The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Page 47
During the height of the fighting, Colonel Lawrence, who had commanded Arab nationalist guerrillas against the Turks, observed of Ireland, ‘You can’t make war upon rebellion.’ On another occasion, he warned the government that the ‘ordinary Englishman’ did not desire and could not afford an empire which rested solely on armed force.25 By June 1921, the cabinet had come to agree with him, grudgingly in the case of some ministers. Once it was clear that the IRA would do all in its considerable power to wreck the elections in the south, the only alternative was to declare the twenty-six counties a colony and administer them through a system of martial law. Macready doubted whether this policy would yield anything beyond a continuation of the war into the indefinite future.
The cabinet shrank from delivering the whole of southern Ireland into the hands of the generals. The past two years had seen a steady increase in protests by senior churchmen, Liberal and Labour MPs, the Trades Union Congress (which had demanded the evacuation of British troops during a special conference in June 1920) and journalists against what Asquith had described as the ‘hellish policy’ of repression and random revenge. It was alienating more and more Irish men and women and tarnishing Britain’s moral reputation throughout the world.
There was much disquiet abroad about the turn of events in Ireland. De Valera had toured the United States during 1919 and early 1920, where he was treated as a nationalist hero on a level with Gandhi and Sun Yat-Sen. He was most warmly received by Irish-American groups. These contributed $5 million in cash to help victims of the war, supplies of food and, clandestinely, arms, and they exerted political pressure on senators and representatives. This secured some anti-British resolutions, but nothing more. The new president, Warren G. Harding’s isolationist credentials ruled out official intervention in what he regarded as a British problem and none of America’s business.26 Ireland was, however, the concern of the dominions, particularly Australia with its large Irish community. General Smuts foresaw that the methods being employed in Ireland would ‘poison’ relations between Britain and the dominions. In June 1921, he took time off from the Imperial Conference to visit Dublin, where, as a former enemy of Britain, he persuaded the Sinn Fein leaders to seek a compromise.27 Britain, he told them, would never tolerate a republic, but would now accept a self-governing Ireland with dominion status.
Negotiations between Sinn Fein and the British government began in October and lasted for just under two months. What passed across the conference table and the treaty which was signed at the beginning of December have since been the source of considerable recrimination. Both sides regarded the truce as a breathing space and were ready to reopen hostilities. The IRA recruited 45,000 much-needed extra volunteers between July and December, and Lloyd George made it plain that he would restart and intensify the war if no agreement was forthcoming.28 On 2 December, Churchill was reportedly ‘full of threats of John Bull laying about with a big stick’. Four days later, when the treaty was about to be signed, he warned Collins, one of the Irish delegates, that the army was ready to resume operations in three days’ time.29 Bluster of this kind convinced many Irishmen then and later that the treaty had been squeezed out of their representatives by threats. It is more likely that Collins and his colleagues were the victims of a bluff; the principal reason why they had been invited to the negotiations was to forestall the extension of a war which was embarrassing the government, and which Macready believed was unwinnable.
Arguments about the circumstances in which the Anglo-Irish treaty was agreed were inevitable given its contents. Southern Ireland became a self-governing ‘Free State’ and a dominion. The treaty also recognised the detachment of Ulster and its Catholic minority from the Free State, and its status as a part of the United Kingdom, but with its own peculiar parliament. For those for whom the dream of Irish nationhood encompassed a single land, a hallowed historic entity, the border between the south and the north was a wound. It was an incision made for the sake of expediency, and its existence symbolised the ancient domination of Ireland by England. The nationalist movement, like Ireland, was split by the Treaty; although it was ratified in the Dáil by just seven votes, its opponents continued to fight it. The pragmatists fought and beat the idealists in a civil war that dragged on into 1923 and in which Collins was killed in a skirmish. The fighting spilled over the Ulster frontier, which anti-treaty forces attempted to redraw by force, provoking a vicious anti-Catholic backlash in Belfast.
