Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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235 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
The key was the north, Rhodes’ private empire in Rhodesia.
Foiled on the Rand and frustrated at the Cape, Rhodes’ best hope was
to speed up Rhodesia’s development and build a grand new colony
embracing the Bechuanaland Protectorate (then still under imperial
control). The Protectorate would be Rhodesia’s land bridge to the Cape.
As part of ‘Greater Rhodesia’ it would help surround the Transvaal
on two sides. The third stage of Rhodes’ plan was to promote the
federal union of the Cape, Natal and Greater Rhodesia. Then ‘the three
combined will bring peaceful pressure to bear upon the republics to
drive them into a S[outh] African federation’.
41
Milner proposed to
fasten imperial policy once more to Rhodes’ chariot wheels. But, this
time, the ‘Colossus’ was to be kept on a leash ‘unless he is to make
a shipwreck of his own ambitions and our permanent interests’. The
persistent African risings against Rhodes’ Company government cast
doubt on his schemes – at least for the moment. It was vital to preserve
some imperial control over Rhodesia and to make him wait for the
eventual transfer of the Protectorate. ‘His projected game is a good
game but . . . he is desperately anxious to have another slap at old Kruger
by “peaceful means”.’
42
As Milner recognised, Rhodes ‘was much too
strong to be merely used’. His cooperation had to be bought. But his
‘Northern’ strategy was the only shot in the imperial locker. Milner
settled in for the long haul, and a ‘qualified success’. ‘A united and
loyal S[outh] Africa on the Canadian pattern if it ever comes about
is a thing of the very distant future’, he told one of his oldest and
closest friends.
43
But Britain’s strategic interests, thought this ‘civilian
soldier of the Empire’ (Milner’s self-description), were safe enough: ‘I
don’t mean in the least that I despair of the maintenance of British
supremacy.’
44
Cautious pragmatism was the keynote of an imperial policy
which waited on the maturing of Rhodes’ schemes. The Transvaal was
‘bound to topple’, Milner told Asquith, the future prime minister.
45
There was little point taking up the mine-owners’ main grievance, the
dynamite monopoly imposed by Kruger’s government. Scarcely three
months later, Milner performed an astonishing u-turn. Now he urged
an openly aggressive policy towards the Transvaal, and, in a notorious
speech (at Graaff Reinet on 3 March 1898), questioned the loyalty of
the Cape Afrikaners to the imperial connection. Milner may have been
reacting to Kruger’s unexpectedly resounding success in the Transvaal’s
presidential election in February. He may have been anxious about
236 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
Rhodes’ grip on Rhodesia. But there was another reason for his harder
line. Early in 1898, Rhodes too was switching tactics. With the Par-
liamentary inquiry into the Jameson Raid behind him, and the black
revolt in Rhodesia broken, he was ready to re-enter Cape politics. His
old alliance with the Bond was irreparable; but he had a new vehicle.
He had become the darling of the ‘English’ in the towns. In the Cape’s
Eastern Province, the South African League had been formed to rally
loyalty to the Empire and (by a deft association) to Rhodes. In 1897,
the League created the ‘Progressive’ party to campaign for free trade,
agrarian improvement and the redistribution of seats – causes care-
fully identified with imperial loyalty. Before the end of 1897, a private
understanding had been reached between the Progressives and Rhodes’
own followers.
46
Six days after Milner’s speech, Rhodes announced his
conversion to the Progressive programme and opened fire on the Bond
for its hostility to northern expansion and its resistance to an imperial
naval contribution.
47
Rhodes, sneered his bitterest enemy in the Cape,
wanted a majority ‘not to unify South Africa, but to purchase . . . the
Bulawayo railway and . . . that very bad egg Rhodesia’.
48
But Rhodes
was also determined to give urban (and ‘English’) voters a fairer share
of seats. His new alliance would bring him the townsmen’s vote. With
firm control of the Cape Parliament he could tighten the knot round
Kruger’s neck. Milner had little choice but to follow him.
In fact, throughout 1898, Milner’s dependence on Rhodes grew
deeper. His own attempt to draw Chamberlain into the struggle for
‘reform’ in the Transvaal misfired badly. A sharp rebuke arrived from
London. Chamberlain had other fish to fry and was preoccupied with
the struggle for hinterlands in West Africa. At Rhodes’ direct request,
49
Milner pleaded for his grandiose scheme to build a new railway beyond
the Zambezi and open a vast new northern extension. Britain’s strategy
in South Africa, he urged, depended upon the gamble of Rhodesia’s
development. Capital would be attracted by the sheer scale of Rhodes’
project; a great new railway empire, pivoted on Bulawayo, would kick-
start the Rhodesian economy as a counterpoise to the Transvaal.
50
Two
weeks earlier, Milner had warned Rhodes against ‘worrying’ Chamber-
lain with this scheme.
51
But in the course of the year the prospects of
direct imperial action grew steadily fainter. The British press was dis-
tracted by other imperial excitements in the Sudan and China. In South
Africa, everything turned upon Rhodes. Chamberlain was anxious to
hear about his gold prospects in Rhodesia.
52
The Transvaal was ‘in a
237 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
twitter’ about his plans.
53
Redistribution and electoral victory would
make Rhodes master of the Cape. His reward might be Bechuanaland.
54
After two years in the wilderness, Rhodes seemed once more near the
pinnacle of power.
Rhodes may have calculated that an election victory in the Cape
and a third premiership would give him scope for some rapprochement
with his erstwhile allies in the Bond. The Cape Afrikaners were as
anxious as he to promote South African unity (though not at impe-
rial command) and just as fearful of Kruger’s dabblings in great power
diplomacy – a vice attributed to his ‘Hollander’ advisers. With their
help, Kruger might yet be overcome. The triumph and the spoils would
be his, not Downing Street’s. It was perhaps not so much Rhodes’ fail-
ure as the circumstances of his defeat that made conflict unavoidable.
In the Cape elections of 1898, Rhodes had denounced ‘Krugerism’ and
demanded ‘equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi’.
55
But, contrary to most prediction, and despite lavish spending, Rhodes’
Progressives were narrowly defeated although winning a majority of
votes cast. A Bond ministry took office. Rapprochement went out of
the window: a fresh round of ‘racial’ politics came in at the door. English
‘race-sentiment’, the stock-in-trade of the South African League, was
turned up to whip in the remaining ‘English’ politicians who had stood
out against Rhodes. Rhodes harried the Bond ministry in parliament
and out.
56
He pressed for redistribution, northern expansion and fed-
eral union. He erected a statue to Van Riebeek, the Dutch founder
of Cape Town. Rhodes appealed squarely to Afrikaner misgivings and
‘English’ resentment at Kruger’s refusal of white equality on the Rand.
57
Then, in January 1899, he set off for Britain to rally support, raise
fresh capital for his Zambezian railway and negotiate the passage of his
telegraph to Cairo through German East Africa.
As he did so, the pan-British rhetoric of loyalty and grievance
that he and Milner had unleashed in March 1898 and which had
reached a crescendo in October 1898 at last bore fruit on the Rand.
Throughout 1898, the quiescence of the Uitlanders had been a source
of frustration to Milner. He had made contact with Percy Fitzpatrick,
the leading Uitlander politician; but, with the ‘old reformers’ of 1895
still under ban, political organisation was minimal. The mining compa-
nies, who had hopes of economic reform, were reluctant to antagonise
the regime on whose goodwill they depended. They had no reason
to manipulate Milner: still less to be used by him. But, in December
238 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
1898, two events combined to transform Rand politics. The forthcom-
ing expiry of the dynamite monopoly reopened the central issue between
the mining houses and the government in Pretoria. Smouldering resent-
ment over the arbitrariness of Boer administration on the Rand came to
a head with the murder of an Uitlander, Edgar, by an Afrikaner police-
man. The main Uitlander movement, a branch of the South African
League, barred from local demonstration, stumbled upon an alterna-
tive tactic. It framed a petition to the Crown. The means to link the
political struggle on the Rand with imperial sentiment at home and in
the Cape – the trick that had eluded Milner – had at last been found. It
was a turning point.
