By now the British Empire had expanded to truly global proportions. In 1759, General Wolfe and his soldiers scaled the cliffs at Quebec on the St Lawrence River, and took the French city. Four years later, Canada became a British colony. However, ten years after that, when the British government imposed taxes on the American colonies, and then tried to sell them tea (imported tax free by the East India Company from China), this resulted in the Boston Tea Party. Colonists dressed as Native Americans boarded the ships and cast tea chests into Boston harbour. Demonstrations against inept British rule, under the slogan ‘No taxation without representation’, soon spread throughout the thirteen British colonies in America, and in 1776 they achieved a historic victory, forming the United States of America.
By now Captain Cook had sailed the south Pacific and planted the British flag in Australia, claiming the entire territory for the Empire in 1770. After the British had lost their American colonies, they no longer had a penal colony where they could exile such criminals as were deemed not worthy of hanging. The theft of a sheep, or ‘goods valued at twelve pence’, merited the death penalty; pickpockets and juvenile offenders were merely exiled for life to penal colonies in the Americas, where they usually worked as indentured labourers. But now that Australia had been discovered, the authorities decided that this was just the place to establish a new penal colony, and in 1788 a ship carrying the first prisoners arrived at Botany Bay (now Sydney).
The empire may have been flourishing across the globe, but the majority of the people back home, like those who had been subjugated abroad, derived little benefit from this. On the contrary, the Industrial Revolution resulted in an exodus from rural areas to the cities in search of work. What they found was even worse than the servitude of working the land. The rapidly expanding cities were soon teeming with factory workers enduring long hours and housed in appalling conditions.The figures speak for themselves. In 1700, Manchester had been a small market town with a population of 10,000. By 1800, this had become 95,000; by 1850 it had become 250,000.
When the German factory owner, Friedrich Engels, moved to Manchester and saw for himself the unbelievable squalor of the slums, he wrote to his friend Karl Marx, and together they composed the Communist Manifesto, with its stirring call to arms: ‘Workers of the world unite!’ The British Empire was making people rich, but throughout the world, and even at home, the condition of its subjects was often a humanitarian disgrace. (The fact that the Marxist system simply doesn’t work, and itself would often lead to conditions of widespread and appalling distress when it was applied, does in no way gainsay the disgraceful conditions it sought to alleviate.)
When the First World War broke out in 1914, many thousands of young men in cities throughout Britain enthusiastically volunteered to join the army. The army’s slogan was, ‘Britain Needs You’. The slogan of many joining up was: ‘This is our chance to get out of here, lads.’ Three years later, word spread through the trenches that there had been a revolution in Russia, and many of those same lads rejoiced at the news that somewhere at last all men might be equal. Years later, when my father had become a successful businessman in London, he was in the habit of raising his glass, ‘To the Kaiser and Lenin.’ When the bemused company would ask what he meant by this seemingly contradictory toast, he would reply: ‘The Kaiser got me out of Glasgow, and Lenin made me believe there could be justice on this earth.’
Ironically, the British Empire had always had trouble at home. It had taken centuries for the component territories of Great Britain to acquiesce to what was for the most part English domination. In 1301, after Edward I had defeated the Welsh, he promised them ‘a prince born in Wales who did not speak a word of English’. The Welsh assumed that this would be a Welshman who spoke the Welsh language, but they had been tricked. Their new prince turned out to be Edward I’s infant son, who happened to have been born in the (English) castle at Caernarvon in Wales. From this time on, the reigning monarch’s son has traditionally taken the title Prince of Wales.
The Scots proved more troublesome, bitterly contesting all attempts at conquest by the ‘auld enemy’. Then came the last years of the seventeenth century, when the Scots decided to branch out into the empire business, attempting to found a colony of their own at Darien, in Panama. This was financed by the Company of Scotland, a joint-stock company on the East India Company model. (Ironically, this Scottish company was founded by William Paterson, the Scotsman who had successfully founded the Bank of England.) Everyone in Scotland became enthused with this patriotic scheme, and all who could sank their savings into it.
