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

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285 / The Edwardian transition

in all three. With its monetary controls now centralised in London, the

Indian economy (and its vital functions) had been brought under closer

imperial supervision. For the white dominions, not only were British

markets and capital indispensable, but close contacts with London were

needed for local businessmen who hoped to expand abroad, invest sur-

plus funds or exploit their expertise in less developed economies. In the

British system, all (or almost all) commercial roads led to London. They

would do for so long as London could play its part in global commerce;

so long as the British economy could produce, consume and invest on

an imperial scale; so long as its chosen partners could maintain their

hectic growth; and so long as Britain was the safest and strongest haven

for foreign money. But, on all these scores, even in the boom years up

to 1914, there was at least some room for doubt.

Some of the symptoms of later weakness were already visible.

For an advanced economy, the British were much too dependent upon

the comparatively simple and labour-intensive technology of textile-

making. They depended too heavily on coal, as an export and as a fuel.

Their rate of saving was low and the failure to invest at home was

reﬂected in stagnating industrial productivity. As many social critics

complained, too much of the population was paid too little, a con-

sequence of widespread under-employment. This limited consumption

and promoted the migration that remained so marked a feature of

British life. Among Britain’s most dynamic trading partners, there were

signs that the furious expansion of their agrarian economies was level-

ling off: in New Zealand, Canada and Argentina. Nor was the City’s

great role as banker to the world without risk. The American crisis of

1907 had shown that funds that rushed in could also rush out. The

large volume of short-term funds that London attracted were poten-

tially destabilising. Just holding them there might mean interest rates

too high for domestic growth. Above all, perhaps, by relying so much

on the proceeds of global trade, the British had staked their future on a

world without war, or, at least, on a world without world-war. Some

of these anxieties lay behind the campaign for tariff reform in Britain.

Protection was meant to reduce Britain’s over-exposure to external

economic forces. Protectionists like Milner insisted that, in the age of

world-states, cosmopolitanism was dead and its champions deluded. At

the time prosperity helped deﬂate the protectionist cause. The imperial-

ism of free trade still ruled. Its theory and practice had been the secret of

both Victorian expansion and its Edwardian climax. The implications

286 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

of its breakdown were massive. Acceptance of its logic and recognition

of its beneﬁts had held together the disparate elements of the British

world-system. It weathered the Edwardian squalls. But its real test was

to come.

The politics of cohesion

Like any worldwide empire, the British system was a prey to centrifugal

forces. Resentment, recalcitrance, resistance and rebellion came natu-

rally to those who felt (in different ways) the weight of British political

and ﬁnancial power. Political independence, economic self-sufﬁciency,

or cultural autonomy promised obvious gains to at least some colonial

(and semi-colonial) elites. But only if the conditions were right, the costs

were low and the beneﬁts clear.

In the long Edwardian decade, the economic and geopolitical

conditions we have examined were, in general, imperially benign. They

favoured not the break-up of empire but its cohesion and closer inte-

gration. In terms of grand strategy, the danger to imperial solidarity

had been twofold. If British power was insufﬁcient to exclude rival

inﬂuence from its spheres, or promised inadequate protection against

external attack, colonial leaders would drift towards home-grown poli-

cies in defence and diplomacy. In dependencies, the prestige of British

rule would fall, forcing a choice between coercion and concession. The

second danger was that the costs of defence would spiral uncontrol-

lably. In the British system, they would fall most heavily on taxpayers

at home and in India. The likely consequence would be a domestic

revolt against imperial commitments and an Indian revolt against a

grasping Raj.

In the event, both dangers were contained with surprising ease.

Great power competition after 1900 was largely turned to Britain’s

advantage. Crucially, the main burden of defence was naval, and the

main focus of fear was home not colonial – in Britain itself. Hence

British opinion was easily rallied and the Indian taxpayer left unscathed.

As an added bonus, the self-governing dominions were readily per-

suaded of the threat to British sea-power and of the urgency of offer-

ing (some) help. Though friction persisted (within the dominions and

between their governments and London), it was smoothed by the credi-

bility of British power, the aggressive demeanour of German diplomacy

287 / The Edwardian transition

and the global scale of great power rivalry: isolation was not an option.

Economic trends were similarly favourable. In the race for growth,

colonial politicians and businessmen looked more than ever to Britain

for money, markets or migrants. In a world of dynamic commerce,

autarky was a cul-de-sac. Proﬁts came from large combines and wide

connections. In Britain, commercial buoyancy was especially timely.

