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

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THE EDWARDIAN TRANSITION

The last long decade before the outbreak of the First World War was

a proving ground. It tested the extent to which the British had been

able to adapt their superstructure of power and inﬂuence to the more

strenuous global conditions that set in during the 1880sand1890sand

reached a further peak of intensity after 1900. The judgment of histori-

ans has been variable. The Edwardian decade has sometimes been seen

as the ‘high noon’ of empire, the last hurrah of a self-conﬁdent imperi-

alism. But, usually, the view has been sterner. Indeed, the more closely

the Edwardians have been scrutinised, the more they seem prone to

well-merited anxieties. Far from delivering a new security, their aban-

donment of ‘splendid isolation’ brought the uncertain liabilities of the

Triple Entente and an uneasy dependence on Japan in East Asia. The

cost of defending their naval supremacy was a furious arms race with

Germany, and ended in a strategic withdrawal from the Mediterranean

Sea. The Edwardian economy lost ground on productivity, and real

incomes stagnated – one cause of large-scale industrial unrest in the

last years of peace. The scale of mass poverty revealed by contempo-

rary inquiry was an indictment of both ‘national efﬁciency’ and social

justice. Domestic stability was threatened by ﬁerce divisions over tariffs,

taxation and the constitution. The revival of the Irish Question after

1910 highlighted the failure of parliamentary government to resolve the

future of Ulster and raised the spectre of civil war in the British Isles.

On this view, it is easy to see why the last years before the

First World War are often contrasted unfavourably with the mid-

Victorian era. Late-Victorian Britain was a ‘declining hegemon’; Edwar-

dian Britain a ‘weary titan’. But the reasoning here is faulty. Britain’s

‘hegemonic’ status in the mid-nineteenth century is often invoked but

rarely described. It is a plausible myth. British power in mid-century

256 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

had little purchase over much of continental Europe where allies were

vital to intervention or leverage. Much of the non-European world lay

beyond the reach of either the Royal Navy or the Indian Army. The

sphere of mid-Victorian Britain’s economic primacy was wide (though

far from global) but it was also shallow – since much of it was barely

exploited. The late Victorians’ empire was richer as well as bigger. Too

much can be made of their ‘relative decline’, especially when the mea-

sures for it are vague. Too little has been made of the rising wealth of

the Edwardians’ empire and the growing mass of assets they were piling

up abroad. Indeed, for Edwardian Britain, the real question was not the

retention or loss of a nebulous ‘hegemony’, but whether, as the British

system expanded in a more intensely competitive world, its parts could

be made to cohere.

Imperial grand strategy and the South African War

Before 1899, the grand strategy of empire had seemed obvious. British

foreign policy was the policy of a sea-power, the sea-power. The Royal

Navy was assumed to be capable of defeating any naval force that chal-

lenged it in a general war. Command of the sea would be secured by a

decisive victory and the destruction of the enemy ﬂeet – as had happened

at Trafalgar. Thereafter, the great archipelago of British interests and

possessions spread across the globe would be invulnerable to invasion –

with the signal exceptions of India and Canada. British sea-power

would apply the brutal tourniquet of blockade to bring the enemy

to terms. The Navy was thus the great defensive and offensive weapon

of British world power. By contrast, the functions of the Army were

of almost secondary importance. It existed to support the civil power

at home, not least in Ireland; to supply men for the large contingent

maintained in India; to garrison the bases and coaling stations scat-

tered round the world; to provide for home defence in the unlikely

event of an invasion undetected by the Navy; and to supply, if need

be, an expeditionary force of up to 70,000 men for service overseas.

In the Stanhope memorandum of 1891 that set out the Army’s role in

this order, the likelihood of such an expeditionary force being sent to

Europe was treated as of almost fantastic improbability.

These strategic preconceptions dictated the distribution of

British forces around the world and inﬂuenced their formations and

257 / The Edwardian transition

tactics. The Navy was deployed on nine stations, each embracing a vast

area of sea. On the Home Station were eighteen battleships and sixteen

cruisers as well as a mass of smaller craft: this was the front line against

invasion and the reserve against emergency elsewhere. In the Mediter-

ranean, where the British had the greatest reason to fear a combined

assault by France and Russia and much to lose, they kept a large force

of twelve battleships and thirteen cruisers in a ﬂeet of more than forty

ships. On other stations, with the exception of China, they relied upon

cruisers to maintain their seaborne primacy: ten in the Western Atlantic

(the North America and West Indies station), two off the east coast of

South America; four in the Eastern Paciﬁc; seven to patrol the Cape

of Good Hope and the West African coast; four on the East Indies

station; and eight on the Australian.

