Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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165 / The Britannic experiment
railways and create a local Australian court of appeal. But his vision
of Australian nationhood was heavily tinged with ‘Britannic nation-
alism’. For Parkes, Australian unity derived ‘from the crimson thread
of kinship [that] runs through us all’.
89
Under federation, he urged,
‘we should have an outline of empire such as we could never hope for
as isolated colonies; and our place would be admitted in the rank of
nations, under the noble and glorious flag of the mother land.’
90
For
Parkes, Australia’s nationhood would rest on an affirmation of British
origins and undergird her destiny as the dominant local power in the
South Pacific.
Parkes’ ideas chimed with the widespread sense that the Aus-
tralian colonies were too small (in population) and weak for an age of
agglomeration.
91
Arguments of this sort had been behind the enthusi-
asm for imperial federation shown by politicians like Alfred Deakin and
Edmund Barton in the 1880s.
92
By the 1890s, imperial federation no
longer seemed feasible. Even Australian federation seemed a Sisyphean
task. The first attempt to promote its acceptance among the colonial
parliaments reached stalemate, partly because of the opposition of free
traders (strong in New South Wales) who feared Victoria’s protection-
ism would become universal, and the labour parties who feared the
coercive power of a federal government in the pocket of wealth. But,
with signs of wider public support (at the Corowa convention), political
momentum revived. After a meeting of the colonial premiers in 1895,
opposition fears were allayed by the promise of an elected convention
to draw up the federal constitution. The constitution itself made large
concessions to the provincialism of the colonies. The Canadian model
for a strong central government was rejected.
93
The separate colonies
(now to be ‘states’) retained wide powers over their economic devel-
opment, immigration and taxation: the centre was largely confined to
defence and external relations (both under imperial supervision), com-
merce (trade, tariffs and currency) and the control of aliens. In what
may have been a concession to radical sentiment, the new federation
was christened the ‘Commonwealth’ of Australia.
Looking back from an era when the old imperial links between
Australia and Britain have withered away almost completely, some
historians have been tempted to see in federation the imagining of a
distinctively Australian nation that had shrugged off its colonial status.
Only sentimental attachment to the mother-country, and a desire not
to hurt her feelings, suggests one, prevented the move to whole-hog
166 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
republican independence.
94
But this is a misreading of the intentions
of the ‘founding fathers’ and also of the special quality of Australian
nationalism. The makers of federation had no desire to ‘cut the painter’
and few illusions about the danger of doing so. Deakin and Barton
had been enthusiasts for closer imperial ties, not separation. Kingston
had denounced the idea that any British-born person should not have
full rights in the new federation.
95
John Forrest of Western Australia
was to die at sea in 1918 on his way to take his seat in the House
of Lords. Sir Samuel Griffiths praised the federal scheme as ‘designed
by Her Majesty’s loyal subjects to serve as a further and lasting bond
of union between the Australian colonies and the Mother country’.
96
The federalists had also been keen to include New Zealand in the new
‘nation’. Their preoccupation with defence and Asian immigration rein-
forces the impression that they were less concerned to assert a new Aus-
tralian identity in the world at large than to exert a stronger Australian
influence on the imperial centre in London, where sovereign power on
immigration, foreign policy and defence ultimately resided. Australian
nationalism, as reflected in the federal idea, was not so much a demand
for independence as a recognition that closer integration in the British
‘world-system’ was the price of growth, and perhaps of survival.
That is not to say that Australian leaders had settled for an
indefinite future of dependence. Far from it. If federation was envisaged
as a new phase in the imperial relationship with Britain, it was because
empire on the British model was compatible with an enlarged sense of
Australian nationhood; indeed, symbiotic with it. Acceptance of feder-
ation and allegiance to the Australian nation it created grew out of a
convergence between two very different traditions in colonial Australia.
