The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (19 page)

Egypt was the proving ground for arguments originally formulated in post-Mutiny India to justify a Raj based not on consent but on force. To many Liberals, the 1880s were an intellectual watershed.
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The gloomy evidence from India that progress was advanced by authority more than by persuasion
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was driven home still more painfully by what seemed the failure of liberalism in Ireland against religious bigotry and backward-looking sectionalism. In the imperial sphere, this Indo-Irish disillusionment was the solvent of mid-Victorian liberal confidence. It paved the way for the rapprochement between liberalism and the authoritarian tradition of colonial rule brilliantly evoked by Milner. But it was not the only factor at work. The rapidity of global partition after 1880 served notice that under what a later generation would call ‘the strenuous conditions of the modern world’ there was little room for states that had failed the test of ‘social efficiency’.
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These ‘dying nations’ were a danger to themselves, a helpless prey to European predators and a source of friction between the emerging ‘world states’. They could not be left in festering decay. Nor, without affronting the tenets of free trade, could they be allowed to preserve their seclusion, closing off their resources to outside enterprise.
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The real question was not whether some form of external supervision was needed but the terms on which it should be imposed. In the British case, the prominent missionary and humanitarian lobby, the commercial allies of the ‘open economy’ and the powerful administrative elite associated particularly with India created a large potential constituency for a ‘new imperialism’ along these lines. Traces of evangelicalism, free trade, Ireland and India were fused in a new doctrine of administrative trusteeship – the ‘imperial idea’ whose clash with opposing democratic ideals imparted, said Mackinder, ‘a singular richness and resource to the modern British nation’.
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These were the overlapping, half-contradictory versions of empire that were by 1900 deeply embedded in Britain's political culture. Each had its stage army of supporters. Each was, at least minimally, compatible with the others. Collectively, they represented an overwhelming coalition committed to the British world-system. They explain why ‘empire’ was so protean a concept in late-Victorian Britain, and why the meaning of ‘imperialism’ was so elusive. But the diversity of interests, opinions and language mobilised behind ‘empire’ also explains why no single imperial ideology emerged and why the politics of empire in Britain often appeared more divisive than it really was.

Towards 1900

‘I quite agree with you’, wrote Lord Milner to Cecil Rhodes in August 1898, ‘that there is an enormous change in British opinion with regard to schemes…involving risk and expenditure in Imperial expansion, during the last few years. Things have been going very fast indeed – in the right direction.’
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Milner was writing on the eve of the conquest of the Sudan, at the height of Chamberlain's aggressive partition diplomacy in West Africa, and with his own struggle with Kruger very much in mind. The ‘forward policy’, reviled by the Gladstonians in 1880, had become habitual. The British system, hitherto content to leave its interests in large areas of the world under loose, if not negligible, supervision, had become formalised. With the coming of world politics, the British had played a central role in the partition of the globe. They had taken the largest slice of the territorial share-out – and were soon to have more.

This great expansion had not occurred because British leaders subscribed to new theories of economic imperialism nor because they thought that their electorate would be appeased by circuses abroad. Nor had it arisen, for the most part, from any deep-laid strategic design. It cannot be explained merely as a defensive reaction against the proactive imperialism of rival powers. But it was not random. The pattern of annexation and occupation closely reflected the distribution of existing commercial and strategic interests. The crucial variables that determined the scale of British intervention were usually the leverage those interests could exert at home, the agency they could command ‘on the spot’, and the diplomatic risk involved in the assertion of a territorial claim. With so many springboards of expansion around the world in place before 1880, it was hardly surprising that the late Victorians should have responded to the new geopolitics with an octopus-like ubiquity.

Yet even this can hardly explain the relative ease with which the British had piled up territorial gains in Afro-Asia by 1899. Here, paradoxically, they had benefited from the very circumstance that had seemed to threaten their older, looser world system. The imperialism of their European rivals may have been eager, but it was not single-minded. The continental great powers regarded the balance of power in Europe, and the
status quo
it guaranteed, as the magnetic pole of their diplomacy. Their outlook was conservative. None of them was prepared to risk its security or status in Europe for the sake of a foreign adventure. France had shrunk from confrontation over Egypt in 1884 (mistrusting German support) and accepted humiliation over Fashoda in 1898. Russian policy towards Turkey, Persia and China was far more cautious than British alarmists allowed. Germany dreaded the realignment implicit in an Anglo-French entente: Germany was happy to see the British in Cairo, noted the Belgian Foreign Office in 1898, because it drove a wedge between Britain and France.
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Revealingly, no two
European
powers went to war over a colonial issue between 1880 and 1914. For similar reasons, the continental powers found it difficult to combine against the ubiquitous British despite widespread European resentment against them. Where partition had been stalled by great power disagreements, the unexpected tenacity of the intended victim, or the intervention of a third party (Japan's role in East Asia), Britain's strategic (in the Middle East) and commercial (in China) interests had been the principal beneficiary.

Even where partition had been imposed, in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, its impact upon the British system had been much less severe than the Gladstonians had feared. Egypt had been a huge strategic burden. But the conquest and rule of tropical Africa had been astonishingly cheap. For all the colonial powers in Africa, an agreed partition was the means to ending local rivalry, and reducing the military and administrative costs of faraway colonialism to the minimum. The settling of claims allowed their paper empires to be lightly governed and lightly guarded: internal ‘pacification’ of the indigenous, not external, defence against each other, was the prime expense. The British, whose acquisitions weighed most heavily (in population if not acreage), gained most from this consensual colonialism. Thus far it had allowed them to absorb a vast new territorial empire without suffering any drastic imbalance in their world-system or risking its stability. Between the 1880s and the century's end that system turned out to be more resilient than contemporaries had sometimes feared and more successful than historians have usually allowed. By design and good fortune, but often by virtue of their prior claims on the spot, the British had been able to shield their most valuable interests against the effects of geopolitical change. They had also been able (as we will see in the next chapter) to turn the new world economy to their commercial advantage. But none of this would have been possible without a comparable process of change in Britain itself.

