In August 1999 the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission, meeting in Accra, issued a demand for reparations from “all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions, who participated and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism.” The Sum suggested as adequate compensation — based on estimates of “the number of human lives lost to Africa during the slave-trade, as well as an assessment of the worth of the gold, diamonds, and other minerals taken from the continent during colonial rule” — was $777 trillion.
“How,” he asked, “did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world… How did an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?” How, despite their “good intentions,” did the British sacrifice “common humanity” to “the fetish of the market?”
The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces — using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favour of the metropolis — it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either. In this view, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that mattered, not the coercive integration of imperialism. Thus, investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies, while the cost defending the Empire was a burden on taxpayers, who might otherwise have spent their money on the products of a modern consumer goods sector.
The difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire. It is, however, instructive to try to imagine a world without the Empire. But while it is just about possible to imagine what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First World War, the imagination reels from the counter-factual of modern history without the British Empire.
At that time, the British Empire amounted to little more than a handful of Caribbean islands, five North American ‘plantations’ and a couple of Indian ports. But Christopher Columbus had laid the foundations of Spain’s American empire more than a century and a half before. That empire was the envy of the world, stretching as it did from Madrid to Manila and encompassing Peru and Mexico, the wealthiest and most populous territories on the American continent. Even more extensive and no less profitable was Portugal’s empire, which spread outwards from the Atlantic islands of Madeira and Sao Tome to include the vast territory of Brazil and numerous trading outposts in West Africa, Indonesia, India, and even China. In the 1493 the Pope had issued a bull allocating the trade in the Americas to Spain and trade in Asia to Portugal. In this division of the world, the Portuguese had got the sugar, spices and slaves. But what the English envied most was what the Spanish discovered in America: gold and silver.
From such shamelessly piratical origins arose the system of “privateering” or privatized naval warfare. Faced with a direct threat from Spain — culminating in but not ending with the Armada — Elizabeth I took the eminently sensible decision to license what was happening anyway. Robbing the Spaniard thus became a matter of strategy.
Henry VIII had needed to import bronze cannons from the continent. But home-made iron cannons, though harder to cast, were far cheaper (almost one-fifth the price). This meant significantly more “bangs per buck” — a technical advantage that was to endure for centuries.
In particular, what the English consumer liked was to mix his sugar with an orally administered and highly addictive drug, caffeine, supplemented with an inhaled but equally addictive substance, nicotine. In Defoe’s time, tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar were the new, new things. And all of them had to be imported.
The tea-table among the ladies and the coffee house among the men seem to be the places of new invention. What people liked most about these new drugs was that they offered a very different kind of stimulus from the traditional European drug, alcohol. Alcohol is, technically, a depressant. Glucose, caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, were the 18th-century equivalent of uppers. Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush — a rush nearly everyone could experience.
The beauty of imported textiles was that the market for them was practically inexhaustible. Ultimately, there is only so much tea or sugar a human being can consume. But people’s appetite for new clothes had, and has, no such natural limit.
The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602. It was part of a full-scale financial revolution that made Amsterdam the most sophisticated and dynamic of European cities. Ever since they had thrown off Spanish rule in 1579, the Dutch had been at the cutting edge of European capitalism. They had created a system of public debt that allowed the government to borrow from its citizens at low interest rates. They had founded something like a modern central bank. Their money was sound. Their tax system — based on the excise tax — was simple and efficient. The Dutch East India Company represented a milestone in corpoprate organization too. By the time it was wound up in 1796 it had paid on average an annual return of 18 percent on the original capital subscribed, an impressive performance over such a long period.
In other respects, however, the two East India companies had much in common. They should not be equaled naively with modern multinational corporations, since they were much more like state-licensed monopolies, but on the other hand they were a great deal more sophisticated than the associations of buccaneers in the Caribbean. The Dutch and English merchants who founded them were able to pool their resources for what were large and very risky ventures under the protection of government monopolies. At the same time, the companies allowed governments to privatize overseas expansion, passing on the substantial risks involved. If they made money, the companies could also be tapped for revenue or, more commonly, loans, in return for the renewal of their charters. Private investors, meanwhile, could rest assured that their company had a guaranteed market share of 100 percent.
Yet no sooner had the East India Company solved the problem of Dutch competition than it ran into another, far more insidious source of competition, its own employees. This is what economists call the “agency problem”: the fundamental difficulty the proprietors of a company have in controlling their employees. It is a difficulty which grows in proportion to the distance between those who own the shares and those on the payroll.
The much longer journey times between Asia and Europe made the East India Company’s monopoly at once easy and hard to enforce. Compared with the North American trade, it was hard for smaller rival companies to compete for the same business; whereas hundreds of companies carried goods to and from America and the Caribbean by the 1680s, the costs and risks of the six-month voyage to India encouraged the concentration of trade in the hands of one big operator. But that big operator could only with the utmost difficulty control its own staff when it took them half a year just to reach their place of work. Letters of instruction to them took just as long. East India Company employees therefore enjoyed a good deal of latitude — indeed, most of them were wholly beyond the control of their London paymasters. Ans since the salaries they were paid were relatively modest, most company employees did not hesitate to conduct business on the side, on their own account. Others went further, leaving the company’s employ altogether and doing business exclusively for themselves. These were the bane of the directors’ existence: the interlopers.
