The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  It was fears for the Canal as well as an urge to fracture the recent unity between Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary which drove Disraeli to intervene in the affairs of Turkey. A rebellion of its Balkan subjects in 1875 had led to a war of massacre and counter-massacre, which the European powers and the Liberals in Britain blamed on the Turkish government. British moral outrage at Turkish atrocities in what today is Bulgaria was orchestrated by the Liberals, with Gladstone leading the denunciation and calling on the government to abandon its support for the decrepit and callous régime in Constantinople. The interests of humanity outweighed those of India’s safety. Fortunately for Disraeli, Russia invaded the Balkans and by the end of 1877 its army was within sight of the Straits.

  Public opinion began to swing behind Disraeli. A British fleet, led by the most up-to-date battleship in the world, the splendidly named HMS Devastation, anchored in the Dardanelles and, just to make sure that no one forgot that India’s security was at stake, Indian troops were shipped to Malta. The empire was mobilising for war, and music hall audiences, infected with war fever, bellowed out the song of the moment:

  We don’t want to fight, but, by Jingo if we do,

  We’ve got the ships; we’ve got the men; we’ve got the money too!

  Thereafter the word ‘jingoism’ came to stand for every form of clamorous, pugnacious and intestinally inspired patriotism. Neither it nor its manifestations were novel; there had been ‘jingoes’ in 1759 and throughout the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. The 1877 crisis was solved by diplomacy and not war. Russia, severely debilitated by its war effort, withdrew from the Straits, and Britain received Cyprus, a potential sentry post for the Suez Canal.

  What had been demonstrated by the war scare during 1877 was the fickleness of public opinion, which had swung between the emotional poles of extreme moral indignation against Turkey and an equally passionate urge to fight on its behalf against Russia. The pendulum swung again in 1879, this time against Disraeli.

  He was not by instinct an annexationist, preferring policies which affirmed and consolidated British power where it was already established, rather than those that enlarged it. For instance, in 1877 he had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India, a gesture designed to link the monarchy with the empire, to bind India more closely to Britain and to serve as an earnest of the permanence of British government there. It was, therefore, very much against Disraeli’s wishes that his ministry became embroiled in the takeover of the Transvaal in 1877, the invasion of Afghanistan in 1878, and the war against the Zulu kingdom which began in January 1879. All had their roots in the responses to local crises by individual officials who believed, mistakenly, that the home government would support belligerent policies. Matters were made worse by the near annihilation of a British column at Isandlwana in Zululand in the first month of the war, and there were some near-run things in Afghanistan.

  This rash of aggressive wars was a signal to Gladstone to abandon semi-retirement and the study of theology and to arouse the conscience of the nation against the iniquities of what he called ‘Beaconsfieldism’ – Disraeli having taken the title Earl of Beaconsfield in 1877. Beaconsfieldism was an unwholesome political cocktail whose main ingredients were amoral opportunism, military adventures, and a disregard for the rights of others. During the winter of 1879–80 Gladstone, brimming with energy and moral indignation, traversed southern Scotland and denounced the policies which were destroying Britain’s reputation for fair play and justice. Ten thousand Zulus had died, he told a Glaswegian audience, for ‘no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery their homes and families’. Villages had been razed in Afghanistan and their inhabitants left to starve, victims of a government bent on conquest.

  Some of those who listened may have been among the crowds which had gathered in Edinburgh in February 1879 to watch three dozen volunteers from the 50th Regiment march from the castle to Waverley Station, the first stage of their journey to Zululand. Thousands cheered, handkerchiefs were waved from windows and the bands played ‘Cheer Boys! Cheer!’, ‘Who will care for Mother now?’ and ‘The Union Jack of Old England’. Those seeking an explanation of this brave show would have found it in the Scotsman, which defined the Zulu as ‘a savage pure and simple, abjectly submissive to the loathsome superstitions of the witch finder and rain doctor, and with his life and belongings entirely at the will of a brutal tyrant.’

  Patriotic euphoria was a transient thing, and some who had succumbed to it thought again, and voted for Gladstone. The Liberal victory in the 1880 general election was, for him, a sign that the nation had turned its back on flag-waving jingoism and lost whatever taste it may have had for conquest. Under the new Liberal government the country would return to its old ways; through free trade and self-help its people would gain in prosperity and moral strength, and Britain, through example, would continue to reshape the world in its own image.

  3

  The Mission of Our Race: Britain and the ‘New Imperialism’, 1880–1902

  In 1880 the British could still regard the world as their oyster, but with marginally less confidence than twenty or thirty years earlier. Britain was still the world’s only global power and much, perhaps the greater part, of its international strength lay in its ability to influence weaker, less developed states rather than in the possession of a territorial empire. India was, of course, a priceless asset. During the past twenty years, Indian troops had undertaken the coercive work of unofficial empire in China, Malaya and Abyssinia and had been summoned by Disraeli to defend Turkey from Russian aggression.

