A Patriot's History of the Modern World

by Larry Schweikart

  Rhodes and Alfred (Lord) Milner, however, were also responsible for a program of “equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi,” thereby introducing a degree of fair treatment of natives. While he brooked no tolerance for Zulu practices such as those that required a young male to kill someone or steal cattle to be eligible for marriage, he urged Zulus to direct their energies to working in the mines, convincing them that it was onerous and difficult (which it was) and itself constituted a display of heroism (it did). After five years, the Zulu miners returned with enough money to buy cattle for marriage eligibility.

  Politicians such as Rhodes set England on a course to gradually prepare native populations for freedom, and, as Lionel Curtis, secretary to Lord Milner, put it, “the peoples of India and Egypt…must be gradually schooled on management of their national affairs…. I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome.”110 Curtis became one of the leading voices for “Imperial Federalism,” or a commonwealth system of independent former colonies still tied to England.

  Lord Milner and Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu took a similar view. As early as 1917, Milner argued that the goal of the British government was to increase “association of Indians in every branch of the administration and [to ensure] the gradual development of self-governing institutions…with a view to…responsible government in India,” a code phrase everyone understood as “independence.”111 England established a Dominion Department to govern the colonies, complete with conferences every four years to monitor progress. Even Canada received a high degree of autonomy with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which established nearly complete legislative independence from Parliament (although full independence did not come until well after World War II).

  In most African colonies, of course, movements toward dominion status produced radical disparities between the masses of blacks and the handful of whites. Kenya had over two million blacks and only three thousand whites in 1910, most of whom were government employees. The British hoped that as natives learned English and acquired an education, they would leaven their home countries and lift others up. Instead, educated natives used their skills as a passport to escape to England or the United States.

  Dislocations produced by Versailles established numerous protectorates and mandates throughout Africa and the Middle East, mostly to the benefit of England and France, and often blindsided the hopeful colonials who had arrived at the peace conference in 1919 expecting to receive a path to independence. One of the most profound pieces of mismanagement involved the dissection of the Ottoman Empire. At the peak of its power, the Ottoman Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in area and population, stretching from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, from the Balkans as far north as Poland and to the northern shore of the Black Sea. These vast provinces were administered by twenty-one governments overseeing seventy vilayets (subprovinces), each under a pasha. The Turkish state was strictly Islamic in religious practices, secular in orientation and government processes, and impervious to genuine reform.112 One group longing to escape from under the Turkish thumb, the Arabs, constituted a disparate band of tribes whose animosity to one another strongly resembled that of the Plains Indians in America. During World War I, the British had established an Arab Bureau, which promised important and self-promoting Arabs, such as the Saudi-born Faisal bin Hussein, assistance and recognition once the fighting ended. Facilitated by an unorthodox and uncontrollable British colonel fluent in Arabic, T. E. Lawrence, the Arab Bureau gave birth to a group called the “Intrusives,” whose objective was to “shape the Arab world to fit the needs of the Empire.”113

  Lawrence’s reputation first rose after he rescued a British force that had marched from India only to be ambushed outside of Baghdad. Functioning inside Arabia (later Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Syria), Lawrence concluded that an Arab revolt could be led only by one of Hussein’s sons, Emir Faisal, with his army of some four thousand irregulars. In a well-known transformation, permanently glamorized in David Lean’s 1962 film, Lawrence of Arabia, the British colonel “went native,” donning robes, the kaffiyeh (headdress), and sporting a gold, curved dagger. Despite Lawrence’s cash disbursements to Faisal, a rival in Riyadh named Ibn Saud mounted his own program with the British to head postwar Arabia. Harry St. John Bridger Philby, the British emissary to the region, backed Saud so much that he converted to Islam. Thus Lawrence and the Hashemite tribe under Hussein bin Ali were pitted against Saud and the Wahhabis supported by Philby, in the process fanning their tribal hatreds. To make matters worse, Britain and France had, in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, already sliced up the Middle East even before the Ottoman Empire had fallen. This arrangement contradicted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (which established a national homeland for the Jews in the region) by recognizing an Arab state in the place. It also promised Russia control of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits. Nevertheless, across the Atlantic, Wilson’s own report writers were producing a “Report on the Proposals for an Independent Arab State” that suggested Arabia be united with a caliphate located in Mecca. When the Versailles Conference actually started, however, Ibn Saud was in Riyadh while Faisal and Lawrence were lobbying in France for Hashemite dominance. For a moment it appeared they might successfully coax the Allies into forming a united Arabian state, but the French held firm in their determination to have a chunk of the Ottoman Empire (Syria), and Wilson was beaten down through the need to repeatedly concede points in return for support for his League of Nations.

