Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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145 / The Britannic experiment

high levels of imports, the domestic balance of payments, and new

exports of capital. The ‘sub-empire’ of India assumed after c.1870 a

primarily (but not exclusively) military function, meeting the ordinary

costs of almost two-thirds of the Empire’s regular land forces: its British

garrison and its own Indian army. By contrast, the settlement colonies

were not expected to pay for their strategic defence and were allowed

(unlike India) to protect local industry. Their contribution instead was

to borrow and trade on a scale (proportionately) far greater than India.

And, increasingly, by the end of the century, they began to take up the

part of Britain’s most reliable allies, bound to her ‘system’ by deep ties

of self-interest and self-identiﬁcation.

The Britannic idea

This ‘Britannic’ solidarity was a crucial dimension of the British world-

system, and one of the keys to its tenacious survival in the twentieth

century. It would have greatly surprised the early Victorians. Indeed, it

is easy to see why opinion in Britain in the earlier part of the century had

shown little enthusiasm for the settlement colonies. They seemed liabili-

ties scattered broadcast across the world. With the exception of the two

‘Canadas’ (modern Ontario and Quebec) and New South Wales, their

populations were tiny and their prospects uncertain. Far from form-

ing solid territorial blocs, British North America, British South Africa

and the British South Paciﬁc were fragmented and ﬁssiparous. The

Canadas had been forced into uneasy union in 1840, but the ‘Lower’

or Maritime provinces remained stubbornly separate: indeed, overland

travel between them and the Canadas was dauntingly difﬁcult.

In the

1850s, six separate governments ruled over the one million or so set-

tlers in Australia, while geographical separation (on a much smaller

scale) encouraged a similar trend in New Zealand. Although London

had recognised that local self-government (‘responsible government’)

could not be resisted in most settlement colonies (but not in Cape

Colony), their ﬁnancial fragility and proneness to faction – rather than

party-based politics – cast doubt on how far self-reliance could be

carried.

Worse still, in too many cases, the risk of foreign invasion or

local ‘native’ wars had made them a drain on Britain’s limited military

manpower. In the 1840s, frontier conﬂicts in South Africa and New

Zealand, as well as the tension provoked by the Oregon crisis with the

146 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

United States, dispersed British forces from one end of the world to the

other.

Nevertheless, by around 1850, a more positive estimate of the

settlement colonies had begun to take root. The ‘Colonial Reformers’

attributed the colonists’ failings to interference from London, not the

inherent defectiveness of colonial societies. Edward Gibbon Wakeﬁeld’s

idea that the British were especially adapted to colonise became more

inﬂuential. The irresistible ﬂow of Gladstonian rhetoric was deployed

in support of British colonisation. ‘The object [of colonization]’, he

began to tell audiences, ‘was to reproduce the likeness of England, as

they were doing in Australia, New Zealand, North America and the

Cape, thereby contributing to the general happiness of mankind.’

Far

from being seen as tiresome dependants, they were increasingly thought

of, in some circles at least, as little Americas, from whom separation

was certain at some foreseeable point. In the world of free trade, the

balance of colonial costs and beneﬁts could only be negative. But there

was also gradual acceptance that the settler communities could be a

valuable adjunct to British wealth and power, and a ‘healthy’ extension

of British society.

Three separate developments may have strengthened this view.

The ﬁrst (and perhaps the most important) was the effect of rail-

way construction. Railways connected large British interests to settler

expansion. Railway-building offered much more deﬁnite proof that the

colonies could achieve dense and continuous settlement, replicating the

pattern of British society at home, and sustaining a similar level of insti-

tutions and culture. Above all, perhaps, investment in railways created

loud vested interests with an obvious motive in selling the colonies’

future to British opinion.

The second development was the growing

belief from mid-century onwards that industrialisation in Britain had

imposed high social costs some of which could be redeemed in the

colonies. This was the idea that colonial life, free from the contagion of

urban industrialism, offered a physically and morally healthier climate.

Here British social virtues could be preserved and revived; the perils

of decadence, degeneration and ‘Caesarism’ – a populist dictatorship –

averted.

This perception coincided with the steady advance of emigra-

tion (and return migration) to become key social features not just of

the Celtic ‘periphery’ but of English society as well. Thirdly, with the

rising sense of a world that was linked by fast and regular movement –

by wire, steamship and rail – the settlement colonies came to look less

147 / The Britannic experiment

like the random results of demographic opportunism and more like

the links in an imperial ‘chain’, part of a system of global power. The

message of John Robert Seeley’s Expansion of England (1883), that the

settlement colonies should be seen as an organic extension of Britain

not part of the burdensome empire of rule, was the cogent expression

of an emerging idea, not a sudden new insight.

