The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (17 page)

The implication was that the imperial burden had become dangerously heavy at a time when British politics were inflamed by the social, ethnic and religious antagonisms unleashed by domestic radicalism and Irish Home Rule. For governments of either party, foreign or colonial entanglements brought with them the risk of war, embarrassment and expense in a period of exceptional instability in domestic politics. It was this that made veterans of either party like the Liberal Harcourt and the Conservative Hicks-Beach so wary of new commitments in Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Harcourt feared the entrenchment of British power in Egypt and the slide towards a
de facto
protectorate. He opposed the annexation of Uganda. Hicks-Beach warned Salisbury that spending on empire would rouse opposition at home and increase the pressure on the landed interest already beleaguered by agricultural depression.
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For both men, an expanding empire was an open-ended risk, an unlimited liability. Meeting its demands would drive both parties into conflict with their natural supporters, wreck the interests for which they stood and exhaust their electoral credit. Keeping the parties afloat in rough democratic seas meant reducing to the minimum their exposure to the high winds of competitive imperialism and its fearsome corollary, great power rivalry in Europe. But to ardent imperialists like Milner and his circle it was precisely this cringeing attitude to public opinion, the influence of ‘wire-pullers’ and party hacks, and the elevation of party over empire that explained the weakness and vacillation they saw in British policy. A decadent, hysterical elite, too timid to lead, too selfish to abdicate, blocked the constructive programme that was needed to fuse domestic and imperial politics and to educate the masses. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, the radical journalist J. A. Hobson warned that the irrational instincts of mass opinion made it an easy prey to propaganda and delusion.
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As we shall see, the imperialists protested too much and raised a false alarm. But it is easy to see why they were anxious. If domestic opinion turned against the defence of empire, the imperial system might unravel with astonishing speed. A ‘premature’ withdrawal from the exposed salient of Egypt would signal an immediate shift in the Mediterranean balance of power. The steady advance of British influence all along the seaborne approaches to India would go into reverse. The long-range defence of its landward frontier against encroaching rivals in Persia, Central Asia and Tibet would look less sure. It was a cliché of Anglo-Indian officialdom that a strong frontier policy was the touchstone of British rule in northwestern India, and the best warrant for Muslim loyalty. A second ‘mutiny’, however modest, would re-open the Indian question in British politics with a vengeance. In China and at the Cape, British interests, influence and prestige also depended upon the assumption that force would be used to prevent their attrition. Failure to win parliamentary support for naval expansion would be just as dangerous. Naval primacy, at whatever the cost, was the ultimate guarantee that the British could underwrite their own claims and those of their innumerable clients and subjects. Its loss or disavowal was bound (amid much other damage) to rouse the separatist tendency latent in the colonial politics of the ‘white dominions’ or, in the special case of Canada, to weaken the argument against political union with its southern neighbour. In the domino theory of empire that Salisbury had invented (but which was taken up by many Unionists), the fate of Ireland was crucial. Its strategic position across the Atlantic approaches to Britain,
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and its symbolic value as a proving ground of British institutions meant that Ireland was the exposed nerve of both domestic and imperial politics. The concession of Home Rule, and the failure to uphold the Union and ‘tame’ Irish nationalism, would be, on this view, the starting-gun for the implosion of British world power.

It is hard to tell how large a shift there was after 1880 in British attitudes to empire. There were no opinion polls to record public feeling on issues of empire and world power. In the election campaigns of the period, ‘imperial’ questions were absorbed into more urgent debates over Ireland in 1886, or wartime ‘loyalty’ in 1900. ‘Imperial sentiment’ played second fiddle to anti-Irish feeling, patriotic enthusiasm and the anxiety over employment and living standards at home. There is, anyway, much anecdotal evidence that, except in moments of unusual excitement, imperial questions stirred little public interest. It is true that contemporaries detected a persistent strain of jingoism in popular politics – a reserve tank of xenophobic prejudice. But to politicians like Salisbury jingoism was not a useful political fuel but a blind force, ‘a strain of pure combativeness’ at the base of society.
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It was a far cry from the traditional attachment to the national interest whose decay he had lamented. It had little to do with the intelligent cultivation of ‘empire-mindednesss’ or a new sense of imperial identity. Radical commentators attributed any sign of popular support for overseas expansion, conquest or adventure to the crude emotions stirred up by manipulative politicians and an unscrupulous press: behind both stood the sinister shape of financial influence.
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Playing upon the irrational instincts of an ill-educated urban mass, they created a jingo ‘false-consciousness’, transient and febrile. Working-class voters whose real interest lay in social reform and a redistribution of wealth were bought off with the fool's gold of imperial glory. Many historians have followed a similar line: that it took disillusionment with the South African War of 1899–1902 to prick the bubble of jingo-imperialism and usher in the sober age of liberal reform after 1906.

