Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  40.Annexations benefited Boers, British settlers, and natives alike. The aim in South Africa was a federation on the model of Canada. ‘The Transvaal’, 12 May 1877. The paper criticized incompetence, especially in local officials, but with the goal of winning wars underway rather than debating their merits. ‘Responsibility for the Disaster in Zululand’, 22 February 1879; ‘End of the Zulu War’, 26 July 1879; ‘The Next Step in South Africa’, 2 August 1879; ‘The War with the Transvaal’, 5 March 1881; Porter, The Lion’s Share, London 1996, pp. 94–101.

  41.‘Our Colonies and Possessions’, 28 April 1883.

  42.‘The Expansion of the Empire’, 13 December 1884.

  43.A. G. Hopkins, ‘The Victorians and Africa: A Reconsideration of the Occupation of Egypt, 1882’, Journal of African History, 1986, pp. 377–78, 380.

  44.The 250 or so other victims were Egyptians. Donald Reid, ‘The Urabi Revolution and the British Conquest, 1879–1882’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt, Vol II, ed. W. M. Daly, Cambridge 1998, p. 231.

  45.Certain Liberals had claimed that these men were legitimate nationalists, and that Britain selfishly ‘sought to thwart the efforts of the Egyptian people to establish a government more in harmony with their national sentiments’. ‘The Situation in Egypt’, 15 July 1882. Liberals in favour of intervention needed to do a better job of explaining that it was neither for the sake of bondholders, who must assume their own risks, nor for trade, which might alarm other states that ought to be ready for peaceful penetration by Britain: ‘What surer way could there be of deterring such countries as China, or even Turkey, from admitting British capital with the freedom we wish to see than to tell them that if they allow our traders to gain a footing within their boundaries they open the door for armed interference on our part with their affairs?’ ‘British Interests in Egypt’, 29 July 1882.

  46.‘Our Policy in Egypt’, 1 July 1882. Delays in putting troops on the ground – due to French indecision – did have a welcome effect, showing the world that Britain ‘sought not only to safeguard our own interests, but also to secure for the people of Egypt a larger amount of freedom and of self-government than they have yet enjoyed’. ‘Egypt’, 22 July 1882. War was ‘compatible with the liberties’ of the Egyptians, saving them from the Turks. The more ‘autonomous Egypt becomes, the more absolutely independent of foreign dictation … the better we shall be pleased’. ‘Egypt’, 26 August 1882.

  47.‘Europe and the Egyptian Crisis’, 8 July 1882; ‘Attitude of the Powers’, 16 September 1882.

  48.‘Financial Control in Egypt’, 13 January 1883. ‘Our expedition to Egypt was neither a humanitarian crusade nor buccaneering adventure.’ ‘We went because we had definite interests … the success of Arabi would have driven European capital and industry out of the country, revived the direct control of the Sultan, and permanently endangered the high road to the East.’ ‘Mr. Gladstone on Egypt’, 11 August 1883.

  49.‘It is no doubt to be desired that Egypt should continue to regulate its finances in accordance with Western methods; but that the Khedive himself can see to.’ ‘Egypt and Financial Control’, 30 September 1882; see also Darwin, The Empire Project, pp. 70–72.

  50.‘The Fall of Khartoum’, 7 February 1885.

  51.‘The campaign should be one river battle, a month of confused expeditions, and then tranquility.’ ‘Upper Burmah’, 24 October 1885.

  52.To Randolph Churchill, secretary of state for India, Lord Dufferin called his ultimatum to King Thibaw ‘a very friendly proposal for the settlement of the dispute between his Government and the Bengal Burma Trading Association’. Ernest Chew, ‘The Fall of the Burmese Kingdom in 1885: Review and Reconsideration’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September 1979, p. 378; ‘Upper Burmah’, 24 October 1885. The British burned, uprooted and moved whole villages in their effort to kill and isolate guerrillas who continued to resist after the annexation.

  53.It was ‘inappropriate’ for British Chambers of Commerce to ‘glory’ in this war. ‘Mr Bright on the Probable War with Burmah’, 7 November 1885. But, ‘so long as civilised and uncivilised races are brought into contact by the industrial and commercial activity of the Western world, operations such as those in which we are reluctantly engaged on the Irrawaddy must from time to time be inevitable. Arbitration is out of the question with a barbarous despot’, while ‘no state can permit its subjects, engaged in legitimate pursuit of trade and exercising rights given to them by contract, to be plundered at pleasure’. ‘England and the East’, 21 November 1885. There was ‘no need for alarm’ after a guerrilla war sprang up. General Macpherson could ‘subdue Burmah with an army of 30,000’ in dry season. ‘Burmese Difficulties’, 21 August 1886.

