Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (29 page)
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Authors: Niall Ferguson
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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It took an American to take British understatement to its historic zenith.
When Stanley’s story broke, it dominated the front pages of the English-speaking world. Yet this was more than just a scoop. It was also a symbolic meeting between two generations: the Evangelical generation that had dreamt of a moral transfiguration of Africa; and a new, hard-nosed generation with more worldly priorities. Cynical though he was, aware though he quickly became of the cantankerous old man’s faults, Stanley was touched and inspired by the meeting. Indeed, he came to regard himself as Livingstone’s successor, as if their meeting at Ujiji had somehow anointed him. ‘If God willed it’, he later wrote, he would be ‘the next martyr to geographical science, or if my life is spared ... [would] clear up ... the secrets of the Great River [Nile] throughout its course’. At the time of Livingstone’s funeral (at which he was among the eight pallbearers), Stanley wrote in his diary: ‘May I be selected to succeed him in opening up Africa to the Shining light of Christianity’. But he added a significant rider: ‘My methods, however, will not be Livingstone’s. Each man has his own way. His, I think, had its defects, though the old man, personally has been almost Christ-like for goodness, patience ... and self-sacrifice’.
Goodness, patience and self-sacrifice were not to be the qualities Henry Stanley brought to Africa. When he led an expedition up the River Congo, he went equipped with Winchester rifles and elephant guns, which he did not hesitate to use on uncooperative natives. Even the sight of spears being shaken at his boat made him reach for his repeating gun: ‘Six shots and four deaths’, he recorded with grim satisfaction after one such encounter, ‘were sufficient to quiet the mocking’. By 1878 Stanley was working on behalf of King Leopold II of the Belgians to create a private colony for his International African Association in the Congo. By an irony that would have appalled Livingstone, the Belgian Congo would soon become notorious for its murderous system of slave labour.
Livingstone had believed in the power of the Gospel; Stanley believed only in brute force. Livingstone had been appalled by slavery; Stanley would connive at its restoration. Above all, Livingstone had been indifferent to political frontiers; Stanley wanted to see Africa carved up. And so it was. In the time between Livingstone’s death in 1873 and Stanley’s death in 1904 around a third of Africa would be annexed to the British Empire; virtually all the rest would be taken over by a handful of other European powers. And it is only against this background of political domination that the conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity can be understood.
Commerce, Civilization and Christianity were to be conferred on Africa, just as Livingstone had intended. But they would arrive in conjunction with a fourth ‘C’: Conquest.
4
HEAVEN’S BREED
A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.
Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black.
Kipling
T
he Victoria Memorial in the centre of Calcutta was intended by the British to be their answer to the Taj Mahal, a timeless expression of imperial grandeur that would awe those over whom they ruled. Today, however, the statue of Queen Victoria, gazing wearily out over the Maidan, looks more like a symbol of the transient nature of British rule. Splendid though it looks, the memorial is a solitary white island in the sea of Bengalis who inhabit every available corner of this miasmic metropolis. The astounding thing is that for the better part of two centuries not just Bengal but the whole of India was ruled by just a few thousand Britons. As someone remarked, the government of India was ‘a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their leave and without their help’.
he Victoria Memorial in the centre of Calcutta was intended by the British to be their answer to the Taj Mahal, a timeless expression of imperial grandeur that would awe those over whom they ruled. Today, however, the statue of Queen Victoria, gazing wearily out over the Maidan, looks more like a symbol of the transient nature of British rule. Splendid though it looks, the memorial is a solitary white island in the sea of Bengalis who inhabit every available corner of this miasmic metropolis. The astounding thing is that for the better part of two centuries not just Bengal but the whole of India was ruled by just a few thousand Britons. As someone remarked, the government of India was ‘a gigantic machine for managing the entire public business of one-fifth of the inhabitants of the earth without their leave and without their help’.
The British were also able to use India to control an entire hemisphere, stretching from Malta all the way to Hong Kong. It was the foundation on which the entire mid-Victorian Empire stood.
