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

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405 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

support. It was vital, he urged, that Britain renounce secret diplomacy

for open covenants. Then the dominions would know what commit-

ments they faced.

115

Smuts knew very well that, whatever the guise,

South African involvement with Britain’s global interests was deeply

unpopular with many Afrikaners. The ‘bulk’ of the Dutch people, he

told a friend in Britain, were republicans.

116

But he was convinced

that a united British Empire within the League of Nations was the key

to world order in an age of great uncertainty; and that survival as a

‘white man’s country’ (itself far from certain in the 1920s) made empire

membership essential for South Africa. In a conscious echo of Rhodes’

programme, Smuts looked forward to a chain of white states stretching

north to Kenya – ‘A great white Africa along the eastern backbone,

with railway and road communications connecting north and south’ –

under South African inﬂuence and sooner or later as part of the South

African Union. Here was the promise of South Africa’s greatness, and

her commercial prosperity (as the sub-metropole of this settler Africa)

and the best guarantee against a colonial policy that favoured Indian

traders or native (i.e. African) chiefs.

117

But this long game of South

Africa’s future made it all the more vital to have inﬂuence in Lon-

don, to be a partner in African empire, and to keep the loyalty of

the South African English and the British settlers to the north of the

Limpopo.

In 1921, Smuts had turned the tables on his nationalist oppo-

nents. Post-war prosperity and the reaction of English voters against

republicanism gave him and his ex-Unionist allies a clear election vic-

tory over both Hertzog and the Labour party. The electorate had given a

‘decisive answer’ on the question of secession, said Smuts.

118

After that,

almost everything went wrong. Depression, the bloodshed on the Rand

and the continuing fear of a crisis in Europe damaged Smuts’ reputation.

In 1923, to Smuts’ great chagrin, the white settlers in Southern Rhode-

sia (where rule by the British South Africa Company was about to end)

voted for a separate future as a self-governing colony rather than join

the South African Union. In the general election of June 1924, although

its popular vote held up well, the South Africa party lost badly to the

National and Labour parties united in a pact.

119

Smuts was hated by

Afrikaners and many British, Fitzpatrick told Lord Milner.

120

‘Intense

unreasoning racialism (i.e. towards the English) and class hatred and

communism’, was how he explained the defeat to Amery.

121

But the

1924 election was not the prelude to South African secession.

406 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

Hertzog and his able lieutenant, Daniel Franc¸ois Malan (a

predikant turned newspaper editor), had been the champions of repub-

licanism. But, with the defeat of 1921 and the social crisis within the

Afrikaner community, their priorities shifted. To tackle the problem of

‘poor whites’, if need be by a ‘colour bar’ in employment, to safeguard

the cultural unity of the Afrikaner people and to promote Afrikaans

as a national language (the 1910 constitution provided for English and

Dutch) laid a premium on power not principled opposition. Hertzog

knew that without Labour party support he had little hope of defeat-

ing Smuts, and that many of Labour’s English voters would desert it

if it allied with him on a republican ticket. Instead, he was able to

trade on the widespread fear of white unemployment and the ‘igno-

rant panic’

122

over black competition. His greatest fear was that Smuts

would beat him by an appeal to the Britannic sentiments of the English

minority. ‘Smuts het net een kans’, he told Malan in November 1923,

‘en dit is nogmaals ’n khaki electie’ – Smuts had one last chance, a

khaki election.

123

What Hertzog wanted, when once in power, was the

same formal status for which Smuts had pressed: constitutional equality

within the Empire, as the substance (or so he claimed) if not the form

of republican independence. By an ironic twist, the need to safeguard

a white South Africa – the same ultimate goal as Smuts – had led him

to accept, for the time being at least, the same constraints and the same

solution.

The dominions and Ireland

Hertzog’s opportunity came with the Imperial Conference in 1926.At

the previous post-war conferences in 1921 and 1923, the dominion

premiers showed no appetite for the constitutional debate envisaged

in 1918. Hertzog gave warning of his intention, and the British gov-

ernment planned its tactics carefully. A. J. (now Lord) Balfour, who

chaired the committee of British and dominion ministers set up at the

conference to report on ‘inter-imperial relations’, had already signalled

his willingness to concede the principle of equal status to the white

dominions.

