by Jan Morris
Finale
Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the North-west died away;
Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay;
Bluish ’mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay;
In the dimmest North-east distance dawn’d Gibraltar grand and grey;
‘Here and here did England help me: how can I help England?’—say,
Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,
While Jove’s planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.
Robert Browning
27
QUEEN VICTORIA went home happy on her Jubilee day. History had humoured her, as she deserved. The sun had shone all day—‘Queen’s weather’, the English called it—and there was nothing ironic to the affection her people had shown her. She had rolled through London intermittently weeping for pleasure, and studded her diary that evening with joyous adjectives: indescribable, deafening, truly marvellous, deeply touching.
To Victoria the fabric of her great Empire must have seemed almost indestructible. It had been created in her lifetime, and now in the last years of her reign it had reached its noonday. She would leave it as the most stupendous of heritages for her dear Albert and his innumerable successors. Today imperialism has long lost its power to move men’s hearts, and the idea of alien rule, however benevolent, is unacceptable to most civilized peoples. In those days it was different. Self-determination was not yet a creed, nor even often an aspiration, and colonial rule was not in itself degrading. Stripped of its emotional overtones, the British Empire did possess several tremendous merits. It was an association of like-minded States of British origin, whose friendship and kinship would prove a blessing to the world at large. It was an instrument of universal order: its scattered bases had enabled the Royal Navy to keep the world at peace for the best part of a century, and its strong arm had established the rule of law in many once-turbulent places. It was an agency of material progress: everywhere its technicians laid down the foundations of industry, and paved the way for change. It was a mighty stimulant: it injected new ideas into comatose societies, it shook up stagnant cultures, it prodded peoples withdrawn from the world into indignant protest, it pulled half Asia out of the Middle Ages, half Africa momentarily out of barbarism. And like it or not, it kept Britain herself among the Great Powers for another half-century. It was the existence of the Empire that enabled the British, those champions of liberty, to play a part in the affairs of the nations far greater than their own meagre resources would allow, or their precarious prosperity justify.
2
So their pride was understandable, as they contemplated their possessions that summer. It was a world of their own that they commanded, stamped to their pattern and set in motion by their will. Their flag was, if not loved, at least respected everywhere. Their ships lay in every port, and majestically moved down every waterway. Their trains puffed to intricate time-tables across the plains of Asia. Their armies stood to their guns in gulleys of Chitral or barrack squares of Canada, their administrators ordered the affairs of strangers from Lagos to Hong Kong. Manors in Barbados, Grecian churches in Singapore, conservatories in Melbourne and towers of Madras owed their existence to the British: at their word dams arose in India and cables were thrown across oceans, roads arched towards Tibet or the Pacific, rupees chinked in the godowns of the east, the starter’s flag dropped on a thousand race tracks and troops of petty princelings obsequiously salaamed. In every continent the Queen’s judges decreed lives or deaths, the Queen’s warships swanked into harbour and the sounds of Empire echoed: hymn tunes, reveilles, halloos, sirens, rifle-chatter, ‘Play the game’ from the schoolmasters and ‘Boy!’ from the lounging planters. It was a stupendous surge of their own energy that the British were witnessing, and it stood beyond logic or even self-control: as when a man suddenly realizes his own strength, and expects life itself to obey him.
3
The New Imperialism quickly subsided. Two years later the Boer War broke out, and the confidence of Empire faltered. Four years later Victoria died, and an age ended. Twenty years later Fisher’s dreadnoughts found their real enemy at last, not in any spiced tropical waters, where the white gunboats lay, but on a misty afternoon off the coast of Denmark: and Lord Kitchener of Khartoum, no longer monopolizing the Maxim gun, sent his English armies into far greater miseries and heroisms than they ever knew at Lucknow, Rorke’s Drift or the Khyber.
