Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956
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As H. C. Jackson, a long-time Sudan civil servant, writing in retirement in
the early 1950s pointed out about the Sudanese that
their main concern was to live without fear, to practice their religion
without interference, and to keep for their own use what they had
earned or grown, free from the depredations of robbers or unjust tax-
gatherers. They could not forget the old unhappy days of bloodshed,
extortion and famine, and were grateful to the British for the prosperity
they enjoyed and the security in which they could now pass their lives.
34
The mutual respect, knowledge of Arabic, and care not to trample on the
religious and cultural sensitivities of Sudanese troops allowed Boustead
during the Abyssinian campaign to lead his Frontier battalion with consid-
erable success against numerically superior Italian forces. The linguistic
experience of soldiering in the Sudan could be easily transferred as the
empire shrank to the Arabian Peninsula itself, from the Sudan Defence
Force to the Bedouin Hadhrami Legion. Muslim troops and Arabic lan-
guage formed a pool of manpower, which could be transferred from one
part of the empire to another.
Among the most famous to have served with Arab troops was Glubb
Pasha (Lt. General Sir John Glubb) whose name is associated with the
Jordanian Arab Legion, which he commanded from 1939 until his dis-
missal by King Hussein in February 1956. While Glubb commanded a
Jordanian rather than a British force (although it contained a number of
British officers on secondment), the Arab Legion under his command
served alongside British troops during the Iraq and Syrian campaigns of
1941 and helped to guard British military installations all over the
Middle East during the Second World War. While the Arab Legion drew
recruits from settled parts of Jordan, Glubb also adopted a policy of
bedouinization drawing recruits from bedouin tribes as far afield as
southern Iraq and Kuwait. As opposed to the town dweller, the loyalty of
the bedouin was a personal one to their clan, their tribe and their
sheikh. In the Arab Legion, their loyalty was to King of Jordan, a direct
descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. As such the bedouin element
was much less prone to the political intrigue, which has bedevilled other
Arab armies since 1945 and rallied to King Hussein during the
attempted coup of 1957 and again in 1970 and 1971 in the fighting
against Palestine Liberation Organization commandos. In looking at
Glubb, James Lunt has pointed out that
his philosophy stemmed from his faith, which was based on the power
of love. For him, as for the simplest bedouin camel-herd, God was
ever-present, all-seeing and all-beneficent. The Arabs knew he was a
devout man and respected him the more for it. His soldiers were
never mere names or numbers. They were always individuals.
35
212 A.H. Ion
In a real sense, religious differences, provided mutual respect existed
among men of faith, proved no barrier to the recruitment of Arabs or
Sudanese or Nigerians into British controlled forces. Just as there was a
marked tendency among Anglican missionaries during the late nineteenth
century to seek out groups, often belonging to dying cultures like the
Ainu of remote Hokkaido or the Tayal of Taiwan who were unsullied by
impact of modernization and urbanization, or the nineteenth century sol-
diering counterpart drawn to the Northwest Frontier with its public school
boy adventuring against the wily scheming Pathans, so the late imperial
soldiers and administrators, like Glubb or Boustead, found themselves
most attune with the bedouin of the desert or the Furs of Darfur. These
were peoples still largely untouched by the polluting influences of the
modern town and urban culture but still possessing from earlier times a
manly warrior tradition. Where there was little respect for religious beliefs,
religion could act as a potent force against military occupation as was the
case with the resistance of the Karen hill tribesmen, many of whom were
influenced by Christianity, to the Japanese in Burma.
While the Indian Army and Indian troops were seen as imperial police-
men to be sent to quell the emergency in both Mesopotamia and East
Africa at the beginning of the First World War, the experience of fighting
von Lettow-Vorbeck revealed that the King’s African Rifles and other
African regiments could perform well in military operations more
sophisticated than punitive expeditions against recalcitrant tribesmen. It
was not, of course, until the Second World War that African troops were
employed outside of Africa. In the fighting in Burma against the Japan-
ese, African troops proved to be very capable in the jungle warfare. As
David French has pointed out, it was during the Second World War that
Britain relied more than ever before upon the manpower of the Empire.
