The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (13 page)

Disraeli's government reacted angrily but indecisively. A fleet was sent to lurk in the approaches to Constantinople and an Indian army contingent sent to Malta. London grandly urged the Turks to stand firm and embrace reform. But, with France still traumatised by defeat in 1871 and no sign of animosity between the Russians, Germans and Austrians, there was no chance of repeating the diplomatic triumph of 1856. After much huffing and puffing, the result was a ‘strategic retreat’ in British policy, carefully disguised by Disraeli as a diplomatic victory.
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The British took Cyprus, theoretically to guard Turkey's Asian provinces against further Russian encroachment, and staved off the ‘Big Bulgaria’ which might have brought Russian influence to the Aegean. But Salisbury (who became Foreign Secretary in 1878) was under no illusion that the ‘Eastern Question’ was settled.
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Indeed, the wholesale confiscation of Ottoman Europe and Russia's advance in the Caucasus, acquiring Kars, Batum and Ardahan, suggested that Turkey's decay had entered the terminal phase. In every court in Europe, Salisbury told his ambassador in Constantinople, ‘the Empire is looked upon as doomed’.
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This was the larger context in which the governments of both Disraeli and Gladstone tried to exert political and financial discipline on Egypt whose default had followed on the heels of Turkey's in 1876. Away from the Balkan cockpit, it was easier for Britain and France (the main source of Egypt's loans) to exert their joint influence through the so-called ‘Dual Control’ over Cairo's finances. The real difficulty was that the drastic reduction of government spending to meet the ‘coupon’ owed to the bondholders was bound to offend the powerful vested interests upon whom the Khedive's regime depended: landowners; the bureaucracy; above all, the army. It was hardly surprising that, while Ismail had been anxious to restore his credit and regain access to money-markets in the West, he also used every means to loosen the foreign control at the heart of his government. But, when France and Britain secured his deposition by the Ottoman Sultan (his formal overlord) in June 1879, in favour of the more pliant Tewfik, the whole khedivial structure began to disintegrate. By September 1881, an alliance of discontent had made Colonel Arabi, a senior army officer, the dominant power.
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The scale of Egyptian debt, Egypt's importance as the closest and most dynamic of Europe's new Afro-Asian trading partners and her strategic value as the ‘highway’ to the East (drastically increased with the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869) all made an Anglo-French accord with the ruling power in Cairo of the greatest urgency. But the prospects of an agreement with Arabi were always bleak. The Anglo-French officials of the ‘Dual Control’ regarded his movement as a roadblock in the path of financial reform. Without the wholehearted backing of a ‘native’ government, they feared the shrivelling of their influence. Their hostility was loudly echoed by the large European community (nearly 100,000 strong) who lived under extra-territorial privilege and largely exempt from taxation. They were regarded by Arabi's following as a parasitical class responsible for Egypt's misfortunes.
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The atmosphere of mistrust was deepened by the efforts of Tewfik to restore his authority, and by the natural suspicion on the Arabist side that sooner or later the Western powers would act against him and (as in Cyprus and Tunis) impose their rule. Under these conditions, reconciling autonomy, stability and financial reform would have needed a miracle.

For the British and French governments did not regard Egypt as a sovereign state whose independence had to be respected at all costs. Nor was this just a British view. ‘L’Egypte a une importance politique qui lui interdit l’indépendance’ was the terse Russian summary.
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Its uncertain status as an autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire, its protected European ‘settlers’, and the Khedive's acceptance of the Dual Control made it a region where international interests and influence were already uniquely entrenched, and where local rights were closely circumscribed. On this view, they were bound to regard Arabi's demand of ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ as a dangerous and retrograde slogan. The result was an escalating campaign of pressure and threat to deflate his prestige and restore the Khedive as the prime mover in Egyptian politics. In June 1882, the appearance of a French and British fleet at Alexandria, Egypt's premier port and its window on Europe, led to a massacre of Europeans. In July, Admiral Seymour's bombardment of the city merely raised Arabi to the zenith of his fame as the champion of Egyptian rights against the alien oppressor.

