Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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345 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919
or inspires them with revulsion.’
121
For the English politicians, fear of
another revolt and dependence upon Botha to prevent it happening,
were deeply frustrating.
122
They were furious at the terms on which
South Africa’s contribution to the larger war was made. In August
1915, Botha arranged for a volunteer contingent of brigade strength to
be raised for overseas service. (In all, over 70,000 whites, overwhelm-
ingly drawn from the English community, and 44,000 blacks served in
Europe.
123
) But he insisted that they be paid for by London and incor-
porated in the British army – a decision which meant that their pay at
‘imperial’ rates was one-third of the ‘Union’ pay received by those who
fought in South West Africa or by the (mainly Afrikaner) contingent
that fought under Smuts in German East Africa. The Unionist party
leaders raged privately at Botha’s refusal to bring his South African
party into a ‘loyal’ coalition to fight the war. But they dared not attack
him openly, despite the strong feeling among their supporters, for fear
he would resign or drift into alliance with the covert republicans in the
National party.
Indeed, Botha became more not less indispensable the longer
the war went on. Military failure in Europe and the Near East, the
stimulus of the Dublin rising, and agrarian discontent among rural
Afrikaners, helped to revive the republican cause in the second half of
the war. In 1918, controversy over the Union government’s payments
to London (to meet some of the costs of the South African contingent),
rumours that conscription would be introduced to meet the manpower
crisis on the Western Front and mounting labour unrest (among whites
and blacks) as shortage and inflation took their toll, heightened the
political tension. Nationalists talked openly of demanding ‘complete
independence’ (code for a republic) when the war ended. In January
1919, they agreed on a delegation to Paris to reverse the verdict of
1902 and restore republican status to the Transvaal and Orange Free
State. English politicians looked on fearfully. ‘The war . . . has opened
up much of the old racial consciousness’, said Duncan gloomily. ‘It has
also accentuated the sense of dependence involved in the subordination
of our South African politics to the exigencies of a desperate war.’
124
But, if the Afrikaner majority united behind a republic and secession
from the Empire, the result would be disastrous. ‘The English would
fight’, and ‘it would be impossible for the British Government and the
rest of the Empire to keep out of it.’ Something had to be done to
appease the Afrikaner sense of racial subjection and build a real South
346 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
African citizenship. If the Empire cannot provide adequately for South
Africa in these respects, it will not keep South Africa as a member.’
In fact, the war had starkly revealed the peculiar terms on which
South Africa was attached to the British system. Isolationism was a
much more powerful factor there than in any of the other dominions.
This was partly a matter of Afrikaner resistance to imperial ‘service’:
the same feeling could be found in Quebec. But it sprang just as much
from the unspoken fear that a holocaust of white men in a far-off war
would imperil the physical base of white supremacy in a sub-continent
where it was recent, hard-won and fragile. Though blacks had almost
no political power, the zwaartgevaar (‘black danger’) was here, as in
much else, the real governor of South African politics. For Unionist
politicians, the war was a great disappointment. They had failed to
force Botha into an Anglo-Afrikaner coalition avowedly ‘loyal’ to the
imperial connection. Instead, the war had seemed to strengthen the
old ‘Krugerist’ republican strand of Afrikaner nationalism. The English
were divided by the politics of class. The standard-bearers of Britannic
sentiment in South Africa resigned themselves to the role of an imperial
garrison, ready to block the road to secession by whatever means. But,
before the full impact of post-war unrest and instability could be felt,
Botha died prematurely in August 1919.
India
In South Africa, the political compact of 1910 had been preserved by
carefully limiting its contribution to the war. No such option existed
for India. South Africa was a vital strategic outpost whose gold output
was mobilised for London’s war economy. But India was a main base,
the second centre of British military power. Once the war spread to
the Near and Middle East, India was expected to bear much of the
burden: to counter the Turkish threat in the Persian Gulf (and to
the British-controlled oilfield in Southwest Persia) and then to invade
the Ottoman provinces of modern Iraq. In the dark days of 1918,
when the ‘new war’ threatened imperial disaster, India was pressed
even harder for men and resources to meet the shortfall elsewhere. All
this was bound to be a source of heavy strain. India’s modern infrastruc-
ture was only very partially developed. There was little reserve capacity
for the sudden increase in the transport of persons and products. In an
overwhelmingly agrarian economy, much of it near the margin of sub-
sistence, there was little scope for the increase of revenue or for the vast
347 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919
domestic borrowing through which London had financed much of its
war expenditure at home. Above all, a government in which all execu-
tive power was wielded by British officials faced the Himalayan task of
winning Indian loyalty to an imperial war. If the war was to mean the
recruitment (of volunteers), an increased burden of taxation, the eco-
nomic hardships of inflation, shortage, bottlenecks, and the restriction
of personal liberty, for what higher purpose were Indians being asked
to make such sacrifice?
