by Adam Tooze
Edwardian Britain, in the pre-war years, had witnessed spectacular struggles over votes for women and some murmurings about a further extension of the working-class franchise. In 1910 not quite two-thirds of the male population was entitled to vote, with disenfranchisement in poor urban districts rising to over 60 per cent.34 After a war that had taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of men from those same districts, this was no longer a sustainable position. According to conventional expectations any substantial widening of the electorate would tilt the political balance decisively toward the Liberals and the emerging Labour Party. But unlike in Imperial Germany, the democratization of Britain was not allowed to become a matter for ruinous confrontation between democratic and anti-democratic forces. In February 1918, with barely a ripple of public argument, Britain passed the largest franchise reform in its history.
Many observers at the time and since have attributed the smooth passage of this dramatic reform to intelligent procedural solutions.35 A cross-party parliamentary conference had begun discussing the issue in the autumn of 1916. Headed by the Speaker of the House of Commons, the patrician Tory moderate James Lowther, it conducted itself as the very model of sophisticated compromise. By early 1917 the cross-party conference had already agreed on manhood suffrage. Within a matter of months it agreed a compromise formula on female suffrage that would enfranchise millions of women, but maintain an overall male majority in the electorate. The only issue that was hotly debated in Parliament was the proposal to introduce an element of Proportional Representation. Designed to give a voice to minorities, it was Lloyd George who got this conservative provision dropped. The avoidance of conflict was striking. But it invites a question: What allowed a fundamental process of constitutional change to appear as little more than a procedural adjustment, ‘pre-chewed political baby food’, as one conservative fundamentalist commented?36 Beneath this idealized image of discursive agreement lay something more fundamental: a clear commitment by the leadership of both established parties to secure the legitimacy of the political process by ensuring that the reforms appeared neither as a bribe nor as a concession extracted by coercive threats. Across the political divides, there was an interest in maintaining Britain’s self-image as a peaceable kingdom, stabilized by successive waves of top-down reform.37 Behind this well-cultivated facade, however, it is clear that tables were thumped and points of principle clashed. The threat of open public protest was essential to maintaining the momentum of reform. Crucially, a solid coalition between democratic feminists, the Labour Party and the trade union movement made clear that any measure to enfranchise soldiers and male war workers that did not include votes for women would be unacceptable. Conversely, feminist activists were sufficiently committed to their alliance with Labour that at the crucial moment in early 1917 they chose to support manhood suffrage, even though they gained only a restricted female franchise.
The sense that they faced an unstoppable inevitability led the Tories to take the initiative themselves. In August 1916 it was the patrician Lord Salisbury who introduced the emotively entitled Trench Voting Bill. To avoid panicking the party’s suburban base, Tory Central Office kept to themselves alarming calculations about the likely increase in young working-class voters and enfranchised trade unionists. Meanwhile, the Tory leadership worked hard to silence embarrassing outbursts of openly anti-democratic sentiment from within their own ranks.38 The press, with Lord Northcliffe leading the way, rallied to the democratic consensus. By 1917, in the pages of The Times, opposition to the franchise was painted as divisive and ipso facto unpatriotic.
The result was a process of historic change that appeared to move of its own accord. As Lord Bryce, the eminent constitutionalist, commented to his colleague A. V. Dicey in September 1917, the contrast with the struggles over the great Reform Act of 1866 was stark. Then, both sides of the argument had assumed ‘that fitness’ for the franchise ‘had to be proved’, Now, ‘when one talks to the young sentimental woman suffragist he [sic] sees no relevance in the enquiry whether the great mass of women know or care anything about politics. It is quite enough for him that they are human beings. As such they have a right to vote.’39 Meanwhile on the left, militant advocates of suffrage were left to wonder at a mysterious transformation for which a decade of activism and protest had doubtless prepared the way, but that now seemed to be moving of its own accord. As the militant suffragist Millicent Fawcett put it to a triumphant suffragist and Labour rally in the spring of 1917: ‘The result of the Speaker’s Conference was an illustration of the deathless energy and vitality of the suffrage movement. The Conference had been initiated by an anti-suffragist, presided over by an anti-suffragist and consisted at first of fifty percent anti-suffragists; though the brew seemed distinctly anti-suffrage, when the tap was turned – suffrage came out.’40
Throughout the British franchise reform debate overt references to the wider world were scarce. As the ‘mother of parliaments’ Westminster took no lessons from foreigners. That ‘foreign’ influences were abroad in British politics at all was indicative of the seriousness of the crisis. But despite this strategic parochialism, by 1917 international concerns were more or less openly entering into the discussion of the British constitution. In his retrospective account of the Speaker’s Conference, Lowther himself made a revealing admission. He ‘felt very strongly’ that to ‘renew’ the ‘party and domestic polemics’ over the franchise that had wracked the pre-war era, ‘would bring discredit upon Great Britain in the face of her Dominions and colonies, at the very moment when the nation should be occupied in the consideration of large and novel problems . . . As time went on I became more and more impressed with the soundness of this view, and frequently pressed it upon my colleagues when there seemed to be any danger of a breakdown.’41 To Lowther, as to other British conservatives, resistance to democracy had become an anachronism.
