It took only thirty years, from 1800–30, to wipe out the estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Aboriginal inhabitants of Tasmania. It was an act of genocide that mirrored Columbus’s extermination of the indigenous populations of the Caribbean. In what became termed the ‘Black War’, a collection of British settlers and seal hunters proceeded to hunt the native population to death. Their final act involved linking arms in a human chain across the island to comb out its last surviving inhabitants. These were rounded up and transported to neighbouring Flinders Island where they were left to the vagaries of disease and starvation. The last three surviving Aborigines suddenly became a focus of interest for the scientific community in 1869 when it attempted to establish whether these poor ‘creatures’ could in fact be the missing link between apes and humans! When the last male died, his body parts were unceremoniously cut up and sold as souvenirs. The last native woman, in an attempt to escape the same fate, asked to be buried at sea. However, she was buried, her body later exhumed and her skeleton put on display by the Royal Society in the Tasmanian Museum until 1947.(4)
On the Australian mainland, it is estimated there may have been as many as a million indigenous inhabitants when Cook landed. By 1834, the Nygugar tribe began to fight back against the expansion of white settlement in Western Australia but — similar to what had taken place in the Americas, disease, war, imprisonment, resettlement, cultural disintegration and the removal of their children — had a devastating effect on their numbers and their culture. The notion that the whites had arrived to an ‘empty land’ remained on the statute books, to Australia’s shame, until 1992 and the subject of the ‘history wars’ still engenders much bitter debate today.(5)
By 1861, the Maoris of New Zealand faced the onslaught of British imperialism in the Taranaki and Waikato wars. These wars are long forgotten in England and rarely, if ever, get a mention on the national curriculum.
The early period of the nineteenth century demonstrates the broad sweep and immense reach of British maritime imperial ambitions. From 1812–14, whilst still engaged in the life and death struggle with Napoleon, Britain still found the time to attempt to wrest back the United States in an invasion from Canada, which stretched all the way down the Mississippi to Louisiana and razed the capital city of Washington to the ground en route.(6) And from 1813 onwards, the ‘Great Game’ began with Tsarist Russia for domination of Central Asia from Persia to Burma, where Russia and Britain battled out an epic colonial conquest, treading in the footsteps of Alexander the Great.(7)
Between 1853–56, Britain led an alliance during the Crimean War which included France, Ottoman Turkey and the kingdom of Sardinia, ostensibly to shore up the power of the declining Ottoman Empire, but in practice to check the further expansion of Russia. For much of the period leading up to the First World War, British foreign policy continued to regard Russia as the greatest threat to its imperial project, not least in India and Persia.(8)
During the Opium Wars of 1840–43 and 1856–60, Britain not only humiliated China, but forced her to her knees in the basest of immoral trades. Britain played the role of imperial drug pusher; first smuggling opium (a product grown in India and sold in ever-increasing quantities to China), then forcing open China’s markets for opium through war. She then shipped tea from China to plant in India. The opium trade was officially outlawed in China and strictly prohibited in England, Wales and Scotland, due to its addictive and morally corrosive qualities. Despite the ban, parts of London, especially the areas around Covent Garden, Clerkenwell and along the Thames in London’s East End had numerous opium dens and were known as centres of vice and prostitution. Even Queen Victoria herself was said to have succumbed to opium addiction after the death of her beloved Prince Albert.(9) The two Opium Wars led to the creation of a new British colony in China, with Hong Kong being ceded to Britain after the first Opium War, and other territories in Canton being leased to Britain after the second.(10) With the advent of greater protectionism and the Depression in Europe, which lasted from 1873–96, Britain sought to open up additional new overseas markets to compensate.
