The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  Events in Malaya were paralleled by those in Fiji, where informal empire also disintegrated under the pressure of changes brought about by economic development and contact with Europeans. The complex and serpentine politics of Fiji had, by 1871, given rise to a bizarre situation in which King Thakombau was ruling as a constitutional monarch advised by a cabinet of European cotton-planters and merchants (including a bankrupt Sydney auctioneer on the run from his creditors) and two native chiefs. The government’s many internal problems were made worse by the existence of a local lobby which claimed that the only solution to Fiji’s difficulties was British rule.

  The annexationists had allies in New Zealand, New South Wales and Britain. In the former two, Fiji was represented as a country ripe for colonisation, an argument which Australian expansionists extended to Papua and New Guinea. In Britain, Gladstone’s ministry had to contend with pressure from humanitarian and missionary groups. Between 1835 and 1860 the Fijian missions had made 60,000 converts, but it was believed that only British rule would extirpate cannibalism and ritual sacrifice from among the islands’ remaining animists. There was also concern about the spread of ‘blackbirding’, a form of slave trading in which Pacific islanders were cajoled or forced aboard ships, and then transported as indentured labourers to the Peruvian guano fields or the Queensland sugar plantations. The Royal Navy had tried to interrupt this traffic during the 1860s, but had been hampered by the refusal of Australian juries to convict kidnappers.

  A combination of commercial and philanthropic arguments persuaded an unwilling British government to investigate the alleged collapse of central authority in Fiji. The men-on-the-spot, naval officers, were easily convinced that the islands would slide into anarchy if the British flag was not hoisted, and so in 1874 the government approved annexation. There was a strong and understandable feeling in anti-imperialist Liberal circles that ministers had been outmanoeuvred by a determined coalition of interest groups.

  After 1874 British policy in the Pacific reverted to the old pattern of policing the islands by warships and careful avoidance of any action that might lead to permanent occupation. Australian adventurers, keen to do a Rajah Brooke in Papua and New Guinea, were frowned on by the Colonial Office which, however, made it clear that steps to acquire these regions would be taken if there were signs that another power was considering their annexation.

  The coming of the new imperialism in the 1880s saw Germany and France preparing to stake out claims to various South Sea islands. German interest in the region went back thirty years, and during the 1860s the Hamburg-based Goddeffroy and Son had outstripped all its rivals as general traders in the Pacific. The firm collapsed in 1879, but Bismarck was happy to subsidise its successors, the New Guinea Colonial Company, and the Deutsche-See-Handels-Gesellschaft, in order to win political favours from the business community and the colonial lobby. He also approved a series of annexations of islands between 1883 and 1886.

  There was something surreal about the German procedure of establishing sovereignty. In 1886 a German gunboat hove to off one of the Solomon Islands and sent a landing party ashore. Local chiefs were given trading flags and a proclamation in a presentation box, while a board inscribed ‘German Imperial Protectorate’ was set up. A German flag was then raised and lowered, and the officials and sailors returned to the ship.10 Whether or not they understood exactly what was happening to them, the Solomon Islanders were deeply impressed by this display, for they related its every detail to a British naval officer fourteen years later. As they sailed through the islands the Germans also renamed them: New Britain became New Pommern, and so on.

  The island names were changed again when Britain, Germany, France and the United States haggled over a final settlement of who kept what. Britain got Papua, the Solomon and Gilbert and Ellice Islands, while the Germans were satisfied with Samoa, New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Caroline and Marianna Islands. The Chancellor, Prince von Bülow, was delighted and predicted that this sprinkling of islands and atolls would become ‘milestones along the road … to Weltpolitik’. Global power of this kind was an expensive luxury for, in 1913, Germany had to pay a 1.8 million mark subsidy to sustain its Pacific empire.11

  But in the heyday of the new imperialism economic value took second place to prestige, which bestowed an exaggerated importance on even the tiniest island. In August 1900 French officials boasted to New Hebridean tribesmen that, ‘This land belongs to the French Company and you are not to work it any more … We will drive you and the British, too, from the island and have it for ourselves.’12 As so often was the case, such bluster meant very little, although it must have been frightening for those on the receiving end. Six years later the British and French governments agreed to govern the New Hebrides as a condominium.

