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

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THE WAR FOR EMPIRE, 1914–1919

The longer war

1914 was the watershed between two ages of empire. In the long nine-

teenth century after 1815, the British world-system had developed as if

there were no danger of a general war in Europe or across the world.

Despite the Crimean War, the wars of Italian and German uniﬁcation

and the Franco-Prussian War, this had proved a reasonable assump-

tion. The results can be seen from a glance at the map. Britain’s set-

tlements, possessions, spheres and commercial property were scattered

broadcast across the globe. Whatever the constitutional niceties, in the

‘formal’ empire colonial rule was highly devolved: to settler politicians

in the white dominions; to imperial ofﬁcials in the rest. Devolution

assumed that their defence would fall to the Royal Navy, or be made

redundant by its global reach. The exception was India which paid

for its own standing army and much more beside (two-thirds, in fact,

of the Empire’s regular army). Imperial rivalry was real, and posed a

threat to Britain’s interests. But the threat was usually more regional

(and Near Eastern) than general. Much of its force was deﬂected by

the partition diplomacy of the 1880sand1890s. As a consequence,

across large parts of the world, British inﬂuence could be maintained

by the ‘soft power’ of commerce and culture. This had made possible

the coexistence of imperialism and liberalism in Britain, in the settler

colonies and even, more ﬁtfully, in India. For all its hard coercive face,

colonial rule retained the power to engage local sympathy by its lib-

eral promise – however sparingly fulﬁlled – of individual freedom and

material progress. The imperialism of free trade, variously interpreted,

frequently modiﬁed, often abused, remained the Leitmotif of a system

306 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

whose protean ideology was a cocktail: global and cosmopolitan as

much as racial and territorial.

The geopolitical foundations of the Victorian and Edwardian

world-system rested in the last resort upon two sets of equations at the

opposite ends of the Old World. In East Asia where a local great power

might have challenged British inﬂuence, there had seemed little to fear

before the mid-1890s. Thereafter, disintegration not self-assertion was

the most likely prognosis for China. Japan was a different story. After

1895, when it seized Taiwan, it became a cadet imperialist. Ten years

later, it became the strongest military power in East Asia, defeating the

Russians. But Japan was still a ‘country power’: fearful of a European

combination against it. Up to 1914, its local strength seemed to work

to Britain’s advantage. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, twice renewed,

held the ring in East Asia while British efforts were concentrated on the

deterrence of Germany.

In Europe, the geopolitical equation was very different. Europe

was active, not passive. In Churchill’s expressive phrase, it was ‘where

the weather came from’. Commercially, territorially and demograph-

ically, nineteenth-century Europe was in a phase of hyper-expansion.

Towards the end of the century, the pace and scale of this European

‘enlargement’ rose sharply on a tide of trade and capital. International

tensions – stoked by private interests – grew more acute. But only to a

certain point. Dynamic though the continent had become in its social

and economic character, politically it remained in the grip of the long

conservative reaction that set in generally after 1815. The old regime

persisted. No great power government dared contemplate kicking over

the European chessboard – with the possible exception of Napoleon

III in 1859. All had too much to lose, or were too uncertain of ulti-

mate victory. Nor were they driven into general war by the threat to

their survival. Nationalism exerted a potent appeal as the instrument

of state-building (‘ofﬁcial nationalism’) and as an equal and opposite

claim for the liberation of ‘submerged nationalities’ from the chains of

dynastic Europe. Both versions could have volatile consequences. But,

until the end of the century, great power governments seemed more

than capable of restraining their disruptive potential.

For the British, this pattern of continental politics was highly

convenient. They could not hope to prevent the overﬂow of European

trade, inﬂuence and territorial ambition into the wider world. But there

were good grounds to think that the distribution of power in continental

307 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

Europe between four and a half great powers (the half being Italy)

would persist indeﬁnitely. No single power, nor any likely combination

of powers, could hope for a durable hegemony over all the rest. The

mutual antipathy of the continental states neutralised their resentment

at Britain’s vast share of imperial booty. Fearing that they would be

dragged into war by the antics of their frontiersmen in Afro-Asia (or

the furore of their admirers at home), continental statesmen accepted

the partition diplomacy through which Salisbury and his successors

hoped to stabilise (and maximise) the British share. Thus, for all the

intensity of Europe’s engagement with the wider world after 1870,there

were few signs before 1914 of a coming revolution in world politics.

In a ‘closed system’ in which the global ‘commons’ had been all but

shared out, international politics were bound to be stressful. Zones of

insecurity would wax and wane. But, while the East remained passive,

and the West was locked in the defensive diplomacy of the ‘balance of

power’, the British world-system – strung out between the two – could

guard its networks at bearable cost.

In retrospect, of course, we can see that the pre-war decade

contained the omens of catastrophic change. German economic power

was growing rapidly. Nationalism in East and Central Europe was

becoming more violent. Urbanisation and agrarian hardship screwed

up the social tensions. Most dangerous of all, as it turned out, were

the volcanic nationalisms of Southeastern Europe. The Balkan Wars of

1912–13 and 1913–14, and the struggle of Serbian nationalists against

Austrian over-rule in Bosnia, were symptomatic of a region where the

writ of the great powers hardly ran, but where their rivalries were

fuelled by the ethnic conﬂict of would-be clients. In July 1914,the

Habsburg government tried to use the Sarajevo murders to crush Ser-

bian nationalism, and humiliate Russia, Serbia’s great power sponsor.

It was a colossal blunder. Southeastern Europe was not a remote colo-

nial region where the stakes were low and compromise easy. Its fate

was thought crucial to the balance of Russian, Austrian and German

power. So the statesmen who had partitioned half the world fell out

over the most backward corner of their own continent.

The First World War was the violent rupture of the nineteenth-

century world in which the vast scale of British expansion had been

possible. It was the murderous ﬁrst act of a conﬂict that was to last

until the 1950s, or (by some criteria) until 1990. It helped blow apart

the world economy and reversed the ﬁrst ‘globalisation’ in a wave of

308 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

economic nationalism. The collapse of the old imperial order in East and

Central Europe wrecked the pre-war basis of great power diplomacy

and sanctiﬁed the nation-state as the ideal form of territorial polity.

In post-imperial Europe, ethnic conﬂict became even more bitter and

much more wide-ranging. It was soon entangled in the ideological war-

fare between communism and its enemies, with drastic consequences

for regional stability. Nor in the closed system the world had become

could the war’s effects be conﬁned to Europe. By its end, almost every

state had become a belligerent or been drawn willy-nilly into the ﬁght-

ing. In East Asia the consequences were especially dramatic. In this

unpartitioned corner of the semi-colonial world, the wartime abdica-

tion of the European powers had been a golden opportunity for local

ambition. ‘Passive’ East Asia entered its revolutionary phase in the tri-

angular struggle of nationalists, communists and Japanese imperialists.

Western interests could no longer be protected by a gunboat and a cor-

poral’s guard. By the mid-1930s, it seemed increasingly likely that the

turbulence in East Asia would spill over into the ‘colonial’ lands of the

South Paciﬁc, Southeast Asia and even India.

The impact of these vast changes on the British system was pro-

found and ultimately devastating. It is tempting in hindsight to see the

First World War as the ﬁrst and longest step towards its eventual dis-

integration. But that may be too simple a judgment. The war imposed

huge strains on the British system. It permanently altered the exter-

nal setting. It badly damaged the international economy with which

British power had grown symbiotically. But the British were also the

principal victors in this war of empires. They lost less and gained more

than all the other original combatants. In the post-war world, with

its corrosive frictions and shattered ﬁnances, this ‘victory’ won them a

crucial breathing-space. It bought strategic gains and political time: to

entrench their empire militarily and reform it constitutionally. It was a

vital respite before the long war of the twentieth century resumed its

course.

The Imperial Armageddon

Before the war, British leaders (and their strategic advisers) had assumed

that the Royal Navy would be Britain’s principal weapon in any Great

Power conﬂict in Europe. The pre-war scheme for a small expeditionary

309 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

force (the ‘BEF’) to ﬁght on the continent alongside France had not

altered this view: there were no plans to increase the size of the army

even after a war had begun.

The reasoning behind this ‘navalist’ strat-

egy was simple. The British expected that, in a war fought to maintain

the European balance of power against German aggression, the great

conscript armies of France and Russia would bear the brunt of the ﬁght-

ing on land. The BEF would be a useful reinforcement in the critical

opening phase – and a gesture of solidarity. But Britain’s real contribu-

tion would be maritime and economic. The navy would sweep the seas

clear of enemy warships (and safeguard vital lanes of supply), gobble up

the German colonies and impose the blockade that would steadily stran-

gle the German economy. Meanwhile, British ﬁnance, industrial output

and inexhaustible coal would sustain the war effort of the Entente. A

war fought on these terms until the Germans gave in would have a

minor impact on British interests around the world. It would leave the

pre-war shape of the British world-system largely unchanged.

Within a few weeks of the outbreak of war in August 1914 it

was clear that this grand strategy was quite unreal. It was true that

Germany’s surface navy was soon driven from the high seas. In South-

west Africa and the South Paciﬁc (though not in German East Africa

where Von Lettow Vorbeck held out to the bitter end), German colonies

were quickly seized. But British sea-power was not the great offensive

weapon on which navy traditionalists had counted. The attempt to

break through the Dardanelles in 1915 was an embarrassing failure.

The British Grand Fleet spent the war in the Orkneys waiting for the

Germans to venture into the North Sea. When they did so in 1916,there

was no Trafalgar but only the inconclusive battle of Jutland. The role

of the Royal Navy was vital but defensive, though it was ill-equipped

to counter the submarine menace especially after February 1917 when

the Germans turned to unrestricted submarine warfare. Tied down in

the North Sea, it watched the rise of American sea-power in the North

Atlantic, and its Japanese counterpart in the Western Paciﬁc. Block-

ade was its primary means of attack: the slow remorseless pressure on

the morale and physique of the German army and people.

But, even

in 1918, it was uncertain whether it could work fast enough to stop

Germany winning the war.

Instead, for the British, like their continental allies, the ‘real’ war

was on land. Although the Germans were denied a Blitzkrieg victory in

1914, by the end of the year they controlled most of Belgium, including

310 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

part of its coastline, and a large area of Northern France to within ﬁfty

miles of Paris. Far from intervening to restore the balance of power,

the British now found themselves in a dangerous position. If France

were defeated outright, or gave up an unwinnable struggle to evict the

Germans, Britain would have suffered a catastrophic setback. German

control of Belgium and its ports would destroy the beneﬁts of British

insularity. French defeat would end the cooperation that allowed naval

concentration against Germany. It might mean German control over

France’s ﬂeet. At best, the security of Britain – the imperial centre –

would have been compromised in ways that weakened British inﬂuence

around the world. At worst, the Germans would have taken a long step

towards uniting the European continent against Britain’s global preten-

sions. In either case, the implications for the stability and cohesion of

the British world-system were stark.

It followed that, from the end of 1914 until the armistice of

November 1918, the British war effort was dominated by the increas-

ingly desperate struggle to reverse the early verdict of the ﬁghting

and escape the geopolitical nightmare threatened by failure to liberate

Belgium and Northern France. Lord Kitchener, who had been brought

into the Liberal government to take charge of the army, quickly realised

that a vast new volunteer force must be raised for the continental war.

He intended to hold it back for a decisive blow, perhaps in 1917,

when the continental powers had fought themselves to a standstill.

This would ensure a loud British voice in the subsequent peace, an echo

of the Vienna treaty in 1815. He was too optimistic. The scale of Ger-

man success against the Entente powers forced a premature offensive

in 1915.In1916, the disasters on the Eastern Front,

and the attrition

of France’s manpower at Verdun, forced the British into a reluctant

offensive on the Somme that was abandoned after 400,000 casualties.

