Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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455 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
but to follow Britain blindly into any war that it fought. But nor did
he want their foreign policies to diverge. The best solution, he thought,
would be ‘agreement by the British nations, that . . . none of them, not
even Great Britain, are 100 per cent international “persons”’.
124
They
should not make war on their own, nor even make treaties that might
involve them in wars without each other’s consent.
Canadian nationalism of the Dafoe variety was highly articu-
late but had a limited following. It attracted suspicion. Dafoe himself
acknowledged that ‘the Canadian people do not want now any def-
inite break in what we call the “British connection”’.
125
There was
still a very powerful minority, ‘holding the money, employing labour,
owning the newspapers and controlling the parties’, who ‘are very
British in sentiment’ and who would answer ‘Ready, aye ready’ to an
appeal from Britain, whatever the cause and however divided the rest of
Canadian opinion.
126
It denounced the idea that Canada had interests
that were different from Britain’s. The headquarters of this feeling were
found in Toronto, the ‘Belfast of Canada’, and the ‘most assertively
British of Canadian cities’.
127
But just as disheartening in the nation-
alist view was the indifference of the ‘isolationists’ to events elsewhere
in the world as if Canadians could ‘contract out of the universe’.
128
Isolationism seemed to be growing in strength after 1931 along with
the fear of involvement in Europe’s intractable conflicts. Its domestic
parallel was endemic provincialism, and the rooted mistrust of the fed-
eral government. It was this that had led to the clause in the Statute of
Westminster by which power to amend the Canadian constitution was
carefully reserved to the Imperial Parliament (and denied to Canada’s),
at the explicit request of Canadian leaders. ‘Provincial rights’ remained
a potent political cry, in Quebec above all, where Canadian ‘national-
ism’ was readily seen as a ‘British’ conspiracy. Maintaining the ‘British
connection’ in its unreformed shape, ill-defined, emotive and open (as
some thought) to British abuse, was thus the great bulwark to unwanted
constitutional change.
The boldest challenge to this political impasse came paradox-
ically from the Conservative government of R. B. Bennett between
1930 and 1935. Bennett had denounced the Liberals for failing to deal
with the depression effectively. Bennett’s own cry was ‘Canada First’,
a sharp rise in tariffs to defend Canadian industry. This cut little ice on
the prairies which had to pay more for home-made manufactures while
grain prices fell steeply. Bennett had gone to the Imperial Conference
456 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
in London to demand an imperial (and thus Canadian) preference in
the British market for food. Labour rebuffed this attack on free trade.
But the 1931 crisis in Britain, the new National Government and its
swift turn to protection gave Bennett his chance. By inviting the British
and other Empire governments to an economic conference at Ottawa,
he aimed to reverse that defeat. The British would be forced to concede
the ultimate prize, a protected home market for Empire food exports in
return for a modest revision in Canadian tariffs. Bennett’s plans were
concerted (by his own tacit admission) with the Australian chief dele-
gate, Stanley Bruce, the former prime minister, and now the eminence
grise of Australia’s economic diplomacy. He had the British ‘completely
encircled’.
129
Bennett may well have believed that the British delegation
would not dare to resist. As a close friend of Lord Beaverbrook, he may
have been swayed by his and Leo Amery’s hopes of promoting a real
protectionist government in Britain, much more fully committed to
‘Empire Free Trade’. A hard line in Ottawa (where Amery was active)
would help this to happen.
130
It may have been an inkling of this that
enraged Baldwin and Chamberlain with Bennett’s conference tactics.
Certainly Bennett was playing for high stakes. He regarded himself as
the saviour of Empire, who would drag the British kicking and scream-
ing towards his own version of it. To have upheld ‘Canada First’, saved
the prairie’s grain market, and imposed a form of ‘Empire Free Trade’
on the recalcitrant British would have been a remarkable triumph for
his vision of Empire. But Baldwin and Chamberlain were not so easily
broken.
As a shrewd businessman, Bennett hedged his imperial bets.
Access to American markets (closed up by Washington’s emergency
tariff) remained a vital concern. When President Roosevelt embraced
freer trade, Bennett eagerly sought a commercial agreement to match
that with Britain. But his domestic experiment in a strong central gov-
ernment and the Bennett ‘New Deal’ fell apart in the face of provincial
resistance, internal party division and Bennett’s ill-health. The 1935
election was a Conservative bloodbath. Although both parties agreed
in opposing Canadian involvement in Britain’s confrontation with Italy,
the new Liberal government soon faced the old question: what would
Canada do if Britain was drawn into a conflict in Europe. Mackenzie
King may have thought privately that Canada neither could nor should
stand apart.
