Pax Britannica (10 page)

T
HE infatuated British public did not greatly concern itself with the motives of the Pax Britannica. It had happened. It was splendid. It was part of that divine order which had made Britain supreme and Victoria sixty years a Queen. The pragmatic tradition of England, like the climate of the island, was antipathetic to clear-cut analyses, the definition of principles or the formulation of intentions. Besides, the various pieces of the Empire had accrued so gradually, often so imperceptibly, like layers of molluscs clinging to a rock in the ebb and flow of the tide, that the process seemed altogether motiveless. It had not exactly been achieved. It was more properly ordained—a charismatic anointment of the British, like a Higher Summons.

In fact, one imperial end was basic to all others: profit. Many nobler and subtler motives played their part, and many passionate imperialists did not stand to gain at all, but the deepest impulse of Empire was the impulse to be rich. It had always been so. Loot of the more respectable kind had been a fundamental of British imperialism since the first adventurers went to India in search of spices or indigo, or Humphrey Gilbert realized the wealth of the Newfoundland fisheries. Romantics now saw their Empire as a cornucopia from which good things flowed along the seaways to their islands—gold and furs from the western possessions, gold, skins, diamonds, wines and feathers from the south, silk, rice, tea and precious stones from the east, ivory from Africa and food from all quarters. Wool, wood, rubber, cotton, tin, iron ore, zinc—all these essentials of British prosperity, produced within the Empire, flowed back to Britain in a safe sure stream. ‘The tropical and temperate possessions of the Empire’, wrote Flora Shaw
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in her article on the
British Empire in the
Encyclopaedia
Britannica,
‘include every field of production which can be required for the use of man’, and a third of all the miners and quarrymen of the world worked in imperial soil.

In the 1890s this atavistic view of imperial profit was paramount, and there was a Spanish streak to the New Imperialism. These were gold-rush years. Some of the most powerful forces behind the expansion of Empire in Africa were the gold and diamond corporations of South Africa and the City of London, and nothing excited the public more than the news of another fabulous gold strike in yet another corner of the Queen’s possessions. Within the past few decades they had found gold and silver in Australia, in New Zealand, in India, in Canada, in South Africa. Tens of thousands of emigrants, many of them educated men, had sailed from Britain for these imperial goldfields. In Australia the silver deposits of Broken Hill had not only lured away almost the entire labour force of the New South Wales railways, but had half cleared the South Pacific of those thousands of beachcombers, odd-job men and confidence tricksters who formed a peripatetic population for the islands. In Canada armies of prospectors were labouring over the passes to the new goldfields of the Yukon—a journey so frightful that often, when at last they reached the diggings of Bonanza Creek, they turned in relief and went home again. In South Africa the British had built the gold metropolis of Johannesburg, were prospecting north of the Zambesi, and had created in the Big Hole at Kimberley one of the most astonishing memorials to the impetus of avarice.

Nothing expressed the opportunism of Empire better than the Big Hole, in the days before the big combines bought out the small miners. The site was divided into hundreds of smallholdings, separated by roadways. As the frenzied miners dug away to the very edges of their holdings, so the roadways collapsed, the pit grew deeper, and the only way to extract the diamond ore was by rope
pulleys, from the diggings themselves to the lip of the hole. Soon every miner had his own ropeway, and the whole vast mess of the Big Hole was covered in a mesh of ropes, gently shimmering in the hot wind like an enormous spider’s web, or swaying with the weight of innumerable buckets—at the top of each thread a barrow or a truck, at the bottom, far down in the chasm, a sweating imperialist. In a single year nearly 50,000 men came to scrabble in and around this pit, fighting each other, drinking too much, gambling wildly, dossing down in sleazy boarding-houses and occasionally making fortunes, until at last Cecil Rhodes, the greatest fossicker of them all, bought them all out with the most valuable cheque ever written: ‘Five Million, Three Hundred and Thirty-Eight Thousand, Six Hundred and Fifty-Eight Pounds—Only’.
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The prospector was one of the familiars of the British Empire. He was a classless creature, deserter or bishop’s son, Honourable or wanted, and often an eccentric, too: a Mr John Derbyshire had travelled to the Kimberley diggings from the Natal coast on a tricycle fitted with a triangular sail, and when Bryce visited the boom town of Johannesburg in the nineties he was struck by the number of cultured men to be found there, incongruous among the shanties, the dusty streets and the unlovely yellow piles of the mine dumps. Many English remittance men took their chance in the Yukon that year, and one of the most striking outfits to set off from Edmonton for the goldfields was that led by Lord Avonmore, with a group of gentlemanly associates, numbers of servants and ten thousand pounds of supplies.
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The legend of Australia was largely created by its myriad prospectors, often to be found half-wild in the wastelands, looking for tin, gold or silver, shacked up often enough with an aboriginal bushwoman, living on kangaroo steak and sweet
potatoes, sometimes striking it rich and hastening into Kalgoorlie or Broken Hill for an orgy of gambling and drinking, more often reduced to destitution, packing up his pans, his pots and his woman and stumbling off towards another elusive Eldorado.

