Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  But empire was the thing. After Kimberley, Rhodes ensured his fortune by investing in the newly founded mines which began to extract gold from the massive deposit discovered in the Transvaal. He parlayed his wealth into political power, untroubled by too many worries on such questions as whether it was entirely proper for him to buy secret control of southern Africa’s leading newspaper, the Cape Argus. The stones which had made him rich had a value entirely dependent upon the absurd enthusiasms of human fashion, but Rhodes claimed to see permanent, practical benefits for the world in bringing as much territory as possible under British rule. It was, inevitably, a highly selective vision which even he acknowledged came at a cost: land was a great deal more important to him than any nonsense about human rights. In 1887, for example, he told the House of Assembly in Cape Town that ‘the native is to be treated as a child and denied the franchise … We must adopt a system of despotism in our relations with the barbarians of South Africa.’ It is as redundant to wonder whether Rhodes was a racist as to question whether he wore a moustache on his self-satisfied face, for the evidence is overwhelming. When he plotted his Cape-to-Cairo railway or, as prime minister of the Cape, cast lustful imperial eyes on the lands beyond the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers he was not thinking of the welfare of anyone but ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’.

  Rhodes – whose African ambitions meant he acquired the inevitable nickname ‘Colossus’ – was an empire-builder on the scale of Clive of India, and when he wanted to exploit the mineral rights obtained from the Matabele king, Lobengula (in exchange for a promise of money, a thousand rifles and a boat), the British government gave him a chartered company similar to the old East India Company. Under the motto ‘Justice, Commerce, Freedom’, with a couple of dozy dukes on the board, the British South Africa Company, with Rhodes at its helm, could do more or less as it pleased in southern Africa, seizing land, making treaties, laying down the law and running its own banking system and police force. Rhodes promised that the firm would people the territories it acquired with settlers whose loyalty would be to queen and country. By the end of 1890, he was the most powerful man from the southern Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, running the company, Prime Minister of the Cape and chairman of the diamond business. The great tracts of land about to fall under the sway of his company would become known as Rhodesia (today Zambia and Zimbabwe), and he was not yet forty. The American writer Mark Twain was unable to decide whether Cecil Rhodes was a lofty patriot or the devil incarnate, but observed that, either way, ‘When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambesi.’ True to form, the British Establishment laid aside worries about Rhodes, elected him to membership of the Athenaeum Club and in February 1895 had him sworn of the Privy Council.

  But then this Napoleonic figure stumbled. Rhodes’s vision of an Africa dominated by Anglo-Saxons was threatened not by the poorly armed, comparatively unsophisticated tribes who had lived there since before the days when the British wore woad, but by the Boers, the descendants of Dutch settlers who in the middle of the seventeenth century had established a colony at the tip of southern Africa. To escape the British they had for decades been migrating further and further away from the coast. Rhodes now cooked up a plot to seize by force the goldfields of the Boers’ colony in the Transvaal. The man he chose for this task was an old friend from Kimberley, Dr Leander Starr Jameson, an unscrupulous, socially ambitious gambler. One of the reasons for Dr Jameson’s presence in southern Africa was his belief that the drier climate would be good for his health. He stayed because the living was comparatively easy and the wealth he accumulated great. Just after Christmas 1895 the doctor launched his raid into the Transvaal at the head of a force of badly equipped police and assorted riff-raff volunteers. The idea had been that, when they saw the British column, the Uitlanders – the largely British prospectors who had poured into the Transvaal to prospect for gold, and who paid most of the taxes yet were denied the vote – would stage their own rebellion against the Boers: the Jameson Raid was to be the detonator that fired the explosion. But the rising never came, and four days after he had thundered into the Boers’ territory, Jameson ingloriously surrendered to them. This ineptly planned and incompetently executed pantomime had several consequences, one of which was to force Rhodes’s resignation from the premiership of the Cape Colony and another of which was to lay the ground for the South African War between the Boers and the British, which cost many thousands of the lives of his precious Anglo-Saxons.