131
But his public position was to say as little as possi-
ble and fall back on the formula ‘parliament will decide’. The prime
457 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
reason for this, as for many years past, was fear that Quebec would
revolt against any prior commitment to Britain and bring down the
Liberals, both party and government. ‘British imperialism’, said Henri
Bourassa, still the great tribune of Quebec’s survivance, ‘must not be
allowed to drag Canada into any more wars.’
132
Ernest Lapointe, the
Quebec Liberal leader, said much the same thing. Both were fiercely
opposed to the separatist nationalism of the ‘Action franc¸aise’ and its
clerical leader, the Abb
´
e Lionel Groulx. Neither was anxious to give
him a cause. Indeed, while this sleeping dog lay, Canadien separatism
remained carefully vague about when and how a separate Quebec state
might come into being. Its leaders denied any wish to break Canada
up: ‘Nous ne voulons rien d
´
etruire’, said the Abb
´
e Groulx piously.
133
Nor could they count on any support from the voters. The real polit-
ical voice of French Canada’s nationalism was the ‘Union nationale’
of Maurice Duplessis. Duplessis’ government was a thorn in Ottawa’s
side. Its programme was not separation but the unremitting defence of
provincial autonomy.
134
Canada’s ‘British connection’ – by default or
by choice – remained the pole of its politics.
South Africa
In the cruel trajectory of South African history, the inter-war years have
often been seen as the prelude to the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism
and its programme of apartheid. It was certainly true that an amalgam
of paternalism, segregationist attitudes and overt racial discrimination
(especially in the treatment of labour) prefigured much of the substance
of post-war apartheid although without the ideological ‘rigour’, system-
atic enforcement (by classification and removal) and violent repression
of the 1950s and after.
135
Africans (some 10,000 of whom had quali-
fied for the vote under the property-based franchise that prevailed in the
Cape) were removed from the voters’ roll in 1936, but ‘coloureds’ (the
South African term for those of mixed race) were not. Zwaartgevaar
(‘black peril’) was invoked continually by white politicians in search of
cheap votes. But the inter-war state lacked the means to impose real
control over many black communities in town and country alike. In
a similar way, the irresistible rise of Afrikaner nationalism to political
dominance was much less apparent to contemporary eyes than hind-
sight suggests.
There were several reasons for this. The dominant personality
in South African politics was General J. B. M. Hertzog, prime minister
458 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
from 1924 until 1939. To his political critics, Hertzog’s shortcom-
ings were plain. He was the ‘apostle of the short view’ and shared
‘that latent sense of racial grievance’ that inspired many of his fol-
lowers, wrote Patrick Duncan, Smuts’ right-hand man in the South
African party.
136
Hertzog was often accused of cloudy and imprecise
language (as were Botha and Smuts), the means of survival in South
African politics as almost everywhere else. But he was ready to claim
that the Imperial Conferences of 1926 and 1930 had lifted the bur-
den of British hegemony, and removed any doubt about South African
sovereignty. With the hypothetical right of secession assured, prag-
matic acceptance of the Britse konneksie had become politically possi-
ble. Hertzog lent his authority to The King’s Republics, published by
H. J. Schlosberg, a South African lawyer,
137
which claimed that, though
the dominions now had the right to neutrality, it was inconceivable
that they would exercise it if Britain were in danger.
138
Hertzog himself
now veered towards the position that no issue of substance divided
Afrikaners and ‘English’ (the local term for those of British descent).
The task of the National party, he told its 1930 congress, was to build
a‘gekonsolideerde Suid-Afrikaanse volk’. The two streams of English
and Afrikaans culture must eventually merge (‘saamvloei’).
139
Here,
perhaps, was a tacit admission that the struggle to define an Afrikaner
identity by the systematic denial of ‘English’ influences and attitudes
was futile and unwinnable, and could only prolong the sometimes
bitter antipathy of the previous decade.
Hertzog may have also been hoping to undermine Smuts, his
main political rival. Smuts’ South African party enjoyed the support of
many better-off Afrikaners who disliked the (white) populist style of
the Nationalists, their pact with the Labour party and the secessionist
republicanism favoured by a vociferous wing.
140
It also attracted most
of the English vote, since Smuts’ attachment to the Britse konneksie
could hardly be doubted. ‘Are we going to desert General Smuts, a
Dutchman who is sacrificing health and leisure for the British cause?’,
asked the young Harry Lawrence in a speech at Kalk Bay near Cape
Town in 1927.
