Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (44 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Joseph Chamberlain was Britain’s first authentically, self-consciously imperialist politician. Originally a Birmingham manufacturer who had made a fortune from manufacturing wooden screws, Chamberlain had risen through the ranks of the Liberal Party via the National Education League and local government, only to quarrel with Gladstone over the question of Irish Home Rule and gravitate – as a ‘Liberal Unionist’ – towards the Conservatives. The Tories never really understood him. What was one supposed to make of a man who played lawn tennis wearing ‘a closely buttoned black frock coat and top hat’? But they had few better weapons against the Liberals, particularly as Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionism quickly evolved into Liberal Imperialism. Chamberlain read Seeley’s
Expansion of England
avidly; indeed, he later claimed it was the reason for sending his son Austen to Cambridge. When he heard Froude was visiting Cape Town, he wrote: ‘Tell them in my name that they will find the Radical Party more sternly Imperial than the most bigoted Tory’.
In August 1887, to test the flamboyant defector out, Salisbury invited Chamberlain to cross the Atlantic and attempt to broker an agreement between the United States and Canada, who were bickering over fishing rights in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The trip opened Chamberlain’s eyes. In per capita terms, he discovered, Canadians consumed five times more British exports than Americans; yet there were many influential Canadians who openly contemplated a commercial union with the US. Even before he reached Canada, Chamberlain fired off a broadside against this idea. ‘Commercial union with the United States’, he declared, ‘means free trade between America and the Dominion,
71
and a protective tariff against the mother country. If Canada desires that, Canada can have it; but Canada can only have it knowing perfectly well that [it] means political separation from Great Britain’. Speaking in Toronto, Chamberlain sought to counter Canadian drift with an impassioned appeal to ‘The greatness and importance of the distinction reserved for the Anglo-Saxon race, that proud, persistent, self-asserting and resolute stock which no change of climate or condition can alter ...’
The question, Chamberlain asked, was whether ‘the interest of true democracy’ lay in ‘the disintegration of the Empire’ or in ‘the uniting together of kindred races with similar objects’. The key, he suggested, lay in ‘the working out of the great problem of federal government’ – something that Canadians had achieved in their own country, but which ought now to be done for the Empire as a whole. If imperial federation was a dream, he concluded, it was nevertheless ‘a grand idea. It is one to stimulate the patriotism and statesmanship of every man who loves his country; and whether it be destined or not to perfect realization, at least let us ... do all in our power to promote it’.
On his return home, he fervently proclaimed his new faith in ‘the ties between the different branches of the Anglo-Saxon race which form the British Empire’.
Chamberlain had yearned for some time to be a ‘Colonial Minister’. In June 1895 he surprised Salisbury by turning down both the Home Office and the Exchequer in favour of the Colonial Office. As Colonial Secretary he repeatedly affirmed his ‘belief’ in ‘the wider patriotism ... which encloses the whole of Greater Britain’. Only if the Empire stood still would it be surpassed; imperial federation was the way forward, even if that did imply compromises on the part of both metropolis and colonies. ‘The British Empire’, Chamberlain declared in 1902, ‘is based upon a community of sacrifice. Whenever that is lost sight of, then, indeed, I think we may expect to sink into oblivion like the empires of the past, which ... after having exhibited to the world evidences of their power and strength, died away regretted by none, and leaving behind them a record of selfishness only’.
Chamberlain was by no means the only politician of the time to embrace the ideal of Greater Britain. Almost as dedicated a believer was Alfred Milner, whose
Kindergarten
of young devotees in South Africa – later reconstituted in London as the ‘Round Table’ – would come close to realizing Rhodes’s dream of an imperial Jesuit order. ‘If I am also an imperialist’, Milner declared, ‘it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and its long supremacy at sea, has been to strike fresh roots in distant parts of the world. My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial limits. I am an imperialist and not a Little Englander because I am a British race Patriot. It is not the soil of England ... which is essential to arouse my patriotism, but the speech, the traditions, the spiritual heritage, the principles, the aspirations, of the British race ...’ This kind of rhetoric was infectious – especially, it should be added, to social outsiders like Chamberlain and Milner who did not always find it easy to share the government benches with complacent scions of the aristocracy.
72
Of course, all this presupposed a readiness on the part of the Dominions to redefine their relationship with the metropolis – a relationship which most of them, on reflection, preferred to leave on the rather vague, devolved basis which had grown out of the Durham Report. The white colonies were not short of enthusiasm for the idea of Greater Britain. Indeed, they were quicker than the British at home to adopt the Earl of Meath’s suggestion of an annual ‘Empire Day’ on the Queen’s birthday (24 May), which became an official public holiday in Canada in 1901, in Australia in 1905, in New Zealand and South Africa in 1910 but only belatedly, in 1916, in the mother country. But there was a difference between symbolism and the reduction of autonomy implied by the idea of imperial federation. Crucially, as things stood, the Canadians were entitled to – and from 1879 did – impose protectionist tariffs on British goods, an example soon followed by Australia and New Zealand; it was highly unlikely that this would be the case in a federal Empire. Another glaring hole in the federalist argument was India, whose role in a predominantly white Greater Britain was far from clear.
73
But the biggest hole of all was Ireland.
