Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (51 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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EMPIRE FOR SALE
 
If we are defeated this time, perhaps we will have better luck next time.
For me, the present war is most emphatically only the beginning of a
long historical development, at whose end will stand the defeat of En-
gland’s world position
...
[and] the revolution of the coloured races
against the colonial imperialism of Europe.
Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz, 1915
 
In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves
...
[It] was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically – and secretly, of course – I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear
...
But I could get nothing into perspective
...
I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.
George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’
 
 
 
 
 
I
n the last decade of the Victorian era, an obscure public schoolboy made a prophecy about the British Empire’s fate in the coming century:
I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger – London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London ... I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future. The country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion ... but I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save London and the Empire from disaster.
 
Winston Churchill was just seventeen when he spoke those words to a fellow Harrovian, Murland Evans. They were astonishingly prescient. Churchill did save London, and indeed Britain. But, in the end, not even he could save the British Empire.
Within a single lifetime, that Empire – which had not yet reached its furthest extent when Churchill made his prophecy in 1892 – unravelled. By the time Churchill died in 1965, all its most important parts had gone. Why? Traditional accounts of ‘decolonization’ tend to give the credit (or the blame) to the nationalist movements within the colonies, from Sinn Fein in Ireland to Congress in India. The end of Empire is portrayed as a victory for ‘freedom fighters’, who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their peoples of the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, the principal threats – and the most plausible alternatives – to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires.
These alternative empires were significantly harsher in their treatment of subject peoples than Britain. Even before the First World War, Belgian rule in the notionally ‘independent’ Congo had become a byword for the abuse of human rights: the International Association’s rubber plantations and railways were built and operated on the basis of slave labour and the profits flowed directly into the pocket of King Leopold II.
92
Such was the rapacity of his regime that the cost in human life due to murder, starvation, disease and reduced fertility has been estimated at ten million: half the existing population. There was nothing hyperbolic about Joseph Conrad’s portrayal of ‘the horror’ of this in
Heart of Darkness
. It was in fact two Britons who exposed what was going on in the Congo: the British Consul, Roger Casement; and a humble Liverpool clerk named Edmund Morel, who spotted that immense quantities of rubber were being shipped out of Belgium but virtually no imports except guns were going in. Morel’s campaign against the Belgian regime was, he said, ‘an appeal addressed to four principles: human pity the world over; British honour; British Imperial responsibilities in Africa; [and] international commercial rights
coincident with and inseparable from native economic and personal liberties
’. True, the British Empire had not treated African slaves in Jamaica much better in the eighteenth century. But the correct comparison must be between these other empires and the British Empire as it was in the twentieth century. On that basis, differences were already manifesting themselves even before the First World War, and not only in comparison with Belgian rule.
The German satirical magazine
Simplicissimus
made the point lightheartedly in 1904 with a cartoon contrasting the different colonial powers. In the German colony even the giraffes and crocodiles are taught to goosestep. In the French, relations between the races are intimate to the point of indecency. In the Congo the natives are simply roasted over an open fire and eaten by King Leopold. But British colonies are conspicuously more complex than the rest. There, the native is force-fed whisky by a businessman, squeezed in a press for every last penny by a soldier and compelled to listen to a sermon by a missionary. In reality, the differences were more profound – and deepening. The French did not behave much better than the Belgians in their part of the Congo: population loss was comparably huge. In Algeria, New Caledonia and Indochina too, there was a policy of systematic expropriation of native land which made a mockery of Gallic rhetoric about universal citizenship. German overseas administration was no more liberal. When the Hereros sought to resist the encroachments of German colonists in 1904, Lieutenant-General Lothar von Trotha issued a proclamation which declared that ‘every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot’. Although this ‘annihilation order’ (
Vernichtungsbefehl
) was later withdrawn, the Herero population was reduced from around 80,000 in 1903 to just 20,000 in 1906. For this Trotha was awarded the
Pour le Mérite
, the highest German military decoration. The Maji Maji rising in East Africa in 1907 was suppressed with equal harshness.
Nor should the comparisons be confined to West European powers. Japanese colonial rule in Korea – a protectorate from 1905 and a colony directly ruled from Tokyo from 1910 – was conspicuously illiberal. When hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate in support of Yi Kwang-su’s Declaration of Independence, the so-called March First Movement, the Japanese authorities responded brutally. Over 6,000 Koreans were killed, 14,000 were injured and 50,000 were sentenced to imprisonment. We should also remember the quality of Russian rule in Poland, the Ireland of Central Europe; and in the Caucasus, where it extended as far as Batum on the Black Sea and Astara on the Caspian Sea; in the Central Asian provinces of Turkestan and Turkmenia; and in the Far East, where the new Trans-Siberian Railway took the Tsar’s writ all the way to Vladivostok and finally into Manchuria. To be sure, there were resemblances between Russian colonization of the steppe and the roughly contemporaneous colonization of the American prairies. But there were differences too. In their European colonies the Russians pursued aggressive policies of ‘russification’: coercion of the Poles was increasing at a time when the British were debating Home Rule for Ireland. In Central Asia, resistance to Russian colonization was dealt with uncompromisingly: a revolt by Muslims in Samarkand and Semirechie in 1916 was bloodily suppressed and the rebel death toll may have reached hundreds of thousands.
Yet all this would pale into insignificance alongside the crimes of the Russian, Japanese, German and Italian empires in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the most likely alternatives to British rule were Hirohito’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich and Mussolini’s New Rome. Nor could the threat posed by Stalin’s Soviet Union be discounted, though until after the Second World War most of his energies were devoted to terrorizing his own subjects. It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that ultimately ruined the British Empire. In other words, the Empire was dismantled not because it had oppressed subject peoples for centuries, but because it took up arms for just a few years against far more oppressive empires. It did the right thing, regardless of the cost. And that was why the ultimate, if reluctant, heir of Britain’s global power was not one of the evil empires of the East, but Britain’s most successful former colony.
Weltkrieg
 
