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

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215 / ‘Un-British rule’ in ‘Anglo-India’

core of their programme survived unchanged. Like European national-

ists, the Congress leaders saw in the educated class a proxy for the

nation. They saw themselves as trustees of the Indian idea. Their

vision of India was (politically at least) to remake it along Gladsto-

nian lines. The object of the Congress, declared its president in 1912,

was ‘to create a nation’ whose citizens would be ‘members of a world-

wide empire’. ‘Our great aim is to make the British Government the

National Government of the British Indian people.’

118

India was to

be a British Indian nation, inspired by the ideals of British-style Lib-

eralism. The apparatus of the Raj would be the scaffolding of Indian

nationhood, just as the adoption of British values would be the secret

of self-rule. Pressing the old case for easier Indian entry into the ranks

of the Civilians, Motilal Nehru insisted that, even if Indian candidates

were locally chosen, they should still be sent to Britain to complete

their education: ‘to acquire those characteristics which are essentially

British and . . . absolutely necessary in the interests of good government

in India’.

119

It was ‘axiomatic’, he went on, that the administration in

India ‘must have a pronounced British tone and character and too much

stress cannot be laid on Indians acquiring that character as a habit’.

120

It was no accident that Motilal sent his son (Jawaharlal) to Harrow and

Cambridge: he was meant for the Civil Service, not Congress.

In retrospect, we can see that each of these ideas of India

received in this period a decisive check. By 1914 they were all at stale-

mate. A new cadre of imperially minded Indians, ready and willing

to do India’s imperial duty, was the white hope of advanced opinion

in Britain. If the British world-system was not to weaken or stagnate,

India’s contribution must grow greater, its role more dynamic, its lead-

ers more receptive to their imperial task. In reality, there was not the

smallest sign that the most moderate of the Indian moderates would

agree to India’s existing imperial burdens once self-government was

granted. Like it or not, London would ﬁnd itself bound to the Civilian

Raj. The unofﬁcial ties of sympathy between the Imperial centre and its

Indian friends would be fretted by this dilemma. As for the Civilians,

their hope of embedding their rule in Indian sympathies, fusing their

autocracy with Indian conservatism, had (as it turned out) little chance

of success. It depended too heavily upon stiﬂing the appeal of Indian

nationalism in the educated class and on rallying new groups and inter-

ests to provincial institutions without the means to satisfy their wants.

For the ‘British Indian nationalists’ of the Congress, the future was just

216 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

as gloomy. Indeed, they were trapped in a paradox. Without mobilising

a larger following (the course rejected in 1907) they had little hope of a

breakthrough at the provincial (let alone the All-India) level. Without

wresting more power and patronage from the Civilians, they had few

means of widening the appeal of the ‘manly liberalism’ they espoused.

When the dust had settled on the Morley-Minto reforms, that much

was clear.

To an extent only dimly glimpsed before 1914, the political

ground was heaving beneath them all. A fourth idea of India was in the

making. It was less the dream of an Indian state than the anxious search

for Indian community. Its prophet was Gandhi, whose Hind Swaraj

(1909) brusquely rejected Western civilisation and Congress ideology in

favour of a spiritual India of self-sufﬁcient villages. Outside the formal

world of Civilian rule and Congress politics, a host of new interests

was emerging. Hindu sabhas,

121

Muslims,

122

caste associations, leagues

of peasants,

123

even groups of workers, sought a new solidarity or

defended an old. In Bengal

124

and Madras,

125

new social ambitions

were afoot in the countryside. Congress’s ‘British India’ meant little

to such men. Regional interests and communal identities were much

more pressing. Whom they would follow and to what effect were as

yet unknown. The answers would come much sooner than anyone

expected.

THE WEAKEST LINK: BRITAIN IN

SOUTH AFRICA

In South Africa, the bond of empire was weaker and the strains on it

much greater than in other colonies of settlement. The European whites

were predominantly non-British; the indigenous blacks more numerous

and resilient. The frontier wars of conquest lasted longer, were fought

with greater ferocity and spread out over a whole sub-continent. For

much of the nineteenth century, South Africa was viewed in London

as a hybrid region: a composite of settler and ‘native’ states. Imperial

policy veered unpredictably between a ‘Canadian’ solution of settler

self-government and the ‘Indian’ solution of direct control – at least

over the large zones where autonomous black communities survived.

Partly as a result, on the white side certainly, the ‘Imperial Factor’ was

regarded with profound mistrust.

South Africa was likely to be an awkward element in the impe-

rial system at the best of times. The sub-continent was stuck in its own

version of Catch-22. As long as the struggle between whites and blacks

continued there could be no hope of devolving imperial authority to

a settler government on the model of Canada, the Australian colonies

or (most relevantly) New Zealand. The whites were too divided; and

the blacks were too strong to be contained without the help of imperial

troops. But every imperial effort to promote settler unity and impose

a common policy towards black peoples and rulers roused fresh white

animosity against London’s ‘dictation’ – especially among the Afrikaner

(or Boer) majority. Suspicion of the Imperial Factor was the main cause

of South Africa’s peculiar fragmented state structure, with its division

between two colonies, two Boer republics and a scattering of black

territories, some in direct relations with London through the High

218 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

200 400

100 200 300 miles

500 km300100

Port Elizabeth

Grahamstown

Cape Town

East London

Durban

Bloemfontein

Johannesburg

Pretoria

Kimberley

BECHUANALAND

GERMAN

SOUTH-WEST

AFRICA

RHODESIA

BAROTSELAND-

NORTH-WESTERN

RHODESIA

PORTUGUESE

WEST

AFRICA

BRITISH

CENTRAL

AFRICA

CAPE COLONY

CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

TRANSVAAL

SOUTHAFRICAN

REPUBLIC

ORANGE FREE

STATE

GRIQUALAND

WEST

STELLALAND

GOSHEN

BRITISH

BECHUANALAND

TRANSKEI

BUSHMAN

LAND

BASUTO-

LAND

SWAZI-

LAND

BR.

KAFFRARIA

PONDO-

LAND

GRIQUA-

LAND EAST

NATAL

Source: Philips' College Atlas for Southern Africa (plate III)

published by George Philip and Son, London, 1957

Map 8 South Africa in the nineteenth century

Commissioner in Cape Town, who doubled as the Cape Colony’s gov-

ernor. But, in the late nineteenth century, South Africa turned into

something more than a tiresome frontier province of the Empire. It

became the arena where the political and strategic cohesion of the

British world-system was tested to its limit.

There were several reasons for this. In the 1880s, South African

politics were transformed by the new wealth from diamonds and gold.

The rapid growth of the mineral economy sucked in foreign capital

and sharpened the competition for trade between the South African

states. But its most disturbing effect was to create uncertainty about the

geopolitical orientation of the whole region. With its gold revenues and

commercial leverage as the great inland market, the autonomous Boer

republic in the Transvaal now had the means to strike free from British

paramountcy, dragging the rest of Southern Africa with it. But it also

219 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

ran the risk of being inundated by foreign (mainly British) immigrants

attracted by its new prosperity. If that were to happen, the Transvaal

would become British by default, pulling the Afrikaners of the interior

back into Britain’s orbit, and making South Africa another Canada. The

stakes were high. By the 1890s, the grand problem of South African

politics seemed about to be settled. But no one could be sure what the

outcome would be.

What made this regional issue into an imperial question was

the intersection of South Africa’s economic revolution with two wider

political forces. The fate of the Transvaal, and of South Africa, turned

(or so it seemed) upon the treatment of the immigrant British, or

Uitlanders. The Transvaal was the high water mark of British migration,

the demographic imperialism that had served so well to extend British

inﬂuence, power and wealth. Kruger’s republic ﬁercely resisted the

habitual demand of British communities overseas for political and cul-

tural predominance as the self-appointed standard-bearers of progress.

But, in doing so, it set itself against a tide of British ethnic national-

ism then approaching its peak. As a result, the Transvaal’s relations

with Britain and the rest of South Africa became entangled in the bitter

ethnic rivalry of Afrikaners and ‘English’ (the usual term for British

settlers in South Africa) in the prelude to war in 1899. Worse still,

at the very moment when economic change was maximising political

uncertainty, South Africa became the focus of imperial rivalry. As the

new geopolitics of partition extended ever more widely across the Afro-

Asian world, Britain’s claim to regional supremacy in Southern Africa,

languidly asserted since 1815, became critical to her strategic interests

and world power status. This sudden conjuncture of ethnic, economic

and geopolitical tensions turned South Africa, almost overnight, from

a colonial backwater into the most volatile quarter of the Victorian

empire.

This was the setting for the prolonged struggle over the polit-

ical control of Southern Africa which reached its crisis between 1895

and 1909. To all the main protagonists, cabinet ministers, proconsuls,

British settlers, blacks and Boers, interests of fundamental importance

seemed at stake: imperial safety, economic progress, personal liberty,

political freedom, cultural survival. In the longer view, the outcome of

the struggle, the uniﬁcation of South Africa as a self-governing, British

dominion rather than its secession, or balkanisation into competing

states, created a vital adjunct of British world power in the century

220 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

of global wars. But the more immediate question, as Southern Africa

entered its time of troubles, was whether imperial power could reshape

the sub-continent to its own design even at the point of the bayonet.

The lessons of the South African past were not encouraging.

Supremacy or stalemate

The British seized the Cape from the Dutch in 1795, returned it, and

took it again for good in 1806. The halfway house to India could not

be left in the hands of an enfeebled client of France, which the Nether-

lands had become. For the British, what mattered was Table Bay and

the naval base at Simonstown on the Indian Ocean side of Cape Point.

But this southern Gibraltar had a straggling hinterland. Beyond the

mountains around Cape Town lay a sprawling, thinly populated pas-

toral colony that stretched away for seven hundred miles to the north.

Wandering trekboers lived by transhumance and practised slavery.

On the Cape’s eastern frontier they had clashed since the 1770swith

Nguni (or Xhosa) peoples moving south in search of pastures. Even

before British rule began, friction between Boer frontiersmen and the

colonial authorities in Cape Town had sparked a local rebellion.

After

1806, British efforts to pacify the frontier, reduce their military costs

and outlaw slavery compounded Boer resentment at alien rule and its

anglicising tendency.

Already there were early signs of the imperial dilemma. Should

the British push forward and take control of the turbulent zone where

whites and blacks raided and counter-raided? Could they impose a

real separation between the quarrelsome frontier communities? Were

Boer and black misdeeds to be punished with an even hand? Should

the colonial government in Cape Town seek treaty partners among the

Xhosa chiefs and extend protection to its African allies? Behind all this

was the question of whether control of the South African Cape required

command of the South African interior. But, after 1836, it was no longer

just a matter of the Eastern Cape and its border wars. The British had

to deﬁne their imperial interest across the whole sub-continent.

For by that time a double revolution was transforming the

nature of the imperial problem. The drastic consolidation of the Zulu

state under Shaka (c.1787–1828) had released a huge wave of demo-

graphic turmoil affecting much of modern South Africa and beyond:

221 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

the mfecane or ‘crushing’.

Communities and tribes were disrupted,

defeated and displaced. As Shaka’s victims sought safety beyond his

reach, they invaded new neighbourhoods and provoked fresh conﬂicts.

Over a vast swathe of the interior highveld, the mfecane unleashed a

chaotic process of forced migration and ethnic conﬂict. As old commu-

nities fragmented, rival leaders competed to build a following, claim

land and assert their rule. The effects were felt all along the porous

frontier of the Cape. As a result, white traders, trekkers and mission-

aries, as well as runaway slaves and servants, moved easily into the

masterless realm beyond the Orange. Then, in the later 1830s, a large

movement of Cape farmers from the embattled Eastern Province – some

15,000 between 1834 and 1840 – trekked north and east to found a

Boer republic in Natal. Between them, the mfecane and the Great Trek

sucked the Colony’s human frontier deep into the interior. In a few

short years, the zone of imperial concern had been driven north from

the Orange to the Limpopo, and was on its way to the Zambezi.

