Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (55 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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Before the 1920s the British had been remarkably good at not ‘wembling’ – at taking their Empire seriously. That in itself was an important source of imperial strength. Many a heroic deed was done simply because it was what a white man in authority was expected to do. As an assistant superintendent in Burma in the 1920s, George Orwell found himself having to shoot a rogue elephant ‘solely to avoid looking a fool’:
I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of ‘natives’; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do.
 
Eric Blair, as he was known then, could scarcely have been better prepared for his task. He had been born in Bengal, the son of a civil servant in the Opium Department, and had been educated at Eton. Yet even he now found it hard to play the role of world policeman with a straight face.
Orwell was far from unique. All over the Empire, a generation was quietly cracking. Leonard Woolf, husband of the novelist Virginia Woolf, had joined the Ceylon civil service in 1904 and was sent to govern a thousand square miles up-country. He had resigned even before the war, convinced of ‘the absurdity of a people of one civilization and mode of life trying to impose its rule upon an entirely different civilization and mode of life’. The most an imperial administrator could hope to do, he concluded, was to
prevent people from killing one another or robbing one another, or burning down the camp, or getting cholera or plague or smallpox, and if one can manage to get one night’s sleep in three, one is fairly satisfied ... Out there ... things happen slowly, inexorably by fate, and you – you don’t do things, you watch with the three hundred millions.
 
As a young man, Francis Younghusband had crossed the Gobi Desert, witnessed the Jameson Raid and in 1904 led the first British expedition to the Dalai Lama’s court at Lhasa. By 1923, however, he had been converted to the idea of free love and had taken to referring to himself as Svabhava, ‘a follower of the Gleam’; four years later, he produced a book entitled
Life in the Stars: An Exposition of the View that on Some Planets of some Stars exist Beings higher than Ourselves, and on one a World-Leader, the Supreme Embodiment of the Eternal Spirit which animates the Whole
. Erskine Childers is remembered today for his scaremongering thriller
The Riddle of the Sands
. Yet this veteran of the Boer War ran guns from Germany to the Irish Volunteers in 1914, acted as secretary to the Irish delegation in the Treaty negotiations of 1921 and finally faced a firing squad for siding with the extreme Republicans in the Irish Civil War.
An especially strange case was that of Harry St John Bridger Philby. The son of a Ceylon coffee planter, Philby was another man with all the makings of a
Boys’ Own Paper
imperial hero: a King’s Scholar at Westminster, an outstanding First at Trinity, Cambridge, a place in the Indian Civil Service. Philby’s feats in the Middle East during and after the First World War were overshadowed only by those of Lawrence. Yet by obsessively backing the claims of Ibn Saud to supremacy in post-Ottoman Arabia, Philby went against the official line in Whitehall, which was to support Lawrence’s nominee King Husayn. In 1921 Philby resigned from government service on the point of being dismissed. By 1930 he had converted to Islam and was assiduously serving the interests of Ibn Saud, who had by now ousted Husayn. The culmination of Philby’s defection was his successful negotiation of the vital 1933 deal between the Saudis and Standard Oil, which ensured America’s later predominance over Britain in the Arab oil fields. His son, the Soviet spy Kim Philby, later recalled that under his father’s influence he was ‘a godless little anti-imperialist’ even before he reached his teens. Loss of faith in Empire often went hand in hand with loss of faith in God.
Even Lawrence himself, the hero of the Desert War, had a breakdown. Having been turned into a celebrity by the American impresario Lowell Thomas, whose film
With Allenby in Palestine
opened at Covent Garden in August 1919, Lawrence fled the limelight, first to All Souls and then, rather less obscurely, to an RAF base at Uxbridge, where he adopted the pseudonym Ross. Having been discharged from the air force, he enlisted in the Tank Corps under the name Shaw, in honour of his new and most unlikely mentor, the maverick playwright George Bernard Shaw. To avoid the stir caused by the publication of the abridged
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, Lawrence rejoined the RAF and was posted to Karachi, before retiring to Dorset. He was killed in a meaningless motorcycle accident in 1935.
If heroes like these had doubts, it was no wonder that those with little experience of the Empire had them too. E. M. Forster had travelled in India only briefly when he accepted the job of private secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas in 1921. The experience inspired
A Passage to India
(1924), perhaps the most influential literary indictment of the British in India, in which priggish young men say things like ‘We’re not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly’ and prim young ladies complain about ‘always facing the footlights’. Though his knowledge was acquired from mere tourism, Somerset Maugham delighted in the cracks in the façade of mastery, like the episode in ‘The Door of Opportunity’, in which a single act of cowardice up-country costs a man both his career and his wife. Here was the key question: ‘So you realize that ... you have covered the Government with ridicule ... [and] made yourself a laughing-stock in the whole colony[?]’ Another literary tourist, Evelyn Waugh, did something still more damaging to the British in Africa with his
Black Mischief
(1932): he made fun of them, from the unscrupulous adventurer Basil Seal to the Oxford-educated Emperor Seth. In the
Daily Express
(whose meddling in colonial affairs inspired Waugh’s later
Scoop
), J. B. Morton’s ‘Beachcomber’ column featured a cavalcade of even more ludicrous imperial characters: ‘Big White Carstairs’, the Resident of Jaboola and the M’babwa of M’Gonkawiwi. But perhaps nothing better captured the new and disreputable image of Empire than David Low’s cartoon character Colonel Blimp. The stereotype of a superannuated colonial colonel – fat, bald, irascible and irrelevant – Blimp personified all that the interwar generation despised about the Empire. Low later summed up his creation’s persona in revealing terms:
Blimp was no enthusiast for democracy. He was impatient with the common people and their complaints. His remedy to social unrest was less education, so that people could not read about slumps. An extreme isolationist, disliking foreigners (which included Jews, Irish, Scots, Welsh, and people from the Colonies and Dominions); [he was] a man of violence, approving war. He had no use for the League of Nations nor for international efforts to prevent wars. [But] in particular he objected to any economic reorganization of world resources involving changes in the status quo.
 
