The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (5 page)

The first and most fundamental was the new balance of power and wealth across Eurasia. China's defeat in the first opium war (1839–42), however partial, signalled that East Asia would be a passive actor in world politics for the foreseeable future. The implications were massive. Peking had lost by default the chance to invoke great power diplomacy to restrain its unwelcome new sea-borne neighbour. British interests could press forward in maritime East Asia against only local resistance. The value of India as the base from which to project British power in the East had been strikingly vindicated. At almost the same time, the prolonged ‘Eastern crisis’ of 1830–41 confirmed the fragility of the Ottoman and Iranian empires, and the wide new scope for British trade and diplomacy in Egypt and the Middle East. The Eastern crisis was also a critical test of the post-Napoleonic order in Europe. What it revealed was not the existence of British hegemony (that luxuriant myth of current historiography) but a pattern of European politics which, while not free from conflict, disfavoured both a grand coalition against Britain (a constant threat between 1778 and 1814) and recourse to a general war. Although their European diplomacy was intermittently stressful, the British were able to distribute their military power across the globe (and lock up much of their army in India after 1860) on the cheerful assumption that domestic invasion was at worst a remote possibility. In the Americas, too, the geopolitical climate after 1830 was much more propitious. The new Latin American states were now fully detached from their old masters in Europe, and thrown open (in theory at least) to British influence and trade. With the anglo-settler republic in North America, relations were more fractious. But the headlong expansion of the ‘slave south’ (the main source of Lancashire cotton) and the commercial Northeast (with its close ties to London and Liverpool) had created a sufficient degree of mutual dependence to avert renewal of the frontier and maritime warfare of 1812–14, despite the prolonged crisis in Canada and the territorial disputes in Maine and Oregon. An American war, as the British well knew, would have been a strategic catastrophe with global effects.

The other conditions can be listed more briefly. The scale of Britain's industrialisation after 1830 was critical (a simple index of this is the production of pig iron: 1796: 125,000 tons; 1830: 677,000 tons; 1860: 3.8 million tons
²⁰
). Pre-industrial empires required an abundance of coercive force to suppress rebellion and repel external attack. Even close commercial and cultural ties were no guarantee of colonial loyalty, as the Thirteen Colonies had shown. Industrialism changed the context and equation of imperial power. It increased the dependence of ‘colonial’ economies, and encouraged their development in every world region. It facilitated the global projection of military power far beyond the old limits of wind-powered warships, and greatly cheapened its use once telegraph, steamship and railway could shuttle information and manpower swiftly across vast distances. It turned the demographic imperialism of settler societies from a slow laborious advance into a
Blitzkrieg
invasion, swamping local resistance and transforming faraway natural environments into ‘neo-Europes’ and ‘new Britains’. It hugely reinforced the cultural prestige of the imperial rulers, and (through the new technologies of communication) increased the volume and intensity of their cultural impact. Industrialisation was also closely connected with two other pre-conditions for the growth of Britain's world-system: the great British out-migration and the export of capital. Not until the 1830s and 1840s did the annual trickle of migrants begin to swell into the flood that helped build a ‘British world’. Not till the 1850s and 1860s were the funds coming to hand to build the City's great property empire abroad. In short, without the geopolitical and ‘geo-economic’ conditions which Britain was peculiarly well placed to exploit, but which had scarcely developed before 1830, British expansion would indeed have remained ‘not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine’. Without them, the only safe course for Britain would have been, in Adam Smith's words, ‘to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances’.
²¹

In the story that follows,
Part I
attempts to describe how a British system emerged in the long ‘Victorian peace’ (a relative term to Zulus, Ashanti, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Aborigines, Maori, Indians, Burmese, Chinese and others) up to 1914.
Part II
traces its fate in the ‘age of iron’ that followed.

