Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (4 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Would other empires have produced the same effects? It seems doubtful. In my travels I caught many glimpses of world empires that might have been: in dilapidated Chinsura, a vision of how all Asia might look if the Dutch Empire had not declined and fallen; in whitewashed Pondicherry, which all India might resemble if the French had won the Seven Years War; in dusty Delhi, where the Mughal Empire might have been restored if the Indian Mutiny had not been crushed in 1858; in Kanchanaburi, where the Japanese Empire built its bridge on the River Kwai with British slave labour. Would New Amsterdam be the New York we know today if the Dutch had not surrendered it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonization?
Anglobalization
 
There are already several good general histories of the British Empire in print. My aim has been not to replicate these but to write the history of globalization as it was promoted by Great Britain and her colonies – ‘Anglobalization’, if you like. The structure is broadly chronological, but each of the six chapters has a distinct theme. For simplicity’s sake the contents may be summarized as the globalization of
1. Commodity markets
2. Labour markets
3. Culture
4. Government
5. Capital markets
6. Warfare
Or in rather more human terms, the role of
1. Pirates
2. Planters
3. Missionaries
4. Mandarins
5. Bankers
6. Bankrupts
The first chapter emphasizes that the British Empire began as a primarily economic phenomenon, its growth powered by commerce and consumerism. The demand for sugar drew merchants to the Caribbean. The demand for spices, tea and textiles drew them to Asia. But this was from the outset globalization with gunboats, for the British were not the first empire-builders, but the pirates who scavenged from the earlier empires of Portugal, Spain, Holland and France. They were imperial imitators.
The second chapter describes the role of migration. British colonization was a vast movement of peoples – a
Völkerwanderung
unlike anything before or since. Some quit the British Isles in pursuit of religious freedom, some in pursuit of political liberty, some in pursuit of profit. Others had no choice: they went as slaves or as convicted criminals. The central theme of this chapter, therefore, is the tension between British theories of liberty and the practice of imperial government, and how that tension came to be resolved.
Chapter Three emphasizes the voluntary, non-governmental character of empire-building, focusing in particular on the increasingly important role played by evangelical religious sects and missionary societies in the expansion of British influence. A critical point here is the self-consciously modernizing project that emanated from these organizations – the Victorian ‘NGOs’. The paradox is that it was precisely the belief that indigenous cultures could be Anglicized which provoked the most violent nineteenth-century revolt against imperial rule.
The British Empire was the nearest thing there has ever been to a world government. Yet its mode of operation was a triumph of minimalism. To govern a population numbering hundreds of millions, the Indian Civil Service had a maximum strength of little more than a thousand. Chapter Four asks how it was possible for such a tiny bureaucracy to govern so huge an empire, and explores the symbiotic but ultimately unsustainable collaboration between British rulers and indigenous elites, both traditional and new.
Chapter Five deals primarily with the role of military force in the period of the Scramble for Africa, exploring the interaction between financial globalization and the armaments race among the European powers. Though the trends had been anticipated before, this was the era when three crucial modern phenomena were born: the truly global bond market, the military-industrial complex and the mass media. Their influence was crucial in pushing the Empire towards its zenith. The press, above all, led the Empire into the temptation the Greeks called hubris: the pride that precedes a fall.
Finally, Chapter Six considers the role of the Empire in the twentieth century, when it found itself challenged not so much by nationalist insurgency – it could deal with that – but by rival, and far more ruthless, empires. The year 1940 was the moment when the Empire was weighed in the historical balance, when it faced the choice between compromise with Hitler’s evil empire and fighting on for, at best, a Pyrrhic victory. In my view, the right choice was made.
In a single volume covering what is, in effect, four hundred years of global history, there must necessarily be omissions; I am all too painfully aware of these. I have endeavoured, however, not to select so as to flatter. Slavery and the slave trade cannot and are not disclaimed, any more than is the Irish potato famine, the expropriation of the Matabele or the Amritsar massacre. But this balance sheet of the British imperial achievement does not omit the credit side either. It seeks to show that the legacy of the Empire is not just ‘racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’ – which in any case existed long before colonialism – but
• the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization;
• the Anglicization of North America and Australasia;
• the internationalization of the English language;
• the enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity; and, above all,
• the survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s.
As a young man, fresh from his first colonial war, Winston Churchill asked a good question:
What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? To give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to plant the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain – what more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort?
 
But Churchill recognized that, even with such aspirations, the practicalities of empire were seldom edifying:
Yet as the mind turns from the wonderful cloudland of aspiration to the ugly scaffolding of attempt and achievement, a succession of opposite ideas arise ... The inevitable gap between conquest and dominion becomes filled with the figures of the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier, and the lying speculator, who disquiet the minds of the conquered and excite the sordid appetites of the conquerors. And as the eye of thought rests on these sinister features, it hardly seems possible for us to believe that any fair prospect is approached by so foul a path.
 