Naval spending ﬂoated on a high tide of revenue. Lloyd George’s new

taxes, controversial as they were, easily paid for the increase in naval

and social expenditure.

103

The economic burden of rearmament was

easily carried by the enormous surplus in the balance of payments. The

sense of general prosperity checked the appeal of tariffs and helped

smother the campaign for imperial preference. Since tariff reform and

its political rider ‘imperial unity’ (between Britain and the white domin-

ions) were at odds with the free trade basis of commercial empire and

excluded India, their disruptive potential for the British system would

have been considerable. Of course, the Edwardians were not free from

economic anxiety. In The Nation’s Wealth (1914), the radical MP Leo

Chiozza Money gloomily compared Britain’s natural resources with

those of Germany and the United States. But even he conceded that

Britain was still at the mid-point of her greatness: decline lay more than

a century away.

In Britain, then, the political climate was sympathetic to empire

but unpropitious for schemes of imperial ‘reform’. Public alarm over

defence shone a ﬁtful spotlight on the white dominions as sources of

loyal manpower. Their commercial prospects and migrant appeal were

touted more aggressively in the British press.

104

Imperial news was more

widely and professionally reported. An inﬂuential section of the political

elite (on both sides of the party line) was attracted to the idea of ‘closer

union’ with the sister nations of ‘Greater Britain’. But wide differences

existed on timing and method even among the enthusiasts. A broader

consensus prevailed that, while imperial unity was desirable, perhaps

even inevitable, imperial federation was at best premature, at worst

unworkable.

105

Towards India and the tropical dependencies, British

opinion was complacent. The Morley–Minto reforms had taken India

off the political agenda. The commercial promise of tropical territories

bought off half the critics of imperial aggrandisement. The new gospel

of imperial duty, artfully diffused (not least in The Times), disarmed

most of the rest. The radical critique of empire, fanned into ﬂame by

the South African War, burned low by the decade’s end. In the age

288 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

of diplomatic detente, constitutional devolution (in South Africa and

India) and social reform, ‘imperialism’ was less easily damned as the

road to national ruin.

106

The dominions

The dominions’ counterpart to this imperial attitude in Britain was the

‘Britannic nationalism’ of their English-speaking populations. Britannic

nationalism was both more and less than an afﬁrmation of empire loy-

alism. It asserted that Canada (or Australia or New Zealand) was (or

must soon become) ‘nations’ – the highest stage of political and cultural

development. Only as nations could the white dominions escape the

dependent, parochial quarrelsomeness of their colonial origins. Only

as nations could they offer their citizens security, opportunity and the

promise of progress, cultural as well as material. But they must be

‘British nations’, because it was British (or British-derived) institutions,

culture, ethnic origins and allegiance (to the British Crown) that held

them together. It was being ‘British’ that endowed them with their

‘progressive’ qualities and their sense of a manifest, expansionist des-

tiny. This was a far cry from colonial cringe. Nor was it always a

recipe for imperial harmony. Britannic nationalism demanded partner-

ship between Britain and the settler countries not central direction.

It meant a dominion commitment to imperial defence but a domin-

ion voice in imperial policy. It viewed empire as a cooperative and

‘Britishness’ as a common inheritance – not the private property of the

‘old country’.

There were good reasons why Britannic nationalism and its

message of political community among the British nations should have

been inﬂuential (though not uncontested) in the pre-war years. The

upsurge in trade, migration and investment showed that British expan-

sion, far from being over, was more vigorous than ever. Whatever

metropolitan doubters might say, there was little dispute on the impe-

rial frontier that the future belonged to ‘white men’s countries’. So long,

that was, as they took pains to defend their ‘inheritance’. It was signif-

icant that alarm in Britain over Germany’s threat to the naval shield

coincided with dominion fears of the ‘Yellow Peril’ and of Japanese

hegemony in the Paciﬁc. These common sources of fear and hope took

on added colour in each dominion. In Canada, it was resentment at

the French Canadians’ ‘disloyalty’ and their obstruction of the nation-

making programme of the English Canadians. In Australia, the defence

289 / The Edwardian transition

of ‘White Australia’ against an imaginary Asian invasion became the

central purpose of the federation achieved in 1900 and the guarantee of

its social cohesion. In New Zealand, racial purity as a ‘British’ country

was part of the message of social reform in the Liberal era after 1890.