The final victory went to de Valera and his followers. In 1937 he reframed the Irish constitution, making Eire a republic. This was not strikingly significant, although it mattered considerably to those whose nationalism had remained unsullied by the 1921 compromise. Ever since the 1931 Statute of Westminster, Ireland, like the other dominions, had enjoyed complete freedom in the management of all its external and internal affairs. This independence was asserted in September 1939 when de Valera declared Ireland neutral in Britain’s war against Germany.
Opinion inside Britain was split over the Anglo-Irish Treaty and its implication for the empire’s future. On one extreme, the Spectator had demanded that the Irish should be thrown out of the empire as they had shown themselves manifestly unfit to enjoy its enviable privileges.30 The government could not afford to indulge in tantrums: strategic considerations alone (Irish bases had been invaluable during the recent campaign against the U-boat) required that southern Ireland remained a British satellite. And so it was on paper, and for this reason Curzon declared the treaty a victory for Britain, as did Lloyd George.31
Sir Henry Wilson and the diehards bitterly disagreed. By what he described as a ‘cowardly surrender to the pistol’, Britain had exchanged the substance of power for its shadow. The empire, he predicted, was now ‘doomed’.32 ‘We must either clear out or govern,’ Wilson insisted in May 1921, and when it became obvious that a pusillanimous cabinet had chosen the former course in Ireland, he resigned and got himself elected as a Unionist MP for an Ulster seat. Wilson, like many other senior officers, some ultra-Conservatives, and right-wing newspapermen, believed the empire ultimately rested on a narrow base. It would only survive so long as Britain possessed superior force and the will to apply it remorselessly whenever dissent broke surface. Politicians, whom Wilson despised, lacked this resolution because they were continually sidetracked by party considerations, the opinions of the press, and the need to further their own careers. Made distraught by the settlement in Ireland, which he believed would soon be repeated elsewhere, Wilson may have entertained fantasies of himself as the Caesarian saviour of the country and the empire, a British Mussolini or, more appositely, General Franco. He did not live to become Britain’s man of destiny; in June 1922 he was assassinated outside his house in Eaton Square by two IRA gunmen, who were quickly captured (one had a wooden leg), tried and hanged.
Wilson was an embittered, perhaps slightly deranged military man whose outbursts would be echoed during the next forty years by those who believed that the empire had in some way been betrayed by indecisive or weak-willed politicians. In what was a long-drawn-out rearguard action, they argued repeatedly that strong men and firm measures would overcome the protests of the empire’s discontented subjects who were, they always insisted, an unrepresentative minority of self-seeking troublemakers. But one knotty problem remained; if, as Wilson and those of like mind insisted, the empire had to be held together by force then how much force was the government entitled to use?
Gandhi, examining the implications of the Irish treaty, interpreted the circumstances which led to its agreement not as a failure of nerve, but as an assertion of traditional moral principles. ‘It is not fear of losing more lives that has compelled a reluctant offer from England,’ he wrote in December 1921, ‘but it is the shame of any further imposition of agony upon a people that loves liberty above everything else.’33 One who had felt this shame more deeply than some of his cabinet colleagues, the Liberal historian and president of the Board of Education, H.A.L. Fisher, later summed up the c
oncessions offered to Ireland as ‘achievements of the Liberal spirit’.34 This spirit held the key to the empire’s future, according to J.J. Jones, a Labour MP and former trade unionist. Shortly before the debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he told the Commons, ‘I believe the Empire will eventually be saved by self-determination. You cannot any longer keep the people in chains…’35
These statements had much in common with those made by opponents of the American War in the 1770s. More significantly, perhaps, they highlight the contradiction which lay at the heart of the twentieth-century British empire. It had been understood by Cleon, who, in the fifth century BC, had reminded the citizens of another imperial power, Athens, that ‘a democracy is incapable of empire’. ‘Your empire’, he continued, ‘is a despotism and your subjects disaffected conspirators, whose obedience is ensured not by your suicidal concessions, but by your own strength.’ He concluded with a demand for the severest chastisement of rebels in terms of which Sir Henry Wilson would have approved. And yet Britain, like Athens, was proud of its democracy and the freedoms enjoyed by its people, and from the seventeenth century onwards had exported its institutions and ideals to its colonies. Its empire was not and, despite growling on the right, would never be a military dictatorship.