The late Victorians

experienced an enlargement of their mental horizons, and also perhaps

in their sense of identity.

In late-Victorian Britain, this shift of attitudes was part of a

new imperial outlook. It was matched by a change in the colonies

of white settlement, soon to be called the ‘white dominions’. There

too the imperial idea was transformed and made popular. Yet, by the

latter part of the century, in all the settlement colonies, there was a

growing sense of self-conscious nationhood and (especially after 1900)a

buoyant view of their economic future as ‘young nations’. This paradox

was resolved by the special quality of settler nationalism. In Canada,

Australia, New Zealand and (as we shall see) among the British minority

in South Africa, national identity was asserted by rejecting subservience

to the British government, but by afﬁrming equality with Britain as

‘British peoples’ or ‘nations’. It was this ‘Britannic nationalism’ which

underpinned the commitment of all the white dominions to the imperial

enterprise, and the British world-system, until its eventual disintegration

in the 1940sand1950s. It was not an unthinking observance of old

imperial loyalty, nor an unconsummated passion for an impractical

imperial federation. It was stronger, subtler and deeply rooted in the

needs of the dominions themselves. Socially, it derived from the feeling

that creating modern large-scale societies demanded institutions and

habits – private and public – on the model already familiar in Britain, the

great exemplar of a ‘modern’ community, but improved and adapted to

local requirements. Politically it sprang up when two great imperatives

converged in the later nineteenth century: the urge for expansion and

need for cohesion. Expansion in an age of rival empires and ‘world-

states’ could only be secure under the aegis of British power, and so long

as the imperial centre acknowledged the claims of its Britannic outposts.

So Britannic nationalism meant asserting settler inﬂuence at the heart of

the empire. Secondly, as settler society grew more urban and industrial,

more divided by wealth and class, more conscious of deﬁciencies of

education and welfare, Britannic ethnicity offered the promise of social

cohesion, and a charter for social renewal. A reformed and puriﬁed

148 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

local Britishness went hand in hand with – was the domestic counterpart

to – a grander role as ‘British nations’, partners, not subjects, of imperial

Britain.

Canada

The oldest self-governing settler societies in the British Empire were

in British North America. They were also the ﬁrst to federate – as

the Dominion of Canada in 1867. With the acquisition of Ruperts-

land – the vast northern domain of the Hudson’s Bay Company –

in 1869, adhesion of British Columbia (in 1871) and Prince Edward

Island (in 1873), Canada became a transcontinental state rivalling in

territorial scale the great republic to the south. But in wealth and pop-

ulation it was puny. There was the rub. A second transcontinental state

in North America ﬂew in the face of commercial and geographical

logic. Along its whole length, the new dominion was bound to feel

the immense gravitational pull of American enterprise. The builders

of confederation embarked upon a staggeringly grandiose venture for

a small colonial community, deeply divided by ethnicity, region and

religion, and already strung out along a ribbon of cultivation between

Lake Huron and Halifax. Measured by ambition, the ‘Fathers of Con-

federation’ (principally John A. Macdonald and George Brown) were

among the greatest of Victorian empire-builders, planning a vast new

colony anchored by ‘British connection’,

loyal to the British Crown

and drawing on British migrants and capital to fuel its expansion. They

looked forward to the day, declared George Brown in the confederation

debates in 1865, ‘when one united government under the British ﬂag

shall extend from shore to shore’.

From the beginning, the politics of the new dominion were

dominated by two interlocking priorities. The ﬁrst was to make the

new federal constitution workable. That meant reconciling the Mar-

itime provinces to the burden of debt that the old Canadian provinces

(now Ontario and Quebec) had accumulated building railways and

canals, and to the tariff that had been imposed to pay for them. It

meant the careful management of Quebec with its French Canadian

majority and its vocal minority of English Canadians in Montreal and

the ‘Eastern Townships’. Federation had separated the two Canadian

provinces previously locked in legislative union, but did little to reduce

149 / The Britannic experiment

the mutual antipathy of Protestant Ontario and Catholic Quebec. It

meant heading off the opposition among Ontario farmers to the rail-

way and banking interests from whose headquarters in St James Street,

Montreal, the ﬁrst prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was widely

believed to take his orders and his party funds. It meant an uphill strug-

gle to broaden the power and authority of the new ‘general government’

in Ottawa against provincial pressure for devolution or even (in the case

of Nova Scotia) for secession.

