The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  Missionaries were not only pathfinders of empire, and even, at times, pacifiers. Through their connections with British churches they linked the empire with the ordinary men, women and children who collected money for and promoted their activities. One of these helpers, Mrs Jellyby, was caricatured by Dickens in Bleak House (1851) as a creature who ‘could see nothing nearer than Africa’ and neglected her family duties in favour of work for the mission settlement of ‘Borriboola-Gha’ on the banks of the Niger. But then Dickens had no time for the noble savage – ‘His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility, nonsense.’20 Nonetheless, thousands of Dickens’s countrymen went to considerable effort to provide for the metamorphosis of such creatures into useful Christians.

  Subscribers to missions were encouraged to donate money, Bibles and material by sheaves of tracts which outlined the wretchedness and depravity of the heathen. Lurid accounts were presented of Indian infanticide, sati, idolatry and superstitions. From the Pacific and Africa came stories of tribal warfare, cannibalism, domestic slavery and thinly veiled details of sexual promiscuity. There were in central Africa vices which ‘cannot be explained or named for shame’. According to one exasperated missionary, ‘The imagination of the Kaffir runs to seed after puberty. It would be safer to say it runs to sex,’ which explained why, after the age of fifteen, white pupils surpassed blacks!21 Church- and chapel-goers in Britain were all conscious of the vastness of the task which faced the missionaries, and knew too well what lay behind the words of Bishop Heber’s popular hymn for foreign missions:

  What though the spicy breezes

  Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle,

  Though every prospect pleases

  And only man is vile …

  Interestingly, these lines were written in a Shropshire parsonage, before their author set foot in India.

  * * *

  The soldier, like the missionary, was also seen as a civiliser. This was a period of almost continual imperial warfare. Between 1817 and 1878 there were intermittent campaigns against the tribes of the eastern Cape, known indiscriminately as Kaffirs, and in 1879 a British army invaded Zululand. An expedition entered Abyssinia in 1867 to rescue hostages held by the Emperor Theodore, and in 1873–4 there was a large-scale punitive war against the Asante of the Gold Coast. The army in India fought campaigns in Burma (1824 and 1853), Afghanistan (1838–42 and 1878–80), conquered the Sind (1843) and the Punjab (1845–6 and 1848–9), and suppressed the Mutiny (1857–8).

  From time to time large columns penetrated the North-West Frontier punishing its notoriously recalcitrant tribesmen. There were also campaigns in New Zealand fought on behalf of the colonists against the Maoris between 1846 and 1870. A rebellion was put down in Canada in 1837, China was attacked three times between 1839 and 1860, Persia once in 1856.

  The British press gave extensive coverage to the earlier campaigns, usually reproducing stories from local papers, official despatches and letters from men serving at the front. On 10 January 1840 The Standard reprinted the Bengal Gazette’s account of operations in Afghanistan together with despatches from senior officers there. The same paper also came by some servicemen’s letters, including one with an eyewitness account of the drowning of men and horses of the 16th Lancers during the march to Kabul.22 Similar sources were used by the Sun during 1847 for its pieces on the frontier campaigns in New Zealand and Cape Colony.

  Within the next ten years there was a revolution in journalism which completely transformed the treatment of imperial news. The nearness of the Crimea had allowed pressmen, the first war correspondents, to follow the army, compile reports, and send them back by fast steamer and train for publication ten to fourteen days later. The time lapse was reduced to forty-eight hours in May 1855, when a telegraph office was established at Balaklava, the army’s base. Henceforward, the wars of empire were covered first-hand. War correspondents accompanied British forces during the Indian Mutiny, the 1859–60 China War, and the Abyssinian, Asante, Afghan and Zulu campaigns. Each of these wars gained a further immediacy through the reproduction as engravings of on-the-spot sketches and photographs in the Illustrated London News, which had been founded in 1842. Ten years later it was running pictures of scenes from the fighting in Cape Colony, including a lively and realistic drawing of the 76th Highlanders skirmishing in the bush, which was accompanied by a description of the action by the officer-artist.23 The popularity of these illustrations was so great that by the 1870s specially commissioned war artists were being sent to the front alongside reporters.

