Pax Britannica (11 page)

Behind the trade lay the capital: British money sunk in the imperial goldfields, plantations, trading companies, railways, insurance firms, shipping lines. Britain was banker and moneylender to all her Empire. Her capitalists had cash to spare. The railway boom at home was over, the rate of industrial expansion had slackened, and the second or third generation of industrialists looked around for profitable opportunities elsewhere. There was a wide choice of developing foreign countries, and into nearly all of them British money went, but a field of profit at once secure, worthy and patriotic was offered by the Empire. There was nothing rude then to the epithet of capitalist. It was thought very proper for the British moneyed classes to plough their cash into Indian railways, African mines or Polynesian copra. Not only did it pay interest, and help the recipient countries to develop, and bind the natives closer within the family circle: it also ensured, by financing ports, docks and railways, that a flow of food and raw materials came back to Britain in return—for the gulf between the rich peoples and the poor was so immense that most imperial loans were necessarily repaid in kind.

It was a common belief among the late Victorians, if we are to go by the literature of the New Imperialism, that all these imperial activities had made their country rich: more than a belief, an assumption, for just as they did not often define their motives, so they did not generally analyse the economic situation very precisely. To the public the extension of Empire seemed more or less to have coincided with a fabulous increase in Britain’s wealth, and they assumed it to be cause and effect. Britain was still the richest of nations. Her exports were running at more than
£
216 million a year, compared with
£
181 million for the United States and
£
148 million for Germany. Her overseas investments were worth something like
£
1,700 million—15 per cent of the national capital, bringing in some
£
100 million interest each year. British gold reserves were much the largest in Europe, and the pound was the strongest and most stable currency.

Much of this was imperial profit. Trade often had followed the flag, and the colonial commerce was very important to Britain. The transplanted Britons of the white colonies still preferred British goods, from sentiment as from habit, and the main imperial trade routes all led to England. Colonial Governments naturally did much of their buying through their agents in London; colonial companies raised their capital in the City as a matter of course; much of London’s big re-export business was in colonial goods. There were parts of the Empire—Cape Colony was one—where British exporters and importers enjoyed a virtual monopoly, and almost everywhere else officialdom tended to favour the British businessman over his foreign competitor. In earlier years the flow of goods from India had been altogether one way—they were paid for by taxes raised on the spot.

The New Imperialists represented British progress as a cycle of imperial expansion. They reasoned that the wealth of India, a century before, had provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution—which had enabled the British to acquire their new Empire elsewhere—which was itself now paying dividends. They backed
their arguments with figures which pictured the whole Empire as an economic unit. It was, they liked to say, ‘first among the Powers’ in wheat, wool, timber, tea, coal, iron, gold. In steel it was exceeded only by the United States and Germany. In tobacco it was second only to Spain. It produced a third of the world’s coal, a sixth of the wheat. Its volume of trade had consistently grown, as the Empire itself grew. In 1820 British foreign trade had been worth
£
80 million: by 1897 the Empire’s total foreign trade was worth
£
745 million. Britain’s terms of trade, too, had consistently improved—which is to say, she paid less for the things she bought, and got more for the things she sold. ‘Selling dear, buying cheap’ seemed to be one of the perquisites of Empire, if only because by controlling so many of the sources of supply, the British could keep the price of raw materials down.

The flow of commerce within the Empire somehow seemed particularly heartening, as though so many eager vassals were working away there, year by year, exchanging their commodities backwards and forwards for the indirect benefit of their suzerains. The popular statistics of the time are full of ‘inter-British’ trade figures. They contributed mystically to the aspiration of a self-sufficient, all-inclusive Empire, impervious to the designs or catastrophes of the world at large. Australia sent her silver to India. India sent her rice to Natal. Canada sent her manufactured goods to the West Indies. The New Zealand grassland industries existed entirely to satisfy imperial markets. As Flora Shaw pointed out in the
Britannica,
‘the butter season of Australasia is from October to March, while the butter season of Ireland and northern Europe is from March to October’. The New Imperialists foresaw an Empire self-supporting in everything—a world of its own, with Britain herself as a vast smelter, processor or refiner at the centre.

Such was the profit-mechanism of Empire, as the activists saw it in 1897. Since it seemed, from the vantage-point of the Jubilee, to be a tremendous success, the instinct of the time was naturally to make it more so, and especially in the last of the unexploited continents,
Africa. The more land you possessed, surely the richer you were. The more people you ruled, the greater your labour force. The more directly you controlled a country, the safer was your investment there, and the more generous the dividends it was likely to pay.

