Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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385 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
saddle in front of us or whether they cling on behind and hold us round
the waist. The great thing is that the firm seat in the saddle should be
ours.’
64
The alternative was a troublesome ‘entanglement’ in parochial
concerns of no imperial value. Thirdly, that even the cut-down primacy
they retained after the dust had settled in 1923 was of vital importance
to their imperial system. Indeed, for all the setbacks they had suffered
by 1922, the British had gained a real prize. The buffer zone protecting
Suez and the Gulf was far wider and deeper than ever before. The costs
of guarding it after 1923 were low. Its value as compensation for British
weakness in Europe would soon enough be shown.
What is surprising in retrospect is how little interest the British
seemed to take (beyond the ‘official mind’) in the new treaty empire
they had founded in the Middle East, an empire that now included
not only the mandates in Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Palestine, the ‘veiled
protectorate’ in Egypt, the real protectorates in the Persian Gulf, and a
colony in Aden (still under the Bombay government) but also two new
client states in the Nejd and Hedjaz (soon to be forcibly united as Saudi
Arabia by Ibn Saud). Part of the reason may lie in the absence of the
causes that endeared tropical Africa to press and public: the crusade
against slavery and the struggle for souls. Partly it may have been due
to the ignorance or antagonism that shaped British views of the Islamic
world, only partially (and later) offset by the romantic imagery of
T. E. Lawrence.
65
But, most of all, the explanation may lie in the
hour of its acquisition, a time of introversion and exhaustion when the
relief of burdens was the first priority of domestic politics. With no
energy to invest and no capital to send, the British connection remained
narrow and shallow, the preserve for the most part of diplomats and
pashas. There was almost no sympathetic engagement with the nation-
building aspirations of the Arab literati – the constructive ambivalence
that lubricated politics in India and the colonial world – a failure with
a long and bitter legacy. In that sense, Britain’s ‘moment in the Middle
East’
66
remained cast in the mould of its first imagining.
The politics of Gandhi
The vast new liability that Britain assumed in the Middle East after 1918
was bound to affect the internal balance of the British world-system.
It was fiercely criticised in Britain on grounds of expense. It was a
386 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
source of anxiety and irritation (as we will see) among Canadian leaders
who feared its military implications. But the biggest repercussions were
inevitably in India. After all, it was widely assumed that the main
burden of defending the new ‘imperial’ interest in the Middle East
would fall on India. The Indian taxpayer would foot the bill. Even
more controversially, India would have become an accessory to the
final liquidation of the Ottoman Empire, the humiliation of the Sultan-
Caliph, and the imposition of Christian rule over the Muslim Arabs – a
role that many millions of Indian Muslims might be expected to resent.
As we have seen, nervousness about Muslim criticism of India’s war
effort in the Middle East had already led the government of India into
the repression against which Gandhi had mobilised so effectively in the
Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919.
These difficulties were compounded by the new political status
towards which India was supposed to be moving. The August Decla-
ration of 1917 had promised progress towards ‘responsible govern-
ment’, the constitutional equivalent, it was widely assumed, of the
self-government enjoyed by the dominions. The Imperial Conference
in 1918 reinforced the impression that India would be treated in the
meantime as an honorary dominion. India became, somewhat bizarrely,
a non-self-governing member of the League of Nations and the Indian
government campaigned actively (but abortively) to be given a mandate
in East Africa as a reward for war service. These concessions implied
that Indian views would be listened to more carefully than before the
war in matters of foreign policy. The second complication was that both
London and New Delhi were committed to implementing the ‘Mont-
ford’ reforms, to win Congress support for the gradual devolution of
British rule – but on British terms, with safeguards for British interests
and to a British timetable. Political calm – or at least the absence of
violent controversy – was a precondition for their successful launch,
even more so after the Rowlatt Act and Amritsar. Thirdly, while the
emergency of war had passed, the urgency, in London’s view, of the
close coordination of Indian and British policy was as great as ever.
For, if India was to play its (large) part in the new imperial burden
in the Middle East, its army would have to be managed much more
closely from London than in pre-war times. Its trade, revenues and cur-
rency would also need more direct supervision if they were going to
contribute positively to the revival of British economic power.
