The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (51 page)

The dominions

The dominions’ counterpart to this imperial attitude in Britain was the ‘Britannic nationalism’ of their English-speaking populations. Britannic nationalism was both more and less than an affirmation of empire loyalism. It asserted that Canada (or Australia or New Zealand) was (or must soon become) ‘nations’ – the highest stage of political and cultural development. Only as nations could the white dominions escape the dependent, parochial quarrelsomeness of their colonial origins. Only as nations could they offer their citizens security, opportunity and the promise of progress, cultural as well as material. But they must be ‘British nations’, because it was British (or British-derived) institutions, culture, ethnic origins and allegiance (to the British Crown) that held them together. It was being ‘British’ that endowed them with their ‘progressive’ qualities and their sense of a manifest, expansionist destiny. This was a far cry from colonial cringe. Nor was it always a recipe for imperial harmony. Britannic nationalism demanded partnership between Britain and the settler countries not central direction. It meant a dominion commitment to imperial defence but a dominion voice in imperial policy. It viewed empire as a cooperative and ‘Britishness’ as a common inheritance – not the private property of the ‘old country’.

There were good reasons why Britannic nationalism and its message of political community among the British nations should have been influential (though not uncontested) in the pre-war years. The upsurge in trade, migration and investment showed that British expansion, far from being over, was more vigorous than ever. Whatever metropolitan doubters might say, there was little dispute on the imperial frontier that the future belonged to ‘white men's countries’. So long, that was, as they took pains to defend their ‘inheritance’. It was significant that alarm in Britain over Germany's threat to the naval shield coincided with dominion fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and of Japanese hegemony in the Pacific. These common sources of fear and hope took on added colour in each dominion. In Canada, it was resentment at the French Canadians’ ‘disloyalty’ and their obstruction of the nation-making programme of the English Canadians. In Australia, the defence of ‘White Australia’ against an imaginary Asian invasion became the central purpose of the federation achieved in 1900 and the guarantee of its social cohesion. In New Zealand, racial purity as a ‘British’ country was part of the message of social reform in the Liberal era after 1890. Here, too, external defence and internal peace made a double case for Britannic sentiment. Relations between the dominions and Downing Street may have been tetchy. The scale of contribution to imperial defence was bound to be controversial – bitterly so in Canada. The cause was not so much doubt about the imperial association as division over how its burdens should be shared.

In South Africa, Britannic nationalism played a different part. The white ‘nation’ was predominantly Afrikaner not British. The grant of self-government to the former Boer republics had brought Afrikaner not British politicians to power. Union in 1910 gave them control over a unitary (not federal) dominion. To the ex-proconsul Lord Milner, conceding self-government before the British could form a majority among whites had been disastrous. ‘I absolutely decline’, he wrote in 1908, ‘to take any further account of South Africa in drawing up the balance sheet of empire.’
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But, he conceded, there was a saving grace. Because South Africa was ‘technically a British country’, British emigrants could exert their improving influence without losing their nationality. ‘It may be’, he concluded, ‘that it is the destiny of the Englishman in South Africa to turn the scale in South Africa to save the better native [i.e. Afrikaner] element from being submerged by the worse.’
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The leading ‘English’ politicians in South Africa adopted this view. Their Progressive (Unionist after 1910) party embraced the classic programme of Britannic nationalism: support for immigration, the ‘Imperial Navy’ and imperial preference in a ‘united…nation, forming an integral part of the Empire and cooperating harmoniously with Imperial authority’.
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But the party's leaders saw that, with an ‘English’ minority, opposition to the Afrikaners on purely racial lines was futile. Instead, their object must be to divide the ‘extreme racial backveld’ section from the ‘progressive’ elements under Botha and Smuts.
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It was vital to prevent the Free State politicians, Hertzog and Steyn, and their ‘cultural nationalist’ allies in the Cape's Afrikaner Bond, from dominating the government.

