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

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335 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

doubled again, his mood was explosive. Canada could not be expected

to put four to ﬁve hundred thousand men in the ﬁeld and be treated

like ‘toy automata’, he burst out to Perley. ‘Is the war being waged by

the UK alone, or is it a war waged by the whole Empire?’

Hughes’

opinion ‘as to the future necessity of the Overseas nations having an

adequate voice in the Empire’s foreign policy’, he told Perley, ‘coincides

entirely with my own’.

Borden and Hughes were determined that the dominions’ con-

tribution to the war should be rewarded by the unequivocal abolition of

their ‘colonial’ status in matters of external policy. Unlike Joseph Cook,

joint leader of the New Zealand coalition government, they were not

interested in imperial federation. Their chance came with the arrival

of Lloyd George in Downing Street, and the Milnerites in government.

Milnerite enthusiasm for ‘closer unity’ coincided with the grim accep-

tance that dominion help in the unending war would be increasingly

important, and the even grimmer recognition that dominion leaders

had to be consulted about the minimum terms of peace acceptable. In

late December 1916, the invitations went out to an ‘Imperial War Con-

ference’ that ran from March until May 1917. In the event, Hughes

remained in Australia to ﬁght for conscription, and Louis Botha sent

his deputy, General Smuts. The dominion delegates were convened

with British ministers as the ‘Imperial War Cabinet’. War aims were

discussed. London made ambiguous promises about imperial prefer-

ence after the war. But the main outcome of the meetings was agree-

ment that relations with the dominion governments would have to be

adjusted after the war to respect their status as ‘autonomous nations

of an Imperial Commonwealth’, with arrangements for ‘continuous

consultation’ and an ‘adequate voice in foreign policy and . . . foreign

relations’.

Smuts, who put the case against imperial federation with

crushing force, remained behind as a member of the War Cabinet, but

not in any representative capacity. Borden rushed home to deal with

the crisis over conscription.

In fact, there was little agreement among the dominion lead-

ers about the direction of constitutional change beyond the demand

for autonomy. Nor was there much sign (apart from the presence of

Smuts) that dominion views had more inﬂuence over the strategy of the

warafterMay1917 than before. When the Imperial War Conference

reassembled in the summer of 1918, it was against the terrible backdrop

of impending disaster: the crisis in Flanders; the risk that Italy and even

336 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

France might be forced into peace before American help could arrive;

the desperate need, as British manpower sagged, for more men from the

dominions; the prospect of Milner’s ‘new war’ with Germany in control

of the Eurasian heartland. Borden, Massey and Hughes raged against

the incompetence of the British generals on the Western Front.

Lloyd

George smoothly ‘deduced . . . the lesson that they should share with

the British Government the responsibility for the control of military

operations in the future’.

New arrangements were agreed to allow

the dominion premiers to communicate direct with their British coun-

terpart. But the sudden change in the course of the war checked any

further experiment. When it came to negotiating an armistice in Octo-

ber, Lloyd George simply ignored his dominion colleagues. It took a

ﬁerce protest from Borden, backed by Hughes, to ensure dominion rep-

resentation in what became the British Empire delegation to the peace

conference.

Why did opinion in the dominions tolerate so unequal a part-

nership in a war that cost them so dear? Much of the answer lies in the

complex emotions of Britannic nationalism. In Canada, the tidal wave

of pre-war migration made the sentimental bond with Britain especially

close. ‘I am afraid of the element known as the British-born’, conﬁded

the Liberal ex-premier Wilfrid Laurier, who saw the magnetic pull of

imperial loyalism as the biggest threat to Canadian stability before the

war.

Indeed, some 70 per cent of the ﬁrst contingent of the Canadian

Expeditionary Force were British-born, and, even in 1918,theymade

up around half of its manpower.

But the eager response of recent

immigrants was only part of the explanation for Canada’s commitment

to the war. The Conservative premier, Robert Borden, had long been

convinced that Armageddon was coming, that Canada should play its

part at Britain’s side, and that sharing the burden would clinch her

case for an ‘imperial nationhood’ alongside the mother country.

much of English-speaking Canada, support for the war and the man-

power sacriﬁce it demanded became the test of Canadian status as a

‘British nation’ rather than a colonial dependency. ‘Canada should do

her whole duty’, declared Clifford Sifton who had led the Liberal revolt

against the reciprocity bill in 1911.

Volunteer recruitment became

an afﬁrmation of British identity and Protestant conscience, especially

in Quebec among the ‘Anglo-Protestant’ elite

and on the prairies

where Europeans and Americans, rather than settlers of British birth

or origins, made up much of the population. It was heavily promoted

337 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

by Protestant clergymen and the Orange Lodges.

It was no coinci-

dence that the heightened emotion of wartime soon found expression

in the attack on bilingualism in Ontario and Manitoba where there

were French-medium schools. Abolishing bilingual schools was neces-

sary if Manitoba was not to be a ‘middle-Europe . . . ﬁlled with warring

races’, claimed John Dafoe, editor of the Manitoba Free Press,themost

inﬂuential Liberal paper in the West.

English-speaking Canadians had watched with increasing

resentment the apparent indifference of French Canadians to the call

of national duty. Proportionately, 150,000 French Canadians should

have joined up, not the 15,000 who had done so, said Dafoe, adding

for good measure that they were ‘the only known race of white men to

quit’.

Dafoe’s savagery was a measure of the chasm between French

and English attitudes by the middle of the war. Even Oscar Skelton, an

admirer (and later biographer) of Laurier, was critical of the ‘provin-

cialism’ of the French Canadian outlook.

In Quebec, the reaction was

incomprehension and growing bitterness. Henri Bourassa, the tribune

of French Canadian opinion, dismissed the conﬂict as one between

‘Anglo-Saxon mercantilism and love of gold’ and ‘German autocracy

and militarism’. They were as bad as each other.

The war was an

affair of ‘agglomerations’, not ‘small nations’.

Bourassa had been

violently opposed to sending a Canadian contingent to the Boer War.

In 1910, he had denounced Laurier’s naval scheme as a step towards the

conscription of French Canadians in Britain’s imperial wars and had

helped to drive him from ofﬁce on a tide of French Canadian suspicion.

For Laurier, the course of the war threatened deep and lasting damage

to his hopes of political recovery, based as they were upon a recon-

ciliation between provincial nationalism in Quebec and the Liberals

of English Canada. The closer Borden came to his object of partici-

pating in the planning of imperial defence, he feared, the more deeply

Canada would be committed to ‘all the wars of the Empire’

–and

the more dangerously French Canadians would be alienated from the

rest of Canada. But there was no mistaking the enthusiasm of English

Canadian Liberals for Canada’s part in the war.

These deep divisions reached a crisis in 1917. With the terri-

ble losses on the Western Front, voluntary enlistments were no longer

enough to ﬁll and reﬁll the ranks of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

The fairness and efﬁciency of ‘voluntary’ recruitment aroused misgiv-

ing. Even Bourassa conceded that conscription might be better than

338 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

‘enlistment by intimidation, threat and blackmail’.

On his return

from the Imperial War Conference in May 1917, Borden opened the

campaign for compulsion. He pressed Laurier to join a coalition gov-

ernment to carry it through. Laurier refused, and argued instead for a

referendum, mindful, no doubt, that in Australia (as we shall see) con-

scription had failed this test of opinion. But in English Canada his Lib-

eral colleagues abandoned him for a ‘Unionist’ coalition formed under

Borden’s leadership in October 1917. For them, conscription became

the test of Britannic nationhood. The fate of conscription, said Sifton,

would show whether or not Canada was ‘[just] a helpless aggregation of

sectional communities held together by time-serving interests’.

When

the election came, however, the Unionist government took no chances.

The year before, Arthur Meighen, Borden’s ﬁxer, had argued that ‘to

shift the franchise from the doubtful British and anti-British of the male

sex and to extend it . . . to our patriotic women would be . . . a splendid

stroke’.

In the Military Voters Act and the Wartime Elections Act,

he had his way. Naturalised aliens (i.e. not of British birth) resident

for less than ﬁfteen years lost the vote. Every soldier, of whatever age

or pre-war residence, gained it, as did nurses and the wives, widows,

mothers and sisters of soldiers. With the help of the ‘gag’, whose effects

were felt mainly in the prairie provinces, the election was a triumph for

the Unionist coalition which took 153 seats against the 82 held by the

Laurier Liberals, all but 20 in Quebec. The Conscription Act followed

in 1918.

The passing of conscription was the highwater mark of Britan-

nic nationalism in Canada. It marked the readiness of English Canadi-

ans to identify their contribution to the imperial war effort as the acid

test of nationhood at whatever cost in racial friction. For the result

was to divide Canadian politics along racial lines. ‘The government

have won’, said Laurier, ‘but the peace of the country is certainly in

danger.’

Quebec no longer held the balance of political power, one of

Borden’s supporters told him, but the result might be to make ‘an irrec-

oncilable Ireland in this country’.

It would take a generation to repair

‘what the fanatics have destroyed in a few months’, groaned Skelton.