In Africa there were still territories to be annexed, labour forces awaiting employment, resources to be tapped and markets to be created. The New Imperialism in Britain, the apogee of the idea of Empire, was above all manifested in the scramble for Africa. India, the West Indies and the white colonies had, it seemed, always been there, part of the background of the Englishman’s life. It was the new magic of Africa that set the tone—Cape-to-Cairo all red, Wilson’s last stand on the Shangani River, those swaying pulley-ropes above the Big Hole at Kimberley, Cooks’ white steamers paddling past pyramids into desert sunsets. Powerful economic lobbies pressed the British Government into African adventures.

The profits were not always immediate. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company had not yet paid a dividend,
1
and the Imperial British East Africa Company never paid one from start to finish. But long-term benefits, it was thought, were assured, and it was the duty of the Government to make them possible. Such a duty had long been accepted. Palmerston had declared it the business of Government to ‘open and secure the roads for the merchant’. Joseph Chamberlain thought it was the task of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office to ‘find new markets and defend old ones’, while the War Office and the Admiralty protected the flow of commerce. Abroad, national power was properly used to further private trade and investment—by forcing other countries to reduce their tariffs and abolish their monopolies, by opening up such decayed and shuttered organisms as the Turkish and Chinese empires, and by creating new markets for British goods. ‘Our burden is too great,’ Gladstone once complained to the rampantly expansionist Rhodes. ‘We have too much, Mr Rhodes, to do. Apart from increasing our obligations in every part of the world, what advantage do you see to the English race in acquisition of new territory?’ ‘Great Britain is a very small island,’ was Rhodes’s reply. ‘Great Britain’s position depends on her trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at
present devoted to barbarism we shall shut out the world’s trade. … It must be brought home to you that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.’

The expansion and retention of the world! In terms less gloriously flamboyant, the British as a whole now echoed Mr Rhodes. What the business community really wanted was the Open Door—the opportunity to trade freely everywhere, irrespective of sovereignty. If they could not have this, in a world which would not accept the principles of Free Trade, very well then, Empire it must be. It might at first sight, Adam Smith had written, seem very proper for a nation of shopkeepers to found a great empire with the sole purpose of creating more customers: and there were many businessmen still who thought it a very proper end of imperial policy. If another country seized an African territory, instantly a tariff was imposed to keep out British goods: it was the duty of the British Government to get there first. The Empire, Rhodes also said, was a bread-and-butter question, and its expansion was essential to the equilibrium of Britain. ‘In order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.’

So all these various instincts and impulses of profit were forcing outwards the frontiers of Empire.—‘
God
Who
made
thee
mighty
make
thee
mightier
yet!
’
And the bigger it was, the bigger it had to be. If the first cause was generally commerce, investment, or raw materials, the second was the need to protect the stake: from the seacoast into the hinterland, from the exposed plateau across the mountains, from India into Burma, from Egypt into the Sudan, and everywhere to the next islet, headland or river basin, the one the Empire could not safely afford to be without.

In some of their suppositions, as we shall later see, the New Imperialists were deluded. The profit instinct was not infallible:
foreigners were barging into those cherished colonial markets, Empire in Africa was a very different thing from the Raj and the white colonies, Britain’s wealth was not so imperial as they thought. But rightly or wrongly, the urge to profit lay at the root of the New Imperialism, just as it had impelled the adventurers of England out of their cramped islands from the start. Already there were formidable critics of the movement—not only liberal politicians and journalists, but economists, too. The most forceful of them all was Hobson, who argued that if all this money, all this enterprise had stayed at home, ordinary English people would have benefited more. Easy money for capitalists and traders, he reasoned, did not mean better homes, schools or health for the British masses.

He preached to an unresponsive audience. In Russia the young Lenin heard him, and believed. In England few listened. The rich did not approve of such unorthodoxies, and the poor were all out in the streets, waving their flags for Jubilee.

T
HE means of profit were for the few, but the hope of glory was almost universal. Empire and Imperialism, wrote the journalist W. F. Monypenny,
1
filled the place in everyday speech once filled by Nation and Nationality—the national ideal had given way to the imperial. The existence of the Empire, and its expansion, seemed to satisfy some national psychological need. In 1878 Lord Carnarvon, then Colonial Secretary, had felt obliged to ask what the word ‘imperialism’ actually meant.
2
The
Oxford
Dictionary
gave an answer: ‘the principle or policy of seeking, or at least not refusing, an extension of the British Empire in directions where trading interests and investments require the protection of the flag, and of so uniting the different parts of the Empire having separate Governments as to secure that for certain purposes, such as warlike defence, internal commerce, copyright and postal communications, they shall be practically a single State.’ By 1897 nobody was likely to need a definition. So cataclysmic had been the explosion of the new ideas, so carried away was the nation, that everybody knew the meaning of imperialism now.

