The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  In 1931 Britain gave Australia (as well as Canada, Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, and Newfoundland) dominion status as an equal and self-governing part of the British Empire. The Australians themselves, however, were so little interested in this change of status that their legislature did not approve the measure until 1942—because of the Second World War—and New Zealand did not approve it until after the war, in 1947.

  Australia at War

  The keystone of British defenses in the Pacific was allegedly impregnable Singapore—except for the fact that Singapore fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942. With British Malaya overrun, Singapore lost (Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”6), and Britain’s two great Pacific battleships, HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales,7 sunk by the Japanese (on 10 December 1941), Australia had to look to the United States as its chief effective ally in the Pacific to stave off a Japanese invasion. On 27 December 1941, Australian Prime Minister John Curtin announced in the pages of The Melbourne Herald, “The Australian Government regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the Democracies’ fighting plan. Without any inhibitions of any kind, I must make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links of kinship with the United Kingdom.”8 To that end, Curtin put Australia’s Pacific force under the command of American General Douglas MacArthur.

  Nevertheless, as part of the British Empire, Australia itself acted as a world power, with its troops deployed against Axis forces in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Sixty thousand Australians had been killed in World War I. Despite sending 200,000 more men overseas than it had in the First World War, Australia lost just under 40,000 dead in World War II—8,000 of them perishing in Japanese prison camps.

  After the war, the Australian government felt more acutely than ever that demography is destiny and made an aggressive play to attract European immigrants in general and British immigrants in particular; from 1946 to 1949, 700,000 aspiring Australians arrived. What they found was a country that, despite its notoriously Bolshie unions, was profoundly conservative. Robert Menzies of the Liberal Party (Australia’s leading conservative party) governed as prime minister from 1949 to 1966 in coalition with the rural conservative Country Party (now the National Party). The economy boomed, Australian foreign policy was resolutely pro-British, pro-American, and anti-Communist, and in 1951 Australia and New Zealand cemented their wartime alliance with the United States in the ANZUS Security Treaty. Australia was also a member of SEATO, the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (1954–77), an Asian version of NATO—its original members consisted of the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Pakistan, and Thailand—that dissolved with France’s declining power, Britain’s decision to curtail its commitments east of Suez, and Pakistan’s withdrawal after the secession of Bangladesh. It nevertheless provided part of the rationale for America, Australia, and New Zealand’s defense of South Vietnam against Communist aggression (as did ANZUS).

  Britain’s residual authority over Australia was demonstrated in 1975 when Governor-General John Kerr, representing Her Majesty the Queen (though actually appointed by Australia’s then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam), dismissed Whitlam, leader of the Labour Party, as prime minister (he had been in office since December 1972) because his spendthrift ways had forced an apparently insoluble government budget crisis. Kerr appointed an interim government under the Liberal Party’s Malcolm Fraser and ordered an election, which Fraser won in a landslide. An attempt to turn Australia into a republic—removed from the queen’s authority—was defeated in a national referendum in 1999. The only change, occurring in 1974 during Gough Whitlam’s Labour government, was that Advance Australia Fair replaced God Save the Queen as the national anthem—not the best choice, but a forgivable one.

  The Kiwi Connection

  For the British in Australia, New Zealand started as a whaling and seal-hunting station. Then came missionaries who saw the cannibal Maoris and their white ruffian friends as souls to be saved. The Maoris gained the essentials of civilization—potatoes (introduced by Captain Cook) and muskets—and proceeded to feast on the one and prey on their tribal neighbors with the other in the so-called Musket Wars (1807–42). Fun-with-muskets reduced Maori numbers by possibly a third.

  New Zealand in the first half of the nineteenth century was a pretty rough place. The Christian missionaries helped change that. The Christians taught, shockingly, that cannibalism was bad, that treating women as items of sexual barter was improper, and that selfishness was wrong. The missionaries also gave the Maori a written language, medical care, and an example of peaceful service.

  The other saving grace for New Zealand was its incorporation into the British Empire with the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Signed by more than 500 Maori tribal chiefs, the treaty provided New Zealand with a British governor and gave Maoris the rights of Englishmen (only up to a point, in practice). Under the protection of the Union Jack, New Zealand became an attractive prospect for immigrants from the British Isles and elsewhere. Just as the Maoris had enjoyed the company of the jolly jack tars with whom they first traded, they found more respectable settlers fine trading partners, and early New Zealand prospered.

  But lurking beneath the Maori farmer was the warrior, and as white immigrants showed a voracious hunger for land (though they still only inhabited twenty percent of it), some Maoris began to show their teeth. The Maori Wars were limited to the North Island of New Zealand, where the vast majority of the Maori lived. They ranged from early skirmishes in the 1840s, to battles involving British regulars in the early 1860s, to minor émeutes that lasted until around 1872. The hostile Maoris were a hard and challenging foe, though most Maoris supported the British and were willing to fight for them. Given their experience in the “Musket Wars,” they were useful allies.