When the so-called Darien Scheme failed – largely due to its ill-chosen jungle site, and its vulnerability to Spanish attack – the entire nation was bankrupted. In 1707, Scotland signed an Act of Union with England, prompting the national poet Rabbie Burns to declare that the Scots ‘were bought and sold for English gold’. There followed unsuccessful rebellions in 1715 and 1745. In the latter, the Scots reached Derby, just over 100 miles short of London, but when no one turned up to fight them, they simply returned home.
The third of England’s Celtic neighbours, the Irish, suffered worst of all. The Normans had invaded as early as 1169. After the Reformation, England’s fear of Catholic Ireland being used as a base for European Catholic powers to attack mainly Protestant England, led to further incursions and rebellions. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ‘plantations’ were established, during which the indigenous Irish were driven off land that was then given to Protestant immigrants, largely from Scotland.These occupied much of the north of the country. Famine and emigration cut a swathe through the entire country during the nineteenth century. By 1841, the population of Ireland had risen to 8.5 million. By 1900 this had fallen to 4.5 million.
Then in 1916, an uprising was staged in Dublin, which was partly put down by shells lobbed into the city by a British naval vessel at the mouth of the River Liffey. Many view this as the first people’s revolution of the twentieth century (coming, as it did, just a year prior to the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia). In 1922, Ireland would finally gain independence. The country which had a claim to being the first colony of the British Empire, was now the first colony to break free from it. (America didn’t count. As far as the Irish were concerned, this was just a civil war amongst the English. And besides, by now large sections of New York, Boston and Chicago had been colonised by the Irish.)
A map of the British Empire at its greatest extent (1921).
By 1913, the ‘Dark Continent’ of Africa had been all but totally divided between the European powers. Only Liberia and Ethiopia remained free, with the British and the French taking the lion’s share. Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist par excellence, had pushed north from the Cape Colony with the aim of founding British colonies ‘from the Cape to Cairo’, but was temporarily thwarted by the German colonisation of Tanganyika (now mainland Tanzania).
The success and retention of the British Empire depended largely upon the British navy. Being an island race, the British had long understood that their only defence against more powerful continental neighbours lay in ‘ruling the waves’. When the occasion arose, it was the British navy that had guaranteed British sovereignty. By defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588, Drake had ‘singed the King of Spain’s beard’. Nelson’s victory over the French fleet at Trafalgar in 1805 ensured that Napoleon could not launch an invasion. The Royal Navy didn’t actually win the Battle of Jutland against the Germans in 1916 – if anything, it was a draw, with the Germans claiming to have inflicted greater losses. But after this confrontation, the Germans had no alternative but to return to port, where they remained confined for the rest of the war. Not for nothing is the navy known in Britain as the ‘Senior Service’. However, it was the junior service, the upstart Royal Air Force, who in 1940 won the Battle of Britain in the skies over southern England, once again ensuring that no invasion could be launched.
So how did the British Empire end? By 1914, the European pow
ers had taken over almost the entire globe – with the British, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish and the Portuguese leading the way. Germany, by now the powerhouse of central Europe, had been a latecomer – for the simple reason that Bismarck’s united German Reich had only come into existence in 1871, too late to pick up anything but a few bits and pieces of unconquered territory that lay scattered across the globe. So, what next? Perhaps inevitably – despite a ‘foolproof’ network of interlocking alliances – the Europeans turned on each other, tearing apart their continent in what became known as the First World War.
The Western allies, led by Britain and France, were only rescued by the Americans, after which US President Wilson presided over the Versailles Peace Conference. His message was self-determination for all peoples. This was accepted in Europe, but the superior diplomatic skills of the British and the French ensured that no such enlightened policy was applied to empires outside Europe. The British Empire was safe, but in fighting the war the British themselves had run up huge debts with the Americans.
