Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  In one sense it was true. The movement of people out of the British islands had transplanted the culture of the English all over the world—wherever the climate was temperate enough, and the resources were sufficiently tempting. The British were the most restless of the European peoples, and the greatest flow of emigration was still out of the British Isles, with Italy second and Spain a distant third. The flow varied, with the bad times and the good at home. Between 1840 and 1872—years of famine in Ireland and depression in England—about 6½ million people had left the British Isles. Since then the pressure had slackened, and an average of some 200,000 had been going each year in the eighties and nineties. Most of them went because they were workless, landless or even starving. They did not greatly care whether they stayed within the Empire or not—the Irish, indeed, particularly wanted to be out of it—and three-quarters made for the United States, the most promising haven of all. The British colonies and possessions offered good opportunities for business and professional people, but appealed to working men chiefly at moments of boom or gold rush—it was not often the pioneering instinct that took poor people to the Empire, only a desire for security and a fair chance. Australia was still tainted by its convict past, South Africa needed little unskilled labour, Canada seemed to most people only a second-class United States, New Zealand was essentially a farmer’s country, with little scope for artisans. The New Imperialists were often disappointed by the British working man’s reluctance to go adventuring in his Empire.

  Still, some 10 million British emigrants were now distributed through the colonies, and they included all sorts. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in the 1830s, had introduced planned settlement to Australia and New Zealand—his settlers went out as complete communities, with all the trades and professions represented.1 Since then laissez faire had generally governed the imperial migrations, and the Empire found its own level: unemployed cotton workers, dispossessed Highlanders, Irishmen emaciated by generations of malnutrition, remittance men, dedicated missionaries, hopeful villains—the emigrant ships knew them all. It was big business for the shipowners and brokers, and to some British ports the ceaseless flow of the emigrants, never to return, was an everyday fact of life, a perpetual good-bye to one’s own folk. The boarding-houses along Dock Road in Liverpool lived on the custom of the emigrant families, strolling excitedly along Merseybank in the evening to see their ship awaiting the morning tide: and high above the harbour at Queenstown, the port of Cork, the architect Augustus Pugin had built a tall valedictory cathedral, its steeple silhouetted above the little town and its bay like a last blessing from Ireland, as the emigrant liners steamed sadly into the Atlantic.

  The most curious migrants of all were the groups of young women who, carefully chaperoned and segregated, went out in batches from England to the white colonies. The Queensland Government ran an official scheme for such Female Emigrants. Their passages were paid, and jobs were guaranteed for them at the other end, so long as they could prove themselves to be healthy, of good character, and more or less the right age. Every month the British India boat to Brisbane carried eighty or a hundred of them, under the care of a matron and two under-matrons. They were scrupulously segregated aft, and discipline was strict. The girls messed ten to a table under the supervision of the eldest emigrant, known as ‘the captain’, and after breakfast each morning their cabins were inspected for tidiness by the chief matron. On deck they were separated by a double hand-rail from the rest of the passengers, and they were strictly forbidden to speak across it. Even if, as sometimes happened, a girl’s parents or brothers were elsewhere on the same ship, she was permitted to visit them only once a week. Thus, refrigerated in purity, these perishable cargoes were shipped to the bounds of Empire, where lusty colonials presently defrosted them to perpetuate the breed.

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  Emigration to the Empire was officially popular. There were those who objected that the best and most enterprising of the British were leaving the islands, but it was pointed out that one British resident in Australia consumed as much British produce as ten British emigrants to the United States, and anyway imperial emigration, as the New Imperialists liked to say, was no more than ‘a redistribution of population within the nation’.

