The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (6 page)

If the British had blasted open the path to unlimited commerce with the world beyond Europe, it also looked by the 1820s and 1830s as if the regimes at the far end of their long-distance sea-lanes had become more receptive, or at least more vulnerable, to their trade and diplomacy. In those decades, it seemed as if vast new worlds were now ready to be explored, exploited, colonised or converted. The successive opening up to travel and trade of Central and South America, the Niger, the South African interior, parts of the Middle East (especially Egypt), the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, New Zealand, the North Pacific and China promised a global revolution of which Britain was likely to be the main beneficiary. ‘The situation of Great Britain’, remarked a parliamentary committee in 1837, ‘brings her beyond any other power into communication with the uncivilised nations of the earth.’
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With command of the sea, a lion's share of inter-continental trade and a long lead in the use of industrial techniques, the British had the means (or so hindsight has often suggested) to make a universal empire along the lines they chose. With little to fear from any European rival, and the means to beat down any local resistance, they would become the hegemon, the invincible power.

A closer inspection makes for a more sober assessment. It was true that, since the naval triumph at Trafalgar, Britain's maritime strength made it hard for any other European state to attack its far-flung possessions by sea. The diplomacy of George Canning (British foreign minister, 1822–7) was intended to exploit this advantage and restrict Britain's European neighbours to the affairs of their continent. Britain alone of the European powers would have position and influence in the world beyond: this was why it was so urgent to establish friendly relations with the newly independent states in Latin America.
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But, if Canning had hoped that Britain's command of the New World would allow it to cast off the burdens of the Old, his successors (Canning died in 1827) learned a different lesson. His pupil, Lord Palmerston, faced a series of crises in Europe that threatened most of the gains of 1815. After 1830, the Belgian revolt tore in half the Netherlands kingdom – the guard-dog created against French domination of the Low Countries (and the invasion route to Britain). Spain and Portugal, saved from Napoleon by Wellington's army, seemed likely to fall under conservative monarchs who would look to Austria, Russia or even to France rather than to Britain. The Ottoman Empire seemed about to break up, with Egypt and Syria falling to Mehemet Ali (suspected by London to be a client of France) and the rest of the empire – including the Straits – remaining under the sultan, now reduced by misfortune to dependence on Russia. Britain lacked the means to act decisively, however vital its interests in the Eastern Mediterranean. ‘It was not in our power, already engaged in the affairs of Belgium and Portugal, to enter into a third business of this kind’, the British prime minister told Palmerston in April 1833. ‘We had no available force for such a [commitment] and I am quite sure that Parliament would not have granted us one.’
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Instead, it was laborious diplomacy, the skilful exploitation of Russo-French rivalry and the mutual exhaustion of the local protagonists that brought Palmerston his triumph in 1840–1. Ottoman revival and Mehemet Ali's defeat restored the regional balance and secured the prime British interest in excluding any other great power from a dominant influence in the Eastern Mediterranean or on the land-bridge to India. In much the same way, Palmerston used the hostility of the ‘Eastern Powers’ (Prussia, Austria and Russia) towards France to entrench the independence and neutrality of the new Belgian state in the 1839 treaty.

The tense diplomacy of 1830–41 showed that British prestige and security, and the safety of their lines of communication with the outer world, depended upon an active diplomacy in Europe, not a passive enjoyment of Europe's internal divisions, let alone the assertion of London's irresistible will. In the world beyond Europe, as much as in Europe itself, British leaders had to reckon with the ambitions of three large states as eager as they were to extend the sphere of their influence. France, Russia and the United States, Palmerston told the House of Commons in 1858, were ‘three great…powers…so far independent of naval warfare that even a naval reverse does not materially affect them’.
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Each had the means to disrupt British influence or cut down its scope. Of the three, it was France that was the most potentially dangerous, although hopes of a liberal alliance – what Palmerston once called ‘a Western Confederacy of free states’
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– periodically lulled British suspicion that Napoleonic ambitions still lingered in Paris. But French influence and interests in Belgium, Spain and Italy, the occupation of Algiers (in 1830) and the special connection with Egypt were a constant factor in British diplomacy. The reputation and size of France's military machine, its volatile politics (with five regime changes between 1815 and 1851), its revolutionary tradition, and the influence derived from its enormous cultural prestige, made for uneasy and often irritable relations. ‘Nothing can be settled in Europe or the Levant without war’, the Duke of Wellington told Peel (then prime minister) in 1845, ‘unless by good understanding with France; nor can any question be settled in other parts of the world, excepting by the good understanding between France and this country.’
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French public opinion was thought dangerously febrile: ‘a certain number of turbulent men, without profession, occupation or principles, idle and thoroughly demoralized, passing their time in reading newspapers and talking politics…give a fictitious character to public opinion’, said Palmerston, quoting Guizot.
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The French government, said Peel, had ‘very little control over the popular will, and equally little over its servants, military, naval and diplomatic’.
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That France was also a naval power, active in the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, increased the danger of collision and a storm in the press. A French squadron blockaded the River Plate estuary in the late 1830s. In the second Western war against China in 1856–60, the French presence in East Asia was as large as the British. More serious was the risk that France would exploit Anglo-American tensions. Most frightening of all, at least for a time, was the fear that the application of steam power would allow France to reverse Britain's historic naval advantage and open the way for a
Blitzkrieg
invasion.

