Pax Britannica (3 page)

T
HE Diamond Jubilee crystallized the new conception of Empire, and made people feel they were part of some properly organized working unit. The notion of a Greater Britain had been devised by the young Charles Dilke
1
thirty years before: but though the phrase had caught on among educated people, until the eighties and nineties the great British public had never really seen their Empire as anything but a vague and ill-explained appendage to sea-power, scattered somewhere beyond the horizon, and sporadically growing. It was Sir John Seeley who remarked, in his seminal book
The
Expan
sion
of
England,
2
that the Empire had been acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. He did not mean that it had been won by wool-gathering, but that the public at home was cheerfully indifferent to the whole ‘mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our State’.

Not long before the statesmen themselves had often doubted whether the Empire was worth its trouble, and not only radicals but High Tories and even colonial officials had assumed it would eventually disintegrate. Gladstone the Little Englander had expressed a popular view, when he called the triumphs of Empire ‘false phantoms of glory’. The Bill which, in 1876, created Victoria
Empress of India, had aroused furious opposition. Disraeli, its progenitor,
1
loved addressing her as ‘Your Imperial Majesty’, but Gladstone called it ‘theatrical bombast and folly’, and
The
Times
thought it ‘tawdry’. In those days the word ‘Empire’ still referred, in liberal British minds, to the dominions of foreign tyrants, and the idea of a
British
Empress seemed a monstrous negation of principles.
Twenty years had passed, Gladstone was dying, and Greater Britain had grown so explosively that the Colonial Office List, 153 pages long in 1862, occupied 506 pages in 1897. The Empire had become an official enthusiasm. Victoria approved of it. Tennyson had hymned it. The public now surveyed Greater Britain with a proprietorial concern, as though they were inspecting a hitherto neglected piece of family property. What they saw was this: an immense conglomeration of territories, of every kind, climate and state of development, linked only by Britain’s mastery of the sea, and strewn untidily across all the continents. The British Empire was a gigantic hotchpotch. Represented in pillbox hats and embroidered jackets, with British officers swankily in the van, the constituent colonies may have seemed to possess a certain uniformity, if only of foot-drill. In fact they were a wild jumble of territories, and ranged from proper nations like Canada, negotiating its own commercial treaties and announcing its own tariffs, to backwaters like British Guiana, into whose murky hinterland no Englishman had ever penetrated.

Outside this heterogeneous mass there shone a reflected glow of Empire. There were many foreign countries in which an Englishman did not feel himself altogether abroad, in which he enjoyed the advantages of an economic influence, a cultural understanding or an historical link: countries like the Argentine, where British enterprise had lately provided not only the first shorthorn, sheep-dip
and game of polo, but also the first electric light, steamship, tramway, bank, telephone service and insurance company, and all the original railways; or Nepal, where a British Resident lived in semi-regal style, surrounded by his own protective cavalry; or Siam, whose foreign trade was almost all in British hands; or even the United States, where England was still commonly regarded as the Mother Country. All sorts of special privileges, accorded to British subjects in many parts of the world, acknowledged the fact of imperial power. Colonies of Britons thrived, their conceits humoured and their extravagances welcomed, in places like Florence, St Petersburg and Bordeaux. Consular courts stood outside the local law in countries like Persia and Turkey—the British court at Constantinople had its own gaoler. Some of the China treaty towns were virtually self-governing British colonies. The military adviser to the Sultan of Morocco was a Scotsman, the Inspector-General of the Chinese Customs an Irishman, Thomas Cook’s the travel agents owned the funicular up Mount Vesuvius.
1
The Imperial Bank of Persia was a British registered company and the British colony in Venice kept, against all the rules, seventeen cows in a garden. All this was the nimbus of Empire, or the earthshine.

One degree nearer the Crown were those many territories which, though unquestionably British, were only coloured red on the map by courtesy of the adventurers. The world was still unfolding itself before the Victorians, largely at British instigation, and the great age of African exploration, only just ending, was inextricably linked with the imperial saga. The public was addicted to tales of far adventure, and tall stories of Empire (the crows of northern Australia, it was said, flew backwards to keep the dust out of their eyes, while in New Guinea there was alleged to be a mountain 32,000 feet high). The British Empire was half-empty and half-explored. Its
average density of population was 36.8 to the square mile, compared with 373.3 at home in Britain, and there was room for every sort of wildness: the aboriginal mothers of Australia habitually ate their new-born children, the Gonds of Nagpur worshipped serpents and the smallpox. In every continent men of British stock and nationality were still extending the limits of the Pax Britannica, into territories that grew wilder and less hospitable as they grew scarcer. In Africa they were pressing up the Nile, across the Zambesi, inland from the Gold Coast and the mouth of the Niger. In Asia they had recently moved into Upper Burma, North Borneo, and many islands of the South Pacific. In the south they were penetrating the miserable heartland of Australia, and ih the west the Klondike gold rush was luring thousands of prospectors into the Yukon. This was the moving frontier of the British, the uncompleted adventure.