  The redistribution was essentially unplanned. Convicts and paupers were no longer transported to the colonies, and the British Government offered no subsidies to rid itself of its undesirables. In earlier years the emigration business had often been shady. Innocents were lured to the colonies with false promises, were shipped there in ghastly discomfort, and often trailed home to Britain again penniless and disillusioned, or joined the shambled riff-raff of failed emigrants which roamed the British possessions. By the 1890s it was better organized. There was an Emigrants’ Information Office, officially financed, diverse charitable bodies concerned themselves with emigration, and several colonial governments offered assisted passages—one could go to Canada for £3. The colonies no longer accepted all comers; free movement within the Empire was not a right of citizenship. Their London agents chose the people they wanted, and the British Empire never professed itself a haven for the tired, the poor, or the masses yearning to breathe free. In the last years of the century the British themselves were not anxious to go. The British birth-rate was dropping, conditions at home were better, and several of the colonies had been going through lean years. Of the 145,000 people who emigrated that year, some 50,000 went to the colonies. Nearly 30,000 went to the Canadian West, where 200 million acres of marvellous land, so the publicists said, were only awaiting cultivation: in two or three years most of them would either have taken the magic road to Manhattan or made good as prairie landowners.1 The rest mostly went to South Africa, after gold. Hardly any went that year to Australia—the Australian colonies were in between booms, and for some time more people had left them than had entered: it was many a long year since Queen Victoria herself, more than usually exasperated by politics at home, had threatened to emigrate down under with all her little princelings.

  The white colonials were, in effect, still Britons, and to most emigrants Britain was still Home. They could come back when they wished, and pick up the threads where they dropped them. The white colonies really did form a Greater Britain. Of the eleven colonial Premiers who came to London for the Jubilee, seven had been born in Britain, while the Premier of Tasmania had spent half a lifetime serving the Crown in the Indian Civil Service. British standards still generally applied in the white dependencies, things British were generally regarded as best, and the prestige of the British governing classes, socially and intellectually, remained unchallenged, however resolutely the earthier colonials sneered at ‘the colonial cringe’.2 The great festival of Empire raised few sniggers in Ottawa, Durban or Sydney. To many colonials it was a welcome revival of British virility, in a country apparently emasculated in the lily-postures of its aesthetes. The Australians, perhaps a little patronizingly, sent a shipload of meat as a Jubilee present to the British poor.

  The people of the oldest colony, Newfoundland, were among the most staunchly British of all. Along the fierce Atlantic coast of the island, up past Bristol’s Hope to Twillingate and Leading Tickles, there were settlers whose forebears had come from Britain in the seventeenth century. They lived still in recognizably British cottages, talking a queer mixture of West Country, Irish and New England, and forming sprawling clans of fisherfolk and farmers, so that all the way around Conception Bay, for instance, you would find people called Dawes, scratching their potato fields, winching their nets, or silent beneath the toppled tombstones of their clapboard churches.1 The senior settlement of all was Cupids, which had originally been called Cuper’s Cove, and was founded by the Merchant Venturers of Bristol in 1609. It looked like a fishing town in one of the bleaker Scottish firths: austerely set upon its grey inlet, its waters icy, its rocky sheltering hills stubbled with moorland grass and conifers. In a wavering line its houses brooded around the water’s edge, dominated by the United Church of
Canada and the Orange Lodge. Nobody in Cupids was rich—it had proved a begrudging kind of paradise. Life was very simple, loyalties were secure, Union Jacks and lithographs of Queen Victoria were to be found in almost every homestead. Only occasionally did an inquisitive visitor bounce up the rocky road from St John’s, to visit this birthplace of Greater Britain, and see what an emigrant looked like nearly three centuries after the event.2

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  If the Empire dispersed the British, it displaced many thousands of their subject peoples, too. The movement of African slaves had ended 80 years before, but out through the imperial channels there still spilled hundreds of thousands of Indians, like water overflowing from a brimming bucket, to flood the perimeters of the Indian Ocean, and trickle through to far more distant parts. They were the migrant labourers of Empire. They went to Sarawak, Fiji, to Trinidad in their thousands, to South Africa, even to British Columbia. In many territories of the Empire Indian labour was essential to the prosperity or security of the white colonists. In Mauritius and the West Indies this was because the landowning classes had never come to terms with the Negroes since their emancipation from slavery. In Africa it was because the local peoples were reluctant to work for wages, or for whites. In northern Australia the climate was thought to be too hot for European manual labour. In Burma the Burmese did not take to soldiering. In Ceylon the Sinhalese did not take to plantation work. There were Sikh soldiers in Nyasaland, Sikh policemen in Hong Kong. At least a million Tamils had gone south to Ceylon during the past half-century, and the colony of Aden, at the arid tip of Arabia, depended for its existence upon its Indian craftsmen, builders and blacksmiths, first taken there by the British when they seized the place in 1839.

