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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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The telegraph cable and the steamship route were two of three metal networks that simultaneously shrank the world and made control of it easier. The third was the railway. Here too the British tacitly acknowledged the limitations of the free market. The British railway network had been constructed after 1826 with only minimal state intervention. But the railways the British built throughout their Empire, though they too were constructed by private sector companies, depended on generous government subsidies which effectively guaranteed that they would pay dividends. The first line in India, linking Bombay to Thane twenty-one miles away, was formally opened in 1853; within less than fifty years, track covering more than 24,000 miles had been laid. In the space of a generation, the ‘
te-rain
’ transformed Indian economic and social life: for the first time, thanks to the standard third-class fare of seven annas, long-distance travel became a possibility for millions of Indians, ‘joining friends and uniting the anxious’. Some contemporaries predicted a cultural revolution arising from this, in the belief that ‘thirty miles an hour is fatal to the slow deities of paganism’. Certainly, the Indian railways created a huge market for British locomotive manufacturers, since most of the tens of thousands of engines put into service in India were made in Britain. Yet this network was from its very inception strategic as well as economic in purpose. It was not through the munificence of British shareholders that the main Lucknow railway station was built to resemble a grandiose Gothic fortress.
As one eminent imperial commentator put it, the Victorian revolution in global communications achieved ‘the annihilation of distance’. But it also made possible long-distance annihilation. In time of war, distance simply had to be overcome – for the simple reason that Britain’s principal source of military power now lay on the other side of the world.
As had long been the case, the standing army in Britain itself was relatively small. In Europe it was the Royal Navy that did the work of defence: more than a third of the country’s huge fleet was permanently stationed in home waters or the Mediterranean. It was in India that the British kept the bulk of their offensive military capability. In this respect, little had been changed by the Mutiny. True, the number of native troops was reduced after 1857 and the number of British troops increased by roughly a third. But there were limits to the number of men the British could afford to station in India. A Royal Commission reported in 1863 that the mortality rate for other ranks (enlisted men) in India between 1800 and 1856 was 69 per thousand, compared with a rate for the equivalent age group in British civilian life of around 10 per thousand. Troops in India also had a much higher incidence of sickness. With quintessentially Victorian precision, the Commission calculated that, out of an army of 70,000 British soldiers, 4,830 would die each year and 5,880 hospital beds would be occupied by those incapacitated by illness. Since it cost £100 to recruit a soldier and maintain him in India, Britain was thereby losing more than £1 million a year. Given that a similar force might have cost around £200,000 stationed in Europe, the extra £800,000 had to be regarded as a kind of tropical service premium. This was a very circumlocutory way of saying that no more British troops should be sent to sicken and die in India. Consequently, the sepoy had to stay if the Indian Army was to maintain its strength.
The upshot was that by 1881 the Indian Army numbered 69,647 British troops and 125,000 Native, compared with British and Irish forces at home of 65,809 and 25,353 respectively. As a proportion of the total manpower of all British garrisons in the Empire, the Indian Army therefore accounted for well over half (62 per cent). In Lord Salisbury’s acid description, India was ‘an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them’. And draw he and his fellow Prime Ministers regularly did. During the half century before 1914 Indian troops served in more than a dozen imperial campaigns, from China to Uganda. The Liberal politician W. E. Forster complained in 1878 that the government was relying ‘not upon the patriotism and spirit of our own people’ but on getting ‘Gurkhas and Sikhs and Mussulmen to fight for us’. There was even a musichall parody on the subject:
We don’t want to fight,
But, by Jingo, if we do,
We won’t go to the front ourselves,
We’ll send the mild Hindoo.
 
Like nearly every component of the mid-Victorian Empire, the Indian Army too depended on technology: not just the technology that produced its rifles but also the technology that produced its maps. We should never forget that as important as the telegraph in the technology of domination was the theodolite.
As early as the 1770s, the East India Company had grasped the strategic importance of cartography: in the Anglo-Indian wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the army with the more accurate maps had a crucial advantage. The British Isles themselves had been mapped – for precisely the same reason – by the pioneering Ordnance Survey. In 1800 the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India had been established under the leadership of intrepid map-makers like William Lambton and, from 1818, George Everest. Working at night to protect their theodolite readings from the distorting heat of the sun, they set out to create the first definitive
Atlas of India
– a vast compendium of geographical, geological and ecological information immaculately set out on a scale of four miles to an inch.
Knowledge is power, and knowing where things are is the most basic knowledge a government requires. But as the Great Trigonometrical Survey pushed in to the Himalayas – where Everest gave his name to the world’s highest mountain – the intelligence being gathered took on a new significance. Where, after all, did British India actually end? It is easy to forget that, at its full extent, it was substantially larger than India today, encompassing present-day Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma, not to mention southern Persia and Nepal. For a time, it seemed that Afghanistan too would be absorbed into the Raj; some even dreamt of annexing Tibet. On the other side of India’s mountainous northern marches, however, lay another European empire with similar aspirations. In the nineteenth century, Russia’s empire grew just as rapidly over land as Britain’s did over sea – southwards into the Caucasus, through Circassia, Georgia, Erivan and Azerbaijan; eastwards from the Caspian Sea along the Silk Road through Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent as far as Khokand and Andijan in the Pamir Mountains. There, barely twenty miles apart, the lion and the bear (as
Punch
cartoons invariably depicted them) glared belligerently at one another across one of the most inhospitable terrains in the world.
