Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (43 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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In other words, it was only worth acquiring new territory if it strengthened Britain’s economic and strategic position. It might look well on a map, but the missing link that would have completed Rhodes’s ‘red route’ from the Cape to Cairo did not pass that test. As for those who resided in Africa, their fate did not concern Salisbury in the slightest. ‘If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people’, he had reminded his Cabinet colleagues in 1878, ‘the British Empire would not have been made’. Sultan Bargash was soon to discover the implications of that precept.
In August 1885 Bismarck sent four warships to Zanzibar and demanded the Sultan hand over his empire to Germany. By the time they left a month later, the territories had been divided up neatly between Germany and Britain, leaving the Sultan with just a coastal strip. Nor was the Sultan the only loser in this. John Kirk’s work in Africa was at an end, for the Germans demanded and got his resignation. Not that the Germans cared two pfennigs for Zanzibar. Just a few years later, in July 1890, Bismarck’s successor recognized a British protectorate over it in exchange for the island of Heligoland, off Germany’s North Sea coast. This truly was Monopoly on a global scale.
Across Africa the story repeated itself: chiefs hoodwinked, tribes dispossessed, inheritances signed away with a thumbprint or a shaky cross and any resistance mown down by the Maxim gun. One by one the nations of Africa were subjugated – the Zulus, the Matabele, the Mashonas, the kingdoms of Niger, the Islamic principality of Kano, the Dinkas and the Masai, the Sudanese Muslims, Benin and Bechuana. By the beginning of the new century, the carve-up was complete. The British had all but realized Rhodes’s vision of unbroken possession from the Cape to Cairo: their African empire stretched northwards from the Cape Colony through Natal, Bechuanaland (Botswana), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi); and southwards from Egypt, through the Sudan, Uganda and East Africa (Kenya). German East Africa was the only missing link in Rhodes’s intended chain; in addition, as we have seen, the Germans had South West Africa (Namibia), Cameroon and Togo. True, Britain had also acquired the Gambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast (Ghana) and Nigeria in West Africa, as well as the north of Somaliland (Somalia). But the West African colonies were islands in a French sea. From Tunis and Algeria in the north, downwards through Mauritania, Senegal, French Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Upper Volta, Dahomey, Niger, Chad, the French Congo and Gabon, the greater part of West Africa was in French hands; their only eastern possession was the island of Madagascar. Besides Mozambique and Angola, Portugal retained an enclave in Guinea. Italy acquired Libya, Eritrea and most of Somaliland. Belgium – or to be precise the Belgian King – owned the vast central territory of Congo. And Spain had Rio de Oro (now southern Morocco). Africa was now almost entirely in European hands, and the lion’s share belonged to Britain.
Greater Britain
 