In the course of the war, Britain, the Dominions and the Empire mobil-
ized 103 divisions or their equivalents of which only 49 were raised in
Britain and 54 were raised in India, West Africa and the Dominions.
36
By
providing Britain with the manpower to stave off defeat in the Second
World War and to defeat ultimately its enemies, the Empire more than
proved its worth.
III
Religion also played a political role in the empire, which impinged on
imperial defence. It was important, in many cases, to try to prevent religion
from becoming the emotional focus that could lead to an intensification of
conflict. This was true even in an apparently stable country like late nine-
teenth century Canada. The relatively minor 1885 Riel Rebellion in the
Canadian Northwest had within it the potential of creating serious dif-
ficulties for Canadian confederation had Louis Riel, its Metis leader,
chosen to fan Roman Catholic–Protestant antipathies and French and
The empire that prays together stays together 213
English hostilities by projecting himself as a Francophone Roman Catholic
martyr unjustly persecuted by a largely Anglophone Protestant Federal
government led by Sir John A. Macdonald, a statesman born in Scotland.
Happily, for the Canadian government, atheistic statements by Riel alien-
ated many of the Roman Catholic clergy in Quebec. Only a small imperial
force was needed to pacify the Canadian Northwest and to capture Riel
whose subsequent execution remains a controversial issue in Canadian
history. Canadian federal governments ran great political risks, however, in
going against the Roman Catholic clergy in Quebec whose particularistic
proclivities were opposed to any Canadian physical participation in imper-
ial defence. This the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier had realized at
the time of the Boer War, and the Conservative government of Robert
Borden found out during the Conscription Crisis in 1917.
As well as Canada, religion was a political factor in other parts of the
empire including the strategically crucial British mandate of Palestine
after the First World War. Rudyard Kipling considered Palestine so
important a region that he described it as ‘the buckle on the belt of the
world’,
37
whose Holy Places were sacred to Christians, Jews and Muslims
alike and where British rule both there and elsewhere in the Middle East
faced grave difficulties, if the problems of Palestine became a Pan-
Muslim affair.
38
While political and religious turmoil marked British rule
in Palestine down to 1948, it was not religion that was Britain’s undoing
in the Middle East. It was the secular political revolution in the Middle
East that came out of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, which first manifested
itself in the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 that challenged Britain’s posi-
tion there. The empire had provided British administrators and soldiers
with opportunities to manage religion, but the Egyptian revolution
brought a changing direction to the wind of morning blowing in the
Middle East. Ironically, it was not Pan-Muslimism but rather a secular
Pan-Arabism espoused by Colonel Nasser of Egypt that proved the
undoing of Britain.
The debacle of the Suez Intervention of 1957 revealed Britain to be
out of touch with the new political reality in the Middle East. The revolu-
tions in Syria and Iraq following hard on that of Egypt destroyed govern-
ments in place since the end of the First World War and with it the
outside dominance of Britain and France in that region. The new
regimes were led by military officers and educated townspeople who had
been brought up under what they perceived to have been the iron heel
of foreign imperialism and saw salvation through the implementation of
secular political agendas at home and anti-imperialism abroad. It would
have to wait for the Iranian Revolution of 1979 before religion was
brought back to the forefront in Middle Eastern politics. While this
might have marked the return to a more familiar grounding for Middle
Eastern politics, the passing of the imperial age meant that the
pool of British military and administrative knowledge of how to deal with
214 A.H. Ion
Islam, which had accumulated with the imperial experience, had also
largely disappeared.
If it was new secular factors rather than religion that challenged that
Britain’s post-Second World War position in the Middle East, it was reli-
gion that finally broke up British India. The recalcitrant attitude of the
National Congress Party towards the war effort against the Axis powers
caused the wartime Viceroy of India, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell,
actively to promote cooperation between Indian Muslims and the British
authorities because of the realization that a disproportionate percentage
of the Indian Army was Muslim.
39
Imperial defence concerns caused by
the Japanese danger to India led him to do this in spite of both the
Muslim League’s call for Britain ‘to divide and quit’ India and the fact
that British India was on the verge of cleaving itself apart on the
independent fissure lines between Hindus and Muslims. Once the war
had ended, high expectations of early independence meant that it was
difficult to go back on past understandings. Military considerations also
meant that the British authorities had little room to manoeuvre in obtain-
ing a political solution to the issue of divide or not. There was a belief
among the British authorities that the loyalty of the Indian Civil Service
and the Indian Army could not be trusted in carrying out British orders.
