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against the divergent, the left-behind. Rhodes confessed ambition for his company to “take as much of the world as it possibly could,” was simply an armed, greedy version of Kant’s “Dare to Know”. Just as no question was was unaskable, no place was too far off to possess or exploit. No position was secured by history or distance or sentiment. This was, for instance, the lesson taught to Lin Zexu, the Qing Dynasty bureaucrat sent out from Beijing in 1839 to stop the British opium sales that were reducing China to a drugged, useless coma. “Suppose there were people from another country who carried opium for sale to England and seduced your people into buying and smoking it?” Lin wrote the Queen. “Certainly your honorable ruler would deeply hate it and be bitterly aroused?” Lin thought that he was speaking as the voice of a great, eternal empire. Victoria never replied. To the extent Victoria was aroused by anything in Southern China, it was likely by the way in which, a few months after Lin’s letter, the British emasculated the Qing military and moved into Hong Kong for a 150-year stay. “Whatever happens,” the Hilaire Belloc had his Colonial character Captain Blood famously quip in an 1885 poem, “we have got the Maxim and they ‘ave not.” 224 The machine guns were a totem of dominance in Shangani and on other colonial front lines; they marked a gulf between modern and unmodern, between industrial and agricultural. The weapons had first appeared in the mid-1800s on battlefields in the American Civil War, after the inventor Richard Gatling sent a package of samples to the White House and convinced President Lincoln - a famous gadget freak - that their firepower might bring the Civil War to a faster close. Lincoln ordered the Army to try the guns, but Gatling’s early attempts were honestly too immature to tell decisively on the battlefields of the American south. Within a few decades, however, the guns were perfected in places like Africa, or on the frontlines of the 1904 Russo- Japanese War. They represented a compelling, inarguable logic of industrial war: A machine and a gun. We mowed them down like grass. You could read that line as metaphor: Mowing grass was, in the end, the act of a machine killing a wild, natural world into a clean, useful order. The Europeans were the grass-clipping machine; the rest of the world was, well, the grass. For a colonial temperament hardened for “The Great Game” of empire on the playing fields of Eton, preparing a lawn for tennis and a territory for exploitation were not particularly distinct acts. The Shangani battle gunshots struck the European mind as powerful confirmation of everything they suspected about the magic violence of an industrial age. The image of such a device suited the aggressive, engineering-led mood of era. As Gatling - and his competitor Hiram Maxim - peddled the guns, they faced a predictable resistance, of course: Europe’s cavalry officers were in love with their well-bred horses. But the age was, finally, the story of aggressive industry flattening old habits. Trains were assaulting the countryside. Factories were pounding apart the habits of labor. Social stampedes of speed-climbing nouveau riche, political attacks of new industrial unions and counter attacks all expressed this aggressive energy. The soundtrack of Germany in the decades after 1869, as Bismarck stitched together a new nation 224 “Whatever happens”: Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveler, (London: Edward Arnold, 1898) 152 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018384