Babel

by R.F. Kuang

He quashed his memories too. His life in Canton – his mother, his grandparents, a decade of running about the docks – it all proved surprisingly easy to shed, perhaps because this passage was so jarring, the break so complete. He’d left behind everything he’d known. There was nothing to cling to, nothing to escape back to.

London was both unimaginably rich and wretchedly poor. London – lovely, ugly, sprawling, cramped, belching, sniffing, virtuous, hypocritical, silver-gilded London – was near to a reckoning, for the day would come when it either devoured itself from inside or cast outwards for new delicacies, labour, capital, and culture on which to feed.

‘Then is King George going to invade China?’ he persisted. For some reason this made the gentlemen laugh. ‘Would that we could,’ said the man with the deep voice. ‘It’d make this whole enterprise a lot easier, wouldn’t it?’

He discovered that in Parliament, in town halls, and on the streets, reformers of every stripe were fighting for the soul of London, while a conservative, landed ruling class fought back against attempts at change at every turn.

‘How does all the power from foreign languages just somehow accrue to England? This is no accident; this is a deliberate exploitation of foreign culture and foreign resources.

‘What makes the English superior is guns. Guns, and the willingness to use them on innocent people.’

‘We hold the secrets, and we can set whatever terms we like. That’s the beauty of being cleverer than everyone else.

English did not just borrow words from other languages; it was stuffed to the brim with foreign influences, a Frankenstein vernacular. And Robin found it incredible, how this country, whose citizens prided themselves so much on being better than the rest of the world, could not make it through an afternoon tea without borrowed goods.

The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’

Reform, unrest, and inequality were the keywords of the decade. The full impact of a so-called silver industrial revolution, a term coined by Peter Gaskell just six years before, was just beginning to be felt across the country. Silver-powered machines of the kind William Blake dubbed ‘dark Satanic Mills’ were rapidly replacing artisanal labour, but rather than bringing prosperity to all, they had instead created an economic recession, had caused a widening gap between the rich and poor that would soon become the stuff of novels by Disraeli and Dickens.

Truly, the only ones who seemed to profit from the silver industrial revolution were those who were already rich, and the select few others who were cunning or lucky enough to make themselves so.

It should have been distressing. In truth, though, Robin found it was actually quite easy to put up with any degree of social unrest, as long as one got used to looking away.

There were rumours of a grand dinner to be put on for Oxford’s poor and homeless, but the city authorities argued that the richness of roast beef and plum pudding would put the poor in such a state of excitement that they would lose their ability to properly enjoy the illumination.*

But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored for now; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.

They could see where it was going, but the people who had the power to do anything about it had been placed in positions where they would profit, and the people who suffered most had no power at all.

‘But that’s the great contradiction of colonialism.’ Cathy uttered this like a simple matter of fact. ‘It’s built to destroy that which it prizes most.’

Power did not lie in the tip of a pen. Power did not work against its own interests. Power could only be brought to heel by acts of defiance it could not ignore. With brute, unflinching force. With violence.

He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.

‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’