On Gilbert Murray's Anti-Imperialist, 'Benevolent Racism'

As I noted yesterday (recall), I read recently Liberalism and the Empire: three essays (1900) by Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J. L. Hammond. This collection is clearly building on, and in the same intellectual orbit as, J.A. Hobson’s (1900) War in South Africa and anticipates many of the themes of Hobson’s (1902) Imperialism: A Study.

Today my focus is on Gilbert Murray’s middle essay, “The exploitation of inferior races in ancient and modern times: an Imperial labor question, with a historical parallel.” When he published his piece, the Australia born Gilbert Murray (1866 – 1957) had just resigned his professorship of Greek at the University of Glasgow. A few years later he became the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. His classical learning is rather important to the essay because it involves a comparison between how the Greeks and Romans massacred, colonized, and enslaved with more modern counterparts (especially the English in South Africa and Australia).

Murray introduces the theme of his essay as follows:

THIS essay is an attempt in a purely scientific spirit, without controversial animus and without sentiment, to throw a little side-light upon a vast problem of the present and future by the study of a very similar problem, and a great failure to solve it, in the past. It proposes no detailed remedies for the evils with which it deals, but merely attempts to put in a fairer and perhaps a more philosophic light a subject which is wrapped in a glow of vainglory for the majority of English people, and is apt to be scouted with unpractical aversion by the more generous. (p. 118)

Murray, thus, aims to avoid the moralizing (“unpractical aversion”) of the generous cosmopolitan few and the nationalist self-aggrandizement of the many. Interestingly enough, his own ‘purely scientific spirit’ is compatible with moral apprehension of the facts (‘evils’). This evaluative scientific spirit permeates the work. Since Murray denies he will offer detailed remedies, he implies he wishes to offer a kind of unvarnished understanding. He sticks to that stance almost until the end.

And, yet, a sensitive reader may well wonder about the title’s coupling of ‘exploitation’ with ‘inferior races.’ He doesn’t define these terms at the start of the paper, but by the by. In the case of ‘exploitation’ and, as we’ll see, ‘inferiority,’ Aristotle is Murray’s partial lodestone. I quote (albeit having substituted away the N-word):

The answer, of course, is that Aristotle was not afraid of the word 'slave,' and used it far more lightly and freely than we care to do. His own admirable definition of the term as 'a live tool' seems to cover exactly the same ground as our word 'exploit.' In so far as a person is 'exploited' — that is, in so far as he is used for another's interest without any regard for his own — he is, according to Aristotle, a slave. The ancients would certainly have regarded not only the enforced labour of the Matabele, but the ordinary indentured labour of ['Africans’] in Kimberley, Kanakas in Queens-land, and coolies in India, Demerara, Fiji, and the like, as slave labour. (p. 134) [Cf. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 1161b and Politics 1253b).

Murray’s main underlying point is that while the British empire may have abolished slavery de jure, the practice still exists on a massive scale. The empire is exploitative in character. For, our purposes it is interesting that for Murray there is a kind of commensurability between the vocabulary of modern social science (‘exploit’) and Ancient philosophy (to be used as a ‘slave’).

As an aside, Murray had introduced this passage with the claim that “many, perhaps most, Greek philosophers from the fifth century B.C. onwards condemned the institution of slavery in itself as 'contrary to nature.’ Some of the democratic sophists, like Alcidamas, proposed its actual abolition.” (p. 133) The mention of Alcidamas’ stance is prima facie a bit puzzling because Murray had intimated he would offer no such reform program. I return to that below.

Be that as it may, this commensurability also seems to be present in his vocabulary of superiority/inferiority. I quote:

It is, as Aristotle said, a fact in nature, a fact which can be altered and mitigated in various ways, but which consists ultimately in the juxtaposition of a ‘superior’ and an 'inferior' breed of men. It is important to notice in passing that these words 'superior' and 'inferior' have in this context little, if any, purely moral connotation. One race is ‘up,’ and the other is ‘down’; and the ' ups ' not only often use their position like fiends, but usually tend to suffer a good deal of moral deterioration from the mere fact of that position. (p. 150)

So, for Murray it is fairly typical that more powerful peoples tend to abuse those in their power and become morally worse doing so. While the massacres and “cruelties perpetrated by white men upon coloured men,” (p. 152) are not unexpected given the great power difference, they exhibit the moral corruption of the English and other imperialist nations. As he puts it “Let no one delude himself with the fancy that, though the German Dr. Peters may flog his concubines to death, though Frenchmen in the New Hebrides may twist the flesh off their servants' backs with pincers, though our own newspapers may revel in reported horrors from the old Transvaal or the Congo Free State, Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Irish men are quite of another breed.” (p. 153) It is a fact of nature that typically all imperial rulers become moral monsters.

