The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (40 page)

For forty years after 1860 Britain dominated China’s commerce. In 1895 Britain enjoyed two-thirds of all China’s foreign trade, which then totalled £53.2 million. Opium remained at the head of the list of China’s imports, accounting for an average of £10 million a year during the 1880s, with Lancashire cottonware in second place with an annual value of about £3 million. As well as having a near-monopoly of China’s markets, Britain had a stranglehold on the Chinese customs. These had passed under foreign control in 1853 as an emergency measure when Taiping insurgents threatened Shanghai. Twenty years later the entire Chinese customs service was managed by Sir Robert Hart, who had a staff of eighty-nine Europeans of whom more than half were British. This supervision guaranteed the government a reliable source of revenue and was also a safeguard for foreign capitalists. In a passage which gives an insight into the mind of British investors, the
Economist
of 15 January 1898 commented that, ‘The Customs Houses of China are within reach of British shells’, which presumably might be fired if its government defaulted on its loans.

British political paramountcy in China ended in 1895. The sudden and complete collapse of China in the 1894–5 Sino-Japanese War signalled the country’s weakness, to the rest of the world. Japan was the first to take advantage, with demands for sovereignty over Formosa (Taiwan), a £35-million indemnity and the Liaotung Peninsula. This last was withdrawn after protests from France, Russia and Germany, who had combined in a cynical conspiracy to protect China. In return, a grateful Chinese government granted France mineral rights in Yunnan, Kwangsi and Kwantung and Hankow was delivered to Germany. Russia, already dreaming of an empire in Manchuria, was allowed a controlling stake (paid for by the Czar’s treasury) in the Chinese Eastern Railway which, when finished, would connect northern China with the eastern terminus of the projected Trans-Siberian Railway.

In 1897 Germany put in a bid for more territory, using the by now well-worn excuse of murdered missionaries, this time in Shantung. Their deaths opened the way for the German occupation of Kiachow, which was turned into a naval base, and a monopoly of investment in mines and railways in Shantung. Russia, sensing that the ‘scramble for China’ had begun, slipped into Port Arthur in March 1898, two years after she had helped shift the Japanese out.

These brutal manifestations of the new imperialism caused dismay in Britain. Hitherto British governments, confident in the knowledge that their businessmen enjoyed supremacy in China, had supported a free-trade-for-all-comers policy, and turned a blind eye to French and Russian efforts to lop off China’s outlying tributary provinces, Indo-China and Korea. The events of 1897–8 suggested that China, like Africa, would be partitioned with the result that Britain would lose markets. The encroachments of protectionist Russia posed the most serious threat; the Trans-Siberian railway would facilitate mass emigration to underpopulated eastern Russia and, once its branch lines to the south had been laid, would serve as a conduit for China’s trade with Europe, which had previously been carried by British ships.

After statements that it had no territorial claims to China, the Marquess of Salisbury’s government announced in April 1898 that it had leased Wei-heiwei on the coast of north China as a naval base. At the same time a promise that no other power would be allowed concessions in the Yangtze basin had been extracted from Peking. Not that this counted for much, since soon afterwards China approved the Russian-funded Hankow-Peking railway which infringed Britain’s local investment monopoly. Fears of further confrontations led to the reinforcement of the Far Eastern squadron, which was increased to three battleships and ten cruisers, making it equal to combined Franco-Russian fleets in the area.

Salisbury feared that defending Britain’s informal, commercial empire in China would stretch the country’s resources to breaking point.
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Britain was currently embroiled in the conquest of the Sudan, was preparing for a showdown with France on the upper Nile, and was on a collision course with the Boer republics in South Africa. The transfer of warships to the China station depleted the home and Mediterranean fleets, but Britain could not afford to let Germany, Russia and France do as they wished in China.