Seventy years later the grand illusion had collapsed, and England was a European island once more. The script was discredited, the props had disintegrated, and the British, looking back at that colossal performance, wondering at the scale, the effrontery, the vulgarity and the nobility of it all, could scarcely recognize themselves in the actors up there, or identify their smaller lives with that drama long ago.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THE faults of this book are patently my own. It has been saved from many more by a number of colleagues, friends and generous acquaintances who applied their specialist knowledge to early drafts of the manuscript. Particular chapters and passages were read by Sir Thomas Armstrong, Miss Pamela Hinkson, Dr Brian Inglis, Father A. Jesse, Major-General James Lunt, Professor Arthur Marder, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, Sir James Penny, Mr J. I. M. Stewart and Mr Clough Williams-Ellis. Finally Mr D. K. Field-house, Beit Lecturer in the History of the Commonwealth at Oxford, most kindly read the whole manuscript. I owe my warm thanks to all these people, hope they will like the finished product, and apologize for mistakes and misjudgements I have slipped in when their backs were turned.
2
The Kipling quotations in the book are used by permission of Mrs George Bambridge, Methuen and Co Ltd, Macmillan and Co Ltd, the Macmillan Company of Canada Ltd and Doubleday and Co, Inc., New York. The quotations from C. J. Dennis and Henry Lawson are used by permission of Messrs Angus and Robertson. Mr Hugh Noyes has allowed me to use an extract from a poem by his father, Alfred Noyes. The quotation from Sir Arnold Wilson comes from his book South West Persia, by permission of the Oxford University Press. The quotation from Winston Churchill’s The River War is used by courtesy of Eyre and Spottiswood (Publishers) Ltd and The Hamlyn Publishing Group Ltd. The two quotations from A. E. Housman are used in England by permission of the Society of Authors as the literary representatives of Housman’s estate, and Messrs Jonathan Cape, London publishers of Housman’s Collected Poems. In the United States they are reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.: the first quotation comes from 1887, in A Shropshire had—Authorized Edition—from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, copyright 1939, 1940, © 1959 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright © 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Symons: the second quotation is from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, copyright 1936 by Barclays Bank Ltd, copyright © 1964 by Robert E. Symons.
I apologize to any copyright holders whose rights I have unwittingly ignored.
3
I could not have written the book without the Bodleian Library and its subsidiaries in Oxford, and the London Library. I am also indebted to the Colonial Records Project in Oxford, which introduced me to several passages of reminiscence, to the National Archives in Ottawa and Salisbury, Rhodesia, to the Colonial Office and India Office Libraries in London, the National Library in Dublin, the Connemara Library in Madras, the Simla Library and the St Lucia Historical Society. Much of the necessary travel was made possible by the skill of my New York agent, Julian Bach.
Pax Britannica is intended to be the centrepiece of three books, the first describing the rise of the Victorian Empire to the climax it describes, the third tracing the imperial decline to that condition of uncertain emancipation in which the British nation now finds itself.
Index
Abbas II, Khedive, 1, 2, 3n.
Abercorn, Duke of, 1
Aberdeen, Lord, 1, 2
Aborigines Protection Society, 1
Abyssinia, 1, 2 and n., 3, 4, 5 6, 7
Achill Herald, 1
Achill Island, Ireland, 1
Adelaide, Australia, 1, 2
Aden, Arabia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and Diamond Jubilee, 1
government of, 1, 2
telegraph to, 1
trade of, 1, 2and n.
Admiralty, Board of, 1
Adowa, Ethiopia, 1, 2
Afghanistan, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
Africa, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 British expansion in, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
Central, 1, 2
East, 1, 2, 3n., 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
education in, 1
German colonies in, 1
maps of, 1
missionaries in, 1, 2, 3
racial attitudes in, 1 2, 3–3, 4
railways of, 1
sports in, 1, 2
West, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
African Lakes Co., 1, 2
Afridis, 1, 2, 3
Alaska, 1
Albert, Prince, 1
Alert, H.M.S., 1
Alexandria, Egypt, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Alfred, Prince, 1
Algeciras, Spain, 1
Algeria, 1
Alice Springs, Australia, 1, 2n.