124

When Hertzog presented his draft, in which the domin-

ions were described as ‘independent states’,

125

it was not the principle

to which the British ministers objected but the wording. They were

ready to concede the dominions’ right to exercise external as much as

internal autonomy – the right to conduct their own foreign policy –

but resisted ‘independence’ as implying the lapse of their Empire

407 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

membership. (Mackenzie King also opposed ‘independence’ as an

American usage that would be badly received in English Canada.) After

a blizzard of drafts, Balfour produced a formula of almost theologi-

cal intricacy in which the central concession of the dominions’ equal

constitutional status (and their implicit right of secession) was carefully

balanced against their free and willing recognition of empire member-

ship. In a sunburst of good will it was accepted by all.

The effect of this pronouncement was twofold. It gave a mean-

ing to dominionhood that was ﬂexible enough to embrace all the domin-

ions’ varied relationships with Britain. The risk of a division between

the dominions themselves was averted. Secondly (and consequentially),

it reinvented the bilateral connection between Britain and the different

dominions as an intimate form of international association whose terms

of membership (‘free association’) were very attractive to small states

in an age of collective insecurity. ‘The British Empire’, said Balfour’s

version, ‘depends essentially . . . on positive ideals. Free institutions are

its lifeblood. Free cooperation is its instrument. Peace, security, and

progress are among its ideals.’ This appealed to a wide segment of

opinion in all the dominions for whom the dangers of isolation and

diplomatic ‘weightlessness’ were as important as Britannic loyalty, if

not more so. Balfour’s formula acknowledged that the real ties that

would hold the dominions to Britain were the informal ties of sentiment

or self-interest. Its acceptance by the least Britannic of the dominions,

South Africa and the Irish Free State, showed that for one reason or the

other exit from the British world-system had as yet little appeal.

Balfour’s motive is clear enough. He wanted to discredit the

‘small but obstinate minority who . . . persistently advocate the break-up

of the Empire’.

126

Free association would pull the rug out from beneath

the secessionists. Austen Chamberlain, the Foreign Secretary, may have

hoped that he would gain his reward in the dominions’ diplomatic

sympathy: indeed, in the defence discussions that followed, all except

the Irish Free State said that they would come to Britain’s aid if ever

necessary.

127

Balfour, Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead (the Secretary

of State for India) bundled Amery, the Dominions Secretary, along with

them. He was a political lightweight. But the three senior ministers may

have had another reason for wanting an amicable settlement. All three,

especially Birkenhead and Chamberlain, had been deeply involved in the

Anglo-Irish treaty of December 1921. They had the strongest motive

for avoiding confrontation with the Irish Free State government and

408 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

rousing ‘die-hardism’ from its slumbers on the Tory backbenches. Nor

could they be sure that too little ﬂexibility at the conference might not

damage the pro-Treaty government in Dublin and pave a path to power

for its republican and secessionist enemies.

Indeed, of all the dominions, the Irish Free State was the one

that British ministers watched most nervously.

128

Its assimilation to the

dominion ‘model’ was more a hope than an expectation. Its ‘Britannic

garrison’ after partition was far smaller than South Africa’s. For all

the practical limits to linguistic independence, its cultural revolt against

Englishness was more vehement than anything seen in the other domin-

ions. Alone of the dominions, it had won self-government in a violent

insurrection against British rule. Alone among the dominions, its right

to self-rule was limited by treaty. In the war of independence (1919–21),

Sinn Fein declared an Irish Republic, and its candidates who were suc-

cessful in the United Kingdom general election of December 1918 (but

refused to take their seats at Westminster) met as a separate Irish par-

liament, the Dail Eireann. After eighteen months of guerrilla warfare,

terrorism and reprisal had produced a stalemate truce in July 1921,and

a treaty settlement was hammered out in London between the Lloyd

George government and a Sinn Fein delegation. It gave the twenty-

six counties of southern Ireland ‘Canadian’ status as a self-governing

dominion, but rejected the demand for an Irish republic outside the

Empire and insisted on an oath of allegiance to the King by those tak-

ing ofﬁce or sitting in the Dail. The possibility of a united Ireland – if

Northern Ireland agreed – or of repartition on terms more generous to

the South was held open. By a narrow majority, the Dail upheld the

treaty proposals. But the Sinn Fein government split. De Valera, presi-

dent of the 1919 republic, denounced the oath of allegiance (though he

was willing to recognise the King as the head of the Empire). Much of

the Irish Republican Army in the south and west rebelled against a civil-

ian regime whose treaty-based constitution was at odds with the claim

that the citizen in arms was the true embodiment of the Irish nation –

and which threatened to end the free rein that the ‘ﬂying columns’

enjoyed.

129

It took a bloody civil war, with a death-toll heavier than in

the Anglo-Irish struggle, to impose the authority of the ‘treatyites’ and

the Free State government.

