The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (28 page)

On its own, the navy question might have weakened Laurier but not unseated him. His second miscalculation was more dangerous. Historically, the Liberals were the party of free trade, who had opposed the protectionism of Macdonald's ‘national policy’. After the defeat of reciprocity in 1891, Laurier had given up the idea of regional free trade with the United States, adopting instead a tariff preference towards Britain in 1897 – a shrewd sop to freer trade and Britannic feeling. But there were powerful economic interests that still hankered after free entry into the American market for Canada's staple products. Above all, there was the West. By 1910, the three prairie provinces were growing at phenomenal speed as immigrants and capital flooded in to develop the wheat economy.
⁴⁸
Here was a ‘new’ Canada whose support would be decisive in the political struggle hitherto confined to the three sections of eastern Canada. The grievances of the prairie West against high land prices, high transport costs and grain prices lower than those just across the American border
⁴⁹
became focused in 1910 in a campaign against the tariff – as Laurier learnt at first hand during a prolonged tour of the region. When the American government offered mutual free entry in natural products, Laurier jumped at the chance to win over the West and the farming interests in Eastern Canada eager to sell to or export through the United States. It might offset the Western dislike of his naval programme.
⁵⁰
Being confined to natural products, reciprocity posed, apparently, no threat to the industrial interests in Eastern Canada sheltered by the national policy tariff. And, in an era of ‘good feelings’ between Britain and the United States, the danger of an imperialist backlash seemed slight. Opposition to reciprocity he dismissed contemptuously as ‘froth’.
⁵¹

Instead, the result was indifference in Quebec where the naval question was all
⁵²
but an explosion of rage in Ontario. The signal was given by Clifford Sifton, Laurier's sometime lieutenant in English Canada, and the proprietor of the
Manitoba Free Press
. Sifton denounced reciprocity as a threat to Canadian nationality.
⁵³
He was quickly followed by the ‘Toronto Eighteen’, the cream of Toronto's Liberal elite, the bankers, financiers and merchants at whose head stood Byron E. Walker and Zebulon Lash.
⁵⁴
Their defection began a full-scale revolt in Ontario against official Liberalism. Laurier's opponents made play with the claim that the limited reciprocity on offer would soon be extended, under American pressure, to complete free trade. It was a short step to argue that ‘British connection’ was in danger and Canada's own freedom at risk. ‘On the day British connection fails us’, roared the
Montreal Star
, ‘Canadian independence is lost.’
⁵⁵
Rejecting reciprocity meant ‘self-reliance and allegiance to the Empire’.
⁵⁶
Critics at the time were quick to see the campaign against reciprocity as naked self-interest masquerading as imperial loyalty.
⁵⁷
Indeed, it was true that, as Canada's industrial zone, Ontario depended heavily on the ‘national policy’. The Toronto plutocracy was bound to fear that freeing the West to trade south rather than east would endanger the new rail links being built from Toronto to the West and (consequentially) the prospects of the Canadian Bank of Commerce of which Walker was president. But it was also no coincidence that the Liberal defectors included those most ardently committed to the union of Ontario and the West as the heartland of a British Canada: Sifton, Walker and John Willison. To weaken prematurely the ties binding the prairies to Eastern Canada would shatter this dream. Reciprocity had been rejected in 1891 at a time when the West was unoccupied, Willison told a Toronto audience. Now it was filling up with Americans and a multitude of foreigners (i.e. non-British immigrants). ‘Even the very optimistic will admit that the national problem is very different from that which we faced even ten years ago…[I]t is a mighty problem to fuse these [new people] into a common citizenship.’
⁵⁸
When reciprocity was defeated, Sifton told the Ottawa
Citizen
: ‘the national development of Canada along British lines will go on.’
⁵⁹

