Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  Accounted for in these diverse ways, one acquisition seemed to lead logically to the next. Trade led to the defence of trade, exploration led to settlement, missionaries needed protection, where once the Liverpool merchants loaded their transports with slaves for America, now the Royal Navy needed bases to keep foreign slavery in check. It was like a monumental snowball, and though in the past the lesser campaigns of Empire had scarcely fired the passions of the public, now the British had suddenly become aware of the staggering momentum of it all. During Queen Victoria’s reign they had acquired eighteen major territories, and now scarcely a month passed without another satisfactory adjustment of relations.

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  Never since the world began, Seeley had written, did any nation assume anything like so much responsibility. ‘Never did so many vast questions in all parts of the globe, questions calling for all sorts of special knowledge and special training, depend upon the decision of a single public.’ Literally thousands of languages and dialects were spoken in the British Empire, from Hindustani, Chinese and Arabic to the shadowy remnants of Manx, still occasionally to be heard in hill farms on the Isle of Man. Every world problem was Britain’s problem. She was the greatest Hindu and the greatest Muslim Power, and there was no kind of climate or terrain with which Englishmen of the day were not familiar. The official lists of imperial appointments wonderfully demonstrated this range and versatility. What a state it must have seemed, when one could thumb through a red-bound register to see which of one’s fellow countrymen was Governor of Madras or Agent in Egypt, which was the officer in charge of the ex-Amir of Kabul, who commanded H.M.S. Alert on the North American Station, who was presently Inspector of Steam Boilers and Prime Movers in Bombay, and who it was in charge of the police post on the Yukon trail between Skagway and Dawson City!

  Never so much responsibility: but then at that moment of her history Britain was settled in the habit of authority—authority in the family, in the church, in social affairs, even in politics. It was the last heyday of the patricians. British Governments, for all the liberalizing influences of reform, were still paternally authoritarian, and the English posture abroad was habitually one of command. To the educated Englishman responsibility came naturally. No other Power had been so strong for so long, so stable in its institutions and so victorious in its wars: and Britain’s naval supremacy really did give the country a measure of universal sovereignty, that immemorial dream of conquerors. In theory no other state could ship an army across the seas without British consent, and in practice the merchant shipping of the rest of the world was largely dependent upon British cables and coaling stations. The presence of the sea, at once insulating the Mother Country and linking it with the Empire, gave the British an imperial confidence. ‘I do not say the French cannot come,’ as Admiral St Vincent had once remarked; ‘I only say they cannot come by sea.’

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  So it looked to the British. By means complex and often shadowy, they had acquired a quarter of the world, and could behave with privileged immunity in much of the rest. There was a good deal of brag to the Britain of the nineties, but then there really was a good deal to brag about. It was expressive of the size and variety of the British Empire that papers marked S.L. often went astray in the Colonial Office: nobody could be sure whether they were intended for Sierra Leone, a colony for liberated slaves on the west coast of Africa, or for St Lucia, an island in the West Indies ceded by France under the Treaty of Paris, where the laws were mostly French, the food was mostly Creole, and the mongoose had recently been introduced from India in an attempt to keep down the rats.

  1 Charles Dilke (1843–1911) was a rare kind of politician, a radical imperialist. His book Greater Britain‚ written at 23 after a world tour, was an immense popular success, offering educated Britons a new vision of themselves as a benevolent master race. Dilke’s distinguished career as a Liberal republican was ruined by a famous divorce case in 1886, in which he was accused of adultery with the wife of another M.P.

  2 The Expansion of England was a series of lectures delivered by Seeley (1834–95) as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. It dealt with the period 1688–1815, but served to give the British a wider view of their imperial mission, and was one of the source books of the New Imperialism, remaining in print until 1956—the year the British realized that their expansion had ended.

