The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (31 page)

Here was an embryonic view of New Zealand as a distinct nationality, a new British nation in the South Pacific, with its own empire in miniature. But, at the end of the 1880s, New Zealand entered an economic and social crisis. The depression and financial panic felt in Australia crossed the Tasman Sea. Discontent among urban workers in the docks, railyards and workshops of the larger towns combined with farmers’ grievances. By 1890, it seemed, the frontier had closed. The unlimited supply of land for the farmer-settlers had run dry. The key resource that had allowed New Zealand to avoid the social tensions of the Old World was exhausted. Of course, the shortage was an optical illusion. Thousands of acres were ‘locked up’ in the possession of the pastoralist ‘gentry’ who had built up great sheep runs in the palmy days of mid-century. In 1891, a new generation of populist politicians came into power calling themselves Liberals and appealing to labour. They were led by John Ballance (premier, 1891–3) and his charismatic successor, ‘King’ Richard Seddon (premier, 1893–1906), a former pub-keeper from the South Island's west coast, a gaunt region of gold and coal mines. Seddon and his lieutenants, John McKenzie and William Pember Reeves, knew that, in a country where every (white) man had the vote, equal opportunity for all (white) men was the unwritten Magna Carta of New Zealand politics. Reeves swiftly introduced new laws to regulate wage-bargaining, factories and the conditions of labour.
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The spectre of the workhouse – that grim symbol of social failure in Victorian Britain – was lifted by the coming of old age pensions. The state took on wide new social responsibilities, later trumpeted by Reeves in his
State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand
(1902).
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Meanwhile, McKenzie pressed forward with ‘bursting up the great estates’: buying out the runholders (many of them eager to sell) and parcelling up the land for closer settlement – a programme soon reinforced by the vigorous purchase of Maori land in the North Island.
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The enlargement of the Liberal state, and its espousal of ‘state socialism’, has sometimes been seen as the founding of a new political tradition in New Zealand, coinciding with the moment when the local-born at last outnumbered the incomers from Britain.
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But, if this is true, it is only half the story. The real purpose of Liberal reform was not to build a socialist state but to protect New Zealand against the social warfare and class-conflict of the Old World. The Arcadian promise, New Zealand's gift to Old Britain, had to be kept. The prospect of social mobility within a broadly equal society had to be preserved
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if need be by state action. None of this meant that Seddon and his followers wanted to turn New Zealand into an isolated Pacific utopia, proudly separate from a decadent motherland. When Reeves opposed the return to Vogelism – large-scale borrowing for rural development – he was packed off to literary exile as agent-general in London.
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A new nationality
was
being forged in New Zealand but its roots did not lie in socialism or a self-conscious Pacific identity.
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The social crisis of the 1890s had gone deeper than material hardship. It evoked a widespread dissatisfaction with the rough and ready society of colonial New Zealand. The drive to modernise settler society fused with the struggle to preserve its egalitarian ethos. Both seemed to require a clean-out of its darker corners, a campaign for social (and racial) ‘hygiene’, and a new spirit of social conformity. From this grew a demand for temperance (women's suffrage in 1893 was a by-product of the abortive crusade for prohibition), improved education, better policing, more protection for children, young women and mothers, as well as the expulsion of the alien and unwanted.
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In ‘God's own country’,
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there was no place for sloth or larrikinism. The ugly face of the new emphasis on social uplift and discipline was ‘white New Zealand’: the exclusion of non-white migrants like the small Chinese minority who had come to the mining towns of the South Island.
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A new social ideal was in the making: the small independent yeoman farmer or ‘cow-cockie’. It was given reality by the technological revolution in New Zealand agriculture. By the mid-1890s, the technique of refrigeration, the spread of large freezing works and the growing demand for frozen meat and dairy produce in Britain was transforming the New Zealand economy. Mutton and butter matched wool as the premier export.
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The area under white occupation increased by 50 per cent between 1896 and 1911, and the volume of production by 60 per cent.
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The colonisation of New Zealand entered a second phase, lasting into the 1930s when settlers were still struggling to carve out dairy farms ‘up on the roof’ in the old Maori ‘King Country’ of central North Island.
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Crucially, this new agrarian bonanza assured the economic success of the Liberals’ drive to make New Zealand a land of small farmers. It consolidated the ‘rural myth’
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that belied the scale of New Zealand's port-cities, the growth of a unionised workforce, the industrial basis of agricultural production and the extreme dependence on faraway urban consumers.

