Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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395 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
Without some vehicle through which to play an active part in the ‘New
World’ created by the war, they argued, the dominions would see their
most vital interests going by default.
Canada
As the largest and oldest of the dominions, Canada’s attitude was of
key importance. Before the war, the Canadian premier, Sir Robert
Borden, had been an ardent advocate of a common imperial foreign pol-
icy, over which Canada should exert a significant influence. Canada had
made the largest contribution in manpower to the imperial war effort.
Borden’s ‘Unionist’ coalition had driven through conscription against
the passionate protest of the French Canadians in a bruising demon-
stration of Britannic loyalty. In 1918, Borden had been instrumental in
gaining dominion representation at the peace conference in Paris as part
of the ‘British Empire Delegation’. But, after 1921, under the Liberal
prime minister, Mackenzie King, the Canadian government repudiated
much of the approach for which Borden had stood, insisted upon the
right to negotiate and sign a separate treaty (the ‘halibut’ treaty with
the United States in 1923) and supported (in 1926) the demand from
Ireland and South Africa that dominion equality with Britain, including
the right to their own foreign policy, should be formally recognised in
a public statement.
83
King’s apparent hostility to the claims of empire,
his almost paranoid suspicion of the ‘centralising’ aims of the Lon-
don government, and his determination that the Canadian government
should have the first and last word on any external commitment were
easily converted by a later mythology into a programme for indepen-
dence. But King’s objectives were much less spectacular. They are better
understood as a defensive reaction to the fluid state of Canadian politics
than as a novel vision of Canadian nationhood.
The end of the war in Canada saw a rapid deflation of the Bri-
tannic sentiment that had helped to carry the Unionist coalition and
conscription to victory in 1917. The end of a booming war economy
exacted an immediate toll. The gross domestic output per person, hav-
ing risen by some 8 per cent between 1913 and 1917, fell back by
an astonishing 27 per cent in the four years that followed, causing a
slump in living standards.
84
The worst effects were felt on the Prairies
among wheat farmers and the service industries they supported, and
in rural Ontario. For the Unionist government, which struggled vainly
to prop up grain prices, the political backlash was catastrophic. It had
396 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
alienated Quebec by conscription. Now the west and the rural east were
in revolt as well. In the cold post-war climate, the Unionist slogans of
conscription, the flag and the tariff were redundant or worse. When
they eventually went to the polls under Borden’s tough and uncompro-
mising successor, Arthur Meighen, the Unionists suffered a shattering
defeat. A rejuvenated Liberal party under Mackenzie King won most
seats (116). The farmer’s protest party, newly formed in the west, car-
ried 65. Meighen, who lost his own constituency, was reduced to 50.
But the 1921 election did not bring about a settled regime like those that
Macdonald, Laurier and Borden had been able to fashion. King had no
overall majority. Three-party politics made for prolonged uncertainty
in a period of great international turbulence. They placed a premium
on excluding so far as possible the influence of unpredictable external
factors. The greatest danger by far was a call to arms from London
in a European or Near Eastern war and the fervent response it would
evoke in Canada. Four times in twenty years the appeal to Britannic
loyalty had struck the dominion’s brittle politics with the force of an
earthquake: in 1899,in1911 (over reciprocity and a Canadian navy),
in 1914 and (most destructively) over conscription in 1917. The short-
lived Chanak crisis in September 1922 was a timely reminder that the
threat was still there. ‘The minute there is any war or threat of war in
Europe in which Great Britain might be involved’, remarked an Anglo-
phone Quebec politician, ‘the Jingoes will so stir up the Country that
in a Plebiscite or Referendum 75% of the people would immediately
vote for war.’
85
Mackenzie King was an Ontario Presbyterian, the son of a
Toronto barrister turned academic.
86
But his position as Liberal leader
was crucially dependent on his support in Quebec – where Ernest
Lapointe, the provincial leader, was his vital ally until his death in
1941
87
– and the avoidance of any damaging rupture between his fol-
lowers there and in English Canada. A jingo storm would tear his
government apart. This was why King waged his relentless bureau-
cratic war against any form of words that bound Canada to the chariot
of British foreign policy, that made Canada party to the treaty obliga-
tions that London assumed in Europe and elsewhere, or which implied
that the dominion prime ministers at the Imperial Conference formed
an imperial ‘cabinet’ empowered to take decisions that were binding
on their own dominions. King’s fears ran deeper. A secretive, reclu-
sive man, whose private views were carefully veiled, he was deeply
397 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
suspicious (and not without reason) of British politicians and the British
press. At the Imperial Conference in 1923, he expected a press attack in
London on his ‘disloyalty’ to the Empire that would be loudly echoed
in the Canadian papers.