387 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
The omens were unfavourable even without the additional fric-
tion that the Middle East threatened in Indian politics. The aftermath
of war brought economic turbulence: a steep price rise followed by a
slump in 1920. Resentment at the tax increases of wartime, and the
coercive methods of recruitment practised by the Punjab government,
were now reinforced by additional grievances. As prices fell, tenants
and cultivators paying rent to landlords and land revenue to govern-
ment came under heavy pressure. In many places, the light, benevolent
hand of government now seemed more grasping and, where it upheld
the claims of landlords, less just. In the towns, the see-saw of prices
created labour unrest, symptomatic, the British thought, of socialist or
communist infiltration. From all these came the risk of widespread dis-
turbance. But what made them really dangerous was the chance that
they would fuse with two more political movements whose object was
mass mobilisation round a single issue.
The first of these was the ‘culturalist’ revolt that Gandhi had
been organising since his return to India in 1915. At the heart of
Gandhi’s message (spelt out in his 1909 manifesto, Hind Swaraj,or
Indian self-rule) was the call for isolation from the West and cultural
renewal from within. This was not unique to India (a similar pro-
gramme was advanced by social critics in contemporary Japan) but
Gandhi’s appeal was exceptionally wide and his powers of persuasion
extraordinary. From his newspapers Navajivan (in Gujerati) and Young
India (in English) poured a stream of political direction, tactical advice
and moral instruction. It was aimed at the disparate constituencies he
was intent on forging into a grand coalition. Among the most important
of these were the cultural activists for whom the propagation of India’s
vernacular languages (as print and literature) was the vital medium of
social improvement; social reformers who wanted to restore traditional
morality and social cohesion (for example, through restraint of liquor-
selling); religious reformers anxious to purify and invigorate Hinduism
by an attack on superstition and greater emphasis on its spiritual con-
tent; and other groups for whom the status of women, or the treatment
of untouchables was the most pressing concern. To all these interests
and many others, the institutional politics fashioned by the British and
adopted by the Congress offered little. All of them wanted their public
concerns forced on to the political agenda. All of them were susceptible
to the ‘culturalist’ programme that Gandhi urged and to his claim that
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India faced a parting of the ways between a genuine swaraj and the
empty promise of British ‘reform’.
Gandhi’s was not the only movement that reached out beyond
the anglo-literate elite. Even before the war, social and religious
reformism among Muslims had been attracted by the appeal of pan-
Islamic feeling. The Ottoman Empire, guardian of the Holy Places, was
in danger from Christian imperialism. During the war, the Indian gov-
ernment had been nervous enough to throw the Ali brothers in gaol
for fear that they would canalise Indian Muslim unease and undermine
discipline in the disproportionately Muslim Indian army. Mahomed Ali
had been kept in gaol until late 1919. But on his release he soon began
to call for Indian Muslim support against the victor powers’ treatment
of the Ottoman Empire. The subjection of Muslim Arabs to Christian
rule, the Greek invasion of Anatolian Turkey, the loss of Jerusalem –
a Muslim Holy Place as much as a Christian – showed Western (and
especially British) contempt for Muslim opinion. But it was the threat to
the Ottoman Sultan, the Khalifa or ‘Commander of the Faithful’, that
became the rallying cry for local Muslim elites who were keen to pro-
mote the cause of religious and social reform, and to assert their Islamic
credentials. Through the ulama (scholars and scribes), and the sheikhs
and mullahs who preached in the mosques, the downward transmis-
sion of this single-issue campaign to restore the Khilafat was likely
to be more rapid and intense than any comparable movement among
Hindus.
Gandhi grasped the urgency of uniting the Khilafat movement
with his diffuse coalition of oppositional groups. The collapse of the
Rowlatt satyagraha in the bloody aftermath of Amritsar had damaged
his influence. The Congress leaders were rowing back hard from the
confrontationist tactics of the spring. If the Muslims were left to go it
alone, and the Congress endorsed the Montford constitution, his ‘cul-
turalist’ programme would have failed and the reforms ‘could be used to
deprive us of our freedom’.
67
The Congress decision in December 1919
(meeting ironically in Amritsar) to accept the new constitution but press
for its improvement showed the danger. Gandhi’s response was imme-
diate. In January 1920, he appeared at the Khilafat conference to call
for Hindu–Muslim unity and urge non-cooperation with government.