In 1875, only 10 per cent of the African Continent had been colonised by Europeans, and that was primarily the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique (which, due to Portugal’s early gift for navigation, had been colonised from the early fourteenth century). The only other large European possession in Africa at the time was French Algeria. The earliest colonial possession before that had ironically been made by the United States on the West African coast in 1820, which they named Liberia. Initially it was a place from which to obtain slaves; after the Civil War it was a ‘hoped-for’ repository to send them back to. Italy made a grab for Eritrea in 1870 and for a larger share again in 1882; and it added the ‘prize’ possession of Somaliland between 1895 and 1896. The Belgians took the vast interior of central southern Africa (an area the size of Western Europe) in the form of the Congo in 1880 and proceeded to initiate the largest genocide in African history, slaving to death millions in an all but forgotten European genocide. However, it was France — the ‘old enemy’ — who was Britain’s main rival for dominance on the ‘Dark Continent’. To that end, Britain encouraged German ambitions to take a seat at the colonial table, and particularly in Africa. France took Tunisia in 1881, Guinea in 1884, and amalgamated huge tracts of territory to form French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa in 1895 and 1910, respectively. From 1884, Germany gained Togoland, Cameroon and South West Africa.(11) Imperial Germany thus became the third largest imperial power in Africa after Britain and France, acquiring 2.6 million square miles of territory and 14 million souls.(12) Britain’s interest in helping Germany, so as to thwart France’s ambitions, enabled her to gain the lion’s share. The greatest prize in Africa came in 1882, when Britain occupied the strategically important crossroads between the Mediterranean and the Arabian Sea at the intersection between North Africa and Arabia; namely Egypt, and the recently completed Suez Canal.cxxxvii With it came Egypt’s unruly possession of Sudan. Great Britain then moved south in an attempt to lift the self-imposed siege of General Gordon.cxxxviii The general had ostensibly been sent to help evacuate the Egyptian garrison from Khartoum, in the face of the growing threat of an early outgrowth of Muslim Fundamentalism in the form of the Mahdi Army. Gordon captured the hubris of the media and self-belief in Britain’s God-given right to rule the world. He thought it anathema to retreat in the face of a ragtag Muslim army and faced the nemesis of Britain’s second military defeat in the Sudan before the British Empire eventually reconsolidated its position in the province with overwhelming force.
A concerted push now began, both from the north and the south of the African continent to link up British possessions, from Sudan on to Uganda, Lake Victoria and Kenya. From the south the push came from the Cape Colony to overrun the Transvaal in 1877 and the homeland of the Zulus during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879. This culminated in the first Boer War of 1880–81, when the white Afrikaner settlers and ancestors of the former Dutch Cape Colony rose up in revolt, declaring their independence against the British extension of control over the entirety of Southern Africa. In the first setback for British colonialism since the loss of the thirteen colonies in America, British Prime Minister Gladstone gave way and allowed the Boers nominal self-government in the Transvaal. This might have held, had it not been for the discovery of gold in the Transvaal in 1886, precipitating a US-style gold rush. The stage was set for a renewed conflict that shook the empire, Britain’s image, and its foreign policy like no other.
Cecil Rhodes made his fortune in Southern Africa founding the De Beers Diamond Company. He became Prime Minister of the British Cape Colony in 1890 and then launched the takeover of the Transvaal. He later founded the British colony of Rhodesia, which was named after him. A man of boundless energy with a vision of expanding the British Empire from Cape Town to Cairo, he made a fortune in the gold and diamond trades along the way. His last will and testament, written in 1877 (he died in 1902), is illumina
ting, helping to show how the drive to extend the British Empire had taken on its own momentum through its most vigorous sons of the empire. The executors of his will were no less than the Colonial Secretary Lord Carnarvon and the Attorney General Sidney Shippard. The will was charged with setting up a secret society with the explicit aim of extending the British Empire throughout the world. These plans were to encompass all of Africa, the settling of South America, the Holy Land, the seaboards of China and Japan, the Malay Archipelago and so on, all of which were to be colonised by British settlers. The plans even went so far as to suggest ‘recovering’ the United States to establish ‘so great a power as to hereafter render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.’(14) Rhodes vigorously pursued this aim during his lifetime.cxxxix
Britain’s first attempt to conquer the Transvaal may have had limited success, but Rhodes was not about to let the Afrikaners stand in the way of extending either his personal fortune, or the fortunes of the British Empire. Following the Gold Rush, he and Joseph Chamberlain (Colonial Secretary) engineered the failed Jameson Raid,cxl increasing the pressure on the Boers through trade sanctions and tariffs to the point where war became inevitable. The Second Boer War changed the face of the British Empire forever.