88
He suspected British ministers of ‘briefing’
against him, and angrily complained to L. S. Amery of London’s habit
of appealing over Ottawa’s head to public opinion in Canada.
89
King
was determined to warn London off from such public appeals for Cana-
dian support and to insist upon Ottawa’s right to decide its external
obligations. But he was equally determined not to be cast as an enemy
of ‘British connection’ or as lukewarm about Canada’s imperial ties.
Neither (it seems likely) accorded with his private opinions; both would
have been fatal to his public reputation. He did not want to redefine
Canada’s place in the world, and he showed little interest in the con-
stitutional debate over dominion status until Irish and South African
pressure made some declaration unavoidable in 1926. The Canadian
delegation did not want a definition, King’s senior official, Oscar
Skelton, told a favoured journalist.
90
His real aim was to stabilise
Canadian politics (and his own lease on power) by moving as close
to an isolationist position within the British system as he dared. It was
a solution very similar to Laurier’s. It fell far short of nationalism.
There were nationalists in Canada after 1918, but King showed
no sympathy for them, and they all but despaired of him. In Quebec,
nationaliste feeling was moving gradually away from the outlook once
championed by Henri Bourassa, towards a more hostile view of ‘British
connection’ and (under the influence of the Abb
´
e Groulx) towards the
dream of peaceful separation from the rest of Canada.
91
In English
Canada, post-war nationalism formed a polar opposite. It was built
on the pre-war claim to full equality with Britain in the management
of the Empire and on an angry repudiation of the ‘isolationist’ and
‘abjectly colonial’ mentality attributed to the French Canadians.
92
Its
most articulate proponents after 1918 were Sifton and Dafoe, propri-
etor and editor of the Winnipeg-based Manitoba Free Press.Bothhad
been ardent conscriptionists in 1917. But, by the early 1920s, both were
convinced that the Britannic patriotism to which they were loyal was
being abused by the reckless expansionism of the Lloyd George govern-
ment, especially in the Middle East, and by its assumption of European
liabilities that had little to do with the common concerns of the white
dominions. They backed King’s efforts to disentangle Canada from
these ‘false’ imperial burdens, but they wanted to go further and gain
398 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
formal recognition of Canadian sovereignty. They were in no doubt that
Canada was and should be a ‘British nation’, and wanted the (white)
Empire to become a ‘league of British states’, free and equal but bound
together by racial sympathy and mutual interest. This sectional view
of Canadian identity was anathema in Quebec (as Bourassa pointed
out to Dafoe),
93
and, as Dafoe himself acknowledged, this ‘national’
idea had yet to supplant the imperial sentiment of which King was so
nervous. Indeed, for all its ambivalence, King’s careful formula proved
surprisingly durable. His Conservative opponent, Arthur Meighen, had
already asserted Canada’s particular interests and her special ties with
the United States in the argument over renewing the Anglo-Japanese
alliance in 1921. Borden’s closest adviser, the diplomat-lawyer Loring
Christie, abandoned in the early 1920s the old Borden policy of a com-
mon foreign policy. Like Dafoe and Sifton, he was alarmed by the signs
that Britain had turned away from her imperial destiny to plunge into
the quagmire of European diplomacy.
94
To be true to the Empire was
not to follow the same route. Meighen himself, in despair at reviving his
electoral fortunes without support in Quebec, had conceded by 1925
that no Canadian government should follow Britain into war without
holding and winning a general election. An uneasy consensus had been
reached.
Australia
In Australia and New Zealand, by contrast, there was little enthusiasm
for greater detachment in imperial relations: quite the reverse. Radi-
cal opinion in the Pacific dominions disliked the expansion of ‘tropi-
cal empire’ over non-white peoples and distrusted the motives that lay
behind it – for similar reasons to radicals in Britain. It resented the influ-
ence of the City of London and its power to frustrate the political aims
of Labour in the state governments. But, despite widespread industrial
unrest at the end of the war, radicalism and the Labour party made little
headway in the post-war decade.
95
The commemoration of the war was
conservative and imperial-minded: Gallipoli as Britain’s blunder and
Australia’s sacrifice was a much later mythology.
96
Australian leaders
were more sympathetic than Canadian leaders to Britain’s Middle East-
ern travails: Australia’s interest in the Suez Canal was second to none.