IV
Whilst the Lloyd George government steered through the domestic crises of the summer of 1917, in India matters were coming rapidly to a head. In July, Chamberlain resigned as Secretary of State for India. He thereby accepted responsibility for the disastrous Mesopotamian campaign of 1915 that had been the independent responsibility of the government of India and the Indian Army. As his replacement Lloyd George chose not a conservative, but a Cambridge-educated liberal, Edwin Montagu, the assimilated scion of a prominent Jewish banking family. To Montagu the situation was clear. Britain must reclaim ‘the courage and sureness of touch which rendered us famous as Empire builders’. Otherwise, it would ‘make a series of Irelands’ across the world.42 The administration of the Raj had become too rigid and bureaucratic. It could not merely rely on its reputation for efficiency. In the words of the foremost historian of British imperial strategy, it had ‘to become political, to argue its case, to win over opinion’.43 For this, a statement of purpose was essential and it seemed to Montagu that by 1917 the only acceptable slogan was ‘self-government’.44 Montagu did not imagine Home Rule for 240 million Indians as a single nation state. ‘As a goal,’ he proclaimed, ‘... not one great Home Rule country, but a series of self-governing provinces and principalities, federated by one central government’. Nor was he in a hurry. Montagu still believed that self-government was a project that would be realized over ‘many years . . . many generations’.45 Such qualifications were the staple of nineteenth-century justifications of empire. But as Montagu took office the credibility of this gradualist approach to reform was fraying. As he wrote to Chamberlain in the summer of 1917, they must promise ‘self-government’ now. To do anything less would only arouse bitter disappointment. Better to make no announcement. But, in that case, they must steel themselves for ‘grim repression on a growing scale and the alienation of many, if not all, the moderates’.
By August the decision could no longer be put off. Without British concessions to show for their pains, the moderates would be completely routed at the upcoming annual meeting of the Indian National Congr
ess. With no more time to lose, it was former Viceroy and arch-conservative Lord Curzon who proposed a compromise. India should be promised neither self-government nor self-determination, but ‘the fuller realisation of responsible government’. What Curzon wished to imply by stressing responsibility remains mysterious. Perhaps he meant to warn against ‘irresponsible’ Indian opposition.46 He may have wished to restate the familiar British self-justification of protecting India from an upper-caste Hindu tyranny. Whatever Curzon’s intention, the formula allowed Montagu to present the House of Commons on 20 August 1917 with a historic statement. The ultimate objective of the Raj was the ‘increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India under the aegis of the British crown’. In India the moment at which such a tepid pronouncement might have roused real enthusiasm had passed. Nevertheless, the implications were momentous. As Montagu admitted to Chamberlain, if they had simply promised ‘self-government’, that might have been construed to mean that India could be placed under a ‘Hindu dictator’. ‘Responsible government’ clearly meant that any such ruler would have to be ‘responsible to some form of parliamentary institution’.47
In India itself, Viceroy Chelmsford knew that he needed to deliver a more concrete gesture. Overruling opposition from the provincial governors, he ordered Annie Besant’s release from house arrest. In the autumn of 1917 it was not London but the cause of Home Rule that claimed a great victory. December 1917 saw the incongruous spectacle of Besant, an elderly Anglo-Irish woman presiding triumphantly over the most agitated mass meeting the patrician Indian National Congress had ever witnessed. Indian nationalism was becoming a mass movement.
After the Versailles Treaty it was to become a commonplace that simple liberal nostrums such as ‘self-determination’ were ill-adjusted to complex historical realities. But whatever the complications of Silesia or the Sudetenland, they paled by comparison with the problem facing Secretary of State Montagu in his attempt to devise a system of ‘responsible’ self-government for India. The task involved devising a constitution for an entire subcontinent, an extraordinarily diverse slice of humanity, divided along lines of religion, ethnicity, caste and class. Not only that, but it involved facing the contradiction between the constitution of the Raj, which the British were not afraid to call ‘autocratic’, and the demands of representative government. Within weeks of making his historic announcement Montagu was writing in a state of some gloom to the Viceroy, ‘the more I think of the subject, the more I realize the extraordinary difficulties of the position . . . Is there any country in the world that has attempted a half-way house in this, or a quarter-way house? An autocratic and independent executive is common. Self-governing institutions are now (I don’t ever quite know why), accepted as the only proper form of government. How can you unite the two? Can you have a form of government administered by an alien agency partly responsible to the people of that country itself?’48
The ground plan of this ‘quarter-way house’ was worked out between Montagu, Chelmsford, the leadership of the Congress and the Muslim League over the winter of 1917–18. The particulars, especially regarding electoral provisions, were further elaborated in Westminster committee and shepherded through Parliament by Sinha, who became the first Indian to be raised to the peerage, in 1919. Governmental authority in India was divided between a central executive, provincial governments and local authorities. Central and provincial governments were to be answerable to legislative councils constituted in part through nomination and in part through electorates of varying size. Significantly, by 1922, the British relinquished all official control over local government in India and the urban franchise was rapidly expanded.49 At the provincial level, the equivalent of medium-sized European states, the make-up of the electorate varied, with special representation being granted to landowners and urban business interests. To prevent upper-caste domination, separate electoral colleges were provided for non-Brahmins. Throughout, the electorate was to be split between Hindu and Muslim on the formula agreed by the Congress and the Muslim League at Lucknow in 1916. As Montagu and Chelmsford acknowledged, these compromises were far from any liberal ideal. But they were not merely reactionary either, as is evidenced by the solution adopted for the female franchise. This was to be determined at a provincial level, with the result that in the elections to the Madras state legislature more women were entitled to vote than in all but a handful of the most liberal European nations.
