The Honorable Edward Montagu-Stuart-Wortley, CB, CMG, DSO, MVO (31 July 1857 – 19 March 1934)

Although he received greater and more formal rewards for his services, perhaps he set as much store by a signed photograph of the old slaver, Zubeir Pasha, which was accompanied by the following address in Arabic: “This has been presented as a token of remembrance and regard by Zubeir Rahma Pasha, the Abbaside, to his honoured friend His Excellency the Mighty Officer Stuart-Wortley, who commanded the military division on the eastern bank which took part in the conquest of Omdurman, the rout of Abdullah el Taisha and the destruction of his armies with the help and by the powers of this zealous hero. Moreover, at this action there was in his company my son, Misara, to whom His Excellency vouchsafed high thanks and noble commendation.” Wortley personified all that was engagingly paraxodical about the late Victorian and Edwardian upper classes. Unhindered by complexes and accepting privilege as a right, he and his kind could “walk with kings nor lose the common touch”. He was as much at home around a camp fire with the Bedouin camel drivers as in a great society drawing-room; as Military Attaché in Paris, or on a diplomatic mission to the Grande Porte, he blended as easily with the rich and powerful, of whom he was one, as with the wild Jaalin irregulars before Omdurman. Resolute yet easily bored, reliable yet casual, brave to the point of recklessness yet shrewd and resourceful, he had more than his share of luck and in a lifetime of campaigning was never once wounded. Warfare to him was an attack on a zariba sword in hand, a charge of heavy cavalry or a night journey in a leaky rowing-boat with the enemy on both banks, not the organized slaughter of the Great War. His world perished on the fields of Flanders and the heights of Gallipoli. If he did not quite fulfil his early promise perhaps it was because he could not be bothered. He retired in 1919 as a Major-General and died in 1934. If he is in Paradise, how dull he must find it! Unless, of course, he is allowed an occasional donkey race along the corridors of some celestial Shepheard’s Hotel or a long camel ride across an ethereal desert with a few pint bottles of ‘fizz’ clinking in his saddle-bag.

— Henry Keown-Boyd, A Good Dusting: The Sudan Campaigns, 1883–1899, 1986

Wikipedia

Daniel McCarthy, over at the American Conservative, argues that if you want liberalism and democracy, you are going to need an Empire capable of “by upholding a relatively un-Hobbesian global security environment.”

In the 19th century, the United States enjoyed the advantages of an international security environment propitious to liberalism and democracy without having to incur the costs of empire necessary to sustain those conditions. America could be liberal without having to be imperial—although the Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos might well disagree. Beginning with World War II, however, if America wished to remain liberal and democratic, it would have to become imperial in many of the ways Britain had been—including playing a leading role in Europe and on the oceans. Indeed, America would have to do much of what the British Empire had done in the previous century on an even larger scale.

The efflorescence of liberal democracy in the latter half of the 20th century—the growth of international trade and support for democracy and human rights to the point where the total package appeared to be the “End of History”—was not a spontaneous, natural development. It was driven by U.S. prestige and power. Germany is now deeply committed to political liberalism, and Japan may in some respects be more consumerist than the U.S. itself. But these states were, of course, remade by the U.S. after World War II.

This is not to say there aren’t genuinely local traditions of liberalism or democracy to be found among America’s allies, nor that American arms can simply transform any other kind of regime into a liberal and democratic one: the apparent success of nation-building in Japan and Germany owed as much to the threat that the Soviet Union posed to those states as to anything America did. The Germans and Japanese had the most urgent incentive imaginable to make their newly liberal and democratic constitutions work—because aligning with the U.S. was the only insurance they could buy against being annexed by the Soviet empire instead.

There is a crucial difference between the Napoleonic, land-empire mentality that wants to revolutionize other states—a mentality taken to extremes by the Soviets and exhibited with considerable fervor by many neoconservatives and liberal hawks today—and the example set by Britain in the 19th century, which was a liberal but not revolutionary world power and encouraged liberalization mostly though indirect means: via trade, culture, and above all, by upholding a relatively un-Hobbesian global security environment.

Liberal anti-imperialists today, whether libertarian or progressive, make the same mistakes Britain’s pacifists and America’s interwar noninterventionists once did: they imagine that the overall ideological complexion of the world, as determined by the state most capable of projecting power, need not affect their values and habits at home. They believe that liberalism is possible without empire.

Read the whole thing.