The result was to bring a new depth and meaning to the old tenets of ‘Vogelism’. The familiar idea of New Zealand as an Arcadia recreating an idyll of rural England was energised and transformed by a vision of social renewal. New Zealand was not to be an archaic Britain but a distinct, progressive experiment in Britishness. New Zealanders reinvented themselves not as a colonial fragment but as a modern, rural British (or ‘Britannic’) nation in the South Pacific, which had successfully erased the economic inequalities and social divisions of the class-ridden motherland, partly by transplanting what was best and brightest from ‘Home’.
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The future lay not in gradual separation from the mother-country but in more and more vigorous reciprocity with her: the exchange of goods, men and ideas to press ahead with the full colonisation of the New Zealand landscape, still half-conquered and half-alien.
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This was the ideology of ‘dominionhood’, the shift from colonial to ‘dominion’ status consummated in 1907, and marked by local adoption of ‘the Dominion’ as the country's colloquial name. It reflected a new confidence that New Zealand had something positive to add to the grand project of making a ‘British world’. It was hardly surprising, then, that Seddon should also have revived the imperial and sub-imperial planks of Vogel's platform and imbued them with a blunt no-nonsense populism.

Indeed, since Vogel's time, the pace of diplomatic competition in the Pacific had quickened and with it the New Zealanders’ sense of vulnerability. The idea that New Zealand could escape involvement in the quarrels of the Old World – once favoured by Seddon's old rival, the South Island lawyer Robert Stout
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– now seemed fanciful in the age of
Weltpolitik
. The Anglo-German agreement on Samoa in 1899 was the final straw: clinching evidence of London's blindness to destiny – and New Zealand's interests.
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Seddon revived Vogel's scheme for a Polynesian dominion. His well-publicised Pacific tour in 1900 was meant to jog London's elbow and assert New Zealand's claim as the real trustee of the British interest in the South Pacific. Seddon's imperialism was the counterpart of his nationalism. It identified ‘Empire’ not with the territorial possessions of the imperial government but with the territorial interests of the overseas British. Sympathy for the Uitlanders in the Transvaal was its natural expression. Seddon had no doubts about the justice of the British cause in South Africa and regarded the outbreak of the Boer War there as a welcome sign that London could be made to defend its beleaguered subjects.
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It was a tendency he was eager to encourage by New Zealand participation. ‘The flag that floats over us’, he told the New Zealand parliament, ‘was expected to protect our kindred and countrymen who are in the Transvaal.’ It was ‘our duty as Englishmen’ to support the Uitlanders’ struggle. ‘We are a portion of the dominant family of the world’, he went on,

