Imperialism and Socialism (1886–1901)
Unlike its Roman predecessors, the British Empire did not consist of contiguous territory. It was higgledy piggledy and amorphous. That was because it had been created in an ad hoc way over the previous 250 years by a mixture of daring adventurers, chartered companies and, very occasionally, deliberate government policy. Trade was the driving force behind the British Empire, and ever since the American colonies became independent it was the trade centred on India that controlled its direction. India was the ‘jewel in the imperial crown’, and protecting India was what the empire was all about.
From the beginning of the seventeenth century India had made the East India Company extremely wealthy with its spices, as well as its luxury goods of silks and printed calicoes. Two hundred years later India was the entrepôt for a very sophisticated three-cornered trade. It continued to make all concerned in it, British merchants and manufacturers, Indian merchants and maharajahs, Chinese merchants and Mandarins, and the British Treasury, very rich. After the industrial revolution Britain exported cheap finished cotton, woollen and metal goods to India, India sent some of these goods to China and China exported tea to Britain. By the mid-nineteenth century a domestic Indian cotton industry was supplying cotton for British manufacturers, as well as tea from the Indian tea plantations created for the British export market.
Britain’s was never a militaristic or centrally planned empire like those of Spain and France. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century and in the course of her duel with France for colonial supremacy in India and America, Britain used war to gain territory, and she used war to protect her commerce. Her position as the world’s premier trading nation began with her gains at the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which she consolidated after the Napoleonic Wars. By the late nineteenth century her occupation of strategic harbours meant that safe ports for British ships were strung like a helpful safety net from the coast of China via India, through the Arabian Sea round the coast of Africa. They ran from Hong Kong, to Labuan island off North Borneo, to Aden at the entrance to the Red Sea. Keeping Ceylon after the Napoleonic Wars enabled Britain to defend India from attack from both east and west. The tea trade with China was secured in 1819 when Stamford Raffles had seized Singapore. Britain thus commanded the Straits of Malacca with what became one of the empire’s most important naval bases. Her emphasis on commerce tended to ensure that the flag of official government followed unofficial traders.
The inestimable financial value of India kept even so reluctant an imperialist as Gladstone occupying Egypt to protect the Suez Canal, and it was the need to consolidate the defence of an empire centred on India that determined the government’s foreign policy. Protecting India often meant extending the empire’s territories. Burma, which provided India’s border to the east, was annexed in 1886 as a result of fear of French activity in Indo-China. Protecting India’s north-west border would have led to a protectorate over Afghanistan had her conquest not proved so elusive; it required the occupation of Baluchistan in 1876, and in 1907 the establishment of a protectorate over southern Iran. All of these moves derived from the need to control the land route to India, and that also provoked the persistent antagonism towards Russia over her own expansion into central Asia.
The empire bred its own colonial imperialists too. By 1900 Singapore, which had begun as a small island trading colony, insisted on occupying the Malay States to protect herself. In the late nineteenth century Australians and New Zealanders added about one hundred Pacific islands to their territories, such as New Guinea in 1883 and the New Hebrides in 1887. By the late 1880s South Africa, where a struggle for dominance between British and Boer had been going on for close to a century, had produced the most vocal of the colonial imperialists, an MP for Cape Colony named Cecil Rhodes. Well over six feet tall he soon became known as the Colossus, a pun on his name and on his ambitions for the British Empire.
The son of an East Anglican vicar the young Rhodes had been sent out to South Africa to cure the weak heart which eventually killed him at the age of forty-nine. Instead he made a fortune with the De Beers diamond company at Kimberley. He was patriotic to the core. His views that British territory in South Africa had to extend much further north coincided with Lord Salisbury’s desire to find additional markets for British trade and to stymie German ambitions.
