The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (32 page)

Even more than at home, Scots and Irish ‘colonials’ adopted a ‘British’ allegiance even if they preserved a strong sentimental attachment to their ethnic identity. There were several reasons for this. The mobile conditions of colonial life discouraged the formation of closed or exclusive communities. The parochial disputes of faraway homelands had diminishing relevance. But perhaps the most important factor of all was the inclusive character of colonial political life. Responsible (or parliamentary) government was open to all (men) without regard to religion. And, although the distinction between Catholic and Protestant remained an important divide, it was not wide enough to subvert Catholic attachment to British institutions. In three Catholic Irishmen, Thomas D’Arcy McGee (1825–68), an ardent champion of confederation in Canada, (Sir) Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903), sometime premier of Victoria, and Charles Coghlan (1863–1927), first prime minister of Southern Rhodesia, strong nationalist feeling was combined with a ‘Burkean reverence’ for parliamentary government and (at least outwardly) deep loyalty to the Crown.
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5 ‘UN-BRITISH RULE’ IN ‘ANGLO-INDIA’

British rule in India had always been an awkward compromise between principle and practice. The early Victorians had declared that the purpose of the Company Raj was the political education of Indians and their preparation for eventual self-government. Fifty years on, progress towards this goal was barely perceptible. At the end of Company rule in 1858, the Queen's Proclamation had reassured Indians that race discrimination would play no part in the new colonial regime. But this was hard to square with the status of even educated Indians in the politics and social life of the late-Victorian Raj. The third contradiction was even more telling. The British had founded their rule on the promise of social and economic improvement: what the annual reports of the Indian government were to call ‘moral and material progress’. Yet, even at the end of the century, India remained prey to devastating famines, terrifying epidemics and contagious diseases whose sphere was widening not contracting. Literacy (even in local languages) remained (at around 10 per cent) embarrassingly low. But, while social progress seemed stalled, the Indian government spent more and more on the army, and especially on that part of it ‘borrowed’ from Britain. It was hardly surprising, then, that the terms of India's association with the British world-system became more controversial after 1880. But it was India's
growing
importance to the imperial system, as much as the grievances of its social elites, that shaped its late-Victorian and Edwardian politics.

Map 7 The Indian Empire

Imperial India?

In the later nineteenth century, the value of India as the second centre of British world power became more than ever an axiom of British thinking. This was partly because, in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857, Company rule was replaced by the direct control of the London government, a transition glamorised a few years later by the proclamation of Victoria as ‘Queen Empress of India’ or
Kaisar-i-Hind
. But mainly it reflected the rising contribution that India made to the world-system whose consolidation in the age of world politics after 1880 we have been tracing. Without India as one of its four grand components, the British world-system would have been without some of the most vital sources of its security, stability and cohesion. And part of the motive and much of the means for the acquisition of so many lesser dependencies in Afro-Asia would have been lacking.

India's contribution to British world power was not left to chance or self-interest. It was deliberately shaped by British rule. After 1870, the Indian economy was developed rapidly as a major producer of export commodities: wheat, raw cotton, jute and tea, among others.
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It also became an ever more important market for British exports, especially cotton textiles and iron and steel. At a time when many other markets were being sealed off by tariffs, India was wedged open by imperial
fiat
.
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The British officials who ran the Indian government could levy import duties; but they could not
protect
Indian producers of textiles against outside competition because London insisted that any tariff be matched by a local excise. In this way, India, which bought some 25 per cent of Lancashire's export production, took the largest share of Britain's largest export up to 1914. Simultaneously, the growth of its own exports, mainly destined for European or American consumers, earned the foreign exchange that, when remitted to Britain, helped square Britain's own balance of payments. For, while Britain was usually in deficit to Europe and the United States, India was always in deficit to Britain. This was partly a matter of borrowed capital, much of it by government to build railways, and much of it at London's urging – since longer lines meant wider markets.
³
But it also grew from the ‘Home Charges’ that London imposed on India to pay for the British troops that were stationed there, as well as the pensions of British officials and the cost of the India Office, the Whitehall department from which Indian affairs were supervised.

