Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  And there was Salem Hardieker,

  A lean Bostonian he—

  Russ, German, English, Halfbreed, Finn,

  Yank, Dane and Portugee,

  At Fultah Fisher’s boarding-house

  They rested from the sea.

  What increases there had been in imperial trade had mostly been with the self-governing colonies, whose economic policies were almost as independent as France’s or Germany’s, and were certainly not designed to benefit the Old Country. Some people thought, indeed, that the possession of the dependent Empire actually blunted British commercial initiative, offering the feebler salesmen a comfortable feather-bed, tempting the less aggressive firms to rely on British power for their profits. Salesmen were said to study foreign tastes with reluctance, and Steevens reported from one of his journeys ‘the usual weary story—foreigners content with smaller profits, excessive rates of interest charged by English agents, inelastic terms of credit, incompetent travellers’.

  Even the immense overseas investments of the British were no longer primarily imperial investments. Far more British capital was sunk in the United States than in India, and the disparity was rising. Loans within the Empire might be less liable to default, but loans to foreigners were much better gambles. Indian Government loans returned an average of 3.87 per cent: foreign loans were averaging 5.39 per cent. Nor were colonial loans necessarily better for the nation as a whole than foreign loans: much of the money that went to India was used to build factories, cotton mills and jute mills which eventually displaced British exports.

  Of course the Empire was not just so much needless extravagance. There were obvious advantages, as we have already seen, in controlling the sources and prices of one’s raw materials, and in governing one’s own markets. India cost the imperial treasury nothing, the Indians paying not only for their own administration and army, but even for part of the cost of the British troops stationed in their country. Some £16 million in Indian gold went to England annually from India, in payment for services and capital—the nearest thing the Crown received to tribute in the Roman tradition. As for the self-governing colonies, their only drain upon the resources of the Mother Country was the cost of imperial defence, while their outpouring of gold, silver, diamonds, wheat, wool and nickel gave strength to the London money market, the centre of it all.

  The adventures of the New Imperialism were quite another matter. Trade was not following the flag into Uganda, Upper Nigeria, Bechuanaland and the Ashanti country. Burma had to be subsidized. Even Rhodesia had so far drawn a blank. Yet a phenomenal amount of money had been spent, during the past twenty or thirty years, in acquiring these unpromising domains. Wars were fought all over the place, roads and railways were expensively constructed, vast commitments of defence and administration had been added to the imperial burden. British ambitions in South Africa had already snared the Empire into the farcical humiliation of the Jameson Raid, and were now leading it inexorably towards war with the most formidable tribe in Africa, the Boers. Africa, the land of the New Imperialism, was like a quagmire, leading the British ever more deeply into trouble, bringing closer every year a clash between the rival imperialists—if not with the French, whose exploratory parties were then advancing across the continent towards the Nile, then with the Germans, only precariously kept in check by Salisbury’s elegant diplomacy. Out of those steamy hinterlands little of value came, and into the kraals of those incomprehensible cultures few British manufactures found their way. In most of the jumble of protectorates and spheres of influence there was very little government, even under the One Flag, and few British investors were tempted to send their capital down so crooked a drain.

  There were critics even then to point out these unpalatable truths. J. A. Hobson based his case upon these very statistics. Dilke, one of the high prophets of the New Imperialism, thought that by deceiving themselves on the economic aims of the Empire the British would be diverted from more practical purposes of ‘common nationality and racial patriotism’. Salisbury and his advisers well knew that the drive behind the new British Empire in Africa was mostly defensive—keeping others out, securing older possessions, acquiring bargaining stakes. Lesser breeds without the law of Free Trade were setting the pace now, and the activists of the African scramble were the Germans and the French: the British, who really had quite enough Empire already, grabbed by reaction.