The fate of the treaty was watched in London with great anx-

iety. The risk of embroiling the North – where Catholic nationalists

were harassed by Protestant paramilitaries – seemed high. Michael

409 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

Collins, the charismatic leader of the IRA, who led the Free State army

in the civil war, was suspected of duplicity: few tears were shed in

London when he was ambushed and murdered by the anti-treaty forces

in August 1922.

130

For British leaders, the success of the Free State gov-

ernment was critical if Ireland was to escape a further round of turmoil

and then a further round of imperial crisis. Partly for that reason, they

acquiesced in a quasi-republican constitution in which authority was

derived from ‘the people of Ireland’ (not the king-in-parliament).

131

When the North rejected a united Ireland and the boundary settlement

left the frontier unchanged, they sweetened the pill for the Dublin gov-

ernment by ﬁnancial concessions. The Free State government won a

popular mandate, but the balance seemed ﬁne. The army mutiny of

1924, the continued threat of IRA violence and the return of the anti-

treatyites (as Fianna Fail) to the Dail, made its tenure seem fragile. The

danger that it would repudiate the treaty and declare a republic could

not be ruled out.

132

British leaders may have exaggerated the risk. Despite the hang-

over of republican violence, the Free State government represented a

powerful body of Irish opinion that preferred free trade (with Britain)

to isolation and autarky,

133

and accepted that, without the association

with Britain, the Irish voice in international affairs would be embarrass-

ingly faint.

134

To the larger farmers and local businessmen who formed

the backbone of the old Irish party before 1914, and supported the

treatyite Cumann na nGaedheal, overthrowing the constitution was a

menace to order. For the champions of Catholic conservatism, the most

inﬂuential ideology in the new state,

135

republicanism was suspect for its

atheism and socialism. Cosgrave and O’Higgins, his dynamic deputy,

were determined to restore an ordered society of strong institutions,

lawful authority and ﬁrm discipline.

136

Their aim was not to break the

treaty, but to free themselves from the surviving relics of Ireland’s sub-

ordination to Britain – in part to disarm their Fianna Fail opponents.

This was why at the Imperial Conference they were quick to follow

Hertzog with a list of detailed ‘anomalies’ in dominion status, and why

O’Higgins insisted that Ireland’s separate status should be formally

marked in the royal title. When the ‘O’Higgins comma’ was inserted,

the king was no longer ‘King of Great Britain and Ireland’ and the

overseas dominions, but ‘King of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British

Dominions’. To Birkenhead, one of the signatories of the Anglo-Irish

treaty, the need to meet the Irish leaders over their ‘tiresome points’

137

410 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

and protect a settlement that is ‘working better than our most extrav-

agant hopes’ was unarguable. In Ireland, more than anywhere else,

what mattered most was to make cooperation a habit and ingrain the

constitutionalist outlook that was its greatest ally.

Like Hertzog (who returned in triumph to South Africa), the

Irish leaders found merit in the constitutional experiment codiﬁed by

the conference. They had equal status and external autonomy. In return,

they accepted the Crown (with some ambiguity) as their head of state

and the symbol of their membership of the ‘Empire-Commonwealth’ –

a term just creeping into use. Like the other dominions, they recognised

the British system as the magnetic pole of their external relations. Like

them, they had much to lose from an open break. For the moment,

it seemed that Ireland might be shaped to the mould of an ‘imperial

nation’, to become another Canada in substance as well as form. The

stresses of the next decade would settle the question.

The Empire at home

After 1918, there was good reason to doubt whether the vast world-

system the late Victorians had assembled would command the support

of British society at home. A positive view of its costs and risks sprang

from the distinctive complex of ideology and politics in late-Victorian

Britain. The late Victorians had been loyal to laissez-faire economics.

They accepted the logic of free trade and the gold standard and regarded

with equanimity their ever-growing dependence on foreign food, for-

eign trade and a foreign income from investments. They acknowledged

the force of the geopolitical corollary. That Britain must be a global

power to defend the sphere of free commerce and guard its long lines

of maritime transport was argued over in detail but rarely disputed in

principle. The electorate that sanctioned this globe-wide imperialism

excluded all women and more than one-third of adult men. No party

dedicated to the ideas of socialism or the sectional interests of the work-

ing class could win a majority in parliament. The electorate’s antipathy

to Irish nationalism, partly on sectarian grounds, made it amenable to

arguments for coercion elsewhere: unionism at home helped underwrite

imperialism abroad. And, although some of its articles had come under

attack in Edwardian politics – in the struggle over tariff reform and

411 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

Irish Home Rule – the prime assumptions of this ‘liberal imperialism’

went largely unchallenged until the First World War.

