Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
Подождите немного. Документ загружается.
445 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
that most of them (though not Churchill) wanted most: the forthcom-
ing conference on imperial economic unity.
76
It was enough to secure
an overwhelming majority.
As Churchill had prophesied, Cosgrave soon dropped through
the trap-door, to be replaced by De Valera. But, the Free State
apart, most opinion in Britain observed little change in the domin-
ion relationship. Jimmy Thomas’ claim that the Statute was the ‘cut-
ting away of dead wood which will render possible new growth’
77
was largely accepted. Certainly, among ministers, scepticism about the
honesty and even the intelligence of dominion politicians was deeply
ingrained. Close encounter at Ottawa reinforced this impression: ‘Ben-
nett a cad and deceitful’ (Baldwin); ‘Bluff!! Mendacity!! Dishonest!!
Liar!!’ (Neville Chamberlain); ‘Bennett a liar’ (Thomas).
78
The financial
instincts of Australian leaders were viewed with suspicion. When New
Zealand’s first Labour government declared its support for a ‘planned
economy’, the reaction was bemused irritation at such doctrinaire folly.
But, if most politicians in the overseas dominions were regarded in
Britain as parochial in outlook and meagre in talent, they also seemed
free of any ‘nationalist’ aspirations to ‘real’ independence. The ‘British’
identity of Canada, Australia and New Zealand was taken for granted.
The exception was South Africa, whose ‘native policy’ had already
attracted humanitarian disapproval in Britain.
79
But doubts over South
African ‘loyalty’ were largely assuaged by the entry of Smuts into coali-
tion with Hertzog in 1933. The most ardent British imperialists, includ-
ing Leo Amery, Edward Grigg and Lionel Curtis who kept the Milnerite
faith, were also among Smuts’ warmest admirers. Appeasing Afrikaner
demands for the symbols of sovereignty was the surest way, so they
argued, of creating a loyal Anglo-Afrikaner dominion. They looked
forward to the prospect of a union of two peoples (the blacks were
invisible) that would ‘follow the history of the Union of England and
Scotland’.
80
The powerful Anglo-South African interest entrenched in
the City, at The Times, and in academe as well, exerted its influence
against any criticism that might offend Afrikaners and endanger the
prospects of ‘fusion’ as the South African historian, W. M. Macmillan,
found when coming to Britain in 1934.
81
This complacent British view of their dominion relations did
not extend to India. Between 1928 and 1935, three British governments
wrestled with Indian ‘reform’: to frame a new constitution that would
win Indian consent – or at least acquiescence. Part of their problem was
446 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
the refusal of the Congress to accept anything short of full indepen-
dence, with a ‘strong’ central government. But they were also hemmed
in by the widespread unease in the Conservative party that extended
well beyond the notorious Die Hards. Neither the minority Labour
government of 1929–31 nor the National Government that followed it
could hope to enact a new constitution unless its Conservative critics
were kept to a minimum. The main difficulty lay in persuading Con-
servative party opinion that elective self-government should be granted
not just to the provinces (as the 1930 Simon Report had proposed
and to which even most Die Hards agreed), but to the centre as well,
and that India should be promised a future as a self-governing domin-
ion. A loud chorus of outrage, orchestrated by Churchill, denounced
both these ideas. It drew on a mass of inherited prejudice about Indian
incapacity (lovingly cultivated by generations of ‘Old India Hands’),
as well as more recent alarm about caste and communal violence.
It castigated the betrayal of imperial duty, an ethos still loudly pro-
claimed in other parts of the Empire. It exploited the embarrassing
absence of Indian leaders pledged to work the reforms in a loyal and
cooperative spirit, and pointed instead to the Congress campaign of
civil disobedience from mid-1930. It took up the cause of Lancashire
cotton, whose waning market in India might decline even more if a
self-governing India adopted local protection. It evoked an intangible
sense that conceding self-rule to ‘babu’ politicians (so often the butt
of official disparagement) would mark a shameful defeat, a blow to
‘race-pride’, and a public avowal that British ‘decline’ had become
irreversible.
The pull of these powerful emotions was sometimes unnerving.
To Conservative leaders, the danger of being painted as less than loyal
to the Empire posed an obvious risk. A sudden upset in India might set
off an earthquake in the mood of their followers. Their endorsement
of the 1933 constitutional plan offering India responsible government
at the centre, and future dominionhood as an ‘All-India’ federation,
was shot through with unease. Yet, at the reform bill’s second read-
ing in February 1935, it was supported by more than three-quarters
of Conservative MPs.