  In some areas the need for the old-style informal empire was disappearing. In 1886 the commander of the Cape Squadron told the Admiralty that it was no longer necessary for warships to police the waters off the Plate. The days of violent revolutions and civil wars had passed and the slave trade had been ended. Now governments kept order and, even during the tensions of presidential elections, British lives and property were respected. He added that the navy’s ships in this part of the world were obsolete and ‘objects of ridicule’, unlike the modern men-o’-war which guarded local French and Italian interests.1 This observation was a reminder that other European powers were following Britain’s example and providing world-wide naval protection for their businesses and investments. German and French warships now cruised regularly in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans.

  The appearance of foreign warships in areas which had been almost wholly under British surveillance was a token of a greater change that was occurring throughout the world. Contemporaries called it the ‘new imperialism’, a phrase that was subsequently taken up by historians to describe the sudden surge of annexations by the great powers, chiefly in Africa, the Far East and the Pacific. In fact, there was little that was novel about this phenomenon save its frenzied pace and the participation of Germany, Italy, the United States and Japan, states which had previously avoided overseas expansion.

  The reasons for this outbreak of conquest and occupation of underdeveloped and militarily weak countries by the industrial nations were complex. Everywhere, there was plenty of heady talk about the progress of mankind and the spread of civilisation. After America’s annexation of the Philippines in 1899, Senator A.J. Beveridge proclaimed his faith in ‘the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilisation of the world’. The same sentiments were expressed by German, French and Italian imperialists, and in Britain they had been uttered repeatedly over the past sixty years. Vaunting one’s own civilisation usually involved decrying someone else’s, a common indulgence whenever powers clashed over who should have what. In 1885, when a British army was fighting its way down the Nile to rescue General Charles Gordon from Khartoum, La France scornfully observed:

  England, who would have done nothing to save civilisation, or Khartoum, its citadel in the Sudan, has only undertaken her costly and adventurous expedition in order to deliver one of this arrogant race which considers itself superior to the rest of humanity.
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  Behind the bombast of late nineteenth-century imperialism lay economic uncertainties and self-doubts which troubled both old and new imperial powers. From 1872 the patterns of world trade were changing in ways which hurt all countries, particularly Britain. From then until 1896 there was a world-wide recession whose effect was tempered by sporadic, short-lived booms. The French, German, Italian, Russian and United States governments reacted by dropping free trade in favour of protection. As the tariff barriers went up, British exports to these countries tumbled. And yet in Britain the old faith in free trade remained as strong as ever, especially in the Liberal party. There were objections from the fainthearted and realists, like the Liberal-Radical Joseph Chamberlain, but they never overrode the simple belief that the golden age of free trade would somehow return and with it Britain’s dominance of world trade.

  So, in 1880, the new Liberal government was stuck with free trade, faced with slackening exports (they fell from an annual average of £234 million in the first half of the decade to £226 million in the second), rising imports, a growing population and an increase in urban deprivation. Furthermore, Britain was no longer the world’s only industrial power and her rivals were gradually catching up and overtaking her. Between 1880 and 1910 Britain’s portion of the world’s trade shrank from 23 to 17 per cent, and by the latter date her share of the world’s industrial capacity was 15 per cent, compared to the United States’s 35 per cent and Germany’s 16 per cent.

  These figures reflected industrial stagnation, the decline of the entrepreneurial spirit, and the lack of that inventiveness which had marked the early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Britain lagged behind in the development of new industrial technologies and production methods, leaving the United States and Germany to make the pace in chemicals, oil, electrical engineering and motor cars. It was paradoxical that during the 1870s and 1880s those vital accessories for Britain’s imperial campaigns, Gatling and Nordenfelt machine-guns, were manufactured in America. Those two innovations of the early 1880s, telephones and electric lighting, were both promoted in Britain by American-owned companies. Nevertheless, Britain was cushioned against the effects of diminishing exports and backward production methods by the ‘invisible’ earnings from banking, shipping, insurance and investments. By 1913 these last totalled £3,780 million.

  Britain had to come to terms with cutthroat competition in a contracting world market. As the 1880s proceeded, export outlets were further reduced as her protectionist rivals began to stake out stretches of the world, occupy them, and then declare them exclusively reserved for their own traders and investors. Britain attempted to deflect this process, but with limited success. Diplomatic pressure ensured that in 1884 the markets of the privately-owned Congo Free State were open for all comers. Again, in 1898, the British government protested when Germany and Russia were negotiating with China for concessions in Shantung and Manchuria which would give each power a monopoly of trade and investment in its province.2

  Disapproving diplomatic noises were not enough. While adhering to the dogma of free trade, Britain had to keep abreast of her rivals. Businessmen, often acting through their local chambers of commerce, began urging a policy of annexation on the government to prevent existing or potential markets from being lost to competitors. Colonial lobbying became a growth industry during the last years of the nineteenth century with well-organised and funded expansionist pressure groups springing up in Germany and France. In these countries and in Britain the imperialists made alliances with the owners of the new, cheap, mass-circulation press which had the power to sway lower-middle- and working-class opinion.

