The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (3 page)

A history of the British world-system must take account of these facts. First, British
possessions
(coloured red on the map) may loom large in the story, but only as parts of the larger conglomerate. Secondly, while the political, economic and cultural history of different colonial (and semi-colonial) territories can be studied up to a point as a local affair, the links between them and other parts of the system exerted a critical if variable influence on their politics, economics and culture. The limits of British concession to Indian nationalism would be inexplicable without the fact of India's contribution to ‘imperial defence’, just as the goals of the pre-1914 Congress make little sense except as a claim to be treated on terms of equality with the ‘white dominions’ of the ‘British world’. Canada's extraordinary commitment of men in two world wars – the greatest traumas of its twentieth-century history – derived fundamentally from a sense of its shared identity as a ‘British nation’. The survival of Afrikanerdom in South Africa – the central fact of
its
twentieth-century history – was the prize for success in fighting the British to a virtual stalemate in 1899–1902, exploiting their fear (as Smuts had foreseen) that keeping their army too long on the veld would endanger too many vital interests elsewhere. Only the parochialism of most British historians has veiled the pervasive effects of Britain's external connections on its institutions and outlook: the huge migrant flows, the vast overseas wealth, the ‘imperial’ monarchy, the cultural confidence bred by the sense of enduring ‘centrality’ in a globalised world. Thirdly, ‘British connections’ were dynamic not static. Their strength and solidity at any particular time were powerfully (perhaps decisively) shaped by the play of economic and geopolitical forces at the global not just imperial level.

But how to write such a history? It plainly cannot be done as a series of parallel histories of regions and colonies, whose distinctive development and ultimate separation form the
Leitmotif
of their story. This is the ‘nationalist’ historiography in which ‘British connection’ is an alien force, and a barrier to nationhood with all that it promised. In ‘national’ histories, links forged by migrations and the flows of goods and ideas retreat to the margins, or form the static backdrop to the national ‘project’. But nor can it be done as a grandiose study in ‘imperial policy’, as if decisions taken in Whitehall, and the thinking behind them, were the dominant force in the fate of the system. Quite apart from the limits to imperial authority imposed by local conditions and external pressures, the ‘policy-makers’ rarely had a free rein to decide what British (or imperial) interests were, let alone how to preserve them. Least of all will it help to fall back upon a crude stereotyping of conflicting ‘imaginaries’, in which ‘British’ conceptions of mastery are contrasted with the values of their indigenous subjects. Although their widely different assumptions about race, gender and class shaped the British connection with almost every part of the world, there was no single pattern of ‘hegemonic’ assertion and local response. British opinions were not monolithic (since Britain was a complex and pluralistic society) and changed over time. The same could be said of almost every society into which British influence was inserted. Most important of all, discerning the impact of ‘imaginings’, ‘representations’ or ‘colonial knowledge’ requires something more than a sampling of texts: the careful reconstruction of economic and political contexts must be the starting point of enquiry.

Even a book as lengthy as this one could not hope to do justice to the multiple threads that bound different places to Britain and to other parts of its system. Instead, its main focus is upon what might be called ‘imperial politics’: the almost continual debate over the terms of association by which the various member states (including Britain itself) were bound to the British system. This was not simply the question of whether some form of independence was preferable – for most of the time, this was hardly practical politics. It was more often a matter of the limits of local autonomy; of how far British values (especially representative government) were being respected in practice (a key issue in India); of what place in the system colonial states should aspire to; how much influence they should wield over the general direction of policy (especially in matters of external defence); and whether the benefits and burdens of empire were being shared fairly between them. Politicians in states like Argentina or Egypt, without formal ties to the Empire, but with no means of escape from the British embrace, faced much the same issues. So in their own way did political leaders in Britain, which, together with India, met the main costs of imperial defence. Of course, this debate was not only conducted between organs of colonial and British opinion, or between colonial spokesmen and imperial officialdom. It divided parties and factions in each member territory where religion, ethnicity and regional interests, as well as private ambition, helped determine the outcome.

