Empires Of The Word Part 31

Texas is now ours. Already, before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; ... other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it, between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions ... It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoliation, unrightful and unrighteous-military conquest under forms of peace and law-territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice, and justice due by a double sanct.i.ty to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded ...

John L. Sullivan, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, vol. 17, July/August 1845 So the English settlers established themselves in farming communities on the eastern coast of North America. The next challenge came less from the indigenous peoples than from fellow Europeans. In the seventeenth century, the English did not have the eastern seaboard to themselves, but had to share it with colonists from France to the north, and Spain in Florida to the south (see map on p. 413). Even the centre was not uncontested, since there were Dutch and even Swedish territories intervening between Britain's Ma.s.sachusetts and Virginia plantations. In all these cases, the field was cleared by wars in the mother country's strategic interests. The Dutch were expelled fairly briskly from Nieuw Nederland (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and the southern half of New York State*) in 1664, and the French, after a century of wars, from Nouvelle-France (eastern Canada), and Louisiane east of the Mississippi, in 1763. Britain also briefly acquired t.i.tle to Florida from Spain, in exchange for Havana, which it had captured in 1762; it lost it again after the war of 1812. These were the proceeds of global struggles between the European powers, but nonetheless they opened the territories up to settlement by speakers of English.

The next major event was the war from 1775 to 1783 in which the English-speaking colonies made themselves independent of their home government in London, the 'American Revolution' which created the USA. This was highly significant politically, in that it formed an autonomous source of expansion for the English colonies in the continent; henceforth the chief English-speaking power in North America was a state 'with a built-in empire',26 and, as it transpired, a western frontier that constantly receded until it reached the Pacific coastline. The federal form of government that was devised in 1777 turned out to be well suited to this new empire with dynamic borders, as new acquisitions progressed from territorial status to statehood.* But it also had immediate linguistic effects outside the USA. Many who could not accept the new dispensation decamped northward to Canada, and so created a significant English-speaking community in Ontario. In the following century, this was to attract one of the main streams of immigration into North America, thereby boosting its English-speaking population quite independently of the USA.

By 1783, less than two centuries after the first English colony at Roanoke, English was the official language of every settlement in the east of North America. At that point, three-quarters of what is now the continental USA ('the lower 48') was still under the nominal control of foreign powers, France, Spain and-north-west in the Oregon territory-Great Britain. But in the lapse of two generations, by 1853, the whole area was taken by the USA.* Furthermore, by 1890 settlers had set up cities and farms in every part of the area. North of the Rio Grande and Gila rivers there was nowhere left for a significant, independent, language community to flourish.

It had all happened so easily, in just a few major const.i.tutional gulps. President Thomas Jefferson took advantage of the brief supremacy of Napoleon in France to purchase the remaining extent of the French Americas, la Louisiane, in 1803; this alone doubled the area of the USA. The next two presidents, James Madison and James Monroe, annexed Florida from Spain, ratifying the deed in 1821; it turned out to be harder to detach Seminole Indians than the Spanish, and the wars with them, begun in 1817, lasted until 1842. Most of the rest of the country was taken during the administration of a single president, James Knox Polk. In 1845 he accepted the accession of Texas, which had detached itself from Mexico-itself newly independent of Spain. In 1846 he split the difference with Britain to end a long wrangle over owners.h.i.+p of the Oregon country, and so created the present western border between the USA and Canada at the 49th parallel. The annexation of Texas, and imposition of war reparations, led to war with Mexico: the USA promptly won it, taking Mexico City in the process, but in 1848 declared itself content to absorb California and the rest of the west.27 It might have held out for the whole of the rest of Mexico, but eventually decided it was too heavily populated with foreigners. As Senator John J. Calhoun opined-in amazing defiance of two centuries of American history: 'To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of ... incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes. I protest against such a union as that! Ours ... is the Government of a white race.'28 All the lands that had been gained in this rapid onset had of course long been populated, though hardly at all by the European powers from whom they were acquired. The people who had been there-some two hundred separate language communities in English-language America, and over fifty in California alone-found that contact with the settlers followed a fairly predictable course. In the first instance, before they even appeared, mysterious and deadly diseases would beset the tribe. Then, when the white man came to meet them in person, there would be an attempt at conciliation, which might lead to a treaty as between independent nations, the United States (or His Majesty's) Government and the tribe, which would designate boundaries, and mutual obligations. There might be as much as a generation of peaceful coexistence; but later, as more and more white people arrived, and began to encroach on tribal land, the tribes would find that the white men's willingness to enforce the agreement against their own people was highly limited; the tribes would find their territories violated, and their livelihoods destroyed. This might mean war, but ultimately the tribes would always lose it. There were just too many whites, and they were far better armed. All too often, the final stage was a unilateral action by the white men to confine or deport the tribes to a reservation, which might be thousands of miles away. This was the English way with the natives of America, and it was repeated over and over again.