  Amateur journalists and artists held their own for many years. Some families who received letters from soldiers passed them to the local newspaper for publication. These descriptions of campaign life often had a striking verisimilitude. One, written by an unknown 78th Highlander after the Cawnpore massacre and published in the Aberdeen Chronicle in October 1857, may stand for many others:

  It [the massacre] made our blood boil with rage, and I could later hear the men of the 78th saying one among another, ‘I will never spare a man with a black face’… I have seen some terrible sights. Oh dear! it would make you sick if I were to tell you all I have witnessed during the short time I have been in Bengal. I am sick tired of it, as we have much to do. There is only a handful of us and we have to encounter about nineteen to one of us, and sometimes more. I have had some narrow escapes lately, and I am in danger of my life every moment: but I still live in hopes that I will be spared to see this affair finished and return home to Scotland again. He will be a lucky dog, however, who gets through it safe … We have hard marching and hard fighting, with very little to eat; and as our clothes and shoes are nearly worn out, we are just like so many raggamuffins. However we are keeping our spunk up in the hopes of the ‘good time’ coming.

  Those who pored over this must have felt a thrill of admiration for the stamina and bravery of their countrymen. No other imperial war had been reported in Britain in such detail or with such a wealth of eyewitness detail. Most of it was horrific; the News of the World promised its readers the ‘fullest and exclusive details of Indian atrocities’ in November 1857. Its pages and those of the other papers were full of blood-chilling accounts of the random slaughter of men, women and children and hints of darker, unprintable outrages by the mutinous sepoys. Assailed by these hideous tales, there was a universal demand for retribution. Thus a speaker in the usually sedate Cambridge Union: ‘When the rebellion has been crushed from the Himalayas to Comorin; when every gibbet is red with blood; when every bayonet creaks beneath its ghastly burden; when the ground in front of every cannon is strewn with rags, and flesh, and shattered bone – then talk of mercy.’24 Similar bloodthirsty rhetoric poured from editorials and pulpits.

  What happened in India during 1857 and 1858 had a profound impact on British thinking about the empire and its peoples. According to their masters, the Indians had for many years been the beneficiaries of a humane system of government, deliberately contrived to uplift them and modernise their country. In the light of this, the Mutiny was both an act of betrayal and a wilful rejection of progress. Had the British failed to penetrate into the interior of the Indian mind? The National Review thought so: ‘The CHILD and the SAVAGE lie very deep at the foundations of their [the Indians’] being. The varnish of civilisation is very thin, and is put off as promptly as a garment.’25 If this were so, and the events in India strongly suggested it, then much humanitarian endeavour had been in vain. Furthermore, the premises on which it had been based were false. Reclamation of the ‘savage’ through exposure to European religion and knowledge might not be possible because of indelible flaws within his character.

  The Indian Mutiny strengthened British racism and threw doubt on the gospel of the philanthropists. The gulf that was emerging between the two approaches to empire was dramatically revealed during the repercussions that followed the Morant Bay insurrection in Jamaica at the end of 1865. Unrest and unemployment among the black population had been causing te
nsion throughout the island for some time. A riot at Morant Bay, in which several white officials and militiamen were killed, was interpreted by the governor, Edward Eyre, as a signal for a rebellion, equal in scale and ferocity to the Indian Mutiny. Immediately, and in some ignorance as to what exactly was happening, he declared martial law and launched a reign of terror in the Blue Mountains of western Jamaica. Something of its flavour, and the state of mind of those ordered to enforce it, is revealed by a message sent by Colonel Thomas Hobbs of the 6th Regiment describing the execution of suspected rebels: ‘I … adopted a plan which struck immense terror into these wretched men, FAR more than death, which is, I caused them to hang each other. They entreat to be shot to avoid this.’26 It is highly likely that many who died this way were unconnected with the disturbances. Hundreds were hanged, including the Reverend G.W. Gordon, a black Baptist minister, and many more flogged. Where trials were held they were short and summary.