It would be quite wrong to imagine that the Anglo-Dutch merger handed India over to the English East India Company. The fact remained that both Dutch and English traders were minor players in a vast Asian empire. Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were no more than tiny outposts on the edge of a vast and economically advanced subcontinent. The English at this stage were merely parasites on the periphery, reliant on partnerships with Indian businessmen.
It was a victory based on naval superiority. But this in turn was possible only because Britain had one crucial advantage over France: the ability to borrow money. More than a third of all Britain’s war expenditure was financed by loans. The institutions copied from the Dutch in the time of William III had now come into their own, allowing Pitt’s government to spread the cost of war by selling low-interest bonds to the investing public. The French, by contrast, were reduced to begging or stealing. Credit was the principal advantage which England had over France. Behind every British naval victory stood the National Debt.
As Pitt correctly divined, the “seeds of war” were already germinating in the peace terms. The struggle for world mastery between Britain and France would rage on with only brief respites until 1815. But the Seven Years War decided on thing irrevocably. India would be British, not French. And that gave Britain what for nearly two hundred years would be both a huge market for British trade and an inexhaustible reservoir of military manpower. India was much more than the “jewel in the crown.” Literally and metaphorically, it was a whole diamond mine.
And the Indians themselves? The answer is that they allowed themselves to be divided — and, ultimately, ruled.
I can assert with some degree of confidence that this rich and flourishing kingdom may be totally subdued by so small a force as two thousand Europeans. The Indians are indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly beyond all conception. They attempt everything by treachery rather than force. What it is, then, can enable us to secure our present acquisitions or improve upon them but such a force as leaves nothing to the power of treachery or ingratitude?
A man so violent in his disposition that in the absence of foes he thought at once of self-destruction.
In the 1750s little more than a tenth of the population of the British Isles lived in Scotland. Yet the East India Company was at the very least half-Scottish.
The nabobs were men like Pitt, Clive and Hastings, who brought their Indian fortunes back home and converted them into imposing stately homes like Pitt’s at Swallowfield. Nor did they confine themselves to buying real estate. It was with money he had made in India that Thomas Pitt bought the Parliamentary seat of Old Sarum, that notorious “rotten borough” which his more famous grandson later represented in the House of Commons. It was magnificent hypocrisy on William Pitt’s part when he complained in January 1770:
The riches of Asia have been poured in upon us, and brought with them not only Asiatic luxury, but, I fear, Asiatic principle of government. The importers of foreign gold have forced their way into Parliament, by such a torrent of private corruption, as no private hereditary fortune could resist.
Between the early 1600s and the 1950s, more than 20 million people left the British Isles to begin new lives across the seas. Only a minority ever returned. No other country in the world came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants. In leaving Britain, the early emigrants risked not merely their life savings but their very lives. Their voyages were never without hazard; their destinations were often unhealthy and inhospitable. To us, their decision to gamble everything on a one-way ticket seem baffling. Yet without millions of such tickets — some purchased voluntarily, some not — there could have been no British Empire. Fore the indispensable foundation of the Empire was mass migration: the biggest in human history. This Britannic exodus changed the world. It turned whole continents white.
It is often forgotten that the majority — around 69 percent — of British emigrants in the 17th century went not to America but to the West Indies. That, after all, was where the money was. Trade with the Caribbean dwarfed trade with America: in 1773 the value of British imports from Jamaica was five times greater than those from all the American colonies.
The original Spanish word for a sugar plantation was ingenio — engine — and producing sugar from cane was as much industry as agriculture. But this was an industry in which not just sugar cane but human beings were the raw materials.
The war is at the very heart of Americans’ conception of themselves: the idea of a struggle for liberty against an evil empire is the country’s creation myth. But it is the great paradox of the American Revolution — and it strikes you forcefully when you see today’s prosperous Lexingtonians trying to relive their forefathers’ self-sacrifice — that the ones who revolted against British rule were the best-off of all Britain’s colonial subjects. There is good reason to think that, by the 1770s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world. Per capita income was at least equal to that in the UK and was more evenly distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better education than the Old Englanders back home. And, crucially, they paid far less tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shilling a year in taxes. The equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling. To say that being British subjects had been good for these people would be an understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured labourers of Virginia or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of imperial authority.
Yet Samuel Adams’s famous slogan “No taxation without representation” was not a rejection of Britishness, but rather an emphatic assertion of Brittishness. What the colonists said they were doing was demanding the same liberty enjoyed by their fellow subjects on the other side of the Atlantic.
In fact, most of the Declaration is rather tedious and overstated list of wrongs supposedly inflicted on the colonists by the King, whom they accused of trying to erect a “Tyranny over these States.” It bears all the hallmarks of a document heavily revised by an outsize committee. It is Jefferson’s preamble that people remember today: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Of course, a republic was nothing new. The Venetians, the Hanseatic Germans, the Swiss and the Dutch all had them; indeed, the British themselves had conducted their own brief experiment with republicanism in the 1650s. But Jefferson’s preamble ensured that the American republic would be fashioned in the language of the Enlightenment: in terms of natural rights — above all the right of every individual “to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.”
