The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  Emigration to Canada, Australia, South Africa and, after 1840, New Zealand offered salvation for those who might otherwise have languished and died in a homeland which could not provide for them. The government concurred and, between 1819 and 1825, allocated £95,000 in subsidies for pauper emigration. Local authorities followed suit; in 1826 the Board of Guardians of Benenden in Kent paid £14.10 shillings (£14.50p) each to twenty-seven men, women and children for their passage to New York. This was a large outlay, but it was a once and for all measure which relieved ratepayers of people who would have been a burden for many years to come. For this reason, the 1834 Poor Law included provisions for assisting poor emigrants. The 1891 Reformatory and Industrial Schools Act gave their governors the power to send delinquent children to the colonies. Private charities did likewise: the Salvation Army and Dr Barnado’s paid for the passage of orphans to the colonies and, in the sixty years after 1870, 100,000 were settled in Canada alone.1 As in previous centuries, enforced emigration provided a solution to domestic social problems.

  Most nineteenth-century emigrants were not state-funded. When they did receive help, it came from voluntary charities set up for the purpose and based upon the principles of self-help. Typical of this sort of body was the Highlands and Islands Emigration Society which assisted crofters from an economically moribund region to settle on farms in Australia during the 1850s. It was axiomatic that anyone who was industrious and thrifty would prosper in the colonies. A prospectus for the Canadian province of New Brunswick, issued in 1842, claimed that a workman there, drawing wages of between twenty and thirty pounds annually, could in a few years accumulate enough capital to buy his own farm since average land prices were about three shillings (15p) an acre. ‘Were young persons of either sex to engage themselves in this way,’ the author concluded, ‘they would be certain of succeeding to comfort and independence – would become useful members of society – and would strengthen those ties by which this colony is attached to the parent state.’2

  Many underwent this process of regeneration, and some who did wrote home letters which were circulated to encourage other emigrants. Typical was that sent by James Dobbie of Lanark, Canada, to his father and friends in 1826:

  I really bless God every day I rise, that He was ever pleased in the course of his providence to send me and my family to this place. We are not without difficulties here, but they are nothing to your wants in Glasgow; we have always plenty to eat and drink, and have always a little to spare … I wish you would try and do all you can to come out: you will find plenty of work, and hard work, but be assured it will pay well. My stock of cattle consists of one yoke of oxen, three milk cows and three young ones. I have got up a very handsome new house, with the assistance of fifteen young men, it was raised in one day; it is 24 feet in length and 15 in breadth.3

  This must have been very tempting since Clydeside was suffering badly from a trade recession. In January 1827, when handloom weavers’ wages had dropped to four shillings (20p) a week, reports that five times that amount were being paid in America persuaded 800 heads of families to ask the local authorities for assisted passage. High wages, as much as the chance to become a self-sufficient farmer, always acted as a magnet for immigrants. William Lang, an ex-waiter and ward room steward of HMS Lark, jumped ship in Sydney in April 1885. His defence was poverty, for he could only send home twenty-five shillings [£1.25p] a month to his wife and six children in England. ‘The thought of this drove me wild,’ he pleaded, ‘and the temptation of employment on shore at good wages, at a Hotel in the Blue Mountains, enabling me to provide for my little ones proved too great, and I ran.’4 A stony-hearted court martial gave him eighteen months’ hard labour since there had been a rash of similar desertions.

  The conventional immigrant paid the cost of his passage. In 1834 transatlantic fares from Liverpool and Glasgow were as little as twenty-seven shillings (£1.35), for which the passenger endured the misery of sleeping on the deck, and cabins were between £14 and £35. The 12,000-mile journey to Australia and New Zealand cost £23 steerage and £50 with a cabin and, as on all other voyages, passengers had to provide their own food. Those who paid the lowest fares suffered much discomfort. A well-to-do passenger crossing the Atlantic in 1834 peeped into the steerage-class quarters and saw ‘children crying, women screaming, and all tossing about from side to side as the vessel pitched: butter, biscuit, treacle, beef and potatoes all lying higgledy-piggledy or rolling from side to side.’5 Conditions improved and fares fell after 1840 when steamships superseded sailing vessels: in 1898 a single ticket to Australia could cost as little as thirteen guineas (£13.65p).