Then there were the islands, fortresses and coaling stations, strung out along the shipping lanes. Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong stood along the orient route. St Lucia guarded the West Indies, Bermuda lay in mid-Atlantic, Halifax in Nova Scotia was the home of one British squadron, Esquimalt in British Columbia the base of another. Everywhere British ships could berth in British harbours, stock up with British coal, replenish their supplies of British beer or biscuits, paint their hulls with British paint, pick up their instructions from British cable stations beneath the protection of British guns. In every sea a ragbag of islands announced the imperial presence: islands close at home, like the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which were technically not parcel of the realm, but overseas possessions; petty islands of the south Atlantic, like St Helena where Napoleon died, or Ascension where the Lord Mayor of London’s turtles came from; desert islands like Perim or Socotra; high-sounding islands like the Solomons, the Spice Islands or the Leewards; islands everyone hankered after, like the Bahamas or the Seychelles, and islands that nobody had ever heard of, like the Chagos Islands, or Dudosa; islands as big as Newfoundland or as infinitesimal as Diamond Rock, a granite lump in the Caribbean which had been garrisoned by the Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, and given the prefix ‘H.M.S.’. There were valuable islands, useless islands, heavenly islands, ghastly islands. Barbados was claimed to be the most
densely populated island on the globe. Bermuda lived chiefly by supplying early vegetables to the city of New York. For the possession of the island of Cyprus the British paid
£
92,800 a year in tribute to the Sublime Porte, together with 4,166,220 okes of salt—fortunately more than covered anyway by repayments on a British loan to Turkey made forty years before.

Many of these strongpoints and outposts stood on the road to India, the grandest of the imperial possessions. India was different in kind from the rest of the Empire—British for so long that it had become part of the national consciousness, so immense that it really formed, with Britain itself, the second focus of a dual power. If much of the Empire was a blank in British minds, India meant something to everybody, from the Queen herself with her Hindu menservants to the humblest family whose ne’er-do-well brother, long before, had sailed away to lose himself in the barracks of Cawnpore. India was the brightest gem, the Raj, part of the order of things: to a people of the drizzly north, the possession of such a country was like some marvel in the house, a caged phoenix perhaps, or the portrait of some fabulously endowed if distant relative. India appealed to the British love of pageantry and fairy-tale, and to most people the destinies of the two countries seemed not merely intertwined, but indissoluble.

And finally there were the white colonial settlements, for many Britons the core and real point of their Empire. Into almost every temperate territory of the unoccupied globe the British had moved—only in Latin America had they been irrevocably forestalled. Full-scale British nations flourished in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Lesser settlements were implanted in the Falkland Islands, the sugar islands of the Caribbean, Bermuda, Fiji, Ceylon and India. Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen had settled in Ireland. The first emigrants were prospecting the farming country of the East African highlands, and out-spanning their ox-wagons in the Rhodesian veldt. Wherever there was White Man’s country vacant, the British had seized and occupied it, filling in the empty spaces of the world, and setting up their own kind of society wherever they went. Such was, so the romantic idealists thought, the manifest destiny of the Empire.

All this the British people surveyed, as they thumbed through the Jubilee souvenirs, or wondered at the sweep of red on the schoolroom map. It was an extraordinary estate. Disraeli had called its character ‘peculiar—I know no example of it, either in ancient or modern history’. An inventor had to take out thirty-five separate patents if he wished to protect his device throughout the Queen’s possessions. The Roman Empire in its prime comprised perhaps 120 million people in an area of 2½ million square miles: the British Empire, now that it had reached ‘the limits set by nature’, comprised some 372 million people in 11 million square miles—ninety-one times the area of Great Britain. Throughout this immense dominion, this quarter of the globe, the British enjoyed rights of suzerainty, shading away from automatic citizenship in Canada or Australia to a very probable invitation to the New Year Durbar at the British Residence in Bahrein,
1
or a distinctly better chance than most of getting a room with a bath at Shepheard’s.

The acquisition of it all had been a jerky process. Absence of mind it never was, but it had happened so obscurely that to the ordinary Briton the rise of the Empire must have seemed more like some organic movement than the conscious result of national policies. There seemed no deliberation to it. One thing simply led to another. There had been a British Empire for nearly three hundred years, and though colonies had come and gone since then, there were distant parts of the world which had been British for twice as long as the United States of America had been in existence. Greater Britain was born in 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert took nominal possession of Newfoundland, and by 1609 the first imperial settlers, a company of castaways, had been washed up on Bermuda—to inspire the first imperial work of art,
The
Tempest.
Later in the seventeenth century the British implanted their authority in several
Caribbean islands, in North America, in Honduras, West Africa and India. In the eighteenth century they extended themselves in Canada and India, took over Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope and sent their first convict settlers to Australia. In the nineteenth century they had acquired a vast new empire in Africa, besides New Zealand, Fiji, North Borneo and much of Malaya. And through all these centuries they had been picking up islands, forts and spheres of influence along the way, St Helena (1651) to Cyprus (1878), and what the Colonial Office List described as ‘countless smaller possessions and nearly all the isolated rocks and islands of the ocean’. The Empire had never been static, and would never be complete. The Romans honoured a God of frontiers, Terminus, who used to be represented as a very large stone. A comparable British deity would be symbolized by something far more portable, for their Empire grew in jumps, sometimes leapfrogging a continent to possess a further island, sometimes by-passing a river basin, sometimes swapping one territory for another, sometimes even refusing one—the Dualla chiefs of the Cameroons repeatedly asked to be annexed, but the British either declined or took no notice at all.

Most Englishmen, asked what it was all about, would probably have described it as a trading system, but this was only partly true. The trading instinct had led to the early settlements in India, and to the slave colonies of West Africa with their protective forts, but most of the British possessions were acquired either for
Lebensraum
or for strategy. In India the British were gradually forced into conquest to protect their original interests, rather than to extend them: first across the subcontinent itself, then beyond the perimeters of India—into Baluchistan in the west, Burma in the east, Sikkim and Bhutan in the north, and across the Indian Ocean into Aden, East Africa and Egypt.