Symptoms of discontent were not lacking in India. Almost from
the beginning of the war, the government in Delhi had been alarmed
by the threat of armed conspiracy by Sikh militants based in the United
States and the revival of terrorism in Bengal. But the war against the
Ottoman Empire raised a much more worrying prospect. Many edu-
cated Muslims in India had been agitated before 1914 by the fear that
Turkey as the largest independent Muslim state and guardian of the
Holy Places in Mecca and Jerusalem was about to collapse. Defeat
by Italy and the Balkan states in 1912–13 tolled the Turkish knell.
Associations had been formed to express Muslim solidarity and send
material help. Muslim politics in India became increasingly responsive
to this sense of a wider Islamic identity. In May 1915, the government
of India interned the most prominent of the younger and more radical
Muslim politicians, the brothers Mohamed and Shaukat Ali, on the
grounds that they had made contact with Turkish agents, were pro-
moting pro-Turkish sympathies in their newspapers, and were active
champions of ‘pan-Islamism’.
125
The result was to pave the way for
a much closer alignment between the leaders of the Muslim League
and the Indian National Congress than had seemed possible before
1914. By early 1916, the Viceroy was becoming anxious to pre-empt
the call for some political reward for Indian loyalty by a constitu-
tional initiative of his own – though one that fell far short of the ‘colo-
nial swaraj’ (dominion-style self-government) to which Congress was
committed.
126
The appearance of the ‘Home Rule Leagues’ in 1916
showed that open discontent was spreading among Hindus as well as
Muslims. But, before New Delhi could extract a decision from its embat-
tled masters in London, the Indian politicians pulled off a stunning
coup. In December 1916, the Congress and the Muslim League reached
agreement upon a set of constitutional demands whose studied moder-
ation concealed a far-reaching challenge to British authority. Far from
being the handiwork of ‘extremists’, it had been endorsed by the elected
348 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
members of the Viceroy’s legislative council – a group of unimpeachable
respectability.
Delhi and London were now galvanised into activity. The
Viceroy pressed not for the promise of a post-war declaration, but a dec-
laration now. Without it, he warned, it would be difficult ‘to arrest the
further defection of moderate opinion’ to the campaign for ‘immediate
Home Rule’.
127
In London, the Secretary of State, Austen Chamber-
lain, was sympathetic. Like the Viceroy’s, his reforming instincts were
cautious. But, in the summer of 1917, Chamberlain was swept away
by the damning report of the Mesopotamia Commission which blamed
the India Office and the government of India for mismanaging the dis-
astrous advance on Baghdad. He was replaced by a Liberal, a prot
´
eg
´
e
of Asquith, but now a follower of Lloyd George, Edwin Montagu.
Montagu had known the India Office as a junior minister. As a Jew, he
was alert to the racial arrogance of British officialdom of which edu-
cated Indians so often complained. Most of all, he was fiercely critical
of the bureaucratic mentality of the Civilian Raj. The government of
India was ‘too wooden, too iron, too inelastic, too antediluvian’, he
told the House of Commons shortly before his appointment. It had to
become political, to argue its case, to win over opinion. With his abra-
sive manner and radical ideas, Montagu was an unlikely appointment
to the India Office. But the accident of war had given him a doctor’s
mandate to shake up the lethargic Indian government and head off the
danger of Indian unrest – at the very moment when the receding hope
of victory in Europe made help from the empire countries all the more
vital. In August 1917, Montagu extracted from the War Cabinet per-
mission to announce a new departure in Indian politics. In his famous
announcement on 20 August 1917, India was promised ‘the gradual
development of self-governing institutions’ and ‘the progressive real-
ization of responsible government . . . as an integral part of the British
Empire’.
128
What this coded language seemed to mean was that the
Viceroy’s opposition to ‘colonial swaraj’ had been overcome. The days
of ‘constitutional despotism’ were numbered. India’s political future lay
in the promotion to dominion-type self-government that the Congress
had so long been demanding.
The Congress–League scheme had been careful to disavow
interference with India’s imperial burdens, the likely cause of objec-
tions from London. External affairs, the princely states and the army
budget were all excluded from the purview of the new elected councils
349 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919
it called for at provincial and All-India level.