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American. Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.
The amazing thing is that so many people should have voted with their feet against American independence, choosing loyalty to King and Empire over “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
It was, as we have seen, Thomas Jefferson who coined that famous phrase. But there was a difficulty which the American revolutionaries found rather embarrassing. Did their Declaration that all men were “created equal” also apply to the 400,000 black slaves they collectively owned — roughly a fifth of the total population of the ex-colonies, and nearly half that of his native Virginia?
The British had been attracted to Asia by trade. They had been attracted to America by land. Distance was an obstacle, but one that with fair winds could be overcome. But there was another continent that was attractive to them for diametrically different reasons. Because it was barren. Because it was impossibly remote. Because it was a natural prison.
With its weird red earth and its alien flora and fauna, Australia was the 18th-century equivalent of Mars. This helps explain why the first official response to the discovery of the New South Wales by Captain Cook in 1770 was to identify it as the ideal dumping ground for criminals.
The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony populated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners.
Perhaps the best explanation of the Australian paradox is this. Although the system of transportation made a mockery of the British claim that theirs was an empire of liberty, in practice the effect of the policy was liberating for many of those sent to Australia. This was partly because, at a time when private property was the holiest of holies, British criminal justice routinely convicted people for offences that we today would regard as trivial. Although between half and two-thirds of those transported were “repeated offenders,” nearly all of their crimes were petty thefts. Australia literally started out as a nation of shoplifters.
Wedgwood produced thousands of anti-slavery badges, depicting a black figure on a white background and bearing the motto “Am I not a man and a brother?”
Converting the heathen was a dangerous enterprise. To succeed, the missionary movement needed an army of young men — idealistic, altruistic adventurers, willing to go to the ends of the earth to spread the Word. There could not be a greater contrast between the missionaries’ motives and those of the previous generations of empire-builders, the swashbucklers, the slavers and the settlers.
To many of the missionaries, the subcontinent was a battleground in which they, as soldiers of Christ, were struggling against the forces of darkness. “Theirs is a cruel religion,” Wilberforce had bluntly declared.
It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.
What these events — the war against slavery and the wars for opium — had in common was that British naval mastery made them possible. At first, it is true, the Admiralty had been appalled by the advent of steam, believing it would “strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire.” But quickly it became apparent that the new technology had to be adopted, if only to keep up with the French. Far from weakening the Empire, steam power tended to knit it together.
The telegraph was another invention of the Admiralty had tried to ignore. It was not the military but the private sector that developed the 19th century’s information highway, initially piggy-backing on the infrastructure of the early railways.
Since it cost $100 to recruit a soldier and maintain him in India, Britain was thereby losing more than $1M a year. Given that a similar force might have cost around $200k stationed in Europe, the extra $800K had to be regarded as a kind of tropical service premium. This was a very circumlocutory way of saying that no more British troops should be sent to sicken and die in India. Consequently, the sepoy had to stay if the Indian Army was to maintain its strength.
From 1879, the date of the second British attempt to invade and control Afghanistan, until the third attempt in 1919, Britain and Russia conducted the world’s first Cold war along the North-West Frontier. But the spies in this Cold War were surveyors, for whoever mapped the frontier first stood a good chance of controlling it. The Great Survey of India thus became inextricably bound up with espionage: what one of the early British frontiermen called the “Great Game.” At times it really did seem like a game. But this was a deadly game played in a no man’s land where the only rule was the merciless Pakhtun or “Pathan” code of honour: hospitality to the stranger, but a cut throat and an interminable vendetta against all his kin if he transgressed.
It was a truth almost but not quite universally acknowledged: no one treated subjects of Queen Victoria like that and got away with it. But to extricate a group of hostages from darkest Ethiopia was no small undertaking, since it called for the dispatch of what today would be called a rapid reaction force. The remarkable thing was that the force in question was not itself British. Abyssinia was about to feel the full military might of British India.
It was to be hoped that the captives may be released by the Diplomatists at any cost of money, for the expedition would be very expensive and troublesome; and if not a hostile shot is fired, the casualties from the climate and accident will amount to ten times the number of the captives. Still if these poor people are murdered, or detained, I suppose we must do something.
Within a few months, the invasion force set sail from Bombay to Massowah on the Red Sea coast. On board the flotilla were 13,000 British and Indian soldiers, 26,000 camp followers and a huge mass of livestock: 13,000 mules and ponies, and equal number of sheep, 7,000 camels, 7,000 bullocks and 1,000 donkeys — not to mention 44 elephants. Napier even brought a prefabricated harbour, complete with lighthouses and a railway system. It was a huge logistical feat, perfectly combining Indian muscle with British technology.
The Abyssinian Emperor had taken it for granted that no invading force would be able to cross the 400 parched and mountainous miles between the coast and Magdala. He had not reckoned with Napier.