Yet, it was not the Indian Civil Service and Indian Army that ultimately
was important in deciding whether or not India that the British left
behind was partitioned or not, it was the British. As has been shown, as
early as 1892, Charles Dilke stressed that British ascendancy was moral
and rested on character and self-confidence. It was self-confidence that
the British lacked in India after the war; the will to rule had evaporated.
The defence of British India ultimately did not rest with the Indian Army
but with the British armed forces. British soldiers in India had no
stomach for maintaining peace and order there; they only wanted to go
home.
40
It was left to Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy, to reach what
settlement he could. As it had in 1857, so religion in 1947 brought
turmoil to India. It was Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs who were now pitted
against each other, and this time the Christian British washed their hands
of the religious bloodshed that marked the end of their rule of the sub-
continent.
In its times of greatest crisis, Britain was able to mobilize the man-
power resources of the Empire for its defence and in doing so greatly
adding to its military strength and hard power. In times of peace, locally
raised levies in Africa, India and China allowed Britain to maintain law
and order in its Empire without the need for a very large British stand-
ing army. In large part, this was only possible because of the ability of
Britain to accommodate men of different religions and customs within
locally raised levies. While Christianity was the religion of most Britons
and was considered by many as being an essential part of British civil-
ization, non-Christians were happily accepted as soldiers (sometimes for
The empire that prays together stays together 215
216 A.H. Ion
the protection of Christian work, as in Nyasaland) and Christian sensitiv-
ities were not allowed to interfere. What the missionary movement did
provide through its evangelistic, educational, medical and social work
was reinforcement for the efficacy of British civilization and institutions
in the minds of colonial peoples, and in doing so, it enhanced the
imperial power through soft power. At the same time, Christian missions
can also be seen as contributing to the growth of nationalism among
colonial peoples, which was not necessarily in the interest of Britain as
the imperial overlord. If decolonization meant that the predominantly
Muslim regiments in the British imperial forces in Africa and India dis-
appeared, the retrenchment of the British Army has also meant that the
Cameroonians and so many other regiments raised in England and Scot-
land in times when Christianity was an important force in national life
have also gone. The religious tapestry of the overseas Empire helped
weave the protective shroud of imperial defence in the 100 years
between the Indian Mutiny and Suez on which British trade, prestige
and power was sustained. Its wool and woof also made the military saga
of Empire that more colourful, adventurous and inspiring.
Notes
1 Max Warren, Social History and Christian Mission (London, 1967), 72.
2 See Ian Hernon, Britain’s Forgotten Wars: Colonial Campaigns of the 19th Century
(Thrupp, 2003), 405–424.
3 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914: A Study of Empire and
Expansion (Basingstoke, 3rd. edition, 2002), 330–331.
4 James Lunt, Imperial Sunset: Frontier Soldiering in the 20th Century (London,
1981), 205.
5 Eric Goddard, ‘The Indian Army – Company and Raj’, Asian Affairs, 63 (New
Series Vol. VII), Part III (October 1976): 263–276, 263.
6 Gordon Johnson, ‘Indian Independence (1) Taking the strain, (2) Cutting the
knot’, Asian Affairs, XVI (Old Series Vol. 72), Part III (October 1985): 254–264,
257.
7 James Lawrence, Raj: The Making and the Unmaking of British India (London,
1997), 540, quoted in Sean M. Maloney, Canada and UN Peacekeeping: Cold War
by Other Means, 1945–1970 (St Catherines, 2003), 23.
8 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, edited and with an introduction by John
Gross (Chicago and London, 1971), 43.
9 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Eathen’, quoted in Angela Partington, The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford, 1992), 398.
10 See, for instance, Norman Etherington, ‘Missions and Empire’, in Robin W.
Winks, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Volume V: Historiography
(Oxford, 2001), 303–314.
11 The other elements being: first, the maintenance of the Empire; second, the
opening of new areas for our surplus population; third, the suppression of the
slave trade, and fifth, the development of British commerce.