  This is not how it seemed to the public at large, nor how the newspapers presented the case. In ten years Britain had acquired new territories fifty times as large as the United Kingdom—what else could that be but profitable enterprise, to make the richest of countries richer yet? It would have been almost inconceivable for the enthusiastic reader of the Daily Mail that summer, scanning the list of imperial acquisitions since, say, that year they all went down to Brighton with Aunt Flora, to suppose that all those exotic new names, those Kadunas and Lusakas, those Bulawayos and Bugandas, did not mean hard cash in the imperial till. The idea that it might all be losing money would have shocked him. The suggestion that money might be better spent on schools, hospitals, pensions, would probably have seemed unpatriotic. The thought that it might all be a colossal error of judgement, and that the British might be better off without any Empire at all, would probably have struck him as quite lunatic.

  11

  So the foreigner’s first impression was right in a way. London was not, like Rome, paved with the spoils and trophies of Empire, because this was only incidentally an imperial capital. The New Imperialism was too new to have planted its own monuments—and too insubstantial, for it was a gusty sort of movement, a sudden gale of emotion, swooping suddenly out of that leaden London sky. It was like a fad: as everybody sang Dan Leno’s songs, or copied Marie Lloyd’s hair, or went bicycling on summer evenings, so they talked excitedly of Greater Britain and the White Man’s Burden, thrilled to Sullivan’s settings of Newbolt’s Songs of the Sea, and dreamt with the Poet Laureate of British victories, land and sea alternately, like schoolboys in bed imagining endless triumphs at the wicket. Beneath this fizz the affairs of England tremendously proceeded, the statesmen practised their delicate art and the Empire-builders did their best.

  1 W. P. Frith (1819–1909) had long endured the sneers of the avant-garde, but the public loved his work, and it was lavishly reproduced. I have a strong fellow-feeling for a craftsman who said of his most successful work, Derby Day, that ‘the acrobats, the nigger minstrels, gypsy fortune tellers, to say nothing of carriages filled with pretty women, together with the sporting element, seemed to offer abundant material for the line of art to which I felt obliged—in the absence of higher gifts—to devote myself’.

  1 Imperial preoccupations, and the taste for exotica that accompanied the New Imperialism, certainly contributed to the running success of the English Rubaiyat, but Edward FitzGerald himself (1809–83) had nothing imperialist to his make-up, and lived almost his entire life as a kind of recluse in Suffolk.

  1 At least one great fortune was based upon this finicky enthusiasm. Marcus Samuel (1853–1927) began as an importer of oriental shells, extended his trade to rice and curios, became interested in petroleum and called his oil company, founded in 1897, after his original commodity: Shell.

  1 Nobody could be much more Anglo-Indian than Yule (1820–89). The son of an East India Company soldier, he served in the Bengal Engineers and married first the daughter of a Bengal civilian and second the daughter of an Anglo-Indian general. He transferred to the Indian political service, and when he came home to England in 1875 was appointed to the Council of India. One of his brothers became British Resident at Hyderabad, the other was killed while commanding the 9th Lancers in the Indian Mutiny.

  1 She sounds a disagreeable woman, but she was not really cursing, nor am I bowdlerizing her soliloquy: a dam was a small Indian coin, as Wellington knew when he popularized the phrase ‘a twopenny dam’.

  1 There are still sacred cats at Axum, and their character is recognizably akin to that o
f the English Abyssinian—which is now popularly supposed in the cat fancy to be descended from the mummified cats of ancient Egypt.

  2 Nothing symbolized the end of Empire more poignantly than the announcement, with the withdrawal from Uganda in 1962, that there were no more British gorillas.

  1 How different it all looks now! Australians and New Zealanders may still assimilate themselves easily enough, but most Canadians and South Africans are unmistakably alien in England. The Rhodes scholarships still bring hundreds of young ‘colonials’ to Oxford, but there were no Indians at Eton in 1967, and only one African. An occasional Indian and West Indian cricketer still brings grace or gaiety to the county cricket championships, and there is scarcely a city in England that does not have its community of Indians, Pakistanis or West Indians—giving the country a far more imperial look today than it ever had in the age of Empire, and posing problems the Empire-builders never thought of.

  1 A society nothing if not resilient: originally the Colonial Society, in 1928 it turned itself into the Royal Empire Society, and it is now the Royal Commonwealth Society, its premises occupying the same London site throughout.