Napier’s victory was the archetypal mid-Victorian surgical strike: what was known at the time as “butcher and bolt” operation. Vast superiority in logistics, firepower and discipline had overthrown an emperor with the minimum of British casualties.
The fact that Indian troops could be deployed as far afield as Ethiopia with such success spoke volumes about how India had changed since the 1857 Mutiny. Just ten years before Napier’s expedition, British rule in India had been shaken to its foundations by the Mutiny. But the British were determined to learn from that experience. In the Mutiny’s aftermath, there was a transformation in the way they ruled India. The East India Company was finally wound up, ending the anomaly whereby a corporation had governed a subcontinent.
Though it was a thankless and sometimes hellish job, the elite who did it gloried in their nickname: “the heaven born.”
Worst of all was the responsibility of governing literally millions of people, particularly during crises like the plague that swept Bombay in 1896 or the famine of 1900. As Machonochie later recalled, “That time marked the end of happy irresponsible days.”
When people feel threatened by another ethnic group, their reaction is usually to disparage it, in order to affirm their own superiority. This was the way the Anglo-Indians behaved after 1857. And they expected the law to uphold their superiority.
The education which the Government has given them … they use chiefly to taunt it in a discontented spirit … And these men … now cry out for power to it in judgment on, and condemn the lion-hearted race whose bravery and whose blood have made their country what it is, and raised them to what they are.
“One’s wife may be walked off for an imaginary offence and … what would more please our fellow subjects — than to bully and disgrace a wretched European woman? The higher her husband’s station and the greater respectability, the greater the delight of her torturer. Are our wives to be torn from our homes on false pretenses to be tried by men who do not respect women, and do not understand us, and in many cases hate us? Fancy, I ask your Britishers, her being taken before a half-clad native, to be tried and perhaps convicted…”
Such language laid bare one of the older complexes of the Victorian Empire: its sexual insecurity.
The question is why the threat of Indian judges trying Englishwomen was so often linked to the danger of sexual contact between Indian men and British women. After all, there was no shortage of such contact in the other direction, between British men and Indian women.
For many British officials in India, toiling for years on end in a far-flung land, the thought of “home” — not simulated in Simla, but the real thing, to which a man might one day retire — provided consolation in the heat of the plains. As the Victorian era drew to a close, however, the expatriates’ memories of home became increasingly at odds with the reality. Theirs was a nostalgic, romantic vision of an unchanging rural England, of squires and parsons, thatched cottages and forelock-tugging villages. It was an essentially Tory vision of a traditional, hierarchical society, ruled by landed aristocrats in a spirit of benign paternalism. The fact that Britain was now an industrial giant — where as early as 1870 most people lived in towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants — was somehow forgotten.
A similar process happened in the other direction, however, as people in Britain imagined India. “What should they know of England, who only England know?” Kipling once asked, a reproach to his countrymen who ruled a global Empire without setting foot outside the British Isles. He might have put the question to Queen Victoria herself. She was delighted when Parliament bestowed on her the title of Empress of India (at her own suggestion) in 1877. But she never actually went near that place. What Victoria preferred was for India to come to her.
The playboy Maharaja — wealthy, Westernized and weakened to the point of political impotence — was to become a familiar figure throughout India.
In return for running the kingdoms for them and granting them a generous allowance, the British expected only one thing in return: supine loyalty. Generally they got it.
There was, however, a fatal flaw in all this. The Durbar was splendid theatre, no doubt; but it was a facade of power, not the real thing. After the Indian army, the true foundation of British power was not the Maharajas on their elephants but the elite of Anglicized lawyers and civil servants Macaulay had called into being.
Liberty does not descend to a people. A people must raise themselves to liberty. It is a blessing that must be earned before it can be enjoyed.
Sure enough, like the proud citadels of Nineveh and Tyre, most of Curzon’s works have not endured. As Viceroy he had striven with all his self-assured zeal to make British government of India more efficient. He believed passionately that without India Britain would drop from being “the greatest power in the world” to being “third rate.”
How much more disappointed he would have been to see the statues of the Queen-Empress and sundry imperial proconsuls that stand today in the neglected back yard of Lucknow Zoo, where they were dumped after Indian independence. There can be few more vivid emblems of the transience of imperial achievement than the immense marble Victoria that dominates this shabby little spot.
You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition without the use of force.
In the space of just a few years, as the 19th century gave way to the 20th, British attitudes toward their Empire flipped over from arrogance to anxiety. The last years of Queen Victoria were a time of imperial hubris: there simply seemed no limit to what could be achieved by British firepower and finance. As both policeman and banker to the world, the British Empire attained a geographical extent unrivaled in history. Even its nearest competitors, France and Russia, were dwarfed by the Britannic Titan — the first true superpower. Yet even before the Queen-Empress expired in her bedroom at Osborne House in 1901, nemesis struck. Africa, which had seemed to be British by right, dealt the Empire an unexpected and painful blow. While some responded by retreating into a defiant jingoism, others were assailed by doubts. Even the most gilt-edged generals and proconsuls exhibited symptoms of what is best described as decadence. And Britain’s most ambitious imperial rival was not slow to scent the opportunity such doubts presented.
