The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (9 page)

By the later 1840s, the missionary societies had mapped out a vast field of operations. ‘Contrast…the present openness of the whole world to missionary enterprise’, exulted the Church Missionary Society, recalling the era when India had been barred, New Zealand ‘shunned’ and the Caribbean blacks ‘crushed’.
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At home they could draw on a reservoir of popular sympathy organised through the evangelical societies into a private army of millions, ‘ready’, said a correspondent in
Blackwood's
in 1824, ‘to take the field at a moment's notice’.
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The
Missionary Register
, one of several missionary organs, had over 120,000 subscribers in 1826.
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Exeter Hall was opened in 1831 for the annual meeting of the societies, whose attendance ran into the thousands. Gentlemanly evangelicals were found in cabinet and Parliament. Missionary publications – autobiography, propaganda and travel (like John Phillip's
Researches in South Africa
, 1828) – shaped public knowledge of remote places. No one did more to arouse public enthusiasm than David Livingstone (1813–73), the missionary-explorer of South Central Africa. Livingstone's ardent evangelism, his epic crossing of Africa (1852–6), and his passionate attack on the Arab and Portuguese slave trades, evoked intense public sympathy. Livingstone's own writings, full of danger and hope, and his keen sense of publicity, reinforced the effect. By the late 1850s, he was a great public figure. His lectures at Oxford and Cambridge led to the founding of a new Anglican mission, the Universities Mission to Central Africa. His vehement campaign against the East African slave trade forced the government in London to fund a ‘Zambezi expedition’ to open the river to ‘legitimate’ trade. Livingstone himself was received by the Queen. At a great farewell banquet of over 300 guests in February 1858, he lectured his hosts (some of the great men of the day) on their self-evident duty. ‘Should we be able’, he told them, ‘to open a communication advantageous to ourselves with the natives of the interior of Africa, it would be our great duty to confer upon them the great benefits of Christianity which have been bestowed upon ourselves’ – a demand greeted with cheers.
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‘Were your lordship in power’, he wrote to Lord Palmerston the following year, ‘I would strongly urge free trade to be secured on the Zambezi.’
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Of course, missionary enterprise could be an awkward partner with other forms of British enterprise. Missionaries often depended on traders – Gutzlaff had sailed on ships selling opium. In New Zealand, they sold muskets and speculated in land. Sometimes, they took public office or acted as intermediaries between colonial rule and indigenous peoples. But, in other ways, their ‘version’ of empire conflicted with the interests of merchants, settlers and officialdom, and their networks of information and lobbying competed with those of their secular rivals for public support. For more than most outsiders, missionaries depended upon the goodwill of their hosts. They needed local sponsorship, better still an invitation from authority.
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Missionary strategy envisaged not the indefinite tutelage of subject peoples but the rapid creation of a native clergy. In West Africa, the most dynamic missionary leaders were the part-African Thomas Freeman and the Yoruba Samuel Crowther.
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Christian conversion worked best where missionaries helped to rebuild local communities fragmented by ethnic conflict or the fall-out from European expansion. ‘The great bane of Africa’, wrote the South African missionary statesman, Dr John Phillip, ‘is the minute fractions into which its tribes have been broken up by the Slave Trade; we have here materials for a viable building but nothing can be done towards it till the fragments are joined together. The Gospel is the only instrument by which this means can be accomplished.’
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British protection should be extended over neighbouring peoples (he had the Xhosa in mind), but they should become British subjects and their lands secured against settler incursion. Britain's true interest lay in fringing its borders with independent black nations sharing a common Christian civilisation.
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Far from conceding that the missions depended on empire, Phillip insisted that the reverse was the case. Missionaries, he urged, ‘are…extending British interests, British influence and the British empire…[E]very genuine convert…made to the Christian religion becomes the ally and friend of the colonial government.’
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To much missionary opinion, the greatest obstacle to conversion was the contamination of their flock by the vices and desires of itinerant traders and land-hungry settlers. ‘The White Man's intercourse has demoralised them, his traffic has defrauded them, his alliances have betrayed them, and his wars have destroyed them’, the Aborigine Protection Society told Lord Glenelg in 1838. ‘They have thus lost the virtues of the savage without acquiring those of the Christian.’
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‘The great intercourse with the Shipping’, raged the New Zealand missionary Henry Williams in 1831, ‘is the curse of the land.’
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For many missionaries, then and later, spiritual salvation could only be assured by physical segregation.

