Finally, finally, the British won through. The Atlantic trade effectively ended, the navy shifted its attention to East Africa, and British steam power finally drove out the slave traders there too. Slavery does still exist in parts of Africa and elsewhere, and campaigns to extirpate it are ongoing, yet the problem is less than it used to be. Boswell’s ‘gates of mercy’ may finally be closing.
From the point of view of British exceptionalism, it needs to be stated that the British campaign against the slave trade was, historically speaking, remarkable. Never before had any country, for purely moral reasons, committed so much money, men and diplomatic capital to a cause so positively injurious to the national economic interest. Even today, with the rich world overflowing with material plenty, it seems oddly difficult for most wealthy countries to meet their self-imposed target of making 7/10 of one penny in every pound available to the developing world. To state a fact, however, is not to make a moral judgement. If a school bully spends an hour thumping someone in the school playground, he does not all of a sudden cover himself in glory for finally choosing to stop.
The British may have been slow to acquire the taste for muscular do-gooding, but it’s a taste that lingers still today. There are nations more generous than we are when it comes to handing out development aid, but not one that commits a greater share of national income to military-backed peacekeeping and humanitarian missions. Our taste for combining military force with moral intent is one that our forebears would certainly have recognised. Lord Palmerston—the Victorian anti-slaver and gunboat diplomat—would surely be proud.
* The quote is from the remarkable Olaudah Equiano, who was enslaved in Gambia, transported to the British West Indies and survived to write a notable account of his experiences.
* France, with the temporary fervour of revolution, had done so briefly in 1794. A few northern states had already done so in the USA.
THE RELUCTANT FATHER
In 1850, the scale of British global leadership was at an all-time high. In industry, commerce, finance, technology and sheer naval muscle Britain was the world leader. Furthermore, British ascendancy had been around a long time. France’s imperial and naval challenge had more or less been ended by the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763 (the American war proving to be a nasty, but temporary, setback). Britain’s industrialization had enjoyed a headstart of at least fifty years over its war-torn European rivals. Knowing all this, you might well be inclined to guess that the British Empire would be pretty much at the peak of its power too. More colonies might tumble into the bag later on, but the colonial knapsack would already be bulging with goodies.
That picture is entirely true—or rather, entirely false. Or, if we’re to be entirely honest, then it’s both true and false, utterly precise and wholly misleading. If that explanation hasn’t yet completely clarified things, then perhaps some geography will.
At first glance, the striking fact about the map of Britain’s possessions in 1713 is that it’s not all that different from the same map 140 years later. There have been substantial territorial gains (in Canada and India) and one major loss (the breakaway American colonies). Australia, however, was still largely unsettled; Britain’s African colonies little more than spots of colour on the coasts; Canada divided between its east and west coasts. Even in India, the 1850 map is somewhat deceptive. The country wasn’t a colony, in the fairly straightforward way that the American states had been colonies. Much of India was still run by theoretically autonomous princely states. The rest of it was not run by Whitehall, or any Whitehall agency; it had been taken over and was still run by private enterprise in the shape of the East India Company, whose shares could be bought and sold on the stock market. (Because this last fact is a reasonably familiar one, it’s easy to overlook its tremendous oddness. In principle, if you’d been rich enough, you could simply have made a dawn raid on the stock market and bought India. Since the country accounted for roughly one fifth of the world’s population in 1850, and one seventh of world GDP, that’s roughly equivalent to being able to buy China today.)
Overall, then, in 1850 the geographical extent of the British Empire as acquired by and administered from Whitehall was little changed from 1713. Arguably the lost American colonies represented a bigger loss than could be offset by the (limited) gains made in Australia and the (chilly) ones made in Canada. Viewed in that light, Britain’s long period of world dominance seems to have profited her, in geopolitical terms, almost nothing. What in hooting heck had she been doing?
The answer is simple: Britain had been consciously, carefully and brilliantly building the most extensive empire in the history of humanity—but the empire she built so busily was strategic and commercial in nature, not primarily territorial. Glance back at those maps. The most striking difference between the two is both obvious and easy to overlook: it’s all those tiny little dots and splodges of colour—Malta, Gibraltar, Ascension Island, St Helena, Bermuda, the Leeward and Windward Islands, Rio de Janeiro, the Falkland Islands, Aden, Cape Colony, Mauritius, Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney and the rest. In geographical extent, those fine places may have amounted to little more than a handful of Iowa cornfields, but in strategic terms, in the age before mechanized land transport, they dominated the world. Through the era of the Pax Britannica, until the dawn of the twentieth century, no other country in the world operated a naval base outside home waters. Britain had almost forty, including all the most important ones.* It didn’t simply have the strongest navy in European waters; it had the strongest navy in every other ocean of the world as well, including the Pacific. This, in effect, was Britain’s first empire, the strategic empire, negligible in territory, vast in consequence; the empire upon which everything else depended.