The theme of this book, then, is the continuous interplay of two sorts of tensions. The first was internal: the chronic disagreements over how the British system should work, usually expressed as political conflict over the connection with Britain or ‘British connection’. The second was external. The meaning of ‘British connection’ – its prestige and appeal, its perceived costs and benefits – was pulled this way and that by the ‘exogenous’ forces of the global environment. The unpredictable shifts in the shape of world politics; geopolitical change and the rise of new powers; boom, bubble and bust in the global economy; the unforeseen impact of ideological movements and their contagious appeal: their collective effect was to create an ‘external’ arena of extraordinary turbulence before 1900, and of volcano-like chaos in the twentieth century. On their rollercoaster ride through modern world history, the most powerful units of the British world system were at times flung together by centripetal attraction, at times sucked apart as if about to spin off into separate trajectories. We know of course that, in the great crisis of empire in 1940–2, the system all but broke up and never fully recovered. But, up until then, it had seemed axiomatic that, in one form or another, with more local freedom or less, the bond of empire would hold and the system endure.

What then were the system's most powerful components whose adhesion mattered most to its chance of survival? The most important by far was the imperial centre: the British Isles, yoked together for most of the period in a British ‘Union’ or by the ‘dominion’ relationship with Southern Ireland between 1921 and 1948. This composite ‘Britain’ (more often called ‘England’ after its dominant element) supplied much of the energy that the system demanded. Its huge financial resources, vast manufacturing output and enormous coal reserves (its so-called ‘Black Indies’ of a thousand coalfields)
⁵
made Britain a commercial and industrial titan, whose principal rivals, the United States and Germany, engaged much less in trade or traded mainly with Europe. Even by the late 1880s, Britain disposed of more (steam) horsepower per head than any other state, including the United States.
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Its large surplus of manpower (the product of birth-rate and prevailing social conditions) fuelled Britain's ‘demographic imperialism’, the human capacity to stock the settlement colonies and maintain their British complexion, despite a much larger migrant stream to the United States. Britain was also at all times a great power in Europe, and able to use its leverage there as part of the general defence of its interests worldwide. The great strategic bonus of this European role, until the inter-war years, was that the main source of its power in European politics, the world's largest deep-sea navy, could also be used to uphold the oceanic supremacy first grasped at Trafalgar in 1805. Britain also possessed a set of cultural assets whose value is harder to quantify but is of crucial importance. In their institutional form, these were the clubs and societies, associations and leagues, patrons, sponsors and churches (as well as government agencies) through whom information and knowledge of the world beyond Europe was collected, collated, digested and diffused to the public at large or to a more privileged few. Not the least of the attributes that Britain contributed to the overall strength of its system was as a great cultural entrepot.

In the world east of Suez, the indispensable element in British world power was India. Imperial India was more than the countries of modern ‘South Asia’. It was ‘Greater India’: a ‘sub-empire’ ruled from Calcutta (and Simla), extending from Aden to Burma, and with its own sphere of influence in the Persian Gulf, Southwest Iran, Afghanistan and (for some of the time) Tibet. ‘Greater India’ might even include coastal East Africa, whose metropole was Bombay until the late nineteenth century, and the ‘Straits Settlements’ of the Malayan peninsula, ruled from Calcutta into the late 1860s. The agrarian revenues of the Indian ‘heartland’ paid for a British-officered Indian army and after 1860 for a large British garrison, between a third and a half of Britain's regular army. Of the peace-time strength of the British and Indian armies – together almost the whole regular land force of the British world-system – the Indian taxpayer paid for nearly two-thirds. India's internal market, pegged open by rule, and its return on investment, underwritten by government, was a major contributor to British employment (India was the largest market for Britain's principal export) and to Britain's balance of payments. India's ports and railways (the largest network outside the West), its merchants, migrants and labourers, its British-owned banks and agency-houses, and its strategic position on the marine trunk road to East Asia, made up the engine of Anglo-Indian expansion, an enterprise under both British and Indian management. By the late nineteenth century, it was hard to imagine how this intricate fusion of British and Indian interests could be prised apart without disaster for both.

