[转帖] [2012.09.15] Pondering the past 追思大英帝国历史

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http://www.ecocn.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=82787
【导读】大英帝国本身无所谓好坏善恶；对帝国的审视首先要植根于它所处的历史时期之中

The British empire
大英帝国

Pondering the past
追思历史

Britain’s empire was far more complex than its critics appreciate
英帝国比批评家们所认为的要复杂许多

Sep 15th 2012 | from the print edition

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Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain. By John Darwin. Allen Lane; 478 pages; £25. To be published in America in February by Bloomsbury; $35. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

《未竟的帝国：英国的全球扩张》，约翰•达尔文著。艾伦莱恩出版社出版，全书478页，售价25英镑。美国地区将由布鲁姆斯伯里出版社出版，售价35美元。Amazon.com、Amazon.co.uk 有售。

JOHN DARWIN has spent his whole career thinking about Pax Britannica. Three years after his magisterial study, “The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970”, the Oxford historian has returned yet again to the subject. This time, though, his focus is different and the period he covers is longer. His new book is not a straightforward narrative of the British empire’s rise and fall. Rather, it is a brilliantly perceptive analysis of the forces and ideas that drove the creation of an extraordinary enterprise. At its zenith the British empire was almost impossibly grand in conception and yet was frequently so “improvised and provisional in character” as to appear almost ramshackle.

约翰•达尔文的毕生精力都用于研究“不列颠治世”【注1、2】。三年前，这位牛津大学的历史学家曾发表过权威著作《帝国伟业：1830年到1970年间英国世界体系的兴衰》，如今他又重新回到了这个课题上。然而这一次他的研究重点有所不同，所涉及的历史时期也更长一些。达尔文的新书并未对大英帝国的兴衰展开平铺直叙。确切地说，这本书对推动一项伟业开创的种种动力和理念进行了极富洞察力的分析。在大英帝国的鼎盛时期，人们认为它宏伟壮观得几乎不可思议，但它在实际上却常常只是“昙花一现、命不久长”，以至于看起来似乎即将瓦解崩塌。

In fact, argues Mr Darwin, there was, at least for its first 100 years or so, no single vision of empire, but several. These reflected the unusually pluralistic and intellectually open society that Britain had become during the “long” 18th century (from 1688 to 1815). It was, above all, at this stage an empire driven less by the state than by the personal ambitions of people with vastly different backgrounds and agendas: from fortune-seeking gentry to merchants looking for new markets, impoverished economic migrants and evangelical missionaries.

达尔文称，至少在大英帝国最初的100年左右，人们对帝国的愿景实际上并不统一，而是存在好几种。这些愿景表明英国在“漫长的”19世纪（从1688年到1815年）变成了极为多元化、思想开放的社会。毕竟，在这个阶段，帝国发展与其说是在由国家推动，不如说是个人雄心的作用。这些人出身背景大不相同，社会角色也是迥异：有些是追求财富的上流社会人士，有些是寻找新市场的商人；有些是一贫如洗的经济移民，有些是福音派传教士。

Over time the state began, often reluctantly, to take on more of the protection and ultimately the running of these inchoate ventures overseas. Before that, the colonising of America and the gradual takeover of India by the East India Company were chiefly commercial projects that were dependent on private capital and private risk. And the American settler uprising that began in 1775 was essentially a reflection of the tensions between this private-enterprise notion of empire and the growing financial burden of securing it both from rival European colonial powers and from displaced indigenous peoples.

随着时间的流逝，带着几分不情愿，英国开始更多地去负责保护这些不成熟的海外产业，最终对它们展开了运作。在此之前，对美洲的殖民、以及用东印度公司逐步接管印度【注3】，都主要是一些取决于私人资本和私人风险的商业项目。英帝国既要防备与其竞争的其他欧洲殖民强国，又要防备背井离乡的本土民族，因此财政负担不断加大；而始于1775年的美洲移民起义在本质上反映了帝国的这种私营企业观念和财政负担之间的紧张关系。

If there was no single vision of empire, neither was the project ever monolithic in practice. Between the late 18th and the early 19th centuries four very different types of British empire had begun to emerge. The first were the self-governing colonies in North America, the Caribbean and Australasia; second, India and the opportunity it provided for Britain to project power from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea; and third, a ragbag of smaller territories, some of them bases acquired as way stations to India, some trade entrepots such as Hong Kong and Singapore and some “maritime bridgeheads” in east and west Africa with relatively ungoverned hinterlands. The fourth kind of empire, suggests Mr Darwin, was a more informal one in places such as Argentina and Egypt where British influence was exercised through commerce, investment and shrewd diplomacy (occasionally of the gunboat kind).