Where differences arose between Australia and Britain, it was over
Australia’s claim to the German ex-colonies in the South Pacific and
the thorny issue of the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Here there was a
399 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
passionate Australian (and New Zealand) belief that renewing the
alliance was the vital means of restraining Japan from imperial aggres-
sion. But, against Canadian opposition, and (more cogently) the
urgency of reaching an Anglo-American accord, the Pacific dominions
protested in vain.
Australian and New Zealand dissatisfaction arose not from a
fear of imperial commitments but from what they saw as London’s
indifference to imperial interests. King saw a plot to make Canada
party to a common imperial policy. Hughes and Massey (more realisti-
cally) resented their exclusion from the imperial decisions that mattered.
At the peace conference in Paris, Hughes fought a stubborn battle to
annex Germany’s conquered colonies in the South Pacific not hold them
as mandates under the League of Nations – a struggle that brought him
into conflict with both the British government and President Wilson.
97
The ‘class C’ mandate (envisaging permanent trusteeship) was the com-
promise outcome. In the furious arguments over the Japanese alliance
and at the Washington Conference in 1921–2, the Australian govern-
ment saw further proof that its vital interests received little attention in
British diplomacy. For Hughes, the last straw was the crisis at Chanak in
September 1922 and the conference that followed at Lausanne. Unlike
Canada and South Africa, he reminded London, Australia and New
Zealand had answered Churchill’s call for help and promised troops if
they were needed to defend the Dardanelles against the resurgent Turks.
But neither dominion was represented at the conference. Hughes’ rage
knew no bounds. ‘The habit of asking Australia to agree to things when
they are done and cannot be undone’, he told the Bonar Law cabinet,
is one which will wreck the Empire if persisted in. You have
already seen Canada and South Africa standing aloof on
the plea that they had not been consulted. I have pointed
out . . . many times that what is wanted, and what we are
entitled to, is a real share in moulding foreign and Imperial
policy. In foreign affairs the Empire must speak with one
voice.
98
Hughes’ frustration was the greater because, as he readily admitted,
‘there is only one course open to us in practice and that is to follow
Britain’.
99
Unless Australia spoke as part of the Empire, he told the
Australian parliament in September 1921, its voice ‘would be lost across
400 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
the waste of waters’. ‘But when Australia speaks as part of the British
Empire
[w]ith its 500,000,000 of people, its mighty navy, its flag
on every sea, its strongholds on every continent, its power
and glory shining and splendid, then she speaks in . . . tones
that are heard and heeded . . . With our hands on the lever
of Empire, we move the world, but casting this aside we are
shorn of our strength and count for little or nothing.
100
The uncompromising intensity of Hughes’ Britannic nationalism was a
measure of this brutal realism about Australia’s prospects in isolated
independence.
Hughes’ language was characteristically blunt. But his suave
successor as prime minister, Stanley Bruce, was just as unequivocal. ‘It
is useless for anyone to maintain that if we were an independent nation,
with no connection with the British Empire, we should be in a posi-
tion to protect ourselves’, was his message in 1924.
101
The reason was
simple. ‘We have the most wonderful unprotected white man’s country
in the world’: defending it relied on British help. The fierce rhetoric of
Hughes and Bruce, and the similar attitude in New Zealand, showed
that the war had quite different effects in the South Pacific from those
it had set off in Canada and (as we shall see) in South Africa. In Aus-
tralia, the issue of conscription had been deeply divisive. But neither
there nor in New Zealand did it result in an ethnic fissure. Instead, it
strongly reinforced the pre-war sense of racial and strategic vulnerabil-
ity. The signs of China’s resurgence in the ‘May the Fourth’ movement,
and the visible evidence of Japanese sea-power and imperial ambition,
were easily converted into the racial nightmare of ‘teeming millions’
of Asian immigrants that an Australia without British support might
be forced to admit. It was this anxiety, and the fear that the post-war
recession might drive Australia back to the dark days of the 1890s,
that led post-war governments to call for even closer economic ties
with Britain. What Australia needed, said Bruce, was ‘men, money and
markets’: Britain must supply them. The limitless possibilities of Aus-
tralian development became an article of faith. When the geographer
Griffith Taylor sought to puncture inflated claims by pointing out that
Australia could support at best 20 million people at an American stan-
dard, he found it wiser to pursue his career in another dominion.
102
401 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
The population (a mere six million in 1925) must be boosted; the inte-
rior colonised. The same impulse was felt among writers and artists.
