Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (73 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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Some readers may find it helpful to think of modern flight times, but replace the word ‘hours’ with ‘weeks’.

By a ‘factory’ the directors simply meant a warehouse: the company was not itself engaged in industrial production.

Byng’s fate inspired Voltaire’s famous one-liner: ‘In this country it is thought well to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others’.

Contemporary reports spoke of 146 prisoners, most of whom suffocated to death. It seems likely that the number was smaller, but there is no doubt that a large proportion of them died. It was the height of the Indian summer and the ‘hole’ was a cell just eighteen feet by fourteen.

By contrast, Irishmen were over-represented in the lower ranks. In the early nineteenth century, the Bengal army was 34 per cent English, 11 per cent Scottish and 48 per cent Irish.

French Huguenots had already established settlements in what became South Carolina and in northern Florida in the 1560s.

It is important to bear in mind that at this time the North American coast was primarily of interest as a source of strategic support for Britain’s ambitions in the Caribbean, otherwise known as the ‘West Indies’. Hence the familiar yet incongruous term ‘Indians’ for natives of North America.

In 1800 only 3.5 million out of 13.5 million people in Latin America were white, of whom 30,000 were Spanish born
peninsulares.
The rest were American-born creoles. By 1820 around a quarter of the population of Latin America were of mixed ethnic origin.

A further inducement to attract entrepreneurial emigrants to America was the founding of Georgia in 1732 as an asylum for debtors.

By the end of the nineteenth century around three-quarters of the population of Great Britain lived in England, compared with a tenth in Scotland and a tenth in Ireland. But in the Empire the English accounted for barely half of colonists. Scots constituted around 23 per cent of the British-born population in New Zealand, 21 per cent in Canada and 15 per cent in Australia. The Irish constituted 21 per cent of the British-born in Canada and New Zealand, and fully 27 per cent in Australia.

This was the average mortality rate for the entire period of the British slave trade, 1662 – 1807. The rate was closer to one in four in the early decades. As Newton’s account makes clear, the slaves were kept permanently chained up, lying on ledges barely two and a half feet high ‘like books on a shelf’. However, the death rate among the crews of slave ships was even higher – around 17 per cent in the second half of the eighteenth century. Hence the sailor’s rhyme, ‘Beware and take care / Of the Bight of Benin: / For one that comes out / There are forty go in’.

In Virginia it was enacted in 1662 that the mulatto children of slave women should themselves be slaves; in 1705 interracial marriage was prohibited.

First to Nova Scotia, then to Sierra Leone. It is not clear if this change of location was for good or bad behaviour.

This was not an unrealistic projection. In 1700 the population of British North America had been around 265,000, by 1750 it was 1.2 million and by 1770 2.3 million – more than the population of Scotland.

‘Nothing could be more coarse or clumsy or ungracious than his outside. Two large prominent eyes rolled about to no purpose (for he was utterly short-sighted), a wide mouth, thick lips and inflated visage, gave him the air of a blind trumpeter.’ (Horace Walpole)

Here was the moment when the idiosyncratic institutions of the Asian and American halves of the British Empire fatally clashed. The East India Company had been hard hit by the American colonists’ boycott of tea, which was part of the campaign against the Townshend Duties. Struggling with a tea surplus and a burgeoning debt burden, the company simply wanted to unload some of its surplus on the American market.

The distance of the first convict fleet’s voyage from Portsmouth to Rio de Janiero, from Rio to Cape Town and from Cape Town to Botany Bay was 15,900 miles.

In fact, and despite government encouragements to migrate to Australia, the US long remained the most popular destination for emigrants from the United Kingdom. Of the 600,000 or so people who left England, Wales and Scotland between 1815 and 1850, 80 per cent went to the United States. Of the staggering 13 million who left the United Kingdom in the sixty years after 1850, the proportion was about the same, with the Irish in particular favouring the ‘land of the free’ over the Empire. Only as the twentieth century wore on did more and more Britons opt to emigrate to the Empire rather than America. More than 6 million Britons emigrated to the Empire between 1900 and 1963, roughly eight out of ten of all British emigrants.

Not only altruistic but remarkably successful. When I visited Freetown in February 2002, three months before free elections were held in the country, one man I met exclaimed, on learning my nationality: ‘Thank God for Britain!’

In the words of King Gezo, who disposed of 9,000 slaves a year, ‘The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing ... a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people?’

In his own words, ‘a violent purgative combined with quinine and the warm bath or ped chivium. I have always observed that as soon as the slightest movement took place in the bowels the perspiration burst forth from the skin and headaches vanished – 3 grains of calomel, 3 of quinine, 10 grains rhubarb, 4 grains of resin jalap mixed with a little spirit is a good combination.’ This was the basis of the later ‘Livingstone Pill’ or ‘Zambezi Rouser’.