From 1879, the date of the second British attempt to invade and control Afghanistan, until the third attempt in 1919, Britain and Russia conducted the world’s first Cold War along the North-West Frontier. But the spies in this Cold War were surveyors, for whoever mapped the frontier first stood a good chance of controlling it. The Great Survey of India thus became inextricably bound up with espionage: what one of the early British frontiersmen called the ‘Great Game’. At times it really did seem like a game. British agents ventured into the uncharted territory beyond Kashmir and the Khyber Pass disguised as Buddhist monks, measuring the distances between places with the aid of worry-beads – one bead for every hundred paces – and concealing the maps they surreptitiously drew in their prayer wheels.
44
But this was a deadly game played in a no man’s land where the only rule was the merciless Pakhtun or ‘Pathan’ code of honour: hospitality to the stranger, but a cut throat and an interminable vendetta against all his kin if he transgressed.
The British could never drop their guard on the North-West Frontier. Yet this was not the furthest extremity of British India. Thanks to the Victorians’ mastery of technology, the Raj could extend its reach right across the Indian Ocean.
In 1866 the Empire found itself confronted by a distant hostage crisis that tested its system of communications to the limit. A group of British subjects had been imprisoned by the Emperor Theodore (Tewodros) of Abyssinia, who felt the British were showing his regime – the only Christian monarchy in Africa – insufficient respect. Theodore had written to seek British recognition. When the Colonial Office failed to reply, he arrested every European he could get his hands on and marched them to his remote mountain fortress at Magdala. A diplomatic mission was sent, but they too were incarcerated.
It was a truth almost but not quite universally acknowledged: no one treated subjects of Queen Victoria like that and got away with it. But to extricate a group of hostages from darkest Ethiopia was no small undertaking, since it called for the dispatch of what today would be called a rapid reaction force. The remarkable thing was that the force in question was not itself British. Abyssinia was about to feel the full military might of British India.
Without the burgeoning global network of telegraphs and steam engines, the British response would have been impossible. The decision to send an invasion force to free the hostages was taken by the Prime Minister, Lord Derby, after consultation with the Cabinet and sovereign. When the Queen’s written appeal of April 1867 for the release of the prisoners went unanswered, the government saw no alternative but to liberate them ‘by force’. Naturally, a decision like this had implications for all the great departments of state: the Foreign Office, the War Office, the Admiralty and the Treasury. All had to be consulted. But to be carried out, the invasion order had to cross the world from the Secretary of State for India in London to the Governor of the Bombay Presidency ten thousand miles away, because that was where the necessary troops were. Once such an order would have taken months to arrive. Now it could be sent by telegraph.
The man charged with planning the expedition was Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Napier, a stern disciplinarian of the old school, but also a military engineer of genius. For public consumption, ‘Break thou the Chains’ was the rousing command he received from the Queen, and Napier afterwards adopted
Tu Vincula Frange
as his motto. But privately Napier approached his task with the gloomy realism of the professional soldier. It was to be hoped, he wrote to the Duke of Cambridge on 25 July 1867,
that the captives may be released by the Diplomatists at any cost of money, for the expedition would be very expensive and troublesome; and if not a hostile shot is fired, the casualties from the climate and accident will amount to ten times the number of the captives. Still if these poor people are murdered, or detained, I suppose we must do something.
 
As he had probably expected, it fell to him – and therefore to the Indian Army – to do it. On 13 August Napier produced his estimate of the forces required: ‘four regiments of Native Cavalry, one squadron of British cavalry, ten regiments of Native Infantry ... four batteries of Field and Horse Artillery; one mountain train; a battery of six mortars 5½ inch ... if possible two of them to be 8-inch and a coolie corps, 3,000 strong, for loads and working parties’. Two days later he was offered command of the expedition. By November, Parliament – recalled early by Disraeli, who hoped to reap some electoral benefit from the affair – had voted the necessary funds. Thereafter, as the Secretary of State, Sir Stafford Northcote, informed the Viceroy, ‘all further proceedings connected with the organization and equipment of reinforcements, when called for by Sir Robert Napier, should rest with the Government of India’. Northcote also reminded the Viceroy that the ‘Native portion’ of Napier’s force would continue to be ‘maintained’ – in other words, paid for – as usual, by the Government of India.
Within a few months, the invasion force set sail from Bombay to Massowah on the Red Sea coast. On board the flotilla were 13,000 British and Indian soldiers, 26,000 camp followers and a huge mass of livestock: 13,000 mules and ponies, an equal number of sheep, 7,000 camels, 7,000 bullocks and 1,000 donkeys – not to mention 44 elephants. Napier even brought a prefabricated harbour, complete with lighthouses and a railway system. It was a huge logistical feat, perfectly combining Indian muscle with British technology.
The Abyssinian Emperor had taken it for granted that no invading force would be able to cross the 400 parched and mountainous miles between the coast and Magdala. He had not reckoned with Napier. Slowly but inexorably, he marched his men to their destination, leaving the carcasses of thousands of dehydrated beasts in their wake. They reached the foot of the fortress after three long months, and, in a mood of relief that the footslogging was over, prepared for the final assault. As a violent thunderstorm broke above them, and with the band playing ‘Garry Owen’, the West Riding and Black Watch regiments led the charge uphill. In just two hours of fierce fighting Napier’s force killed more than 700 of Theodore’s men and wounded 1,200 more. The Emperor himself committed suicide rather than be captured. Only twenty British soldiers were wounded; not one was killed. As one member of the expedition gleefully recalled: ‘There was a fluttering of silk regimental Colours, the waving of helmets, and the roaring of triumphant cheers. The sounds of victory rang down the hill and travelled along the plateau for a distance of two miles ... and the hills re-echoed “God Save the Queen”’.
BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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