103
Coming to terms with Australia’s landscape, love and fear of the Aus-
tralian ‘bush’, and adaptation to the Australian environment became
the hallmarks of ‘Australianness’: a creole identity not in conflict with
‘Britishness’ but a supercharged, perhaps superior, version of the north
European original.
Indeed, Hughes and Bruce reasserted the British character of
the Australian Commonwealth in terms inconceivable to a Canadian
premier – at least one who wanted some votes in Quebec. ‘We are all
of the same race and speak the same tongue in the same way’, said
Hughes, ‘we are more British than the people of Great Britain . . . [O]ur
great destiny is to hold this continent in trust for those of our race who
come after.’
104
‘It is . . . essential to remember’, insisted Bruce, ‘that the
British Empire is one great nation . . . the British people represent one
nation and not many nations as some have endeavoured to suggest.’
105
Of course, not all Australian opinion was convinced by this heavy stress
on imperial ties. Too much deference to Britain ran athwart the claim
that Australian society was stronger, fairer, more democratic and more
manly than the parent stock. Self-reliance and the cultivation of ‘Aus-
tralian sentiment’ was how Labour preferred to lay the emphasis. It
wanted to cut away some of the outward signs of subordinate status:
the judicial appeal to London and the appointment of state governors by
the Crown. But these were superficial. The defence of ‘White Australia’
remained the foremost plank on the party platform. Labour was as
committed as Bruce’s government to the urgent need for economic
development, and accepted that large-scale immigration was the neces-
sary price.
106
But, when immigrants flocked in from Southern Europe, it
was quick to denounce them for taking jobs ‘from British workmen’
107
and forced a government ban on employing ‘foreigners’. For Hughes
and Bruce, then, there was little to fear at home from a close association
with imperial policy, as long as it reflected their views and protected
their interests. Their real concern was not that the London government
would impose its wishes, but that those wishes were becoming too self-
ishly narrow. Like Christie, and other old followers of Borden, they
were alarmed by the European turn in British policy. The air defence
of Britain (against a putative threat from France) might consume the
resources needed for a stronger presence in the Pacific and at Singapore,
Bruce warned in 1924. If post-war Britain with its straitened finances
402 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
chose to protect the Home Islands at the expense of ‘outlying parts’,
Australia would be in peril.
108
It was not declarations of dominion free-
dom that were needed (or so he might have said), but a clear reminder
to opinion in Britain of the global scope of imperial interests.
South Africa
South Africa was not a ‘British nation’. Nor was there a common feel-
ing of South Africanness, even among its white minority. Of the four
main overseas dominions, it had been the last to receive the full mea-
sure of self-government. Among the whites (a more fluid category than
it became under apartheid after 1948) there was an Afrikaner majority
but more than half a million ‘English’ – English speakers mostly of
British origin. Afrikaans (a patois of Dutch) was still only a language in
the making, and well-educated Afrikaners were as likely to use English
as Dutch in business or professional life.
109
Indeed, there were many
Afrikaners in the propertied and professional classes for whom the par-
liamentary government introduced to the Cape in the 1870s was the
optimal combination of order and liberty. There a property-based fran-
chise and the wide degree of local autonomy made symbolic allegiance
to the British monarch at worst unobjectionable, at best a buttress of
social stability and the racial order. When ‘responsible government’
was extended to the rest of the country after the South African War
of 1899–1902 (but with manhood suffrage for whites and no votes
for blacks), this pragmatic loyalty was adopted by many Afrikaners
in the old republics. It was futile to break up the Union of 1910 to
revive the pre-war states. To drag the whole country into secession
from the Empire as the ‘South African Republic’ would mean imperial
intervention and a third Boer War. Worse still, it would set off a civil
war among the whites. In a sub-continent, where blacks outnumbered
whites by nearly four to one, and where memories of war’s catastrophic
impact were all too recent, this was a desperate option.
Nevertheless, the First World War had placed a major strain on
the pragmatic compromise that Botha embodied. Although the 1914–
15 rebellion had collapsed, Afrikaner support for the National party
established by General Barry Hertzog in 1913 was markedly stronger
by the end of the war. Much Afrikaner opinion was bitterly resent-
ful of South Africa’s involvement in an ‘English’ war and regarded a
British imperial triumph with foreboding. The rise of republicanism –
which stood for an Afrikaner state outside the Empire – alarmed the
403 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926
English politicians in South Africa. When Smuts returned from Europe
on Botha’s death to take up the premiership, he found it hard to bend
the older man’s bow. He lacked Botha’s canny sense of Afrikaner feel-
ing or the charm (some alleged more material inducements) through
which he kept his followers loyal. In the first post-war election in 1920,
Smuts’ South Africa Party emerged neck and neck with the National-
ists, driving him towards fusion with the Unionists (the old party of
Rhodes, and led by his political and financial legatees) to keep his hold
on power.
