The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (16 page)

The sheer scale of Britain's global activity from China to Peru, the inevitable intermingling of political and economic interests, the different conjunctures of international affairs and the economic cycle and the shifting cast of actors make any overview a heroic abstraction. But there are obvious ways in which neither grand model quite fits the evidence. Thus the furious arguments
within
the political elite after 1880 over Ireland, Egypt and South Africa show how useless it was to appeal to an agreed version of the ‘national interest’ as the lodestone of imperial policy. The ‘national interest’ was not a text to be consulted; it was a trophy carried off by force of rhetoric or the canny appeal to public sentiment; at best, it was an oracle of Sibylline ambiguity. However much it yearned for seclusion in a ‘hidden city’ barred to the uninitiated, the ‘official mind’ was forced to accept the discipline of popular government. Delegations had to be seen; newspapers read; questions answered; support rallied; public emotions appeased; opponents (and colleagues) outmanoeuvred, by fair means if possible. No policy-maker cultivated a more Olympian detachment than Lord Salisbury, the ‘great Unapproachable’.
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But, even Salisbury acknowledged that diplomacy must defer to popular prejudice. ‘The loss of Constantinople’, he told Lord Randolph Churchill in 1886, ‘would be the ruin of our party…The main strength of the Tory party…lies in its association with the honour of the country.’
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When governments were divided and control over imperial policy was disputed between ministers, as happened frequently between 1880 and 1900, indecision and the tendency to sniff the popular breeze were all the greater. The normal state of the ‘official mind’ was not cool certainty but chronic schizophrenia.
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This endemic turbulence made it all the less likely that any government would risk identifying itself openly with a single economic interest, however powerful. In fact, the relations between government and business in the imperial sphere were marked not by a sense of common purpose but by deep mutual mistrust and a conscious disparity in outlook and values. Businessmen raged against diplomatic ignorance of commercial realities. Ministers and officials sneered at the obtuseness of private entrepreneurs. The Royal Niger Company became Salisbury's
bête noire
in the quest for Anglo-French agreement in West Africa. ‘Goldie’ (its head), complained Salisbury, ‘is a great nuisance. His knowledge of foreign relations must have been acquired in a music hall.’
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Proconsuls jeered at the dubious ethics of their business counterparts. Salisbury's contemptuous dismissal of the British commercial population in Johannesburg (‘a people for whom we care nothing’
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) is well known. To the exponents of ‘chartered imperialism’, the efficiency of their ‘company states’ organised along semi-commercial lines and answerable to shareholders, stood in dynamic contrast to the ‘cumbrous machinery’ of colonial administration.
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The hallmarks of colonial rule were heavy taxation, wasteful expenditure and vaunting official ambition. But, in official eyes, unofficial imperialists and the business interests behind them showed a myopic disregard for the framework of order that was needed to make their commercial inroads tolerable to indigenous populations and home opinion.

At bottom, there was a fundamental divide that could not be bridged by agreement on the logic of capitalism. If matters came to a crisis, the incentives and obligations that shaped business decisions were very different from those at work in politics and government. Status, merit, honour and success were judged very differently in these two worlds. Lost battles did not break banks but they could break governments. Trade monopolies made business sense but political trouble. Conscripting semi-servile labour – African, Indian, Chinese – lowered commercial costs, but (if discovered) could raise the home political temperature to boiling point. A diplomatic rebuff (unless of directly commercial significance) was of little moment in the City, but at Westminster it was the noose from which a government could be hanged. In theory, diplomacy and commerce might march in step, but at the first sign of trouble each followed quite different rules of engagement. It was grudging respect for each other's utility, not identity of outlook, that drove them into wary collaboration.