  When reports of the uprising first reached Britain, Eyre was congratulated for having taken swift and vigorous measures which had prevented a massacre of the colony’s 15,000 whites by half a million blacks. A satirical magazine, Fun, printed a cartoon in which a manic negro, wielding a firebrand and a machete, cavorts over the corpses of white women and children, an unmistakeable reminder of the Mutiny. Underneath is the caption, ‘Am I a man and a brother?’ a sneering reference to the anti-slavery campaign’s motto, ‘I am a man and a brother’.

  Once the grim details of Eyre’s operations had filtered back to Britain, there was a unanimous cry from every humanitarian lobby for his prosecution for murder. In response to this clamour, a committee was hastily organised for Eyre’s defence as the saviour of Jamaica. Intellectual and literary heavyweights attached themselves to both camps: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Kingsley and Dickens stood by Eyre, John Stuart Mill and Darwin against him. Much of the debate was emotional and focussed on the victims, the Jamaican blacks, who, claimed Eyre’s partisans, had brought their misfortunes on themselves through laziness. Edward Cardwell, the Whig Colonial Secretary, considered the youth of Jamaica ‘idle, vicious and profligate’, an opinion quoted approvingly by the Quarterly Review, which feared that the entire negro population of the West Indies was being ‘driven back to its ancestral barbarism’.27 The controversy spluttered on for the rest of 1866; Eyre was sacked by the Whig-Liberal ministry, but, like its Tory successor it refused to indict him. He was not re-employed and died in 1900.

  The significance of the Eyre scandal lay in the fact that it revealed a substantial body of intellectually respectable opinion which believed that a large proportion of the empire’s subjects were impervious to improvement and needed a firm hand to keep them in order. Humanitarians had misjudged the ‘savage’: he was a fickle creature whose capacity for moral and intellectual elevation was limited. For some, his role within the empire was that of a permanent underdog. Nevertheless, the fuss that had been made about Eyre acted as a brake on others of like mind. In 1879, General Sir Garnet Wolseley, commander-in-chief in South Africa, had reluctantly to abandon a plan to unleash the Swazis against the Zulus. He wrote:

  I have to think of the howling Societies at home who have sympathy with all black men whilst they care nothing for the miseries inflicted on their own kith and kin who have the misfortune to be located near these interesting niggers.28

  The Eyre debate coincided with a wider political controversy over the empire’s future. There existed in Liberal, Nonconformist and free trade circles a fear that the empire engendered belligerent nationalism and militarism, which undermined what they saw as Britain’s real national virtues, thrift and industriousness. John Bright took a characteristically extreme standpoint when he claimed that, ‘Inasmuch as supremacy of the seas means arrogance and the assumption of dictatorial power on the part of this country, the sooner it becomes obsolete the better.’ Waving cudgels had no justification in a world where free trade was increasing the interdependence of nations and reducing the friction which had formerly been the source of wars. As for the colonies, they had no economic value and the bill for their defence and administration was an expensive luxury.

  Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Cape Colony were all moving towards self-government and there seemed no reason why, in the near future, they should not detach themselves from Britain as America had done. The Times rejected this argument and, in an editorial of 4 February 1862, asserted that the white colonies were ‘uniformly prosperous, and desirous of maintaining their connexion with the mother country and each other’, and that their present felicitous state was ‘a triumph of civilisation’ of which Britain ought to be proud. Many colonists agreed. A New Zealand settler predicted that his colony would ‘rise as a community to the enviable status of their forefathers, and then they would form the stoutest of all bulwarks to guard our noblest of privileges, civil and religious liberty.’29 Potential colonists were anxious that Britain kept its empire. The working-class journal, the Bee Hive, believed that the colonies belonged to the whole nation and collected 100,000 signatures for a petition which asked the Queen to promote state-funded emigration schemes for the unemployed.

