The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (68 page)

At the same time, the Civilians were determined (as so often in the past) to win more freedom from their masters in London. They had gained a major victory with the grant of ‘fiscal autonomy’ in 1919: a historic concession in which the old prohibition on Indian tariffs and import duties was lifted, in recognition of the urgent need to raise more revenue. They wanted a convention that London would not interfere in matters of purely Indian (as opposed to imperial) interest.
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They wanted more latitude to deal with Indian politicians without coming under the kind of pressure to gaol or coerce felt by the Viceroy at the time of non-cooperation. London could scarcely dispense with their services. In its straitened financial circumstances after 1918, it had all the more need to keep up the old army system in India, in which one-third of the British army was barracked in India at Indian expense, and the Indian army was an imperial reserve. Against the furious protest of Montagu and the Indian government, tightening London's control over the Indian army (the main theme of the Esher Committee in 1920
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had had to be shelved, but guarding the army budget against Indian politicians was a top priority after 1920. No less urgent was the need to control the value of the rupee and the monetary policy of the government of India. If the rupee fell too low, then India might default on its charges to Britain, and damage further the fragile balance of payments. All this was good reason why the Civilians were still the indispensable allies of the imperial interest in India, the guarantee that it would play its part in the British world-system. If nothing else, non-cooperation had shown that London still needed the ‘steel frame’ (Lloyd George's term) of the Indian Civil Service (ICS).

But had India's ‘new politics’ made their task hopeless? In the mid-1920s, the signs were ambiguous. Congress formally abandoned non-cooperation in 1924, in belated recognition that many of its members had already given up the boycott of the councils. By 1924 also, the Khilafat movement was dead: the office of
khalifa
had been abolished by the Turks themselves. The residue of non-cooperation seemed to be the rising antagonism of Hindus and Muslims and the deepening appeal of both Hindu and Muslim revivalism. The All-India nationalism that Gandhi had urged was less in evidence than the ‘sub-nationalisms’ of region, language, community (like the untouchables) and religion. For the Congress politicians, like Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das, the uncrowned king of Bengal, who had followed Gandhi into agitational politics, the dilemma was obvious. Neither Gandhian populism nor the provincialism that the Civilians were eagerly promoting had much in common with the British Indian state they still wanted to make: both threatened in different ways to abort its birth. They hankered for an Indian dominion (inside the Empire), and an Indian ICS, to build the nation from above. Their instrument was the Swarajya party, formed in December 1922. But, if they were to extract new concessions from the Civilians, and force the pace towards full dominion status, they needed the resources that Gandhi had made: the mobilising potential of his new-style Congress; the inclusive ideology that drew a vast range of communities and classes to the Congress banner and out of the web of Civilian influence. It was vital to capture the Congress machine for constitutional politics
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and to keep at bay the rising tide of Hindu communalism, whose leader Malaviya urged ‘responsive cooperation’ to defend Hindu interests.
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The real enemy, insisted Das, was still ‘the bureaucracy’ – the ICS.
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By 1926, however, the Swarajists seemed on the ropes as their provincial support was eroded by the communal appeal of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ parties.
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Squeezed between the Civilians and provincial communalism, their main hope lay now in alliance with Gandhi. After all, what non-cooperation had shown was that, with skilful leadership, Gandhian mass politics could turn the tables on government and push it towards the concessions that it had seemed in 1921 to be on the verge of making. What was far less certain in 1926 was when the chance to do so would come again.

Imperial nations?

The importance of the white dominions to British world power had been dramatically vindicated in the First World War. Their manpower and resources had made a crucial contribution to imperial victory. They had strengthened Britain's claim to be the leader of free states against autocracy and militarism. They had been a vital prop – perhaps the strongest proof – for the idea that empire was a central element of British life. The existence of self-governing ‘British’ states on three continents outside Europe gave substance to the notion – implicit in British attitudes after c.1880 – that the British were a ‘world people’ uniquely adapted to the task of creating new nations in temperate climes. But the place of the dominions in the British system after 1918 was as problematic as India's – and for similar reasons. There was the unfinished business of 1917, when the new conception of dominion statehood and equality with Britain had been mooted. There was the legacy of the war and the impact of its disturbing aftermath. In all four overseas dominions, the instability of trade, war debts and the downward pressure on wartime wages and prices created social unrest, political division and (in two) the danger of ethnic strife. Most worrying of all was the geopolitical turbulence that lasted into the mid-1920s, bringing with it the threat of unwanted commitments, unlimited liabilities and new insecurities, perhaps even of war. The question of mandates (1919), the renewal or not of the Anglo-Japanese alliance (1921), a possible war over Chanak (1922), the new British commitments in Europe foreshadowed in the Ruhr crisis of 1923 and the Locarno pact of 1925, and the military obligations to the League of Nations set out in the Geneva protocol of 1924, raised in the starkest form the meaning of dominion autonomy and imperial unity. Then there was the question of Ireland.

The result was a political argument in two dominions (muted in Canada, fierce in South Africa) over the form and substance of the ‘British connection’ and an armed struggle in Ireland which turned into civil war after the treaty of December 1921 conceded ‘Canadian’ status to the twenty-six counties of the new ‘Irish Free State’. In Australia and New Zealand, as we will see, there was ample scope for friction with Britain, but much less interest in constitutional change or formulaic autonomy. Indeed, since each of the dominions had its own interests, political traditions and ethnic composition, it seemed highly unlikely that a common formula could evoke its particular place in the British system. This was the fundamental question at issue between 1918 and 1926. Would the five dominions (including Ireland after 1921)
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divide between the three that still regarded themselves as ‘British nations’ (a less than unanimous view in Canada), and the two where republicanism was a powerful, perhaps dominant force? Would the idea of a common dominion status dissolve into a set of bilateral ties between Britain and the several self-governing states, some acknowledging the bonds of kinship, others only the terms of a treaty? Or could all the dominions agree upon a form of words that recognised their ties to each other, to the imperial association and to the British Crown? This was not merely a question of constitutional pedantry. To a wide circle of informed opinion in all the overseas dominions, some statement of common concerns was crucial. This was not to bend the knee to Downing Street but to resist the isolationism that was a latent force in dominion politics. Without some vehicle through which to play an active part in the ‘New World’ created by the war, they argued, the dominions would see their most vital interests going by default.

