The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (4 page)

What difference does it make to the history of British imperialism if we approach it in the way that has just been sketched out? The argument here is that we can take a more realistic view of Britain's imperial power if we keep its main elements in a single field of action. That might also lead us towards somewhat different conclusions on at least five aspects of the imperial past.

First, it might allow us to see more clearly than before that Britain's place in the world was not simply a consequence of Britain's ‘own’ power and its ability to impose it wholesale on the rest of the globe. Instead, the key to British power lay in combining the strength of its overseas components with that of the imperial centre, and managing them – not commanding them – through the various linkages of ‘imperial politics’: some persuasive, some coercive, some official, some unofficial. Stripped of those assets that lay outside the direct control of the administrators in Whitehall, British power in the world would have been feeble indeed. The rest depended upon the willingness of political and business elites in different parts of the world to acknowledge the benefits that membership of the British system conferred, and concede – sometimes grudgingly – that its various costs were worthwhile. Of course, that willingness was bound to depend upon the general equilibrium of the whole British system, and Britain's ability to meet its large share of the overall burden.

Secondly, adopting this view allows us to form a clearer impression of the actual trajectory of British world power, both its rise and its decline. In one school of thought, British world power performed a long diminuendo from its brief mid-Victorian triumph.
⁸
In another, the Edwardian era saw the last fading chance to stave off decline, but one thrown away by the weakness or blindness of the ‘weary Titan's’ own political leaders.
⁹
A third proclaims that British power reached its apogee in the inter-war years.
¹⁰
A fourth was that the gradual decline of those years was briefly reversed in the Second World War before a final sudden descent.
¹¹
A fifth was that the British clung on by hook or by crook until the final surrender of their ‘role’ east of Suez in the late 1960s. Each case has its merits. But, if we ask when each part of the British system could contribute the most to its overall power, it seems clear that neither the ‘white dominions’ nor the mercantile and property empire over which the City presided counted for much before the later nineteenth century, and that the contribution of India, in economic and military terms, also rose in that period. By the inter-war years, in a much harsher environment, there were clear signs of strain, alleviated in part by the weakness of Britain's main rivals until very late in the day. But the real turning point came with the strategic catastrophe of 1940–2. Britain's drastic defeat as a European power, the forced liquidation of the most valuable parts of its property empire, the lapse of its claim to the (more or less) unconditional loyalty of the overseas dominions, and the irrecoverable offer of independence to India to meet the desperate emergency of 1942, marked the practical end of the British system created in the mid-nineteenth century. That empire that hung on after 1945 was built from different (and much more fragile) materials. It relied far more than before upon the efforts of Britain itself, not least the diverting of so much of its manpower into a conscript army and the arduous struggle to earn more from merchandise exports than ever before. It also imposed new burdens on the least-developed parts of the pre-war system. Above all, it depended upon the goodwill and assistance of a far stronger world power, less and less willing to concede even the shadow of parity to its debilitated partner.

Thirdly, a ‘systemic’ view of British imperialism places Britain itself in a different perspective. It serves to remind us that Britain's attachment to empire should not be taken for granted, and that taking part in the system had variable costs and benefits for different sections of British society. It points up the fact that the overseas elements of British world power were quite different in kind and required quite different types of ‘British connection’. To assume that the British at home treated their property empire, the settler societies of the white dominions, and their ‘Indian empire’, as a single set of possessions, or applied in each case a uniform imperial ideology, would be a basic (but all too common) mistake. For one thing, these different components had built up informal alliances inside British society whose outlook and influence varied considerably. For another, the British interests at play were themselves markedly different. For example, the large fragment of British society with friends or relations in the great emigrant flow to Canada after 1900 had little in common with the narrow elite that championed the interests of the ‘Civilian Raj’, or with the shareholders and bondholders who had tied up their fortunes with Argentine railways or funds in Peru.

Viewed in this light, it is hard to see how the sometimes furious debate about whether (and how far) Britain itself was ‘imperialised’ can be settled one way or the other. On the part of some writers, huge claims have been made about the implanting at home of racial, social and sexual values derived from imperial domination abroad. The speculative (not to say intuitive) basis for a good deal of this writing,
¹²
its flimsy dependence upon a handful of texts, and the methodological error of abstracting fragments of evidence from their broader cultural context, have rightly been criticised – recently and trenchantly in Bernard Porter's
The Absent-Minded Imperialists
,
¹³
which insisted that enthusiasm for imperial
rule
was confined to a limited section of the upper classes. But it is equally true that, if we define empire more broadly (to include self-governing colonies and zones of economic preponderance), a much wider constituency saw Britain's fate as tied up with its overseas interests and assumed, for example, the unchallengeable right of British migrants abroad to seize and fill up the lands of indigenous peoples. How far these different conceptions and connections of empire helped to ‘constitute’ British society is indeed a moot point. It can hardly be doubted that the sense of being part of a larger political world extending far beyond Britain was very widely diffused. Only the most obtuse of newspaper readers (perhaps three million adults by 1830)
¹⁴
could have failed to notice that external events often intruded upon their domestic activities. Entrenched vested interests, often commanding a loud public voice, could play upon this awareness of a ‘greater’ Britain on whose power and prestige ‘little’ England depended. But they could not assume a broad public sympathy for all types of empire and on every occasion. Nor of course did the ‘imperial interest’ speak with one voice or express a single concern. If Britain was ‘constituted’ by its empire we should have to consider how far its ‘constitution’ was shaped by flows of migration (and their return), a sense of pan-British identity, the appeal of free trade (as a source of cheap overseas food), and the claims of evangelical Christianity on the conscience and purse of domestic society, as well as by the vicarious pleasures of lording over ‘lesser breeds without the law’. On those grounds alone, the fashionable notion that the least attractive aspects of modern British culture can be traced directly to its unsavoury imperial past, should only appeal to those who like their history kept simple.