  Britain’s scattering of Pacific islands remained for many years the most backward and forgotten of her colonies. None had any great economic potential and all were afflicted by falling population levels; Fiji’s dropped by 30,000 between 1860 and 1873 and the decline only ceased in 1921. Imported diseases, against which the islanders possessed no effective immune systems, were largely responsible for these losses. Efforts were made to reverse this process with some success. The death rate of indentured labourers on the Solomons was cut from five to three per hundred between 1906 and 1921, thanks to the work of a colonial medical officer and the building of a hospital.

  The new colonial administrations were also concerned with the moral welfare of the Pacific islanders, but attempts to eradicate such disruptive customs as inter-tribal warfare met with resistance. Feuding continued on the Solomons well into the 1920s, despite frequent hangings of warriors found guilty of murder. The Malaita fighting men, or ramos, were proud of their warlike traditions, and when they were challenged by a local district officer, who styled himself ‘super ramo’, the result was a skirmish in which he and thirteen native policemen were killed in October 1929. Another source of irritation to the authorities was the islanders’ unwillingness to integrate into the newly introduced market economy. A 1932 official account of the Solomons’ development regretted that the Gela islanders were still refusing to grow more than was needed for themselves and the purchase of tobacco and a few other necessities.13 Nevertheless nearly 7,000 islanders had become part of the new economy by taking work as indentured labourers on the European-owned copra plantations. Conditions appear to have been severe: in 1922 three native overseers were charged with murdering a worker, but were acquitted, as was a Mr C.V. Maxwell, a plantation manager who had been accused of beating to death a servant boy. There were some very dark and unpleasant corners in the remotest parts of the empire.

  6

  A Great English-Speaking Country: South Africa

  ‘The true value of this colony is its being considered an outpost subservient to the protecting and security of our East Indian possessions,’ wrote Lord Caledon, governor of Cape Colony in 1809.1 This view of what otherwise was an unprofitable and turbulent backwater explained why the British had occupied the Cape three years before, and why they insisted on its retention at the end of the French wars. The strategic value of the Cape remained unaltered for the next hundred years. In the early 1900s, Admiral Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, designated Cape Town, along with Singapore, Alexandria, Gibraltar and Dover as one of the ‘Five strategic keys [which] lock up the world’.2 In 1887, nearly twenty years after the opening of the Suez Canal, Cape Town was chosen as the principle staging post for reinforcements bound for India in the event of a war with Russia.3 At that time the Cape was guarded by 4,200 regular troops, supported by 3,000 local volunteers.4

  If Britannia was to rule the waves, Britain had to keep the Cape. This was neither an easy nor rewarding task since the Cape lay in a region where racial tensions were acute and, for the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, economic growth was sluggish. Britain had inherited a dispersed population of whites of Dutch and French ancestry, who called themselves Boers or Afrikaners
, 25,000 black slaves who worked for them, and 15,000 Khoikhois (Hottentots). On the colony’s eastern borders lived 17,000 Xhosa, whose lands the Europeans coveted, and who had been at war to defend them since 1779.

  The Boers were the dominant race. They had first come to the Cape in 1652 and saw their past, present and future in terms of an unending struggle to subdue the land and its black inhabitants. Both had been willed to the Boers by God who, according to their primitive Calvinist theology, had chosen them, as He had the Israelites of the Old Testament, to be the masters of a new Canaan. Like the British, the Boers imagined themselves the blessed instruments of Providence, a belief which gave them extraordinary resilience and reserves of inner strength.