The Boers again gained first blood, invading the Cape Colony and scoring a string of military successes. In a bloody, nasty war that raged from 1899–1901, the British media were initially confident of Britain’s innate supremacy, but became less strident as Britain increasingly resorted to a scorched earth policy and guerrilla tactics to combat the Boers. Ultimately the policy hit the Boers where it hurt most: their families. They were rounded up and incarcerated in so-called ‘reservations’. A new expression was soon to enter the English language to replace this euphemism: ‘concentration camps’, a term that was not first coined to describe the horrors of the Holocaust but the barbarism of the Boer War. In all, nearly 30,000 civilian family members of the Boers who had been rounded up and put in these filthy, disease-ridden camps died of famine and disease; 24,000 of them were children under the age of sixteen. An estimated further 14,000 native black soldiers who had been taken prisoner whilst fighting with the Boers also died, although this number could have been far higher.(15) Due to labour shortages, the British authorities also started importing large numbers of Chinese ‘coolies’ into South Africa as an additional workforce. They were housed in appalling conditions, given paltry wages and forbidden to fraternise with the white population; essentially a modern form of slavery.
The international media took up these brutalities, and for the first time, Britain was globally portrayed as the villain and the oppressor, willing to employ any barbarous means to gain victory for profit’s sake. Bands of Irish volunteers went to fight with the Boers, only underscoring the troubles in store on the home front with the continued repression of Catholic Ireland. Discontent in Ireland rumbled on and remained at the top of the headlines until the outbreak of the First World War, blowing up spectacularly in 1916 — right in the middle of the war — when Irish Republicans rose up in civil war against British occupation.cxli Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 presented a picture of unassailability, but the Boer Wars in particular were showing cracks in the facade of British invincibility. The new century suddenly failed to look as promising as the last, and it was clear that new and more potent threats loomed on the horizon. Old enmities would need to be overcome, and new alliances sought to face them.
The sun could not be allowed to set on the most expansive empire created in human history. It would retrench and it would attribute to itself a new purpose. The Bard of Anglo-Saxonism, Rudyard Kipling, who was born in British India, wrote of this purpose in his famous poem, The White Man’s Burden. It was taken to represent Great Britain’s ‘civilising mission’ to bring ‘peace, prosperity and liberty to the World’.cxlii This was all very altruistic, but it concealed more sinister ideas, many of them originating in Great Britain, that were beginning to gain new pseudo-scientific underpinnings among all of Europe’s colonial powers.
The pseudo-science which supported views on Europeans pre-ordained destiny to rule the world came from a variety of renowned scientists and writers, such as Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who simply took it for granted that the white race was superior. Darwin believed that the Stone Age Aboriginals of Australia and Africa were the most closely related to apes. In Descent of Man, he wrote, ‘At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world.’(17) Francis Galton devised the new ‘science’ of eugenics, which — building on the ideas of evolution advanced by Darwin — effectively argued that ability was entirely the result of inheritance alone. Support for the idea of eugenics was widespread and from the modern perspective it is astonishing how many of the great minds of the early twentieth century wholeheartedly supported the idea of enforcing Malthusiancxliii solutions on the population explosion to ensure that the ‘right kind’ of human beings prevailed. H.G. Wells was among them. He wrote, ‘The extravagant swarms of new births’ was ‘the essential disaster of the nineteenth century’.(18) The writer D.H. Lawrence went further in Fantasia of the Unconscious, and with a kind of chilling premonition of the storm clouds that were gathering over Europe, he wrote, ‘Three cheers for the inventors of poison gas… if I had my way I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly and cinematograph working brightly, then I’d go out into the back streets and the main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt and the maimed, I would lead them gently and they would smile me a weary thanks, and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus”.’(19) Eugenics societies began to spring up all across Europe and the United States. The Bishop of Birmingham, a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, preached the following sermon to his congregation:
Under the harsh social order which prevailed almost to our own time, those human beings who were manifestly unfitted for the struggle and responsibilities of social life failed to survive. The unfit, the defective and the degenerate were eliminated. But of late at great cost to the community we have not only preserved them, but have also allowed them to propagate… If England… is to save herself… and the world… she must be racially sound.(20)
