Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (33 page)
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Authors: Niall Ferguson
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This new elite even penetrated the ranks of the covenanted ICS itself. In 1863 Satyendernath Tagore became the first Indian to pass the exam – which was always open to applicants regardless of skin colour, just as Queen Victoria had promised – and in 1871 another three natives were admitted to the ranks of the ‘heaven born’.
Bose and his ilk were the people on whom the Empire really depended in India. Without their ability to turn the orders of the ICS into reality, British rule in India simply would not have worked. Indeed, the truth was that government throughout the Empire was only really possible with the collaboration of key sections of the governed. That was comparatively easy to secure in places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, where the native populations had been reduced to insignificant minorities. The key problem was how to retain the loyalty of both settlers and indigenous elites where it was the white community that was in the minority, as in India where the British population amounted to at most a mere 0.05 per cent of the total.
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Under Indian conditions, administrators sent out from London saw no alternative but to co-opt an elite of natives. But this was precisely what the British who were actually resident in India ruled out. The men on the spot preferred to keep the natives down: to coerce them if necessary, but never to co-opt them. This was the great imperial dilemma of the Victorian era – and on its horns not just India but the entire British Empire was to be impaled.
Races ApartIn June 1865 a placard appeared on a wharf gate at Lucea in the Jamaican parish of Hanover bearing a mysterious prophecy:
I heard a voice speaking to me in the year 1864, saying, ‘Tell the sons and daughters of Africa that a great deliverance will take place for them from the hand of oppression’, for, said the voice, ‘They are oppressed by Government, by magistrates, by proprietors, by merchants’, and the voice also said, ‘Tell them to call a solemn assembly and to sanctify themselves for the day of deliverance which will surely take place; but if the people will not harken I will bring the sword into the land to chastise them for their disobedience and for the iniquities which they have committed’. ... The calamity which I see coming upon the land will be so grievous and so distressing that many will desire to die. But great will be the deliverance of the sons and daughters of Africa, if they humble themselves in sackcloth and ashes, like the children of Ninevah before the Lord our God; but if we pray truly from our hearts, and humble ourselves, we have no need to fear; if not the enemy will be cruel for there will be Gog and Magog to battle. Believe me.
The placard was signed simply ‘A Son of Africa’.
Jamaica had once been the centre of the most extreme form of colonial coercion: slavery. But its abolition had not much improved the lot of the average black Jamaican. The ex-slaves had been given wretchedly small allotments to farm for themselves. A period of drought had pushed up food prices. Meanwhile, without the subsidy provided by unfree labour, the old plantation economy stagnated. Sugar prices were falling and the development of coffee as a cash crop was only a partial substitute. Where once men had been literally worked to death, now they were idle as unemployment soared. Yet power – political and above all legal – remained concentrated in the hands of the white minority, who dominated the island’s Assembly and its magistracy. A tiny few Jamaican blacks acquired enough property and education to form an embryonic middle class, but they were viewed with intense suspicion by the ruling ‘plantocracy’. Only in their churches were the majority of black Jamaicans able to express themselves freely.
It was against this background that a religious revival swept across the island in the 1860s, a revival that blended Baptism with the African religion Myal to produce a heady millenarian mixture. The sense of an approaching ‘great deliverance’, so vividly anticipated in the Lucea placard, was only heightened by the publication of a letter by Edward Underhill, the secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society, which called for an inquiry into Jamaica’s plight. Rumours circulated that Queen Victoria had meant the ex-slaves to be given land as well as their freedom, instead of having to rent it from their former masters. Meetings were held to debate the contents of Underhill’s letter. A classic revolution of rising expectations was in the making.
It began in the town of Morant Bay in the parish of St Thomas in the East on Saturday 7 October 1865, the date set for the appeal of one Lewis Miller against a minor charge of trespass brought by a neighbouring planter. Miller was the cousin of Paul Bogle, the owner of a small farm at Stony Gut and an active member of the local black Baptist church, who had been galvanized into direct political action by the Underhill letter. Previously Bogle had favoured the creation of alternative black ‘courts’; now he had formed his own armed militia. At the head of around 150 men he marched to the courthouse where his cousin’s case was to be heard. The ensuing skirmishes with the police outside the court gave the authorities good reason to arrest Bogle and his men, but the police were seen off with death threats when they sought to carry out this order at Stony Gut the following Tuesday. The next day, several hundred people sympathetic to Bogle marched into Morant Bay ‘with a blowing of shells or horns, and a beating of drums’ and confronted the volunteer militia who had been sent to protect a meeting of the parish vestry. In the ensuing violence, the crowd stabbed or beat to death eighteen people, among them members of the vestry; seven of their own number were killed by the militia. In the following days, two planters were murdered as violence spread through the parish and beyond. On 17 October Bogle sent a circular letter to his neighbours which was nothing less than a call to arms:
Everyone of you must leave your house, takes your guns, who don’t have guns take your cutlisses down at once ... Blow your shells, roal your drums, house to house, take out every man ... war is at us, my black skin, war is at hand from to-day to to-morrow.
