Ghosts of Empire (52 page)

Besides the endemic corruption that scarred Nigerian economic and political life, ethnic rivalries intensified, with religious animosity between Christians and Muslims aggravating tribal tensions. ‘Everybody is sharpening his knife,' warned one state governor.
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At the end of 2002, violence erupted in the northern capital, Kaduna, over the Miss World pageant that was supposed to be held in Nigeria, after an article appeared in a Lagos-based newspaper suggesting that the Prophet Mohammed would have approved of the pageant. The journalist, a woman staffer on the paper, asked, ‘What would Mohammed think?' She answered her own question by asserting that ‘in all honesty he would probably have chosen a wife from among them'. Four days of religious violence ensued, during which more than 200 people lost their lives. At least twenty-two churches and eight mosques were destroyed in Kaduna, causing the Miss World event to be relocated to London.
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The old hostility towards the Igbos still remained. Chinua Achebe described the situation in pessimistic terms: ‘Nigerians of all other ethnic groups will probably achieve consensus on no other matter than their common resentment of the Ibo [
sic
]. They would all describe them as aggressive, arrogant and clannish.' A Western writer, travelling in Nigeria in the late 1990s, could claim that the ‘[Biafran] war was still in the mind of everyone in eastern Nigeria even among the majority of the Ibos [
sic
] who were born after the guns fell silent'. Ojukwu, in his ‘impeccable upper class English accent', could tell the reporter that part of the Igbo problem
was that ‘we don't realize that we have survived'.
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Ojukwu was now a successful businessman who claimed his old adversary, Gowon, as a personal friend, but the wounds still festered. He was in philosophical mood at the beginning of the twenty-first century when he observed that politicians were ‘stirring up ethnic hatred because they have little else to offer'. His subsequent statement could be applied to many other situations, in lands far removed from the African scene: ‘the more empty the leadership, the more reliance on primordial forces'.

It was clear, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that the structural problems that ‘have bedevilled Nigeria since Lord Lugard's amalgamation in the name of the British Crown have not been resolved'.
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That amalgamation had ushered in a period of indirect rule, in which a system that had been developed for one area of the country was indiscriminately foisted on to another part. Besides the problem of yoking together different areas with radically different traditions, there was a wider problem of decolonization and democracy itself. The whole tenor of British rule in Nigeria, as in other places, had been elitist and aristocratic. Northern emirs, Yoruba chiefs and business tycoons had been fêted and flattered by the colonial regime. Indirect rule itself deliberately elevated the so-called natural leaders of society and used them as instruments of imperial power. Nigeria was, as one high commissioner believed in 1968, ‘one of the major British creations in Africa and hitherto the most successful'.
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Nigerians felt an ‘intense interest in Britain', in the view of one British deputy high commissioner in Lagos in the 1970s, because ‘Britain created Nigeria out of the bush and . . . almost all the institutions which Nigerians value here were either imported from Britain or deliberately fostered by British administrators'. And yet, in a statement of great insight, the same official, Richard Parsons, observed that it was the elitist nature of many of the African leaders that made democracy so difficult to achieve: ‘In retrospect the tragedy in modern Africa is perhaps that successive British Governments, when giving independence to their African territories, insisted on trying to transfer power to ostensibly democratic regimes based on the Westminster model. This has run counter to the views of many African leaders who are unashamedly elitist.'
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This may have been true, but the whole premise of indirect rule in Nigeria had been
‘unashamedly elitist'; indeed it was the very nature of British rule that had encouraged the elitism in the first place. Ojukwu, the Sardauna of Sokoto, the Yoruba chiefs and others had merely adopted the lofty, patrician style of their colonial masters; genuine democracy was as alien to them as it had been to Goldie and Lugard at the beginning of the twentieth century. Democracy, even without tribal conflict, never really stood a chance in Nigeria.