By this means, Rhodes envisaged bringing the whole African continent under British domination. His justification was simple: “We are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.” There were literally no limits to Rhodes’s ambitions. He could talk with total seriousness of “the ultimate recovery of the USA as an integral part of the British Empire.”
In the words of Lord Rothschild, it was now “clear that England must secure the future predominance” in Egypt. That predominance would never be formalized into outright colonization. No sooner had they occupied Egypt, than the British began reassuring the other powers that their presence there was only a temporary expedient: a reassurance repeated no fewer than 66 times between 1882 and 1922.
Like Bismarck, colonies only interested Salisbury as properties on the board of great power politics. He was openly dismissive of Rhodes’s vision of extending British power across the length of the African continent. He found it “a very curious idea that there is some special advantage in having a stretch of territory extending all the way from Cape Town to the sources of the Nile. I can imagine no more uncomfortable position than the possession of a narrow strip of territory in the very heart of Africa, three months’ distance from the coast, which should be separating the forces of a powerful empire like Germany and another European Power. Without any advantages of position we should have had all the dangers inseparable from its defense.
The gold standard had become, in effect, the global monetary system. In all but name, it was a sterling standard.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this was how cheap it was to defend. In 1898 there were 99,000 regular soldiers stationed in Britain, 75,000 in India and 41,000 elsewhere in the Empire. The navy required another 100,000 men, and the Indian native army was 148,000 strong. Yet the total defence budget for that year was a mere 2.5 percent of net national product. Nor did the burden rise significantly when Britain boldly modernized her entire fleet by building the first Dreadnought, a ship so advanced — with its 12-inch guns and it revolutionary turbines — that it rendered all existing battleships obsolete the moment it was launched. This was world domination on the cheap.
The British, however, knew too much ancient history to be complacent about their hegemonic position. Even at the zenith of their power they thought, or were reminded by Kipling, of the fate of Nineveh and Tyre. Already, there were many who looked forward uneasily to the decline and fall of their own empire, like all empires before it.
It is still remembered today for its memorable characterization of the unplanned nature fo the 18th-century Empire: “We seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” But it was the book’s contemporary political message that captured the public imagination. Seeley acknowledged the vast extent of Britain’s Empire, but he foresaw imminent decline if Britain persisted in its absent-minded attitude to imperialism:
“If the US and Russia hold together for another half century, they will at the end of that time completely dwarfs such old European states as France and Germany and depressed them into a second class. They will do the same to England, if at the end of that time England still thinks of herself as simply a European State.”
“The British Empire,” Chamberlain declared in 1902, “is based upon a community of sacrifice. Whenever that is lost sight of, then, indeed, I think we may expect to sink into oblivion like the empires of the past, which after having exhibited to the world the evidence of their power and strength, died away regretted by none, and leaving behind them a record of selfishness only.”
Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was exciting.
As one of his editors replied when asked what sells a newspaper,
“The first answer is ‘war’. War not only creates a supply of news but a demand for it. So deep rooted is the fascination in a war and all things appertaining to it that a paper has only to be able to put up on its placard ‘A Great Battle’ for its sales to go up.”
In 1863 Dr James Hunt had dismayed his audience at a meeting in Newcastle of the British Association for the Advancement of Science by asserting that the “Negro” was a separate species of human being, half way between the ape and “European man.” In Hunt’s view the “Negro” became “more humanized when in his natural subordination to the European,” but he regretfully concluded that “European civilization was not suited to the Negro’s requirements or character.”
The negro, easily excitable, is in the highest degree susceptible to all the passions. To the negro, remove only pain and hunger, and its naturally a state of enjoyment. As soon as his toils are suspended for a moment, he sings, he seizes a fiddle, he dances.
The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind. As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage.
For Pearson, as for many other Social Darwinists, life was struggle, and war was more than just a game — it was a form of natural selection. As he put it, “National progress depends on racial fitness and the supreme test of this fitness was war. When wars cease mankind will no longer progress for there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock.”
As usual, British calculations were both strategic and economic. Despite the growing importance of the Suez Canal for British trade with Asia, the Cape remained a military base of “immense importance for England” for the simple reason that the Canal might be vulnerable to closure in a major European war. It remained “the cornerstone of the whole British colonial system.”
Not only was imperialism immoral, argued the critics. According to the Radicals, it was also a rip-off: paid for by British taxpayers, fought for by British soldiers, but benefiting only a tiny elite of fat-cat millionaires, the likes of Rhodes and Rothschild. “Every great political act must received the sanction and the practical aid of this little group of financial kings.”
A new threat to the security of the Empire was now unmistakably looming. It was not a threat from disaffected subjects but from a rival empire just across the North Sea. It was a threat not even the peace-loving Liberals could afford to ignore. And, by a singular irony, it was a threat posed by one people whom both Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain had regarded as the English-speaking race’s equals. The Germans.