After two years of war on the Western Front, and a quarter of a million

British dead, there had been no progress on the most vital of British

war aims.

Indeed, by the end of 1916, the military problem seemed all but

insoluble – except to the generals. To win on the Western Front, the

British and the French had to drive the Germans from positions they had

seized and fortiﬁed in the opening phase of the war. They had to achieve

this against an enemy enjoying all the advantages of interior lines. As

an attack developed, the Germans could shuttle their reinforcements

311 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

across the battle zone by rail: the attackers had to walk through mud

and barbed wire. Moving into the open exposed the attacking force

not just to riﬂe and machine gun ﬁre, but to the deadly barrage of

heavy artillery, which inﬂicted three-quarters of all casualties. With

little chance of a decisive breakthrough, the only means of breaking the

enemy’s will was through ‘attrition’: forcing German troops to ﬁght, at

whatever cost, in the hope of eventually wearing down their reserves of

manpower and morale. With so desperate a strategy, and so few signs

of success, it was hardly surprising that by November 1916 a mood of

pessimism engulfed most of those responsible for the war effort of the

British Empire.

These were the circumstances in which the coalition govern-

ment that Asquith had formed in May 1915 was overthrown by a polit-

ical coup in December 1916. The new coalition led by Lloyd George,

with some Liberal but more Tory support, signalled the determination

to win and to mobilise every resource for victory. But Lloyd George,

who grasped better than anyone the political and technical difﬁculties

of a total war, and Lord Milner, who became his chief lieutenant, were

both keenly aware of how the drain of blood on the Western Front

would affect the deeper sources of British power. Even with conscrip-

tion to ﬁlter the call-up of skilled men, the huge losses of attrition war-

fare would weaken the British economy, limit its war production and

cut down the exports that helped pay the inﬂated bill of vital imports.

Economic exhaustion would accelerate war-weariness, starve Britain’s

allies of the material they needed and might break both the will and

the means of victory. Despite these misgivings, no alternative plan was

possible in 1917.

Instead, the pressure grew for even greater sacriﬁce

on the Western Front. The gradual collapse of the Russian army, the

threatened collapse of the French – whose losses had been far higher

than the British – made a new offensive against the German line a grand

strategic necessity. This was Passchendaele: a battle in the mud from

July to November 1917 that cost the BEF over 220,000 dead. Yet, by

the end of 1917, as the Bolshevik revolution dragged Russia out of war,

the prospects for victory in the West looked darker than ever. Triumph

in the East would give the German High Command just the reinforce-

ments it needed to break the Allied line, seize the Belgian coast and

capture Paris. If it moved fast enough it could pre-empt the arrival of

American troops and smother the impact of the United States’ decision

500 1000

250 500 750 miles

1250 km750250

Petrograd

Moscow

Berlin

Vienna

Paris

London

Rome

Cairo

Jerusalem

Tehran

Baku

GERMAN EMPIRE

HAPSBURG EMPIRE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

IRAN

INDIA

Georgia

occupied by

Germany

German

advance 1918

Muslim rebellion

against Russian

rule 1918

Area controlled by Central

Powers 1918

Netherlands

Source: J. Darwin, After Tamerlane (Penguin Books, 2007)

Map 9 The First World War in 1918

313 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

to enter the war (a result of Berlin’s unrestricted submarine warfare) in

April 1917. It could win the battle for Europe.

The spring and summer of 1918 thus turned out to be the climax

of the war, the moment at which for the British and their allies defeat

came closest. This was the ‘new war’ against which Milner warned

Lloyd George in March 1918. With the signature of the treaty of Brest-

Litovsk (6 March), the Germans had won the war against Russia ‘which

used to cover our whole Asian ﬂank’. With the Germans poised to

swing round the Black Sea and enter the Caucasus, and the Turks now

freed from Russian pressure, ‘we have a new campaign which really

extends from the Mediterranean shore of Palestine to the frontier of

India . . . [W]hether or not Japan takes on North Asia – I doubt her

doing it – we alone have got to keep Southern Asia.’

