The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (50 page)

As the terrifying lessons of conquest sank in, the conquerors often found it easy to overawe their new subjects. When Captain Abadie arrived in Ilorin a year after Goldie’s campaign, he found its people submissive. Commandeering lodgings was an easy business, and afterwards Abadie remarked on the drollery of ‘two very hot and dirty, begrimed, badly clothed Englishmen dictating to a crowd of about six hundred Muhammadans, all big swells, and kicking them out.’
28
A clue to their reaction was revealed soon after; when Abadie set up his camera to photograph the local prince all his attendants fled at the sight of the tripod which reminded them of the mounting for a machine-gun.

The two men’s overbearing behaviour was an extreme example of the self-confidence of their class. British social attitudes were exported to Africa, where the orthodoxy that the government of naïve native peoples was best entrusted to gentlemen was already taking root. Surveying the employees of the trading companies in Lagos in 1898, Lieutenant Archibald Eden was appalled by what he saw:

The type of Englishman, in the shape of the trader, whom we meet in these parts, is too awful for words to describe; they are all more-or-less counter-jumpers of the worst type and biggest bounders into the bargain.
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Lieutenant Ladislaus Pope-Hennessey, who arrived at the same time, took an instant dislike to the colonial government officials, who were all ‘bounders’ and ‘cads’ addicted to ‘cocktails’, a novelty which the young officer found distasteful. Lugard shared these prejudices and feared that the conduct of men who were not gentlemen lowered respect for all white men.

He and Goldie had separately discovered ‘gentlemen’ among the Fulani Muslim princes of central and northern Nigeria and were impressed by their sophistication, bearing and the orderly procedures of their law courts and administration. Here were men with whom the British could cooperate, and Islamic institutions could be adopted to suit British needs. The first preliminary was the by now ritual trial of strength which occurred between 1902 and 1904, when the states of Sokoto and Kano were invaded and their armies defeated by Lugard.

Resistance from the ruling élite ceased, but there was a sudden upsurge of popular opposition to the British in February 1905 under the banner of Mahdist millennialism. The followers of this movement, including many slaves and ex-slaves, identified the British and French armies which had entered their country during the past decade with Baggal, an anti-Christ figure who, in Islamic eschatology, would appear before the coming of the Mandi. The rebels surprised and overcame a British column at Satiru, capturing a slightly damaged Maxim gun, rifles and ammunition. No use was made of these spoils. Like its counterpart in the Sudan, the Nigerian Mahdist movement was backward-looking, and so the insurgents disdained to use the implements of modern, infidel war, relying instead on faith and traditional weaponry. In their next engagement, they adopted a mass charge and were defeated with over 2,000 dead.
30

The Fulani aristocracy cooperated with the British in the suppression of this uprising, which threatened their own as well as their conqueror’s authority. The two were now working in tandem as Lugard had introduced the system known either as ‘indirect rule’ or ‘dual control’. He wanted above all to maintain a continuity of government and assure Britain’s new subjects that, with the exception of slavery, Islamic practices were to be preserved and respected. Once this was clear, Muslim princes and clergy rallied behind the new order and the old courts and civil service continued to function, but under the eye of a British resident. This form of government suited the circumstances of Northern Nigeria for it was inexpensive and required limited manpower. Moreover, an instinctive
rapport
developed between the princes and the conservative, public-school and university educated administrators who were filling the ranks of the Nigerian civil service during the 1900s. Interestingly, the Colonial Office recruiters preferred sportsmen, who were presumably fitter and, most importantly, knew how to play by the rules.

The day-to-day running of indirect rule is vividly described in Joyce Cary’s
Aissa Saved
(1932), which is set in the fictional province of Yanrin in 1921. Cary, who served in the Nigerian civil service, was aware of the tensions created by the new order. Alongside the emir and his Muslim staff, all of whom followed the paths of tradition, was a new élite which had been created over the past forty years by British educators in Sierra Leone and southern Nigeria. Early colonial government depended on this body of literate blacks, one of whom, a graduate from a Sierra Leone mission school and a Royal Niger Company agent at Ekow, was described by a British officer who met him in 1892. The clerk was ‘sleek and polite’ and, ‘a great man in the eyes of the local aborigines’ with whom he exchanged palm oil for ‘gaudy Manchester cottons’. In the evening he ‘played selections from
Hymns Ancient and Modern
on a harmonium in the drawing room of a hut, hung with portraits of the royal family.’
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Lugard admitted the value of such men, but insisted that they should never usurp or interfere with the functions of men whose power derived from tradition. No African clerk or constable could override the judgement of, say, a village headman. This was the rule in Cary’s Yanrin, where Jacob, an educated Christian from the coast, considered himself one of the three ‘civilised persons’ in the region. He wore white man’s clothing, was less deferential than the local natives, and had absorbed some politics. On hearing that a massacre of Christian converts was imminent in a nearby town, he urges Bradgate, the British resident, to take immediate action. ‘I run for you, sah, because I say, if dem Christians done get killed someone go write paper in England, write praps parliament member, den ma frien Mister Bradgate catch big trouble.’ As in India, the British faced the dilemma of how to handle a class of educated natives who were vital for everyday administration, but who knew something of the outside world and the political values which obtained in it. They were not always compliant collaborators, as Jacob’s remarks suggest, and it is not surprising that British administrators preferred the old hierarchies of Africa.

9

Ye Sons of the Southern Cross: The White Dominions

In his patriotic vision,
The Poets’ Pilgrimage to Waterloo,
Robert Southey wrote of ‘those distant lands, where Britain blest with her redundant life the East and West’. He was thinking of Canada and Australia, which, like many of his countrymen, he saw as repositories for superfluous men and women, unwanted by reason of their poverty or criminality. This was the age of Robert Malthus, the parson-schoolmaster who devoted his life to studying the calculus of population growth, and concluded that a spiralling birth rate could only be checked by cyclical famines. This bleak prognosis was widely accepted and appeared confirmed by the starvation that followed bad harvests during the 1810s.