What then would it become? In 1919 the empire had been given a new tide, ‘the British Empire and Commonwealth of Nations’, a phrase first used by General Smuts. It was a felicitous choice of words which banished from the self-governing dominions that stigma of inferiority and subservience conveyed by membership of an empire. Invented by sixteenth-century political writers, ‘Commonwealth’ stood for a free community of equals with shared interests who worked together for the good of all. Emotional attachment to Britain and a common ruler, the British monarch, held together a Commonwealth whose states had undergone a similar evolutionary process, passing from dependent colonies to self-governing nations. At every stage, this transformation had been made on Britain’s terms, and on the assumption that Britain was legally entitled to give or withhold political rights to its subjects everywhere.
Between 1919 and 1922 the Irish had broken this pattern. They had called the tune and forced an extremely reluctant British government to dance to it. If the empire was a monolithic, essentially authoritarian structure then the Irish Revolution marked the beginning of its decline. If it was a living organism, continuously adapting itself to its environment, then the Irish troubles were no more than a chapter of unhappy accidents which would have little or no effect on the course of the empire’s development.
3
Their Country’s Dignity: Egypt, 1919–42
Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, the commander-in-chief of the army that had finally overturned the Ottoman empire and made Britain the supreme power in the Middle East, was pessimistic about the future of the empire he had enlarged. He kept his doubts to himself, for he had been made high commissioner in Egypt in March 1919, an appointment which owed much to his well-known strength of character and iron will. But he lacked the inner conviction of other warrior proconsuls, for he was a man of broad intellectual horizons with a questioning mind. This enabled him to detect the historical forces that were beginning to gather momentum and would soon be ranged against the British empire. Talking with a close friend after dinner one evening early in 1920, he remarked that the empire would inevitably fall apart once more and more of its subjects became educated.1 He was worried that what they learned would not provide them with the ‘responsibility and integrity and leadership’ which were essential for those who exercised power over others.
Events of the past eight months had made Allenby uncomfortably aware that pupils in Egypt’s schools were learning to hate Britain and everything it stood for. One of them, Gamel Abdul Nasser, born in 1918, later recalled that ‘when I was a little child every time I saw an aeroplane flying overhead, I used to shout: “O God Almighty, may a calamity overtake the English.”’2 Another future Egyptian leader, Anwar el-Sadat, born in 1921, remembered the bitter anglophobia of his father, whose hero was Kamal Atatürk, the Turkish nationalist leader who had successively overcome the Italians, Greeks and the French, and then outwitted the British. In 1932 the young Sadat was excited by what he read in the newspapers about the life of Gandhi, then passing through Egypt on his way to argue India’s case before the British government.3
And yet, paradoxically, the young nationalists shared with Allenby a sense that they too were resisting inexorable forces. Nasser, then a high-school student, recalled ‘shouting himself hoarse’ during anti-British demonstrations in 1935. ‘But it was to no avail – our cries died into faint echoes that moved no mountains and blasted no rocks.’ The empire seemed immovable, as it did to other young men who bellowed slogans, hurled stones and fought with police and soldiers. Moreover, as Egyptians had painfully discovered, the aeroplanes which periodically overflew their cities and towns could drop bombs.
Young men like Nasser and Sadat were among the thousands of Egyptians who regularly took to the streets between the wars to demand an end to British interference in the running of their country. Their protests were orchestrated by the Wafd, which was the largest political party in Egypt and, for Sadat and others like him, stood as ‘a symbol of the struggle of the entire Egyptian people against the British’. For the British, the Wafd was a nuisance which might eventually go away. To speed its departure, they spied on its activities (without much success), arrested and exiled its leaders when it appeared to be getting too powerful and at other times tried to pretend it did not exist.
