Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (42 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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As leader of the Opposition, Gladstone had objected violently to Disraeli’s foreign policy in the Near East. He had instinctively disliked the purchase of the Suez Canal shares; he also accused Disraeli of turning a blind eye to Turkish atrocities against Christian communities in Bulgaria. Yet now that he was in power, Gladstone executed one of the great U-turns of Victorian foreign policy. True, his instincts were to stick to the system of Anglo-French ‘dual control’ in Egypt. But the crisis coincided with one of those domestic political
bouleversements
so common in the history of the Third Republic. While the French quarrelled among themselves, the risk of an Egyptian default loomed larger. There were now full-scale anti-European riots in Alexandria. Egged on by his more hawkish Cabinet colleagues, and assured by the Rothschilds that the French would not object, Gladstone agreed on 31 July 1882 to ‘put down Arabi’. British ships duly shelled the Alexandrian forts, and on 13 September General Sir Garnet Wolseley’s invasion force – which consisted of three squadrons of Household Cavalry, two guns and about 1,000 infantry – surprised and destroyed Arabi’s much larger army in the space of just half an hour at Tel-el-Kebir. The next day they occupied Cairo; Arabi was taken prisoner and packed off to Ceylon. In the words of Lord Rothschild, it was now ‘clear that England must secure the future predominance’ in Egypt. That predominance would never be formalized into outright colonization. No sooner had they occupied Egypt, than the British began reassuring the other powers that their presence there was only a temporary expedient: a reassurance repeated no fewer than sixty-six times between 1882 and 1922. Formally, Egypt continued to be an independent entity. In practice, however, it was run as a ‘veiled Protectorate’ by Britain, with the Khedive yet another princely puppet and real power in the hands of the British Agent and Consul-General.
The occupation of Egypt opened a new chapter in imperial history. Indeed, in many ways, it was the real trigger for the African Scramble. From the point of view of the other European powers – and French acquiescence did not last long – it was now clearly imperative to act, and act fast, before the British took over the entire continent. The British, for their part, were willing to share the spoils, provided they retained control of the strategic hubs at the Cape and Cairo. The biggest game of Monopoly in history was about to begin. Africa was the board.
Such carve-ups were nothing new in the history of imperialism, as we have seen. Until now, however, the future of Africa had been of concern only to Britain, France and – as the first European power to establish colonies there – Portugal. Now, however, there were three new players at the table: the kingdom of Belgium (founded in 1831), the kingdom of Italy (founded in 1861) and the German Empire (founded in 1871). The Belgian King, Leopold II, had set up his International Association in 1876, sponsoring exploration of the Congo with a view to its conquest and economic exploitation. The Italians fantasized about a new Roman Empire extending across the Mediterranean, identifying Tripoli (modern Libya) as their first target of acquisition; later they invaded Abyssinia, lost ignominiously at Adowa in 1896 and had to rest content with part of Somalia. The Germans played a more subtle game – at first.
The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen. When Bismarck said that his map of Africa was the map of Europe,
68
he meant that he saw Africa as an opportunity to sow dissension between Britain and France – and to lure German voters away from his liberal and socialist opponents at home. In April 1884 Bismarck announced a protectorate over the bay of Angra Pequena, in what is today Namibia. He then extended German claims to include the entire territory between the northern border of the British Cape Colony and the southern border of Portuguese Angola, adding for good measure Cameroon and Togo further up the West African coast and, finally, Tanganyika on the other side of the continent. Having thereby established Germany’s credibility as an African player, Bismarck then called a major international conference on Africa, which met in Berlin between 15 November 1884 and 26 February 1885.
69
Ostensibly, the Berlin Conference was intended to ensure free trade in Africa and particularly freedom of navigation on the Congo and Niger Rivers. Those are the issues that take up most of the clauses of the conference’s final ‘General Act’. It also paid lip service to the emancipatory ideals of the Livingstonian era, binding all the signatories
to watch over the preservation of the native tribes, and to care for the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being and to help in suppressing slavery, and especially the Slave Trade. They shall, without distinction of creed or nation, protect and favour all religious, scientific, or charitable institutions and undertakings created and organized for the above ends, or which aim at instructing the natives and bringing home to them the blessings of civilization. Christian missionaries, scientists, and explorers, with their followers, property, and collections, shall likewise be the objects of especial protection. Freedom of conscience and religious toleration are expressly guaranteed to the natives, no less than to subjects and to foreigners.
 
But the real purpose of the conference was (as its opening agenda made clear) to ‘define the conditions under which future territorial annexations in Africa might be recognized’. The crux of the business was Article 34, which stated:
Any power which henceforth takes possession of a tract of land on the coasts of the African Continent outside of its present possessions, or which, being hitherto without such possessions, shall acquire them and assume a protectorate ... shall accompany either act with a notification thereof, addressed to the other Signatory Powers of the present Act, in order to enable them to protest against the same if there exists any grounds for their doing so.
 