Yet behind the marble façade, the Raj was the conundrum at the very heart of the British Empire. How on earth did 900 British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers manage to govern upwards of 250 million Indians?
How did the Victorians do it?
The Annihilation of DistanceAt the apex of the Victorian Empire was the Queen herself: industrious, opinionated, as passionate in private as she was impassive in public, indefatigably procreative and spectacularly long-lived. Like a latter-day Plantagenet, she was remarkably peripatetic: she disliked Buckingham Palace, preferred Windsor and had a soft spot for remote and rainy Balmoral. Her favourite residence, however, was probably Osborne, on the Isle of Wight. It had been acquired and remodelled at the instigation of her adored husband (and cousin) Albert and it was one of the few places where the couple could enjoy a measure of that privacy – and intimacy – which they were usually denied. It was, she declared, ‘so snug & nice to have a place of
one’s own
, – quiet & retired ... It is impossible to imagine a prettier spot, we have a charming beach quite to ourselves – we can walk anywhere without being followed or mobbed’.
one’s own
, – quiet & retired ... It is impossible to imagine a prettier spot, we have a charming beach quite to ourselves – we can walk anywhere without being followed or mobbed’.
Osborne House itself is built in the Renaissance style, a typical piece of nineteenth-century architectural historicism. It is both literally and metaphorically thousands of miles from the global Empire over which Victoria reigned. In other ways, however, it was far from backward looking. The garish allegorical fresco above the main staircase looks at first sight like yet more Italianate pastiche. But on closer inspection, it depicts ‘Britannia’ receiving the crown of the sea from Neptune, attended by ‘Industry’, ‘Commerce’ and ‘Navigation’. As those three figures on her right suggest, the royal couple understood full well the connection between Britain’s economic power and her global mastery.
Since the late eighteenth century, Britain had been pulling ahead of her rivals as a pioneer of new technology. British engineers were in the vanguard of a revolution – the Industrial Revolution – that harnessed the power of steam and the strength of iron to transform the world economy and the international balance of power. Nothing illustrated this better than the view from Osborne House, which looks straight across the Solent. Reassuringly visible on the other side is Britain’s principal naval base at Portsmouth, then the largest in the world, and an imposing manifestation of British sea power. Fog permitting, the Queen could watch the comings and goings of her navy as she and her husband promenaded through Osborne’s elegantly landscaped gardens. By 1860 she would have been able to pick out with ease the supreme expression of mid-Victorian might: HMS
Warrior
. Steam-driven, ‘iron clad’ in five inches of armour plate and fitted with the latest breech-loading, shellfiring guns,
Warrior
was the world’s most powerful battleship, so powerful that no foreign vessel ever dared to exchange fire with her. And she was just one of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors – making the Royal Navy the biggest in the world by far. And thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world’s merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world’s oceans as Britain did in the mid-nineteenth century. Queen Victoria had good cause to feel secure by the seaside.
Warrior
. Steam-driven, ‘iron clad’ in five inches of armour plate and fitted with the latest breech-loading, shellfiring guns,
Warrior
was the world’s most powerful battleship, so powerful that no foreign vessel ever dared to exchange fire with her. And she was just one of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors – making the Royal Navy the biggest in the world by far. And thanks to the unrivalled productivity of her shipyards, Britain owned roughly a third of the world’s merchant tonnage. At no other time in history has one power so completely dominated the world’s oceans as Britain did in the mid-nineteenth century. Queen Victoria had good cause to feel secure by the seaside.