Rhodes was just one of the three most famous late-nineteenth-century empire-builders–the others were Sir William Mackinnon and Sir George Taubman Goldie–whose activities vastly expanded British territory in Africa. By 1900, out of thirty European protectorates in Africa fifteen were British. From the late 1880s Britain’s economy was faltering under the threat of industrial competition from Germany and America. Most European countries had abandoned free trade and adopted tariffs to protect their infant chemical and electrical industries. The seeds of very widespread discontent had been sown in Britain by the depression and unemployment. Energetic, patriotic businessmen like Rhodes, Goldie and Mackinnon believed that Africa, where Britain already had a considerable presence, was the answer. Not only was Britain the occupying power in Egypt and the dominant power at the Cape, as a result of her taking the lead in the anti-slavery movement fifty years before she had ousted the Dutch and Danish settlements on the west coast of Africa. By the mid-1870s after the defeat of the Ashantis Britain controlled the Gambia, the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone.
Much of the immense continent of Africa was empty of human habitation. It was freshly mapped by explorers and made easier to get to because of steam power; it offered markets and raw materials which were becoming scarce in Europe. Developed nations were now making their own manufactures with British machinery. Britain’s falling share in world trade after a century of supremacy convinced the Conservative and Unionist governments that they should actively welcome the empire-builders’ plans to extend their areas of operation. Under royal charter, specially established companies exploited the resources of and frequently ended up governing the lands whose chiefs they made agreements with. The Royal Niger Company was founded in 1886 by Goldie to consolidate Britain’s already dominant position on the west coast of Africa. It extended the British territories inland from Lagos in the Gulf of Guinea to the borders of French West Africa and the German colony of Kamerun. Mackinnon’s mission to end the Arab trade in slavery that Livingstone had found still flourishing on the east coast saw the beginning of British rule of the territories later known as Kenya and Uganda. The founder of the East Africa Company in 1888, Mackinnon employed H. M. Stanley to negotiate business deals with the chiefs of the Nile Lakes area. Instead of selling their people, they could be paid to have their lands mined.
The acquiring of protectorates or areas of influence in Africa by private chartered companies meant that the British government achieved foreign policy aims without despatching troops or warships. However, Britain was not alone in seeing Africa as a solution to her economic woes. By the mid-1880s her control of Egypt to secure the route to India was threatened by the penetration of Africa by other European powers determined to find their own diamond mines.
King Leopold II of Belgium made arrangements in the late 1870s with local chiefs to form a state on the Congo river, the immense river system discovered by Livingstone which bisected the African continent from east to west. Alarm at Leopold’s activities resulted in a conference of the European powers at Berlin in 1884–intended to orchestrate the peaceful division of Africa into colonies. The conference laid down rules for the claiming of territory and spheres of influence. All nations were allowed free navigation of the Congo, Zambezi and Shire rivers, while the Congo Basin formed part of the Congo Free State which became Leopold’s personal fiefdom.
This set a pattern of avoidance of war, and in the next five years Lord Salisbury came to peaceful arrangements with the other European powers over the division of Africa. A private treaty with King Leopold ceded land near Lake Tanganyika to the British East Africa Company, while in 1890 Britain swapped t
he apparently unimportant island of Heligoland in the North Sea to Germany in return for Zanzibar and Pemba. An Anglo-French treaty defined spheres of interest in Nigeria, Zanzibar and Madagascar in 1890. In 1891 treaties with Italy and Portugal defined British and Italian Somaliland, and the extent of Portuguese and British territory.
But, despite these arrangements, Britain and the British population of Cape Town were extremely worried in 1884 when Germany joined what had become known as ‘the scramble for Africa’. Convinced by her industrialists that as a united empire she should have her ‘place in the sun’, in the next two years Germany acquired millions of square miles to the north of the British Cape Colony, moving troops into Togo on the west coast and creating German East Africa, which reached from Lake Victoria down to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique. Most alarming of all, on the west coast of southern Africa Germany occupied the land stretching from the northern border of Cape Colony along the Orange river up to Angola, or Portuguese West Africa. It was named German South West Africa.