Part I Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’: the elements of Empire in the long nineteenth century

1 VICTORIAN ORIGINS

After mercantilism

From the 1830s onwards, the Victorians gradually transformed their sprawling legacy of war and mercantilism into a world-system much of whose fabric survived into the late 1940s. Yet they did not do so to a conscious plan, nor under the influence of a master ideology. Victorian imperialists were drawn from different interests and classes. They were driven by motives that were at times contradictory. Rival visions of empire pulled them in different directions. Nor could they count on a source of irresistible power to carry them forward wherever they chose. British firepower and capital formed a limited stock for which, at any one time, there were competing demands. The scope for enlarging British influence or territory was not just a function of British wishes or needs. It also depended upon many factors and forces outside the control of – perhaps even unknown to – British interests and agents. Hence, much of their handiwork followed the law of unintended consequences. However clear-sighted the prophet, it would not have been easy to foresee the path followed by British expansion between 1830 and 1880. It would have been harder still to envisage the societies that it helped to create both overseas and at home in the British Isles. The imperial system that the Victorians made emerged by default not from design.

Once we concede that there was nothing inevitable about the extraordinary course of Victorian imperialism, we can begin to explore the gravitational field that governed British expansion: propelling it forward in some places; holding it back in others; bending and twisting its impact; raising or lowering its costs; imposing or concealing its contemporary meaning. The starting point must be the play of geopolitical pressures. Victorian Britain was a powerful state, but it was not all-powerful, and much nonsense is talked of Victorian ‘hegemony’. Even a minister as aggressive as Lord Palmerston, whose belligerent rhetoric is sometimes naively equated with his conduct of policy, was always acutely aware that British strength had its limits, especially on land. Victorian statesmen avoided confrontation with other strong powers whenever they could. Those who schemed for the extension of colonial territory looked first to the regions where little resistance was feared, or where the British already commanded the main geographical gateways. Secondly, it would be a mistake to imagine that the moves to expand Britain's spheres of rule, protection or semi-free trade were part of a programme or policy invented in Whitehall. Much more important was the pressure exerted by the old networks and lobbies that managed Britain's overseas interests and the new ones that sprang up to promote commercial, land-seeking, emigrant, humanitarian, missionary or scientific enterprise. The annexation of New Zealand, the first ‘opium war’ against China, and Britain's maritime presence on the west coast of Africa, reflected the strength of these lobbies, and their power to bend the ‘official mind’ to their will. Yet the fate of these schemes, and of many others besides, was also determined by a third force at work. The ‘men on the spot’, in the bridgeheads of trade, settlement, religion or rule, had to marshal the ‘investments’ (of money, men, credit or force) transmitted from Britain and use them to leverage added local resources. How successful they were in exploiting the trade, settling the land, tapping the revenue or enlisting the manpower of the regions around them decided how fast their bridgeheads would grow – and how much appeal they would have to those with influence at home. Indeed, building their ‘connection’ in London, winning over the press and public opinion, and cementing their ties with a favourable lobby, were a constant concern. The supreme practitioner of this ‘bridgehead politics’ after 1880 was to be Cecil Rhodes. But he had many precursors.

Left to itself, expansion of this kind was likely to throw up a whole series of ‘sub-empires’: offshoots of influence, occupation and rule wherever British interests could gain a favourable purchase. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were clusters of British merchants spread around the world from China to Peru, entrenched more or less in the overseas trade of formally sovereign states. There was a clutch of free-ports under British jurisdiction, where British merchants (and others) strove to gather the trade of the neighbouring region: Gibraltar, Singapore and Hong Kong. There was a mass of (mostly) small settlements scattered across the enormous territories claimed or conquered as British ‘possessions’ and annexed to the Crown: ‘British’ North America (comprising the huge tracts ‘ruled’ by the Hudson's Bay Company west of the Great Lakes as well as ‘the Canadas’ – modern Ontario and Quebec – and the four maritime provinces); Australia (perhaps one million immigrants along the ‘boomerang coast’ from Brisbane to Adelaide); New Zealand (a dozen small colonies mainly linked by the sea); and South Africa (where a handful of British in the Cape Colony and Natal lived with the more numerous ‘Dutch’ in a tense and often violent relation with the black communities within and beyond the colonial frontier). There were the old plantation colonies of the British West Indies, once the jewel in the imperial crown, but (with free trade in sugar and the loss of slave labour) now falling behind their economic competitors (Brazil and Cuba retained their slaves until late in the century). And there was India, still ruled by the Company (until 1858) with its huge ‘sepoy’ army, a great conquest state whose influence was exerted spasmodically on the arc of territories from Aden (annexed to Bombay in 1839) in the west to Singapore (ruled from Calcutta until 1867) in the east. In what sense, we might ask, was this disparate collection of ‘work camps in the wilderness’, mercantile agencies, mildewed plantations, treaty-ports and port-cities, coaling stations and bases, fractious semi-protectorates and one huge garrison state to be considered an ‘empire’? Yet, by the late nineteenth century, this ‘project of an empire’ (in Adam Smith's phrase) had become a world-system. Its component parts assumed increasingly specialised roles. They fitted together in ways that maximised Britain's power in the world. How had this happened?