Just over twenty years later, Europe once again began tearing itself apart. On this occasion the Americans arrived a little earlier, just in time to save solitary Britain (and the distant USSR) holding out against Hitler. After this war, Britain was indebted to America to the tune of £21 billion (a debt that would not finally be paid off until 2006). In 1945, Britain could barely support itself, let alone an empire. The largest ‘white colonies’, such as Canada, South Africa and Australia, had already been granted ‘dominion status’ (virtual, then increasingly real, independence). By now the message of self-determination had spread across the globe.
Reluctantly, Britain was forced to grant independence to India in 1948. One by one, over the coming decades, the British colonies struggled to follow suit. Armed conflict was tempered by negotiations with leaders of independence movements. (It became almost a rite of passage for the future leader of a newly independent nation to have served time in a British jail.) Finally, only a few tiny outposts remained. These were either unwilling to pay, or could not afford, the expenses involved in independence – or were possessed of a British patriotism that had long since vanished in the motherland.
These last remnants now include only the likes of Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, and St Helena (once Napoleon’s own personal penal colony). Meanwhile there remain some scattered island ‘protectorates’ in the Indian and Pacific Oceans – ensuring that the sun still never sets on the British Empire, but only just, and only in the most literal sense.
The next empire runs almost parallel to the British Empire, but only in temporal terms. Any other comparison of the two provides an object lesson in the vagaries of sideways history.
37 Though the Congo was not actually Belgian, but instead was the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, it having been sold to him by the British journalist and explorer Henry Stanley (of ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’ fame) after it had been unaccountably turned down by the British.
38 This epithet has its counterpart in reality. The Koh-i-Noor diamond, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, which originated from India, forms the centrepiece of the actual British crown. The Indian-owned diamond was ‘ceded’ to Queen Victoria in 1848.
39 Nehru, India’s first prime minister went to Harrow and Cambridge. Jinnah (the first prime minister of Pakistan) and Gandhi both studied law and became barristers in London.
40 Astonishingly, recent DNA analysis has revealed that John Punch was the twelfth-generation grandfather of Barack Obama on his mother’s side.
41 No one appears to have considered the slaves themselves worthy of compensation.
9
The Russian Empire
Churchill famously described Russia as ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. This was the case for centuries before Churchill made his remark, and indeed arguably remains so to this day. What will Russia do next? What will become of Russia?
A series of Russian Nesting Dolls, each of which fits inside the other (from right to left).
The fact that so much of Russia is still opaque, even in the age of internet technology and social media, remains an enigma in itself. This undeniably has something to do with its sheer size and the variety of its people. Russia is far and away the largest country in the world. In its present state it covers over 6.6 million square miles. (Canada comes a poor second, with 3.8 million square miles.) Then there is the question of national pride, and an accompanying mistrust of foreign influences, which encourages an element of secretiveness.
Geographically speaking, all of Russia west of the Ural Mountains is part of Europe. Yet culturally speaking Russia has always remained ambivalent about its European status. Three hundred years ago, Peter the Great founded St Petersburg on the marshy shores of the Baltic. This was intended to be Russia’s ‘Window to the West’ – a new city of classical stone facades to replace the age-old ‘wooden’ Moscow as the capital. Russia had begun to modernise, but this Europeanisation was never fully accepted, even amongst the nobility. Arguably, the heart of old Russia remained in Moscow, with its walled Kremlin of ancient cathedrals, onion-domed towers and palaces.42
The Russian Empire began as it meant to go on. Its founder is generally recognised to be Ivan the Terrible, who assumed the title ‘Czar of All the Russias’ in 1547, when he was just seventeen. His grandfather Ivan III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, had driven the remnants of the Mongols/ Tatars from central Muscovy at the end of the previous century, expanding his domain north-west to the shores of the Baltic and north-east to the shores of the Arctic Ocean.
