Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (56 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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Yet the significant thing about the Depression in Britain is not that it was so severe but that, compared with its impact in the United States and Germany, it was so mild. This had nothing to do with the Keynesian revolution in economic theory: although Keynes’s
General Theory
(1936) made the case for government demand management – in other words, the use of budget deficits to stimulate a depressed economy – it was not put into practice until much later. What brought recovery was a redefinition of the economics of Empire. Britain had gone back onto gold at the old rate partly out of fear that the dominions would switch to the dollar if the pound were devalued. In 1931 it turned out that the pound could be devalued and the dominions would gladly follow. Overnight the sterling bloc became the world’s largest system of fixed exchange rates, but a system freed from its gold mooring. There was also a radical change in trade policy. Twice before the British electorate had rejected protectionism at the polls. But what had been unthinkable in good times came to be seen as indispensable in the general crisis. And just as Joseph Chamberlain had hoped, ‘imperial preference’ – preferential tariffs for colonial products, adopted in 1932 – boosted trade within the Empire. In the 1930s the share of British exports going to the Empire rose from 44 to 48 per cent; the share of her imports coming from there rose from 30 to 39 per cent. Thus it was that even as the political bonds between Britain and the dominions were loosened by the Statute of Westminster (1931), the economic bonds grew tighter.
103
General Theory
(1936) made the case for government demand management – in other words, the use of budget deficits to stimulate a depressed economy – it was not put into practice until much later. What brought recovery was a redefinition of the economics of Empire. Britain had gone back onto gold at the old rate partly out of fear that the dominions would switch to the dollar if the pound were devalued. In 1931 it turned out that the pound could be devalued and the dominions would gladly follow. Overnight the sterling bloc became the world’s largest system of fixed exchange rates, but a system freed from its gold mooring. There was also a radical change in trade policy. Twice before the British electorate had rejected protectionism at the polls. But what had been unthinkable in good times came to be seen as indispensable in the general crisis. And just as Joseph Chamberlain had hoped, ‘imperial preference’ – preferential tariffs for colonial products, adopted in 1932 – boosted trade within the Empire. In the 1930s the share of British exports going to the Empire rose from 44 to 48 per cent; the share of her imports coming from there rose from 30 to 39 per cent. Thus it was that even as the political bonds between Britain and the dominions were loosened by the Statute of Westminster (1931), the economic bonds grew tighter.
103
The message of the Wembley Exhibition had not been so misleading: there really was still money in the Empire. And it was a message drummed home relentlessly by bodies like the Empire Marketing Board (established by Leo Amery to convey the case for imperial preference subliminally). In 1930 alone there were over two hundred ‘Empire Shopping Weeks’ in sixty-five different British towns. At the Board’s suggestion, the King’s chef provided his own carefully devised recipe for an ‘Empire Christmas Pudding’:
| 1 lb. of sultanas..................................... | AUSTRALIA |
| 1 lb. of currants..................................... | AUSTRALIA |
| 1 lb. of stoned raisins............................. | SOUTH AFRICA |
| 6 ozs. of minced apple........................... | CANADA |
| 1 lb. of breadcrumbs............................. | UNITED KINGDOM |
| 1 lb. of beef suet .................................... | NEW ZEALAND |
| 6 ozs. of candied peel ............................ | SOUTH AFRICA |
| 8 ozs. of flour ....................................... | UNITED KINGDOM |
| 4 eggs ................................................... | IRISH FREE STATE |
| ½ of ground cinnamon ......................... | CEYLON |
| ½ of ground cloves ............................... | ZANZIBAR |
| ½ of ground nutmegs ........................... | STRAITS SETTLEMENTS |
| 1 pinch pudding spice ........................... | INDIA |
| 1 tbsp. brandy ...................................... | CYPRUS |
| 2 tbsps. rum .......................................... | JAMAICA |
| 1 pint old beer ...................................... | ENGLAND |
The composition of this delectable concoction conveyed an unambiguous message. With the Empire, there could be Christmas pudding. Without it, there would be only breadcrumbs, flour and old beer. Or, as Orwell said, an Empireless Britain would be just a ‘cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes’.
The irony was that even as the Empire grew more economically important, its defence sank inexorably down the list of political priorities. Under pressure from their voters to honour wartime pledges to build ‘homes fit for heroes’, not to mention hospitals and high schools, British politicians first neglected and then simply forgot about imperial defence. In the ten years to 1932 the defence budget was cut by more than a third – at a time when Italian and French military spending rose by, respectively, 60 and 55 per cent. At a meeting of the War Cabinet in August 1919 a convenient rule had been adopted:
It should be assumed, for framing revised Estimates, that the British Empire will not be engaged in any great war during the next ten years, and that no Expeditionary Force is required for this purpose ... The principal function of the Military and Air Forces is to provide garrisons for India, Egypt, the new mandated territory and all territory (other than self-governing) under British control, as well as to provide the necessary support to the civil power at home.
