After 1860, British exports to the empire increased at a faster rate than its trade with the rest of the world, cushioning the negative effects of the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s and the growing competition from continental Europe and the United States.172 However, as early as the 1870s, the total value of British exports to Europe and the USA began to fall seriously. In the ten non-European countries in which 82 per cent of British capital was invested, exports fell by almost 50 per cent in the years 1870 to 1913.173 Fortunately for Britain, there was an empire where it could dump its exports, though, of course, Britain’s share of exports going to the empire was slowly decreasing between the 1860s and 1913.174 Britain’s best customers (in per capita terms) were the British themselves, suitably transplanted as settlers in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Unlike Americans (well on the way to industrialization), these ‘British’ settlers did not compete with British manufacturing but supplied the mother country with mineral and agricultural goods in exchange for British industrial products.
The closeness between these ‘white’ Dominions, as they were soon called, and Great Britain should not be underestimated. Americans really regarded themselves as a separate nation and all the more so as immigrants from other European countries changed the demographic balance. Australians, Canadians, and New Zealanders, however, continued to think of themselves as British and did not hesitate to send their men to fight for Britain in the great wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, and kept the British monarch as their head of state well into the twenty-first century. Only by the 1970s did many Australians no longer think of themselves as ‘basically British’.175 By then, of course, a majority of Australians had non-British ancestors.
The pro-imperial economic argument became less plausible as economic growth accelerated in the thirty years after 1945 when both Great Britain and France lost their empires. The French financial daily Les Échos in a scaremongering article of 12 March 1956 entitled ‘La France sans l’Algérie?’ declared that the loss of Algeria would cause such a level of unemployment that ‘the political balance of France would be rapidly destroyed’.176 They were wrong. In October 1960 a group of conservative intellectuals produced a manifesto against other intellectuals who were against the war declaring that the French army in Algeria had been pursuing for years une mission civilisatrice sociale et humaine.177 Six months later, on 11 April 1961, President Charles de Gaulle, with the war in Algeria in its seventh year, discovered that decolonization was in the national interest: ‘In today’s world … France has no interest in keeping under her law and rule an Algeria which has chosen another destiny.’178
Table 15 Independence from the United Kingdom of Colonies and Protectorates
1967 Aden
1968 Mauritius; Swaziland; Nauru
1970 Tonga; Fiji
1971 Bahrain; Qatar; United Arab Emirates
1973 Bahamas
1974 Grenada
1976 Seychelles; Gilbert and Ellice Islands
1978 Dominica; Solomon Islands
1979 St Vincent and the Grenadines; St Lucia
1980 New Hebrides, now known as Vanuatu
1981 Antigua and Barbuda; Belize
1983 St Kitts and Nevis
1984 Brunei
Similarly, in the Netherlands it was feared that the loss of Indonesia would be a catastrophe. Yet, after the Netherlands ‘lost’ Indonesia in 1949, the Dutch economy expanded remarkably, and it could be mooted that such expansion might not have been as significant had the country tried to hold on to a colony seventy times bigger than itself and seven times more populous.179
Between 1967 and 1984, Britain gave up, or was forced to give up, the remains of her empire. The list is a long one (see Table 15).
The list seems impressive, yet few in the United Kingdom took much notice of the end of British rule, or even knew where these places were. It was all done with little struggle – unlike in India, Kenya, Malaysia, and many other countries. For most British people the end of the empire had come about when India was ‘lost’ in 1947. Others could not ignore the price demanded by the end of British rule as easily as those at home. For instance, the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–60), which started as an uprising of the Kikuyu of Kenya (Mau Mau was the term used by the British), was violently and cruelly suppressed.180 Thousands were imprisoned in harsh concentration camps, subject to torture and degrading conditions.181 Eventually, in 1961, Kenya was ‘granted’ independence. No assessment was made to see whether they had been sufficiently ‘civilized’; colonies were just costing too much. It was not until 2013 that the British (Conservative) government recognized that ‘Kenyans were subjected to torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration’, and agreed to pay compensation.182
Colonies cannot all be lumped together. Some were certainly profitable: India for the British and the Maghreb (north Africa west of Egypt) for the French. In 1914 the Maghreb took 61.7 per cent of French investment in their empire – Algeria on its own accounted for 41.5 per cent.183 India, Algeria, and Indochina were colonies for which an economic case could be made – unlike, say, Madagascar or Uganda. Yet it is equally reasonable to suggest that empire-building had to be somewhat connected to the metropolitan economy.184 Acquiring and developing a colony is, undoubtedly, a business; but who profits? Colonial development, like defence spending, often simply constitutes a transfer of resources from the public coffer to private purses.