12 Warren, Social History and Christian Mission, 30.
13 Captain Colomb, R. N., Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean: A Record of Naval
Experiences (London, 1968, originally published in 1873), 403.
14 Henry H. Montgomery, Foreign Missions (London, 1908), 83.
15 Ibid., 98.
16 Warren, Social History and Christian Mission, 131.
17 Peter Hinchliff, ‘Africa’, in John McManners, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History
of Christianity (Oxford, 1992), 455–487, 486.
18 Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (Harmondsworth, 1964), 254.
19 David Gilmour, ‘Empire and the East: The Orientalism of Lord Curzon’, Asian
Affairs, vol. XXVI (Old Series vol. 82), Part III (October 1995): 270–277, 272.
20 Colomb, Slave-Catching in the Indian Ocean, 410–432.
21 Ibid., 411.
22 Keith Sinclair, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington, 1957), 222–223.
23 Keith Sinclair, A History of New Zealand (Harmondsworth, 1959), 42.
24 Warren, Social History and Christian Mission, 31.
25 A. P. Thornton, The Imperial Idea and Its Enemies: A Study in British Power
(London, 1959), 50.
26 Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke and Spenser Wilkinson, Imperial Defence (London,
1892), 101–102.
27 Sir Stanley Reed and S. T. Sheppard, eds, The Indian Year Book 1929 (Bombay
and Calcutta, 1929), 281.
28 Denis Judd, The Lion and the Tiger: The Rise and Fall of the British Raj, 1600–1947
(Oxford, 2004), 136–137.
29 D. H. Cole, Imperial Military Geography (London, 1924), 353–354.
30 Judd, The Lion and the Tiger, 154.
31 Akbar S. Ahmed, ‘An Aspect of the Colonial Encounter in the North-West
Frontier Province’, Asian Affairs, Vol. IX (Old Series Vol. 65), Part III (October
1978): 319–327, 325.
32 Lieutenant-Colonel H. Moyse-Bartlett, The King’s African Rifles: A Study in the
Military History of East and Central Africa, 1890–1945 (Aldershot, 1956), 684.
33 Hugh Boustead, The Wind of Morning: The Autobiography of Hugh Boustead
(London, 1971), 78.
34 H. C. Jackson, The Fighting Sudanese (London, 1954), 32.
35 James Lunt, ‘Glubb Pasha’, Asian Affairs, vol. XVIII (Old Series Vol. 74), Part II
(June 1987): 129–137, 137.
36 David French, The British Way in Warfare 1688–2000 (London, 1990), 205.
37 Kipling quoted in Cole, Imperial Military Geography, 326.
38 Ibid., 327.
39 Judd, The Lion and the Tiger, 161.
40 Ibid., 168–169.
The empire that prays together stays together 217
11 Propaganda and the defence of
empire, 1856–1956
Stephen Badsey
Propaganda was not a word, or even an idea, that came readily to the
defenders of the British Empire during 1856–1956, particularly during the
first half of our period. A search of the National Archives at Kew reveals
only a handful of files dated before 1906 with the word ‘propaganda’ in
their titles, and in all cases these are either references to the activities of
foreigners, or to the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda, the body estab-
lished by the Roman Catholic Church to promote the dissemination of
true doctrine in 1622. Of files referring to ‘Empire Propaganda’ there are
exactly two, dating from the late 1930s and 1940s and dealing with routine
matters in the Dominions Office and the British Council, respectively.
1
It
was not until the First World War that the British government established
any official organisations for the production and dissemination of propa-
ganda, whether aimed at their own people, their enemies, or neutrals.
Contrary to a powerful mythology which started in the 1920s and has not
yet been entirely eradicated, there was no coherent policy or organisation
for British propaganda in 1914, and the institutions that were created
were at first a bewildering mixture of the official and the semi-official. For
the British, propaganda was something that other countries did, while one
First World War propagandist characterised their own activities as ‘con-
fined to the presentation of facts and of general arguments based upon
facts’.
2
Indeed, from the First World War onwards, the preferred British
term was always ‘news’ or ‘information’. The ad hoc organisations were
not even partly consolidated into a Ministry of Information (MoI) until
spring 1918 and even that ministry was disbanded immediately at the war’s
end. The sinister overtones that the word propaganda acquired in the
course of the First World War and shortly afterwards led to a continued
British preference for the term ‘news’ to describe their minimal official
propaganda efforts of the interwar period.
