Empire, as every schoolboy knows, is bad. Very, very bad. Yet for most of history, it was very, very popular…Alexander the Great, Caesar Augustus, Charlemagne, and even Pope Gregory the Great were all big fans. So what gives?

It is a question we approach from the end of empire in today’s volume, The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley. The book is a biography of one Sir Alan Burns, who rose through the British Colonial Service during the twentieth century and who emerged as a diplomat and a scholar of its final days. Burns entered the Colonial Service in 1905 as a junior revenue officer in St. Christopher-Nevis, “the lowliest job in the least significant part of the British Empire.” By this point, the British imperial goal was to build sufficient local governance and education to allow the colonies to emerge as independent nations. This philosophy is key to “liberal colonialism,” to which Burns adhered unwaveringly.

Burns was himself a colonial, born and raised on St. Kitts in the Caribbean. Today that sounds rather tony, but at the turn of the twentieth century St. Kitts was very much a poor British colony. Burns was influenced early by the arrival of Her Majesty’s West Indies Royal Commissioner on a visit in 1897 (the ceremonial impressed, plus there was a rebellion to put down), and it seems that Burns was born to management. Sent off to school in England, he wrote his mother a letter…formatted as four bullet points, each setting briefly an issue or problem and making a concrete request for his mother’s decision or action; and summing up with a brief but warm personal message before returning to a call for follow-up on the items above captioned. If he weren’t dead and straight, I’d marry the guy. Coming from an obscure family in a poor colony made Burns’s rise in the Colonial Service more difficult, but it also produced an officer who understood the colonials as more than just the Great Unwashed…he was, after all, one of them.

Burns spent nearly a decade serving in various capacities in the West Indies. As he rose, a mentor advised him to post to Africa, which is how we find Sir Alan in Lagos, Nigeria in 1914 with mosquito netting and portable bathtub in tow. His timing could have been better…World War I was brewing. The great powers had pledged cooperation in Africa in 1885 and 1886, but with the start of the war the Allies realized that the colonies were a valuable source of materials for Germany; and the Germans realized that they could tie up the Allies militarily by attacking their colonial holdings. (The Germans actually coined the term, der Welt Krieg — World War — to describe this globalization of hostilities.) Burns served the Allied side and saw real, life-threatening action in the Cameroon Campaign. Colonial postings, it turns out, were shooting assignments.

More than military politics were changing for the Colonial Service: back home, the moralists were afoot.

Our author informs us that before Burns’s generation, colonial postings were strictly bachelor affairs. Officers were normally married, but the wives stayed home on the idea that life in the field was too dangerous and inconvenient for families. Colonial officers had to that point operated with a great deal of personal latitude, both in how they kept peace in their colonies and in how they organized their private lives. The latter generally involved keeping one or more mistresses (and one presumes, a certain number of misters) as local “wives.” By the start of the twentieth century, Victorian morals turned to the colonies and announced that families separated and marital vows flaunted were unacceptable. Wives, Burns’s included, began to come along on postings, much to the inconvenience of all concerned. Accommodations in the poor colonies were, well, poor. And when wives came along, they necessarily displaced one or more high-ranking officers from whatever level of comfort they had billeted into. Officers had household staff, who generally considered it their right to goof off during the day while the guy was at the office; wives tended to make them work, which made everybody grumpy. And for their part, the wives — generally at loose ends when not berating the staff — were often chased around during the day by other ex-pats: Burns’s own wife, Katie, was the ongoing target of an Anglican priest’s amorous envoy. But wives, morality, and change came.

Predictably, the French took the morality of colonial adultery to extreme, claiming that the resultant mixed-race children were important to building a Greater France. People have been calling the French oversexed since the fourteenth century.

