Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Mobilising Empire, 1914–17

  On 31 July 1914 the Australian Labour Opposition leader Andrew Fisher promised that ‘should the worst happen […] Australians will stand beside the mother country to help and defend her to our last man and our last shilling’.4 This was a magnificent expression of Britannic nationalism in what would later be called the Anglosphere. The worst did happen and the self-governing Dominions contributed a million men to the battlefields. A good deal of solidarity came from the fact that many of the Dominion soldiers were British-born – 70 per cent in the case of the first contingent of Canadians – but the crucible of war that killed or wounded 65 per cent of Australian servicemen also forged a new national consciousness in the Dominions and an ambition to be treated as equals by the mother country. Increasing demands for manpower and the issue of conscription after 1916 also threatened the Empire. Irish republicans launched an Easter rising in 1916 that was closely watched by Afrikaners who had sympathies with Germany. The Military Service Act in Canada drove a wedge between British and French Canadians, who overwhelmingly refused to serve.5 Two referendums bringing in conscription in Australia in October 1916 and December 1917 were defeated. Australian workers feared that if they were drafted overseas they would be replaced by ‘sullen, dark intruders with Negroid features or turbaned coolies flooding across the land’.6

  The French colonies provided about 600,000 indigenous soldiers for the war, of whom 70,000 were killed. General Charles Mangin, who had commanded Tirailleurs Sénégalais on the Fashoda expedition, believed that colonial troops would be a Force noire because of their ‘rusticity, endurance, tenacity’ and an ‘incomparable power of shock’.7 North and West African soldiers distinguished themselves at Verdun in 1916 but suffered atrocious losses at the Chemin des Dames in 1917. Armed resistance broke out in the Aurès, in the mountainous region east of Algieria, in November 1916, and was violently suppressed. Conscription quotas were imposed on villages; those which did not provide soldiers were burned to the ground and manhunts were organised in what looked like a revival of the slave trade. In 1917 Clemenceau changed the tactic and sent Blaise Diagne, the first black deputy elected to the French parliament, on a tour of the West African Federation to find recruits. He found 63,000 recruits but largely in response to official lies about the future abolition of the Code de l’Indigénat and access of Africans to citizenship and jobs.8

  The position in the Middle East was especially perilous. Germany had increased its influence over the Ottoman Empire by building the Berlin to Baghdad railway, and in November 1914 encouraged Sultan Mehmet V, who was also the Caliph, to declare a jihad on the British, French and Russian Empires and to call their Muslim subjects to revolt. The British imposed a protectorate on Egypt and repelled an Ottoman force that attacked the Suez Canal in February 1915.9 In April 1915 they pushed back a mujahideen army in Mesopotamia.10 They then made a series of promises that were mutually contradictory and would leave a divided legacy. Hussein the Sharif of Mecca was promised Arab independence and proclaimed himself ‘king of the Arab lands’. The 1917 Declaration of Foreign Secretary Balfour promised the Jews a national homeland although qualified this by saying that ‘nothing shall be done that may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’.11 Meanwhile the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of May 1916 cynically divided the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian peninsula between Britain, which would get Transjordan and Iraq, France, which would get most of Syria, and Russia, which would get Constantinople and Eastern Anatolia. After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks published the treaty and annulled the tsarist claims. They also dropped out of the war, exposing the Middle East to a renewed German–Ottoman offensive. The British were obliged to send in more forces from the Dominions and India as a matter of urgency, occupying Jerusalem in December 1917 and Mosul and Damascus in October 1918.

  India made a massive contribution to the war effort, providing 800,000 volunteers. In 1917 the viceroy made a gift of £100,000 without consulting his legislative council, which was paid for by a 65 per cent increase in the tax burden. Opposition built up in the Home Rule League led by Tilak which brought together representatives of the Congress and the Muslim League in 1916 to demand constitutional reforms, and the Khalifat movement of Mohammed and Shaukut Ali, which expressed solidarity with the Ottoman sultan. The leaders of these movements were arrested under the 1915 Defence of India Act. The new Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montague, nevertheless decided that concessions would also have to be made to keep the Indians loyal. On 20 August 1917 he announced that India would progress towards self-government. It remained to be seen whether this promise would be kept after the war.

