The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (18 page)

Thirdly, after 1880, the channels through which images and information from the colonial and semi-colonial world reached public attention in Britain became wider and deeper. Not surprisingly, the growing mass of external activity and connections required an ever more extensive network of domestic agencies – to mobilise its funds, recruit its personnel, process its information and trumpet its virtues. Settler governments began to compete more actively for capital and emigrants through British newspapers
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and their high commissions in London.
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From the late 1860s,
The Times
had carried a long monthly article surveying Australian affairs. A vast audience of would-be emigrants, investors, subscribers and recruits (not to mention their friends and relations) had to be addressed through pamphlets, prospectuses, brochures, religious literature and travel books (some deliberately designed like Trollope's to promote emigration). The demand for foreign news went up. A specialised press arose to meet (for example) the needs of ‘Anglo-India’ in Britain.
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A tidal wave of print formed the backwash of empire. In Britain more than anywhere else, the new culture of worldwide mobility coincided with the coming of mass literacy (after the Education Act of 1870) and the appearance (after 1884) of mass politics.

It was in fact no accident that the promoters, lobbies, pressure groups and vested interests of empire and the wider ‘British world’ should have flourished in late-Victorian Britain. Their insistence that Britain's future lay in a deepening engagement with overseas communities, especially with those already bound by political ties to the Mother Country, chimed with some of the strongest social and cultural tendencies of the age. Late-Victorian society was decisively reshaped by the economic revolution in its food supply. From the 1870s onwards, the volume of imported food, grain especially, rose with dramatic speed – by three times between 1872 and 1903.
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Farmers on cheap or ‘free’ land in North America could undercut the agrarian economies of the Old World. Without the burdens of rent, tax and intensive husbandry (necessary on ‘old’ soils), all they needed to compete was cheap bulk transport and an organised commerce. By the 1870s, an extensive rail network and a streamlined market (including a huge ‘futures’ market in Chicago
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) brought the output of the American Midwest straight to the consumers of Europe. With their vast Atlantic traffic, accessible ports, dense communications and large population, the British Isles were the obvious market for American food. Here, politics were as critical as economics. It was the decision, unique among Europe's larger states, to preserve free trade and the open economy which threw open the British market to unlimited competition from foreign foodstuffs.

The results were dramatic. As farm prices fell so did rents and wages. As agricultural depression set in through the 1880s, rural communities (especially in the ‘wheat countries’
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) shrivelled. The distinctiveness and diversity of rural life began to atrophy. A tide of migration flowed towards the towns and cities. As a more uniformly urban society took shape, it adopted new social and cultural habits. Processing industries for imported food catered for a ‘national’ market, setting the trend towards mass retailing and the use of advertising to mobilise consumers. The falling price of food pushed up the living standards of families in work and created larger disposable incomes for new consumer goods: including ‘exotic’ foodstuffs, leisure, sport and ‘cultural products’ like newspapers, books and magazines. The literate urban consumer, with new tastes and interests shaped by marketing and the printed word, was a key figure in the remaking of late-Victorian society.

These changes in society at large were mirrored in the reshaping of the elite. The drastic fall of rents cut away the income of the landed class, or of that portion mainly dependent on agricultural receipts. Wealth and power within the aristocracy shifted towards those whose agrarian incomes were buttressed with earnings from finance, commerce or public employment.
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The titled ‘guinea pig’ became a familiar figure on the boards of companies: by 1896, one-quarter of the peerage held directorships.
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The pressure for inter-marriage with wealthy but non-landed families became more acute. The marriage market, like the food market, was opened up to American imports. New creations in the peerage marked the arrival of a neo-aristocracy for whom landed property was less a source of income and authority than an item of (very) conspicuous consumption and a leisure amenity. The independent ‘country gentlemen’, the traditional ballast of the parliamentary system against its ‘faddists’, placemen and adventurers, shrank in numbers and influence. New lifestyles, new sources of income, new social and geographical horizons,
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and perhaps a new urgency in wealth creation in the speculative nineties were all signs that the upper class was being recreated behind the facade of aristocratic continuity.
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To many contemporaries the outward sign of this change was the galloping expansion of the financial world, the brutal display of new wealth and the pre-eminence of London – that ‘vortex of gigantic forces’ as H. G. Wells called it
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– as the centre of culture, fashion and commerce.