Every year until 1932 ‘the Ten-year Rule’ was renewed, and every year new spending was put off. The rationale was straightforward: as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1934, Joseph Chamberlain’s son Neville
104
admitted: ‘It was impossible for us to contemplate a simultaneous war against Japan and Germany; we simply cannot afford the expenditure involved’. As Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the ‘one thought’ of General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd between 1928 and 1940 was ‘to postpone a war – not look ahead’.
104
admitted: ‘It was impossible for us to contemplate a simultaneous war against Japan and Germany; we simply cannot afford the expenditure involved’. As Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the ‘one thought’ of General Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd between 1928 and 1940 was ‘to postpone a war – not look ahead’.
In 1918 Britain had won the war on the Western Front by a huge feat of military modernization. In the 1920s nearly everything that had been learned was forgotten in the name of economy. The stark reality was that, despite the victory and the territory it had brought, the First World War had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before. War had acted as a forcing house for a host of new military technologies – the tank, the submarine, the armed aeroplane. To secure its post-war future, the Empire needed to invest in all of these. It did nothing of the kind. The British took pride in the ‘red line’ of civilian air services linking Gibraltar to Bahrain and on to Karachi, but next to nothing was done to build up the Empire’s air defences. At the Hendon Air Pageants in the 1920s a major attraction was the mock bombing of ‘native’ villages; but this was about the extent of the Royal Air Force’s capability. In 1927 General Sir R. G. Egerton argued passionately against replacing horses with armoured vehicles in the cavalry on the intriguing ground that ‘the horse has a humanizing effect on men’. Despite Churchill’s espousal of tanks and armoured cars (or perhaps because of it) the decision to motorize cavalry regiments was not taken until 1937. To those responsible for equipping the cavalry, it had seemed more important to design a short lance of the type used in India for pig-sticking. When Britain went to war again in 1939 most of her field guns were still the 1905 model, with half the range of their German equivalents.
The politicians got away with it for a time because the principal threats to the stability of the Empire appeared to come from within rather than from without.
At noon on Easter Monday 1916, a thousand or so extreme Irish nationalists led by the poet Patrick Pearse and the socialist James Connolly marched into Dublin and occupied selected public buildings, notably the huge General Post Office, where Pearse proclaimed an independent republic. After three days of fierce but futile fighting in which British artillery inflicted substantial damage on the city centre, the rebels surrendered. This was plainly an act of treason – the rebels had in fact asked for and been sent German guns – and the initial British response was harsh: the leading conspirators were quickly executed. The dying Connolly had to be propped up in a chair to be shot. In the aftermath of the war, the government was willing to deploy former soldiers, the notorious Black and Tans, to try to stamp out militant republicanism, now something more like a mass movement behind the banner of Sinn Fein and its military wing, the Irish Republican Army. But as would happen so often in the period, the British lacked the stomach for repression. When the Black and Tans opened fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match at Croke Park, there was almost as much revulsion in England as in Ireland. By 1921, with British losses approaching 1,400, the will to fight had gone and a peace deal was hastily cobbled together. Ireland had already been partitioned the previous year between the predominantly Protestant north (six counties) and the Catholic south (the remaining twenty-six). Lloyd George’s sole achievement now was to keep both parts within the Empire. But for all the fuss about oaths to the Crown and dominion status, the ‘Free State’ in the south was well on the road to independence as a republic (which it would finally achieve in 1948).
Time and again, in the inter-war period, this was a pattern that would repeat itself. A minor outbreak of dissent, a sharp military response, followed by a collapse of British self-confidence, hand-wringing, second thoughts, a messy concession, another concession. But Ireland was the test case. In allowing their very first colony to be split in two, the British had sent a signal to the Empire at large.
Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower. The names of over 60,000 Indian soldiers killed in foreign fields from Palestine to Passchendaele are inscribed on the vast arch of the India Gate in New Delhi. In return for their sacrifice, and perhaps also to ensure that any German blandishments to the Indians would be ignored, Montagu had pledged in 1917 what he called ‘the progressive realization of responsible government’ in India. That was one of those phrases that promised much, but left the date of delivery vague – and possibly very remote. To the more radical members of the Indian National Congress, as well as the more extreme terrorist groups in Bengal, the pace of reform was intolerably slow. True, Indians now had at least a measure of representation for themselves. The Central Legislative Assembly in Delhi even looked like a miniature House of Commons, right down to the green leather seating. But this was representation without power. The government’s decision to extend the wartime restrictions on political freedom for a further three years (which empowered it to search without a warrant, detain without a charge and try without a jury) seemed to confirm that the promises of responsible government were empty. Indians looked to Ireland and drew the obvious conclusion. It was no good just waiting to be given Home Rule.