By any measure, China and Great Britain were two of the great powers in the first half of the nineteenth century. Each nation felt itself to be superior to all other nations and races in the world, by virtue of its history, its traditions and the special character of its people, and it was this feeling of superiority that brought them, inevitably, into conflict with each other. The contact between these two superpowers of the age was brought about by trade. Ever since Lord Macartney's famous mission to Peking (as Beijing was then called in English) in 1793, the British had been trying to open China up to greater commerce.

By the early nineteenth century, British merchants were already making a great deal of money from China and, more importantly, they were well organized and politically astute. The main source of the commercial income of the British merchant in China was the trade in opium. It has been estimated that by 1830 the opium trade in Canton (modern Guangzhou) was ‘the largest commerce of its time in any single commodity, anywhere in the world'.
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Despite the riches to be made in the commerce with China, there was very little respect for the Chinese themselves. One of the men who would later symbolize the fabulous wealth of the British merchants was James Matheson, a tough Scot who was an avid campaigner on behalf of British traders. He urged the government in London to protect British trade and merchants from the Chinese. In a pamphlet, written in 1836, he boasted of having been ‘engaged in active commercial pursuits at Canton for the last seventeen years'. Yet, despite his experience and increasing fortune, he found the Chinese to be ‘a people characterised by a marvellous degree of imbecility, avarice, conceit and obstinacy'. It was unjust, he believed, that the Chinese should possess a ‘vast portion of the
most desirable parts of the earth' when they were not willing to share their wealth with foreigners by trading with them. The Chinese, in his view, were selfish; they merely wanted to ‘monopolize all the advantages of their situation' and keep the foreigners, principally the British, out of their domestic market. Matheson greedily observed that, in China, there lived ‘a population estimated as amounting to nearly a third of the whole human race'; then as now, businessmen were beguiled by the prospect of selling to the Chinese, who, in the early nineteenth century, were likely to have formed an even greater proportion of the world's inhabitants than they do today. (In 2010, China was estimated to constitute between a fifth and a quarter of the world's population.) Ten years before the repeal of the British Corn Laws in 1846, Matheson invoked free trade as a justification for opening up trade with China.
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Matheson was one of those Scots who typify the dynamism and commercial acumen of the British imperialist during this period. Born in Lairg in Sutherland in 1796, he had studied Science, Law and Economics at Edinburgh University, before going to Canton in 1819 to start his career in trade. A keen disciple of Adam Smith and his free-trade ideas, he was a writer of force and passion, convinced that it was the duty of the British government ‘to make a firm and decisive demonstration in favour of our oppressed fellow-subjects in Canton'. The problem British merchants faced was simply that the Chinese government did not want them there, especially as the British were fuelling the trade in opium and thereby promoting drug addiction among the Chinese. In the context of the modern debate on drugs, Chinese officials were merely being prudent and responsible. To Matheson, however, they were showing ‘contempt and injustice towards us', and were not playing fair, because they had already threatened to ‘expel us from China', and such an act would ‘not only be attended with the most destructive consequences to the trade', but would ‘reflect intense dishonour upon the national character'. It would be dishonourable to surrender to the Chinese, because they were a weak nation; indeed, they were so weak that their emperor had ‘neither the inclination nor the power to resort to hostile measures . . . if he saw us disposed to offer a serious resistance'. Gunboats and force would suffice to show which nation was the real master in the East. The Emperor was far
too conscious of ‘his weakness and our strength' to start disrupting what was already a lucrative trade.
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Initially, Matheson's plea of 1836 received little attention in Westminster or Whitehall. Merchants from Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow were continually harping on the same theme, arguing that the Whig government, under the lackadaisical Lord Melbourne, needed to do something to place British trade on a ‘more secure footing than it at present enjoys' in China. China was potentially an enormous market; everyone knew that. ‘No country presents to us the basis of a more legitimate and mutually advantageous trade than China,' proclaimed the Manchester Chamber of Commerce and Manufactures in February 1836.
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Britain's trade with China, noted another merchant in the same year, was already ‘of equal if not greater importance than that with any other nation in the world' and, if properly encouraged, would be ‘capable of almost unlimited increase'.
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The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, enjoying the second of three spells in that office, was very conscious of the importance of China. He ruled over the Foreign Office in an imperious manner, commenting sharply on notes submitted in bad handwriting, especially when contrasted with his own beautiful free-flowing script. He was aged fifty-two in 1836, and was, even at this relatively early date, viewed as the most dynamic and powerful minister in the government. Lord Melbourne, the elegant Whig aristocrat, was nominally prime minister, but it was to the Foreign Secretary that the entreaties of the Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester merchants were so eagerly addressed. Even in the 1830s Palmerston was well on his way to becoming the legendary figure of his old age in the 1850s and 1860s. He was a famous seducer of women, who managed to marry his long-term mistress, the wife of Lord Cowper, only when he was fifty-five and she fifty-eight, even though smart society in London knew that they had been occasional lovers for twenty years. He was a sportsman who enjoyed boxing and field sports, but was also regarded as something of an intellectual and had, unusually, gone to Edinburgh University for a couple of years to learn some Philosophy and Economics, before resuming, at Cambridge University, the customary Classical studies he had pursued at Harrow.
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With a practised diplomat's eye, Palmerston could see that, in the early 1840s, competition among European manufacturers would make
commercial markets on the continent of Europe difficult for British goods to penetrate. As a consequence of this competition, Britain should ‘unremittingly endeavour to find in other parts of the world new vents for our industry'. In modern business parlance, British manufacturers needed new consumers for the goods they were now producing in such abundance. The most logical market was China, which ‘at no distant period' would give Britain ‘a most important extension to the range of our foreign commerce'.
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The Chinese Emperor and the scholarly officials who administered his empire were as contemptuous and dismissive of the British as the British were of them. The problem was a fine instance of the clash of civilizations, the inability of two cultures to understand one another. All Chinese officials had won their honoured positions by passing strenuous competitive examinations in the Confucian classics and they despised commerce. Britain, on the other hand, had, since at least the seventeenth century, identified itself as a trading nation. Commerce, to the Chinese mind, was a ‘well-known barbarian idiosyncrasy', one of the things that ‘made a barbarian what he was'.
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The Emperor himself would observe in 1849 that ‘it is plain that these barbarians always look on trade as their chief occupation' and it was true that the English, of all the Western powers, were the ones most addicted to this low pursuit, for it was their aristocracy who, among all European nations, had most intermarried with wealthy traders. In China, the merchant was a totally contemptible figure, taking his place in society far below the scholar, and below the farmer and even the craftsman.
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This conflict of values lay behind the naval conflict now known as the first Opium War.