3
A new MoI was established at
the start of the Second World War, together with other more clandestine
propaganda organisations including the Political Warfare Executive
(PWE), but these also began the war badly and were both disbanded in
1945.
4
To take successive British governments at their own valuation
would suggest that propaganda played no part at all in the defence of
Great Britain and its Empire until 1914 and that thereafter it was seen as a
distasteful and temporary wartime expedient, to be abandoned as soon as
peace was declared.
Professional practitioners and students of propaganda not only define
propaganda much more widely than this but do not associate the idea of
propaganda inherently with deceit or dishonesty. From the 1920s
onwards, most definitions of propaganda have emphasised its function,
that of influencing opinion in a direction desired by the propagandist.
Propaganda can appeal to the intellect, the emotions, or both; it works
best in a partnership with real power, and also with the truth, or at least in
the absence of blatant or deliberate falsehood. In this sense, according to
the 1950s French political theorist Jacques Driencourt, ‘Everything is pro-
paganda’.
5
Among the cultural achievements, artefacts and events identi-
fied as British Imperial propaganda, are the building of the Ottawa
parliament and the cathedrals of Sydney and Calcutta in the English
Gothic style, Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’ of 1903, and even that
the first ever cinema film to be shown in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1897 was a
dramatisation of Henry Rider Haggard’s novel She.
6
Culture and the arts,
including literature, have traditionally been seen as peripheral to the prac-
tical business of government (or, at best, additional as in the Marxist ‘base
and superstructure’ theory), and this has applied particularly to the use of
the arts as propaganda in the service of warfare. For the whole of the
period 1856–1956, it was de rigeur for senior British military commanders
to affect to despise propaganda and the press as distasteful irrelevances.
But there are fashions and discoveries in history as in any other discipline,
and a most influential recent development has been the linking together
of culture with political and economic power, so that those still struggling
to come to terms with Karl von Clausewitz must now also face Jürgen
Habermas. Yet, another of those philosophers whose works are quoted far
more often than read (his seminal book The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere was translated into English only in 1989) the popularity of
Habermas’s arguments, and those of his interpreters, stems from their
useful explanation for the non-quantifiable factors in political and military
power.
7
Habermas postulated that, in eighteenth-century Britain and
Europe, circumstances combined to produce a ‘public opinion’, consist-
ing largely of informal associations of the economically powerful and the
culturally and intellectually influential, that was also separate from the
ruling court. At a time of comparatively weak instruments of government,
it was not enough for the rulers of Europe to hold political authority and
military power, and it was also important for them to impress this bourgeois’
public opinion and secure its cooperation. Methods of gaining this public
opinion included displays of culture both in the narrow sense of the arts
and in the wider sense of patriotism or other forms of ideological unity.
The celebrations, commemorations, and processions that accompanied
military victories or important political events were not merely frills, they
Propaganda and the defence of empire 219
were an essential part of the power that a ruler possessed.
8
This eight-
eenth-century model of a relationship between a ruler whose political and
military power was in practice limited and a body of subjects aware of their
own identity and wielding considerable influence fits very well with the
British Empire at its height. This would make propaganda, in the sense of
a public display of confidence backed by the credible threat of force, one
of the critical elements of Imperial defence. Indeed, these cultural theo-
ries show, at times, a striking connection with more conventional military
concepts of deterrence. One of the clearest examples comes at the very
start of our period. In 1856, the British forced a conclusion to the
Crimean War on terms favourable to themselves by publicly building the
‘great armament’, a floating siege train intended to bombard the coastal
fortress defending St Petersburg, and then, after the peace was signed, dis-
playing this mighty flotilla at Spithead for the world to see and The Times
to report.
9
In a reflection of this link between power and propaganda, official con-
cerns were expressed throughout the period about British ‘prestige’, espe-
cially in the maintenance of order in India after the Mutiny of 1857.