Late-Victorian society was thus far from being dragged willy-nilly behind an alien imperial juggernaut. Imperial-minded interests, lobbies and pressure groups took easy root in a soil well harrowed by the side-effects of international economic change. ‘Empire’ was acceptable to a broad swathe of opinion because it appealed both to those alarmed by the stresses in late-Victorian Britain and to those exhilarated by its new possibilities. The stresses were real. Rather than surrender free trade, the ark of their social covenant
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as well as the talisman of national wealth, the late Victorians tolerated the external pressures transmitted inwards by their open economy. They accepted the rising mobility of capital and labour. But there were deep misgivings. Social commentators warned against a ‘rootless’ and ‘volatile’ urban proletariat,
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and sighed with regret for a more stable and ‘rooted’ agrarian age.
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The evidence of urban poverty recorded by observers like Booth and Rowntree suggested that the uneven distribution of wealth was a serious threat to the social fabric. Nervousness about a growing ‘under-class’ was coupled with alarm at the rise of a new asocial plutocracy, fattening on the profits of financial speculation.
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Both raised fears about a decline of civic virtue in an era of incessant change. Both implied the need for a stronger state: to remedy social abuses and hold society together. Indeed, a new state did appear in late-Victorian Britain employing four times as many public servants by 1914 as it had in 1870.
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To all these various concerns, some version of ‘empire’ offered hope: emigration (including child emigration) as a specific against unemployment and urban degradation; a grand imperial monarchy as the focus of popular conservatism and loyalty to established institutions – the object of the million-member Primrose League, which remained ‘vague, amorphous and sentimental in its imperialism’;
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a grander imperial state whose need for strength abroad would be the counterpart of social reform at home; an imperialised civic virtue that would rise above the petty squabbles and shabby compromises of the party system.

Late-Victorian imperialism grew out of this set of interlocking alarms and assumptions. It was bolted together by the recognition that Britain could not escape the process that we might call ‘early globalisation’ – the rapid dismantling of the economic and cultural barriers between Europe and the rest of the world. Contemporary opinion regarded it as irresistible and ‘progressive’, but also risky. Unlike its late-twentieth-century counterpart, late-nineteenth-century globalisation accelerated at a time when colonialism was already entrenched in Afro-Asia and when half a dozen states had the means and the will to carve out new colonial zones in its wake. This ‘globalisation in an imperial setting’ prompted an ambivalent British reaction: enthusiasm for the spread of commerce, ‘civilisation’, religion and (sometimes) settlement; anxiety that a fiercer and fiercer imperial competition would leave Britain worsted or set off a war. The polemical exchanges between self-styled ‘imperialists’ and their more sceptical critics were sharpened by this sense of double jeopardy. Britain could not turn her back on the new international economy. Her commercial life demanded it; her living standard (increasingly) depended on it. But, at the same time, the gross extension of her vital interests in a boisterous world, and the growing dependence on foreign food, foreign trade and foreign income made it harder and harder (or so it seemed) to balance the demands of security and prosperity.