The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were soon to be swamped by the massive popular mobilization of 1919. But in the spring of 1918 the report jointly written by Montagu and Chelmsford could still claim to be a powerful restatement of the basic agenda of liberal empire. Responsible government must be the goal of British rule in India, the report insisted, because it was the ‘best form of government’ that the British themselves ‘knew’.50 Upholding a racial double standard in India was not tenable in the long run. Despite the differences that segmented Indian society, its unity was growing. Illiterate peasants were maturing into responsible citizens. Britain must gamble that the best way to hasten the growth of the capacity for self-government was to transfer responsibility to the Indians themselves, the exercise of which would ‘call forth the capacity for it’. Meanwhile, the troublesome nationalists should not be repressed, but acknowledged as Britain’s own ‘children’. Their desire for ‘self-determination’ was the ‘inevitable result of education in the history and thought of Europe’. In the long run British rule could only be legitimate if it satisfied the ‘desires which it creates’. Nor should London expect gratitude and react resentfully when it was not shown. Things were past the point at which Britain could expect plaudits from its grateful imperial subjects. But it should not be deterred by protest or discontent. As one official was later to put it, ‘the gradual change from Autocratic to responsible Government cannot be effected without taking risk’.51 Britain should persist with its liberal programme sustained by the ‘faith that is in us’.
Despite profound reservations, the Indian political class, once more, fell in with this appeal.52 Down to the end of the war Gandhi could be found travelling across India, recruiting volunteers for the war effort of the liberal empire. Home Rule, he insisted, meant not independence, but that Indians ‘should become . . . partners in the Empire’, like Canada and Australia.53 The radical Hindu nationalist Tilak called on his fellow Indians to view British war bonds as the ‘title deeds of Home Rule’.54 When the great popular uprising against British rule began in 1919, it was not triggered by discontent at the inadequacy of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals. It was sparked by outrage at the fact that the trust which the Indians had once more placed in that settlement had been violated by precisely the kind of draconian measures that liberals such as Montagu were desperate to avoid.
V
Long-simmering nationalist resentments, long-standing liberal promises, and the pressure of the war were the main drivers of the crises facing the Lloyd George government in 1917. Russia’s democratic revolution of the spring of 1917 – not the Bolshevik coup – added further pressure. But how did America figure in this constellation? During her period of house arrest in the summer of 1917, Annie Besant imagined herself at the centre of a worldwide network. She appealed to Australia to reject London’s call for conscription. Besant had copies of the journal she kept during her internment sent to sympathizers in Japan and the US, so that ‘England’s allies might put pressure upon her not to trample in India on the principles for which they were all fighting in Europe. If the American press take up the matter as we hope it may, the Indian government will not be able to cover up its deeds . . . The British democracy will hear via the United States of the war upon liberty declared by the Indian government, and the president of the (United) States may interfere on behalf of India . . .’55 But appealing as it may be to construct a ‘Wilsonian
moment’ in India, it existed, if it existed at all, in the minds of no more than a handful of nationalists.56 What would link Indian politics to the world was the internal politics of the empire – London, Ireland and imperial policy in the Middle East. The same could not be said for Ireland. It looked less to the rest of the empire than across the Atlantic. As a result, the Irish question, with all its ramifications for British politics, became entangled to a quite extraordinary degree in London’s relations with Washington.
In 1916 there was no public more susceptible to the appeal of Sinn Fein than the Irish community of the United States.57 And if there was any population in the United States to which Wilson’s ‘peace without victory’ stance made immediate and intuitive sense it was Irish Americans. Facing bitter competition from Sinn Fein it was John Dillon, the deputy leader of the hitherto moderate Nationalist Party, who demanded to know from London: ‘How can you face Europe? How can you face America tomorrow, and pose as the champions of oppressed nationalities? What answer will you have when you are told, as you will be told at the peace conference, “go home and put your own house in order”.’58 America’s entry into the war relieved but did not lift this pressure. In his speech to Congress on 2 April 1917 Wilson placed the United States on the side of democracy against untrustworthy autocracies. But he left open where the Entente were to be situated. In correspondence with London, it was the Irish impasse that he highlighted as the only obstacle to ‘an absolutely cordial cooperation’ between the US and Britain. Following the overthrow of Tsarism, all that was needed to demonstrate that ‘the real programme of government by the consent of the governed had been adopted everywhere in the anti-Prussian world’ was Home Rule.59