Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (50 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 1907 the Foreign Office mandarin Eyre Crowe, who had himself been born in Leipzig, drafted a ‘Memorandum on the present state of British relations with France and Germany’. Its stark message was that Germany’s desire to play ‘on the world’s stage a much larger and more dominant part than she finds allotted to herself under the present distribution of material power’ might lead her ‘to diminish the power of any rivals, to enhance her own [power] by extending her dominion, to hinder the co-operation of other states, and ultimately to break up and supplant the British Empire’.
In the 1880s, when France and Russia had still seemed to be Britain’s main imperial rivals, British policy had been to conciliate Germany. But by the early 1900s it was Germany that seemed to pose the biggest threat to the Empire. Crowe’s case was not difficult to make. Already the German economy had overtaken the British. In 1870 the German population had been 39 million to Britain’s 31 million. By 1913 the figures were 65 to 46 million. In 1870 Britain’s GDP had been 40 per cent higher than Germany’s. By 1913 Germany’s was 6 per cent bigger than Britain’s, meaning that Germany’s average annual growth rate of per capita GDP had been more than half a percentage point higher. In 1880 Britain’s share of world manufacturing production was 23 per cent, Germany’s 8 per cent. In 1913 the figures were, respectively, 14 and 15 per cent. Meanwhile, as a result of Admiral Tirpitz’s plan to build a North Sea battle fleet, beginning with the naval law of 1898, the German navy was fast becoming the Royal Navy’s most dangerous rival. In 1880 the ratio of British to German warship tonnage had been seven to one. By 1914 it was less than two to one.
89
Above all, the German army dwarfed Britain’s by 124 divisions to ten, every single infantry regiment armed with MG08 Maxim guns. Even counting the seven British divisions based in India did little to close this huge gap. In terms of manpower, Britain could expect to mobilize 733,500 men in the event of war; the Germans would have 4.5 million.
89
Above all, the German army dwarfed Britain’s by 124 divisions to ten, every single infantry regiment armed with MG08 Maxim guns. Even counting the seven British divisions based in India did little to close this huge gap. In terms of manpower, Britain could expect to mobilize 733,500 men in the event of war; the Germans would have 4.5 million.
The Conservatives and Unionists claimed to have answers to the German question: conscription to match the German army man for man and Germanstyle tariffs to help pay for it. But the new Liberal government rejected both on principle. They retained only two of their predecessors’ policies: the commitment to match and, if possible, outstrip German naval construction and the policy of
rapprochement
with France.
rapprochement
with France.
In 1904 an ‘Entente Cordiale’ had been reached with the French on a wide range of colonial issues. At long last, the French acknowledged the British dominance of Egypt, while in return the British offered the French a free hand in Morocco. A few trivial British territories in West Africa were conceded in return for the renunciation of vestigial French fishing claims off Newfoundland. Although with hindsight it might have made more sense to seek such an arrangement with Germany – and indeed Chamberlain himself flirted with the idea in 1899
90
– at the time the Anglo-French Entente made a good deal of sense. True, there seemed to be a number of potential areas for Anglo-German overseas cooperation, not just in East Africa but also in China and the Pacific as well as in Latin America and the Middle East. Financially, there was close cooperation between British and German banks on railway projects ranging from the Yangtse valley in China to the Delagoa Bay in Mozambique. As Churchill later put it, ‘We were no enemies to German colonial expansion’. The German Chancellor himself said in January 1913 that ‘colonial questions of the future point to co-operation with England’.
90
– at the time the Anglo-French Entente made a good deal of sense. True, there seemed to be a number of potential areas for Anglo-German overseas cooperation, not just in East Africa but also in China and the Pacific as well as in Latin America and the Middle East. Financially, there was close cooperation between British and German banks on railway projects ranging from the Yangtse valley in China to the Delagoa Bay in Mozambique. As Churchill later put it, ‘We were no enemies to German colonial expansion’. The German Chancellor himself said in January 1913 that ‘colonial questions of the future point to co-operation with England’.