10
As
the pinnacle of this prestige, the elaborate ceremonials of enthronement
and anniversaries for the British monarchy, which were an entirely artifi-
cial creation arising out of fears of republicanism that first appeared late
in the reign of Queen Victoria, were also an important part of the propa-
ganda of Empire. Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897, in particular, was
marked by processions of Imperial troops through the centre of London.
11
Although Victoria herself never visited India despite being made Empress
in 1877, her grandson George V’s durbar in Delhi in 1911 completed the
process whereby Royal occasions became also Imperial occasions. These
events became propaganda displays of power and prestige, orchestrated to
offset agitation by Bengali nationalists.
If there was no actual British government department dedicated to pro-
paganda in Victoria’s reign, it was because there scarcely needed to be.
Propaganda was such an integral part of the way that the British ruled their
country and Empire that its operation at any time in the period 1856–1956
reflected the prevailing political orthodoxy. In the Victorian era, it was
either a well-understood practice of the governing elites or a largely infor-
mal arrangement between government and business, to the extent that
Reuter’s news agency’s own authorised history has described its role during
1865–1914 as ‘an Imperial institution’, having been given a monopoly
within the Empire in 1870.
12
Reporters for British newspapers working
overseas actively sought to cooperate with the local British embassy or con-
sulate.
13
Later, in the First World War, as government became more active
in organising the country for war, so propaganda organisations evolved
from a series of temporary improvisations towards more centralised
control. Finally, in the Second World War and afterwards, propaganda
would become almost entirely an activity run or directed by the state.
220 S. Badsey
In the Victorian era, there were a few private or semi-private organisa-
tions dedicated to promoting the idea of Empire, such as the Empire
League or the Imperial Institute founded in London in 1887 as part of Vic-
toria’s Golden Jubilee.
14
But mostly, propaganda took the form of the arts,
including paintings, plays, music halls, and novels, together with images
from advertising and other aspects of everyday life; the later Victorians and
Edwardians lived their lives surrounded by the propaganda of Empire.
15
Much of this propaganda was militaristic in nature, including an emphasis
on military service for the Empire and such pressure groups as the Navy
League and the National Service League. Particular studies have been
made of the ways in which young boys were propagandised, including the
stories depicted in Boys Own Paper (founded in 1879 by the Religious Tract
Society), W. H. Fitchett’s Deeds That Won the Empire (1899), and the original
1908 edition of Scouting for Boys, now characterised as an ‘imperialist hand-
book’.
16
The propaganda of Empire was always of great importance as a jus-
tification for its continued expansion, including the depiction in
newspapers and books of enemies as fundamentally ‘other’, and of the
British as engaged in a civilising mission.
17
This was the propaganda that
the British gave to themselves, and which the two or three generations after
1856 grew up learning, and it is possible to trace its effects on their political
and social elites. Although the Empire had little to do with the reformed
public schools movement begun by Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby that
spread first throughout Britain and then the Dominions, by about 1900,
the ideals of social hierarchy and upper class leadership which it instilled
were expressed most deeply in the armed forces and in Imperial service.
18
The propaganda of Empire was so much part of the social fabric of these
schools that overt public declarations were seen as bad taste and contrary
to the public school ethic; Rudyard Kipling’s archetypal 1870s public
schoolboy ‘Stalky’ (based on Kipling’s friend Major General Lionel Dun-
sterville, with whom he had attended the United Services College)
described an overly enthusiastic school speech-day propagandist of Empire
as a ‘Jelly-bellied Flag-flapper’.
19
Rather, phrases such as ‘The school spe-
cialises in the preparation of boys for the ICS [Indian Civil Service] and the
Colonial Services’ were given discreet mention in the school prospectus.
20
Imperial ideals were held as deeply as religious beliefs; indeed, they were
often combined, and it was considered just as inappropriate for a gentle-
man to discuss them.
21
This may all seem removed from the defence of the British Empire, but
it was of great importance to the way in which the Empire was defended.
The ideology of correct and gentlemanly behaviour as a trait of the British
ruling elite played a particular role in the continued Indian acceptance of
British rule after 1857 and even in the negotiations that led to independ-
ence in 1947. At the height of the Second World War, the offer of a per-
sonal ‘gentleman’s agreement’ enabled the British to improve relations
with Pandit Jawaharal Nehru, then held under detention, by allowing him
Propaganda and the defence of empire 221