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Scotland’s part in the British Empire.2 Indeed, the strong focus on
Empire in his work—or on the aftermath of Empire—makes it
surprising that Douglas S. Mack does not mention Jenkins at all in
his book on Scottish fiction and the British Empire (Mack 2006). It
is important in the context of Jenkins’s outlook on Empire that the
beginning of the twentieth century saw the British Empire as “the
envy of the other great powers, the greatest empire the world had
ever seen” (Kitchen 1996: 48). Born at the end of the period of
Britain’s imperial heyday,3 Jenkins grew up during World War I
and the early interwar years. His most formative years as a young
adult must therefore have been within the later interwar period.
This is important because this period saw the rise of a new debate
that was characterised by “a growing uneasiness that much of the
talk about the moral mission in the Empire was hypocritical”
(Kitchen 1996: 75). Jenkins was undoubtedly aware of this debate,
and must have done some independent stock-taking on the moral
values of imperialism during these and the following years, which
saw British imperial policy often marked by uncertainty, upheaval,
and political and individual disagreement (Kitchen 1996: 61–122).
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Empire was dying;4 as a result,
Jenkins’s years abroad fell within a period which was marked by the
rapid decline of the British Empire. Although Sabah in Malaysia is
the only former British colony where Jenkins lived during his years
abroad, British influence had been considerable also in Afghanistan,
as is made evident in Jenkins’s novels set there, such as Some Kind of
Grace (1960) and Dust on the Paw (1961). Interestingly, Jenkins’s
first year in Sabah (1963) was the same year in which Sabah became
2 It should be noted here that Scotland’s status within Britain has been seen by some as inferior and
comparable to that of the colonies, most notably in Michael Hechter’s study of “internal colonial-
ism” in the British Isles, which argues for the “incorporation of the Celtic periphery into England
[… as being] imperial in nature” (Hechter 1975: 65; see also Finlay 1998 and Schoene 1995). This
line of argument was already being made during the Scottish Literary Renaissance in the 1930s,
and Jenkins is very likely to have been aware of such ideas. However, the Scots were also very active
participants in building the British Empire and were proud of this (see Finlay 1998: 28). These
facts make Scotland’s role within the British Empire extremely dual and paradoxical in nature, a
fact which is evidently felt by Jenkins, since several of his foreign stories emphasise the compli-
cated relationship between the Scots as colonised and the Scots as coloniser.
3 See Kitchen 1996: 43–60. Kitchen terms the years 1876–1914 as ‘The Heyday of Empire’.
4 Kitchen deals with this period in a chapter entitled “The End of the Empire.” See Kitchen 1996:
123–142.
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