In strategic terms, however, it was still France and her ally Russia that were Britain’s principal rivals overseas; and settling old disputes on the periphery was a way of freeing British resources to meet the growing continental challenge from Germany. As the Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Francis Bertie, said in November 1901, the best argument against an Anglo-German alliance was that if one were concluded ‘we [should] never be on decent terms with France, our neighbour in Europe and in many parts of the world, or with Russia, whose frontiers are coterminous with ours or nearly so over a large portion of Asia’. That was the reason Britain backed France against Germany over Morocco in 1905 and again in 1911, despite the fact that formally the Germans were in the right.
Nevertheless, the Liberals’ Francophilia, which quickly translated what had been a colonial understanding into an implicit military alliance, was profoundly hazardous in isolation. Without adequate military preparations for the eventuality of a continental war, the ‘continental commitment’ to France made by the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was indefensibly dangerous. It might conceivably deter Germany from going to war, but if it did not, and Britain were obliged to honour Grey’s commitments to the French, what exactly would happen then? Britain retained its naval superiority over Germany; in that arms race the Liberals had not shown weakness. After his move to the Admiralty in October 1911, Churchill even upped the ante by aiming to maintain a new ‘60 per cent standard ... in relation not only to Germany but to the rest of the world’. ‘The Triple Alliance is being outbuilt by the Triple Entente’, he crowed to Grey in October 1913. ‘Why’, he asked bluntly the following month, ‘should it be supposed that we should not be able to defeat [Germany]? A study of the comparative fleet strength in the line of battle will be found reassuring’. Superficially it was. On the eve of war, Britain had forty-seven capital ships (battleships and battle cruisers) to Germany’s twenty-nine and enjoyed a similar numerical advantage in virtually every other category of vessel. Moreover, calculations of the total firepower of the rival navies made the differential between them even larger. But Tirpitz had never aspired to build a fleet bigger than Britain’s; just one big enough ‘that, even for the adversary with the greatest sea power, a war against it would involve such dangers as to imperil its position in the world’. A navy between two-thirds and three-quarters the size of the British would, Tirpitz had explained to the Kaiser in 1899, suffice to make Britain ‘concede to Your Majesty such a measure of maritime influence which will make it possible for Your Majesty to conduct a great overseas policy’. That had very nearly been achieved by 1914.
91
And by this time the Germans were producing technically superior battleships.
91
And by this time the Germans were producing technically superior battleships.
It was also far from clear that naval superiority would affect the outcome of a continental land war: by the time a British blockade had ground down the German economy, the German army might have been in Paris for months. Even the Committee of Imperial Defence recognized that the only meaningful help that could be offered to France in the event of a war would have to come from the army. Yet in the absence of conscription, as we have seen, the British army was dwarfed by the German; and that was the crux of the matter. The politicians might try to argue that a handful of British divisions could make the difference between a German and a French victory, but in London, Paris and Berlin the soldiers knew it was a lie. The Liberals could credibly have either a commitment to defend France
and
conscription, or a policy of neutrality and no conscription. The combination they preferred – the French commitment but no conscription – was to prove fatal. Kitchener acidly remarked in 1914: ‘No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world’.
and
conscription, or a policy of neutrality and no conscription. The combination they preferred – the French commitment but no conscription – was to prove fatal. Kitchener acidly remarked in 1914: ‘No one can say my colleagues in the Cabinet are not courageous. They have no Army and they declared war against the mightiest military nation in the world’.
In 1905 a book appeared with the intriguing title of
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
. It purported to be published in Tokyo in 2005 and envisaged a world in which India was under Russian rule, South Africa under German rule, Egypt under Turkish rule, Canada under American and Australia under Japanese. This was just one of a veritable library of dystopian fictions published in the decades before the First World War. As time passed, and with the encouragement of Lord Northcliffe, whose
Daily Mail
serialized such works on generous terms, more and more authors dwelt on the potential consequences of a German military threat to the Empire.
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire
. It purported to be published in Tokyo in 2005 and envisaged a world in which India was under Russian rule, South Africa under German rule, Egypt under Turkish rule, Canada under American and Australia under Japanese. This was just one of a veritable library of dystopian fictions published in the decades before the First World War. As time passed, and with the encouragement of Lord Northcliffe, whose
Daily Mail
serialized such works on generous terms, more and more authors dwelt on the potential consequences of a German military threat to the Empire.