82
It seems very unlikely that (as has sometimes
been claimed) this decisive result reflected a falling away in the British
commitment to Empire. Its arduous passage suggests quite the reverse.
The real explanation for the success of the bill was both the widespread
belief that (in its eventual form) it would secure key British interests
447 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
without a sterile (and costly) repression, and the backing it won from
almost all senior politicians. To accuse this great phalanx of age and
authority (what Lord Hugh Cecil called ‘Front Benchdom’
83
)ofbeing
indifferent to the safety of British world power was too much even for
Churchill.
But what lay behind this consensus, and how had it been built?
Perhaps the critical stage was the conversion of Baldwin, the Conser-
vative leader, to the need to make more than purely provincial conces-
sions, and offer progress towards Indian self-government at the centre.
Like Ramsay MacDonald, Baldwin accepted the view of Lord Irwin
(whom he had appointed as Viceroy) that a way had to be found to
reconcile Indian ‘moderate’ opinion to the British connection, and that
to appear to renege on the promise of eventual self-government made in
1917 would be politically fatal. It chimed with his instinct that the art
of good government was holding the centre against the extremes – in
both Britain and India. On three vital occasions – in November 1929,
in March 1931 and in December 1934 – Baldwin threw all his pres-
tige behind the cause of reform. His message was shrewd. Again and
again he insisted that the aim of concession was ‘to keep India in the
Empire’;
84
that to fall back on repression ‘would break up the Empire’
(a silent reminder of Ireland);
85
that ‘the Empire was organic and alive
and in constant process of evolution’
86
and could not be governed by
Victorian methods. ‘The present proposals’, he told his Cabinet col-
leagues in March 1933 when the reform scheme white paper was about
to be published, ‘might save India to the Empire, but if they were not
introduced we should certainly lose it.’
87
Indeed, far from conceding
that Britain’s position in India had become a lost cause, or that its
Empire was redundant, Baldwin argued the opposite, portraying his
Die Hard opponents as defeatists and wreckers with obsolescent ideas.
‘The Empire of today’, he declared in a memorable phrase, ‘is not the
Empire of the first Jubilee.’
88
Baldwin could count on two useful supports. First, some
of the most ardent imperialists shared his view of India, including
Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times. They rejected Die Hard
ideas as crude and old-fashioned, and Churchill himself as a political
fossil. Secondly, the expert advice from the ‘men on the spot’ echoed
the need for an advance at the centre to draw the sting of the Congress
and force it back into ‘constitutional’ politics. Two recent ex-Viceroys,
Lords Reading (1921–6) and Irwin (1926–31), pressed the same case.
89
448 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
Retired Indian officials were quietly called up to preach the new gospel.
The ‘Union of Britain and India’ society was formed in May 1933
to back the white paper policy: its chairman, steering committee and
membership were almost entirely made up from former members of the
Indian Civil Service.
90
Churchill could play on the fears of Conservative
activists and enjoyed the support of two great press barons, Rothermere
and Beaverbrook, both old foes of Baldwin. But some of his allies mis-
trusted his motives; his tactics in Parliament offended even some of
his friends; and his knowledge of India was transparently shallow. The
Die Hards’ best hope was to stir up enough internal party division to
frighten the leadership into dropping the bill. Their most dangerous
claim was that under its rules the Congress would capture the vast bulk
of the seats in any central assembly, and that an Indian dominion on the
Statute of Westminster model could repeal any safeguards that London
laid down. It was precisely these points that worried Austen Cham-
berlain, who exerted his influence over a large middle group otherwise
sympathetic to the government scheme. But, once the Cabinet agreed
to excise any reference to India’s future ‘Dominion Status’ from the
bill, and to adopt indirect election to the proposed federal assembly, it
won over the last major figure with the power to obstruct it.
91
Of the
seventy-nine Conservative MPs who rejected the bill in February 1935,
only Churchill himself had held cabinet rank. ‘Front benchdom’ had
triumphed.
The price of consensus had been a large helping of caution.
The bill’s supporters assumed that India’s advance to self-government
would be closely controlled by the Viceroy (armed with an arsenal of
‘safeguards’); that London’s grip on India’s army and its external rela-
tions would remain absolute for a long time to come; that the Congress
would be hobbled by the constitutional privileges conferred on the
Muslims and Princes; and that India’s dominionhood (the content of
which was left carefully vague) would only begin at an unspecified time
in the future. How far these conditions could be imposed in fact, and
in constitutional theory, will be discussed later on. But, as an index of
British ideas about their own place in the world, the Act is revealing.