Had politics in South Africa been solely a matter of the antago-
nism between the white communities, they would at least have been sim-
ple. The republican option repelled the English but also many Afrikan-
ers who feared the turbulence it threatened. So long as that was true, the
British connection was safe. But, after 1918, Afrikaner opinion became
more susceptible to the appeal of nationalism not less, as the irritations
of wartime were replaced by new sources of grievance. The main rea-
son lay in the rising fear of the educated class – clerics (predikants),
teachers, (a handful of) academics, lawyers and journalists – that the
deepening poverty among rural whites (almost all Afrikaners) would
destroy the cohesion of the Afrikaner people. By 1921, the numbers of
‘poor whites’ (the term was coined in 1906 for those neither skilled nor
semi-skilled) was estimated at over 150,000 – perhaps one-fifth of the
Afrikaner community.
110
Over much of South Africa, the land was too
poor or too dry to support much more than subsistence farming, and
after 1920 the problem was made worse by the huge fall in agricul-
tural prices from the artificial heights of the First World War.
111
To the
Afrikaner elite, three outcomes of almost equal horror seemed all too
likely. The poor whites might be seduced by the appeal of socialism or
communism and exchange their ethnic loyalty for one based on class.
If they drifted to the towns, they might be absorbed by the English
culture that was dominant there. Or they might lapse into ‘barbarism’
by adopting the living standards of the blacks and intermarrying with
them. It was this double crisis – the threatened loss of both Afrikaner
and white identity in so large a fraction of the Afrikaner people –
that gave Afrikaner nationalism its urgency and sharpened the edge of
its racial message: explicitly against imperialism and its Doppelganger
capitalism; implicitly against the silent threat of the black majority.
Social rather than ethnic antagonism was also a problem for
those English politicians who counted on Britannic solidarity to keep
404 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
Afrikaner republicanism at bay and force Afrikaner ‘moderates’ to
accept the permanence of the British connection. Class conflict between
English (often British immigrant) mineworkers and the mining interest
whose influence was strong in the Unionist party had been a feature
of pre-war politics and had led to the rise of the Labour party on the
Rand. After 1918, these intra-English class tensions erupted spectacu-
larly. Post-war depression was the immediate cause. South African gold
producers were trapped between the fixed price of gold and the rising
costs of drilling ever deeper into the gold-bearing reef beneath Johannes-
burg. They longed to cut their costs by substituting cheap black labour
for the costlier white men they were forced to employ by the strength
of (white) organised labour on the Rand. The surge in prices during
wartime (when gold’s price was still fixed) made matters worse, and
when the temporary relief that came with the fall in the post-war value
of the pound against gold was reversed by early 1922, and depression
led to declining production, the crisis could not be postponed. When
the mineowners suspended the old ratio of white to black workers, a
strike broke out. In early March 1922, it became a general strike on the
Rand, and then an armed insurrection as some of the strikers declared
a socialist republic. Smuts’ reaction was uncompromising. Troops were
sent in, and in several days of fighting over 200 people were killed. The
strike was crushed. The number of white miners was cut by over 3,000
and real wages fell. The gold industry returned to profit.
112
But Smuts’
identification with the mining interest was to cost him dear. Three rev-
olutions in a few short years, sighed one English politician, was ‘too
much for any country’.
113
Smuts was committed wholeheartedly to empire membership.
He had commanded the imperial force in the East African campaign.
He had represented South Africa at the Imperial Conferences of 1917
and 1918. By the last year of the war, he had become one of the most
powerful figures in Lloyd George’s government. He played a leading
part in the planning for a league of nations and in the diplomacy of
peacemaking at Paris in 1919. In a secret mission in 1921,hehad
pressed on the leaders of Sinn Fein the argument for accepting domin-
ion status and not holding out for secession and an Irish republic.
114
Yet
Smuts had also been one of the loudest voices demanding British recog-
nition of the dominions’ equality: in constitutional status and exter-
nal policy. And, like other dominion leaders, he thought that Britain’s
involvement in post-war Europe would weaken her claims on dominion