The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (85 page)

Overall though the idea of a strong and conquering Britain was what won the public imagination and made them vote Conservative. When Salisbury returned as prime minister in 1895, imperial fever was at its height after the conquest of Lower and Upper Rhodesia. Imperialism was the dominant mood, and not just in Britain. The defeat that year of the decaying Chinese Empire by her tiny island neighbour Japan which had industrialized and modernized along western lines was the signal for Russia, Germany, France and Britain to demand spheres of influence in that empire for themselves. The Boxer Rebellion five years later resulted in the slaughter of the personnel in the European embassies’ compound at Peking (Beijing). Supposedly the work of rebels, the rising was in fact aided by the Chinese government behind the scenes, but the European powers rapidly reasserted control. Even America, whose whole history had been a reaction against colonialism, succumbed to the spirit of the age and joined in carving up the undeveloped world. She declared war on Spain in 1898 and took the Spanish Empire, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba for her own. The only real success for the non-European world, which otherwise was uniformly defeated by the imperialist powers, was when the Ethiopians routed the Italians at Adowa in 1896.

Even Rudyard Kipling occasionally viewed the expanding British Empire with the melancholy of historical perspective. He wrote the poem ‘Recessional’ at the height of the imperial frenzy in 1897 to warn of the suddenness with which ‘all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre’. But there was nothing melancholic about the ex-Liberal Joe Chamberlain, who regarded the empire’s economic potential with all the enthusiasm of the screw manufacturer he had once been. Chamberlain gave up as a bad job attempting to bring both halves of the Liberal party back together, asked Salisbury for the then unimportant job of colonial secretary and took firm hold of the imperial tiller. All he could think of was that the empire which had gained three and a half million square miles in twelve years must be the solution to Britain’s financial troubles. As the age of iron gave way to the age of steel, German advances in steel manufacture meant that by the mid-1890s Germany was overtaking Britain’s steel production. The empire was like an undeveloped estate. If it was better managed, it could be the making of Britain–after all, its combined population was 300 million people.

Britain, Chamberlain believed, was a force for good, whose rule over the new territories of the British Empire could be justified only if she brought ‘security and peace and comparative prosperity to countries that never knew these blessings before’. Under Chamberlain the Colonial Office regularized the production of tropical crops like jute, cocoa, palm oil and coffee. In west Africa he made the government build ports and schools of medicine and sent troops to clear off marauding local tribes. He interfered in the economies of the West Indies by creating Royal Commissions to investigate the trade of the islands, some of which were facing bankruptcy since the decline of their share of the sugar industry owing to the cultivation of sugar beet in mainland Europe from the late nineteenth century. Indeed, Chamberlain let it be known that where he had once thought in terms of the nation he intended to think in terms of empire. The cautious Lord Salisbury himself even committed himself so far as to divide the world into ‘living and dying’ nations and emphasized ‘England’s…Imperial instincts’.

The 1887 Golden Jubilee had been marked by the first Colonial Conference of prime ministers at which Salisbury had emphasized the need of the empire for self-defence. Ten years later at the Diamond Jubilee, to mark sixty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, Chamberlain tried to draw the colonies into an even closer relationship with Britain. As part of the jubilee ceremonies fifteen colonial premiers were sworn in as members of the Privy Council. At the new Colonial Conference Chamberlain attempted to create a Council of the Empire to co-ordinate defensive policy. But, although Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders took pride in belonging to the British Empire, they valued their recently achieved self-government far too much to consent to what they feared might be the thin end of a wedge of centralization. Chamberlain’s invitation was politely refused.

The Diamond Jubilee was the subject of much attention both in Britain and abroad. An even larger parade of representatives of all the nationalities protected by Britain took place to mark the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee than had done at the Golden Jubilee. The huge array of ships at Portsmouth reminded the world that Britain continued to rule the waves as she had done since the Battle of Trafalgar. The tiny Queen Victoria crowned by her widow’s lace veil led the imperial procession through London in her open carriage. The ‘Grandmother of Europe’, as she was known now that so many of her children had married the heirs to European thrones, more than ever was the reassuringly human apex of the richest, most powerful, most stable empire in the world. A famous
Punch
cartoon of that era shows Britannia dancing with herself in ‘splendid isolation’. Britain apparently had no need of foreign allies when she owned so much of the world. In fact the empire was heading for a fall.