Virtually all shades of opinion agreed, however, that, in whatever form, Britain must choose the Open Sea and not the Closed Door. Autarkic retreat to the Home Islands was not an option. ‘Many men have dreamt that it would be a pleasant thing to close the capital account of empire and to add no further to its responsibilities’, Salisbury told an audience in Bradford in May 1895. ‘That is not the condition which fortune or the evolution of the world's course has assigned to the development of our prosperity’.
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Like it or not, Britain's place lay at the centre of the world, a position graphically emphasised on a conventional map. ‘As commerce has grown more world-wide’, remarked Chisholm's
Commercial Geography
(first published in 1889), ‘as the New World has become more populous and more wealthy, the advantage of situation has come to belong to the British Isles, which are nearly in the middle of the land-surface of the globe’.
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In the Columbian epoch, insisted Halford Mackinder, the foremost geographer of the day, ‘Britain gradually became the central, rather than the terminal, land of the world’.
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Centrality derived from Britain's double openness, towards Europe and towards the ‘ocean highways’; from her having an eastern and a western shore; and from the dual qualities of ‘insularity’ and ‘universality’.
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But most of all it sprang from the part played by sea communications in a global system of economics and politics. ‘The unity of the ocean’, said Mackinder, ‘is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world.’
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The significance of Britain's geographic position and the logic of naval supremacy were both ‘rediscovered’ in the 1880s and 1890s. Fear of French, Russian and (later) German competition coincided with a great widening of maritime horizons towards East Asia (as a commercial jackpot) and the Pacific (as a sea and cable route). Naval ‘scares’ became a recurrent feature, and rival experts fumed and quarrelled. But there was no mystery about the entrenchment of seapower in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination. As the barrier to invasion from Europe, the guarantor of trade routes and food supply and the guardian of possessions and spheres more far-flung than before, the Navy seemed the key to Britain's place and prosperity in the new and uncertain ‘globe-wide world’. ‘It is the Navy’, intoned a Liberal minister in 1894, ‘which delivers us…from the curse of militarism.’
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This was all the more so with the rise of other world-states. ‘In the presence of vast Powers, broad based on the resources of half-continents’, warned Mackinder in 1902, ‘Britain could not again become mistress of the seas. Much depends on the maintenance of a lead won under earlier conditions.’
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The third element in the late Victorians’ reinvention of empire was a new view of migration. It was no longer regarded simply as the providential evacuation of waste (as in the eighteenth century) nor as the convenient redistribution of labour and consumption recommended by Malthus and Edward Gibbon Wakefield. By the 1880s, emigration was an established social function in the English ‘heartland’ as much as the Celtic periphery.
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Its value was still seen in part as an overflow for unwanted labour and a safety valve for poverty and despair. Emigration had become respectable: an acceptable choice for single women;
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a means of redemption for abandoned children.
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As the reaction against the consequences of industrialisation gathered pace in Britain, it acquired a new virtue. Emigrant communities in the Empire became the healthy alternative to the urban decadence of industrial Britain. This view increasingly coloured attitudes towards the white dominions by the 1890s. It was combined with the hope that the emigrant British would reinforce the solidarity of the settler countries with imperial Britain, an idea whose influence was still strong fifty years later in the report of the Royal Commission on Population.
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Lastly, the late Victorians accepted, though with much less enthusiasm, that their dependent empire of rule was bound to grow larger and to last indefinitely. To the mid-Victorians, their Indian Raj had been a grand exception, justified by John Stuart Mill as a rescue from chaos. But a powerful strand of radical opinion had never been reconciled to this oriental despotism. That was why the extended occupation of Egypt had been so controversial in the 1880s: it seemed to entrench the Indian mode of empire with all its risks and vices. It threatened to drag Britain into another Raj, and more mutinies, in a little India that was dangerously exposed to foreign interference. But, if Egypt occasioned much liberal unease, it also became the battering ram against liberal arguments. A series of powerful imperialist tracts, of which the most influential was Milner's
England in Egypt
(1892), insisted that Egypt was too anarchic to be left to itself. To do so would be to invite international crisis and threaten British interests. Cromer's regime as consul-general in the ‘veiled protectorate’ offered proof that financial acumen could calm the diplomatic storm. The old Egyptian hands clinched their argument with a shrewd appeal to liberal prejudices. Their veiled authority, they insisted, was the best trustee of foreign interests, the true guardian of peasant Egypt and the real engine of material progress.