by Jan Morris
Much of this was imperial profit. Trade often had followed the flag, and the colonial commerce was very important to Britain. The transplanted Britons of the white colonies still preferred British goods, from sentiment as from habit, and the main imperial trade routes all led to England. Colonial Governments naturally did much of their buying through their agents in London; colonial companies raised their capital in the City as a matter of course; much of London’s big re-export business was in colonial goods. There were parts of the Empire—Cape Colony was one—where British exporters and importers enjoyed a virtual monopoly, and almost everywhere else officialdom tended to favour the British businessman over his foreign competitor. In earlier years the flow of goods from India had been altogether one way—they were paid for by taxes raised on the spot.
The New Imperialists represented British progress as a cycle of imperial expansion. They reasoned that the wealth of India, a century before, had provided the capital for the Industrial Revolution—which had enabled the British to acquire their new Empire elsewhere—which was itself now paying dividends. They backed their arguments with figures which pictured the whole Empire as an economic unit. It was, they liked to say, ‘first among the Powers’ in wheat, wool, timber, tea, coal, iron, gold. In steel it was exceeded only by the United States and Germany. In tobacco it was second only to Spain. It produced a third of the world’s coal, a sixth of the wheat. Its volume of trade had consistently grown, as the Empire itself grew. In 1820 British foreign trade had been worth £80 million: by 1897 the Empire’s total foreign trade was worth £745 million. Britain’s terms of trade, too, had consistently improved—which is to say, she paid less for the things she bought, and got more for the things she sold. ‘Selling dear, buying cheap’ seemed to be one of the perquisites of Empire, if only because by controlling so many of the sources of supply, the British could keep the price of raw materials down.
The flow of commerce within the Empire somehow seemed particularly heartening, as though so many eager vassals were working away there, year by year, exchanging their commodities backwards and forwards for the indirect benefit of their suzerains. The popular statistics of the time are full of ‘inter-British’ trade figures. They contributed mystically to the aspiration of a self-sufficient, all-inclusive Empire, impervious to the designs or catastrophes of the world at large. Australia sent her silver to India. India sent her rice to Natal. Canada sent her manufactured goods to the West Indies. The New Zealand grassland industries existed entirely to satisfy imperial markets. As Flora Shaw pointed out in the Britannica, ‘the butter season of Australasia is from October to March, while the butter season of Ireland and northern Europe is from March to October’. The New Imperialists foresaw an Empire self-supporting in everything—a world of its own, with Britain herself as a vast smelter, processor or refiner at the centre.
5
Such was the profit-mechanism of Empire, as the activists saw it in 1897. Since it seemed, from the vantage-point of the Jubilee, to be a tremendous success, the instinct of the time was naturally to make it more so, and especially in the last of the unexploited continents, Africa. The more land you possessed, surely the richer you were. The more people you ruled, the greater your labour force. The more directly you controlled a country, the safer was your investment there, and the more generous the dividends it was likely to pay.
In Africa there were still territories to be annexed, labour forces awaiting employment, resources to be tapped and markets to be created. The New Imperialism in Britain, the apogee of the idea of Empire, was above all manifested in the scramble for Africa. India, the West Indies and the white colonies had, it seemed, always been there, part of the background of the Englishman’s life. It was the new magic of Africa that set the tone—Cape-to-Cairo all red, Wilson’s last stand on the Shangani River, those swaying pulley-ropes above the Big Hole at Kimberley, Cooks’ white steamers paddling past pyramids into desert sunsets. Powerful economic lobbies pressed the British Government into African adventures.
The profits were not always immediate. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company had not yet paid a dividend,1 and the Imperial British East Africa Company never paid one from start to finish. But long-term benefits, it was thought, were assured, and it was the duty of the Government to make them possible. Such a duty had long been accepted. Palmerston had declared it the business of Government to ‘open and secure the roads for the merchant’. Joseph Chamberlain thought it was the task of the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office to ‘find new markets and defend old ones’, while the War Office and the Admiralty protected the flow of commerce. Abroad, national power was properly used to further private trade and investment—by forcing other countries to reduce their tariffs and abolish their monopolies, by opening up such decayed and shuttered organisms as the Turkish and Chinese empires, and by creating new markets for British goods. ‘Our burden is too great,’ Gladstone once complained to the rampantly expansionist Rhodes. ‘We have too much, Mr Rhodes, to do. Apart from increasing our obligations in every part of the world, what advantage do you see to the English race in acquisition of new territory?’ ‘Great Britain is a very small island,’ was Rhodes’s reply. ‘Great Britain’s position depends on her trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at present devoted to barbarism we shall shut out the world’s trade. … It must be brought home to you that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.’
The expansion and retention of the world! In terms less gloriously flamboyant, the British as a whole now echoed Mr Rhodes. What the business community really wanted was the Open Door—the opportunity to trade freely everywhere, irrespective of sovereignty. If they could not have this, in a world which would not accept the principles of Free Trade, very well then, Empire it must be. It might at first sight, Adam Smith had written, seem very proper for a nation of shopkeepers to found a great empire with the sole purpose of creating more customers: and there were many businessmen still who thought it a very proper end of imperial policy. If another country seized an African territory, instantly a tariff was imposed to keep out British goods: it was the duty of the British Government to get there first. The Empire, Rhodes also said, was a bread-and-butter question, and its expansion was essential to the equilibrium of Britain. ‘In order to save the 40 million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines.’