Here, too, external defence and internal peace made a double case

for Britannic sentiment. Relations between the dominions and Down-

ing Street may have been tetchy. The scale of contribution to imperial

defence was bound to be controversial – bitterly so in Canada. The

cause was not so much doubt about the imperial association as division

over how its burdens should be shared.

In South Africa, Britannic nationalism played a different part.

The white ‘nation’ was predominantly Afrikaner not British. The grant

of self-government to the former Boer republics had brought Afrikaner

not British politicians to power. Union in 1910 gave them control over a

unitary (not federal) dominion. To the ex-proconsul Lord Milner, con-

ceding self-government before the British could form a majority among

whites had been disastrous. ‘I absolutely decline’, he wrote in 1908,

‘to take any further account of South Africa in drawing up the balance

sheet of empire.’

107

But, he conceded, there was a saving grace. Because

South Africa was ‘technically a British country’, British emigrants could

exert their improving inﬂuence without losing their nationality. ‘It may

be’, he concluded, ‘that it is the destiny of the Englishman in South

Africa to turn the scale in South Africa to save the better native [i.e.

Afrikaner] element from being submerged by the worse.’

108

The leading

‘English’ politicians in South Africa adopted this view. Their Progres-

sive (Unionist after 1910) party embraced the classic programme of

Britannic nationalism: support for immigration, the ‘Imperial Navy’

and imperial preference in a ‘united . . . nation, forming an integral

part of the Empire and cooperating harmoniously with Imperial

authority’.

109

But the party’s leaders saw that, with an ‘English’ minor-

ity, opposition to the Afrikaners on purely racial lines was futile.

Instead, their object must be to divide the ‘extreme racial backveld’

section from the ‘progressive’ elements under Botha and Smuts.

110

was vital to prevent the Free State politicians, Hertzog and Steyn, and

their ‘cultural nationalist’ allies in the Cape’s Afrikaner Bond, from

dominating the government.

Botha was too shrewd to wear his heart on his sleeve. He was an

adept of the ambiguous phrase. His regime, grumbled Milner’s South

African conﬁdant Percy Fitzpatrick, was ‘dishonest and unclean’.

111

290 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

But he made a reassuring ﬁgure. ‘Ties with the Mother Country must

be strengthened’, he declared in 1910. He wanted a ‘South African

nationality . . . able to take an honourable place in the ranks of sister

states’.

112

‘Botha really wants to do what is best for the British Empire’,

wrote Walter Long, a senior British Conservative who met him at the

Imperial Conference in 1911. It would be disastrous to alienate him.

113

Even Milner agreed he was better than any alternative.

114

Both urged

in favour of Jameson’s policy of conditional cooperation. Botha’s own

motives are hard to reconstruct. Fitzpatrick believed that both he and

Smuts had realised that they could not rule through the ‘Dutch’ (i.e.

Afrikaner) party alone.

115

This analysis seems plausible. Certainly, they

showed little inclination towards the cultural nationalism of their Cape

and Free State allies, though they were wary of its ethnic appeal. They

preferred to feel their way towards a more inclusive ‘South Africanism’

acceptable to ‘moderate’ Afrikaners and English – the old programme

of Rhodes before 1895. So in the ﬂuid aftermath of Union the local

Britannic nationalism operated in low key. But its role was crucial

nonetheless. For it served as a warning to Botha and Smuts that repu-

diation of the spirit of empire membership (never mind the letter of

British sovereignty) would drive the English into all-out opposition and

force them into the arms of those who wished to reverse the verdict of

1902.

India

Among the dominions, adhesion to the British system was a matter of

sentiment and calculation. It was nourished by the feeling of ‘British-

ness’, the beneﬁts of ‘British connection’ and the promise of inﬂuence

over British policy. Neither sentiment nor calculation had so much

scope in India. Indians, after all, had almost no share of executive power

in British-ruled (not princely) India. Their direct inﬂuence on imperial

policy was negligible. And, as Indian nationalists regularly complained,

India paid a tribute to Britain in money and men – burdens that London

dared not impose on the dominions.

The British ‘Civilians’ (the name was gradually slipping out of

use) were eager to cultivate Indian loyalty but uncertain how to do it.

By 1900, the dominant strain in their policy was an appeal to ‘feudal’

attitudes they thought typically Indian: a sense of fealty; a respect for

authority and the glamour of power. If India’s natural leaders were

princes and aristocrats, their instincts were conservative and royalist.