Ivan the Terrible’s childhood was copybook psychopath. He ascended to the princedom of Muscovy at the age of three, after his father died from blood-poisoning. His mother would die five years later, from a more direct form of poisoning by a palace faction. This left young Ivan to be groomed by rival groups of Boyars. These were the feudal artistocrats of Eastern Europe, their name deriving from the old Bulgarian word boylare, meaning ‘noble’. While Muscovy was plunged into chaos by rival boyars, the young Ivan grew up amidst a court filled with intrigue, suspicion and poisoning. His response was to develop a habit of torturing small animals.
Despite such an unpropitious upbringing, Ivan grew into an intelligent young man, well-versed in literature and music. He also developed an ambition to restore the country back to the pre-Mongol days of the earlier Kievan Rus’ federation, when the principalities and domains occupied by the Rus’ stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea and east towards the Ural Mountains. To a large extent this had grown from the hinterland of the Daugava-Dnieper River systems down which the original Vikings had sailed from Scandinavia to the Black Sea and Constantinople in the tenth century.
It was this link with Constantinople that had been responsible for the population of Rus’ becoming Christians. Vladimir the Great, the ruler of Kievan Rus’ in the early eleventh century, was a convinced pagan, worshipping the ancient Viking and Slavic gods. In common with the prevailing practices expected of a pagan ruler, he took several wives and some eight hundred concubines. He appeased the gods for his continuing good fortune by erecting many shrines and statues to them.
For some time, Christian missionaries had ventured from Constantinople into Kievan Rus’, suffering much martyrdom in the process. However, these ‘Apostles to the Slavs’ would introduce a number of beneficial innovations. They set down the oldest known version of the Slavic alphabet, the Glagolitic alphabet, which was modelled on the Greek alphabet. Their followers would later go on to develop the Cyrillic script, named after the Byzantine St Cyril, who had pioneered the earlier Slavic alphabet. In time, Cyrillic would come to be used by the Russian, Eastern European and North Asian languages.
Vladimir was so impressed by the advances introduced by these Christian monks that he began to have his doubts about the pagan gods, and dispatched commissioners to study other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and Byzantine Orthodox Christia
nity. The commissioners dispatched by Vladimir to Constantinople were overwhelmed by the beauty of a service conducted in the huge domed cathedral of Hagia Sophia, the finest building in the Byzantine world. ‘We no longer knew whether we were in heaven or on earth,’ they told Vladimir.
Consequently, Vladimir was baptised in 987. He then summoned the entire population of Kiev to gather in the waters of the River Dnieper, where they were given a mass baptism. From now on, Kievan Rus’ would be a Christian nation. Surprisingly, the people of Kievan Rus’ took to the new religion and a strong connection was made to Byzantium. This would even outlast the centuries of Mongol rule (1237–1480). Yet the Mongol conquest would have the effect of isolating still further the people of Rus’ from Europe, an isolation that would persist even after the Mongols had been driven out by Ivan the Terrible’s grandfather.
When Ivan had himself crowned ‘Czar of all the Russias’, this was more than an act of self-aggrandisement, it also harked back symbolically to a past that was by now all but legendary. Ivan was claiming the legacy of the pre-Mongol Kievan Rus’. According to the contemporary US historian Janet Martin, a specialist in medieval Russia: ‘The new title symbolised an assumption of powers equivalent and parallel to those held by the former Byzantine caesar and the Tatar khan, both known in Russian sources as Czar. The political effect was to elevate Ivan’s position.’ The Czar was thus not only the secular ruler of Russia, but also its divine leader, who had been appointed by God to enact his will.
The concept of the ‘Divine Right of Kings’ was widely accepted in Europe, too. On the other hand, the ultimate religious power remained universal and separate, in the form of the Pope. And even here, religious power would not remain absolute. In the early years of the sixteenth century, western Europe would be split by the Reformation. The century preceding this had seen the Renaissance, which affected Europe’s entire culture. Art, architecture, literature and science would all be transformed under the influence of a new humanism, derived ultimately from Ancient Greek and Roman sources. This philosophy placed a crucial value on individual humanity, creating a profound mental sea change.
Empire Page 16