Indeed, a close study of popular culture suggests that the attractions of empire had little appeal except to those in the middle and upper classes to whom it might offer some material benefits – a career or a dividend. However stark they might seem in our selective rear view, the literary, musical or visual celebrations of empire were lost in the mass of non-imperial production. The efforts of imperialists to educate and inform testified not to their confidence in the imperialism of the masses, but to their fears of indifference or even downright hostility. Even after the trauma of the South African War, and perhaps because of it, this feeling persisted. ‘One must unfortunately explain to these d___d fools’, wrote Milner of his audiences in 1906, ‘why we want…an Empire, and it pinches one in dealing with the methods of maintaining it.’
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Certainly, if the records of policy-making are any guide,
mass
enthusiasm for empire-building, whether spontaneous or manufactured, was considered a will o’ the wisp. Far from bowing to a surge of popular imperialism or trying to drum up votes by derring-do on the imperial frontier, ministers of both parties viewed public opinion with deep mistrust. They feared (in Salisbury's words) a ‘jingo hurricane’ that could drive them on the rocks: an ill-conceived foreign adventure (like the relief of Gordon at Khartoum) ending in disaster. They were just as frightened of new commitments for which support at home might die away, leaving them helpless in the political doldrums. Both would be a huge electoral liability. But, equally, they could not afford to treat every demand for intervention or annexation with patrician contempt. Still less could they hope to ‘manage’ all public discussion of imperial issues, or reduce it to a soothing murmur of approbation. As a recent study has shown, a large part of the public interest in empire was expressed through pressure groups and associations lying outside the formal arena of parliamentary politics or straddling the usual lines of party loyalty. It connected with new political issues (like women's rights) and mobilised enthusiasts for a new kind of social politics.
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Working-class opinion might have been indifferent to the glories of the Raj, or the ‘civilising mission’ in tropical Africa. But it could hardly have been so to the value of overseas markets, some like India sustained by colonial rule. And their habit of migration displayed the tacit belief that British people were entitled to occupy the lands of others, provided their resistance was not embarrassingly stiff. This ‘demographic’ imperialism might not have been glamorous. But no British leader would have dared question its claims. In late-Victorian politics, ‘empire’ had come to mean more than the aggressive pursuit of new places to rule.

This suggests that we need a more complex explanation for the receptiveness of British opinion towards the huge growth of imperial liabilities after 1880 and the willingness to accept a large and growing burden of imperial defence. One obvious starting point is the capacity of interests connected with empire and Britain's spheres of overseas influence to maintain an influential presence on the domestic scene and win the political support necessary for their projects. In the past, the East India Company, the anti-slavery movement, the evangelicals, the China traders and the philanthropic businessmen of the South Australian or New Zealand Companies in the 1830s, had all enjoyed moments of special leverage in British politics. But they had all been vulnerable to the charge of ‘old corruption’ and to the ebb tide of public altruism. By the 1880s, however, imperial interests had dug deeper into domestic society and built a wider network of alliances. They also adapted with striking success to the new scale of popular politics and even to its language.