  It is estimated that 16 million emigrants sailed from Britain between 1815 and 1914, of whom about one in four went to the United States, the rest to the colonies. Periods of recession witnessed the largest exoduses; 1.8 million left Britain between 1901 and 1910, half settling in the white dominions, whose popularity rose steadily during the next sixty years. Ireland provided a large proportion of these immigrants; about 800,000 between 1815 and the 1845–6 famine and an astonishing one million in the seven years after, most of whom were destined for the United States.

  There were also smaller flows of immigration within the empire. When Scots left Clydeside in the 1820s, they were replaced by Gaelic, Catholic Irish (there were 27,000 in Glasgow in 1827), who were willing to take lower wages and so contributed to further emigration from Scotland. A combination of overpopulation, chronic poverty and demands for cheap unskilled labour lay behind the Irish migration as it did that of Indians and Chinese. Indian labourers were recruited for plantation work in the West Indies from the 1850s onwards and Fiji from the 1880s, where they balanced the fall in the native birth rate. The agricultural, mining and railroad boom on the west coast of the United States and Canada drew Chinese, Japanese and, by the turn of the century, Sikhs. In 1852 there were 52,000 Hong Kong Chinese alone in California, and by 1900 15 per cent of the population of British Columbia was Asian.

  The influx of Chinese and Japanese into Canada stirred up racial tensions and official efforts were made to ban Asians.6 This was possible because since the mid-1890s the government had been encouraging mass immigration from central Europe and Russia, where there were plenty of destitute men and women who were glad to accept low wages in the expanding lumber, construction and mining industries of Canada’s midwest. There was racial friction in Australia following the import of Chinese labourers after the gold rush of 1852. For the next forty or so years the Australian trade union movement and later the Labour party agitated against further Chinese immigration on the grounds that it would drive down wages. The result of this campaign was the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act which codified what became known as the ‘White Australia’ policy.

  Non-white labour was required for work which was shunned by British immigrants. Most emigrants had been enticed to the colonies by official promises of cheap land and with it the chance to achieve financial independence. It was universally accepted in Australia and New Zealand, as it had been in North America, that the original occupants of the land had forfeited their rights of possession by their failure to use it productively. Landing in New Zealand in 1845, Surgeon Pine was dismayed to find, ‘Its fields are uncultivated … its mines unworked; its rivers unnavigated.’ He automatically concluded that the country should become the property of ‘intelligent people of the old world.’7 They were already there, introduced by the New Zealand Company, whose guiding spirit was Colonel Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He was a singleminded enthusiast for emigration which, he believed, had to be practised with scientific precision so that the fledgling colony would have a proper balance of men and women, landowners and labourers. Gibbon had an elastic conscience (he had once allegedly abducted an heiress) which made it easy for him to persuade the Maoris to forsake their lands in return for such cheapjack trifles as razors, ribbons, looking-glasses and Jew’s harps.

  These and other British manufactures were among the loot British s
oldiers carried off from the pah (fortified camp) of Paramatta in 1845.8 Paramatta had refused to accept the new order and his resistance started twenty-six years of intermittent wars between the Maoris and the settlers, backed until the mid-1860s by the British army. The Maoris could not hope to win and, like other South Sea Islanders, their population fell as they came into contact with alien diseases, but they held their own with a courage and skill which impressed their adversaries. They were not, like the Australian aborigines, driven into the wastelands and hunted like kangaroos, but allowed to become integrated into New Zealand. Maoris who passed the property-owning hurdle were given the vote when New Zealand received its constitution in 1852, and British soldiers paid them a unique tribute by erecting a war memorial to their dead in Christ Church Cathedral.