Botha was too shrewd to wear his heart on his sleeve. He was an adept of the ambiguous phrase. His regime, grumbled Milner's South African confidant Percy Fitzpatrick, was ‘dishonest and unclean’.
¹¹¹
But he made a reassuring figure. ‘Ties with the Mother Country must be strengthened’, he declared in 1910. He wanted a ‘South African nationality…able to take an honourable place in the ranks of sister states’.
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‘Botha really wants to do what is best for the British Empire’, wrote Walter Long, a senior British Conservative who met him at the Imperial Conference in 1911. It would be disastrous to alienate him.
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Even Milner agreed he was better than any alternative.
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Both urged in favour of Jameson's policy of conditional cooperation. Botha's own motives are hard to reconstruct. Fitzpatrick believed that both he and Smuts had realised that they could not rule through the ‘Dutch’ (i.e. Afrikaner) party alone.
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This analysis seems plausible. Certainly, they showed little inclination towards the cultural nationalism of their Cape and Free State allies, though they were wary of its ethnic appeal. They preferred to feel their way towards a more inclusive ‘South Africanism’ acceptable to ‘moderate’ Afrikaners and English – the old programme of Rhodes before 1895. So in the fluid aftermath of Union the local Britannic nationalism operated in low key. But its role was crucial nonetheless. For it served as a warning to Botha and Smuts that repudiation of the spirit of empire membership (never mind the letter of British sovereignty) would drive the English into all-out opposition and force them into the arms of those who wished to reverse the verdict of 1902.

India

Among the dominions, adhesion to the British system was a matter of sentiment and calculation. It was nourished by the feeling of ‘Britishness’, the benefits of ‘British connection’ and the promise of influence over British policy. Neither sentiment nor calculation had so much scope in India. Indians, after all, had almost no share of executive power in British-ruled (not princely) India. Their direct influence on imperial policy was negligible. And, as Indian nationalists regularly complained, India paid a tribute to Britain in money and men – burdens that London dared not impose on the dominions.

The British ‘Civilians’ (the name was gradually slipping out of use) were eager to cultivate Indian loyalty but uncertain how to do it. By 1900, the dominant strain in their policy was an appeal to ‘feudal’ attitudes they thought typically Indian: a sense of fealty; a respect for authority and the glamour of power. If India's natural leaders were princes and aristocrats, their instincts were conservative and royalist. Hence British rule should clothe itself in imperial purple and assume the dignity of the Mughal empire. The corollary was indifference approaching hostility towards those Indians who had responded most enthusiastically to the modernising, liberal and ‘scientific’ face of British rule: the ‘microscopic minority’ organised in the Congress. Yet, in reality, this group could not be ignored. The Civilians might have
liked
a feudal polity: they certainly
needed
a profitable colony. They had to foster the modern India they came to dislike. They had to tolerate the Indians who helped to make it work. And they had to accept that the microscopic minority had the political means to embarrass their rule and upset their faraway masters in London.

As we have seen, the Congress did this to some effect in the years after 1905. But, in a larger view, political conditions in the pre-war Raj did not favour a serious assault on India's subordinate place in the British world-system. The British had been able to stabilise their military spending, a prime grievance of nationalist politics. Good times in trade took the heat out of
swadeshi
agitation in Bengal. The princes were appeased with the promise of non-interference. Muslims were conciliated by separate electorates. The Congress moderates received their schedule of constitutional reform: disappointment was buried in the small print. Unappeased were the followers of Tilak whose ‘new party’ principles bore the stamp of ‘cultural nationalism’: the repudiation of British rule, not a plea to share in it. But Tilak was rejected by the moderate majority: without their protection he was crushed by the British.

For all their impatience with the Civilian Raj and its parsimonious concessions, the Congress leaders were boxed in. In theory, they could have widened their popular appeal. They could have taken the Tilak road. But this was the low road to power through the cultivation of ‘sub-national’ feeling in India's linguistic provinces: playing on religion, caste or ethnic prejudice. It was a road the Civilians were determined to block. But the Congress leaders rejected it anyway, favouring instead the ‘high’ road: entering on merit the ranks of the Civilians and widening the scope of representative politics. In practice, their ‘national’ programme needed the British to abdicate voluntarily, allowing the Congress, once installed in power, to ‘make a nation’ from above. The only principle on which this nation could be made was the ‘British’ principle: a people unified not by religion or language, but by institutions and allegiance. It was not surprising then that the Congress leaders defined their goal as a status equivalent to that of the white dominions; that they protested their loyalty and proclaimed their attachment to British values. Less confidently than their dominion counterparts, these Indian politicians also asserted a claim to be British, in ethos, attitude and allegiance if not by ‘race’. They felt all the more keenly the ‘racial’ antagonism their aspirations aroused. Hence perhaps the heartfelt plea of Surendranath Banerjea, long the most dynamic figure in Indian politics. ‘May I be permitted to make an appeal…to…the Government of India’, he told the Indian legislative council in 1913,