The possibility of instant fortune, every man his own Rhodes, was essential to the mystique of Empire. Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa went wild, when the mining boom hit Ontario, and young Fizzlechip ‘came back from the Cobalt country with a fortune, and loafed around in the Mariposa House in English khaki and a horizontal hat, drunk all the time, and everybody holding him up as an example of what it was possible to do if you tried’.
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In London agencies thrived by arranging passages to the goldfields for hopeful adventurers, and one day that summer the
Daily
Chronicle
printed a spirited gold-rush ballad:

This was very much in the spirit of the New Imperialism, and the excitement of the new African Empire was largely a gambler’s kick. The great South African mining corporations, City-backed and often Jewish-run, approached the whole subject of Empire rather in the manner of the wayward prospector, subjugating all else to the main chance. For many Englishmen the imperial climax was soured by get-rich-quick. ‘All this Empire-building,’ cried the Radical John Morley. ‘Why, the whole thing is tainted with the spirit of the hunt for gold.’
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Hoggenheimer the Randlord became a
familiar butt, while the new plutocracy created by the influx of South African gold was frequently lampooned in
Punch,
indulging in grotesque and ignorant ostentation.

Trade was a steadier imperial impulse, and if it did not excite the public quite so spectacularly, gave to the British Empire much of its presence and solidity. High on Victoria Peak above the harbour of Hong Kong lived the taipans, the grandest of the imperial merchants, riding the crest of the China trade. Above their palaces their house flags flew majestically, and in immaculate barouches they drove down the twisting island roads to their offices on the waterfront. They were successors to a long line of British merchant princes, and all over the world they and their peers were part of the imperial scene, richly and comfortably entrenched in profitable fields of commerce. The greatest commercial asset, Rhodes once said, was the British flag: and if a stream of raw materials and natural products flowed back to Britain from the colonies, she in return sent them everything undeveloped countries needed to catch up—machinery, steel, clothing, arms, carriages, railway equipment, books, and every kind of manufactured luxury. The Empire was in no sense a private market. The British were committed to Free Trade, and for nearly fifty years their Empire had been open to all comers. But they did enjoy obvious advantages in their own possessions, and the anti-imperial economist J. A. Hobson considered the whole imperial movement to be a British sales device, necessitated by an excess of production over home demand, and a consequent need to find profitable markets and fields of investment abroad.
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To travellers along the imperial routes British commercial supremacy must have seemed overwhelming. The British merchant
was ubiquitous, and the imperial economic services were unchallenged. In every port Lloyd’s agent was at your service. In every capital a bill on London was instantly honoured. When a liner captain approached Port Said, whatever his nationality, he knew for certain that already awaiting his vessel there, loaded deep with piles of coal and blackened half-naked men, would be the coal-rafts of the Port Said and Suez Coal Company, British owned and managed, and geared to refuel the transient ship with best South Wales coal at the rate of eight tons a minute. To many parts of the Empire the arrival of a British bank, generally on Scottish lines, set altogether new standards of method and reliability (though in India they sometimes lived more racily by making loans to improvident native rulers, and exploiting the fluctuations in the unstable local currencies).