On extra-European stations, the

most visible sign of British sea-power was often the gunboat, a small,

lightly armed ship of some 600 tons with a crew of between 60 and

100.

But the workhorse of British sea-power beyond European waters

was the faster, well-armed, long-range cruiser, patrolling the sea-lanes

and paying the courtesy calls that served as a none too subtle reminder

that coastal states without navies and who depended upon the revenues

from trade were wise to avoid the sea-power’s displeasure.

By contrast with the Navy, the Army was somewhat more heav-

ily concentrated. On the eve of the South African War it disposed of 31

cavalry regiments and 142 infantry battalions grouped in pairs to form

the county regiments created by the Cardwell reforms.

The infantry

battalions were maids-of-all-work. In 1896, eighteen were scattered in

pockets around the world from Bermuda to Hong Kong, three were in

Egypt, three in South Africa, and ﬁfty-two were in India. The remainder

were at home, not so much as a striking force as a reservoir from which

the overseas units were ﬁlled up. Indeed, it was easy to imagine that

the Army at home existed chieﬂy to service the great garrison kept in

India since the Mutiny: this was the manpower problem that obsessed

its chiefs. Where the Army had seen action since the Crimean War it

had fought small wars with small formations against Asian or African

foes, usually lacking modern weapons.

On colonial battleﬁelds, indi-

vidual resource and the brute courage of a professional army substituted

for the staff skills and modern tactics prized by continental generals.

Against an uncivilised foe military doctrine was straightforward. ‘Dash

at the ﬁrst fellows that make their appearance’, said Wellington, the

greatest of the ‘sepoy generals’, ‘and the campaign will be ours.’

258 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

Of course, the late-Victorian system had been far from perfect.

The generals fretted constantly over the shortage of manpower. ‘We

live from hand to mouth, like the insolvent debtor who meets his daily

liabilities by shifts invented on the spur of the moment’, complained

Lord Wolseley in 1896. ‘Is this a real military system, or is it a system of

make-believe?’

The demand for more battleships on overseas stations

rose inexorably: in the Mediterranean after the Franco-Russian alliance,

and also in China. To cover the gaps, it had sometimes been necessary to

make guarded promises of joint defensive action, as Salisbury had done

with the Mediterranean agreements of 1887. Such precautions were

needed, he told Queen Victoria, against the danger of the continental

powers treating ‘the English Empire as divisible booty by which their

differences might be adjusted’.

But it was the South African War that

was cause and occasion for the most drastic review of grand strategy

since the 1860s.

There were several reasons for this. The defeats of ‘Black Week’

in December 1899 shattered any remaining complacency about the

likely performance of the Army in a war against a ﬁrst-class oppo-

nent. The humiliation of military failure bred a mood of recrimination

that surfaced during the war and afterwards at the Elgin Commission’s

enquiry into its conduct. ‘For frank, not to say malicious criticism of

one another’, remarked Milner sardonically in January 1900, ‘I know

of no set of men equal to our haute arm

ee.’

To the Royal Commission,

Kitchener and other senior ofﬁcers presented a catalogue of defects: the

poverty of intelligence; the shortage of staff skills; the age and inﬁr-

mity of battalion commanders; the absence of professionalism among

ofﬁcers; above all the lack of any means to control the movements of

an army far larger than the usual colonial expedition. One regimental

adjutant had been reduced to advertising in a Cape Town newspa-

per for information on the whereabouts of his unit.

‘Regarded as

an institution or society’, remarked Leopold Amery crushingly in The

Times History of the War in South Africa, ‘the British army of 1899

was undoubtedly a success . . . As a ﬁghting machine it was largely a

sham.’

During the war, the concentration of so much military man-

power in South Africa made the defence of India (the ﬁrst object of

imperial grand strategy) look increasingly precarious. With Russia’s

military frontier grinding towards the Himalayas, the Indian Viceroy

Lord Curzon insisted that in the event of war 70,000 men would have to

be sent immediately to India – a calculation the War Ofﬁce was forced

to accept in 1901.

Even if the men were available, South African

259 / The Edwardian transition

experience was bound to raise doubts about the Army’s ability to face

an Armageddon in the Hindu Kush.

But it was sea-power not the defence of India that touched the

rawest nerve and galvanised the British cabinet. When Lord Selborne

became First Lord of the Admiralty in November 1900, he quickly

sounded the alarm to his colleagues.