we are of the English-speaking race. Our kindred are scattered in dispersed parts of the globe, and wherever they are, no matter how far distant apart, there is a feeling of affection – that crimson tie, that bond of unity existing which time does not affect – and in the end will become indispensable.
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But New Zealanders took part not at London's command but as ‘partners’ in the Empire, ‘sharing the profits and knowing the advantages’.
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Seddon's rhetoric was at once a manifesto of ‘Britannic nationalism’ and a claim to full membership in the management committee of the British world-system. His great ally, John McKenzie, was an advocate of imperial federation. His successor as premier, Melbourne-born Sir Joseph Ward (premier, 1906–12), was to urge an ‘imperial parliament of defence’ at the Imperial Conference in 1911 – but to no avail.
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New Zealand's commitment to empire was thus neither cynical nor deferential, still less an aberration from the path to nationhood. Its vehemence and certainty reflected the uniquely close fit between the geopolitics of this white colonial settlement in the South Pacific and the peculiar trajectory of its economic development. The influence of both reached their height at the moment when the localised outlook of mid-Victorian New Zealand began to be reshaped by the rise of its late-Victorian ‘Britannic’ ideology of modernity, discipline and expansion. Unlike Canada or Australia, there was much less of a tradition of isolationism to challenge the ideal of the ‘imperial nation’.
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There was no ethnic interest to appease: the Maori had no quarrel with the imperial connection declared the MP Honi Heke in October 1899.
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Instead, more completely than in any other dominion, a new sense of nationhood fused with a new conception of empire as the vehicle of local safety and national ambition. But it was an empire that was expected to embody not just the interests of the United Kingdom, but a broader ‘Britannic’ ideal.

Building the British world

By the end of the nineteenth century, it was no longer a pipe-dream that the main settlement colonies, with Canada in the van, might form the heart of an overseas ‘British world’, a vast zone held together not by rule or coercion but by common political values, and cultural attraction as well as (in this case) by racial solidarity. Nor that a sense of shared ‘Britannic’ nationality, a collective insistence on a shared ‘Britishness’, provincial but equal (or even superior), would induce spontaneous identification with the fortunes of Britain, and even a willingness, in a real emergency, to spend blood and treasure in the common British cause. In the first forty years of the twentieth century, this ‘Britannic’ identity was tested and proved in the hardest of trials. Indeed, many contemporaries learned to take it for granted as a fact of political life. Dismissed, disparaged or simply ignored by the ‘nationalist’ historians of the ex-‘white dominions’ in the 1960s and after, its pervasive, foundational importance has been rediscovered in more recent years.
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For historians of the British Empire, its key contribution to the strength and survival of the British world-system can hardly be doubted.

There was a further dimension of the ‘Britannic experiment’ which we should not overlook. The settlement colonies, John Robert Seeley declared, were really ‘a vast English nation’ merely dispersed by distance.
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Seeley wrote in an age when the distinction between ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ was usually elided, when Scotsmen (or ‘Scotchmen’) sometimes called themselves ‘English’, and when Scotland itself could be referred to as ‘North Britain’. But Seeley knew perfectly well that the making of empire and what he called ‘Greater Britain’ were the handiwork of all the four nations that comprised the British ‘Union’ – to the cohesion of which he was passionately committed.
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Seeley seems to have assumed – what much recent scholarship has confirmed – that the opportunity, power and prestige brought by empire reinforced the appeal of a composite ‘British’ nationality in the Home Islands themselves. Welsh, Irish and Scots took pride in an empire they had helped to create, cherished their links with their overseas countrymen, and identified their ‘regional’ interests – merchant, migrant and missionary – with the empire's success.
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In the settlement colonies, distinct Scots and Irish identities were emphatically visible. Scots made up a significant proportion of emigrants to Nova Scotia and Upper Canada (Ontario). A ring of Scots families supplied most of the mercantile leadership in Canada's premier port-city, Montreal.
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The Presbyterian church, the ‘Caledonian’ societies and a fondness for curling forged strong social bonds. In Australia, too, Scots Presbyterians played a prominent part in the professions and business. Scots made up nearly a quarter of New Zealand's population by the end of the century.
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And, although the main tide of Irish migration had turned to the United States by the 1850s, an earlier stream of Protestant Irish from both North and South had decisively shaped Upper Canada's political life, not least through the influence of the Orange Lodge in the province.
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Catholics were more numerous in the Australian colonies where one-quarter of the population was of Irish descent in 1900,
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and in New Zealand where they made up three-quarters of the Irish total and some 13 per cent of the whole population.