In the later nineteenth century, then, India's economic value to Britain – and to Britain's ability to service its world-system – was great and growing. The expansion of the Indian economy widened British markets, increased the demand for British capital and helped India bear more easily the cost of its second great imperial contribution – to imperial defence. Even before 1857, the Company had maintained a sizeable army in India to uphold its power and expand its territories. It had ‘borrowed’ British troops at a charge from the home government. After the Mutiny, the Indian troops were cut down in number to between 120,000 and 140,000. But, at the same time, the all-British contingent was enlarged so as to be roughly half the size of the Indian. As we have seen, providing 60–70,000 British soldiers for Indian service (with inevitable ‘wastage’ for disease) was a major strain on the British military system and enforced considerable adaptation. But there was also a benefit. By the late nineteenth century, when the Empire's standing armies totalled some 325,000 men, two-thirds of this number was paid for by the Indian taxpayer. For the rule was that every British soldier, once embarked for India, had to be paid, pensioned, equipped and fed by the government of India, not of Britain. And there was an irresistible tendency, as time went on, for more and more British soldiers to be kept in India at Indian expense. How valuable this was politically can be grasped by asking how readily the British parliament would have agreed, at a time of rapidly rising naval costs, to maintain an army nearly three times as large as that for which the Treasury had actually to pay. How valuable it was strategically can be illustrated by the frequency with which troops were despatched from India after 1860 on operations that had little or nothing to do with India's own defence – to China (1860, 1900–1), Ethiopia (1867–8), Malaya (1875), Malta (1878), Egypt (1882), Sudan (1885–6, 1896), Burma (1885), East Africa (1896, 1897, 1898), Somaliland (1890, 1903–4), South Africa (1899, but white troops only) and Tibet (1903).
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India's commercial and military contributions were both functions of British rule which facilitated, or enforced, a distinctive pattern of economic development and financial spending. India made a third contribution that was less directly the result of colonial control. Across the whole face of the ‘British world’, Indian manpower and commercial expertise helped open new regions to British influence and make colonial government financially viable. Indian labour made plantation agriculture possible in Malaya, Southeast Africa and the Pacific. It built the railway to Uganda. Indian peasants streamed into British Burma and made it the rice bowl of Southeast Asia.
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Indian retailers and merchants, with lower overheads than their European counterparts, built a commercial infrastructure in places too exacting for the ‘nation of shopkeepers’.
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Indian policemen, clerks and orderlies served as far away as China.
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In much of the tropical world east of Suez, ‘British’ expansion was really an Anglo-Indian enterprise: here was a field almost as much of Indian as of British colonisation. It was Winston Churchill as a junior minister who picturesquely evoked East Africa as ‘the America of the Hindu’.
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Between 1880 and 1914, these commercial, military and demographic connections (and others) sharpened the dominant tendency in late-Victorian and Edwardian India: its ever-closer integration into the British world-system. ‘Advancing civilisation’, remarked the Indian Currency Committee in 1893, ‘brings with it constantly increasing demands for Government action and enterprise.’
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Irrigation schemes and, above all, railways, were a heavy call on Indian revenues. Financing them drove the government of India ever more frequently to the capital market in London. As a result, the proportion of its public debt that was held there rose from a mere 7 per cent in 1858 to 60 per cent by 1914.
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Servicing this debt became an ever-increasing burden, especially when silver, the basis of India's currency, depreciated sharply against gold in the later nineteenth century. As a guarantee against default on the ‘Home Charges’, the government of India was forced after 1898 to maintain a gold fund in London, managed by the India Office, whose operation regulated the supply of money in India – and thus the general level of economic activity there.
¹¹
This was integration with a vengeance. The ‘silver problem’ exacerbated the growing burden of Indian military spending, especially that part of it needed to ‘rent’ the British garrison from London. Between 1884 and 1897, India's military expenditure increased by 45 per cent – a colossal figure.
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Much of this was due to the fall in silver's value. But it also reflected increases in both Indian manpower (up by 20,000) and the size of the British contingent (up by 10,000).

Behind this martial expansion lay the diplomatic and geostrategic imperatives that seemed to be drawing India ever more closely into London's embrace. The new geopolitics of the later nineteenth century envisaged a handful of ‘world states’ whose global pre-eminence would be based on their coordination of territories, resources and populations. At the same time, Asia (especially East Asia and the Pacific) was becoming the focus of European (and American) economic and diplomatic rivalry. ‘I am one of those’, Lord Curzon told an enthusiastic audience on the eve of his departure as Indian Viceroy in 1898,

who think that the Eastward trend of Empire will increase and not diminish…[T]he strain upon us will become greater not less. Parliament will learn to know East Asia as well as it now knows Europe [and] Asiatic sympathies and knowledge will be…the interest of the whole nation (Cheers).
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Both these developments pointed to a steady rise in the imperial importance of India, the springboard and citadel of British influence in Asia – the ‘pivot and centre’, in Curzon's phrase, ‘of the British Empire’.
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But they also made India more vulnerable. In the 1870s, the British had been alarmed by the threatened disintegration of the Ottoman Empire exposing their sea communications with India to Russian and French interference. In the 1880s, the advance of Russia into Central Asia had produced a crisis (over Penjdeh in 1885). In the 1890s, the impact of Russia's colonial presence there began to sink in: the threat of a Tsarist encirclement of Persia east and west of the Caspian Sea; and a forward move towards the Persian Gulf and India's maritime frontier. As the risk of Anglo-Russian confrontation over China grew greater, so did the danger of a Russian jab towards India. When ‘[Russia's] Siberian railway is ready’, argued Lord Salisbury in 1900,

she will want to be mistress of the greater part of China: and if Afghanistan is unprotected she can force us to give way in China by advancing upon India. She won't try to conquer it. It will be enough for her if she can shatter our Government and reduce India to anarchy.
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The meaning for Anglo-Indian relations was clear. India must play a larger but also more obedient part in imperial strategy. It must take up the burden of forward defence in Persia and the Himalayas – but not in ways that risked a great power conflagration.
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It must reorganise its ramshackle armies, concentrate them in the Northwest and recruit from the Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, Baluchis and Gurkhas who were suited to the northern climate.
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It must acknowledge its function as the strategic reserve of the British Empire in the East.
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It must contribute to the costs of the Royal Navy.
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Its diplomatic agents in the Middle Eastern borderlands must faithfully echo the shifts and twists of London's European diplomacy – especially the intermittent search for an accommodation with Russia pursued by Salisbury and Lansdowne. And it must guard against the political disruption of its military system. ‘I dread the day’, the Secretary of State warned Viceroy Elgin, ‘when the northern or fighting races from who we draw recruits take to reading the vernacular press.’
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