The sound and fury of the Die Hard campaign was a noisy distrac-
tion. What really stood out was the solid insistence of the most ardent
reformers that India must remain part of the British world-system, and
that, until its leaders accepted this ‘imperial’ fate, they would languish
in the limbo of semi-self-government.
449 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
Of course, opinion in Britain on India and the Empire was
not monolithic. On the Left, the reform scheme was derided as too
little and too late to reconcile the nationalists in India. The turn to
protection revived the old radical charge that economic imperialism
was bound to bring war. Labour’s election manifesto in 1935 urged
‘equitable arrangements for access to markets, the international con-
trol of . . . raw materials and . . . the extension of the mandate system to
colonial territories’.
92
It was the Cobdenite formula: more free trade
meant more peace. But most of those who condemned the current prac-
tice of rule in the Empire imagined a future in which Britain was the
centre of a loyal community of self-governing satellite states, bound
together by common interests and values. There is little reason to think
that this imperial world-view was unrepresentative of British opinion
at large. ‘The people of this country’, remarked Neville Chamberlain,
‘have a deep sentiment about the Empire, but it is remote from their
ordinary thoughts’.
93
Perhaps this was true, although there was much
to remind even the least politically minded of Britain’s imperial ties –
not least the stream of those travelling to the white dominions and
back. Indeed, ‘ordinary’ opinion in Britain relied for its knowledge of
much of the world on accounts that were shaped by settler, administra-
tive, missionary or commercial interests, each in their way committed
to empire. In the inter-war years, as much if not more than in previous
eras, three grand propositions still framed British thinking: that they
formed a distinct British ‘race’ among the world’s peoples;
94
that their
institutions and culture enjoyed both global pre-eminence and universal
appeal; and that Britain was still the emporium of the world’s trade and
ideas. Set against these, the divisions and boundaries within their impe-
rial system seemed of little importance. ‘The British prefer to emphasize
the unity of the Empire’, remarked an acute foreign observer. ‘To them
England and the Empire are one, and no such thing exists as an England
conceived separately.’
95
In the ‘Newer World’: the dominions
96
The arduous negotiations at Ottawa taught British ministers – if they
needed reminding – that dominion politicians had as keen a sense of
their own ‘national’ interest as the London government itself. With the
formal conferment of the dominions’ full sovereignty under the Statute
450 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
of Westminster, the vigorous assertion of their economic self-interest,
and their increasing alarm that Britain might be drawn into a conflict in
Europe in which they had no stake, it has sometimes appeared as if this
was the time when the dominions acquired a fully fledged sense of their
national identity. A new ‘nationalist’ spirit had replaced colonial sub-
servience. They were nation-states in the making, no longer stuck fast
in uneasy ‘dominionhood’. It would be hard to deny that the language
of ‘nation’ became more widely used among dominion politicians in
the inter-war years. But it would be wrong to assume that more than
a handful of such ‘nationalists’ envisaged a future outside the British
world-system or favoured an open rebellion against it. There were sev-
eral reasons for this. First, among communities of mainly British ori-
gin, affirming a Canadian or Australian identity was not meant to deny
their continuing Britishness. They would still be ‘British nations’ as
well, numbered among the ‘British peoples’. Secondly, even European
immigrants from outside the British Isles displayed a strong attachment
to ‘British’ institutions (especially parliamentary government) and the
Crown as a source of common allegiance. Thirdly, even where such
attachments were weak or contested, as among some French Cana-
dians, Afrikaners and Irish, the right to secede from the Empire and
become a republic (to which the Statute of Westminster gave tacit con-
sent) exerted at best an ambiguous appeal. The costs and risks in each
case were dauntingly high, and full exit from the Empire was carefully
assigned to the indefinite future.
The Pacific dominions
Among the five dominions, there was inevitably wide variation in the
extent to which the ‘British connection’ impinged upon their local pol-
itics in a period of considerable turmoil. Of the four overseas domin-
ions, Australia and New Zealand were the most homogeneously British.
Ethnic resentment against Britain, even in hard times, had little political
scope. Both declined to enact the Statute of Westminster in their own
legislatures, and showed little interest in the work of its drafting.
97
Both
were keenly aware of how dependent they were on British sea-power for
strategic protection and to safeguard the racial exclusiveness – ‘White
Australia’ and ‘White New Zealand’ – that formed the bedrock of their
social and cultural identity. In both, the political and business elite (and
many farmers as well) acknowledged the umbilical link between their
economic prosperity and their close relations with Britain, nowhere
451 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
more than in Melbourne’s Collins Street, Australia’s ‘City’. This was
not just a matter of markets. In both Pacific dominions, the circulation
of credit and cash was tied very closely to the size of the sterling reserves
that their banks held in London. The London balances were ‘the real
regulative factor and the key to the whole banking system’.
