Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (41 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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The official Matabeleland campaign souvenir, published on the fortieth anniversary of this one-sided little conflict, opens with Rhodes’s ‘tribute’ to the men who had conquered the Matabele ‘savages’. The highlight, however, is a grotesque hymn dedicated to the conqueror’s favourite weapon. The hymn actually started life as a Liberal satire on the expedition, but Rhodes’s men brazenly adopted it as their anthem:
Onward Chartered Soldiers, on to heathen lands,
Prayer books in your pockets, rifles in your hands.
Take the glorious tidings where trade can be done,
Spread the peaceful gospel – with a Maxim gun.
 
 
Tell the wretched natives, sinful are their hearts,
Turn their heathen temples into spirit marts.
And if to your teaching they will not succumb,
Give them another sermon with the Maxim gun.
 
When the Ten Commandments they quite understand,
You their Chief must hocus, and annex their land;
And if they misguided call you to account,
Give them another sermon – with a Maxim from the Mount.
The Maxim gun was in fact an American invention. But its inventor, Hiram Maxim, always had his eye firmly on the British market. As soon as he had a working prototype ready in his underground workshop in Hatton Garden, London, he began issuing invitations to the great and the good to give the weapon a trial. Among those who accepted were the Duke of Cambridge, then Commander-in-Chief, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Sutherland and the Duke of Kent. The Duke of Cambridge responded with that alacrity so characteristic of his class: he was, he declared, ‘greatly impressed with the value of machine guns’; indeed, he felt ‘confident they will, ere long, be used generally in all armies’. However, he did ‘not think it advisable to buy any just yet’, adding: ‘When we require them we can purchase the most recent patterns, and their manipulation can be learnt by intelligent men in a few hours’. Others were quicker to appreciate the huge potential of Maxim’s invention. When the Maxim Gun Company was established in November 1884 Lord Rothschild was on its board. In 1888 his bank financed the £1.9 million merger of the Maxim Company with the Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company.
So close was Rhodes’s relationship with the Rothschilds that he even entrusted the execution of his will to Lord Rothschild, specifying that his estate should be used to fund an imperialist equivalent of the Jesuit order – the original intention of the Rhodes Scholarships. This would be ‘a society of the elect for the good of the Empire’. ‘In considering question suggested take Constitution Jesuits if obtainable’, Rhodes scribbled, ‘and insert English Empire for Roman Catholic Religion’. Rothschild in turn assured Rhodes: ‘[O]ur first and foremost wish in connection with South African matters is that you should remain at the head of affairs in that Colony and that you should be able to carry out that great Imperial policy which has been the dream of your life’.
The creation of his own personal country and his own imperialist holy order were indeed merely components of a much bigger Rhodesian ‘Imperial policy’. On a huge table-sized map of Africa (which can still be seen in Kimberley today) Rhodes drew a pencil line stretching from Cape Town to Cairo. This was to be the ultimate imperial railway. From the Cape it would run northwards like some huge metal spine through Bechuanaland, from Bechuanaland through Rhodesia, from Rhodesia through Nyasaland, then on past the Great Lakes to Khartoum and finally up the Nile to its final destination in Egypt.
By this means, Rhodes envisaged bringing the whole African continent under British domination. His justification was simple: ‘We are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race’. There were literally no limits to Rhodes’s ambitions. He could talk with total seriousness of ‘the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire’.
At one level, wars like the one waged by Rhodes against the Matabele were private battles planned in private clubs like the Kimberley Club, that stuffy bastion of capitalist conviviality of which Rhodes himself was among the founders. Matabeleland had become part of the Empire at no cost to the British taxpayer since the entire campaign had been fought by mercenaries employed by Rhodes and paid for by the shareholders in the British South African and De Beers companies. If it turned out that Matabeleland had no gold, then they would be the losers. In effect, the process of colonization had been privatized, a return to the early days of empire when monopoly trading companies had pioneered British rule from Canada to Calcutta. Rhodes was indeed consciously learning from history. British rule in India had begun with the East India Company; now British rule in Africa would be founded on his business interests. In one letter to Rothschild he even referred to De Beers as ‘another East India Company’.
Nor was he alone in thinking this way. George Goldie, the son of a family of Manx smugglers who spent his youth as a dissolute soldier of fortune, also dreamt as a boy of ‘colouring the map red’; his grand design was to annex every square mile from the Niger to the Nile. In 1875 he had gone to West Africa to try to salvage a small merchant house belonging to his sister-in-law’s family. By 1879 he had merged it with a number of other palm oil companies to form the National African Company. But Goldie quickly became convinced that ‘it was hopeless to try to do business where they could not impose real law and order’. In 1883 he proposed that the National African Company take over the whole of the lower and middle Niger region on the basis of a royal charter. Three years later he got what he wanted: a charter was granted to a revived Royal Niger Company. Again, it was the seventeenth-century model of sub-contracted colonization, with shareholders rather than taxpayers bearing the risk. Goldie would pride himself on seeing ‘that the shareholders, with whose money the company was built up, were fairly treated’:
The phrase was that ‘the pioneer was always ruined’ and I said that in this case the pioneer should not be ruined, and he was not. I had gone into the street, and induced people to give me a million to begin with. I was bound to see that they got a fair return on their money. If I had not done so, I should have been committing a breach of trust. My work was an international struggle to obtain British possession of that territory, and I may remind you that the work was brought to a successful conclusion before the Niger Charter came to an end. I think that you will agree with me that I was absolutely bound to protect the shareholders’ interests in the first place ...
 