As those words suggest, this was now an overtly racial conflict. One white woman claimed she heard the rebels singing a bloodcurdling song:
Buckras’ [whites’] blood we want,
Buckras’ blood we’ll have.
Buckras’ blood we are going for,
Till there’s no more to have.
A planter received a death threat signed by ‘Thomas Killmany, and intend to kill many more’.
There had been revolts against white rule in Jamaica before. The last one, in 1831, had been suppressed ferociously. To the newly appointed Governorin-Chief, Edward Eyre, a man baked hard in the Australian outback,
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there could only be one response. In his view, the only causes of black poverty were ‘the idleness, improvidence, and vice of the people’. On 13 October he declared martial law throughout the county of Surrey and sent in regular troops. In the course of a month of unbridled retribution, around 200 people were executed, another 200 flogged and 1,000 houses razed. The tactics Eyre sanctioned were strongly reminiscent of those adopted to suppress the Indian Mutiny just eight years before. To say the least, there was scant regard for due legal process; indeed, the soldiers – many of whom were in fact black themselves, as it was the 1st West India Regiment which was deployed, with the Maroons in support – were effectively licensed to run amok. A number of prisoners were simply shot without trial. One invalid youth was shot dead in front of his mother. A woman was raped in her own home. There were countless floggings.
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there could only be one response. In his view, the only causes of black poverty were ‘the idleness, improvidence, and vice of the people’. On 13 October he declared martial law throughout the county of Surrey and sent in regular troops. In the course of a month of unbridled retribution, around 200 people were executed, another 200 flogged and 1,000 houses razed. The tactics Eyre sanctioned were strongly reminiscent of those adopted to suppress the Indian Mutiny just eight years before. To say the least, there was scant regard for due legal process; indeed, the soldiers – many of whom were in fact black themselves, as it was the 1st West India Regiment which was deployed, with the Maroons in support – were effectively licensed to run amok. A number of prisoners were simply shot without trial. One invalid youth was shot dead in front of his mother. A woman was raped in her own home. There were countless floggings.
Besides Bogle himself, among those executed was George William Gordon. A landowner, a former magistrate and a member of the island’s elected assembly, Gordon was a pillar of the black community and an unlikely revolutionary; the only surviving photograph of him shows the bespectacled, bewhiskered incarnation of respectability. He had almost certainly played no part in the uprising. He was in fact nowhere near Morant Bay when it broke out, though the parish of St Thomas in the East was his constituency and he had recently been expelled from the vestry there. But as a ‘half-caste’ – the son of a planter and slave girl – who had publicly championed the cause of the former slaves, Gordon had been marked down by Eyre as a troublemaker; indeed, it had been Eyre who had dismissed him from the magistracy three years before. Now, to ensure that he was finally disposed of, Eyre had him arrested and removed from Kingston to the area where martial law was in force. After a hurried trial, he was convicted – partly on the basis of highly dubious written depositions – of inciting the rebellion. On 23 October he was hanged.
The Morant Bay rising had been emphatically and ruthlessly crushed; but the white planters who applauded Eyre’s handling of the crisis were in for a shock – as was Eyre himself. Having initially been praised by the Colonial Secretary for his ‘spirit, energy and judgment’, he was stunned to hear that a Royal Commission had been set up to inquire into his conduct and that he himself had been temporarily replaced as Governor. This reaction against his brutal tactics originated among the membership of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, who still kept the old flame of abolitionism burning and saw Eyre’s use of martial law as a reversion to the days of slavery. In far-flung Africa, even David Livingstone heard of the affair and fulminated:
England is in the rear. Frightened in early years by their mothers with ‘Bogie Blackman’ they were terrified out of their wits by a riot, and the sensation writers, who act the part of the ‘dreadful boys’ who frighten the aunts, yelled out that emancipation was a mistake. ‘The Jamaica negroes were as savage as when they left Africa.’ They might have put it much stronger by saying, as the rabble ... that collects at every execution at Newgate.
But the campaign against Eyre soon spread beyond what one of his defenders called ‘the old ladies of Clapham’ to embrace some of the great liberal intellectuals of the Victorian era, including Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill. Not content with his dismissal as Governor, the committee they formed mounted four separate legal actions against him, beginning with a charge of accessory to murder. However, the deposed Governor also had influential supporters: among them Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Charles Dickens and the poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson. None of the legal actions was successful, and Eyre was able to retire to Devon on a government pension, which he collected until his death, aged eighty-six, in 1901.
Nevertheless, from the moment Eyre left Jamaica, the old regime of rule by the planter class was over. From now on, the island would be governed directly from London through the Governor; a Legislative Council dominated by his appointees would replace the old Assembly. Here was a step back to the old days before ‘responsible government’ had devolved political power to British colonists; but it was a step taken in a progressive rather than a reactionary spirit, designed to circumscribe the power of the plantocracy and protect the rights of black Jamaicans.
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This was to become a fundamental feature of the later British Empire. In Whitehall and Westminster, liberal ideas were in the ascendant, and that meant the rule of law had to take precedence, regardless of skin colour. If that did not seem to be happening, then the will of colonial assemblies would simply have to be overridden. Yet British colonists – the men and women on the spot – increasingly saw themselves as not just legally but biologically superior to other races. As far as they were concerned, the people who attacked Eyre were ingenuous
bien pensants
who had no experience or understanding of colonial conditions. Sooner or later, these two visions – the liberalism of the centre and the racism of the periphery – were bound to collide again.
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This was to become a fundamental feature of the later British Empire. In Whitehall and Westminster, liberal ideas were in the ascendant, and that meant the rule of law had to take precedence, regardless of skin colour. If that did not seem to be happening, then the will of colonial assemblies would simply have to be overridden. Yet British colonists – the men and women on the spot – increasingly saw themselves as not just legally but biologically superior to other races. As far as they were concerned, the people who attacked Eyre were ingenuous
bien pensants
who had no experience or understanding of colonial conditions. Sooner or later, these two visions – the liberalism of the centre and the racism of the periphery – were bound to collide again.
By the 1860s race was becoming an issue in all of the British colonies, in India as much as in Jamaica; and no one took the issue more seriously than the Anglo-Indian business community.
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Jamaica was an economy in decline. Victorian India, by contrast, was booming. Immense sums of British capital were being invested in a range of new industries: cotton and jute spinning, coal mining and steel production. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Cawnpore, on the banks of the River Ganges: once the site of some of the most bitter fighting of the Indian Mutiny, transformed within a few years into the ‘Manchester of the East’, a thriving industrial centre. This transformation was due in large measure to hard-faced men like Hugh Maxwell. His family – originally from Aberdeenshire – had settled in the district in 1806, where they had pioneered the cultivation of indigo and raw cotton. After 1857 it was Maxwell and men of his stamp who brought the industrial revolution to India by importing British spinning and weaving machinery and building textile mills on the British pattern. In the age before steam power, India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving and dying. The British had first raised tariffs against their products; then demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected. Now they were intent on rebuilding India as a manufacturing economy using British technology and cheap Indian labour.
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Jamaica was an economy in decline. Victorian India, by contrast, was booming. Immense sums of British capital were being invested in a range of new industries: cotton and jute spinning, coal mining and steel production. Nowhere was that more obvious than in Cawnpore, on the banks of the River Ganges: once the site of some of the most bitter fighting of the Indian Mutiny, transformed within a few years into the ‘Manchester of the East’, a thriving industrial centre. This transformation was due in large measure to hard-faced men like Hugh Maxwell. His family – originally from Aberdeenshire – had settled in the district in 1806, where they had pioneered the cultivation of indigo and raw cotton. After 1857 it was Maxwell and men of his stamp who brought the industrial revolution to India by importing British spinning and weaving machinery and building textile mills on the British pattern. In the age before steam power, India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving and dying. The British had first raised tariffs against their products; then demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected. Now they were intent on rebuilding India as a manufacturing economy using British technology and cheap Indian labour.
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