  In the Far East the war contributed to the rise of Japan and the tribulations of China. In China a revolution in 1911 finally overthrow the Qing emperor and power passed to the Guomindang or Nationalist party of Sun Yat-sen, who declared a republic. Unfortunately it had no military base and could not resist the former Qing military supremo, Yuan Shi Kai, who seized power in 1913.12 The outbreak of war in 1914 took European forces away from the Far East, and Japan, which had been in alliance with Britain since 1902, took the opportunity to seize the German concession of Shantung. On 18 January 1915 it also presented China with twenty-one demands, including the right to develop her interests in Manchuria and to impose advisers on the Chinese central government. This last demand was withdrawn under pressure from Britain and the United States, but it was a firm indication of Japan’s ambition to impose at least an informal empire on China.13

  ‘The Wilsonian Moment’: Dreams and Realities

  The intervention of the United States in the war in 1917 was a turning point. This was not only because of the size of the American Expeditionary Force, about two million strong, including 350,000 African-Americans, or because of its economic strength through war loans to its European allies. The moral and ideological force of the ‘Wilsonian moment’ altered the balance of legitimacy between the colonial powers and the colonised. In his inaugural address on re-election on 5 March 1917 Woodrow Wilson declared that the United States would insist both that ‘governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the governed’ and on ‘the actual equality of nations in all matters of right and privilege’. A month later, addressing Congress, he said that America was entering the war ‘for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own affairs and for the rights and liberties of small nations’. This message was echoed from an entirely different direction by the Bolsheviks who took power in Russia in October 1917. On 29 December Leon Trotsky, commissar for foreign affairs, advised Britain and France that their propaganda claim that they were fighting for the small nations of Europe, such as Belgium and Serbia, must also be extended to Ireland, Egypt, Madagascar, India and Indo-China, since ‘to refuse self-determination to the peoples of their own state and colonies would mean the defence of the most naked, the most cynical imperialism’.14

  These messages were not lost on leaders of opposition to colonial rule in the colonies, who moved mountains to come to Paris to meet and influence the decision-makers of the Peace Conference at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919. Emir Khaled, the grandson of Abd al-Qadir, who qualified as a captain in the French Army but was regarded with suspicion and never given a command, wrote to Woodrow Wilson in May 1918 to complain that in Algeria, ‘under a so-called republican regime, the greater part of the population is ruled by exceptional laws that would make barbarians ashamed’. Egyptian nationalists under Sa’d Zaghlul formed a ‘Wafd’ or delegation party, hoping to be invited to Paris, and on 25 January 1919 sent a memorandum on Egyptian National Claims to Wilson. Prince Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, turned up in Paris at the end of November 1918, hoping to obtain the promised independence of Syria. Bal Gangadhar Tilak went to London and on 2 January 1919 asked Lloyd George and Wilson for interviews, enclosing a pamphlet called Self-Determination for India. Finally, Ngu
yen Tat Thanh, the son of a disgraced Indochinese mandarin who went into exile in Paris in 1911, requested an audience with Wilson to present a document entitled ‘The claims of the people of Annam’. He signed it Nguyen Ai Quoc, Nguyen the Patriot.15