  Saud’s forces attacked Hussein’s troops while the dignitaries met in Versailles, and Lawrence hustled back to negotiate a cease-fire before the House of Saud took over everything. Faisal established a freely constituted government in Damascus—in French territory—but the French crushed his troops and forced him into exile. In 1921, the British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, installed Faisal as the king of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), a British protectorate, after a rebellion against direct British rule there had been put down at great cost. Ibn Saud eventually controlled all of the largely desert wasteland later known as Saudi Arabia, and the region probably would have remained insignificant internationally for centuries had it not possessed vast resources in oil. Following centuries of precedence in which successful revolutions afterward eliminate their more radical adherents, in 1929 Saud destroyed the followers who had brought him to power, the troublesome Ikhwan brotherhood, when they attempted to extend the borders of his Wahhabist realm.

  Britain, Balfour, and Israel

  Of course, one other issue complicated all the other tribal and national struggles already laid upon the table: the national Jewish homeland promised by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization. Weizmann became a convert to Zionism in 1896 when he met Theodor Herzl, author of Der Judenstaat (“The Jewish State”). Weizmann thereafter dedicated himself to its creation. A chemist who had sold his discoveries to I. G. Farben, Weizmann moved to England where he met Balfour in 1906, the year Balfour won his seat in Parliament. Spurred by C. P. Scott, the editor of the influential Manchester Guardian, Weizmann and Balfour developed a compelling argument that Britain should encourage the formation of a Jewish state, and in the process provide a regional protector for the Suez Canal and an outpost for British power in the Middle East. Weizmann labored to line up a coalition inside Parliament for his cause.

  In 1918 the British government sent a Zionist Commission to Palestine to lay the groundwork that would implement the Balfour Declaration. Dodging German U-boats in the Mediterranean, the Commission, including Weizmann, set up shop in Tel Aviv. Weizmann immediately met General Edmund Allenby, but overall found the officer corps unfriendly to his cause. Many had arrived with copies of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Despite their opposition, Weizmann won over the general. Other unfriendly encounters occurred with the former Jerusalem official Musa Kazim al-Hu
sayni, who carried a copy of the Protocols with him, as well as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Kamel Bey al-Husseini, a rabid anti-Semite and future acolyte of Adolf Hitler. Weizmann’s meeting with Faisal in the Sinai went somewhat better, with the Jewish leader shepherded about by Lawrence of Arabia. Both Lawrence and the Arabs thought the Zionists could be instrumental in advancing Arab objectives with Britain at a future peace conference.

  However, the problem all along was that the Balfour Declaration—whatever intention Britain had of living up to it—constituted only a single statement by one government. Weizmann and his allies, therefore, drafted a plan for a Jewish state in Palestine under British authority. Then on January 3, 1919, Weizmann and Faisal signed a bilateral agreement acknowledging the creation of independent Jewish and Arab states. Perhaps at that time, more than any other, the reality of “Middle East peace” was closest: both men agreed their people had suffered under colonialism and promised to work together.

  Fittingly, even as those with the most to lose—the Arabs and Jews—moved toward harmony, the French destroyed the moment. Sylvain Lévi, a Jewish French confidant of the Jewish Baron Edmond de Rothschild who had a personal grudge against Weizmann, spoke. He shattered the case laid before the delegates by warning that newly arriving Jews would disrupt the region, and alluded to the “Bolshevik” influences of the Russian Jews. Perhaps when contrasted against the pro-Zionist arguments it wasn’t much, but given that many of the delegations were wary of any potential dislocations or upheaval that might cause future problems in the Middle East, the discussion of the Jewish state became a nonstarter.

  Quickly, the Versailles delegates dropped the Palestine issue and moved on to the disposition of Germany, leaving the Palestinian porcupine for England to hold. Still full of hope, Weizmann sailed to Palestine, where hostile British officers almost prevented him from landing. Then the Zionists discovered that the British government would give them no land at all and that they had to raise funds to buy every tract. “We found we had to cover the soil of Palestine with Jewish gold,” Weizmann dourly noted.114 Over time, Jews would continue to trickle into Palestine, until in July 1937 Britain announced yet another special commission under Lord William Peel, who reported that “Arab nationalism is as intense a force as Jewish [nationalism]…. The gulf between the races is thus already wide and will continue to widen if the present Mandate is maintained.” There is “no common ground” between the Jews and the Arabs, he continued: “Their national aspirations are incompatible.”115

  Frameworks for De-colonialism

  Unlike the Americans, who had established a logical, sensible policy for admitting new peoples into the Union as full citizens (i.e., Hawaii) or setting them on a genuine road to independence (as seen in the Philippines), the Europeans lacked any such framework, let alone an effective one, in spite of their centuries-old experience with colonies.