The government was only too happy to proceed on this basis. As Goldie put it in 1892, Britain had ‘adopted the policy of advance by commercial enterprise ... The sanction of Parliament was not to be expected for the employment of imperial resources’ to further his ambitions.
For Goldie as for Rhodes, what was good for his company was self-evidently good for the British Empire. And like his South African counterpart, Goldie saw the Maxim gun as the key to the expansion of both. By the end of the 1880s he had conquered several of the Fulani emirates and launched wars against the settlements of Bida and Ilorin. Though he had little more than 500 men at his disposal, the Maxims enabled them to defeat armies thirty times as large. It was a similar story in East Africa, where Frederick Lugard had established British primacy in Buganda while in the employ of the Imperial British East Africa Company.
66
So impressed was Goldie by Lugard’s performance that he hired him to work for his Niger Company. When Northern Nigeria was made a British protectorate in 1900, Lugard was appointed its first High Commissioner; twelve years later he became Governor-General of a united Nigeria. That transformation from trading monopoly to protectorate was typical of the way the Scramble for Africa proceeded. The politicians let the businessmen make the running, but sooner rather than later they stepped in to create some kind of formal colonial government. Although the new African companies resembled the East India Company in their original design, they governed Africa for far shorter periods than their Indian precursor had governed India. On the other hand, even when British rule became ‘official’ it remained skeletal in its structure. In his book
The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa
(1922), Lugard would later define indirect rule as the ‘systematic use of the customary institutions of the people as agencies of local rule’. This was a rather elaborate way of saying that Africa would be ruled the way the princely states of India were ruled: with existing African rulers as puppets and a minimal British presence.
That, however, was only half the story of the Scramble for Africa. For while Rhodes was working northwards from the Cape, and while Goldie was working eastwards from the Niger, British politicians were working southwards, from Cairo. And they were doing so in large measure because they feared that if they did not, someone else would.
It was the French who made the running in North Africa, chipping away far more readily at the edges of the Ottoman Empire than the British. Their first bid for supremacy in Egypt had been made by Napoleon, only to be sunk decisively by the Royal Navy at the Battle of Aboukir in 1798. But the French did not wait long after Napoleon’s fall to resume their activities in the region. As early as 1830 a French army had invaded Algeria; within seven years the French controlled most of the country. They had also been quick to give their backing to Mehmet Ali, the modernizing Egyptian leader who sought to flout, if not to overthrow, the Ottoman Sultan’s authority. Above all, it was French investors who took the lead in the economic development of Turkey and Egypt. The man who designed and built the Suez Canal was a Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and the greater part of the capital invested in that vast and strategically portentous undertaking – opened in November 1869 – was French. Time and again, however, the British were able to insist that the future of the Ottoman Empire was a matter to be decided between the five great powers: not just Britain and France, but also Russia, Austria and Prussia.
Indeed, it is impossible to understand the Scramble for Africa without seeing that it had its antecedents in the perennial struggle between the great powers to maintain – or overthrow – the balance of power between them in Europe and the Near East. In 1829 – 30 they had reached a consensus about the future of Greece and Belgium. In the wake of the Crimean War (1854 – 6), they reached a more fragile consensus about the future of Turkey’s remaining European possessions, in particular the Black Sea Straits. What happened over Africa in the 1880s was in many ways simply the continuation of European diplomacy in other places – with the important qualification that neither Austria nor Russia had ambitions south of the Mediterranean. Thus, at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the offer to France of Tunis was a mere sub-clause of the much more complex agreements reached about the future of the Balkans.
When it became clear in 1874 that the governments of both Egypt and Turkey were bankrupt, it seemed at first that matters would be settled by the usual great-power confabulation. However, first Disraeli and then his arch-rival Gladstone could not resist the temptation to take unilateral action to give Britain the edge in the region. When the Khedive of Egypt offered to sell his shares in the Suez Canal Company for £4 million, Disraeli seized the opportunity, turning to his friends the Rothschilds – who else? – for the colossal cash advance necessary to close the deal. True, ownership of 44 per cent of the Canal Company’s original shares did not give Britain control over the canal itself, especially as the shares had no voting rights until 1895 and had only ten votes thereafter. On the other hand, the Khedive’s pledge to pay 5 per cent of the value of the shares every year in lieu of dividends gave the British government a new and direct interest in Egyptian finances. Disraeli was in fact wrong to suggest that the Canal Company was in a position to close the canal to the growing volume of British shipping now using it. On the other hand, there was no guarantee that the law binding the Company to keep the canal open would always be respected. As Disraeli rightly said, the ownership of the shares gave Britain an additional ‘leverage’. It also turned out to be an exceptionally good investment of public money.
67
French hard feelings were in some measure assuaged by the subsequent reorganization of Egyptian finances, which (at the suggestion of the French government), established a multinational commission on which England, France and Italy were equally represented. In 1876 an international Bank for the Egyptian Public Debt (
Caisse de la dette publique
) was established and two years later, at its suggestion, Egypt acquired an international government with an Englishman as Finance Minister and a Frenchman as Minister of Public Works. Simultaneously, the English and French Rothschilds agreed to float an £8.5 million loan. The
Journal de Débats
went so far as to describe this cosy arrangement as ‘almost equivalent to the conclusion of an alliance between France and England’. One British statesman summed up the rationale of the compromise: ‘You may renounce – or monopolize – or share. Renouncing would have been to place the French across our road to India. Monopolizing would have been very near the risk of war. So we resolved to share’. But this policy of sharing was not to last. In 1879 the Khedive dismissed the international government. The powers responded by deposing him in favour of his supine son Tewfiq. But when Tewfiq was overthrown by the Egyptian military, led by the anti-European Arabi Pasha, it quickly became apparent that a move was afoot to free Egypt from foreign economic dominance altogether. Alexandria was fortified and a dam built across the Canal. A full-scale default on the country’s external debt became a serious possibility. The very lives of the 37,000 Europeans resident in Egypt seemed under threat.

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