Canada

As the largest and oldest of the dominions, Canada's attitude was of key importance. Before the war, the Canadian premier, Sir Robert Borden, had been an ardent advocate of a common imperial foreign policy, over which Canada should exert a significant influence. Canada had made the largest contribution in manpower to the imperial war effort. Borden's ‘Unionist’ coalition had driven through conscription against the passionate protest of the French Canadians in a bruising demonstration of Britannic loyalty. In 1918, Borden had been instrumental in gaining dominion representation at the peace conference in Paris as part of the ‘British Empire Delegation’. But, after 1921, under the Liberal prime minister, Mackenzie King, the Canadian government repudiated much of the approach for which Borden had stood, insisted upon the right to negotiate and sign a separate treaty (the ‘halibut’ treaty with the United States in 1923) and supported (in 1926) the demand from Ireland and South Africa that dominion equality with Britain, including the right to their own foreign policy, should be formally recognised in a public statement.
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King's apparent hostility to the claims of empire, his almost paranoid suspicion of the ‘centralising’ aims of the London government, and his determination that the Canadian government should have the first and last word on any external commitment were easily converted by a later mythology into a programme for independence. But King's objectives were much less spectacular. They are better understood as a defensive reaction to the fluid state of Canadian politics than as a novel vision of Canadian nationhood.

The end of the war in Canada saw a rapid deflation of the Britannic sentiment that had helped to carry the Unionist coalition and conscription to victory in 1917. The end of a booming war economy exacted an immediate toll. The gross domestic output per person, having risen by some 8 per cent between 1913 and 1917, fell back by an astonishing 27 per cent in the four years that followed, causing a slump in living standards.
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The worst effects were felt on the Prairies among wheat farmers and the service industries they supported, and in rural Ontario. For the Unionist government, which struggled vainly to prop up grain prices, the political backlash was catastrophic. It had alienated Quebec by conscription. Now the west and the rural east were in revolt as well. In the cold post-war climate, the Unionist slogans of conscription, the flag and the tariff were redundant or worse. When they eventually went to the polls under Borden's tough and uncompromising successor, Arthur Meighen, the Unionists suffered a shattering defeat. A rejuvenated Liberal party under Mackenzie King won most seats (116). The farmer's protest party, newly formed in the west, carried 65. Meighen, who lost his own constituency, was reduced to 50. But the 1921 election did not bring about a settled regime like those that Macdonald, Laurier and Borden had been able to fashion. King had no overall majority. Three-party politics made for prolonged uncertainty in a period of great international turbulence. They placed a premium on excluding so far as possible the influence of unpredictable external factors. The greatest danger by far was a call to arms from London in a European or Near Eastern war and the fervent response it would evoke in Canada. Four times in twenty years the appeal to Britannic loyalty had struck the dominion's brittle politics with the force of an earthquake: in 1899, in 1911 (over reciprocity and a Canadian navy), in 1914 and (most destructively) over conscription in 1917. The short-lived Chanak crisis in September 1922 was a timely reminder that the threat was still there. ‘The minute there is any war or threat of war in Europe in which Great Britain might be involved’, remarked an Anglophone Quebec politician, ‘the Jingoes will so stir up the Country that in a Plebiscite or Referendum 75% of the people would immediately vote for war.’
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Mackenzie King was an Ontario Presbyterian, the son of a Toronto barrister turned academic.
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But his position as Liberal leader was crucially dependent on his support in Quebec – where Ernest Lapointe, the provincial leader, was his vital ally until his death in 1941
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– and the avoidance of any damaging rupture between his followers there and in English Canada. A jingo storm would tear his government apart. This was why King waged his relentless bureaucratic war against any form of words that bound Canada to the chariot of British foreign policy, that made Canada party to the treaty obligations that London assumed in Europe and elsewhere, or which implied that the dominion prime ministers at the Imperial Conference formed an imperial ‘cabinet’ empowered to take decisions that were binding on their own dominions. King's fears ran deeper. A secretive, reclusive man, whose private views were carefully veiled, he was deeply suspicious (and not without reason) of British politicians and the British press. At the Imperial Conference in 1923, he expected a press attack in London on his ‘disloyalty’ to the Empire that would be loudly echoed in the Canadian papers.
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He suspected British ministers of ‘briefing’ against him, and angrily complained to L. S. Amery of London's habit of appealing over Ottawa's head to public opinion in Canada.
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King was determined to warn London off from such public appeals for Canadian support and to insist upon Ottawa's right to decide its external obligations. But he was equally determined not to be cast as an enemy of ‘British connection’ or as lukewarm about Canada's imperial ties. Neither (it seems likely) accorded with his private opinions; both would have been fatal to his public reputation. He did not want to redefine Canada's place in the world, and he showed little interest in the constitutional debate over dominion status until Irish and South African pressure made some declaration unavoidable in 1926. The Canadian delegation did not want a definition, King's senior official, Oscar Skelton, told a favoured journalist.
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His real aim was to stabilise Canadian politics (and his own lease on power) by moving as close to an isolationist position within the British system as he dared. It was a solution very similar to Laurier's. It fell far short of nationalism.