Allan Line shipping line, 1, 2
Ambala, India, 1 and n.
Amery, L. S., 1 and n.
Ames, Captain, 1
Andaman Islands, 1
Anderson, ‘Champagne’, 1
Anti-Slavery Society, 1
Arabi Pasha, 1 and n., 2, 3
Arbuthnot (army officer), 1
Arbuthnot, Rear-Admiral Robert, 1 and n.
Argentina, 1, 2
Arnold, Matthew, 1, 2, 3
Arnold, Dr Thomas, 1
Arnold, Tom, 1n.
Ascension Island, 1, 2, 3
Ashanti, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Aspinall, Clara, 1
Assam, India, 1
Aswan, Egypt, 1
Aswan Dam, Egypt, 1 and n., 2
Attock, India, 1
Austin, Alfred, 1, 2, 3, 4and n., 5
Australia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14and n., 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 aborigines of, 1, 2 and n., 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
animals introduced to, 1
architecture of, 1, 2, 3
arts of, 1, 2, 3
colonial defiance in, 1, 2
crops transplanted to, 1
and Diamond Jubilee, 1
drinking in, 1
gold and silver mines of, 1, 2
irrigation in, 1
laws of, 1
mail service to, 1, 2
maps of, 1
migration to, 1, 2, 3, 4 and n.
rabbits in, 1 and n.
racial attitudes in, 1, 2, 3
railways of, 1
self-governing colony, 1, 2
settlers of, 1, 2
shipping lines to, 1, 2
sports in, 1
telegraph to, 1, 2
trade of, 1
Avonmore, Lord, 1 and n., 2
Ayerst, Lieutenant, 1
Aylward, Rev. A. Frewen, 1
Baden-Powell, Robert, 1, 2
Badulla, Ceylon, 1
Baedeker, Karl, 1
Bahama Islands, 1, 2, 3
Bahrein, 1 and n.
Baker, Sir Benjamin, 1
Baker, Sir Samuel White, 1, 2
Balfour, Arthur, 1
Baluchistan, 1
Banks, Thomas, 1 and n.
Bantry Bay, Ireland, 1
Barbados, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Crown Colony, 1
Barlow, George, 1
Barnato, Barney, 1
Baroda, India, 1
Barrow Creek, Australia, 1 and n.
Bascomb, John Robert, 1
Basutoland, 1
Bates, Daisy, 1
Batman, John, 1
Beardsley, Aubrey, 1, 2
Bechuanaland, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Beerbohm, Max, 1
Begg, I., 1n.
Beit, Alfred, 1
Belfast, Ireland, 1, 2
Belloc, Hilaire, 1
Bengal, India, 1n., 2, 3, 4, 5n., 6
Benin, West Africa, 1, 2
Benson, A. C., 1
Bentham, Jeremy, 1
Bermuda, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Crown Colony, 1, 2
Besant, Sir Walter, 1 and n.
Beveridge, Henry, 1 and n.
Bhutan, India, 1
Bikaner, India, 1
Bismarck, Otto von, 1, 2
Blachford, Lord, 1
Blackwood’s Magazine, 1, 2
Blane, William, 1
Bligh, Captain William, 1
Blunt, Wilfrid, 1 and n., 2, 3
Bombay, India, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and n., 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 University of, 1
Bordeaux, France, 1
Bornu, Africa, 1
Bowers, ‘Reverend’ Charles, 1
Boycott, Captain Charles, 1n.