It is sometimes argued that an empire cushioned countries from economic decline and delivered profits for investors, but the artificial survival of some economic sectors is not necessarily in the interest of the wider economy. The end of empire, when it happened, was not generally as economically catastrophic for the ‘mother-country’ as its proponents feared. Throughout the period of decolonization, that is, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the main cost associated with colonies was that of defending them. The costs, military and financial, were always far greater if one had to face the problem of having one’s settlers ensconced in the colonies and resisting decolonization: the French in Algeria, the British in Rhodesia and, to some extent, in Kenya. There were, of course, exceptions: the French had relatively few settlers in the whole of Indochina (23,700 in 1913 and 34,000 in 1940), and even fewer from metropolitan France, yet they fought to retain Vietnam from 1946 until their catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954.185
The main practical argument for empires is that one could trade within them. This argument had some strength in countries such as Britain where dependency on imported food and raw materials was particularly pronounced.186 Trading patterns, however, differed so much from country to country that it would be useless to generalize. The economic growth of much of western Europe did not rely on trade with the ‘periphery’ as the British did.187 But that was because a significant part of British economic growth relied on manufacturing cotton cloth, which required importing raw cotton from India (a colony), Egypt (a semi-colony), and the United States (an ex-colony). Before the Second World War what we now call the ‘Third World’ was of limited importance to world trade (it absorbed only 17 per cent of total exports), but it mattered much more to the United Kingdom, whose exports to the periphery represented 40 per cent of its own trade, though only 4–6 per cent of total production (still much higher than other countries).188 And, of course, it mattered more because if you have an empire, you are more likely to trade with it than if you have not got one. As in most things in life, empires benefited some, others thought they did benefit, still others remained indifferent, unable to calculate whether they had anything to gain. Yet empires did shape the fate of capitalism throughout the decades, the fate of countries that had empires, the fate of those that had no colonies and, of course, the fate of those who were colonized.
18
The Great Colonial Debate: The French and the British
Whether or not colonies were functional to capitalism has long been debated particularly in the two leading colonialist countries
of the period: Great Britain and France. Were colonies useful for industry, commerce, and finance? Were they a useful outlet for functionaries and migrants from the mother country? Did colonies inspire pride and patriotism, thus contributing to the formation of a national community, and so toning down the anxieties caused by capitalism? Patriotic, racial, and humanitarian arguments, along with economic ones, were constantly deployed in the great colonial debates in Britain and France. It was not simple to balance the cost in human lives, in military spending, in subsidies, against the benefits – the acquisition of primary products, the protection of one’s own markets, employment, and international prestige.1 Colonies made some of the people who thought they were going to get rich poor – investing abroad was a risky business. Between 1900 and 1905 fourteen out of the fifteen companies that obtained mining concessions in Sudan failed.2 Mining and prospecting attracted the ill-informed, the over-optimistic, and the unscrupulous.
One could always sell to the colonies, but the richest colonies were those settled by white colonists. It is a truism that one can make more money selling to the rich than to the poor since, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it (The Rich Boy, 1926), the former have more money, though there is an ample market selling low quality to the lower income groups – but this was to be an achievement of the twentieth century. In the decades leading up to the First World War the prosperous were mainly in Europe and North America and so it is not surprising that, on the eve of the First World War, the industrial powers of the world were still one another’s best customers.3
You could be an independent European state and still have a sizeable chunk of your economy controlled by foreigners: in Romania, at the close of the nineteenth century, foreign capital totally dominated gas and electricity production, metallurgy, chemicals, and forestry products. Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Belgian capital together held about 57 per cent of the capital invested in the country.4 Still, by 1913, Romania ranked fourth in the world as a wheat exporter (after Russia, Canada, and the United States) and was the second largest oil producer in Europe.5
It is rare in history to have a situation where everyone gains or everyone loses. Colonialism was no different. The military expenditure involved in the defence of the colonies was a burden for all taxpayers, but the expenses were public, the profits substantially private. By the 1880s the rulers of Victorian Britain had devised a ‘Treasury test’ to decide whether a territory was worth taking over: the colony had to generate enough revenue to pay for its rule.6 This was not always complied with, but one can see the logic: a little like asking the hanged man to pay for his rope. The Victorians wanted empire on the cheap.
