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

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355 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

a Home Rule Ireland would be permanent, and the Redmondites that

it would be temporary. When the truth was revealed, the ‘agreement’

fell apart. Redmond angrily rejected the offer of immediate Home Rule

for the twenty-six counties outside Ulster, knowing that much of his

following would reject a compromise that left many Catholic national-

ists in a separate North. In the House of Commons in March 1917,the

Redmondites complained bitterly of British betrayal. ‘What is it that

stands in the way of Ireland’s taking her place as a self-governing part of

the Empire?’, asked the leader’s brother, William Redmond.

144

Ireland

wanted to be like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, ‘side by side

in the common cause’. John Redmond himself offered a sombre and

prophetic warning. The ‘revolutionary party’, almost banished before

the war, was now reviving. His own position had been made untenable.

In a savage peroration, Redmond blamed his political bankruptcy on

the treachery of British leaders. ‘Any British statesman who . . . once

again teaches the Irish people the lesson that any National leader who,

taking his political life in his hands, endeavours to combine local and

Imperial patriotism, endeavours to combine loyalty to Ireland’s rights

with loyalty to the Empire – anyone who again teaches the lesson that

such a man is certain to be let down and betrayed by this course, is

guilty of treason not merely to the liberties of Ireland but to the unity,

strength and best interests of this Empire.’

145

Lloyd George replied

merely that Ulster could not be forced into Home Rule.

There was to be one last throw of the political dice. Too much

was at stake to abandon all effort at settlement. For London, an unrec-

onciled Ireland would embarrass Britain’s relations with the United

States (now a ‘co-belligerent’), threaten Irish recruitment and alarm the

Unionist majority in Parliament on which the Lloyd George ministry

depended. For Redmond and the Irish National party it would ensure

the oblivion that Redmond feared. The Irish Convention of 1917–18

was a desperate attempt to ﬁnd a bargain acceptable to the nationalists,

and both the Northern and the Southern Unionists (who had most to

lose from partition).

146

It failed, but its real failure was to have been

irrelevant. It was boycotted by Sinn Fein, and Sinn Fein was already

by 1917 the most powerful force in Irish politics. While Redmond pur-

sued a constitutional will-o’-the-wisp, Sinn Fein urged mass support for

outright separation. It crushed the Redmondites in the by-elections. In

May 1917, it won the open endorsement of the Catholic hierarchy. But

the real secret of its remarkable rise was the Irish fear of conscription.

356 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Ireland had been carefully exempted from the Military Service

Act of 1916. But its shadow loomed large in Irish society. As the war

dragged on, it seemed only a matter of time before conscription crossed

the Irish Sea. There were many reasons why Irish attitudes were so dif-

ferent from those in mainland Britain. Even the Redmondites insisted

that without Home Rule conscription was illegitimate. Like Afrikaners

or French Canadians, the Catholic majority denied an obligation to

ﬁght for the Empire, even if many were willing to do so. Ireland had the

highest rate of emigration in pre-war Europe:

147

even without conscrip-

tion, the haemorrhage of young men (and women) was the cruellest fact

in Irish life. In rural Ireland especially, conscription threatened (or was

thought to) the survival of small farms dependent on family labour.

Scares proliferated about the moral and physical pollution that army

service would bring. Conscription would debauch as well as impover-

ish, a notion not discouraged by the clergy. Politically and culturally, it

meant anglicisation, the fraying of local loyalty and Catholic identity.

The fear of conscription was thus the cause that turned the

republican separatism of Sinn Fein into a popular movement, and Irish

politics into its revolutionary phase. As the Convention ﬂoundered

towards collapse, the slide towards open revolt gathered speed. For,

by April 1918, the threat of conscription had become dangerously real.

As the crisis of British manpower grew with the huge new losses on

the Western Front, the call-up in Britain was extended to men as old

as ﬁfty-one. After a bitter internal row, the Lloyd George government

shelved its application to Ireland – for the moment. The effect on Ireland

was like a call to arms. The Volunteer brigades recruited and trained

more actively than ever.

