Ghosts of Empire (25 page)

The ‘men on the ground' like Bernard and the Viceroy, Lord Ripon, were measured, cool pragmatists. The real sabre-rattlers were found among the merchant community in Rangoon, where rice-traders, like the Glasgow-born Steel brothers, were already beginning to make large fortunes. Other ardent imperialists were the adventurers and journalists, who often had less actual experience of Asian and Indian affairs. There were men like Archibald Colquhoun, a former ICS engineer and now a
Times
correspondent, who, in books and pamphlets, raised the war-cry in favour of imperial expansion. To men like Colquhoun, war and trade were inevitably linked. In his crude worldview, there were only two languages in the world, war and commerce. The British ‘begin with trade and we progress to war'. On the other hand the French ‘begin with war, and never get beyond it'. To Colquhoun, Burma was the ‘best unopened market in the world'.

Colquhoun, a bachelor in his mid-thirties, enjoyed the swashbuckling side of empire. Fond of champagne, powerfully built and sporting a walrus moustache, he was a copybook imperialist and an ‘explorer of the first rank', who in 1881–2 had travelled from Canton to Bhamo in northern
Burma.
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He also indulged in lofty thinking about strategy and geopolitics. The average civil servant, stationed in Rangoon or Simla, often did not have the time to meditate on such matters. Colquhoun believed that ‘the theatre of European jealousies and rivalries has been extended from Turkey and the Levant to the China seas', which meant that the ‘eastern problem of the future for England is Russia on the west and France on the east, closing in on her Indian frontiers'.
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Trying to move public opinion in England in favour of conquering Burma, he now resuscitated the old story about Thibaw and the massacres. ‘The present King of Burmah has become infamous through his many massacres,' he wrote, but even Colquhoun understood that the ‘monopolies granted by the king' were a ‘standing grievance to our merchants in British Burma'. This, Colquhoun saw, was an even ‘more formidable indictment' against Thibaw than the ‘constantly recurring massacres', which he luridly described. He played on the old themes of the China market and the nightmare of Burma ‘still coquetting with France'.
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Thibaw thought that he understood European politics. He believed that he could play the British against other European powers. In Mandalay, once the English had departed in 1879, there remained ‘a numerous colony of French and Italian' adventurers.
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An anonymous pamphlet from 1884 expressed alarm that ‘France's ambition to become a great colonial power has risen to an amazing height.'
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The paranoia about the French grew during the early 1880s. One British army major, in a book describing the conquest of Burma, revealed that he had visited Paris in the spring of 1880 and had attended a meeting of what was called ‘la société de Cochin-Chine', Cochin-China being a region in the southern part of what is now Vietnam. This meeting was not well attended. The Englishman spoke bad French but he could understand, so he claimed, that the role of the society was to act as a ‘sort of private Intelligence Department not ostensibly supported by Government'. Eight years after the meeting, from his desk in London, Major Edmond Browne chronicled the ‘feebly supported attempt to establish French influence at Mandalay'. The French, by the time Major Browne was writing, had failed in their attempt to extend their influence in Burma, and their failure induced a feeling of jingoism in Browne, who crowed that the ‘French Government, when
faced in a frank and conciliatory spirit by John Bull, were obliged to admit that his interests in Burma far exceeded their own'.
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In Burma's affairs, the tone in the early 1880s was more combative than it had been a decade before. This change of tone matched a change in personnel and mood. The relatively relaxed, if eccentric, Liberal Lord Ripon had been replaced as viceroy of India in 1884 by Lord Dufferin, an aristocrat of a traditional mould. Dufferin was a dreamer and a romantic. Although he had served in Gladstone's first government in 1868, he had accepted the highly desirable ambassadorship to Russia from Disraeli, the Conservative Prime Minister. As an Irish landowner, who lived well beyond his means, he was very sceptical of tenants' rights and yet, in the 1870s, Gladstone was now championing the tenants in Ireland, as a prelude to Home Rule. Dufferin, in modern terms, was an apolitical career diplomat. He had style and polish. His mother, he often boasted, had been only eighteen when he was born in 1826, and he used to say, as if to explain his eccentricities, ‘You see, my mother and I were young together in the reign of George IV. We shared our youth.' This statement involved some poetic licence, as George IV had died only a week after Lord Dufferin's fourth birthday, but it is true he had a close relationship with his mother, though this was strained when she married a man who, fifteen years her junior, was only three years older than Lord Dufferin.