For Murray, then, Aristotle is right that there is a natural hierarchy among kinds of men, even if the hierarchy itself can be partially diminished and adjusted to some degree. He makes this much more explicit near the conclusion of his essay which shades into exhortation:

Let us frankly abandon for the present the ideal of one universal British law — we have never really acted upon it. Let us recognise the dependent condition of the natives, help towards liberty those that can be helped, and defend the rest by every possible means from masters who are sure, at the best, to exploit them harshly. There is in the world a hierarchy of races. The bounds of it are not, of course, absolute and rigid, as the negro judges in America and the many eminent natives of India show; but, on the whole, it seems that those nations which eat more, claim more, and get higher wages, will direct and rule the others, and the lower work of the world will tend in the long-run to be done by the lower breeds of men. Thus much we of the ruling colour will no doubt accept as obvious. (p. 156)

The powerful have duties to the powerless. So, let’s call this a kind of ‘benevolent racism.’ Now, in the nineteenth century such benevolent racism justified empire as a civilizing project.

But, unlike (say) J.S. Mill, for Murray this benevolence is not expressed or furthered by such a civilizing mission. Rather, duty involves abandonment of empire: “If ever in the lifetime of the world a duty has been laid upon a nation, a great and manifest obligation lies on us towards our subject-peoples, the duty of endeavouring by strenuous and honest sympathy, justice, and even magnanimity, to obliterate our cruel conquests, and justify our world-wide usurpation.” (p. 157) In the final sentence of the essay, Murray quotes Burke — in a passage highlighted by John Morley’s study — to emphasize this very point: “On the way in which we respond to that call of duty, more than on any other single criterion, depends the verdict that history must pass upon us, whether to proclaim us the greatest and most beneficent of nations, or merely to dismiss us as one more group in the long dark flight of transient and unprofitable conquerors, ‘birds of prey and of passage,’ at whose final disappearance Humanity will raise her bent head and utter a sigh of relief.” (p. 157)

We’re now in a position to understand Murray’s position. It’s indeed the case that he offers (recall) “no detailed remedies” for the evils he diagnoses. But while accepting Aristotle’s diagnosis of the human condition, he thinks Alcidamas does point in the right programmatic (first best) direction: abandon empire or we will become human monsters.

In fact, according to Murray, there is a second-best alternative that he expects to be equally unpopular. This is the civilization mission (which I have associated with Mill above, and which Murray will associate with old-fashioned idealists below). However, the point of that mission would be not beneficence, but (rather) enlightened self-interest:

There is one further question which would once have been asked, and which may still occur to a few old-fashioned idealists. Is this subjection of the inferior races to be absolute and eternal, or is there any prospect of our educating them up to the point of freedom and self-government? The question is a distasteful one to the modern politician. We used once to vaunt our intention of achieving this end in India; we are bound by solemn and reiterated engagements to strive after it in Egypt. It is, or was, held as a kind of ideal, a shadowy part of our ‘Imperial Mission’ elsewhere. Meantime, no political party with any prospect of holding office seems to have the faintest hope of achieving that end, or even much desire of working towards it. A similar problem occurred in the Roman Empire, and Gibbon reflects (end of chapter xxxi., on Gaul) that if the provinces had ever really been vitalized and trained to self-government, instead of being administered by despotic bureaucracies, that Empire might never have fallen. We are at present shirking the herculean task, just as Rome shirked it. It seems to demand qualities which are not cultivated by such nations as Rome or England. (p. 151)

That is to say, according to Murray the English empire is doomed to fall because when it will need defending in a time of dire emergency its subject nations will not be allied, self-governing nations, but rather break (now quoting Gibbon) “their chains, and…revenge the injuries and the disgrace of their cruel servitude.”

Murray, not unlike Hobson, is clearly a racist and an anti-imperialist. But unlike Hobson, who advocated supra-national federalism among settler-colonists and the world’s ‘superior’ races, Murray thought (not unlike his fellow-essayists, Hirst and Hammond) that the best policy would be imperial retreat, a wealthy ‘little England’ in the tradition of Cobden and Bright. But, unusually, he thought the second-best policy would be to federate with subject-populations so as to avoid imperial decline. So, somewhat oddly, while Murray’s vocabulary is Aristotelian, the political theory is Machiavelli’s.