For three-quarters of a century Britain could have expanded into this area but had not done so. With the threat of a large German colony there in 1885, on Cecil Rhodes’s advice the British government annexed Bechuanaland, the territory running north of Cape Colony between the Boer republics and German South West Africa. In the view of Rhodes and many of the Cape British, the discovery of gold in the Boer Transvaal in 1886 had wrecked the balance of power in southern Africa so that the Transvaal, with its vast income of £24 million a year flowing from the goldmines of the Rand (the massive gold-bearing ridge in the Transvaal), threatened to become more powerful than the British Cape Colony.
To tip the balance back to the Cape Colony, it was argued, a new British Empire should be constructed running north–south. There should be a forward movement up Africa. Rhodes believed that if Britain was not careful she would soon be shut in by Boer and German colonies. Germany had her eye on greater influence in South Africa and she had begun to court the Boer republics, with whom she had a natural affinity. Annexing Bechuanaland put an end to the movement of Boer settlers there, but Rhodes also believed that British territories should extend further north into Zambezia, the immense lands running up to the Belgian Congo. Rhodes’s own chartered company, the British South Africa Company, was formed in 1889 to find a new Rand north of Boer territory in Zambezia. The Boers continued to be as unwilling to associate with non-Boers like Rhodes as they had been in the days of the Great Trek half a century before. Terrified by the way their colonies, first the Cape and then Natal, had been taken over relentlessly by the British, they allowed foreigners or Uitlanders few civil rights and forced them to pay most of the taxes.
Enthusiasm for acquiring land in Africa began to snowball as the British government became influenced by the Cape imperialists, who were also the financiers of the new private companies that owned concessions in the goldmines of the Boer Transvaal. Even imperial civil servants sent out from London were infected by a patriotic sense of having to stop the Germans, the Dutch, the French, the Portuguese and the Belgians.
By 1895 the visionary Rhodes had added to the British Empire 750,000 square miles of African territory, north from the Transvaal to the Belgian Congo–the colony of Rhodesia. He became the darling of a large number of Britons and was said to be one of the richest men in the world. The mass-circulation newspapers liked nothing better than colourful tales of derring-do on the ‘dark continent’ it was all part of the imperial fever which led to the dictum that ‘the sun never sets on the British Empire’. As the empire now stretched through eight times zones, it was true enough.
The territory then named after Rhodes but now called Zimbabwe had been gained by a trick. Her ruler, the grand and difficult potentate King Lobengula, had been warned by the Aboriginies’ Protection Society in London not to allow Rhodes anything other than the mineral rights for which he had been negotiating. But though the agreement between the two was indeed solely for mineral rights and not land rights, the summer of 1890 saw a column of handpicked Cape Colony pioneer settlers trekking into Lobengula’s Mashonaland, the area south of the River Zambezi. Each had been promised a 3,000-acre farm by Rhodes, by now prime minister of the Cape Colony, in return for building a road across the country. They planted a flag at what they called Mount Hampden and even began building a city named Salisbury in honour of the British prime minister.
Though Lobengula refused to accept delivery of the charter company’s shipment of rifles, to show that he repudiated the treaty, he dared not attack the settlers. After all, their superior weaponry had slaughtered his cousins the Zulus at Ulundi. Meanwhile the smoothtalking Dr Storr Jameson, Rhodes’s right-hand man and the managing director of De Beers, who had negotiated the treaty with King Lobengula, continued to avow the charter company’s peaceful intentions. He even relieved Lobengula’s painful gout by giving him morphine injections. But Mashonaland, as some in the Colonial Office had predicted, was not a second Rand. The chartered company nearly went bankrupt paying for a police force, for a telegraph line and for a railway, while no gold showed up to finance the infrastructure. Dr Jameson, who by 1893 had become resident commissioner of the new colony, decided with Rhodes that the way out of bankruptcy would be to go further north again and annex Lobengula’s other kingdom, Matabeleland. When Jameson used a border raid by Lobengula to destroy Matabeleland’s army, the king took poison and was buried in an ox skin in a cave.
