (I have in mind Kipling’s Indian characters) in such works.” 55 When a
person does this, they find that,

52
Ibid.
53
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 11.
54
Ibid., 63.
55
Ibid., 66.
 27

The novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are

unthinkable without each other. Of all the major literary forms, the novel is the
most recent, its emergence the most datable, its occurrence the most Western, its
normative pattern of social authority the most structured; imperialism and the
novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to
read one without in some way dealing with the other. 56

It is surprising that Cannadine did not make it a point to address these arguments,
especially since the great literary figures of the time filled their stories with references to class,
social structures and imperial adventures. Surely Cannadine could have used these authors to
address Said’s claims? Instead, the reader is left with Said’s unchallenged analysis of the British
Empire as it is portrayed in literature. “In short, British power was durable and continually
reinforced. In the related and often adjacent cultural sphere, that power was elaborated and
articulated in the novel, whose central continuous presence is not comparably to be found
elsewhere.” 57
In her 2011 presidential address to the American Academy of Religion, Kwok Pui-lan
observed the following,

Postcolonial theory has made an impact in the field, raising questions about power
and knowledge, the politics of representation, and the construction of the West
and the rest. …The field of religion will have to move beyond its European and
American dominance to become global in nature, asking questions about new
ways of conceptualizing “religion” and about religion’s roles in social and
economic life and global culture. 58

Kwok verbalized many of the fears expressed by Cannadine at the end of Ornamentalism.
After the Second World War, Indian independence and its “triumph for the middle-class, urban-
based radicals the Raj had so detested…dealt many mortal blows to the British Empire as a
traditional, hierarchical organism.” 59 The “democratization” of the African colonies meant the
British were engaged in “dismantling indirect rule and setting up representative local
government, and shifting their attention from the rural chiefs to the city-dwelling bourgeoisie to
whom they hoped to hand over power,” 60 while in the Middle East, “‘the people’ finally

56
Ibid., 71.
57
Ibid., 73.
58
Kwok Pui-lan, “Presidential Address: Empire and the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of
Religion 80:2 (June 2012), 295.
59
Cannadine, Ornamentalism, 156.
60
Ibid., 160-161.
 28

triumphed over ‘the pashas’, and the nationalists over the empire.” 61 For Cannadine, and for
many of his generation who longed for the glory days of a dominion where the “sun never set,”
“the ‘post-Britannic’, ‘de-Brittanicized’ Commonwealth was not the fulfillment, but the
antithesis (indeed, negation) of empire – a voluntary organization run by a secretary-general and
pledged to promote equality, rather than a mandatory organization presided over by a king-
emperor and pledged to uphold hierarchy.” 62
This movement away from the Empire and towards the Commonwealth developed
alongside “a major shift in the historiography of the British Empire,” where

One part took the form of a wholly desirable commitment to write the indigenous
history of newly independent, ex-colonial states, thereby escaping the old and
arguably racist view of the empire as a white-dominated and invariably
progressive enterprise. The other part, which complemented this development,
was formed by the rise in the dominions of a new, nationalist historiography that
emphasized internal themes and minimized the importance previously attached to
imperial connections. 63

Furthermore, this new historiography gave greater weight to those elements Cannadine
avoided in his treatment of empire as a social hierarchy looking for a parallel hierarchy.

The transformation of the imperial order can also be viewed, synchronically, from
two angles. Imperial integration was vertical: economic links joined Britain to her
distant satellites in exchanges that tied production and consumption together;
social relations were governed by a racial hierarchy that ranked Anglo-Saxons
above other peoples; political ties were based on the dominance of metropole and
monarch and the ranked subordination of the constituents of empire. Post-colonial
integration was horizontal: economies became specialized in a narrow range of
intermediate goods and services that were traded among multiple regional centres;
social relations were founded on a belief in equality that was the necessary
counterpart of the creation of multicultural societies; political systems were
correspondingly open and, in principle, democratic. 64

As Peter Hansen observed,

The significance of Cannadine's impassioned plea for status at the expense of race
lies not in some deeper meaning but in its very exteriority, like ornamentalism
itself. After all, status was only “part” of an imperial project to order
61
Ibid., 163.
62
Ibid., 167.
63
A.G. Hopkins, “Rethinking Decolonization”, Past and Present 200 (August 2008), 213-214.
64
Ibid., 242.
 29

hierarchically a virtual empire that is already over, and improvement was

inevitable. The implication is that not as much is at stake in the study of empire as
post-Saidian, post-modern, or post-colonial scholars have supposed. 65

If this last statement is correct, where does this treatment leave the post-colonial, post-
imperial, post-Cold War, post-modern reader?
In looking at the post-imperial British society, it would appear that both
“Ornamentalism” and “Orientalism” are alive and well, albeit with a nostalgic feel. For instance,
George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion has been transformed into the beloved musical My Fair
Lady, with Eliza and Alfred Doolittle contrasted by Professor Henry Higgins and Colonel
Pickering, yet these contrasts remain part of a bygone era of class distinctions. No longer do
these characters serve as the imperial critique Shaw intended; instead they have become
representatives of a distant, lovable past. All one needs do is remember the song “Why Can’t the
English?” with such verses as “Look at her, a prisoner of the gutter, condemned by every syllable
she ever uttered. By law she should be taken out and hung, for the cold-blooded murder of the
English tongue,” or “Why can't the English teach their children how to speak? This verbal class
distinction, by now, should be antique. If you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you
do, why, you might be selling flowers, too!” 66 Class may no longer work that way, but many
people remember when it did, and the influence those days held. Empire has gone the way of
Eliza’s cockney accent, but the British look at both fondly and, for some, longingly.
Over the past thirty years, British television has produced such popular series as The
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1984-1994), Downton Abbey and Brideshead Revisited (1981),
with their representations of British social life during the Victorian, Edwardian and interbellum
eras, respectively. British soap operas such as Coronation Street and EastEnders are popular for
their dealings with issues surrounding the working classes in Greater Manchester and London,
while Emmerdale and the farming community it portrays represent life in the rural Yorkshire
Dales. In each example, the show blends strong characters, local accents, dialects, and soap
opera plots into glimpses of “British life” from the corners of the British Isles and British
society. For the more humorous turn, the comedic series Are You Being Served and Keeping Up