  2 Successively soldier, journalist, policeman and politician, Vincent (1849–1908) was the first director of criminal investigation at Scotland Yard, but was as widely known for the Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire, which ran into nineteen editions.

  1 Hastings (1732–1818), Governor-General of Bengal under the Company, was accused of a variety of offences—breaking treaties, selling whole Indian districts, hiring out British troops to a local despot. He was acquitted of all the charges but ruined anyway, pour encourager les autres.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Overlords

  God save Ireland, said the heroes,

  God save Ireland, said they all.

  Whether on the scaffold high,

  Or on the battlefield we die,

  O, what matter when for Ireland dear we fall.

  T. D. Sullivan

  24

  BY Telford’s road or Stephenson’s railway line the British travelled to Holyhead in Anglesey: and sailing out to sea through a mesh of forts and stoneworks, in four hours the packet-boat took them to Kingstown. It had once been called Dunleary, but was renamed in honour of a visit by King George IV in 1821.1 For hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, for generations of British administrators, for a whole class of Anglo-Irish gentry, this was the gateway to the nearest and most fateful of all the British possessions: Ireland.

  It was 750 years since Henry II had sent his first English armies to the sister isle, but the British had never quite succeeded in subduing it. It lay there through the centuries festering, a drain on English wealth, a prod often to English consciences. To most Englishmen it was an integral part of the kingdom, like Scotland. The Irishman was only an ornery and inconsequential kind of Briton, talking a comical dialect and pursuing a misguided form of Christianity: if he rebelled against English sovereignty he was guilty of plain treason, like any other subject of the Crown. To the Irish patriot, on the other hand, Ireland was a nation and the Irish were a race: possessing their own language, honouring the most ancient Christian church in the West, with arts and mores and aspirations all their own—an oppressed people whose nationality was being deliberately stifled, so that by the 1890s Gaelic was alive only in a few remote corners of the island, and the land lay ruined and empty. And to plague the issue further still, there were many people on both shores who suffered from a dichotomy of these views, who were not at all sure where the right lay, or what Ireland really was, or what it should mean to be Irish.

  Before 1800 Ireland had a parliament of its own, of a kind. It met in handsome classical premises in the centre of Dublin, with its own Houses of Lords and Commons, but since 1692 no Catholics had been eligible to sit in it, so that the native Irish were virtually unrepresented. The Act of Union of 1800 abolished it anyway, and united the English and Irish Parliaments at Westminster; Irish constituencies now sent their members to the Imperial House of Commons, and representative Irish peers sat in the House of Lords in London. Under Gladstone two Home Rule bills had been introduced, intended to revive the Irish Parliament, and give it autonomy in internal affairs. The first had been rejected by the Commons, and led to Chamberlain’s defection from the Liberal Party; the second was thrown out by the Lords and led to Gladstone’s fall, the return to power of the Conservative-Unionists, and the triumph of the New Imperialism.

  The Protestant north-east of Ireland, Ulster, flourished moderately. Its separate character had been moulded early in the seventeenth century, when its aristocracy had fought an unsuccessful campaign against the English, and their lands had been distributed among immigrant settlers, mostly Lowland Scots. Few of its people wanted Home Rule, and in Belfast there were prosperous shipbuilding and textile industries. The Catholic south was a different world. Half-emptied by the fearful potato famine of the 1840s, drained still further by mass migrations abroad, deprived of industry, bled of cash, impoverished by bad agriculture and generations of absentee landlordism, the green landscape lay there stagnant and forlorn. The population of Ireland had been 8 million in 1841: it was 5 million in 1897. Its literacy rate was little higher than Burma’s. Its death-rate was actually rising, and Dublin’s was higher than any other European city’s. Its peasantry was weakened by malnutrition and dulled by a fatalistic form of Catholicism that was peculiarly its own. Its countryside, one of the most fertile in Europe, was neglected and dilapidated—more than 60 per cent of it given up to grass, a proportion unparalleled in the world, and only about 11 per cent ploughed. The chief ambition of young Irishmen was simply to leave: to the cities first, out of the morose countryside, to Liverpool or London next, to America or Australia best of all. Marriages were fewer, and happened later, than in any other country: of women between 15 and 45, only one in three was married. This was a sick, old country, peopled by absent friends. A standard decoration of the Irish cottage was the daguerrotype of a daughter far away, with her rings and ornaments painted in gold upon the photograph. The country hummed with suggestions of subversion, but peace was maintained in a sullen equilibrium. This was a moment of pause. A series of Land Acts had at least relieved the peasants of their worst social burdens: they had security of tenure now; Ireland no longer often saw the horrible old scenes of peasant eviction, helmeted constables shamefacedly at the gate while the tenants, prodded by an impatient bailiff, stumbled out with their pathetic bits and pieces. The Conservative-Unionists hoped to conciliate the Irish by material concessions—‘killing Home Rule by kindness’—and were generous with grants for agricultural improvement, and loans to help the peasantry buy its own land.