That string of naval bases had two purposes. First, they enabled Britain to impose her Pax Britannica on the rest of the world, whether the rest of the world liked it or not. Second, they kept the sea lanes clear of warfare and piracy, so that everyone could get down to the one thing that, in British eyes, genuinely mattered: the ordinary, everyday business of making shedloads of money. In the mid-nineteenth century, Britain was not merely the world’s most evolved industrial economy, she was also, by far, its most international. European countries didn’t trade as much, and they traded mostly with each other. Not so Britain, for whom Europe accounted for little more than a third of imports and exports. The rest of the trade was with the world: with the United States, India, Latin America, everywhere.
This, then, was the second empire, the commercial empire, invisible, omnipresent, lucrative. If the strategic empire was the one that mattered geopolitically, the commercial one was the bit that brought home the bacon. As for the third possible form of empire—an empire of territory and dominion—who on earth would want such a thing? The American colonies might have been lost, but trade and investment with the new United States had vastly increased. Just as important, all the expense and bother of government were now someone else’s headache. Instead of throwing British tea into Boston harbour, those plaguey Americans now had to tax themselves, police themselves, defend themselves, make hard political choices themselves. From the British perspective, it was a win-win outcome. So deeply ingrained was the British opposition to acquiring needless overseas territories that the word ‘empire’ was almost never used. Napoleon Bonaparte had been an emperor; the very word now connoted tyranny, the antithesis of British values.
Obviously enough, something changed. By the end of the century, huge swaths of Africa lay under the British flag. The colonies in Canada and Australia had filled out to the maximum limits of geography. India was now ruled direct from Whitehall, the Queen had become its Empress, and further territories had been added to the north, east and west of the country too. The ideology had shifted as well. No longer did empire suggest something suspiciously French; empire now was Britain’s crowning glory, her chief strength, the prime vessel for her God-given role as bringer of civilization. To the progenitors of this new imperi
al culture, the more elephants, tigers and dancing tribespeople, the better. (An attitude the Queen still pays for today. A British monarch? She must love dancing tribespeople. Can’t get enough of them. Bring on the bongo drums.)
It would be all too easy to interpret the change as simple hypocrisy, to assume that the powerful will always be greedy for territory, no matter what the rhetoric might claim. Yet such an explanation falls wide of the mark. The strange, counterintuitive fact is this: the British Empire was born of weakness, a response to competition, the defensive reaction to a changing world.
The examples are too numerous to list in full, but a handful of cases (mostly from the 1870s and 1880s) will make the point. Afghanistan and Baluchistan were folded into the British Empire, for fear of the Russians. Burma was invaded and incorporated for fear of the French. Egypt was made a protectorate, largely because of worries over French influence. Territory was snatched in South and East Africa, because of fears over Germany. Islands in the western Pacific went the same way and for the same reason, New Guinea being divided half and half between the two countries. In West Africa, Nigeria sprang into being as a result of British alarm over French and German acquisitions.
In almost every case, the result for the British government was worse afterwards than it had been before. Nice as it might be for Edwardian schoolkids to drool over their pink-coloured maps, the simple fact is the world in 1913 was a far less friendly place for Britain than the world of 1850. In that earlier, happier world, for example, East Africa had been under the influence of the sultan of Zanzibar. The sultan knew that he needed to keep the British sweet, and so he did. The British could trade as they pleased with the whole of East Africa; they had all the security they needed, and zero expense, zero responsibility. Scroll forward fifty years, and Britain had lost in every conceivable way. Trade with what is now Tanzania had disappeared because it had become a German colony. Trade with the rest of East Africa continued, but now had to be paid for with all the troubles and expense of colonial administration. This third empire—an empire of territory, government, expense and responsibility—was precisely the one that Britain had sought to avoid.
The most obviously exceptional fact about the British Empire is its sheer extent: one quarter of the land and population of the earth; domination of the oceans; the sun never setting and all that. Just as exceptional, though, was the way in which empire came into being: from private enterprise more than public intention (in the early period); from growing weakness more than growing strength (in the later). Britain never, as the Victorian historian Sir John Seeley put it, acquired her empire ‘in a fit of absence of mind’, but that’s not to say that the empire she’d ended up with was the one she’d wanted. Britain had wanted, and carefully built, her first empire, the one of naval bases and dominance of the sea lanes. She had also wanted, and wanted badly, her second empire, the one of trading and investment. The third empire was never quite like that. As the historian Bernard Porter puts it:
There was no deliberate intention on the part of the Foreign or Colonial Offices to colonise the world in order to make things easier for the British capitalist—rather the reverse. Britain would much have preferred to extend her trade without extending her political control. But things seemed to be taken out of her hands. The area of British economic interest in one or two places hardened into areas of overt colonial or near-colonial domination, by a natural process, almost, of reaction and counter-reaction. Victorians grumbled at the responsibilities thus incurred, but they had about as much right to complain as a reluctant father-to-be. They did not want what happened, but they had wanted the thing which had made it happen in the first place.