In the new landscape of post-war economics and politics, this

late-Victorian consensus looked less secure. Economic discontent was

real enough in late-Victorian society and industrial militancy had been

a striking feature of the pre-war decade. But their political impact had

been blunted by the general prosperity of skilled workers and by a

franchise that excluded many of those most vulnerable to economic

misfortune – the army of unskilled and casual labour. By the end of

1920, these pre-war conditions no longer held good. The post-war

depression brought high unemployment to skilled workers as well as

unskilled. It affected those organised in trade unions (a much larger

number than before the war) as well as those who were not. But the

most important change was that all men affected by the slump in trade

now had the vote since adult males over twenty-one, as well as some

women, had been enfranchised in the reform Act of 1918. The result

politically was profoundly unsettling. A prolonged depression would

mean an alienated class, excluded by poverty, but included by politics.

It would be empowered by the franchise against a social system from

which it had nothing to gain. Not surprisingly, fear of a ‘socialism’ (a

vaguely deﬁned creed) that would be swept into power by a working-

class electorate, haunted the politicians of the older parties.

138

For

there seemed no doubt about who would be the beneﬁciary of the two

new facts of British politics: the great pool of working-class discontent

and the huge new electorate (three times as big as the old) with no

tradition of loyalty to either Liberals or Conservatives. In the excitable

climate bred by the Russian revolution and industrial confrontation in

Britain – at its tensest in 1921 – it was easy to credit the Labour

party with the extremist views from which its leaders recoiled. Paciﬁsm,

‘bolshevik’ sympathies, and antipathy to colonial rule, especially in

India, seemed synonymous with socialism.

These fears (in some quarters, hopes) turned out to be exagger-

ated. It was industrial labour, not political Labour, that proved the real

threat to the British world-system. It rejected the sacriﬁces on which

the revival of London’s commercial empire was supposed to depend.

At the end of the war, it was widely agreed by expert opinion that

British prosperity meant restoring the commercial conditions that had

ruled in 1914. London must resume its place as the world’s greatest

412 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

banker, lender and market-place. The gold standard must be revived

as a self-regulating mechanism of monetary control and the guarantee

of sterling’s worth as the global currency. British debts must be repaid.

British exports must recover lost markets and win new ones to ease the

strain on the balance of payments and help renew the ﬂow of outward

investment. At government level, this programme meant the stringent

control of public expenditure. But its social and industrial meaning was

much more drastic. If British exports were to be competitive, British

costs had to fall. The large gains in real income conceded in the war

and its inﬂationary aftermath would have to be clawed back. By Keynes’

estimate, while the cost of living had risen by 60 per cent, the combined

effect of higher wages and shorter hours had more than doubled real

wages.

139

The ﬁerce deﬂation of 1920–1 was aimed in part at this objec-

tive. But its results were not what its authors intended. The numbers of

unemployed rose rapidly from 700,000 at the end of 1920 to over two

million by mid-1921 and remained above 1.2 million for the rest of the

decade. But it proved impossible to push down the wages of those in

work. Instead, the sharp fall in prices that deﬂation produced boosted

their real incomes still further, by some 13 per cent between 1919 and

1922, on top of the wartime rise.

140

In the climate of industrial militancy

and electoral uncertainty that dominated the early 1920s, imposing a

wholesale reduction of wages was out of the question. It would have

meant economic controls as draconian as in wartime, repellent alike to

capital and labour, and hastily scrapped in 1919. In a tacit social and

political bargain, those in work kept the real income gains of 1914–22

(the exception were the miners).

141

The unintended victims were the

unemployed.

Worker resistance to cuts in real wages had a real signiﬁcance

for the part Britain played in her imperial system. It made the price of

thereturntogoldin1925 –thesine qua non of commercial empire –

uncomfortably high, and cut down the beneﬁts it was supposed to bring.

High interest rates, a fragile pound and a restricted stream of investment

abroad were the penalty for setting the gold value of sterling at a level

designed to compete with the dollar, but without the fall in industrial

costs that was needed to make British exports competitive. In the crucial

phase of economic adjustment, industrial labour had refused to give up

what it had gained since 1914, and could not be coerced into doing so.

It could not be bent to the purpose of a revived commercial empire.

413 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

Its resistance to the ‘logic’ of bankers and businessmen could be seen,

indeed, as an instinctive form of metropolitan ‘isolationism’, a refusal

to bow to the harsh demands of the international economy. It set the

limits to the post-war promise of the British world-system.

This was the most potent (if least conscious) act of worker

‘anti-imperialism’. At the same time, the rapid growth of a mass con-

stituency for the Labour party (Labour vote, 1910: 371,722; 1918:

2,385,472; 1922: 4,241,383; 1923: 4,438,508; 1924: 5,489,077) lent

added weight to radical opinion in imperial matters. Before 1914, critics

of empire had attacked the cost of imperial wars, the threat to peace of

imperial rivalry, the authoritarian trend of colonial rule and the com-

mercial exploitation of indigenous peoples. But their voice had been

mufﬂed by political concession in India and South Africa, the diplo-

matic settlement of colonial disputes (especially with France) and the

domestic (rather than imperial) threat posed by the new German navy.

Even J. A. Hobson, the critic-in-chief of British imperialism, had come

to concede the beneﬁcent effects of international trade.

142

But, as the

war dragged on, he revived (in Democracy after the War (1917)) the

old claim that imperial antagonism was the real cause of conﬂict. With

militarism enthroned at the heart of government, and imperialism (in

the person of Milner) at its elbow, an Allied victory would mean the tri-

umph of reaction. The ‘imperialist’ project, checked since 1906, would

resume its course. An imperial tariff, territorial expansion and the eco-

nomic exploitation of Afro-Asian peoples would destroy free trade at

home, cut down living standards and corrode the tradition of political

liberty. The best defence was a league of nations, ‘international gov-

ernment’ and the careful protection of indigenous cultures against the

social damage of enforced industrialism. In the last year of the war, this

radical programme received a powerful boost. Ofﬁcial endorsement of

the idea of a league, the publication of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen

Points and the emergence of Labour (which Hobson joined in 1918)as

a mass-based party, strengthened its claim on public attention.

Hobson’s warnings were echoed by the band of writers who

made up Labour’s ‘intelligence branch’ in imperial policy: Leonard

Woolf, whose Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) denounced

colonial rule as a licence to rob; Sydney Olivier, whose The League

of Nations and Primitive Peoples (1918) pressed the case for interna-

tional trusteeship; and E. D. Morel, veteran of the Congo campaign,

who published The Black Man’s Burden in 1920. Their critical view

414 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

of the pre-war world (Olivier believed that the humanitarian tradi-

tions of colonial rule had been corrupted by business after 1890)

143

chimed with a larger body of ‘middle opinion’ disillusioned by polit-

ical, diplomatic and economic failure in the aftermath of the war. A

new commitment to the reconstruction of Europe was urged by Alfred

Zimmern in Europe in Convalescence (1922). The destructive impact

of the reparations demand was condemned by J. M. Keynes in The

Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920). The hidden commit-

ments and secret promises that had sheltered ‘old diplomacy’ from

public opinion were denounced in Lowes Dickinson’s The Interna-

tional Anarchy in 1926. Such polemics by themselves meant little. But

the electoral support for the Liberals and Labour (in 1923,theycom-

manded together nearly nine million votes to the Conservatives’ ﬁve

and a half) suggested that a large body of public opinion took a similar

‘neo-Gladstonian’ view of Britain’s overseas interests. The pre-war ver-

sion of imperial diplomacy (if not already discredited) had been made

redundant by victory. Peaceful cooperation through an international

concert, not an empire in arms, was the need of the moment. The

predatory instincts of colonial settlers and businessmen should be care-

fully restrained before they whipped up revolt, or provoked a fresh clash

between colonial powers. A new bond of sympathy must be forged with

the aspirations of colonial peoples, when they embraced the values of

the Liberal state.

Of course, none of this implied the repudiation of power. The

Labour leadership had refused any truck with Gandhian agitation in

1920, and insisted in its ﬁrst (minority) government in 1924 on strict

adherence to the Montford constitution.

144

The champions of trustee-

ship insisted that African self-government lay far in the future. The

effect was more subtle. The liberal mood of the early 1920s inspired

a more thoughtful defence of colonial rule and a more critical view

of its actual practice. The ex-proconsul, Lord Lugard, whose sense of

publicity was unusually sharp (his wife had been on the staff of The

Times) urged a ‘dual mandate’ in tropical Africa. Economic develop-

ment brought reciprocal beneﬁts to Europeans and Africans. The task

of government was to balance the interests of international trade and its

indigenous subjects.

145

Amid the new stress on enlightened trusteeship

and non-interference with ‘primitive’ peoples, ‘indirect rule’ acquired

additional merit. A neo-traditional regime based on customary law and

chieﬂy rule became the settled dogma of African policy. In the new