  Home Rule seemed a dead letter. Charles Stewart Parnell, that fascinating genius of Irish liberty, had died in 1891, and though the spell of his character lived on, still some of the fire had left the movement.1 Gladstone was at death’s door. The British were cock-a-hoop with Empire. The Irish Home Rulers at Westminster could do little but protest or boycott.2 In the imperial context, set beside the marvels of African expansion, or the Great Game, Ireland’s anxieties seemed nagging and parochial. The island brooded impotently.

  2

  Implanted in this melancholy setting were the Anglo-Irish, successors to settlers whose Englishness had been enforced as a matter of royal policy; under the fourteenth-century Statutes of Kilkenny they had been forbidden to intermarry with the Irish, to speak Gaelic or even to behave in Irish ways. This was the Protestant Ascendancy, an imperial ruling caste. Its members could be English-born, English-descended, or simply Anglicized Irish. Though often poor they were usually gentlemanly, and they owned most of the large Irish estates—sometimes complete communities of their own, the smithy, the sawmill, the carpenter’s shop, the laundry, the piggery, the dairy, the kennels, all clustered around the big ungainly house with its lawns and rhododendrons. From their ranks chiefly sprang the hunting and shooting men, healthy and imperturbable, whose
dash was legendary throughout the Empire, and who represented for many the true Irish character: for the Anglo-Irish were the Middle Nation, English to the Irish, Irish to the English. They shared many of the common settlers’ attitudes. They loved the Mother Country in the principle, but not always in the practice. They were separated from the native peasantry by barriers of caste and religion, but sometimes they went native themselves, and embraced the Irish cause ferociously. The Pale, the circuit of delectable residential country around Dublin, had been traditionally their preserve since Henry II’s Anglo-Norman barons settled and fortified it: and one of the saddest imperial allusions in the language was the contemptuous epithet ‘beyond the pale’—not quite a white man, not a pukka sahib, Irish in fact.

  At Duckett’s Grove in County Carlow one Anglo-Irish landlord, William Duckett, Esquire, Deputy Lieutenant, celebrated the Diamond Jubilee with a fête. The Union Jack flew from a turret of the great bleak mansion, and the gardens were gay with bunting, white cloths on trestle tables, the scrubbed white frocks of the tenantry and the ribbons of the presiding gentry. There was a nourishing al fresco dinner for the estate employees and their families—150 souls in all, many of them in the Duckett service all their lives, and all of them given a holiday that day with full wages. The health was drunk of Mr and Mrs Duckett and Miss Olive Thompson (locally known, we are told, as ‘The Children’s Friend’). Plaques were distributed among the young people, engraved with portraits of Queen Victoria, and there were games all afternoon on the lawn, while the old ladies sat chatting in the shade, remembering the Jubilee of ’87, the celebrations at the end of the Crimean War, the Queen’s Coronation sixty years before, or best of all the astonishing festivities, it seemed only yesterday, when the 70-year-old Mr Duckett, game as ever, had brought home his new bride and her daughter Miss Olive Thompson, and the tenants had taken the horse from the carriage shafts and pulled the ladies up the drive themselves, cheering and laughing, through the castellated gatehouse and up the long drive with its sculpted images of ‘queens and animals and I don’t know what’.1