A.N. Wilson: After the Victorians

A.N. Wilson's previous book, The Victorians, was noteable for its startling claim that Queen Victoria, that paragon of virtue, was illegitimate. According to Wilson she was the daughter of her mother's male secretary. This male secretary was a haemophiliac. Thus Wilson claimed to have sorted out the great mystery of how haemophilia entered the royal houses of Europe, changing history.

After the Victorians continues this colourful, highly personal, almost chatty way of retelling the stories of Britain's diminuendo from being the most powerful nation on earth till that low point, in 1944, when Roosevelt only semi-jokingly said that he understood Britain was bankrupt and it seemed as good a time as any "to take over the British Empire".

Wilson's basic question is Lenin's — "who has the power to do what to whom?"

He follows the trajectory of what he calls "the deepest question of the 20th century" as Indian and Irish and Africans question Britain's imperial right to do a great deal to them. He's not exactly an apologist for empire but he does put forward an interesting case that the gradualist constitutional monarchy of Britain damaged the globe much less than its collectivist or corporatist replacements, which tended to be much more murderous and far more authoritarian.

Wilson places the relatively small death tolls of Britain's worse gaffes in India beside the vast numbers of Indians who slaughtered each other after independence. I suppose in a smaller way the hideous shambles of contemporary Zimbabwe, one-time foodbowl of Africa, is a present case in point.

He also looks back to the Victorian period, asserting that its ability to live alongside doubt stood it in better stead than the 20th century with its rush towards certainty in the form of fascism and stalinism. But he also provides an interesting view of how present-day difficulties, in Iraq for example, arose out of imperial muddles of the last century.

The mess of Gallipolli, something which affected New Zealand directly, arose partly out of Churchill's obsession that the Germans were trying to build a railway which would effectively cut off the British from India. Wilson asserts that from the moment the Royal Navy switched from steam/coal to oil, oil became the great source of antagonism between the Germans and the British, leading indirectly to the catastrophe of World War I.

Little changes, you might think. If anything, Wilson's book is underlaid by the crossfade between Britain and America as the two imperial nations — something Muslim activists are not slow to notice.

Yet there's a pathos in Wilson's trajectory, too, as Britain tried to do the right thing in the early 1940s, fighting fascism largely alone only to effectively end up in the boneyard of history.

* Peter Wells is an Auckland writer and film maker.
* Random House, $79.95