148

For many young men, armed resistance

as a Volunteer seemed the only defence against compulsory service

in the British army. Raiding and counter-raiding between Volunteers

and police intensiﬁed. De Valera, now leader of Sinn Fein, drew up a

national pledge against conscription that was signed by tens of thou-

sands at the church door on 21 April 1918 and endorsed by a general

strike two days later. Amid these signs of violent upheaval (and with

deepening gloom on the Western Front), London turned once more to

repression. The Sinn Fein leadership (some 150 persons) was gaoled

and its meetings proscribed – a step widely seen as the prelude to con-

scription. But it was now too late to break the grip of the movement

and its military wing on the Irish countryside. For the rest of the war, an

armed truce prevailed. When peace came, Sinn Fein’s electoral triumph

357 / The war for Empire, 1914–1919

(outside Ulster) and the opening shots of its military struggle showed

how far and how quickly the war had transformed the old landscape

of Anglo-Irish relations.

It was at ﬁrst sight surprising that the revolt against empire

had gone furthest so near the centre of the British system. The paradox

is superﬁcial. Though the demands of war had been felt across the

whole imperial world, the alienation they caused had been deepest in

Ireland. In pre-war Ireland, political expectations had been higher and

the edge of violence closer than anywhere else – with the consequences

seen in 1916. As in India, the imperial government could not promise

enough to save its would-be allies from defeat by ‘extremists’. As in

India, its agents enraged their opponents by the threat of coercion. But

the real catalyst of Irish nationalism in its republican and separatist

mode was fear that the imperial state was about to drive its control

deeper than ever before into the localities – through conscription and

its enforcement – and thus reverse the pre-war trend to devolution. It

was in Ireland, then, that the cloven hoof of war imperialism was most

clearly visible, and in Ireland that the reaction was most deadly.

War and empire

The effects of the war on the British system were disturbing but also

contradictory. Its extraordinary conclusion in Europe – unimaginable

in 1914 – had wrecked, for the time being at least, the old balance of

power, which had exerted so much inﬂuence on the extra-European

diplomacy of the European states. Devising a stable successor regime

that would restrain the jealousies of the European powers within Europe

and beyond was one of the most pressing concerns of the ‘peacemak-

ers’ who gathered in Paris in January 1919. Secondly, the war had

set in motion a geopolitical revolution in East Asia. The weakness of

a Russia engulfed in civil war (the disintegration of Russian colonial

power in Northeast Asia seemed highly likely in 1919), the (relative)

strength of Japan, and the rise of xenophobic nationalism in China

(that was to burst out in May 1919) threatened a general onslaught

against Western interests on this furthest frontier of the British world.

Thirdly, the war had destabilised the world economy and checked the

globalising trends from which Britain had proﬁted so much before

1914. It loaded Britain with debts both internal and external. At

358 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

the same time, the sacriﬁce of men and wealth and the terrible uncer-

tainties that persisted almost until the end of the conﬂict had strained

the old basis of cooperation between Britain and the empire countries,

goading into life the secessionist strand of local nationalism in Ire-

land, India and even South Africa. By way of compensation, the war

had crushed for the moment the great power rivalry of Germany and

Russia, whose competitive expansion British leaders had feared most

before 1914. As a result, the British had been able to occupy much of

the Eurasian ‘cockpit’ in the Near and Middle East, the region where

geopolitical uncertainty had seemed most dangerous to the imperial

system – but at what cost, and for how long?

This was what one of Woodrow Wilson’s advisers was to call

‘the new world’.

149

How far British leaders could reconstruct their pre-

war system, and adapt it to the shape of the new international order,

and how far they could carry with them their partners, agents, allies

and collaborators in India, the dominions and the ‘outer empire’, will

be seen in the chapters that follow.

MAKING IMPERIAL PEACE, 1919–1926

In 1918, the British won an astonishing, almost fortuitous, victory,

snatching an imperial triumph from what seemed, as late as June,

the jaws of continental defeat. Their greatest imperial rivals had been

broken, one (Russia) by the other (Germany). In the Armageddon of

empires, British credit, domestic unity and imperial cohesion had been

tested to the limit, but had survived. Of the three principal victor pow-

ers, the United States, France and Britain, the British seemed best placed

to turn the making of peace to their advantage. They had made the

largest territorial gains, in the Middle East, Africa and the Paciﬁc and

had most to bargain with. They had incurred heavy debts to the United

States, but London’s inﬂuence on post-war reconstruction was bound

to be large, since it was from London that the European victor states

had borrowed most. With their pre-war rivals in disarray, there seemed

little danger that British authority would be challenged by colonial

politicians – whose leverage had been cut down by peace – or client

states, no longer able to play off two sides in the great game of imperial

inﬂuence. Above all, perhaps, with the gravest threat to the balance of

power in Europe extinguished by the defeat of the Central Powers, the

British could hope to lower their naval guard (after the strain of the

Anglo-German arms race) and ease the pre-war tensions over imperial

defence created by their single-minded concentration on the North Sea.

European peace would leave them free to remake their partnerships

with dominion, Indian and colonial politicians. Devolution – promised

to the dominions and India in 1918 – would earn a dividend of loyalty.

The British world-system would enter an Antonine Age of peace and

prosperity.

But it did not turn out like that. Inevitably, the violent disrup-

tion of the pre-war order could not be repaired overnight. Nor was it

360 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

likely that a new blueprint for world politics would command ready

assent among the victorious allies, let alone in the ranks of the defeated

or disenfranchised. Everywhere the prospect of a post-war settlement

that might last for decades raised the stakes of political and social strug-

gle: between states, peoples, races, religions, clans and classes. Success –

whether dominance, freedom or security – was vital before the new

moulds hardened, before new rulers could climb into the saddle, before

cynicism or despair set in among the rank and ﬁle on whose back-

ing leaders at all levels depended. For all these reasons, the formal

diplomacy of peacemaking was sure to be staged against the disorderly

backdrop of political or armed struggle wherever there was the chance

of a fait accompli, or the hope of winning the national status that the

peacemakers seemed so willing to dispense.

The British system was bound to be especially vulnerable to

this post-war turbulence. Sprawled across the globe, it faced nation-

making movements at every point: Irish, Greek, Turkish, Arab, Egyp-

tian, Persian, Afghan, Indian, Chinese and West African. Its open soci-

eties were easily permeable by new ideologies of class, nation, race or

religion. Without a draconian apparatus of control (unimaginable in

most places if only for reasons of cost), its colonial and semi-colonial

regions could not be closed to external inﬂuence or new ideas. Its com-

mercial prosperity depended upon an open trading economy and mul-

tilateral ﬂows of goods and money. The prolonged dislocation of this

ﬁne-spun web threatened to wreck the mutual self-interest underpin-

ning the politics of empire, and drain the wealth that paid for its costly

superstructure. Peacemaking in its broadest sense – settling territorial

boundaries and sovereignty, reopening the channels of trade, adjusting

the spheres of great power interest – would need to be early and com-

plete. The risk otherwise was that discontent and uncertainty would

subvert the collaborative base of British rule and erode the loyalty of its

self-governing partners to the idea of a British system. But peacemak-

ing was anything but swift and far from complete. It was an intricate

puzzle requiring dozens of pieces to be ﬁtted together. Cooperation

in one ﬁeld required agreement in another and harmony in a third.

Territorial settlement, strategic security and economic reconstruction

were all entangled in a maddening knot of conﬂicting interests. Con-

sequently, peacemaking in Europe dragged on until the Dawes Plan

(1924) and Locarno (1925) and ignored Russia’s place in the post-war

order. In the Middle East, a territorial settlement was delayed until the

361 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

treaty of Lausanne (1923) and ﬁnal agreement over the northern bor-

der of Iraq until 1926. In East Asia, the Washington treaties of 1921–

2 checked great power rivalries but not the determination of Chinese

nationalists to attack the foreign privileges embodied in treaty-ports and

concessions.