  It was not long before these pious hopes of the opponents of colonialism were dashed. Wilson’s high ideals were designed to take the moral high ground from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires rather than to bring down the colonial system. There was no problem about confiscating the German colonial empire in Africa and dividing it between Britain, France and Belgium, but Clemenceau and Lloyd George had fought the war to defend and even extend their own empires, not to liquidate them. A law sponsored by former Governor-General Charles Jonnart on 4 February 1919 gave more Muslim Algerians the vote in local elections but did not concede what they really wanted, citizenship dans le statut, French citizenship while remaining Muslims.16 In Egypt Zaghlul and other Wafd leaders were arrested on 8 March 1919, triggering a revolution in Egypt in which 800 Egyptians were killed. Balfour blamed Bolsheviks and Islamists and asked the Americans to recognise the British protectorate in Egypt, which they did.17 In March 1920 a pan-Syrian congress of national leaders met in Damascus and proclaimed the independence of Greater Syria. This was not to the taste of the French, who duly marched into Damascus and drove Faisal out. The Government of India reform sponsored by Secretary of State Edward Montagu and Viceroy Chelmsford fell far short of the self-government promise of 1917. The franchise was widened and Indians were give representation on provincial legislative councils, not in the central government. But the fear of revolutionary opposition was met by bills drafted by Justice Rowlatt to give the Indian government a battery of arbitrary powers. In protest, Gandhi launched a satyagraha movement of non-violent resistance and a general strike. This was met by state violence as on 13 April 1919 General Reginald Dyer ordered Indian Army troops to open fire on a meeting at Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar, killing 300 and injuring a thousand people.18 This single event tarnished the reputation of the British in India like none other. Back in France, Nguyen Ai Quoc despaired of the whole Wilsonian project. He read Lenin’s ‘Theses on the National and Colonial Question’, presented to the second congress of the Comintern in June 1920, which urged national and colonial liberation movements to support the revolutionary proletariat. He joined the French Communist Party when it was founded in December 1920 and in 1923 travelled to Moscow to work for the Comintern. Later he would become known as Ho Chi Minh.19

  It was not only the aspirations of former colonised countries that were given short shrift at the Paris conference. Japan was invited as a great power, but Japanese emigrants to California and elsewhere suffered discrimination because of their race. The Japanese delegation campaigned to assert a clause on racial equality into the League of Nations covenant, but was unable to overcome ideas of white superiority nurtured by Britain and its dominions.20 Former Japanese Prime Minster Okuma criticised ‘the perverted feeling of racial superiority entertained by the whites. If things are allowed to proceed in the present way […] the peace of the world will be endangered.’21 Twenty years later the United States and European powers would have reason to regret their racial arrogance.

  As a gesture of compensation, Japan was allowed to keep the concession of Shantung, but this grossly antagonised the Chinese who came to Paris hoping for the abrogation of eighty years of unequal treaties imposed by foreign powers. Frustrated students demonstrated in Tiananmen Square on 4 May 1919 in protest against this national humiliation and formed a student union. The May 4 movement spread to professionals, office workers and traders, who boycotted Japanese goods, while dock, railway and factory workers went on strike. Like air rushing into a vacuum, China was suddenly opened up to new ideas, including communism and feminism, which challenged the Confucian cult of rulers, masters and parents. Young people were empowered to leap over a century of isolation and backwardness and to seek the triumph of East over West.22

  Keeping the Lid on Empire

  Empire Day continued to be celebrated across the British Empire on 24 May every year after 1902, on the birthday of the Queen-Emperor Victoria.23 British people still emigrated to the Dominions, encouraged by the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, especially as unemployment grew between the wars. Assisted passages were given to 18,600 people emigrating to Canada and 172,000 to Australia between 1922 and 1936, fewer Irish now and mostly from the industrial regions of the North of England and Scotland.24

  There was, nevertheless, a dynamic in the Dominions and colonies after the war to assert greater independence from the Empire and equal status with the metropolis. This tendency also had an impact on relations with non-white indigenous peoples, since greater autonomy allowed the Dominions a freer hand to be brutal. Rhodesia was billed as a ‘new Australia’, and achieved self-government in 1923, after responsibility was transferred from Rhodes’ British South Africa Company. Scottish emigrants mixed with ‘poor whites’ from South Africa, a third of them Afrikaners. Threatened by the majority Ndebele and Shona populations, who had launched the Chimurenga War in 1896–7, the emigrants organised a Territorial Force Reserve after 1926 to maintain white supremacy. In Kenya, which became a colony in 1920, settlement was rather different. It was dominated by officers and gentlemen, many of whom had served in India, attracted by big game hunting and the boast of ‘the colony without income tax’. They were permitted a monopoly of the ‘white highlands’ to grow tea, coffee and maize, but were concerned about the control of towns and trade by the Indian population. In 1923 they even threatened rebellion against the Crown to prevent the Indians being allowed freer immigration and greater representation.25 In South Africa, the pro-Empire party of General Smuts was beaten by the National Party of General Herzog in 1924. They were divided over loyalty to the Empire, but they could agree on dealing with the African threat. Together they passed a law in 1933 disfranchising the minority of Africans who still had the vote in the Cape. Smuts regarded Africa as a ‘white man’s country’ and argued against equality. ‘The British Empire does not stand for the assimilation of its peoples into a common type but for the fullest development of its peoples along their own specific lines’, he told an Oxford audience in his 1930 Rhodes lecture. He urged the preservation of tribal chiefs and their councils, and the discouragement of ‘urbanised and detribalised natives’ which in his view would lead only to ‘Bolshevism and chaos’.26

