Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  ‘When looked into, all this success means gold,’ was the brutal conclusion reached by travelling British MP Charles Dilke. ‘There is industry, there is energy, there is talent, there is generosity and public spirit, but they are the abilities and virtues that gold will bring, in bringing a rush from all the world of dashing fellows in the prime of life.’12 Just as cotton transformed the prospects of Bombay, so the gold fields of Mount Alexander and Ballarat poured a molten prosperity on to Melbourne. On 9 July 1851, a public meeting subscribed a 200 guineas reward for the first ‘strike’ within 200 miles (320 kilometres) of the city. Over the next decade, the Australian colonies would extract some 25 million ounces of gold, amounting to 40 per cent of the world’s output and accounting for two-thirds of the value of Victoria’s total exports; between 1851 and 1861, Victoria produced 88 per cent of Australia’s gold. Yet the first impact of the gold-strike was rapid depopulation. ‘The whole city is “gold mad”,’ reported the Melbourne Morning Herald. ‘Richmond [suburb] is a deserted village, so far as the lords of creation are concerned, only one grey-headed old gentleman of some 70 summers being left’. ‘Within the last three weeks the towns of Melbourne and Geelong and their large suburbs have been in appearance nearly emptied of their male inhabitants,’ complained Charles La Trobe, the first lieutenant-governor of Victoria, in October 1851, in a letter to the colonial secretary, Lord Grey. ‘Not only have the idlers thrown up their employment and run off to the workings, but responsible tradesmen, farmers, clerks and not a few of the superior classes have followed. Cottages are deserted, houses to let, business is at a standstill, and even schools are closed.’13

  It did not take long for the population tide to turn, and soon enough Melbourne was wrestling with an influx of gold-diggers, prospectors, prostitutes, merchants and lawyers. A pioneer colonial community became a gold-mine metropolis and, almost overnight, a city with ‘American’ levels of entrepreneurial bravado. Stock exchanges, banks, building societies, investment companies, brokers’ offices and mercantile houses sprang up across the city centre. ‘As we cross Elizabeth-street and think of the muddy gully of fifty years ago, the eye is lost in amazement at the magnificent vista of warehouse, bank and public building that stretches on either hand,’ wrote a contemporary, in language reminiscent of the early days of Hong Kong. ‘Standing at the corner it is possible to count some twenty banks, most of them housed in buildings on which no money has been spared.’14 In contrast to ‘staid and steady’ Sydney, there were now ‘the bustling, gold-digging, go-ahead Victorians’. ‘Were I ever to return to Australia, I should pitch my tent in Melbourne,’ wrote the British author and journalist Frank Fowler in 1859. ‘The lively, business-like character of the place and people pleases me … At any hour of the day, thousands of persons may be scurrying along the leading thoroughfares, with true Cheapside bustle and eagerness.’15 Like Bombay, Melbourne was a place of business. ‘Is there a company to be got up to stock the wilds of Western Australia, or to form a railway on the land grant system in Queensland, to introduce the electric light, or to spread education amongst the black fellows, the promoters either belong to Melbourne or go there for their capital,’ wrote the Anglo-Australian journalist Richard Twopeny. ‘There is a bustle and life about Melbourne which you altogether miss in Sydney. The Melbourne man is always on the look-out for business, the Sydney man waits for business to come to him.’16

  Yet Australia Felix was a child of wool as well as gold, and for all the Ballarat mining boom total gold exports to Britain were still less than one-third of those of the Australian wool trade. With easy capital from the London clearing houses behind them, smart Victoria middle-men bought up vast tracts of cheap Australian land and exported the produce (on ships like the Cutty Sark) to London and Liverpool. In the 1880s, the development of refrigerated shipping meant that butter and meat from the dairy market could be added to the cargo. The colonial economy worked well for Australia, with a lucrative export industry and high levels of domestic investment on the back of lax credit. Between 1860 and 1890, the Australian colonies were the principal imperial borrowers of funds from the City of London, rising from £400,000 in 1873 to £10.8 million in 1879 to £51.4 million in 1883–6. By 1890 the Australasian colonies had accumulated greater debts per head than anywhere else in the world.17 ‘Mountains of sugar from the Mauritius, tea from China, and of everything else that man can want, from every part of the world, are reared, pile upon pile, in and about Flinders Street,’ marvelled Edwin Carton Booth. ‘Farther north, so as to be equally convenient for the railway station and the wharf, larger and more imposing-looking buildings still, have been erected for the special purpose of storing wool, sent down from the up-country stations, and awaiting its shipment to England.’18 For Froude, the trade and energy of Melbourne’s Williamstown port instantly recalled the great imperial docks of Merseyside. ‘Huge steamers – five, six, or seven thousand tons – from all parts of the world … Steam launches, steam ferry-boats, tugs, coasting steamers were flying to and fro, leaving behind them, alas! black volumes of smoke, through which the city loomed as large as Liverpool.’19

  ANOTHER ENGLAND

  It was a source of great angst amongst the proponents of the British Empire that the affinities between Melbourne and Merseyside were not sufficiently appreciated back in the mother country. ‘There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state,’ wrote the historian J. R. Seeley in 1883. ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind … thus, if we are asked what the English population is, it does not occur to us to reckon-in the population of Canada and Australia.’20 Seeley’s Expansion of England was the most influential text in a growing body of literature in the late nineteenth century urging the British public and their political leaders to embrace colonies like Australia and reimagine their approach to Empire.