With the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal Republic two years before British imperialism had begun to overreach itself. Cecil Rhodes and the Rand lords, whose engineering expertise was responsible for developing the Rand goldmines, had never ceased to resent the way they were treated by the Dutch, as it was their efforts that had made the Transvaal rich. As a boy of ten, the Transvaal’s President Kruger had been part of the Great Trek away from Cape Colony to find a new promised land. He had no interest in alleviating conditions for the Uitlanders besmirching it, who were a motley crew of speculators, adventurers and camp followers. He disliked and disapproved of them quite as much as his primitive and religious fellow Boers. By 1895 affairs were at such a pitch that 35,000 Uitlanders had signed a petition asking for better treatment by the Boers, but it had been rejected. Many of the leading Uitlanders then began to plot a rising against Kruger.

With Chamberlain as colonial secretary, Britain used gunboats and soldiers in a way which had not been seen since Palmerston. Troops were sent to defeat the constant encroachments of the French into British West Africa. During his first term British battleships appeared in the Indian Ocean to force President Kruger to open the fords he had closed to prevent Uitlanders using them to avoid tax on the railways. With Chamberlain so keen to defend British interests, the inventive Cecil Rhodes, by now prime minister of the Cape, and his chief lieutenant Jameson believed they had a receptive audience for their plan to wrest control of the Transvaal and its goldfields from the Boers.

When Chamberlain was approached by Rhodes and Jameson and warned that they planned to go to the rescue of the Uitlanders with a force of about 500 men, he did not try to stop them–he may even have helped them by notifying the police of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland to join the raid. But he does not seem to have known when it would take place. Meanwhile the momentum for a rising fizzled out, partly because many of the Uitlanders were not British but German or American. By coincidence the US president S. G. Cleveland, who was facing re-election, chose this moment to threaten Britain with war over British Guiana’s disputed border with Venezuela. American patriotism was running high–Cleveland talked of twisting the lion’s tale.

Uitlanders did not want the raid to be a triumph for British imperialism, so their uprising never took place. Jameson and his 470 accomplices nonetheless thundered optimistically into the Transvaal. But this time he was dealing not with the more credulous warriors of the Matabele peoples but with the politically savvy Kruger, who having captured Jameson and his troops created an enormous international outcry about the attempt to take over the Transvaal. Britain responded with a whitewashing official inquiry described by the Liberal press as the ‘Lying in State’. Though Chamberlain was cleared, Rhodes was forced to resign as prime minister of Cape Colony. But the British were still largely behind Jameson, whose derring-do became the subject of popular ballads, and many agreed with Chamberlain’s sympathetic description of Rhodes as a ‘rebel patriot’.

Anglo-German rivalry was felt more keenly round this time and was increased by a tactless telegram which the kaiser Wilhelm II, Queen Victoria’s nephew, sent to President Kruger in January 1896. The kaiser congratulated Kruger on foiling the raid ‘without recourse to the aid of friendly powers’, which suggested that in the event of a war in South Africa the Dutch would have German arms on their side. Germany had become noticeably less friendly to the British. The two powers were rubbing up against one another in colonial and commercial rivalry round the world, with friction arising not only over South Africa but over the Middle East. Germany, intent on replacing Britain as most-favoured nation at Constantinople, used Britain’s demands for reform after a new Armenian massacre by the Turks in 1898 to cement her position and obtain the rights to build a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. France remained Britain’s chief colonial rival, but she had never made the mistake of attempting to compete with the British fleet. Yet in 1897 Germany began to build a navy as big as Britain’s, and when the kaiser announced that Germany’s future lay on water, alarm bells began to ring within the British government. It was well known that the minuscule size of Britain’s professional army required her to entrust her defence to her navy, as she had done for almost a hundred years. Germany’s refusal to limit her naval expenditure while maintaining and increasing the 400,000-strong army which had mauled France in the Franco-Prussian War was an action Britain could only perceive as hostile.