Two very different poets had between them expressed the popular interpretation. The first was the balladeer G. W. Hunt, whose most famous music-hall song had given a word to the language:

By no means everybody, even in this brash heyday of the creed, found Jingoism tasteful. Chauvinism was an old British trait, but this aggressive conceit was something new. Queen Victoria, contemplating the national vainglory with some disquiet, once observed that she could not quite understand ‘why nobody was to have anything anywhere but ourselves’. To most Britons, nevertheless, the spirit of Empire was essentially acquisitive, and Jingoism itself was one of the motives of imperialism.

The second poet was Alfred Austin, who apostrophized his country in loftier metre: 

Fewer would quarrel with this image of the imperial presence, a magnanimous Galahad of the wheat fields, friend and protector of all. The British saw their country as a special kind of Power,
sui
generis,
making rules of its own and legitimately imposing them on others. To the British Empire no conventions applied. Command, authority, privilege were natural rights of the British people. The world measured its longitude from Greenwich, and the postage stamps of Great Britain, alone in the world, did not bother with a national title, but simply bore Victoria’s head. Take it, the British seemed to say to the world, or leave it.

To this specialness the Queen herself no doubt subscribed, just as her person summed it up. It was Disraeli, thirty years before, who had made an imperialist of Her Imperial Majesty. He saw the Empire
as an Eastern pageantry, a perpetual durbar, summoning the British people away beyond the dour obsessions of Europe to a destiny that was spiced and gilded. Under his seductive influence Victoria, like so many of her subjects, found herself bemused by the exotic allure of Empire. The Queen had a horror of John Bullism, by which she meant arrogance and bullying in diplomacy: but the older she grew, the more she grew accustomed to the imperial stance, until by the time of her Diamond Jubilee her very appearance among her satraps, mercenaries and imperial commanders seemed to give sanction to the idea of the British Empire as a divinely sponsored phenomenon—By Appointment to God.

The Empire was at its zenith, the Crown glittered as never before, magnificently in the centre of the world lay England, home and glory. With such a background of national self-esteem, it was difficult not to be pugnacious. The late Victorians were plumper and more complacent than their fathers had been, but they still had plenty of
élan,
and the history of the past century had inspired them with a happy contempt for all adversaries. Their society was stable. Their inventive genius was everywhere acknowledged. The superiority of their arms seemed to have been permanently established by the twin victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. There had been setbacks, of course, generally when a gallant company of cruelly outnumbered Britons had been caught unfairly by surprise: but even the blunders of the Crimea had been redeemed by the effortless conquest of Egypt, and by a score of successful small colonial wars. Nowadays, when a British soldier marched into some unknown and potentially hostile territory, he marched in the almost certain conviction that he was going to win. The British armies of the day fought ferociously, matching barbarism with brutality, and seldom hesitating to employ the most terrible of weapons, the Maxim gun or the expanding Dum-Dum bullet, against the most primitive of enemies—‘Butcher and Bolt’ was the army’s own nickname for punitive expeditions. But it was all in a good cause. As Austin exclaimed in another irresistible poem:

So
th
e taste for power inflamed the imperial violence. It must have seemed so easy. In India the Forward School of strategists constantly pressed for the extension of frontiers northward and eastward through the passes—to confront the enemy, Russian, French or Chinese, muzzle to muzzle on ground of British choosing. In the Pacific the virile Australians wanted to create a Mare Nostrum, excluding other European Powers and keeping the Asiatics where they belonged. In Africa the British seemed to be storming belligerently everywhere, seizing territories or abasing chieftains for reasons that were basically economic or strategic, but were often sublimated on the spot into the sheer love of a scrap. Austin was once asked to define his idea of Heaven. It was, he said, to be sitting in a garden receiving news by alternate messengers of British victories at sea and British victories on land. The British were not really a belligerent people—few nations were more
civilian
than Victorian Britain—and they had not been engaged in a life-and-death struggle since the defeat of Napoleon. But a generation of easy victories had gone to their heads, and they were drunk with glory. Sometimes they yielded to surges of vindictive anger. Gladstone himself had ordered the bombardment of Alexandria, after the revolt of Arabi Pasha the nationalist in 1882, confounding those who forecast that he would only intervene with the Salvation Army. The boys at Eton unanimously voted that Arabi ought to be hanged for his patriotism, and Queen Victoria agreed with them.