That they may so discharge their exalted duties that this sentiment may be deepened…that we may all feel and realize, no matter whether we are Englishmen or Scotchmen or Irishmen or Indians, that we are Britishers: fellow-citizens, participating in the privileges and also in the obligations of of a common Empire.
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This was scarcely the promise of unconditional obedience to London's wishes. It was more a demand to be treated with respect. But it also suggested how far the pre-war Congress was from contemplating a future outside the Empire. As with the dominions, it was the terms not the fact of membership it was determined to challenge.

The new empire in Africa

In the old empire, the central question of imperial politics was how far the dominion peoples and Indian elites would identify their interests with the British world-system. In the ‘new’ empire, the issue was more fundamental. The buffer zones annexed to defend the mid-Victorian
imperium
were a jigsaw legacy of partition. It was hard to imagine their future as loyal imperial communities. Colonial states had to be made before colonial societies could form inside them. In West Africa, British rule before the Scramble had been confined to coastal enclaves. In the partition era after 1884, each enclave acquired an enormous hinterland (the exception was Gambia). Sovereignty was one thing, authority another. Imposing British control on these vast interiors required considerable force: against the Hut Tax revolt in Sierra Leone; against the Ashanti in 1901; against the Yoruba states and Ibo peoples of Southern Nigeria and the Muslim emirates of the North. With the defeat of this inland resistance (Kano and Sokoto submitted to Lugard in 1902) came the moment of political decision.

It might have been expected that the British would carry upcountry the political system they had devised for the Coast. This was far from democratic. But it provided for legislative bodies with nominated African members;
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an English legal system with juries, a bar and a separate judiciary; and the beginnings of municipal government. A ‘creole’ elite spreading east from Freetown (the metropole of Creoledom) had grown up along the Coast, fervently conscious of its progressive, Christian and civilised credentials, and eager to share in the imperial advance.
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But it soon became clear that the British had other ideas.

The dominant factor was the need to impose a colonial
pax
as quickly as possible and at minimum cost. With few sources of revenue and heavy military outgoings, the British in the interior were eager to settle with the emirs and chiefs they had defeated or overawed. There was no time to replace them or to reconstruct their conquered polities in the image of the Coast. It was easier and cheaper to restore the old regimes on condition of loyalty, and exert British paramountcy directly through a cadre of ‘Residents’ backed up by the threat of force. This was the system devised for Northern Nigeria, variations of which were applied in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. It left no room for legislatures, municipalities or English law. When Northern and Southern Nigeria were unified in 1914 to relieve the British Treasury of the burden of the impecunious North (annual revenues £210,000 per annum) at the expense of the South (annual revenue £2 million),
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Lugard, the architect of ‘amalgamation’ was careful to restrict coastal institutions to the old colony of Lagos. He was determined to spread his favoured system of ‘indirect rule’ as widely as possible. ‘Fixing’ the population geographically and socially became the overriding principle of British policy. It meant shoring up, or even inventing, ‘traditional’ rulers, and excluding the ‘interference’ of creole lawyers and ‘speculators’
¹²⁰
from the interior. Not surprisingly, the creole elite became increasingly restive, protesting its loyalty but denouncing the drift towards racial exclusion and arbitrary rule.
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But its influence beyond the coastal towns was limited. The conservative bias of British over-rule was congenial to its ‘traditional’ allies. The cash-crop revolution, bringing rising incomes to an emergent peasantry, eased the strains of conquest. And, with the growth of its customs revenues, the colonial state in British West Africa could afford to govern and tax with a very light hand. Politically, then, the West African colonies were set to become not nations-in-the-making but so many tribal confederacies united only in subjection to their British overlord.
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