Of the likeliest causes, perhaps three were decisive. The first was the greater integration permitted by technical advance and institutional change. The telegraph, steamship and railway speeded the flows of goods, information and people (as well as military force) between the imperial centre and its outlying parts. The rise of an international capital market in London, and its vast ‘information exchange’ (of newspapers, news agencies, specialised journals, commercial intelligence and promotional literature) increased the dependence of colonial or semi-colonial regions on this grand metropolis. When competing for markets, money and (in the case of settler countries) men, or if claiming the support and sympathy of the ‘imperial factor’ in their local affairs, they had to ‘sell’ themselves as net contributors to the larger ‘British world’, promising profits, goods or services not on offer elsewhere. The second influence at work was connected with this. The way that empire was imagined by the 1870s revealed the drawing of ever sharper distinctions between the economic trajectory, social development and political status to which different regions could aspire. J. R. Seeley's famous denial that the ‘kith and kin’ settlements of ‘Greater Britain’ (the phrase was coined by Charles Dilke in 1869
¹
) were an empire at all was one symptom of this. Indian demands for an equal place in what Dadabhai Naoroji called the ‘imperial firm’,
²
and the angry rejection of a constitutional status below the internal self-government enjoyed by most settler societies, showed how quickly the implications of this were detected elsewhere. Thirdly, from the late 1860s onwards, the British began to think more systematically about the defence of their widely scattered possessions. One committee (in 1867) enquired into the prospects of organising a ‘Force of Asiatic Troops for General Service in Suitable Climates’ (to replace British garrisons).
³
In the late 1870s, the Royal Commission on Colonial Defence, spurred on by the fear of Russian advance, debated what contribution the colonies should make to their own protection.
⁴
As the novel conception of ‘imperial defence’ began to take shape, India's role as the ‘imperial strategic reserve’ in the world east of Suez became the dominant element in British plans for its future. The pressures of world politics, like those of the new ‘world economy’ (whose emergence may be dated from c.1870), pushed and prodded the mid-Victorians’ forward rush into the late Victorians’ world-system

The geopolitics of expansion

Britain's global position after 1815 has often been seen as almost prodigally favourable in geopolitical terms: conferring free movement in almost any direction. It was certainly true that the era of world war between 1793 and 1815 had brought the British some remarkable winnings. They handed back Java and the other Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia as a dowry for the new Netherlands kingdom (modern Belgium and the Netherlands) that was meant to serve as the northern barrier to renewed French expansion. But they kept Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Mauritius and the Cape as a way of preventing the return of French sea-power to the Indian Ocean in any foreseeable future. In the Mediterranean, with their hands on the Ionian islands, and above all on Malta with its Grand Harbour, they could keep their navy in the eastern part of the sea astride the main maritime route to the Straits and Egypt. In the North Atlantic, they already controlled (in Halifax and the British Caribbean) the bases from which to watch the American seaboard. The collapse of Spain, and the client status of Portugal, had now opened the South Atlantic coast to British maritime influence in Brazil and La Plata and (with the occupation of the Falkland Islands in 1833) gave them a guard-post that commanded Cape Horn. In themselves, the territories that the British acquired were not of great value and had small or poor populations. But their geostrategic meaning was huge. Their capture by Britain signalled the end of the mercantilist order that had partitioned Europe's seaborne trade with the Americas and Asia between the closed economic empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and Britain. The age of ‘free’ trade was about to begin.