Imperial hubris — the arrogance of absolute power — had been and gone, to be replaced by acute fear of decline and sudden fall. Rhodes was dead, Chamberlain dying. The scramble for Africa, those halcyon days of Maxims against the Matabele, suddenly seemed a distant memory. It was the scramble for Europe, now fast approaching, that would determine the fate of the Empire.
There are always members of Parliament who try to make the Army and Navy smaller, so as to save money. They only want to be popular with the voters of England, so that they and the party to which they belong may get into power. These men are called “politicians.” They do not look to the good of their country. Most of them know and care very little about our Colonies. If they had their way before, we should by this time have been talking French, and if they were allowed to have their way in the future, we may as well learn German or Japanese, for we shall be conquered by these.
The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory for “freedom fighters,” who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their people of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the 20th century, the principal threats — and the most plausible alternatives — to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires.
Yet all this would pale into insignificance alongside the crimes of the Russian, Japanese, German and Italian empires in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time Churchill became PM in 1940, the most likely alternatives to British rule were Hirohito’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich and Mussolini’s New Rome. Nor could the threat posed by Stalin’s Soviet Union be discounted, though until after the Second World War most of his energies were devoted to terrorizing his own subjects. It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that ultimately ruined the British Empire.
In reality, the First World War came about because politicians and generals on both sides miscalculated. The Germans believed (not unreasonably) that the Russians were overtaking them militarily, so they risked a pre-emptive strike before the strategic gap grew any wider. The Austrians failed to see that stamping on Serbia, useful though that might be in their war against Balkan terrorism, would embroil them in a European-wide conflagration. The Russians overestimated their own military capability almost as much as the Germans did; they also stubbornly ignored the evidence that their political system would crack under the strain of another war so soon after the fiasco of defeat by Japan in 1905. Only the French and the Belgians had no real choice. They Germans invaded them. They had to fight.
Our consuls in Turkey, in India, agents… must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers, for if were are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.
Though it is often forgotten, WW1 was as “total” in Africa as resources permitted it to be. In the absence of extensive railways and reliable beasts of burden, there was only one solution to the problem of logistics: men. Over 2 million Africans served in WW1, nearly all as carriers of supplies, weapons and wounded, and thought they were far from the fields of Flanders, these forgotten auxiliaries had as hellish a time as the most exposed front-line troops in Europe.
What the Germans needed were men like Lawrence, human chameleons with the ability to penetrate non-European cultures. But to produce such men requires centuries of Oriental engagement.
On 29 September the German High Command, fearful of a rout, demanded an armistice, leaving the dirty work of negotiating surrender to the hitherto impotent German parliamentarians.
Partly for that reason, many Germans failed to understand why they had lost the war. They sought responsibility within Germany, pinning the blame on one another (the incompetent militarist or the November criminals, according to taste). The reality was that German defeat was exogenous, not endogenous: it was the inevitable result of trying to fight a global conflict without being a global power.
At Versailles, there was much talk of a new international order based on self-determination and collective security. However, when all had been drafted and signed, it looked like just another version of the familiar old story: to the victors the spoils. As the historian H.A. Fisher put it, the peace treaties draped “the crudity of conquest” in “the veil of morality.”
By allying with the Turks, the Germans had made the Middle East a theatre of the war. The result had been to hand the Middle East to Britain.
The British grabbed all they could of both the German navy and merchant fleet. Despite the fact that the German scuttled the former at Scapa Flow rather than hand it over, the result was an astonishing naval preponderance. Counting only Dreadnoughts and subsequent models, Britain had 42 capital ships afloat, against the rest of the world’s total of 44. The US was second with just 16.
Before the 1920s, the British had been remarkably good at not “wembling” — at taking their Empire seriously. That in itself was an important source of imperial strength. Many a heroic deed was done simply because it was what a white man in authority was expected to do. As an assistant superintendent in Burma in the 1920s, George Orwell found himself having to shoot a rouge elephant “solely to avoid looking a fool”:
“I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.”
Today the word [Empire] is sadly tarnished … [identified] with ugliness like corrugated-iron roofs and raw townships, or, worse still, with callous racial arrogance. Phrases which held a world of idealism and poetry have been spoilt by their use in bad verse and after-dinner perorations.
But the great machine that had once worked so smoothly now juddered and stalled. One reason for this was the creation of huge new debts as a result of the war: not just the German reparation debt, but also the whole complex of debts the victorious Allies owed one another. Another was the failure of the American and French central banks to abide by the gold standard “rules of the game” as they hoarded scarce gold in their reserves. The main problem, however, was that economic policy — once predicated on the classical liberal tenets that budgets should be balanced and banknotes convertible into gold — was not subject to the pressure of democratic politics. Investors could no longer be confident that already indebted governments would have the will to cut spending and put up taxes; nor could they be sure that, in the event of a gold outflow, interest rates would be raised to maintain convertibility, regardless of the domestic squeeze that implied.
The composition of this delectable concoction conveyed an unambiguous message. With the Empire, there could be Christmas pudding. Without it, there would be only breadcrumbs, flour and old beer. Or, as Orwell said, an Empire-less Britain would be just a “cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes.”