  These ideas of indirect rule or association, working with traditional elites, became increasingly current in French Africa also. Administrators were concerned that previously held doctrines of assimilation would only lead to the emergence of French-educated, deracinated young urban blacks who nurtured ideas of equal rights. ‘We came as conquerors, we appeared as liberators, we released them from the tyrannical domination of a bloody oligarchy’, Martial Merlin, governor-general of French West Africa, told colonies minister Albert Sarraut in 1921. ‘But the greatest source of loyalty’, he said of the chiefs, ‘lies in the tranquillity we assured them’.27 Sarraut imbibed and developed these ideas, arguing later that assimilation, defined as ‘mass naturalisation’, was an error. France should stick to the existing practice of giving French citizenship to only an elite of indigenous people who ‘give guarantees of ability and fulfil certain conditions’, such as surrendering their legal status as Muslims. The masses should stay outside the cité française, remaining in the cité indigène.28

  In North Africa, an alliance with traditional elites was less easy. In Morocco, a powerful tribal leader, Abd el-Krim, set up a fledgling Islamic state in the mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco. He defeated the Spaniards in 1921 and launched a holy war against the French in 1924. Lyautey was unable to defeat Abd el-Krim and the latter held out until 1926.29 Meanwhile, Algeria was ruled by settlers who refused to share power with the Muslim majority. Steadily, the Muslims organised, both as an Association of Algerian Muslim ulamas, and in the populist Étoile Nord Africaine found
ed in 1926 by Messali Hadj, an Algerian worker in Paris. In 1927 Messali told a Congress of Peoples of the East, meeting in Brussels, that the Code de l’Indigénat must be abolished and Muslims should be able to vote and be elected dans le statut, becoming French citizens who were also Muslims. In 1936, former Governor-General Viollette persuaded socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum to offer reforms, and was prepared to allow 30,000 more Algerian electors in the first instance, who would not have to renounce their status as Muslims. This was rejected as insufficient by the Étoile Nord Africaine, given the Muslim population of 5.5 million, but above all by the settlers, who organised a mass resignation of mayors against the threat of Muslim voters. The reform was withdrawn and Messali Hadj was arrested as a threat to state security.30

  In the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire had once ruled, the League of Nations attempted to reconcile local demands for self-government with the interests of colonial powers through the mandate system. The justification was that the subject peoples were on the road to self-government but not yet ready for it.31 There was nevertheless the suspicion that mandates were protectorates by a different name, offering few restraints on the colonial power. There was also the problem that the mandates of Syria, Iraq and Palestine were artificial units that could not reconcile the claims of competing ethnic and religious groups. In Syria, France decided to make a virtue of this, splitting off a Christian-majority Lebanon, an Alawite state on the north coast and a Druze state in the south. In 1925 Druze rebels joined forces with former Ottoman soldiers in Damascus, but the French replied with the sustained bombing of Damascus from the air, killing 1,500 people.32 In Iraq, the British occupation faced a rebellion in June 1920 led by 130,000 Shiite tribesmen in the south who achieved a truce with Sunnis, by former Ottoman soldiers in Baghdad, and by Kurds in the north. The British replied with massive force (Figure 2.2), including aerial bombing, and killed over 8,000 Iraqis before having Faisal crowned a puppet king.33 In Palestine, the Arabs rioted in 1929 and launched a revolt in 1936 against growing Jewish immigration and land grabs and demanding an independent government. Several hundred Palestinian Jews were killed but British repression killed some 5,000 Palestinian Arabs.34