Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (21 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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The American experiment of going it alone as a republic had been undeniably successful. Would the other white colonies now break away as republics the way the United States had? Would there be a United States of Canada or of Australia? Perhaps the surprising thing is that this did not happen.
Some of the credit for the fact that it did not is due to the unlikely figure of John Lambton, the Earl of Durham, a high-living hangover from the Regency era, who was sent to Canada to head off this fresh colonial revolt. A ‘flamboyant despot’, in the words of one contemporary, Durham announced his arrival in Quebec by prancing through the streets on a white charger and installing himself at the Château St Louis, dining off gold and silver platters and quaffing vintage champagne. Despite appearances, however, Durham was no lightweight. He had been one of the authors of the 1832 Reform Act, hence his nickname ‘Radical Jack’. He also had the wit to be well advised. Charles Buller, his private secretary, had been born in Calcutta, studied history with Thomas Carlyle and had won a reputation as a brilliant barrister before entering the House of Commons; while Durham’s principal adviser, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had written extensively on land reform in Australia – ironically, while languishing in Newgate prison, where he had been sent for three years for abducting an under-age heiress. He was just one of many thinkers of his generation who were haunted by the spectre, conjured up by the statistician Thomas Robert Malthus, of unsustainable population growth at home. To Wakefield, the colonies were the obvious answer as an overflow for surplus Britons. But to encourage free settlement, as opposed to continued transportation, he was convinced that some kind of accommodation had to be reached with the settlers’ inherently British sense of independence.
Durham, Buller and Wakefield spent just six months in Canada before returning to England and presenting their report. Though primarily concerned with the specific problems of Canadian governance, it had a profoundly important subtext relevant to the whole of the British Empire. Indeed, the Durham Report has a good claim to be the book that saved the Empire. For what it did was to acknowledge that the American colonists had been right. They had, after all, been entitled to demand that those who governed the white colonies should be accountable to representative assemblies of the colonists, and not simply to the agents of a distant royal authority. What Durham called for in Canada was exactly what an earlier generation of British ministers had denied the American colonies:
a system of responsible government [such] as would give the people a real control over its own destinies ... The government of the colony should henceforth be carried on in conformity with the views of the majority in the Assembly.
 
The report also implied that the Americans had been right to adopt a federal structure between their states; that too was to be copied in Canada and later in Australia.
Admittedly, it was not acted upon immediately. Although the government hastened to implement Durham’s principal recommendation – that Upper and Lower Canada be united in order to dilute French influence in the former – responsible government was not introduced until 1848, and then only in Nova Scotia. It was not until 1856 that most of the Canadian colonies had been granted it. But by this time the idea had caught on in Australia and New Zealand, which also began moving in the direction of responsible government. By the 1860s the balance of political power in all the white colonies had decisively shifted. From now on, the governors would play more of a decorative role, as representatives of a likewise increasingly decorative monarch; real power would lie with the colonists’ elected representatives.
‘Responsible government’, then, was a way of reconciling the practice of empire with the principle of liberty. What the Durham Report meant was that the aspirations of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans – which were to be little different from the aspirations of the Americans in the 1770s – could be and would be answered without the need for wars of independence. From now on, whatever the colonists wanted, they pretty much got. That meant, for example, that when the Australians demanded an end to transportation, London gave in. The last convict ship sailed in 1867.
So there would be no Battle of Lexington in Auckland; no George Washington in Canberra; no declaration of independence in Ottawa. Indeed, it is hard not to feel, when one reads the Durham Report, that its subtext is one of regret. If only the American colonists had been given responsible government when they had first asked for it in the 1770s – if only the British had lived up to their own rhetoric of liberty – there might never have been a War of Independence. Indeed, there might never have been a United States. And millions of British emigrants might have chosen California instead of Canada when they packed their bags to go.
21
3
 
THE MISSION
 
When the contrast between the influence of a Christian and a Heathen government is considered; when the knowledge of the wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect on the unspeakable blessings to millions that would follow the extension of British rule, it is not ambition but benevolence that dictates the desire for the whole country. Where the providence of God will lead, one state after another will be delivered into his stewardship.
Macleod Wylie,
Bengal as a Field of Missions
(1854)
 
 
 
 
 
I
n the eighteenth century the British Empire had been, at best, amoral. The Georgians had grabbed power in Asia, land in America and slaves in Africa. Native peoples were either taxed, robbed or wiped out. But paradoxically their cultures were largely tolerated; in some cases, even studied and admired.
The Victorians had more elevated aspirations. They dreamt not just of ruling the world, but of redeeming it. It was no longer enough for them to exploit other races; now the aim became to improve them. Native peoples themselves would cease to be exploited, but their cultures – superstitious, backward, heathen – would have to go. In particular, the Victorians aspired to bring light to what they called the Dark Continent.
Africa was in fact a great deal less primitive than they imagined. Far from being ‘one rude chaos’, as an early English traveller called it, sub-Saharan Africa was home to myriad states and nations, some of them a good deal more economically advanced than contemporaneous pre-colonial societies in North America or Australasia. There were substantial towns like Timbuktu (in modern Mali) and Ibadan (in modern Nigeria), gold and copper mines, even a textile industry. However, in three respects it struck the Victorians as benighted. Unlike North Africa, the faiths of sub-Saharan Africa were not monotheistic; except for its northern and southern extremities, it was riddled with malaria, yellow fever and other diseases lethal to Europeans (and their preferred livestock); and, perhaps most importantly, slaves were its most important export – indeed, supplying slaves to European and Arab traders along the coast became the continent’s biggest source of revenue. The peculiar path of global economic development led Africans into the business of capturing and selling one another.
Like the non-governmental aid organizations of today, Victorian missionaries believed they knew what was best for Africa. Their goal was not so much colonization as ‘civilization’: introducing a way of life that was first and foremost Christian, but was also distinctly North European in its reverence for industry and abstinence. The man who came to embody this new ethos of empire was David Livingstone. For Livingstone, commerce and colonization – the original foundations of the Empire – were necessary, but not sufficient. In essence, he and thousands of missionaries like him wanted the Empire to be born again.
This was not a government project, but the work of what we today would call the voluntary sector. But the Victorian aid agencies’ good intentions would have unforeseen, and sometimes bloody, consequences.
From Clapham to Freetown
 