The third great component of the British world-system was not territorial. It might almost be thought of as a ‘virtual India’: a vast abstract realm of assets and interests. This was the hinterland of the City of London, a ‘commercial republic’ bound together by self-interest not rule, but containing within it a fast-growing ‘empire’ of British-owned property. The jewel in the crown of this empire of commerce was the deep-sea merchant marine, much of it serving non-British customers, but earning a huge income remitted to its owners at home. It was closely paralleled by British-owned railways: like the Great Indian Peninsular and the East Indian Railway, the Canadian Pacific Railway, the Great Southern Railway in Argentina, or the humbler ‘Simon Bolivar’ in Northern Venezuela. Banks and insurance companies, shipping agents and packers, and a mass of installations including utilities, harbour-works, telegraph companies (like the globe-spanning ‘Great Eastern’), plantations, mines, and concessions for oil, also helped to ensure that the profits Britain drew from the growth of world trade were second to none. By the 1890s, the income that was drawn from these overseas assets and the invisible income from shipping and services was equivalent to between 70 and 80 per cent of the earnings from Britain's domestic (merchandise) exports (in 1960, by contrast, Britain's net invisible income was much less than one-twentieth of the earnings from exports). They more than covered the payment gap between British exports and imports (the remotest of dreams in 1960) protected the value of sterling, and built up the ‘war-chest’ of overseas assets on which British governments drew deeply in both world wars.

The fourth component was the ‘awkward squad’ of self-governing settlement colonies, called ‘dominions’ after 1907, or, colloquially, ‘the white dominions’. It was a disparate group that comprised Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (after union in 1910), Newfoundland (whose bankruptcy brought rule by a British commission from 1933 until 1949, when it became a province of Canada), the Irish Free State (from 1921 until 1948 when it became a republic and left the Commonwealth) and Southern Rhodesia (which, after 1923, enjoyed dominion-like status, but without full self-government). To the French Canadian minority, the Afrikaner majority among South African whites, and, in the Irish Free State, loyalty to the ‘British connection’, was at best conditional, at worst non-existent. But, among the ethnic British majorities in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, and the large ‘English’ minority among South African whites, a sense of shared British identity (to be sharply distinguished from any subservience to Britain) was deeply ingrained. Dominion politicians declared over and over again that Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland were ‘British countries’, or ‘British nations’. To them and their constituents (since this was a popular not an elite point of view), the ‘Empire’ was not an alien overlord, but a joint enterprise in which they were, or claimed to be, partners. It was not so much England as the Empire for which they were fighting, said Milner in 1917.
⁷
Its interests were – or ought to be – theirs. The Whitehall officials who dealt with these ‘colonial’ leaders found them prickly and unyielding, and took their revenge in disparaging minutes. In fact, the dominions were a critical element in British world power. The remarkable loyalty of the ‘overseas British’ and their economic efficiency made them the most reliable overseas part of the whole British world-system, contributing a million men for military service in the First World War (as many as India), and more in the Second, as well as (from Canada especially) vital industrial and financial resources.

British world power, to put the matter more starkly, required the cooperation of each of these elements and the resources they offered – material and psychological. When they fell away, collapsed or seceded (as largely happened between 1940 and 1947), that world power soon ended. Three further points, however, need to be made. The first is that those long-favoured categories of ‘imperialism’ and ‘nationalism’ as the binary opposites of imperial history are of limited value in making sense of this story. In much of their overseas system, the British could make little use (even if they wanted to) of coercive methods or authoritarian rule. Among those British ‘imperialists’ for whom ‘closer union’ with the settlement colonies was the greatest priority, sharing London's command of foreign affairs and defence through a federal system was the favoured solution. Secondly, although ‘nationalist’ histories make much of resistance, and eagerly trace the genealogy of independence movements back to the earliest phases of colonial rule, most of those who were politically active in colonial societies were far more ambivalent. For some, foreign rule had been a political and cultural bonanza, displacing the power of groups they disliked more. Thus many Bengali Hindus felt liberated from the Muslim regime that Clive had defeated. For others, nationalist activity was primarily ‘tactical’ – to obtain specific concessions – not ‘strategic’ – to forge a separate sovereign state. Nor is this surprising. For the third point to make is that, until very late in the day (the early 1940s is the likeliest time), it seemed wisest to assume that British world power would remain exceptionally formidable, that escape from its orbit would be exceptionally difficult, and that, in a world of predatory powers, the imperial frying-pan was not the worst place to be. It was much more realistic to seek the widest autonomy that the British system had to offer than to strive for the grail of an unimaginable sovereignty. With the exception of Jawaharlal Nehru, who dreamt of a Marxist millennium, and of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian nationalist leadership of the 1920s and 1930s showed an indifference to the international scene that seems amazing in retrospect.