The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (42 page)

In fact, throughout 1898, Milner's dependence on Rhodes grew deeper. His own attempt to draw Chamberlain into the struggle for ‘reform’ in the Transvaal misfired badly. A sharp rebuke arrived from London. Chamberlain had other fish to fry and was preoccupied with the struggle for hinterlands in
West
Africa. At Rhodes’ direct request,
⁴⁹
Milner pleaded for his grandiose scheme to build a new railway beyond the Zambezi and open a vast new northern extension. Britain's strategy in South Africa, he urged, depended upon the gamble of Rhodesia's development. Capital would be attracted by the sheer scale of Rhodes’ project; a great new railway empire, pivoted on Bulawayo, would kick-start the Rhodesian economy as a counterpoise to the Transvaal.
⁵⁰
Two weeks earlier, Milner had warned Rhodes against ‘worrying’ Chamberlain with this scheme.
⁵¹
But in the course of the year the prospects of direct imperial action grew steadily fainter. The British press was distracted by other imperial excitements in the Sudan and China. In South Africa, everything turned upon Rhodes. Chamberlain was anxious to hear about his gold prospects in Rhodesia.
⁵²
The Transvaal was ‘in a twitter’ about his plans.
⁵³
Redistribution and electoral victory would make Rhodes master of the Cape. His reward might be Bechuanaland.
⁵⁴
After two years in the wilderness, Rhodes seemed once more near the pinnacle of power.

Rhodes may have calculated that an election victory in the Cape and a third premiership would give him scope for some rapprochement with his erstwhile allies in the Bond. The Cape Afrikaners were as anxious as he to promote South African unity (though not at imperial command) and just as fearful of Kruger's dabblings in great power diplomacy – a vice attributed to his ‘Hollander’ advisers. With their help, Kruger might yet be overcome. The triumph and the spoils would be his, not Downing Street's. It was perhaps not so much Rhodes’ failure as the circumstances of his defeat that made conflict unavoidable. In the Cape elections of 1898, Rhodes had denounced ‘Krugerism’ and demanded ‘equal rights for every white man south of the Zambezi’.
⁵⁵
But, contrary to most prediction, and despite lavish spending, Rhodes’ Progressives were narrowly defeated although winning a majority of votes cast. A Bond ministry took office. Rapprochement went out of the window: a fresh round of ‘racial’ politics came in at the door. English ‘race-sentiment’, the stock-in-trade of the South African League, was turned up to whip in the remaining ‘English’ politicians who had stood out against Rhodes. Rhodes harried the Bond ministry in parliament and out.
⁵⁶
He pressed for redistribution, northern expansion and federal union. He erected a statue to Van Riebeek, the Dutch founder of Cape Town. Rhodes appealed squarely to Afrikaner misgivings and ‘English’ resentment at Kruger's refusal of white equality on the Rand.
⁵⁷
Then, in January 1899, he set off for Britain to rally support, raise fresh capital for his Zambezian railway and negotiate the passage of his telegraph to Cairo through German East Africa.

As he did so, the pan-British rhetoric of loyalty and grievance that he and Milner had unleashed in March 1898 and which had reached a crescendo in October 1898 at last bore fruit on the Rand. Throughout 1898, the quiescence of the Uitlanders had been a source of frustration to Milner. He had made contact with Percy Fitzpatrick, the leading Uitlander politician; but, with the ‘old reformers’ of 1895 still under ban, political organisation was minimal. The mining companies, who had hopes of economic reform, were reluctant to antagonise the regime on whose goodwill they depended. They had no reason to manipulate Milner: still less to be used by him. But, in December 1898, two events combined to transform Rand politics. The forthcoming expiry of the dynamite monopoly reopened the central issue between the mining houses and the government in Pretoria. Smouldering resentment over the arbitrariness of Boer administration on the Rand came to a head with the murder of an Uitlander, Edgar, by an Afrikaner policeman. The main Uitlander movement, a branch of the South African League, barred from local demonstration, stumbled upon an alternative tactic. It framed a petition to the Crown. The means to link the political struggle on the Rand with imperial sentiment at home and in the Cape – the trick that had eluded Milner – had at last been found. It was a turning point.