  It was an imperial ideology that had its own roots in the mid-Victorian upsurge of interest in Britain’s Saxon past. ‘A Saxon race, protected by an insular position, has stamped its diligent and methodic character on the century,’ explained the mystical Sidonia in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Tancred, or The New Crusade (1847). ‘And when a superior race, with a superior idea to Work and Order, advances, its state will be progressive, and we shall perhaps follow the example of the desolate countries. All is race; there is no other truth.’ In a similar collection of works, historians such as Sharon Turner, William Stubbs and Henry Hallam successfully popularized this highly racial understanding of British identity in which the main constituents of English blood, character and language could be traced back, through the Norman Conquest, to the early Anglo-Saxons. ‘The chief element of our nation is Germanic, and we have good cause to be proud of our ancestry,’ became the established view, as expressed by Sir Edward Creasy, Professor of History at the University of London in the 1850s and ’60s. ‘Freedom has been its hereditary characteristic from the earliest times at which we can trace the existence of the German race.’21 Seeley’s contribution, together with the likes of polemicist-historians J. R. Green and J. A. Froude and politician Sir Charles Dilke, was to broaden out that sense of a unique, Anglo-Saxon inheritance from England on to the shores of the ‘English-speaking, white-inhabited, and self-governed lands’ of the Empire.22

  So, rather than grumbling about the financial burden of the colonies, Seeley urged his readers to regard these distant lands as fondly as they would the counties of Kent or Cornwall. ‘When we have accustomed ourselves to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it all England, we shall see that here too is a United States. Here too is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.’23 Such a fraternal approach would prevent exactly the kind of misunderstandings between mother country and colonies which had led to the Boston Tea-Party: Seeley was adamant that the precedent of division set by the A
merican Revolution was far from inevitable. Yet it was also true that, if the Empire was to survive, then London would need to deploy a different method of governing. ‘The English race do not like to be parts of an empire,’ explained J. A. Froude, with unconscious hypocrisy. What the English-speaking peoples of the Dominion of Canada (brought together in 1867 with the union of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), Australia and other white settler states wanted was a more egalitarian form of Commonwealth, ‘held together by common blood, common interest, and a common pride in the great position which unity can secure’. To prove his point, Froude embarked on a round-the-world trip to speak to this settler diaspora. ‘Amidst the uncertainties which are gathering round us at home,’ he reported back optimistically, ‘it is something to have seen with our own eyes that there are other Englands besides the old one, where the race is thriving with all its ancient characteristics.’24

  It was a beguiling philosophy of racial destiny, colonial conquest and Saxon freedom – an ‘empire of liberty’ – which rapidly made its way from the pages of history books into politicians’ speeches. ‘I believe in this race, the greatest governing race the world has ever seen,’ exclaimed the Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, ‘in this Anglo-Saxon race, so proud, so tenacious, self-confident and determined, this race which neither climate nor change can degenerate, which will infallibly be the predominant force of future history and universal civilization.’25 For all the innate superiorities of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, however, global hegemony was by no means assured. Indeed, the colonial secretary was increasingly exercised at the strategic threat posed to the Empire by the military and demographic rise of Russia, Germany and the United States. Chamberlain’s solution was for Great Britain to take advantage, economically and politically, of the expanse of its empire. The later nineteenth century had witnessed a surge of colonial aggrandizement, the so-called ‘Scramble for Africa’. The diamond and railway magnate Cecil Rhodes set the tone in southern Africa by declaring, in his 1877 ‘Confession of Faith’, that it was Britain’s duty ‘to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory’ because ‘we are the finest race in the world and … the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race’. From the ‘Cape to Cairo’ was Rhodes’s mantra as the British Empire finally expanded out of the Cape Colony into ‘Rhodesia’, Sudan, Egypt and Kenya, as well as Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana. In addition to this, east of Suez, the colonial partition of South-east Asia brought Burma, Malaya and Borneo into London’s portfolio. And just as important was the development of already existing colonial interiors. The railway revolution begun in Bombay also now opened up mineral riches and prime agricultural land in tropical Africa, in Canada and in Australia. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British Empire grew by over 4 million square kilometres and added an extra 57 million subjects.