Investing in the colonies might cost the taxpayer but it might benefit local enterprises, thus colonialism could also be seen as a major public subsidy to the private sector. During the Second Empire the French state launched a series of public-works programmes in conjunction with private capital to develop Algeria: lighthouses, roads, dams, and so on, thus contributing to private profits.7 It may be possible to calculate who benefited, but exceedingly difficult to work out who lost since it would involve some rather tricky counter-factual calculations (e.g. the consequence of an alternative pattern of public spending).8
Throughout the expansion of the French Empire, Britain remained France’s leading commercial partner. In 1906 the French Empire absorbed only 11 per cent of France’s exports. Not enough to make it essential, but not so little to make it irrelevant. Of course, it depended who you were. If you produced beer, the empire was crucial since 75 per cent of French beer was exported to the colonies (for obvious reasons Britain, Belgium, and Germany were unlikely to import French beer).9 But the French sub-Saharan colonies were never worth the effort and expense. Even in 1930 these colonies were unable to provide France with more than 5 per cent of the coffee it imported. The French blamed the innate laziness of the natives. In fact, many French colonies had been acquired for political reasons. Economic issues were an add-on.10
Nor should we forget that even at the height of empire-building there always was, even in Britain, some opposition to colonialism, particularly from those in favour of capitalism. Some of this opposition was inspired by older liberal ideas that originated in the eighteenth century from political thinkers such as David Hume (Political Discourses), Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations, a third of which was about empires), and Adam Ferguson (Essay on the History of Civil Society).11 Even a committed Tory such as Samuel Johnson praised, in 1744, the poet Richard Savage for censuring:
those crimes which have been generally committed by the discoverers of new regions, and to expose the enormous wickedness of making war upon barbarous nations because they cannot resist and of invading countries because they are fruitful; of extending navigation only to propagate vice, and of visiting distant lands only to lay them waste. He has asserted the natural equality of mankind …12
Adam Smith, the first to refer to Britain as a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, wrote that:
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight, appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.13
As the British Empire expanded, liberal opposition to it increased. Richard Cobden and John Bright, the champions of free trade, Gladstone, and J. A. Hobson (the liberal anti-imperialist economist author of Imperialism: A Study, 1902, a text that influenced Lenin) were among those who insisted that the possession of an empire brought no material rewards to the nation as a whole; indeed, it harmed its growth prospects. Hobson thought that the imperial acquisitions of the 1890s brought little or no increase in trade, that most trade was with European countries and with the United States, and that the dictum ‘trade follows the flag’ had no foundation at all.14 He thought that free trade was under threat from both the advocates of protectionism and warmongering imperialists.15 Hobson regarded Free Trade (his capital letters) as a stage of social evolution where ‘militarism is displaced by industrialism’ and where ‘nationalism yields place to an effective internationalism based upon identity of commercial interests’.16 There was a lofty purpose to Hobson’s politics. Quoting approvingly Richard Cobden, Hobson explained that he advocated free trade not just because it would create prosperity but because it would ‘unite mankind in the bonds of peace’.17 Eventually, Hobson’s opposition to imperialism mellowed, and, just before the First World War, he granted that the penetration of backward areas could be to the advantage of both the mother country and the colonies.18
Even liberals, however, had no doubts that colonized people were not ready for liberalism. John Stuart Mill, who, like Hobson, thought that Britain gained little from her colonies, wrote in Considerations on Representative Government (1861):
less advanced populations … must be governed by the dominant country, or by persons delegated for that purpose by it … There are, as we have already seen, conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization … Such is the ideal rule of a free people over a barbarous or semi-barbarous one.19
A little earlier, in December 1859, in Fraser’s Magazine, he had written:
To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error … To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject … barbarians have no rights as a nation …20
Years before he had explained that savages were savages, in spite of body strength and courage, and though ‘often not without intelligence’ they were unable to cooperate and were just too selfish.21
Such conviction of the superiority of one’s nation
or race was quite common at the time (and still persists), as was the idea that one can classify states in terms of how civilized they are, meaning how close they are to the Western notion of civilization (today we talk of Western values as espoused by ‘the international community’, i.e. the West). Thus James Lorimer, Regius Professor of Law at the University of Edinburgh, writing in the 1880s, divided humanity into three ‘concentric zones’: civilized, barbarous, savage.22 The first, obviously, consisted of Europe and areas inhabited by people of ‘European descent, such as North and South America’. These could enjoy ‘plenary political recognition’, in other words be fully fledged participants in international politics. The second tier (Japan, China, Persia, Turkey, etc.) could enjoy at best ‘partial political recognition’, while the unfortunate rest could only be granted ‘natural or mere human recognition’. Lorimer admitted the possibility of upgrading (not a word he used): should the Japanese continue at their ‘present rate of progress for another twenty years’, he explained, then they could be granted plenary political recognition. The Turks, however, would probably be downgraded to the status of savages.
Such views were held even by distinguished poets. Here is Coleridge’s complacent ‘table talk’: ‘Colonisation is not only a manifest expedient, but an imperative duty for Great Britain – God seems to hold out his finger to us over the seas.’23
At the end of the nineteenth century the idea that natives were inferior was the consensus. The idea that Africa was just the ‘Dark Continent’ had barely changed since Hegel’s bizarre assertion, in his Philosophy of History (1820s), that Africa:
The Anxious Triumph Page 63