The quickening pace of foreign penetration provoked popular resistance inside China. There had been spasms of violent xenophobia, largely directed against missionaries in 1891–2, and by the end of 1898 a new anti-foreigner movement had emerged, the I-ho chuän (Righteous and Harmonious Fists), or Boxers. Its members hated all Europeans, Chinese Christians and anyone who used alien manufactures. The Boxers boasted magical powers which made them immune to bullets, and possessed what turned out to be a suicidal addiction to fighting with traditional swords and spears. They were, initially, anti-Manchu, but their obscurantist ideology won them friends among the ultra-conservatives at court and in the government. The sympathetic governor of Shansi, Yü-hsien, incorporated the Boxers in the local militia and then unleashed them on foreign missionaries and their converts.

By the beginning of 1900 the Dowager Empress, Tzu-hsi, had cobbled together an alliance with the Boxers in order to deflect popular anger away from the dynasty and towards the foreigners. It was a shortsighted and self-defeating policy since the Chinese government’s ambivalence towards the Boxers was already serving to draw more and more British, French, German, Russian and American warships to the Gulf of Chihli. Fearing an allied advance on Peking, Tzu-hsi finally took the plunge on 18 June and committed imperial troops to join 30,000 Boxers in an attack on the walled legation quarter of Peking.

This was madness and the Empress’s pro-Boxer policy was swiftly repudiated by the more realistic provincial mandarins. More importantly, from the viewpoint of the few hundred defenders of the legations, General Junglu refused to lend the defenders his modern artillery. On 14 August an international army, 18,000-strong, entered Peking and relieved the legations.

The Boxer troubles were a godsend for Russia. They provided the excuse to pour 200,000 troops into Manchuria and to transfer warships from the Baltic to Vladivostok and Port Arthur. Mutual distrust between Britain and Russia was as strong as ever, but there were strategic restraints on how far the British government could go to frustrate the annexation of Manchuria and preserve the
status quo
in China. During 1900 and 1901 the Admiralty just managed to maintain naval parity with France and Russia, but at the cost of reducing the numbers of the home and Mediterranean fleets. The only answer lay in reaching an accommodation with Japan, which was forcefully contesting Russian claims to Manchuria and Korea.

The Anglo-Japanese alliance of January 1902 allowed Britain to withdraw from the Far Eastern naval race. Each power promised to assist its partner if it was attacked by two or more countries, an arrangement which left Japan free to go to war with Russia without fear of French intervention. In terms of the history of the British empire, the accord with Japan was a turning point. Britain had been forced to admit that she could no longer maintain her paramountcy in China singlehandedly, and henceforward her informal empire there would depend upon the goodwill and cooperation of Japan.

Nevertheless, the short-term results of the alliance were invaluable. In February 1904 Japanese warships made a pre-emptive strike against the Russian squadron at Port Arthur, the first of an amazing sequence of land and sea actions which shattered Russia’s dreams of a Far Eastern empire and overturned the local balance of power. Russia’s humiliation was greeted with undisguised pleasure throughout Britain and the alliance with Japan, now a vital prop to British pretensions in the Far East, was renewed in 1911. For the people of this region, and for that matter the rest of Asia, Japan’s victory had a far greater significance. Japan, an Asiatic power, had proved that European armies and navies were not invincible; the trend of over a hundred years had been reversed.

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Elsewhere in the Far East and in the Pacific the nineteenth century witnessed the gradual replacement of informal by formal empire. In the early 1800s Malaya and the islands of the East Indies had attracted a handful of energetic, ambitious young opportunists: Sir Stamford Raffles, John Clunies-Ross, Alexander Hare and Sir James Brooke. All were animated by the spirit and vision of Clive and, like him, had a peculiar knack of turning local circumstances to their own and their country’s advantage. Dutch power was in eclipse and the small independent states of Malaya and Borneo were fragile and therefore keen to obtain British friendship and armed assistance.