  Thus the ironic phenomenon unfolded in which colonial states demanded democratic rights they had never understood or practiced (or, often, even seen up close) from nations that were only in the infancy of learning how to operate democratic institutions themselves. Germany and Russia still had functioning kings as late as 1917 in Russia’s case, 1918 in Germany’s, and Belgium still had one. France had experienced a shocking turnover rate in the type of government (empire, monarchy, republic) it enjoyed, careening from Napoléon to Louis XVIII to Louis Philippe to Napoléon III to the Third Republic in less than a century. Only England and Holland had long histories of peaceful, nonrevolutionary self-government. Nevertheless, it was to the democratically dysfunctional European nations that the colonies looked for role models.

  After the Treaty of Versailles, the French colony of Cameroon requested “the right to choose the [European governing power that supervised it]” and demanded civil rights, security for chiefs, and an end to land expropriations. South Africans insisted on universal suffrage in 1921, and the African National Congress (ANC) in 1923 issued a “declaration, statement or Bill of Rights” that endowed the Bantu and non-African coloreds with “liberty of the subject, justice and equality for all classes in the eyes of the law.” It also called for “democratic principles” of equality of treatment and citizenship in the land, “irrespective of race, class, creed or origin.”116 These were admirable sentiments, almost never seen in action in the mother countries, and certainly glassy-eyed romantic notions given the absolute absence of the recognition that tribes still dominated most of the African colonies.

  Europeans ignored such appeals. Instead, they displayed their possessions proudly at international gatherings. From May to November 1934, the Colonial Exhibition in Paris attracted eight million visitors. It was elaborately staged to celebrate France’s colonies, including African and Tunisian pavilions with natives dressed in traditional garb. A previous counterdemonstration, the anticolonial exhibition in 1931, had drawn only four thousand.117 Soviet attempts to agitate within the colonies mostly floundered. Two Soviet Africanists working at the Russian African bureau collaborated with nationalist Albert Nzula of the Orange Free State to publish The Working Class Movement and Forced Labor in Negro Africa (1922). The book was astounding given that the Soviets were “busy turning the Ukrainian farm belt into something resembling Leopold II’s Congo Free State.”118 It had little impact, and Nzula later died in Russia due to overdrinking, passing out, and lying in the freezing Moscow streets for hours as people walked by.119

  Despite the illusion of a commonwealth of cheerful brown, black, and yellow people pulling together for the mother country, the reality was quite different. The Great War had produced ever new and more severe problems for the European colonial empires, not the least of which was their eventual disposition. A few had already seen the future: Frederick Lugard’s book The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922) argued that “the civilized nations have at last recognized that while on the one hand the abounding wealth of the tropical regions of the earth must be developed and used for the benefit of mankind, on the other hand an obligation rests on the controlling power not only to safeguard the material rights of the natives, but to promote their moral and material educational progress.”120 But there is no indication that policymakers gave it much more consideration than they had Nzula’s tract.

  Britain held out the possibility of national independence for its colonies, and in India’s case, virtually promised it. Critics maintained that even in the case of India, the British weren’t serious; apologists that independence was only a matter of when, not if. Not so: while going through the motions of independence, Britain circled, constantly searching for the perfect time and ideal process, neither of which could ever appear in the real world.

  Other European countries wandered aimlessly with their colonial policies. France was in the process of absorbing large numbers of foreigners from its colonies, giving citizenship to some 2.3 million between 1889 and 1940, while allowing another 2.6 million foreign noncitizens to remain in the country. This was in keeping with European notions that people from the empires could be assimilated on a slow basis into the homeland. On the other hand, many French politicians had no intention of granting millions of Algerian Muslims citizenship. In 1920, the resident-general of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, called for a “radical change of course” for Algeria and its Muslim population, and the governor-general of Algeria, Jean-Baptiste Abel, warned that if France refused to admit Algerians into their national structure, “beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.”121 Rather than Algerians becoming French, settlers (known as colons) populated Algeria and exploited the locals. Lyautey likened colons to Germans in their racism.122

  The vast pool of native manpower enticed French officials, who not only looked back at the staggering losses from the war, but also looked forward at the potentially higher German birth rates. Only through empire could France generate the numbers needed to offset potential European threats—armies that would never materialize, but which remained tantalizingly near in 1939, when the
minister for the colonies promised to raise two million native troops for the defense of France. Then there was the ever-present need for raw materials. This, too, preoccupied the French at Versailles, where the Mosul oil fields were part of a “Greater Syria” France coveted. Instead, Lawrence of Arabia had put the Arabs in physical (if not political) control of Damascus, leaving only Lebanon for la Mère-patrie. Instead of oil, France obtained a beautiful port plus the headaches of keeping the Lebanese Christians—Lebanon was formed to provide a state in which Lebanese Maronite Christians would predominate—and the local Arabs separate, foreshadowing the no-win “peacekeeper” role the United Nations would adopt unsuccessfully in future decades. French colonies in Africa gobbled up capital, and the French share of investment going to territories rose to almost half of all French investment, mostly in Algeria. A more neglected colony was French Indo-China, which, like Morocco, was overpopulated with European bureaucrats—more than in all of British India.