The real imperial issue in late-Victorian politics was thus not whether empire was desirable, nor even whether it should be defended. On both questions, a broad consensus emerged. Where opinion, and sometimes parties, divided was over how these objects should be secured and, more to the point, what extra burdens (if any) should be loaded onto Britain. What claims should the enterprise of building and entrenching a British world-system be allowed to make upon a complex industrial society with its own domestic priorities, its social and cultural divisions, and its liberal tradition? As we have seen, much of the intensity with which imperial questions were debated by the political elite after 1880 arose from its anxiety about the remaking of the political kingdom in the British Isles. The new mass electorate (after 1884), the revival of the Irish Question and the new ‘social politics’ of the ‘great depression’ together transformed the political landscape. Viewing their overseas commitments through the prism of rising domestic uncertainty, it was inevitable that ministers and officials should often dislike the expansionist moves into which they were forced by outside pressures or the logic of partition diplomacy.

In fact the political mood had proved surprisingly benign. After the Third Reform Act, which doubled the United Kingdom electorate and enfranchised some 60 per cent of adult males over twenty-one,
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the radical impetus so widely anticipated seemed to wither away. The political Armageddon for which Salisbury had planned did not materialise. As Prime Minister for much of the period between 1886 and 1902 (there was Liberal ministry in 1892–5), Salisbury had envisaged a Fabian defence of the Union, empire and aristocracy. Instead, the more conservative mood in Mainland Britain was sharpened by sectarian feeling in areas like South Lancashire where Catholic Irish immigration had been heavy. The shift towards single member seats in the Third Reform Act allowed the Conservatives to capitalize on ‘Villa Toryism’: the middle and lower middle class suburban property-owners on whose fears the party played skilfully.
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The fall of Parnell and his death in 1891 seemed to take much of the steam out of the Irish nationalist challenge, so that defending the Union came to seem practicable as well as necessary: the ideal combination from Salisbury's point of view. The mood of social crisis declined. Strong public finances underwrote heavier spending on defence. The Liberal cabinet of 1892–5 agreed to spend more on the Navy (a decision that led to Gladstone's retirement), stand firm in Egypt and annex Uganda. When Salisbury returned to power in 1895 after the Liberal interlude, a new political era opened up. The Unionist coalition, with over four hundred seats, overawed its divided Liberal opponents. The Union was safe (for the moment). Salisbury could pursue his cautious diplomacy of imperial coexistence and risk the small wars and confrontations that rose in the Sudan, West Africa, Siam and Venezuela with domestic equanimity. Here at last was the climate in which imperial enterprise might hope for a fair wind from opinion at home. Now was the moment to reconstruct British politics and erase the obsolete conflict between domestic reform and imperial defence. This was the aim behind Rosebery's efforts to rebuild Liberalism after Gladstone.
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It was the target of Chamberlain's cautious moves towards protection and imperial federation after he had entered Salisbury's cabinet in 1895. Indeed, to some of Chamberlain's more ardent supporters, the time was ripe to push aside the ‘old gang’ – the timid aristocratic leadership of Unionism – in favour of a dynamic chief who would grasp the challenge of mass politics in the coming age of competing ‘world-states’.

But before the South African War it was hard to proclaim that the British position was in imminent danger. The British had been the great beneficiaries of the imperialism of coexistence to which the great powers subscribed tacitly. In the aftermath of Fashoda, the French and Russian foreign ministers pondered gloomily how British assertiveness in the colonial sphere could be restrained.
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Far from falling apart, the British world-system was being drawn together more closely. Britain's imperial functions – as strategic guardian, colonial ruler, demographic reservoir, market-place, merchant and lender – were more deeply engrained in public attitudes, social behaviour and economic choice: the latter was evident in the rising volume of foreign investment and company formation. The settler countries had become larger and more important markets for British goods and capital. Through migration, trade and the exchange of ideas, they made closer links with Britain, the metropole of their culture as well as their commerce. In India, the rapid growth of an export economy made the Raj a better market for British goods and a huge commercial debtor whose earnings elsewhere in the world, when remitted to London, plugged a vital gap in Britain's balance of payments. In trade, currency and military organisation, India was being adapted step by step to an imperial role, a future envisaged (if with different emphases) by both civilian rulers and Congress nationalists.
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In the commercial empire, where British property and investment was not protected by sovereignty, the scales were being tipped more heavily against autarky or default. The widening use of gold as the standard of currency value reinforced the trade-promoting effects of the multilateral payments system pivoted on London. The management of overseas assets – once fraught with numerous perils – became safer and more straightforward in the age of swift telegraphic connections. The City could control its commercial empire with a speed and precision undreamt of by its mid-Victorian financiers.

Thus in an age conventionally seen as the zenith of predatory imperialisms, the British seem well placed to prosper. The Diamond Jubilee of 1897 expressed patriotic self-confidence. The Spithead review of the Fleet seemed proof that it was justified. But, there was, nonetheless, an undertow of anxiety. Global competition brought an endless round of commitments and confrontations whose risk and scale were hard to measure. Britain was a power without allies, and often without friends. A ‘scrimmage at a border station’ might unleash a war and threaten invasion. The danger of arrogance and complacency in the Jubilee year was the theme of Kipling's ‘Recessional’, published in
The Times
. Unless it paid heed, Britain would follow past empires into collapse and oblivion: