Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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295 / The Edwardian transition
unorganised blacks. Hence segregation, not integration, seemed the
best solution for the medium term. The threat of racial conflict was not
ignored by contemporary observers of the imperial system. But they
tended to be fatalistic about settler domination and thought African
advance would be slow.
Islam
Rather less attention was paid (outside official circles) to the other
great fissure that ran through the British world-system. By 1914,the
British system depended upon the loyalty and cooperation of a vast
array of Muslim rulers and notables: in Zanzibar, Nigeria, Egypt, the
Sudan, the Persian Gulf, Princely India and British India, and the Malay
States. British relations with the Ottoman Empire and Persia (the largest
independent Muslim states) were also exceptionally delicate: both were
buffer states whose hostility or collapse would threaten the strategic
corridor connecting Britain and India. British attitudes to Islam were
contradictory, and there was no tradition of studying the contempo-
rary Islamic world as there was for example in the Netherlands.
128
Evangelicals and humanitarians, reared on tales of David Livingstone
and the Arab slave trade, were deeply unsympathetic. Romantics were
attracted by the ‘timeless’ pre-industrial East and the warrior ethos of
desert society. But the most powerful influence on British policy was a
wary respect for Islamic ‘fanaticism’: the supposed ability of Muslim
rulers or preachers to arouse intense popular feeling against ‘infidel’
imperialists. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, Gordon’s fate at Khartoum,
and bloody disasters in Afghanistan had ingrained this deeply in the
‘official mind’.
But how dangerous was Islam to the political cohesion of the
British system? The Islamic world stretched from Morocco to the Philip-
pines. Islam, remarked the intellectual traveller Gertrude Bell, ‘is the
electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected,
and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no
sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it’.
129
The govern-
ment of India harped constantly on the danger of a ‘pan-Islamic’ move-
ment transmitting the grievances of Middle East Muslims to India and
beyond. With its chronic anxiety about a second Mutiny, its turbulent
borderlands on the Northwest Frontier, and its diplomatic interests
in the Persian Gulf, the Indian government’s fears were understand-
able. Its real purpose was to restrain the ‘Gladstonian’ enthusiasm for
296 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
liberating the Ottoman Sultan’s Christian subjects to which opinion at
home seemed all too prone. As the ‘great Muhammadan Power’, the
Civilians insisted, Britain could not be seen to act against the inter-
ests of Islam. But few British observers thought pan-Islamism counted
for much. ‘As a factor in British policy’, recalled Ronald Storrs of
his time in pre-1914 Egypt, ‘the doctrine of the caliphate – of pan-
Islamic theocracy – was mainly the creation of the India Office.’
130
It
‘can never become a movement of importance’, judged Arnold Wilson,
then a young consul in Southwest Persia.
131
Lord Cromer was equally
sceptical.
132
In a survey of India published shortly before 1914, Bamp-
fylde Fuller, a former Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal (a Muslim major-
ity province), contrasted the political and educational backwardness of
Muslims with the progress of Hindus – the real source of any challenge
to the Raj.
133
In fact, British opinion, whether sympathetic or not, tended to
regard Islam as a culture in decline. It commanded enormous popular
piety but had failed intellectually. It was the ‘speculative’ and ‘dogmatic’
nature of Islam, argued Fuller, that made Muslims resistant to modern
knowledge. ‘Swathed in the bands of the Koran’, remarked Sir William
Muir, the leading academic expert on Islam, ‘the Moslem faith, unlike
the Christian, is powerless to adapt itself to varying time and place, keep
pace with the march of humanity, direct and purify the social life or
elevate mankind.’
134
Hence the British assumption that, so long as care
was taken not to offend popular religiosity, or the vested interests of the
ulama, the interpreters of Islamic law, a modus vivendi was perfectly
possible. British authority should be decently veiled behind Muslim
notables: this was the ruling principle of the Cromerian and Lugardian
systems. If provocation was avoided, and prestige maintained, there
was little danger of Muslim piety turning into nationalist passion.
Whatever its premises, this sanguine view of Anglo-Muslim
relations looked plausible enough before 1914. In India, where most
of Britain’s Muslim subjects could be found, Muslim political attitudes
were coloured by the fact of competition with Hindus and fear of Hindu
predominance. In Northern Nigeria, the colonial pax had helped the
emirs against their over-mighty subjects and permitted the extension
of Islamic influence over long-resistant ‘pagan’ peoples.
135
In Egypt,
where the Khedive was usually at odds with the ulama of the al-Azhar –
the greatest centre of learning in the Muslim world – an independent
Egyptian state held little appeal for the doctors of law and theology.
297 / The Edwardian transition
Islamic feeling ran athwart the ideas of nationalism and its religious
guardians were suspicious of secular rule. Only in extreme conditions,
where secular authority was unusually weak or social disruption excep-
tionally acute, did Islamic politics seem likely to thrive – or pose a real
threat to British power.
Ireland and Empire
Ironically, in the last few years before 1914, the main threat to imperial
unity lay closest to home – in Ireland. There was nothing new in this.
