The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (10 page)

In all of these cases, settler control of the colonial state was a critical factor in local success. It was conceded by London in the 1840s (in British North America) and 1850s (in Australia and New Zealand) with almost complete local autonomy, as ‘responsible government’. It was the colonial state that decided what land could be granted, at what price it was sold, and where and from whom it should be bought for resale. The colonial state's revenues could be used to subsidise railways, or pay for their building. The colonial state had the power (conceded by London after 1859) to protect local enterprise by tariffs against competition from Britain. In South Africa, the local equation was radically different. Here, the (British) settler bridgehead was feeble. As in New Zealand, it faced a tough local opponent: the African peoples along the Eastern Cape frontier. But the injection of migrants and capital that made New Zealand dynamic (with a white population of 300,000 after a mere thirty years of colonisation) was lacking at the Cape. A desultory trade in wool was the best it could manage. Regarding the colony as a financial black hole after the costly frontier wars of the 1840s, London pulled back. For the next thirty years, no proconsul in Cape Town had the military means to command the northern interior, and there was no local entrepreneur with strong British connections to create a business empire on the necessary scale. Instead, the initiative passed to the Afrikaner frontiersmen, the trekkers or Boers. It was they, not the British colonial state, who seized the interior's resources of labour and land to create their trekker republics, not so much states as loose federations of their paramilitary bands, the notorious commandos.
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So great was the Boers’ distaste for fixed boundaries that they treated map-makers as spies.
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Only where sea-power gave the British a foothold could they make their influence felt. They annexed Port Natal. When the trekkers (who had arrived before this imperial riposte) departed in dudgeon for the highveld interior, a precarious beachhead of traders and farmers grew up under the eye of the Zulu kingdom across the Tugela. This was Natal, the puny and troublesome offspring of the original Cape Colony.

But no settler bridgehead was a rival to India in power and importance in the mid-nineteenth century. Here a unique set of circumstances had permitted the growth of an exceptional Anglo-Oriental imperialism. More completely than anywhere else, the British in India had been able to take rapid command of local resources and turn them to their use. It had been the East India Company's victory at Plassey over the Bengal nawab, Siraj ud-Daulah, that had laid the foundation. Within eight years of Plassey, the Company had assumed the
diwan
, the right conferred by the Mughal ruler in Delhi to collect the land revenue of the subah of Bengal. In Bengal and the Carnatic (and wherever its rule was imposed), the Company inherited a long-established revenue system whose yield could be diverted to fill its deep pockets. It could also exploit India's commercial economy, for India had been, in textiles at least, the workshop of the world in the eighteenth century. Indian bankers advanced some of the credit on which the Company's campaigns against other Indian rulers had depended.
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India's exports of opium, a Company monopoly, came to supply nearly one-fifth of its income.
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India could also supply, through its market of military labour,
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a wellspring of manpower not already attached to clan or feudal allegiance. The Company state could build up an army of nearly a quarter of a million men. It could also afford to hire from the Crown (at a cost of more than £1 million a year) between twenty and thirty thousand British troops to stiffen its sepoys and act as a check upon unrest in its army.