141
Smuts seems to have regarded himself more and more
as the bearer of Rhodes’ old vision of a grander South Africa: fully
self-governing, Anglo-Afrikaner in culture, but part of the Empire. He
was keener than ever upon South Africa’s northward expansion by a
‘fair linking up with the two Rhodesias’, as well as ‘friendship and
459 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
collaboration with the rest of British Africa’ as ‘junior members of
the family’.
142
A federation of states from the Cape to the Equator
143
would form a great African dominion to rival Australia or Canada – a
prospect his opponents denounced as a ‘kaffir state’ nightmare. Yet, for
all Smuts’ prestige, his party’s survival could not be taken for granted.
He had no obvious successor (Smuts was sixty in 1930) with the con-
nections and skill to keep the party’s Afrikaner support. His English
lieutenants feared that the siren call of hereniging (reunion) would lure
their Afrikaner allies away. And the party’s cohesion was constantly
strained by its English ‘extremists’ who opposed what they saw as the
steady erosion of the link with the Empire. ‘Politically they are like chil-
dren’, said Duncan contemptuously of a breakaway faction in Natal. ‘I
do not think the fits of imperial hysteria are good for us or the British
connection.’
144
The suggestion by one of his English frontbenchers that
the party should abandon the dual language provisions of the South
Africa Act was dangerous enough to draw a savage rebuke from Smuts
himself.
145
Perhaps surprisingly, the politics of Depression allowed both
Hertzog and Smuts to escape their extremists and construct a ‘mod-
erate’ centre enjoying broad Afrikaner and English support. Hertzog
had hoped to ride out the storm without leaving the gold standard, as
the British had done. But signs of white unrest on the Rand
146
and the
bruising effect on agricultural exporters brought a revolt in his party
and pushed him towards a coalition with Smuts in February 1933.
Both came under pressure from their Afrikaner supporters to press
on towards ‘fusion’, a union of parties. The critical issue became South
Africa’s ‘status’ – the real extent of the freedom conferred by the Statute
of Westminster. Within Hertzog’s party a sizeable faction led by D. F.
Malan was hostile to fusion, because it meant accepting dominionhood
as a permanent condition and losing the hope of a republican future
outside the Empire. For some of Smuts’ English supporters, there was
the opposite fear that their voice would be drowned by the Afrikaner
majority, and that Malanite republicanism would enjoy too much influ-
ence. But, when the ‘status’ bill was debated (the bill enacted the terms
of the Statute of Westminster in South African law), Smuts won over his
doubters while those who favoured a future republic also drew back.
147
Only seven MPs opposed the bill. The way was now open to form
the ‘United’ party: the status Act was its charter. However, much to
460 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
Duncan’s relief, Malan and his followers chose in the end to stay out.
‘It will consolidate our [new] party against a republic’, was Duncan’s
conclusion, while ‘a small ultra-British group mainly in Durban and
East London’ formed on the opposite wing.
148
The so-called ‘Domin-
ion’ party won a sensational by-election in 1935 (‘Are you a bulldog
or a handsupper?’ was its cry),
149
but most English voters elsewhere
heeded the warning that ‘the English-speaking must have the support
of the moderate Afrikaans-speaking. They alone cannot prevent the
country from seceding from the British Empire.’
150
But what had fusion achieved? To its supporters it marked
the end of ‘race’ conflict between Briton and Boer and the creation
of a new ‘South Africanism’. To ensure its success, they were will-
ing, like Duncan, to remove the African franchise – on the grounds
that it might cause a dispute among whites. But fusion did not stop
the movement to build a distinct Afrikaner identity, which gathered
speed in the 1930s, with the promotion of the Afrikaans language (a
patois which replaced Dutch as the country’s official second language
in 1924), the rapid growth in the number of Afrikaans-only schools
(by 1936, 55 per cent of white children were receiving instruction
only in Afrikaans
151
), and the systematic propagation of an ‘Afrikaner’
account of South African history in which the Afrikaners were cast
as the innocent victims of black barbarity and British imperialism.
152
The approaching centenary in 1938 of the Great Trek was perfectly
timed to advance the agreeable myth that the Afrikaners were a cho-
sen, martyred but ultimately victorious people and the republic their
symbol of national ‘liberation’. Against the power of this racial and
cultural appeal (which hindsight confirms), the United party’s ‘South
Africanism’ now looks rather wan. But it would be wrong to assume
that success was assured to separatist nationalism before the Second
World War. For many Afrikaners, it was the weakness and poverty of
their language and culture that really stood out. The higher civil ser-
vice was still overwhelmingly English, and few senior officials could or
would speak Afrikaans. English opinion was voiced by English-owned
newspapers in all the main cities. Almost the entire business world was
English and a large proportion of its most influential members were also
British by birth. The same was true of the main professions – medicine,
law, education, journalism, engineering and architecture.