65
Peter H. Hansen, “Ornamentalism and Orientalism: Virtual Empires and the Politics of Knowledge,” Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History 3:1 (2002), available online at
http://muse.jhu.edu.proxycu.wrlc.org/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/v003/3.1hansen.html.
66
Cf. My Fair Lady, Act I, Song III, “Why Can’t the English?,” Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, Music by
Frederick Loewe, 1956.
 30

Appearances used social status and affectivity as plot devices for hilarity, double-entendres,
misunderstandings and social commentary. Perhaps no series achieved greater success in this
field, however, than Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whose “Oxbridge” creator-actors found easy
targets for their comedy routines in the idiosyncrasies of British life, especially those of
professionals, authority figures such as military officers and policemen, middle-age British
housewives and the nobility.
When one looks to movies for similar expressions of this Orientalism-Ornamentalism
interplay, perhaps no better example can be found than the James Bond franchise. In these
movies, the superspy of the British Secret Service represents the unflappable British gentleman
who drives an Aston-Martin, jets to the Alps, Hong Kong or Monte Carlo to gamble at swanky,
high-roller casinos, enjoys his martinis “shaken not stirred,” and ends up bedding the beautiful
woman. Often Bond is pitted against exotic villains, including Chinese-German scientists,
Polish-Greek polymaths, German and Californian billionaires, or products of Nazi genetic
engineering experiments, but rarely the British criminal mastermind, for that breed rarely exists.
At the end of the movie, Bond defeats them all with ingenuity, gallantry, wit and the ever-present
British stiff upper lip.
Finally, in looking at classical music examples, one recalls the performances by the BBC
Symphony Orchestra at The Last Night of the Proms. At this performance, which closes an eight-
week summer season of daily orchestral concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London, conductor,
orchestra and audience alike participate in performing popular classical and British patriotic
pieces. These patriotic songs include Edward Elgar's Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1 (and
the hymn Land of Hope and Glory), Sir Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs, Rule,
Britannia! by Thomas Arne, Hubert Parry's Jerusalem, and the British national anthem, known
to American audiences as God Save the Queen. For this performance, audience members are
seen standing in Royal Albert Hall in strange national customs ranging from bowler hats
decorated with Union Jacks to fancily-decorated kilts, waving flags from England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland (with a growing number of national flags also seen recently) and
using obnoxious noisemakers to add to the experience. Even while singing songs with such noble
verses as “Dear Land of Hope/thy hope is crowned/God make thee mightier yet” and “I will not
cease from Mental Fight/Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand/Till we have built Jerusalem/In
 31

England’s green and pleasant Land,” the audience approaches each with an ever-growing sense
of frivolity and mirth. How should one interpret this merriment?
In many ways, the songs at “Last Night of the Proms” represent what the
Oriental/Ornamental project has become in Britain. The tradition symbolizes the British looking
at themselves with a sense of nostalgia for what has been lost, while also knowing that the
pageantry of the British system can be maintained in the tongue-in-cheek representations of the
present. Sea shanties are no longer standard musical fare in the Royal Navy, but the fact that
young British men and women in 2012 find meaning in singing them is part of maintaining their
discourse with their past. The sea shanty, serious or not, is now as much a part of “being British”
as the monarchy, Lord Nelson, Wimbledon, red double-decker busses, Trafalgar Square or “tea
time.” The songs have become an “Oriental” claim by Britons on themselves, just as much as the
song is an “Ornamental” flashback. To use Said’s terminology, the present British recognize the
British of the past as “Other,” and their discourse with that “Other” becomes the representation
of themselves now in relation to that past. To sing the sea shanties does nothing to change the
present realities of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a once-world
power past its prime, but it does everything in maintaining the ornamentality of the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland when it was the world power par excellence.
Perhaps the final element this Orientalism/Ornamentalism hybrid offers is a glimpse to
other imperial powers of what lies ahead. The project transforms itself into the slave whispering
“Memento mori - Remember you are mortal,” in the ears of a Roman general during their victory
triumph. It serves as fair warning that all imperial systems fade away, even those as blessed as
Cannadine’s British Empire. Said and Cannadine both warn their readers that culture stagnates,
power wanes and one man’s imperial success could become that same man’s colonial failure in a
short amount of time. Peter Hansen took this as the cautionary tale of Ornamentalism.

Though addressed primarily to a British audience, Cannadine sees

Ornamentalism as a transatlantic book. America appears as the first country to
reject hierarchy, and as the egalitarian model later followed by dominions and
colonies alike. (pp. 15, 39, 132, 170)But America also haunts the book as the land
preoccupied with race, and Cannadine's experience teaching on both sides of the
Atlantic created “contradictions not yet fully reconciled.” Considered in a
transatlantic context, the wider debate over discourse, difference and race in the
 32

British Empire may seem to resemble the American “culture wars” more than the
German historikerstreit. 67

Hansen believes Cannadine points across the Atlantic with a withered imperial finger, warning
the United States: “Memento mori,” or better still, to adapt the words attributed to the British
Protestant reformer John Bradford, “There but for the grace of God goes you.”

67
Hansen, “Ornamentalism and Orientalism: Virtual Empires and the Politics of Knowledge.”
 33

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