  It is estimated that between 1815 and 1912 some 21.5 million people emigrated from the British Isles – there can hardly have been a family that did not have a relative living somewhere overseas. The biggest single group are believed to have been drawn to the United States, but millions more settled in the empire, and in so doing created a British diaspora. The imperial historian Ronald Hyam estimates that by 1900 two-thirds of the English-speaking people lived outside Europe. Most had been driven to leave by need: when Robert Louis Stevenson sailed on an emigrant ship from Glasgow in the summer of 1879 he described it as a ‘shipful of failures, the broken men of England’, whom any casual observer might well have assumed were all ‘absconding from the law’. But there were plenty of other motives, too. Some joined gold rushes, established farms or ran trading stations. Others went to serve the Crown, still more hoped to win one: another Kipling short story, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, tells of a couple of one-time soldiers who establish themselves as monarchs in the remotest corner of Afghanistan. Needless to say, it all goes wrong, but anyone deterred could turn instead to the great fictional model for those with monarchical ambitions, Daniel Defoe’s story of a man washed up on a tropical island, Robinson Crusoe. ‘How like a King I look’d,’ says Crusoe as he marvels at the island he controls; James Joyce thought him ‘the true symbol of the British conquest’. (In mid-nineteenth-century Borneo, James Brooke established himself as an authentic ‘white rajah’. The second rajah of Sarawak, for whom the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography summons a wheelbarrow-load of adjectives – ‘brave, ruthless, decisive, pragmatic, austere, dignified, parsimonious, reserved, and self-sufficient’ – ruled as ‘both an English gentleman and an oriental despot’. The third rajah walked away from the kingdom in the 1940s.) For most of the remainder who left Britain, life in the empire promised freedom of one sort or another – from class, from creditors, from penury, from religious oppression. Living abroad offered a better life, at lower cost. For many there was something about the mere act of leaving the ordered society in which they had grown up which allowed them to breathe more freely. ‘I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me,’ as Somerset Maugham put it.

  How to manage this restlessness? Britain’s overseas possessions did not make the Statue of Liberty’s offer to ‘your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’, which appealed so much to the hungry Irish desperate to escape British rule. The British Empire was scattered across the globe, and different parts of it were deemed to have different attractions and different functions. West Africa, with its sweaty climate and sickly reputation, was a great deal less appealing than the bright, airy highlands of Kenya, for example, and throughout the early years of the twentieth century the leader of the Kenyan settler community, Hugh Cholmondeley, third Baron Delamere, fought to keep the place in the hands of a certain class of white person. Many in the Colonial Office were easily pushed into agreement. The attractions of the highlands to the well-bred Englishman were obvious enough. Land was cheap, the climate was kind, the streams were full of trout and the whisky was plentiful. As Lord Cranworth, who emigrated there in 1906, explained, there were two reasons to go to east Africa: (a) big-game shooting, and (b) shortage of cash. Sir Hesketh Bell, appointed high commissioner in neighbouring Uganda the previous year, noted that ‘British East Africa is fortunate in starting with such a class of immigrants’ and advocated a policy not very dissimilar to the plantations of Ireland:

  If Bri
tish East Africa is really to become a ‘white man’s country’ – which most of the settlers seem to think it should be – then it would be better to limit its territory, as far as possible, to those regions which are fit for European settlement. The outlying areas, which are manifestly only suitable for negro occupation, would more advantageously be placed within the boundaries of a territory that may ultimately be developed as a truly African State.*

  It was high-handed stuff. In fairness, many of the whites in what became Kenya turned out to be pretty successful as farmers, becoming wealthy growing tea and coffee. But they then consolidated their position by creating a (whites-only) legislature which passed laws imposing hut taxes and banning others from growing coffee. Similar things were happening in Rhodesia, but to a rather different class of white settler. While Kenya was for the upper classes, Cecil Rhodes’s creation offered to many of the servicemen demobilized at the end of the Second World War land and wealth they could never have found at home, with vast swathes of the best land reserved for them. To give a sense of what this meant, the Land Tenure Act of 1969, a statute which purported to offer a fairer division of the spoils between whites and blacks, meant that Rhodesia’s 250,000 white people could now own only as much land as five million black citizens.

  This promotion of white settlement in the twentieth century might have been comprehensible at the height of the empire, for it offered agricultural development and the creation of a cadre of imperial loyalists. But it was at odds with the proclaimed political purpose of twentieth-century empire: by the 1920s, the fashionable belief was in ‘custodianship’ of less developed lands. In 1923, the Colonial Secretary declared that ‘primarily Kenya is an African territory, and His Majesty’s Government think it necessary definitely to record their considered opinion that the interests of the African natives must be paramount, and that if, and when, those interests and the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail’. The writing was on the wall. When Kenya broke free of the empire in 1963, the white community learned the lesson that the white community in Zimbabwe – the site of Cecil Rhodes’s grave – were to discover a few decades later, that efficiency in production cannot defy majority rule for ever.