To a succession of governors in Cape Town, the case for extend-

ing their imperial mandate over the whole sub-continent seemed unan-

swerable. The Cape’s strategic value would be lost if any harbour in

the region was controlled by independent whites: sooner or later they

would solicit the presence of a foreign power. On this argument, Natal,

with its magniﬁcent port, was annexed in 1844, persuading the dis-

gruntled trekkers to seek republican freedom on the interior highveld.

Maritime supremacy was easy enough. But there was also a case for

dogging the steps of the emigrant Boers wherever they went. For it soon

became clear that the wars of expansion between the trekkers and rival

statebuilders in the mfecane aftermath – like the Sotho ruler Moshesh

or the Griqua captains Kok and Waterboer

– destabilised the whole

frontier. Endless border wars forced up the imperial garrison but held

back the Cape Colony’s commercial and political growth. Without an

inland paramountcy to impose order on all its warring communities,

the sub-continent would remain a costly colonial backwater, a constant

embarrassment to the humanitarian conscience and an inconvenient,

perhaps dangerous, drain on the scarce resource of military power.

The argument was persuasive but the means were lacking. Gov-

ernor after governor claimed that peace and plenty would follow an

extended paramountcy. One proposed an elaborate scheme of treaties,

magistrates and police beyond the Orange.

Three years later, Sir Harry

Smith swept aside chieﬂy rule in Xhosaland and annexed the whole

222 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

northern frontier up to the Vaal, to bring the Boers back under British

rule. ‘My position’, he declared in a revealing analogy,

has been analogous to that of every Governor General who

has proceeded to India. All have been fully impressed with

the weakness of that Policy which extended the Company’s

possessions . . . [F]ew . . . especially the men of more gifted

talents, have ever resigned . . . without having done that,

which . . . circumstances demanded and imperatively

imposed upon them. Such has been my case.

The Colonial Secretary gave reluctant sanction: enlargement, he said,

was inevitable.

But, in 1851, after spending millions, the Colonial

Ofﬁce called a halt. The Boers were in revolt. The Eighth Xhosa War,

provoked by Smith’s policy, had been a military shambles hastily aban-

doned by Smith’s successor. Further north, the Zulu state still loomed

over the tiny colony in Natal. With black resistance unbroken, further

coercion of the independent Boers beyond the Orange was politically

futile and militarily dangerous. London made the best of a bad job. In

1852–4, in the conventions of Sand River and Bloemfontein, it con-

ceded the Boer republics practical autonomy and patched up peace on

the Cape frontier. A further advance under Governor Grey aimed to

incorporate the whole border zone between the Cape’s eastern frontier

and Natal. It was aborted by the outbreak of the Indian Mutiny, and the

hasty removal of much of Grey’s force, and then by the deepening crisis

in New Zealand to where Grey himself was transferred – although not

before the great Xhosa cattle-killing of 1857 (a despairing act of self-

immolation) had allowed him to push the settler frontier forward to the

river Kei.

But, for nearly twenty years, the Imperial Factor withdrew

from the South African interior, on the argument that, with the coast

(mostly) under British control, the inland republics were no threat to the

strategic command that was the ultima ratio of the imperial presence.

The ‘conventions policy’ was a grudging recognition of the

underlying weakness vitiating all attempts to make the sub-continent

as ‘British’ as Canada or Australia, or to master it imperially as the

British had mastered India. The Imperial government would not ﬁnance

a vast campaign of territorial conquest in Southern Africa. There (as

elsewhere) imperial expansion waited on local agents to create a frame-

work of information, order and opportunity: without it, reinforcements

223 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa

of capital and manpower were hard to attract. Nor was British military

power a decisive weapon without the follow-through of local force.

But, in South Africa, the coastal colonies in the Cape and Natal were

cripplingly weak. They had no great staples like timber, wheat or wool

(though wool came closest), attracted few migrants and borrowed little

capital. Overland transport was costly and slow. The interior yielded

few commodities. The commercial energy that drove forward the settler

frontier elsewhere was in short supply. As a settler society, South Africa

was a pale shadow of Canada. Nor, despite Sir Harry Smith, could it be

a second India. There was no peasant economy to tax, no sepoy army to

recruit, and no means to pay for the ‘hire’ of imperial troops – the three

conditions which had allowed Anglo-Indian sub-imperialism to ﬂour-

ish unchecked by London’s veto. Far from being the dominant force

in Southern Africa, the coastal colonies found themselves in frustrating

equipoise with the interior states, white and black. Black societies could

be harassed and threatened, but they were mobile, resilient and difﬁcult

to incorporate – partly because, in the primitive state of the colonial

economy, that meant seizing their land by force and conscripting their

labour. The Boer republics were an even harder nut to crack.