Behind this reinforcement of empire on the home front lay three great changes. The first was the sheer scale by the 1880s of overseas enterprise and settlement: a mass of overlapping mini-empires of traders, investors, migrants, missionaries, railway companies, shipping companies, mining ventures, banks, botanists and geographers. ‘In every large seaport or manufacturing town in this Kingdom’, pronounced the explorer H. M. Stanley in 1884, ‘an enterprising shipowner or…manufacturer…should know something of geography.’
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New geographical societies in Edinburgh and Manchester were followed by those on Tyneside (1887), Liverpool (1891) and Southampton (1897).
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Britain's huge stake in the foreign trade of the extra-European world made commercial and political conditions from China to Peru the object of anxious scrutiny in a host of industrial districts now dependent on far-flung markets. Lancashire cottons might still be Britain's premier export. But, for a wide range of other industries, commercial geography had gone global. From the Black Country round Birmingham, Walsall exported three-fifths of its manufactures, the greater part to India and the settlement colonies.
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Newcastle exported 30 per cent of its steel, almost all to ‘India and the Colonies’.
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‘The Colonies and India particularly afford very large markets for the products of the district’, reported the Sheffield chamber of commerce in 1885.
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To businessmen around the country, emigration and railway building were favoured panaceas for the falling off in trade. Capital exports soared after 1880, doubling British foreign investment by 1900 (and quadrupling it by 1913). Migration from Britain also showed a strong upward trend. From 1880 to 1893, the numbers leaving for extra-European destinations never fell below 200,000 a year, peaking at 320,000 in 1883. For six of the thirteen years after 1901, it exceeded 300,000 a year, before reaching a new peak of 470,000 on the eve of the First World War.
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There were also many more ‘sojourners’ who spent their working lives abroad as soldiers, officials (in the new tropical dependencies), policemen, doctors, teachers, forestry experts, engineers and businessmen. Railway and steamship lines recruited their technical and managerial staff in Britain. The British India Steam Navigation Company alone employed 800 ‘Europeans’ (i.e. British) – almost as many as the Indian Civil Service. Schools, universities and newspapers in India and the white dominions looked to Britain for professional expertise. In 1899, there were more than 10,000 British missionaries around the world.
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By the end of the century, a career overseas, punctuated by home leave and ending in retirement at Cheltenham, Bournemouth, Bedford or other spots favoured by climate or schooling, had become a familiar pattern in middle-class life. Just as serial migration, punctuated by returns, was a feature of many working-class communities from Scotland to Cornwall.
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The volume of trade, migration and investment flowing overseas was symptomatic of the increasing integration of the domestic and international economy. It pointed to the growing attraction that its settler and colonial possessions exerted on the sea-power of the Old World. That had long been true of the United States. Indeed, much informed opinion by the 1880s was convinced that an introverted, militarised and dynastic Europe would be eclipsed by its dynamic offshoot beyond the Atlantic. In the ‘world of fifty years to come’, wrote the historian J. R. Green in 1880

how odd, how ludicrous, will be the spectacle of France and Germany…still growling and snarling over their little Alsace! To me all these Bismarcks and Dizzys and Andrassys are alike anachronisms…whose mighty schemes and mighty armies are being quietly shoved aside by the herdsmen of Colorado and the sheepmasters of New South Wales.
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By the last decade of the century, however, the role of the United States as the great recipient of migrants and capital was rivalled more and more by Britain's settler empire and India. New ‘Americas’ were rising in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Britain's colonial societies acquired a new scale and sophistication. Their communications improved; they became more open to external influence; their economies were oriented more firmly to international markets. The scope of colonial government expanded. New functions were assumed – in transport, education, public health, conservation and public works. The effect was to reduce the social and cultural distance between the Mother Country and what had once been a string of settler outposts and an oriental garrison state. The points of contact were multiplied. Tastes and lifestyles converged – even in India where family life became more common for the British and a ‘western education’ more common among Indians: between 1881–2 and 1901–2 there was a threefold increase in the number of Indians being taught in English at schools and colleges.
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A subtle but decisive shift occurred in British attitudes to the colonies of settlement. For Seeley, Froude and Dilke,
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who commented authoritatively on ‘Greater Britain’, they had become the future sources of strength, an extension of Britain, the basis of a ‘world-state’. Canada, thought Dilke, would support a population as large as that of the United States; Australia a ‘white population which may be counted by hundreds of millions’.
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