Fourthly, while the importance of India and of the ‘empire of commerce’ are a familiar theme in almost all modern accounts of British world power, the place of the white dominions has been all but ignored by two generations of imperial historiography.
¹⁵
At best, the overseas British have appeared in the guise of ‘pre-fabricated collaborators’, copying the habits and consuming the products of the industrial Britain in whose mould they were formed.
¹⁶
In a characteristically witty aside, the most brilliant historian of modern British imperialism dismissed Anglo-dominion relations as a question of ‘treaties about halibut’.
¹⁷
Revision is long overdue. The dominions cannot be fitted into the Procrustean bed of ‘imperial collaboration’. Nor can their contribution to British world power be treated as less important than India's. In four dominions out of five (including Newfoundland), commitment to the British cause in 1914 was a matter not of elite calculation but of popular will. And, unlike the rest of the empire, the dominions were willing and able to sustain a large-scale war effort in manpower and materiel during the system's great crisis, and to do so moreover at their own expense. It was the will and the means to identify their interests with those of Britain, and at huge physical cost, that made the dominions so special. It was only once Britain could no longer make good its claim on their loyalty, or had signalled a new orientation towards Europe,
¹⁸
that their attachment began to corrode.

Finally, by thinking in terms of a British system of world power, not of a bundle of territories superintended from London, we can make some better sense of the final strange phase of British imperialism: the zigzags and u-turns after the Second World War. As we have seen, with the loss of so many overseas assets, the independence of India, the dominions’ strategic dependence upon the United States, the eclipse of Britain itself as a great naval power, and its renewed vulnerability to external attack, the pre-war British system had almost completely collapsed. Yet there was also the need, and (as it seemed) the scope, to construct a new one, to restore British security and British prosperity. This was why the British pressed into service colonial regions that had previously been of only marginal value in tropical Africa, tropical Asia and the Middle East. The Middle East was a special case. The British had been drawn deeper and deeper into this crossroads sub-continent with its layer upon layer of cultures, religions and peoples. They had rushed in to protect their short sea route to India through the Suez Canal and occupied Egypt in 1882. They fought an arduous war after 1914 to protect the approaches to Egypt and the Persian Gulf against Germany's Ottoman ally. In the year of imperial crisis in 1918 – a 1940 that might have been – they extended their reach as far north as the Caspian to pre-empt a German advance from the broken empire of Russia. In the inter-war years, they clung to much of their takings. After 1945, in far gloomier conditions, they had a powerful motive to hang on regardless. Now the Middle East was a base from which to defend Britain itself against the daunting threat from the east. But the costs and risks of it all, like the costs and risks of ruling the tropical colonies much more intensely, fell entirely on Britain. The balance of safety became agonisingly narrow. A forward move by a rival great power (hostile or friendly), a show of resistance by local nationalist leaders, an open quarrel with an indispensable ally, a spasm of weakness in an overstrained economy: each was enough to produce symptoms of crisis. Fifteen years after the Second World War, the effort to build a new British world-system had come to little or nothing. By 1960, it was only a question of how to preserve as much influence as possible in a superpower world.

But why begin the history of Britain's world-system in the 1830s and 1840s? After all, Adam Smith, from whose sceptical phrase this book takes its main title, saw the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape as decisive moments in the history of the world. By the 1770s, when
The Wealth of Nations
was published, the British had won a great North American empire, and were in the process of seizing a second vast empire on the Indian sub-continent. If they had lost much of the first by the mid-1780s, they had certainly gained a good deal of the second. Between 1783 and 1815, they added much more to this haul: Eastern Australia (annexed in 1788); the Cape Colony (taken for good in 1806); Trinidad and Mauritius; Penang (in modern Malaysia); and Malta and the Ionian islands in the Mediterranean. They ejected the French from Syria and Egypt; sent their (Indian) navy into the Persian Gulf; and made an abortive attempt to ‘liberate’ Buenos Aires from Spanish imperial rule. By 1818, with the final defeat of the Maratha confederacy, their East India Company was the dominant power in South Asia. If the exertion of military power all over the globe is the test of world power, a strong case can be made for this earlier period.
¹⁹

Nor was Britain itself without obvious signs of embracing this imperial and global role. The attempt to reassert British authority over the American colonies had evoked very mixed feelings in opinion at home, while the ‘oriental’ corruption of the ‘nabobs’ in India aroused the resentment on which Burke sought to play in the impeachment of Hastings. Adam Smith's famous tract denounced the ‘mercantilist’ equation between political empire and commercial expansion. But, with the onset of world war in the 1790s, the huge mobilisation of manpower and money for the struggle with France, the vast scope of the conflict – in every continent – swept away any doubt that Britain's survival required a military effort over much of the globe. The old empire of settlement (of which only a rump remained) paled in comparison with the new empire of conquest. What was taken by military force would have to be kept by arbitrary power. The untrammelled authority of British officials, not local self-government by elected politicians, became the constitutional rule.

Of course, this ‘empire of authority’ of which the great symbol was India remained a key element in British world power almost until its demise. But it would be wrong to see it as the dominant or even representative element. In a longer view, the militarist ethos of 1790–1815 was a transient phase: it soon came under domestic attack once peace and depression set in. The following decades saw the steady restriction of governors’ powers except in the poorest or most vulnerable outposts. The 1790s to the 1820s was an age of crisis and strain. It was less the classical era of British world power than its turbulent pre-history, when prevailing conditions remained very uncertain. In the 1830s and 1840s, by contrast, most of the favourable conditions had begun to converge for the growth of the loose decentralised construct that sustained British world power into the 1940s.