Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (75 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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93
The Germans acted more out of a sense of weakness than strength. The Chief of the Great General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, told the State Secretary at the Foreign Office Gottlieb von Jagow in May 1914: ‘We must wage a preventive war to conquer our opponents as long as we still have a reasonable chance in this struggle.’ Note the doleful phrase ‘a reasonable chance’. But Moltke was convinced ‘that we would never again find a situation as favourable as now, when neither France nor Russia had completed the extension of their army organizations’.
94
At the start of the war Buchan was a war correspondent before joining the army. He served on the Headquarters Staff of the British Army in France as temporary Lieutenant-Colonel and when Lloyd George became Prime Minister was appointed Director of Information (1917 – 18). He was briefly Director of Intelligence, but had informal access to intelligence information throughout the war.
95
Though there was already a railway connection between Berlin and Constantinople (via Vienna), the Sultan’s aim was to extend the line across Anatolia via Ankara to Baghdad. The German bankers only really wanted to build the line to Ankara but in 1899 were forced into going on to Baghdad by the Kaiser. They then sought to make the line profitable by extending it to Basra. There had been considerable British suspicion of the project, but it cannot be regarded as a cause of the war. In fact a deal had been struck on the very eve of the war giving the Germans the right to extend the line to Basra in return for letting the British lead the exploitation of the Mesopotamian oilfields.
96
One of the most successful actions at the Somme was the Secunderabad Brigade’s attack at Morlancourt.
97
The Australian Frederic Manning’s semi-autobiographical novel
Middle Parts of Fortune
captured the equally disgusted mood among ordinary English soldiers at the Somme.
98
In fact he was back in government (as Minister of Supply) just two years later.
99
The subsequent neglect and high mortality of Townshend’s force was a scandal which led to the resignation of Austen Chamberlain as Secretary of State for India, though the fault lay with his subordinates’ misguided parsimony.
100
He is supposed to have said, on being handed the keys to the city: ‘I don’t want yer city. I want some heggs for my hofficers!’
101
Under the wartime Sykes-Picot agreement, which Lawrence furiously disavowed. He told Faysal he ‘intended to stick to them through thick and thin if necessary to fight against the French for the recovery of Syria’.
102
Total UK foreign capital stocks in 1930 amounted to $18.2 billion; the figure for the US was $14.7 billion.
103
In 1926 the Balfour Report on Imperial Relations had proposed redefining the dominions as ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status and in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs ... [and] united by a common allegiance to the crown’, and this wording was adopted in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. The dominions were still barred from passing legislation contrary to Westminster, but now Westminster could only legislate for the dominions at their request and the dominions were free to withdraw if they wished from what was now rechristened the ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’. Interestingly, there was little enthusiasm for this decentralization in either Australia or New Zealand, which did not adopt the statute until the 1940s.
104
Chamberlain never shared his father’s passion for the Empire, perhaps because as a young man he had been forced by his father to run a 20,000 acre sisal estate in the Bahamas. The venture was a total failure.
105
Gandhi served as a stretcher-bearer at Spion Kop.
106
The episode is alluded to in Forster’s
A Passage to India
: ‘Why, they ought to crawl from here to the caves on their hands and knees whenever an English-woman’s in sight ... they ought to be ground into the dust ...’
107
On 9 August, just before the Germans launched their offensive against Britain’s air defences, the RAF had 1,032 fighters. The German fighters available for the attack numbered 1,011. Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 pilots, several hundred more than the Luftwaffe. And crucially, Britain out-produced Germany: during the crucial months from June until September 1940, 1,900 new fighters were churned out by British factories, compared with just 775 in Germany. The technical advantage of radar and a superb system of command and control also greatly enhanced British effectiveness. Overall, German losses (including bombers) were nearly double British (1,733 to 915).
108
The term ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’ was first used in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 to convey the near autonomy of the dominions.
109
In a speech in Tokyo in 1944 Bose explicitly called for an Indian state ‘of an authoritarian character’. By this time he was calling himself the
Netaji
(dear leader) and affecting the usual fascist uniform.
110
He was the son of Lord Parmoor and the husband of the heiress to the Eno’s Fruit Salts fortune.
111
William Ferguson Massey, New Zealand Prime Minister from 1912 to 1925.
112
His mother was Brooklyn-born Jennie Jerome, daughter of Leonard Jerome, proprietor of the
New York Times
.
113
General Smuts replied in an interview for
Life
the following December that the Commonwealth was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history’.
114
Nor, significantly, did Roosevelt seem to intend that trusteeship should be the future basis of Russia’s vast Eurasian empire. This was what British officials dubbed the ‘salt water fallacy’: somehow colonies were treated differently if they were separated from those who ruled them by sea.
115
As he told a friend in 1941: ‘I always regard a visit [to the US] as in the nature of a serious illness to be followed by convalescence’.
116
To be precise, Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, ‘KG, PC, GCB, OM, GCSI, GCIE, GCVO, DSO, FRS, Hon. DCL, Hon. LLD, Hon. D.Sc., AMIEE, AMRINI’ – as he liked to remind people. Mountbatten liked to construct genealogical tables plotting his family’s royal lineage, using a system designed for pedigree cattle breeders.
117
The Muslim League had been founded as early as 1906 but, under the leadership of Mohammad Ali Jinnah, it became committed to the idea of a separate Muslim state only in 1940.
118
Both the Jewish state and Arab nationalism were in some measure creations of British policy during the First World War; but the terms of the 1917 Balfour Declaration had turned out to contain a hopeless contradiction: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine ...’
119
The last installment is due to be repaid in 2006.
First published in 2002 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London wc2r 0rl, England
 
 
First U. S. paperback edition published in 2004 by Basic Books.
 
Copyright © Niall Ferguson, 2002
 
The moral right of the author has been asserted
 
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 
 
Ferguson, Niall.
Empire : the rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power / Niall Ferguson.
p. cm.
Originally published: London: Allen Lane, 2002.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-0-465-01310-4

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