In March, the Congress inquiry into the Punjab disturbances – drafted
mainly by Gandhi – was published. It was a brilliant polemic designed to
convert the most respectable of Congress constitutionalists to the cause
389 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
of the Khilafat and non-cooperation. Its main target was the Punjab
government and the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Michael O’Dwyer. His
speeches were quoted to show his contemptuous attitude to Congress
and the educated class – the ‘grasshoppers’ – reminiscent of Curzon’s
in 1905. The Punjab government was denounced as terroristic and cor-
rupt. The moral was clear. By failing to repudiate O’Dwyer, the Raj had
broken the concordat in which its respect for the law and the educated
class was exchanged for Congress moderation. To right the ‘Punjab
wrong’, and force British rule back to legality, Congress must unite
with the Muslims and take up the ‘Khilafat wrong’ as its own. By the
middle of 1920, Gandhi was winning the argument. The Turkish peace
terms showed the scale of the Muslim grievance. The Indian members
of the government’s enquiry into the Punjab troubles (the Hunter Com-
mission) refused to sign the report. The ‘small print’ of the Montford
constitution showing that Civilian influence would still be entrenched
in provincial politics was published in June.
68
With few urban seats to
contest, electoral victory would depend on the support of Muslims in
almost every province.
69
The Congress leaders risked being left behind
by Gandhi’s appeal for Hindu–Muslim unity and rejected by their dis-
appointed provincial supporters. So, at the special Calcutta Congress
in September, to which Gandhi brought large numbers of Muslim del-
egates, the Amritsar vote was reversed, and non-cooperation endorsed
to bring ‘swaraj in one year’.
The decision for non-cooperation, reaffirmed at the main
Congress meeting at Nagpur at the end of the year, marked a cru-
cial shift in the politics of the post-Mutiny Raj. Non-cooperation
meant boycotting elections to the new provincial councils, refusing
or returning the award of honours, rejecting government in favour of
‘national’ schools, avoiding the courts in favour of unofficial tribunals
and practising swadeshi, the choice of local over imported products. It
was to be enforced by volunteers who would engage in satyagraha –
non-violent civil disobedience. Gandhi reconstructed the Congress as a
vehicle for his supporters and an organisation to challenge government
at every level. Most dramatic of all was his repudiation of Congress’
loyalty to the ‘British connection’, and its hope of inheriting the British
Indian state. The Raj, insisted Gandhi, was an evil empire, guilty of
‘terrorism’
70
and ‘Satanism’.
71
Hindu–Muslim unity was more impor-
tant than preserving the British connection. What India needed was a
‘separate existence without the presence of the English’ and the right to
390 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
secede from the Empire. Unless Indians were acknowledged as equals,
only complete separation would bring ‘Swaraj, equality, manliness’.
72
Non-cooperation was a programme for self-sufficiency and isolation, a
rejection of the imperial duties whose discharge was burdensome to all
and loathsome to Muslims. It redefined Indian nationalism as the search
for community rooted in local values and vernacular culture, commit-
ted above all to Hindu–Muslim unity. It was an astonishing turn in
Indian politics. Yet, Gandhi’s success would have been inconceivable
without Britain’s advance into the Middle East, the furious reaction
of India’s Muslim politicians, and the skill he displayed in harnessing
Congress and its ‘constitutional’ grievances to the Muslim cause and
his own.
The campaign got under way in earnest in 1921. At the local
level, it was often a struggle of wills between the Congress district com-
mittees and their volunteers and the British district officer, backed up
by the police and local notables who were reluctant to alienate the offi-
cial machine. The Viceroy’s government thought that non-cooperation
would fizzle out, and urged its officials not to make ‘prison martyrs’
of its leaders. But, by July 1921, the confrontation was becoming
increasingly sharp. The Khilafat leadership veered towards more vio-
lent tactics. In September, the Ali brothers were arrested for sedition.
In November, the visit by the Prince of Wales led to widespread riot-
ing in Bombay in which several Europeans were killed. As the fear
grew of more general violence, the Viceroy, Lord Reading, came under
heavy pressure from London to arrest Gandhi and the Congress ‘high
command’. Then at the end of January 1922, at Bardoli in Bombay,
the Congress leadership called for mass civil disobedience, including
non-payment of taxes. Non-cooperation had reached its climax.
