Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (3 page)
Read Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power Online
Authors: Niall Ferguson
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
6.78Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
The central nationalist/Marxist assumption is, of course, that imperialism was economically exploitative: every facet of colonial rule, including even the apparently sincere efforts of Europeans to study and understand indigenous cultures, was at root designed to maximize the surplus value that could be extracted from the subject peoples. The central liberal assumption is more paradoxical. It is that precisely because imperialism distorted market forces – using everything from military force to preferential tariffs to rig business in the favour of the metropolis – it was not in the long-term interests of the metropolitan economy either. In this view, it was free economic integration with the rest of the world economy that mattered, not the coercive integration of imperialism. Thus, investment in domestic industry would have been better for Britain than investment in far-flung colonies, while the cost of defending the Empire was a burden on taxpayers, who might otherwise have spent their money on the products of a modern consumer goods sector. One historian, writing in the new
Oxford History of the British Empire
, has gone so far as to speculate that if Britain had got rid of the Empire in the mid-1840s, she could have reaped a ‘decolonization dividend’ in the form of a 25 per cent tax cut. The money taxpayers would have saved as a result of this could have been spent on electricity, cars and consumer durables, thus encouraging industrial modernization at home.
Oxford History of the British Empire
, has gone so far as to speculate that if Britain had got rid of the Empire in the mid-1840s, she could have reaped a ‘decolonization dividend’ in the form of a 25 per cent tax cut. The money taxpayers would have saved as a result of this could have been spent on electricity, cars and consumer durables, thus encouraging industrial modernization at home.
Nearly a century ago, the likes of J. A. Hobson and Leonard Hobhouse were arguing along very similar lines; they in turn were in some measure the heirs of Richard Cobden and John Bright in the 1840s and 1850s. In
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), Adam Smith had expressed his doubts about the wisdom of ‘raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods with which these could supply them’. But it was Cobden who had originally insisted that the expansion of British trade should go hand in hand with a foreign policy of complete non-intervention. Commerce alone, he maintained, was ‘the grand panacea’,
The Wealth of Nations
(1776), Adam Smith had expressed his doubts about the wisdom of ‘raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods with which these could supply them’. But it was Cobden who had originally insisted that the expansion of British trade should go hand in hand with a foreign policy of complete non-intervention. Commerce alone, he maintained, was ‘the grand panacea’,
which, like a beneficent medical discovery, will serve to inoculate with the healthy and saving taste for civilization all the nations of the world. Not a bale of merchandise leaves our shores, but it bears the seeds of intelligence and fruitful thought to the members of some less enlightened community; not a merchant visits our seats of manufacturing industry, but he returns to his own country the missionary of freedom, peace, and good government – whilst our steamboats, that now visit every port of Europe, and our miraculous railroads, that are the talk of all nations, are the advertisements and vouchers for the value of our enlightened institutions.
The critical point for Cobden was that neither trade nor even the spread of British ‘civilization’ needed to be enforced by imperial structures. Indeed, the use of force could achieve nothing if it sought to run counter to the beneficent laws of the global free market:
So far as our commerce is concerned, it can neither be sustained nor greatly injured abroad by force or violence. The foreign customers who visit our markets are not brought hither through fear of the power or the influence of British diplomatists: they are not captured by our fleets and armies ... It is solely from the promptings of self interest that the merchants of Europe, as of the rest of the world, send their ships to our ports to be freighted with the products of our labour. The self-same impulse drew all nations, at different periods of history, to Tyre, to Venice, and to Amsterdam; and if, in the revolution of time and events, a country should be found (which is probable) whose cottons and woollens shall be cheaper than those of England and the rest of the world, then to that spot ... will all the traders of the earth flock; and no human power, no fleets or armies, will prevent Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds, from sharing the fate of their once proud predecessors in Holland, Italy, and Phoenicia ...
Thus there was no need for an Empire; trade would take care of itself – and everything else too, including world peace. In May 1856 Cobden went so far as to say that it would ‘be a happy day when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia’.
The common factor in all such arguments was and remains, however, the assumption that the benefits of international exchange could have been and can be reaped without the costs of empire. To put it more concisely: can you have globalization without gunboats?
Empire and GlobalizationIt has become almost a commonplace that globalization today has much in common with the integration of the world economy in the decades before 1914. But what exactly does this overused word mean? Is it, as Cobden implied, an economically determined phenomenon, in which the free exchange of commodities and manufactures tends ‘to unite mankind in the bonds of peace’? Or might free trade require a political framework within which to work?