129
But over internal affairs
the control of elected Indians was to be very wide. Resolutions passed
by the councils could be carried against the veto of the executive at
the second attempt. The old adversary, the Indian Civil Service, was to
be removed altogether from the new executive bodies in the provinces
and in the government of India in Delhi, to be replaced by a mixture of
appointed Indians and British from ‘home’, free (it was assumed) from
the taint of the Civilian ethos. Montagu’s plan was to extend devolution
at the provincial level and push India firmly down the road to federa-
tion, the only ‘thinkable’ policy, he told Lloyd George.
130
In the autumn
of 1917, he set out for India to persuade the Viceroy and the Civilians
to adopt a much more drastic form of provincial self-government than
they had intended, to reduce central control over provincial revenues
and leave much of the provinces’ affairs to elected Indian ministers.
These ideas were badly received. When Montagu met the Viceroy and
the provincial governors – the barons of the Civilian Raj – in Delhi, he
was dismayed by the governors’ hostility to real reform.
131
But, in 1918,
the Civilian Raj was in low water. Its reputation for competence had
been destroyed by the Mesopotamia Commission. Under this cloud, it
had little hope of appealing over Montagu’s head to opinion at home.
If they did not heed his advice, Montagu bluntly told the governors, ‘I
would resign and they must get somebody else’.
132
Moreover, the need
for a radical overhaul was voiced as much by ‘imperialists’ as by rad-
icals in Britain. Lionel Curtis, the ‘prophet’ of the ‘Round Table’ (the
influential pressure group for imperial federation), who was reputed to
have the ear of Lords Milner and Curzon, as well as that of The Times
(or so Montagu believed), had mobilised opinion in India and Britain
behind an even more radical scheme of provincial devolution, breaking
up the provinces into ‘provincial states’.
133
The senior Civilians also
knew that the demands of the war effort were bound to grow even
more voracious, and with them the need for Indian cooperation. In the
triangle of Indian politics, both London and local opinion were against
them. They could not obstruct simultaneously a reforming minister and
the grand coalition of Indian politicians.
With his doctrine of winning over the Indian ‘moderates’, Mon-
tagu eventually gained the grudging acquiescence of Chelmsford and his
colleagues to what (the term was Curtis’) came to be called ‘dyarchy’.
In the provinces, government business was to be divided into ‘trans-
ferred’ and ‘reserved’ subjects: with the first category coming under
350 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
the control of Indian ministers ‘responsible’ to elected legislatures. At
the centre, the old legislative council was to be enlarged and have an
elected majority. But it would have no control over any part of the
central government; it could not prevent the passing of the budget;
nor would any member of the Viceroy’s government be responsible
to it. To meet the long-standing Congress complaint, one-third of the
Indian Civil Service would henceforth be recruited in India. For all its
compromises, this was strong medicine for the Civilians, and even the
civil servant charged with drafting the report could hardly conceal his
distaste for its recommendations.
134
Montagu went home to publish
what was to be called the ‘Montagu–Chelmsford Report’ believing that
he had headed off the impending crisis in Indian politics that he, like
Curtis, had feared: the inevitable result (they thought) if Indian politi-
cians were denied some responsibility for government and driven into
demagogy or agitation. But, if Montagu had hoped that his reward for
reforms that went far beyond what Morley had considered only nine
years earlier would be the grateful thanks of ‘political India’, and the
triumph of the ‘moderates’, he was to be sorely disappointed. In reality,
India was on the brink of a political earthquake.
The first sign of this was the Congress’ furious rejection of
the reform scheme. At a special session to debate the reforms, speak-
ers queued up to denounce the leisurely timetable for Indian self-
government, the miserly allocation of civil service posts to Indians,
and the failure to concede any measure of responsible government at
the Indian centre.
135
The delegates still spoke the language of loyalty.
‘We want to save the Empire’, said one, ‘we want to keep up the British
connection . . . we see the far-ahead danger of an isolated India.’
136
But
they were outraged by the government of India’s plans for new laws to
deal with the threat of sedition (an omnibus term that covered terror-
ism, conspiracy and political unrest) once the wartime legislation ran
out. The Rowlatt Report (it took its name from the judge who wrote
it) was roundly condemned. Montagu had also been uneasy at the dra-
conian powers the report recommended. He had pressed Chelmsford
to reform the Criminal Intelligence department, which routinely spied
on Indian politicians. ‘It is convenient but very dangerous to govern
by means of your police’, he lectured the Viceroy.
137
It was wrong to
exaggerate the threat of violence by a ‘handful of deluded fanatics’.
138
But he dared not press his opposition too far: the Rowlatt Act was
the Viceroy’s quid pro quo for reform. Whatever its justification, this
351 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919
was to be a staggering political blunder. For the Rowlatt Act was the
catalyst for mass politics in India.
