The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (53 page)

From these rigidities sprang the crisis of 1910–14. Its origins, and Redmond's opportunity, lay in the travails of the Liberal government. By 1909, its social programme (and electoral credibility) were at risk from blocking tactics in the House of Lords and the scale of its spending on the Navy. Its counter-stroke, the budget of 1909 and the consequential bill to limit the powers of the House of Lords, brought a constitutional crisis and a general election. The levelling up of Liberal and Unionist (or Conservative) strength in the House of Commons forced the Liberal cabinet into the arms of the Irish party while the passage of the Parliament Act (removing the veto of the House of Lords) erased their excuse for not honouring the long-standing commitment to Irish autonomy. A third Home Rule bill was drafted. In January 1913 it passed its last stage in the Commons with a majority of 110.
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While offering Redmond much less than he wanted, especially in Irish control over revenue and spending, it included Ulster in the Home Rule scheme. The result was an explosion. Predictably, the bill was rejected in the House of Lords. The Unionists demanded a general election, or a referendum, before the bill could be turned into law. In Ulster, preparations went ahead for armed resistance to a Home Rule government with the open encouragement of Unionist leaders like Milner. Elsewhere in Ireland, the resort to force began to be seen as inevitable: gun-running followed drilling. Compromise was elusive since all sides glimpsed the chance of triumph and feared the divisions that concession might bring. Even the belated acceptance by the Liberal government (at the instigation of Churchill and Lloyd George) of Ulster's exclusion from Home Rule brought further insoluble differences over the boundaries of the excluded area and the question of temporary or permanent exemption from the operation of the bill. At the moment when the shootings at Sarajevo and the prospect of a far more terrible crisis in Europe suspended domestic hostilities over Ireland, a descent into civil war in Ireland and (at best) constitutional impasse in Britain seemed all too likely.

The astonishing case of Irish Home Rule mocks the argument that the British world-system owed its strength and cohesion to the shrewd pragmatism and liberal instincts of the governing elite in London. Confronted by the twofold challenge of Irish nationalism and Ulster Unionism, that elite was at sixes and sevens. Both Liberals and Conservatives hoped to exploit Home Rule to win the party battle in mainland Britain. Neither dared alienate the Irish factions with whom they were allied. The Irish crisis throws into relief the chronic weakness to which the imperial centre was often subject. For London was only rarely capable of decisive intervention in local politics. Its usual role was to adjust the balance between the local parties: to regulate, encourage or obstruct. Its freedom of action was often constrained by the numerous and vocal colonial lobbies active in Britain though these also were usually too weak to impose their will. Where (as in the Irish case) the local parties were finely balanced, could exert almost equal pull inside British politics and came to symbolise rival notions of imperial power, the strain became almost unbearable.

In the last resort, then, the cohesion of the British system was less a matter of British
policy
than of the complex workings of imperial politics. The theoretical paramountcy of the Imperial government was exercised under demanding conditions. It was hemmed in by the free trade convictions of the British working class, unmoved by the argument for tariff reform.
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It was checked by the strength of the two old-established ‘garrisons’ in Ireland and India and of their allies and supporters in British opinion. It was wary of the militant appeal of Britannic nationalism that Milner had invoked so successfully in 1899. It dared not coerce the self-governing colonies. A determined proconsul with the press in his pocket, like Lord Lugard in Nigeria, was hard to restrain. It was the incoherence and improvisation to which all this gave rise that fuelled the ambition of the self-styled imperialists in Edwardian politics. To free ‘imperial’ questions from the messy entanglement in domestic politics, and to discipline the lobbies and factions whose influence loomed large, they wanted to create an Empire-wide public opinion and an Empire-wide parliament. Before 1914, they made little headway. But with the crash of the old order they thought they saw their chance.

