is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit … What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.24
This dismal view of Africa was held also by Victor Hugo, who had been intransigent in his opposition to the despotism of Napoleon III. Back from his self-imposed exile of almost twenty years, Hugo welcomed the mission civilisatrice of the Third Republic. On 18 May 1879 during a speech at a banquet commemorating the abolition of slavery, he declared in tones that would have been unthinkable one hundred years later:
There are only two faces to this wild Africa: barbarism when inhabited, savagery when deserted … Seize this land. Take it. From whom? No one. Take it from God … God offers Africa to Europe … Where kings brought war, bring harmony. Take it not for the gun but for the plough, not for the sword but for commerce, not for conquest but for fraternity. [prolonged applause] Send your excess labour to Africa and, at a stroke, you will resolve the social question, transform your proletarians into property-owners. Go and build! Build roads, cities, grow and multiply and on an earth with fewer priests and princes, the divine spirit will manifest itself through peace and the human spirit through freedom.25
Few would have objected to the view of Captaine Renard, Secretary-General of the Union Congolaise (the association of companies in French Congo), in his 1901 report La colonisation au Congo Français, that Africans were inferior, and that the Europeans were the ‘elder brothers’.26 He wrote what he thought was obvious: civilization would have to be imposed on the natives by force, ‘le fusil en main’ (gun in hand), since the natives were of low intelligence and naturally lazy and should be forced to work and treated like slaves.
In French Congo the routine violence inflicted on the natives went largely overlooked (since it did not reach the horrific levels of the Belgian Congo), until some sensational case would spark moral outrage in the mother country. The Toqué-Gaud affair was such a case and caused widespread scandal in Paris. It appeared that two colonial administrators, George Toqué and Fernand Gaud, decided to punish a recalcitrant native by exploding a dynamite stick tied around his neck on 14 July 1903 as a way of celebrating the French Revolution and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man. There was a trial and the two murderers were condemned to only five years’ imprisonment. Regarded by local whites as martyrs, the men were released after a mere two years.27 George Toqué was eventually executed in 1920 by a military squad at Vincennes for complicity with the Germans during the First World War.
In mainland France the light sentence was received with opprobrium. A committee of inquiry was set up under the explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza, a fierce defender of the rights of natives. Brazza wrote his report but died on the way back from the Congo. In France he was given a state funeral, though there was also private relief. His report on the horrors of French colonialism was kept hidden from the public.28
Brazza was far from being an ordinary administrator. Born in Castel Gandolfo near Rome (as Pietro di Brazzà), he acquired French nationality and explored the Congo and Ogooué rivers on behalf of the French government, founding various settlements, one of which became Brazzaville. In November 1885 he was appointed commissaire général of French Congo. He protected the natives from excessive exploitation by private firms and offered decent working conditions to those who worked for the French state. He was a humanitarian colonialist whose rule was in sharp contrast to the horrific conditions on the other side of the river Congo (Belgian Congo).
Brazza had obviously gone ‘native’, to use an expression diffused in British colonial circles denoting colonial administrators who took the side of the locals instead of prioritizing the interests of the mother country. He was a gentle colonialist accused of practising ‘philanthropy not colonization’, in the words of one plantation owner. His downfall was inevitable: he was dismissed in 1897.29 His successor, Émile Gentil, was not so philanthropic and allowed ‘normal’ colonial repression and exploitation until the Toqué-Gaud affair in 1903 led to Brazza’s last mission of 1905.
Unsurprisingly, arch-imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes thought that, within the hierarchy of the ‘civilized’, the English had a special role. Well before he became fabulously rich thanks to the diamond trade and before becoming Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, in his Confession of Faith (1877), a kind of will, written at the age of twenty-five, Rhodes intoned:
if we had retained America there would at this moment be millions more of English living. I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives.30
Those who were clearly in the pro-colonial camp included conservatives, who had little faith in the free market since they regarded capitalism as an anarchic and unpredictable system: Disraeli, of course, but also liberals like Joseph Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke (once a republican, in favour of female suffrage and trade unions) who turned into Radical Imperialists.31 They felt that an empire protected by the Royal Navy would be a positive factor in deterring others from acquiring their own colonies to the disadvantage of British trade.32 In 1888, Joseph Chamberlain, who had broken with Gladstone over Irish Home Rule, declared:
Is there any man in his senses who believes that the crowded population of these islands could exist for a single day if we were to cut adrift from us the great dependencies … the natural markets for our trade? … If tomorrow it were possible, as some people apparently desire, to reduce by a stroke of the pen the British Empire to the dimension of the United Kingdom, half at least of our population would be starved.33
The target of these ‘new imperialists’ were the ageing Gladstone and the shrinking band of free-trade Manchester liberals. Lord Rosebery had them in mind when, as a Liberal Prime Minister, in a speech in Sheffield (25 October 1894), he decried the party ‘of small England, of a shrunk England, of a degraded England, of a neutral England, of a submissive England’.34 His liberal imperialist followers would be in power in the years leading to the war: H. H. Asquith (Prime Minister 1908–16), Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary 1905–16), and R. B. Haldane (Secretary of State for War 1905–12).