  Once the wars were over, New Zealand’s settlers turned the country into a most prosperous democratic colony. Miners struck gold on the South Island while on the North the land was dominated by farmers and sheep. In the 1880s, with the advent of refrigerated shipping, New Zealand became a large-scale exporter of meat and dairy products. It also happily shipped soldiers—including warrior Maoris—to serve the Empire whenever required. New Zealand sent as many troops, in proportion to population, to the Boer War in South Africa as Britain did. In the First World War about a third of New Zealand’s total male population between the ages of twenty and forty were casualties (killed or wounded). When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, there was no doubt that New Zealand would be at Britannia’s side. Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand’s first Labour Party prime minister, elected in 1935 and serving until his death in 1940, said, “Both with gratitude for the past, and with confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go, where she stands, we stand.”9 After the war, the Kiwis proved equally as martial as the Aussies, sending troops to Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam.

  After the Vietnam War, New Zealand’s political climate, always liberal, turned decidedly leftish (while maintaining a market-oriented economy). In 1984, New Zealand’s Labour government declared the country a “nuclear-free zone” and tried to pretend it was a trendy, fashionable non-aligned nation. Later, though, Kiwi troops were sent to the war in Afghanistan and Kiwi medical and engineering units were sent to join Allied forces in the Iraq War. The New Zealand Labour Party goes turn and turnabout with the conservative National Party, and the country remains an important member of the British Commonwealth, whose Far Eastern membership includes: Brunei, Kiribati, Malaysia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and occasionally Fiji.

  For He Is an Englishman (Even If He Happens to Live in New Zealand)

  “The New Zealander among John Bulls is the most John-Bullish. He admits the supremacy of England to every place in the world, onl
y he is more English than any Englishman at home. He tells you he has the same climate,—only somewhat improved; that he grows the same produce,—only with somewhat heavier crops,—that he has the same beautiful scenery at his doors, only somewhat grander in its nature and diversified in its details; that he follows the same pursuits and after the same fashion—but with less of misery, less of want, and a more general participation in the gifts which God has given to the country.”

  Anthony Trollope, New Zealand, Being a Portion of ‘Australia and New Zealand’ (an abridgment of the original work) (Chapman and Hall, 1874), p. 128

  Poms, Diggers, and Kiwis United in World War II

  “I was called over and so met the famous [German Field Marshal Erwin] Rommel for the first time.... He asked ‘Why are you New Zealanders fighting? This is a European war, not yours. Are you here for the sport?’ . . . I held up my hands with fingers closed and said, ‘The British Commonwealth fights together. If you attack England you attack New Zealand and Australia too.’”

  Kiwi Brigadier George Clifton, quoted in Desmond Young, Rommel: The Desert Fox (William Morrow, 1978), pp. 134–35

  Hong Kong

  Missing from that list of course is Hong Kong, an unlikely Chinese pearl of the British Empire, which was relinquished to mainland China in 1997. Hong Kong had been acquired after one of Britain’s most gloriously high-minded little wars, the First Opium War (1839–42), fought to establish the important libertarian principle of free trade. As John Quincy Adams said: “Which has the righteous cause?. . . Britain has the righteous cause.” Opium, he pointed out was “a mere incident to the dispute; but no more the cause of the war than the throwing overboard the Tea in Boston harbor was the cause of the North American revolution.... The cause of the war is the Kow-tow! the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China, that she will hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind, not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of relation between lord and vassal.”10 Of course in any battle over arrogance, Britain was sure to win, and did; in this case gaining among other prizes an unremarkable, rocky, and barely inhabited island named Hong Kong. Britain would make it remarkable; British law and honest-dealing made it an entrepôt for enterprising immigrants.

  The Arrow War (or Second Opium War, 1856–60) expanded Britain’s holdings to include the Kowloon Peninsula, and they were expanded again with the so-called “New Territories” in 1898. Hong Kong was the British Gibraltar of the East, but far wealthier, as British tai-pans turned it into a hub of imperial trade. As James Morris noted, “Everywhere the symptoms of empire showed: the ships always steaming in from India, Australia or Britain itself, the Indian soldiers who often formed its garrison, the Sikh policemen and hotel doormen, the Australian jockeys who won all the races at Happy Valley, above all the British mesh of the place, the webs of money, style, and sovereignty which bound the colony so unmistakably to the imperial capital far away.”11

  Even so, the population was overwhelmingly Chinese, the government undemocratic (on the paternal-authoritarian model), and the British, as Morris notes, “thought of the Chinese as foreigners in the colony, and themselves as true natives.”12 While there was color prejudice, there was also an exhilarating air of freedom, which is why Chinese thronged to it. If they were not admitted to certain clubs or granted the democratic rights of Englishmen, they were utterly free to practice commerce, which they did with gusto.

