Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (54 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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By the late summer of 1918 it was clear that the Kaiser’s strategy of global war had foundered. In the end it was not so much that
Greenmantle
was fiction; it was that the German strategy lacked realism. Like the plan to send 50,000 Turkish troops to mobilize the Kuban Cossacks under an Austrian officer who happened to be the brother of the Metropolitan of Halyc, or the equally mad bid by the ethnographer Leo Frobenius to win over Lij Yasu, the Emperor of Abyssinia, the
Weltkrieg
was simply unworkable. What the Germans needed were men like Lawrence, human chameleons with the ability to penetrate non-European cultures. But to produce such men requires centuries of Oriental engagement. Typical of the amateurism of the Germans overseas was their expedition to the Emir of Afghanistan, whose fifteen members travelled via Constantinople equipped with copies of a Victorian world atlas and disguised as a travelling circus. Small wonder the anti-British
jihad
had done no more than temporarily stiffen Turkish resolve; small wonder that Arab nationalism proved to be the more powerful force.
The First World War was a truly global conflagration. But in the end it was decided in Western Europe. The Austrians won the war they had wanted against Serbia. The Germans also won the war they had wanted, against Russia. They also defeated Romania. On the other hand, the British and French succeeded in beating the Ottoman Empire, not to mention Bulgaria. Even the Italians eventually defeated Austria. None of it was decisive. The only way to end the war was in Flanders and France. There the Germans made one last bid for victory in the spring of 1918, but when those offensives petered out defeat was inevitable and the morale of the German army – so resilient up until this point – began at last to wilt. At the same time, the British Expeditionary Force, having spent four bloody years trying to grasp mass warfare on land, finally ascended its learning curve. With the return of mobility to the Western Front, proper coordination of infantry, artillery and air power was at last achieved. In May and June 1918 fewer than 3,000 German prisoners had been taken by British forces. In July, August and September, the number shot up to more than 90,000. On 29 September the German High Command, fearful of a rout, demanded an armistice, leaving the dirty work of negotiating surrender to the hitherto impotent German parliamentarians.
Partly for that reason, many Germans failed to understand why they had lost the war. They sought responsibility within Germany, pinning the blame on one another (the incompetent militarists or the November criminals, according to taste). The reality was that German defeat was exogenous, not endogenous: it was the inevitable result of trying to fight a global conflict without being a global power. Considering the vast differential between the resources of the two empires, the only real puzzle is that it took the British Empire so long to win.
At Versailles, where the peace conference was held, there was much talk, inspired by the American President Woodrow Wilson, of a new international order based on self-determination and collective security. However, when all had been drafted and signed, it looked like just another version of the familiar old story: to the victor the spoils. As the historian H.A.L. Fisher put it, the peace treaties draped ‘the crudity of conquest’ in ‘the veil of morality’.
Despite Lawrence’s wartime promises to the Arabs, it was agreed to give Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine the status of British ‘mandates’ – the euphemism for colonies – while the French got Syria and the Lebanon.
101
The former German colonies of Togoland, Cameroon and East Africa were added to the British possessions in Africa. In addition, South-West Africa went to South Africa, Western Samoa to New Zealand and northern New Guinea, along with the Bismarck Archipelago and the northern Solomons, to Australia. Phosphate-rich Nauru was shared between the two Australasian dominions and Britain. So now even the colonies had colonies. In all, around 1.8 million square miles were added to the Empire and around 13 million new subjects: as the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour complacently noted, the map of the world had ‘yet more red on it’. The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, commented dryly that he would like to hear some arguments against Britain’s annexing the whole world. A year later, as if to prove the point, the Colonial Secretary Leo Amery laid claim to all of Antarctica.
By allying with the Turks, the Germans had made the Middle East a theatre of the war. The result had been to hand the Middle East to Britain. Already before the war, Aden, Egypt, the Sudan, Cyprus, Northern Somaliland, the Trucial States as well as Muscat, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar had been brought directly or indirectly under British influence. Now the mandates had been added without, as one official put it, ‘the official pantomime known as “declaring a protectorate” ’. Moreover, British influence was growing over the Pahlavi monarchy in Persia, thanks to the majority British shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum). As an Admiralty memorandum of 1922 put it: ‘From the strategical point of view the essential thing is that Great Britain should control the territories on which the oil is situated’. Although at this time the Middle East accounted for only 5 per cent of world output, the British were empire-building with the future in mind.
Nor were these territorial prizes considered sufficient. In 1914 Germany had been Britain’s principal rival at sea. The war, the armistice and the peace treaty between them annihilated Germany as a marine power. The British grabbed all they could of both the German navy and merchant fleet. Despite the fact that the Germans scuttled the former at Scapa Flow rather than hand it over, the result was an astonishing naval preponderance. Counting only Dreadnoughts and subsequent models, Britain had forty-two capital ships afloat, against the rest of the world’s total of forty-four. The United States was second with just sixteen.
It is well known that at Versailles the decision was taken to make Germany liable for the costs not just of war damage but also of wartime pensions and separation allowances; hence the huge scale of the reparations bill subsequently presented. It is less well known – because the British later tried to blame the French – that this was done largely at the insistence of the Australian Prime Minister William M. Hughes, who discerned that his country would gain nothing if a narrow definition of reparations were adopted. A bombastic Welshman who had emigrated to Australia in his early twenties, Hughes brought to the peace-making process all the refinement of the Sydney waterfront, where he had won his political spurs as a trade union organizer. The Kaiser, he declared, might have led Germany,
but she followed not only willingly, but eagerly. Upon the shoulders of all classes and all sections lies the guilt. They were drunk with bestial passion, with the hope of world conquest – Junker, merchant, and workman, all hoped to share in the loot. Upon the German nation, then, rests the responsibility for the war, and she must pay the penalty of her crime.
 