Britain faced a revival of French

sea-power in the Mediterranean, making Admiral Fisher’s call for more

battleships there irresistible. Simultaneously, the Boxer Rebellion in

China and the intervention by the Western Powers and Japan made the

risk of a forced partition far greater, and with it the chance of conﬂict

between the Powers. Britain had to match the rapid growth of Russia’s

eastern sea strength. ‘We could not afford’, wrote Selborne urgently,

‘to see our Chinese trade disappear, or to see Hong Kong and Singa-

pore fall, particularly not at a moment when a military struggle with

Russia might be in progress on the conﬁnes of India.’

For Selborne,

the emergency in East Asia on top of his Mediterranean difﬁculties was

the last straw. A new course was essential. The cabinet toyed uneasily

with a scheme to ally with Germany, but ﬂinched at the prospect of mil-

itary commitments in Europe. All the while, fear of Russia, that power

to whom ‘defeat, diplomatic, naval or military matters less . . . than to

any other power’,

grew steadily stronger. ‘A quarrel with Russia any-

where, about anything, means the invasion of India’, groaned Balfour,

Salisbury’s nephew and heir-apparent, in December 1901.

Without

allies, Britain would be fair game if France joined in. The short-term

solution was a naval alliance with Japan in East Asia, concluded not

without misgivings in January 1902. The end of the South African War

in May 1902 did nothing to ease the naval strain. ‘We must have a

force which is reasonably calculated to beat France and Russia’, wrote

Selborne in January 1903, ‘and we must have something in hand against

Germany.’

Meanwhile, London struggled inconclusively with army

reform to provide its share of the huge force of three or four hun-

dred thousand men that Kitchener (now Commander-in-Chief in India)

declared essential to repel an invasion brought closer by Russia’s new

strategic railways in Central Asia.

But the government’s real decision

was to endorse Selborne’s demand for a large rise in naval spending

(50 per cent greater by 1905 than in 1899) and the revolution in naval

deployment that Fisher had planned.

Fisher became First Sea Lord and the Navy’s professional head

in October 1904.

He was determined to match the French and Rus-

sians in the Mediterranean, where Britain’s imperial communications

260 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

were most vulnerable, and was passionately committed to equipping

the Navy with the fast, armoured ‘all big gun’ warships made possible

by technical advance. The price, as Fisher saw with brutal realism, was

the scrapping of large numbers of older, less powerful ships – ‘too weak

to ﬁght, too slow to run away’ – and the concentration of resources and

manpower in a modern battle-ﬂeet in European waters. In December

1904, Selborne announced a drastic redeployment. The South Atlantic

station was wound up, the China, East Indies and Australian stations

effectively merged. In place of the scattering of cruisers around the

world, four cruiser squadrons, kept mainly in Europe, would be ready

‘to show the ﬂag in imposing force, wherever it may be deemed to be

politically or strategically advisable’.

In the following year, the ﬁve

battleships on the China station were brought home. Large numbers of

gunboats, Fisher’s ‘bugtraps’, were swept away. The dreadnought age

had dawned.

The naval policies initiated by Selborne and Fisher were a

response to the weakness revealed by Britain’s isolation during the

South African War and the growth in German, French and Russian

sea-power. By 1907, the strategic situation had markedly improved, or

so it seemed. The threat of a Franco-Russian attack had all but disap-

peared; the danger of a combined assault by the three great European

powers had vanished. The reason lay in diplomatic success and vicari-

ous military good fortune. In April 1904, Salisbury’s successor as for-

eign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, at last succeeded where Salisbury had

failed in persuading France to agree to a comprehensive settlement of

outstanding disputes in the imperial sphere. At the heart of the ‘Entente

Cordiale’ was the mutual recognition of each other’s primacy in two

zones of great diplomatic sensitivity: Egypt, where the British ‘tem-

porary occupation’ had been an open sore in Anglo-French relations

since 1882; and Morocco, whose proximity to French Algeria made

its external connections a matter of intense concern to governments in

Paris. The British hoped that the Anglo-French entente would open the

way to an agreement with Russia, the real threat to their position in

India and East Asia. The prospect looked bleak, and when Russia and

Japan (Britain’s regional partner in East Asia) went to war in 1904 over

the future of Korea and Manchuria, the danger of an Anglo-Russian

clash brieﬂy seemed acute. But, in a dramatic reversal of expectations

(Fisher expected Russia to beat Japan),

Russian naval power was

shattered at the battle of Tsushima – Japan’s Trafalgar – in May 1905.