  Occupied by the Japanese during World War II, then a haven for refugees fleeing Communist China, Hong Kong was a beacon of freedom (without democracy) in the Far East. Its reigning genius in the 1960s was Sir John James Cowperthwaite, who as Hong Kong’s financial secretary from 1961 to 1971 kept the island blissfully free of regulations and government intervention, preferring to keep taxes low and let people get on with their commercial affairs. When the British surrendered Hong Kong to mainland China, they handed the Communist Chinese a capitalist dynamo (and guarded it by what paper accords they could) that the People’s Republic has so far refrained from dismantling.

  An Empire of Capitalists, Rajahs, and Planters

  Another capitalist powerhouse created by Britain was Singapore; founded as a British trading post by Stamford Raffles in 1819, it is now a global financial center and port, one of the busiest in the world. In addition, the British were in Borneo—where they planted a line of “white Rajahs” in the province of Sarawak—and Malaya. The East India Company had been active in Malaya since the late eighteenth century. As generally happened, the Company proved a dab hand at government and took responsibility for administering Malaya, until British colonial administrators—ruling sometimes directly, sometimes through local sultans—took over for them.

  In Malaya, the British fought pirates, encouraged trade, and tried to keep the peace between the variegated peoples—whom they made even more diverse. British merchants arriving with the East India Company were followed by rubber planters, engineers to run the tin mines, businessmen, policemen, and administrators. Chinese traders came to the coast and then expanded vastly in numbers. Indians, specifically Tamils, were imported as laborers.

  A Book the Anti-Colonialists Don’t Want You to Read

  SAS: Secret War in South-East Asia, 22 Special Air Service Regiment in the Borneo Campaign, 1963–1966, by Peter Dickens, not only for its lessons in how to defeat anti-colonialist subversion but also for its proof that Britain’s former colonies often gladly relied on British help to defend themselves. Dickens, incidentally, was the great-grandson of Charles Dickens and a captain in the Royal Navy.

  British expatriates loved Malaya for its tropical beauty, its gracious people, and its pleasantly ordered outdoor life. The British, of course, also kept the peace—and keeping the peace meant defeating a Communist insurgency in Malaya that lasted from 1948 to 1960, the British succeeding with tremendous courage and political and military skill, most especially under British General Sir Gerald Templer, whom Winston Churchill appointed High Commissioner of Malaya (1952–54). They succeeded again, defending Brunei, Borneo, and independent Malaysia from Indonesian aggression in a “confrontation” (or undeclared border war) that lasted from 1962 to 1966.

  Britain did rather well by her Far Eastern colonies: from Singapore to New Zealand, from Australia to Hong Kong. In 1960, at celebrations marking the end of the Malayan Emergency—celebrations that included a victory parade with “everyone from Aborigines with blowpipes to men in armoured vehicles” while overhead “Canberra jets roared”—a pro-British American businessman, Norman Cleaveland, “looked at the placards of the Tunku [Tunku Abdul Rahman, first prime minister of Malaysia] smiling down from every corner, and turning to [British Field Marshal Sir Gerald] Templer said simply, in his direct American way, ‘Pity no one thought of putting up a photo of Churchill. This country owes him a hell of a lot.’”13

  Chapter 24

  SIR THOMAS STAMFORD RAFFLES (1781–1826) and SIR JAMES BROOKE (1803–1868)

  “One of the greatest and best servants our Empire ever possessed. He was perhaps the first European who successfully brought modern humanitarian and scientific methods to bear on the improvement of the natives and their lot.”

  “An equally remarkable man, ‘Rajah’ Brooke of Sarawak, without official aid, won northern Borneo by sheer force of personality and by the best British methods of treating native races.”

  —G. M. Trevelyan1

  Stamford Raffles not only had a great name for a dashing empire-builder, he was the example par excellence of an enlightened, energetic, entrepreneurial English imperialist. In fact, Raffles, “the Father of Singapore,” was the model for the aspiring James Brooke who became the White Rajah of Sarawak, a title we would no doubt all long to hold.

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Singapore was founded by an Englishman named Stamford Raffles

  James Brooke, a freelance imperialist, essentially annexed a province of the Sultan of Brunei on his own

  The “W
hite Rajahs” of the Brooke family ruled Sarawak for a hundred years

  * * *

  Raffles was born on a ship bound for England from Jamaica, the very year that Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. By the time he was fourteen his spendthrift father could no long afford Raffles’ school fees, so he was sent to work as a clerk for the East India Company in its London headquarters of East India House. Whatever formal schooling he lacked he more than compensated for by becoming a dedicated lifelong autodidact. His employers noted his industry, his keen intelligence, and his steady nature, and in 1805—the same year he married a striking and vivacious widow ten years his senior—he was sent to Penang (or Prince of Wales Island, as they called it) as an assistant to the governor. Typically, he taught himself Malay on the voyage to his new post.

  Raffles, throughout his career in Southeast Asia, was flush with enthusiasm to learn everything he could about the peoples and the land he served: language, art, religion, history, botany, zoology—whatever there was to learn, Raffles wanted to learn it, even if his commercial duties meant he had to do so on his own time. During normal working hours, he pored over accounts and mastered all the commercial skills necessary to running a Company outpost—so much so that in 1807 he became chief secretary to the governor.