Notes

What would Pilate do?

LI was happy to receive a little email from our friend Alan this morning. He is resurrecting his own blog, Gadfly's Buzz. He also liked, actually liked, our continuing series of posts about James Fitzjames Stephen -- which seem, otherwise, to have decreased our readership significantly, at least according to that little inaccurate site meter thing we keep on this site.

Odd. We find Fitzjames Stephen to be a more and more fascinating figure. After reading his entry in the National Biography (a series started and edited by his brother, Leslie Stephen, who was -- as our readers already know -- Virginia Woolf's Dad, as well as the model for the polymathic dynamo in George Meredith's The Egoist), we realized that, by accident, we are ending the year by tying together many of the themes we've pursued on this site. We've written about Lord Macaulay (5/4/02) and Lord Bacon, wandering into Macaulay's essay about the Trial of Warren Hastings; we've written about Mike Davis' scarifying and much ignored book about the "Victorian holocaust" -- a book that gains its power by simply describing the famines of 1876 and 1877 in India. The description indicts the Raj, by the common consent of today's historians a beneficent entity, for its gross inhumanity(2/16/02) -- and to put a parenthesis in a parenthesis, as is our usual, maddening way of going about things, Davis' work reminds us, again, in this time of imperialist nostalgia, that the British empire is judged on a moral standard that makes heavy use of such omissions as would, transposed to 20th century Russia, clear Stalin of wrongdoing. Take the popular history of the Raj recently published by Lawrence James (Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India). Not only is there no entry in the index for famine (although it does sport a couple of photos of famine victims), but James devotes more space to Lord Curzon's management of state pageantry than to the famines that might have killed as many as two million people in the 1870s. Here is almost the entire substance of James' report on the latter, troubling affair:

"In 1876 and 1877 there had been two successive seasons of inadequate rainfall which had affected a swathe of country stretching from Mysore to Punjab, in which 58 million people faced chronic food shortages [editor's note -- this is euphemism as high art]. The government's efforts to cope with this disaster had failed, partly because of underfunding, partly because of the current laissez faire dogma which forbade interference with market mechanisms, and partly because there was not enough railroads to convey foodstuffs..." This is what is known as understated prose. The reader of James' 670 page tome might be forgiven for never exactly gathering that famine killed a couple of million Indians during the heyday of the British Raj. And, if the reader pauses during James brief, awkward walk through the years of rain shortfalls, he will be reassured that, after all, the faulty response can be laid to a doctrine, laissez faire -- an impalpable thing, to be found in economics dictionaries -- rather than in the human, all too inhuman, policies of the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, that were firmly supported by the Conservative government in England -- although not by the liberals under Gladstone, it should be said. James himself provides an image for the kind of history he is creating -- and the kind that is still created about this period. In the early1800s, James claims, colored prints of the Indian countryside started to appear in England, and became popular. But, as he notes, the prints customarily "omitted" the Indian multitudes that thronged in those landscapes. Well, so it was, and so it has been ever since. If, of course, James had emphasized such chronic food shortages -- the fault, of course, entirely of nature, and not at all of a pernicious and rapacious tax system, combined with a systemic neglect of the agricultural structure of the countryside that had been built up over two centuries, and that, by some miracle of nature James doesn't contemplate, had prevented chronic food shortages in the eighteenth century -- if James had emphasized famine, it might be harder to 'adjust the balance,"as James puts it, against the "Marxists" and left wingers who have slandered the Raj.
End of parenthesis...
We've also written about Governor Eyre of Jamaica and his brutal suppression of a black and mulatto uprising (9/09/020. The uprising has become the centerpiece of a revisionist history of the socialist impulse in 19th century England, undertaken by an economics professor at George Mason University, David Levy, in collaboration with Sandra Peart. All of these themes converge in the figure of James Fitzjames Stephen, strange as that might seem. When Stephen went to India in order to reform the law of evidence in the colony, he built on the regulatory structure created by Macaulay. Stephen was a particular friend of Lord Lytton, who went home in some disgrace -- a disgrace compounded of his response to the famine and his failures on the frontier. And, finally, Stephen was officially a part of the prosecutor's entourage in the Eyre affair.
We'll have more to say about the latter in the next post. And then, we promise, we will get to the much delayed Pilate problem.