  Men and women contemplating emigration to Canada in the 1820s were assured that on arrival they would enjoy the same rights there as they had in Britain, whatever this may have meant to the poor of that time. In a similar vein, an invitation to immigrants issued by the Queensland government in 1908 offered them the chance to help lay the foundation of a nation of brave, diligent, and liberty-loving men’.9

  Between these two dates the internal government of the white colonies had been transformed. The process had started in 1839 with the publication of a report by Lord Durham of an investigation he had conducted in Canada after small-scale disturbance there two years before. The Whig peer’s recommendations for local self-determination were the basis for a policy which his party implemented between 1847 and 1867. The Canadian provinces, the Australian states, New Zealand and Cape Colony were each given constitutions that provided them with elected governments with powers to make laws and distribute land. From the early 1840s there had been a flow of former Chartists to Australia and New Zealand and their radical ideas provided a leaven for political life in both colonies. Without an aristocracy to act as a brake on reform and with a large population drawn from the British working class, it was inevitable that the colonies soon had a wider franchise than Britain and governments willing to undertake novel and far-reaching social reforms.

  Local autonomy led the way to the voluntary creation of nation states: in 1867 Canada became a confederation, Australia a federation in 1901, and South Africa in 1910, including the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, which had been granted self-government in 1906. Here there were no liberal franchises, for the British government had been forced, for the sake of obtaining political peace, to accept the exclusion of black and mixed-race voters from the Transvaal and Orange Free State electorate. Non-white voters made up 1 per cent of Natal’s voters and 15 per cent of Cape Colony’s. The price paid by Britain for a stable and tractable dominion in South Africa was toleration of what, in 1910, was a customary apartheid, a system of discrimination and segregation that would, in thirty-eight years’ time, be given the force of law.

  The compromise in South Africa was a reminder that political expediency as well as liberal principles had shaped Britain’s policies towards her white colonies. The Whig dogmas of laissez faire and public economy, as well as the belief that British political rights should be enjoyed by all British subjects, wherever they lived, had dictated the first moves towards colonial self-determination. Self-governing colonists could raise their own taxes and pay for their own administration and, most importantly, protection; in 1858 the Canadian garrison had cost the Treasury £261,000. By 1871, the redcoats had been recalled from all the colonies save the volatile Cape, and the colonists had to raise and fund their own militias.

  As administrative bonds were severed, the question was raised as to the future relationship between Britain and her colonies. Despite predictions that home rule was the first step along a road that led towards complete independence, there were few signs that any of the colonies wished to break their remaining political ties with Britain. Queen Victoria remained the head of state in each dominion, as the self-governing colonies were called, and her features appeared on their postage stamps and coins. Canada and Newfoundland, more royalist perhaps than the king, produced issues which showed Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales and obscurer members of the royal family.

  Alongside such advertisements of attachment to Britain, there were indications that the colonies were developing a distinctive identity and culture of their own. These were most pronounced in Australia. A prospector who arrived at the Victoria gold diggings in 1853 found himself in the middle of ‘an American type of society’. ‘All aristocratic feelings and associations of the old country are at once annihilated,’ he observed. ‘Plebianism of the rankest, and, in many instances, of the lowest kind, at present dwells in Australia, and riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position.’10 Digger egalitarianism soon became part of the Australian consciousness. The ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) soldier ‘is no lover of privilege of class. He does not understand it,’ proudly announced the Queensland School Paper in November 1917.11 According to the official Australian history of the war, the classless Australian fighting men were also independent-minded, refusing ‘to take for granted the prescribed opinions’ and were ready always to take the ‘vigorous and unfettered initiative’. Individualism was balanced by a powerful sense of brotherhood which lay at the heart of the Australian male psyche. It was known as ‘mateship’ and its only rule was that ‘a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate’.12 None of these qualities endeared Australians to that stick-necked breed of Englishmen, often army commanders, who believed in an orderly, disciplined society in which everyone stuck to the rules. A gentleman cricketer, writing in 1888, regretted that players in Australian touring XIs tended to contest umpires’ decisions.13

  There was a small but clamorous group of Australians who rejected British standards. The Sydney Bulletin regularly poured scorn on what it called ‘colonial cringe’, a mass inferiority complex which accepted the innate superiority of all things British. The Bulletin also denounced attempts to promote imperial consciousness in Australia as a ploy to further Britain’s selfish interests, and accordingly renamed Empire Day as ‘Vampire Day’.14 The Bulletin’s carping did not seriously weaken Australian imperial sentiment nor convince Australians that Britain’s interests were not necessarily their own.