  The nearest the government came to taking imperial disengagement seriously was in 1865, when a parliamentary committee recommended the evacuation of tiny stations on the West African coast. Nothing came of the proposal, largely because of the practical difficulties and uncertainty about what would replace British rule. The anti-imperialists had always been a small lobby making a great deal of noise about an issue which aroused little public interest. Moreover, predictions that the world was about to enter a golden age of harmony and free trade were dramatically disproved by the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Danish war of 1863, and the Austro-Prussian war of 1866. Nor did it make much political sense to contemplate disbandment of empire when Britain’s rivals were engaged in empire-building: Russia was advancing into central Asia and France had completed the subjugation of Algeria in 1860 and Cochin China (Viet Nam) in 1867.

  Benjamin Disraeli viewed the mutable world of the 1860s with misgivings. He was the most striking and influential figure within the Conservative party, which he led after 1868. His advancement within a party in which cleverness was mistrusted had not been easy. Flamboyant, Jewish, a novelist by profession and frequently strapped for cash, Disraeli once likened his career to the ascent of a ‘greasy pole’. But he was, as he would have been the first to admit, the most talented figure in a party which had not won a general election since 1841, and whose only taste of power in the intervening years had been as partners in a couple of coalitions. It entered office again in July 1866 with Lord Derby as Prime Minister and Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer and the power behind the throne.

  Disraeli had been angered by every turn of Liberal foreign and imperial policy, which he considered fainthearted. As a pragmatist, he realised that Britain had to maintain its standing as a global power actively, and if necessary forcefully, pursuing its interests. This could only be done if Britain maintained and strengthened her overseas empire for it was these possessions, particularly India, which made Britain strong and respected. The empire was an asset to be cherished. Disraeli the politician detected a reservoir of imperial and patriotic sentiment among the electorate, and he intended to tap it in the interests of his party. Within a year of taking office, and with Disraeli’s encouragement, the government demonstrated that Britain was still a power to be reckoned with. In the summer of 1867 an Anglo-Indian army landed on the Abyssinian coast, marched inland, and stormed Magdala. where the Emperor Theodore had been holding a number of European prisoners, including British officials. The Abyssinian expedition was a minor triumph and proved that the spirit of Palmerston was alive and his mantle had fallen on Disraeli.

  Success in Africa did not bring Disraeli an election victory. In 1868 the Liberals under Gladstone were returned and with them a foreign and imperial policy based upon high-minded abstract principles. Disraeli continued to beat the patriotic drum, defendi
ng the monarchy from the assaults of Liberal republicans, and exposing his opponents’ failure to uphold British interests abroad. Much of what he had to say was contrived to arouse the national pride of the new working-class electorate. They were the target of a seminal speech, delivered at the Crystal Palace in June 1872:

  When I say ‘Conservative’, I use the word in its purest and loftiest sense. I mean that the people of England, and especially the working classes of England, are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness – that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country.

  He went on to pledge himself and his party to maintain all those institutions, particularly the empire. Henceforward, the Conservative party was closely identified with patriotism, the monarchy and the empire.

  In 1874 the Conservatives were returned to power, not so much because of their John Bullishness, but because the Liberals had run out of steam and the electorate was keen for a change. The next six years revealed the nature of Disraeli’s populist imperialism. In practice it followed lines laid down by Palmerston: Ottoman integrity and Indian security had to be upheld at all costs and informal empire enforced with vigour. The completion of the Franco-Egyptian-financed Suez Canal in 1869 had increased the need for Britain to remain the dominant power in the Middle East, since it was now India’s lifeline. By a feat of legerdemain, Disraeli secured a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company in 1875 and added the Canal to Britain’s unofficial empire.