For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice? What follows will, I hope, enable the reader to decide.
1
 
WHY BRITAIN?
 
By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and A frica for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither.
Samuel Johnson,
Rasselas
 
 
 
 
 
I
n December 1663 a Welshman called Henry Morgan sailed five hundred miles across the Caribbean to mount a spectacular raid on a Spanish outpost called Gran Grenada, to the north of Lago de Nicaragua. The aim of the expedition was simple: to find and steal Spanish gold – or any other movable property. When Morgan and his men got to Gran Grenada, as the Governor of Jamaica reported in a despatch to London, ‘[They] fired a volley, overturned eighteen great guns ... took the serjeant-major’s house wherein were all their arms and ammunition, secured in the great Church 300 of the best men prisoners ... plundered for 16 hours, discharged the prisoners, sunk all the boats and so came away’. It was the beginning of one of the seventeenth century’s most extraordinary smash-and-grab sprees.
It should never be forgotten that this was how the British Empire began: in a maelstrom of seaborne violence and theft. It was not conceived by selfconscious imperialists, aiming to establish English rule over foreign lands, or colonists hoping to build a new life overseas. Morgan and his fellow ‘buccaneers’
2
were thieves, trying to steal the proceeds of someone else’s Empire.
The buccaneers called themselves the ‘Brethren of the Coast’ and had a complex system of profit-sharing, including insurance policies for injury. Essentially, however, they were engaged in organized crime. When Morgan led another raid against the Spanish town of Portobelo in Panama, in 1668, he came back with so much plunder – in all, a quarter of a million pieces of eight – that the coins became legal tender in Jamaica. That amounted to £60,000 from just one raid. The English government not only winked at Morgan’s activity; it positively encouraged him. Viewed from London, buccaneering was a low-budget way of waging war against England’s principal European foe, Spain. In effect, the Crown licensed the pirates as ‘privateers’, legalizing their operations in return for a share of the proceeds. Morgan’s career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces.
Pirates
 
It used to be thought that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. In reality the expansion of England was far from inadvertent: it was a conscious act of imitation. Economic historians often think of England as the ‘first industrial nation’. But in the European race for empire, the English were late beginners. It was only in 1655, for example, that England acquired Jamaica. At that time, the British Empire amounted to little more than a handful of Caribbean islands, five North American ‘plantations’ and a couple of Indian ports. But Christopher Columbus had laid the foundations of Spain’s American empire more than a century and a half before. That empire was the envy of the world, stretching as it did from Madrid to Manila and encompassing Peru and Mexico, the wealthiest and most populous territories on the American continent. Even more extensive and no less profitable was Portugal’s empire, which spread outwards from the Atlantic islands of Madeira and São Tomé to include the vast territory of Brazil and numerous trading outposts in West Africa, Indonesia, India and even China. In 1493 the Pope had issued a bull allocating trade in the Americas to Spain and trade in Asia to Portugal. In this division of the world, the Portuguese had got the sugar, spices and slaves. But what the English envied most was what the Spanish discovered in America: gold and silver.
Since the time of Henry VII, Englishmen had dreamt of finding an ‘El Dorado’ of their own, in the hope that England too could become rich on American metals. Time and again they had drawn a blank. The best they could ever manage was to exploit their skills as sailors to steal gold from Spanish ships and settlements. As early as March 1496, in a move clearly inspired by Columbus’s discovery of America on behalf of the Spanish crown three years before, Henry VII granted letters patent to the Venetian navigator John Cabot, giving him and his sons
full and free authority, faculty and power to sail to all parts, regions and coasts of the eastern, western and northern sea [not the southern sea, to avoid conflict with Spanish discoveries], under our banners, flags and ensigns ... to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens or infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians ... [and to] conquer, occupy and possess whatsoever such towns, castles, cities and islands by them thus discovered that they may be able to conquer, occupy and possess, as our vassals and governors lieutenants and deputies therein, acquiring for us the dominion, title and jurisdiction of the same towns, castles, cities, islands and mainlands so discovered ...
 
The English sense of empire envy only grew more acute after the Reformation, when proponents of war against Catholic Spain began to argue that England had a religious duty to build a Protestant empire to match the ‘Popish’ empires of the Spanish and Portuguese. The Elizabethan scholar Richard Hakluyt argued that if the Pope could give Ferdinand and Isabella the right to occupy ‘such island and lands ... as you may have discovered or are about to discover’ outside Christendom, the English crown had a duty to ‘enlarge and advance ... the faith of Christ’ on behalf of Protestantism. The English conception of empire was thus formed in reaction to that of her Spanish rival. England’s empire was to be based on Protestantism; Spain’s rested on Popery.

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