In 1918 Britain had won the war on the Western Front by a huge feat of military modernization. In the 1920s nearly everything that had been learned was forgotten in the name of economy. The stark reality was that, despite the victory and the territory it had brought, WW1 had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before. War had acted as a forcing house for a host of new military technologies — the tank, the submarine, the armed aeroplane. To secure its post-war future, the Empire needed to invest in all of these. It did nothing of the kind.
To protest against the extension of wartime controls, Gandhi called on Indians to harness satyagraha, which roughly translates as “soul force.” It was a deliberately religious appeal to make resistance passive, not violent. Nevertheless, the British were suspicious. Gandhi’s idea of a hartal, a national day of “self-purification”, sounded to them like just a fancy word for a general strike. They resolved to meet “soul force” with “fist force.”
In his eyes, the British were “an admirably trained people” who had “worked for three hundred years to assure themselves the domination fo the world for two centuries.” They had “learned the art of being masters, and of holding the reins so lightly withal, that the natives do not notice the curb.”
What Germany had to do, he argued, was to learn from Britain’s example. “The wealth of Great Britain is the result of the capitalist exploitation of the 350 million Indian slaves.” That was precisely what Hitler most admired: the effective oppression of an “inferior” race. And there was an obvious place where Germany could endeavor to do the same. “What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us.” If Hitler had a criticism of the British it was merely that they were too self-critical and too lenient towards their subject peoples:
“There are Englishmen who reproach themselves with having governed the country badly. Why? Because the Indians show no enthusiasm for their rule. I claim that the English have governed India very well, but their error is to expect enthusiasm from the people they administer.”
During the whole of my political activity I have always expounded the idea of a close friendship and collaboration between Germany and England… This desire for Anglo-German friendship and co-operation conforms not merely to sentiments which result from the racial origins of our two peoples, but also to my realization of the importance for the whole of mankind of the existence of the British Empire. I have never left room for any doubt of my belief that the existence of this empire is an inestimable factor of value for the whole of human cultural and economic life. By whatever means Great Britain has acquired her colonial territories — and I know that they were those of force and brutality — nevertheless, I know full well that no other empire has ever come into being in any other way, and that in the final resort it is not so much the methods that are taken into account in history as success, and not the success of the methods as such, but rather the general good which the methods yield. Now there is no doubt that the Anglo-Saxon people have accomplished immeasurable colonizing work in the world. For this work I have a sincere admiration. The thought of destroying this labour appeared and still appears to me, seen from a higher human point of view, as nothing but the effluence of human wanton destructiveness.
However, this sincere respect of mine for this achievement does not mean forgoing the securing of the life of my own people. I regard it as impossible to achieve a lasting friendship between the German and Anglo-Saxon peoples if the other side does not recognize that there are German as well as British interests, that not only is the preservation of the British Empire the meaning and purpose of the lives of Britishers, but also that for Germans the freedom and preservation of the Germain Reich is their life purpose.
This was the careful calculated preamble to a final bid to avert war with Britain by doing a deal based on co-existence: the British would be allowed to retain their overseas Empire if they would give Hitler a free hand to carve out a German Empire in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Fuhrer believes that the British Empire must be preserved if at all possible. For if it collapses, then we shall not inherit it, but foreign and even hostile powers will take it over. But if England will have it no other way, then she must be beaten to her knees. The Fuhrer, however, would be agreeable on the following basis: England out of Europe, colonies and mandates returned. Reparations for what was stolen from us after the World War.
Altogether 130,000 imperial troops — British, Australians and Indians — gave themselves up to a force less than half that size. Never in the history of the British Empire had so many given up so much to so few. Only too late did it transpire how worn out the Japanese themselves had been after their gruelling jungle route march. Royal Artillery gunner Jack Chalker was among the prisoners. “It was hard to believe we were now in Japanese hands,” he later recalled. “That night, was we wondered what the future held for us, we couldn’t help but think of the Rape of Nanking… Our prospects were not encouraging.”
By 1944 the British authorities had begun to suspect “an official policy of humiliating white prisoners of war in order to diminish their prestige in native eyes.”
It is our purpose by interning American and British prisoners of war in Korea, to make the Koreans realize positively the true might of our Empire as well as to contribute to the psychological propaganda work for stamping out any ideas of worship of Europe and America which the greater part of Korea still retains at the bottom.
Since the mid 18th century, it had been one of the Empire’s proudest boast that “Britons never, never shall be slaves.” But that is exactly what the PoWs on the railway were.
In Dunlop’s eyes, the railway the Japanese — or rather their captives — were building was “an astonishing affair” which seemed “to run without regard for the landscape as though someone had drawn a line on the map.” At Konyu the line went directly though a massive rock face 73 metres long and 25 metres high.
Disgusting, deplorable, hateful troop of men — apes. It is a bitter lesson for all of us not to surrender to these beasts while there is still life in one’s body.
This was the Empire’s Passion; its time on the cross. After this, could it ever be resurrected?
Anything, in other words, but to take over Mexico — which would have been the British solution.
One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning for a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone.
The colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back. All you doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war.