261 / The Edwardian transition

The British regained a clear margin of naval superiority over Germany,

France and Russia combined. In 1907, the Tsarist government, weak-

ened by defeat and revolution, accepted a diplomatic compromise in

Persia and Central Asia – where friction with Britain had been greatest –

that left southern Persia and Afghanistan, the ‘gates to India’, ﬁrmly in

the British sphere.

The Anglo-Russian entente completed the rap-

prochement between London and its long-standing rivals in the Outer

World. Meanwhile, in the diplomatic crisis of 1905–6, when Germany

had tried to disrupt the Anglo-French agreement over Morocco and

revive British isolation, the new alignment had held ﬁrm – just.

The promise of a new international equilibrium did not last

long. By the end of 1908, there was growing alarm in Britain at the

open challenge now posed by the ship-building programme of the

German navy. While fears about the German plans were somewhat

exaggerated, the schedule for dreadnought construction by Germany’s

Mediterranean allies, Italy and Austria-Hungary, meant that a new

round of the arms race had begun. In February 1909, the Asquith

cabinet agreed to build eight new dreadnoughts, four more than their

original estimate, on the assumption that proof would be forthcom-

ing of German plans. By March, a full-blown ‘scare’ was under way,

rapidly reaching Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

An agitation

sprang up in Australia to give a dreadnought to the Royal Navy.

The

New Zealand government offered two dreadnoughts. The Canadian

government under Laurier compromised with a scheme for a Cana-

dian Naval Service.

At a special imperial conference on defence held

in July, the British Admiralty urged the formation of dominion ‘ﬂeet

units’, recognising that, in the Paciﬁc dominions, public opinion would

demand some local control over the ships for which it had paid – even

if they came under Imperial command in time of war. But the centre-

piece of British policy was the remorseless drift towards a single-minded

concentration on the naval race with Germany. Already in 1909,the

Admiralty had quietly accepted that it could no longer match the two

next strongest naval powers combined (the ‘two power standard’) and

must settle instead for a margin of 60 per cent over Germany. By 1912,

even this looked ambitious as a new German naval law was broached.

When the Haldane Mission failed to reach agreement with Berlin on a

standstill, the need to preserve superiority in the decisive battleground

of any Anglo-German naval war – the North Sea – forced the Asquith

government into a strategic revolution.

262 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

The revolution was a naval withdrawal from the Mediterranean

announced in July 1912 by Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the

Admiralty. The most powerful ships of the Mediterranean ﬂeet were

to be redeployed to the North Sea: the rest would be no match for the

Austrian or Italian dreadnoughts of Germany’s allies. To protect her

vast Mediterranean interests, her marine highway to the East and the

naval approaches to Egypt, Britain would rely instead on the good-

will of France, whose Atlantic squadron was transferred from Brest to

Toulon in September. The clear implication was a deepening commit-

ment to the support of France in any European conﬂict – the subject of

secret ‘military conversations’ between the two general staffs since the

Moroccan crisis of 1905–6. Britain’s army, like her navy, now seemed

to be focused not on the defence of a far-ﬂung empire, but on deterring

a German bid for primacy in Europe.

On the face of it, the change in Britain’s strategic fortunes since

the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899 had been dra-

matic. Indeed, the new pattern of world politics suggested that between

1900 and 1914 Britain and its world-system had experienced a sharp

phase of relative decline. The symptoms seem obvious. In regions once

thought vital to British interests, their protection had been left to others

or to luck. Once, governments in London had cut a lordly dash, treat-

ing European diplomacy with insouciance and basing British power on

seaborne self-reliance. Now they had been dragged into the European

maelstrom as reluctant players in a volatile game of competing alliances.

The Army had been remodelled for convenient deployment on the Euro-

pean mainland, almost unthinkable before 1900. The old priorities of

global power had shrunk to a continental commitment. Britain could no

longer afford the luxury of ‘splendid isolation’ because British opinion

would no longer pay for it. Indeed, as great power competition hotted

up, British industrial power had slipped back. In a period of relative eco-

nomic decline, the strain of upholding a worldwide pre-eminence and

safeguarding the regional security of the British Isles had become too

great. Over-extension abroad and under-performance at home forced

a strategic change. The question was: if Britain gave up its role as the

strategic guardian of the British system, how long would it be before

its cohesion began to falter, its subject peoples became restless and its

enemies closed in?