Dreams of private glory, too, forced the imperial play close up to the net, and helped to keep the pugnacity aboil. J. S. Mill once
called the British Empire ‘a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes’, and certainly the native energy of the British needed outlets.
1
With 40 million people in their islands, a countryside tamed by railways and roads, and a newly educated generation reaching maturity, the more adventurous of the British felt cramped. They pined for more elemental environments, where climate, terrain, opportunity and the pitch of everyday life could all be more extreme. Most Britons emigrated, as we have seen, because they needed to, but many more were just in search of space, danger and responsibility and open air—and some, so sophisticated commentators suggest, were obeying a kind of sexual compulsion, a reaction to the celibate frustrations of the British public schools. Fame and fortune could be made out of imperial adventure.
Punch
once suggested a coat of arms for the reporter-explorer Henry Stanley, Livingstone’s putative rescuer, containing in one quarter ‘two dwarfs of the forest of perpetual night proper, journalistically exploited to the nines, with the motto
Eminent
Travellers
Rescued
While
You
Wait’.

For others the inducements were less immediately romantic. There were jobs to be found in the Empire less prosaic than their equivalents at home. The clerk could aspire to a merchant’s desk in Barbados or Singapore. The journalist could follow Kipling to the
Pioneer
at Allahabad, or write off
on
spec
to the Toronto
Globe
,
the Melbourne
Age
or the
Cape
Times
—all sound imperialist organs which welcomed able Englishmen. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, even the occasional artist, could pursue their professions less conventionally and often more profitably in colonial cities, while for working men, Lord Rosebery once assured the Trades Union Congress, the Empire provided ‘a variety of guarantees and opportunities … which can be offered by no other country in the world’. Standards of living were often much higher than at home. In the tropics especially servants were cheap and plentiful—even sergeants’ wives had maids and houseboys, while private soldiers in India invariably employed Indians to clean their buttons and boots.

To a really ambitious man the highest posts of Empire could bring most of the satisfactions of politics without the degradations of hustings or debate. Great splendours of position attended the successful imperial administrator. The chance of a truly regal status in life, such as a Colonial Governor enjoyed, with his own court and etiquette, his palace on the hill, a subject people at his feet and the Union Jack at his flagstaff—the mere possibility of such an elevation was enough to make a susceptible bureaucrat imperialist to the last gunboat. In the old days the Marquis Wellesley, though voted a grant of
£
20,000 for his services in India, died embittered because the Government refused to create him Duke of Hindustan. By the 1890s ambitions were less gorgeous, but were still compelling enough to create an interested lobby for the extension of Empire. Sir George Campbell, one of the most liberal of late Victorian imperialists, and himself a former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, thought the existence of a large and increasing class of people wanting to fulfil themselves abroad ‘reason and justification for foreign extensions where they can legitimately be made’.

What incentives they were! The smell of the veldt, the illicit delight of a sabre-slash in the sunshine, a drum-beat out of the forested hills, the first sod turned on your own homestead, with a million acres to come; the wheezing breath of your dear old bearer, as he lit the juniper fire in the morning, and brought the teapot steaming to your bed; the never-sated excitement of tigers, the pride of red tunic and swagger stick in the bazaars, the thump of the band behind you as you clattered, the Colonel’s lady, in your spanking tonga through the cantonment, or the dull gleam of a nugget in the clay, Twelve Below Discovery on Bonanza Creek: gracious acceptance of curtsies, on the lawn for the Queen’s Birthday—sparkle of brass polished thin, as your carriage braked precariously down the tree-shaded road from the Peak—sudden tap of Morse in the silence of the Outback—first place for the Royal Mail on the convoy through Suez—unexpected promotion to be officer in charge of the Ex-Amir of Kabul—
‘the
Ship
cannot
dock
at
Addah
owing
to
the
surf,
but 
Mr
Micah
our
Agent
will
be
on
the
beach
to
welcome
you
from
the
Surf
boat,
and
I
remain,
Dear
Sir,
Y
our
Faithful
Servant
,
p.p.
F.
and
A.
Swanzy’
.
The cloud of dust and jingle of accoutrement, as the dispatch rider swept in with an ultimatum for the paramount chief; the gleaming plates of the entrepreneurs on the waterfront at Singapore; flowers and brown arms in the Pacific evening; flash, and fire, and black men all around you, and great ships steaming, and curry on the train at Sher Shah junction, and the Admiral’s pinnace chugging across Esquimalt Bay, and the surreptitious glance at the
Gazette,
over the breakfast table before morning inspection, on the day they announced the Birthday Honours. All these fortified the pugnacity of Empire: and filtered back along the trade routes, distilled in the heady patriotism of home, they laced the policies of State.