These teething problems were constantly entangled with the

second great issue that absorbed both Macdonald and his Reform (or

‘Grit’, later Liberal) opponents: how to make good the dominion’s

claim to the vast western empire beyond the Great Lakes, the key to

its future as a separate ‘British’ North American state. The imperial

government in London had been eager to transfer ‘Rupertsland’ to

Canada, believing that the Hudson’s Bay Company could no longer rule

a vast inland colony now thought ripe for agricultural development. But

the conveyance was not as easy as it seemed. For one thing, the best

organised community in the west, the mixed-race (French and Indian)

Metis in the Red River Valley (near modern Winnipeg), objected to a

transfer that they feared would bring a ﬂood of British settlers from

Ontario.

Under the charismatic leadership of Louis Riel, they staged

the ﬁrst of two northwestern rebellions whose suppression required the

despatch of imperial troops under Sir Garnet Wolseley, the ubiquitous

generalissimo of the Empire’s smaller wars. The Metis were routed

and the new province of Manitoba set up.

But, as Macdonald well

knew, a much greater challenge awaited. Only with a railway across the

continent could he hope to transform the northwestern interior from

an economic desert into a great agrarian asset – and Canada from a

stagnant eastern colony into a dynamic continental state.

In the ﬁrst decade of confederation, there was little to show for

the high hopes of 1867. Macdonald’s ﬁrst attempt to commission a rail-

way across the continent was a failure, and the ensuing ‘Paciﬁc scandal’

blew him out of ofﬁce in 1873. His Reform party opponents, suspicious

of the Montreal capitalists, and hobbled by economic depression, made

no headway. Canada was in the doldrums. The immigrants it did attract

were as likely to pass on to the United States as to stay; many more

Canadians moved south of the border in search of better times: nearly

one million between 1881 and 1891.

Macdonald came back to ofﬁce

in 1878. In the thirteen years that followed, he fashioned a surprisingly

150 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

durable political regime, presided over the completion of the east–west

railway and pushed through Canada’s transformation into a separate

northern economy with a tariff wall to guard its railways, trade, ﬁnance

and infant industry. Together, the ‘Macdonaldian state’, the Canadian

Paciﬁc Railway and the ‘national policy’ turned the prospectus of con-

federation into something like reality. The question was whether the

‘Canada’ that Macdonald had made could survive the disappearance

of his master touch.

By the time of his death in 1891, Macdonald had been the

dominant ﬁgure in Canadian politics for ﬁfty years. In the black arts of

patronage, ‘Old Tomorrow’ was a virtuoso, reconciling Canada’s com-

plex dualities – English and French, monarchy and populism, liberal

and clerical, protestant and catholic, provincial and federal – by the

systematic use of every ofﬁce under federal control in a spoils system

for party purposes.

Perhaps instinctively, he grasped the irreducible

conditions of Canadian unity. British institutions and a shared alle-

giance to the British Crown formed the only ideological glue between

the regions and peoples that made up the federation. The mercantile

and ﬁnancial nexus at Montreal was the natural (indeed only) focus

of a ‘northern economy’. The transcontinental hinterland, and a rail-

way to serve it, offered the only escape from the economic failure and

encirclement that threatened Eastern Canada. Macdonald’s ‘national

policy’ had fused these into a rough and ready programme and a loyal

political following. Together, they were robust enough to overcome the

challenge of ‘reciprocity’ in 1891 – the call for commercial union with

the United States championed by the Liberal opposition. ‘The old ﬂag,

the old policy and the old leader’ (Macdonald’s slogan in 1891) fended

off the critics of the ‘northern economy’, despite deepening depression

and the lack of any sign that the west would relieve it. But, by the

mid-1890s, the political system that had been built round Macdonald’s

personal ascendancy was on the brink of collapse. The provinces were

in revolt and determined to win back from the centre some of the rights

and revenues conceded in 1867. More ominously still, the coalition that

Macdonald had forged between Montreal business, the protestant and

loyalist tradition in Ontario and the clerical conservatives (the Bleus)

in Quebec – the electoral basis of Conservative predominance since the

1870s – began to break up. The growth of mass politics in Quebec

weakened the elite on whom Macdonald had relied.

The vitriolic dis-

agreement between Ontario and Quebec politicians over the execution

of Louis Riel (convicted of murder after the second northwest rebellion

151 / The Britannic experiment

in 1885) and over separate schools for Manitoba Catholics

widened

the breach and exposed Macdonald’s successors to criticism from all

sides. When the Conservatives were swept away by a new system-

builder, the Liberal Wilfrid Laurier, the result was not only a new party

regime. To many Canadians, a new deﬁnition of the Canadian state

and its bond with Britain now seemed necessary.