‘Imperialism’ was the viewpoint of those who (apart from attachment
to the monarchy, ‘British’ institutions, and cultural and social models
drawn from Britain) insisted that Australia could not be a self-sufficient
faraway country in the South Pacific.
97
Its only imaginable future lay in
a programme of social, economic and cultural enlargement. Expansion
(of any kind) required a continuous transfusion of capital and labour
from Britain (and thus conditions that would attract them) as well as the
guarantee of strategic protection against rival European imperialisms
or the ‘Asiatic’ threat. Set against imperialism was the isolationist tradi-
tion. Isolationism was endemic in settler societies but peculiarly strong
(among British colonies) in Australia. Convict alienation from the impe-
rial gaoler; the tyranny of imagined distance; the digger democracy of
167 / The Britannic experiment
the goldrush era; the influence of republican radicalism imported from
‘home’; the dislike for cosmopolitan capital and the class divisions it
encouraged: all these combined to diffuse a pervasive suspicion of impe-
rial motives and truculent faith in a self-sufficient ‘island-continent’
with its promise of escape from the Old World’s conflicts.
98
Amidst
the urban despair of the 1890s, it found expression in the myth of the
‘Bush’: an Australian nation forged in an Australian environment.
99
Its
loudest voice was the Bulletin.
100
‘No Nigger, no Chinaman, no las-
car, no Kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour’, it raged in a
characteristic outburst, ‘is an Australian.’
101
Convergence between imperialism and isolationism was pos-
sible in the 1890s because both sides accepted that the cohesion of
Australian society in a period of great social stress depended upon the
defence of a racially exclusive egalitarianism.
102
The social and labour
reforms of the 1890s which helped reconcile Labor to federation were
matched by the recognition that isolation could no longer ensure racial
exclusion and a ‘white Australia’. Even the Bulletin abandoned republi-
canism in 1896.
103
Federation registered the fusion of imperialism and
isolationism in a new ideological compound. This ‘imperial national-
ism’ was not a reversion to colonial deference, but the optimal pathway
up from an inadequate colonial autonomy. Empire membership left
wide scope for achieving much of the old isolationist agenda. It permit-
ted tariffs, state-control of economic development, and the elaborate
apparatus of wage arbitration. It also promised greater influence over
imperial decisions and the best hope of realising Australia’s ‘manifest
destiny’ in the South Pacific. Australia’s ‘imperial nationalism’ asserted
her claim on the resources and sympathy of the pan-British world, and
her right to direct the local energies of the British world-system. It drew
proudly on the civic and commercial self-confidence of British commu-
nities around the world and the belief that ‘Britishness’ conferred the
cultural attributes of civilisational progress. Far from yielding to the pri-
macy of Downing Street, it quietly insisted that Australian Britishness
was more vigorous, manly and forward-looking than the home-grown
variety
104
and (in its own large sphere) the natural standard-bearer of
the imperial purpose. Australian nationalism was not a repudiation of
imperialism but its confident vanguard.
Of course, these distinctive features of Australian nationalism,
catalysed by strategic and demographic anxiety,
105
created inevitable
differences between the outlook of the new Commonwealth and
168 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
official opinion in Britain. The Australian colonies contributed over
16,000 volunteers to the imperial cause in the South African War. But
there was a strong dissenting tradition which suspected the part played
by British finance and was deeply uneasy at an imperial war against
free white men in Southern Africa.
106
After 1902, Milner’s recourse to
‘Chinese slavery’ in the Transvaal was fiercely criticised by all shades
of Australian opinion.
107
There was bound to be friction between the
ideal of a ‘White Australia’ and the needs of an empire in which white
settlers formed only one element in a complex political and strate-
gic equation. Thus Australian governments were keen to contribute to
naval defence. But a sense of remoteness, and of London’s European
priorities, sharpened the case for a local army and a local (not imperial)
navy to guard home waters in case of need.
108
Australian governments
hoped to shape imperial policy in the South Pacific but got scant encour-
agement from the Colonial Office, still their channel of communication
with the imperial government.