  1 Progenitor, too, of the New Imperialism. Disraeli (1804–81) had first given glamour to the imperial idea, with gestures like the acquisition of Suez Canal shares, strokes of policy like the movement of Indian troops to Malta to confront Russia, and phrases like: ‘The key of India is not Herat or Kandahar, the key of India is London.’

  1 The Scotsman was Harry Aubrey de Vere Maclean (1848–1920), who played the bagpipes and the guitar and was an indefatigable amateur inventor. The Irishman was Robert Hart (1835–1911), resident in China for fifty-four years and virtually the creator of the Chinese maritime customs service.

  The Vesuvius funicular, the subject of the song Funiculì Funiculà, was destroyed in the eruption of 1944, and Cook’s sold its remains after the Second World War, retaining a share in the ownership of the chairlift that has replaced it.

  1 This traditional function is still going strong. Its guests, proceeding to the Residency from their air-conditioned villas, generally think they are merely celebrating the passage of another year of exile, but in fact they are honouring the proclamation of Victoria as Queen-Empress on January 1, 1877.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Life-lines

  Sons, be welded, each and all

  Into one imperial whole‚

  One with Britain, heart and soul!

  One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!

  Britons, hold your own!

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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  THE Roman Empire was self-contained. The Spanish Empire was concentrated. The Russian Empire was continental. The British Empire was broadcast across the earth, and communications were the first concern of its late Victorian rulers. The electric telegraph and the steamship had transformed the Pax Britannica. Fifty years before the imperial offices in London had been geared to time-lags of months or even years. Now the mail took four weeks to Australia, and there were only a few remote or recent colonies to which the Queen’s Jubilee message finally made its way in the pouch of a native runner. The whole Empire was suddenly accessible, and every new link seemed to be welding it into something more muscular and permanent. The communications of the world were overwhelmingly in British hands. It was a preoccupation of the British to keep them so, and to ensure that every territory of the Empire was linked to London by British routes—All-Red Routes, in the jargon of the day. Cecil Rhodes’s idea of a Cape-to-Cairo railway line was more than just a speculator’s dream: it vividly expressed the national vision of British-controlled highways crisscrossing all the continents.

  Of course the control would be asserted, the British emphasized, for the benefit of everybody: but as the Russian Foreign Secretary remarked, when told in 1889 that the British were opening up the Karun River in Persia for the advantage of all nations,‘c’était là une manière de parler’. To other nations the imperial methods often seemed preposterously high-handed. The British roamed the seas as though they owned them, and treated waters particularly important to their strategy, like the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, more or less as territorial preserves. The Navigation Acts, which reserved British imperial traffic for British ships, had been repealed half a century before: but the Empire still depended upon British command of its arteries, and phrases about the life-lines and the imperial links occur with such monotony throughout the literature of imperialism that one would expect them to lose their impact by sheer repetition, like soldiers’ swear-words.

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  A favourite map of the time was the kind that showed a small red blob for each British ship at sea—like thousands of corpuscles sprinkled through the veins of the world. It was on the shipping lanes, m
ore than anywhere, that British supremacy showed. At sea at any one moment, we are told, were British ships carrying 200,000 passengers and as many merchant seamen. More than half the merchant shipping of the world flew the Red Ensign—13½ million tons of it, or half as much again as in 1877. A thousand new ships were launched in the years 1896 and 1897, and of every thousand tons of shipping passing through the Suez Canal in the 1890s, 700 tons were British (95 were German, 63 were French, 43 were Dutch, 19 were Italian: 2 were American). The British had originally enjoyed a monopoly of the steamship trade, and they were still vastly more experienced than any of their competitors.

