Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (40 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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The Death Railway by one of the men who had to build it: sketch of Konyu-Hintok Cutting, Thailand, by Jack Chalker, 1942
‘All British colonies are awake. Why must Indians stay slaves? Seize this chance, rise!’ Japanese cartoon inciting Indians to throw off British rule,
c.
1942
‘Allied teamwork wins the game’, cartoon by Conrado Massaguer, illustrating the importance of having the right allies
Enthusiastic Egyptians mob Colonel Gamal Abdel-Nasser, 29 March 1954
The Empire sunk: the blockade of Port Said during the Suez Crisis, 19 November 1956
5
 
MAXIM FORCE
 
There are two oriflammes; which shall we plant on the farthest islands – the one that floats in a heavenly fire, or that hangs heavy with foul tissue of terrestrial gold? There is indeed a course of beneficent glory open to us, such as never was yet offered to any poor group of mortal souls. But it must be – it is with us, now, ‘Reign or Die’ ... And this is what [England] must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men; – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on.
John Ruskin, inaugural lecture as
Slade Professor at Oxford, 1870
 
 
[T]ake Constitution Jesuits if obtainable and insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion.
Cecil Rhodes, outlining the original concept of the
Rhodes Scholarships to Lord Rothschild, 1888
 
 
You cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition . . . without the use of force.
Joseph Chamberlain
 
 
 
 
 
I
n the space of just a few years, as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, British attitudes towards their Empire flipped over from arrogance to anxiety. The last years of Queen Victoria were a time of imperial hubris: there simply seemed no limit to what could be achieved by British firepower and finance. As both policeman and banker to the world, the British Empire attained a geographical extent unrivalled in history. Even its nearest competitors, France and Russia, were dwarfed by the Britannic Titan – the first true superpower. Yet even before the Queen-Empress expired in her bedroom at Osborne House in 1901, nemesis struck. Africa, which had seemed to be British by right, dealt the Empire an unexpected and painful blow. While some responded by retreating into a defiant jingoism, others were assailed by doubts. Even the most gilt-edged generals and proconsuls exhibited symptoms of what is best described as decadence. And Britain’s most ambitious imperial rival was not slow to scent the opportunity such doubts presented.
Cape to Cairo
 