98
A short-
fall in earnings or the failure to raise a loan in the City threatened the
drastic contraction of the local money supply and a savage depression
of the kind both had suffered some forty years earlier.
In Australia particularly, the effects of the slump were extremely
unsettling. The huge fall in world prices was part of the story. What
made things much worse was the scale of the borrowing, public and
private, in the boom decade that ended abruptly in October 1929.With
public revenues falling, huge railway losses, and the drastic decline in
overseas earnings, the risk of default on local and overseas debts loomed
large. But the action required to avert this calamity was bound to be
painful and to evoke fierce opposition, especially from the supporters
of the government in power, the first Labour government since 1916.
When the Scullin ministry accepted the advice of the Niemeyer mission
(Sir Otto Niemeyer was deputy governor of the Bank of England) that
cuts had to be made and wages reduced to balance the federal and state
government budgets, the reaction was bitter. The Australian Council of
Trade Unions denounced the Loans Councils (which managed public
borrowing) for being ‘in the hands of money sharks, loan-mongers
and capitalists’.
99
As unemployment shot up towards 30 per cent, the
Labour party executive called for the nationalisation of banks and
insurance companies, and the renegotiation of Australia’s war debt
to Britain. While Scullin was away at the 1930 Imperial Conference
(and promising that Australia would not consider default
100
), a civil
war was being fought within his party and government. In New South
Wales, the radical populist Jack Lang won the state election for Labour,
and led the demand to ‘nationalise credit’. ‘Enthroned in our society’,
he later declared, ‘is a hierarchy of financial anarchists playing with the
world of men and women for sheer personal gain’: the villains of the
piece were the British banks in Australia and the leaders who had made
Australia into a ‘chattel nation’.
101
After twice defaulting on the New
South Wales overseas debt, Lang was dismissed by the state’s governor
in May 1932, by which time Scullin’s government had also collapsed. In
December 1931, the United Australia party, a composite of the National
party and Labour rebels like Joe Lyons, the new party’s leader, came
452 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
into power, promising, in Lyons’ words, ‘ruthlessly to eradicate all
influences insidiously or openly weakening the ties of Empire’.
102
Some historians have been tempted to see in the crisis a conflict
between conservative middle-class loyalists, deferential to Britain and
earnestly mimicking British upper-class rituals, and Labour’s ‘radical
nationalists’, bent on resisting Britain’s ‘imperial demands’.
103
It was
certainly true that the professional and business elite (most visible in
Melbourne, and closely connected to mining finance) regarded itself
as the Australian embodiment of Britain’s upper class, and subscribed
to its political and educational ideals as well as its leisure habits. The
young Robert Menzies (a Melbourne barrister) contrasted the refine-
ment of the British ‘establishment’ with the crudeness and avarice of its
American counterpart. ‘They engage in a nauseating mixture of senti-
ment (“Mother’s Day”) and dollar-chasing, not palatable to the English
mind’, he wrote after a visit to the United States. ‘They have no con-
sciousness of responsibility for the well-being or security of the world;
no sense of Imperial destiny.’
104
It was equally true that an acrid dislike
for the British monied elite was voiced on the left of Australian politics.
But it is much too crude to equate this with rejection of Britishness or
Australia’s British identity. One of the first steps of the Labour govern-
ment when the depression arrived was to close the door to ‘alien’ (i.e.
non-British) migration. In a speech criticising the Ottawa terms, Scullin
(whose origins were Catholic and Irish) insisted that the point of impe-
rial preference was the mutual advantage of ‘British nations trading
with one another and . . . keeping the maximum amount of business
within the British family of nations’.
105
His successor as party leader,
John Curtin (also Catholic and Irish), who had flirted with repudiating
Australia’s debts, was no less emphatic. Australians, he claimed, ‘not
only desire to be one people but that we shall be kindred from a com-
mon stock; that we shall . . . be a white people predominantly of British
origin’.
106
As leader of the United Australia party, Joe Lyons (Catholic
and Irish) played the ‘Empire’ card. His more conservative colleagues,
like Menzies’ mentor, J. G. Latham, might have disliked the Statute
of Westminster, but they were also determined to extract the most
favourable trade terms from Britain and be ready to look to the Japanese
market.
107
Trade with the East was where Australia’s economic destiny
lay, was Latham’s conclusion.
108
The notorious reluctance of Lyons’
government to question the Royal Navy’s ability to defend Australia
may have owed most to its fear that this would weaken the Admiralty’s
453 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
case for a strong Eastern fleet and throw an intolerable burden back on
Australia itself.