Part II ‘The great liner is sinking’: the British world-system in the age of war

8 THE WAR FOR EMPIRE, 1914–1919

The longer war

1914 was the watershed between two ages of empire. In the long nineteenth century after 1815, the British world-system had developed as if there were no danger of a general war in Europe or across the world. Despite the Crimean War, the wars of Italian and German unification and the Franco-Prussian War, this had proved a reasonable assumption. The results can be seen from a glance at the map. Britain's settlements, possessions, spheres and commercial property were scattered broadcast across the globe. Whatever the constitutional niceties, in the ‘formal’ empire colonial rule was highly devolved: to settler politicians in the white dominions; to imperial officials in the rest. Devolution assumed that their defence would fall to the Royal Navy, or be made redundant by its global reach. The exception was India which paid for its own standing army and much more beside (two-thirds, in fact, of the Empire's regular army). Imperial rivalry was real, and posed a threat to Britain's interests. But the threat was usually more regional (and Near Eastern) than general. Much of its force was deflected by the partition diplomacy of the 1880s and 1890s. As a consequence, across large parts of the world, British influence could be maintained by the ‘soft power’ of commerce and culture. This had made possible the coexistence of imperialism and liberalism in Britain, in the settler colonies and even, more fitfully, in India. For all its hard coercive face, colonial rule retained the power to engage local sympathy by its liberal promise – however sparingly fulfilled – of individual freedom and material progress. The imperialism of free trade, variously interpreted, frequently modified, often abused, remained the
Leitmotif
of a system whose protean ideology was a cocktail: global and cosmopolitan as much as racial and territorial.

The geopolitical foundations of the Victorian and Edwardian world-system rested in the last resort upon two sets of equations at the opposite ends of the Old World. In East Asia where a local great power might have challenged British influence, there had seemed little to fear before the mid-1890s. Thereafter, disintegration not self-assertion was the most likely prognosis for China. Japan was a different story. After 1895, when it seized Taiwan, it became a cadet imperialist. Ten years later, it became the strongest military power in East Asia, defeating the Russians. But Japan was still a ‘country power’: fearful of a European combination against it. Up to 1914, its local strength seemed to work to Britain's advantage. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, twice renewed, held the ring in East Asia while British efforts were concentrated on the deterrence of Germany.

In Europe, the geopolitical equation was very different. Europe was active, not passive. In Churchill's expressive phrase, it was ‘where the weather came from’. Commercially, territorially and demographically, nineteenth-century Europe was in a phase of hyper-expansion. Towards the end of the century, the pace and scale of this European ‘enlargement’ rose sharply on a tide of trade and capital. International tensions – stoked by private interests – grew more acute. But only to a certain point. Dynamic though the continent had become in its social and economic character, politically it remained in the grip of the long conservative reaction that set in generally after 1815. The old regime persisted. No great power government dared contemplate kicking over the European chessboard – with the possible exception of Napoleon III in 1859. All had too much to lose, or were too uncertain of ultimate victory. Nor were they driven into general war by the threat to their survival. Nationalism exerted a potent appeal as the instrument of state-building (‘official nationalism’) and as an equal and opposite claim for the liberation of ‘submerged nationalities’ from the chains of dynastic Europe. Both versions could have volatile consequences. But, until the end of the century, great power governments seemed more than capable of restraining their disruptive potential.

For the British, this pattern of continental politics was highly convenient. They could not hope to prevent the overflow of European trade, influence and territorial ambition into the wider world. But there were good grounds to think that the distribution of power in continental Europe between four and a half great powers (the half being Italy) would persist indefinitely. No single power, nor any likely combination of powers, could hope for a durable hegemony over all the rest. The mutual antipathy of the continental states neutralised their resentment at Britain's vast share of imperial booty. Fearing that they would be dragged into war by the antics of their frontiersmen in Afro-Asia (or the furore of their admirers at home), continental statesmen accepted the partition diplomacy through which Salisbury and his successors hoped to stabilise (and maximise) the British share. Thus, for all the intensity of Europe's engagement with the wider world after 1870, there were few signs before 1914 of a coming revolution in world politics. In a ‘closed system’ in which the global ‘commons’ had been all but shared out, international politics were bound to be stressful. Zones of insecurity would wax and wane. But, while the East remained passive, and the West was locked in the defensive diplomacy of the ‘balance of power’, the British world-system – strung out between the two – could guard its networks at bearable cost.