  The movement here and there of this manpower, together with Chinese and Polynesians, had its affinities with slavery still—in the 1880s South Sea islanders had often been kidnapped to work on the Queensland sugar plantations. Most of the Indian migrants were indentured labourers: they agreed to go for a set number of years, at the end of which they were either given a free passage home or stayed where they were as free men. The traffic was officially controlled. The Colonial Office arranged the movement of Indians to the Caribbean sugar colonies, and British Guiana, Natal, Mauritius and Fiji all had their immigration agents in Calcutta. There were terrible abuses nevertheless. The Indians were so naïve, the employers so worldly, that unfair exploitation was inevitable. Recruiters were often paid by head of labour, which encouraged them to be unscrupulous, and planters sometimes treated their indentured labourers virtually as private property. When, at the end of their engagement, the Indians chose to settle on the spot, as they nearly always did, they found themselves very unwelcome. In Australia they were obliged to remain in the tropical north, to prevent their tainting the European south, and in the West Indies they were resented not only by the whites but no less by the Negroes.1

  To the British themselves it was only part of the immense sweep of imperialism, which made the world their chessboard. The movement of subjects from one part to another was organic to the structure, and the cross-traffic of imperial migration was constant and inescapable. You would find Australian jockeys in Calcutta, shipped with their horses from Victoria for the Viceroy’s races, and Maltese mess-men on the British warships of the West India station. Voyageurs from the Canadian rivers had navigated the Gordon relief expedition to Khartoum, and the young men of Tristan da Cunha habitually migrated to the Cape of Good Hope. When the Ceylonese coffee crop was ruined by disease in 1869 many Ceylon planters moved on to Burma, Borneo, the Straits Settlements or Australia, and there was a whole corps of adventurers that wandered across the Empire from gold strike to gold strike. West Indian soldiers were on imperial duty in West Africa. Irish priests and schoolmasters were all over the Empire. It was a common practice to exile dissident notables to distant imperial possessions: the Egyptian nationalist Arabi Pasha was imprisoned in Ceylon—he chose the island himself, it is said, because to Muslims it was Adam’s place of exile, when he and Eve were expelled from their Egypt.1 A legendary character of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, still vividly remembered in Lucknow, was an African who was killed fighting on the side of the mutineers, and who was so good a shot that the British soldiers nicknamed him Bob the Nailer, until at last they nailed him.2 The fact of the British Empire had done all this: had dovetailed all these different peoples, switched them east and west, made the Indian familiar in Trinidad and the Chinese in Australia—all in obedience to whatever hazy laws and instincts governed the energies of imperialism.

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  As for the flora and fauna, in many parts the existence of the British Empire had literally changed the face of the earth, by means which to some fundamentalists flew in the face of nature. Ever since Captain Bligh set sail from Tahiti with bread-fruit trees for the West Indies, the British had been busy, like so many fanatic geneticists, taking cuttings, crossing strains or transplanting hopeful hybrids. One of the several rationales of Empire was the theory that its complete range of climate must enable the One Race, beneath the One Flag, to make itself self-sufficient in foodstuffs. John Wilson of Blackwood’s Magazine had observed seventy years before that the sun never set on the British Empire. Now the concept of imperialism was wider still, and the theorists had realized that somewhere in the Empire it was always summer, too, so that the imperial harvest might last the whole year through. Inspired partly by such stately insights, and partly by the need to live and make a profit, the British had freely experimented with the transfers of crops and animals from one territory to another, sometimes with great success, sometimes disastrously.