153
Their ties
with Britain – family, business or professional – remained strong. The
towns into which many Afrikaners were moving were mainly English
461 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
in culture. It was hardly conceivable that a political movement that
proposed to root out the Britse konneksie could escape the furious
opposition of this English middle class to an Afrikaner republic out-
side the Empire. Few well-informed Afrikaners believed that it could
be imposed on a hostile minority. Indeed, even republicans were forced
to concede that it lay far in the future, while half of those teaching
at Stellenbosch University, the seed-plot and seminary of Afrikaner
nationalism, backed Hertzog and Smuts, not Malan’s ‘Purified Nation-
alists’. A true (ware) Afrikaner society might be the white hope of ages
to come: in the world of practical politics, South Africa would remain a
dominion.
It was true that dominionhood left undefined the terms of the
British connection in several crucial respects and made the tacit conces-
sion that any dominion could secede from the Empire if it chose. The
fact that no dominion did so after 1931 was not because there was a
constitutional bar, but because in each case the balance of its politics
was against such a move. New Zealand’s Labour government, elected
in 1935, might have had little ideological sympathy with the National
Government in London. But its deep British attachment was strongly
affirmed: ‘New Zealand was bound to Britain by unbreakable ties of
blood’, declared the new prime minister.
154
Its planned economy rested
on hopes of closer economic integration with Britain – the only real out-
let for the increased production of primary products.
155
At the other
end of the spectrum, the Irish Free State under De Valera’s Fianna Fail
government rejected the oath of allegiance, refused to pay the annu-
ities owing under the 1921 treaty, and resisted the economic coercion
with which London responded. In 1937, a new constitution recognised
the Crown but only by virtue of Eire’s ‘external association’ with the
Commonwealth. But De Valera stopped short of declaring a republic
or leaving the Commonwealth, partly because to have done so seemed
likely to erase any hope of Ireland’s reunification.
156
For all the domin-
ions, the greatest source of concern was Britain’s involvement in a new
European conflict. For Australia and New Zealand, this arose from
anxiety that London might overlook its real imperial duty in the Asia-
Pacific. In South Africa and Canada, it sprang from the fear that, unless
Britain itself was in obvious danger, the local response would foment a
racial divide and destroy the fragile consensus on which dominionhood
rested. As Europe slid towards war, both kinds of risk grew greater and
greater.
462 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
Holding India: ‘from power to influence’?
157
Had India become the grand anomaly in the British world-system by
the mid-1930s? Certainly some people thought so. ‘India is a great
historical accident and remains an incredible anomaly’, opined John
Dafoe. Hindus and Muslims, he thought, ‘are not part of the moral
unit . . . I might call the British Commonwealth of Nations’.
158
The link
between Britain and the white dominions had now become voluntary.
It was a matter of choice, however theoretical, whether or not to stay
in the Empire. In much of the tropical empire, the demand for self-
government barely existed as yet outside a very narrow elite. But India
was different. There, since the end of the First World War, the British
had faced a mass nationalist movement whose leaders had called if not
for purna swaraj (complete independence) then for self-government as
full as that of Australia or Canada. Under Gandhi’s dynamic direction,
the Indian National Congress had challenged British authority in a
large-scale campaign of civil disobedience that was only abandoned (in
1922) for fear of a rising spiral of violence. But, as a tactical weapon, as
well as a way of restoring momentum and extending support, it retained
its appeal to the Congress’ Gandhian wing. In 1930, it was turned to
again to lever major concessions at a time when the British seemed at
sixes and sevens.
The British for their part seemed less sure than they had been
before 1914 about what their Raj was to do. The social problems of
India had always seemed daunting, but now they were more conscious
than ever that they had only makeshift solutions. The Royal Commis-
sion on Indian Agriculture (1928) was set up to inquire into the causes
of low productivity. But it pointedly ignored the key issue of land tenure
so as not to enrage the Raj’s key allies among the landholding classes. As
the Congress pushed deeper into rural society, the old British claim that
they were the guardians of peasants and cultivators looked more and
more threadbare. Indeed, the reforms of 1918–19 were meant to shift
the burden of social questions towards the ‘transferred’ departments in
provincial governments under the charge of elected Indian ministers.
The Raj seemed to be asking, as Milner had asked of the British in
Egypt in 1920: ‘Are we trying to do too much for these people and
getting ourselves disliked without materially benefiting them?’