As a result, the claims of the dominion governments, as well as

Irish, Indian, Egyptian, Arab and (some) African nationalists for wider

inﬂuence and greater autonomy in the British system were caught up in

the larger instabilities of the post-war world. Mistrustful of London’s

intentions, fearful of new British claims upon them, resentful of the

apparent disregard for their ethnic, religious or constitutional aspira-

tions, they had little sympathy for the mood of chronic anxiety that

hung over the cabinets of Lloyd George and his prime ministerial suc-

cessors. Among British ministers and their advisers, the avalanche of

international and imperial demands bred a siege mentality that verged at

times on paranoia. Die-hards and visionaries pondered loudly whether

the end of empire was at hand. But, by the mid-1920s, the worst seemed

over. The danger that internal stresses and external pressures would

together set off a general crisis of the British system receded. Its strate-

gic security and ﬁnancial solvency did not break down. The centre held.

As nationalism fell back from the high tide of 1919–20, its leaders made

their peace – for the moment – with the British world-system.

‘New World’ geopolitics

The ﬁrst priority of British ministers in London was to secure a peace

that would avert a future commitment to European security on the

terrible scale of the War. The logic of Britain’s global interests, as they

well understood, was to protect the imperial centre but not at such

cost as to imperil the defence and development of the rest of their

world-system. The stringent terms imposed in the treaty of Versailles

(28 June 1919) were designed to disarm the terrifying power of German

‘militarism’. Germany’s navy was seized (but scuttled by its crews) and

its rebuilding forbidden; her colonies were conﬁscated; and her army

capped at 100,000 – one-third the peacetime size of the combined

British and Indian armies, one-eighth the size of France’s. But the larger

problem remained: how to prevent the (eventual) resurgence of German

power and enforce (in the meantime) the punitive terms of peace.

362 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

For an important group of British opinion, the answer lay in

forging an Atlantic partnership with the United States.

There were

many attractions. An Anglo-American alliance would rule the waves

and the exchanges. It would be the decisive counter-weight to any

power that aspired to dominate the European continent. It appealed

to the vague emotion of pan-Anglo-Saxon racial unity to which politi-

cians of all parties were susceptible. It would avert the risk of naval and

ﬁnancial rivalry, whose impact on Britain was bound to be adverse. It

was favoured by Canadian leaders, and by Smuts, the heir-apparent in

South African politics. It was the best guarantee against the continen-

tal entanglements upon which all the dominions looked with anxiety

and disfavour as a dangerous distraction from imperial purposes. It

would draw Britain away from the ‘old diplomacy’ of secret commit-

ments and (as the war had shown) unlimited liabilities towards open

covenants and deﬁned obligations: and thus stabilise her claims on

dominion loyalty.

Above all, it would make bearable the otherwise

open-ended burdens of the League of Nations Covenant as the instru-

ment for post-war collective security.

But in Europe such an Anglo-American partnership proved

impossible. On the British side, even those keenest on Atlantic amity

would not give up the claim to naval superiority and its vital instru-

ment, the right of blockade.

The ‘freedom of the seas’ – on which

Woodrow Wilson insisted – remained a bone of contention. For Wilson,

naval parity with Britain was the only basis on which the United States

could enter the new world order envisaged in the League of Nations

Covenant.

But, before the naval issue could be resolved, as it was in

part at the Washington conference in 1921–2, American membership of

the League of Nations was bluntly rejected by the United States Senate.

This reaction against further involvement in the rancorous quarrels of

the Old World had a second vital consequence. It aborted the three-

way security pact through which Britain and the United States were

together to guarantee France against unprovoked attack by Germany.

When ratiﬁcation failed in Washington, the Anglo-French pact lapsed

as well.

From July 1919, therefore, the British were thrown back on

less attractive solutions to the most pressing of their strategic concerns.

They could not wash their hands of Europe for fear that the dangers

that had forced their intervention in 1914 would quickly recur, and

because a European settlement was economically vital. They might

363 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

have been tempted to hark back to ‘Edwardian’ solutions: to rebuild

a European ‘balance of power’ so that no state could dominate the

continent against them. But the balance of power was now discredited

by its failure in 1914, and by public suspicion of the ‘old diplomacy’ of

alliance treaties and secret clauses. Instead, London was pledged to col-

lective security and the League of Nations. In principle, this shared the

burden of keeping the peace and enforcing the treaty system of post-war

Europe among the great continental states. In practice, the Bolshevik

revolution in Russia and the fragmentation of Eastern Europe threw the

task of containing Germany and policing the treaties back upon Britain

and France. Worse still, the communist ‘contagion’ from Russia threat-

ened to spread through a Europe that was economically devastated and

socially disoriented. What was needed was a Concert of Liberal Europe,

to preside over the new era of national self-determination, to promote

material recovery and to repel the Bolshevik menace. That meant the

reconciliation and cooperation of Britain, France and Germany.