In fact, the first Uitlander petition was turned away (to Milner’s
consternation) by his locum tenens in Cape Town. But the Transvaal
government now showed open signs of anxiety. In February 1899,
it attempted to divide its opponents by negotiating the ‘Great Deal’
with the mining houses, offering certain commercial concessions and
a modest extension of political rights in exchange for a public dis-
avowal by the houses of ‘political agitation’.
58
With Milner’s encour-
agement, Fitzpatrick, the vital linkman between the mining houses
and the political movement, sabotaged the agreement by premature
publicity.
59
Both men calculated that imperial intervention – evident
in Chamberlain’s renewed protest over the dynamite monopoly and
his private warnings to the mining houses against the ‘Great Deal’
– could be mobilised. In March, the second Uitlander petition (with
more than 20,000 signatures) was forwarded to London. Chamber-
lain had little choice but to accept it, since rebuffing it would have
meant repudiating the ‘suzerainty’ which he had asserted in principle
but avoided in practice. By early May it was clear that a new round
of imperial pressure would supercharge the complaints of the mining
houses and the Uitlanders. Milner’s famous despatch likening their
treatment to that of a servile class of ‘helots’
60
was artfully designed to
raise ethnic feeling at home and in South Africa to fever pitch. Behind
Milner’s populist rhetoric rallied the followers of Rhodes and the
League. In Britain, he could rely on a chorus of journalists and lob-
bies, and here too Rhodes conducted a parallel campaign. Together
with Alfred Beit, one of his closest allies, Rhodes heavily subsidised the
(Imperial) South Africa Association, founded in 1896 to campaign for
the Uitlander cause.
61
In the Transvaal, said The Times, was a ‘vast
number of British subjects whose grievances cannot be denied’. Could
239 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
Britain afford to let its protection be seen as ‘inefficient against an
insignificant Republic’.
62
Kruger was too old a hand in imperial politics not to see the
danger. Rhodes and Milner might ‘bounce’ the Imperial government
into armed intervention before cooler judgment prevailed. By agreeing
to meet Milner at Bloemfontein at the end of May 1899 to discuss
Uitlander rights, he hoped to appease ‘moderate’ opinion in Britain and
deflate the jingo mood. He probably calculated that a limited extension
of the franchise would allow Chamberlain to draw back from con-
frontation. If so, it was a shrewd estimate. But at Bloemfontein Milner
refused to negotiate, insisting upon the vote for Uitlanders of five years’
residence and a fixed allocation of seats for the Rand. When Kruger
refused, Milner broke off the talks. Chamberlain was furious. British
opinion, Selborne (his deputy) warned Milner, was not ready for war.
Milner’s helot despatch had made less public impact than had been
expected: ‘we simply cannot force the pace.’
63
Milner was in despair.
‘British South Africa had been tuned to concert pitch’, he told Selborne.
But now Chamberlain was playing for time. ‘He seems to me to wish
a patch-up.’ But delay would erode the loyalty and resolution of the
Uitlanders and their local supporters: the Transvaal would use it to pre-
pare for war. Unless London was ready to stand firm and to send troop
reinforcements to show it meant business, Milner concluded bluntly,
he would ask to be removed.
64
At the eleventh hour it seemed that Kruger was about to repeat
his earlier triumphs in 1881 and 1884. Milner and Rhodes could huff
and puff. ‘English’ opinion in the towns could seethe at Boer injustice.
Editorials might rage. But, as Milner remarked candidly, Boer com-
mandos with their rifles and horses, backed by the heavy guns that
Kruger had been buying, were more than a match for the scattered
British garrisons and the unarmed ‘English’ population. Unless London
steeled itself to send an ‘expedition’ to coerce the Transvaal, Kruger’s
combination of military and economic strength would steadily tilt the
regional balance in his favour. Why then did the Transvaal government
not stand firm on Kruger’s offer at Bloemfontein and test London’s
nerve in the way that Milner feared?