The challenge had already been posed by the radical historian

Goldwin Smith, sometime professor in Oxford, now the resident sage

in Toronto. In his widely read Canada and the Canadian Question

(1891), Smith denounced the dominion as the artiﬁcial product of tar-

iffs, (subsidised) railways and political corruption. The ‘primary forces’

in Canadian life, he insisted, were pulling it towards a continental

future as part of the United States – a future Smith welcomed as the

fulﬁlment of Anglo-Saxon race unity. Towards French Canada and its

claims, he displayed, by contrast, a mixture of contempt and dislike.

French Canadians were irredeemably backward. But English Canada

alone was too weak to swamp, swallow and digest them. Continental

union with the United States, among other beneﬁts, would break the

obstacle they posed to social progress.

Smith’s argument may have been extreme, but he evoked many

of the prejudices of Protestant, Liberal Ontario against the Macdonald

state and Quebec. His book drew a carefully argued riposte from O. A.

Howland, a Toronto lawyer from one of the city’s leading families.

The ‘natives of this country’ said Howland, would not accept the

extinction of their ‘separate nationality’. The St Lawrence river sys-

tem gave Canada the means for a separate statehood, but within the

Empire – ‘a term which should be transferred from the island of Great

Britain to the whole of our modern union of constitutionally governed

English nations’.

‘The free men of the Empire’, he went on, claimed

‘equal Imperial citizenship, whether our homes are in Great Britain,

or Canada or Australia.’

As part of the Empire, Howland insisted,

Canada would enjoy greater freedom and security than the United States

could offer. It would keep its own constitution and escape the crushing

embrace of Chicago and New York. And, within ﬁfty years, the Empire

would ‘comprise not less than three mighty states . . . more than equal

in population and resources to the United States [in 1860]...What

Armageddon of history would threaten the integrity of that vast

alliance?’

In Howland’s tract, we can see the emerging themes of Britannic

nationalism in its Canadian version. As elsewhere in the settler colonies,

152 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

this was a complex political emotion. Its appeal ranged far beyond the

small minority who looked forward to an imperial federation or called

themselves ‘imperialists’. In Canada, it was a cross-party sentiment

that was strongest between 1890 and 1920, but continued to shape the

English-Canadian outlook until c.1960. It was an echo of Macdonald’s

old war cry: ‘A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.’

It afﬁrmed that Canada was a ‘British’ country in allegiance, institu-

tions and values. But it was not to be mistaken for the Macdonaldite

Toryism which Britannic nationalism rejected as a shabby, inadequate

compromise bringing internal disunity and external impotence. Indeed,

just because it was based on the endless ‘squaring’ of rapacious interests,

chief among them the clerical conservatives of Quebec, Macdonald’s

‘system’ – so its critics maintained – would bar, not open, the way to a

Britannic future.

In the early 1890s, a variety of political fears coalesced into

the informal programme at whose heart lay the ‘Britannicising’ of

Canada. The election of 1891 and the wide appeal of commercial inte-

gration with the United States showed that Smith’s attack on the idea

of Canada could not be taken lightly. If Canada was to survive as a

‘separate nationality’, patriotic sentiment would have to be founded on

something more durable than Macdonald’s ﬁxes, fudges and ﬁddles.

Politics must be cleaned up and modernised. Political leadership should

be based on a covenant with the people and be seen to respond to their

needs. This was the Gladstonian model whose inﬂuence in and beyond

the English-speaking world has been insufﬁciently recognised.

Its real-

isation was made all the more urgent by recognition that urbanisation,

industrialisation and (after 1900) the ﬂood of immigration had cre-

ated new social problems and demanded new moral and social action,

including factory laws, education and temperance. A populist gospel of

social duty, moral uplift and physical improvement laid stress, as else-

where across the ‘British’ world, upon ethnic solidarity: ‘Britishness’

was to be the building block of a more efﬁcient, better-disciplined as

well as more mobile society.

To the champions of reform, it seemed obvious that a new-

style dominion must be built up as a protestant, secular state, guided

by a progressive liberalism and governed (through its parliamentary

institutions) by an enlightened public opinion. Equally, that, while

Canada’s ‘separate nationality’ could only be guaranteed as a ‘British’

nation, national dignity and self-esteem demanded an equality of

153 / The Britannic experiment

status with Britain in what Howland had provocatively called a ‘fed-

eral Republic . . . united under a hereditary president’.