Later in his career, Dufferin served as ambassador in Paris, where Bertrand Russell, the British mathematician and philosopher who had just graduated from Cambridge, stayed with him in 1894. Dufferin, Russell remembered years later, was a ‘delicious man–so perfect and well-rounded'. He retired in 1896, aged seventy. His contemporaries never found him so ‘delicious'.
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He was charming, they all agreed, but very spoilt. In contrast to the unusually independent-minded and home-schooled Lord Ripon, Lord Dufferin had gone through the traditional aristocratic treadmill, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he never finished his degree, leaving after only two years, though he served a term as president of the Union. He had spent some years travelling, including a notable trip to Iceland and Norway, when still in his twenties. It was this trip which provided the material for his successful book
Letters from High Altitudes
, a collection of letters ostensibly written to his mother.
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A romantic like Dufferin was drawn to the exoticism of empire, and even though he was initially not that enthusiastic about annexing Burma, he had no real ideological opposition to expanding Britain's reach, unlike some Liberals. It was important that, when the final reckoning with Thibaw came, a man who really believed in the imperial mission should hold the reins in India. The individual temper, character and interests of the people in charge determined policy almost entirely throughout the British Empire. There simply was no master plan. There were different moods, different styles of government. Individuals had different interests; centralizing forces were often dissipated by individuals on the ground, even when powerful characters, sitting in Whitehall, were trying to shape events in the empire. More often than not, there was very little central direction from London. The nature of parliamentary government ensured that ministries came and went; policies shifted and changed, often thanks to the verdict of the ballot box, or even because of a minor Cabinet reshuffle.

The circumstances surrounding the final annexation of Burma illustrate the role that chance, the vagaries of the electoral cycle and the idiosyncrasies of personality all played in the extinction of the Burmese monarchy. By 1885, the French were keenly involved in the affairs of Upper Burma. An urgent letter that July from the secretary of the Chief Commissioner of Lower Burma to the Viceroy's government in India gave details of the scale of that French involvement. The French, it seemed, were going to build a railway financed by their government and by a company that would be set up for that purpose. The railway, the British learned, would take seven years to build and would be constructed from Mandalay down to Lower Burma. The concession would be seventy years, so it was hoped that the Burmese would finally own the railway in 1955. The second plan the French had conceived was the establishment of a bank. This bank, it was planned, which was to be called the Royal Bank of Burma, would receive capital from the French government and would be incorporated as a company, which would then raise further capital. Its function would be to lend to the Burmese King and to merchants and it would have offices in Paris, London and Mandalay. It was agreed that this august institution would lend to normal Burmese merchants at 15 per cent, while the King
would get a preferential rate of 10 per cent.
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This was a reasonably high rate even for the time (the British government could borrow at less than 4 per cent from its own lenders), but then again, Thibaw, who everyone believed had massacred more than fifty members of his own family, was not the most reliable credit risk.

The French agents in Mandalay had been busy. The British were afraid that, if both the railway and the bank went ahead, the French would then have firm control over the trade and commerce of Upper Burma and would also control the only railway line in that region. These consequences would be ‘disastrous to British interests in lower Burma'. More frustratingly, the French would then be able to open up the Irrawaddy river to all international ships ‘on some such footing as the Danube now is'. Something had to be done. Even Charles Bernard, the Chief Commissioner of Lower Burma, cast aside his liberal ideas of non-intervention, stating that if Thibaw's government ‘threw themselves into the arms of a foreign power' the British government would be compelled to abandon the policy of non-intervention. He was pragmatic enough to realize that putting another king in Thibaw's place might not work, as the French could always influence Thibaw's successor.