At first sight, Gandhi’s decision seems strange, and it turned
out to be reckless. There were already signs that the anger of Muslims
and peasants was being turned not only on government but against
other Indians, Hindus and landlords. The Congress politicians, always
doubtful of Gandhi’s tactics, looked on with misgiving. But there were
also signs that the government might give way. Lord Reading had been
looking for a way out. He was pressing for a change of heart towards
Turkey. He had offered a round table conference. His masters in
London had come to terms with Sinn Fein (in December 1921) and were
about to concede the ‘independence’ of Egypt. One more push might
break the British will, before the Hindu–Muslim alliance fell apart and
391 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
non-cooperation collapsed. But Gandhi miscalculated. When Reading
tried publicly to force London into concessions to Turkey (mainly to
show the Indian government’s sympathy for Muslim feelings), Mon-
tagu (who had published his telegram) was sacked. Then, at Chauri
Chaura in the United Provinces, twenty-two policemen were killed by a
mob. Gandhi called off mass civil disobedience. Soon afterwards he was
gaoled. Within weeks, non-cooperation began to subside. By 1923,the
return to constitutional politics had become irresistible. Had Gandhian
politics been merely an episode?
The British certainly hoped so. The scale of non-cooperation
had been a profound shock to the Civilians of the Indian Civil Service.
They now had to work out new tactics for a constitution in which
Indian ministers would control part of every provincial government,
and elected politicians or ‘MLCs’ (Members of the Legislative Coun-
cils) would become much more important as intermediaries between
provincial governments and the localities. The old ‘Anglo-India’ was
dead, but the goal of the new polity seemed uncertain, even to the most
senior Civilians. ‘Today I walked with Hailey for an hour and a half
before dinner’, wrote Sir Frederick Whyte, who presided over the Cen-
tral Legislative Assembly. ‘We tried to answer the question “Where are
we going?”.’
73
In fact, Hailey, who was soon to be governor of the
Punjab, became the arch-exponent of the new Civilian policy. It was
based on the assumption that there were two Indias: Congress India
in the towns and districts, where Congress influence was strong, and
Traditional India, where it was not. The object of Civilian policy was
to contain the one and mobilise the other. At the provincial level, that
meant careful attention to the franchise and the distribution of seats,
and the deft encouragement of politicians and parties that would ‘play
the game’ of constitutional politics rather than resorting to boycott
or agitation. If shrewdly done, it meant that, even when the Congress
returned to the electoral fray, its ‘assault on the Legislative Council can
be awaited with interest and without alarm’.
74
At the district level, it
meant the vigorous use of patronage, influence and reward (like the
grant of pensions, honours, or gun licences) to counter the influence of
Congress politicians and build up a ‘loyal’ party of ‘Government men’.
75
It also meant guarding the princely states against pressure or criticism
from Congress. India might be pledged to eventual self-government,
but there was no reason to think that it had to be self-government in
the Congress (let alone the Gandhi) style.
392 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
At the same time, the Civilians were determined (as so often in
the past) to win more freedom from their masters in London. They had
gained a major victory with the grant of ‘fiscal autonomy’ in 1919:a
historic concession in which the old prohibition on Indian tariffs and
import duties was lifted, in recognition of the urgent need to raise more
revenue. They wanted a convention that London would not interfere
in matters of purely Indian (as opposed to imperial) interest.
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They
wanted more latitude to deal with Indian politicians without coming
under the kind of pressure to gaol or coerce felt by the Viceroy at the
time of non-cooperation. London could scarcely dispense with their
services. In its straitened financial circumstances after 1918, it had all
the more need to keep up the old army system in India, in which one-
third of the British army was barracked in India at Indian expense, and
the Indian army was an imperial reserve. Against the furious protest of
Montagu and the Indian government, tightening London’s control over
the Indian army (the main theme of the Esher Committee in 1920
77
had had to be shelved, but guarding the army budget against Indian
politicians was a top priority after 1920. No less urgent was the need
to control the value of the rupee and the monetary policy of the govern-
ment of India. If the rupee fell too low, then India might default on its
charges to Britain, and damage further the fragile balance of payments.
All this was good reason why the Civilians were still the indispensable
allies of the imperial interest in India, the guarantee that it would play
its part in the British world-system. If nothing else, non-cooperation
had shown that London still needed the ‘steel frame’ (Lloyd George’s
term) of the Indian Civil Service (ICS).
