A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Yet, there were other reforms. Flogging in peacetime was abolished in 1869, while provisions were made for better military education and the retirement of officers. More generally, with their stress on professionalism, the Cardwell reforms meant the end of an ancien régime that no longer seemed appropriate in an age of widespread change. For example, the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the geopolitics of British power, encouraging interest in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East as a forward defence zone for India; while the spread of steam power and ironclad warships ensured that Nelson’s navy no longer set the model for naval conflict.

  There were defeats along the way to imperial expansion, especially at Isandlwana (1879) and Maiwand (1880) at the hands of the Zulus and Afghans respectively, but the British were usually successful in battle, notably over the Zulus in 1879, in particular at Ulundi. Victory at Tel el Kebir (1882) left Britain dominant in Egypt, while the fate of Sudan was settled at Omdurman in 1898, when artillery, machine guns and rifle fire devastated the attacking Mahdists, with 31,000 casualties for the latter and only 430 for the Anglo-Egyptian force. Technology and resources were not only at stake on the battlefield. In 1896, the British force invading the Sudan built a railway straight across the Sahara Desert, from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamed. Extended to Atbara in 1898, it played a major role in the supply of the British forces.

  Much British imperial expansion, especially in 1880–1914, arose directly from the response to the real or apparent plans of other powers, particularly France and Russia. However, the search for markets for British industry was also important. Thus, both economic and political security were at stake and, as a result, the imperialist surge of activity at the close of the century has been seen as marking the beginning of a long decline from the zenith of British power, of imperial position starting to fray under pressure at the same time as it continued to expand.

  The nature of empire also changed. Sovereignty and territorial control became crucial goals. They replaced the pursuit of influence and of island and port possessions which had been the characteristic features of much, although by no means all, British expansion earlier in the nineteenth century. Suspicion of Russian designs on the Turkish empire, and of French schemes in north Africa, led the British to move into Cyprus (1878) and Egypt (1882); concern about French ambitions in South-East Asia resulted in the conquest of Mandalay (1885) and the annexation of Upper Burma (1886); while Russia’s advance across Central Asia led to attempts to strengthen and move forward the ‘North-West Frontier’ of British India and also to the development of British influence in southern Iran and the Persian Gulf, through which the British routed the telegraph to India. French and German expansion in Africa led Britain to take counter-measures, in Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Nigeria and Uganda, all moves in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ by the European powers.

  Specific clashes over colonial influence with other European powers increasingly interacted from the late 1870s with a more general sense of imperial insecurity as confidence was put under pressure by the growing strength of other states. More clearly, in the 1880s, there was public and governmental concern about naval vulnerability and, in 1889, this concern led to the Naval Defence Act, which sought a two-power standard: superiority over the next two largest naval powers combined. The importance of naval dominance was taken for granted. It was a prerequisite of an ideal of national self-sufficiency that peaked in the late nineteenth century.

  The Boer War

  By 1900, the British had an empire covering a fifth of the world’s land surface and including 400 million people. This was an empire of power and technology that was articulated by the application of British knowledge. The infrastructure of power was impressive. Britain had constructed 20,000 miles of railways in India by 1900, while a British-controlled submarine cable to India was in place from 1870.

  Yet, this primacy faced problems. Britain was also involved in a difficult trans-oceanic conflict, the Boer War with the Afrikaner (Boer; whites of Dutch descent) republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal in southern Africa. Regional hegemony was a key issue. British leaders found it difficult to accept Boer views and were willing to risk war in order to achieve a transfer of some power in the region. The Boer War is often seen as a classic instance of ‘capitalist-driven’ empire building. However, Alfred Milner (1854–1925), the aggressive Governor of Cape Colony, was essentially driven by political considerations and his own ambition. The British ministers were greatly influenced by the fear that if, given the gold and diamond discoveries, the Boers became the most powerful force in southern Africa, it might not be long before they were working with Britain’s imperial rivals, especially the Germans in South-West Africa, and threatening its strategic interests at the Cape. The Prime Minister, Salisbury, remarked that Britain had to be supreme.

  Ministers in London thought the Boers were bluffing and would not put up much of a fight if war followed; while the failure of the British to send sufficient reinforcements persuaded the Boers to think it was the British who were bluffing. The Boer republics declared war after Britain had isolated them internationally and had done everything possible to provoke them. Initially, the outnumbered and poorly led British were outfought by the Boers’ effective combination of the strategic offensive and a successful use of defensive positions, as well as by their superior marksmanship with smokeless, long-range Mauser magazine rifles.

  Boer capabilities revealed serious deficiencies in British tactics and training, not least a continued preference for frontal attacks and volley firing; a lack of emphasis on the use of cover and the understanding of the consequences of smokeless powder; and, more generally, a lack of appreciation of enhanced defensive firepower. In ‘Black Week’, in December 1899, British forces suffered heavy casualties in a series of battles, including Magersfontein and Colenso, with frontal attacks foolishly preferred to the uncertainties of flank movement.