Emigration to Canada, Australia, South Africa and, after 1840, New Zealand offered salvation for those who might otherwise have languished and died in a homeland which could not provide for them. The government concurred and, between 1819 and 1825, allocated £95,000 in subsidies for pauper emigration. Local authorities followed suit; in 1826 the Board of Guardians of Benenden in Kent paid £14.10 shillings (£14.50p) each to twenty-seven men, women and children for their passage to New York. This was a large outlay, but it was a once and for all measure which relieved ratepayers of people who would have been a burden for many years to come. For this reason, the 1834 Poor Law included provisions for assisting poor emigrants. The 1891 Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act gave their governors the power to send delinquent children to the colonies. Private charities did likewise: the Salvation Army and Dr Barnado’s paid for the passage of orphans to the colonies and, in the sixty years after 1870, 100,000 were settled in Canada alone.
1
As in previous centuries, enforced emigration provided a solution to domestic social problems.

Most nineteenth-century emigrants were not state-funded. When they did receive help, it came from voluntary charities set up for the purpose and based upon the principles of self-help. Typical of this sort of body was the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society which assisted crofters from an economically moribund region to settle on farms in Australia during the 1850s. It was axiomatic that anyone who was industrious and thrifty would prosper in the colonies. A prospectus for the Canadian province of New Brunswick, issued in 1842, claimed that a workman there, drawing wages of between twenty and thirty pounds annually, could in a few years accumulate enough capital to buy his own farm since average land prices were about three shillings (15p) an acre. ‘Were young persons of either sex to engage themselves in this way,’ the author concluded, ‘they would be certain of succeeding to comfort and independence – would become useful members of society – and would strengthen those ties by which this colony is attached to the parent state.’
2

Many underwent this process of regeneration, and some who did wrote home letters which were circulated to encourage other emigrants. Typical was that sent by James Dobbie of Lanark, Canada, to his father and friends in 1826:

I really bless God every day I rise, that He was ever pleased in the course of his providence to send me and my family to this place. We are not without difficulties here, but they are nothing to your wants in Glasgow; we have always plenty to eat and drink, and have always a little to spare … I wish you would try and do all you can to come out: you will find plenty of work, and hard work, but be assured it will pay well. My stock of cattle consists of one yoke of oxen, three milk cows and three young ones. I have got up a very handsome new house, with the assistance of fifteen young men, it was raised in one day; it is 24 feet in length and 15 in breadth.
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This must have been very tempting since Clydeside was suffering badly from a trade recession. In January 1827, when handloom weavers’ wages had dropped to four shillings (20p) a week, reports that five times that amount were being paid in America persuaded 800 heads of families to ask the local authorities for assisted passage. High wages, as much as the chance to become a self-sufficient farmer, always acted as a magnet for immigrants. William Lang, an ex-waiter and ward room steward of HMS
Lark,
jumped ship in Sydney in April 1885. His defence was poverty, for he could only send home twenty-five shillings [£1.25p] a month to his wife and six children in England. ‘The thought of this drove me wild,’ he pleaded, ‘and the temptation of employment on shore at good wages, at a Hotel in the Blue Mountains, enabling me to provide for my little ones proved too great, and I ran.’
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A stony-hearted court martial gave him eighteen months’ hard labour since there had been a rash of similar desertions.

The conventional immigrant paid the cost of his passage. In 1834 transatlantic fares from Liverpool and Glasgow were as little as twenty-seven shillings (£1.35), for which the passenger endured the misery of sleeping on the deck, and cabins were between £14 and £35. The 12,000-mile journey to Australia and New Zealand cost £23 steerage and £50 with a cabin and, as on all other voyages, passengers had to provide their own food. Those who paid the lowest fares suffered much discomfort. A well-to-do passenger crossing the Atlantic in 1834 peeped into the steerage-class quarters and saw ‘children crying, women screaming, and all tossing about from side to side as the vessel pitched: butter, biscuit, treacle, beef and potatoes all lying higgledy-piggledy or rolling from side to side.’
5
Conditions improved and fares fell after 1840 when steamships superseded sailing vessels: in 1898 a single ticket to Australia could cost as little as thirteen guineas (£13.65p).

It is estimated that 16 million emigrants sailed from Britain between 1815 and 1914, of whom about one in four went to the United States, the rest to the colonies. Periods of recession witnessed the largest exoduses; 1.8 million left Britain between 1901 and 1910, half settling in the white dominions, whose popularity rose steadily during the next sixty years. Ireland provided a large proportion of these immigrants; about 800,000 between 1815 and the 1845–6 famine and an astonishing one million in the seven years after, most of whom were destined for the United States.

There were also smaller flows of immigration within the empire. When Scots left Clydeside in the 1820s, they were replaced by Gaelic, Catholic Irish (there were 27,000 in Glasgow in 1827), who were willing to take lower wages and so contributed to further emigration from Scotland. A combination of overpopulation, chronic poverty and demands for cheap unskilled labour lay behind the Irish migration as it did that of Indians and Chinese. Indian labourers were recruited for plantation work in the West Indies from the 1850s onwards and Fiji from the 1880s, where they balanced the fall in the native birth rate. The agricultural, mining and railroad boom on the west coast of the United States and Canada drew Chinese, Japanese and, by the turn of the century, Sikhs. In 1852 there were 52,000 Hong Kong Chinese alone in California, and by 1900 15 per cent of the population of British Columbia was Asian.