Much the same had been true in the 1590s, the 1640s, the 1680s, the
1770s, 1780sand1790s, the 1820s and the 1880s. But, after 1900,
Home Rule ‘nationalism’ was supposed to have been killed by British
‘kindness’.
136
The sale and redistribution of land had been expected
to create a contented peasantry, immune to the violent rhetoric of the
‘land war’ that had raged since the 1870s, and shrewdly aware of
the economic benefits brought by the Union of Britain and Ireland.
Municipal and parliamentary politics, not agrarian terror, would be
the political vehicle of this farmer class and its allies among the small-
town tradesmen. In this prosaic new world, ‘romantic Ireland’ would
be dead and gone, ‘with O’Leary in the grave’.
It failed to happen, at least not on the decisive scale that the
architects of ‘kindness’ had hoped for. Part of the reason was the success
of the Irish National Party, once led by Charles Stewart Parnell, in
entrenching itself over much of Catholic Ireland outside Ulster and
the City of Dublin. The Irish party was a formidable machine. When
elected local government was extended to Ireland in 1898 in the form
of county councils, the party gained a virtual monopoly of the powers
and patronage it gave – as Unionist landowners bitterly complained. Its
local bosses played a prominent role in the machinery for land sales,
the process that was rearing a new breed of wealth in the countryside.
The rapid growth of a provincial press gave the party’s leaders and their
newspaper allies an efficient means of mobilising opinion and exerting
pressure. The one thing the party could not do was to force the British
government to concede Home Rule. Until 1905, it faced a massive
Conservative majority at Westminster. After 1906, as one Anglo-Irish
landlord remarked, the scale of the Liberal landslide meant that the
new government had no reason to risk introducing a third Home Rule
298 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
bill.
137
After all, Home Rule had twice before been the rock on which
Liberal governments had been wrecked.
The Irish party leader, John Redmond, understood this. Red-
mond was from a Catholic landowning family. His strategy was subtle
and perhaps – given the divisions among his followers – deliberately
opaque. Raising money in America he spoke of an Irish nation as if
complete independence was the plan. But his real aim was to win Ire-
land the equivalent of dominion autonomy, the same status as Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. He liked to compare himself
to Louis Botha, who had reconciled Afrikanerdom to self-government
under the British Crown. ‘Our stake in the Empire’, he told a Liberal
journalist in 1908, ‘is too large for us to be detached from it . . . [T]he
Irish people peopled the waste places of Greater Britain. Our roots
are in the Imperial as well as the national.’
138
‘Once we receive home
rule’, he told the Daily Express in 1910, ‘we shall demonstrate our
imperial loyalty beyond question.’
139
In The Framework of Home Rule
(1911), Erskine Childers appealed to the Unionist opponents of Home
Rule in similar terms. Ireland had nothing to gain by separation (i.e.
complete independence), he claimed. ‘Ireland has taken her full share
in winning and populating the Empire. The result is hers as much as
Britain’s.’ Indeed, giving Ireland Home Rule was part of the project of
imperial unity, ‘the indispensable preliminary to the close union of all
the English-speaking races’.
140
Redmond hoped to reassure the enemies
of Home Rule in both Britain and Ireland, to portray the Irish party
as sober and responsible, and to appeal to a sense of All-Irish national
identity, Northern and Protestant as well as Southern and Catholic.
In fact, Redmond’s analogy between Ireland and South Africa
was misplaced and his chances of success were thin. More than half his
parliamentary party were ‘agrarians’ for whom the land struggle was
still a political talisman. The party’s popular movement, the United
Irish League, was implicated in harrying landowners into forced sales
and in ‘cattle-driving’.
141
A vocal part of his following were ‘cultural’
nationalists, dismayed by the suddenness and intensity with which a
Gaelic-speaking and non-literate society had been overwhelmed by
anglicisation.
142
Limited opportunities for the new Catholic middle
class (the comparison with the Bengal bhadralok is suggestive) bred
fierce impatience with ‘Dublin Castle’, the seat of British rule in Ireland.
By 1913, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the seedbed of this revolution-
ary and culturalist nationalism, had more than 100,000 members.
143
299 / The Edwardian transition
When Redmond declared (in October 1910) that he was in favour of
a federal solution, making Ireland part of a ‘Federal Empire’, he was
forced to retract and repudiate by the pressure of party opinion.
144
But,
if the room for manoeuvre on the nationalist side was limited, the scope
for concession by their Unionist opponents seemed even less.
If Ireland had been a thousand miles away, Joseph Chamber-
lain is supposed to have remarked in 1893,
145
it would long since have
been granted self-government. Inescapable proximity and ineradicable
difference were the Irish condition. To British critics of Home Rule,
Ireland was too close to be entrusted with self-government: it was part
of the Empire’s ‘central power’, not an outlying province.