  The popular press invited the public to participate in the international bargaining for territory and occasional head-on collisions which marked the period of the new imperialism. It was soon found that the masses could be whipped into a belligerent frenzy whenever it appeared that their country was being flouted. Consider the fictional Mr Madison in Henry Williamson’s Donkey Boy, a City insurance clerk who was proud to be ‘the father of a son and daughter in the greatest nation on earth’. He read one of the new, tabloid papers, The Daily Trident which:

  … with its reiterated, almost pronged policy of fidelity to King, Country, and Empire through the triple virtues of Faith, Hope, and Vigilance, was the bedfellow of his mind. Let the radicals call it the Yellow Press; he knew the truth when he saw it: he had a mind of his own in such matters.3

  The proprietors of the new papers understood what the Mr Madisons wanted; Lord Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mail (founded 1896), once remarked that his readers relished a ‘good hate’. There were plenty of opportunities for this pleasure as the 1880s and 1890s unfolded and imperial rivalries intensified.

  How could Britain adjust to and survive in a world which was rapidly changing and where the dice were no longer loaded in its favour? It could, as many Liberals believed, rely on the old formula of free trade and unofficial empire. But the latter was no longer practical in an age when other countries were establishing their own, jealously guarded spheres of influence across the world, and in many instances taking control of so-called ‘empty’ areas in Africa and the Pacific. The practical response was to jettison old shibboleths and join in the rush to acquire territory, if only to forestall rivals.

  When unofficial empire collapsed in Egypt in 1882, Gladstone’s government substituted direct control, occupying the country by force. Likewise when, in 1884, it seemed that German settlers in South-West Africa (Namibia) might join forces with the Boers of the Transvaal and take over Bechuanaland (Botswana), hitherto loosely controlled through British missionaries, the government stepped in and declared a protectorate. It was all very galling for Gladstone who had so firmly set his face against imperial filibustering, but he could not allow power to slip from Britain’s grasp. Moreover, he could not ignore strategic arguments put forward by imperialists within his own cabinet or public opinion.

  In broad terms, Britain was committed to hanging on to its old influence, even if this meant replacing informal with direct control. There was no imperial masterplan beyond a determination to ensure the absolute security of India. ‘As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world,’ claimed Lord Curzon in 1901. ‘If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third rate power.’ No one would have seriously challenged this assertion nor the policies designed to protect the subcontinent. They were pursued ruthlessly to the point when, during the winter of 1898–9, Britain was willing to go to war to prevent France from keeping a toehold in the Nile valley. Less than a year later, in October 1899, Britain did go to war against the Transvaal and the Orange Free State to defend its paramountcy in South Africa. Loss of control over the Nile valley would have jeopardised Egypt and weakened Britain’s grip on India’s lifeline, the Suez Canal. Similarly, the dilution of British power in southern Africa would have imperilled the Cape and with it British naval supremacy in the South Atlantic and Indian oceans.

  Elsewhere Britain could afford to compromise. The partition of East and West Africa, the sharing out of Pacific islands, and the balancing of the great powers’ interests in China were managed diplomatically, if not always cordially.

  * * *

  The enlargement of the empire and the wars which accompanied it attracted enormous public interest in Britain. The process coincided with a widespread revision of ideas about the empire and its future. Rethinking the empire had been stimulated by two speculative books, Sir Charles Dilke’s Greater Britain (1869) and the best-selling The Expansion of England (1882) by Sir John Seeley. Both offered consolation for those who were apprehensive about Britain’s future. For Seeley the empire was the main source of British strength and its expansion and unity were vital for the nation’s survival as a great power. In the modern world size equalled strength and vitality; both America and Germany had grown in area and population during the past twenty years and had accordingly increased in strength. The sinews of British power were its colonies, particularly the white do
minions, which were an extension of Britain. If, as Seeley hoped, they continued to expand then Britain could hold her own in the world and eventually outdistance her new rivals.

  The British empire was an expression of what Seeley considered to be the special genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, that is the British. Social Darwinism was now fashionable and its theories, a rough and ready transfer of Darwin’s principles from the world of plants and animals to that of men, suggested that certain races were better fitted to survive and flourish than others. Leaving on one side the pertinent question as to who exactly were the Anglo-Saxons, and late nineteenth-century imperialists usually did, there was a common agreement that their assumed progeny, the British, represented a super-race. This conclusion could be justified in terms of material, scientific and intellectual progress and adaptability. The fact that the Anglo-Saxons had dispersed across the globe and mastered their environment added to the general feeling that they were ideally qualified to rule.

  Notions of racial superiority blended with arguments for imperial unity to produce an ideology for the new imperialism. It suited the times, since it offered Britain a chance to reverse the decline of its international power and revive a torpid economy. After all, in 1884 three million Australians consumed £23 million pounds’ worth of British goods. Here was not only a valuable market, but a country whose ties of kinship, language and institutions were with Britain. Striking proof of this was provided the following year when New South Wales sent troops to serve alongside British and Indian units in the Sudan.