  Such expansion offered the prospect of exciting new consumer markets for British manufacturers. ‘In the multiplying numbers of our own fellow-citizens animated by a common spirit, we should have purchasers for our goods from whom we should fear no rivalry,’ as Froude put it.26 In the first instance, that meant copying the example of the United States by erecting import duties and introducing tariff reform among the British colonies. ‘Sugar has gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it?’ Chamberlain demanded. ‘Let us claim some protection like every other civilized nation.’27 The former Birmingham screw manufacturer endorsed the stance taken by the liberal polemicist J. A. Hobson: that the economics of the late nineteenth-century British Empire was enriching the finance houses of the City of London – the Rothschilds, the Barings and the Coutts – but beggaring British industry and so, in the long run, undermining national competitiveness. The country that had fired up the industrial revolution was now sliding towards what the Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin would later call ‘the “rentier” state, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons”’.28 Between 1870 and 1914, the accumulated total of British assets abroad grew from c. £700 million to almost £4 billion, returning an income of roughly £300 million per annum – which was then re-exported and put to work on high-yielding infrastructure projects abroad. London had become, as Chamberlain put it, ‘the clearing house of the world’, which yielded high returns by shovelling cheap money into the colonies while starving manufacturing at home of investment. While the gentleman capitalists of the south of England might have been doing well, northern industrialists and Midlands farmers were struggling under the impact of an increasingly liberalized global market. In 1854 manufactured imports into Great Britain from other competing economies were equivalent to just 10 per cent of the UK’s manufactured exports; by 1913, that figure had topped one-third. And the growth of imports was so rapid that, between 1870 and 1913, net manufactured exports (exports minus imports) grew at only 0.4 per cent per annum. In 1902 net exports of manufactures fell to their lowest point at less than £20 million, and Britain, once the Workshop of the World, endured the ignominy of a trade deficit to foreign countries on the most highly finished goods.29

  In Chamberlain’s analysis, all of this proved that the school of free trade and minimal government (the ideology that had built Manchester and Hong Kong) was redundant in an age of competing imperial powers. In its place, as the city’s former mayor, he posited ‘the Birmingham school’ of state intervention, both to strengthen the Empire and to improve the welfare of the British people. In policy terms, that meant an imperial free-trade area to coalesce the economic interests of the colonies and prove the Empire’s worth to the industrial conurbations of Britain. Chamberlain’s ambition was for a colonial Zollverein, a customs union, with ‘a treaty of preference and reciprocity’ with Britain’s global possessions, which would allow the mother country to take advantage of their expanding populations whilst also protecting indigenous industry against unwelcome Russian, American and German competition. Chamberlain thought it could be ‘the strongest bond of union between the British race throughout the world’.30

  The political accompaniment to tariff reform would be imperial federation, with a single shared parliament and executive ruling over the White Dominions or ‘British nations’. ‘England may prove able to do what the United States does so easily,’ thought Seeley, ‘that is, hold together in a federal union countries very remote from each other. In that case England will take rank with Russia and the United States in the first rank of state.’ For it was essential to remember that ‘Greater Britain is not a mere empire … Its union is of the more vital kind. It is united by blood and religion.’31 The challenge was to use the communications revolutions of the steamship and telegram to craft a transnational system of governance which combined colonial diversity with more centralized governance. It was a problem Joseph Chamberlain had begun to wrestle with after a trip to Canada in the late 1880s – the ‘working out’, as he phrased it, ‘of the great problem of federal government’. Terrified at the prospect of Canada and America joining together in a customs union, Chamberlain used a speech in Toronto in 1887 to champion ‘the greatness and importance of the distinction reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race, that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which no change of climate or condition can alter, and which is infallibly bound to be the predominant force in the future history and civilization of the world’. His ultimate ambition was to federate ‘all these great independencies of the British Empire into one supreme and Imperial Parliament, so that they should all be units of one body, that one should feel what the others feel, that all should be equally responsible, that all should have a share in the welfare … of every part’.32

  Australia was among the greatest of those independencies. ‘Nestling down in the most southerly and most pleasant corner of the great Australasian island-continent, there lies a land in many respects the very counterpart of England,’ wrote the au
thor of Another England: Life, Living, Homes and Homemakers in Victoria (1869).*

  The habits of life, the tone of thought, many of the experiences, and all the affections of its sparse population are essentially English … The laws under which these far-off Britons live, the customs they observe, the houses they build, the towns they inhabit, the institutions they support, and the industries they pursue, all possess a strong family likeness to the same things at home.33

  ‘How the Australians do like to copy Old England!’ continued Charles Rooking Carter, ‘a colonist of twenty years standing’ in his colonial elegy Victoria, The British ‘El Dorado’; or, Melbourne in 1869.

  There is no place like it, they say; they are proud of it – of having sprung from it; and this sentiment is almost as strongly cherished by the new generation, who have never set foot on the ancestral soil, as it is by native-born Britons … Does Great Britain take note of and value this loyalty? If on no other account but for the sake of her own greatness, let us hope that she does.34

  But as Seeley and others had feared, too little was made of this sentiment; the federal bonds between Australia and England were being allowed to atrophy. The premier of Victoria in the 1880s, Robert Service, had ‘hoped to see England grow more conscious of the value of the colonies to her, and the colonies of the consequence attaching to them as members of a great empire,’ noted J. A. Froude. ‘They resented – knowing that they were as English as ourselves – being treated by English ministers as if they were strangers accidentally connected with us, as if blood and natural affection were to go for nothing.’35