Boy’s Own Paper, 1, 2, 3
Braddon, Sir Edward, 1
Brazil, 1
Brighton, Australia, 1
Brisbane, Australia, 1
Briscoe, F.J., 1
British Army, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 garrison towns of, 1
lower ranks of, 1
officers of, 1
out of date, 1, 2
religion in, 1
British Columbia, 1, 2, 3 and n., 4, 5, 6, 7
British Guiana, 1, 2, 3, 4n., 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
British Honduras, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
British India shipping line, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
British Museum, London, 1
British South Africa Co., 1, 2 and n., 3, 4, 5n., 6, 7, 8, 9 and n.
British West Indies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and British Army, 1, 2
crops transplanted to, 1
mail service to, 1
migration to, 1, 2
racial attitudes in, 1, 2
religion in, 1
shipping lines to, 1
telegraph to, 1
trade of, 1, 2
Brooke, Sir Charles Anthony, 1
and n., 1
Brooke, James, 1n.
Brown, Sir Frank, 1
Brown, John, 1
Browne, Major, 1
Browning, Robert, 1
Brunel, Isambard, 1
Bryce, Lord, 1 and n., 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11
Brydon, Dr William, 1, 2
Buchan, John (Lord Tweedsmuir), 1 and n., 2
Buckingham Palace, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Bulawayo, Rhodesia, 1, 2
Buller, Sir Redvers, 1
Bulletin, The, Sydney, Australia, 1
Burke, Robert, 1, 2 and n., 3
Burma, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 conquest of, 1, 2, 3
government of, 1, 2
migration to, 1, 2
railways of, 1
Burnell, Arthur, 1
Burton, Sir Richard, 1
Busb Ballads and Galloping Rhymes (Adam L. Gordon), 1
Butler, General, 1
Butler, Lady Elizabeth, 1, 2and n.
Byron, Lord, 1
Cadogan, Lord, 1 and n., 2
Cairo, Egypt, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Calcutta, India, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 and n., 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27n, 28and n., 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 University of, 1
Calpe Hunt, 1
Cambridge, Duke of, 1
Cameroons, 1
Campbell, Sir George, 1, 2, 3
Canada, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and n., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 architecture of, 1, 2, 3
and British Army, 1
colonial defiance in, 1
and Diamond Jubilee, 1, 2, 3
Dominion status, 1n., 2, 3, 4
Eskimos of, 1, 2n., 3
French, 1, 2, 3 and n., 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10
gold and silver mines of, 1, 2, 3
hotels of, 1and n.
Indians o
f, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
irrigation in, 1
mail service to, 1
maps of, 1
migration to, 1, 2
racial attitudes in, 1, 2, 3
railways of, 1, 2
Scots in, 1
self-governing colony, 1, 2, 3
settlers of, 1, 2
shipping lines to, 1, 2, 3
sports in, 1
telegraph to, 1
trade of, 1, 2, 3
United States and, 1, 2, 3
Canadian Pacific Railway, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Cape Colony, 1n., 2, 3, 4, 5n., 6, 7, 8 laws of, 1
nationalism in, 1
self-governing colony, 1
trade of, 1
Cape of Good Hope, 1, 2
Cape Times, 1, 2n.
Cape Town, South Africa, 1, 2
Cardwell, Edward, 1
Caribbean islands, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Carlton, Australia, 1
Carlyle, Thomas, 1, 2, 3, 4
Carnarvon, Lord, 1 and n.
Canington, Charles, 1
Casement, Roger, 1, 2n.
Casino Palace Hotel, Port Said, 1, 2n.
Caste (T. W. Robertson), 1 and n.
Castle Steamship Co., 1, 2
Castries, St Lucia, 1, 2, 3, 4
Catherine of Braganza, 1
Cawnpore, India, 1, 2
Cecil, Lord Edward, 1
Ceylon, 1, 2, 3 and n., 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15n., 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 animal transplantations to, 1
d British Army, 1
Burghers of, 1
crop transplantations to, 1
Crown Colony, 1, 2
gardens of, 1
laws of, 1
migrations to, 1, 2
railways of, 1
religion of, 1
Rock Veddahs of, 1
temples of, 1, 2
Chagos Islands, 1