  The Bulletin’s anti-British shafts were being launched at a time when Australia and the other dominions were becoming increasingly aware of the political and strategic value of the imperial connection. So too was Britain which, since the mid-1870s, was endeavouring to survive in a mutable and none too friendly world. As she entered into competition with hostile powers whose strength matched her own, it became imperative for Britain to cultivate colonial goodwill. The colonies were becoming valuable assets, since their assistance might prove vital in the event of conflict with France and Russia. Shifts in the global balance of power generated anxieties within the dominions, which had for the first time to come to terms with their own isolation and vulnerability. The possibility of an Anglo-Russian war in 1877–8, and with it seaborne raids by Russian warships on the Pacific coastlines of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, made the governments of each appreciate the extent of their dependence upon the Royal Navy.

  One immediate consequence of this scare was the purchase of warships by Victoria and Queensland in 1882–3 and a greater willingness on behalf of these and other dominion governments to contribute to Britain’s naval budget. A sense of common purpose and shared responsibilities prompted the New South Wales government to send 700 volunteers, all in red coats, to join the British army in the Sudan in May 1885. These soldiers, and offers of help from South Australia, Victoria and New Zealand, impressed Wolseley. He wrote warmly to Lord Loch, the governor of Victoria, and said that he had welcomed the Australians ‘not only as comrades, but as countrymen’. Their disembarkation at Suakin was an event of tremendous significance for Britain, which was far beyond the blinkered ‘vestry who ruled in Downing Street and there pose as the successors of Pitt, Palmerston and Beaconsfield.�
�� For Wolseley, the common ministerial failing was that lack of imperial imagination which made it impossible for them to appreciate the power of the empire. Not could they see its future potential as Britain’s partner. And yet he predicted, ‘When war with Russia comes, as come it must before many years pass away, we shall have help from all our Colonies.’15

  Four years later, during the winter of 1889–90, the young Churchill, then a schoolboy at Harrow, listened spellbound to an address on the Imperial Federation of Wolseley’s dreams. The speaker, Dr G.R. Parkin from Nova Scotia, foretold that one day, ‘Nelson’s signal [England expects that every man will do his duty] will be flashed, not along a line of ships, but along a line of embattled nations around the world.’ These words, whose resonance was so close to that of his own rhetoric, stuck in Churchill’s mind and he was able to recall them over sixty years after.16 So too could another Harrovian listener, Leo Amery, who like Churchill was mesmerised by the ‘big idea’ of Imperial Federation. It held the key to the survival of Britain as a world power, and, like other late-Victorian imperial ideas, was breathtaking in its scope, which was perhaps why it appealed to youthful imaginations.

  The idea of some kind of imperial unity was superficially attractive, especially to those disturbed by Britain’s comparative decline as a world power. But practical attempts to facilitate closer relations between Britain and the dominions and the creation of a coordinated imperial defence policy ended in failure. A series of conferences of dominion prime ministers, held intermittently between 1887 and 1907, produced much talk but no results. There was an understandable suspicion that Britain was promoting imperial unity to further her own international interests, and dominion leaders were chary about committing their armed forces to British control. In Canada there were deep misgivings among the French-speaking population about becoming embroiled in a war with France, and in 1898, when such a war appeared likely, the Canadian government doubted whether Canadien militiamen could be persuaded to take part in the seizure of St Pierre and Miquelon islands.17 Again, in 1899, French-Canadians were reluctant to support Britain in what they saw as a war of imperial aggression against the Boers.