291 / The Edwardian transition

Hence British rule should clothe itself in imperial purple and assume the

dignity of the Mughal empire. The corollary was indifference approach-

ing hostility towards those Indians who had responded most enthusias-

tically to the modernising, liberal and ‘scientiﬁc’ face of British rule: the

‘microscopic minority’ organised in the Congress. Yet, in reality, this

group could not be ignored. The Civilians might have liked a feudal

polity: they certainly needed a proﬁtable colony. They had to foster the

modern India they came to dislike. They had to tolerate the Indians who

helped to make it work. And they had to accept that the microscopic

minority had the political means to embarrass their rule and upset their

faraway masters in London.

As we have seen, the Congress did this to some effect in the

years after 1905. But, in a larger view, political conditions in the pre-

war Raj did not favour a serious assault on India’s subordinate place

in the British world-system. The British had been able to stabilise their

military spending, a prime grievance of nationalist politics. Good times

in trade took the heat out of swadeshi agitation in Bengal. The princes

were appeased with the promise of non-interference. Muslims were

conciliated by separate electorates. The Congress moderates received

their schedule of constitutional reform: disappointment was buried in

the small print. Unappeased were the followers of Tilak whose ‘new

party’ principles bore the stamp of ‘cultural nationalism’: the repudia-

tion of British rule, not a plea to share in it. But Tilak was rejected by

the moderate majority: without their protection he was crushed by the

British.

For all their impatience with the Civilian Raj and its parsimo-

nious concessions, the Congress leaders were boxed in. In theory, they

could have widened their popular appeal. They could have taken the

Tilak road. But this was the low road to power through the cultiva-

tion of ‘sub-national’ feeling in India’s linguistic provinces: playing on

religion, caste or ethnic prejudice. It was a road the Civilians were deter-

mined to block. But the Congress leaders rejected it anyway, favouring

instead the ‘high’ road: entering on merit the ranks of the Civilians and

widening the scope of representative politics. In practice, their ‘national’

programme needed the British to abdicate voluntarily, allowing the

Congress, once installed in power, to ‘make a nation’ from above. The

only principle on which this nation could be made was the ‘British’

principle: a people uniﬁed not by religion or language, but by institu-

tions and allegiance. It was not surprising then that the Congress leaders

292 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

deﬁned their goal as a status equivalent to that of the white dominions;

that they protested their loyalty and proclaimed their attachment to

British values. Less conﬁdently than their dominion counterparts, these

Indian politicians also asserted a claim to be British, in ethos, attitude

and allegiance if not by ‘race’. They felt all the more keenly the ‘racial’

antagonism their aspirations aroused. Hence perhaps the heartfelt plea

of Surendranath Banerjea, long the most dynamic ﬁgure in Indian pol-

itics. ‘May I be permitted to make an appeal . . . to . . . the Government

of India’, he told the Indian legislative council in 1913,

That they may so discharge their exalted duties that this

sentiment may be deepened . . . that we may all feel and

realize, no matter whether we are Englishmen or

Scotchmen or Irishmen or Indians, that we are Britishers:

fellow-citizens, participating in the privileges and also in the

obligations of of a common Empire.

116

This was scarcely the promise of unconditional obedience to London’s

wishes. It was more a demand to be treated with respect. But it also

suggested how far the pre-war Congress was from contemplating a

future outside the Empire. As with the dominions, it was the terms not

the fact of membership it was determined to challenge.

The new empire in Africa

In the old empire, the central question of imperial politics was how far

the dominion peoples and Indian elites would identify their interests

with the British world-system. In the ‘new’ empire, the issue was more

fundamental. The buffer zones annexed to defend the mid-Victorian

imperium were a jigsaw legacy of partition. It was hard to imagine their

future as loyal imperial communities. Colonial states had to be made

before colonial societies could form inside them. In West Africa, British

rule before the Scramble had been conﬁned to coastal enclaves. In the

partition era after 1884, each enclave acquired an enormous hinter-

land (the exception was Gambia). Sovereignty was one thing, authority

another. Imposing British control on these vast interiors required con-

siderable force: against the Hut Tax revolt in Sierra Leone; against the

Ashanti in 1901; against the Yoruba states and Ibo peoples of Southern

Nigeria and the Muslim emirates of the North. With the defeat of this

293 / The Edwardian transition

inland resistance (Kano and Sokoto submitted to Lugard in 1902) came

the moment of political decision.