Once the war was over, however, the momentum behind Borden’s

grand alliance was quickly lost. Economic difﬁculties and sectional dif-

ferences between the prairies and the East fractured the wartime unity of

Britannic sentiment. The coalition fell apart and, by 1921, the Liberals,

under Mackenzie King, had returned to power. And, in the meantime,

339 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

Borden’s pre-war dream of a seat at the table when foreign policy was

made for the Empire had dissolved in the cold clear air of the aftermath.

In Australia, recent British immigration was also a factor in

the readiness with which public opinion responded to the outbreak of a

faraway war. The ﬂow of British migrants had picked up strongly in the

last years before 1914, though not on the same scale as in Canada.

To a much greater extent than in Canada, the British-born minority

were prominent in political life: both wartime premiers had been born

in Britain.

100

But the eagerness with which Australians greeted the call

of imperial duty was not just a result of nostalgia. Long before the

war, anxiety about the ‘Yellow Peril’ of Asian migration and the ris-

ing power of Japan had made defence an important issue in Australian

politics and bred two different but complementary reactions. The sense

of remoteness from Britain placed a premium on self-help. The defence

Act of 1903 authorised conscription for home defence, and from 1911

military training was compulsory for young men. Australian govern-

ments pressed hard for control over their own ‘ﬂeet unit’ contribution

to the Royal Navy. But they were just as anxious for a louder voice in

British policy since the imperial umbrella rather than local defence was

the real guarantee of White Australia’s survival in an empty continent.

That may have been why a secret promise was made in 1911 to send an

expeditionary force to Britain’s aid in time of war, and why the Aus-

tralian government was determined that any troops it sent should ﬁght

together and not be split up amongst British units.

101

Their inﬂuence in

London, so the Australian leaders believed, depended not just on what

they contributed to empire defence, but also on what they were seen to

contribute.

Ofﬁcial enthusiasm helped to ensure the rapid formation of

an all-volunteer Australian Imperial Force (AIF), and the enlistment

of over 50,000 men by the end of 1914. At the local level, recruit-

ing was promoted through the existing system for military training,

and by the ‘patriotic leagues’ who arranged the enlistment meetings

where men ‘joined up’ in an emotional atmosphere of patriotic sac-

riﬁce. As in Canada, Protestant clergymen were vociferous recruiters.

‘We are British ﬁrst and Australians second’, said the Anglican min-

ister in one country district in Victoria.

102

A sense of adventure and

fear of unemployment at the beginning of the war (when trade was

disrupted) were reinforced by a happy naivety about life at the front.

Nevertheless, once Australian troops were committed at Gallipoli, and

340 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

the scale of the war became gradually clearer, the federal government

hastened to boost the volunteer impulse. ‘Eligible’ men from eighteen to

forty-ﬁve had to ﬁll in a card to say whether they were willing to enlist,

and, if not, why. Recruitment was reorganised to give a larger role to

‘recruiting sergeants’ and intensify the moral pressure to volunteer.

103

It was not enough. Once much of the AIF had been transferred to the

Western Front after the evacuation of Gallipoli, and its losses began to

mount (six times as many Australians were eventually killed there as at

Gallipoli), the struggle to reﬁll its ranks began to haunt the Australian

ministers. If the AIF was not just to waste away, and with it Australia’s

reputation and inﬂuence in London, something had to be done. That

something was compulsion.

The most ardent champion of this view was William Morris

Hughes, who had become premier in 1915. Hughes exempliﬁed the

‘White Australia’ outlook of the Labour party, and its Asian paranoia.

He had been a strong supporter of military service before the war.

He mistrusted British ministers, but had no doubt that the fate of the

four million Australians turned on their claim to British support as

partners in the imperial enterprise. He spent much of 1916 in London

partly to negotiate terms for the Australian wool-clip, partly to publi-

cise Australia’s contribution to the war. On his return, he threw himself

into a furious campaign for conscription, since compulsory service in

Australia applied only to home defence. To dramatise his appeal and

maximise cross-party support, Hughes chose to test opinion through a

referendum, not a general election. The wide public support for recruit-

ment (even among those who opposed conscription) suggested that

he would win an overwhelming victory. But, at the referendum of 28

October 1916,helostbyover90,000 votes.

104

When he tried again in

December 1917, in what seemed even more desperate circumstances,

the margin was even bigger.

105

Conscription proved bitterly divisive in wartime Australia, and

the divisions long outlasted the war. In country districts especially,

they separated friends and even families. Opponents of conscription

bore the taint of disloyalty. In the eyes of Protestant and middle-class

opinion, the ‘shirkers’ who resisted compulsion were identiﬁed with

the Catholic and Irish communities and with organised labour. The

ruling Labour party split over the issue. Hughes led his followers into

a new coalition and formed the Nationalist party in 1917. The rest

of the Labour party drifted gradually to the left. By the middle of

341 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

1918, the New South Wales party had declared in favour of an imme-

diate peace. At the party’s federal conference, the resolutions of the

Imperial War Conference were rejected in favour of full Australian self-

government, an end to all legal appeals to London, and the abolition of

the honours system. Labour leaders also gradually withdrew from the

recruiting effort which relied heavily on the publicity of speeches and

meetings.

What lay behind the double failure of conscription? How far

did it reﬂect opposition to the ‘misuse’ of Australian manpower in a

‘British’ war? How far did it spring from mistrust of British strategy

and alarm at British methods? How far did it signal the growth of a new

Australian identity that was determined not to be taken for granted by

an overweening mother-country? The answer must be: not very much.

It was true, for example, that some of the ﬁercest opponents of con-

scription were both Irish and Catholic. Amongst the large Irish Catholic

community in Australia, there was wide support for Irish Home Rule

and (after Easter 1916) furious anger at London’s brutal treatment

of the leaders of the Dublin rising. Hughes himself had warned that

Home Rule was an imperial, not just a British, question. It was natural

that many Irish Australians should resist the Britannic rhetoric with

which Australia’s contribution to the war was justiﬁed. But the wider

argument against conscription had little to do with the repudiation of

Britishness or empire. In a voluntaristic society, it was an attack on

individual rights. Some opponents complained that conscription would

mean the permanent weakening of trade unionism, as the champion of

working-class interests in the wage arbitration system. It would be the

prelude to the industrial conscription of labour. Others insisted that

Australia was doing as much as it could. In rural districts, and among

farmers, conscription was feared as a remorseless drain on agricultural

labour and the family farm. But the most widely vented, and proba-

bly most inﬂuential, arguments were those that portrayed conscription

not as an attack on Australia’s autonomy, but as a deadly threat to its

white, Britannic identity.

The logic was not hard to follow. It appealed to the old, half-

submerged tradition of isolationism in Australia: resentment at the

costly involvement in European wars at the expense of more immediate

concerns. Germany posed no danger, claimed the rising young Labour

politician, John Curtin: Japan was the real menace.

106

And, while send-

ing off Australia’s manpower to Europe would make no difference

342 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

against Germany, it would make all the difference in resisting Japan.

This argument was especially powerful in Queensland, the ‘invasion

colony’ most exposed (it was believed) to attack from the north.

107

But

defence was not the only issue. The more insidious danger was the inﬁl-

tration of non-white labour: the old bogey of the Labour party and the

trade unions. ‘Vote against conscription and Colonial Coloured labour’

urged anti-conscriptionists in Victoria. ‘The Coloured Ocean . . . will

swamp us if we do not stop the forcible deportation of our men, who

are the white walls of Australia’, howled a Queensland pamphlet. ‘Vote

no and keep Australia for future Australians – pure, free, unfettered

and peopled with our own race and blood’, roared another.

108

Hughes

was guilty of treason against White Australia, said Curtin.

109

The pro-

conscription rhetoric of defence and democracy was neutralised by the

claim that draining off white manpower would open the door not just

to non-white labour but the erosion of hard-won political rights. One

anti-conscription cartoon portrayed a dark-skinned, turbanned ﬁgure

bringing down an axe labelled ‘yes’ on the neck of ‘democracy’s’ crouch-

ing (white) form. ‘Goodbye democracy’ was its byline.

The vote against conscription was thus not a repudiation of

empire, let alone of Britishness. It was a vote against an open-ended

commitment to the war on the Western Front. It expressed a fear that

the deeper purpose of empire – conceived as the expansion of ‘White

Australia’ in its South Paciﬁc homeland – would be jeopardised by the

reckless expenditure of its most precious resource: white men. But it was

far from reﬂecting any wider disenchantment with the war. Hughes’

defeat in the ﬁrst referendum was followed by the crushing victory of

his Nationalist government in the general election of May 1917.The

Labour government in Queensland, the only state ministry to oppose

conscription (the Labour governments in South Australia and New

South Wales had supported it), was at pains to reassure British opin-

ion that its commitment to victory was unimpaired.

110

Other Labour

leaders, perhaps fearful of the ‘lose-the-war’ label that Hughes tried to

hang round their neck, insisted on their support for the war and enlist-

ment. Nor was the ‘digger’ myth that emerged in the second half of the

war to celebrate ANZAC heroism at Gallipoli at odds with the ‘Britan-

nic’ tradition of White Australia as the British vanguard in the Southern

Seas. The tough, independent-minded digger colonising the ‘bush’ ﬁtted

perfectly with a ‘conservative imperial nationalism’ in which Australia

played the part of the ‘imperial farm’.