  This did not become a problem in those places where the indigenous population had been either entirely wiped out or reduced to such pitiful states that the settlers encouraged by Britain could do more or less as they pleased. Canada, Australia and New Zealand had been the destination of the majority of British migrants. None of these territories had been white before the arrival of colonists, of course, but they could all become attractive destinations to help solve a recurrent political anxiety in Britain. The industrial revolution had turned the country into the first state in modern history in which most of the population lived in smoky, overcrowded cities that seemed to breed sickly citizens. The open spaces of empire stood in bright and breezy contrast. In the 1830s, for example, a young man named Edward Gibbon Wakefield had devised a theory for exporting surplus population. Wakefield was no great figure of probity (at the time he was in prison for abducting an heiress) but his idea had superficial plausibility. British colonies could not develop, he argued, because they lacked labour, so he proposed that land there might be sold to those who wished to try their luck as farmers, and the money raised then used to transport workers from Britain. There were many holes in this plan, not the least of them being the need to define what was a reasonable price, to say nothing of who had title to sell anything in the first place. Wakefield promoted settlement schemes all over the place, from South Australia to Canada, but his most successful was in New Zealand, and in May 1839 he dispatched his brother and son to buy land at the other end of the earth. Their vessel arrived in New Zealand in the record time of ninety-six days, to be followed, a few months later, by the first group of migrants.

  The circumstances under which the settler community came to dominate New Zealand still rankle with the islands’ original inhabitants. It is certainly true that a dozen or so Maori chiefs had appealed to the British for protection – mainly from European traders and the rowdy crews of whaling ships. It is also true that the government was troubled by the possibility of a French settlement being established there. And there were calls from missionaries for British intervention. The government in London dispatched an emissary, William Hobson, a straightforward naval captain, with strict instructions from the Colonial Secretary that he was to play fair with the tribal chiefs: any land he bought in the name of the government, for example, was to be territory they could surrender ‘without distress or serious inconvenience to themselves’. Hobson drew up what he thought was a document which safeguarded the interests of both parties and it was translated into the Maori language by a couple of missionaries. On 6 February 1840, at Waitangi, some forty Maori chiefs and a gathering of frock-coated Europeans signed the treaty. In the following weeks, messengers scurried about the country collecting the signatures of another 500 chiefs.

  But what had they agreed to? Unfortunately, the Treaty of Waitangi was less than crystal clear, since the English and Maori versions turned out to be imprecise translations of each other. The Maoris appear to have believed that the treaty allowed Queen Victoria nominal government, in exchange for which the Maoris were to be offered protection and left to manage their own affairs. But there was no real Maori concept of sovereignty, for there was no single ruler of the whole country.* Settlers poured on to the land: at the time of the treaty there were reckoned to be about 2,000 white people in New Zealand and an estimated 125,000 Maori. Within the next twenty years the number of settlers would rise to 100,000. By the 1890s a (white) historian was explaining the imperative that drove things: ‘A fertile and healthy Archipelago larger than Great Britain’ simply could not be left in the hands of ‘a handful of savages – not more, I believe, than sixty-five thousand in all and rapidly dwindling in numbers’. One hundred years later, well over half the population was classified as European. Maoris made up fewer than eight in every hundred citizens.

  A sort of settlement mania bubbled away. In 1870, even John Ruskin, the outstanding art critic of his day, delivered himself of the judgement that England faced the highest challenge ever presented to a nation:

  This is what she must either do, or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men – seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching these her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea.

  We have simply no idea how many indigenous peoples in the British Empire were killed either directly or indirectly by the settlers arriving from Britain to make real these dreams and schemes. No one bothered to keep a tally. But we can be certain that it was a very large number indeed. Those not killed by gun or sword perished by exposure to hitherto unknown diseases imported by explorers, soldiers and settlers.

  Perhaps the most tragic of all was the fate of the original inhabitants of Tasmania, of whom the word ‘genocide’ can be accurately used. These short, shy, nomadic people were ethnically distinct from the Aborigines of mainland Australia, from whom they are thought to have been isolated for perhaps 8,000 years. Apart from animal skins, they wore few clothes, smearing their bodies with red ochre and wearing simple necklaces of shells or bones. No one knows how many of them were living on the island when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman arrived there in 1642 – they built no towns and migrated from place to place as the seasons changed. Theirs was an extremely unsophisticated culture: they were said to have been unable to start a fire, to have no specialized stone tools, to have been unable to cut down a tree or to hollow out a canoe, and their language seemed to Europeans to have no grammar. It is perfectly possible, of course, that their lack of development – tantamount to a crime in the minds of so many Europeans – was exaggerated, in order to justify their persecution. But w
hen Captain Cook landed on the island in 1777 he had certainly found them unthreatening. What contact the native Tasmanians had with outsiders – mainly groups of sealers on the coast, who bought or abducted women – brought them nothing but misfortune, with venereal disease causing many to become infertile, and others dying from pneumonia, tuberculosis and influenza.