In 1914 Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, the minister responsible for the world’s biggest navy. The bold and bumptious war correspondent who had made his reputation covering the triumph of Omdurman and the travesties of the Boer War had entered Parliament in 1901 and, after a brief period on the Conservative backbenches, had crossed the House and risen rapidly to the front rank of the Liberal Party.
No one was more keenly aware than Churchill of the threat to Britain’s position of world power posed by Germany. No one was more determined to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy, regardless of how many new battleships the Germans built. Yet by 1914, as we have seen, he was confident: in his view, ‘naval rivalry had ... ceased to be a cause of friction’ with Germany, since ‘it was certain we could not be overtaken’. On colonial questions too there seemed room for Anglo-German compromise, even cooperation. As late as 1911 the assumption among British military planners was that, in the event of a European war, any British Expeditionary Force would be deployed in Central Asia; in other words, it was taken for granted that the foe in such a war would be Russia. Then, in the summer of 1914, a crisis in another empire – in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina – brought the British and German empires quite suddenly into a calamitous collision.
Like many other statesmen of the time, Churchill was tempted to explain the war as a kind of natural disaster:
[The] nations in those days [were] prodigious organizations of forces ... which, like planetary bodies, could not approach each other in space without ... profound magnetic reactions. If they got too near the lightnings would begin to flash, and beyond a certain point they might be attracted altogether from the orbits ... they were [in] and draw each other into due collision.
 
In reality, the First World War came about because politicians and generals on both sides miscalculated. The Germans believed (not unreasonably) that the Russians were overtaking them militarily, so they risked a pre-emptive strike before the strategic gap grew any wider.
93
The Austrians failed to see that stamping on Serbia, useful though that might be in their war against Balkan terrorism, would embroil them in a European-wide conflagration. The Russians overestimated their own military capability almost as much as the Germans did; they also stubbornly ignored the evidence that their political system would crack under the strain of another war so soon after the fiasco of defeat by Japan in 1905. Only the French and the Belgians had no real choice. The Germans invaded them. They had to fight.
The British too had the freedom to err. At the time, the government claimed that intervention was a matter of legal obligation because the Germans had flouted the terms of the 1839 Treaty governing Belgian neutrality, which all the great powers had signed. In fact, Belgium was a useful pretext. The Liberals went to war for two reasons: first, because they feared the consequences of a German victory over France, imagining the Kaiser as a new Napoleon, bestriding the Continent and menacing the Channel coast. That may or may not have been a legitimate fear; but if it was, then the Liberals had not done enough to deter the Germans, and the Conservatives had been right to press for conscription. The second reason for going to war was a matter of domestic politics, not grand strategy. Since their triumph in 1906, the Liberals had seen their electoral support wither away. By 1914 Herbert Asquith’s government was on the verge of collapse. Given the failure of their foreign policy to avert a European war, he and his Cabinet colleagues ought indeed to have resigned. But they dreaded the return to Opposition. More, they dreaded the return of the Conservatives to power. They went to war partly to keep the Tories out.
The familiar images of the First World War are of the ‘storm of steel’ at the Somme and the muddy hell of Passchendaele. Because the war began in Sarajevo and ended at Versailles, we still tend to think of it as primarily a European conflict. Certainly, the core German war aims were ‘Euro-centric’: the main objective was to defeat Russia, and the German army’s immense sweep through Belgium into northern France was merely a means to that end, designed to protect Germany’s back by knocking out or at least badly hurting the Tsar’s principal ally. On closer inspection, however, the war was a truly global clash of empires, comparable in its geographical range to Britain’s eighteenth-century wars against France, which had ended nearly a century before.

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