With a revenue of around £30 million a year by the early 1850s (perhaps half that of Britain), the Indian government had a freedom of action no other colony matched. London constantly frowned on its expansionist tendencies, fearing disaster and financial collapse. One viceroy was sacked for defying its veto but usually Calcutta had its way in the end and the area ruled by the Company Raj was extended relentlessly. What drove the Company forward was partly the fear that its brittle regime could not take the strain of a turbulent zone on its external frontier or in the autonomous states that divided the tracts of Company rule.
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To less sympathetic observers, the real cause could be found in the unreformed nature of the Company state. Denouncing the war against Burma in 1852, Lord Ellenborough, a former governor-general himself, ascribed the Indian government's aggression to the influence of ‘certain…British merchants…in concert and connexion with the press at Calcutta, the movements of which I have always viewed with anxiety and distrust [because] the desire to push forward trade and make a money speculation is the feeling which actuates the press at Calcutta’.
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But they were not the only culprits, since the pressure for war came from ‘a large part of the civil and the whole of the military service’.
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Jobs, plunder and perquisites – not a sense of imperial purpose – formed the compass they steered by. Indeed, it was not hard to see the Company's ‘servants’ in India as a selfish and self-appointed oligarchy whose ranks were replenished increasingly from the sons of old Company men.
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‘We require some change which shall enable Englishmen to enter the service of the Indian government by other channels than one small college’, argued
The Times
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– a reference to Haileybury, the Company's training school. Nor was this the only complaint. Manchester cotton merchants, hungry for markets, lambasted the Company's miserly spending on railways and roads: between 1834 and 1848, it had spent less than one half per cent of its revenues on improvements like this.
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The Company's local mercantile allies, who often acted as agents in its officials’ private affairs, were suspected of trying to keep out the competition from home – with the Company's help. No British exchange bank was allowed to start up in India until 1851, and then by mischance.
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It was thus hardly surprising that, when the Company's failings were put on brutal display at the time of the Mutiny in 1857, it found few friends in Britain. The Mutiny had been a stunning shock to the Company: its intelligence system had failed almost completely.
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The British were lucky that the Mutiny (or ‘Great Rebellion’) was not universal. Instead, it was largely confined to the Upper Ganges valley, although its effects spread out into the lightly ruled tracts of upland Central India. The main centres of revolt were in Delhi, where the Mughal emperor had been the Company's pensioner, and in Awadh (Oudh), whose Muslim nawab had been brusquely displaced by the British in the previous year. The Mutiny released some of the bitter resentments that the headlong expansion of Company power had built up over decades. The Company's apparent alliance with the Christian missions, and its disparaging treatment of the Mughal ruler and court, alarmed and enraged North Indian Muslim divines. Fear that the Company meant to treat other princely states as it had treated Awadh pushed the Nana Sahib, a Maratha prince, into open revolt. Agrarian unrest was fed by the hardship of once-prosperous peasant communities caught between the exactions of landlords and the loss of army employment, as the British revised their zones of recruitment. But it was the sepoy mutiny of May 1857, first at Meerut forty miles from Delhi, that set off the explosion. It revealed – or seemed to – that the Company's power could be easily broken.
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But the British hung on and assembled an army in the newly conquered Punjab. They had recaptured Delhi by the end of the year. A large British army, rushed out from Europe, smashed its way up the Ganges, exacting savage revenge for the murder of British women and children and imposing what was seen (by many British observers) as a white reign of terror. Although resistance smouldered on for more than a year, the real back of the revolt was broken in months, largely because there was little to hold its disparate elements together. The Mutiny had been, nonetheless, an extraordinary crisis. It demolished at a blow much of the mid-Victorians’ complacency and challenged their self-confidence. As soon as the worst was over, the Company was called to account.

The reaction was penal. The Company state was abolished by Parliament with hardly a whimper. Its enormous army was cut down by half. Under the new regime, civilian values were meant to prevail. Railway construction to open up India to Lancashire's wares became an urgent priority. The result was a paradox. In theory, the great garrison state that the Company's servants had made would now be the springboard for British expansion across southern Asia. India's wealth (in money and men) would be pledged more completely to the imperial cause. And so it was – up to a point. But there was a price to be paid. When the Company's army was shown to resemble not so much the sword of Achilles as his vulnerable heel, the effect on the disposition of Britain's own military manpower was bound to be large. ‘The Government of India’, a pre-Mutiny Viceroy had warned, ‘unlike the Colonies of the Crown, has no element of national strength on which it can fall back in a country where the entire English community is but a handful of scattered strangers’.
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Since creating a large British ‘colony’ in India was out of the question, the gap had to be filled by a military force. From the Mutiny onwards, it became axiomatic that the number of British soldiers in India must never be less than half the strength of the Indian army: even with a reduced sepoy army, that meant a far larger contingent than in pre-Mutiny days. The reward (for Britain's taxpayers) was great; the strain on the army unremitting. In the emergent world-system, India's place had been set – as Britain's great ‘barrack in an Eastern sea’.