These objections suggest that there is no need to choose between two starkly different views of late-Victorian imperialism. It is possible instead to reconstruct the workings of the ‘official mind’ to take better account of the untidy reality. The starting point is to recognise that, as in earlier periods, the initiative for British imperial expansion rarely if ever lay with governments, ministers and officials in London. The Colonial Office, remarked one ardent unofficial imperialist, could not be a creative force: it was ‘the “governor” of the steam-engine, not the boiler’.
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The energy for advance had to come from elsewhere. After 1880, much as before, expansion was incremental and its agents usually local men (both official and unofficial) who enjoyed backing at home from the array of public and private bodies with interests on the periphery of empire. With the acceleration of trade and investment, and the ready means of switching capital from one region to another, it was not surprising that the speed with which the frontier of European influence was driven forward was getting faster and faster. Nor that zones of longstanding sensitivity (like the Near East) should have seemed at greater risk from a sudden shift in their political and economic fortunes. But the hinterlands into which British interests ventured differed widely in two crucial ways. In some cases, the unofficial presence had grown strongly enough, or rallied sufficient local support, to establish a visible British interest; in others, it had not. Some of these ‘bridgeheads’ enjoyed highly placed or well-organised sponsors at home, with backstairs influence or the means of publicity; others were much less well endowed.

The real task of the ‘official mind’ was to decide which of these interests deserved official support and in what form. For that purpose, arcane criteria of the ‘national interest’ were of little use – except as rhetorical cover. What counted was whether those who wanted to drag the ‘imperial factor’ after them, or enlist its support in their local struggles, could peg out their claim not just in Africa or Asia but on public attention in London. Newspaper coverage and a talent for propaganda were vital. At the height of its difficulties in the 1890s, the Royal Niger Company, struggling against commercial rivals, bureaucratic hostility and French advance, won the backing of the
The Times
in a series of planted articles.
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Its chairman, complained a British diplomat in West Africa, ‘is on the spot [i.e. in London] and has a ready and clever tongue’.
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Even to official agents in the field it often seemed that the best plan was to act first and wait for public opinion to rally behind. It was no good asking the Foreign Office for permission in advance, advised Milner in 1895. ‘The people on the spot must take things into their own hands, when, if the occasion of the decisive move is well chosen, public opinion here will surely approve.’
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But that meant careful attention to rousing public feeling and the artful depiction of a ‘forward policy’ as the defence of an existing (and valuable) interest. Even the great Lord Cromer was not above using the press ‘to work for a “forward game”’, and outflank his nominal master, Lord Salisbury.
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‘Just like all British governments’, Cromer was reported as saying. ‘they will act more or less in a hand to mouth way on the spur of the moment, but they will not think out and adopt a steady policy.’
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Of course, the weaker the vanguard of British influence and the more exposed it was to local or international attack, the harder it would be to extract a commitment from the policy-makers. Nor was there any point ‘firing into a continent’ (in Conrad's graphic phrase): there had to be sufficient local agency to be the ‘transformer’ that would inject British power into local circuits. Reasonable certainty was needed that the cost would be minimal or could be recouped. The vital decision London had to make turned most of all upon a geopolitical calculus, in which the international risks of intervention were weighed against the local means of British leverage and the extent to which opinion at home had been mobilised for action.

It was hardly surprising that policy made under these conditions was often erratic and inconsistent, lurching forward, falling back, plunging from inertia to frenzy. The longer decisions lingered in the arena of opinion bounded by Westminster, the City and the Clubland of St James, the more likely they were to be improvised, opportunistic and unpredictable. The effects of this were felt more severely in some regions than in others. In the ‘inner zone’ which followed the Anglo-Indian ‘security corridor’ from Gibraltar to Bombay, the official interest was dominant. Here matters could often be settled privately between London and Calcutta, and strategy was a trump card. But, in the vast ‘outer zone’ beyond, the official interest was much weaker, and official concepts more protean. Here, even the master of
Realpolitik
could lose his way. Even Lord Salisbury became, as we have seen, the target of savage private criticism from insiders who saw in his chessboard diplomacy not a master-plan but muddle and sloth. It might indeed be argued that the whole pattern of Britain's territorial aggrandisement after 1880 had less to do with any grand strategy, than with the latent strength of the bridgeheads of influence and occupation established before the era of partition and the all-but-irresistible pressure on governments to support them, where practicable, against their enemies. But that is not the whole story. The most striking feature of the period after 1880 was precisely the uncertainty about how the ‘national interest’ could be defined in an era of such disorienting fluidity. But, if policy-makers, proconsuls, private imperialists, press and public opinion all displayed periodic signs of hysteria, it was partly because geopolitical disorder abroad seemed to be matched by the unnerving fluidity of the domestic political scene.

