When the British decided to use the island as a penal colony in 1803 there were perhaps 8,000 of these unfortunate people left. They now faced a trial of strength with citizens of the most technologically advanced nation on earth. In the convicts who had been transported to Tasmania they met individuals already brutalized by a penal system which had shipped them across the world and then dumped them. The free settlers who followed were hardly more sensitive. Indigenous people were hunted down from horseback, caught in steel traps, shot, speared, bludgeoned, poisoned and mutilated. Not a single European was ever punished for the murder of Tasmanian Aborigines, although there is an account of a flogging ordered because a settler had forced a woman to wear the head of her freshly murdered husband on a string around her neck. The young Charles Darwin, who visited Tasmania in 1836, thought the extirpation of the Aborigines was ‘unavoidable’. ‘I do not know’, he noted drily, ‘of a more striking instance of the comparative rate of increase of a civilised over a savage race.’ As many as could be found of the original Tasmanians were rounded up by Christian missionaries and shipped to Flinders Island, a dozen miles away, ‘for their own safety’. Here they were given new names and introduced to the Bible and the meaning of money. Flinders Island has a strange Orcadian beauty, but the aborigines found its barren shores unutterably depressing, and while the evangelists preached, the Tasmanians perished. By 1847, fewer than fifty were alive and soon afterwards the project was abandoned, the natives shipped back to their island, to drink themselves to death under the gaze of visiting anthropologists.
In May 1876, the last full-blooded member of their community on the island, a woman named Truganini, died at the age of seventy-three. A tiny woman (she was said to be only 4 feet 3 inches tall) with a whiskery face, her mother had been murdered by Europeans. Her sister had been kidnapped by Europeans. Her stepmother had been abducted by Europeans. Her husband had been drowned by Europeans. She had been raped by Europeans. Sterile from sexually transmitted diseases, she became a settlers’ prostitute. Unsurprisingly, photographs of her in old age do not show her smiling. In later years she had paired up with the last surviving male in her community, and had been desolate when white scientists had dissected his dead body to feed the learned societies’ appetite for evidence of the differences between the races: her own last words were ‘Don’t let them cut me, but bury me behind the mountains.’ She did not get her wish. Two years after burial in a prison grave she was disinterred, her body boiled, and her skeleton strung together for exhibition in the Tasmanian Museum, where she remained on display until 1947.
Chapter Nine
‘Patriotism, conventionally defined as love of country, now turns out rather obviously to stand for love of more country’
John M. Robertson, Patriotism and Empire, 1899
By the end of the nineteenth century no one in the country could have been unaware that Britain commanded the biggest empire the world had ever seen. City streets bore the names of imperial battlefields, and plants brought to Britain by imperial botanists bloomed in suburban gardens. Most of the bread the British ate was made with wheat imported from the empire. Caribbean sugar and Indian tea* were on every high street. ‘Tommy Atkins’, the put-upon imperial soldier, was a stock character in the music hall, and the morning newspapers were his chorus. Writers like Rider Haggard, R. M. Ballantyne, G. A. Henty and plenty of bombastic imitators fed the imaginations of teenage boys with adventure tales like King Solomon’s Mines or With Wolfe in Canada: The Winning of a Continent. It was twenty years since flush-faced drunks had first fallen out of pubs at closing time singing the bouncy chorus lines:
We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.
Why, in 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had even turned down an invitation to become home secretary in favour of running the colonies.
The grandest showing-off of empire came two years later, in the festivities to mark Queen Victoria’s sixty years on the throne. The parade ten years earlier, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her reign, had had a smattering of exotic maharajahs in attendance, but the event was, essentially, a domestic affair, the plump little queen in her black dress receiving the applause of her people. As her reign progressed, the tide of red – the colour chosen by imperial cartographers to mark out British possessions – lapped across the world so quickly that maps had to be recoloured and reference books rewritten. By 1897 the ambitions of Germany were a cloud on the horizon, but there had really been no power to challenge Britain’s pre-eminent status since the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The army was twice the size it had been when Victoria ascended to the throne, the navy four times larger. Joseph Chamberlain – ‘Joseph Africanus’ as the press called him – proposed that the diamond-jubilee parade should show the world what was what.