Germany was replacing Russia as the power Britain felt most wary of, especially after 1890 when Russia, disturbed by the strength of the British reaction over the Penjdeh crisis, turned away from expansion in central Asia in favour of penetrating the failing Chinese Empire instead. In the mid-1890s there had been a general regrouping of alliances all round, though Britain continued to remain unallied. After the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the consequent fall of Bismarck, the German–Russian alliance lapsed. France, perpetually afraid of a fresh attack from Germany and desperately in need of a friend, began to court Russia. The understanding between Russia and France was symbolized when French loans were raised at the Paris Bourse for a Trans-Siberian Railway. And in 1895 their links became official. Fear of Germany had created strange bed-fellows: Russia’s eastern autocracy in a Dual Alliance with the volatile Third Republic of France against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria–Hungary and Italy. Thwarted colonial ambitions had pushed Italy on to Germany’s side when France seized Tunis in northern Africa. Thus by 1895 Europe was divided into the two armed camps which were such a feature of the geopolitical world in the years before the First World War.

But uneasiness about Germany made little difference to Anglo-French colonial rivalry. In the Upper Nile at Fashoda the two countries very nearly came to blows. Though the Jameson Raid had failed, the spirit of gung-ho imperialism was flourishing more strongly than ever in England. The country now thrilled to the reconquest of the Sudan by Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the commander-in-chief, or sirdar, of the Egyptian army, at the Battle of Omdurman in September 1898. British honour and the death of Gordon were avenged when Kitchener destroyed the dervish armies of the mahdi’s successor, the khalifa, and retook Khartoum. The nation rejoiced even more when Kitchener faced down a small French force sent out from French West Africa to claim the Upper Nile, for France continued to be infuriated by the British control of Egypt. Straight from the heat of Omdurman Kitchener marched south to Fashoda to challenge Captain Marchand, who had hoisted the French flag. Kitchener put up the British and Egyptian flags in response and left an Egyptian force there. But though the farcical situation was worthy of the contemporary comic operas of Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, both countries were in deadly earnest. Lord Salisbury announced that Britain was prepared to open hostilities, and the Royal Navy was put on alert. But when France’s new ally Russia made it very clear that she had no intention of going to war with Great Britain over somewhere in Africa, France was forced to back down.

It seemed yet another triumph for British arms, and it was in a mood of patriotic euphoria that Britain began to move towards war with the Boers. The Boers believed that the British government had been secretly behind the Jameson Raid and that there would one day be another attempt to take over the Transvaal. President Kruger’s government began to stockpile arms with the enormous profits from the goldmines. Chamberlain and the rest of the Conservatives and Unionists became convinced the Boers were a threat not only to peaceful coexistence but to British supremacy at the Cape. The Jameson Raid had created race hatred between the Boers and the English settlers. After Rhodes’s disgrace his government had been replaced by a Dutch ministry at the Cape sympathetic to the Boers. With some of the Boers in the Transvaal advertising themselves as liberators of the oppressed Dutch at the Cape, the possibility loomed of the colonies joining up under Dutch leadership in a Dutch United States of South Africa. There were rumours that German officers were advising the Boers. The Germans were certainly selling arms to them.

The treatment of the Uitlanders within the Boer republics worsened. There were violent clashes between Boer police and the Uitlanders, and a petition from over 20,000 workers was sent to Queen Victoria asking her to help them. The high commissioner of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, warned that Britain had to intervene quickly to protest about the Uitlanders’ treatment or the sight of ‘thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots’ would undermine faith in the British Empire. War was inevitable if Kruger would not grant the civil rights that Britain requested. There was a last conference at Bloemfontein in 1899. But the stubborn old Kruger would not betray his people and their sacred land. If the Uitlanders were given the vote, even in five years’ time, they would outnumber the Boers. When Kruger could not agree, Milner broke off negotiations and went back to the Cape. The Second Boer War ensued.