In the mid-nineteenth century, apart from a few coastal outposts, Africa was the last blank sheet in the imperial atlas of the world. North of the Cape, British possessions were confined to West Africa: Sierra Leone, Gambia, the Gold Coast and Lagos, most of them left-overs from the battles for and then against slavery. Within twenty short years after 1880, however, ten thousand African tribal kingdoms were transformed into just forty states, of which thirty-six were under direct European control. Never in human history had there been such drastic redrawing of the map of a continent. By 1914, apart from Abyssinia and Liberia (the latter an American quasi-colony), the entire continent was under some form of European rule. Roughly a third of it was British. This was what came to be known as ‘the Scramble for Africa’ – though the Scramble
of
Africa might be nearer the mark.
The key to the Empire’s phenomenal expansion in the late Victorian period was the combination of financial power and firepower. It was a combination supremely personified by Cecil Rhodes. The son of a clergyman in Bishop’s Stortford, Rhodes had emigrated to South Africa at the age of seventeen because – so he later said – he ‘could no longer stand cold mutton’. He was at once business genius and imperial visionary; a robber baron, but also a mystic. Unlike the other ‘Rand Lords’, like his partner Barney Barnato, it was not enough for Rhodes to make a fortune from the vast De Beers diamond mines at Kimberley. He aspired to be more than a money maker. He dreamt of becoming an empire-builder.
Though his public image was that of a lone colossus bestriding Africa, Rhodes could not have won his near-monopoly over South African diamond production without the assistance of his friends in the City of London: in particular, the Rothschild bank, at that time the biggest concentration of financial capital in the world. When Rhodes had arrived at the Kimberley diamond fields there had been more than a hundred small companies working the four major ‘pipes’, flooding the market with diamonds and driving one another out of business. In 1882 a Rothschild agent visited Kimberley and recommended large-scale amalgamation; within four years the number of companies was down to three. A year later, the bank financed the merger of Rhodes’s De Beers Company with the Compagnie Française, followed by the final crucial fusion with the bigger Kimberley Central Company. Now there was just one company: De Beers. It is usually assumed that Rhodes owned De Beers, but this was not the case. Nathaniel de Rothschild was a bigger shareholder than Rhodes himself; indeed, by 1899 the Rothschilds’ stake was twice that of Rhodes. In 1888 Rhodes wrote to Lord Rothschild:
65
‘I know with you behind me I can do all I have said. If however you think differently I have nothing to say’. So when Rhodes needed financial backing for a new African scheme in October 1888 he had no hesitation about where to turn.
The proposition Rhodes wanted Rothschild to consider was the concession he had just secured from the Matabele chief, Lobengula, to develop the ‘simply endless’ gold fields which Rhodes believed existed beyond the Limpopo River. The terms of his letter to Rothschild make it clear that his intentions towards Lobengula were anything but friendly. The Matabele king, he wrote, was ‘the only block to Central Africa, as, once we have his territory, the rest is easy, as the rest is simply a village system with a separate headman, all independent of each other ... The key is Matabele Land, with its gold, the reports as to which are not based solely on hearsay ... Fancy, this Gold Field was purchasable, at about £150,000 two years ago, is now selling for over ten millions’. Rothschild responded positively. When Rhodes joined forces with the existing Bechuanaland Company to create a new Central Search Association for Matabeleland, the banker was a major shareholder, and increased his involvement when this became the United Concessions Company in 1890. He was also among the founding shareholders when Rhodes established the British South Africa Company in 1889; indeed, he acted as the company’s unpaid financial adviser.
The De Beers Company had fought its battles in the boardrooms of Kimberley. The British South Africa Company, by contrast, fought real battles. When Lobengula realized he had been hoodwinked into signing over much more than mere mineral rights, he resolved to take Rhodes on. Determined to dispose of Lobengula once and for all, Rhodes responded by sending an invasion force – the Chartered Company’s Volunteers – numbering 700 men. The Matabele had, by African standards, a powerful and well-organized army: Lobengula’s
impis
numbered in the region of 3,000. But Rhodes’s men brought with them a devastating secret weapon: the Maxim gun. Operated by a crew of four, the 0.45 inch Maxim could fire 500 rounds a minute, fifty times faster than the fastest rifle available. A force equipped with just five of these lethal weapons could literally sweep a battlefield clear.
The Battle of Shangani River in 1893 was the first ever use of the Maxim in battle. One eyewitness recorded what happened:
The Matabele never got nearer than 100 yards led by the Nubuzu regiment, the king’s body guard who came on yelling like fiends and rushing on to certain death, for the Maxims far exceeded all expectations and mowed them down literally like grass. I never saw anything like these Maxim guns, nor dreamed that such things could be: for the belts of cartridges were run through them as fast as a man could load and fire. Every man in the laager owes his life under Providence to the Maxim gun. The natives told the king that they did not fear us or our rifles, but they could not kill the beast that went pooh! pooh! by which they mean the Maxim.
 
To the Matabele it seemed that ‘the white man came ... with ... guns that spat bullets as the heavens sometimes spit hail, and who were the naked Matabele to stand up against these guns?’ Around 1,500 Matabele warriors were wiped out. Just four of the 700 invaders died.
The Times
reported smugly that the Matabele ‘put our victory down to witchcraft, allowing that the Maxim was a pure work of an evil spirit. They have named it “S’cockacocka”, owing to the peculiar noise it makes when in action’.
Lest anyone should be in any doubt as to who had masterminded the operation, the conquered territory was renamed Rhodesia. Behind Rhodes, however, lay the financial might of Rothschild. Significantly, a member of the French branch of the family noted with satisfaction the connection between the news of ‘a sharp engagement having taken place with the Matabeles’ and ‘a little spurt in the shares’ of Rhodes’s British South Africa Company. The Rothschilds’ sole worry – and it was amply justified – was that Rhodes was channelling money from the profitable De Beers Company into the altogether speculative British South Africa Company. When the maverick Conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill returned from a visit to South Africa in 1891 declaring that ‘no more unwise or unsafe speculation exists than the investment of money in [mining] exploration syndicates’ and accusing Rhodes of being ‘a sham ... [who] could not raise £51,000 in the City to open a mine’, Rothschild was incensed. There were few graver crimes in the eyes of a
fin de siècle
financier than to talk down an investment.

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