In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria reigned supreme at the apex of the most extensive empire in world history. The figures are astonishing. In 1860 the territorial extent of the British Empire had been some 9.5 million square miles; by 1909 the total had risen to 12.7 million. The British Empire now covered around 25 per cent of the world’s land surface – making it three times the size of the French and ten times the size of the German – and controlled roughly the same proportion of the world’s population: some 444 million people in all lived under some form of British rule. Not only had Britain led the Scramble for Africa. She had been in the forefront of another Scramble in the Far East, gobbling up the north of Borneo, Malaya and a chunk of New Guinea, to say nothing of a string of islands in the Pacific: Fiji (1874), the Cook Islands (1880), the New Hebrides (1887), the Phoenix Islands (1889), the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (1892) and the Solomons (1893).
70
According to the
St James’s Gazette
, the Queen-Empress held sway over ‘one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers, ten thousand islands’. A postage stamp was produced showing a map of the world and bearing the legend: ‘We hold a vaster Empire than has ever been’. Maps showing its territory coloured an eye-catching red hung in schools all over the country. Small wonder the British began to assume that they had the God-given right to rule the world. It was, as the journalist J. L. Garvin put it in 1905, ‘an extent and magnificence of dominion beyond the natural’.
The extent of Britain’s Empire could be seen not only in the world’s atlases and censuses. Britain was also the world’s banker, investing immense sums around the world. By 1914 the gross nominal value of Britain’s stock of capital invested abroad was £3.8 billion, between two-fifths and a half of all foreign-owned assets. That was more than double French overseas investment and more than three times the German figure. No other major economy before or since has held such a large proportion of its assets over-seas. Between 1870 and 1913 capital flows averaged around 4.5 per cent of gross domestic product, rising above 7 per cent at their cyclical peaks in 1872, 1890 and 1913. More British capital was invested in the Americas than in Britain itself between 1865 and 1914. In addition, these flows were far more geographically dispersed than those of other European economies. Only around 6 per cent of British overseas investments were in western Europe. Around 45 per cent were in the United States and the white settler colonies. A fifth were in Latin America, 16 per cent in Asia and 13 per cent in Africa. True, only £1.8 billion was actually invested in British colonies, and nearly all of this was invested in the older colonies; hardly anything was invested in the new African acquisitions of the Scramble. But the importance of the Empire was increasing. On average it attracted around 38 per cent of portfolio investment between 1865 and 1914, but by the 1890s the share had risen to 44 per cent. Likewise, the Empire’s share of total British exports was on the increase, rising from between a quarter and a third to almost two-fifths in 1902.
In any case, not all of the British Empire was formally under British rule: the maps actually underestimated the extent of the imperial reach. The immense amounts of capital sunk into Latin America, for example, gave Britain so much leverage – especially in Argentina and Brazil – that it seems quite legitimate to speak of ‘informal imperialism’ in these countries. It might of course be objected that British investors had no business investing in Buenos Aires and Rio when they should have been modernizing the industries of the British Isles themselves. But the anticipated returns on overseas investment were generally higher than those from domestic manufacturing. In any case, this was not a zero-sum game. New foreign investment soon became selffinancing, since earnings from existing overseas assets consistently exceeded the value of new capital out-flows: between 1870 and 1913 total overseas earnings amounted to 5.3 per cent of GDP a year. Nor is there any compelling evidence that British industry was hampered by a shortage of capital before 1914.
It was not only through investment that the British extended their informal Empire. Commercial negotiations also pushed large sectors of the world economy to accept free trade: witness the trade treaties with Latin American countries, Turkey, Morocco, Siam, Japan and the South Sea islands. By the late nineteenth century, around 60 per cent of British trade was with extra-European partners. Free trade with the developing world suited Britain. With her huge earnings from overseas investment, not forgetting other ‘invisibles’ like insurance and shipping, she could afford to import vastly more than she exported. In any case, the terms of trade – the relationship between export and import prices – moved by around 10 per cent in Britain’s favour between 1870 and 1914.
Britain also set the standard for the international monetary system. In 1868 only Britain and a number of her economic dependencies – Portugal, Egypt, Canada, Chile and Australia – were on the gold standard (which fixed the value of a country’s paper money in terms of gold and obliged its central bank to convert notes into gold on demand). France and the other members of the Latin Monetary Union, as well as Russia, Persia and some Latin American states were on the bimetallic (gold and silver) system, while most of the rest of the world was on the silver standard. By 1908, however, only China, Persia and a handful of Central American countries were still on silver. The gold standard had become, in effect, the global monetary system. In all but name, it was a sterling standard.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this was how cheap it was to defend. In 1898 there were 99,000 regular soldiers stationed in Britain, 75,000 in India and 41,000 elsewhere in the Empire. The navy required another 100,000 men, and the Indian native army was 148,000 strong. There were barracks and naval coaling stations, thirty-three of them in all, dotted all over the world. Yet the total defence budget for that year was just over £40 million: a mere 2.5 per cent of net national product. That is not much higher than the relative burden of Britain’s defence budget today, and far less than the equivalent percentage spent on the military during the Cold War. Nor did the burden rise significantly when Britain boldly modernized her entire fleet by building the first Dreadnought, a ship so advanced – with its 12-inch guns and its revolutionary turbines – that it rendered all existing battleships obsolete the moment it was launched. Between 1906 and 1913, Britain was able to build twenty-seven of these floating fortresses at a cost of £49 million, less than the annual interest charge on the national debt. This was world domination on the cheap.
The British, however, knew too much ancient history to be complacent about their hegemonic position. Even at the zenith of their power they thought, or were reminded by Kipling, of the fate of Nineveh and Tyre. Already, there were many who looked forward uneasily to the decline and fall of their own empire, like all the empires before it. Matthew Arnold had already pictured Britain as ‘The weary Titan, with deaf / Ears, and labour-dimm’d eyes ... Staggering on to her goal; / Bearing on shoulders immense, / Atlantean, the load, / Well-nigh not to be borne / Of the too vast orb of her fate’. But could the Titan somehow be revived? Could the inevitable waning of her power be arrested and reversed before she staggered and fell? One man thought that it could.
John Robert Seeley was the son of an Evangelical publisher in whose office the Church Missionary Society had held its meetings. A moderately successful classical scholar, Seeley had made his name in 1865 with
Ecce Homo
, which told the story of Christ’s life with a scrupulous inattention to the supernatural. Four years later he was elected to the Chair of Modern History at Cambridge, where he devoted his time to modern diplomatic history and a biography of the nineteenth-century Prussian reformer Stein. Then in 1883, rather to everyone’s surprise, Seeley produced a best-seller,
The Expansion of England
. In the space of just two years it sold more than 80,000 copies, and remained in print until 1956.
Seeley’s
Expansion
purports to be a history of the British Empire from 1688 to 1815. It is still remembered today for its memorable characterization of the unplanned nature of the eighteenth-century Empire: ‘We seem ... to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. But it was the book’s contemporary political message that captured the public imagination. Seeley acknowledged the vast extent of Britain’s Empire, but he foresaw imminent decline if Britain persisted in its absent-minded attitude to imperialism:
If the United States and Russia hold together for another half century, they will at the end of that time completely dwarf such old European states as France and Germany and depress them into a second class. They will do the same to England, if at the end of that time England still thinks of herself as simply a European State.
 
Seeley insisted that it was time to move beyond the haphazard, improvised Empire of the past. Britain should take advantage of two inescapable facts: first, that British subjects in the colonies would soon outnumber those at home; secondly, that the technology of the telegraph and steamship made it possible to unite them as never before. Only by knitting together this ‘Greater Britain’ could the Empire hope to compete with the superpowers of the future.
Seeley himself was no empire-builder. He had never ventured beyond Europe; indeed the idea for the book had come to him while on holiday in Switzerland. Plagued by insomnia and a nagging wife, he was a byword in Cambridge for donnish pomposity, ‘an almost excessive gravity of deportment’ as one contemporary put it. But his call for a strengthening of the bonds between Britain and the white, English-speaking colonies was music to the ears of a new generation of imperialists. Such ideas were in the air. In 1886, after a visit to Australia, the historian J. A. Froude published
Oceana, or England and her Colonies
. Four years later the disgraced Liberal politician Sir Charles Dilke – whose career had been ruined by an ugly divorce case – brought out
Problems of Greater Britain
. ‘Greater Britain’ was perhaps the most succinct expression of what all these writers had in mind. As Dilke put it, the aim was for ‘Canada and Australia [to] be to us as Kent and Cornwall’. When such notions found a champion in high places, the result was a profound shift in government policy towards the Empire.

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