The Gladstone cabinet was now in a quandary. A change of government in France had ruled out joint action. To do nothing would be to acquiesce in Arabi's supremacy. But did Britain's interests really justify a unilateral military intervention, courting international resentment, and risking domestic outrage at the shameless reversal of Gladstone's Midlothian principles of 1879? Gladstone was in two minds, if not more. But a strong ‘war party’ in the cabinet insisted that Egypt was on the verge of anarchy, that Arabi was goading a murderous xenophobia, and that only prompt action – an invasion – could save Britain's vital interest in the free passage of the Canal. With his mind on Ireland, Gladstone accepted defeat, and the vote for war credits passed triumphantly through the Commons. In September, an expeditionary force of 31,000 British and Indian troops swept Arabi aside at Tel el-Kebir and placed Egypt under a ‘temporary occupation’ that was to last for more than seventy years.

The real motives for this crucial decision, with its vast unforeseen consequences for Britain's world position, have been fiercely debated ever since. Was the Canal really in danger at the moment in July when the cabinet authorised an invasion? Was there any risk of France striking a separate bargain with Arabi and subverting British influence? Was Arabi the monster of anarchy that he was painted? Were British ministers as indifferent to the laments of the bondholders as they claimed? Was strategy rather than economics the true compelling force that drove the British into Egypt? Scepticism on all these fronts has been vigorously expressed.
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But the closest archival study of the decision shows convincingly that even those who came to favour invasion were extremely hesitant until the massacre at Alexandria, and all hope of persuading the Turkish government to ‘restore order’ had vanished. The bombardment of Alexandria was a ‘calculated risk’ to frighten Arabi and his followers into retreat, taken in the knowledge that he might then disrupt the Canal.
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The invasion was prepared on the assumption that this last effort to coerce the Arabists might make the Canal, hitherto untouched by disorder, a scene of confrontation.

Disentangling the motives at work in a group of ministers struggling to make sense of a faraway crisis and distracted by bitter simultaneous divisions over rural disorder in Ireland is a rough and ready task. But several points stand out clearly. It is unlikely that those in favour of military intervention drew a sharp distinction between Britain's wider interests in Egypt and her strategic interest in the Canal. It would have been quite illogical to do so. The Canal lay some distance from the Delta towns, but its commercial centres at Port Said and Suez could not be insulated from wider popular unrest.
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Even Gladstone acknowledged that ‘the safety of the Canal will not coexist with illegality and military violence in Egypt’.
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Nor, as Arabi's own actions showed, would the Canal be safe if the conflict between his regime and the Western powers intensified. The Canal was much the largest tangible British interest in Egypt, and its fate was bound up with the question of who ruled in Cairo.

But, in that case, if the Canal was so critical, why not come to terms with Arabi and ease the tension that endangered its use? Why jeopardise a vital interest by the clumsy attempt to suppress a movement whose capacity for harm was limited? Plausible or not, such an argument would have made little impression on the group of ministers for whom the Canal's safety loomed so large. Their leader, Lord Hartington, was Secretary of State for India; he would have liked to have been Viceroy in 1880.
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Lord Northbrook at the Admiralty was a former Viceroy, deeply suspicious of the loyalty of India's Muslims. Charles Dilke, junior minister at the Foreign Office, a close friend of Joseph Chamberlain and a key member of the ‘forward party’, shared the widespread post-Mutiny view that British rule in India was inherently fragile. For all these ministers, India was not only the second centre of British power but the prism through which they surveyed non-European politics. To have compromised with Arabi would have threatened the prestige on which authority in India was held to depend. To have done so after the Alexandria massacre, with its horrible evocation of the Mutiny, would have been inconceivable. Of all the ministers in the Gladstone cabinet, those most alarmed about the Canal (because of India) were those least disposed to treat with Arabi (because of India). They were the most susceptible to alarmist reports about a coming anarchy and the least likely to see Arabi as a ‘national’ leader fighting fairly for freedom.