The result was a disaster for Laurier. Instead of fighting a Conservative party divided over the navy, he fought it with a Liberal party divided over trade. In riding the tiger of Britannic sentiment on the navy question, he lost Quebec. By unintentionally confronting it over reciprocity, he lost Ontario. His place as premier was taken by Robert Borden and his careful policy by an eager commitment to help with Britain's naval ‘emergency’ and claim a voice in London's defence and foreign policy. To Laurier, it was obvious that he had been defeated by the insurgent force of Britannic sentiment. He told the South African premier, Louis Botha, that the defection in Quebec had been large ‘though not abnormal’. But, in Ontario, ‘it was not a defeat, but a landslide. In the latter Province the jingo spirit was the cause.’ He went on: ‘You are quite right in supposing that there will be a revival of the Jingo element.’
⁶⁰
Botha had sympathised, as well he might: ‘I very much fear that the result will be a revival of the jingo spirit in all parts of the British Empire.’
⁶¹

Between 1890 and 1914, the most forceful and articulate champions of Canadian nationhood were those who insisted that Canada's future lay as a British or ‘Britannic’ country. Only as a British country, they argued, could Canada forge a cohesive identity at home – around a common language, institutions and history. Only as a senior partner in the Britannic association (i.e. Empire) could Canada transcend its colonial status and begin to take responsibility for the defence of its national interests. This Britannic nationalism was less than the full-blown imperialism of those who favoured imperial federation;
⁶²
but much more than support for ‘British connection’. ‘British connection’ was politically anodyne. In French Canada, loyalty to the monarch and to British institutions as the guarantee of liberty was proverbial. Even Henri Bourassa, the scourge of British imperialism, proclaimed his loyalty to ‘British connection’. But, to the Britannic nationalists, if it meant no more than the sectional compromises invented by Macdonald and refined by Laurier, then it was a feeble substitute for a real nation-state. Their priority was uniting the three great English-speaking sections: ‘backward’ French Canada could stumble on behind, perhaps, in due course, to be annexed in spirit. It would, perhaps, be wrong to exaggerate the extent to which Canadian opinion was preoccupied with nation-building and the imperial tie, especially in an age of such rapid economic change. But the linked crisis over the navy question and reciprocity showed that Britannic nationalism was the strongest political sentiment in Canada. It was fanned by economic buoyancy and the sense of a tightening commercial, strategic and demographic bond with Britain. In 1911, with the Borden premiership, it seemed to hold the initiative. Its finest hour, and its greatest trial, were yet to come.

‘Britannic’ Australia

The Australian communities,
wrote Edward Shann in 1930
, festooned along a coastline of ten thousand miles are nowadays strangely uniform in social structure. In each port…you will find a group of importers’ warehouses, some big wool-stores, a railway terminus, a wharf-lumpers’ union and a number of public houses tied to breweries. If there is a capital-city in the near-background, it is inhabited largely by a civil service connected with Crown lands, public works and education. Its environs will boast some industries engaged on the simpler manufactures or on the repair and maintenance of the mechanism of land transport. Ships, if they can, seek cheaper repair elsewhere…Over the range is the scene of the peculiarly Australian work done by a scattered population of miners, farmers and station-hands, who turn out staple raw-products on a rough, grand scale with labour-saving machinery…

Brooding over the coastal capital and browbeating…the mercantile and professional classes…stand the federated trade unions. Their Trades Hall is the scene of a fluctuating contest between the capable leaders of three groups: (i) the shearers, miners and timber-workers of the bush, (ii) the town artisans, and (iii) the transport workers and public works employees. These contend for mastery…through the primaries or ‘selection-ballots’ that name the labour candidates for the local or national parliament…The farmers, with some aid from pastoralists and the middle class, are learning political organization from the workers, but are still clumsy and inarticulate. This social structure varies little with the minor staples that differences in local climate may add to the dominant wool and wheat. The Australian communities have set in these forms with a surprising uniformity. In the politics of each the drive comes mainly from a hard-eyed, hard-headed, hard-mouthed working democracy.
⁶³