In Britain, and perhaps in Britain alone, colonialism and free trade went together. Britain consolidated its empire, acquired new colonies, and did not embrace the wave of protectionism sweeping the industrialized world. In Great Britain free trade was a genuinely popular movement, ‘a national ideology’ supported by industrialists and workers alike.35 Free trade was seen by the trade unions as ensuring cheap food, and by the middle classes as the basis for low taxes and economic growth.36 As Frank Trentmann has written, ‘The pocket was never very far from the heart.’37
The new great British consensus around empire and free trade linked the aristocracy with finance (for some reason aristocrats thought that banking was nobler and more genteel than manufacturing, and the City a better place to be than Sheffield or Manchester – a traditional view going back to the late seventeenth century). This consensus made it possible for the Conservative Party to rule almost uninterruptedly between 1885 and 1905 and to hold at bay the rise of a working-class party until the First World War. Some complained that the government ignored domestic industry in favour of overseas enterprise, particularly as manufacturing began to falter in the 1880s, but no government would have ignored the immense flow of British investment abroad.38 In the mid-1850s the stock of net assets overseas was 8 per cent of the total wealth owned by Britons, by 1870 it had reached 17 per cent, and by 1913 it was a staggering 33 per cent: ‘Never before or since has one nation committed so much of its national income and savings to capital for
mation abroad.’39
One of the reasons the empire was attractive to British investors is that it was heavily subsidized by British taxpayers. This was particularly true of the cost of its defence.40 The burden of paying for the Boer War, for example, fell entirely on the British taxpayer. This caused some perplexity. Thus Sir Garnett Wolseley (Governor of Natal in southern Africa), discussing in 1878 the impending assumption of British control over the whole of the Transvaal, warned that to rule such a large territory in the face of Boer opposition would require ‘a large garrison of British troops here, the expense of which must be defrayed by the Imperial exchequer’.41
In September 1901 the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, in a letter to Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, lamented that while once Britain could do what it liked, now managing the empire had become ‘a question of money’. A few months earlier, in April 1901, Lord Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, also in a letter to Curzon, expressed his fear of what we would call now ‘imperial overstretch’:
Our interests being so extended makes it almost impossible for us to concentrate sufficiently, in any one direction, the pressure and power of the Empire so as to deter foreign nations from trying to encroach upon our interests in that particular quarter.42
It is difficult to estimate the proportion of taxes that specifically went towards paying for the defence of the empire.43 Britain spent more on defence than France and Germany, though India underwrote all of its own administrative costs as well as the costs of its ‘defence’. But this was not so for the white dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.44 Without the empire, the British taxpayer would almost certainly have had a smaller bill, even though India paid for itself.45
In 1914 the value of British investment abroad was still double that of the French and three times that of the German. Hardly any of it was in manufacturing (where it would have competed with domestic production). Only 12 per cent was in plantation and mining. The largest share went into infrastructures such as railways, docks, tramways, telegraphs and telephones, gas, and electricity.46 Such projects were usually sponsored or guaranteed by governments.
That British investment abroad was excessive was an argument deployed by those who accused the City, as they still do, of disregarding the interests of the nation in favour of their own (a bizarre accusation which assumes, against centuries of evidence, that bankers should act like selfless patriots – tantamount to accusing bank robbers of being dishonest). Karl Marx, realist to the end, intoned in the third volume of Capital, ‘If capital is sent abroad, this is … because it can be employed at a higher rate of profit in a foreign country.’47 Yet it was not British investment in the British Empire that was disproportionate but rather, before the First World War, investment made in the United States – unsurprisingly since it was the fastest-growing economy in the world. Half of British overseas investment went to the western hemisphere, namely Canada, the USA, and Latin America. Only one-twelfth went to continental Europe. Australia and New Zealand, with barely 6 million people (fewer than London at the time), received 8 per cent, almost the same as the whole of Europe. Canada and Argentina were more valuable to Britain than the whole of Africa.48 The majority of investment to Asia went to India. Africa got relatively little.49 The so-called ‘Dark Continent’, from the British point of view, especially tropical Africa, was economically speaking of very little value. J. A. Hobson was right: trade did not follow the flag.
Niall Ferguson, a historian who has a positive view of empires, or at least of the British brand, thinks that before 1914 ‘the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs’.50 By ‘most people’ one assumes Ferguson means ‘most British people’. And the phrase ‘had seemed’ leaves open the question whether the benefits did outweigh the cost or whether this was just an impression, something almost impossible to measure. When it comes to the post-1914 era, Ferguson has fewer doubts: the costs did outweigh the benefits. Yet the empire went on for decades – in the Indian subcontinent until 1947, most of Africa until the 1960s – and was not vacated without some kind of struggle. It is therefore quite possible that popular support for imperialism grew simply because the empire, as it became established, could rely on a powerful propaganda machine, even though the gains from it (if any) were shrinking at a fast rate – further evidence that economics does not rule everything.
