Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (74 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Especially under the Empire-minded mastership of Benjamin Jowett, Balliol became the college of choice for would-be proconsuls. Between 1874 and 1914 no fewer than 27 per cent of Balliol graduates were employed in the Empire.

It is fashionable to allege that the British authorities did nothing to relieve the drought-induced famines of the period. But this is not so. In 1874 H. M. Kisch, an ICS magistrate of the Second Class, was sent to organize famine relief in an area of Behar covering 198 square miles and a population of around 100,000. ‘Since I came here’, he wrote home proudly, ‘I have erected 15 government grain store-houses, and opened about 22 relief works, I give employment to about 15,000 men and women per day, and am feeding gratuitously about 3,000 more. I have full authority to do what I choose, and I do it’. The calamity of 1877 was due to a failure to adopt the same methods.

There were only 31,000 British in India in 1805 (of whom 22,000 were in the army, 2,000 in civil government and 7,000 in the private sector). By 1931 there were 168,000 in all: 60,000 in the army and police, 4,000 in civil government and 60,000 employed in the private sector. In 1881 the British in India numbered 89,778 in total.

The third son of a Whipsnade curate, Eyre had been the first white man to walk across the Australian desert from Adelaide to Moorundie. Ironically, in the light of subsequent events at Morant Bay, his reward for this feat of exploration and endurance was to be made Magistrate and Protector of the Aborigines in the area. Today a lake, a peninsula and the motorway between Adelaide and Perth are all named after him.

No one considered for a moment that this might best be achieved by allowing them to be properly represented in the Assembly and magistracy.

The term Anglo-Indian is sometimes used, confusingly, to denote people of mixed British and Indian parentage. I have preferred to follow the Victorian practice of using ‘Anglo-Indian’ to refer to British long-term residents in India and ‘Eurasian’ to refer to the issue of ethnically mixed unions.

This was not the case in the cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.

One possible source of sexual anxiety was the awareness that the supposedly clear line between ‘White and Black’ was in reality quite blurred. After two centuries of contact with Europeans, there was a substantial mixed race population, usually referred to as ‘Eurasians’, who were often employed in low-level public sector jobs (particularly on the railways and telegraphs). Revulsion against ‘miscegenation’ was an important feature of the later Victorian period: Kipling devotes at least two short stories to the ‘fact’ that the hue of a woman’s fingernails was the best guide to the purity of her breeding (a darkness to the semicircles along the base of the nail spelling ostracism). One Indian-born soldier who won notoriety after the First World War heard his mother exclaim when his father lit his cigarette from a Burmese girl’s cheroot: ‘That sort of looseness is what has peopled Simla with thirty thousand Eurasians!’ The fact that the majority of such liaisons were between white men and Indian women did not stop people fantasizing about inter-racial sex with the genders reversed.

Congress was founded by Allan Octavian Hume, a Liberal ICS man who had been sickened by the anti-Ilbert campaign.

He was most concisely satirized in verse: ‘My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, / I am a most superior person, / My cheek is pink, my hair is sleek, / I dine at Blenheim once a week’.

And it was not just the fact that (as Machonochie observed) many of the Indian princes privately resented the ‘schoolmasterly’ way Curzon was inclined to treat them. Curzon even managed to upset them at the moment of their apotheosis at the Durbar by failing to return their visits.

It was a grave blow to the self-esteem of the British literary elite when Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. George Bernard Shaw sneered at ‘Stupendranath Begorr’ – a cheap dig that illustrates how widespread the aversion to educated Bengalis had become.

From 21 years to 32. However, in the same period (between 1820 and 1950), British life expectancy increased from 40 to 69 years.

That changed in the inter-war years however. By 1945 Indian mills supplied three-quarters of domestic consumption.

It is, however, quite unjustifiable to compare British reliance on the free market in the famine of 1877 with the Nazi policy of genocide against the Jews. The Viceroy, Lord Lytton, was certainly wrong to imagine that market forces would suffice to feed the starving after the catastrophic drought of 1876. But his
intention
was not murderous, which Hitler’s was.

‘To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory all our own’.

Even so, the fact that someone has bashed off her nose still seems strangely sacrilegious.

Nathaniel Rothschild was elevated to the peerage in 1885, the first Jew to enter the House of Lords. He is referred to throughout this chapter as Lord Rothschild.

Lugard was the son of two missionaries who had joined the Indian Army after failing the Indian Civil Service exam. He had gone to Africa after catching his wife in bed with another man, which caused him to lose his faith in God (not to mention his wife).

By January 1876 the share price had risen from £22 10s 4d to £34 12s 6d, a 50 per cent increase. The market value of the government’s stake was £24 million in 1898, £40 million on the eve of the First World War and £93 million by 1935 (around £528 a share). Between 1875 and 1895, the government received its £200,000 a year from Cairo; thereafter it was paid proper dividends, which rose from £690,000 in 1895 to £880,000 in 1901.