The merchants themselves were quite open about their desire for war. ‘What, then, would be the force requisite to coerce the Chinese empire, with its countless millions of inhabitants?' asked one trader, an East India Company agent in China. Hugh Hamilton Lindsay answered his own question, confidently stating that a hostile power would need a seventy-four-gun ship, manned by 500 men, a large frigate and some troops, numbering about 3,000 in total.
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Of course, the merchants' fond dreams of humbling the ‘celestial empire' needed strong lobbying in London to prompt the otherwise lethargic ministers into action. Towards the end of
1839, an issue arose which was quickly exploited by another canny Scottish opium-dealer and stirred the young Queen Victoria's ministers into action.

William Jardine, Matheson's business partner, had been born in 1784, the same year as Lord Palmerston. He had been trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh and had spent the early part of his career as a ship's surgeon with the East India Company. At the age of thirty-four, he had given up this career and set up a trading business in Bombay, where he met James Matheson, who was already speculating in the opium trade, and from Bombay they both went to Canton, where they shrewdly believed much more money could be made. In their commercial activities, Jardine and Matheson were successful, Jardine in particular being a natural businessman, a man who never offered visitors a seat when they called upon him in his office. This lack of courtesy was prudent because it meant that visitors spent less time in his office; more business could be carried out if negotiators had the discomfort of having to stand up during the whole transaction.