Perhaps the most vivid expression of the triumphalist post-war mood is Sigismund Goetze’s grandiose allegorical mural ‘Britannia Pacifatrix’ commissioned by the Foreign Office and completed in 1921. Britannia stands resplendent in Roman helmet and red robe, flanked to her left by four cleancut, Adonis-like figures representing the white dominions, and to her right by her somewhat more exotic allies, France, the United States and (once the fount of their strange republican form of government) Greece. At Britannia’s feet, the children of the vanquished enemy prostrate themselves, repentant. Scarcely visible beneath the knees of the great white gods is a little black boy carrying a basket of fruit – presumably to represent Africa’s contribution to victory.
Yet there was an illusory quality to Britannia’s victorious peace. True, the Empire had never been bigger. But nor had the costs of victory, by comparison with which the economic value of these new territories was negligible, if not negative. No combatant power spent as much on the war as Britain, whose total expenditure amounted to just under £10 billion. That was a steep price to pay even for a million square miles, especially as they generally cost more to govern than they yielded in revenue. The cost of running Iraq, to give just one example, amounted in 1921 to £23 million, more than the total UK health budget.
Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs. After the war the costs suddenly, inescapably, outweighed the benefits.
Doubts
 
For most of the twentieth century, the twin concrete towers of Wembley Stadium were the supreme architectural symbol of English football, home of the annual Football Association Cup Final. Originally, however, they were built as a symbol of British imperialism.
The British Empire Exhibition was opened by King George V on 23 April 1924. It was intended as a popular celebration of Britain’s global achievement, an affirmation that the Empire had more than just a glorious past but a future too, and in particular an economic future. The official guide was quite explicit about the Exhibition’s purpose; it was
To find, in the development and utilization of the raw materials of the Empire, new sources of Imperial wealth. To foster inter-Imperial trade and open fresh world markets for Dominion and home products. To make the different races of the British Empire better known to each other, and to demonstrate to the people of Britain the almost illimitable possibilities of the Dominions, Colonies, and Dependencies together.
 
To mark the occasion, the drab suburban streets were renamed by Rudyard Kipling after imperial heroes like Drake. But the tone of the event was set by the stadium itself. The fact that it was made of concrete and looked hideous was in itself a bold statement of modernity. The opening of the exhibition was also the occasion of the first royal radio broadcast.
By one measure it was a great success. More than 27 million people flocked to the 200-acre site; indeed, the exhibition was so popular that it had to be reopened in 1925. On Empire Day itself, more than 90,000 people crowded into the stadium for a service of thanksgiving – not quite as many as had watched Bolton Wanderers play West Ham United the year before (127,000), but a large turnout nonetheless. Visitors could marvel at an equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales made entirely out of Canadian butter. They could relive the Zulu Wars, which were spectacularly re-enacted inside the stadium. They could ride from pavilion to pavilion aboard the somewhat hopefully named ‘Neverstop Train’. Wherever they looked there were tangible examples of the Empire’s continuing vitality – above all, its economic vitality.
The irony was that, despite a government subsidy of £2.2 million, the Exhibition made a loss of over £1.5 million, in marked contrast to the profitable pre-1914 exhibitions. Indeed, in this respect, there were those who saw unnerving parallels between the Empire Exhibition and the Empire itself. Perhaps even more worryingly, the exhibition became something of a national joke. In a story for the
Saturday Evening Post
, P. G. Wodehouse sent his most famous creation, Bertie Wooster, to visit Wembley with his friend Biffy. Preoccupied as they were with the latter’s difficulties with a girl, both soon tired of the worthy but dull attractions:
By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast and were working towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of the rather jolly Planter’s Bar in the West Indian section ... I have never been in the West Indies, but I am in a position to state that in certain of the fundamentals of life they are streets ahead of our European civilization. The man behind the counter, as kindly a bloke as I ever wish to meet, seemed to guess our requirements the moment we hove into view. Scarcely had our elbows touched the wood before he was leaping to and fro, bringing down a new bottle with each leap. A planter, apparently, does not consider he has had a drink unless it contains at least seven ingredients, and I’m not saying, mind you, that he isn’t right.
The man behind the bar told us the things were called Green Swizzles; and, if ever I marry and have a son, Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down in the register, in memory of the day his father’s life was saved at Wembley.
 
Billy Bunter of the
Magnet
was another visitor, as was Noël Coward (‘I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire, and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems’). In
Punch,
H. M. Bateman’s cartoon asked simply: ‘Do you Wemble?’

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