The next day,

the expected German blow fell in the West, but with unexpected force.

Within days it had shattered the British Fifth Army in its path. ‘We are

very near a crash’, wrote the government’s chief military adviser, Sir

Henry Wilson, on 24 March.

A week’s ﬁghting cost the BEF 114,000

men. ‘You must ﬁght with your backs to the wall’, Haig, their comman-

der, told his troops (the irreverent reply was: ‘where’s the wall?’). As

the Germans pressed forward, the British faced the dilemma of aban-

doning the Channel ports or losing touch with the French armies to

the south. ‘No readjustment of our forces can save the situation’, said

Milner (now Secretary of State for War) until the British and French

divisions began to hold their ground against the Germans.

‘We are a

fast dwindling army’, wrote Wilson on 12 April. ‘This is desperately

serious.’

By early June, with the Germans at the Marne, and shells

falling in central Paris, British leaders began to ponder how they would

ﬁght on if France and Italy (where a new German-Austrian offensive

was expected) gave up the struggle. ‘The United States too late, too late,

too late: what if it should turn out to be so?’, groaned the American

ambassador to his diary.

Milner was in no doubt that the supreme crisis of the war had

arrived. ‘We must be prepared for France and Italy being beaten to

their knees’, he told Lloyd George. ‘In that case, it is clear that the

German-Austro-Turko-Bulgar bloc will be master of all Europe and

Northern and Central Asia up to the point where Japan steps in to bar

the way.’

Milner predicted a global war in which Britain and her allies

would be forced to defend the maritime periphery against a ‘heartland’

dominated by German power. ‘It is clear’, he argued,

314 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

[t]hat unless the only remaining free peoples of the world,

America, this country and the Dominions, are knit together

in the closest conceivable alliance and prepared for the

maximum sacriﬁce, the Central bloc under the hegemony of

Germany will control not only Europe and most of Asia

but the whole world . . . If all these things happen, the

whole aspect of the war changes. These islands become an

exposed outpost of the Allied positions encircling the

world – a very disadvantageous position for the brain-

centre of such a combination.

The ﬁght, he concluded, ‘will now be for Southern Asia and above

all for Africa (the Palestine bridgehead is of immense importance)’.

Here was a terrifying prospectus of Britain’s imperial future from the

most ardent of imperialists. The old balance of power had vanished

like a dream. Britain’s eastern empire now lay open to an attack far

more dangerous than anything threatened by Russia in the days of the

‘great game’. Japan’s domination of East Asia, foreshadowed in its ‘21

demands’ to China in 1915, would be the price of its support. Ameri-

can ﬁnancial and military help would be more indispensable than ever,

strengthening when peace came the American demand for the ‘free-

dom of the seas’ and the international settlement of colonial claims:

key elements in Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ published in Jan-

uary 1918. The ‘new world’ taking shape by the middle of 1918 bore

a frightening resemblance to the warnings of Halford Mackinder, the

geographer and imperialist, some fourteen years before: a vast ‘heart-

land’ (ruled by Germany) controlling the ‘world island’ (continental

Europe, Asia and Africa) leaving only an outer fringe where sea-power

could contest its claims. With Britain and India under siege, and Lon-

don’s commercial empire in ruins, the rump of the British world-

system would have little choice but to look to the United States as

its saviour.

We know in hindsight that Milner was too pessimistic. Within

a month, the tide in the West had begun to turn. But his grim prognosis

left a fateful imperial legacy. Failure on the Western Front, perhaps a

‘Dunkirk’ in which the British army abandoned the continent, made the

Middle East the new fulcrum of imperial defence. It was there that the

road must be barred to the Central Powers whose victory in the region

would cut the British system in two and roll it up in detail. In the ﬁrst