It had not yet been decided to take the drastic step of annexing the country to the British Empire. The French, after subtle British diplomacy, were beginning to relent. As late as October 1885, Bernard's office informed the Viceroy's government that, although annexation had seemed like a good idea in July, the French had now been involved in ‘friendly action' towards the British; it was now ‘quite possible to stop short of annexation'. E. S. Symes, Bernard's secretary, argued that the ‘retention of a feudatory Prince at Mandalay would have advantages over annexation'. It would, Bernard believed, be more popular with the ‘Burmese race', in both Lower and Upper Burma. Keeping a feudatory prince would also be cheaper.
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Dufferin, the Viceroy, was equally unsure about annexation and, in November, he wrote to General Sir Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's private secretary, averring that the ‘Empire is certainly large enough, and nothing would have induced me to have extended our territories if it could have been avoided'.
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On 30 October Bernard's office received a curt and authoritative telegram from the Indian government:
‘you will be informed directly it is settled, whether country is to be annexed or not'. Edward Sladen, the Burmese expert, who was fluent in the language, was convinced that annexation was the only answer. In his report on the political situation in Burma, written in September, he suggested that only annexation would provide ‘real security against the periodical scares and uncertainties' which were so common a feature of Burmese politics. Even he recognized that this step was a last resort; annexation would not take place without ‘exhausting every other course of action'. Sladen was only too conscious that the Burmese people were ‘imbued with an almost superstitious veneration for the Royal Family'. He even conceded that a protectorate on the ‘Hyderabad system might succeed', if, he added, ‘accompanied by a military occupation of the country by British troops'.
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Meanwhile a campaign was being prepared. It was now obvious to British officials that the French had to be prevented from spreading their influence and that Thibaw's intention of ‘coquetting with the French' had to be thwarted. What remained unclear was the outcome. Thibaw had to be removed, but the fate of the monarchy was still in the balance. It was, as so often happens, a case of ‘fight now, think about the future later'. A suitable pretext for the war had arisen in the summer of 1885, when the Burmese council of ministers had imposed a large fine on the Bombay Burma Trading Corporation for illegally exporting timber from Upper Burma without paying the proper royalties to Thibaw. On 22 October an ultimatum was sent to the Burmese government which stated, among other things, that the fine should go to arbitration, and that a British resident should be received at Mandalay with ‘a proper guard of honour and a steamer'. Burma in effect would be reduced to a puppet state. The Burmese refused the conditions, giving the British the excuse they wanted to begin the military campaign.
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The campaign itself was one of those one-sided colonial wars which have all the air of a tragicomedy. The man in charge of the expedition, Harry Prendergast, was another son of empire, having been born in India. His Burma Field Force, of which Colonel Sladen was appointed chief political officer, consisted of 10,000 troops. On 2 November, as a thunderstorm broke over Madras, a lavish dinner was held to celebrate the arrival of General Prendergast and the coming campaign. Even though it was
certain that Thibaw would be crushed by the might of the British forces, the end, when it came, was sudden and unexpected. Thibaw had utterly misjudged the British. On 7 November he issued a proclamation calling for a ‘holy war' against ‘the English', in which he eloquently denounced ‘the English Kala barbarians' who were planning to ‘bring about the impairment and destruction of our religion' and the ‘violation of our national traditions and customs'.
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Subsequent history suggests that he may have been justified in his concerns about the future of his country, but the high-flown rhetoric could not save him. In late October, Sladen had been in Rangoon playing the newly invented game of lawn tennis nearly every day and going to dinner parties in the evenings. He confided in his diary on the 29th that he expected ‘strenuous opposition and real hard fighting'. Some things in the history of the empire never changed. On 7 November, as Thibaw was breathing fire against the English, Sladen calmly noted in his diary that ‘33 years ago I was much in the same position with my regiment on board HMS Sphynx prior to the second Burmese War'. He noted hopefully that this would be ‘the third and last struggle with Burmese arrogance'.
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