  The three biggest shipping lines, Peninsular and Oriental, Elder Dempster and British India, had all based their fortunes on the Empire trade, and scores of lesser companies lived by it, from exslavers of Liverpool to raffish schooner partnerships of the South Seas, their captains cheerfully drinking and whoring their way from one cargo to another. The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company had direct imperial origins—it was chartered in 1839 because the Government thought a steam service to the West Indies an imperial necessity, and still sent its ships to Barbados once a fortnight. The New Zealand Shipping Company prospered by feeding Britain with frozen mutton from the Antipodes. The ‘Blue Funnel’ Line—the Ocean Steamship Company—based many of its ships on Singapore, never bringing them home at all. The Shaw Savile ships on the New Zealand run went out by the Cape of Good Hope and came back by the Horn, circumnavigating the globe every three months. Four big shipping lines ran from England to Canada; two went from Liverpool to West Africa, following the slavers’ route; there was a weekly service to South Africa. Britain had a greater share of ocean traffic than ever before in her history, and much of it was on the imperial routes. In every imperial port the London shipping agents were the mainstays of commerce, and in smaller places the arrival of the boat from England was a great event. High on Signal Hill at St John’s, Newfoundland, above the narrow entrance to the harbour, the house flags were hoisted on a yard-arm—James Murray, Shea and Co, Campbell and Smith, Rothwell and Bowring, James Baird: and beneath that fluttering welcome, announcing their arrival to the city far below, the weathered ships would beat in from the Atlantic, into the deep cold harbour behind the bluffs, while the Newfoundlanders hastened down their hilly streets to greet them at the quays.

  On the Far East route the service had become almost institutional, so long and so regularly had the steamships been carrying Anglo-Indians to and from their dominions, the brisk young cadets so fresh, pink and assured, the brown stoop-shouldered veterans sickly from a thousand fevers. P. and O. and British India ran the service in partnership, each a company of profound and crotchety character. Kipling said British India offered ‘freedom and cockroaches’, while P. and O. acted ‘as though twere a favour to allow you to embark’:

  How runs the old indictment? ‘Dear and slow’,

  So much and twice so much. We gird, but go.

  For all the soul of our sad East is there,

  Beneath the house-flag of the P. and O.

  It took about seventeen days to India—£50 up—and one of the great daily functions of the Victorian world was the passage of the British liners through the Suez Canal: black-hulled ships with high-sounding names, Coromandel or Kaisar-i-Hind, Ophir, Bezwada or Pentakota, their high superstructures spick and span above the sand, look-outs alert on their flying bridges, muslin and scarlet gaily at their rails and Red Ensigns fluttering one after the other down the waterway. So much a part of Empire was their passage that the common abbreviation for the best combination of cabins on the India run (Port Outward, Starboard Home) had already gone into the language: Posh.

  The British were obsessed with distance. It was Macaulay who had written, in 1848: ‘Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press excepted, those which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species’—and he was thinking in particular, perhaps, of the steamships of the P. and O., which had only four years previously opened their Indian service.1 To the later Victorians steam had ‘annihilated distance’. In Macaulay’s day the passage to India took four months, and merchants went out to settle there for life, sometimes never going home at all. Now they generally returned to England after five years, to marry; after ten years their children went home to school, their wives returning every other year to see them; and after twenty years, when they were important enough in the business, they were quite likely to retire to the English shires themselves, leaving the firm in the hands of junior partners, and occasionally pottering out to Calcutta on supervisory visits. For hundreds of British families the Eastern journey was part of life, like the beginning of term, or the annual session with the dentist. They generally met friends on board ship, and at Suez two imperial streams joined, the Anglo-Indians and the Anglo-Egyptians inspecting each other coolly, each finding the others insufferably provincial and, with their affectations of dress and language, their tiffins or their suffragis, their tarbooshes and ill-advised saris, often a little comic too.

