Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Agents and the problem of agency: the context
- 2 Why Africa needs Europe: from Livingstone to Stanley
- 3 Kipling's “Law” and the division of bureaucratic labor
- 4 Cromer, Gordon, Conrad and the problem of imperial character
- 5 T. E. Lawrence and the erotics of imperial discipline
- 6 Resurrecting individualism: the interwar novel of imperial manners
- Conclusion: work as rule
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere railway board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A success would have pleased him very much on refreshing novel grounds; but on the other side of the same feeling, it was incumbent upon him to cast it off utterly at the first sign of failure. A man may be thrown off.
Joseph Conrad, NostromoWhen the Gladstone government dispatched General Charles Gordon to Khartoum in January of 1884, it assigned him a confusing mission that was the inevitable outgrowth of incoherent policy. Convinced that the Mahdist uprising was not worth the cost of suppressing, the British government seems to have envisioned the impossible: that Gordon, renowned for exceptional powers of “personal influence,” would be able to stage a withdrawal of Europeans and Egyptian troops without needing a costly imperial army to keep the Mahdi at bay during the withdrawal. To be sure, the government took its time in approving the mission, for Gladstone himself ordered it only after the public outcry in Britain, carefully nurtured by W. T. Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, which editorialized that the triumph of the Mahdi would inevitably lead to the reestablishment of slavery in the Sudan, had become too politically powerful to be resisted any longer.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940Writing and the Administration of Empire, pp. 99 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998