In fact, the first Uitlander petition was turned away (to Milner's consternation) by his
locum tenens
in Cape Town. But the Transvaal government now showed open signs of anxiety. In February 1899, it attempted to divide its opponents by negotiating the ‘Great Deal’ with the mining houses, offering certain commercial concessions and a modest extension of political rights in exchange for a public disavowal by the houses of ‘political agitation’.
⁵⁸
With Milner's encouragement, Fitzpatrick, the vital linkman between the mining houses and the political movement, sabotaged the agreement by premature publicity.
⁵⁹
Both men calculated that imperial intervention – evident in Chamberlain's renewed protest over the dynamite monopoly and his private warnings to the mining houses against the ‘Great Deal’ – could be mobilised. In March, the second Uitlander petition (with more than 20,000 signatures) was forwarded to London. Chamberlain had little choice but to accept it, since rebuffing it would have meant repudiating the ‘suzerainty’ which he had asserted in principle but avoided in practice. By early May it was clear that a new round of imperial pressure would supercharge the complaints of the mining houses and the Uitlanders. Milner's famous despatch likening their treatment to that of a servile class of ‘helots’
⁶⁰
was artfully designed to raise ethnic feeling at home and in South Africa to fever pitch. Behind Milner's populist rhetoric rallied the followers of Rhodes and the League. In Britain, he could rely on a chorus of journalists and lobbies, and here too Rhodes conducted a parallel campaign. Together with Alfred Beit, one of his closest allies, Rhodes heavily subsidised the (Imperial) South Africa Association, founded in 1896 to campaign for the Uitlander cause.
⁶¹
In the Transvaal, said
The Times
, was a ‘vast number of British subjects whose grievances cannot be denied’. Could Britain afford to let its protection be seen as ‘inefficient against an insignificant Republic’.
⁶²

Kruger was too old a hand in imperial politics not to see the danger. Rhodes and Milner might ‘bounce’ the Imperial government into armed intervention before cooler judgment prevailed. By agreeing to meet Milner at Bloemfontein at the end of May 1899 to discuss Uitlander rights, he hoped to appease ‘moderate’ opinion in Britain and deflate the jingo mood. He probably calculated that a limited extension of the franchise would allow Chamberlain to draw back from confrontation. If so, it was a shrewd estimate. But at Bloemfontein Milner refused to negotiate, insisting upon the vote for Uitlanders of five years’ residence and a fixed allocation of seats for the Rand. When Kruger refused, Milner broke off the talks. Chamberlain was furious. British opinion, Selborne (his deputy) warned Milner, was not ready for war. Milner's helot despatch had made less public impact than had been expected: ‘we simply cannot force the pace.’
⁶³
Milner was in despair. ‘British South Africa had been tuned to concert pitch’, he told Selborne. But now Chamberlain was playing for time. ‘He seems to me
to wish a patch-up
.’ But delay would erode the loyalty and resolution of the Uitlanders and their local supporters: the Transvaal would use it to prepare for war. Unless London was ready to stand firm and to send troop reinforcements to show it meant business, Milner concluded bluntly, he would ask to be removed.
⁶⁴

At the eleventh hour it seemed that Kruger was about to repeat his earlier triumphs in 1881 and 1884. Milner and Rhodes could huff and puff. ‘English’ opinion in the towns could seethe at Boer injustice. Editorials might rage. But, as Milner remarked candidly, Boer commandos with their rifles and horses, backed by the heavy guns that Kruger had been buying, were more than a match for the scattered British garrisons and the unarmed ‘English’ population. Unless London steeled itself to send an ‘expedition’ to coerce the Transvaal, Kruger's combination of military and economic strength would steadily tilt the regional balance in his favour. Why then did the Transvaal government not stand firm on Kruger's offer at Bloemfontein and test London's nerve in the way that Milner feared?

In reality, both principals, Kruger and the British cabinet, were more vulnerable than they appeared to the campaign that Rhodes and Milner had orchestrated. Chamberlain's instinct had been to settle. But he was faced with Uitlander hostility to any retreat from Milner's demands at Bloemfontein
⁶⁵
and with signs of widespread feeling in Britain that the Uitlander cause could not be abandoned.
⁶⁶
Chamberlain, whose own political ambition was far from sated, was reluctant to alienate his natural supporters. Both he and his cabinet colleagues now saw that anything short of Milner's demands on the franchise issue would count as a failure to assert the supremacy (and uphold the suzerainty) on which they had always insisted. For their part, Kruger and his agile lieutenant, the youthful J. C. Smuts, also realised that some agreement must be reached: to avert the danger of imperial intervention; to ease the threat that ‘loyalist’ ministries would take office in the Cape and Natal; and to stave off the slump brought by political uncertainty to the Rand. But, in seeking a way out of the franchise dispute, Smuts made a fatal misjudgment.