Britain's empire of trade, like its settlement and Indian empires, also depended upon the success of expatriate Britons – in digging themselves into the local economy, enlisting local support, and enlarging the scale of export production and the consumption of imports. As we have seen, British merchants and their ‘houses’ were spread around the globe by the 1840s and were well placed to exploit the great expansion of trade that set in after 1850. But the extent to which they held the commercial initiative varied considerably. In Brazil, several large British firms held a commanding position in the coffee and sugar trades, and Brazil remained Britain's best Latin American customer until the end of the century. But the growth of British commercial influence really set in only after the rise of the Sao Paulo ‘coffee economy’ in the late 1860s, and the building of the Santos–Sao Paulo railway in 1868.
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In Argentina, where British merchants had been on the scene early, their influence, and that of their
porteno
allies, had been checked by the long reign of the
caudillo
Rosas (1828–52). The British naval blockade in 1846–8 had made matters worse, and it was an internal shift within the Argentine's politics that really opened the way for commercial expansion after mid-century. Likewise in Peru, where the mercantile house of Anthony Gibb pioneered the export of guano (the dung of sea-birds, an agricultural fertiliser), British hopes of freer trade were forced to hold fire until the dominant Peruvian faction had discovered the fiscal appeal of international commerce.
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In the Levant and Middle East, the free trade agreement that Palmerston had exacted in 1838 opened the Ottoman Empire to British merchants and encouraged the formation of Anglo-Greek firms, like the Rallis or Rodocanachis.
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But it was the collapse of Egypt's attempt to be a textile producer, its switch to becoming a vast cotton plantation, and the ‘cotton famine’ that arose during the Civil War in America, that gave British merchants their niche in the trade of Alexandria, Egypt's main port-city. In Southeast Asia, British control of Singapore after 1819, and its free-port status, made it the base from which British merchants could seek cargoes and customers across a wide maritime region. Opium and guns were their early stock-in trade.
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Improved sailing ships (especially the clipper) gave them an advantage over junk-using Chinese, and the Navy's onslaught on Malay
orang laut
(sea-people) as a pirate community removed some of their local competitors. But it was still merchant entrepreneurs from South China who controlled local trade and the production, from which expatriate interests were largely excluded.
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And then there was China.

In China, the British had tried using direct military force to drive their trade into a huge commercial economy with all the allure of a modern eldorado. Two treaties imposed at the bayonet's point gave British merchants (and other Westerners) a privileged position at numerous ports of entry (the number reached ninety-two by 1914) on China's coasts and rivers – the so-called ‘treaty-ports’. In Shanghai, which commanded the immense Yangtse basin, the ‘land regulations’ of 1845 set aside a zone where foreign residents could buy or lease property, forming a settlement with its own municipal council. British merchants and others were free to import goods at a modest tariff of 5 per cent by value, and were exempt from interference by Chinese officials. Their rights were protected by a small army of consuls – perhaps forty in all – whose influence was backed by the threat of a gunboat's arrival in case of a quarrel. From 1854, when its pressing need of a revenue to counter the Taiping insurgency secured Peking's approval, a Chinese ‘Imperial Maritime Customs Service’ was set up with a European staff to regulate the collection of tariffs and duties. Under these conditions, British merchants could purchase the teas and silks in demand in the West, and exchange them for cotton goods and opium, the largest import, whose traffic was formally legalised in 1858.
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But, although a number of British firms, including Jardine Matheson, Dent's and Butterfield and Swire, set up on the coast, it was far from clear by the mid-1870s how much China could promise. The inland trade remained in the hands of Chinese merchants, sometimes acting as
compradors
for the treaty-port British. Indeed, by the late 1860s, the consuls were reporting that British merchants were being driven out of the inland trade altogether, and that many treaty-ports were redundant.
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Inland residence (i.e. away from the treaty-ports) was the merchants’ panacea, but the consuls rejected this as a vast extension of their administrative burdens and practically unenforceable, a view strongly endorsed in London.
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Behind the barriers of its language and its complex currency system, and without Western-style banks or commercial property law, China was ‘singularly successful at checking foreign economic penetration’, remarks a modern authority.
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