Just before she set out to take part in the parade that bright June morning Victoria went to the telegraph room in Buckingham Palace and sent a message across the world. ‘[From my heart I] thank my beloved people. May God bless them,’ she said. Love them – in an odd, distant, hierarchical sort of way – she probably did. For years courtiers had twittered at the inappropriateness of her closeness to Abdul Karim – ‘the Munshi’ – who had filled the void left by the death of her Scottish ghillie, John Brown. The empire had been none of her doing – she merely had the good fortune to accede to the throne at a time that enabled her to become the Mother of the ‘Mother Country’. But she certainly loved the baubles of empire, badgering her favourite Prime Minister for the title ‘Empress of India’ in order, among other considerations, that her eldest daughter’s marriage to the Crown Prince of Prussia should not mean that as an empress she would one day outrank her mother. In 1876, when Disraeli enabled her to sign herself ‘Queen and Empress’ (of a place she had never set eyes upon) he made an ageing widow very happy.
By the measure of history this period of British glory had been short lived, and the city through which the queen processed still seemed an almost accidental imperial capital. But the work of rebuilding that capital to make it look like the heart of an empire was far from complete (and, indeed, was never completed). Mid-century occupants of Downing Street had spent nearly three decades looking out at mountains of rubble as workers threw up the great edifices of the Foreign Office, Colonial Office and India Office: with their elaborate porticoes, sculptures and murals, these were buildings designed to impress upon everyone the extent of British power. But there were hardly enough avenues available to mount the magnificent parade which was planned: London had few of the boastful boulevards of Paris or Berlin. As ever in British public life, the desire to show off had been undermined by constant worry about the cost of it all. The great imperial army, for example, was run from a War Office in Pall Mall where the drains were so bad that it was widely assumed that when the Secretary of State, the Under-Secretary and the Assistant Under-Secretary all died within months of each other in 1861–2 the drains were at least partly responsible. In 1875, The Times reckoned that the risk of sickness or death in the building ‘should rank in point of danger at about the same level as an Ashantee [west African] campaign’. But the department was not rehoused until 1906. Elsewhere, Trafalgar Square celebrated Nelson, and another mock-Roman column, in Waterloo Place, glorified the former commander in chief of the army, the Duke of York. Cleopatra’s Needle towered over the Thames and equestrian statues of generals dotted the capital. But the spoils of empire in the British Museum were buried away among the little streets of Bloomsbury and the showily imperial Admiralty Arch was not built until long after Victoria’s death (it was intended as a memorial). The greatest testament to the country’s status was not a building at all but the recently opened Tower Bridge, which raised and then bowed itself for the ships which went out to the corners of empire, commercial functionality dressed up in mock-medieval flimflam.
Yet as a spectacle Victoria’s parade did not disappoint. In
addition to the shining swords and glittering cuirasses of the British cavalry, thousands of troops had been summoned from all over the world. The flag-waving crowds watched, alternately awestruck and curious, as one after another they came – Canadian hussars and Indian lancers, Cypriot police in fezzes, white-gaitered Jamaicans, enormous Australian cavalrymen and Hong Kong policemen in coolie hats, Maoris and Dayaks, rajahs and maharajahs. The Daily Mail reported the event as testifying to the ‘Greatness of the British Race’. ‘How many millions of years has the sun stood in heaven?’ it wondered. ‘But the sun never looked down until yesterday upon the embodiment of so much energy and power.’ In front of bunting-strewn buildings and flag-draped lampposts, before open windows filled with onlookers, specially built spectator podiums and pavements crammed with hat-waving clerks and jolly girls, the cavalcade made its way towards St Paul’s Cathedral, the so-called parish church of the empire. The Daily Mail’s star reporter certainly got the intended message:
Up they came, more and more, new types, new realms at every couple of yards, an anthropological museum – a living gazetteer of the British Empire. With them came their English officers, whom they obey and follow like children. And you begin to understand, as never before, what the Empire amounts to. Not only that we possess all these remote outlandish places … but also that these people are working, not simply under us, but with us – that we send out a boy here and a boy there, and a boy takes hold of the savages of the part he comes to, and teaches them to march and shoot as he tells them, to obey him and to believe in him and to die for him and the Queen.
