For a long time it was assumed by some that the inner lives of so-called primitive people were less rich than those of their “civilized” overlords. This fallacy was exposed in the 1920s when the British physician and ethnologist Charles Seligman began collecting the dreams of both colonizer and colonized. Seligman and his team of researchers, who were stretched out across the British Empire, found that the dreams of those “primitive people” were very much like those of an average European. “Dreams of flying were a favorable omen from Indonesia to Austria,” Matthew Parker writes. “If raw meat appeared, this was a prophecy of impending death or bad luck for Irishmen, Solomon Islanders and West Africans alike.”
However, as Parker also points out in One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, there was one significant difference: the major part played by white officials in the dreams of the colonized, almost all of them within “the context of humiliation, reproach or violence.” In one dream, a Ugandan man dreamed of “being given ten strokes with the cane by the District Commissioner.” In another dream, also reported in Uganda, a young man dreamed he was a child again and that the local missionary abducted him and threw him into a deep hole, where he died. “Whatever the particular imperial situation,” Parker writes, “or the status of the dreamer within it, colonized minds were anxious, even damaged.”
The sheer range of Parker’s research in One Fine Day sets him apart from other historians. There is even a chapter on sports within the British Empire, where he deftly explains how and why it was “seen as integral a part of the civilizing mission as law, religion or education.”
“Whatever the particular imperial situation, or the status of the dreamer within it, colonized minds were anxious, even damaged.”
One Fine Day is also refreshingly artful in its conception. Instead of a galumphing wade through the centuries, Parker has chosen to focus on a single day in the British Empire’s history and spin out a globe-trotting narrative from there.
The day in question is September 29, 1923, which marked the occasion of the now little-remembered Imperial Conference, in London. The conference’s main focus was to discuss the rights of Dominion countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to determine their own foreign policy independently of Britain.
On that same day, the Palestine Mandate became law, expanding the British Empire to its maximum extent. It now covered “nearly 14 million square miles” and “a quarter of the world’s land area.” Paradoxically, Parker shows that just as the empire reached its zenith, so, too, did its increasingly repressive policies begin to spell the beginning of its end.
Matthew Parker has chosen to focus on a single day in the British Empire’s history and spin out a globe-trotting narrative from there.
One of the book’s outstanding aspects is the way the author laces his narrative with the opinions of famous writers who were all busy experiencing the vagaries of the British Empire in 1923. There is a 19-year-old George Orwell (then Eric Blair), newly alighted in Burma as a police officer, which brought him “face to face with the darker side of British rule”; E. M. Forster in India, aiming with his most well-known novel, A Passage to India (1924), to build “a little bridge of sympathy between East and West”; W. Somerset Maugham in Malaya, leaving a trail of angry expats in his wake (apparently they did not appreciate having their family skeletons on full display in his books); and, most curious of all, D. H. Lawrence in Australia, writing one of his oddest novels, Kangaroo (1923), and describing the bush as “a strange, vast, empty country … with a pre-primeval ghost in it.”
But it should also be stressed that Parker’s book provides far more than just an Anglo-centric perspective on the British Empire. His reading of numerous local writers and politicians, ranging from Jawaharlal Nehru in India to Marcus Garvey in Jamaica, gives One Fine Day the kaleidoscopic dimension of a Ken Burns documentary. This is especially important in light of recent books about the British Empire, such as Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, which argues all of the benefits of the British Empire’s supposedly civilizing mission and very few of its flaws.
But neither is Parker a hand-wringing snowflake, preferring to let facts speak for themselves. Once in a while, he does let his guard slip and to great effect, especially when describing A Passage to India as a book that demonstrates how “all the foundations of the empire—white supremacy, the platonic idea of a ruling elite, technical and military superiority, even ‘trusteeship’—were based on an idea of British superiority that could not help but insult and irremediably divide.”
Tobias Grey is a Gloucestershire, U.K.–based writer and critic, focused on art, film, and books