It was essentially an exercise in distancing and exclusion. Although US law recognised the tribes as distinct nations, there was no plan to accommodate them or to integrate them as such within the const.i.tution of the republic. Rather, if there was a plan, it was for their members, individually or as families, to become citizens and householders of the republic. Thomas L. McKenney, in charge of Indian affairs from 1816, claimed: 'We want to make citizens out of them'; and part of the process lay in changing their language to English, 'the lever by which they are to elevate themselves into intellectual and moral distinction'.29 On 3 March 1819 the US Congress pa.s.sed an act to give education to provide 'against further decline and final extinction of the Indian tribes... to instruct them in the mode of agriculture suited to their situation, and for teaching their children in reading, writing and arithmetic'. Expenditure increased from $10,000 in 1819 to $214,000 in 1842, when there were thirty-seven schools and eighty-five teachers. Rule 41 of the Reservation Boarding Schools (1881) read: 'All instruction must be in the English language. Pupils must be compelled to speak with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule. Every effort should be made to encourage them to abandon their tribal language.'30 The official intent to eliminate the ancestral peoples of North America as separate ent.i.ties has not, ultimately, been fulfilled. Indeed, the population pendulum is at last swinging back. In 1999 the indigenous population of the USA (American Indian, Eskimo and Aleut) was estimated as 2.4 million, up from 1.4 million in 1980. As a percentage of the total population, this represents a recovery from 0.6 per cent to just under 1 per cent.31 But viewed as a means for spreading English, the official policies must be seen as having been effective, and far harder to reverse than a sheer loss of numbers. By now, pa.s.sive knowledge of English is almost universal. Furthermore, census figures show that by 1990 fewer than a quarter of American Indians were speaking any language but English at home. Even where native language use was holding up best, on the Navajo reservation in the south-west, the number of those among the school-age population speaking only English went up, in this same period of growing Indian numbers, from 11.8 per cent in 1980 to 28.4 per cent in 1990.32 Now it is reported that fewer than half of Navajo children still speak the language.33 In the present situation, the prospect for long-term survival of any of North America's own languages, even in coexistence with English, seems very bleak.

Winning ways

Ask these Pilgrims what they can expect when they git to Kentuckey the Answer is Land, have you any. No, but I expect I can git it. have you anything to pay for land, No. Did you Ever see the Country. No but Every Body says its good land ...

Moses Austin. 179634 'Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,' he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, 'for 'tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don't you be forgetting it! 'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for-worth dying for.'

'Oh, Pa,' she said disgustedly, 'you talk like an Irishman!'

Margaret Mitch.e.l.l, Gone with the Wind, 1936 At this point, with English having completed its spread across North America, it is worth pausing a moment to contemplate this awesome development. By 1890, English had become the presumed common language over 9,303,000 square kilometres of territory, thirty times the area of the British Isles. It was far more than a convenient lingua franca or trade jargon, since for most speakers it was their first language; and for the rest, it was rapidly coming to replace any other language they knew, whether in indigenous tribes or among recently arrived parties of immigrants. Within a single century, a linguistic monoculture had grown to overwhelm a spa.r.s.ely scattered cornucopia of over two hundred different languages. The only expansion comparable to this in its suddenness and its radical penetration is the Muslims' spread of Arabic across the Middle East and North Africa. Others that come to mind-the spread of Greek across the Persian empire by Alexander, or that of French across north and central Africa in the nineteenth century-were as sudden, but far less penetrating; and the deep-set and permanent advance of Latin through western Europe, or of Chinese across the plains and mountains of eastern Asia, took many centuries to bring about. How was this first explosion of the English speech community possible?

In order to give a satisfactory answer, the question is best broken into two. How could a single European language take over the whole of North America? And why of all the contenders was it English which expanded, and not other European languages that were already in place?

The first English colonists' own motives for coming to America were largely the product of delusion. Backers of early voyages of discovery and settlement were courted with prospects of a North-West Pa.s.sage to enable trade with China and India, of landed estates, and of secure bases to derive wealth from fis.h.i.+ng and piracy. The actual returns on capital invested, which came from the fur trade, and from cultivation of crops such as tobacco and indigo, were not foreseen. But from the language point of view, the important thing is not capital, but labour. And after the colonies had become established, there were yet other reasons for people to go out to live there. Most often they were economically desperate, and went under contracts of indentured labour, serving out terms of four or five years before they were free to settle. Others came out to found a new society on ideal principles: such were the famed Pilgrim separatists who came to Ma.s.sachusetts in 1620, and were followed by so many Puritans in the decades that followed, when the home country was racked by civil war, Commonwealth and Restoration. But what many found, when they arrived, was a string of English settlements where good arable land was available, and as yet largely unfarmed. Crops, when planted, flourished, and there were good markets for the harvests. Gradually, the colonies acquired a reputation for plenty, and emigration began to seem ever more attractive to those facing an uncertain future in Britain. They embarked for the west, often bringing wives and children with them. Governments were never oppressive in the colonies; but after the war for independence which prevailed in 1783, the new beacon of political liberty could be added to the attractions of ready wealth on offer.

It is this introduction of wide-scale agriculture, from hundreds of thousands of new farms, which accounts for the spread of the white settlers at the expense of the natives. It gave them the wherewithal to raise large families, far bigger than what was needed to replace their strength in the next generation: instead, the surplus would head off farther west. The population of these English colonies quadrupled in the two generations between 1650 and 1700. And so it continued, unrelenting for more than three centuries from 1600: startling fertility coupled with an unceasing flow of new recruits from Europe.

For choice of language, it turned out to be crucial that the immigration for the first half of this period had been predominantly from the British Isles. Some 220,000 had immigrated during the seventeenth century, and perhaps twice as many in the eighteenth. Small numbers, compared with the 40 million who would come in the next two centuries. But the first immigrants' language influence was decisive: the vast majority of them had come from Britain and Ireland, and spoke English. Not exclusively so: at the beginning of the eighteenth century, already perhaps 8 per cent of the population were of German origin. Nevertheless, in 1794 German-speaking farmers in Augusta County, Virginia, were dismissed when they asked the US House of Representatives for a German translation of the laws. The Speaker of the House at the time, F. A. C. Muhlenberg, happened to be a German himself, but still refused to support the request.*

Since 1820, English speakers have in fact been a minority among immigrants, at 43 per cent. But although immigrants have here and there established communities where many can understand a given foreign language, the USA as a country-perhaps taking its lead from the traditional British stance-has remained resolutely monolingual in English. Despite the vast opportunity to found new towns and cities right up until the end of the nineteenth century as the settlers moved west, English was everywhere accepted as the public language in these new communities as they arose.