But equality

of status meant not indifference to the wider concerns of Empire, but

much fuller participation in them. Only in that way could Canadians

guard their national interests against the danger of Anglo-American

agreement at their expense. ‘Britannic nationalism’ in short meant nei-

ther subservience to Britain nor a repudiation of Canadian nationhood.

It was a programme to achieve a Canadian nation by drawing more

deeply (if selectively) on recent British political practice, and by assert-

ing Canada’s claims (as Britannic nation not colonial dependency) on

the imperial centre in London.

Much of the bitterness in Canadian politics after 1890 sprang

from the fear that the pursuit of Britannic nationhood for Canada

would be frustrated by French Canadian opposition. Until the 1890s,

the willingness of English Canadians to ‘tolerate’ the ‘peculiar insti-

tutions’ of French Canada – especially the entrenched power of the

Catholic church – rested on the assumption that Quebec was (largely)

an inward-looking ‘reserve’ whose population (a minority in the domin-

ion) would not obstruct the ‘progress’ of the British majority. That was

the English-Canadian version of the ‘compact’ of 1867. The Riel affair,

the ﬁllip it gave to French Canadian feeling, and the emergence of

the ‘parti national’ under Honore Mercier ﬁrst belied this hope. The

Jesuit Estates Act (1886) that Macdonald refused to veto seemed to

show that in Quebec the clerical inﬂuence so hateful to Ontario Lib-

erals and protestants was growing more assertive. It led to the viru-

lently protestant Equal Rights Association in Ontario.

Then, in the

1890s, as settlers moved into Manitoba from Ontario, a furious row

broke out over the right of the province’s Catholic, French-speaking

minority to maintain separate schools against the will of the provin-

cial government. In Ontario especially, the dithering of the Macdonald

government was ample proof that it was willing to sacriﬁce the vital

ingredients of nationhood – secular education and popular democracy –

to the corrupt dictates of its coalition with the Quebec Bleus. Indeed,

the ‘schools question’ seemed the crux of Canada’s future. Settlement of

Western Canada, long delayed by depression, was expected to break the

deadlock between English and French Canada. Vast, new, and English-

speaking, provinces in the West would form, politically, a ‘Greater

Ontario’. But not if their politics were fractured and corrupted by the

entrenchment of clerical and French-Canadian inﬂuence.

154 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Indeed, Ontario was the heartland of Britannic nationalism

which was rooted in the province’s Liberal and protestant ethos. It

was the creed of the Orange Order, the most powerful association

in the province.

In Ontario, the shift from agrarian society towards

urbanisation and industrialisation had gone furthest and fastest, and

the need for new kinds of political solidarity was felt most deeply.

Ontario politicians and publicists like Clifford Sifton (soon to be Lau-

rier’s main Liberal henchman in English Canada), Newton Rowell and

John Willison, editor of the great Liberal organ, the Toronto Globe,

were adamant that British values must prevail in Ontario, and Ontario

values in Canada. ‘Upon the English and Protestant people’, declared

Sifton in 1895, ‘most largely rests the duty of developing that province

[Manitoba] in a manner consonant with British institutions – to take

all this heterogeneous mass and make [it] into one.’

And nowhere did

the Britannic programme strike a louder chord than in Toronto, the

provincial capital. Toronto aspired to be the true capital of a modern,

progressive (and therefore British) Canada.

By the 1890s, industry

and the mining boom in Northern Ontario were boosting its wealth

and self-conﬁdence. It was no coincidence that its social elite combined

an intense civic consciousness with political views resembling those

in Howland’s manifesto. The new class of bankers (like G. A. Cox

and Byron Walker), ﬁnanciers like Pellatt

and general merchants like

Flavelle

were eager to give Toronto the institutions of a dynamic,

cohesive urban community. A university, to be a national university

for Canada,

a modern hospital, a museum and an art gallery were

key elements in the grand design. So too were a new railway to the

West to rival Montreal’s Canadian Paciﬁc;

the westward expansion

of Walker’s Canadian Bank of Commerce – by 1915 nearly half the

bank’s branches were west of the Great Lakes;

and the takeover of

Manitoba by Ontario men. When Lord Milner was invited to Canada to

preach the doctrine of closer imperial union, his old friend Glazebrook,

now a Toronto banker, pressed the claims of the city in revealing terms:

The vital and most important part of Canada is the

West . . . [I]t is there . . . that the new type of Canadian is

being developed. Toronto is really . . . the eastern extremity

of the North-West; the new enterprises of the West are

being ﬁnanced in Toronto, and the type of man in the West

shades off as you go East into the Ontario type.