But, in the end, what carried the Gladstone government over the edge into invasion was the weakness of the arguments against it. When Disraeli's cabinet had debated how to check Russia's advance in 1877, the colossal risk of a war without allies was so divisive that ‘in a cabinet of twelve…there are seven parties’.
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But, at the time that military intervention was considered in July 1882, it was clear that a brief occupation to ‘restore order on behalf of Europe’ would present few diplomatic complications and had the approval of both the Ottoman Sultan and the Khedive. The cost would be modest, and would be met partly by India. There was little danger of defeat. Power would revert to the Khedive, not pass to a British governor. On the other hand, if the crisis worsened, the Canal were blocked and more Europeans killed, the government's credit would suffer badly and it would come under irresistible pressure to invade in much less favourable conditions. The ‘geopolitical calculus’ in short was overwhelmingly for intervention and its champions too resolute to be outmanoeuvred by Gladstone.

The occupation was the single most important forward movement made by Britain in the age of partition which set in after 1880. There is no convincing evidence that it was undertaken primarily to recoup the fortunes of British investors in Egyptian bonds. But, equally, it is too schematic to argue that it was merely the culmination of a longstanding interest in the safety of the route to India: a pure question of strategy. The complex reaction to Egyptian politics in London did not spring from the wish merely to
conserve
the existing strategic link with India, still less to recover funds sunk before the crash of ’76. The leading ministers, and the wider public who had celebrated Disraeli's purchase of Canal shares in 1875,
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recognised that Britain's stake in the Canal (and therefore in Egypt) was growing rapidly. An entire shipping system was being built around it,
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and the commercial and military value of India was rising steeply. The canal was not the symbol of a decaying mid-Victorian pre-eminence, but of the dynamic expansion of late-Victorian Britain. That, perhaps, was why its defence united Whigs and Radicals (like Chamberlain and Dilke – who had urged annexation in 1878
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) in Gladstone's cabinet. In the same way, the hard line towards Arabi reflected the late-century view that economic and social progress was too urgent to be obstructed by Afro-Asian regimes whose capacity for self-improvement was now regarded with ever heavier scepticism. In the decade after 1882, Egypt became the test case for arguments about ‘progressive imperialism’ and the matrix of a new imperial consensus on politics and strategy in the era of
Weltpolitik
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The logic of partition

Whatever the logic behind occupation, the Liberal ministers soon found that they had entered Egypt on a false prospectus. Intervention had been meant to achieve a brisk reconstruction of Egyptian politics, locking out ‘disruptive’ elements and allowing Tewfik to organise a government committed to financial and political ‘reform’. Once a safe regime was firmly installed in Cairo, repaying its debts under the eye of the international
Caisse de la Dette
, the British could revert to their old policy of influence and their old partnership with France. But nothing went according to plan. It soon became clear that facile constitutional schemes (like the Dufferin report of 1883) would collapse as soon as the British garrison left Cairo. The internal crisis brought by economic change and deepened by foreign interference, was much too severe to be solved by a Whig formula. Amid all the promises of British withdrawal, Egyptian politicians were understandably reluctant to ally themselves to a transient force. Then, within a year of the British invasion, the Mahdist revolt in Egypt's vast southern colony of the Sudan – a possession which meant as much to Cairo as India to London – threatened to destabilise Egypt's politics still further and spread rebellion in its upper provinces.
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As these complications were rubbed in by Evelyn Baring, the British Agent at Cairo, the date for withdrawal receded until, by 1889, the occupation, however ‘temporary’, had become indefinite.
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The British now feared to leave because they were convinced that a chaos worse than that of 1882 would follow. The logic of intervention had become the logic of control. The strategic and diplomatic cost of this discovery was bound to be high. Turning Egypt into a virtual colony broke every rule of imperial expansion. Thus far, Britain's movement into the Outer World beyond Europe had served to insulate her interests more and more from the play of intra-European rivalry. Except in India (which had its own army and paid for British ‘help’), access to Britain's colonies and spheres was by the open sea, the element where her strategic advantage was greatest. This pattern of maritime expansion allowed the British to localise their conflicts and even to choose between fighting limited or unlimited wars. But Egypt was an exposed salient on the rim of Europe, a great hostage to diplomatic fortune. As the Ottoman Empire sank towards collapse, the eastern Mediterranean became the cockpit of European politics. It was one thing to organise a diplomatic defence of Turkey in the style of Palmerston, quite another to protect a territorial stake as large and important as Egypt. The British dared not lower their guard lest a sudden crisis bring on partition and wreck their status in Cairo. The price was relentless pressure on their naval power, already strained by technical change