如果说人们对帝国的愿景不一致，那么帝国伟业在实际上也从来不是单一庞大的。从18世纪晚期到19世纪早期，大英帝国开始出现了四种截然不同的形态。第一种形态是自治的殖民地，出现在北美洲、加勒比海地区以及澳大拉西亚。第二种形态出现在印度，它为英国提供了把影响力从波斯湾延伸到中国南海的机会。第三种形态是一些零星的小型地区——其中有些是居住地，如通向印度的小站；有些是贸易转运口岸，比如香港和新加坡，以及东非和西非的一些“近海桥头堡”（还有相对来说未受控制的内陆）。达尔文表示，帝国的第四种形态，是在阿根廷、埃及等地那种非正式的统治。在这些地方，英国通过贸易、投资和巧妙的外交来行使影响力（这种巧妙的外交偶尔也会用得上坚船利炮）。

What characterised Britain’s empire most was the matchless adaptability of its builders and promoters. As Mr Darwin puts it: “The hallmark of British imperialism was its extraordinary versatility in method, outlook and object.” In particular, the British excelled at recruiting local elites and interest groups as collaborators without whose consent little would have been possible. The whole project could have been doomed by the loss of the American colonies swiftly followed by the “world” war, lasting 25 years, against France (revolutionary and then Napoleonic) and its allies. But by holding on to India, confirming the supremacy of British sea power, and securing a peaceful Europe after Wellington’s victory at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, a platform was created for unprecedented expansion. The British world-system then held together until the second world war.

最能体现英帝国特点的，是其建立者和推动者彼此之间那种无与伦比的磨合性。正如达尔文所说：“英帝国主义的特征在于它在方法、观点和目标方面有很大的变通性。”特别值得一提的是，英国人擅长动员当地社会精英和利益集团来与自己合作——如果没有这些人的同意，英帝国寸步难行。英国先是失去了美洲殖民地，之后很快又和法国及其盟国打了一场持续25年的“世界大战”（当时法国先是由革命者控制，后来拿破仑掌权），损失惨重——整个帝国伟业几乎濒临覆灭。但英国紧紧抓住了印度；确定了至高无上的海洋权力；在威灵顿公爵滑铁卢告捷和维也纳会议之后实现了欧洲的和平【注4、5】。借此，英国创立了一个平台来进行史无前例的扩张。其后，英国的世界体系一直维持到第二次世界大战前夕。

To the unique geopolitical circumstances that British diplomatic genius was able to exploit at this time could be added at least two other critical ingredients. The first was technology. Railways, fast steamships and then the telegraph made it possible to expand, police and govern a vast, sprawling empire in ways that had previously been impossible with a relatively small army and administrative class.

英国人具有外交天赋，善于利用此时独特的地缘政治形势；除此之外，至少还有两方面的关键因素。其一是技术。铁路、便捷的蒸汽船、还有电报——让英国人能够以一些前所未有的方式来扩张、监督并管理一个广阔且不断发展的帝国。而在此之前，由于相对而言军力有限、统治阶层规模不大，想要以这些方式来运作帝国是不可能的。

The second was the emergence of something approaching a guiding ideology of empire: the old buccaneering empire of conquest and commerce never quite disappeared, but the British empire fashioned in the 19th century was believed by many of those involved in the project to be based on “enlightened reform and disinterested trusteeship”. Its purpose was to rescue benighted parts of the world, in the words of the great propagandist, Thomas Macaulay, from “all the evils of despotism and the evils of anarchy”. It was possible to believe that by spreading the blessings of free trade, good governance and technological progress Britain’s empire really was in the interests of all mankind.