Nor was there much sign that the cultural ferment of the 1930s,
that affected Australia like almost everywhere else, had brought a direct
confrontation with Australia’s peculiar Britishness. Quite the contrary
in fact. In 1936, the writer P. K. Stephensen published an influential
manifesto, The Foundations of Culture in Australia. Stephensen insisted
that Australia must have its own national culture that would diverge
‘from the purely local colour of the British Islands to the precise extent
that our environment differs from that of Britain’. ‘Is it sedition or blas-
phemy to the idea of the British Empire to suggest that each Dominion
in this loose alliance will tend to become autonomous politically, com-
mercially, and culturally?’
109
But the Australia that Stephensen wanted
was a ‘New Britannia . . . cured of some of the vices . . . of the Old One’,
and avoiding ‘Europe’s brawls’. ‘This Island, Australia Felix, effec-
tively occupied by the British race, would be easily defensible against
all-comers: which Britain to-day is not. This Island is waiting for the
British people to occupy it effectively . . . . There is no other part of
the British Empire so suited as the permanent domicile of the British
Race . . . the British people could find no better stronghold and focus
than in the Island Continent of Australia.’
110
The Australian accent was
clear. But this was the cultural programme not of national separatism
but of Britannic nationalism: the claim to be a distinct British people,
equal at least and perhaps even superior to the original stock.
Canada
Scarred by his encounter with its prime minister, R. B. Bennett, at the
Ottawa Conference, Neville Chamberlain took a sour view of Canada’s
part in the Empire. The United States, he said, ‘controls capital and
politics in Canada’.
111
Only ten years earlier he had been ‘surprised
and delighted’ on a visit to Canada ‘to find the most intense British
feeling’.
112
Chamberlain resented what he saw as Bennett’s bullying
tactics, and not without reason. Even Canadian observers were embar-
rassed and uneasy. But Chamberlain’s diagnosis was crude. Canada
was bound to be influenced by its huge southern neighbour, at once
the world’s largest economy, the largest English-speaking country and
Canada’s largest market. The ease and convenience of cross-border
traffic, the importance of New York in Canadian finance, and the
influence of the American media – radio, film and the press – made
454 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
this all-but-inevitable. But pragmatic acceptance of the American fact
was combined with affirmation of Canada’s British identity by English
Canadians, and (with certain qualifications) by French Canadians as
well. At the Conservative convention in 1927, the outgoing leader,
Arthur Meighen, defended his argument that a Canadian government
should consult Canadian opinion before joining Britain in a war by
saying that this would reassure the people that Canada was a ‘real
British democracy’ and thus strengthen ‘British institutions and British
fidelity’.
113
A Liberal party pamphlet of 1933 declared that the party
‘stood for British principles of Free Speech and Free Association’.
114
A
prairie Liberal like Crerar, who disliked ‘Toronto imperialists’ and the
‘strange shore dwellers’ whose first loyalty was to Britain,
115
could still
think of Britain as ‘the Old Country’ and feel an affinity with its Lib-
eral party and opinion.
116
The scale of non-British migration into the
west after 1918 sharpened the mood of its bare British majority.
117
The
Social Credit party, which ruled Alberta after 1935 (and whose leader,
William Aberhart, was an ‘intense Anglophile’), wrapped its electoral
platforms in the Union Jack.
118
A well-regulated service, concluded the
parliamentary committee on radio broadcasting, would be ‘one of the
most efficient mediums for developing a greater National and Empire
consciousness’.
119
Canadian nationalism was not an insignificant force, but, as in
Australia, it was rarely defined in conflict with Britishness. Its urgency
seemed greater after 1930 as the economic depression threatened to
fracture the country. ‘Never before had provinces, races, classes and
parties been so divided’, complained the Anglophone Montreal lawyer,
Brooke Claxton, a former Rhodes Scholar who bought his suits in
London.
120
What was needed was a strong central government to hold
them together. Nationalism reflected the feeling that Canada was still
little more than a grouping of regions and provinces.
121
But its strongest
supporters were equally sure that the nation they wanted should be a
‘British nation’. John W. Dafoe was the editor of the Manitoba Free
Press in Winnipeg, the voice of prairie Liberalism, and the most influen-
tial Canadian journalist of his day.
122
Dafoe was an ardent nationalist.
But he saw Canada’s future as one of the ‘British nations’. ‘I have never
believed’, he told one correspondent in 1928, ‘that one of a number
of British nations having a common king could remain neutral in a
war which threatened the existence of another British nation.’
123
Dafoe
fiercely opposed the ‘tory-imperialist’ view that Canada had no choice