Why, then, was it predominantly from Britain that North America was colonised in those first two centuries? Britain, after all, had hardly been the first to establish a foothold on the eastern American sh.o.r.es: Quebec was founded as the capital of Nouvelle-France in 1608 almost simultaneously with Jamestown in Virginia; and Nieuw Nederland had been begun at Fort Na.s.sau up the Hudson river in 1617, three years before the Pilgrims settled in Ma.s.sachusetts. For seventeen years, 1638-55, even the Swedes had maintained a settlement, Ny Sverige, at Delaware Bay, in the area claimed by the Dutch.

What distinguished the British was their desire to settle. From the very beginning, they looked for individual holdings of land, on which they could make a living, and bring up a family. However far they may have travelled, they aspired to do this on much the same terms, and with the same religious beliefs, that they had accepted in their original homes. The resulting large families would then grow up to repeat the cycle. It was the drive and then the proven ability to do this which meant that, after the first couple of generations, when compet.i.tion arose with other European powers, the British were always present in larger numbers; this translated into winning armies, but it also meant that they soon occupied any territorial gains that they made.

The crunch came with the Dutch after fifty years. In that time, the Dutch West India Company (see Chapter 11, 'Dutch interlopers', p. 395) had gone on from a culture of trading posts for beaver furs, through a supporting infrastructure of farms (bouwerijen),* to offering wealthy businessmen quasi-feudal tenancies called patroons.h.i.+ps, a system designed to ensure the delivery of colonists in packages of fifty. It was only when this preferential treatment for the wealthy was shelved, and the company began to offer mechanics and farmers free pa.s.sage for themselves and their families in 1656, with as much land as they were able to cultivate, that settlement took off, from an estimated two thousand in 1648 to ten thousand in 1660. But it was too late. Settlers were slow to follow the company's urgings to fortify their holdings, and the British neighbours still outnumbered the Dutch four to one.35 In 1664, when Colonel Nicolls arrived with four men-of-war, as one operation in the then global Anglo-Dutch war, Nieuw Nederland surrendered without a fight. It changed hands once more nine years later, but in 1674 was finally awarded to Britain. In the strictly business negotiations that ended the wars, a North American colony famous chiefly for its beaver pelts counted for less than the sugar cane of Suriname, and the nutmeg of Run Island in the East Indies.

The French connection with North America was a decidedly harder nut to crack. French policy had begun quite differently from British, with a strong lead from the king and his court in establis.h.i.+ng settlements, yet a decidedly laissez-faire approach to life once there, as long as the furs continued to flow back to France. The result was a marked variance in social profile, with young single males going out alone to Nouvelle-France to become coureurs de bois, wild frontiersmen, and settling down-if they ever did-a la facon du pays, to found bilingual menages with local women, producing metis children who would hardly consider themselves French at all, and might well not speak the language. This approach made them much more popular with the American Indians, who for the most part sided with them in wars with the Dutch and British. But this turned out not to be the support they needed. The economic focus on the proceeds of hunting-furs-did not make for widespread settlement or domestication of the land, and the reliance on local brides-thereby of course denying issue to as many indigenous men-meant that their population did not increase. The French government attempted to intervene in the process in the 1670s by providing a supply of filles a marier, with some success (see Chapter 11, 'La francophonie', p. 414). But even this could not compete with the natural growth of the land-hungry British.

In the event it was the terms of peace after almost a century of global war, the Treaty of Paris in 1763, which were to end direct French involvement in America. But if North America alone had been the battlefield and the prize, it had long been clear who would prevail. There were over twenty Britons for every Frenchman in the continent at the time.* And if proof were needed of the importance of men on the ground, it was provided by the English rebels of the Thirteen Colonies twenty years later, who defeated the British army as the French never could. As a final insult, the infusion of British loyalists into Canada which the war caused, together with subsequent immigration that excluded France, meant that British subjects, and English speakers, quite directly minoritised the French in what had been their own colony.

The final serious obstacle to English-speaking dominance of North America was provided by the first entrant to the colonial compet.i.tion, the empire of Spain. Although Spain and England had been at royal loggerheads during the sixteenth century, and English pirates had pursued the quarrel unofficially in the Caribbean during the seventeenth, the British and Spanish governments had largely given each other a wide berth during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Then they had come to blows briefly and inconclusively, and exchanged control of Florida back and forth between 1763 and 1783. The real reckoning was to come between their two successor states, the United States of America and the Republic of Mexico, over Texas.

Once again it was the propensity of English immigrants to settle which led to trouble. Moses Austin, discovering deposits of lead, had acquired from Spain-in 1820, just before it granted independence to Mexico-a permit to bring three hundred American families into this territory, hitherto seen as a very barren area. By 1832 his colonies amounted to about eight thousand souls, and others had brought the Anglo population up to twenty thousand. In 1833 a coup in Mexico city installed Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, and reversed Mexican policy on Texas: the Anglos' response was to declare independence and-while staving off Mexican attempts to reclaim the territory-appeal to Uncle Sam. They had to wait out two unsympathetic administrations, but in 1845 President Polk agreed to annexation. Polk got the war he wanted, and was then able to get by force of arms what he had been denied as a purchase, namely the Pacific stretch of Mexico north of the Gila river, including California. In one mighty throw, the USA's bounds had been extended 'from sea to s.h.i.+ning sea'. Then a new surge of Anglo-Saxon ma.s.s settlement sealed the acquisition, though the motive this time was one that the Spanish could very much appreciate: the settlers this time were not farmers but Forty-Niners, prospectors on the track of gold.

The fact that such a vast area-essentially what is now the whole American West-could change hands so lightly demonstrates how superficial the Spanish presence had been in the three centuries of their control. As the French had reached a non-intrusive accommodation with the natives through the fur trade in Canada and Louisiane, so the Spanish, at last planting a string of Catholic missions along the coast from 1769 to 1823, had established only the lightest contact with the Californian subjects of Su Majestad el Rey. Nevertheless, agriculture and stock ranches, with a significant export trade in hide, horns and tallow, had briefly flourished under the auspices of the padres. In the very last years, after Mexican independence in 1821, there had been a movement for more radical settlement, and from 1834 a flurry of land grants were made to Mexicans who came to be known as los Californios, non-clerical settlers who quickly achieved a brutal reputation. But politically, the transition to Anglo control was almost instant.

Linguistically, the situation has turned out to be far more ambivalent. It seems that those padres and even Californios had quite an influence. Today, one and a half centuries after the appropriation of Florida, Texas and northern Mexico, 20 million US citizens, 7.3 per cent of the population, still consider Spanish to be, not their second, but their first language.36 Since almost all of these will live in one of the nine states* that used to be, at least in part, Spanish territory (total population 83 million), the language situation there is actually one where one person in four is still happiest to speak Spanish. The incoming Anglo settlers, resident for five or six generations, have clearly established English as dominant: but the Spanish-language community is not dying out. Indeed, it is still growing.

Changing perspective-English in India

The tongue, which is the key to the treasures of the heart and mind, and which serves as a medium to strengthen the bands of society, as well as an organ to unlock the secrets of the heart, happens to be deprived of its office between the Hindostanies and the English. Most of the English Gentlemen do not understand the language of their subjects, and none of these last understand a word of English. It follows, of course, that a company of Hindians, having business with their English rulers, looks very much like a number of pictures set up against the wall...

Sied Gholam Hossein Khan, 178937 I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one of them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (aged thirty-five), 183538

A merchant venture

An interesting and profound coincidence unites English with Portuguese. Each of the two enjoyed a wide and permanent spread as an everyday language of colonists in the Americas. But around southern Asia each language also expanded, ultimately used more among the local population than by the relatively few sailors, merchants and soldiers who came there from Europe. We have just seen that the property essential for language spread in the Americas had been the propensity for speakers to settle and raise large families, so displacing local peoples, who were thinly spread and technically less developed. Something else must have proved telling in southern Asia, which is home to ma.s.sive populations long used to foreign traders, and where few of the incomers would ever settle permanently. Especially to the British, India and their other Asian colonies were always places for careers, not lives-for postings, not family homes. More than other conquerors, they remained reserved and distant in their control. Yet paradoxically, the British left their mark on these parts of Asia in their language, far more indelibly, as it now appears, than any known previous invader.

The parallel with Portuguese breaks down when the role of the languages in trade is considered. When the English East India Company acquired its crucial bases in India-Madras (1654), Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690)*-the effective lingua franca was still very much Portuguese, 'the language that most Europeans learn first to qualify them for general converse with one another, as well as with different inhabitants of India'.39 The company stocked two hundred Portuguese dictionaries, and every branch office, or 'factory', had a Portuguese linguist, even if the directors in London wrote to Bombay requiring local translation of paperwork because 'the Portuguese spoken in India differed so much from that spoken in Portugal'.40 More informally, much business was done in what the Indians called Feringhee, an informal pidgin of European languages: by the end of the seventeenth century, Portuguese, Danish, French, Dutch and English all had factories within a radius of 10 miles in Bengal. English was at this time usable only among the company's own agents, and never became a lingua franca for trade. In practice, business was usually done through the mediation of a bilingual Indian trader, known as banyan in Calcutta and Bombay, dubash in Madras.

It is also clear that until the nineteenth century higher-level dealings with Indian authorities, above all the Mughal government, were conducted in Persian. Company agents could become fluent in it, although they retained the services of a muns.h.i.+, a combined interpreter, translator, secretary and language tutor. A paragon of such expertise was Antoine-Louis Henri Polier, a Frenchman in the English company's service and a friend of Warren Hastings, who published his Persian correspondence in the late eighteenth century. This shows him highly accomplished, too, in the courtly style that went with the language.41 On this basis the real question is: how did English ever spread in India at all, beyond the transplanted society of the 'writers' (i.e. clerks) of the East India Company, and British regiments serving in the country? The situation, after all, was almost identical with that of the contemporary Dutch in the East Indies, with Persian cast in the role of Malay, Urdu as Javanese, and Portuguese as its very own self. And as we have seen, after a first half-hearted attempt to teach their own language, the Dutch had contented themselves with the linguistic status quo: Dutch never became the language of any but the colonial rulers in the Dutch East Indies (see Chapter 11, 'Dutch interlopers', p. 395). If this pattern had been followed, Persian would have remained the preferred common language of India to the present day.

And there was an extra motive in the back of British minds which drained any enthusiasm for wider use of their native language in India. As a member of the British Parliament put it in 1793: 'We have lost our colonies in America by imparting our education there; we need not do so in India too.'42 This loss was very fresh in memories in the late eighteenth century: Lord Cornwallis, the very general who had delivered the British surrender to George Was.h.i.+ngton in 1781, went on to become governor-general of Bengal from 1786 to 1793. Settler communities of Europeans, if they became well established, might follow the American example, and look for independence on their own terms. On this reasoning, India must remain a foreign country, albeit one kept open reliably for British business; it should not be a new British home. Richard Wellesley, governor-general from 1797, wrote to the chairman of the Board of Control in 1799: ... with relation to powers of banis.h.i.+ng Europeans from the British possessions in India ... those powers appear to me still to be too limited.