111

343 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

In the other Paciﬁc dominion, contributing to the war aroused

much less controversy. In New Zealand, there was the same eager-

ness as in Australia to be seen at Britain’s side. During the war, over

40 per cent of eligible males enlisted for service, the vast majority of

them volunteers. Press, public and government united behind the vision

of empire unity. ‘A great step forward is being made in the work of

Imperial uniﬁcation’, declared The Dominion newspaper in September

1914.

112

In the race to send an imperial contingent, boasted Sir James

Allen, the defence minister, in April 1915, ‘we are a long way ahead

of any one of the Dominions’.

113

The quid pro quo was a voice in

foreign policy;

114

the sine qua non, a voice in London. The joint lead-

ers of the government coalition, Massey and Sir Joseph Cook, spent

much of the war in London, the real centre (as James Belich observes)

of the New Zealand war effort.

115

In May–June 1916, conscription

for overseas service was enacted by an overwhelming parliamentary

majority.

116

There was no great feeling against it, Allen reported to

Massey in London.

117

Of course, this remarkable commitment to a far-

off conﬂict was not unqualiﬁed. By the end of 1916, there was growing

nervousness about the commercial predominance of the United States

and Japan in the Paciﬁc, and industrial unrest welled up in the last

year of the war. But the ﬁerce divisions of Australian politics were

largely avoided. War prosperity allowed the government to conciliate

the most powerful trade unions. New Zealand’s longer history of social

intervention by central government may have made conscription more

palatable. And the isolationist tradition was weaker: a reﬂection partly

of demographic and strategic realities, and partly perhaps of the differ-

ences in ethnic composition (New Zealand’s Irish Catholic community

was smaller, less radical and less inﬂuential than Australia’s) and immi-

grant tradition on the different shores of the Tasman Sea.

The spectre of revolt: South Africa, India, Ireland

South Africa

In Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ethnic majorities of British

descent, urged on by a London-looking press, their Protestant clergies

and the loyalism of recent immigrants, responded to the call of the

Empire in danger. In all three dominions, the political elite insisted that

the survival and solidarity of the Empire was a vital national interest,

344 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

and that their future as ‘British nations’ (the only national future then

imaginable) depended upon the fullest possible commitment to the

imperial enterprise. But, in South Africa, India and Ireland, the pol-

itics of imperial war were very different. South Africa was a dominion

too, but a dominion with a difference. Among whites, to whom politi-

cal power was all but completely reserved, Dutch-speaking Afrikaners

formed a clear majority. While the ‘English’ reacted to the outbreak of

war with martial ardour – ‘Johannesburg is full of patriotic emotion’,

reported the Unionist politician, Patrick Duncan

118

– Afrikaner feel-

ings were much more ambivalent. There was little sense of obligation

to the imperial power whose conquest of the Boer republics was such

a recent and painful memory. Among those Afrikaners in whom the

republican faith still burned ﬁercely, the old adage ‘England’s danger,

Ireland’s opportunity’ bore an obvious South African meaning. The

prime minister, Louis Botha, faced a dilemma. He was acutely sen-

sitive to the charge of dividing the Afrikaner volk. But he was also

aware that refusal to contribute to the war would enrage the South

African English and expose him to the full force of London’s displea-

sure. ‘Racial’ conﬂict between Afrikaners and English was likely to arise

whether he participated too much or too little. Shrewdly, Botha sought

a middle course. At London’s request, he mounted a campaign to cap-

ture German South West Africa (modern Namibia). It was an obvious

target and one that might have been expected to appeal to Afrikaner

feeling as much as English. But politically it was a disaster. To many

Afrikaners, the attack on Germany’s colony was unjustiﬁed, and also

counter-productive: it destroyed their best lever against the imperious

British. Two of Botha’s most senior commanders, and a number of

commandos – the militia units that embodied Boer society at the local

level – rejected the order to serve and rose in revolt. Perhaps 11,000

rebels took up arms against the government. From October 1914 until

January 1915, the issue hung in the balance. ‘People in Johannesburg

do not realise how critical the situation in the country is’, said Duncan,

‘and how much depends on Botha’s being able to keep his people in

hand.’

119

Without Botha, ‘anything might happen’.

120

Botha’s personal authority among Afrikaners and the loy-

alty he enjoyed from the majority of commandos enabled him to

bring the revolt to an end. But bitterness and republican sympathy

remained strong, especially in the countryside. Even in the towns, young

Afrikaners were ‘very disaffected’. ‘The Empire means nothing to them