  54.‘The Congo and the Niger’, 18 October 1884.

  55.‘If he wanted an Australia, he should have looked to South America’, or ‘if he desired an India he should have found one in Asia’. But he had preferred ‘“plantations” often chosen, as in the Cameroons, and perhaps Zanzibar, with little reference to conditions of either climate or of soil.’ ‘New View of Prince Bismarck’, 29 September 1888.

  56.Russia respected firmness. During the Pendjeh crisis the paper threatened to retaliate – ‘there are occasions which compel a country to choose between war and national dishonour’ – for Russian sorties beyond the River Kushk into Afghanistan. ‘The Battle on the Kushk’, 11 April 1885.

  57.‘The French Expedition to Tonquin’, 5 May 1883; ‘M. Ferry’s Speech at Havre’, 20 October 1883.

  58.Other than perhaps to distract the country from the Dreyfus affair. ‘The Fashoda Affair’, 24 September 1898. France itself ‘chose to sever her connection with Egypt, and put an end to Dual Control’ in 1882. Britain, obliged to ‘build up prosperity and order’ alone – and defend it from a ‘turbulent foe to the South’, building up an army and ‘great railway system’ – would never give way to a ‘Power which deliberately declined to take any part in the civilising process’. ‘Question of Fashoda’, 1 October 1898; ‘Temper of the Country About France’, 15 October 1898.

  59.P. M. Holt, The Mahdist State in the Sudan 1881–1898, Oxford 1958, p. 222; Porter, Lion’s Share, p. 167.

  60.‘Continental Criticism of England’, 30 September 1899.

  61.This was addressed to France, whose investors owned a large share of Spain’s debt. ‘United States and Spain’, 12 March 1898. ‘America and the Philippines’, 5 November 1898. See too V. G. Kiernan, America: The New Imperialism: From White Settlement to World Hegemony, London 1978, pp. 100–104. Panama was an ‘American Egypt’. ‘The Panama Canal Again’, 7 November 1903.

  62.Such liberties were ‘considered so vital to American well-being’, after the Civil War, ‘Congress enfranchised the whole negro population, giving them (on paper, at least) equal rights with the whites’ since ‘it was dangerous for a Republic founded on the doctrine of human equality to contain within its bounds a nation of helots.’ ‘If that were true of negroes at home’, it was even more so of ‘half-breeds and of degraded people like those who mostly make up the population of the Philippines thousands of miles beyond the sea.’ While they ‘theoretically share the “rights” of American citizens’, they were ‘ludicrously unfit’ for them. ‘A policy of annexation introduces a conflict of principle into the Republic.’ Other consequences included a ‘practical renunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, on the intelligible ground that one cannot eat one’s cake and have it’. It also meant greater taxation, and centralization of power, to support a large standing army and navy. ‘The Parting of the Ways in America’, 9 July 1898.

  63.T. G. Otte, The China Question: Great Power Rivalry and British Isolation, 1894–1905, Oxford 2007, pp. 2, 17. ‘If the corpse, so rotten and so vast, does not infect the whole world, the world will be unusually fortunate.’ ‘The Disintegration of China’, 11 March 1899. For new, urgently needed markets – within eight months US textile mills produced enough for twelve – America looked ‘mainly in the Far East, and especially China’
where a ‘spirited foreign policy’ was based on ‘fear of the Chinese market being closed to them by the action of Germany, Russia and France’. ‘The Parting of the Ways in America’, 9 July 1898; ‘The United States and The Open Door’, 6 January 1900.

  64.Punishment had to be severe to ‘maintain proper respect for the representatives of Western peoples’ in future, but without ‘demoralising’ state authorities, and preferably exacted by them – to ‘maintain China intact against Western greed and intrigue’. ‘Chinese Problem’, 29 September 1900. This was compatible with regime change. To leave the empress in power would be a ‘denial of justice’. ‘If impunity for murder is to be the first result of the federation of the world, then the world had better remain unfederated.’ ‘First Duty of Europe in China’, 15 September 1900. When ‘justice’ turned into looting, the paper condemned it, not out of ‘rigid morality’, but for ‘impairing efficiency by impairing character’. ‘Loot’, 7 December 1901. It failed to note that British officers, far from ‘winking at’ pillage, organized it at daily auctions. James Hevia, ‘Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and the Plunder of Beijing, 1900–1901’, in The Boxers, China, and the World, eds. Robert Bickers and R. G. Tiedemann, New York 2007, pp. 96–97.