109
Australian prosperity revived after
1904, seeking capital and immigrants from Britain. But protection and
‘socialistic’ legislation went down poorly in the City.
110
And Australian
politicians were deeply suspicious of the imperial ‘embrace’: the sweet
life of London ‘society’. To wear court dress at the coronation, said the
Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher in 1910, was more than his job
was worth.
111
Yet the significance of all this should not be exaggerated.
Before 1914, and long after, to Australian opinion of almost any hue,
independence outside the imperial framework would have meant not
the fulfilment of Australian nationality but its certain negation. Their
nationalism was the fuel, just as federation was the vehicle, for finding
Australia’s true place in the system of empire.
‘New Britain’ in the South Pacific: New Zealand
Among the British settlement colonies, New Zealand was the extreme
case, and remains the most fascinating. It was the most remote from
Britain, perched far out on the Pacific frontier of Australasia. Much of
its terrain was harsh or poor. The value of its grasslands – its princi-
pal wealth – depended overwhelmingly on the demand for food and
wool on the other side of the world. But, despite this, it had grown
with astonishing rapidity into a settled society: from a few thousand
immigrants in the 1840s to over a million whites seventy years later.
112
169 / The Britannic experiment
(Over the same period, the indigenous Maori population had fallen by
two-thirds to less than forty thousand.) This demographic invasion had
been accompanied by a drastic transformation of the pre-colonial envi-
ronment into a land of European grasses, trees, flowers and animals.
113
No less remarkable was the apparent strength of white New Zealand’s
attachment to imperial Britain. Remoteness was no bar. Of all the set-
tlement colonies, New Zealand became the most committed to closer
imperial relations, and regarded itself as the most ‘British’ of the white
dominions. But it would be a great mistake to see this as an unthinking
loyalism, or as the calculating ‘super-patriotism’ of a far-flung outpost.
Nor was it a retrograde diversion from the high road to a Pacific ‘des-
tiny apart’.
114
Quite the reverse. As we will see, the emergence of a
distinct New Zealand nationality at the end of the nineteenth century
was at the heart of New Zealand’s ‘imperialism’. Indeed, ‘imperialism’
and ‘nationalism’ were the two faces of a single identity.
Cook had been the first European to gain an accurate knowl-
edge of New Zealand’s coastline in 1769, circumnavigating these ‘high,
slender, irregular islands’.
115
But, from then until British annexation
in 1840, ‘Old New Zealand’
116
had been a disorderly maritime fron-
tier where some hundreds of European and American whalers, sealers,
traders and timbermen sojourned, settled, trafficked and intermarried
among the Maori. Old New Zealand was part of a ‘Tasman world’ link-
ing the New Zealand islands with the convicts, commerce and sheep
farms of Eastern Australia. Where trade had ventured, missionaries
soon followed (the first was Samuel Marsden in 1814), and in 1833
the British government sent James Busby (dragging with him a prefab-
ricated cottage) to keep order among the escaped convicts, boisterous
seamen and grog sellers who congregated at the Bay of Islands, the
great natural harbour in the north of New Zealand. Busby’s regime
was ineffectual, and a stream of missionary complaints flowed back to
London. Meanwhile, New Zealand had attracted a group of promoters
who hoped to plant British emigrants on land bought (cheaply) from
Maori and resold (less cheaply) to incoming settlers. The New Zealand
Company (with its aristocratic directorate) countered missionary objec-
tions by insisting that ‘systematic colonization’ would bring order to
the chaotic relations between Maori and European in the islands, aiding
not hindering the civilising and converting of the tribes.
117
Unwilling, or
unable, to block the Company, the imperial government trailed reluc-
tantly after it. In 1840, it annexed the islands and, by the Treaty of
170 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
Waitangi, asserted its authority over the resident Europeans and (more
ambiguously) the Maori chiefs.