In reality, both principals, Kruger and the British cabinet, were
more vulnerable than they appeared to the campaign that Rhodes and
Milner had orchestrated. Chamberlain’s instinct had been to settle.
But he was faced with Uitlander hostility to any retreat from Milner’s
240 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
demands at Bloemfontein
65
and with signs of widespread feeling in
Britain that the Uitlander cause could not be abandoned.
66
Chamber-
lain, whose own political ambition was far from sated, was reluctant
to alienate his natural supporters. Both he and his cabinet colleagues
now saw that anything short of Milner’s demands on the franchise
issue would count as a failure to assert the supremacy (and uphold the
suzerainty) on which they had always insisted. For their part, Kruger
and his agile lieutenant, the youthful J. C. Smuts, also realised that
some agreement must be reached: to avert the danger of imperial inter-
vention; to ease the threat that ‘loyalist’ ministries would take office
in the Cape and Natal; and to stave off the slump brought by political
uncertainty to the Rand. But, in seeking a way out of the franchise
dispute, Smuts made a fatal misjudgment.
Smuts was the acceptable reformist face of the Kruger regime. A
Cape Afrikaner, Cambridge educated, a passionate admirer of Rhodes
before the Raid, Smuts regarded white unity as the most urgent polit-
ical need in South Africa. ‘We want a great South African national-
ity’, he declared in 1895.
67
It was the deeper struggle of whites against
blacks that mattered most. Left unplacated, Uitlander grievances would
divide the whites and invite imperial meddling – the real threat to
white supremacy. But Smuts was determined to secure a quid pro quo
for conceding the Uitlander vote. Britain, he insisted, must give up
its claim to influence the Transvaal’s internal affairs: ‘the suzerainty
was pure nonsense’ and should tacitly lapse.
68
Perhaps he believed
that the Salisbury government, with so many commitments abroad,
would shrink from war for a phrase, once the substance of Uitlander
demands had been met. He may well have assumed that neither Kruger
nor the Transvaal Raad (assembly) would accept a one-sided bargain.
Whatever its motive, Smuts’ move broke the iron rule that Kruger had
carefully observed in his dealings with the British: not to challenge
openly the provisions of the 1884 Convention in which Britain’s diplo-
matic primacy was clearly stated. Smuts’ condition was understood in
London as a bid for diplomatic freedom.
69
It was confirmation that
British supremacy was really at stake, not merely the detail of the Uit-
lander franchise: Kruger’s real motive was at last laid bare. Negotiations
collapsed. Early in September 1899, the cabinet authorised the troop
reinforcements for which Milner had been begging and began to pon-
der an ultimatum. Before they could send it, Kruger despatched his own
demanding the troops’ recall. On 11 October, the war began.
241 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
The causes of the South African War have been endlessly
debated. On one side were those who saw the policy of Milner and
Chamberlain as a form of economic imperialism. There were several
versions of this argument. One maintained that capitalism – the Rand-
lords – had manipulated ‘imperialism’ – Milner and the Imperial gov-
ernment – into imposing their programme on Kruger to the point of
war. Another that Kruger’s ‘pre-modern’ republic was intolerable to
British leaders and especially to Milner for whom capitalism was an
indispensable part of modernity.
70
A third that British policy was driven
most of all by the need to ensure the flow of Transvaal gold to London
to support the gold reserves of the Bank of England. None of these
arguments has withstood close scrutiny or mustered convincing docu-
mentary evidence. The Randlords, while bitterly opposed to aspects of
Kruger’s regime, showed no inclination to fish for trouble in London
and preferred to settle their differences amicably with the Transvaal
government. Kruger was much more amenable to the needs of the min-
ing industry than was assumed by writers who saw the war as the clash
between modern capitalism and a pre-modern state.
71
No evidence has
been found that in the critical period before the war the supply of
gold became an issue for British policy-makers. Milner himself, while
contemptuous of Kruger’s misgovernment and corruption, showed no
desire, even in the most private correspondence, to annex the Transvaal
for commercial reasons, let alone to go to war to replace Kruger with
an oligarchy of Randlords.