But had India’s ‘new politics’ made their task hopeless? In the
mid-1920s, the signs were ambiguous. Congress formally abandoned
non-cooperation in 1924, in belated recognition that many of its mem-
bers had already given up the boycott of the councils. By 1924 also, the
Khilafat movement was dead: the office of khalifa had been abolished
by the Turks themselves. The residue of non-cooperation seemed to be
the rising antagonism of Hindus and Muslims and the deepening appeal
of both Hindu and Muslim revivalism. The All-India nationalism that
Gandhi had urged was less in evidence than the ‘sub-nationalisms’ of
region, language, community (like the untouchables) and religion. For
the Congress politicians, like Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das, the
uncrowned king of Bengal, who had followed Gandhi into agitational
politics, the dilemma was obvious. Neither Gandhian populism nor the
393 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
provincialism that the Civilians were eagerly promoting had much in
common with the British Indian state they still wanted to make: both
threatened in different ways to abort its birth. They hankered for an
Indian dominion (inside the Empire), and an Indian ICS, to build the
nation from above. Their instrument was the Swarajya party, formed
in December 1922. But, if they were to extract new concessions from
the Civilians, and force the pace towards full dominion status, they
needed the resources that Gandhi had made: the mobilising potential of
his new-style Congress; the inclusive ideology that drew a vast range of
communities and classes to the Congress banner and out of the web
of Civilian influence. It was vital to capture the Congress machine for
constitutional politics
78
and to keep at bay the rising tide of Hindu
communalism, whose leader Malaviya urged ‘responsive cooperation’
to defend Hindu interests.
79
The real enemy, insisted Das, was still ‘the
bureaucracy’ – the ICS.
80
By 1926, however, the Swarajists seemed
on the ropes as their provincial support was eroded by the communal
appeal of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ parties.
81
Squeezed between the Civil-
ians and provincial communalism, their main hope lay now in alliance
with Gandhi. After all, what non-cooperation had shown was that,
with skilful leadership, Gandhian mass politics could turn the tables on
government and push it towards the concessions that it had seemed in
1921 to be on the verge of making. What was far less certain in 1926
was when the chance to do so would come again.
Imperial nations?
The importance of the white dominions to British world power had been
dramatically vindicated in the First World War. Their manpower and
resources had made a crucial contribution to imperial victory. They had
strengthened Britain’s claim to be the leader of free states against autoc-
racy and militarism. They had been a vital prop – perhaps the strongest
proof – for the idea that empire was a central element of British life.
The existence of self-governing ‘British’ states on three continents out-
side Europe gave substance to the notion – implicit in British attitudes
after c.1880 – that the British were a ‘world people’ uniquely adapted
to the task of creating new nations in temperate climes. But the place
of the dominions in the British system after 1918 was as problematic
as India’s – and for similar reasons. There was the unfinished business
394 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
of 1917, when the new conception of dominion statehood and equality
with Britain had been mooted. There was the legacy of the war and the
impact of its disturbing aftermath. In all four overseas dominions, the
instability of trade, war debts and the downward pressure on wartime
wages and prices created social unrest, political division and (in two)
the danger of ethnic strife. Most worrying of all was the geopolitical
turbulence that lasted into the mid-1920s, bringing with it the threat
of unwanted commitments, unlimited liabilities and new insecurities,
perhaps even of war. The question of mandates (1919), the renewal or
not of the Anglo-Japanese alliance (1921), a possible war over Chanak
(1922), the new British commitments in Europe foreshadowed in the
Ruhr crisis of 1923 and the Locarno pact of 1925, and the military
obligations to the League of Nations set out in the Geneva protocol of
1924, raised in the starkest form the meaning of dominion autonomy
and imperial unity. Then there was the question of Ireland.
The result was a political argument in two dominions (muted
in Canada, fierce in South Africa) over the form and substance of the
‘British connection’ and an armed struggle in Ireland which turned into
civil war after the treaty of December 1921 conceded ‘Canadian’ status
to the twenty-six counties of the new ‘Irish Free State’. In Australia and
New Zealand, as we will see, there was ample scope for friction with
Britain, but much less interest in constitutional change or formulaic
autonomy. Indeed, since each of the dominions had its own interests,
political traditions and ethnic composition, it seemed highly unlikely
that a common formula could evoke its particular place in the British
system. This was the fundamental question at issue between 1918 and
1926. Would the five dominions (including Ireland after 1921)
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divide
between the three that still regarded themselves as ‘British nations’ (a
less than unanimous view in Canada), and the two where republicanism
was a powerful, perhaps dominant force? Would the idea of a common
dominion status dissolve into a set of bilateral ties between Britain
and the several self-governing states, some acknowledging the bonds of
kinship, others only the terms of a treaty? Or could all the dominions
agree upon a form of words that recognised their ties to each other, to
the imperial association and to the British Crown? This was not merely
a question of constitutional pedantry. To a wide circle of informed
opinion in all the overseas dominions, some statement of common
concerns was crucial. This was not to bend the knee to Downing Street
but to resist the isolationism that was a latent force in dominion politics.