  More effective generalship by Roberts and Kitchener transformed the situation in 1900. Moreover, the Army proved adaptable, both tactically and organizationally, as when, responding to Boer tactics, there was use of mounted infantry to a great extent. Britain’s larger force was applied methodically in the overrunning of the Boer heartland in the Transvaal: its capital, Pretoria, was captured on 5 June 1900. The British then turned to the more difficult task of countering Boer raiders. Boer guerrilla operations proved a formidable, but ultimately unsuccessful, challenge, not least because of the British combination of methodical force with flexible mobility.

  The ability of Britain to allocate about £200 million and to deploy 400,000 troops was a testimony to the strength of its economic and imperial systems. Yet, income tax had to be doubled to pay for the war, which also greatly pushed up government borrowing. The Conservative policy of low taxation with financial retrenchment had to be abandoned under the pressure of imperial expansion.

  An anticipation of recent warfare was provided by domestic and international sensitivity to the treatment of Boer civilians, notably moving them from their farms and incarcerating them in camps, in order to prevent them from providing a base and support for guerrilla attacks. To later critics, lacking a sense of comparative perspective, these concentration camps were an early anticipation of subsequent horrors. In fact, the detention camps were not intended as death camps, although the disease that spread there proved fatal to many of the inmates. After the war, British victory was anchored when the Union of South Africa was formed in 1910 in a settlement that gave considerable power to the Afrikaners. This was very much a ‘white’ solution, and one that greatly disappointed the hopes held by some black leaders.

  Queen Victoria’s Empire

  Meanwhile, Empire Day had been launched in 1896 on 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday. While, in 1871, having defeated France, Wilhelm I, King of Prussia, became Emperor of Germany, Queen Victoria, five years later, as a result of the Royal Titles Act, became Empress of India – an empire that was to las
t until the subcontinent was granted independence seventy-one years later, with the title being inherited by her four successors. Streets, towns, geographical features and whole tracts of land were named or renamed in her honour, including the Australian state of Victoria, the city of Victoria on Vancouver Island in Canada, Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, and Lake Victoria in East Africa.

  Imperial status was also part of the re-creation of Queen Victoria in the late 1870s. She was coaxed from reclusive widowhood to a new public role by Benjamin Disraeli, who, as Prime Minister, combined imperial policies with social reform and who sought, in doing so, to foster a sense of national unity and continuity. He realized that monarchy was a potent way to lead the public and control the consequences of the spread of the franchise, a view gently mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operetta, the Pirates of Penzance (1879), in which the pirates, victorious over the maladroit police, rapidly surrender at the close when summoned to do so in the name of the queen. At once an opportunistic and skilful political tactician, who was also an acute and imaginative thinker, Disraeli was able to create a political culture around the themes of national identity, national pride and social cohesion, and to focus popular support for the Conservatives on these themes as an alternative to the Liberal moral certainty in which Gladstone flourished. Disraeli carefully manipulated the queen into accepting his view and playing the role he had allocated her.

  The government of Queen Victoria’s empire was very varied. In some colonies, notably in much of Africa, there was straightforward imperial rule by representatives of the British state, whereas in India there was a careful attempt to incorporate existing hierarchies, interests and rituals. There, the princely dynasties were wooed, from the 1870s, by the creation of an Anglicized princely hierarchy that gave them roles and honours, such as the orders of the Star of India and the Indian Empire, in accordance with British models and interests – a process that was also to be followed in Malaya and in parts of Africa. This process led to a stress on status, not race, that is easy to criticize, not least because the resulting emphasis on inherited privilege served as a brake on inculcating values of economic, social and political development. Nevertheless, this policy was also a response to the large amount of India that had been left under princely rule, while, in practice, the search for support in India and elsewhere was not restricted to the social elite, but was a multi-layered one, extending to the co-option or creation of professional and administrative groups able to meet local as well as imperial needs. Moreover, princes were downgraded to knights in these orders, a subtle demotion that suited British interests.

  In the long-established colonies of white settlement, self-government was extended from the mid-nineteenth century, with the growth of what was called ‘responsible government’. This meant that, in a major measure of liberalization, colonial governors were to be politically responsible to locally elected legislatures, rather than to London, a process that reflected the comparable parliamentary arrangement in Victorian Britain.

  Dominion status, self-government under the Crown, took this process further, offering a peaceful, evolutionary route to independence. Canada became a Dominion in 1867, Australia in 1901, New Zealand in 1907 and South Africa in 1910. Although the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865 had declared invalid any colonial legislation that clashed with that from Westminster, the Act was only rarely invoked. This was a federalism that worked. Meetings of prime ministers from 1887 helped give the Dominions a voice in imperial policy and also offered a means of coherence. During the Boer War, the empire, particularly Australia, Canada, Cape Colony and New Zealand, sent troops, which helped foster Dominion nationalism within the empire, rather than having this nationalism act as a separatist force.