It was easy to mistake the crudity of the Boer states for weak-

ness. But the Boers had developed a highly effective means of ‘primitive

accumulation’ to complement their social and military system.

On the

highveld grassland and around its margins, their horse-borne mobility

and ﬁrepower allowed them to capture African cattle, land and labour

far more easily than in the dense bush and deep valleys of the old Cape

borderlands. The Boer states existed to seize this wealth and redistribute

it among their citizen-warriors organised into the key unit of their social

and political life, the commando. The Boer elite were the commandants

who had ﬁrst pick of the spoils and on whose military prowess their

followers depended. Boer institutions may have been simple,

but their

pastoral economy, drawing labour and foodcrops from black depen-

dants, allowed a thinly spread but highly effective occupation of the

highveld to be imposed in less than twenty years. Boer warfare was per-

fectly adapted to the open veld. Against it, the square and the infantry

charge, the standard British tactics, were largely ineffective.

Stalemate was thus the rule in South African politics. When the

British tried again to break it in the 1870s, the outcome was crushing

failure. Once more, the reason for a forward move was the chorus of

settler and ofﬁcial alarm at growing black resistance in the cockpit of

224 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

peoples between the Cape, Natal and the Boer republics. Once more the

blame was laid on disunity and competition among the whites. Federal

union of the white settler states, British and Boer, favoured by Cape

governors as the acceptable face of annexation, was endorsed by ofﬁcial

opinion in London.

Cape Colony was given Responsible (self-) Gov-

ernment in 1872 in the hope that its leaders would take up the federal

cause. They refused, fearing that the whole burden of frontier control

would fall on them. The Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, turned

instead to the junior colony, Natal, and to Sir Theophilus Shepstone.

Shepstone was the son of a British settler in the Eastern Cape. He

became an ofﬁcial interpreter and, in the border warfare of the 1830s,

rose quickly to be the government’s spokesman among the Xhosa chiefs.

By 1846, he was ‘diplomatic agent’ to the Africans in Natal and to the

Zulu kingdom beyond the Tugela. A large, impassive, secretive man,

Shepstone became the uncrowned king of Natal. He was an imperial

ofﬁcial, but a colonial patriot: an unrelenting Natal sub-imperialist, a

proto-Rhodes without the diamonds. His aim was to build a greater

Natal: to ﬁnd new ‘locations’ for its blacks; to free more land for its

whites; to annex the northern coast; to control the northern trade to the

Zambezi; to conquer Zululand. Carnarvon’s rebuff at the Cape gave

him his chance, for London was now willing to throw the Imperial

Factor and its army into his puny settler bridgehead. Natal would be

the springboard for colonial federation. Shepstone’s local inﬂuence, his

mastery of frontier politics, his command of ‘native policy’, made him

the obvious choice as the new supremo of the northern interior. At

ﬁrst all went well. Worsted in its war against the Pedi, the Transvaal

in 1876 was bankrupt, divided and demoralised. Shepstone talked its

dejected president into surrendering independence and conjured up a

petition for annexation which he declared in February 1877.

The Pedi

were defeated with imperial help.

Then, in the second stage of Shep-

stone’s grand design, the army Carnarvon had sent invaded Zululand,

and (after the disaster at Isandhlwana) decisively broke its power. In

a single forward movement, the British had broken the cycle of frus-

tration and transformed the geopolitics of Southern Africa. Or so it

seemed.

The moment of triumph was short. There was barely time

to broach federation before the Transvaal Boers began to throw off

their new colonial state with its courts and taxes. Paul Kruger’s fame

as a frontier ﬁghter made him the natural leader of revolt. With the