159
Yet (as we have seen) the British could hardly imagine an impe-
rial life after India. The real issue for them was how they could reconcile
463 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
the Indians’ demand for self-government (which they accepted in
principle) with their own irreducible interests. It was India’s contribu-
tion to the strength and cohesion of the British world-system that really
concerned them. Despite its savage contraction as a buyer of Lancashire
cottons, India remained a key market for Britain’s industrial products,
all the more so in the age of the segmented global economy and closed
trading blocs. Thus, although the overall value of British exports to
India fell in the 1930s, India remained the largest single market for
cotton piece-goods, machinery and chemicals, and the second or third
market for electricals and iron and steel goods.
160
Nor was trade the
only or most important economic consideration. Some £500 million
(around 12 per cent of British overseas capital) was invested in India,
three-quarters of it in government debt. India also contributed to the
British balance of payments through its payment for services, pensions
(for British officials), debt interest (mostly on railways) and the costs
of the large British garrison ‘borrowed’ from home. Before 1931,and
even more so after, any change that might affect India’s ability to pay
these ‘Home Charges’ rang loud alarm bells in London. An elected gov-
ernment in Delhi that sent the garrison home, repudiated its debts or
devalued the rupee might wreck sterling’s precarious stability.
161
It was
hard enough sometimes to bully the Viceroy and his British officials: an
independent government of India would be a different matter entirely.
It was widely agreed in London that Britain’s ‘financial stake . . . in India
remains, for all practical purposes, as a permanent obstacle to anything
that could reasonably be termed financial self-government’.
162
In the Depression decade, commerce and finance were an urgent
concern. But even more rooted in British thinking about India was its
strategic importance. This could be thought of as active and passive. By
comparison with other parts of the British world-system, India’s defence
budget was huge: six times that of Australia, the next biggest spender.
India still paid the ordinary costs of almost one-third of Britain’s regular
army, stationed in the sub-continent. By convention, India’s own army
of some 140,000 men, with its British officer corps, was also avail-
able for imperial duty, although London would pay the ‘extraordinary’
costs. After 1920, it was accepted that imperial use of this ‘sepoy’ army
would be careful and sparing; but India remained the strategic reserve of
the British Empire in Asia and its great supply base in war. Troops and
supplies could be sent from its ports to a vast arc of targets from Cairo
to Shanghai. Its vast pool of labour was a pioneer corps in waiting –
as in 1914–18. But ‘passively’ also India was crucial. Together with
464 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
British-ruled Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), its orientation was one
key to the Asian balance of power, and thus that of the world as a
whole. Its Muslim minority looked towards Persia and the Arab Mid-
dle East. The leaders of Congress admired Chiang Kai-shek’s national-
ist struggle in China, and some of them longed for a pan-Asian front
against British imperialism. But, from the British perspective, a divided,
neutral or hostile India, spread-eagled across their route to Southeast
Asia, Australasia and China, would be an unimaginable disaster. So
hard was it to think of ‘imperial defence’ in these terms that the ‘loss’
of India was almost literally unthinkable.
The constitutional tactics that the British pursued to safeguard
their interests and sap Indian opposition were extraordinarily tortuous,
although this was partly because of their own internal divisions. The
first constitutional scheme was advanced by the Simon Commission, set
up in 1927–8 to review the Montford reforms. The Commission (which
was boycotted by most Indian leaders in protest against its ‘all-white’
complexion) proposed to give the Indian provinces almost complete
control of their local affairs (‘provincial autonomy’ with ministerial or
‘responsible’ government on the Westminster model), with the distant
prospect of eventual federation when and if they agreed upon it. In
the central government, the Viceroy’s executive power would remain
unfettered by a toothless central assembly, while the Indian army would
be placed even more clearly under London’s control, with a guaranteed
budget that Indian politicians could not even discuss.
163
Simon’s object
was clear. If the provinces became the arena where Indian politicians
could exercise real power, provincial and not ‘All-India’ politics would
attract most political energy. The Congress party as a ‘national’ move-
ment would soon fall apart as its provincial divisions went their own
separate ways and abandoned the chimaera of early British withdrawal.
In political terms, the Raj would have rounded Cape Horn.
Simon’s scheme was shot down not so much by its Indian critics
as by the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, who saw the lack of any advance at the
‘centre’ as the cause around which Congress would unite to disrupt
British rule. He had already insisted that the promise of India’s future
dominionhood should be clearly affirmed. What Irwin urged was a
round table conference at which all interested parties – British and
Indian – would draw up proposals for a new constitution. Three such
conferences in London in 1930–2 failed to produce an agreed solution.
But they did throw up a novel suggestion on which the British seized