Imperceptibly, even the arch-imperialist was mutating into a Little Englander.
The curious thing about this collective attack of doubt was that it was the traditional imperial elite who seemed most susceptible to it. Popular views of the Empire remained positive, thanks not least to the new and soon all-pervasive mass medium of cinema. The Empire – and a large number of cinemas were themselves called ‘The Empire’ – was natural box office material. It had action; it had exotic locations; with a bit of imagination it could even have heterosexual romance too. It was not surprising that British filmmakers produced films on imperial subjects like
The Drum
(1938) and
The Four Feathers
(1939), a film so powerful that even the
New York Times
called it ‘an imperialist symphony’. More surprising was the enthusiasm for imperial themes that manifested itself in 1930s Hollywood, which in the space of just four years produced not only the classic
Lives of a Bengal Lancer
(1935) but also
Clive of India
(1935),
The Sun Never Sets
,
Gunga Din
and
Stanley and Livingstone
(all 1939). Yet somehow this was the Empire for low-brows. Just a year later, John Buchan could write gloomily: ‘To-day the word [Empire] is sadly tarnished ... [identified] with uglinesses like corrugated-iron roofs and raw townships, or, worse still, with callous racial arrogance ... Phrases which held a world of idealism and poetry have been spoilt by their use in bad verse and after-dinner perorations’.
The creeping crisis of confidence in Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over Germany in the First World War. The death toll for the British Isles alone was around three quarters of a million, one in sixteen of all adult males between the ages fifteen and fifty. The economic cost was harder to calculate. Writing in 1919, John Maynard Keynes looked back fondly on ‘that extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man ... which came to an end in August 1914’:
For ... the middle and upper classes ... life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages ...
 
Now, after the fall, it proved extremely difficult to restore the foundations of the pre-war era of globalization. Even before the war, the first steps had been taken to reduce the international freedom of movement of labour, but afterwards the restrictions proliferated and became tighter, all but choking off the flow of new migrants to the US by the 1930s. Pre-war, tariffs had been on the increase around the world, but they had mostly been designed to raise revenue; in the 1920s and 1930s the barriers against free trade were inspired by visions of autarky.
The biggest economic change of all wrought by the war was in the international capital market. Superficially, this returned to normal in the 1920s. The gold standard was generally restored and the wartime controls on capital movements were lifted. Britain resumed her role as the world’s banker, though now the United States was investing almost as much overseas.
102
But the great machine that had once worked so smoothly now juddered and stalled. One reason for this was the creation of huge new debts as a result of the war: not just the German reparations debt, but also the whole complex of debts the victorious Allies owed one another. Another was the failure of the American and French central banks to abide by the gold standard ‘rules of the game’ as they hoarded scarce gold in their reserves. The main problem, however, was that economic policy – once predicated on the classical liberal tenets that budgets should be balanced and banknotes convertible into gold – was now subject to the pressures of democratic politics. Investors could no longer be confident that already indebted governments would have the will to cut spending and put up taxes; nor could they be sure that, in the event of a gold outflow, interest rates would be raised to maintain convertibility, regardless of the domestic squeeze that implied.
Britain, the biggest single beneficiary of the first age of globalization, was unlikely to gain much from its end. In the 1920s the old and tested policies no longer seemed to work. Paying for the war had led to a tenfold increase in the national debt. Just paying the interest on that debt consumed close to half of total central government spending by the mid-1920s. The assumption that the budget should nevertheless be balanced – and ideally show a surplus – meant that public finance was dominated by transfers from income taxpayers to bondholders. The decision to return to the gold standard at the now over-valued 1914 exchange rate condemned Britain to more than a decade of deflationary policies. The increased power of the trade unions during and after the war not only intensified industrial strife – most visibly expressed in the General Strike of 1926 – but also meant that wage cuts lagged behind price cuts. Rising real wages led to unemployment: at the nadir of the Depression in January 1932 nearly three million people, close to a quarter of all insured workers, were out of work.

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