It was opposition to Rowlatt that brought Gandhi to the fore-
front of Indian nationalism. Gandhi had returned to India in 1915
after nearly twenty years in South Africa. He brought with him a new
political creed of personal liberation through ‘truth-force’ or satya-
graha. Gandhi professed indifference to the mechanics of constitutional
reform and stressed instead a spiritual struggle against the mental dom-
ination of the British Raj. His ideal was not the unitary Indian state
imagined by the Congress leadership but a myriad of self-sufficient vil-
lages, purged of the superstitions, inequalities and insanitariness that
disfigured rural life, and an India freed from the tyranny of its overbear-
ing foreign bureaucracy. By the middle of 1918, he had demonstrated
in an electrifying way the potential of his social and political teach-
ing for mobilising support far beyond the educated and literate. At
Ahmedabad and Kaira in Western India, and at Champaran in Bihar,
he championed local grievances and inspired local disciples. Skilful use
of the press, and meticulous organisation allowed him to keep con-
trol over local activists, the satyagrahis; while mastery of paperwork
and his willingness to act as an intermediary won him credibility with
the government. He preserved a careful ambiguity over the constitu-
tional issue, welcoming the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms but as the
basis for transforming a ‘top-heavy and ruinously expensive’ regime.
139
More controversially, he gave enthusiastic backing to the recruitment
drive for the Indian army in the summer of 1918, arguing that only if
Indians showed their martial qualities would they win British respect.
‘We want the same rights as an Englishman enjoys’, but Indians could
never be treated as equals if they depended on British protection.
140
But the Rowlatt Act seemed a throwback to the brutal dogmas of race
supremacy. It was a moral outrage against which the whole force of
Indian opinion could be rallied peacefully through satyagraha and har-
tal, the mass boycott or shutdown to show public discontent. It was
the perfect issue with which to connect the local networks of Gandhian
activism to the grander question of Indian freedom.
Part of Gandhi’s motive was to throw a bridge to Muslim dis-
content. Indeed, Muslim irritation was just as dangerous to the Civilian
Raj as Gandhi’s experiments in local activism. Islamic consciousness
had been growing before 1914 stimulated by the spread of newspapers,
the diffusion of Islamic literature and more regular contact with the
352 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
Islamic heartland in Southwest Asia. During the war, an alliance grew
up between the educated ‘Young Muslim’ politicians and the ulama,
the religious elite.
141
The gaoling of the leading Young Muslim politi-
cians showed how seriously the threat of pan-Islamic agitation was
taken. Their continued incarceration after the war was over meant that
Indian Muslims were especially sensitive to the repressive implications
of the Rowlatt Act: they had felt the main weight of its wartime equiv-
alent. This was bad enough. But, at the same moment, Muslim opinion
was becoming more and more alarmed over the fate of the Ottoman
Empire, defeated in war and now destined, so it seemed, to be parti-
tioned between the victorious (Christian) powers. To Muslim leaders
who had escaped internment, the Rowlatt Act and the subjugation of
what remained of the free Muslim world (including its Holy Places)
were inextricably linked.
By early 1919, then, the old slogans of the Congress politicians
had been taken up by an army of new activists. Into this cocktail of dis-
content was stirred a long list of material grievances: wartime shortage
and inflation; rising taxation; the terrible scourge of influenza that car-
ried off millions in 1918. In March 1919, Gandhi launched the Rowlatt
satyagraha. Hartals, demonstrations and riots followed in many North
Indian cities, including Delhi, a centre of pan-Islamic feeling. But, in
the Punjab towns, the violence was far worse. News of Gandhi’s arrest
lit the fuze for widespread disorder. It reached a bloody climax at
Amritsar. After three Europeans had been killed, troops under General
Dyer were rushed to the city. Political meetings were forbidden, but
enforcement was patchy. Then, on the afternoon of 13 April, nearly
400 demonstrators were shot dead at the Jallianwala Bagh, an enclosed
space not far from the Golden Temple.
The ‘new politics’ had arrived with a vengeance. The result
was not a downward spiral into violent confrontation (from which
both sides drew back) but a profound remaking of the political world.