Mercantile, migrant and missionary interests in mid-Victorian Britain were eager to enlarge the commercial, colonised and religious spheres where British enterprise was dominant and British influence unchallenged. Their restlessness, aggression, economic dynamism and spiritual ‘energy’ were given force and direction by the peculiar conjuncture that formed early and mid-Victorian society. This was, first of all, a society in the throes of unprecedented mobility, stimulated in part by the differential effects of economic change (driving people off the land, expanding towns and cities) and accentuated by the new means of travel. By 1870, every sizeable town in Britain had a railway station, and the network itself (at 13,000 miles) was the densest in Europe. Industrialism had created the means as well as the motive for migration – within Britain, beyond Britain – on a scale undreamt of before the 1830s. It transformed the geographical space within which people in the British Isles could imagine their lives. Secondly, while Britain had long been a ‘polite and commercial’ society, the growth of new industries alongside old trading connections, the rapid integration of the national economy (partly through railways), and the appearance of new urban societies where social bonds and identities were being remade, created a more intensely competitive and commercialised society, or perhaps more accurately one where a competitive and commercial ethos was ever more widely diffused. We should not listen too much to the lamentations of contemporaries regretting the end of deference (or migrants in exile bemoaning the rise and rise of conspicuous consumption
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), but the census records give some indirect indication of how quickly commerce was expanding as an occupation. In 1851, there were just under 44,000 ‘commercial clerks’; twenty years later, the number had more than doubled (as had the number of merchant seamen). Thirdly, the velocity with which information and ideas could circulate, as well as the volume that the ‘information circuits’ could carry, was also increasing dramatically. Letters and packets that were transported by steam and at hugely reduced cost were part of the story and so was the telegraph. Newspapers and ‘monthlies’ extended their reach. By 1870, the leading London dailies sold together some 400,000 copies, and dailies were printed in forty-three provincial towns. The number of books published rose by 400 per cent between 1840 and 1870.
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Societies sprang up to disseminate knowledge (like the Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830), drawing their subscribers in part from those with utilitarian, not to say mercenary, objects in mind. The scope for publicity, advertisement and pressure-group politics were all enlarged with this industrial production of knowledge. Lastly, economic and social change, far from making Victorian Britain a more homogeneous society, reinforced its pluralism, empowered its interest groups and intensified the sense of spiritual and cultural as well as social struggle. The arena of struggle was, at least partly, to be found abroad. The search for escape from social oppression and hardship, the projects of those who envisaged ideal societies in distant ‘new Britains’, the hopes of those who sought spiritual uplift by saving the heathen, and the enthusiasms of those pursuing humanitarian goals, scientific knowledge or private adventure supplied much of the energy for ‘British expansion’.

This is not to argue that Victorian society was dynamic enough by itself to carve out a world empire. It did not have to be. The new social energy that it generated was injected into the husk of an older empire and supercharged the commercial networks that had already grown up in the Atlantic basin. Both left their mark. Victorian imperialism was thus a curious fusion of mercantilist ambitions and free trade assumptions, ‘nabob’ morality and Evangelical high-thinking, an eighteenth-century ‘estate’ and nineteenth-century ‘improvements’. There is a second limitation on what Victorian society could achieve by itself. It projected its influence all over the world and with particular force into those regions where it met less resistance from an organised state, an existing ‘high culture’ or a developed economy. But the scale and scope of British world power was bound to depend not only on the manpower, money and produce that flowed out from Britain, but also on the extent to which they could leverage more local resources. It was at the ‘bridgehead’ that the question was settled: how and in what form the agents of British expansion could command a hinterland, build a new state and harness its wealth to the imperial project.

