Pax Britannica (50 page)

It must have been almost impossible for the untravelled Englishman to resist this ceaseless publicity, and it is easy to see why men like Elgar, in the tractable society of the English provinces, uncritically absorbed it. The vast new readership of the
Daily
Mail
was intoxicated by stuff like this piece from Steevens (himself then 28 years old): ‘We send a boy out here and a boy there, and the boy takes hold of the savages of the part he comes to, and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to obey him and believe him and die for him and the Queen … and each one of us—you and I, and that man in his shirt-sleeves at the corner—is a working part of this world-shaping force.’ Over and over again the bulk and wealth of the Empire was emphasized, from soap-box and from pulpit, day after day in the newspapers and edition after edition in the popular imperialist books. The weekly full-page feature of the
Illustrated
London
News
was repeatedly devoted to imperial topics: The
Punitive Expedition to Benin, The Massacre in the Niger Protectorate, The Indian Famine, The Plague in Bombay, Lord Roberts on his Arab Charger, Prospecting for Gold in British Columbia, Dervish Fugitives Fleeing Down the Nile, On the Way to the Klondike, Fighting in a Nullah on the Tseri-Kandao Pass.

Since 1868 the Royal Colonial Institute
1
had been assiduously grinding imperial axes. So were the Royal Geographical Society, the Imperial Federation League, the United Empire Trade League. In the schools the glory of Empire shone through every curriculum, interspersed with All Things Bright and Beautiful: it was the duty of every father and school manager, Sir Howard Vincent
2
once said with a genuinely imperial turn of phrase, to ‘inculcate the study of Empire on all within their spheres of influence’. In the very month of the Jubilee a schoolboy ran away from Haileybury, the former college of the East India Company, and committed suicide, apparently because the other boys were persecuting him for his opinions about Crete. He disapproved of British intervention in the affairs of the island, where imperial troops were committed to keep the Turks out, and the newspapers dwelt at length upon a tragedy caused by such quixotic views. ‘That anyone with our present knowledge of Turks and Cretans should be enthusiastic about them’, commented the
Illustrated
London
News
, ‘is amazing … It is probable that his mind was unhinged.’

The New Imperialism was potent politics. The Conservative-Unionist Government certainly owed its confidence to its staunch imperial views, even Salisbury paying lip-service to the cause, and the ringmaster of the Jubilee was Joe Chamberlain, ‘Minister for Empire’.

Fifteen years before Seeley had observed with satisfaction that the political influence on Britain of India was nil. In those days the Empire was not an electoral issue, and the wise politician did not bother his head with it. Seeley was delighted that this was so. He had in mind the situation which might have arisen if Warren Hastings had not been impeached for alleged corruption in India in 1788
1
—an unhealthy domination of Parliament by wealthy vested interests of the Empire. In 1782 Pitt had said, during a debate on Parliamentary reform, ‘We now see foreign princes not giving votes but purchasing seats in this House, and sending their agents to sit with us as representatives of the nation. No man can doubt what I allude to. We have sitting among us the members of the Rajah of Tangore and the Nawab of Arcot, the representatives of petty Eastern despots.’

The worst, though, had never happened, and by 1883, when Seeley wrote, it was unthinkable. On very few occasions in the nineteenth century had imperial affairs vitally affected domestic politics. The Afghan War of 1878 contributed to Disraeli’s fall, the failure to relieve Gordon, coupled with the Irish issue, in the end defeated Gladstone. Ireland was a running sore, Egypt was once described by Milner as ‘the football of English polities’—during the three years after Tel-el-Kebir there were ninety-eight Blue books about the country. But it was only now, in the late nineties, that imperial affairs much mattered at the hustings. Now even Liberals found it necessary to beat the drum, and poor Gladstone, who once told a confused audience that the Liberal Party was opposed to imperialism but devoted to Empire, watched sadly from his last retirement in Hawarden as member after member of his shattered party fell into the moral error he himself had dubbed Jingoism.