The late-Victorians and empire

Indeed, to many ‘imperialists’, alarmed by signs of imperial weakness, it was evident that the dangers abroad found an echo in disturbance at home. Far from providing a stable platform for the defence of a world-empire, British society was in the throes of upheaval. Far from springing to the defence of its vital interests, it was distracted by sectional strife. Far from recognising its need for resources overseas, it was at odds over the share-out of wealth at home. Partisan struggle sapped imperial will. This gloomy connection had been made by Lord Salisbury. In a notorious essay published in 1883, and brusquely titled ‘Disintegration’, he prophesied the imperial doom that would follow the rising clamour for radical reform.
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The radicals’ assault on ‘churchmen, landowners, publicans, manufacturers, house-owners, railway-shareholders [and] fund-holders’ was symptomatic of the sea-change in British politics. Its effects were magnified by the democratisation of the electorate. The ballot was a ‘regime of surprises’; the voters paid only fitful attention; ministerial power was held ‘on a capricious and precarious tenure’; the House of Commons had become the instrument of ‘sudden revulsions of feeling’ unimaginable in earlier times. The result was a social war – ‘civil war with the gloves on’. Society was atomising into hostile fragments. ‘The temper that severs class from class is constantly gaining strength.’ Patriotism was dead or dying. ‘The national impulses which used to make Englishmen cling together in face of every external trouble are beginning to disappear.’ Pride in the ‘stupendous achievement of thousands ruling over millions’ (a reference to India) had shrivelled. Instead, Britain was faced with the ‘loss of large branches and limbs of our Empire, and…the slow estrangement of the classes which make up the nation to which that Empire belongs’. And, of course, it was Ireland that was ‘the worst symptom of our malady’: to abandon the Union would be an avowal ‘that all claims to protect or govern anyone beyond our own narrow island were at an end’.

Salisbury's polemic was partly designed for his own party's consumption. But his acrid vision of democratic politics was shared (from a different angle) by his political opponents while his gloomy portrait of the decline of authority chimed with the prognostications of Herbert Spencer, the most influential social theorist of the age. Spencer had argued that social progress meant the advance from a ‘militant’ to an ‘industrial’ society: from rule by a prescriptive warrior elite towards voluntary cooperation between the myriad of specialised interests thrown up by economic and technological development. Ironically, at the same time as Salisbury was fulminating against disintegration, Spencer was warning (in
Man versus the State
) against collectivist interference with the free play of social competition.
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But Salisbury's fear that a mass electorate would turn its back on the
arcana imperii
of British world power, repudiate imperial obligations and thwart the exercise of consistent policy, became almost a political commonplace. John Morley, the radical editor and parliamentarian, had opined in 1880 that a working-class electorate would refuse to go to war.
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Joseph Chamberlain thought that ‘fighting can never again be popular with the people’.
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‘The old ways of diplomacy are unsuitable to the new Electorate’, he told a friendly editor in 1885.
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Even after the fall of the Gladstone ministry in 1886, Salisbury's colleague, Lord Randolph Churchill, then high-priest of ‘Tory Democracy’, insisted that British policy was by its nature ‘always more or less a policy of hand to mouth’ since the government of the day ‘depends upon a Parliamentary majority…assailed and swayed by an enlightened, but at the same time by a capricious, public opinion’.
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Defending Constantinople, he told Salisbury, could not be done as it had been in the Crimean War or in the Eastern crisis of 1876–8: ‘I doubt whether the people will support that method.’
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