  65.‘The Chinese Indemnity’, 30 March 1901. The partition of China among many powers would lead each to demand privileges like ‘setting up banks, and above all exclusive rights of making loans, and protecting their bondholders by European management of the finances pledged for the interest’. ‘The Problem of China’, 23 June 1900; ‘China and the Concert of Europe’, 29 December 1901; ‘The Foreign Secretary on China’, 25 May 1901.

  66.Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought, Chicago 1999, p. 20; Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism, pp. 21–55; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley 2005, p. 6. For overviews of, as well as interventions in, the scholarly literature on liberalism and empire, see Jennifer Pitts, ‘Political Theory of Empire and Imperialism’, The Annual Review of Political Science, 2010, p 211–35; Andrew Sartori, ‘The British Empire and Its Liberal Mission’, The Journal of Modern History, September 2006, pp. 623–42.

  67.Even recent scholarship that disputes this motive concedes the Transvaal’s new economic clout (after gold finds in 1868) threatened to pull other South African states towards it, and away from Britain’s Cape Colony. By 1898 it was the largest producer of gold, accounting for 27 per cent of the world total. Britain was responsible for half of the £75 million invested there by 1899, and two-thirds of its trade. Christopher Saunders and Iain R. Smith, ‘Southern Africa, 1795–1910’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter, Oxford 1999, Vol. III, pp. 609–10.

  68.Forgetting itself for a moment, the Economist deplored ‘the disturbing, revolutionary effect caused by the sudden growth of an enormously aggressive capitalism in a heretofore stagnant and conservative community’, ‘the evolution of giant monopolies’, which had left ‘society, all institutions … hypnotised’: ‘England and the Transvaal’, 10 June 1899.

  69.‘Chamberlain is supposed to be an adherent of what is called the new diplomacy, which, like the new journalism, the new women, and many other novelties, is not altogether an improvement on the old.’ ‘The Transvaal and the New Diplomacy’, 2 September 1899.

  70.‘Just as the British and Dutch were fused in the earlier history of New York’: ‘Mr Chamberlain’s Deliverance’, 3 April 1897. Boers were white, an economic and cultural argument against fighting them, since they were capable of instituting the proper kind of political economy. Englishmen ‘will sometimes fight dark peoples on ill-understood or uncertain grounds’ for their own good. ‘With white people they prefer to be sure they have a good plea’: ‘Transvaal Negotiations’, 15 July 1899.

  71.It was unwise to link ‘the fate of the British Empire’ to ‘whether a certain number of capitalists and miners on the Rand are to qualify to vote in seven years or five’. ‘Boer and Briton’, 26 August 1899.

  72.‘The Transvaal Issue’, 7 October 1899. Instead of three months, the war lasted almost three years, cost £230 million, and sucked in 450,000 British and imperial troops. About 22,000 died on the British side, 34,000 Boer soldiers and civilians, and ‘not less’ than 14,000 Africans. Saunders and Smith, ‘Southern Africa’, pp. 609–10.

  73.‘Motives of the Boers’, 14 October 1899.

  74.‘Some Reflections on the War’, 16 December 1899; ‘The Military Proposals’, 17 February 1900; ‘The Elections’, 22 September 1900. Criticisms from opposition Liberals were unwelcome. ‘It is the time of the general, not of the politician’: ‘Political Opinion and the War’, 23 December 1899. For a contemporary report on the concentration camps – an institution and term invented by the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler in Cuba in 1896–98, and seamlessly adopted by the British in 1900 – see Emily Hobhouse, Report on a Visit to the Camps, London 1901.

  75.The paper spilt a lot of ink to disprove their liberal-sounding claim that if ‘every nation has a right to regulate its own internal affairs’, that included Egypt. ‘The Situation in Egypt’, 15 July 1882.

  76.‘Bright on the Probable War with Burmah’, 7 November 1885.

  77.‘The Soudan Expedition’, 6 June 1896. John Morley’s loyalty to Gladstone over Home Rule also cost him: formerly a ‘clear-sighted’ and ‘judicious editor of the Fortnightly Review’ with a talent for ‘speaking out’, he was now a ‘party hack’. ‘Mr Morley and the Gladstonian Muzzle’, 1 February 1890.

  78.For a dramatic change of view before and after his conversion to Home Rule, see ‘Mr Gladstone’s Letter’, 4 July 1885; ‘Mr Gladstone’s Scheme’, 10 April 1886; ‘Mr Chamberlain’s Position’, 12 June 1886; ‘Immediate Result of the Election’, 26 June 1886; ‘Government and the Liberal Unionists’, 31 July 1886.