The result has been to confirm the verdict pronounced more
than forty years ago by the shrewdest analysts of late-Victorian imperi-
alism. The British went to war, concluded Gallagher and Robinson, to
defend their regional supremacy and its geopolitical corollary, control
of the Cape and the sea route to India.
72
The sudden economic trans-
formation of the Transvaal mattered not because it created new wealth
to annex but because it gave Kruger the means to assert fuller indepen-
dence and, sooner or later, to drag the rest of South Africa after him out
of the British imperium. The stalemate between the coastal colonies and
the highveld interior (the reason for the persistent failure of confedera-
tion) was about to be resolved in favour of Kruger’s all-powerful gold-
state. In the struggle to contain the secondary effects of the Transvaal’s
economic revolution, Milner had rehearsed every grievance, inflamed
every issue and recruited every ally – until his relentless alarmism even-
tually drove home the threat Kruger posed to British supremacy. But
242 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
what weighed most with British ministers, and especially with Lord
Salisbury, the master of Realpolitik, was neither the economic stake
British interests had amassed nor the rights of the Uitlanders – those
‘people whom we despise’. It was the necessity of preserving, in more
arduous conditions and by more vigorous methods, the old mid-
Victorian supremacy in a vital strategic sphere.
This remains the most convincing account of the ultimate objec-
tive of British intervention in September 1899. But it does not do jus-
tice to the wider causes of the war, nor to the pressures that beat
upon an uncertain cabinet. What made South Africa the sternest test
of late-Victorian imperialism was the collision of three political forces
of exceptional intensity. The first was the enormous geopolitical invest-
ment the British had made in the exclusion of any rival great power
south and east of the Zambezi. It was not only a question of safe-
guarding the Cape. The ink was scarcely dry on the diplomatic map
of Africa and the partition of China and the Middle East was on the
cards. The surrender of British primacy in a region where their interests
were so important and of such long standing would have implied an
astonishing loss of confidence. Salisbury’s sovereign cure for geopol-
itical uncertainty – the careful demarcation of spheres – would have
been jettisoned, with unforeseeable consequences. It was inevitable,
once the argument over Uitlander rights turned into a dispute about
paramountcy, that Salisbury would insist on Kruger’s submission. The
‘old’ British interest in the Cape had become part of a ‘new’ British
stake in the peaceful partition of the world.
Salisbury’s misfortune was that the three-masted barque (Salis-
bury was fond of maritime metaphors) of his partition diplomacy was
struck amidships by a state-building project of unusual strength. Until
the 1880s the Transvaal had been a ramshackle frontier settlement, an
African Costaguana. After Britain’s failed annexation, Kruger’s per-
sonal rule imposed the rudiments of statehood. The discovery and
exploitation of gold after 1886 was widely expected to rot the foun-
dations of what Milner was to call a ‘mediaeval race oligarchy’. Immi-
grants would swamp the old burghers; civilised commerce would dis-
place their predatory pastoralism; Cape liberalism would discredit their
crude trekker republicanism. Like the Trojan horse, the Rand would
conceal an invading army ready at the signal to capture the Boer citadel
and open its gates to British influence. Instead, Kruger skilfully utilised
the bonanza of gold to reinforce his Afrikaner state. The Afro-Asian
world was littered with failures in the ‘race against time’ to modernise
243 / The weakest link: Britain in South Africa
before conquest: Kruger meant to be a winner. He was helped by the
distinctive political economy of the goldfields. The Rand swelled his
revenues, but remained a geographical and social enclave. It was easily
contained, as was shown by the Jameson Raid and its aftermath. It
depended heavily upon the state for its (black) labour supply and for
transport. Its white population – many of them transients
73
–couldbe
treated as restless aliens or guest-workers. Mining revenues and com-
mercial prosperity served not (in the short term) to liberalise Kruger’s
state but to enlarge the patronage at his disposal and consolidate a
loyal burgher elite. They also paid for the arsenal of heavy weapons
to supplement the citizen commando. Under these conditions, to be a
landlocked state in the South African interior was no longer the hand-
icap it had originally seemed. Guarded by geography and the passive
sympathy of the Cape Afrikaners, Kruger’s South African republic had
fashioned an exceptionally favourable geopolitical niche in a world of
imperialisms.