The Wafd had begun life peacefully enough. A few days after the end of the war, a delegation (wafd) of highly respectable Egyptian politicians approached the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, and firmly but politely asked for an end to the British protectorate and the restoration of independence. Their leader, Said Zaghlul, a man once marked out by Lord Cromer for ‘a career of great public usefulness’, drew Wingate’s attention to Britain’s recent promises of self-determination for the Arabs, and suggested that the Egyptians, who were far better qualified to govern themselves, deserved the same treatment. He knew that the ‘liberty-loving’ British would be sympathetic and, to Wingate’s alarm, indicated that Egypt was prepared to lay its case before President Wilson at the forthcoming Versailles conference.4
The High Commissioner treated the delegates firmly but did not dash their hopes to pieces. Egypt was suffering inflation and disruption on account of the war and a public reprimand might easily spark off popular unrest. Far away in London, Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, was appalled by Wingate’s conciliatory approach and ordered him home. A firm hand and not soft words were what was needed, and the Wafd had to be nipped in the bud before Egypt succumbed to the nationalist germ that was infecting India. In March 1919, at Curzon’s instructions, local officials arrested Zaghlul and his companions and bundled them off to exile in Malta.
By taking the offensive Curzon had miscalculated the temper of the Egyptians. So too had the British administration in Cairo, and their error of judgement was less excusable since they might have been expected to have had some insight into the Egyptian mind. They did not; by and large, British civil servants kept their own company and stayed aloof from the Egyptian upper class, which they regarded with a mixture of amusement and disdain. A year before, a British official serving in the Sudan, had explained his colleagues’ voluntary quarantine to Leo Amery:
I am afraid our public school system, which discourages general intellectual curiosity and makes everyone flock together for certain stock games and amusements, undoubtedly acts as a great barrier between us and the educated class in a country like Egypt.5
There were a few exceptions to this rule. That most aesthetic and precious of colonial administrators, Sir Ronald Storrs, had once tried to instruct a Coptic colleague in the manly science of boxing, but on the whole the British stuck to their tennis and race meetings, and seldom ventured outside their clubs and Shepheard’s Hotel. As Storrs notice
d, few educated Egyptians ever bothered to learn English, but continued speaking French even after thirty-odd years of British domination.
There was also, and this became unpleasantly obvious as unrest increased, a widespread racial contempt for the Egyptians. At the onset of the troubles officials and soldiers had dismissed the hard core of nationalists as ‘riff-raff’, a gaggle of students, unemployed and unemployable intellectuals and rabble-rousers who had nothing better to do than idle away their hours in cafés plotting sedition.6 During his discussions with Egyptians at the end of 1919, Milner was unfavourably struck by the ‘vanity’ of the effendiya class and described them and their supporters on the streets as ‘all that is vocal’ in the country, implying that they were a minority who spoke for no one but themselves.7 Time spent arguing with clever Egyptians was wasted according to General Walter Congreve VC, commander-in-chief in Egypt after 1920. ‘When you talk politics to an Easterner you may be sure you will get the worst of it, kick him and he loves and respects you.’8
Those who did the kicking agreed with the General. The troops who were called upon to restore order in 1919 relished the task, even though it held up their demobilisation. British, Indian and Anzac servicemen saw the ‘Gyppo’ as a devious creature who fleeced them whenever he could, and were therefore glad of a chance to get their own back during the suppression of the disorders which followed the exile of Zaghlul. The censors of soldiers’ mail discovered a ‘John-Bullish’ attitude abroad and widespread ‘anger and disgust’ with the Egyptians.9 This persisted after the 1919 uprising: Egyptians celebrating Allenby’s concessions were waylaid and beaten up by British and Australian soldiers keen to uphold the empire’s ‘prestige’, and during the 1920s the high commission had to handle a stream of complaints from Egyptians of all classes who had been manhandled or insulted by servicemen.10 Racial contempt lay behind most of these incidents, although politically aware soldiers, who had sought a reason for the 1919 disturbances, blamed them on President Wilson’s fourteen points.11