The number of persons [not in the company's service] resident in these provinces, as well as in all parts of the British empire in India, increases daily. Among these are to be found many characters, desperate from distress, or from the infamy of their conduct in Europe. Their occupations are princ.i.p.ally... at Calcutta, the lowest branches of the law, the establishment of shops and taverns, or of the places of public entertainment, or the superintendence of newspapers... Amongst all these persons, but particularly the tribe of editors of newspapers, the strongest and boldest spirit of Jacobinism prevailed...

In Madras, the evil resulting from Europeans not in the Company's service is still greater. The advisers of the nabob of the Carnatic, as well as the princ.i.p.al instruments of his opposition to the British government, and of his oppressions over his own subjects, are almost exclusively to be found among that cla.s.s of Europeans.43 British settlement in India, then, apart from activities directly sponsored by the company, was not even seen as desirable by the British authorities. From 1757 to 1856, Kampani Sahib, as it was known, proceeded to expand its financial, political and military control first across Bengal to Delhi, then across the Deccan, and finally to most of what is now India, Pakistan, ri Lanka and Burma. The one thing the company hardly spread at all was a body of speakers of its own directors' language.

Protestantism, profit and progress

In the end, the wider spread of English was begun not by the East India Company, but by British Protestant missionaries.* The company was in general suspicious of missionary involvement in its domains, on much the same grounds-and with better evidence-as those on which they shunned other Europeans. The b.l.o.o.d.y mutiny of their Indian troops in Vellore, near Madras, in 1806 was a.s.sociated with rants by one Claudius Buchanan on Hindu indifference to Christianity, demanding 'every means of coercing this contemptuous spirit of our native subjects'; in 1808 the company had speedily to suppress a tract put out by the Baptist Mission Press in Serampore (rirampur), near Calcutta, 'Addressed to Hindus and Mahomedans'.44 India has long been a dangerous place for pressing a religious point, and the company was sensitive to this hazard, which could be highly damaging to trade.

Nevertheless, there had been churchmen at the company's settlements from the earliest days. Early on, they had had to work in Portuguese, like everyone else, a requirement made explicit in the company's renewed charter of 1698.45 But soon they began to found English-language schools, primarily for children-often orphans-of company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power were growing ma.s.sively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly, ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children a knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his own son to Schwartz's missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of Madras. Schwartz's schools were being supported by all the main powers in the region: the English Company, the Muslim Haidar Ali and nawab of Arcot, and the Hindu raja of Tanjore.46 The market soon responded. By the turn of the century, 'mushroom' schools were growing up in all the centres of English power, but especially round Calcutta. The teachers, 'the broken down soldier, the bankrupt merchant and the ruined spendthrift',47 were in it mostly for the money, but they included respectable British ladies, such as one Mrs Middleton of Dinapur, outside Patna, and even the celebrated Baptist missionary William Carey of Serampore. They were aimed at prosperous Indians, and the fees charged were high. Nevertheless, the att.i.tudes of the teachers were increasingly patronising. Writing to a military officer on the first day of 1801, the Reverend D. MacKinnon revealed his motives: ... I could not discover one particle of cla.s.sical taste, of the knowledge of mathematical truth, or of genuine moral or religious principle in any cla.s.s nor in any individual of the human species born and educated in Hindostan or even in all Asia. The dark race appeared and do appear to me, buried in darkness, moving like mere mechanism and utterly void of those sentiments which dignify and enn.o.ble our species and ent.i.tle us to claim kindred with the G.o.ds.

All my speculations were at last reduced to two simple propositions.

1. That the natives of India cannot be illuminated by their own languages, nor by the Books now existing in those languages.

2. That therefore they must be enlightened by the acquisition of other languages & by reading Books capable of forming their taste & of teaching them useful & solid knowlege as well as genuine moral and religious principles.

So long ago as the year 1787 after preaching a Sermon on Christmas Day on the field of battle of Kudjuah ... I seriously resolved to try the effect of my own feeble efforts. I compiled a Grammar of the English language of which the rules & instructions were written in the Persian language & character. This Book was published in 1791 at the expence and risk of the Proprietors of the Calcutta Gazette Messrs Harington & Morris. I also was at the trouble & expence of causing a Version of the Grammar to be made into the Bengal-language, but that version was not printed.

You will smile when I mention, that when I resolved to make this effort, I formally applied to Government for permission to let in day-light on the Natives of this country. But I mention it, to observe & testify with grat.i.tude, that in all my applications public and private to Government and respectable Individuals, I met with decided encouragement & approbation.

It is but too true that these efforts have not as yet produced any visible effect; altho I can produce instances of Individual natives who have acquired a competent knowlege of the English language by the help of my Grammar...48 As the actions of the East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in London, these att.i.tudes-often shared by such influential reformers as Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill-were becoming the motive force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that 'it is the duty of this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced as may tend to the introduction among them of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement'.49 In the nineteenth century, as British political control expanded and hardened in India, the old laissez-faire business ethic in dealing with the natives, which had entailed a robust mutual respect, was increasingly replaced by an unashamed belief in European superiority, coupled with a duteous endeavour to bring up 'the dark race' to the moral and intellectual level of the G.o.dfearing Briton.