Bridgeheads of empire

The most visible evidence of Britain's power in the world by the mid-nineteenth century was the extraordinary scale of its territorial possessions in North America, the South Pacific, Southern Africa and India. At opposite ends of the globe lay two large bundles of settlement colonies: six in North America (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, ‘Canada’ – modern Ontario and Quebec – and British Columbia) and seven in Australasia (New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, Queensland and New Zealand). In both these vast regions, it was Britain's naval and military power that was the main safeguard against foreign invasion – American, French or, less plausibly, Russian (although fear of Russian attack reached fever pitch in Melbourne during the Crimean War). But neither British strength nor wealth was the primary cause of their rapid development as semi-autonomous colonial states with standards of living as high if not higher than the ‘mother-country’ at home.

The key role had been played by their colonial elites, even before they had wrested full internal self-government from the Colonial Office in London. The North American colonies had had a headstart. Halifax (founded 1749) and Montreal (captured 1760) had attracted merchants from the Thirteen Colonies to the south. After 1783, they were reinforced by loyalist exiles who brought mercantile knowledge as well as artisan skills and a hunger for land. New Brunswick developed quickly as a producer of timber, the main source of wealth, employment and population growth. The leading lumber firm in Saint John, that also built ships and traded with the British West Indies, was founded by refugees from New York.
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Samuel Cunard, founder of the shipping line and a dominant figure in Nova Scotia's economy by the 1830s, was the son of a Pennsylvania loyalist whose burgeoning business empire he inherited. The commercial success of British North America's port-cities attracted merchants from Britain. Hugh Allan arrived in Montreal from Glasgow in the 1820s as the junior partner in the family ship-owning business. He quickly built up a substantial share in Montreal's export trade (the main staple was timber) and secured the mail contract for Liverpool. His business empire embraced railways and telegraphs as well as shipping, banking, insurance and even manufacturing.
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Allan was one of a group of Montreal entrepreneurs whose interests were continental in scale. Their burning ambition was to conscript British capital for the building of railways that would make Montreal into a commercial metropolis to rival New York.
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Their achievement lay in harnessing their British connections to the ruthless exploitation of local opportunities, a task that required both commercial and political skills.

Their counterparts on the other side of the world faced the same challenge. Australia's transformation from a remote prison farm heavily dependent on imperial subsidy was mainly the work of local free settlers and merchants who created a pastoral industry and forced the abandonment of London's attempts to restrain inland expansion. Invoking the rule that the aboriginal peoples had no rights of ownership (the
terra nullius
doctrine), ‘squatters’ seized the colony's principal asset, its far-reaching grasslands, bargaining with the Crown – their nominal possessor – for the lowest land charge. While both South and Western Australia had been founded directly by private interests from Britain, Victoria and Queensland were settled by migrants from the two original colonies, New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (later Tasmania). John Macarthur (1767–1834), who introduced the merino sheep, his son James (1798–1867), who made a Lombard Street marriage, and William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872), explorer, trader, pastoralist, lawyer, politician and ‘booster’, were the key political architects of the pastoral interest and inveterate opponents of London's ‘autocracy’.
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Thomas Mort (1816–78), whose statue now stands near Sydney's Circular Quay, created much of the financial and mercantile apparatus on which the wool trade depended. In New Zealand, where London's annexation had been openly grudging, imperial policy was to restrict the area of settlement to a handful of enclaves. The sale of land by indigenous Maori, formally acknowledged by the treaty of Waitangi as owners of the soil, was to be strictly controlled. In the South Island, where the number of Maori was low (perhaps as few as 5,000 in the 1840s), there was direct settlement from Britain in Otago and Canterbury. But, in the North Island, local men did most to make New Zealand into a settler state. Isaac Featherston, superintendent of the Wellington province, eagerly pushed its boundaries inland to the Wairarapa and Manawatu.
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Auckland interests pressed for occupation of the Waikato valley, the scene of major Anglo-Maori conflict in the mid-1860s.
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But the crucial figure was Donald McLean, the government land agent and, not coincidentally, a major landowner himself in the Hawke's Bay province.
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McLean's aggressive purchasing policy
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stoked the settler appetite for land until the crisis was reached in the 1860s. The Maori wars that followed decided the question: henceforth New Zealand was to be a white settler state.