Towards the end of his life, Livingstone admitted: ‘I have but one regret and that is that I did not feel it my duty to play with my children as much as to teach ... I worked very hard at that and was tired out at night. Now I have none to play with’.

You can still see the slave cells in Stonetown today: dark, dank and stiflingly hot, they convey as starkly as anything I know the misery inflicted by slavery.

‘Some other things have taken well in quarters where I did not expect it’, he noted, ‘and the whole together may have a smack of the “wisdom of the serpent”, though I meant it not so’.

Smith’s only caveat was that he felt the typical Indian woman’s lower half was ‘badly formed and ill calculated to harmonize with so beautiful a superstructure’. He had clearly given the matter a good deal of thought.

The Hindu practice of
anumarana
(‘dying after’) or
sahamarana
(‘dying along with’) was incorrectly called ‘suttee’ by the British. In fact the word
sati
refers to the widow who incinerates herself, and could be translated as ‘saint’.

Nowadays spelt ‘Awadh’, but ‘Oudh’ to the Victorians.

Who married the woman he rescued from her first husband’s funeral pyre.

Captain Robert Smith, the admirer of Indian feminine beauty encountered above, was adamant that abolishing female infanticide and sati had strengthened not weakened British rule, since ‘a very numerous class of the Hindus are not so sensitive on points of their religion now as formerly’. He wanted to see a further ban on the depositing of corpses in the River Ganges. All this would demonstrate ‘a determination on the part of the government to relieve [the Hindu population] from the thraldom of a domineering and self interested priesthood; at the same time leaving them the undisturbed practice of their religion when not accompanied by rites at which humanity shudders’.

The mutineers had turned for leadership to the sons of Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’.

Henry Lawrence’s testimony on this point is illuminating: ‘The sepoy feels that we cannot do without him; and yet the highest reward that a sepoy can obtain ... is about one hundred pounds a year without a prospect of a brighter career for his son. Surely this is not inducement to offer to a foreign soldier for special fidelity and long service’. Was it reasonable to expect ‘that the energetic and aspiring among
immense
military masses should like our ... arrogation to ourselves ... of
all
authority and emolument’?

It was entirely characteristic of the Evangelical era that Wajid Ali was deposed on the grounds that he was excessively debauched.

As usual it took naval force to secure his signature, in the form of a threatened blockade of the island.

Though I was assured by the chief of nearby Mukuni that the name derives from the notion that the chief of Mukuni is a ‘living stone’.

See Chapter 4.

It is a remarkable fact that throughout the first half of the nineteenth century the amount the East India Company earned from its monopoly on the export of opium was roughly equal to the amount it had to remit to London to pay the interest on its huge debt. The opium trade was also crucial to the Indian balance of payments.

Not only did it therefore take much less time to cross the oceans from metropolis to empire; it cost a great deal less. The cost of shipping a bushel of wheat from New York to Liverpool was halved between 1830 and 1880 and halved again between 1880 and 1914. In 1830 transport costs for bar iron had been not much less than total production costs; by 1910 they were less than a fifth.

One mutineer, on his way to execution, identified the telegraph as ‘the accursed string that strangles me’.

Although the British domestic network was nationalized, most of the overseas network was constructed and operated by private enterprise.

Messages for the Foreign or Colonial Offices had to cross London from the Eastern Telegraph Company’s offices in the City; then they had to go through the same registration process as conventional written dispatches.

Among the heroes of this romantic game were ‘pandits’ like Kishen Singh and Sarat Chandra Das, the original of ‘Hurry Chunder Mokerjee’ in Kipling’s
Kim
.

Below the commanding heights of the Viceregal Lodge and the Commander-in-Chief’s residence, the Peterhof, the slopes soon became rather cluttered with mock-Tudor holiday homes. Lutyens said of Simla: ‘If one was told that the monkeys had built it all one could only say [would be]: “What wonderful monkeys – they must be shot in case they do it again”’.

‘Jack Barrett went to Quetta

Because they told him to.
He left his wife at Simla
On three-fourths his monthly screw:
‘Jack Barrett went to Quetta,
And there gave up the ghost,
Attempting two men’s duty
In that very healthy post;
And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him
Five lively months at most.’

The covenanted Civil Service was known as such because its members entered a covenant with the Secretary of State of India. For most of the nineteenth century it had around 900 members. Only in the twentieth century did the number of ICS officers rise significantly above a thousand. In 1939 there were 1,384. Nor was this skeletal staffing unique to India. The entire administrative elite of the African colonial service – spread over a dozen colonies with a population of around 43 million – numbered just over 1,200. The Malayan civil service had 220 administrators for 3.2 million people, which by Indian standards was chronic overmanning.

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