The British have a long tradition of sending aid to Africa. At the time of writing, British servicemen have been stationed in Sierra Leone since May 2000 as peacemakers and peacekeepers. Their mission is, fundamentally, an altruistic one: to help restore stability to a country that has been wracked for years by civil war.
22
A little less than 200 years ago, a Royal Navy squadron was based in Sierra Leone on a comparably moral mission: to prevent slave ships leaving the African coast for America, and thereby to bring an end to the Atlantic slave trade.
This was an astonishing volte face, especially astonishing to the Africans themselves.
23
After the British first came to Sierra Leone in 1562 it did not take them long to become slave traders. In the subsequent two and a half centuries, as we have seen, more than three million Africans were shipped into bondage on British ships. But then, towards the end of the eighteenth century, something changed dramatically; it was almost as if a switch was flicked in the British psyche. Suddenly they started shipping slaves back to West Africa and setting them free. Sierra Leone became ‘The Province of Freedom’. Its capital was renamed Freetown. The freed slaves walked through a Freedom Arch bearing the inscription – now almost obscured by weeds – ‘Freed from slavery by British valour and philanthropy’. Instead of ending up on plantations on the other side of the Atlantic, they were each given a quarter acre of land, a cooking pot, a spade – and their freedom.
The settlements in Freetown were like miniature nations, as they still are today: the Congolese in Congo town, the Fulani in Wilberforce, the Ashanti in Kissy. In the old days the slaves had been brought to the waterfront in chains and locked to iron bars to await shipment across the Atlantic. Now they came to Freetown to lose their chains and begin new lives. What was going on to turn Britain from the world’s leading enslaver to the world’s leading emancipator? The answer lies in a fervent religious revival, the epicentre of which was, of all places, Clapham.
Zachary Macaulay was one of the first governors of Sierra Leone. The son of the minister at Inverary and father of the greatest of Victorian historians, Macaulay had worked for a time as the manager of a sugar plantation in Jamaica. But he quickly found himself unable to reconcile his work with his Christian faith: the daily whippings he witnessed ‘sickened’ him too much. In search of kindred spirits, he returned to England, where he was quickly taken up by the banker and Member of Parliament Henry Thornton, the principal financial backer of the Sierra Leone Company, which had been set up as a small private colonizing venture with the principal aim of repatriating the small population of former slaves living in London. It was at Thornton’s initiative that Macaulay was sent to Sierra Leone in 1793, where his appetite for hard work in a good cause soon secured him the post of Governor. For the next five years, Macaulay immersed himself in the mechanics of the trade he was now resolved to stamp out, dining with the chiefs of African tribes who supplied slaves from the interior and even crossing the Atlantic on a slave ship to witness for himself the sufferings of those on board. By the time he returned to England, Macaulay was not just an expert on the slave trade; he was
the
expert.
There was only one place in London for a man like Macaulay to live, and that was Clapham. There he could be sure of finding like-minded souls. Indeed, it might be said that the moral transformation of the British Empire began in Holy Trinity church, on the north side of Clapham Common. Macaulay’s fellow parishioners, who included Thornton and the dazzling Parliamentary orator William Wilberforce, combined evangelical fervour with hard-nosed political nous. The Clapham Sect, as they came to be known, excelled at mobilizing a new generation of grassroots activists. Armed with Macaulay’s first-hand accounts of the slave trade, they resolved to secure its abolition.
It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people. It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable, but all the evidence points the other way: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart. Like all such great changes, it had small beginnings. There had long been a minority of people within the British Empire opposed to slavery on religious principles. Quakers in Pennsylvania were speaking out against it as early as the 1680s, arguing that it violated the biblical injunction to ‘do unto others as you would have others do unto you’ (Matthew 7 : 12). In the 1740s and 1750s the so-called Great Awakening in America and the rise of Methodism in Britain spread such scruples into wider Protestant circles. Others were turned against slavery by the teachings of the Enlightenment: both Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson were against the slave trade, Smith because ‘the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves’. But it was only in the 1780s that the campaign against slavery gained enough momentum to sway legislators. Slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1780, an example followed with varying degrees of alacrity by a number of other northern states. In 1788 a law was passed in Westminster to regulate conditions on the slave ships; four years later a bill for gradual abolition passed the Commons only to be rejected by the Lords.

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