As for the traders, they were inescapable, princely as the taipans or modest as Collins the hair-lotion man in Salisbury. Far up the steamy Niger you would find the flag of the Royal Niger Company floating listlessly over a mud and thatch hut; and all over the lakes area of Central Africa you would come across ‘Mandala’—the generic name given by the Africans to every trading post of the African Lakes Company, after the glint, we are bafflingly told, in the spectacles of an original Scottish partner. Hong Kong in the nineties seethed with new British companies, floated to exploit the promising China market: all over the Pacific British entrepreneurs, shippers and schooner captains tapped the island trade, coconuts to Singapore, pineapples from Fiji, or deckloads of indentured Polynesians for the Queensland sugarfields. The commerce of India was largely in British hands, and they had made Calcutta one of the great commercial cities of the world, street after street of grave business houses like huge neo-classical factories to process the trade of the interior. The agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company knew more about the Canadian North than anyone else; the Company was the greatest landowner in the north-west, owned half downtown Winnipeg, retained a monopoly of the fur trade and had retail stores all over Canada. Luke Thomas, the principal shipping and trading agent in Aden, was a great-grandson of one of the original British merchants there, and was sensitive to every nuance of trade throughout the
Red Sea area.
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Many of the more horrific accounts of the Masai tribesmen, emanating from the interior of Kenya in the 1890s, were put about by adventurous traders anxious to keep new markets to themselves.

The free ports of the Empire—Gibraltar, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong—were hubs of trade for their respective regions, within which barter, currency exchange, smuggling and all the ancillary arts of the entrepreneur were profitably practised beneath the protection of the Union Jack. In many parts of the Empire coastal trade was virtually a British monopoly. Nobody else had much chance, for example, around the coasts of India—even the Indians themselves, who occasionally tried to compete: the Indian Ocean was virtually monopolized by the ninety ships of the British India line, which had begun operations on the Calcutta-Burma run and gradually swept all rivals off the seas from Rangoon to Mombasa. The greatest commercial asset was the flag.

A young English trader named Harry Martin has left an account of his arrival in the Gold Coast to work for the firm of F. and A. Swanzy, in the newly valuable cocoa trade. At Addah, at the mouth of the Volta, he was lowered over the side of his ship in a wicker garden chair, and swept perilously through the surf on an African longboat. Soaked through and distinctly shaky, he was carried bodily up the beach by the bosun to be greeted by a large genial African, ‘Mr Micah, the Agent’, and given a meal of ‘Roast Chicken, White Bread, Boiled Yam and a tin of Dutch Butter’. The very next day he was handed a cash-box containing
£
300 and told to take it, in a rickety old launch, sixty-five miles up the Volta River to the Company factory.

It sounds a daunting introduction to merchant venturing. The boat repeatedly broke down, the mosquitoes were dreadful, Martin sweated heavily and constantly wondered ‘when someone would come along and murder me and take the money’. Once at the factory, though, he found life rigidly ordered. Swanzy’s had been
in Africa for 180 years, and had acquired a kind of tribal status. The firm even had its own ceremonial mace, like a tribal totem, which its agents sent into a chief’s presence before entering a village—it was a six-foot malacca cane with a silver unicorn at its head. The handful of Englishmen at the factory lived in some formality: the contract lunch for junior employees provided two glasses of light French wine. The labourers were mostly indentured Kroomen imported from Liberia, who arrived filthy and virtually nude, were given names at random like Teapot, Bignose or One Day Gentleman, and were locked into their compound at night. Competition with local German and French traders was intense—each morning buyers were sent out along the country roads to entice cocoa-sellers back to the factory yard—and relations with the local Africans seem to have been dignified: for in those days, Martin writes, ‘the Gold Coast natives were in every way scrupulously honest, reliable and their morals good’.
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