Opposition to empire declined in the years leading up to the First World War. The African continent was carved up in a relatively peaceful manner; it did not lead to war among European states (except for minor clashes); it did bring some discernible benefits and some unverifiable losses. Had colonial conquest entailed long and bitter wars there would have been a major shift in public opinion. Even the Italian defeat by Ethiopia at Adwa in 1896, though it had been a humiliation that rankled for a long time, involved only a few thousand troops. The only British colonial war serious enough to have an impact on public opinion was the Boer War, fought not to subjugate ‘the natives’ but against the Boers, the descendants of Dutch settlers. It took 300,000 men (20,000 of whom died) and a three-year campaign for the British to overwhelm the resistance of the Boers. It taught the British, in Rudyard Kipling’s famous phrase, ‘no end of a lesson’:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
…
It was our fault, and our very great fault – and now we must turn it to use.
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
So the more we work and the less we talk the better results we shall get –
We have had an Imperial lesson; it may make us an Empire yet!51
There was considerable disquiet that the mightiest empire had taken so long and spent so much subduing a ‘little’ people of Dutch settlers. As Mr Brumley, a character in H. G. Wells’s The Wife of Sir Isaac Harmon (1914), ruminates disconsolately, ‘Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amidst the jeering contempt of the world …’52 Sir Garnett (now Lord) Wolseley (see above) declared, ‘if this war comes off it will be the most serious war England has ever had, when the size of our Army and the distance of the seat of war from England are taken into consideration’.53
But the Boer War and the Italian defeat in Ethiopia were exceptions. On the whole, imperial wars did not cost much, were usually won, and those who died were often professional soldiers or mercenaries or foreigners. It would have been unthinkable for a French general to address conscripted French troops and tell them what General Oscar de Négrier told the Foreign Legion (which recruited non-French soldiers) before going to Indochina in 1883 to finish off the conquest of the north of the country: Vous, légionnaires, vous êtes soldats pour mourir, et je vous envoie où l’on meurt! (‘You, Legionnaires, are soldiers destined to die, and I send you where one dies!’). The historian John R. Seeley, in his 1883 Cambridge lectures, pointed out that ‘It remains entirely incorrect to speak of the English nation as having conquered the nations of India. The nations of India have been conquered by an army of which on average about a fifth part was English.’54
Had colonial wars exacted a serious toll in casualties and money, support for colonization would have diminished. The empire was not as popular as it may appear from school textbooks, the parades, and the flag-waving. Many, not just in Britain but also in France, thought colonies too expensive.55 Most just did not care. Harry Johnston, who became the first commissioner of Nyasaland (now Malawi) in 1891 (appointed by the arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes), writing in the Fortnightly Review in 1890 at a time when Great Britain ruled the world, or most of it, lamented:
A British Parliament which annually grumbles at voting a few thousand a year for British Bechuanaland … is hardly likely to find several hundred thousand pounds more for the administration of British East Africa, the Niger Protectorate, or Nyasaland. For this you, the stay-at-home British public, who give your votes at elections, are dire
ctly responsible … your representatives do and have done their utmost, with every government that has been in power for the last half-century, to hinder and hamper the extension and maintenance of the British Empire …56
Nor was the British Colonial Office particularly keen to spend money to protect investors overseas. As Sir Harry Ord, Governor of the Straits Settlement (Singapore and some coastal enclaves) explained to local businessmen: ‘If persons, knowing the risks they run … choose to hazard their lives and properties for the sake of large profits … they must not expect the British Government to be answerable if their speculation proves unsuccessful.’57 There was never a British imperial project, that is, a decision to acquire an empire, and never an original starting point. As John Seeley famously mused:
There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.58
It took the Boer War to make a real impact.59 Until the 1880s only the aristocracy and the desperate were seriously involved in empire-building; the majority of the middle classes did not care; the working classes were unenthusiastic; and the impact of the empire on British culture was slight.60 Until the beginning of the twentieth century, and arguably even later, most people remained ignorant of the empire. Imperial history was not taught in universities.61
There had been imperial allusions in school magazines and there was a genre of popular ‘colonial’ literature where the hero was a Westerner, often helped by a ‘noble savage’, fighting against adversity and less noble savages. But such stuff was popular everywhere in the Western world, including in countries that had no real empire, such as Italy, where the adventure novels by Emilio Salgari sold very well at the turn of the century, when they were written, and well into the twentieth century. After 1880, and not before, British history and geography books became empire-friendly, but the empire was never central in such texts, unlike the Tudors or the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Only in 1911 did a real pro-empire textbook appear: C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling’s A History of England, which mentioned the Industrial Revolution only twice, accusing it of having depopulated the English countryside.62 Its smugness would make today’s readers smile: ‘other nations … have envied us’ and are ‘trying to copy us’ in various fields, including on how ‘to govern subject races well’.63
The Anxious Triumph Page 64