By way of refinement, Article 35 vaguely asserted the signatories’ ‘obligation to ensure the establishment of authority in the regions occupied by them on the coasts of the African Continent sufficient to protect existing rights’. The ‘existing rights’ of native rulers and their peoples were patently not what the act’s authors had in mind.
Here was a true thieves’ compact: a charter for the partition of Africa into ‘spheres of influence’ based on nothing more legitimate than their ‘effective occupation’. And the division of the spoils began at once. It was during the conference that the German claim to Cameroon was recognized; so too was Leopold II’s sovereignty over the Congo. Yet the significance of the Conference went deeper than that. In addition to slicing up a continent like a cake, it brilliantly achieved Bismarck’s core objective of playing Britain and France off against one another. In the subsequent decade, the two powers clashed repeatedly, over Egypt, over Nigeria, over Uganda, over the Sudan. For British policymakers, French explorers like Mizon and Marchand were among the great nuisances of the 1890s, necessitating bizarre showdowns like the Fashoda incident of 1899, a surreal contretemps in the nowhere-land of the Sudan. Indeed, the British were doubly duped by the German Chancellor; for their initial reaction to his triumph at Berlin was to give him everything he wanted (or seemed to want) in Africa, and more.
Soon after the conclusion of the Berlin Conference, the British Consul in Zanzibar was sent a telegram from the Foreign Office in London. It announced that the German Emperor had declared a protectorate over the territory bounded by Lakes Victoria, Tanganyika and Nyasa, which had been claimed the previous year by the explorer Carl Peters’s German Colonization Society. The telegram bluntly instructed the Consul to ‘cooperate with Germany in everything’. The Consul was to ‘act with great caution’; he should ‘not permit any communications of a hostile tone to be addressed to German Agents or Representatives by [the] Zanzibar authorities’. The British Consul in Zanzibar was John Kirk, the botanist on David Livingstone’s ill-fated Zambezi expedition who, after Livingstone’s death, had pledged to continue his work to end the East African slave trade. The order to cooperate with the Germans astounded him. For years he had laboured to win the confidence of the ruler of Zanzibar, Sultan Bargash, on the basis of a straightforward bargain that if the Sultan stamped out the slave trade, Kirk would help extend his East African domain and enrich him through legitimate commerce. The Sultan had indeed banned slave trading in Zanzibar in 1873 and, in return, Kirk had done as he had promised: by 1885 the Sultan’s empire on the mainland stretched for a thousand miles along the East African coast and as far inland as the Great Lakes. Now the Sultan was simply to be dropped by a British government anxious to appease Bismarck.
Kirk had no alternative but to obey his orders from London. ‘I advised the Sultan’, he replied dutifully, ‘to withdraw his opposition to the German protectorate, & admit their claims’. But he made no effort to conceal his dismay. ‘My position has throughout been delicate and difficult and at one time I hardly expected to be able to induce the Sultan to yield without thereby losing further influence over him’. As he wrote angrily to a friend in England:
To my mind there cannot be a doubt that Germany means to absorb the whole of Zanzibar, & if so why does she not say so? I see ... an ominous reference to an agreement of which I know nothing between England and Germany that we are not to run counter to German schemes in this region. Surely when this was agreed to, German schemes were defined, & if so, why was I not told – ? Are these schemes Govt. schemes, or private German schemes? ... Reference is made to my instructions, but no instructions have reached me till quite lately with regard to Germany & the German policy. I have been left to follow my old & approved line of action ... summed up in the Treaty Declarat[io]n which ... I got from the Sultan that he should not cede any of his rights or territory or give the Protectorate of his Kingdom or any part of it to any person without consent of England ... I never had orders to make way for Germany, but I soon saw how the situation stood & I acted cautiously & I hope discreetly ... But why did the Conference powers not jointly invite H[is] H[ighness] [the Sultan to Berlin] ...? They ostentatiously ignored him when they assembled & so far as I have heard never told him what they had done.
 
Kirk felt he was now being asked ‘to compromise through no known fault of mine a good name for past services’. If he exerted pressure on the Sultan to accede to the German demands, as London clearly expected him to, the Sultan would ‘simply drop’ him, ‘& I will have the blame for what I have no power to prevent’.
I am loathe to kick the last prop away so long as we have a chance of redeeming even to a small extent lost ground or saving even a part that may be useful some day in the many changes that will take place here before dominion is finally settled, for this German colonization scheme is a farce & cannot last. Either the country will be worse than ever or Germany will have to expend blood & money and make this what we have made Indian, an Empire. It will pay her to do so, but there is no sign that she contemplates this as yet. So we bid fair to lose the fairly good Protectorate & freedom we have under the Sultan in exchange for a long period of confusion when all my work will be undone.
 
Yet the very idea that the Sultan should have been invited to the Berlin Conference marked Kirk out as one of yesterday’s men. Imperial Monopoly was a game played according to the amoral rules of
Realpolitik
, and the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was as ready to play by those rules as Bismarck. The Sultan, by contrast, was an African ruler. There could be no place round the board for him.
Bulky, scruffy, reactionary and crafty, Salisbury was almost entirely cynical about imperialism. His definition of the value of empire was simple: ‘victories [divided] by taxation’. ‘The Buffalo’ had no patience whatever with the ‘superficial philanthropy’ and ‘roguery’ of the ‘fanatics’ who advocated expansion in Africa for its own sake. Like Bismarck, colonies only interested Salisbury as properties on the board of great power politics. He was openly dismissive of Rhodes’s vision of extending British power across the length of the African continent. As he told his fellow peers in July 1890, he found it
a very curious idea ... that there is some special advantage in having a stretch of territory extending all the way from Cape Town to the sources of the Nile. Now, this stretch of territory North of Lake Tanganyika could only [be] a very narrow one ... I cannot imagine any trade going in that direction ... It is over an impracticable country, and leading only into the Portuguese possessions, into which, as far as I know, during the last 300 years there has been no very eager or impetuous torrent of trade. I think that the constant study of maps is apt to disturb men’s reasoning powers ... But if you look beyond the merely commercial considerations to those which are of a strategic character, I can imagine no more uncomfortable position than the possession of a narrow strip of territory in the very heart of Africa, three months’ distance from the coast, which should be separating the forces of a powerful empire like Germany and ... another European Power. Without any advantages of position we should have had all the dangers inseparable from its defence.
 

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