The British had plenty of experience of dealing with violent protest in India. But the diminutive Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the Mahatma to his followers, a ‘seditious fakir’ to Churchill – was something new: an Englishtrained barrister, a decorated veteran of the Boer War,
105
a man whose favourite poem was Kipling’s ‘If’, and yet, to judge by his skinny frame and loincloth, a traditional holy man. To protest against the extension of wartime controls, Gandhi called on Indians to harness
satyagraha
, which roughly translates as ‘soul force’. It was a deliberately religious appeal to make resistance passive, not violent. Nevertheless, the British were suspicious. Gandhi’s idea of a
hartal
, a national day of ‘self-purification’, sounded to them like just a fancy word for a general strike. They resolved to meet ‘soul force’ with what the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, called ‘fist force’.
105
a man whose favourite poem was Kipling’s ‘If’, and yet, to judge by his skinny frame and loincloth, a traditional holy man. To protest against the extension of wartime controls, Gandhi called on Indians to harness
satyagraha
, which roughly translates as ‘soul force’. It was a deliberately religious appeal to make resistance passive, not violent. Nevertheless, the British were suspicious. Gandhi’s idea of a
hartal
, a national day of ‘self-purification’, sounded to them like just a fancy word for a general strike. They resolved to meet ‘soul force’ with what the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, Sir Michael O’Dwyer, called ‘fist force’.
In the spring of 1919, despite Gandhi’s pleas (though often in his name), Indian resistance went from passive to active. Violence flared when a crowd tried to enforce the
hartal
at Delhi railway station on 30 March. Three men were killed when troops opened fire. The most notorious clash, however, was at Amritsar in the Punjab, where one man attempted to stop what he saw as an incipient rerun of the Indian Mutiny. In Amritsar, as elsewhere, people had responded to Gandhi’s call. On 30 March a crowd of 30,000 gathered in a show of ‘passive resistance’. On 6 April there was another
hartal
. The situation was still peaceful at this stage, but sufficiently tense for two of the local nationalist leaders to be taken into custody and deported. When news of their arrest spread, violence flared. Shots were fired; banks attacked; the telephone lines cut. On 11 April a Church of England missionary named Manuella Sherwood was knocked off her bicycle and beaten insensible by a mob. At this point the civilians handed over power to the soldiers. That night, Brigadier-General Rex Dyer arrived to take charge.
hartal
at Delhi railway station on 30 March. Three men were killed when troops opened fire. The most notorious clash, however, was at Amritsar in the Punjab, where one man attempted to stop what he saw as an incipient rerun of the Indian Mutiny. In Amritsar, as elsewhere, people had responded to Gandhi’s call. On 30 March a crowd of 30,000 gathered in a show of ‘passive resistance’. On 6 April there was another
hartal
. The situation was still peaceful at this stage, but sufficiently tense for two of the local nationalist leaders to be taken into custody and deported. When news of their arrest spread, violence flared. Shots were fired; banks attacked; the telephone lines cut. On 11 April a Church of England missionary named Manuella Sherwood was knocked off her bicycle and beaten insensible by a mob. At this point the civilians handed over power to the soldiers. That night, Brigadier-General Rex Dyer arrived to take charge.
A short-tempered, pugilistic chain-smoker, Dyer was not noted for the subtlety of his approach to civil unrest. At Staff College he had been summed up as ‘happiest when crawling over a Burmese stockade with a revolver in his mouth’. By now, however, he was fifty-four and a sick man, in constant pain from war wounds and riding injuries. His mood was thunderous. On his arrival, he received instructions which stated unambiguously: ‘No gatherings of persons nor processions of any sort will be allowed. All gatherings will be fired on’. The next day he issued a proclamation formally prohibiting ‘all meetings and gatherings’. When, on 13 April, a crowd of 20,000 people thronged the Jallianwalla Bagh in defiance of these orders, he did not hesitate. He took two armoured cars and fifty Gurkha and Baluchi troops to the scene and, as soon as he had deployed them around the crowd, gave the order to open fire. There was no warning and the crowd had no chance to disperse, since the eight-acre meeting ground was surrounded by walls on all four sides and had only one narrow entrance. In ten minutes of sustained shooting, 379 demonstrators were killed, and more than 1,500 wounded. In the aftermath, Dyer ordered public floggings of high-caste suspects. Any Indian entering the street where Manuella Sherwood had been attacked was forced to crawl on his stomach.
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