The rate of change in the colonies picked up with World War II. Burns made a number of significant contributions to the war effort, most notably serving as chief negotiator for the 1941 Lend-Lease agreement between Churchill and Roosevelt, which obviated U.S. neutrality restrictions by swapping ships for basing rights. (Fifty Ships that Saved the World was written about the project.) Burns was chosen as the negotiator in no small part because of his colonial origin and his Scottish family roots…it was felt that the English still had baggage around the American Revolution, and that Sir Alan represented a broader view of the Empire. In less elevated matters, Burns had a couple of novelists to worry about. Ian Fleming (author of the James Bond series) led a successful raid that stole German ships from the port of Spanish Guinea; this fact was later picked up in the publicity for the Bond movies. Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, other noted works) had a less successful plan to set up a brothel in Portuguese Bissau as a means of gathering intelligence from the Vichy French; his plan was not approved and, to the Curmudgeon’s knowledge, never made it into film publicity.

During the war, in 1943, a minor succession to the throne of the Akan people in the Gold Coast (now Ghana) became a major international incident and bellwether of colonialism. It was the case of the Ju-Ju Murder. Chief Nama Ofori Atta I had died; the elevation of his successor required that his stool, his throne of office, be washed. Unfortunately, it needed to be washed with human blood. A band of eight loyalists seized a tribal priest, cut off his jaw, and kept him alive for several hours, oozing the blood needed to wash the sacred stool. Since the priest was living in a British protectorate, British law reacted, and after trial Burns condemned the men responsible to death. Local reaction was positive: nobody wanted his jaw or his kid’s jaw cut off for stool renovation. However, a lawyer named Joseph Danquah took up the cause, claiming that this was an example of tone-deaf imperialists overriding native custom. (The priest would have disagreed.) Ultimately Danquah filed legal challenges that reached Parliament and a request for intervention by the King. After four years of legal wrangling, the sentences were upheld: Burns ultimately commuted the sentences of the two youngest conspirators to twenty years in prison, three were hanged, one died of natural causes during the wrangling, and Burns commuted the remaining two to life imprisonment on the grounds that they had been hauled up to the gallows so many times during the legal maneuvering that they deserved to live.

This disconnect between the academic view of colonialism in the world capitals (honor local tradition!) and the practical needs on the ground (keep law and order and don’t chop off my jaw!) intensified in the post-war years. When it came to colonial matters, the United Nations made things worse rather than better. The UN took upon itself to oversee the nationalization of all colonies worldwide through its Fourth Committee. Burns was the British delegate to that committee and saw the difficulties involved. The colonial powers felt that the UN was getting its “fumbling fingers” into their business, which it was. Any local crackpot or politician (in the day the two were different) could pump up his reputation by delivering some sort of address to the UN; the English were not the only ones with baggage around the Revolution, since the Americans received any and all of them “as if they were George Washington.” It was in this phase that our current perception of empire as very, very bad arose. In Burns’s opinion the UN took too little notice of local conditions and readiness for independence: India and Ghana were in very different states of preparation for local rule, for example. A big part of that blindness was the tendency to regard local violence as somehow acceptable as long as it was black-on-black violence. For Burns, who knew the people involved as people, that was an outrageous position. The Fourth Committee was the old colonialist’s final major assignment and seemingly one of his least rewarding. It was during this phase that Burns, a life-long author, wrote In Defense of Colonies: British Colonial Territories in International Affairs.

Needless to say, it fell on deaf ears.

I do Sir Alan a disservice in this review: we focus here on colonial matters, but his life was interesting on its own and is worthy of consideration. He also had deep and lasting friendships with many black African leaders, several of whom emerge in Gilley’s telling as amazing characters in their own right. However, since the colonial experience is so wholly discredited these days, Gilley’s book does us a great service in showing why intelligent, morally decent men went into the Colonial Service and the practical difficulties they experienced doing their jobs…like a lot of things, it wasn’t as easy as it looked from the outside.

“Imperialism,” wrote Sir Alan, “is denounced by people who have never left the security of their own home town.” And who have jaws to do the denouncing.

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