Ireland, the first of all the colonies of settlement, was the last to be granted what the other white colonies by the 1880s took for granted, ‘responsible gov ernment’. There were three reasons for this. The first was that the majority of Irishmen, though impeccably fair-skinned, were Catholics and, in the eyes of many Englishmen, as racially inferior as if they had been the colour of coal. The second was that a minority – particularly the descendants of those who had settled on the island in the seventeenth century – preferred the arrangement established by the Act of Union of 1800, whereby Ireland was governed from Westminster as an integral part of the United Kingdom. The third and ultimately decisive reason, however, was that men like Chamberlain persuaded themselves that to allow Ireland to have its own parliament – as it had before 1800, and as the other white colonies already had – would somehow undermine the integrity of the Empire as a whole. This, above all other reasons, was why Gladstone’s attempts to grant Ireland Home Rule failed.
There were of course radical Irish nationalists who would never have been satisfied with the very modest devolution of power Gladstone envisaged in his two Home Rule bills of 1885 and 1893. The Fenian Brotherhood had attempted an uprising in 1867; though it failed, they were still able to mount a mainland bombing campaign in its aftermath. In 1882 a Fenian splinter group known as the Invincibles assassinated Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Secretary of State for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, his Under-Secretary, in Phoenix Park. That Irishmen should resort to such violence against British rule was not surprising. Direct rule from Westminster had without question exacerbated the disastrous famine of the mid-1840s, in which more than a million people had died of dearth and disease. It may have been
phytophthora infestans
that ruined the potatoes; but it was the dogmatic
laissez-faire
policies of Ireland’s British rulers that turned harvest failure into outright famine. Yet the men of violence were always a small minority. The majority of Home Rulers – men like the founder of the Home Government Association, Isaac Butt – aspired to nothing more extreme than the degree of devolution then enjoyed by Canadians and Australians.
74
He and the movement’s most charismatic leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, were not merely Anglicized in their speech and culture; they were also good Protestants. Had Parnell not been destroyed by the scandal of his affair with Kitty O’Shea, he would have made a perfectly good colonial premier: as defensive of Ireland’s interests as Canadian premiers were of theirs, no doubt, but hardly an ice-breaker for ‘Rome Rule’.
75
The defeat of both Home Rule bills signalled a return on the part of both Liberal Unionists and the Conservatives to the blinkered politics of the 1770s, when their counterparts in Parliament had obstinately refused devolution to the American colonists. The question their position begged was plain. How could Greater Britain possibly be made a reality if Ireland, the first of all the colonies of settlement, could not even be trusted with its own parliament? This was the contradiction between Unionism and the new ‘constructive’ imperialism to which Chamberlain and his associates seemed blind. True, Chamberlain toyed with the idea of giving the British Isles an American-style federal constitution, allowing Ireland, Scotland and Wales their own separate legislatures and leaving imperial affairs to Westminster; but it is hard to believe he took such schemes seriously. Indeed, given Chamberlain’s relative ignorance of Ireland, it is tempting to think that his desire to ‘sit on’ Home Rule was principally actuated by Gladstone’s adoption of it. The core belief of the Unionists became, in the words of the Tory maverick Lord Randolph Churchill, that Home Rule would ‘plunge the knife into the heart of the British Empire’. In truth, it was the postponement of Home Rule until 1914 that plunged a knife into the heart of Ireland, since by that time Unionist opposition in Ulster had hardened to the point of armed resistance.
Still, none of this diminished the appeal of ‘Greater Britain’ within Great Britain itself. It was partly a matter of targeting voters’ narrow economic self-interest. To Chamberlain, the former industrialist, Empire meant above all export markets and jobs. In this he had in some measure been anticipated by Salisbury, who had asked an audience at Limehouse in 1889 to ‘conceive what London would be without the empire ... a collection of multitudes, without employment, without industrial life, sinking down into misery and decay’. But Chamberlain took such economic rationalization much further. As he told the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in 1896:
The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones. The War Office and Admiralty are mostly occupied in preparations for the defence of these markets, and for the protection of our commerce ... Therefore, it is not too much to say that commerce is the greatest of all political interests, and that Government deserves most the popular approval which does the most to increase our trade and to settle it on a firm foundation.
 
It was self-evident to Chamberlain that ‘a great part of our population is dependent ... upon the interchange of commodities with our colonial fellow-subjects’. Ergo, they must all be imperialists.
Was the Empire really economically beneficial to the mass of British voters? It is not immediately obvious that it was. The benefits of overseas investment were not enjoyed by the majority of people, whose savings (if they had any) were generally invested in British government bonds through savings banks and other financial intermediaries. At the same time, the costs of imperial defence, though not excessively high, were borne primarily by British taxpayers, not by taxpayers in the colonies of white settlement. Indeed, it is arguable that the principal beneficiaries of the Empire at this time were those British subjects who emigrated to the Dominions – of whom, as we have seen, there were a great many. Around two and a half million British nationals emigrated to the Empire between 1900 and 1914, three-quarters of them to Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In most cases, emigration substantially increased their incomes and reduced their tax burdens.
Yet imperialism did not have to pay to be popular. For many people it was sufficient that it was
exciting
.
In all, there were seventy-two separate British military campaigns in the course of Queen Victoria’s reign – more than one for every year of the so-called
pax britannica
. Unlike the wars of the twentieth century, these conflicts involved relatively few people. On average, the British armed forces during Victoria’s reign amounted to 0.8 per cent of the population; and servicemen were disproportionately drawn from the Celtic periphery or the urban underclass. Yet those who lived far from the imperial front line, never hearing a shot fired in anger save at wildfowl, had an insatiable appetite for tales of military derring-do. As a source of entertainment – of sheer psychological gratification – the Empire’s importance can never be exaggerated.

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