118
Annexation was the beginning of a thirty-year struggle to widen
the original settler beachhead (at Wellington) and construct a viable
colonial state. Distance and expense, the shortage of capital, the diffi-
culty of acquiring more land, the antagonism between the early gover-
nors (anxious to restrain settler expansion) and the Company (eager to
satisfy it) and friction with the Maori chiefs dimmed its early promise.
But, by the 1850s, the location of grasslands free of the dense New
Zealand ‘bush’ (patois for forest) in the Wairarapa, Hawke’s Bay
and parts of Taranaki
119
and the planting of new settlements on the
Canterbury plains and in Otago on the South Island gradually turned
New Zealand into a second New South Wales built on wool. In the
early 1860s, the discovery of gold at Gabriel’s Gully in Otago brought
a rush of immigrants, and the white population climbed to 267,000
by 1871. Meanwhile, London had conceded self-government in 1852,
but withheld from the settler politicians control over relations with the
Maori, whose land could only be bought through the agency of imperial
officials – a rule laid down in the treaty.
Until the 1860s, it seemed as if New Zealand might develop
not as a full-blown settler state but as ‘one country, two systems’. In
the South Island where there were few Maori and around the fringes
of the North Island, were a series of settler enclaves, largely confined
to the grasslands and the flat coastal plains and linked together not by
roads but by sea. Across much of the North Island stretched a Maori
‘protectorate’, where Maori hapu and the ‘pakeha-Maori’ who lived
among them farmed and traded largely free from outside control.
120
But it was an uneasy equilibrium. Maori chiefs sold land. More settlers
moved in. The pressure to keep up a brisk market in land sales – the
settlers’ fastest route to a speculative fortune – was intense. By the
late 1850s, Maori unease was turning towards resistance. On the edge
of the settler enclave in Taranaki, the ‘King’ movement sprang up to
unite Maori behind a common leader and the refusal to part with
more land.
121
Far away in London, the Colonial Office was baffled
and irritated by the growing racial friction and accepted its governor’s
advice that more settler responsibility for dealing with the Maori would
curb their aggression.
122
The result was confusion as settler leaders
in the North Island pressed forward, demanding imperial protection
against a Maori ‘conspiracy’. A forceful new governor, George Grey,
171 / The Britannic experiment
with previous experience in the colony, tried to reassert his authority
over the Maori chiefs and conciliate the settler politicians by conquering
the Waikato region, south of Auckland. The New Zealand wars ground
on through the 1860sassome10,000 imperial troops and a large body
of settler volunteers fought the ‘fire in the fern’ – with very mixed
success and a heavy reliance on Maori allies (the so-called kupapa)
hostile to the Kingites.
123
By 1870, when the imperial contingent was
eventually withdrawn, Maori still controlled much of the North Island’s
hilly interior. Their tenacity had bought a breathing space and perhaps
a measure of grudging toleration.
124
But they had failed to check the
steady expansion of the settler world around them.
The main consequence of the wars was to marginalise the Maori
and snuff out what was left of the fragile vision of ‘racial amalgama-
tion’ as the basis of New Zealand society. Henceforth, New Zealand
was to be unambiguously a settler state. But it was, as yet, a small
and backward one. The 1870s, however, were a turning point. In a
period of rising trade and easy money, colonial New Zealand became
a prosperous and successful settler community, able to attract a steady
flow of capital and migrants from the distant metropole. The agents
of this transformation were local men, immigrants who had enough
capital and connections to build up small fortunes in land or trade.
125
They were the runholders whose sheep ranches spread out over the
Canterbury plains; and the merchants who made Dunedin (for a time)
the colony’s main port and manufacturer, and the headquarters of the
Union Steamship Line (founded in 1875) that supplied much of New
Zealand’s coastal and maritime connections.
126
In the North Island, the
leaders were provincial notables like Isaac Featherston, who opened up
Wellington’s hinterland in the Wairarapa; Donald McLean and J. D.