Raffles, frustrated of the chance of starting an empire for the East India Company in Java, laid the foundations of another in Malaya by acquiring Singapore island in 1819. Placed athwart trade routes between India and China, Singapore soon became a major free trade
entrepôt
for South-East Asia and the East Indies. Hare tried to establish himself as an independent prince in southern Borneo, but failed, while his partner, Clunies-Ross, finally ended up as ‘king’ of the Cocos-Keeling islands in the Indian Ocean. Their enterprise inspired another romantic swashbuckler, James Brooke. Something of a misfit in England, Brooke had sought service with the East India Company’s army and had been invalided out as a result of wounds received leading a charge of irregular horse in the Burma War.

Brooke’s lucky break came in 1833, when he inherited £10,000 which provided him with the wherewithal to launch a venture designed to acquire territory and open trade on the coasts of northern Borneo. There was something distinctly Elizabethan about Brooke and his scheme, but it had the passive support of the East India Company and the Admiralty. Brooke’s greatest assets were his audacity, singlemindedness and the well-armed, 142-ton schooner, appropriately named
Royalist,
which made him a power to be reckoned with in regional politics. Between his first reconnaissance of the shores and creeks of northern Borneo in 1839 and 1841, Brooke had made himself indispensable to Hasim Jeal, the regent of Brunei, who was attempting to bring the province of Sarawak to heel. When Hasim feared that Brooke might desert him, he installed him as Rajah of Sarawak.

Appointed as a strong man to rule what beforehand had proved an ungovernable territory, Brooke set about restoring peace and laying the foundations of a stable government and economy. The suppression of coastal piracy was his hardest task, despite regular assistance from British men-o’-war based at Singapore. The Malay and Borneo pirates were persistent and elusive, although their light craft were no match for modern ships’ guns. During one riverine engagement in 1843 Brooke recorded how a single round of grapeshot ‘swept all the men from paddles on one side’ and forced the rest of the crew to jump into the water, where they were shot.
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The British government approved Brooke’s position as Rajah of Sarawak, although he had many enemies among humanitarians, who deplored his vigorous methods of handling pirates. He and his tiny state were a useful addition to Britain’s local unofficial empire. Territorial ambitions in the area were confined to the occupation of islands and small strips of land for naval bases and commercial centres from which influence was exerted over Malaya, Siam and the East Indies. To this end, Penang Island, Port Wellesley, Singapore and Malacca had been secured between 1785 and 1824, toeholds known collectively as the Straits Settlements.

Informal empire in Malaya depended on the cooperation of the local hereditary princes who were expected to keep the peace and safeguard British lives, property and investment. After 1870 these duties proved beyond the capacities of the Malay rulers as the region slid into a period of violent political and economic upheavals. Since the mid-1850s, Selangor and Perak had enjoyed a tin-mining boom, which had brought a mass influx of Chinese immigrants. There were 40,000 in Perak by 1870, and they, like their countrymen in Selangor, were passionately attached to various, mutually hostile secret societies. The Chinese faction struggle in Selangor had deteriorated into a civil war by 1870, and a year later a succession contest broke out in Perak.

Successive governors of the Straits were faced with a dilemma: they had to do all in their power to restore stability inside Malaya while, in the best traditions of informal empire, staying neutral. It proved practically impossible for the British to keep out of Malaya’s internecine conflicts, not least because they had triggered a revival of piracy. In 1870 gunboats had been driven to shell the stockades of a contender to the throne of Selangor after his adherents had impeded the arrest of some Chinese pirates. Such incidents multiplied until, by 1873, the Straits’ authorities had become completely entangled in Malayan politics. Long before, the men-on-the-spot had concluded that the apparatus of informal empire was inadequate to settle the crisis, which could only be resolved by direct intervention.

A tug-of-war consequently developed between British officials and the Liberal Colonial Secretary, Lord Kimberley, who was determined to stop the drift towards Britain taking full responsibility for Malaya. In the end he gave up when the annexationists warned that inactivity would invite German or Dutch intervention. Then and later, even outwardly anti-imperialist governments like Gladstone’s would not dare take the political risk of allowing Britain’s informal power to be superseded by that of another country. The colonial officials got their way; Britain threw its weight behind one of the pretenders in Selangor and Anglo-Indian forces were ordered to pacify Perak and Sungei-Ujong in 1875.