And there in the midst of this purple pageant rode the old queen, sombre in black and grey, holding a long-handled parasol, smiling and bowing to the crowd. An occasional tear rolled down Victoria’s cheek, for she was genuinely moved by the crowd’s enthusiasm, writing in her journal, ‘No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets … The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with real joy.’* Outside St Paul’s, Victoria being too doddery to climb the steps, God – or his representatives – came to her. As the queen sat in her carriage, the choir on the cathedral steps chanted the Lord’s Prayer and the Bishop of London declaimed a special jubilee prayer. At the benediction, the matriarch of empire wept openly. As the Daily Mail put it, she had come to pay homage to the One Being More Majestic Than She.
There was the occasional slip-up in the festivities, of course – one of the more notorious being the disappearance of a massive diamond brought as a gift for Victoria by the nizam of Hyderabad – and there were those who found the whole spectacle distinctly unappealing: the first Independent Labour MP, Keir Hardie, pointed out that people would have been cheering just as lustily if they were celebrating the installation of a British president, while in Dublin a coffin draped in the skull-and-crossbones flag was carried towards the castle, the seat of British power in Ireland, to the beat of a muffled drum. But even the earnest socialist Beatrice Webb admitted to her diary that ‘imperialism is in the air, all classes drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’. The celebrations continued with choral concerts and fêtes, garden parties, Royal Navy vessels dressed overall (with all their flags flying), military reviews, the unveiling of statues, banquets, Sunday-school galas and a march-past of 4,000 public schoolboys. Free food was given to the poor in the West Indies, convicts were set free in India – and in Britain there was the usual gallimaufry of tatty souvenirs (although the golden-jubilee bustle that played ‘God Save the Queen’ every time you sat down did not make a reappearance, perhaps because each time it sounded everyone around felt they had to stand up).
Running this vast enterprise was now Britain’s main international preoccupation. But the empire seemed to require ever more land to make it function, a policy not of ‘What I have, I hold’ but of ‘What I have requires me to have more.’ Or, as one dissident tartly put it, ‘patriotism, conventionally defined as love of country, now turns out rather obviously to stand for love of more country’. The thing had been intellectually incoherent from the start: there had never been a strategic plan to hold sway across the globe. What had developed in its place was the strange product of ruthless opportunism and earnest idealism, courage and smugness, confidence and anxiety. Was it because they knew that at one level the whole thing was really a confidence trick that the British behaved as they did, ready to meet the calculated rebuff or the off-hand slight with ruthless ‘teach them a lesson’ force? Because by the time Victoria celebrated her sixty years on the throne there had been no fewer than seventy wars, expeditionary campaigns or punitive raids fought in her name, everywhere from New Zealand to Canada. In the year of her jubilee parade alone, British troops sacked Benin in reprisal for the king’s reluctance to be colonized, were fighting on the North-West Frontier and were advancing on the capital of Sudan to avenge the death of General Gordon. No one was to be allowed to take Victoria’s empire lightly. In August of the previous year the Royal Navy had fought the shortest war in history, when the sultan of Zanzibar died and his twenty-nine-year-old nephew had the temerity to declare himself successor without first seeking the approval of the British Consul on the island. When the young man refused a British ultimatum to quit the palace, the three British warships in the harbour opened fire. It was two minutes past nine in the morning. By 9.40 it was all over. The British had fired around 500 shells and about 5,000 rounds from their machine guns and rifles. Five hundred Zanzibaris were dead or wounded, for one wounded British petty officer. As Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice had explained, the year before the jubilee, in campaigns against savages ‘mere victory is not enough. The enemy must not only be beaten. He must be beaten thoroughly … What is wanted is a big casualty list … they must feel what battle against a disciplined army means.’ Once the enemy started to run, they were to be pursued by cavalry, their villages burned and their crops destroyed. An example had to be made.