The company's Charter Act of 1813 included the provision that 'a sum of not less than a lac [100,000] of rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India...' But at this stage the company's traditional distrust of missionary priorities was still effective: the funding was explicitly aimed at 'fostering both Oriental and Occidental science... a reliable counterpoise, a protecting backwater against the threatened deluge of missionary enterprises'.50 The decision on how this small sum was to be applied turned out to be crucial for the language history of the subcontinent.

The missionaries' wish to give priority to the English language was all the time gathering support from the home government, and at last from the Indians themselves. In the late eighteenth century the company, following popular urging, had founded a number of prestige colleges for the acquisition of Indian learning: for Muslims the Calcutta Madra.s.sa in 1781, for Hindus the Benares Sanskrit College in 1791, and for incoming civil administrators from Britain the Fort William College in Calcutta in 1800. All of these had some cla.s.ses conducted in English; and Fort William had little else. In the early nineteenth century spontaneous foundations were also made by eminent citizens, notably in 1817 the Hindu College of Calcutta, for 'the cultivation of the Bengalee and English languages in particular; next, the Hindustanee tongue...; and then the Persian, if desired, as ornamental general duty to G.o.d'.51 Ram Mohan Roy, who is considered its presiding genius, was a scholar of Sanskrit and Arabic, but vociferous in his appeals for greater access to English.

... we understand that the Government in England had ordered a considerable sum of money to be annually devoted to the instruction of its Indian subjects. We were filled with sanguine hopes that this sum would be laid out in employing European gentlemen of talents and education to instruct the natives of India in mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and other useful sciences, which the natives of Europe have carried to a degree of perfection that has raised them above the inhabitants of other parts of the world ... We now find that the Government are establis.h.i.+ng a Sanskrit school under Hindoo pundits to impart such knowledge as is clearly current in India ...52 Several new government colleges were also founded, often in oriental disciplines, but under pressure from London the oriental ones were offered various inducements to improve their English-language instruction. Then in the early 1830s came catastrophic falls in the enrolments for all non-English subjects, and corresponding surges for English. A public meeting in 1834 protested against patronage of the cla.s.sical languages, and in favour of English and the vernaculars.53 In this context, the General Committee of Public Instruction made its long-delayed decision on how to spend the company's annual lakh of rupees to promote literature and knowledge. Reversing their previous preference, which had followed the hints in the charter, for native learning (and the translation of European scientific texts into Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian), they decided on 7 March 1835 that 'the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India; and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education, would be best employed on English education alone'.54 This decision, although still controversial at the time, proved fateful.* The number of the government's English-language schools more than doubled within three years of the English Education Act.55 This was just the beginning. When in 1857 universities were founded in the cla.s.sic three British cities, Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, English would be their language of instruction. And this educational preference was simultaneously reinforced in 1835 by a regulation that English was to replace Persian as the official state language and the medium of the higher courts of law, with lower courts using the local vernacular.56 Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian had hitherto kept a half-practical value, comparable to the survival of Latin into early modern Europe: henceforth, like Latin after the Enlightenment, they would be consigned to purely cla.s.sic status, symbols of heritage rather than vehicles of learning and research. And English, which had been little more than the mark of a foreign ruling caste, was now going to serve as the means for opening the whole subcontinent to foreign traditions of culture.

The basic language balance had been struck, and it persisted in India through to independence in 1947. And in practice, although English is now cla.s.sed as an a.s.sociate Official language of India, theoretically inferior to the eighteen official vernaculars, it has persisted right up to the present day. English is universal in South Asia as the lingua franca of the educated: how many actually know it is harder to say, with estimates over the past twenty years rising from 3 per cent to 30 per cent of Indians, but fewer in the other states of the region.57 Another long-term influence that favoured English, especially in the south, was the absence of any other useful lingua franca: Britain's domain had always included the south of the country, and went on to encompa.s.s the whole subcontinent; but Persian or Hindi-Urdu were never acceptable south of the old Mughal boundary. If India, especially a democratic India, is to stay united, it needs a common language that seems neutral, or at least equally oppressive to all.

Success, despite the best intentions

Although Britain had certainly not conquered South Asia in Seeley's 'fit of absence of mind', the spread of Britain's language which followed on from the conquest was almost fortuitous.

The success of English here came about by processes totally different from those that worked themselves out in North America; and these processes were different even from those that had put Britons and Indians in contact in the first place. In North America, English spread while remaining quite detached from local populations, simply displacing them over time by overcrowding numbers and overwhelming settlements. In South Asia, English spread by recruiting the local elites. Despite the company's early fears, English-language immigrants never became very numerous, never stayed for long, and by and large have all now left.

One essential force driving the recruitment was cultural prestige, definitely a British characteristic by the nineteenth century; and the attractions of this prestige went beyond the early motives of gaining preferment in the government or business. Yet it was not cultural prestige which had made India British, but rather the animal spirits of the men in the East India Company. The one point at which these romantic chancers* drew the line was any thought of meddling with local religions, or the roles of the languages that seemed so closely a.s.sociated with them. Protestant missionaries, for all their many scruples, did not have this one, and it was precisely on this point that they gradually won the argument back in the home country. The company men at last were forced to take the risk of a prescriptive line on native education: imagine their surprise when it not only did not cause riots, but even proved popular with the (thinking) public. Indian scholars found that English did indeed give them access to a world of thought beyond Indian tradition, in law, physical and social sciences, politics, literature-even, here and there, religion.