The leftist opponents of globalization naturally regard it as no more than the latest manifestation of a damnably resilient international capitalism. By contrast, the modern consensus among liberal economists is that increasing economic openness raises living standards, even if there will always be some net losers as hitherto privileged or protected social groups are exposed to international competition. But economists and economic historians alike prefer to focus their attention on flows of commodities, capital and labour. They say less about flows of knowledge, culture and institutions. They also tend to pay more attention to the ways government can facilitate globalization by various kinds of deregulation than to the ways it can actively promote and indeed impose it. There is growing recognition of the importance of legal, financial and administrative institutions such as the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems and incorrupt bureaucracies in encouraging cross-border capital flows. But how did the West European versions of such institutions spread as far and wide as they did?
In a few rare cases – the most obvious being that of Japan – there was a process of conscious, voluntary imitation. But more often than not, European institutions were imposed by main force, often literally at gunpoint. In theory, globalization may be possible in an international system of multilateral cooperation, spontaneously arising as Cobden envisaged. But it may equally well be possible as a result of coercion if the dominant power in the world favours economic liberalism. Empire – and specifically the British Empire – is the instance that springs to mind.
Today, the principal barriers to the optimal allocation of labour, capital and goods in the world are, on the one hand, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments, which together have condemned so many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia to decades of impoverishment; and, on the other, the reluctance of the United States and her allies to practice as well as preach free trade, or to devote more than a trifling share of their vast resources to programmes of economic aid. By contrast, for much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the ‘imperialism of free trade’.
Prima facie
, therefore, there seems a plausible case that the Empire enhanced global welfare – in other words, was a Good Thing.
Prima facie
, therefore, there seems a plausible case that the Empire enhanced global welfare – in other words, was a Good Thing.
Many charges can of course be levelled against the British Empire; they will not be dropped in what follows. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was ‘not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind’; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that ‘the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen’; nor, as General Smuts claimed, that it was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history’. The Empire was never so altruistic. In the eighteenth century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged – in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 – the British response was brutal. When famine struck – in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s – the response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable. Even when the British took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.
Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world. To characterize all this as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ risks underselling the scale – and modernity – of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the ‘ornamental’ (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkably non-venal administrations. It was not just my family that benefited from these things.
The difficulty with the achievements of empire is that they are much more likely to be taken for granted than the sins of empire. It is, however, instructive to try to imagine a world without the British Empire. But while it is just about possible to imagine what the world would have been like without the French Revolution or the First World War, the imagination reels from the counterfactual of a world without the British Empire.
As I travelled around that Empire’s remains in the first half of 2002, I was constantly struck by its ubiquitous creativity. To imagine the world without the Empire would be to expunge from the map the elegant boulevards of Williamsburg and old Philadelphia; to sweep into the sea the squat battlements of Port Royal, Jamaica; to return to the bush the glorious skyline of Sydney; to level the steamy seaside slum that is Freetown, Sierra Leone; to fill in the Big Hole at Kimberley; to demolish the mission at Kuruman; to send the town of Livingstone hurtling over the Victoria Falls – which would of course revert to their original name of Mosioatunya. Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but these vast metropoles remain cities founded and built by the British.
It is of course tempting to argue that it would all have happened anyway, albeit with different names. Perhaps the railways would have been invented and exported by another European power; perhaps the telegraph cables would have been laid across the sea by someone else too. Maybe, as Cobden claimed, the same volumes of trade would have gone on without bellicose empires meddling in peaceful commerce. Maybe too the great movements of population that transformed the cultures and complexions of whole continents would have happened anyway.
Yet there is reason to doubt that the world would have been the same or even similar in the absence of the Empire. Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows and migration could have been ‘naturally occurring’ in the past three hundred years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to wipe away.
When the British governed a country – even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles – there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the more important of these would run as follows:
1. The English language
2. English forms of land tenure
3. Scottish and English banking
4. The Common Law
5. Protestantism
6. Team sports
7. The limited or ‘night watchman’ state
8. Representative assemblies
9. The idea of liberty
The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire – the thing that sets it apart from its continental European rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals – far from it. But what is very striking about the history of the Empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain’s imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.
Other books
Tent City by Van Hull , Kelly
Flannery by Lisa Moore
Ghost Writer by Margaret Gregory
Zeno: #8 (Luna Lodge) by Madison Stevens
Jack Daniels Six Pack by J. A. Konrath
Al desnudo by Chuck Palahniuk
Moon Underfoot by Cole, Bobby
La agonía de Francia by Manuel Chaves Nogales
A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just
Lycan Packs 1: Lycan Instinct by Brandi Broughton