But while imperial troops put down dissent, anxiety stalked the consciences of some of those who thought about what it was all for. As long ago as the year of Victoria’s accession, her Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had been troubled by the ‘necessity by which a nation that once begins to colonize is led step by step over the whole globe’. But still the possessions piled up, until by the later decades of the century a belief had taken hold that it was, in the words of one great colonial administrator, Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’ to rule an empire. This was not, he explained, for any reason as crude as ‘earth hunger’, but was in the interests of those who were lucky enough to find themselves living under British domination. If Britain was governed by Christian principles, it should be possible to ‘foster some sort of cosmopolitan allegiance grounded on the respect always accorded to superior talents and unselfish conduct and on the gratitude derived from favours conferred and those to come’. The man who held these beliefs, Evelyn Baring, was to play the most significant role in one of Britain’s most idiosyncratic possessions – even though it never formally became a part of the empire.
For strategists, imperial ambitions were offset by real practical anxieties. Keeping the empire safe meant, above all, safeguarding India, the grandest possession. That in turn required complete confidence in the security of the Middle East, and especially the safety of the Suez Canal, which had opened in 1869 and had cut the journey time to India from months to mere weeks. The anxiety which racked the minds of the guardians of empire was that Egypt lay within the Ottoman Empire, which had been in steady decline throughout the nineteenth century. There had been suggestions before that the safest way to protect British interests was to seize control of Egypt, talk which Viscount Palmerston had earlier disdainfully dismissed, telling a fellow aristocrat that Britain really did not want to control the country ‘any more than any rational man with an estate in the north of England and a residence in the south would have wanted to possess the inns on the north road. All he could want would have b
een that the inns should be well kept, always accessible and furnishing him when he came with mutton chops and post-horses.’ But the condition of the country which controlled access to so much of the vital waterway grew worse and worse, and the Egyptian Khedive – the viceroy appointed by the Turks – was a feeble fellow, who had already sold the British government his country’s shares in the canal. Although the place was under Turkish rule, British business had piled into Egypt: the country was so well suited to the production of cotton that substantial fortunes could be made in a very short time (during the disruption caused by the American Civil War, exports increased ten-fold). The Egyptian state was too weak to take proper advantage of the business, and it was Europeans who developed the banking, irrigation and communication systems. Egypt was a tailor’s dummy of a country.
With hindsight, what happened next might seem inevitable. Nationalist Egyptians nursing a great variety of grievances rose up against the foreign influence, under the leadership of Urabi Pasha, a colonel in the army. At first, the British Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone, supported the idea of ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’, which fitted with his scepticism about many of the claims made for empire, as he had demonstrated in voicing his sympathy for proposals for Home Rule for the Irish. He had no plan to invade Egypt. Yet that was what he ended up doing, taking Britain to war with the bizarre – if not quite articulated – aim of maintaining the authority of the Ottoman Empire. There was a noisy group of angry businessmen with money at stake, while the great majority of ships passing through the Suez Canal flew the British flag. When a bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 failed to cow the revolt, the British parliament voted money to send an army, under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley. Landing forces at either end of the canal, Wolseley made an audacious advance, culminating in an attack before dawn on the Egyptian forces at Tel el Kebir. In half an hour he had destroyed a force of more than 20,000, with the Highland Brigade, which led one wing of the attack, in no mood to take many prisoners. Two days later, the British flag was flying over Cairo and a feverishly grateful Gladstone was soon offering Wolseley a barony.
Empire Page 19