There was Headon Hill’s
The Spies of Wight
(1899); Erskine Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands
(1903); L. James’s
The Boy Galloper
(also 1903); E. Phillips Oppenheim’s
A Maker of History
(1905); William Le Queux’s
The Invasion of 1910
; Walter Wood’s
The Enemy in our Midst
(1906); A. J. Dawson’s
The Message
(1907); Le Queux’s
Spies of the Kaiser
(1909) and Captain Curties’s
When England Slept
(also 1909). In every case, the premise was that the Germans had a malevolent plan to invade England or otherwise overthrow the British Empire. The fear spread down even as far as the readership of the
Boys’ Own Paper
. In 1909 the Aldeburgh Lodge school magazine rather wittily imagined how children would be taught in 1930, assuming that England by then would have become merely ‘a small island off the western coast of Teutonia’. Even Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) tried his hand at the genre with
When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns
(1913).
The Spies of Wight
(1899); Erskine Childers’s
The Riddle of the Sands
(1903); L. James’s
The Boy Galloper
(also 1903); E. Phillips Oppenheim’s
A Maker of History
(1905); William Le Queux’s
The Invasion of 1910
; Walter Wood’s
The Enemy in our Midst
(1906); A. J. Dawson’s
The Message
(1907); Le Queux’s
Spies of the Kaiser
(1909) and Captain Curties’s
When England Slept
(also 1909). In every case, the premise was that the Germans had a malevolent plan to invade England or otherwise overthrow the British Empire. The fear spread down even as far as the readership of the
Boys’ Own Paper
. In 1909 the Aldeburgh Lodge school magazine rather wittily imagined how children would be taught in 1930, assuming that England by then would have become merely ‘a small island off the western coast of Teutonia’. Even Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) tried his hand at the genre with
When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns
(1913).
Imperialist hubris – the arrogance of absolute power – had been and gone, to be replaced by acute fear of decline and sudden fall. Rhodes was dead, Chamberlain dying. The Scramble for Africa, those halcyon days of Maxims against the Matabele, suddenly seemed a distant memory. It was the scramble for Europe, now fast approaching, that would determine the fate of the Empire. Baden-Powell’s response was to found, in imitation of the earlier Boys’ Brigade, the Boy Scouts, the most successful of all the period’s attempts to mobilize youth behind the Empire. With its quirky mix of colonial kit and Kipling-esque jargon, the Scout movement offered a distilled and sanitized version of frontier life to generations of bored town-dwellers. Though it was undoubtedly good, clean fun – indeed its appeal soon spread it far beyond the boundaries of the Empire – the political purpose of scouting was quite explicit in Baden-Powell’s best-selling
Scouting for Boys
(1908):
Scouting for Boys
(1908):
There are always members of Parliament who try to make the Army and Navy smaller, so as to save money. They only want to be popular with the voters of England, so that they and the party to which they belong may get into power. These men are called ‘politicians’. They do not look to the good of their country. Most of them know and care very little about our Colonies. If they had had their way before, we should by this time have been talking French, and if they were allowed to have their way in the future, we may as well learn German or Japanese, for we shall be conquered by these.
Yet the Scouts were hardly a match for the Prussian General Staff; a point nicely made in P. G. Wodehouse’s
The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England
(1909), in which a
Daily Mail
-reading Boy Scout finds the news that Britain has been invaded – by the Germans, the Russians, the Swiss, the Chinese, Monaco, Morocco and ‘the Mad Mullah’ – relegated to a single paragraph between the cricket scores and the late racing results.
The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England
(1909), in which a
Daily Mail
-reading Boy Scout finds the news that Britain has been invaded – by the Germans, the Russians, the Swiss, the Chinese, Monaco, Morocco and ‘the Mad Mullah’ – relegated to a single paragraph between the cricket scores and the late racing results.
The leaders of international financial capitalism – the Rothschilds in London, Paris and Vienna, the Warburgs in Hamburg and Berlin – insisted that the economic future depended on Anglo-German cooperation, not confrontation. The theorists of British mastery were equally adamant that the future of the world lay in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet that hyphen between ‘Anglo’ and ‘Saxon’ proved wide enough to prevent a stable relationship between Greater Britain and the new Empire between the Rhine and the Oder. Like so many other things after 1900, imperial nemesis turned out to be made in Germany.
6
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