Shann was describing (in prose reminiscent of Joseph Conrad) a society that had crystallised in the 1890s when Australia entered her imperial age. In the 1850s, the Australian colonies had been transformed economically by the gold rush, politically by self-government and socially by the end of convict transportation (the exception to all three was Western Australia). In the thirty years after 1860, they had expanded (at 5 per cent a year) in an atmosphere of boom.
⁶⁴
The population rose from one to three million, some 40 per cent of the increase by immigration. The number of sheep rocketed from 40 million in 1870 to 106 million twenty years later.
⁶⁵
Wheat farming sprang up in South Australia. Pastoralism and mining developed in the vast spaces of Queensland.
⁶⁶
Huge deposits of silver, lead and zinc were found at Broken Hill in New South Wales.
⁶⁷
An infant manufacturing economy emerged behind Victoria's tariffs, and Melbourne (as the local metropolis of gold) became the financial capital of the Australian colonies.
⁶⁸
British investment rushed in. Railway mileage tripled in the decade after 1870 to 4,000 miles and reached 10,000 miles in 1892.
⁶⁹
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, and the arrival of the submarine cable in 1872, Australia's long isolation seemed less forbidding. But Europe was still thirty days’ steaming away,
⁷⁰
and up to the 1890s most Australian trade was carried slowly but cheaply in sailing ships.
⁷¹

In fact, between 1860 and 1890, distance and democracy had combined to fashion a highly distinctive pattern of Australian development. Rapid commercial expansion might have been expected to favour the local concentration of wealth and power. But Australia's remoteness from Europe and its huge internal distances worked in the opposite direction. Trade and capital were not funnelled through a single gateway as happened in Canada but entered by a string of ports each with its own agricultural, pastoral and mineral hinterland and its own system of roads and railways. The high cost of transit from Europe cut immigration to a relative trickle (compared with the North American flood)
⁷²
and the high risk of railway construction in Australia's empty interior deterred the private capital that came forward in the Americas. As a result, the political economy of development fell largely under state control. The colonial governments alone had the revenue (from land sales) to meet its demands and bear its risks. Half of Australian borrowing abroad (that is, on London) was by public authorities rather than private enterprise.
⁷³
That might have meant less had colonial ministries been the servants of a mercantile elite. But, since the 1850s, all the eastern colonies save Tasmania had had manhood suffrage. There was little enthusiasm in these colonial democracies for the subsidy of new migrants whose arrival would drive down wages. Separate colonial electorates created a vested interest in separate colonial development, so that Australia's economy like its railways remained fragmented. The political influence concentrated in each colonial capital helped to ensure that public spending flowed disproportionately to boost its rail connections and port facilities, tightening its grip on a ‘private’ hinterland behind and discouraging inter-regional connections.
⁷⁴
Colonial politics revolved, predictably, not around issues of class, status or religion, but around more homely quarrels over ‘log-rolling’ – using political influence to roll public money towards particular persons, interests or localities. Factions not parties dominated the colonial parliaments – a pattern only partly mitigated by disputes between the ‘squatter’ interest with its vast sheep runs and aristocratic pretensions and those who favoured close settlement and small farms.
⁷⁵

Australian experience between 1860 and 1890 seemed to show that colonial autonomy could be successfully practised despite political fragmentation, heavy dependence on a narrow range of staple exports and a small population recruited almost exclusively from British migrants. Australia remained a geographical expression, although a sense of common origins, cultural and occupational similarities and a high degree of labour mobility between colonies encouraged literary depiction of a distinctive Australian ‘type’ or identity common to all. Australian unity remained a vague aspiration. Inter-colonial cooperation was chiefly visible in the common antipathy to Chinese immigration – the occasion of joint inter-colonial declarations in 1881 and 1887 – and in a gradually rising alarm at the arrival of German colonialism in the South Pacific in the same decade.