Now, in hindsight, imperialists began to claim that Britain owed all her success to the existence of her Empire. ‘Our great Empire,’ Lord Rosebery once declared with satisfaction, ‘has pulled us out of the European system. Our foreign policy has become a colonial
policy.’ The spirit of the nation, it was said, depended upon the responsibilities of Empire: Britain’s triumphant position in the world was a response to the imperial challenge. Having our heroes in India, reasoned Sir Charles Crosthwaite, elevated every Briton, and indeed without the Anglo-Indian champions of the Victorian era there would not have been many. The grandest military funeral since Wellington’s had been given to Lord Napier, who never fought a European enemy, and the other exemplars Crosthwaite offered were Henry and John Lawrence, John Nicholson, John Jacob, Herbert Edwardes, Donald Stewart and ‘Bobs’—few of them likely to remain for long in the upper ranks of the British pantheon.

With Chamberlain at the Colonial Office, and this temper of thought politically fashionable, the official attitude to Empire was distinctly braced. A series of new institutions was planned or founded, intended to apply the latest British technology and scholarship to the colonial possessions—the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, the London School of Oriental Languages, the Imperial College of Science. Oriental scholarship in England, long overshadowed by German work, began to revive. Imperial development was considered systematically, as a whole. New life was breathed into the old idea, and all its buds, shy or gaudy, were bursting into flower.

But cause and effect were often muddled: some of the buds were unseasonable, and some went instantly to seed. Nobody had yet made any thorough study of the advantages of Empire, and the general hullabaloo of 1897 was in some ways deceptive. In particular the assumption that the Empire made Britain rich, that the more imperially she behaved the wealthier she would be, was a misconception. It was partly an honest delusion, based upon insufficient evidence, and partly a kind of fraud, devised by men who stood to gain from aggressive national policies.

The colonial trade, which looked so heart-warming portrayed in thick black arrows on diagrammatical maps, was not so important as it seemed. It was arguable that the original flow of imports from
India, under the East India Company, had contributed some of the capital for the Industrial Revolution a century before. It was obviously true that individual firms and families, like Hawkins the rubber man, had been enriched by imperial enterprise. But the staggering wealth which was being celebrated in 1897 had been accumulated above all by Free Trade—that economic philosophy, amounting almost to a dogma, for which the British had abandoned their old system of tariffs and trade restrictions half a century before.

For the Empire had once been virtually a British mercantile monopoly. Preferential tariffs protected the colonial trade, foreign ships were banned from colonial ports, colonies might only export their products to Britain, and in British bottoms. This system had been progressively destroyed during the first half of the century, as Free Trade ideas gathered strength. The repeal of the Corn Laws had preceded by three years the repeal of the Navigation Acts—the one repeal admitting foreign corn into Britain without duty, the other ending the British monopoly of direct shipping routes within the Empire. Free Trade had triumphed, and the old economic meaning of Empire was lost.

To the really dedicated free trader any restriction on commerce with any nation was almost irreligious. Imperial favouritism was incompatible with the creed at its most fervent, and the narrower cause of imperialism seemed almost petty beside the transcendent virtue of the Open Door. Besides, it worked. The British adopted the doctrine more whole-heartedly than anyone, and stuck to it longer, and it could be demonstrated by statistics that Free Trade rather than imperial expansion had made them rich. The Empire was in no way an economic unity, and it was far from self-sufficient. In 1896 Britain had imported 64 million hundredweight of wheat—30.7 million from the United States, 17.2 million from Russia, and only 3.6 million from Canada. Only in potatoes, cheese, apples and fresh mutton was the Empire Britain’s chief food supplier: other foodstuffs came overwhelmingly from foreign countries, the Empire generally providing less than 10 per cent. The Empire’s total foreign trade in 1896 was worth
£
745 million: the total inter-imperial trade was worth
£
183 million. What was more, even in that
high summer of imperialism, while trade with foreign countries was increasing still, trade with the Empire was almost static. The explosion of the British Empire in the preceding twenty years had little effect on Britain’s prosperity. Trade scarcely flourished in the enormous new African territories: in 1897 the whole of tropical Africa took only 1.2 per cent of British exports. Each year the colonies bought a larger proportion of goods in foreign countries, and a smaller from Britain. The horse-drawn trams of Bombay were made in New York, and ships of all nations profited from the imperial trade, as Kipling recognized in his ballad of a Calcutta boardinghouse:

What increases there had been in imperial trade had mostly been with the self-governing colonies, whose economic policies were almost as independent as France’s or Germany’s, and were certainly not designed to benefit the Old Country. Some people thought, indeed, that the possession of the dependent Empire actually blunted British commercial initiative, offering the feebler salesmen a comfortable feather-bed, tempting the less aggressive firms to rely on British power for their profits. Salesmen were said to study foreign tastes with reluctance, and Steevens reported from one of his journeys ‘the usual weary story—foreigners content with smaller profits, excessive rates of interest charged by English agents, inelastic terms of credit, incompetent travellers’.

Even the immense overseas investments of the British were no longer primarily imperial investments. Far more British capital was sunk in the United States than in India, and the disparity was rising. Loans within the Empire might be less liable to default, but loans to foreigners were much better gambles. Indian Government loans returned an average of 3.87 per cent: foreign loans were averaging 5.39 per cent. Nor were colonial loans necessarily better for the
nation as a whole than foreign loans: much of the money that went to India was used to build factories, cotton mills and jute mills which eventually displaced British exports.

Of course the Empire was not just so much needless extravagance. There were obvious advantages, as we have already seen, in controlling the sources and prices of one’s raw materials, and in governing one’s own markets. India cost the imperial treasury nothing, the Indians paying not only for their own administration and army, but even for part of the cost of the British troops stationed in their country. Some
£
16 million in Indian gold went to England annually from India, in payment for services and capital—the nearest thing the Crown received to tribute in the Roman tradition. As for the self-governing colonies, their only drain upon the resources of the Mother Country was the cost of imperial defence, while their outpouring of gold, silver, diamonds, wheat, wool and nickel gave strength to the London money market, the centre of it all.

The adventures of the New Imperialism were quite another matter. Trade was
not
following the flag into Uganda, Upper Nigeria, Bechuanaland and the Ashanti country. Burma had to be subsidized. Even Rhodesia had so far drawn a blank. Yet a phenomenal amount of money had been spent, during the past twenty or thirty years, in acquiring these unpromising domains. Wars were fought all over the place, roads and railways were expensively constructed, vast commitments of defence and administration had been added to the imperial burden. British ambitions in South Africa had already snared the Empire into the farcical humiliation of the Jameson Raid, and were now leading it inexorably towards war with the most formidable tribe in Africa, the Boers. Africa, the land of the New Imperialism, was like a quagmire, leading the British ever more deeply into trouble, bringing closer every year a clash between the rival imperialists—if not with the French, whose exploratory parties were then advancing across the continent towards the Nile, then with the Germans, only precariously kept in check by Salisbury’s elegant diplomacy. Out of those steamy hinterlands little of value came, and into the kraals of those incomprehensible cultures few British manufactures found their way. In most of the jumble of protectorates and spheres of influence there was
very little government, even under the One Flag, and few British investors were tempted to send their capital down so crooked a drain.

There were critics even then to point out these unpalatable truths. J. A. Hobson based his case upon these very statistics. Dilke, one of the high prophets of the New Imperialism, thought that by deceiving themselves on the economic aims of the Empire the British would be diverted from more practical purposes of ‘common nationality and racial patriotism’. Salisbury and his advisers well knew that the drive behind the new British Empire in Africa was mostly defensive—keeping others out, securing older possessions, acquiring bargaining stakes. Lesser breeds without the law of Free Trade were setting the pace now, and the activists of the African scramble were the Germans and the French: the British, who really had quite enough Empire already, grabbed by reaction.