其二就是出现了一种理念，它类似于指导帝国的意识形态：强调征服和贸易、古老的海盗式帝国从未真正消失，但帝国伟业的缔造者认为，19世纪塑造出的大英帝国是以“开明的改革和公正的领土托管”为基础的。用伟大布道者托马斯•麦考利【注6】的话来说，帝国旨在将世界上愚昧落后的地区从“所有专制和混乱的梦魇”中拯救出来。英帝国向世界传播自由贸易、有序治理和技术进步等种种福祉，实际上是在为全人类的利益而服务——这一观点或许真的有几分可信度。

Of course, the reality was often far darker. The iron fist was always clenched within the velvet glove; protecting indigenous populations from the greed of self-governing white settlers was near-impossible. And the racial solidarity that became a prerequisite of rule after the terrible shock of the great rebellion of 1857 in India is irredeemably ugly to modern eyes. On the other hand, the Britain that had enthusiastically participated in the slave trade in the 1700s threw its naval might into a crusade to banish slavery from the world in the 19th century.

当然，现实往往要比人们想象的阴暗许多。温情背后，在天鹅绒手套里攥着的永远是一只铁拳。面对白人自治移民的贪婪，保护原住民几乎不可能。印度在1857年爆发了大规模叛乱，在英国引起了强烈的震动。在此之后，种族团结成了统治的先决条件，这在今天看来丑陋得无以复加。但在另一方面，在18世纪还在积极参与奴隶贸易的英国，到了19世纪却发动了海军力量进行废奴运动。

If a benign geopolitical environment was the bedrock of the 19th-century empire, it was the catalogue of geopolitical disasters of 1940-42 that demolished the British world-system once and for all. Whether the empire could have held for much longer even without those reverses is hard to say. India had become steadily more difficult for Britain to rule and without India, British hegemony in the Middle East, deemed a core national interest until the disaster of Suez in 1956, was increasingly unsustainable. In the context of the cold war between America and Russia, a weakened Britain was no more than a marginal player. However, as Mr Darwin notes, what seems inevitable to us now—the dissolution of empire in a modern world of nation states—did not necessarily appear so at the time or, at least, not immediately. For Britain’s ruling class, including the post-war Labour government, the imperial habit was not easily surrendered.

如果说有利的地缘政治环境在19世纪为英帝国巩固了基础，那么也正是1940到1942年间的一系列地缘政治灾难彻底瓦解了英国的世界体系。如果没有这种种挫败，英帝国能否维持更长的时间？无法断言。印度对于英国来说日渐难以管制。而直到1956年苏伊士运河危机【注7】为止，英国在中东的霸权一直被认为是核心国家利益——失去印度之后，这一霸权也越来越难以维持。在美苏冷战的背景下，受到削弱的英国只不过是一个边缘角色。然而，达尔文指出：在民族国家组成的现代世界，帝国分崩离析，这在我们今天看来是无可避免的；但在当时却未必如此——至少它不会立刻消亡。对于英国的统治阶级来说（包括战后的工党政府），帝国习性一时还难以放下。

Bringing together his huge erudition, scrupulous fairness and elegant prose, Mr Darwin has produced a wonderfully stimulating account of something that today seems almost incredible yet was, in historical terms, only yesterday. It is also a much-needed antidote both to the leftish consensus of the past 50 years that Britain’s empire was unrelievedly awful, a catalogue of cruelty, exploitation and racism, and the recent triumphalist revisionism of more conservative historians, such as Niall Ferguson. The British empire was neither good nor bad, but complicated, paradoxical and, above all, of its time.

达尔文把他的广博学识、审慎公允和清雅文笔糅合到一起，写出了这本趣味盎然的书。它记述的故事在今天看来似乎有点难以置信，然而从历史的角度来说似乎只是发生在昨天。过去50年来，很多人都有一种左派意识，认为英帝国总是很可怖，除了残忍、剥削和种族主义再无其他；而尼尔•弗格森等更为保守的历史学家则秉持一种耀武扬威的近代修正主义。本书也很及时地对这两种思潮进行了矫正。大英帝国无所谓好坏善恶，但它很复杂、很矛盾，而且最重要的是——它属于自己的那个时代。

