Ornamentalism by David Cannadine

            Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine attempts to satisfy the question: How did the British see their own empire from the mid-nineteenth century, through Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1896, and ending with Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation in 1953? Cannadine examines the beginnings of the Empire and all of her localities, and describes the several ways in which British aristocracy propelled the ornamented image of Britain throughout those places and back to England.

            As an English historian and writer, Cannadine also brings a personal aspect to Ornamentalism: Cannadine considers himself a “Coronation child” as he was a three-year-old English boy at the time of Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation (183). Not only that, but Cannadine’s father served in the British Empire’s Royal Engineers between 1942 and 1945. The elder Cannadine’s imperial experience in India certainly left a profound influence on the author, who used his father’s recollections to piece together a boy’s superficial idea of empire (184). Despite his personal familiarity with the British Empire, Cannadine asserts that he “was not drenched in empire” (198).

            In contrast with authors such as Edward Said and Karl Marx, Cannadine strays from the usual scholarship that suggests the British Empire was arranged by racial superiority and inferiority. Unlike Said’s Orientalism, where it is argued that British imperialism exhibited a subtle and persistent prejudice against Arab and Islamic peoples, Cannadine argues that the British Empire was concerned with the familiar and domestic, but also the varied and the exotic. Imperialism consisted of understanding and reordering foreign dominions, colonies, and mandates into analogous and equivalent constructs (xix). Essentially, the British Empire was arranged hierarchically by social status and position. The concept of individual social ordering versus collective racial identity sets Cannadine as a historian far apart from his contemporaries.

Cannadine points out two models of social stratification that would manifest under British imperial expansion. The first model mentioned by Cannadine was the expansion of British social hierarchy as an anti-hierarchical social revolution. When the American colonies were initially settled, the English pattern of social hierarchy was evident. There were great country estates, mansions, an aristocratic-ruling class, all exhibited by a clear social stratification. Abolition in the nineteenth century only served to reinforce the hierarchical view of society. Slaves would be free, but they would remain at the lowest rung of American society. Eventually “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).

The second model was a transoceanic replication and encouragement of Britain’s existing social hierarchy. In Britain, those of the highest social prestige undertook local government and aristocrats at the top of the social hierarchy wielded the power (11). Imperialism took this hierarchy to Britain’s vast colonies, dominions, and mandates. Using India as an example, Cannadine points out that the native regimes and hierarchies of India were considered backward, inefficient, and despotic by the British. Many elite Britons felt that these existing hierarchies could be cherished and preserved. The resulting replication and expansion of British ornamentalism of the Raj was undoubtedly one of the most ostentatious and grandiose realms on earth.

Analogous with India, Australia, Canada, and other dominions employed the British model of social hierarchy. British transplants in Canada continued the layered and established social structure and they exhibited an exaggerated regard for British traditions. Notions of rank and respectability were important there (29). In Australia, Cannadine explains how British transplants continued with traditions from the motherland, such as dueling, coats of arms, genealogy, and obsessions with pedigrees (28). In order for the these new settler dominions to successfully retain the English mark or hierarchy, an aristocratic thread needed to be present. Both Canada and Australia exhibited this thread by displaying fealty towards Britain eagerly desiring and accepting honors and hereditary distinctions. With their replicated social hierarchy and esteemed British traditions, settler dominions and colonies demonstrated the need for unprecedented British grandeur, pomp and circumstance, and projected an image of order and authority, thus legitimizing British rule (18).

            One way Cannadine supports an aspect of his thesis that Britain’s social hierarchy was divided by class and not race, is his treatment of the colonies in the British Empire, specifically Malaya, Fiji, and Africa. As part of Imperial policy, Britain would govern the colonies, not settle them. Using governors and colonial secretaries Malaysians accepted British residents and advisors using the Indian model of hierarchy. Similarly, indigenous Fijian chiefs and leaders were considered on the same social level as aristocratic Englishmen. When the Hon. Arthur Hamilton Gordon served as colonial governor of Fiji, he “codified chiefly authority and entrenched aristocracy as the established order through which the British would govern indirectly” (59). Gordon sought to preserve indigenous influences in support of British authority (61). In Africa, it was obvious that maintaining indigenous hierarchies and supporting the native rulers at the top of society would be the clearest way for the British Empire to govern the new lands. Cannadine maintains that even in Africa, instead of a social hierarchy based on race, the admiration of the dark-skinned Africans led to a recognition of indigenous genius instead of perpetual inferiority (67). As a result, African traditions were able to survive, and the British model of class hierarchy flourished.

            An important way that elite Britons viewed their society was through ornamentalism in the form of honors and titles. Using honorific inventiveness in the dominions, colonies, and mandates, the British Empire was able to promote and encourage traditional hierarchies. Rewards and honors were considered an essential component of the British social structure based on hierarchy (87). It was assumed that Indians cared a great deal about recognition in the form of awards and honors, and as such the British Empire created and bestowed thousands of titles on members of Indian aristocracy (89). This sense of Britishness, tied together through ornamentalism and an ordered imperial society, reinforced the elaborate system of honors and titles that began in metropolis England, extended to the periphery of the Empire, and back to the metropolis.

            In addition, the British Empire came to exude ornamentalism through elaborate ceremonies and occasions. These public ceremonies were opportunities for distant monarchs to pledge fealty and pay tribute to the British Empire (112). Combined with regular and routine observances, ornamentally ostentatious public ceremonies were “globally inclusive, elaborately graded, and intrinsically royal” affairs (105). They afforded a pervasive sense of royalty.

            However celebrated the British Empire was in distant lands, Cannadine offers that there was a difference between theory and practice. Never as fully socially hierarchical as the Britons who governed and collaborated in the Empire, the colonies, dominions and mandates were also a system of exploitation for those who were titled and rich. Some distant lands were never economically similar to Britain, which therefore produced a society less unequal and less layered. Critics of the British hierarchy tended to be on a different social level than those at the top: urban, middle-class, educated, colonists on the periphery of the Empire. There, on the periphery, hostility to hierarchy and empire bloomed (140). Dominion leaders may have coveted imperial titles and honors, but that did not translate into their nation’s dependence. Many leaders on the periphery of the British Empire recognized the need to move away from the traditional British connection. Titles and honors did not make aristocracies (141).

            By 1950 the position of British rule in the dominions had been fundamentally altered. Cannadine argues that because the British Empire had been created and envisaged based on hierarchical consistency and social subordination, it is no surprise that the Empire was finally undermined by the politics of nationalism and the ideas of equality (154). Ornamentalism faded into abandonment and desuetude. There were deliberate repudiations of royalty and empire. By Queen Elizabeth II’s Cornonation, three years after the birth of Cannadine, the monarch was no longer the empress of India or the Ruler of British dominions beyond the seas. Instead, she was bestowed with the title, “Head of Commonwealth” with no social preeminence or constitutional standing (158).

            I think Ornamentalism is especially important in the historiographical debate surrounding the creation, heyday, and decline of the British Empire because Cannadine is able to offer a contrasting theory on the structure of the Empire. His idea that the Empire was constructed on social hierarchy divided by caste instead of race is a bold declaration when compared to the accepted research that the Empire was separated by race. The ornamentalism exhibited in the Raj certainly provides abundant evidence that society was chiefly concerned with social adornments, aristocracies, and wealth. My only criticism of Cannadine is his proximity to the subject. However, given his astute use of journals, literature on the subject, and thorough research, this is quickly overcome. One is able to read Ornamentalism for what it is: a clear social history of the British Empire’s social hierarchy.