Ormond, who dominated Hawke’s Bay;
127
or the Richmond-Atkinson
clan in Taranaki.
128
These men were pocket versions of Cecil Rhodes,
building empires but on a smaller scale. They mobilised capital and
commercial enterprise to push forward from the coastal plains into the
bush:
129
building railways, recruiting settlers, laying out townships.
130
The exception was Auckland, which grew fitfully into a small Pacific
entrepot, exploiting its magnificent harbour, the timber trade in kauri
pine and the short-lived gold rush in the Coromandel. From the start,
Auckland was a merchant not a settler enclave.
131
But the main architect of the new settler state was Julius
Vogel (1835–99), a colonial politician in the same mould as Sir John
172 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
A. Macdonald. Whether as finance minister, premier or agent-general
in London, Vogel was the most influential figure in New Zealand’s
affairs for much of the 1870sand1880s.
132
The son of a Jewish small
businessman in London, Vogel had gone to the Australian gold fields as
a youth, but found his m
´
etier as a newspaperman not a digger. In 1861,
he came to Otago to try his luck in its golden prosperity. By 1870,he
was a leading South Island politician who pressed on his colleagues a
bold plan for rapid economic development. Vogel’s scheme was simple
but audacious. He proposed that the settler government should raise a
large loan in London to finance a programme of railway-building and
subsidised immigration. ‘Let the country but make the railroads and the
railroads will make the country’, he declared.
133
As the railways were
built, and newcomers poured in, the government’s land reserves would
be sold off at a profit, output and exports would swell, the loans would
be paid off, and the colony would rise to a new plateau of prosperity,
with more of the amenities of an ‘old’ country. A virtuous circle of
growth and improvement would be set in motion. Vogel’s prospectus
was seductive. But his real genius lay (like that of Cecil Rhodes) in
convincing investors in Europe (including the Rothschilds) that New
Zealand was a colonial eldorado. Vogel was a visionary who sailed
close to the wind and a speculator on his own account who died in
near-poverty. But his economic programme was transformative
134
and,
by driving through the abolition of the provincial system (where control
of public lands still inconveniently lay), he created a unitary colonial
state in 1876.
In fact, ‘Vogelism’ contained many of the ingredients used by
later governments to fashion a distinctive role for New Zealand in the
British system of empire. Vogel had insisted on the urgency of attracting
British immigrants and capital to ward off stagnation and regression. As
agent-general in London, he used his pen freely to advertise the colony’s
charms. He saw that New Zealand must compete with many other calls
on British investment and grasped (though not the first to do so) that its
special claim must be based on assertions about its likeness to Britain.
‘The ambition of the New Zealand settlers’, he announced in his jour-
nalistic days, ‘has been to make in the Southern Hemisphere an exact
counterpart of Great Britain in the Northern.’
135
With Vogelism, the
myth of New Zealand as the replica of Britain – but without the ‘warts’
of industrialism – entered the political mainstream, and lodged there
firmly for a century. Vogelism proclaimed that the main business of
173 / The Britannic experiment
government was development: borrowing, buying, building, recruiting
and settling. Everything was secondary to the prime task of expansion
and colonisation. But Vogel was not content with a purely domestic
vision of New Zealand’s future. More vigorously than any contempo-
rary, he pressed the colony’s claim to be ‘Queen of the Pacific’. New
Zealand’s manifest destiny was to be the centre of a great Polynesian
dominion
136
– a maritime version of Canada – incorporating Fiji and
Samoa as well as many smaller islands. Vogel wanted to promote this
scheme through a government-backed company based in Auckland, a
pale (and abortive) shadow of Macdonald’s alliance with the Canadian
Pacific Railway. London’s hostility to his plans strengthened Vogel’s
belief in the need for imperial federation to amplify Wellington’s voice
at the imperial centre, and assert New Zealand’s right to act as the local
manager of the imperial enterprise in the Pacific. Indeed, it was Vogel’s
intense vision of New Zealand’s special role, its unique tie with Britain,
and its claim to a Polynesian sub-empire that turned him against entry
into an Australian federation, mooted in the 1880s and favoured by
some New Zealand politicians.