from the print edition | Books and arts


译者注：

1. 约翰•达尔文为牛津大学教授，当代英国著名的史学研究者。

2. 不列颠治世（拉丁语：Pax Britannica）是指英国在19至20世纪的兴盛时期。一般认为1815年的滑铁卢战役标志着不列颠治世的开始。
    自1588年击败西班牙无敌舰队后，英国逐渐取代西班牙，成为海上新兴的霸权国家，控制了主要的海上贸易航线，并开始不断扩张海外殖民地。之后，英国相继在英荷战争和七年战争中打败最强劲的对手荷兰和法国，夺取了两国的大片殖民地，确立了海上霸权。
    1815年英国在拿破仑战争中的胜利又进一步巩固了它的国际政治军事强权地位，工业革命更让英国成为无可争辩的经济强权。
    维多利亚时代的大英帝国步入了全盛时期，在1921年，全世界大约4-5亿人——也就是当时全球人口的约四分之一——都是大英帝国的子民，其领土面积则有约3,700万平方公里（它宣称对加拿大北极圈内、澳大利亚内陆和南极洲的土地拥有主权），是世界陆地总面积的24.75%，从英伦三岛蔓延到香港、冈比亚、纽芬兰、加拿大、新西兰、澳大利亚、马来亚、缅甸、印度、乌干达、肯尼亚、南非、尼日利亚、马耳他、新加坡以及无数岛屿。因为地球上的24个时区均有大英帝国的领土，故被称为继西班牙帝国后第二个“日不落帝国”。英国霸权领导下的国际秩序被称为“不列颠治世”。

3. 英国东印度公司（British East India Company, 简称BEIC）, 又称“可敬的东印度公司”（the Honourable East India Company, 简称HEIC），有时也被称为“约翰公司”（John Company），是一个股份公司。西元1600年12月31日英国女王伊丽莎白一世授予该公司皇家特许状，给予它在印度贸易的特权而组成。实际上这个特许状给予“可敬的东印度公司”于东印度贸易的垄断权21年。随时间的变迁东印度公司从一个商业贸易企业变成印度的实际主宰者。在1858年被解除行政权力为止，它还获得了协助统治和军事职能。

4. 滑铁卢战役（英文：Battle of Waterloo, 法语: Bataille de Waterloo）是拿破仑战争中的最后一场战役，也是军事史上著名的战役之一。这场战役标志着拿破仑将军的彻底覆灭。
    1815年拿破仑率旧部逃离厄尔巴岛，返回巴黎。英国、普鲁士、奥地利等国集结了70万士兵，分头进攻法国。6月17日，拿破仑击败由布吕歇尔将军率领的普军，指派部下格鲁希元帅消灭逃跑的普军，自己则赶到比利时布鲁塞尔南的滑铁卢村，与由威灵顿公爵率领的英军对峙。可是，格鲁希未能按命令消灭逃跑的普军，反而让普军摆脱了自己的追踪。布吕歇尔摆脱法军的追踪后，花了一个上午重整军队，马不停蹄地奔赴滑铁卢。6月18日，拿破仑率军与英军交战。当天下午，正当两支军队都疲惫不堪时，布吕歇尔率领的普军终于赶到，并猛攻法军的右翼。晚上9时，拿破仑率领的法军败走。
    滑铁卢战役后，联军很快攻占巴黎，拿破仑被放逐到大西洋中的圣赫勒拿岛，六年后死亡。

5. 维也纳会议是从1814年9月18日到1815年6月9日之间在奥地利维也纳召开的一次欧洲列强外交会议，这次会议是由奥地利政治家梅特涅提议和组织的，其目的在于重划拿破仑战败后的欧洲政治地图。

6. 托马斯•巴宾顿•麦考利，第一代麦考利男爵，（Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay，1800年10月25日-1859年12月28日），英国诗人，历史学家，辉格党政治家。他经常发表散文、评论和有关英国历史的文章。他也曾经担任陆军大臣（1839年-1841年）和财政部主计长（1846年-1848年）。

7.苏伊士运河危机，也被称为苏伊士运河战争、第二次中东战争、西奈战役或卡代什行动，是一次于1956年发生在埃及的国际武装冲突，当时埃及与英国、法国和以色列的军队爆发战争。英、法、以三国的结盟是一种利益的接合：英法两国对苏伊士运河有着贸易利益，而以色列则需要打开运河，以让以色列船只得以通航。到战争结束后，只有以色列获得了巨大的利益。