In 1943 an American draft Declaration on National Independence went even further: as one British official lamented, “the whole tenor of it is to look forward to the ideal of the dissolution of the British Empire.” Nor did the Americans confine themselves to generalities. On one occasion, Roosevelt pressed Churchill to hand back Hong Kong to China as a gesture of “goodwill”. He even had the temerity to bring up the question of India, at which Churchill erupted, retorting that an international team of inspection should be sent to the American South.
Keynes was the greatest economist of the 20th century, and he knew it. In London everyone — Churchill included — was in awe of his great brain, its brilliance undimmed by the heart disease that would soon kill him. But when he met US Treasury officials in Washington, it was a different story. To the Americans, Keynes was “one of those fellows that just knows all the answers.” Keynes couldn’t stand them either.
In a word, Britain was bust — and the Empire mortgaged to the hilt.
When a firm goes belly-up, of course, the obvious solution is for the creditors to take over the assets. Britain owed billions to the US. So why not simply sell them the empire? After all, Roosevelt had once joked about “taking over the British Empire from its broke masters.” But could the British themselves to sell? And — more importantly perhaps — could the Americans bring themselves to buy?
As President Eisenhower later asked: “How can we possibly support Britain if in doing so we lose the whole Arab world?” Such warnings went unheeded. On 5 November 1956 an Anglo-French expedition landed on the Canal, claiming that the were peacekeepers trying to pre-empt an Israeli-Egyptian war.
Nothing could have revealed Britain’s new weakness more starkly than what happened next.
“A modest little man with a great deal to be modest about,” as Churchill rather unfairly put it, Atlee was nevertheless the more realistic of the two about Britain’s future. He recognized that the new military technologies of long-range air power and the atomic bomb meant that “the British Commonwealth and Empire is not a unit that can be defended by itself. The conditions which made it possible to defend a string of possessions scattered over five continents by mans of a fleet based on island fortresses have gone.” As he argued in March 1946, it was now necessary to “consider the British Isles as an easterly extension of a strategic arc the centre of which is the American continent more than a power looking eastwards through the Mediterranean and the East.”
When perhaps the inevitably struggle came between Russia and ourselves, the question would be who are our friends… those whom we had weakened in the struggle, or those whom we had strengthened? Maybe there was something to be said for British imperialism after all.
Tragically, they often blew away colonial rule only to replace it with civil war.
Yet what made it so fine, so authentically noble, was that the Empire’s victory could only ever have been Pyrrhic. In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did no that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?
Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.
In practice, money invested in a de jure British colony such as India (or a colony in all but name, like Egypt) was a great deal more secure than money invested in a de facto “colony” such as Argentina. This was a better “self of good housekeeping approval” even than membership of the gold standard (which effectively guaranteed investors against inflation) — though most British colonies ultimately had both.
A country’s economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short); this is economic history’s version of the nature-nurture debate. While a persuasive case can be made for the importance of such “given” factors as the mean temperature, humidity, the prevalence of disease, soil quality, proximity to the sea, latitude and mineral resources in determining economic performance, there seems strong evidence that history too plays a crucial part.
Not since before the Suez Crisis has a British PM talked with such unreserved enthusiasm about what Britain could do for the rest of the world. Indeed, it is hard to think of a PM since Gladstone so ready to make what sounds remarkably like undiluted altruism the basis of his foreign policy. The striking thing, however, is that with only a little rewriting this could be made to sound an altogether more menacing project. Routine intervention to overthrow government deemed to be “bad”; economic assistance in return for “good” government and “proper commercial, legal and financial systems”; a mandate to “bring the values of democracy and freedom” to “people around the world.” On reflection, this bears more than a passing resemblance to the Victorians’ project to export their own “civilization” to the world. As we have seen, the Victorians regarded overthrowing rouge regime from Abyssinia to Oudh as an entirely legitimate part of the civilizing process; the ICS prided itself on replacing “bad” government with “good”; while Victorian missionaries had an absolute confidence that their role to bring the values of Christianity and commerce to the same “people around the world” to whom Mr Blair wishes to bring “democracy and freedom.”
Cooper’s solution to this problem was what he called “a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values… an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organization but which rests today on the voluntary principle.”
The hypothesis, in other words, is a step in the direction of political globalization, with the US shifting from informal to formal empire much as late Victorian Britain once did. That is certainly what we should expect if history does repeat itself. Though its imperialism was not wholly absent-minded, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface. As we have seen, its empire began as a network of coastal bases and informal spheres of influence, much like the post-1945 American “empire.” But real and perceived threats to their commercial interests constantly tempted the British to progress from informal to formal imperialism. That was how so much of the atlas came to be coloured imperial red.
No one could deny the extent of the American informal empire — the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies and even of TV evangelists. Is this so very different from the early British Empire of monopoly trading companies and missionaries? Nor is it any coincidence that a map showing the principal US military bases around the world looks remarkably like a map of Royal Navy coaling stations a hundred years ago. Even recent American foreign policy recalls the gunboat diplomacy of the British Empire in its Victorian heyday, when a little trouble on the periphery could be dealt with by a short, sharp “surgical strike.” The only difference is that today’s gunboat fly.