  Yet, at the same time, alongside these changes designed to benefit from the situation of flux in the empire, cracks were appearing in the imperial edifice. Due, in part, to the diffusion within it of British notions of community, identity and political action, there was a measure of opposition to imperial control, with the Indian National Congress formed in 1885 and the Egyptian National Party in 1897. Yet, opposition in the colonies and in the informal empire was still limited in scope, certainly in comparison to the situation after the First World War; and there was also a considerable measure of compliance with British rule. In Ireland, the preferred option was ‘Home Rule’ under the Crown, not republican independence, which, at the time, was the preference of only a minority. Meanwhile, Scots benefited greatly from the empire, while the degree to which they retained considerable independence within the United Kingdom – including their own established Church and legal and educational systems – also militated against political nationalism.

  Britain, France and Germany, 1898–1914

  France was the traditional national and imperial foe, and colonial rivalries provided fresh fuel to keep fear and animosity alive, with the two powers coming close to war over Sudan in 1898 in the Fashoda Crisis as each sought to establish a position on the Upper Nile. Yet Britain and France went to war as allies in 1914. Chance played a central role in this: a major European war broke out at a moment very different to those of heightened Anglo-French and Anglo-Russian colonial tension in the late nineteenth century. Instead, fear of German intentions, and particularly of its naval ambitions, encouraged closer British relations with France from 1904. The Anglo-French entente of 1904 led to military talks in part because defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5 weakened Russia (France’s ally) as a balancing element within Europe, thereby exposing France to German diplomatic pressure, and creating British alarm about German intentions, as in the First Moroccan Crisis of 1905–6 (a Franco-German confrontation triggered by German opposition to French expansion in Morocco). This crisis, provoked by Germany, was followed by Anglo-French staff talks aimed at dealing with a German threat. In 1907, British military manoeuvres were conducted for the first time on the basis that Germany, not France, was the enemy, while, also that year, fears of Germany contributed to an Anglo-Russian entente which eased tensions between the two powers, notably competing ambitions and contrasting anxieties in south Asia. Germany, with its great economic strength and its search for a ‘place in the sun’, was increasingly seen in Britain as the principal threat.

  The economic statistics were all too present to British commentators, not least because Germany’s economic power enabled it to pursue a ‘naval race’ for battleship strength with Britain from 1906. The annual average output of coal and lignite in million tons in 1870–4 was 121 (123 million tonnes) for Britain and 40.4 (41) for Germany, but by 1910–14 the figures were 270 (274) to 243 (247). For pig-iron, the annual figures changed from 7.8 (7.9) and 2.65 (2.7) in 1880 to 10 (10.2) and 14.6 (14.8) in 1910; for steel from 3.5 (3.6) and 2.16 (2.2) in 1890 to 6.4 (6.5) and 13.5 (13.7) in 1910. In 1900, the German population was 56.4 million, but that of Britain excluding Ireland only 37 million, and including it still only 41.5 million.

  In December 1899, the rising journalist J.L. Garvin (1868–1947) decided that Germany and not, as he had previously thought, France and Russia, was the greatest threat to Britain. Rejecting the view of Joseph Chamberlain, Secretary of State for the Colonies, that Britain and Germany were natural allies, their peoples of a similar racial ‘character’, Garvin saw ‘the Anglo-Saxons’ as the obstacle to Germany’s naval and commercial policy.

  British resources and political will were subsequently tested in a major naval race between the two powers, in which the British, in 1906, launched HMS Dreadnought, the first of a new class of battleships and one that reflected the vitality of British industry, at least in shipbuilding. Imaginative literature reflected, and contributed to, the sense of crisis. A projected German invasion was central to The Riddle of the Sands (1903), a novel by Erskine Childers (1870–1922) which was first planned in 1897, when indeed the Germans discussed such a project.

  Yet, political opinion was divided. There were British politicians who sought to maintain good relations with Germany. More
over, the ententes with France and Russia were not alliances, and Britain failed to make its position clear, thus encouraging Germany to hope that Britain would not act in the event of war (which was also Hitler’s mistaken belief when he invaded Poland in 1939). In 1914, the British certainly failed to make effective use of their fleet as a deterrent, restraining Germany from hostile acts.

  The First World War, 1914–18

  The British government was divided over war in 1914, and the German invasion of Belgium (a neutral state guaranteed by Britain) on 3 August was crucial to the decision to enter the war on 4 August as it gave a moral imperative to the outbreak of hostilities. However, the major reason for the British government to act was to defend France from German attack as well as concern over losing it as a vital element in the balance of power. There was fear about what might happen in Europe and to overseas interests if Germany won the war.

  This conflict was to be the worst that Britain had ever waged. It was widely, but erroneously, assumed that the war, although costly in lives, would be short. Furthermore, the First World War was crucially different from Britain’s experience of conflict since the Napoleonic Wars because of its seemingly intractable character, the threat to the British home base, the probability that Britain might lose, with very serious consequences, and the massive quantity of manpower and resources that the war required and destroyed; and if each of these, instead, echoed the experience of the Napoleonic Wars, that was an experience unknown to those alive in 1914. In addition, Britain took a far greater role in the land conflict in the First World War than it had done in the Napoleonic Wars, and, in doing so, broke with previous British assumptions about the country’s natural strategy, as well as responding essentially to German warmaking instead of employing Britain’s strengths, notably its naval power, to best effect.