It is at best uncertain whether Salisbury’s government would
have had the will, the means or the opportunity to throttle Kruger’s
quiet bid for independence but for the intervention of a third force.
It was also doubtful whether the Imperial Factor alone was a match
for the Transvaal whites, any more than it had been in 1880.But,
since the 1880s, the political landscape of the sub-continent had been
transformed and not just by gold. Rhodes had outflanked the Transvaal
and checked its expansion. By astute publicity and prodigal largesse he
harnessed the speculative frenzy of the 1890s to the idea of British
expansion in Southern Africa. His disaster in 1896 was a check, but
by that time his efforts to strangle Kruger had begun to mobilise new
and unexpected support. Jameson’s fiasco had roused an ethnic ‘British’
movement in the Cape which soon spread to the Rand. Its leaders there,
with little prospect of imperial deliverance, looked to the Cape for
support. Building a local constituency was uphill work. Many miners
were short-term migrants with little interest in local politics. Many
suspected the League to be a front organisation for the mine-owners,
a suspicion Kruger tried to encourage. But, by the middle of 1899,the
Edgar case and the new tactic of petitioning the Crown, had given the
League far greater credibility as the voice of the Uitlander.
74
The League’s success among British settlers in South Africa
was symptomatic of a wider late-Victorian phenomenon. ‘Britannic’
nationalism was fiercest where the claim of British communities to social
and cultural predominance was challenged: by Metis, East Europeans,
244 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
French Canadians, Catholic Irishmen, Chinese migrants or Transvaal
Boers. It was fostered by the growing closeness of educational and
sporting connections, the new swiftness of communication, the growth
of the press, the convergence between the urban society of the over-
seas British and their counterparts at home. It was no coincidence
that the Wanderers club in Johannesburg, with its fierce assertion of
British sporting values, was closely identified with the League and the
venue for its meetings when permitted.
75
The League’s appeal was
to an injured sense of ethnic and cultural superiority. At a meeting
in June 1899, wrote one Uitlander, the League’s Transvaal secretary,
Thomas Dodds, ‘was cheered as . . . I have never heard any man cheered
before, particularly at his words “we appeal to Caesar”. He knows
well the pride of race – of which thank God I still have a small portion
left in me.’
76
Dodds’ message was as obvious as it was popular: the
Uitlanders were Roman citizens whose emperor would come to chas-
tise the barbarians. Fitzpatrick’s account of Uitlander suffering The
Transvaal From Within, circulated at the same time in Britain, embod-
ied a similar appeal.
77
The Transvaal government was bound to suspect that the
League was not only the voice of British ‘race patriotism’ but the tool of
Rhodes’ ambition. Despite his electoral defeat in 1898, Rhodes’ hand
was seen everywhere. To the Transvaal League he was its ultimate
leader.
78
Rhodes’ formula of ‘equal rights for all white men’ inspired
the League’s campaign for the franchise and spearheaded its appeal
in Britain.
79
Rhodes kept in close touch with the campaign waged at
home (and with his help) by the South Africa Association’s campaign.
80
To the Transvaal Boers, the ‘great amalgamator’ had become the great
manipulator. ‘Rhodes presses the button and the figure works’ was
how Fitzpatrick described their fear.
81
As a result, the Transvaal lead-
ers were anxious to forestall imperial intervention but also to break the
alliance between the Uitlanders and Rhodes symbolised by the League.
In his negotiations with Fitzpatrick, the Uitlander spokesman in March
1899, Smuts pressed him to repudiate the connection with the League
in the Cape. Fitzpatrick’s reply was uncompromising. The League, he
told Smuts (or so he claimed in a speech), ‘represent[s] a very large
section in South Africa which section has been very friendly to us’. To
his Uitlander audience he added: ‘They [i.e. the Cape ‘English’] are my
people and I (for one) shall not turn my back on them . . . They are our
people and we will stick to them.’
82