In fact, the only disappointment was felt by the Protestant missionaries, who, having won the linguistic and cultural argument, and accepted the gratifying popularity of English-language education, still failed to find many converts among the new English speakers. By and large, the worldly content of modem European culture proved much more attractive to Indians under British rule than any new and readier access to Protestantism. In that sense, the missionaries, who had confidently predicted that 'a thorough English education would be entirely subversive of Hinduism',58 were deceived.

English has remained all over the region, long after the conquest that made its presence possible has been undone. English will probably continue to spread here, or rather to thicken, with the growth of higher education (and other cultural influences, as we shall see). For this reason, the growth of English in India and the rest of southern Asia provides a far better model for any likely future spread of the language than does the history of English in North America.

The world taken by storm

'North America speaks English.'

Answer attributed to German chancellor Bismarck, when asked by a journalist in 1898 to identify the defining event of his times

An empire completed

These two means to the spread of English-what we may call American sweep-aside and Indian re-education-were to be applied, one or the other, across the whole British empire as it expanded to cover a quarter of the earth. Revealingly, the choice was correlated as much with climate as population: the typical-and ultimately most influential-settler is a farmer, and European farmers only really know temperate-zone crops. In temperate colonies, above all Australia and New Zealand, British long-term settlers became a majority of the population, and so English became the princ.i.p.al language. But in the tropics, where British activities were restricted to government, trade and commercial exploitation, the spread of English was more superficial, affecting local elites, and those in contact with British power centres, through school education and gradual recruitment of the locals into British government and enterprise: this was the pattern in most of the Asian colonies-Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Sarawak, Brunei and Sabah.

In the sweep-aside countries,* the action was concentrated in the nineteenth century. Australia is estimated to have accommodated 300,000 people (speaking two hundred languages) when the British began arriving in the 1790s; by 1890 they were down to 50,000 (with 150 languages left). Their population had always been concentrated in the south-east, just as the English speakers are today: that is where there is water. In the same period, English speakers went from nil to 400,000 by 1850, and nearly 4 million by 1900.59 As in the Americas, after the first few years no serious effort was made to accommodate the Aboriginals, let alone learn any of their languages; even the missionaries were rather unsuccessful in making non-destructive contact.

In New Zealand, although the British found it in 1770 held by a single people speaking a single language, Maori, a similar story ultimately played out. After the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was struck between the Maori and Britain, British immigration took off, growing twelvefold in the following decade, from 2000 to 25,000 by 1850. In the next half-century, their population grew thirtyfold again, now boosted by big families, as well as an unceasing flood of hopeful new settlers: by 1900 it had reached 750,000. In the same nineteenth century, Maori numbers sank from well over 100,000 to 42,000. They may have had the advantage of knowing the country for a millennium before the British arrived; but they could not contend with European diseases, and above all the productivity of European farm animals, cattle and sheep, evolved to thrive on temperate gra.s.slands. They put up a bitter fight, but like the Australian Aboriginals, they were swept aside.60 Both Australian Aboriginal and Maori populations have rebounded in the late twentieth century, but their proportions in their own countries remain tiny: 170,000-a little less than 1 per cent-Australians are now reckoned to be of Aboriginal descent (47,000-0.03 per cent-with some knowledge of an Aboriginal language), and there are now over 310,000 Maori-8 per cent of New Zealanders-of whom some 70,000 speak the language, 1.8 per cent. They are simply engulfed by the modern English-speaking nations of Australia (18.5 million) and New Zealand (3.8 million) in which they still struggle to survive.61 Farther north, English speakers came in earnest to South-East Asia only in 1786, when the English East India Company acquired Penang, a small island just off Kedah, largely as a base for naval refitting.* Lord Cornwallis was still governor-general at the time, as keen as ever to avoid settlement, and above all any political involvement. But one thing led to another; the British kindly stewarded the Dutch empire from 1795 to 1814, while its metropolis was occupied by the French, and in the meantime Penang gained a mercantile life of its own, eclipsing the ancient entrepot of Malacca. The British lieutenant-governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, who had opposed return of the Dutch colonies, felt that Penang, lying outside the Straits, was not quite right to protect the burgeoning trade (largely in opium) between India and China. Through an act of diplomatic legerdemain, installing there a Malay sultan who had been slighted by the Dutch, he was able to acquire Singapore for Britain in 1819. It was then a fairly small settlement, but the population instantly went up to five thousand, and began to develop as the new major entrepot.

Subsequent intrigues and wars, always undertaken by the British with an eye to the commercial main chance, resulted in British political control being extended to the whole of Burma (1853-86), Malaya (1883-95) and the northern region of Borneo (1888). As icing on the cake, Britain also acquired its own base in China, Hong Kong (1848, enlarged in 1860 and 1898). The linguistic effect was extension of English for law and administration, all over these parts of South-East and East Asia. Others soon saw which way the language wind was blowing: the Straits Times of Singapore began publication in 1845 (current circulation 386,000, for a national population of 3 million), and the South China Morning Post of Hong Kong in 1903 (circulation 200,000, for a population of 6 million).