  Under the minimalist administration of the Dutch East India Company, the Boers had been largely left to their own devices and were allowed a free hand with the natives. This state of affairs ended with the installation of British colonial administration, which felt morally obliged to deal even-handedly with all its subjects, and extend basic legal rights to those who were black or of mixed race. Therefore no partnership emerged between the Boers and a régime which attempted to apply liberal and humanitarian principles, which the former found incomprehensible. There were further sources of misunderstanding and friction between rulers and ruled. The governors of the Cape were patricians, some, like Sir Benjamin D’Urban and Sir Harry Smith, with illustrious records of service in the French wars, and they and their equally well-connected staffs could distinguish no marks of civilisation among Boers, who appeared uncouth, obstructive and extremely touchy. Missionaries were horrified by the practice of slavery, and by the raiding parties who preyed on native communities whenever the need occurred to replenish the Boer labour force.

  Relations between the colonial authorities and the Boers deteriorated rapidly after 1815 to the point in 1834 when thousands of Boers decided to withdraw into the South African hinterland. What subsequent Boer mythology called ‘the Great Trek’ was a slow and uneven process which lasted several years. In part it was a reaction to the British parliament’s abolition of slavery in 1833, although pressure on the land in the Cape forced many Boers to emigrate. At first, the Cape government feared that the mass exodus would lead to a widespread war once the Boers collided with the expanding Ndebele and Zulu states which lay in their path, and in 1842 the new Boer republic of Natalia was annexed as a precautionary measure. In fact, the well-armed Boers were able to take care of themselves, and their spectacular victories over the Ndebele and Zulus in the late 1830s assured them occupation of what became the Transvaal and Orange Free State republics.

  Given that the overriding aim of British policy in southern Africa was the achievement of local stability, the government saw no useful purpose in attempting to coerce the Boer republics. In 1854 Britain officially recognised their independence, with the proviso that they acknowledged British sovereignty, which made them, on paper at least, part of Britain’s informal empire.

  One persistent Boer complaint had been that the British had failed to deal firmly with the Xhosa on the Cape’s volatile eastern frontier. The recent history of the Xhosa, or Kaffirs as they and other South African blacks were indiscriminately and contemptuously called, was one of intermittent wars to protect their land from settler encroachment. This conflict continued and intensified after the arrival of the British; there were major campaigns in 1811–12, 1819, 1834–5, 1846–7 and 1850–53. The Xhosa were in the same position as the Red Indians of North America and, if the colonists had their way, were destined for the same fate. This was brutally outlined in a letter written to the War Office by a commander during the 1846 campaign: ‘The Kaffir must be driven across the Kei; he must be made your subject; he is wanted to till the Colonists’ land.’ Another officer went further, and predicted the elimination of the Xhosa as the only outcome of the contest for land. ‘They must recede before the white man – all attempts at civilisation are futile. The great want here is a body of energetic colonists to follow in the back of the troops.’5 Irksome frontier wars against an elusive enemy always hardened consciences, but these remarks make it clear that some British were beginning to think in the Boer fashion. South Africa belonged to the white man and the black had a stark choice between submission or extinction.

  The business of grinding down the Xhosa was fraught with difficulties since they were ingenious guerrillas, fighting in rough country which they knew intimately. Explaining this to his superiors in London, a British commander in the 1846 campaign characterised the Xhosa warrior as ‘a greasy savage, whose full dress consists of a feather in his head and a sheaf for his organ of generation, who runs about as quick as a horse’.6 Getting to grips with such an opponent was hard and frustrating work. Nevertheless, bush-fighting came as a relief from tedious garrison duties. ‘I can scarcely keep myself from jumping out of joy at the idea of really being a soldier,’ Lieutenant Fleming of the 45th Regiment told his family as he prepared for action in July 1846. Six months later he was suffering from dysentery, loss of appetite and a hacking cough and was keeping himself alive with doses of quinine and port.7 When the war ended, he had had his fill of excitement and returned to England to take holy orders.