  79.‘Round Table Conference’, 8 January 1887; ‘Shifting of Parties’, 18 June 1887; ‘Mr Gladstone’s Disclosure’, 2 July 1892; ‘Justification of the Unionists’, 18 February 1893; ‘Home Rule and Experience of History’, 25 February 1893; ‘Imperial Federation and Home Rule’, 15 April 1893; ‘Second Reading’, 21 April 1893; ‘The House of Lords will not lose an atom of popularity by rejecting this ill-considered and ill-ominous measure’: ‘Third Reading’, 2 September 1893; ‘Mr Gladstone and the Lords’, 16 September 1893. See the chronology posited by John D. Fair, ‘Liberal to Conservative: The Flight of the Liberal Unionists after 1886’, Victorian Studies, Winter 1986, pp. 294, 314; and T. W. Heyck, ‘Home Rule, Radicalism, and the Liberal Party, 1886–1895’, Journal of British Studies, May 1974, pp. 66–91.

  80.‘Lord Beaconsfield’, 23 April 1881.

  81.‘Lord Salisbury’, 29 July 1899; ‘The Old Ministry and the New’, 19 July 1902.

  82.‘Mr Balfour’s Aims’, 21 November 1903; ‘Mr Balfour’, 26 December 1903. Before his premiership, Balfour had been a ‘firm and imperturbable’ Chief Secretary of Ireland from 1887 to 1891 – especially after the Mitchelstown Massacre, which earned him the nickname ‘Bloody Balfour’. ‘The New Irish Demand’, ‘The Session’, 17 September 1887.

  83.‘The Elections’, 22 September 1899.

  84.Campbell-Bannerman’s ‘methods of barbarism’ outburst about the Boer War was ‘not becoming in a politician of his position’. ‘Real Reason for Keeping Present Government’, 30 November 1901. If Lord Rosebery ‘puts aside, or triumphs over the influences’ which the paper thought had ‘availed to paralyse him as an effective political force – no limit can be easily set to the part which he may yet play’. ‘Two Conceptions of Empire’, 17 October 1903. Lord Rosebery represented middle ground – between the ‘insane imperialism’ of Chamberlain, especially after he came out for imperial preference in 1903 – and idealistic pacifism lingering among advanced Liberals.

  85.‘Unionist Service to Home Rule’, 13 January 1906. Once the size of the Liberal victory became known, the
paper advised the Unionists to ditch Chamberlain and tariff reform without delay, and unite behind Balfour – now ‘one of the finest intellects applied to modern politics’ – to lead an effective opposition. It hoped that ‘the Liberals of the City’ would graciously see that Balfour was returned ‘at once’. ‘General Reflections’, 27 January 1906

  86.Roy Jenkins, Asquith, London 1964, pp. 32–33; J. A. Spender and Cyril Asquith, Life of Lord Oxford and Asquith, London 1932, Vol. I, pp. 45–46. Articles such as ‘The English extreme left’ in The Spectator, 12 August 1876), made Asquith a good fit for the Economist. See, ‘Asquith, Herbert Henry (1852–1928)’, H. C. G. Matthew in ODNB, 2004.

  87.‘The New Radicalism’, 20 January 1883.

  88.Asquith helped Spencer compile material for a book on the ‘synthetic philosophy’ of English political institutions. He found the ‘old philosopher’ rather absurd, but added, ‘it is not for the unemployed to be over-fastidious on such a point.’ For Spencer, Liberalism had grown ‘more coercive in its legislation’ as it got ‘more into power’. ‘What’, Asquith asked, ‘would he have said if he had lived to see a Liberal Government introducing Old Age Pensions and National Insurance?’ H. H. Asquith, Memories and Reflections, 1852–1927, Boston 1928, Vol. I, pp. 49–52.

  89.So long as much of this state action was devolved to the municipal level, along lines championed by Chamberlain in Birmingham, it added, in a significant qualification. ‘The New Radicalism’, 20 January 1883.

  90.‘The Passing of the Franchise Bill’, 21 June 1884; ‘The Folly of the Peers’, 12 July 1884; ‘The Compromise’, 22 November 1884. The paper estimated that 2 million more (or 5 out of 7 million) males ‘capable of bearing arms will be voters’. ‘A Retrospect’, 27 December 1884. For a reassessment of the scope of pre-1918 democracy, see H. C. G. Matthew, R. I. McKibbin and J. A. Kay, ‘The Franchise Factor in the Rise of the Labour Party’, English Historical Review, October 1976, pp. 724, 726.