Chastity, unsurprisingly, was never an option.
* ‘Five strategic keys lock up the globe,’ gloated Admiral (later First Sea Lord) Jackie Fisher, and Britain had them all: Dover, Gibraltar, the Cape, Alexandria and Singapore.
BOMBAY DIRECT
I am just celebrating my fortieth birthday, I’ve got enough socks and I don’t wear ties. Faced with the alarming prospect of finding me a present, my parents-in-law struck on an inspired solution: an original copy of The Times dating from April 1860, and a copy of the Sun dating from April 1797.
The Sun is the more obviously interesting one of the pair. In April 1797, the country was at war with revolutionary France, the mutiny of the fleet at Spithead was in full swing, and the newspaper contains the full text of Admiral Bridport’s address to the seamen of the fleet. Here’s a representative chunk:
You have a father in your KING, who values your hitherto gallant Character—You have Friends in your Commanders, who have spent the prime of their lives in the honourable line of the Wooden Walls of England…Consider this Address as the overflowing of a heart panting for the preservation of the Honour and Happiness of his native Land of Liberty; and let me trust, when next my ears are saluted with Three Cheers, that I shall not be ashamed to hear that animating sound, Rule Britannia, and God Save the King.
They don’t make admirals like that any more, more’s the pity, though it would be better pay which got the seamen back to work, not panting hearts at the Admiralty.
Major as the mutiny was, however, it didn’t make the front page, which was given over to advertisements—the universal layout for British daily papers up until 1900. The ads are much as you might expect. The land, goods and services being pitched include a new play, some grazing land, a book on stenography and the magnificent Cardiac Tincture (‘In a stroke of the Dead Palsy I had the advice of the ablest Physicians…[but] continued helpless, crawling upon crutches…with Bilious Complaints and Costiveness and…a general numbness in my flesh. In this deplorable condition, a friend brought me a Bottle of Cardiac Tincture and a Box of the Detergent Pills…’)
Sixty years on and the ads have changed. The Times’ front page is crowded, dense with advertising, which indeed dominates the entire newspaper. The ads are grouped by theme, kicking off with some personal items (‘LOST, April 8, a LIVER-COLOURED RETRIEVER…TEN SHILLINGS and SIXPENCE REWARD’) and continuing with notices for concerts, exhibitions, pleasure trips and suchlike. The most striking element of the front page, however, is two full columns, close printed, of advertisements by shippers offering to carry freight and passengers overseas, with a further column and a half on the following page. In this one randomly chosen newspaper, there are over 150 ships mentioned (nearly all of them ‘splendid’ or ‘fine and fast-sailing’), sailing off to destinations including Bombay, ‘Kurrachee’, Calcutta, Madras, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington, Alexandria, the Cape of Good Hope, Port Natal, New York, Canada, California, Vancouver Island, Brazil and Argentina.
These ships represented the commercial muscle of the world’s most impressive trading nation. They also, however, represented something just as important, and much less spoken of: the British willingness to jump on a ship and set sail for foreign shores. The outward migration started small. From Columbus’s 1492 landfall to 1820, most migration to the Americas was coerced, with roughly three slaves arriving (8.7 million in total) for every one free European (2.7 million). Those Europeans divided into roughly equal thirds of English/British, Spanish and Portugese, but the crude totals conceal different trajectories. Iberian emigration started earlier, peaked sooner and declined; while English/British emigration started later and went on growing. Through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Britain was the largest source of emigrants in Europe, with an annual average of 3,500 people leaving, mostly for the New World (some sources put the total nearer 6,000). The migrants were mostly Scots and Irish, mostly men, mostly in the prime of their life.
These outflows may have been small, but they mattered. In 1756, the Seven Years War broke out between Britain and France, a battle for global supremacy, with the whole of North America up for grabs. As we know, Britain won that struggle, thanks to Pitt’s leadership, the navy and British financial might. But there’s another explanation, every bit as importa
nt. The population of British North America was over one million, the entire population of ‘New France’ just fifty thousand. New France may have looked enormous on the map, but it was a huge sweep of emptiness, a bold idea signifying nothing. If you want to build an empire, you need to be prepared to leave home.
Those million anglophone Americans were enough decisively to alter the tide of history, but their numbers provided little clue to the deluge that was to follow. In the century between Waterloo and the First World War, around 60 million Europeans would leave for the New World, and still more for Africa, Australasia and elsewhere. Britain’s most significant export over this period wasn’t cotton, or iron, or arms, or ships, but people. We lack detailed statistics for the emigration in the early part of the century, but there’s no doubt at all that Britain was by far the most important source of European migrants to non-European destinations. In the period 1846-50, for instance, it’s estimated that the United Kingdom accounted for a gob-smacking 78 per cent of all emigration from Europe. In the period before 1846, Britain’s share was, if anything, higher. Even during the second half of the century when other parts of Europe started to catch up, the British and Irish wanderlust remains impressive.
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