146
If Irish
autonomy was abused, argued Balfour, there would be little that Lon-
don could do: yet the strategic stakes – if Ireland was disloyal – were
much too high for the risk to be taken. The champions of tariff reform
and imperial federation, like Milner, saw Home Rule as a retrograde
step that would delay not encourage imperial unity. But the greatest
obstacle to Redmond’s programme (and the real difference from South
Africa) lay in the extent to which Ireland’s affairs were entangled in
the party politics of the British mainland. One symptom of this was the
fact that perhaps a quarter of Conservative MPs after 1906 were either
Irish Unionists, Southern Irish gentry sitting for mainland constituen-
cies, or married into Southern Unionist families.
147
The second, and
more serious, was the intensity of ‘Britannic’ sentiment in Northeast
Ireland where religious and cultural antipathy to the Catholic South
was rapidly mutating into an ‘Ulster’ identity with ‘Britishness’ at its
core.
148
But, unlike the British minority in South Africa, which was
forced to settle with the Afrikaner majority, Ulster (like the rest of
Ireland) was represented in the British Parliament. It could rely on
powerful allies in mainland politics to obstruct the progress of Home
Rule. And, if the worst came to the worst, it could threaten civil war in
the heart of the Empire.
From these rigidities sprang the crisis of 1910–14. Its origins,
and Redmond’s opportunity, lay in the travails of the Liberal govern-
ment. By 1909, its social programme (and electoral credibility) were at
risk from blocking tactics in the House of Lords and the scale of its
spending on the Navy. Its counter-stroke, the budget of 1909 and the
consequential bill to limit the powers of the House of Lords, brought
a constitutional crisis and a general election. The levelling up of Lib-
eral and Unionist (or Conservative) strength in the House of Commons
300 / Towards ‘The Sceptre of the World’
forced the Liberal cabinet into the arms of the Irish party while the pas-
sage of the Parliament Act (removing the veto of the House of Lords)
erased their excuse for not honouring the long-standing commitment
to Irish autonomy. A third Home Rule bill was drafted. In January
1913 it passed its last stage in the Commons with a majority of 110.
149
While offering Redmond much less than he wanted, especially in Irish
control over revenue and spending, it included Ulster in the Home Rule
scheme. The result was an explosion. Predictably, the bill was rejected
in the House of Lords. The Unionists demanded a general election, or a
referendum, before the bill could be turned into law. In Ulster, prepara-
tions went ahead for armed resistance to a Home Rule government with
the open encouragement of Unionist leaders like Milner. Elsewhere in
Ireland, the resort to force began to be seen as inevitable: gun-running
followed drilling. Compromise was elusive since all sides glimpsed the
chance of triumph and feared the divisions that concession might bring.
Even the belated acceptance by the Liberal government (at the instiga-
tion of Churchill and Lloyd George) of Ulster’s exclusion from Home
Rule brought further insoluble differences over the boundaries of the
excluded area and the question of temporary or permanent exemption
from the operation of the bill. At the moment when the shootings at
Sarajevo and the prospect of a far more terrible crisis in Europe sus-
pended domestic hostilities over Ireland, a descent into civil war in
Ireland and (at best) constitutional impasse in Britain seemed all too
likely.
The astonishing case of Irish Home Rule mocks the argument
that the British world-system owed its strength and cohesion to the
shrewd pragmatism and liberal instincts of the governing elite in Lon-
don. Confronted by the twofold challenge of Irish nationalism and
Ulster Unionism, that elite was at sixes and sevens. Both Liberals and
Conservatives hoped to exploit Home Rule to win the party battle in
mainland Britain. Neither dared alienate the Irish factions with whom
they were allied. The Irish crisis throws into relief the chronic weakness
to which the imperial centre was often subject. For London was only
rarely capable of decisive intervention in local politics. Its usual role was
to adjust the balance between the local parties: to regulate, encourage
or obstruct. Its freedom of action was often constrained by the numer-
ous and vocal colonial lobbies active in Britain though these also were
usually too weak to impose their will. Where (as in the Irish case) the
local parties were finely balanced, could exert almost equal pull inside
301 / The Edwardian transition
British politics and came to symbolise rival notions of imperial power,
the strain became almost unbearable.
In the last resort, then, the cohesion of the British system was
less a matter of British policy than of the complex workings of imperial
politics. The theoretical paramountcy of the Imperial government was
exercised under demanding conditions. It was hemmed in by the free
trade convictions of the British working class, unmoved by the argu-
ment for tariff reform.
150
It was checked by the strength of the two
old-established ‘garrisons’ in Ireland and India and of their allies and
supporters in British opinion. It was wary of the militant appeal of Bri-
tannic nationalism that Milner had invoked so successfully in 1899.It
dared not coerce the self-governing colonies. A determined proconsul
with the press in his pocket, like Lord Lugard in Nigeria, was hard to
restrain. It was the incoherence and improvisation to which all this gave
rise that fuelled the ambition of the self-styled imperialists in Edwar-
dian politics. To free ‘imperial’ questions from the messy entanglement
in domestic politics, and to discipline the lobbies and factions whose
influence loomed large, they wanted to create an Empire-wide public
opinion and an Empire-wide parliament. Before 1914, they made little
headway. But with the crash of the old order they thought they saw
their chance.
Part II
‘The great liner is sinking’: the British world-system in the
age of war