6
So all these various instincts and impulses of profit were forcing outwards the frontiers of Empire.—‘God Who made thee mighty make thee mightier yet!’ And the bigger it was, the bigger it had to be. If the first cause was generally commerce, investment, or raw materials, the second was the need to protect the stake: from the seacoast into the hinterland, from the exposed plateau across the mountains, from India into Burma, from Egypt into the Sudan, and everywhere to the next islet, headland or river basin, the one the Empire could not safely afford to be without.
In some of their suppositions, as we shall later see, the New Imperialists were deluded. The profit instinct was not infallible: foreigners were barging into those cherished colonial markets, Empire in Africa was a very different thing from the Raj and the white colonies, Britain’s wealth was not so imperial as they thought. But rightly or wrongly, the urge to profit lay at the root of the New Imperialism, just as it had impelled the adventurers of England out of their cramped islands from the start. Already there were formidable critics of the movement—not only liberal politicians and journalists, but economists, too. The most forceful of them all was Hobson, who argued that if all this money, all this enterprise had stayed at home, ordinary English people would have benefited more. Easy money for capitalists and traders, he reasoned, did not mean better homes, schools or health for the Bri
tish masses.
He preached to an unresponsive audience. In Russia the young Lenin heard him, and believed. In England few listened. The rich did not approve of such unorthodoxies, and the poor were all out in the streets, waving their flags for Jubilee.
1 The head of the colonial department of The Times and a friend of Cecil Rhodes, Flora Shaw had been implicated in the Jameson Raid and was an eminent figure of the New Imperialism. She married Frederick Lugard, the African administrator, became a Dame of the British Empire in 1918, and died in 1929.
1 The Big Hole, disused since 1914, became the largest man-made hole in the world—a mile round the top and nearly 700 feet deep. It is now filling up with water at the rate of 12 feet a year.
2 He came of unconventional stock. His father, the fourth earl, was the defendant in the celebrated Yelverton case, in which a woman he was alleged to have married sued him for restitution of conjugal rights, persisting in the suit for nine years, and taking it unsuccessfully to the House of Lords. Our Lord Avonmore, who was nicknamed in Canada ‘Lord Have One More’, did not make his fortune on the Klondike, for he ignominiously failed to get there.
1 Leacock, born in England in 1869, ‘decided to go with them’ when his parents emigrated to Canada in 1876. His Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is about Ontario life around the turn of the century. In the story I quote, The Speculations of Jefferson Thorpe, Fizzlechip later shoots himself and Thorpe the barber loses almost all he has.
2 Morley, the biographer of Gladstone, was as consistently anti-imperialist as his subject, though he was twice Chief Secretary for Ireland and once Secretary of State for India. As Lord Privy Seal he opposed Britain’s entry into the First World War and withdrew from public life, dying as Lord Morley of Blackburn, aged 85, in 1923.
1 Hobson thought oversaving by the rich and investment abroad to be the chief cause of unemployment at home. This brilliantly original and readable theorist, concerned as much with social welfare as with finance, was never offered an academic post, but found some of his theories vindicated, and his name honoured, in the 1930s. He died in 1940.
1 Hudson’s Bay is still a power in Canada, and its great department stores have become so much a part of Canadian life that often when people go shopping they say merely that they are going ‘down the Bay’. Luke Thomas and Co still thrive, too, with offices overlooking the Aden public gardens in which, until its removal in 1967, there stood a Jubilee statue of Queen Victoria.
1 Swanzy’s became, after many amalgamations, the United Africa Company, later acquired by Unilever. The firm’s ceremonial staff was given to the British Museum, and thus disappeared from human knowledge.
1 Its first, 6d on each £1 share, was paid in 1924.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Glory
England, England, England,
Girdled by ocean and skies,
And the power of a world and the heart of a race
And a hope that never dies.
Wilfrid Campbell
7
THE means of profit were for the few, but the hope of glory was almost universal. Empire and Imperialism, wrote the journalist W. F. Monypenny,1 filled the place in everyday speech once filled by Nation and Nationality—the national ideal had given way to the imperial. The existence of the Empire, and its expansion, seemed to satisfy some national psychological need. In 1878 Lord Carnarvon, then Colonial Secretary, had felt obliged to ask what the word ‘imperialism’ actually meant.2 The Oxford Dictionary gave an answer: ‘the principle or policy of seeking, or at least not refusing, an extension of the British Empire in directions where trading interests and investments require the protection of the flag, and of so uniting the different parts of the Empire having separate Governments as to secure that for certain purposes, such as warlike defence, internal commerce, copyright and postal communications, they shall be practically a single State.’ By 1897 nobody was likely to need a definition. So cataclysmic had been the explosion of the new ideas, so carried away was the nation, that everybody knew the meaning of imperialism now.