Here was an embryonic view of New Zealand as a distinct
nationality, a new British nation in the South Pacific, with its own
empire in miniature. But, at the end of the 1880s, New Zealand entered
an economic and social crisis. The depression and financial panic felt in
Australia crossed the Tasman Sea. Discontent among urban workers in
the docks, railyards and workshops of the larger towns combined with
farmers’ grievances. By 1890, it seemed, the frontier had closed. The
unlimited supply of land for the farmer-settlers had run dry. The key
resource that had allowed New Zealand to avoid the social tensions of
the Old World was exhausted. Of course, the shortage was an optical
illusion. Thousands of acres were ‘locked up’ in the possession of the
pastoralist ‘gentry’ who had built up great sheep runs in the palmy days
of mid-century. In 1891, a new generation of populist politicians came
into power calling themselves Liberals and appealing to labour. They
were led by John Ballance (premier, 1891–3) and his charismatic succes-
sor, ‘King’ Richard Seddon (premier, 1893–1906), a former pub-keeper
from the South Island’s west coast, a gaunt region of gold and coal
mines. Seddon and his lieutenants, John McKenzie and William Pem-
ber Reeves, knew that, in a country where every (white) man had the
vote, equal opportunity for all (white) men was the unwritten Magna
Carta of New Zealand politics. Reeves swiftly introduced new laws
174 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
to regulate wage-bargaining, factories and the conditions of labour.
137
The spectre of the workhouse – that grim symbol of social failure in
Victorian Britain – was lifted by the coming of old age pensions. The
state took on wide new social responsibilities, later trumpeted by Reeves
in his State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (1902).
138
Meanwhile, McKenzie pressed forward with ‘bursting up the great
estates’: buying out the runholders (many of them eager to sell) and
parcelling up the land for closer settlement – a programme soon rein-
forced by the vigorous purchase of Maori land in the North Island.
139
The enlargement of the Liberal state, and its espousal of ‘state
socialism’, has sometimes been seen as the founding of a new politi-
cal tradition in New Zealand, coinciding with the moment when the
local-born at last outnumbered the incomers from Britain.
140
But, if
this is true, it is only half the story. The real purpose of Liberal
reform was not to build a socialist state but to protect New Zealand
against the social warfare and class-conflict of the Old World. The
Arcadian promise, New Zealand’s gift to Old Britain, had to be kept.
The prospect of social mobility within a broadly equal society had to
be preserved
141
if need be by state action. None of this meant that
Seddon and his followers wanted to turn New Zealand into an isolated
Pacific utopia, proudly separate from a decadent motherland. When
Reeves opposed the return to Vogelism – large-scale borrowing for rural
development – he was packed off to literary exile as agent-general in
London.
142
A new nationality was being forged in New Zealand but its
roots did not lie in socialism or a self-conscious Pacific identity.
143
The
social crisis of the 1890s had gone deeper than material hardship. It
evoked a widespread dissatisfaction with the rough and ready soci-
ety of colonial New Zealand. The drive to modernise settler society
fused with the struggle to preserve its egalitarian ethos. Both seemed
to require a clean-out of its darker corners, a campaign for social (and
racial) ‘hygiene’, and a new spirit of social conformity. From this grew
a demand for temperance (women’s suffrage in 1893 was a by-product
of the abortive crusade for prohibition), improved education, better
policing, more protection for children, young women and mothers, as
well as the expulsion of the alien and unwanted.
144
In ‘God’s own
country’,
145
there was no place for sloth or larrikinism. The ugly face
of the new emphasis on social uplift and discipline was ‘white New
Zealand’: the exclusion of non-white migrants like the small Chinese