Russia was not a colonial power in the maritime sense (except in Alaska, sold in 1867 to the United States). Its naval power outside Europe was negligible. Russia had been the great counterweight to France in the struggle for Europe before 1815, to Britain's great benefit. By the 1820s, however, the renewal of Russia's southward expansion around the Black Sea, converging on the Straits, had become a major British obsession. The uncertain mood of the Ottoman government (often called ‘the Porte’ after the great gateway in Constantinople where its main offices were), the restless atmosphere of its European provinces and the open rebellion after 1830 of its over-mighty viceroy in Egypt, Mehemet Ali, all raised the prospect of a sudden implosion of Ottoman power. With the Tsar's armies a few forced marches away, he was likely to take a lion's share of the assets. With control of the Straits, the sympathy of Orthodox Greeks and Armenians (the main mercantile classes across the Near East), and a military grip on Eastern Anatolia, Russia would become the greatest power in the region, and the over-lordship of Persia would follow in due course. ‘I take Nicholas to be ambitious, bent upon great schemes, determined to make extensive additions to his dominions and, animated by the same hatred to England which was felt by Napoleon . . .’ was Palmerston's verdict in 1835.
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Whether Nicholas I and his ministers were really committed to the grand geopolitical designs attributed to them now seems unlikely. As an imperial power, Russia suffered from several obvious weaknesses, not least a backward economy, appalling communications, undigested minorities and a brittle and overstretched government.
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Knowing these defects, the Russians were afraid of encirclement and economic attrition and tried to pre-empt them. But Palmerston was not alone in believing that Russia had entered a critical phase in its pursuit of world power. ‘Sooner or later’, he told a cabinet colleague, ‘the Cossak and the Sepoy, the man from the Baltic and he from the British islands will meet in the centre of Asia. It should be our business to make sure that the meeting is as far off from our Indian possessions as may be convenient.’
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He hoped to exploit Russia's defeat in the Crimean War (achieved with the help of French military power,
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not just to drive it away from the Straits but to expel it from the Caucasus, its gateway to Asia and the scene of savage war against the Chechen population. But there and in East Asia, where the Aigun treaty brought them closer to North China in the late 1850s, the Russians were already too strong to be fenced in in this way.

The threat posed by Russia in the Middle East, and, by extension, in Central Asia, acted as a magnet on British grand strategy, sucking the British towards risky forward commitments where their naval advantage was hard to deploy. In the western hemisphere they faced a quite different rival. The American republic was a white settler state, decentralised, populist and territorially avaricious on no less a scale than Russia or Britain. Its leaders were deeply suspicious of Britain and (in the South) fiercely resentful of the British attack on the slave trade and slavery. Britain ‘is a great, opulent, and powerful nation’, declared Henry Clay of Kentucky, ‘but haughty, arrogant and supercilious. Not more separated from the rest of the world by the sea that girts her island than she is separated in feeling, sympathy or friendly consideration of their welfare.’
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What the British called free trade ‘is a mere revival of the British colonial system, forced upon us…during the existence of our colonial vassalage’.
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American opinion regarded Britain's colonial presence on the North American continent as an archaic survival, futile and absurd: the 1812 war had been fought in part to expel it. But the Americans’ restless expansion was bound to impinge on spheres claimed or controlled by British-backed interests. In Oregon and on the Maine–New Brunswick border, an agreement became urgent in the mid-1840s. The Americans also suspected that the British meant to frustrate the absorption of Texas and California, both of them wrenched from Mexican hands, and had designs on Cuba, whose great harbour at Havana guarded the exit from the Gulf of Mexico, and the maritime highway between the Mississippi valley and Europe. ‘We must have Cuba. We can't do without Cuba, [and] above all we must not suffer its transfer to Great Britain’, intoned James Buchanan, Secretary of State in the late 1840s.
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And, as Clay had implied, many Americans resented their dependence upon British industrial goods and favoured a protectionist tariff. Henry C. Carey, the most influential economist in antebellum America, denounced free trade as a disastrous deflection of progress, diverting labour and funds away from local development into costly long-distance commerce.
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The British were not helpless against American pressure. Their main point of weakness was the threat of an invasion of Canada (modern Ontario and Quebec) which was weakly defended and almost beyond the reach of reinforcements once winter set in and the St Lawrence River was frozen. But they had a deterrent: the use of naval power to bombard American sea-ports and blockade American trade. In the disputed Oregon country, there were few American settlers, while the Hudson's Bay Company, with its forts and followers, had a significant presence. Yet, although the threats flew and relations at times seemed close to a rupture, three powerful constraints discouraged British aggression. The first was the fear that an American conflict would encourage the other great powers – especially France – to join in against Britain: this was exactly what had happened in the Revolutionary War of 1775–83. Nervousness about France helped to push the British into settling the Oregon question to American satisfaction in 1846.
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The second was the belief that (as Palmerston pointed out in 1858) British sea-power would be of only limited value if it came to a fight. The best the British could do in periods of tension was to reinforce their Canadian garrison to show they meant business.
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The third was the sense that an American war, however successful, would be self-defeating. It was no coincidence that the emissary sent to resolve the boundary dispute over Maine was Lord Ashburton, a senior member of the Baring family and a banker with wide American contacts (he had helped to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase in 1803). Blockading American trade would inflict spectacular damage on the British economy. Thus the balance of strength in North America, while far from one-sided, decisively moulded the shape of British expansion. It set strict limits to the territorial growth of British North America and made its prosperity dependent in part on the economic goodwill of its great southern neighbour. Secondly, it ruled out any chance of coercing America into adopting free trade. The commercial and industrial power of the ‘Old Northeast’, centred on New York, was already a rival to that of Britain itself.
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A high tariff barrier checked British exports and steadily increased the imbalance of trade in America's favour. And it was from New York, not London or Liverpool, that the trade of the ‘Cotton Kingdom’ (Lancashire's great partner) was managed.
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In this richest of continents, the ‘imperialism of free trade’ had been stopped in its tracks.