Plausible in its own terms, this description is too apocalyptic.

‘Splendid isolation’ was a romantic ﬁction. An active diplomacy in

263 / The Edwardian transition

Europe had always been vital to imperial interests: nowhere more so

than in Egypt and the Near East. It was certainly true that there had been

a fundamental shift in the theory and practice of British grand strategy.

There was a new strategic setting. Britain’s world interests were less

secure. The margin of safety was narrower. The brittle alignments and

fractious diplomacy of pre-1914 Europe can be seen with hindsight to

foreshadow a catastrophic war. But the scale of pre-war change should

not be exaggerated. The real question was not whether there had been

a relative decline from some imaginary benchmark of mid-Victorian

‘primacy’, but whether the British were still strong enough to protect

their system against rival powers – by whatever means. To answer

this properly, and to take a more realistic view of Edwardian strategy,

requires some account of the wider geopolitical scene.

Britain in world politics

The new shape of world politics after 1900 affected all the great powers

competing to be ‘world states’. To none of them did it offer unequivocal

advantage, or a clear road to primacy and hegemonic status. Each faced

political risks at home and abroad that drastically reduced the scope

for forceful action on the international stage. This applied to Germany,

Russia and the United States, the powers that were best placed to take

the initiative. Germany was the strongest. A sustained programme of

naval expansion had made it the principal threat to British sea-power.

Germany’s foreign trade had expanded rapidly and its new merchant

ﬂeet, like its navy, was second only to Britain’s. German investment

had begun to penetrate regions like Latin America, long the preserve of

British capital.

Not surprisingly, in some naval, shipping and colonial

circles, as well as among conservatives hostile to the liberal capitalism

with which London was so closely identiﬁed, antagonism to Britain

was commonplace. But, while German policy was committed to the

Tirpitz plan, and a high seas ﬂeet strong enough to enforce neutral-

ity on Britain in the event of continental war, there was little enthu-

siasm in Berlin for a frontal assault on the British system. German

diplomacy shifted uneasily between Bismarckism and the Weltpolitik

favoured by the Kaiser. The Bismarckian tradition looked coolly on

imperial self-assertion and the German nationalism with which it was

associated. For Bismarck, the gravest threat to the new German Empire

264 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

had been the growth of national feeling among the subject peoples of

Eastern and Central Europe: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and

South Slavs.

Hence German security required good relations between

the three great imperial monarchies ruling over this vast multi-ethnic

Mitteleuropa: the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanovs. British

goodwill should be cultivated as a counterpoise to France whose hope

of revanche and the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine made it the joker of

European diplomacy. This more conservative view of German interests

grew stronger in the last years before 1914. After 1909,therewasno

question of outbuilding Britain in dreadnoughts, not least because the

revenue base of the German central government was much more limited

than that of its British counterpart.

As the means to imperial expan-

sion, the high seas ﬂeet became a broken reed. Meanwhile, the fate of

Mitteleuropa had become more pressing – and Austro-Russian antipa-

thy more dangerous. By the time of the First Balkan War (1912–

13), Berlin was anxious to mend its fences with London and came

to terms over the future disposal of Portugal’s colonies (should Lis-

bon’s bankruptcy bring them on the ‘market’) and the railway line to

the Persian Gulf (the Bagdadbahn). But one crucial element of Welt-

politik remained embedded in German policy. The Kaiser’s government

refused to abandon its naval programme without the promise of British

neutrality in a European conﬂict. It was exactly the concession which

(as we shall see) the logic of Edwardian diplomacy was bound to reject.

The novelty and seriousness of Germany’s naval challenge –

and the reason why it aroused so ﬁerce a reaction in Britain – was

that it threatened to nullify the British claim to be a great power in

Europe, a claim founded ultimately on the possession of sea-power.

But for more than a century it had been the insidious threat of

Russian expansion that had haunted British thinking on imperial

defence. What made Russia so dangerous, thought the policy-makers,

was its ability to exert pressure on four different regions of great strate-

gic or commercial importance to Britain: the maritime corridor between

the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (the ‘Straits’); Persia and the

Persian Gulf; Afghanistan and the inner Asian frontiers of India; and

North China and Peking. In British eyes, the danger was compounded

by the brute scale of Russia’s resources, especially in manpower, and

the erratic, inscrutable processes of Russian policy. In a secretive

hothouse atmosphere, periodically scorched by the gusts of pan-Slav

emotion, rival court camarillas competed for the Tsar’s capricious