In retrospect, of course, we can see that the pre-war decade contained the omens of catastrophic change. German economic power was growing rapidly. Nationalism in East and Central Europe was becoming more violent. Urbanisation and agrarian hardship screwed up the social tensions. Most dangerous of all, as it turned out, were the volcanic nationalisms of Southeastern Europe. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 and 1913–14, and the struggle of Serbian nationalists against Austrian over-rule in Bosnia, were symptomatic of a region where the writ of the great powers hardly ran, but where their rivalries were fuelled by the ethnic conflict of would-be clients. In July 1914, the Habsburg government tried to use the Sarajevo murders to crush Serbian nationalism, and humiliate Russia, Serbia's great power sponsor. It was a colossal blunder. Southeastern Europe was not a remote colonial region where the stakes were low and compromise easy. Its fate was thought crucial to the balance of Russian, Austrian and German power. So the statesmen who had partitioned half the world fell out over the most backward corner of their own continent.

The First World War was the violent rupture of the nineteenth-century world in which the vast scale of British expansion had been possible. It was the murderous first act of a conflict that was to last until the 1950s, or (by some criteria) until 1990. It helped blow apart the world economy and reversed the first ‘globalisation’ in a wave of economic nationalism. The collapse of the old imperial order in East and Central Europe wrecked the pre-war basis of great power diplomacy and sanctified the nation-state as the ideal form of territorial polity. In post-imperial Europe, ethnic conflict became even more bitter and much more wide-ranging. It was soon entangled in the ideological warfare between communism and its enemies, with drastic consequences for regional stability. Nor in the closed system the world had become could the war's effects be confined to Europe. By its end, almost every state had become a belligerent or been drawn willy-nilly into the fighting. In East Asia the consequences were especially dramatic. In this unpartitioned corner of the semi-colonial world, the wartime abdication of the European powers had been a golden opportunity for local ambition. ‘Passive’ East Asia entered its revolutionary phase in the triangular struggle of nationalists, communists and Japanese imperialists. Western interests could no longer be protected by a gunboat and a corporal's guard. By the mid-1930s, it seemed increasingly likely that the turbulence in East Asia would spill over into the ‘colonial’ lands of the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and even India.

The impact of these vast changes on the British system was profound and ultimately devastating. It is tempting in hindsight to see the First World War as the first and longest step towards its eventual disintegration. But that may be too simple a judgment. The war imposed huge strains on the British system. It permanently altered the external setting. It badly damaged the international economy with which British power had grown symbiotically. But the British were also the principal victors in this war of empires. They lost less and gained more than all the other original combatants. In the post-war world, with its corrosive frictions and shattered finances, this ‘victory’ won them a crucial breathing-space. It bought strategic gains and political time: to entrench their empire militarily and reform it constitutionally. It was a vital respite before the long war of the twentieth century resumed its course.

The Imperial Armageddon

Before the war, British leaders (and their strategic advisers) had assumed that the Royal Navy would be Britain's principal weapon in any Great Power conflict in Europe. The pre-war scheme for a small expeditionary force (the ‘BEF’) to fight on the continent alongside France had not altered this view: there were no plans to increase the size of the army even after a war had begun.
¹
The reasoning behind this ‘navalist’ strategy was simple. The British expected that, in a war fought to maintain the European balance of power against German aggression, the great conscript armies of France and Russia would bear the brunt of the fighting on land. The BEF would be a useful reinforcement in the critical opening phase – and a gesture of solidarity. But Britain's real contribution would be maritime and economic. The navy would sweep the seas clear of enemy warships (and safeguard vital lanes of supply), gobble up the German colonies and impose the blockade that would steadily strangle the German economy. Meanwhile, British finance, industrial output and inexhaustible coal would sustain the war effort of the Entente. A war fought on these terms until the Germans gave in would have a minor impact on British interests around the world. It would leave the pre-war shape of the British world-system largely unchanged.