Two very different poets had between them expressed the popular interpretation. The first was the balladeer G. W. Hunt, whose most famous music-hall song had given a word to the language:
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.
We’ve fought the Bear before,
And while Britons shall be true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.1
By no means everybody, even in this brash heyday of the creed, found Jingoism tasteful. Chauvinism was an old British trait, but this aggressive conceit was something new. Queen Victoria, contemplating the national vainglory with some disquiet, once observed that she could not quite understand ‘why nobody was to have anything anywhere but ourselves’. To most Britons, nevertheless, the spirit of Empire was essentially acquisitive, and Jingoism itself was one of the motives of imperialism.
The second poet was Alfred Austin, who apostrophized his country in loftier metre:
Thou dost but stand erect, and lo!
The nations cluster round; and while the horde
Of wolfish backs slouch homeward to their snow,
Thou, ’mid thy sheaves in peaceful seasons stored,
Towerest supreme, victor without a blow,
Smilingly leaning on thy undrawn sword!
Fewer would quarrel with this image of the imperial presence, a magnanimous Galahad of the wheat fields, friend and protector of all. The British saw their country as a special kind of Power, sui generis, making rules of its own and legitimately imposing them on others. To the British Empire no conventions applied. Command, authority, privilege were natural rights of the British people. The world measured its longitude from Greenwich, and the postage stamps of Great Britain, alone in the world, did not bother with a national title, but simply bore Victoria’s head. Take it, the British seemed to say to the world, or leave it.
To this specialness the Queen herself no doubt subscribed, just as her person summed it up. It was Disraeli, thirty years before, who had made an imperialist of Her Imperial Majesty. He saw the Empire as an Eastern pageantry, a perpetual durbar, summoning the British people away beyond the dour obsessions of Europe to a destiny that was spiced and gilded. Under his seductive influence Victoria, like so many of her subjects, found herself bemused by the exotic allure of Empire. The Queen had a horror of John Bullism, by which she meant arrogance and bullying in diplomacy: but the older she grew, the more she grew accustomed to the imperial stance, until by the time of her Diamond Jubilee her very appearance among her satraps, mercenaries and imperial commanders seemed to give sanction to the idea of the British Empire as a divinely sponsored phenomenon—By Appointment to God.
2
The Empire was at its zenith, the Crown glittered as never before, magnificently in the centre of the world lay England, home and glory. With such a background of national self-esteem, it was difficult not to be pugnacious. The late Victorians were plumper and more complacent than their fathers had been, but they still had plenty of élan, and the history of the past century had inspired them with a happy contempt for all adversaries. Their society was stable. Their inventive genius was everywhere acknowledged. The superiority of their arms seemed to have been permanently established by the twin victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo. There had been setbacks, of course, generally when a gallant company of cruelly outnumbered Britons had been caught unfairly by surprise: but even the blunders of the Crimea had been redeemed by the effortless conquest of Egypt, and by a score of successful small colonial wars. Nowadays, when a British soldier marched into some unknown and potentially hostile territory, he marched in the almost certain conviction that he was going to win. The British armies of the day fought ferociously, matching barbarism with brutality, and seldom hesitating to employ the most terrible of weapons, the Maxim gun or the expanding Dum-Dum bullet, against the most primiti
ve of enemies—‘Butcher and Bolt’ was the army’s own nickname for punitive expeditions. But it was all in a good cause. As Austin exclaimed in another irresistible poem:
Who would not die for England! And for Her
He dies, who, whether in the fateful fight,
Or in the marish jungle, where She bids,
Far from encircling fondness, far from kiss
Of clinging babes, hushes his human heart.
And, stern to every voice but Hers, obeys
Duty and Death that evermore were twin.
So the taste for power inflamed the imperial violence. It must have seemed so easy. In India the Forward School of strategists constantly pressed for the extension of frontiers northward and eastward through the passes—to confront the enemy, Russian, French or Chinese, muzzle to muzzle on ground of British choosing. In the Pacific the virile Australians wanted to create a Mare Nostrum, excluding other European Powers and keeping the Asiatics where they belonged. In Africa the British seemed to be storming belligerently everywhere, seizing territories or abasing chieftains for reasons that were basically economic or strategic, but were often sublimated on the spot into the sheer love of a scrap. Austin was once asked to define his idea of Heaven. It was, he said, to be sitting in a garden receiving news by alternate messengers of British victories at sea and British victories on land. The British were not really a belligerent people—few nations were more civilian than Victorian Britain—and they had not been engaged in a life-and-death struggle since the defeat of Napoleon. But a generation of easy victories had gone to their heads, and they were drunk with glory. Sometimes they yielded to surges of vindictive anger. Gladstone himself had ordered the bombardment of Alexandria, after the revolt of Arabi Pasha the nationalist in 1882, confounding those who forecast that he would only intervene with the Salvation Army. The boys at Eton unanimously voted that Arabi ought to be hanged for his patriotism, and Queen Victoria agreed with them.