It might have been expected that the British would carry

upcountry the political system they had devised for the Coast. This

was far from democratic. But it provided for legislative bodies with

nominated African members;

117

an English legal system with juries, a

bar and a separate judiciary; and the beginnings of municipal govern-

ment. A ‘creole’ elite spreading east from Freetown (the metropole of

Creoledom) had grown up along the Coast, fervently conscious of its

progressive, Christian and civilised credentials, and eager to share in

the imperial advance.

118

But it soon became clear that the British had

other ideas.

The dominant factor was the need to impose a colonial pax as

quickly as possible and at minimum cost. With few sources of revenue

and heavy military outgoings, the British in the interior were eager to

settle with the emirs and chiefs they had defeated or overawed. There

was no time to replace them or to reconstruct their conquered polities

in the image of the Coast. It was easier and cheaper to restore the old

regimes on condition of loyalty, and exert British paramountcy directly

through a cadre of ‘Residents’ backed up by the threat of force. This

was the system devised for Northern Nigeria, variations of which were

applied in the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone. It left no room for leg-

islatures, municipalities or English law. When Northern and Southern

Nigeria were uniﬁed in 1914 to relieve the British Treasury of the bur-

den of the impecunious North (annual revenues £210,000 per annum)

at the expense of the South (annual revenue £2 million),

119

Lugard, the

architect of ‘amalgamation’ was careful to restrict coastal institutions

to the old colony of Lagos. He was determined to spread his favoured

system of ‘indirect rule’ as widely as possible. ‘Fixing’ the population

geographically and socially became the overriding principle of British

policy. It meant shoring up, or even inventing, ‘traditional’ rulers,

and excluding the ‘interference’ of creole lawyers and ‘speculators’

120

from the interior. Not surprisingly, the creole elite became increasingly

restive, protesting its loyalty but denouncing the drift towards racial

exclusion and arbitrary rule.

121

But its inﬂuence beyond the coastal

towns was limited. The conservative bias of British over-rule was con-

genial to its ‘traditional’ allies. The cash-crop revolution, bringing rising

incomes to an emergent peasantry, eased the strains of conquest. And,

294 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’

with the growth of its customs revenues, the colonial state in British

West Africa could afford to govern and tax with a very light hand.

Politically, then, the West African colonies were set to become not

nations-in-the-making but so many tribal confederacies united only in

subjection to their British overlord.

122

In East Africa, the onset of colonial rule had been even more

abrupt. There were no old enclaves of European rule on the coast. The

interior had been a dangerous region, ravaged by the Arab slave trade

and endemic warlordism. Once partition began, the British annexed

Uganda in 1894 as the white hope of East African trade and a strategic

wedge against French advance across the continent.

123

Uganda could be

ruled in alliance with Buganda, largest and strongest of the Great Lakes

kingdoms.

124

But the East African Protectorate (‘Kenya’ from 1920)

was a different story. With no natural rulers, except the Arab sheikhs

along the Swahili coast, no revenues, a railway (to Uganda) to maintain

and interior populations ﬁercely resistant to external control, the East

African Protectorate was a ﬁnancial incubus inside an administrative

nightmare. The colonial remedy – white farmers to develop the temper-

ate highlands of central Kenya and Indians to help build the railway –

had obvious dangers. The settlers were quick to adopt the programme

of their brothers to the south: self-government (only for whites); the

throwing open of land to white purchase; a white citizen militia (like

the Boer commando) for security; and the exclusion of Indians from

political life and the ownership of land.

125

The settlers extracted the

‘Elgin pledge’ effectively if not formally reserving the Kenya highlands

for whites. But they were far too few in number to impose a South

African ‘solution’. Well before 1914, East African Indians were mobil-

ising against the threat of settler hegemony.

126

African grievances were

beginning to be voiced.

127

Yet, in this racially segmented society, no

group was strong enough to seize control from below. The colonial

state was too weak to build its ‘nation’ from above.

In West and East Africa alike, colonial rule had created ‘shallow

states’ without roots in local society. Freed from the burden of external

defence by partition diplomacy, the British had no need to dig deep.

Colonial government became an over-rule concerned mainly to keep the

peace between its fractious subjects. The political future of so protean

an empire was at best opaque. To many enlightened imperialists (as well

as liberal opinion more generally), the greed and brutality of unofﬁcial

whites was far more alarming than the political aspirations of (as yet)