This was the object, often muddled and obscure, of Lloyd

George’s coalition government and those of his successors after his

fall in October 1922. What made it Herculean, or worse, were the

interlocking differences blocking a European settlement along the lines

laid down in the peace treaties of 1919. Thus the peace treaties looked

forward to the creation of new nation states in Poland, Czechoslo-

vakia, Hungary and the ‘South Slav state’ (later Yugoslavia), and the

ethnic ‘rectiﬁcation’ of other pre-war boundaries. Such an ambitious

programme depended heavily upon the cooperation of Germany. At the

same time, the treaties prescribed reparations payments through which

Germany would compensate France and Belgium (mainly) for the dam-

age of the war. But, neither reparations on the scale demanded, nor the

peaceful reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, were possible

without a wider programme of economic recovery, and the provision of

new capital to help rebuild Europe’s war-shattered ﬁnances. Here was a

further maddening complication. New capital meant American money.

Fresh American loans were unlikely without agreement on repaying the

wartime advances made mainly to Britain. The British were unwilling

to promise payment unless the huge loans they had made to their Euro-

pean allies were part of the ﬁnancial settlement. (Indeed, loud voices in

Britain, including Keynes and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer,

urged mutual cancellation of all war debts.) But, of their wartime allies,

one (Russia) was a bankrupt outlaw; and the other (France) insisted

364 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

upon large German reparations as the condition of any reckoning. And

so the problem came full circle.

By the end of 1922, after three years of tortured diplomacy,

periodic confrontation and a full-scale war between Poland and Rus-

sia, Europe’s post-war instability approached a crisis. Anglo-French

relations were embittered by growing differences over their approach

to Germany (whose economic recovery was more urgent in British eyes

than the enforcement of reparations) and by rivalry in the Near East.

German resistance to French demands and resentment against the terri-

torial losses imposed by the treaties were fanned by internal discontent

and economic hardship. In January 1923, the Conservative govern-

ment led by Bonar Law, who had emerged from retirement to break

up the Lloyd George coalition, watched impotently as France occupied

the Ruhr to extract German reparations. It faced the demand from the

United States for repayment of its war loans on terms that Bonar Law

rejected as intolerable. It fretted about the military consequences as the

Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, struggled (at the Lausanne conference)

to defend the draconian terms imposed on Turkey in the treaty of S

evres

(1920) against an insurgent regime led by Kemal Ataturk, the treach-

ery (as Curzon saw it) of the French and the hostility of the Russians,

posing now as Turkey’s friend against the British ogre. ‘I have realised

from the ﬁrst’, Bonar Law had told Curzon in December 1922, ‘the

utmost importance of trying to get the Lausanne business settled before

we came to grips with Poincar

e over reparations.’

But, as the Turkish

conference turned sour, and the German crisis deepened, he began to

press the case for withdrawal from Britain’s mandate in Iraq for whose

northern third (the old vilayet of Mosul) the Turks were expected to

wage an armed struggle.

The travails of the imperial centre were leav-

ing their mark on imperial defence. The need for drastic economies at

home (partly to meet the American bill), and the receding prospect of

European peace and reconstruction seemed to be turning Britain’s main

strategic prize in the Middle East into an untenable liability.

1923 was a crisis year. But matters gradually improved. The

nightmare of a Turkish, French and Russian combination against

Britain in the Near and Middle East soon passed. In the treaty that was

signed in July 1923, the Turks accepted the loss of their Arab provinces,

and the demilitarisation of the Straits but regained full sovereignty

in Anatolia and part of Thrace. Mosul was deferred for arbitration.

Bonar Law’s Cabinet colleagues insisted upon accepting the American