Matabeleland became Northern Rhodesia and was annexed to the crown. All the land and cattle of the Ndebele people were removed from them and appropriated by the company. The company’s hut taxes drove the Ndebele to work as labourers since they could not pay them by selling cattle. The Ndebele, an aristocratic tribe who had always relied on servants to perform menial tasks, were forced to help build white towns or to work in the copper mines. When these proud warriors protested, they were beaten by Rhodes’s men. Liberating Africa from the slave trade might have been a rallying cry in the past, but under Rhodes a new kind of servitude was taking place.
The British Liberal press was convinced of skulduggery, but doubts about Rhodes’s unscrupulous methods were swept aside–the ends surely justified the means. By the late 1880s dislike and disapproval of the Colossus among the high-minded was irrelevant. ‘Chartered’, as shares in the British South Africa Company were known, traded for huge sums on the Stock Exchange. Influential thinkers like the Cambridge professor of modern history Sir John Seeley in his 1883 book The Expansion of England had already given credence to the idea of Britain’s imperial mission. So did the popular novels and bestselling verse of the Bombay-born Rudyard Kipling from the mid-1880s on. However the empire was acquired, it was justified by Kipling’s injunction to:
Take up the White Man’s burden–
Send forth the best ye breed–
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
That was the empire’s unofficial motto. The British believed they had much to be proud of when they built a church on the site of the old slave market in Zanzibar and freed the slaves winding through the forests tied to one another by wooden yokes to be shipped to Arabia. The best Victorian newcomers brought Africa the astonishing advances their century had made in medicine, education, manufactured goods and technical innovation. Christian humanitarians, often from modest backgrounds themselves, wanted to help improve the lives of people whose simple pastoral existence and superstitious beliefs appeared primitive to them.
The engineering which had changed the face of Britain changed Africa even more dramatically. Dams and bridges allowed roads to be made where no road had ever run before, across dizzying falls and gigantic rivers. British companies brought pipes for sanitation and drainage. Soon they would carry the cables for electricity for lighting, refrigeration and telephones.
Nevertheless, to the anti-imperialists in Britain much of the behaviour of empire-builders seemed like the exploitation of peoples for their cheap labour, and the t
heft of what was actually their property, the zinc, copper, iron ore and other valuable minerals. British soldiers might fight the Arab slave-traders who continued to prey on neighbouring African tribes, but treaties to develop the country’s mineral rights were generally obtained at the point of a gun. Sir George Taubman Goldie’s Royal Niger Company held a royal charter to rule all the land surrounding the Niger from the Benue to the sea, yet historically this was the land of the Benin people. These private companies, unregulated by the state, yet acting for the British Empire, had great drawbacks–as the history of the East India Company showed. Many of their number were unscrupulous entrepreneurs dedicated to nothing more philanthropic than profit margins. Nevertheless they were being allowed to rule hundreds of thousands of square miles of land, and their inhabitants.
But imperialism was overwhelmingly the mood of the age, all the more so after the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee in 1887, which marked fifty years on the throne. When the queen processed from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey attended by a great throng of representatives of all the countries and nationalities within the empire, the empire was made visible. The bestselling author H. Rider Haggard created even more of a sense of the magic and mystery of Africa with his novels King Solomon’s Mines and She, published in 1886 and 1887 and still widely read today. Going out to work in the colonies, whether managing a tea plantation in India, being a district commissioner or exploring the African jungle was just what a young man of spirit might want to do. By 1907 the British Empire would occupy more than one-fifth of the world’s land mass, the largest empire the world had ever seen, reaching from Canada’s Hudson Bay in the frozen north to the green mountains of New Zealand in the far east.
The Story of Britain Page 75