  As in so many imperial frontier wars, there were natives who were willing to place their local knowledge and skills at their conquerors’ disposal. Khoikhoi were widely employed as scouts and skirmishers, although large numbers deserted during the 1850–53 operations against the Ngquika Xhosa. Gradually, and by a scorched earth policy which starved out their opponents, the British soldiers, known as ‘amarwexu’ (small-pox Satans), got the upper hand, but the spirit of resistance remained strong. In 1855 the Xhosa were heartened by rumours that Britain had been beaten in the Crimea, and that Russian troops would shortly appear and drive all the British from the Cape.8 Soldiers did in fact arrive from the Crimea, but they were former German mercenaries who had been employed to make up the wartime shortfall of British recruits. The War Office, sick of costly frontier campaigns in the Cape, had resurrected a precedent which had been used by the Romans to keep order on chaotic frontiers. The mercenaries, like ex-legionaries, were given farms in return for defending fortified villages in districts recently seized from the Xhosa.9

  Seen from the perspective of London, the Cape and its tiny offshoot, Natal, were Cinderella colonies, continually disturbed by internal and external ructions. Both were unrewarding as markets for British manufactures; in 1855 South Africa imported British goods worth £922,000, which put it on the same level as Peru and well behind the Argentine and Chile. The political development of the two colonies followed the same course as that of the Canadian provinces and Australian states: under Colonial Office guidance, elected parliaments were established in the Cape in 1854 and Natal two years later. Pressure from British and local liberals devised a franchise which included richer black and mixed-race voters. This was done in the hope that a non-white middle class would eventually emerge and join with the white to form a stable, responsible electorate like that in contemporary Britain.

  The late 1860s witnessed an economic revolution in the Cape whose repercussions soon affected every part of southern Africa. The discovery of diamonds in Griqualand, which was swiftly annexed as a crown colony in 1871, attracted investment and immigrants on an unprecedented scale. British imports into the Cape soared from £2 million in 1871 to £7.7 million twenty years later, when the total of the Cape’s exports stood at £9.5 million, a third of which came from diamonds. Between 1871 and 1875, the Cape government inaugurated an ambitious programme of railway construction that, by 1890, gave the colony a network which extended for over 2,000 miles.

  Digging for diamonds and laying railway tracks were both labour-intensive activities requiring a vast, unskilled workforce, which could only be found among the black population. If industrialisation was to proceed, the blacks of southern Africa had to be completely pacified and brought under white control. The need for a final assertion of white supremacy was becoming urge
nt by the mid-1870s as black migrant workers, particularly Pedi from the Transvaal, and Basotho, were using the wages they earned on the diamond fields to buy guns. Obsolete muskets and modern breechloaders, some imported through Natal, were becoming widely available, and for some years the Zulu kings had been building up an arsenal of firearms.10

  A passive black population was also necessary in order to implement the Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon’s plan for a South African federation, comprising the Cape, Natal and the two Boer republics. This appeared an ideal solution to regional problems since it would create a stable unit which, thanks to the Cape’s mineral revenues, would be self-supporting. Cautiously welcomed in the two British colonies, the scheme found little favour with the Boers, who saw it as a stratagem by which Britain could dominate the entire region.

  Progress towards a federation was halted in 1876–8 by a sequence of native rebellions and wars, which were, as it turned out, the last major effort by South Africa’s blacks to stem the advance of white power. There was unrest among the Griquas in the northern Cape, the Pedi and Basotho in the Transvaal, and the Ngquika and Gcaleka Xhosas in the eastern Cape. Local British and troops, bluejackets and marines were able to handle the unrest in the Cape, employing the latest military technology, including the new Martini-Henry breech-loading rifle and Gatling machine-guns. The Boer campaign against Sekhukhuni’s Pedi soon ran out of steam and into trouble when a kommando (unit of mounted volunteer riflemen) was beaten. This reverse exposed the fragility of the Transvaal, and gave Carnarvon a welcome pretext to order its annexation in January 1877. The Boers were grateful for British intervention which, for the time being, guaranteed their safety.