Smuts was the acceptable reformist face of the Kruger regime. A Cape Afrikaner, Cambridge educated, a passionate admirer of Rhodes before the Raid, Smuts regarded white unity as the most urgent political need in South Africa. ‘We want a great South African nationality’, he declared in 1895.
⁶⁷
It was the deeper struggle of whites against blacks that mattered most. Left unplacated, Uitlander grievances would divide the whites and invite imperial meddling – the real threat to white supremacy. But Smuts was determined to secure a
quid pro quo
for conceding the Uitlander vote. Britain, he insisted, must give up its claim to influence the Transvaal's internal affairs: ‘the suzerainty was pure nonsense’ and should tacitly lapse.
⁶⁸
Perhaps he believed that the Salisbury government, with so many commitments abroad, would shrink from war for a phrase, once the substance of Uitlander demands had been met. He may well have assumed that neither Kruger nor the Transvaal Raad (assembly) would accept a one-sided bargain. Whatever its motive, Smuts’ move broke the iron rule that Kruger had carefully observed in his dealings with the British: not to challenge openly the provisions of the 1884 Convention in which Britain's diplomatic primacy was clearly stated. Smuts’ condition was understood in London as a bid for diplomatic freedom.
⁶⁹
It was confirmation that British supremacy was really at stake, not merely the detail of the Uitlander franchise: Kruger's real motive was at last laid bare. Negotiations collapsed. Early in September 1899, the cabinet authorised the troop reinforcements for which Milner had been begging and began to ponder an ultimatum. Before they could send it, Kruger despatched his own demanding the troops’ recall. On 11 October, the war began.

The causes of the South African War have been endlessly debated. On one side were those who saw the policy of Milner and Chamberlain as a form of economic imperialism. There were several versions of this argument. One maintained that capitalism – the Randlords – had manipulated ‘imperialism’ – Milner and the Imperial government – into imposing their programme on Kruger to the point of war. Another that Kruger's ‘pre-modern’ republic was intolerable to British leaders and especially to Milner for whom capitalism was an indispensable part of modernity.
⁷⁰
A third that British policy was driven most of all by the need to ensure the flow of Transvaal gold to London to support the gold reserves of the Bank of England. None of these arguments has withstood close scrutiny or mustered convincing documentary evidence. The Randlords, while bitterly opposed to aspects of Kruger's regime, showed no inclination to fish for trouble in London and preferred to settle their differences amicably with the Transvaal government. Kruger was much more amenable to the needs of the mining industry than was assumed by writers who saw the war as the clash between modern capitalism and a pre-modern state.
⁷¹
No evidence has been found that in the critical period before the war the supply of gold became an issue for British policy-makers. Milner himself, while contemptuous of Kruger's misgovernment and corruption, showed no desire, even in the most private correspondence, to annex the Transvaal for commercial reasons, let alone to go to war to replace Kruger with an oligarchy of Randlords.

The result has been to confirm the verdict pronounced more than forty years ago by the shrewdest analysts of late-Victorian imperialism. The British went to war, concluded Gallagher and Robinson, to defend their regional supremacy and its geopolitical corollary, control of the Cape and the sea route to India.
⁷²
The sudden economic transformation of the Transvaal mattered not because it created new wealth to annex but because it gave Kruger the means to assert fuller independence and, sooner or later, to drag the rest of South Africa after him out of the British
imperium
. The stalemate between the coastal colonies and the highveld interior (the reason for the persistent failure of confederation) was about to be resolved in favour of Kruger's all-powerful goldstate. In the struggle to contain the secondary effects of the Transvaal's economic revolution, Milner had rehearsed every grievance, inflamed every issue and recruited every ally – until his relentless alarmism eventually drove home the threat Kruger posed to British supremacy. But what weighed most with British ministers, and especially with Lord Salisbury, the master of
Realpolitik
, was neither the economic stake British interests had amassed nor the rights of the Uitlanders – those ‘people whom we despise’. It was the necessity of preserving, in more arduous conditions and by more vigorous methods, the old mid-Victorian supremacy in a vital strategic sphere.