If the British wished to abolish the slave trade, they simply sent the navy. By 1840 no fewer than 425 slave ships had been intercepted by the Royal Navy off the West African coast and escorted to Sierra Leone, where nearly all of them were condemned. A total of thirty warships were engaged in this international policing operation. If the British wished the Brazilians to follow their example by abolishing the slave trade, they simply sent a gunboat. That was what Lord Palmerston did in 1848; by September 1850 Brazil had passed a law abolishing the trade. If the British wished to force the Chinese to open their ports to British trade – not least to exports of Indian opium – they could once again send the navy. The Opium Wars of 1841 and 1856 were, of course, about much more than opium. The
Illustrated London News
portrayed the 1841 war as a crusade to introduce the benefits of free trade to yet another benighted Oriental despotism; while the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the conflict, made no explicit reference to opium. Likewise, the Second Opium War – sometimes known as the Arrow War, after the ship that was the
casus belli
– was fought partly to uphold British prestige as an end in itself; just as the ports of Greece had been blockaded in 1850 because a Gibraltar-born Jew claimed that his rights as a British subject had been infringed by the Greek authorities. Yet it is very hard to believe the Opium Wars would have been fought if exports of opium, prohibited by the Chinese authorities after 1821, had not been so crucial to the finances of British rule in India.
39
The only real benefit of acquiring Hong Kong as a result of the war of 1841 was that it provided firms like Jardine Matheson with a base for their opium-smuggling operation. It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.
Illustrated London News
portrayed the 1841 war as a crusade to introduce the benefits of free trade to yet another benighted Oriental despotism; while the Treaty of Nanking, which ended the conflict, made no explicit reference to opium. Likewise, the Second Opium War – sometimes known as the Arrow War, after the ship that was the
casus belli
– was fought partly to uphold British prestige as an end in itself; just as the ports of Greece had been blockaded in 1850 because a Gibraltar-born Jew claimed that his rights as a British subject had been infringed by the Greek authorities. Yet it is very hard to believe the Opium Wars would have been fought if exports of opium, prohibited by the Chinese authorities after 1821, had not been so crucial to the finances of British rule in India.
39
The only real benefit of acquiring Hong Kong as a result of the war of 1841 was that it provided firms like Jardine Matheson with a base for their opium-smuggling operation. It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.
What these events – the war against slavery and the wars for opium – had in common was that British naval mastery made them possible. At first, it is true, the Admiralty had been appalled by the advent of steam, believing it would ‘strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the Empire’. But quickly it became apparent that the new technology had to be adopted, if only to keep up with the French. (The French warship
La Gloire
, launched in 1858, had been one of the principal reasons for building HMS
Warrior.
) Far from weakening the Empire, steam power tended to knit it together. In the days of sail it had taken between four and six weeks to cross the Atlantic; steam reduced that to two weeks in the mid-1830s and just ten days in the 1880s. Between the 1850s and the 1890s, the journey time from England to Cape Town was cut from forty-two to nineteen days. Steamships got bigger as well as faster: in the same period, average gross tonnage roughly doubled.
40
La Gloire
, launched in 1858, had been one of the principal reasons for building HMS
Warrior.
) Far from weakening the Empire, steam power tended to knit it together. In the days of sail it had taken between four and six weeks to cross the Atlantic; steam reduced that to two weeks in the mid-1830s and just ten days in the 1880s. Between the 1850s and the 1890s, the journey time from England to Cape Town was cut from forty-two to nineteen days. Steamships got bigger as well as faster: in the same period, average gross tonnage roughly doubled.
40
Nor was that the only way the Empire became more tightly knit. In the early years of her reign – until the Indian Mutiny, in fact – Victoria had taken relatively little interest in foreign affairs outside Europe. But the Mutiny awoke her with a jolt to her imperial responsibilities, and as her reign wore on they took up more and more of her attention. In December 1879 she recorded ‘a long talk with Ld Beaconsfield, after tea, about India and Affghanistan [
sic
] and the necessity for our becoming Masters of the country and holding it ...’ In July 1880 she was ‘urg[ing] strongly on the Govt, to do all in their power to uphold the safety and honour of the Empire’. ‘To protect the poor natives and to advance civilization’, she told Lord Derby in 1884, was to her mind ‘the mission of Great Britain’. ‘It is I think important’, she declared airily in 1898, ‘that the world at large should not have the impression that we will not let any one but ourselves have anything ...’ In one of the more obscure corners of Osborne House is a clue to why the Queen felt in closer touch with her Empire as she grew older. It was not considered worthy of preservation when the house was given to the nation in 1902, but downstairs in the Household Wing was the Queen’s telegraph office. By the 1870s messages from India could reach her in a matter of hours; and the Queen read them attentively. This perfectly illustrates what happened to the world during Victoria’s reign. It shrank – and it did so largely because of British technology.