Nowadays, knowledge of English is still a mark of the elite in all the successor states of the British colonies. It is often difficult to know what proportion of the people speak it. Its status has become politically controversial in Malaysia since independence in 1957; there is an active policy to 'standardise' on Malay in education, but as in India, English is popular with the large minorities, here Chinese- and Tamil-speaking, who feel threatened by this. In Burma (or, to use its more ancient name, Myanmar) use of English is nowadays not readily admitted by government sources. Its future in Hong Kong, since 1997 returned to mainland China, is obscure, but a survey in 1992 suggested that over 25 per cent had some competence in it. In Singapore, a 1975 survey put competence among the over-forties at 27 per cent, but among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds at over 87 per cent.62 In Africa, there were no major European settlements until the nineteenth century, except for those of the Portuguese and Dutch. But when the scramble for colonies had exhausted the available territory, the spread of English in British possessions followed the re-education pattern as against sweep-aside. The temperate parts of South Africa did attract large numbers of white settlers, but they tailed off as British territory extended northward; the Bantu population, who were fairly recent arrivals themselves, held their ground well. As a result we find 3.5 million English speakers in South Africa, 9.1 per cent of the population, but even grouping together the English and Afrikaans speakers, a million of them mutually bilingual, they amount only to 22 per cent. Farther north, the percentage of native English speakers-essentially white citizens-is far less, 3 per cent in Zimbabwe, 0.5 per cent in Zambia. English is a more significant secondary language in East Africa; there are few native speakers, but 5 per cent of Tanzanians, Kenyans and Ugandans use it, despite the availability of Swahili as an alternative lingua franca. This, of course, is a figure very comparable to countries of Asia that accepted reeducation; and in all these countries, as in so many Asian ones, English remains as an official language.

The other major area of old British colonies in Africa is the west, from Cameroon out along the coast to Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. In this area also is Liberia, another country with English-speaking links, but in this case through its foundation as a preserve for freed slaves from the United States of America. They all have different histories; but they share the fact that their climate has always discouraged white settlement. All define English as an official language, but it appears that only a smallish minority of their populations, again in the region of 5 per cent, are actually speakers. Since all the countries are highly multilingual, another widespread means for communication is the use of English-based creoles, such as Nigerian Pidgin in Nigeria, Krio in Sierra Leone, Liberian English in Liberia.63 The last major area for expansion of English was into the islands dotted across the Pacific. British colonisation of this area came rather later than the French (see Chapter 11, 'La francophonie', p. 417): Fiji in 1874, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands in 1892, the Solomons in 1893, Tonga in 1900. New Guinea's western half was reserved by the Dutch, but Germany and Australia claimed the rest in 1884. Like many German colonies in Africa, this one fell into British hands after the German defeat in the First World War, but in this case the hands were specifically Australian. At the same time, the German (western) half of Samoa was a.s.signed to New Zealand. In the New Hebrides, British missionaries and French planters shared control from 1887.

None of these territories was of great interest to British imperial strategists, except in some notional compet.i.tion with French influence; the islanders in general were left to the s.h.i.+fting mercies of whale and sea-slug hunters, sandalwood cutters, the cultivators of sugar cane, cotton and coconut, and of course missionaries. One result was the temporary recruitment of large gangs of South Sea Islanders to work on plantations in Queensland, Fiji and Samoa, where they learnt to communicate in pidgin English. Another was a vast infusion of Indians into Fiji to engage in sugar planting and processing, so that now close to half its population speak a form of Hindi. But as a long-term result of all those indentured workers, the South Pacific has become a prime area for English-based creoles, and two of them are now accepted as official languages: Tok Pisin is the language of Papua New Guinea, independent since 1975, and Bislama of Vanuatu (once the New Hebrides), independent since 1980. These creoles are very different from the English spread by missionaries. Anyway, the communities that speak this English are all very small minorities in their countries, as one would expect where the language has been spread by re-education.

English was also coming to the Pacific islands from the opposite direction. Since the early nineteenth century Hawaii had been a winter harbour for whalers, and from 1820 it became the focus of interest for fifteen companies of missionaries from New England. US businessmen were also increasingly active, perhaps looking for a new frontier after the fulfilment of their country's 'Manifest Destiny'; they were the main beneficiaries of a land division organised in 1848-50. For a short time, Hawaiian independence survived, balanced among the contending interests of Britain, France and the USA. But American pressure was unabating: a special treaty of reciprocity was struck in 1875, the Hawaiian monarchy was deposed in 1893, and in 1898 the whole archipelago was annexed to the USA.

In 1896 one of the first acts of the Hawaiian republic, formed briefly after the fall of the monarchy, was to require English as medium of instruction for no less than half the school day; but in practice no Hawaiian at all was allowed. In that generation, the transmission of the language from parent to child stopped dead. One grandmother told her granddaughter before her first day of school: E pa'a pono ka 'olelo a ka haole. Mai kalele i ka kakou 'olelo, 'a'ohe he pono i laila. A ia ke ola o ka noho 'ana ma keiamua aku i ka 'ike pono i ka 'olelo a ka po'e haole.

Learn well the language of the whites. Do not rely on our language, there's no value there. One's future well-being is dependent upon mastering the language of the foreign people.64 This sounds like particularly harsh re-education, but in fact Hawaii conforms at least as well to the sweep-aside model: by 1996, with the population now standing at 1.2 million, only 18.8 per cent were ethnic Hawaiians, and half of these had less than 50 per cent Hawaiian ancestry. Outside the one small island of Niihau, everyone on the islands is now at least bilingual in English, and the vast majority know no other language.

In the same year of 1898, the USA took the Philippines and Guam forcibly from Spain in a flush of imperialist glee (see Chapter 10, 'Coda: Across the Pacific', p. 377); and a year later they also enforced their own solution to a long-standing dispute over Samoa, taking the eastern half of the archipelago. There was then a respite for forty years, as these new territories got used to the sound of English; but on 7 December 1941 an attack on Pearl Harbor, in American Hawaii, unleashed the Pacific war with j.a.pan. At the war's end, having got to know a decidedly unbalmy side of the islands as battlefields, the USA found itself in possession of all the j.a.panese colonies in Micronesia. Though no longer colonies after the 1970s, they have all kept close ties to the USA. English has become the lingua franca of the Pacific, but outside Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand it is nowhere a majority language.