  The most ubiquitous of these transplantations was the Australian gum-tree—the eucalyptus, which first left Australia in 1854, but which by the 1890s had been scattered across the world. It was supposed to prevent malaria; some thought the smell of its leaves did it, others the drainage of marshy soils by its roots. The British took it everywhere, and especially to India, where they planted it along thousands of miles of roads, around a hundred cantonments, in countless bungalow gardens, until it seemed to have been part of the landscape always, and the grey shine of its leaves appeared only to be a coating of immemorial Indian dust. Another great success was the rubber plant. This the British imported from Brazil to India, and they were the first to make a regular crop of it, the Brazilians having merely tapped the wild tree. They began with plantations in Ceylon, and later transplanted it triumphantly to Malaya, where it transformed the economy and the landscape, too. The British took tropical crops like pineapples, tea, bananas and sugar to newly exploited tropical countries—South Africa, northern Australia, Rhodesia, Nyasaland. They took familiar temperate crops to unfamiliar temperate zones—notably the potato to Nepal, where it probably spread from the garden of the British Resident in Katmandu to become the staple diet of the Sherpas. It was the Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens who introduced tea-cultivation to Sikkim and Assam, and quinine was first grown in India, in 1862, from cuttings from the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. English furze and blackberry bushes had overgrown the Atlantic island of St Helena, while weeping willows from St Helena, reputedly cuttings from those that shaded Napoleon’s grave, flourished in Australia. The Empire had introduced rice to British Guiana; coconuts to the Bahamas; cinnamon to the Seychelles; lilies to Bermuda; English grass, Kaffir corn, vines, apples, pears and wheat to Australia.

  The entire domestic livestock of New Zealand was first shipped to those islands by the British. The only indigenous mammals were dogs, bats and rats, and the Maoris were originally either vegetarians or cannibals: yet by 1897 there were 2½ sheep, 1½ head of cattle, nearly half a horse and three-tenths of a pig for every human. Most of Fiji’s livestock was also taken there by the British, and in the remote and windswept Falklands Welsh farmers had re-created the sheep-runs of Caernarvonshire and Merioneth. Australia had been stocked with millions of English sheep and cattle, not to speak of blackbirds, and in the 1880s Indian camels had bee
n shipped down there as desert transport: often their Indian or Afghan drivers went with them, and a familiar sight of the Outback was the camel-wagon, heaped high with provisions, with a couple of camels dispiritedly hauling it across the waste, and an oriental in musty draperies huddled on the high driving-seat.1 Camels were also taken to the goldfields of the Cariboo in British Columbia, and some of them were once shipped up the Fraser River by stern-wheeler.

  The Indian Army was a great market for Australian and Arab horses—one of the sights of Bombay was the Arab stables, in the Bendhi bazaar, where dealers from the Persian Gulf sold their horses. Frogs and rats followed the Empire to St Helena, Irish donkeys emigrated to South Africa. On Robben Island in Table Bay were deposited, at one time or another, not only lepers, lunatics and convicts, but a herd of English sheep and a colony of English rabbits—nowhere to be found on the mainland of Africa.2 The sporting instincts of the British distributed across the Empire every manner of shootable, huntable and fishable creature—hares, salmon, trout and deer to hunting-grounds as varied as Tasmania, Ceylon and the Andaman Islands. It was the British, in one of their less-publicized works of usefulness, who took the toad to Bermuda.

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  It multiplied so fast that its progeny became a plague, for sometimes this tinkering with the balance of nature ended disagreeably. The English foxes of Australia persecuted the enchanting lyre-bird and cruelly harassed the koala—the more highly evolved placental mammals, brought by the British, proving more formidable always than the native marsupials. The mongoose, imported to the Caribbean from India to deal with the rats, took to chicken-hunting and became a scourge itself; in Jamaica it attacked lambs, kids, piglets, dogs and cats, exterminated virtually all the game birds, decimated several species of snakes and lizards, practically abolished the tortoises by eating their eggs, and in twenty years totally upset the equilibrium of island life.