The pattern was not immediately clear, but two great trends had been
set in motion. The first was the growth of a novel form of cultural
politics, radically distinct from the liberal programme of the pre-war
Congress. It was rooted above all in religious identity, Muslim and
Hindu, the appeal of which had been growing rapidly. It gave huge
new impetus to the ‘communal’ tendency visible before the war in the
separatist claims of the Muslim League, and ratified in the electoral
arrangements of the Congress–League scheme. It would fuel the great
353 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919
Non-Cooperation movement of 1920–2, but cut short Gandhi’s bold
experiment in Hindu–Muslim unity, and give a lever to the embattled
Civilians as they struggled to manage the new constitution. It would
shape fundamentally the last phase of British rule. The second trend was
its inevitable counterpart. As Indian politics became more ‘religious’,
more populist and more introverted, the old identification of the edu-
cated elite with the Empire and ‘British connection’ became increasingly
strained. They were harassed by new social and religious appeals, and
betrayed by the meanness of the Montford reforms. They had expected
(with British help) to make a British Indian nation from above. Now
they had to reckon with the demand for new freedoms that welled up
from below. In 1919, how it would all end was anyone’s guess.
Ireland
In no part of the Empire, however, were the effects of war more drastic
than in Ireland. Unless the British recovered the ‘courage and sure-
ness of touch which rendered us famous as Empire builders’, Montagu
had mused in June 1917, ‘we shall simply make a series of Irelands
in different parts of the world’
142
– a fate he meant to avoid in India.
What Montagu had in mind, no doubt, was the unappeasable hostil-
ity with which a part at least of Irish nationalist opinion viewed the
British connection; the vicious circle of forcible repression and violent
resistance; the obstruction of Home Rule by Ulster and the Unionists.
In fact, by the middle of 1917, much of Ireland outside Ulster was in
the early stages of a political revolution that went far beyond anything
seen before 1914. In the post-war election of December 1918, Sinn Fein
swept the board with a programme of republican independence. In Jan-
uary 1919, it declared the new republic in being and began to create a
parallel government. As London struggled to reassert its authority, the
spasmodic violence between the republican ‘army’ and the Royal Irish
Constabulary turned into full-scale guerrilla war.
What had made the Irish revolt against empire so much more
extreme than that of Afrikaners or Indians? Of course, it was true
that, in the last months before the outbreak of the war in 1914,the
threat of armed Ulster resistance to Home Rule and the failure to find
a political compromise had created a mood of violent confrontation
between nationalists and unionists, and brought Ireland to the brink of
civil war. But the emotions roused by the European war had brought
an astonishing change of mood. The leaders of the Irish National party
354 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
had declared their commitment to the imperial war effort. The ‘Irish
Volunteers’, formed to counter the Ulster Volunteer Force, became
the ‘National Volunteers’, the kernel, it was hoped, of an Irish Army
Corps on the dominion model. John Redmond, the Irish Party leader,
accepted the wartime deferment of Home Rule. Like Australian or New
Zealand politicians (and like his Ulster rivals), Redmond intended this
demonstration of imperial loyalty to reap a post-war reward. For the
time being, the road to imperial influence lay through the drill-hall
and recruitment meeting. The Irish dominion-to-be (Redmond’s real
objective) would be funded from London’s wartime debt of honour.
The unsolved problem of Ulster’s exclusion was bound to make
this a risky and uncertain strategy. Many of Redmond’s followers were
bitterly opposed to anything that smacked of partition and deeply mis-
trustful of the London government. Redmond’s best hope was that the
wartime comradeship of Irish unionists and nationalists, and their com-
mon sacrifice, would soften their pre-war antagonism and win Ulster’s
agreement to Home Rule on a flood-tide of All-Irish patriotism. Any
prospect of this was badly damaged by the Dublin Easter Rising in April
1916. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, which controlled the Volun-
teer units opposed to Redmond, had planned an armed insurrection
in September 1915. It was delayed into 1916 for the sake of German
help with the weapons needed for a general revolt. Even when these
failed to arrive (they were intercepted by the Royal Navy), the conspir-
ators under the charismatic leadership of Patrick Pearse went ahead
with the Dublin rising. Their motives have been much debated, but a
desperate determination to shock Irish opinion out of wartime loyalty,
perhaps by a ‘blood sacrifice’, may have been uppermost. Whatever
the aim, the effect was seismic. In six days of fighting, the city centre
was wrecked and 450 people (mostly civilians) were killed. The initial
revulsion against the reckless violence of the conspirators was disarmed
by their subsequent fate: ninety were sentenced to death, sixteen were
to die.
143
Republicanism had found its martyrs. More immediately,
the Dublin rising convinced the London government (which wrongly
attributed it to the influence of Sinn Fein) that some new gesture was
needed to isolate the ‘extremists’ in Irish politics and bolster the loyalty
of Redmond’s followers. Home Rule returned to the political agenda
but in circumstances no more favourable than in 1914.
The result was a stalemate. Lloyd George won the shadow of
consent but only by telling the Ulster Unionists that their exclusion from