What Bismarck said to the explorer Eugen Wolff was this: ‘Your map of Africa is all very fine, but my map of Africa lies in Europe. Here is Russia and here’ – pointing to the left – ‘is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa’.

The countries represented were Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and the United States. Significantly, not a single African representative was present, despite the fact that at this stage less than a fifth of the continent was under European rule.

The New Hebrides were governed jointly with France.

In 1867 Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were united to form ‘One Dominion under the Name of Canada’, to which the other Canadian provinces gradually acceded. From 1907 the status of Dominion was extended to all the self-governing colonies of white settlement.

Radical nationalism often attracted its strongest adherents from the periphery of the European empires; in this the Greater Britain movement had something in common with the contemporary Pan German League. Milner himself was brought up in Germany, while his most loyal acolyte, Leo Amery, was born in India of (though he kept it quiet) Hungarian Jewish parentage. Another relative outsider, the Scottish novelist John Buchan, formed part of their circle. The idea of Greater Britain is nowhere more appealingly expressed than in his novels.

India baffled Chamberlain. It seemed to him, he wrote in 1897, ‘to be between the Devil and the deep sea – on the one hand most serious danger of attack from outside & internal disturbance unless full preparations are made – & on the other the prospect of most serious financial embarrassment’. A man who liked foreign cities the more they resembled Birmingham was unlikely to be captivated by Calcutta.

Gladstone himself made the analogy explicit: ‘Canada did not get Home Rule because she was loyal and friendly, but she has become loyal and friendly because she has got Home Rule’. This was quite right, but the Liberal Unionists were deaf to reason.

Paradoxically, however, there were few bastions of Unionist sentiment more staunch than Canada. As early as 1870 Ontario had 900 Orange Lodges, pledged to ‘resist all attempts to ... dismember the British Empire’.

Motto: ‘Many Countries, but One Empire’. The League had 7,000 members in 1900.

Curzon regarded tiger shooting as the greatest of all the perks of being Viceroy, and took a particularly egregious pleasure in being photographed bestriding his victims. As he described it breathlessly to his father: ‘You can hear your heart beat as he comes, unseen, with the leaves crackling under his feet, and suddenly emerges, sometimes at a walk, sometimes at full gallop, sometimes with an angry roar’.

The modern game known to Americans as ‘football’ in fact evolved from the same common British ancestor as both soccer and rugby. For a time it seemed likely that the American colleges would adopt the English Football Association’s rules, but in the 1870s they agreed on a hybrid game and by the 1880s had adopted rules (forward passes, tackling of the ball) quite distinct from and incompatible with those of either soccer or rugby.

The refrain of Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’ (1897), the classic depiction of school cricket as a form of military apprenticeship. Newbolt was a product of Clifton.

A Lowland Scot was fractionally superior to an Englishman. Ancient Athenians came out on top.

He was offered, accepted but then resigned after just three days the Private Secretaryship to Lord Ripon, on the latter’s appointment as Viceroy of India. The sticking point was a letter he was asked to write in response to an address to the Viceroy, to the effect that the Viceroy had read it with interest. ‘You know perfectly’, he declared, ‘that Lord Ripon has never read it, and I can’t say that sort of thing’. He had an obsessive aversion to dinner parties, which would have been a serious handicap in a Viceroy’s Private Secretary.

By the end of the war, Canada, Australia and New Zealand did indeed supply 30,000 troops.

30,000 was an underestimate. According to the Boers’ figures, 54,667 men took up arms, but by 1903 the British were claiming a total of 72,975.

It should be noted that around two-thirds of British mortality was due to typhoid, dysentery and other diseases, not enemy action.

Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin in the 1930s, recalled that when he remonstrated with Goering about the brutality of the Nazi concentration camps, the latter took down from his shelves a volume of a German encyclopaedia: ‘Opening it at
Konzentrationslager
... he read out: “First used by the British in the South African War”’.

The effects of the legislation were bitterly described by Solomon Plaatje in his
Native Life in South Africa
(1916).

Improvements were much slower in coming to the black camps. Significantly, the peak of mortality there – 38 per cent – was in December 1902.

Nineteenth-century bond prices were quoted in percentages of their nominal value. These loans were Turkish bonds secured on the ‘tribute’ paid annually by Egypt to Turkey.

The German aim, it should be noted, was partly defensive, and far from irrational given Britain’s projected use of a naval blockade in the event of a war with Germany.

At one point he talked grandly of a ‘New Triple Alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race’.

To be precise, the German battlefleet was two-thirds the size of the British.

The promenade at Ostend and the golf course at nearby Klemskerke are just two of the fruits of Leopold II’s regime there.

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