sic
] and the necessity for our becoming Masters of the country and holding it ...’ In July 1880 she was ‘urg[ing] strongly on the Govt, to do all in their power to uphold the safety and honour of the Empire’. ‘To protect the poor natives and to advance civilization’, she told Lord Derby in 1884, was to her mind ‘the mission of Great Britain’. ‘It is I think important’, she declared airily in 1898, ‘that the world at large should not have the impression that we will not let any one but ourselves have anything ...’ In one of the more obscure corners of Osborne House is a clue to why the Queen felt in closer touch with her Empire as she grew older. It was not considered worthy of preservation when the house was given to the nation in 1902, but downstairs in the Household Wing was the Queen’s telegraph office. By the 1870s messages from India could reach her in a matter of hours; and the Queen read them attentively. This perfectly illustrates what happened to the world during Victoria’s reign. It shrank – and it did so largely because of British technology.
The telegraph was another invention the Admiralty had tried to ignore. Its original inventor, Francis Ronalds, had been rebuffed when he offered the Navy his brainchild in 1816. It was not the military but the private sector that developed the nineteenth century’s information highway, initially piggybacking on the infrastructure of the early railways. By the late 1840s it was clear that the telegraph would revolutionize overland communications; by the 1850s construction in India was sufficiently advanced for the telegraph to play a decisive part in suppressing the Mutiny.
41
However, the crucial development from the point of view of imperial rule was the construction of durable undersea cables. Significantly, it was an imperial product – arubberlike substance from Malaya called gutta-percha – that solved the problem, allowing the first cross-Channel cable to be laid in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable to follow fifteen years later. When the Anglo-American Telegraph Company’s cable finally reached the American coast on 27 July 1866, having been successfully unrolled and dropped along the ocean floor by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mighty
Great Eastern
, it was plainly the dawn of a new era. That the cable ran from Ireland to Newfoundland made it clear which power was most likely to dominate the age of the telegraph. That the telegraph link from India to Europe had already been constructed by the government of India several years earlier made it clear that the rulers of that power (for all their
laissez-faire
principles) were resolved that it should do so.
42
By 1880 there were altogether 97,568 miles of cable across the world’s oceans, linking Britain to India, Canada, Africa and Australia. Now a message could be relayed from Bombay to London at the cost of four shillings a word with the reasonable expectation that it would be seen the next day.
43
In the words of Charles Bright, one of the apostles of the new technology, the telegraph was ‘the world’s system of electrical nerves’.
41
However, the crucial development from the point of view of imperial rule was the construction of durable undersea cables. Significantly, it was an imperial product – arubberlike substance from Malaya called gutta-percha – that solved the problem, allowing the first cross-Channel cable to be laid in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable to follow fifteen years later. When the Anglo-American Telegraph Company’s cable finally reached the American coast on 27 July 1866, having been successfully unrolled and dropped along the ocean floor by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s mighty
Great Eastern
, it was plainly the dawn of a new era. That the cable ran from Ireland to Newfoundland made it clear which power was most likely to dominate the age of the telegraph. That the telegraph link from India to Europe had already been constructed by the government of India several years earlier made it clear that the rulers of that power (for all their
laissez-faire
principles) were resolved that it should do so.
42
By 1880 there were altogether 97,568 miles of cable across the world’s oceans, linking Britain to India, Canada, Africa and Australia. Now a message could be relayed from Bombay to London at the cost of four shillings a word with the reasonable expectation that it would be seen the next day.
43
In the words of Charles Bright, one of the apostles of the new technology, the telegraph was ‘the world’s system of electrical nerves’.
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