Other famous members of the British Eugenic Society included no less than Julian Huxley, the first General Secretary of UNESCO and the founder of the World Wildlife Fund. Charles Darwin’s son, Major Leonard Darwin, Arthur Balfour, a former British Prime Minister and member of the War Cabinet; William Beveridge, the man who produced the report on which the National Health Service was founded; Dr Marie Stopes, the founder of the first birth control clinic in Britain. Eugenics societies were also set up in the United States, Australia, Germany and Sweden. In all of these nations, legislation to perform compulsory sterilisation was put on the statute books. Over 60,000 individuals of mainly African and Indian origin were sterilised in the US between 1909–60, while in Germany over 75,000 individuals with mental and physical disabilities were forcibly sterilised. Sweden sterilised a similar number of people who the state deemed ‘unfit’ between 1935–76.(21) The British writer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, built on the racial pseudo-historical writings of the French writer and diplomat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who became the most popular writer on the themes of the Aryan ‘Germanic’ Master race and was scathing in his anti-Semitism. He found a resonance for his views in Wagner’s operas and befriended Wagner’s widow, eventually marrying his daughter Eva Wagner.(22) It is incredible to chart the list of those Brits who avidly supported the social Darwinism, eugenics and historical myth of the role of the master race in history. The British philosopher and pacifist, George Bernard Shaw, praised one of Chamberlain’s books as ‘The greatest Protestant manifesto ever written.’(23)
Imperial Europe was entering the dawn of a
new age at the turn of the twentieth century. For a hundred years, since the defeat of Napoleon, Europe’s great powers had turned their attentions to conquering the distant corners of the globe. Now that the world had been carved up, they turned their attentions closer to home. Geopolitical ideas, such as the need for constantly expanding great empires and racial imperialism that had increasingly come to underpin them, were now turned back on the continent from which they had emerged.
GERMAN IMPERIALISM AND THE PURSUIT OF WELTMACHT (WORLD POWER)
For most of the nineteenth century, Prussia had been kept busy consolidating her hold on northern Germany. After German unification, Bismarck had encouraged Germans to be content within their own borders, rather than call for Germany to become a great imperial power. Some have attributed Germany’s problems to the fact that she was a ‘belated nation’, arriving late on the imperial scene, when most of the world had already been neatly divided up. As great as the Second German Reich might have appeared to those who had grown accustomed to a weak, fragmented and malleable centre of Continental Europe, this new Reich in the heart of Europe had not even attainted the territorial extent of the old Holy Roman Empire. Bismarck had consciously opted for the Klein Deutsch (Lesser Germany) solution, which excluded Austria, primarily because he wanted to avoid bringing large numbers of non German-speaking minorities within Germany’s borders.cxliv But nationalists within Germany complained that the Reich would never be complete without the Germans from Austria and that Germany needed to continue to expand and gain colonies to become a truly global power. As the century drew to a close, the numbers of these nationalists and the organisations that supported them grew.
The Germans may have been latecomers to the acquisition of overseas colonies, but under the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II, they learned to acquire a taste for it. From 1885–90, Germany added to her African colonial possessions of Cameroon and German South West Africa (Namibia) by gaining German East Africa (Tanganyika — modern day Tanzania — and Zanzibar). She went on to acquire her own Chinese colony (a mini Hong Kong) following her part in the international intervention to put down the Boxer Rebellion. (One legacy of Germany’s brief sojourn in the Chinese region of Jiaozhou Bay in the Shandong Province is the brewery established at Tsingtao [Quingdao].) The farthest outpost gained by the German Empire was Samoa in the Pacific. The ‘last hurrahs’ of good Anglo-German relations, before the onset of the Boer War and the start of the naval shipbuilding race, allowed for the German and British Empires to swap the island of Heligoland off Germany’s North Sea coast for the African territory of Zanzibar (Germany gaining the former and ceding the latter). There was even discussion of Great Britain and Imperial Germany dividing up poor old impoverished Portugal’s colonies and thereby putting them to better use. However, despite the fact that nationalist groups clamoured for more colonies, German citizens did not emigrate to their new colonies in large numbers. Between 1820 and 1930, 90 per cent of all Germans who emigrated went to the United States, some 6 million in all. They constituted the second largest immigrant community in the US after those from the British Isles.cxlv
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