  The ships that maintained these imperial services were very small. The largest P. and O. boat was the Egypt, launched in Jubilee year: less than 8,000 tons, an ugly square-prowed ship with two slightly leaning funnels, giving it a vacuous look. The biggest ship on the New Zealand run, the Roxaia, was less than 6,000 tons, and the Allan Line passenger liners to Canada were mostly 3,000 or 4,000 tons. Passengers were often wryly amused by the ponderous gentility of these little ships. G. W. Steevens, when he sailed to India in the 1890s, thought the green-tiled smoking-room of his P. and O. like ‘a bedroom suite in the Tottenham Court Road’. The Austrian traveller Baron von Hübner, who made a long voyage in the British India liner Dorunda in 1885, recorded in near-despair the awfulness of a shipboard Sunday—no whist, no bezique, even smoking was unpopular. ‘Young M. caught with a novel in his hand: a lady looks at him fixedly, utters the word “Sunday”, takes away the novel and slips into his hand a hymnbook instead.’

  Still, the shipping lines were intensely proud of their ships, and advertised them extravagantly. The Orient line Guide records what life was like on one of the latest Australia steamers. The new Ormuz was 6,000 tons, a steamer with a trace of sail about her, in her four tall masts and complicated rigging. Her engines were so smooth, the book said, that it was sometimes difficult to believe the ship was moving at all, and her third-class arrangements were particularly complete, ‘the object being both to insure the comfort of the steerage passengers, and also to avoid any annoyance to the travellers in the first and second saloons’. Pictures of the ship pungently suggest oiled wood, creaks, fairly stiff conversations and incipient flirtations. There was an organ in the picture gallery, and in each first-class cabin there was ‘an arrangement by which the electric light can be turned on and off at pleasure by the occupant’. In the first-class dining saloon the passengers, in evening dress, sat in arm-chairs at heavily naped tables, waited upon by bearded stewards and surrounded by potted palms. In the second-class saloon they sat at long communal tables, rather like cocktail bars, with decanters slung on trays from the ceiling above their heads. The Ormuz was so powerful, we are told, that ‘all the horses in use in the British Army, if we could compel them to join in a gigantic tug of war with the Ormuz, would be pulled over’. Passengers were advised to bring a deck-chair with them—‘it should be plainly marked with the owner’s name, in a conspicuous place, not on the back’—and ladies would find ‘what are called tea gowns’ very convenient in the tropics.1

  On the day of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee the old Allan Line steamer State of California was making her last voyage from Liverpool to Canada. At dinner that night, in mid-Atlantic, they honoured the Queen with a banquet. The menu included Balmoral pudding, Victoria cream and Windsor biscuits, ‘and through the generosity of the cabin passengers, a set of handsome prizes were competed for by the steerage in a series of athletic events that created great enjoyment and merriment’.

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  Elabora
te systems of supply, defence and communication serviced these vessels along the imperial seaways, and the sole purpose of some British possessions was to keep the traffic moving: the South Atlantic coaling station of St Helena, for example, was ruined when the Suez Canal was opened. Vast supplies of coal were piled up at stations all along the route—fuel for their own ships figured largely in the British export statistics—and foreign shipping, too, depended largely upon British bunker supplies.2 The British held key ports and maritime fortresses all over the world, and their instinct had always been to gain control of communications, before carrying sovereignty further. They occupied most of the Indian seaboard, before they extended their authority inland. They established great ports at Hong Kong, for the China trade, and Singapore, for the East Indies; Hong Kong’s traffic was greater than Liverpool’s, and fifty lines of ocean shipping regularly used Singapore. They had recently acquired Mombasa, which they saw as the key to the riches of Central Africa, and they still hoped to wrest from the Portuguese the harbour of Delagoa Bay in South-East Africa, the nearest outlet to the goldfields of the Rand.

  They were the arbiters of maritime affairs, and set the world’s standards in matters like seaworthiness and navigational aids. The Greenwich Standards Department verified not only British weights and measures but United States and Russian standards, too. A1 at Lloyd’s was already a world criterion, and it was often British pressure that impelled foreign governments to erect lighthouses and moor lightships. For years the British tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Turkish Government to establish proper navigational aids in the Red Sea: in the end they erected lighthouses themselves—P. and O. built and maintained the lighthouse at Daedalus Reef, a coral strand in the northern Red Sea—and even manned some of them with British lighthouse-keepers.